The ‘girl’ – a member of the Blue Man species who might pass for human in poor lightning and resembled a human female only if the beholder was legally blind – rocked her head in a circular motion that was her culture’s equivalent of a shrug.
“’Oo pay, I pop.” She extended one of her four thick fingers towards the leader of the pair. “Wee nego-tee-ate,” she finished in atrociously-accented English. Neither party had sophisticated imp translator apps, so they were relying in the one language they had in common, more or less. Fortunately, both of their limited vocabularies specialized in this sort of transaction.
“Yah, yah, negotiate,” the designated haggler said. “Good girl. You pop me good, okay? Then mah friend. Ten Gee-Cees.”
“Pop ‘oo good, ‘kay. Freen pop, thees many extra.” She stuck up three fingers. Blue Men – or Women – weren’t exactly sexually compatible with humans, but certain body parts would do well enough as field expedients. Thirteen Galactic Credit Units was a fairly reasonable price for a twosome, even though it probably represented several months of banked pay for the Pan-Asian spacers.
“Good. Thirteen Gee-Cees. Less whining, more suckey-fuckey, okay?”
And they say romance is dead, Heather thought as she watched the unfolding scene from her hiding spot at the end of the alley. Luring the unfortunate Gack crewmembers into the ambush had been child’s play. As soon as the hooker led them out of sight of the main passageway, she and the rest of her ad hoc team pulled aside the stealth blankets they’d used to conceal their presence. Her imp jammed the Pan-Asians’ commo systems, ensuring they couldn’t call for help. The two spacers were surrounded by hostile aliens before they realized their planned sex party had turned into something completely different.
The Boothan Clan was that rarity in galactic criminal circles, a multi-species organization. Most underworld gang stuck to a single species, or even an extended family within that species, on the grounds that outsiders were intrinsically untrustworthy. Major trade junctions like TN-11 were the most likely places to find exception to the rule. The clan members’ loyalty was insured through fear; betraying the Boothan was punishable by death, but only after several weeks of methodical torture and mutilation.
Four figures rose from hiding and blocked both ends of the alley. Two were Blue Men like the prostitute they’d hired as bait, vaguely humanoid, their hairless, narrow bodies covered with slick-looking skin that ranged from sky blue to deep indigo in color. Their yellow eyes seemed to glow in the poor lightning of the alley. One was a Crab, more like a scorpion analogue really: eight legs, two arms with skeletal hands at their end, and two fighting pincers. The last one was a Class Three alien of an unknown species, his physical features completely covered up by a metallic environmental suit reminiscent of medieval plate armor, if a suit of armor had been designed to fit something shaped like a fireplug with three stubby legs and three long arms.
The alien gangsters were armed with a variety of death-dealing equipment, from laser pistols and beamers to the Class Three ET’s sidearm, which looked like a hose at the end of a backpack container and which Heather had been told could spit out a combination of liquid nitrogen balloons and self-propelled solid darts. The Vehelian authorities allowed weapons to be carried on their trading posts – force fields minimized danger to the facility as a whole – but their unlawful use was harshly punished. This gang of thugs didn’t seem to care. Of course, this area had next to no police presence and minimal and easily-bypassed surveillance systems.
“Wha…? Wha…?” the chatty Korean spacer said.
“Be quiet or die,” Heather said in Mandarin, the common language of the GACS. Even the Russian members of the loose confederation had been forced to learn to speak it in the aftermath of First Contact.
“Who are you?” the less talkative one blurted out in the same language.
Heather made a curt head gesture. The armored three-legged fireplug cut loose with his weapon weapon. The center of the Korean spacer’s chest was frozen solid by a splash of liquid nitrogen; a fraction of a second later, a kinetic projectile shattered the frozen flesh, leaving behind a hole large enough to accommodate a human head. The dead Pan-Asian fell to ground without making another sound.
