Or, at least, since I’d been incarcerated on Delphini B.
“Cass used to make a good chilli,” Odo said softly from beside me.
“Cass could make anything exactly the way you liked it.”
“She really gone, boss?”
“You heard the explosion.”
“Yeah,” he said and chucked his still half-full carton of Rhodie chilli in the trash receptacle.
I suddenly couldn’t stomach all of mine.
“Let’s do this,” I said, throwing my leftovers in the bin behind Odo’s.
We walked off in silence, but that didn’t mean we weren’t on high alert. Nothing jumped out and stabbed us. Or slit our throats from behind, so we made relatively good progress towards my contact.
But that’s where our luck ran out.
My contact’s store was shut up tighter than a Mutt’s fist in a bar fight. And it looked like it had been that way for some time.
“What now?” Odo asked.
Now, we were winging it, and I didn’t like winging the sale of the pinnace one little bit. You couldn’t trust pirates. I could have trusted my contact; a little. Maybe more than that in a past life. But anyone else, I just had to go with my gut.
I turned around and studied the nearest stores. Electronics. Body armour. Weapons. Synths. A brothel. A bar. The last called to me, and I had to scrub my face a couple of times to clear my head. My mouth went dry.
“Cap’n?”
“I suppose we better go find this Davros,” I said reluctantly.
“You know it’s a set-up, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” But what choice did we have? “Level three, right?”
“Yeah. How ‘bout I…?”
Odo didn’t get to finish his sentence.
All of a sudden, we were surrounded by Virginis security.
And they were all Mutts.
Well, flux me.
Chapter Seven
They didn’t disarm us. But that was because they were Mutts. The railgun might have dented their thick skulls if we were lucky, but there were six of them and only one railgun. The plasma rifle would have just made them laugh.
If Mutts laughed, that is.
But being left armed also meant we were being taken to another Mutt.
Last time I was here, Chi Virginis had been run by Rhodians. Looked like a change of management had transpired — just our sort of shitty luck.
The Mutts escorting us were head and shoulders bigger than me. Odo did alright, but that’s because he’s a freak of nature. The Mutt, I guessed was the leader, had a squashed nose and a scar bisecting his right eye. The green of his armour was slightly faded compared to his counterpart’s.
He wore the wear with honour.
To a Mutt, nothing beats dying in battle. And if you can’t die in battle, then you’d better look like you’d fought a hundred battles because otherwise, you were worth nothing.
It helped, of course, that they were big beasts with oversized arms and thick skulls and the strength of ten people. Their planet, Malee, was twice as large as Earth. Their gravity almost double.
It made them big-boned and big muscled and big everything. Ideal soldiers; if you found yourself in a rough spot, you wanted a Mutt to keep you company.
There’d been Mutts on Delphini B. I’d avoided them. Like I’d avoided the synths and Clux the Crazy. I could fight a good fight but also knew when to run from one.
It looked like I couldn’t run from this one, so I accepted my fate calmly.
“Why are you detaining us?” I demanded in an outraged tone of voice.
The head Mutt said nothing and the rest acted as if I hadn’t even spoken.
“We’ve done nothing wrong,” I added for good measure.
They kept walking, and as we were packed between their beefy shoulders, we kept walking too. It’d be like swimming against a tide to push against the flow; that’s if the tide was powered by an enormous moon and we were the size of shrimps.
“I don’t think they’re listening,” Odo offered helpfully.
“We have business here on Chi Virginis,” I said, ignoring my engineer. “We don’t plan on staying. How about you let us go do our business and then we’ll get out of your hair?”
The head Mutt offered me a scowl — probably the hair comment; they don’t have any — and then pressed the button for a lift. We stood there, like a can of sardines, staring at the gel coating on the lift which decided to display a picture of a supernova exploding.
I wondered if there was a subliminal message in there somewhere.
The lift opened, and we shuffled in. Odo and me between six rock hard, silent, well-armed beef buses. It was a tight squeeze.
I said nothing on the trip up to what was considered the top level of the station. When we stepped out of the lift, we were in a sumptuous lounge. Soft music played, and glasses clinked, and on a stage, swinging artfully around a stripper pole, was a human woman.
She looked lovely. But how the hell had she found herself here?
“How about we get one of those for the mess deck?” I asked Odo.
“The girl or the pole, boss?”
“The girl is for sale,” a deep voice said. “The pole is structurally important to the station itself.”
“What?” I said, not looking directly at the owner of that voice but shifting enough to spot him in my periphery.
Yep, I’d been right — another Mutt.
“That iddy-biddy pole,” I went on, “holds the whole place together?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“And you let women swing on it?”
He smiled, showing a row of thick, yellow teeth. His armour, I noted, was even more worn than the head Mutt guard. This guy had been around a battlefield or two in his time.
“If we live our lives without risk, Captain Jameson, we only experience a portion of what could be.”
He knew my name. That was kind of alarming. I had a reputation, and I had been here before, but I didn’t like it. He shouldn’t have known my name.
I turned to face him.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I said, “Mr…?”
