by J. S. Morin
“He’s down in the airlock,” Esper said. “You can go say ‘hi’ to him after.”
It would serve Carter right, seeing the ghost of the woman he believed himself to have killed in cold blood. All Esper wanted was to be on hand when that airlock door opened with Yomin standing there unharmed.
The computer core beeped. It was the most noise Esper had heard the device make since they’d stolen it.
“Does that mean it worked?” Esper asked on speculation.
The transparent green of Yomin’s datalens was blotted out by dizzying flashes of data whizzing past. Esper had to avert her eyes.
“Fuck, yeah!” Yomin shouted. “We’re in!”
Esper backed away. “I’d probably better leave. You know… wizards… tech. I might accidentally fuzzle it in my… excitement.”
Mort clapped slowly. “Atta girl. Show those sterile techsters who’s boss. Don’t loiter around while they pick through the untidy leavings of their comrade-in-software down in the airlock. Just scoot—with dignity, mind you—and get yourself a little reward.”
Once the door closed behind her, Esper was alone with the ghostly wizard. “How dare you!” she snapped in a harsh whisper. “Do you want them to think I’m crazy?”
Mort just chuckled in the face of her ire. “By all their definitions, wizards are crazy. Period. End of story. You see things that aren’t there. You believe in things that don’t exist in order to make them exist. All the physics and chemistry they like to think of as fixed an immutable, you smudge out with a bit of spit and the side of your thumb and rewrite however you like.”
Esper sighed heavily.
“Face it,” Mort concluded. “It’s part of your daily life now, getting looked at like a madman—er, madwoman.”
Looking around to make sure no one was emerging from their quarters or coming up from either the cargo bay or the cockpit, Esper continued their argument en route to her quarters. “You can’t keep doing this. I’ll find a way to stop you.”
The wizard trailed along beside her, craning forward to look up at Esper as she strode through the common room. “Or… maybe you could just admit you’ve got me in here, and we can put a few more noggins on the problem of how to get me back out.”
A door thudded shut. Esper was back in her quarters, which used to be Mort’s old quarters. Since no one else was comfortable setting foot in the room, she’s taken up residence on a long-term basis.
On the floor, there was a footlocker. Esper popped the lid manually, eschewing magic for this task.
“What’re you looking for?” Mort asked warily. He knew as well as she did what was in there.
Under piles of odds and ends ranging from souvenirs to her EV suit, Esper found it. The jar was large enough to pour in a six-pack of beer. Roddy had suggested as much at the funeral—a tribute, he’d called it. But Esper had ruled it out and taken custody of the medical specimen jar that held the Earthly remains of one Mordecai The Brown, wizard, deceased.
“Remember this?” Esper asked. She held out the jar at the apparition as if it were garlic and Mort a vampire.
The wizard recoiled all the same. “Get that thing out of my face. That’s not me.”
“No,” Esper replied. “It’s not you. It’s a bunch of dust that used to shave and belch and drink beer and have arguments with the comm panels. It’s the body of Mort. My best theological explanation for you is that you’re Mort’s immortal soul. And while you’re out here, being a bother, you’re getting no closer to the grace you need to find eternal reward in heaven. Every second you waste bothering me about putting you back in a body, making you a body, stealing you a body, or somehow restoring this bucket of ash into your body, you’re risking something happening to me that gets you damned for eternity for the horrible things you’ve yet to repent of.”
Esper shook the jar in Mort’s direction.
“Fine,” Mort groused. The wizard vanished from view.
Esper knew he was still there, lurking, waiting, watching. But for now, at least, she could get a little peace and quiet.
# # #
Astral space drifted by without any sense of time or distance. New Garrelon was long gone. Their course was a vague “back toward ARGO space” pending something more specific to aim for.
Amy had her feet up on the cockpit console, slouching low in the pilot’s seat. She mouthed along with the lyrics to “Love Between the Stars” as she browsed the omni on her datapad.
