by Scott Moon
The sight was intensely unpleasant. She grumbled under her breath and stormed out of her office, turning and heading straight for Dixie’s room. Nothing really made sense to her right now, but she wasn’t stopping to second-guess herself.
The madam of the Mother Lode was out. Pierre and anybody else who might interfere with her curiosity was working in the bar below. She opened the door with her passkey and began a tour of Dixie’s apartment.
She wasn’t quite sure what she expected to find—maybe a pair of Thaddeus’s boots and a bunch of discarded bottles of liquor. And what if that was what she found? This was none of her business and she was being ridiculous. Her eyes rimmed with tears and she clenched her fists in frustration at her own irrationality.
Of course, there was nothing to indicate a night of drunken debauchery. There was, however, a very neatly organized desk. A fashion catalog caught her eye and caused her to sit down and page through it. To her surprise, Dixie had excellent taste, even if she never wore any of these items in Darklanding. She wondered what the buxom blonde would look like in decently fitting clothing of the most modern style.
There were other things on the desk as well. Several impressive stacks of credit chips caught her eye. She dared not touch them. She didn’t even keep that much cash on hand. Beside the stack of money was a peach.
“You just have to flaunt your wealth,” Shaunte said to the room. She lifted the peach and felt the weight of it in her hand. “That has to be worth four or five hundred credits.”
Feeling incredibly guilty, Shaunte put the peach down and checked to make sure she had not disturbed anything else in Dixie’s room. She left feeling naïve and vulnerable. The madam of the Mother Lode had more money than she did, probably more money than Pierre or other businessmen in Darklanding.
There were suddenly too many mysteries in Darklanding. Not for the first time, she blamed the sheriff. Except for people getting blown up in their offices, things had been routine in the spaceport before he showed up.
She stepped out of Dixie’s room, closed the door, and marched smartly toward the stairs and the walkway that surrounded the saloon below. Before she could reach that relative zone of safety, she ran smack into Sledge.
“I am on official business,” she said before she could think.
“I never said you weren’t,” Sledge said.
“You were going to her room!”
“And you are coming from her room. I’m really no good at this. I thought she liked men,” Sledge said.
“What? No, no, that’s not it at all,” she said, watching disbelief color his expression.
He held up both hands in a placating gesture.
Shaunte decided it was time to change the subject before she was found out. She could fire Dixie and have her kicked off the planet, but she didn’t think she could face the embarrassment of being revealed as a snoop. “While I have you here, can you please explain to me why I have two SagCon Special Investigators poking around?”
Sledge narrowed his eyes at her. “Have you been spying on Dixie?”
Shaunte lifted her chin regally and snorted. “I think you should answer my question, Special Investigator Hammer.”
“Well, I suppose it’s pretty simple. I’m here looking for a runaway fugitive and Special Investigator Fry-Grigman was called to transport White Skull to an ultramax facility off planet.”
“Don’t play games with me, SI Hammer. Are you looking for a runaway or a fugitive?”
Sledge didn’t answer immediately, clearly annoyed with the way this conversation was going. The expression on his face was a mixture of disappointment and resentment. The verbal duel was well beneath both of them and he didn’t seem to appreciate it.
“Have you ever heard of Cornelius Vandersun?”
Several things clicked together for Shaunte. She put one hand against the wall and leaned on it for balance. The idea wasn’t totally foreign to her, but she hadn’t actually believed the rich girl runaway could be from such a powerful family. Such thoughts were amusing but little more than daydreams.
“Are you telling me Cornelius Vandersun is Ruby Miranda’s grandfather? “
Sledge smiled. “I’m guessing that you want to help me as much as you can, so I can get her off this planet. As a bonus, I’ll take Penny with me as well. That just leaves you and Dixie to scrap over the sheriff.”
“We’re not scrapping over the sheriff!”
“Of course not,” Sledge said.
Shaunte pushed past Sledge with a huff and stormed back to her office. No sooner had she slammed the door and stomped to her desk than she saw the green message light on her computer. Green only met one thing: a special directive from SagCon.
She didn’t want to open the file and stood tapping her fingers next to the keyboard screen for a full minute. Random thoughts polluted her mind. She tried to corral them, focusing on her mantra of hard work and its relationship to success. None of her usual tricks worked. “Maybe I need to set up a special expense account for medicinal alcohol, or find a therapist on this godforsaken planet.”
She didn’t believe in the calming effects of alcohol, or therapy for that matter. A good success coach might be able to help her through this mess, but she suspected she was just overworked and would soon have everything under control.
She opened the message and skimmed to the end. Normally, she scanned for relevant details and then read it in more detail once she had the overall gist of the message. What she saw in this mandate from SagCon was simple and disastrous.
From now on, the Ungloks could only be paid in SagCon company credits…digital money for an analog culture.
CHAPTER SIX: SagCon Credits
P. C. Dickles stepped down from the ten-ton, eight-wheeled truck too tired to stretch his back despite the stiffness tying him in knots. His back was one solid muscle cramp. All of his joints popped when he moved. The sun hurt his eyes and the air was dry. He never thought the air out here could scratch his throat. He was accustomed to the toxic environment of mine shafts full of dust and fumes. From up on the mountain, Transport Canyon had looked like a postcard paradise, but the magic was gone now that he was there.
