Joseph’s eyebrows elevated slightly at that, and he sat back in his throne. “Not a bad plan, but what makes you think I have a bomb?”
“Come on, Joe, you and I both know you do.”
“All right, so what’s in it for me?”
“You mean besides avoiding whatever fate the Faros have in mind for us—death at worst, slavery at best?”
“You don’t know that. If they’ve gone to all this trouble to take over, they must want Astralis intact.”
“Maybe, but whatever they’re planning, I doubt it lines up with your goals for building a criminal empire. They might be planning to take us back to the Etherian Empire to gather intel for an invasion, in which case your little operation is going to get wrapped up real fast when Etherus is back in charge.”
“True...” Joseph said. “Business has been booming ever since we left. All right, I’ll help you, but on one condition—”
Lucien waited. Here comes the catch...
“I’m sending a team with you.”
“A team?” Lucien wasn’t expecting that.
Joseph spread his hands. “Sure. You can’t hope to do this on your own, and it’s in my best interests to make sure you succeed.”
Lucien considered that, his brow knitted tightly enough to give him a headache. Or maybe it was the muted thumping from the music downstairs. “I don’t want to be an accomplice to the murder of some unsuspecting desk clerk at the center.”
“I’ll make sure my boys stick to stun. Fair enough?”
Lucien still didn’t like it. Joe was up to something. “Do I have a choice?”
“Not if you want my help, no. Thing is, I could pull this off without you, but you can’t do it without me.”
“Not true,” Lucien countered. “You do this without me, and the operation will lose any possible claim to legitimacy. Your men will get arrested when it’s over, and you’ll be implicated in whatever they’ve been charged with.”
“Not if we find the evidence you’re looking for. We do that, and my boys will be heroes, and so will I. In fact, I might even decide to run for office after that.” Joseph grinned and laced his hands over his stomach. “Yeah, I think I might just do that,” he decided, nodding to himself.
“All right, fine. Your team comes with us, but I’m still in charge of the operation.”
“Sure,” Joseph said and stuck out a hand. “It’s a deal.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Lucien said. “I don’t know where that hand has been.”
Joseph laughed. “You come here, begging for my help, and then you insult me like that? Must be hard dragging around those boulders you call balls. I’ve killed men for less.”
“You want to state that for the record?”
Joseph smiled, but his silver eyes were cold as ice. “Maybe I should just kill you, Lucy-lu.” He mimed a gun with one hand and fired it at Lucien’s head.
“You do that, and my partner will kill you next.” With that, the air behind Joseph shimmered, and Brak appeared, his skull-shaped face looming over the back of the chair.
“Boo,” Brak growled.
“The frek!” Joseph jumped up and spun around, backing away quickly. His goons belatedly adjusted their aim. “Motherfreker!” Joe screeched.
The Gor bared his teeth, grinning at the crime boss.
Joseph looked from Brak to Lucien and back again. “Touche, Lucy-lu. Touche.” Turning to his guards, he said, “Who the frek let that monster in here?”
His men glanced at each other, redirecting the blame.
Brak hissed and straightened. “Who do you call a monster?”
Joseph waved his hand dismissively at the Gor. “It’s all good, Skullman. Come on, Lucy, we’re going bomb shopping.”
Chapter 40
Astralis
—TWELVE HOURS LATER—
Tyra had a hard time finding a chance to meet with Lieutenant Commander Wheeler away from the bridge where Admiral Stavos and General Graves would be privy to their conversation. She ended up hanging out in the wardroom around lunch time under the guise of inviting officers to the charity dinner she was organizing.
Finally, at just after one o’clock, Lieutenant Commander Wheeler came in. Tyra tried not to watch too conspicuously as Wheeler made her way down the line-up at the fabricators, and then found a table with a group of other officers. Tyra wove around the room until she reached that table. She pulled out one of the empty chairs and sat down.