“Be quiet or die, I said,” Heather repeated. The surviving spacer kept his mouth shut. His wide eyes regarded the motley group with growing horror. He glanced at the prostitute, who impassively met his stare, and then desperately looked about for a way out. He needn’t have bothered. There was no hope or mercy to be found anywhere on that alley.
It took a few seconds to break into the living crewman’s third-rate implant system and access his personal records, which included a moment-by-moment video feed of his entire life, beginning with his implantation at age fifteen in Ryanggang Province and ending forty years later here, in a back alley on a far-off space station. The records had all the information Heather needed. Imps locked up when their wearer died, which made hacking into them more difficult and time-consuming. That little fact had earned the surviving Korean a few extra seconds to live. As soon as she got what she needed, his time was up.
She found that having people killed in cold blood was even more unpleasant than committing murder in the heat of the moment.
Another head gesture. Another blast of nitrogen and a kinetic coup-de-grace.
Unpleasant, but part of the job.
* * *
Harry Routh spent his last moments bitching about his life.
Life aboard the GACSS-1138 had never been pleasant, and it had only gotten worse. The freighter’s owners and operators were a Korean family who ran sunk their life savings on the small and run-down vessel and aimed to get their money’s worth by any means necessary. To that end, they would do business with anybody, and skimp on such luxuries as proper life support and spare parts.
The Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was a funny country. Harry still barely understood, even after working in a GACS-flagged ship for what felt like a lifetime. The loose coalition of Russians, Chinese and assorted Eastern nations had come together after First Contact had largely depopulated their entire hemisphere. The resulting coalition of semi-independent governments generally cooperated with each other, especially when dealing with outsiders. China and Russia dominated the Sphere and were in fairly good shape. Harry was in a Korean vessel, unfortunately. Korea had been holding the short end of the stick ever since aliens had wiped out most of the South and left the survivors at the mercy of a gaggle of low-level northern officers who’d been lucky enough not to be in Pyongyang when it went up in flames. The 1138 was one of maybe a dozen Korean-flagged merchantmen, and Harry had been terrified to learn it was considered one of the better vessels of the bunch.
Captain Minh, the head of the family as well as of the ship, enforced discipline on his first- and second-cousins with gleeful brutality, and only the fact that his crew had literally nowhere else to go kept the desertion rate to a minimum. Harry had ended up as first mate of that floating disaster through a series of extremely unfortunate events. Like everyone else in the freighter, he was out of choices and out of luck. Except that, as an outsider, kept alive only because he knew how to keep the ship’s systems running, he had to take crap from everyone all the time.
The previous year, he’d put another nail on his coffin by participating in a Lamprey covert operation against the US. He’d never planned to return to American space, but now even the Gacks wouldn’t have him anymore. If the Pan-Asian authorities caught him, or anybody on the crew for that matter, they’d send him to the US for a short trial and a quick execution. As the only American in the crew, he’d earned the dubious honor of having the highest price on his head. Only the fact that the rest of the GACSS-1138 spacers were in the same boat, pun intended had kept them from selling him out. The ship was doomed to spend its days wandering from one alien port to the next.
Their stay on TN-11 had been typical of his life on the Korean ship. Harry never got any shore leave and wa
s stuck on deck the entire time. Then again, maybe he’d been lucky; two crew members hadn’t come back. Desertion was a possibility, but Harry’s guess was that they’d fallen afoul of one of the local criminal gangs that infested the shittier portions of the space station. The captain hadn’t even bothered reporting the disappearances to the authorities. You never wanted to attract the local cops’ attention, not when you sometimes engaged in activities they might not approve of.
Captain Minh had made a half-hearted attempt to find replacements before leaving, but no human in TN-11 would even consider joining the outlaw ship, and aliens were out of the question. It wasn’t because of the life support issues involved in having another species aboard, although that didn’t help. Minh and his crew just couldn’t abide the thought of having nonhumans working and living with them. They were disgusted enough by the presence of an American, although to be fair they would have been just as revolted by a Russian or Thai. Koreans didn’t play well with others, probably because they’d been bombed back to the Stone Age during First Contact and many of the survivors had spent years on an enforced diet of tree bark and long pig. The resulting culture was extremely hostile towards outsiders. Minh’s allowing Harry to stay alive on his ship made him a paragon of tolerance.
