by Glenn Smith
Or so he thought. But when his turn to be served finally came and he stepped up to the counter, the artificially friendly ticket agent immediately redirected him nine counters farther to the right, to Solfleet’s Aerospace Mobility Command service counter. He thanked the smiling agent politely and then headed off in that direction reluctantly, but as he drew closer and saw that he wasn’t going to have to wait in another line, that reluctance vanished. He did wonder, though, as he stepped up to the counter, why all the civilian aerospace carriers still posted agents at their ticketing counters when the entire process had gone fully automated more than a hundred years ago. All in the name of customer relations perhaps?
“May I help you, Sergeant?” the rather rotund middle-aged woman behind the counter asked him, also smiling that pleasant, very familiar, and obviously artificial smile that customer service reps everywhere seemed to borrow from one another. Her wavy shoulder-length platinum hair was obviously bleached and looked even more artificial than her smile, and stood in sharp contrast to her dark brown eyebrows.
“Good afternoon,” Dylan said. “I need to book passage to Mandela Station, please.”
“All right,” she said as she sidestepped over to her computer terminal. She tapped a few keys and gazed at her monitor while she waited, then told him, “There aren’t any more military flights tonight, but there are seats available on a commercial flight departing in a few hours.” She extended her pudgy hand to him and wiggled her fingers in a sort of ‘gimme’ gesture. “I’ll need your identicard, please.”
He took the same forged identicard that he’d given to the police officer out of his sleeve pocket—he’d moved it there to separate it from the rest of them and make finding it quickly that much easier—and handed it to the woman.
“Thank you,” she said politely as she accepted the card.
This was it. This would be the first real test of Commander Royer’s technical handiwork. This was the identicard scan that would either transfer his fictitious service record and all related personal information into the Solfleet computer net and identify him as the person it described or raise an alarm that would immediately notify law enforcement and quickly result in his arrest. The standard policeman’s handcomp that the officer on the street had used hadn’t stood a chance of identifying the forgery. It had only been designed to look for a specific indication that the card wasn’t a forgery, to bring up basic identifying information, and to indicate whether or not there were any outstanding arrest warrants against the person being identified. Military readers, on the other hand, were much more intuitive than civilian models, even in this decade, and retinal scans were always used to confirm that the person bearing the card was in fact the person whom the card identified.
The woman slipped it into the appropriate reader slot and the tip of her tongue slipped out from the corner of her thick-lipped mouth as she tapped a sequence of buttons on the control pad. “Look into the optical scanner, please,” she then directed him.
Dylan stepped over to the device and stared at the twin red dots. The small white rings around them lit up for exactly three seconds, then blinked off.
“Thank you,” she said while she waited for the results to come up on her screen. A few moments later she was still waiting, breathing noisily through her mouth as though the process of identifying him had worn her out. The system was apparently having difficulty with his card and Dylan was beginning to get a little nervous. If he got caught carrying forged identicards, Solfleet Intelligence would lock him up so deep inside the stockade that a company of Force Recon Marines wouldn’t be able to find him, let alone break him out.
Not that the Marines of this era would have any reason to try.
Just as the woman sucked in a breath to say something, a green indicator light winked on with a soft beep. She withdrew his card and handed it back to him. “Better get yourself a new identicard, Sergeant,” she suggested as she entered his reservation into her computer. “Looks like that one’s going bad. Might cause you a lot of inconvenience.”
“Thank you. I will,” he assured her.
Outstanding. Commander Royer, or more precisely whichever member of her staff had actually made the card, had done a good job. Not a great job perhaps, but a good job. Good enough, anyway. The work had fooled Solfleet’s central computer and Dylan’s manufactured personnel record had just been downloaded into the fleet’s database and would now be accessible from all fleet facilities’ local systems. In other words, Solfleet Security Police Sergeant Dylan E. Graves now officially existed.
“Are you traveling on orders?” the woman asked him.
