“I won’t, either.”
We trudged out of the bushes. Dolph breached the surface of the pool in dolphin form. Rex was among those standing on the shore. He laid a gentle hand on Lucy’s back, restraining her from diving in to join Dolph in her excitement. I almost wished I could take it back when I saw that, but it was too late.
We said our goodbyes and went back to the city. Dolph and Martin headed straight out to the spaceport. I located Robbie and told him to pack his bags, ‘cause he was coming with us. He practically licked my hands in joy, until I broke the news that we were no longer an independent trader, but a Fleet subcontractor. Specialty: dirty jobs.
45
Robbie and I got out to the spaceport at 8 PM to find our hangar blazing like an all-night supermarket. Everything the customs inspectors tossed around had been tidied up, fixed, or replaced. A crew of mechanics rode a mobile scaffolding, finishing off a professional patch job on the hull plate that Sophia’s missile had crumpled. I stowed my kitbag and checked their work. While I was hanging upside down, looking at rivets, a Fleet armored car arrived with ammunition for the missile launchers, the point defenses, and the railgun.
We usually had to buy ammo on the gray market in the Fringeworlds. This stuff came straight from the source, smelling of factory grease, festooned with large-type handling cautions. It wasn’t just standard rounds, either. We got fire-and-forget seeker rounds with AI guidance, and even a couple of nukes. I looked around for Irene, thinking she’d be in heaven, and then remembered.
D’Alencon drove up to the hangar in his official unmarked car.
I guess he felt safe with all the Fleet hirelings around.
I was going to deck him, anyway, and then someone else got out of his car.
Rafael Ijiuto.
“Say hi to your new weapons officer,” d’Alencon told me.
“I don’t need a new weapons officer,” I said. “We’re flying with a crew of four. Martin, engineering, Robbie, admin, Dolph, pilot, and I’m going to double as weapons officer.”
“You’re taking him,” d’Alencon said, “because Major General Smith wants you to.”
“Does he also want to get him back alive?” I said.
“I don’t think he cares one way or the other,” d’Alencon said. “But you can’t kill him until he’s done his job.”
Ijiuto was pale and morose. He squinted up at the St. Clare as if she was smaller than he remembered.
“What is his job?” I said.
“As you may recall,” d’Alencon said, “he hired Sophia Hart and her crew to eliminate his cousins. He paid them very well. It is Major General Smith’s belief that Ms. Hart is short of money, and would be open to resuming that relationship. Should you be so unlucky as to run into her out there, Mr. Ijiuto may be your best hope of surviving the encounter. He has been rehearsed in a cover story to explain his release, which y’all will also commit to memory. In a nutshell, he will claim he was freed on account of having diplomatic immunity, and immediately hired you to take him in search of the Travellers. Apart from that, he has also been given operational funds to draw on, which he can put at your disposal to ensure the successful completion of your mission.”
“Basically,” I said, “we’re to consider him our boss.”
“You can just consider him your employee,” d’Alencon said.
“I’m horrible to my employees,” I said. Robbie, listening, sniggered.
“Don’t take it out on him,” d’Alencon said.
LOX and LN2 tankers nosed into the hangar. Another supply wagon trailed them, bringing more goodies. Leaving d’Alencon standing by the wall, I sorted through the stuff in rueful amazement. New rifles and ammunition. Polar gear for the Mittel Trevoyvox climate. A new set of portable HF radios. Medicines for every kind of trauma and infection. When we were in the army, we had to mend our own clothes and buy meds on the black market. Guess the Iron Triangle has a more generous budget.
There was even a new maintenance bot. They must have noticed that the St. Clare didn’t have one. It was a chrome octopus the size of a sheepdog. “Greetings, captain,” it croaked. “I am a certified medic, IT technician, mechanic, and flight engineer. I can also play games.”
“Interactive mode off,” I said. It was too painful to be reminded of MF by this clunky, human-built artificial intelligence. “If I need you, I’ll let you know.”
The bot silently spidered up the airlock ladder.
I looked around and saw d’Alencon watching me. “You still here?”