The nice thing about the omni, as the name implied, was that it had everything. The same data network that kept top-secret documents for Earth Navy also had baking recipes and flatvids of pets doing adorable tricks. The same omni that held the bank accounts of the Rucker Syndicate and the Poet Fleet also served as a storefront for wedding dresses and colonist-made baby clothes. Everyone had the omni. Everyone needed the omni. Everything was on the omni.
Just then, Amy was browsing old personal photos from her navy days, the kind of shore-leave shots that Naval Intelligence hadn’t bothered walling off behind security barriers when Squadron 333 was disbanded.
She hardly recognized herself.
Oh, Amy could pick herself out of the crowd just fine. There was a photo of the squad taking leave on Aquos IX, partying on the beach and practically taking over a tiny resort. Amy was in the middle, just left of center, sandwiched between Vixen and Athena, all of them in bikinis. Scarecrow was the one with the tight smile, clutching her strawberry daiquiri in both hands and wishing the miniature umbrella were big enough to hide behind. Amy could remember being there, but she couldn’t remember being Scarecrow.
Carl was there. Blackjack Ramsey had never met an image-capturing technology he didn’t like. He was front and center in the back row, bare-chested and glistening, reddened with sunburn, and hoisting the mixing pitcher for the margaritas. His other hand had rested on Scarecrow’s shoulder.
Amy had never noticed that detail before. Or if she had, she’d written it off as just a brotherly sort of affection. Scarecrow was Blackjack’s wingman, after all. He looked out for her planetside and shipboard, and she kept Eyndar and Zheen from dusting him in the Black Ocean.
Footsteps came pounding down the corridor, approaching the cockpit rapidly.
Amy juggled the datapad in her lap and pulled her feet from the console. Hastily she switched off the display of the old photos. Now wasn’t the time to get into a discussion on the merits of nostalgia.
“I got it,” Yomin reported, panting as she handed over a datapad. “Carter’s job. It’s on Agos VI. Where’s Carl?”
“Sleeping,” Amy reported with a languid stretch. She was proud of herself on that account. He’d come into their quarters in such an agitated state. That always ended up giving him a little extra energy she could redirect.
“Really? Wow,” Yomin replied, stunned. “After the dress-down he gave me about getting this core decrypted, I’m surprised he could… Oh, never mind. You go, girl.”
“Thaaaaank you,” Amy replied playfully, examining the datapad. “Now let’s see about plotting a course. I think we can safely say our illustrious captain would approve of our new course, seeing how much of a fit he was pitching over how to get at that data. How’d you manage it? Brute force finally punch the right number?”
“Esper,” Yomin admitted.
Amy blinked. “Was there some spell that just fucked up the encryption and didn’t kill all the data?”
“No. She apparently tricked him into entering it. Details got kind of vague.”
Amy cleared her throat. “You don’t think she—?”
“No.” Yomin shook her head. “Neither one.”
There were two brutally effective ways to get a man to give up his secrets. One, Amy had just used on Carl. The other usually resulted in a lot of screaming and often blood. Neither really seemed to be Esper’s M.O.
“Then how—?”
“Magic,” Yomin replied before Amy could finish asking. The tech nodded as if to herself. “Claims it
was magic. What I wanna know is: what magic did that girl use that didn’t blink the lights but got Carter to give up the goodies like it was Halloween in the old country?”
“Is that the old candy extortion holiday?”
“You mean tradition,” Yomin corrected her. “Baton Rouge still celebrates All Hallows Day every year.”
“Still doesn’t account for Esper’s claim of using magic,” Amy said, steering back to the matter at hand. “You thinking she lied?”
“She has been acting a little weird of late. Maybe she got a little itch that needed scratching, killed two birds with one stone.”
Amy wrinkled her nose. “Of all the…”
“I know… I know…” Yomin said, shaking her head. “But you can’t fault a girl gettin’ her needs how she needs ‘em.”
Amy shook her head emphatically. “No. Not buying it. Esper could walk into any dive bar on any planet or space station and do better than Howie Carter.”
“I know,” Yomin said emphatically. “But the heart wants what it wants, and sometimes the heart just knows to get out of the way for a few minutes to get some business done.”
