Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “And we’ll keep playing by the rules,” the fierce brunette added. “At least until I find someone who can kick your ass, Tank.”

  “People keep trying,” Roland replied affably.

  “And dying,” Bettie finished the thought.

  Parker stepped in. “That’s all well and good. And I hear you all on that. Which brings us to the real meat of the issue. If all of you are playing nice and keeping to the new guild rules, where the hell is all this unrelated crime coming from?”

  “Junkies,” said Bettie. “Blaze-brains and speed freaks need creds for a fix. They go for soft targets when they get a jones on.”

  “We’ve got a great bloomin’ passel of new pimps working the streets as well,” Rodney added. “With the Madame gone, it's pure fookin’ chaos in the prostitution rackets. They bring their own muscle, too. We either have Bettie handle it or send ol’ Tank after ‘em. Fook if they’re not popping up faster than we can squash ‘em.”

  Henry had some input, too. “Scabs,” he spat. “Many new pushers are still invading. They see us as weak because we have no central leader. For every one Roland or Bettie throws out, two more show up.”

  “Okay,” the detective seemed to be warming up. “So junkies, pimps, and pushers are the problem, huh? What do you suppose would be a great way to handle that?”

  “Fookin’ cops.” The Dwarf did not seem thrilled with this revelation.

  “Exactly. If I had enough good cops to actually patrol the streets, a lot of this would be handled. I can fix this for you, and all I want in return is a few concessions. Mostly stuff you are already doing, anyway.”

  “Just out wit’ it, lad!”

  “I want a Cop Guild or whatever to sit at the table with the rest of you. We will coordinate to keep the regular folk from getting hurt, and you get to keep doing what you do without having to pay off a whole department.” Sam scowled, then added, “Well, you’ll get to do what you do as long as you keep that shit under wraps, at least. If you start murdering folks on the drag in broad daylight, there’s going to be a problem. All I’m saying is that I accept that Dockside crime is not going away, and I’m not going to insist that you all join charity organizations or whatever. I don’t want to go to war with you guys because as much as putting you all in jail would make my day, you guys aren’t the real problem. What I want is a chance to make Dockside safe for all the people who aren’t criminals, too. If I have to dance with the devil to do that?” The young detective held his hands out to the sides, “Get to fiddling, then.”

  Rodney’s bushy eyebrows rose to a dangerous height, and he stopped before replying, as if to think carefully about his response.

  Sid spoke for him. “So the bribes stop, and you will start to build a police force that can actually deal with street crime?” She did not sound convinced, and Bettie looked on the verge of apoplectic.

  “That will require some serious moral flexibility from your people,” Henry added.

  Sam looked at the man as if he was a complete moron. “As opposed to the ethical contortionists I work with now? I’m not looking for saints. Just a squad that cares more about the people on the street than they do their next blaze fix or kickback.”

  The Dwarf was still thinking, his bionic claw twisting in lazy circles as he examined the opportunities. “And when ye’ have yer wee squad of do-gooders, what then?”

  “We will start figuring out who is sending drug pushers, pimps, and thugs into our town and end the threat. Because, folks, I don’t think this is random at all. I think we are being invaded. People are dying because somebody out there wants Dockside and they are afraid of us working together. I’d rather have that guy’s head on a plate than any of yours.”

  “Ye know damn well who’s head it is yer talking about, don’t ye?”

  “I have leads.”

  “Well, I think the Trade Association will have to talk about this at our next meeting, lad.” The Dwarf looked around at the others in the room, “But I think I can say right now that yer offer is real fookin’ compelling. Especially if yer idea of who is gunning fer us is the same as mine.”