“Commander Wheeler,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”
Wheeler’s eyes darted up, but her head remained hovering over her plate of pasta to avoid spilling. Her eyebrows formed the question that her mouth was too busy to ask, and Tyra launched into an explanation about the charity dinner. She invited Wheeler, along with everyone else at the table, telling them to bring their friends and families.
“I hope you’ll all be able to make it,” Tyra finished.
Commander Wheeler nodded slowly and washed down another mouthful of pasta with a cup of juice. “I’ll see what I can do.” The others gave similarly noncommittal replies.
“Thanks for your time, officers,” Tyra said as she got up to leave. “Oh, and Commander—I wonder if you would be able to help me put together a list of other officers that I could invite? Along with their contact information?”
“I’ll get someone to send that to you.”
Wheeler wasn’t making this easy. Tyra needed to meet her in person. “Thank you... and if I could trouble you for one more thing...”
Commander Wheeler looked up, wearing what was left of her patience on her face. “Yes?”
“Would you mind meeting me in my office to go over the invitations I’m planning to send to those officers? I’d like them to be convincing, and I was hoping you could help me come up with some incentives to offer that might appeal to the ship’s military personnel.”
“That’s easy. Free beer.”
The other officers chuckled at that, and Wheeler smiled at her own joke.
“Well, we can’t offer free anything, since the idea is to raise money... but I’d really like to consult with you on this in more detail. Is there a time you could meet with me later today? I’d consider it a personal favor. There are a lot of families counting on the funds we’ll raise from this dinner.”
Wheeler sighed. “I’m off duty at eighteen hundred hours. I was planning to use that time to hit the rack, but...”
“It won’t take long. I promise.”
“All right.”
Tyra flashed a grin. “Thank you, Commander.”
“Sure.”
Tyra breezed out of the wardroom just as Admiral Stavos was breezing in. She bumped into him in the entrance. “Sorry, sir,” she said.
He caught her by the arm before she could leave. “Councilor? What are you doing here?”
She explained about the charity dinner.
“An excellent idea! I’ll make sure attendance is mandatory for all non-essential crew.”
“Thank you, sir,” Tyra replied, bobbing her head and smiling gratefully.
He smiled back. “Glad I could be of service.”
“Yes, sir. I look forward to seeing you there.”
“Count on it.”
“And General Graves?”
“He’s the XO. Someone should be on the bridge...” The admiral scratched his chin absently through his beard. “I suppose we could leave LC Wheeler with the conn. I’ll invite him for you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Of course.”
Tyra nodded and hurried off, her feet buoyed on a stream of adrenaline. Things were working out perfectly. Wheeler was going to be alone on the bridge. Convincing her to join their plot was more important than ever now.
***
Astralis
Lucien and Brak were back at the Crack of Dawn for the second night in a row, going over infiltration plans with Joseph Coretti and three of his men.
“The ventilation shafts ar
e the easiest way in, but while the fans are on, they’re a death trap,” Joe said, pointing to a holographic schematic of the Resurrection Center.
Lucien nodded. “We could cut the power.”
“My thoughts exactly, but they’ll send a maintenance crew to fix it within minutes, so we need to hack into their comms first. Then when we cut the power, their call to maintenance goes straight to us. Guntha here takes the call and goes in through the front door. From there he can shut down the security system in the ducts so he can get in to make repairs, and voila—the rest of our team will sneak in from outside with the bomb.”
“That might work,” Lucien said.
Joe just looked at him. “Might?” He thumped his chest. “Come on, give me a little credit here.”
“It’s a good plan.”
“It’s a great plan. We came up with it years ago. Took six months to get our hands on the schematics and work out all the details.”
“So why didn’t you go through with it?”
Joe shrugged. “Too risky to hold the center ransom. It’s a one-way ticket. Easy to get in, not so easy to get out.”
“Once we find the evidence we’re looking for, that won’t be a problem.”
“You better be right about that,” Fizk Arak, the team’s demolitions expert said.