Amy rubbed her eyes. “I think I’d almost rather believe she can bore into a guy’s skull and not even dim the lights as she rips his deepest secrets out the hole.”
“Believe what you want,” Yomin replied, tapping the datapad in Amy’s hands. “But this is legit. We’ve got our man. We know his ship. We know his target. And since that sweet thing in the pink sweatshirt can drop us a million lightyears deep in the astral, we can get there first.”
Amy started punching their destination into the nav computer. “Let’s go be heroes.”
# # #
Carl was asleep.
When he told people he dreamed of riches and adventure, it was all a bunch of bullshit. That night Carl Ramsey dreamed of a jazz club in orbit around Luna that served beer-flavored fondue and played techno-polka on a loop. He was wandering the tables, begging for money for the ice cream truck parked on the street outside. When a pair of swordfish finally spotted him a billion terras (all in one heavy coin), he ran outside to find the truck pulling away from the station and driving onto a long road heading straight for Earth.
Carl gave chase.
“Wake up, babe,” Amy cooed from a trillion kilometers away. Her voice echoed with the music of the heavens—which was still techno-polka. “We’re here. Time to get up.”
Blinking and rubbing the gumminess from his eyes, Carl rolled over only to find Amy absent from their bed.
Had he dreamed her, too? Carl was naked under the sheets, so he surmised that she’d been there when he fell asleep. Out in the Black Ocean, only sex and showering warranted nudity, and showering wasn’t an everyday sort of thing on recycled water.
Pawing around the bed, Carl found pants. That was a start.
A brief, barefoot exploration of the room didn’t turn up any clues as to where Amy might have gone, but his attention was drawn inexorably to the outside window.
“The fuck is that?” he asked himself.
The Mobius appeared to be in orbit around Earth. Or more precisely, it appeared like Meyang, an Earth-like that had never been completely civilized.
“Carl, for the love of God, get your ass out of that bed. We’re here.”
It was the comm panel. Carl ambled over and hit the button to reply. “I’m up. I’m up.” He yawned. “Where the hell are we?”
“Agos VI. We got into Carter’s computer core and found out this is where the theft is going down.”
“Great work,” Carl replied with a grin. “See? Crack the whip a little; things get done around here.”
“Yup. Great work, dear. Now get out here so we can brief you on the mission.”
Carl cleared his throat with the comm button depressed. “Um, don’t I usually handle the mission planning and briefings?”
“We’re on a tight schedule, babe. You can plan the next one. Promise.”
Two minutes later, Carl shambled out into the common room wearing a full set of clothes, minus a few buttons being done up properly. He headed straight for the coffee maker.
Overhead, the Earth-like glowed, half-lit by the system’s sun. The local equivalent of Europe basked in the light while Asia fell into slumber. It was weird seeing the planetary surface without a sea of artificial illumination fighting back against the night.
“Nice of you to join us,” Roddy sneered. “I was almost thinking we were set up for a quick, smooth operation down there. Glad to have you awake to put our custom stamp on this job.”
“Wouldn’t want to ruin our reputation,” Carl replied, playing along rather than taking the bait to argue with the laaku while half asleep. He poured himself a cup of coffee and plotted his revenge for when he was fully awake.
“Our target is a smuggler named Jonus Brewster,” Amy announced, bringing up an image on the holo-projector. Brewster had an everyman look, with short-cropped hair and a blank oval face. He was the sort that a planetside customs inspector saw twenty versions of a day and that biometric scanners got bored of looking at.
“If he really brews, maybe we can cut a deal,” Roddy suggested with a chuckle, waggling a beer can.
Amy ignored him and continued. She described his ship and some of his known associates, but Carl spent most of the briefing checking Amy out. He pieced back together the fuzzy pre-sleep era from just before he passed out. Maybe there would be time for a reenactment once this briefing ended.
“All right,” Amy concluded. “We’re on the ground in about fifteen minutes. Your tour of the temple complex is at local dawn, which is about an hour away.”
“Wait. What?” Carl sputtered, spilling half a mouthful of coffee down his shirt. “I just woke up. It’s not remotely dawn.”