“This place is a desert,” he said as he walked toward the science building. He stopped halfway so he could get a good view of the convoy he had brought with him. The demands of the job required him to mix human and Unglok work crews, which was never a good idea under ideal circumstances, but Shaunte Plastes had put him in charge of this operation and he wanted to get it done and get back to the mines.
Twenty-seven trucks were now parked bumper-to-bumper down the main street of Raven’s Haven. Crews jumped down with varying degrees of agility. Not everyone on his team was as old as he was. Of course, a man had to be pretty young to not be old in his line of work.
Dickles was supposed to contact a woman named Amanda Preston, or something like that. He didn’t see her but saw plenty of other townsfolk working like it was the day before payday. Something nagged at him for a moment until he realized what it was. There were already Unglok workers here.
How had they gotten here? He’d never heard of them down in the canyon and knew that they were highly allergic, to the point of fatality, to A19, which had only recently been blown free of the area by Ungwilook’s unpredictable weather system. It seemed rash for them to already be toiling away in the unfamiliar environment. Had they been bunkered down in these buildings during the entire crisis?
He slowed his pace as he thought about the situation, stopping well short of the science building to stare at the town and the people in it. The strangers looked as though they had lived here their entire lives.
A woman’s voice caught his attention and he turned around to see who could only be Amanda Preston, the leader of Raven’s Haven.
“I said they’re hard workers,” the woman repeated. She had the look of a frontier woman, her hair tucked up under her hat and her jumpsuit covering any place skin could be exposed. Her work gloves looked rough and well-used,
and her boots were a few weeks away from needing to be replaced. Her jumpsuit had been patched many times and was made from common fabric, even though it was obvious she was not a common laborer.
“You’re surprised they live here,” she said.
P. C. Dickles was surprised. He was even more surprised that she told him, because it had to be some kind of secret. “Why are you telling me this?”
She shifted uncomfortably, then shrugged. “I’m tired of lies and subterfuge. The Ungloks living in Raven’s Haven are outcast from their society, which probably makes them double outcasts from everyplace else.”
“Why would you hide them?”
She studied him with a face that would make professional poker players wary. “Let me show you around. We have a lot of work to do. If it’s all the same to you, I would appreciate your discretion. Leave the Unglok problem to me.”
“That sounds like a good idea. The Gloks ain’t bad workers, if you know how to talk to them.”
Amanda’s eyes dropped ten degrees below freezing. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Something caught Dickles’s attention, causing him to excuse himself from the conversation. Amanda glared at him. He pretended not to notice. What did he care if some woman he just met approved or disapproved of him?
Most of the Ungloks were congregating around the lead truck in the parked convoy. They were strange people, hard to read their emotions. Dickles didn’t like what he was seeing. They looked angry, maybe even violent. Encountered one-on-one, in some dive bar or on a side street, they could be belligerent. Most of them knew by now it was a bad idea to tangle with a human. The Ungloks were taller but less dense, and usually not as strong as a human. They didn’t show their emotions often.
He approached carefully. “What’s the problem?”
One of the Ungloks was pushed forward as their spokesperson. The others formed a line behind their impromptu leader. “We can’t take this form of SagCon payment. What is the meaning of this?”
Dickles realized he had missed something. He wasn’t an office worker type. This wouldn’t be the first time he missed a memo or policy change.
He held up a hand to stall them and backed away from the growing crowd. It wasn’t difficult to see the humans watching the confrontation from their own little groups. Even the locals of Raven’s Haven were watching now, gathered along porch railings and near the doors of their shops. He pulled his battered tablet from the utility pocket of his jumpsuit and opened his messages.
The process seemed to take forever. He didn’t care about memos and messages or the stupid politics of SagCon. Why would he update his tablet software every five minutes like the computer support officer seemed to want? He had a job to do back at the mines and the sooner he got there the better.
What he read was bad news.
He closed his eyes and said a little prayer before he realized what he was doing. The Ungloks were looking at him strangely, the crowd seemingly having grown already. Local Ungloks from Raven’s Haven joined the non-human miners at the lead truck.
Dickles affected a careless shrug. “SagCon credits are the most valuable thing on the planet. You like to get paid, right?”
“Not muchly the most valuable to us here. Shrines don’t take SagCon credits. Neither do herdsmen in the high mountains. Or craftsman who mend clothing greatly. How do I bury credits for days of rainy?”
P. C. Dickles looked at the humans in the area and then back to the agitated crowd of Ungloks. Some were angry, others looked sad and hurt. He didn’t understand what the problem was. They were paid more than they were worth for the amount of trouble they caused him. He wished this crew were all human. He thought he would already be done by now if he had the right people working for him.
The ungenerous thought bothered him, which only made him angrier.
The Ungloks muttered in their language and pointed at Dickles. He didn’t know if they were growling at him. It sounded like laughter, even if he couldn’t imagine why they would go from anger to amusement at his expense. He clenched his teeth and glared at the leader.