Joseph patted him on the back. “No worries, Fizzy. Lucy-lu wouldn’t risk going to corrections over this. He knows what happens to cops in prison—don’t you, Lucy? We’ve got lots of old business associates on the inside waiting for you if you frek this one up.” Joe grinned.
Lucien narrowed his eyes at that, and Brak hissed.
“Oh, don’t worry, they’ll be happy to see you, too, Skullman. So? When do we get the green light on this?”
“Four days from now, at seventeen hundred hours,” Lucien said.
“Why so long? We’ve already figured out the details. We need to move!”
“My wife is setting up a charity banquet for Fallside.”
“I don’t give a fr—”
“It’s a distraction,” Lucien explained, holding up a hand to forestall Joe’s expletive.
The gangster glowered darkly at having been shushed. “Fine. Four days.”
“Seventeen hundred hours,” Lucien repeated.
“Get here two hours early or we’ll go without you.”
Lucien nodded and glanced at Brak. “We’ll be here. Till then, no more meetings.”
“Fine by me,” Joe said. “Having a cop prowling around here is bad for business.” His goons nodded their agreement with that. None of them liked having to work with cops. Lucien wasn’t thrilled about the setup, either. He glanced from Guntha, the hulking skinhead, to Fizk, the sneering, curly-haired demo guy, to the third and final member of the team, who had yet to be introduced. The man looked vaguely familiar: short dark hair, dark eyes, tall and trim with an almost military straightness to his posture. Black ops? Ex-Paragon? Lucien wondered. Where had he seen this guy before?
The man hadn’t said a word, having spent the entire meeting in the shadows, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets and dark eyes gleaming. Those eyes tracked Lucien as he turned to leave, and he hesitated, staring right back. The man’s face was an expressionless mask, and he didn’t take his eyes off Lucien for so much as a second. Not even to blink. Something about the guy was just off, and it was more than the usual gangster vibe. His movements were too precise, his muscles too loose...
Suddenly Lucien had it. His mind flashed back to the stakeout he’d planned with Brak right before the Faros had invaded, the one where they’d seen the look-alike for Titarus Cleever, the late son of High Court Judge Cleever. This mystery guy had been there that night, too. Lucien was sure of it.
“Something wrong?” Joe asked.
“I have a policy about my partners in crime,” Lucien said slowly.
Joe snorted and elbowed Fizk in the ribs. “You hear that, Fizzy? The man’s barely got his feet wet and he’s already got a policy.”
Fizk snickered, his curly hair bobbing as air stuttered from his lips.
Lucien took the mocking in his stride, and nodded to the man in the shadows. “Who’s he?”
Joe turned. “Him? He doesn’t have a name.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t have a name?” Lucien demanded.
“He’s a bot, an android. Frekking deadly. Our best fixer. Cost a damn fortune to build him off the books and splice in new code to get past all those pesky commercial bot laws about not injuring people.”
“That’s highly illegal,” Lucien said.
“You aren’t going nark on me, are you, Lucy?”
“No.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want Bob to have to fix you.”
“I thought you said he doesn’t have a name.”
“He doesn’t. That’s his human alias. He’s got an ID and everything, don’t you, Bobby boy?”
Bob nodded slowly, but said nothing.
Lucien grimaced and shook his head. “We’ll see you in four days, Joe.”
“It’s a date, Lucy. Bob, why don’t you see these boys out. Go strut your stuff for them.”
The bot melted out of the shadows, but bot was the wrong term for him. He was an android. Creating androids was supposed to be illegal—an old law from the Etherian Empire that had yet to be overturned. AI, however, had been legalized soon after Astralis left, which explained how Bob could function.
Apparently Joe had grown tired of waiting for the laws regarding androids to catch up. As they walked downstairs and back through the club, Lucien found himself watching the girls on the stage and the waitresses sauntering through the room with their hovering trays and spotlights.