With no replacements available, they’d be leaving with a short crew. Which meant someone had to pick up the slack, and as usual Harry got the short end of the stick. On top of getting no leave time, Captain Minh had him supervising the loading of their next shipment. Their last delivery had consisted of a thousand tons of Class One foodstuffs, and that had been a mess. The 1138 new cargo was not biological, thankfully: electronic components, fairly valuable stuff, and the shipping fees for delivering it to a Crab colony would keep the little merchantman running for a good while. On the down side, the trip would take about ninety warp-hours spread over five weeks, and Harry would be busting his ass for most of it.
“Watch it, Sagong!” he yelled at one of the crewmembers, who was about to drive a mag-lev forklift into a bulkhead. Sagong glared at him but slowed down and maneuvered the container through the door without breaking anything. The last thing they needed was damaged cargo. The Captain would take any penalties out of the shares of all crewmembers involved.
I can’t live like this, he thought, not for the first or the thousandth time. He had a plan of sorts: save enough to buy his out of his contract, and then find some ETs willing to pay what he was worth. Failing that, he intended to jump ship with the clothes on his back and take his chances. So far, neither opportunity had presented itself. But some day, hopefully soon…
A sudden flash of light interrupted his thoughts. Next thing he knew, Harry was crumpled against a bulkhead, trying to blink away the afterimages dancing in front of his eyes. He couldn’t hear a damn thing.
Explosion.
The concept felt dull and distant, much like the sound that eventually got through the temporary deafness. The whine of charging capacitors and sizzle of energy blasts. Shooting. Someone was shooting inside the ship.
Someone screamed loud enough to be heard over the beamer discharges. Harry thought he recognized Sagong’s voice, but the scream had been too distorted with pain to be sure, and it was quickly cut off.
We’re under attack.
The thought brought back memories of life in the Navy, drills and battle stations. Captain Minh should be on his imp, screaming at the Port Authority. Who would be crazy enough to attack a ship here?
A figure loomed over him. Its head was hidden behind a helmet, but the eyes looking down at him from a transparent visor were human.
“Wait…” Harry croaked.
Human, yes, but there was no mercy in those eyes as the attacker leveled a beamer at him.
A shitty end to a shitty life.
* * *
“And you’re sure this isn’t going to come back and bite us in the ass,” Guillermo Hamilton said. It wasn’t a question, more of a combination of a statement and a veiled threat.
“The GACSS-1138 left on schedule and will complete its delivery,” Heather said. “Nobody at their next stop will care what species the ship’s crew is, even assuming they can tell humans from Blue Men. After that, the ship will quietly disappear. The Boothan Clan Lord assured me neither the vessel nor the bodies of its crew will ever be found again.”
“Kind of unsettling, how easy it is to steal a freighter, even a small one, in the middle of one of the busiest warp lanes in the galaxy.”
“It wasn’t that easy. Without my implants making sure the local security sensors didn’t notice the commotion, it would have been impossible. And we wouldn’t have pulled it off at the common docking stations. Security is a bit lax in the low-rent docks. You truly get what you pay for around these parts.”
“I guess we’re clear, then,” Guillermo said. He didn’t look happy about it.
“Yes. I figure someone in the State Department will eventually let the Pan-Asians know they shouldn’t bother looking for the ship. That it’s been taken care of. They won’t like it, but having it vanish into hard vacuum makes things easier for everyone. Word will get around that working with the enemies of humankind isn’t conducive to a long or healthy life, and there’s plenty of plausible deniability to go around.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“I made sure the entire thing was done off the books, as per your instructions. As far as everyone is concerned, the Company had nothing to do with the mysterious disappearance of a Gack freighter. The Vehelians have no indication a crime was committed in their territory, and their records show that the ship departed TN-11 without incident.”