“I’ll talk to payroll, but it won’t change anything. We need to get to work right now,” he said.
“Why talk to payroll? If it won’t work to talk, what is the point of talking?” the Unglok leader said. Several of the others started stomping around each other and grunting in their language.
“What are you doing now? Throwing tantrums? Stop acting like a bunch of children,” Dickles said.
“You do not know us. My people are trying to calm themselves and do what you say.”
Dickles felt like he was three inches tall.
* * *
Thaddeus didn’t have time to deal with prisoners, not after what Shaunte had dropped on him the second he walked into her office. He didn’t know how corporate officials and politicians could be so stupid. There were a few things that should not be tampered with in a frontier or an army: Food, liquor, women, and pay. But mostly pay.
Getting paid was the reason people lived in these hellholes. He needed to find Mast Jotham and get some advice. His friend’s absence was starting to cause him a great deal of grief. Thad wished he knew what the Ungloks would do if pushed too far.
The lockdown facility where he had stashed White Skull and several of the more problematic citizens of Darklanding was simple; the reinforced cells were strong enough to contain an explosion. He didn’t have state-of-the-art prison facilities, but the locals knew how to make a tough building. The sooner he got rid of White Skull and the other troublemakers he’d gathered up since his assignment to Darklanding the better.
He unlocked the front door with a thumbprint and his personal code, then went into his secondary office. He hated the place and spent as little time there as needed. The temporary structure had been placed squarely on the ruins of his old office and felt like bad luck. Rather than retrofit the jail cells that had survived the blast, he’d had them knocked down and replaced with another temporary but explosive-proof prefabricated dormitory that had originally been designed to store explosives. Seemed prudent and more than adequate for his needs. He didn’t plan on arresting a lot of people.
He checked his messages and stalled as long as he could, noting that the coffeemaker didn’t seem to be working and that there was no food in his small refrigerator. Eventually, he made his way down the hall, checked the security protocols, and slid back the communication panel to White Skull’s cubicle.
“I read your alert on my tablet. What’s the problem?” Thaddeus asked. He checked the facility log, noting that White Skull had been harassing the other prisoners over the general comm system required by the Prisoner Fair Treatment Act. In old world prison cells, inmates could yell through the bars. Since modern facilities—even his ugly jail—were tighter than airlocks, the law had mandated the general comm system.
Thad pushed the warden’s bell. A timer appeared, indicating how long he could harass the inmate with the loud sound. He released it almost immediately, not wanting to use up his allotted time all at once.
White Skull didn’t move at first, but remained lounging on his cot as though Thad had inconvenienced him. He looked greasy and tired.
“Well, thanks for showing up. I’m sure you have a real busy schedule here on Darklanding, lawman,” White Skull said.
Thaddeus fought his impulse to respond to the jibe. He went through a round of combat breathing exercises to calm himself and said nothing. In with the good air…out with the bad air…
White Skull pushed himself up from the cot, sitting on the edge as though he expected Thad to come inside and sit down for a chat. He stared at the window, obviously calculating his words.
“There’s a lot more going on in Darklanding than you realize. I’m not sure you appreciate who Ruby Miranda is or what type of trouble is circling the spaceport as we speak,” White Skull said.
“What the hell you talking about?” Thaddeus didn’t like the feeling he was getting from this conversation.
“I mean when there’s one Vandersun, there has to be more. If you were any bit of a lawman, you’d arrest that girl. She’s wanted for murder and a bunch of other things that I’m sure you don’t want in a respectable place like Darklanding.” He laughed at his own words.
“None of that’s any concern of yours,” Thad said, trying to catch up.
White Skull laughed hysterically. He gasped and wheezed until he had control of himself, then laid down on the cot with his eyes closed. “Maybe, maybe not. It’s going to concern you, however, because I’m about to break out of here and collect that bounty.”
“Let me give you a tip, Mister Skull. Don’t tell your captor you’re going to break out. Kind of ruins the element of surprise,” Thad said.
“Oh, I think you’re going to be very busy. What with all the payroll problems you’re about to have with the Gloks,” White Skull said.
“Where are you getting your information?” Thaddeus asked.
“I’m a businessman. You’re just a hired gun. I keep up on current events. The SagCon decision to pay less reliable native workers exclusively in SagCon credits has been a huge debate for years. I didn’t know if it had happened on this crap planet, but your reaction confirms it. You should retire, lawman. You should clear out before we meet again in the open.”
Thad smiled. “That’s the last thing I’m worried about.”
White Skull made several rude noises.
“Don’t waste my time again. There are provisions for shutting down some of your creature comforts,” Thad said.
White Skull laughed almost hysterically. “Comforts?”
“Like the ability to harass your fellow inmates over the general comm. That can be a seven-day isolation order. Rations can be cut to fifty percent for two days. Lighting is unreliable here on Darklanding. My deputy is probably a big fan of Unglok rap music and could be put in charge of prisoner recreation and entertainment. Don’t make me get creative,” Thad said. “Stop bothering the Ungloks in the other cells.”
“None of your rules are going to apply when I’m out. Maybe I should make some rules of my own. Maybe I am going to take your cowboy hat for a trophy. Use it to…”