  Sid, Henry, and Bettie nodded their approval. With this, the meeting was adjourned.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Pride of Wayfair docked at Enterprise station after two days of stomach-wrenching acceleration and equally unpleasant deceleration. Having deposited her riches in Dockside and subsequently gorged herself with goods bound for the frontier, Pride needed to refuel and refit before ‘gating out to Gethsemane and then on to Wayfair. Despite the risk of capture, Jean Marceau knew he had to take his chances and slip off-ship while docked at Enterprise station. If he disembarked at Gethsemane, he would be a penniless fugitive wandering around in a religious colony. Even without the onus of a dead terrorist’s biometrics, Jean would not last long there. Gethsemane was populous, prosperous, and if one ignored the religious fervor of its occupants, thoroughly modern. Their concepts of crime and punishment, however, skewed to the ‘archaic’ side of the spectrum with a fervor and enthusiasm that did not bode well for a man with Jean’s criminal record.

  If he rode the cruise all the way to Wayfair, he would be that same penniless fugitive in a system owned and operated almost entirely by mega-corporations. There would be a bio-scanner on every door he passed through, redundant security checkpoints at every way station, and a private militia that owed allegiance only to the company store. The constabulary in Wayfair was not subject to any authority higher than the COO of whatever corp owned their turf. If he somehow managed to slip through the cracks, Jean had heard of a few good-sized smuggling outfits in the system that he could hook up with. Yet his chances of getting to them unhindered by law-enforcement seemed slim to the point of nonexistent. He seriously considered trying, all the same. The Fixer’s little comm-jockey expected him to make for Galapagos, and Jean wanted nothing more than to give him the slip. Objectively speaking, Galapagos was the best place to make such an attempt. No one in Galapagos would care one whit if Jean was a terrorist or a crook or even a six-headed dragon. Not having money would be a problem, as it always was. Fortunately for Jean, Galapagos had no official currency and Galops were the kind of folk who could be convinced to take all sorts of things in trade. For all these reasons it was a dejected Jean Marceau indeed who resigned himself to walking the path his enemies had set him on.

  Skulking through Enterprise station while wearing the biometrics of a known terrorist was only one of the many problems his erstwhile victim had left him to contend with. With his comm reduced to an electronic paperweight, Jean had to find a public terminal to dial in to his accounts. Naturally, they were empty. The little Venusian bastard had drained them of what small resources they held, and Jean was not the sort of man normal people were wont to extend credit to. This did not leave him entirely without resources though. Jean’s life had left him with many interesting talents and maneuvering through the world with nary a cred chit to his name was not unfamiliar territory to the man. Where there were people and trade, there would be drugs and smuggling. Jean Marceau merely had to find that cohort without getting pinched to put his skills to good effect.

  The drug pusher possessed very little understanding of interplanetary law enforcement, but he understood that Enterprise Station was an economic free trade zone. Everyone who traded with Earth made a stop here, and thus immunity was automatically extended to those who traded within the zone. There were rules, of course. Mostly trade agreements and basic peace-keeping conventions to prevent anarchy. Jean was ignorant of the details, but he was cognizant that as long as he abided by the station rules, there would be no reason for the local constabulary to take any special notice of him. This might have helped him to relax, but the knowledge that Pike’s Privateers had the peace-keeping and defense contracts on Enterprise ruined any relief he may have enjoyed. Running afoul of the galaxy’s most elite fighting force was not the sort of conflict a person like Jean was equipped for.

  Criminals are
ever a tenacious lot, and most had difficulty understanding the relationship between risk and reward. Thus, even on Enterprise Jean felt confident he would find an enclave of smugglers and thieves too brave or too stupid to choose a safer home. He made locating this place his goal for the first few hours on-station and as he suspected would be the case, it did not take long. He spotted a pickpocket working the edge of the receiving deck and cornered the urchin in a storage unit. When facing opponents half his size, Jean counted himself a fierce fighter. It only took a few seconds of rough slapping to get the skinny child to give up a likely location. Jean left the pickpocket crying and slipped into a maintenance stairwell.

  Down below the retail zones, Enterprise Station had its own little underworld. Mostly smugglers, the tiny den of iniquity bustled like a foul-smelling ant colony. With the sobbed directions from the child memorized, Jean found his way down there with little trouble despite the Byzantine meanderings of the darker parts of Enterprise. The most complicated part was giving any places with active scanning equipment a wide berth. Fortunately for Jean, the elements he was attempting to contact tended to establish their haunts under the same strictures he did.

