I turned away, and saw another familiar light. It was the lit-up sign across the street that read KEN'S CAF, either because of a misspelling or because the last E kept winking out. Beneath that, there was a familiar awning with a transparent plastic tent draped over it in a slightly halfhearted effort to turn an outdoor dining area into an indoor one.
Of course. I must have unconsciously drifted here to get some inexpensive dinner at one of my favorite . . . well, most frequently attended, restaurants, which happened to be near the spaceport. That made perfect sense.
I parted the flap and headed straight to the counter, shaking the excess rain from my flight jacket. Most of the benches were packed, probably from the wet driving people in; some of them weren’t even star pilots. They were easy to spot, the nonpilots, because they weren’t hunched over their bowls like dogs trying to get their dinners scoffed down before a bigger dog came over.
Ken himself had risen to the occasion by putting on one of his cleaner singlets. He gave a little jolt of surprise at my presence, then a nod of acknowledgment, as he grabbed one of the bowls by his side and began filling it with rice and a lumpy brown substance that only the menu could attest was katsu curry.
“Try the salad tonight,” said a familiar voice to my left. “I saw him get the lettuce out of a fresh bin bag.”
I turned to see my old friend Flat-Earth Frobisher, waiting to pay for two bowls of curry on a tray. He was the same as always: shirtsleeves, trousers stained with fabric conditioner, paunchy figure, thinning hair, perpetual faint smile. It was a look that suited him so well, I could have sworn his waist had ballooned out like that the instant he first unstrapped his flight jacket.
Hardly surprising to find him here, two doors down from his launderette, but it was good to see him all the same. For one thing, he was smart: he’d gotten out of star piloting before most of the rest of us did, and he knew how to get grease stains out of silvery jumpsuits. That made him an ideal sounding board for my problem.
“Frobisher,” I said in cheery greeting. “You got time to talk?”
“Sure. Come join our table.” He eyeballed the bowl of slop that Ken was preparing. “Can I get this for you?”
“Oh, you don’t have to . . .”
“It’s fine, really. Least I can do.”
“All right then, yes,” I said quickly, having made the one refusal demanded by basic politeness.
He added my bowl to his tray, waved the back of his hand under Ken’s chip scanner until it gave a watery electronic sigh to indicate a confirmed payment, then started leading me through the narrow rows between diners. “Where’ve you been, anyway?” he asked over his shoulder. “Thought you might’ve finally gone to Salvation.”
I grimaced as the idea tossed around my head like a sourball in my mouth. “That’s the place where star pilots go. I’m trying to break off from the whole star pilot thing.”
“So now you hang around just outside the spaceport instead of inside it. Baby steps, is it?”
“I told you, I—”
I stopped dead as we passed into the deepest corner of the dining area, and my hands balled into fists. Not out of anticipation for dinner, but because of who I had just spotted seated at an otherwise empty table.
It was Electra Blue. Chief assassin of the Kraken Sector Triad.
“You!” I hissed, dropping into a quick-draw stance and batting my jacket aside to bring my blaster holster into reach.
Electra’s eyes narrowed in recognition. She hadn’t changed at all: the cool blue skin that glittered faintly in the dim fluorescent light, the snow-white hair that clung tightly to her head, the slender limbs and angular features that seemed like they must have been carved from driftwood. “Zo, we meet again.”
We stood frozen in a tense, silent standoff for a handful of seconds that seemed to stretch on and on like the moment between a torpedo’s launch and its detonation, before Frobisher broke the spell by dropping the tray of bowls onto her table with a clonk. “Oh, give it a rest, you two,” he said, without malice. “It was only funny the first few times.”
Electra smirked as I took a seat opposite her. “Oh, it iz good to zee you again, though.” The skin around her eyes crinkled in that papery way idiosyncratic of Kraken Sector humanoids. “Why haven’t you been around lately?”
“Trying to break off from the whole star pilot thing, apparently,” said Frobisher, passing out the bowls.