“I warned you not to go to the Hurtworlds, Tiger.”
“You should know by now I don’t take good advice.”
“This is all my own damn fault. That night I came to your place, I thought I was being so slick, fooling the algos. But there was surveillance on your apartment.”
“There was?”
“They thought Sophia Hart might get in touch with you.”
I laughed. It was oddly comforting to know that the Iron Triangle had got me and Sophia so wrong. “I didn’t spot any surveillance.”
“it would have been one or more covert micro-drones. They customize them to look like insects.”
I suddenly remembered the moth on my front porch, which had mysteriously flown away from the porch light.
“We don’t use those. Our policy is that you have a right to know when you’re under surveillance. But the Iron Triangle don’t give a fart about your human rights.”
“I gathered that.”
“Couple days after you left, I got called in to the chief prosecutor’s office.” D’Alencon clearly needed to unburden himself. It wouldn’t kill me to let him. “There’s the chief, standing there like a potted plant. And there’s Smith, sitting in her chair. Previous to that I had not been aware of the Iron Triangle’s involvement. Oh, the whole department knew something was hinky with the Ijiuto case. It was political. The Fleet interrogated the suspect with no PD officers present, which is unheard-of. They even confiscated his belongings. So I did not come into that meeting completely unprepared. But Smith had a surprise for me, all the same. ‘So,’ he says, ‘you had a chinwag with Michael Starrunner. Is there something between the two of you?’”
“What was he implying?”
“That I was corrupt.”
I laughed. It honestly sounded like a bad joke. Jose-Maria d’Alencon and corrupt didn’t belong in the same sentence, or even on the same planet.
D’Alencon did not smile. “They got me over a barrel, Mike. There are corruption charges on the chief’s desk. I don’t play along, she signs them. I lose my job, I might even face jail time.”
I rubbed my mouth, realizing that d’Alencon had not betrayed me. The police department had betrayed both of us. “Did you tell them about … about …” My thoughts leaped back to my confession to him in the evidence room at PdL PD HQ.
“All that’s between you and me, stays between you and me. They aren’t interested in your personal history, anyway. The surveillance drone picked up our conversation about your trip to the Hurtworlds. I told them that I thought the run might have something to do with Pippa Khratz. That lit a fire under Smith’s ass. Next day, he headed out to Yesanyase Skont himself.”
“He was scared I might get to her before he did.” I remembered something Pippa had said. “He must’ve already ordered the army to take her into custody. But they couldn’t find her, because the infantry garrison on Yesanyase S is rotten through and through. The Hurtworlds Authority volunteer on the ground suspected that they were going to mistreat her, and hid her … until I got there.”
“That fits.” D’Alencon sighed. “Couple weeks later, Smith comes back, empty-handed, wild with rage. We heard him shouting at the chief prosecutor all the way down the hall. Then he called for me. He’d calmed down by that time, thank goodness. He says, ‘Get me something on Starrunner. Something that could put him away for life.’ And I … I gave him the Timmy Akhatli case. The evidence is only circumstantial, but it’s good enou
gh for government work.” D’Alencon met my eyes. Anger darkened his pudgy, honest face. “Why’d you have to go and do that, Tiger? Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Mike!” Dolph yelled, from the cargo crane operator’s seat. “Can you help me lift this shit into the airlock?”
“Coming,” I yelled back. I hesitated. “Bones, I … I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” d’Alencon said. “So am I.”
*
We took one last call from Smith on the ship’s radio, orbiting 140 klicks above Ponce de Leon. “The technicians tell me your ship has no hardwired skip multiplier limit. That’s illegal.”
“Your point?” I caught myself being insolent. Floating in orbit on the bridge of the St. Clare made me feel free and powerful, like I had the whole Cluster in the palm of my hand. I had not yet fully adjusted to the new reality that I was an unpaid, unwilling Fleet subcontractor.
“My point is that time is of the fucking essence,” Smith said. “Our calculations say you can safely get there in fifteen standard days. Make it happen.”
“Yes, sir.” I ended the call. “Fifteen standard days? What does he think we are, a Fleet jalopy?”