  That is how he found himself in a dim storage hangar eleven decks below the clean silver surfaces of the Promenade Deck. The space was large, wide open, and obviously had not been used for storage in a long time. Tables and chairs were set up in a haphazard fashion and hollow-cheeked smugglers sat around them playing table games and swigging from metal flasks. An array of tired-looking men and women dressed in little more than underwear and looks of quiet desperation made their way among the groups, offering private dances or other services best provided in seclusion to the rough crowd talking and drinking. It was not a bar as near as Jean could tell. Mostly because there was no one serving drinks. Everybody seemed to have their own supply of whatever intoxicant suited their fancy, and nobody appeared eager to share. This, at least, was an opportunity Jean could exploit. He scanned the room, narrow eyes searching for a familiar scene. He found it quickly and he made his way across the floor to a table near one dirty gray wall.

  Three people sat there. Six red-rimmed eyes darting to and fro while furtive hands shook small inhalers furiously. The elements of sadness and fear mingled on those faces and Jean recognized the unique terror of an addict at the tail end of a fix. He pasted a big friendly smile on his face and sat down without asking. His sudden appearance startled the group. One set of numb fingers fumbled and then dropped the empty inhaler mid shake and it bounced on the table with a clatter. The owner squeaked in terror and slapped a hand over it, the other hand clawing at his belt line for what Jean presumed was a weapon.

  “Peace, squaddie,” Jean said calmly, his hands up. “Just a traveler, here. No squid, no jones on me.”

  The eyes of all three stared at Jean, each trying to make sense of the newcomer. The one who dropped his inhaler spoke first. He had sandy hair and a wan face. Pale thin lips quivered and his voice shook. “No jones? You’re square?”

  “Fuckin’ perpendicular, squaddie. I come to help.”

  “Why?”

  Jean let his amiable smile widen. “Like I said, I’m a traveler. Might need some help movin’ on, is all. I know a jones when I see it and I can get you square for a while if you want.”

  This was of course, the ultimate bargaining chip. Blaze was a popular drug for its pleasant high and generally benign side effects. The addiction, on the other hand, was merciless. On its own, blaze was not much more harmful to the body than booze or THC. This might lead an individual to believe that a little puff of the pleasant vapor now and then amounted to nothing more than a harmless lark. What the budding addict might not know is that the innocuous little molecule bonded permanently to several key structures in the brain. After only a few uses, a person would start to have a hard time feeling anything pleasant without it. If not checked, life between puffs would deteriorate into a morass of depression and anxiety. Jean knew the stages of blaze addiction intimately, and he knew from experience that more than half of all blaze addicts committed suicide within fifteen years of starting. There were many who argued that the ultimate torture of blaze addiction was not that blaze killed the user, rather it made the user kill itself. Jean agreed with that assessment. Blaze was insidious, and that was why Jean preferred thanatos or DimStim. A two-day hangover and the occasional psychotic episode were still better than killing yourself over a fix.

  The pusher sat among three mid-stage blaze addicts and looked them over carefully. Their eyes were bloodshot but not yet rheumy. Their hair sat in unkempt clumps on their heads but did not appear neglected. All three had the disheveled look of someone who had slept in their clothes, but none wore the tattered rags of a person who had given up on self-care altogether.

  A second spoke. This was a woman, greasy blond and wearing a dangerously low-cut shirt. “You can get us square?” Her swooping neckline revealed a long arc of cleavage. While her face was pale and stretched, her décolletage still swelled with the fullness of youth. In the bad light of the converted cargo bay a man could be forgiven for thinking her beautiful. The wisdom of experience was not always a boon and Jean had been in plenty of badly lit rooms with junkies. He had already figured out that better lighting would destroy the illusion, and that was a shame.

  “We squaddies?” Jean needed to drag this out. He wanted them desperate and dependent upon him.

  “Get me square, handsome, and ‘squaddie’ won’t be the half of it.”