Frobisher wasn’t the only former star pilot I knew who’d ended up marrying his archnemesis. After everyone stopped adventuring, it didn’t take long for the nemeses to start pining for each other. It turned out that there are a lot of deep, soulful things you can only find out about a person by trying to kill them for years on end.
I’d messed around with Electra and her followers a few times, most seriously on the occasion they were hired to assassinate an ambassador I was transporting, but that was about as far as we ever got. We’d never reached the point of actively plotting revenge against each other—or “third base,” as it was sometimes known—but there was still a warm regard between us.
“Oniriz Venture? Zeriouzly?” she said, after we’d been huddled around the little booth, tucking into reheated curry, and I had filled the Frobishers in on my plans. “Juzt to get away from ztar piloting?”
“What’s so great about star piloting? You spend half your life star piloting, what do you get out of it? Nothing but unmarketable skills, and then Jacques McKeown rips your story off for one of his plying books.”
“Is he still doing that?” asked Frobisher, holding his plastic fork aloft. “I thought that was why everyone was getting little secret gifts of money a while back. I heard he grew a conscience and decided to share the wealth.”
“I heard he waz hunted down and killed,” Electra said with obvious relish. “I heard the onez that did it zplit up the money over the ruinz of hiz corpze.”
“Well, guess we’ll never know,” I said, hopefully not with too much obvious haste. “The point is, I’m done with it. I’m moving on.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to completely cut yourself off from everything to do with it.” Frobisher gave a little smirk at his own thoughts. “This has always been your problem, hasn’t it? You can’t do anything in moderation.”
I glanced from him to his wife uncertainly. “I just told you I’ve quit star piloting.”
“Yeah, but most people would just quit. You can’t even do moderation in moderation. Most people wouldn’t move to the edge of the universe and change their identity. Most people aren’t that dramatic.” He made to put his fork to his mouth, but hesitated. “What’s your new name, again? Captain Handsome?”
“Dashford Pierce,” I muttered, accurately predicting Electra’s reaction.
“Ha!” she barked with a spray of rice before covering her mouth apologetically. “That’z even better.”
“Maybe we don’t all trust ourselves not to give in to temptation.” I lowered my gaze.
“You know what I think,” said Electra, rocking playfully. “I think you need a zpecial zomeone.” She fondly squeezed Frobisher’s knife hand, and he gave me a confirmatory nod.
“Yes, well, we didn’t all do the archnemesis thing.”
“Mm, I remember.” Electra pouted. “Could never commit for very long, could you. Alwayz holding out for zomething more interezting. If you’d taken the time to really get to know zomeone, maybe you wouldn’t be zo unfocuzed now.”
“There must have been one,” wheedled Frobisher, raising a cheeky eyebrow. “There must have been one villain you’d always thwart first if there were a bunch of them needed thwarting.”
I leaned away, letting the air blast out of my lungs as my back hit the bench. This wasn’t a conversation I was at all in the mood for. “I dunno. I was never looking for anything serious.”
“What about Mimi the Red?”
Frobisher asked. “She was going on about you for days after the Caurus 9 job.”
“Ugh, that little flirt. A new fazcination every other week.”
“There was Terrorgorn,” I said thoughtfully, eyeballing the ceiling. “I’d always notice when Terrorgorn was doing something.”
“Everybody did,” murmured Electra.
“Yeah, that’s not really the kind of thing we’re talking about,” said Frobisher. “I don’t picture Terrorgorn sitting with his feet up in quiet retirement. He’s probably in a dungeon somewhere trying to chew his way out through the floor.”
“With any luck,” added Electra.
“I suppose there was Malcolm Sturb. I chased the Malmind off a few worlds.”
Electra perked up. “Oh yez, dear Malcolm. Shame all thoze arrezt warrantz are keeping him out in the Black. What’z he up to now?”
I swallowed my mouthful of rice. “Last I knew, he was working with Salvation Station. Putting on shows for tourists.”