“No ma’am,” he answered honestly. “I’ll be paying for it myself.”
“Okay.” She made the appropriate entry. “Any luggage?”
“No luggage. Just a day trip.”
“All right,” she said as she completed the entry. “You’re all set, Sergeant Graves. Gate number eleven. Take the escalator up, follow the signs, and have a nice flight.”
“Thank you.” Dylan walked off, headed for the gate.
Chapter 7
Jennifer set her cup down on the table in front of her and glanced at her watch again. She was beginning to get a little impatient. She and Ashley had finished their dinner almost an hour ago and were already nursing their third cups of coffee, and had still seen no sign of Crewman Omar Al-Sharif. They’d eaten fairly lightly, not wanting to fill up too much in case they ended up engaged in a foot pursuit before the night was over, had skipped dessert altogether, and were quickly running out of things to talk about over coffee, so looking like they weren’t yet ready to get up and leave was growing increasingly more difficult. But what other choice did they have? If they wanted to make the arrests tonight, then all they could do was keep waiting. Al-Sharif’s contact might have been sitting at the next table for the past hour for all they knew, but until Al-Sharif himself showed up and made contact with him, they simply had no way to identify him.
“Think your friend might have chickened out?” Ashley asked her.
Anything’s possible, I suppose,” Jennifer answered as she raised her cup to her lips again. She took another sip and made a sour face—her coffee was cooling off too quickly—then added as she set the cup aside, “I hope not, though. I’ve been waiting for this night for weeks.”
“Yeah, well, he better show up soon or people are going to start getting suspicious.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look around. We’re pretty much the last of the dinner crowd. The club crowd is already starting to take over the place. Everyone’s drinking the hard stuff but us. We’re going to stand out like a Veshtonn blood-warrior in church pretty soon.”
“Yeah, good point,” Jennifer agreed, looking around while trying not to be too obvious about it. Sure enough, a more raucous clientele was fast filling up the place, virtually all of them drinking, some of them heavily, turning the place into one big party. The band would probably take the stage soon and start the people dancing. “I was just thinking pretty much the same thing. I hope we don’t have to call it off.”
“If he doesn’t show his face soon we’re going to have to, Jenny. Either that or we’re going to have to start drinking something harder than coffee and dancing like we’re on a date.”
“Hell, Ashley, I’d make out with you in the middle of the dance floor right now if I thought it would make him show up any faster,” Jennifer quipped.
“Uh, let’s not get carried away,” Ashley suggested with a smile.
Jennifer smiled right back and said, “Hey, as I recall, you’re the one who wanted to join me and the blond god in bed.”
“Yeah, but that was mostly for him. A guy his size and build? Imagine how big his...”
“Hold that thought,” Jennifer interrupted, making a mental note of the fact that she’d said ‘mostly for him’ and not ‘only for him’ as she raised a hand between them and looked past her toward the front doors. “He just came in.”
&n
bsp; “Who just came in?” Ashley asked, suddenly serious again. “The blond god or the other guy we’ve been waiting for?”
“The other guy,” Jennifer answered, just as seriously.
“That figures,” Ashley commented, rolling her eyes. “Now that I have to pee, it’s time to go to work. I knew I shouldn’t have drunk three cups of coffee.”
“Go. Make it quick.”
As Ashley slid out of the booth and headed for the ladies’ room, Jennifer picked up her coffee cup and peered over its brim as she took a long sip of the now much too cold to enjoy brew. As she watched, the suspect crewman stopped not far inside the doors and looked around, then approached the bar and slid up onto a stool. He ordered a drink, just a beer from the tap as it turned out, and then sat there clutching his mug in both hands, staring into it. He looked nervous. Good. That probably meant the exchange was going to take place as arranged. Their wait might have been a long one, but at least she and Ashley hadn’t been wasting their time.