  Jean smiled. The tawdry come-on was as old as addiction itself and as sincere as a politician’s promise. He could tell the woman had used this trick to get a fix more than once, yet he could not pretend to care. If he had the time, he would take her up on the offer, too. As precarious as his situation was, he decided to err on the side of prudence this time and skip the excitement of a frenzied romp with a woman high on blaze. Having done it once or twice before, he understood he was passing on a very good time. Ever the pragmatist, survival remained his chief priority for the moment so fun would have to wait.

  “Okay, squaddies,” he began. “I need to travel on to Galapagos, but my stacks aren’t in real good order. I’m hoping to get set up with a crew heading that way. One that doesn’t want to know my business. Get me the data on that, and I’ll get you square.”

  “You cargo?” asked the first.

  “I’m contraband,” Jean replied. “But I’ll ship just fine.”

  The addict’s face very clearly indicated that Jean’s admission was not helping his cause. He asked another question. “You willing to pull an oar?”

  “Sure. I’m no hitter but I’ll take a swing if I got to.”

  The man nodded slowly. “I know a boat. Leaves in thirty hours. Crew is real spiky, but if you pull an oar, they give you a seat on the bench.”

  Jean hid his internal flinch. ‘Pulling an oar’ was a Galop euphemism for doing all the dirty work other crew members were expected to do. Jean had always tried to avoid heavy violence. He had neither the stomach nor the skills for the sort of duties crewing a Galop knorr would require. He had no desire to spend the next few weeks in a spirited bout of frontier piracy, but even that would be safer than lingering on Enterprise Station.

  He made his decision, wry in the knowledge there was no real decision to be made. He ducked a curt nod to the sandy-haired junkie. “Sounds good. You get me on that boat and I’ll get you square.”

  “No!” the woman’s voice was a shrill and piercing cry. “You gotta square us now!”

  “Easy, squaddie.” Jean offered a compromise. “Let’s call this captain first and get me shipshape. If it’s all square, then you’re square a flash after.”

  The woman looked like she was going to cry, but Jean held the line. The man nodded and pulled out a dilapidated handheld comm unit. He flicked a trembling thumb across the screen, waited a moment, and then tapped in a reply. After another tense twenty seconds, he showed Jean the screen. A message read, “Put him on t
he line.”

  Jean took the offered handheld and placed it against his ear gingerly. He tried very hard not to think about all the places this comm and its owner had likely been and merely hoped his last set of inoculations would protect him from whatever diseases might be crawling around on the dirty device.

  “Hello?”

  The voice that came back was breathy and reedy at the same time. “Augie says you want a seat on my benches.”

  “I want to get to Galapagos,” Jean replied. He tried to make his voice strong and confident. “I’ll pull an oar if I have to.”

  “So you’re broke?”

  “All my money is tied up in foreign investments at the moment.”

  The captain guffawed. “I don’t need a clown. I need guys who follow orders and keep their mouths shut.”

  “I don’t even have anybody to talk to, Captain.”

  “You any good with your hands?”

  Jean’s lie was smooth. “Good enough. Nobody is gonna mistake me for one of Pike’s guys but I hit more than I miss.” The irony of this last statement stung Jean deep inside. There was no shortage of evidence to support a scathing indictment of his skills with a gun, his last attempted murder being only the latest example. With any luck, the captain would not require validation of his combat prowess.

  There was a throaty grunt from the man on the line. A sort of half-laugh, half-acknowledgment implying both amusement and derision. “Fine, then. You got a name?”

  “Do I need one?”

  “Gotta call you something. I can call you ‘Shit-rat’ if you want.”

  Jean accepted the riposte with a smile. “You can call me Little John.”

  “I have two Little Johns, a Little Joe, and one Big John on the crew already. Do better.”

  “Fuck it. My name is Jean.”

  A sniff from the captain. “Sounds like one of those faggy French names.”

  “Take it up with my parents.”

  “Whatever. It’s better than ‘Shit-rat,’ I guess. Welcome aboard, Jean. We sail in thirty hours from bay twenty-two whether you are here or not. Pay is food and water rations plus an eighth of a share of profit for the voyage. We’ll drop you in Galapagos in two weeks.”