Dolph shrugged, sifting through the data in his AR display. The bridge felt different without Irene, smaller and too bright. Dolph had expressed doubt about my plan to double up as weapons officer. The St. Clare was designed, after all, for three bridge officers. And now, instead of Irene, we had Rafael Ijiuto.
He floated in the left seat without an AR headset. No way was I giving him access to any of my ship’s controls. I had only let him on the bridge because there wasn’t another spare couch.
As I calculated our FTL burn, Ijiuto said hopefully, “We could just run. Make a quick refuelling stop in the Fringeworlds, and then head for home. There’s a lot of room to hide on the Darkworlds. When the Fleet first came to New Gessyria, they didn’t even think it was inhabited. They thought we must’ve all died. Then we came out of the forests and gave them the surprise of their lives ...”
I thumbed the intercom. “Skip field generator status, Marty?”
“Nominal.”
“Roger. Dolph, confirm orientation.”
“Orientation confirmed.”
“Throttle up.”
“Throttling up now.” The main drive roared into life, shaking the ship.
“Initiating exhaust field on my mark.”
“Copy.”
“And mark.” I threw the switch. The violent jolt of sudden acceleration tossed us back against our couches.
A cry came through our headsets.
“Robbie!” Dolph exclaimed.
I peeled off my harness and flew off the bridge, down the trunk corridor. We were still weightless, but the ship was now accelerating, as the exhaust field multiplied the speed of the particles jetting out of our engine. 0.1 gees of thrust gravity dragged me aft. I caught the edge of the lounge door, swung in by one hand, kicked off from the wall, and slapped the poky admin officer’s berth open.
Robbie’s foot hit me in the chest. I grabbed onto the top edge of the door. Robbie was spreadeagled in the air, kicking comically as he tried to get back to the couch that took up most of the berth.
“You OK?” I said. “Why aren’t you strapped in?”
“I thought it was over,” he said shamefacedly.
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s only just beginning.”
Someone laughed behind me. I turned and saw Ijiuto hanging onto the door of the lounge, cackling at the sight of me trying to stuff Robbie’s legs back into his berth.
I saw red. I arrowed towards Ijiuto and grabbed his arm. “Gimme a hand, Robbie.” We towed him, struggling, across the lounge and crammed him into the admin berth. I slammed the door and set it to locked. Now it would open only to my palm-print.
“Power down, ya,” Robbie yelled at the wall in street dialect, as Ijiuto banged on the inside of it, like Zane Cole had done.
“Did you leave any of your stuff in there, Robbie?”
“Yeah man, my kitbag.”
“That’s yes, Captain.”
“Yes, Captain,” he said, grinning.
“We’ll get it when we give him a toilet break.” I put my face close to the wall. ”You’re on my spaceship now,” I shouted. “You ever want to get out of there, you lick my boots and call me God.”
46
Fourteen days later, we exited the skip field, still travelling at 2% of light speed, near the orbit of the fawn-colored gas giant that shared the Mittel Trevoyvox system. I left Dolph on the bridge, stepping our speed down in easy increments. The trip had gone smoothly. On top of being an all-Shifter crew, we were now an all-male crew. It made it easier to maintain discipline. I’d had everyone exercising their blues away and competing in our AR shooter sims.
Now it was time to let the prisoner out.
I floated in front of the admin berth with my left hand resting lightly on Robbie’s neck fur. The lower half of Martin’s body coiled lightly around my legs. “Here we go,” I said, feeling unaccountably nervous.
I pressed my palm on the panel and let Rafael Ijiuto out.
We’d been letting him out every day for bathroom breaks, and taking him food and water. But that had been Robbie’s responsibility. I confess I had avoided any contact with him. Now his appearance shocked me. His beard had grown in patchily, like dirt. His face was pouchy and pallid. And he stank: a rich, homeless funk that reminded me of the time he had turned up in my office, claiming to have walked eight hundred kilometers.
He looked at us and said, “You fucking animals.”
Suddenly I felt ashamed of the claws and teeth beside me, the pulsating coils of muscle around my legs. I felt ashamed of what I was. It lasted only a second, but it left me quiet.