She set her cup aside again—she’d drunk all the cold coffee she could stomach for one night—glanced down at her blouse for a second, and then looked around at a number of the other young women in the club. Short skirts, tight jeans or leather pants riding low on the hips, stiletto heels, form-fitting tops, many of those being worn without bras underneath. Sexy to the point of being a bit risqué seemed to be the norm in the club now. She’d dressed fine for dinner, but between the two of them Ashley was the one who’d dressed more appropriately for this crowd and Jennifer was starting to feel like people were beginning to notice how out of place she was.
She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, considered for a moment what she could do about that, and then, as nonchalantly as she could managed, unbuttoned the third and fourth buttons on her blouse so that her black lace bra could easily be seen when she moved her arms away. Not a whole lot better, given how relatively conservative that bra was, but it was the best she could do without running back to her quarters to change, and there was no way she was going to take the time to do that and risk missing the exchange.
Ashley finally returned a few minutes later, sat down, and exhaled sharply. “I feel much better now,” she remarked.
“What took you so long?” Jennifer asked her.
“Hello,” Ashley responded. “Three cups of coffee, remember?” she asked, her eyebrows rising to the top of her forehead as she reminded her friend and partner of the obvious. Then she suggested, “You might want to consider taking that little walk yourself while you still have time. You drank as much as I did.”
“No, I’m good for a while,” Jennifer told her, hoping even as she said it that she’d still be good to go when things finally started happening. Then she reconsidered whether Ashley might be right. Maybe she should try to go now, even though she didn’t feel like she had to.
“So what’s going on?” Ashley asked her. “Anything happen yet?”
“No, he’s still at the bar nursing his beer,” Jennifer answered, shaking her head slightly. “He hasn’t made contact with anyone, except for the bartender.”
“Hmm,” Ashley intoned pensively as her eyes narrowed. “You don’t think...”
“No,” Jennifer answered confidently before Ashley could even finish asking the question. She felt sure of it. “No, it’s not the bartender.” Although, after she reconsidered the possibility for a moment, she had to admit that it could have been him. After all, she didn’t really know the bartender wasn’t Al-Sharif’s contact. She just had a strong feeling that he wasn’t. A feeling that she decided to stick with. “We just need to wait a little while longer.”
“If you say so, but I’m sure as hell not having any more coffee while we wait,” Ashley told her in no uncertain terms. “It’s making me so damn hot that I’m starting to sweat, and unlike you, I don’t have any outer clothing I can take off. Speaking of which,” she prattled on as her eyes fell to Jennifer’s cleavage, “I see it’s making you pretty hot, too.”
“What? Oh, yeah, a little bit,” she admitted as she wiped a thin sheen of sweat from her brow. “But I can’t take my jacket off without… you know… revealing the tools of the trade.”
“Maybe next time you’ll think things through a little better,” Ashley replied. Then she pointed out, “But I was referring to your blouse.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said, glancing down at herself again. “Just trying to blend in a little better. Seems I’m a little overdressed for this crowd.”
“Yeah,” Ashley agreed, nodding her head, “come to think of it, you do look a little too much like a cop compared to the rest of the girls here. Tell you what. Next time we do this I’ll help you choose your wardrobe.”
Jennifer snickered. “Deal,” she agreed. “As long as you make me look as good as you do right now.”
“What’s so funny?” Ashley asked, grinning in response to Jennifer’s laughter.
“I just can’t get over the sudden change. You’ve always dressed so conservatively and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear makeup before. Now you finally get your cherry popped and suddenly you’re a woman of the world.”
“Oh, I didn’t just get my cherry popped, girl,” Ashley assured her. “I got it annihilated. I mean, Roberto was so...”
“Stop right there,” Jennifer pleaded, grinning with embarrassment and raising her hands in surrender. “You’re going to... you know... get me all worked up.”
“Really? Want me to go find the blond god for you?”