Mutts don’t go by simple Mr or Mrs titles. They have Battle Leader this and Supreme Axe Grinder that. But I could hardly guess which it would be.
“You may call me Malcolm.”
Odo sniggered and then covered it with a cough. I offered him a brief glare to indicate he should get ahold of himself and then looked directly at Malcolm.
“Pleasure,” I said dryly.
“Believe me, the pleasure is all mine.” And that didn’t sound creepy at all.
He held out a big arm and indicated the curved banquette seat behind him. He waited until we took our spots; the guards positioning themselves at our backs and at the end of the benches so we couldn’t get out easily. A table separated us from Malcolm, but it was a gel-covered monstrosity in pristine condition. So, my bet was it would stop a railgun slug in a fraction of a heartbeat.
I placed my hands on its surface, and Malcolm smiled, this time without the teeth.
“Imagine my surprise,” he said as another human woman approached us with a tray of frothing drinks. Rhodian single malt, at a guess. The finest in the galaxy and three hundred chits apiece. “When our facial recognition software picked you up in the central hub?”
“I guess I just have one of those faces. You think you see it everywhere.”
“The last time this particular face was seen was on Delphini B.”
I sat back and smiled, showing my teeth.
“I get around,” I said softly.
“Please,” Malcolm said, “enjoy your drink.”
Odo looked at me and then shrugged, lifting the single malt to his lips and downing it. It was a show of nonchalance I didn’t feel. My eyes held those of the Mutt’s, and he smiled thinly, then lifted his own glass to his lips and downed the single malt in one hit.
I’d lost that round, but I wasn’t going to
get too upset about it. Odo had an ironclad stomach. I was still malnourished.
Unless of course, you thought Delphini B beer was a whole food group, and for a while there, I certainly had.
I lifted the glass to my lips and inhaled. Good single malt. Good Rhodian whisky.
With more enjoyment than I cared to acknowledge, I savoured the whisky on my palate.
Malcolm chuckled and said, “There is a bounty on your head for two million chits.”
I spat the whisky out all over the pristine gel-coated table.
Odo slapped me on the back when I started to cough.
“Dead or alive?” I managed between hacking.
Malcolm stared at me and said, “Unspecified.”
Great. Just great. I was a dead man walking.
“Which way are you leaning?” I enquired, once I’d got myself more or less under control again.
“I am a businessman, Captain. Strange, I know. To see a Mal with a taste for capitalism.”
“I’m all for capitalism,” I told the Mutt, I mean Mal. “As long as it makes me money.”
“I would think a cargo hauler would be.”
“So, let’s cut to the chase. You want something. Otherwise, my head would be on a platter, and you’d be calling in that mark.”
“I may still do so; I simply wanted to meet the man, the human, who has garnered the highest bounty on his head since the Great Victory.”
The Great Victory was the Mutts’ most sacred battle. It was taught to all little Mutts with such fervour and passion, that to show anything less than religious devotion to it was frowned upon. I mean, really frowned upon. The type of frowning upon that gets you shafted.
Malee was a constant battlefield, and the Mutts loved it.
This guy was an anomaly. Mutts liked nice things. Especially if those nice things killed other things better. But capitalism? Luxurious surroundings? Expensive whisky? Not so much.
I wondered if he’d paid to have his armour dulled and if he did, then he was one dangerous Mutt to go up against.
A dishonourable Mutt was an unpredictable Mutt.
I felt my palms go clammy.
“Well,” I said, feigning indifference I didn’t feel. “Now you’ve met me. What’s your price?”
“Two million chits would do nicely, but as you blew up your rust bucket of a cargo ship back on Ceres Alpha and currently have in your possession a stolen Zenith racing pinnace, I doubt you could pay the bill.”
“But you have something else in mind.”
He smiled. “I think I like you, Captain. You’re very quick.”
The woman returned with another tray of glasses full of single malt. Malcolm either wanted me to get very drunk and make a bad decision, or he really was made of chits and liked showing off.
I studied the guy as the drinks were disbursed. Two million chits for my head was an easy hour’s work for him. Why not take it?
What could I possibly do for the Mutt that he couldn’t get done for himself?
“Perhaps we could help each other, Captain Jameson,” Malcolm said.
I doubted it, but I’d bite.
“Sure, why not?”
“You plan to run the blockade.”
This guy knew too much. He had to have an extensive network available to him. But you didn’t get to the top of the pirating food chain by playing nicely. My danger-danger alarms were going off like fireworks on New Earth Day inside my head.
“Maybe,” I said slowly, drawing the word out.
“I know where they’re keeping her.”
I said nothing, my heart beating too quickly.
“I know how to get into the complex and where inside it she is.”
This was too good to be true, so I waited.
“I know what they’ve been doing to her.”
OK. I couldn’t quite hide the twitch of my cheek on that one, but he didn’t acknowledge the tell; just kept talking.
“I know she has forty-eight hours to live.”
Odo let out a small sound of disquiet. I was ice.
“I need only one thing for this information and should payment not be met; I should like to point out where you are.”