“Oh, poor boy,” said Electra, referring to the progenitor of the galactic cybernetic hive mind that once scourged a thousand worlds. “We uzed to catch up every now and again zo he could show me hiz new toyz, and hiz enthuziazm waz zo infectiouz . . .”
Quite a lot of things about the Malmind were infectious, but I’d never considered enthusiasm to be one of them. “So what were we talking about, again? You’re suggesting I call up Malcolm Sturb and invite him out to a dinner dance?”
I noticed that they had both become distracted by something behind me, and that the hubbub of conversation in the entire restaurant had died down to a low conspiratorial rumble.
A man was moving through the diners, creating a bubble of silence around him everywhere he went. He was quite tall and wide in the paunch, and like many figures of authority in Ritsuko, he had a Japanese set to his features, with neatly trimmed black hair and a mustache as smooth and rectangular as a blackboard duster. It was someone I’d met before. The last time, he had been releasing me from a pair of handcuffs and advising me to stay out of trouble.
Inspector Honda of the Ritsuko City Police Department. I immediately took an even closer interest in my food, but he wasn’t coming toward me. He was slowly and deliberately walking through the dining area like a school-exam officiant, and when he finally stopped, it was in a seemingly random position in more or less the middle of the room.
“Good, this seems private enough,” he loudly announced, tottering sleepily. He addressed a uniformed officer who had just appeared behind him. “Now, give me that interesting report you gave me, again.”
“Erm . . .” The officer looked at his tablet after a quick nervous glance around the restaurant. “It’s about Salvation Station . . .”
“Salvation Station, that community of star pilots that live out in space and are connected to several less-than-legal acts of piracy!” bellowed Honda, deliberately lingering on every relevant word. “Sorry, that was for me, the old memory occasionally needs prompting. What about them?”
“There’s a rumor that they’re planning something,” said the officer quietly, although he was clearly audible over the dead silence. “Something in this city.”
“I think you said something that may involve the Henderson crime organization, oh my goodness, how embarrassing, I of course meant to say family business,” said Honda, in a flat, faintly slurred monotone. “Well, officer, just between you and me, if the star pilots are planning to do something silly in this city, then the police would take a pretty dim view of it, wouldn’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if anyone should happen to want to do their civic duty and share insider knowledge of such a thing, then our gratitude would manifest in all kinds of ways, wouldn’t it, officer?”
“As you say, sir.”
Honda made a prolonged sigh and slapped his buttocks. “Well, thank you for indulging me. Occasionally it helps my thought processes to loudly talk out a problem in a room full of star pilots. Let’s get back to the station.”
Every eyeball in the room stared fixedly at a point slightly to the left of Honda and his lackey as they shuffled awkwardly through the crowds and out of view, until a sudden increase in the volume of the conversation around me indicated that they had finally left the restaurant.
Frobisher leaned forward, still with one eye on the door. “Aren’t you pretty close to that lady who runs Salvation now?”
A complicated rainbow of feelings arced across my mind as I mulled over my response. “We’ve, uh. We’ve worked together in the past.”
Electra grinned impishly. “And do I detect zome feelingz for her?”
“Sure. Feelings of mutual dislike, antipathy, and the occasional night terror at the thought of ever running into her again. Can we change the subject?” I didn’t like the knowing looks the Frobishers were giving each other. “I was hoping for some advice tonight.”
“Right, this Oniris idea. What do you need advice about?” said Frobisher. Electra snorted tolerantly and pushed away her empty bowl.
“Where would you go if you needed to find scientists? The normal kind, not the ones that build doomsday machines.”
Frobisher reeled slightly, heaving the air out of his lungs and staring at the ceiling in thought. “I suppose I’d go to the university.”
Ritsuko City’s only university was in the west side, roughly on the border between the Japanese and European quarters. I tried to remember what had been going on there on the very, very few occasions I’d had cause to go near it.