“Yes I do,” Jennifer answered wide-eyed and with a nod. “Absolutely. Unfortunately, we have a job to do instead.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Ashley acknowledged, teasing her. “I guess you’ll just have to take care of it later... by yourself.”
Jennifer snickered again. “As if it would be the first time.”
“Ooh, you naughty little girl.”
“Hey. You can’t possibly sit there and tell me you’ve never...” She fell silent when she saw a man enter the club, stop a few steps inside the doors, and start looking over the crowd. He was tall and slender, almost grotesquely so, with small deep-set eyes and sharply angled features, unkempt shoulder-length dark hair, and an almost but not quite neatly trimmed sparse beard. He wore a dark-colored, long-sleeved turtleneck, either blue or green—she couldn’t be sure which, now that all the lights had been dimmed to a more nightclub-like level—and nondescript dark trousers tucked into the tops of badly scuffed work boots. Definitely not a member of Solfleet, or of any other Earth-based military service for that matter. Not looking like that. A civil servant then. Probably a dock worker or other laborer.
“What’s up?” Ashley asked, suddenly very serious again.
“Don’t look, but I think our visitor just walked in.”
“Are you sure? What’s he doing?”
“No, I’m not sure,” Jennifer answered with a slight shake of her head. “Not yet. But I am pretty sure this guy’s never been in here before.”
“How would you know? You’ve never been in here before.”
“For one thing, he ignored Little Green Manny, Junior.”
Ashley gasped with overly exaggerated shock. “How dare he! That is nothing short of sacrilege! No one disrespects Little Green Manny, Junior like that!”
“Exactly,” Jennifer agreed, smiling. “Even I know that.”
“He should buy the next round for that,” Ashley insisted. Then, setting all kidding aside, she asked, “Seriously though, is that all you’ve got? The fact that he ignored the fake Martian on his way in?”
“Call it a gut feeling,” Jennifer told her. “Anyway, let’s see what happens.”
The man continued looking around as he started slowly making his way through the club toward the back wall, but he soon did a double-take toward the bar and then turned and headed in that direction. He had an odd way of walking, Jennifer noticed. He seemed almost to bounce up off the balls of one foot while he raised the other one several inches higher than was necessary
to walk across a flat floor. As he approached she looked more closely at his eyes—deep-set and small, yet somehow still overly bulbous. An almost white light blue in color, but with an overall reddish-yellow tint to them, as though exceedingly tired and bloodshot. Or was it just the club’s lights making them look that way? Maybe, but there was something else about him as well. Something about his skin. It looked too… too dry. Almost leathery, like that of the proto-human Naku, which he clearly wasn’t, but shinier. Shinier even than that of the average human, now that she looked a little closer. Almost as though he were covered with a fine layer of perspiration. No. Not perspiration. It went deeper than the surface. It was something... something else. He was something else—something not quite human. But what?
Then again, it might just have been the lights.
He stopped directly behind Al-Sharif for a moment, then squeezed up to the bar between him and the guy sitting next to him and said something to the bartender, who nodded in response and then walked off. Al-Sharif turned his eyes to the stranger briefly but didn’t appear to say anything to him. In fact, Jennifer couldn’t be sure they’d even made eye contact with each other. The bartender returned with a bottled beer, opened it, and handed it to the stranger, who nodded his thanks, stepped back from the bar...
...and pulled his hand out of Al-Sharif’s coat pocket and then calmly walked away.
“Handoff complete,” Jennifer mumbled so that only Ashley would hear her, “and I damn near missed it.”
“What are they doing now?” Ashley asked her.
“The crewman’s still sitting at the bar,” she answered. “The other guy’s making his way toward the exit, real slow like. He bought a beer, but he isn’t drinking it.”
As Jennifer continued watching, the stranger acted as though he were trying to look like he was mingling with the crowd while he slowly inched closer and closer to the exit. Then, when he reached Little Green Manny, Junior, he turned his back, set his beer down on the Martian’s head, and made a beeline for the doors.