He looked around the sumptuous room with its plush furnishings and expensive liquor and multitude of enslaved human women.
I’d learned long ago that I couldn’t save everyone in the universe who needed saving. It had damn near killed me, and it was the reason why I was no longer that man. The man who had been a loyal New Earther. That man was no longer me.
So I didn’t blink at the show he put on and wanted me to see. I didn’t stir myself beyond staring back icily.
All that mattered was getting to Zyla.
If I could save Zyla, maybe Doc’s death would weigh easier on me. I knew in my heart that wouldn’t be the case. But my mind was a stubborn beast.
“Non-payment will be met with consequences, Captain,” Malcolm said as if his threat required clarification. It didn’t. I got it.
Lots of armed Mutts and lots of chits to throw around willy-nilly. Hiring a bounty hunter to hunt me down should I fail my end of the bargain was a given. But Malcolm liked his drama.
He was a Mutt after all.
“Go on,” I said softly. “What do you need?”
“There is a Mal of interest in one of the cells within the building your navigator is being held inside. I want him brought back to me. In one piece.”
“And if he isn’t in one piece when I find him?”
“With no further harm to him, then.”
“How will I know which one he is?”
“He is the only one of my kind in captivity on Zenthia.”
To have caught a Mutt must have been something to see. They went berserk when cornered. Certainly at their most lethal if they thought themselves close to death. For the Zeniths to hold one was impressive. And it also meant the security on his cell would be the highest of Zenith high tech.
“Will he cooperate with me?”
“I’ll give you a phrase to say that he will recognise and trust. How he reacts after your exit from Zenthia is up to you. I suggest you treat him with respect.”
I nodded. “I’ll need a ship.”
“And it just so happens that I have need of a racing pinnace.”
Again, I doubted it, but he’d find a way to make money out of stripping the little ship.
“You have something to trade for it?” I asked.
He let out a laugh and then another and another, his whole body rumbling. Finally, he sobered and said, “You’re on Chi Virginis, Captain Jameson. Here, you can buy whatever you please.”
Words were exchanged with one of the Mutt guards, and then a portable vid-screen was produced. On it was a binding contract. Malcolm really liked dotting his Is and crossing his Ts. He’d be the first Mutt I’d ever met who didn’t settle things with a strong arm contest.
It made me uneasy.
But the contract had no hidden clauses that I could see, and the ship he was willing to trade for the pinnace appeared to be worth more than the little racing machine, and he even threw in a few extras. Like upgraded railguns and plasma cannons with damn near limitless capacity and an FTL engine that made Odo drool beside me.
“This ship is mine once the deal is done?” I checked.
“You bring my…compatriot to me, and the ship and modifications are all yours.”
It was a sweet deal. Which was why I was sweating buckets and my heart was beating mercilessly fast inside of me. Either Malcolm didn’t think we’d make it through the blockade or he thought we’d die in the rescue attempt. Or maybe he really did think we deserved the better end of the bargain if we succeeded.
He was also setting us up with as much of an advantage as he could manage to ensure our success. So the Mutt he wanted rescued was important to him.
I could use that.
“OK,” I said and placed my thumb on the vid-screen. My biometrics were scanned and accepted, and then Malcolm did
the same, and just like that, I was in bed with a Mutt.
And a pirate Mutt at that.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said, standing. “We need to get started.”
“Oh, did I forget to tell you?” Malcolm said sweetly. “Your navigator is set to be executed in forty-eight hours, but my compatriot is set to be executed in a little less than twenty-four.”
Son of a bitch.
“You could have mentioned that,” I growled.
“The ship is fast, Captain. Not as fast as the pinnace; that would be reckless. But it is faster than your Harpy. You can reach Zenthia in time if you leave immediately.”
“Departure clearance already approved, no doubt,” I said sourly.
“Of course. I run the place. I can pick and choose who gets preferential treatment.” He paused. “And who gets shafted.”
I smiled all teeth. “I guess we’ll be seeing you, then.”
“I guess you will.”
I looked at Odo; who looked a little shocked. And then I turned on my heel; my engineer close behind me. We were escorted with just two Mutts this time, which made the elevator ride more comfy. But the looks we received from the beings walking the umbilicals was priceless.
We were in deep shit.
Whoever this Malcolm had been, whoever he was now, he was feared and respected in equal measure.
“I feel like I’ve just signed a deal with the devil,” I muttered.
“Like I said, Cap’n,” Odo drawled. “Big cajones.”
“We didn’t have a choice,” I told him.
“You won’t hear me arguing.”
“Forty-eight hours, Odo,” I said softly.
“The clock is ticking.”
“Why do I feel, then, that I’ve made a big mistake?”
“‘Cause brains you have,” the head Mutt guard said in an impossibly deep voice. “Or what is for brains in puny species.”
Now here was a Mutt that fit the picture of Muttness nicely.
“Thank you,” I said. “I think.”
He smiled, showing yellow teeth and led us out into an umbilical that had a row of vid-screens showing the outside of the space hub.
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 8