“Not bad, I suppose,” Guillermo conceded. “I’ll send off a report with the next courier, eyes-only. We’ll both get an unofficial attaboy and the usual reward for a job well done.”
“Good.”
Revenge hadn’t been as satisfactory as she’d expected, but she at least felt a sense of closure. Of course, that still left the Lampreys. Hopefully she’d get a chance to settle that score, too.
Ten
Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC
“I can’t believe we’re off to see a witch,” Gonzo muttered. “Sometimes I don’t believe the shit we do for pussy.”
“No hookers anywhere around here, so the witch will have to do,” Russell said as he drove the civilian vehicle he’d rented for the night. The car’s handling was terrible, the IC engine made a continuous roaring noise that annoyed the shit out of him, and he felt every bump on the poorly-maintained road all the way up his spine. He’d shelled out twenty bucks for the privilege of driving this POS for the night once it became clear they weren’t going to let him borrow the platoon’s LAV for this recon mission. He didn’t mind the expense; he had some money to burn, courtesy of Dragunov’s pathetic attempt at bluffing, and nowhere else to spend it. It’d been three months after they’d arrived to P-3, three months of hard work and no play. Hard to believe he’d gotten laid more often in P-4, which had held less people in total than any of the top five cities here. Being deployed in this hick-ridden valley sucked ass.
He’d been on a quest to find loving companionship at reasonable rates since day one, spending time and money among the local yokels to see if anybody could point out a discreet cathouse in the area. All he’d gotten from his efforts had been lots of blank stares, some cussing and a couple bar fights. Until now.
“There’s this woman. Might be she can help you,” the local bartender had said reluctantly after Russell plopped up an obscenely-large tip in front of him, all in anonymous cred tubes that the IRS didn’t need to know about. Even so, getting the story out of him had been like pulling teeth, but Russell had been relentless. VR porn could only get you so far in life.
“Are you sure she’s down to fuck?” Gonzo asked as they turned into a tiny country road leading up into one of the gazillion hills that dotted Forge Valley.
“Dude said she’ll do a reading first, some witch stuff with
cards or whatever, and if she decides you are worthy, she’ll do whatever she thinks you need,” Russell explained. “He made it sound like she was willing to go full service.”
Or maybe the dude had steered him wrong and the woman at the other end of the road would be an old spinster with a large collection of pets or someone who’d get Russell in trouble otherwise. Russell had been a little too persistent, so maybe this was a way to try and get rid of him. In which case that bartender would get what was coming to him. He didn’t say any of that out loud, though. Best to have a positive attitude.
“And if you ain’t worthy?”
“Not gonna happen,” Russell said confidently. “I know how these scams work. She’ll do the readings of my credit stick and will know I’m worthy. Here in the boondocks, she can hardly hang out a shingle announcing she’s whore, can she? The local Bible-thumpers would run her out of town. But doing it this way, all them horny farmers can say they’re just getting their fortunes read. Everybody wins.”
“Whole thing doesn’t sound right,” Gonzo said. He’d only agreed to come along because he’d been just as bored as Russell. “How much business can she do anyway? She’s in the middle of nowhere, even for this one-cow town.”
Gonzo had a point. The ‘fortune teller’ lived well off the beaten path. Their drive was taking them to the very edge of farmland and imported Earth plant life in the valley; the trees around here were a mixture of native and terrestrial species. The local varieties were tall and spindly, their long pointed leaves arranged in a circle on top, a little bit like palm trees, except the trunks were studded with sharp hollow spines filled with poisonous sap. You didn’t want to frolic around them woods without some high-grade nano-meds on you. The witch liked her privacy. Maybe the remote location made it easier on the locals, too. Out of sight, out of mind.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 15