“Yeah,” Roddy replied. “Way to keep up. Earth Standard it over yonder.” He pointed up at Europe as it drifted lazily past. “We’re heading to Alaska.”
Carl’s eyes widened. “Tell me Alaska is tropical on this world.”
Yomin tapped at her datalens. “Current temperature at the vish kinah holy site is currently minus four.”
Straightening up and ignoring the coffee stain on his shirt, Carl took command. “All right. Our strike team is me, Rai Kub, and Roddy. We hit the starport and grab this… what was his name, Brewer?”
“Brewster,” Amy replied, arms crossed.
Carl continued along. “We grab this Brewster punk workin’ our job, take his hardcoin, and hand him and Carter’s computer core over to the Earth Navy garrison.”
“Right…” Amy said. “Except that the Tal Geru hasn’t been stolen yet. The plan is that you, Rai Kub, Esper, and Yomin visit the Temple of the Half-Year Sun. You’re going to be on hand when the Tal Geru is stolen. You’re going to grab the thief, get the details of the handoff, and intercept Brewster then. This is tesud jurisdiction, so we’ll have a pretty good case to make for keeping the payment as a bounty for turning over Brewster to them. The Tal Geru never leaves the planet, and everyone lives however-they-would-have-anyway ever after.”
Carl raised a finger. “Or that.”
Roddy kicked him in the shin. “Thanks for making the rest of us listen to it twice.”
“Any questions?” Amy asked.
Esper pulled a hand out of her sweatshirt pocket and raised it like a grade-school student. “What’s it look like? The Tal Geru that is.”
Amy tapped a button on her TeleJack, and the image in the holo-field shifted.
“It’s a miniature version of the temple itself, carved from ice and preserved by a miracle over five hundred years ago. It never melts, even in direct sunlight.”
“Pretty,” Yomin said admiringly. “Do they take requests? I’d love a neck pillow made from that stuff.”
“It’s a holy relic,” Amy continued. “The native priests won’t say what it does, but they’ve made it clear they value it over the temple itself.”
Carl clenched a fist. Once this was over, h
e could just taste a bonus payment from a bunch of grateful priests. This was ARGO space, if not the civilized part of it. Those priests would cough up terras from every orifice out of gratitude.
# # #
Rai Kub had never been to the Great Ice Teeth. That’s what this region was called on Old Garrelon. His people had never settled it. The stuunji were hardy people, but they disliked the cold. They’d never overpopulated their world, so it had never become necessary to inhabit the cold, bleak north beyond the line of the sun’s horizon.
At least it was pretty.
The vish kinah had a city on the waterfront. The ocean was a harsh, unforgiving expanse of blue that would have frozen Rai Kub to the gristle if he fell in. The city itself wasn’t modern but had modern touches that had been added by the occupiers. Stone and wood buildings intermixed with glass and steel tram depots, starports, and off-world restaurant chains.
Having grown up on offworld food, Rai Kub knew most of them by reputation, even if he didn’t dine there. There was a Freddy’s InstaFish, a Burger Barn, a Latte-Speed, and a Noodle-O-Rama. A few others were imports he didn’t recognize, and some were local establishments done in offworld style.
Rai Kub took all this in on the tromp from the starport to the vish kinah holy site. The Temple of the Half-Year Sun was up in the mountains that loomed over the port town. Their immediate destination was an enclosed tram line that ran to the temple from a depot at the outskirts of town. Carl led the way, as usual, with Esper and Yomin trailing behind. Rai Kub’s position was at the rear, where he could keep an eye on everyone.
“You’d think someone would climate-control these primitive Earth-likes,” Carl grumbled.
“The locals like it this way,” Esper replied.
Carl spread his gloved hands. “In the great wide history of the galaxy, since when have locals ever known what’s good for them?”
Rai Kub liked the locals. The vish kinah people were cute little things, with fuzzy faces and button-nosed snouts. Their tiny round ears and long facial whiskers twitched when they spoke. They came right up to Rai Kub’s waist—the perfect height for petting. The stuunji had to restrain himself from stroking the soft-looking fur every time they passed one on the streets.