Robbie hackled. I patted his neck absently.
Ijiuto aimed a withering sneer at me, then floated past us into the hall. We followed. I was trying to parse why he made me feel so bad about myself.
“What, you wanna come with me to the head, too?”
Ijiuto peed into the suction funnel without bothering to close the door. As he was zipping up, a light jolt shook the bulkheads, pitching him against the wall.
“What was that?”
“We’re there,” I said. “Haven’t you been keeping track?”
“It’s only been thirteen days and change.”
“Exactly. We ran the acceleration up to half a gee before entering the skip field, and then flew blind through the edge of the Core.” I had the satisfaction of seeing him pale somewhat. “Peaked out at 1,950 c, which is substantially faster than Smith believes we can go. So we’re here, and he’s not. That gives us an advantage. What we’ll do with it remains to be seen. At present we’re decelerating towards Mittel Trevoyvox.”
I slapped Robbie’s shoulder.
“Go and strap in. You might want to spray some disinfectant around in there first.”
“Oh, man.” As Robbie drifted past Ijiuto, he swiftly turned his head and snapped at Ijiuto’s legs, catching the fabric of his pants and ripping it. Ijiuto cried out. Robbie laughed and went on his way.
Martin lapped his coils higher around me, until his head was under my chin. I rested my forearms on the snake’s body and watched Rafael Ijiuto float forward to the bridge. I was feeling sick again.
“Prochlorperazine,” Martin whispered. “A half dose.” I had confided in him about my bouts of nausea. I said it was probably space sickness. After all these years? He surely didn’t believe me, but he pretended to. “And Mike? Don’t drink when you’re taking that stuff.”
“Roger,” I said, mentally filing the warning under ‘ignore’. “I’m sure I’ll feel better when we’re on the ground.”
*
We were travelling so fast that it took the best part of a day to decelerate down to Mittel Trevoyvox orbit. Microimpacts continually shook the force field nose shield, making the journey a nailbiter. After all these millennia of inhabitation
by various civilizations, Mittel T’s Lagrange points and graveyard orbits were strewn with junk. We had to constantly use the masers to nudge larger pieces of debris off our trajectory, or vaporize smaller ones. I crouched over Irene’s consoles, playing whack-a-mole with scraps of ancient satellites, while Dolph continually adjusted our course to compensate for the microimpacts. Rafael Ijiuto sat in my couch, picking his teeth like a lord.
“Guess we outran Smith’s drones,” Dolph said when we got close enough to Mittel Trevoyvox to see what was in orbit … or rather, what wasn’t.
As we had experienced for ourselves on the way back from Mittel T last time, the limits of modern technology put a ceiling on FTL speed. We had scraped right up against that ceiling on our way here: 1,950 c. Faster than that, not even FTL drones can fly. So, even if Smith had dispatched drones from Ponce de Leon to order other Fleet units in the volume to Mittel Trevoyvox, they had not received their orders yet.
We had the place to ourselves … apart from the Fleet and Ek units regularly stationed here.
“What’s that?” Ijiuto said.
He had no AR headset, so he was looking at the physical external feed screen. “Ek space station,” I said, before I processed what I was seeing.
The geodesic sphere of the space station looked … dented.
No. Holed.
The feed gained detail as we rushed lower. Sunlight reflected off structures inside the space station that were not meant to be exposed to vacuum.
“Here comes the Fleet patrol ship,” Dolph said. The arrowhead boat orbited into view at 180 klicks, right above the space station.
I reached across Ijiuto for my comms and hit the ship-to-ship frequency. “Hey flyboy, how’s it hanging?”
“He’s tumbling,” Dolph said. As we crossed the Fleet ship’s orbit, it glided past, not fifty klicks away, swinging over and over like a flipped coin that would never come down. The open radio channel hissed.
“Dead,” I said.
That poor kid. He had bragged about defending humanity, putting a brave face on his backwater posting … and then death had come to Mittel Trevoyvox, like a whisper out of the void.
Dirty Job Page 28