“But if you really want my advice,” said Frobisher, suddenly serious, “I’d say, before you go hang around there in a sandwich board, hoping to draw in science graduates with no will to live, on top of the hope that Oniris are true to their word and actually will help you abandon everything and everyone you’ve ever known . . .” He took a deep breath. “Maybe instead you could have a good long, hard think and find another way to deal with whatever’s making you unhappy.”
I bit my lip, and let it slowly uncurl from under my teeth as I thought. “So what would you make the sandwich board out of?” I said.
Chapter 3
As was my habit, I spent the night in the forward luggage compartment of my ship, using the usual pile of unclaimed lost property as bedding. Empty suitcases for a mattress, an old dog carrier for a pillow, and my blanket was a gigantic flower-patterned muumuu that no member of one prior tour group would admit to owning.
Maintaining, and indeed living on, the Neverdie was not something I considered incongruous with my intention to stop being a star pilot. After all, I didn’t intend to stop being any kind of pilot; it was my main skill set. There was always the chance of getting some nice sedate transporting jobs, assuming a highly contagious brain parasite went around at some point making everyone forget how quantum tunneling worked.
Besides, it wasn’t like I had many alternatives. The rent on a parking space in the largely unused section of Ritsuko City Spaceport was a tracload cheaper than an apartment. The spaceport even came with manned security at no extra cost, even if they did occasionally mistake you for a tramp on your way back from the bathroom and truncheon you to the floor.
This also meant a free early-morning wake-up call, because there was usually some poor bracket whose parking permit had expired during the night getting turfed out by the security team at bang on six o’clock. I’d grown used to being stirred from sleep by a reassuring dawn chorus of truncheons hitting hull plating and angry swear words.
So when I was gently woken that morning by the shuttle-bay lights coming on for the day and bleeding through from the cockpit, I instantly knew that something was wrong. The spaceport was completely silent but for the distant hum of the Quantunnel section and the highly conspicuous sound of people trying too hard to be quiet.
I rolled over, scattering bags and holdalls, until my ear was pressed agains
t the maintenance plate that led to the open landing-gear compartment. Sure enough, I could hear soft footfalls on the cement just outside. One person? No . . . two. Two people trying to very inconspicuously sneak past my landing leg.
“This is the one, right?” said one of them in a hushed tone.
“Red bay twelve,” replied the other. “And keep your voice down. He might hear us through the landing-gear compartment.”
Both the voices were male, and the first speaker sounded younger than the second, but that was all I was prepared to say with certainty. They probably weren’t station security, because they were trying to go unnoticed. Security always tried to be as obvious as possible, as they had to pay for their own truncheons, and would sooner avoid needless wear and tear if intimidation could do the work.
I kept listening. The footfalls moved away, around toward the airlock entrance and out of earshot. I waited for developments, but all fell silent.
After a few minutes of consideration, I crawled out of the luggage compartment into the cockpit and peered down the central gangway to the airlock door. It remained closed and silent, but it was the kind of tense, expectant silence that two men waiting in ambush might create.
I weighed the possibilities. I was still paid up with the bay rental as far as I knew. Maybe security were coming to throw me out illegally? That might explain why they were being quiet. If word got around that they had tossed me out without cause, the uproar from the wider star pilot community would . . . not faze them in the slightest. No, that probably wasn’t it.
As my mind raced, the mental fog of early morning began to clear and a memory of the previous night slammed home. I had been woken by my phone buzzing near my head, signaling the arrival of a new email. Instinctively I had checked it, and a single, devastating subject line had slowly swum into focus like a horde of invading barbarians appearing over a hill:
ATTENTION: JACQUES MCKEOWN
And upon seeing it, I had hurled my phone across the room as if it had transformed into a scorpion. By the time I had sunk back into sleep I had convinced myself that it had been a dream, but now that I was remembering this, I couldn’t help noticing that my phone wasn’t in its usual place.
Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash Page 2