Maybe they were all androids, too. Androids wouldn’t have the same inhibitions as people, and they presented none of the health or privacy concerns for clients that real humans did, which made them ideal sex workers.
One of the girls brushed Lucien’s arm on his way out, her fingers grazing his. She must have felt his wedding ring, but she didn’t even blink at that. “Leaving so soon?” she asked. “Stay, and I’ll make it worth your while...” She whispered that last part in his ear, and Lucien felt his cheeks flush in spite of himself.
Bob shot the girl a look, and she paled. An instinct for self-preservation? Maybe these girls weren’t androids, after all, but they obviously knew something about Bob. Fixer slash pimp? Lucien wondered.
Bob stopped at the entrance and held the door open for them. “Have a good night,” he said.
Brak walked out without a word, but Lucien lingered in the entryway. “You, too,” he said, and held out his hand to the alleged android. “Nice to meet you.” The android eyed his hand, but made no move to shake it. “Are you going to leave me hanging? We’re partners now.”
Bob released the door—it smacked Lucien in the back, but he pretended not to notice—and took his hand. Lucien purposefully tested the man’s grip by squeezing as hard as he could. Bob’s hand resisted being crushed, and he showed no signs of discomfort. He didn’t even exhibit the vengeful human response of squeezing Lucien’s hand back.
Definitely a bot. “See you around,” Lucien said.
Bob nodded. “See you.”
Lucien caught up with Brak in the parking lot.
“I will never understand why your males visit places like this. Is it not frustrating to be enticed to mate yet not be able to do so? Are those males all... impotent?”
Lucien laughed. “Not likely, and I’m sure most of them don’t stop at just being enticed.”
Brak snorted. “Growing up in the Etherian Empire I learned that humans were monogamous and mate for life. In the past eight years since leaving, I have seen much to support the opposite. Do your females not mind their mates visiting such places?”
“They can’t mind what they don’t know.”
Brak hissed. “These men lie, too? They have no honor. My people would cast them out as exiles.”
“Yeah, I think
that’s already happened, buddy. We’re all exiles out here, and the irony is, we cast ourselves out.”
“Yesss, I have thought this also. Perhaps we will have the sense to return home someday.”
As they reached Lucien’s car, he waved it open, and they climbed in the back. “Hubble Mountain, Winterside, 112 Evergreen Street,” Lucien said as he buckled up.
“Right away, sir,” the car replied. It pulled out of the parking lot and into the abandoned alley where the club was located. Down here in the sub-districts, hover cars all drove along the streets, since there wasn’t technically any sky to fly up into. The streets themselves were really just one long tunnel after the next. Lucien was amazed people didn’t get claustrophobic living down here.
The car took them straight up a riser street to the surface, and they popped out in the middle of a park filled with snow-covered evergreens. They soared high into the sky and joined a stream of traffic at five hundred meters heading for Hubble Mountain.
“Krak—” Lucien cursed, suddenly remembering. “—I forgot to stop at your place, Brak. You’re welcome to stay the night with us if you want. You can help us keep an eye on Atara.”
“That is fine,” Brak said.
“Great. I’ll take some steaks out of the freezer, for you.”
Brak grimaced. “No, I buy fresh.”
“Frozen’s free.”
“Tastes free, too.”
Lucien laughed. “Suit yourself.”
***
Astralis
“I have Lieutenant Commander Wheeler here to see you, ma’am.”
“Send her in, please, Corita,” Tyra replied via her ARCs. “And make sure we’re not disturbed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As soon as her secretary ended the comm connection, Tyra turned off her ARCs. A moment later, the door chimed and slid open, revealing Commander Wheeler. Her blond hair was tied up in a bun, tucked under a black navy hat, but frizzy strands leaked out at odd angles, giving her a frazzled look. Making matters worse, she wasn’t wearing any makeup to conceal the dark circles under her eyes.
Dark Space Universe (Books 1-3): The Third Dark Space Trilogy (Dark Space Trilogies) Page 56