Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  “Is that all?”

  “My rig was built to take hits, Jimmy. My helmet has good armor and shit scanners. Tell me about Bob and Venus.”

  “You have the rest. Robertson pushed Hardesty’s timetable up so Hardesty panicked and sent the Balisongs after the only person who could expose him. It’s obvious now that The Brokerage knew Hardesty feared Richardson. It does not take a tactical genius to predict how you were going to react to someone attacking your home and your people.”

  Roland had to concede the point. His repertoire of conflict-resolution techniques managed to be both robust and effective, though even Roland had to admit it suffered from a distinct bias toward the direct approach. “So they smuggled in three special-forces goons mounted to hot-rod armatures ahead of time, knowing I would be heading over to swat the Red Hats?”

  “Yes. That appears to be the case. They happily risked an interplanetary catastrophe for the chance to achieve their goal.”

  “Which was me all along.” Roland sighed. “And because they knew you sick bastards would simply burn me to keep the tech out of their hands, they’ve been keeping Dockside under fire.” The big head oscillated in a rueful shake. “That’s actually kind of clever. UEDF can’t simply vaporize me because Dockside will go to hell if they do, so The Brokerage gets to keep taking potshots at me while you guys are stuck sitting on your hands.”

  “More or less correct, Corporal. It has been a maddeningly effective strategy.”

  “But now you want me to do what? Go after them?” Heavy brows furrowed in a deep and dangerous frown. “I do not respond to UEDF command structure anymore. I won’t take orders from you, or anyone else at the UEDF.”

  “Of course not, Mr. Tankowicz.” Roland noticed that James had not called him ‘Corporal’ this time. ”You are long past the reactivation point for your service. The UEDF has nothing to do with my visit. I am attached to the Department of Espionage and Clandestine Operations.”

  “You’re with DECO?” Roland harrumphed his displeasure. “That explains a lot.”

  “I thought you would be more amenable, Mr. Tankowicz,” said James with a thin smile. “DECO doesn’t need a soldier, a spy, or an assassin for this mission. We need a fixer. Which leads me to the second reason we have not simply erased you from the board.”

  “And that is?”

  “You forget, Mr. Tankowicz. Alicia Walker was one of ours. DECO never forgets when an agent goes down, and we have not forgotten that it was the UEDF that caused her death. There is a star on the wall at our office for ‘Sneak,’ Breach, and some of the senior staff were there when it was hung up. This is a chance to humiliate the UEDF and go after a major galactic criminal element at the same time.

  “I had forgotten she was a spook,” the big man acknowledged. “So I guess it’s time you and I started sharing intel, then.”

  This seemed to amuse the analyst. “Really? You have information for me?” The man sounded amused at the prospect, as if there was no way Roland could possibly know something he did not.

  “Earlier today somebody tried to kill one of my people.”

  James frowned. “Which one?”

  “Richardson.”

  “The terrorist?”

  “The scout.” There was a sharp edge to Roland’s reply, and James decided not to push that particular button. Roland continued as if James had not said anything. “Some no-name blaze pusher got uppity and took a shot at Manny right in the middle of the street. Killed a random civilian with his piss-poor aim, too. Anyway, we tracked him to Demeter where he hopped up to the Pride and took off for Enterprise.”

  “So he is gone, then?”

  “Hell no. We burned his ID, pulled his accounts, and Manny swapped his biometrics with a dead Red Hat. This guy has only one place to go now.”

  The analyst nodded, impressed despite himself. “You couldn’t get him before he made orbit, so you made sure he had no other options. Well played.”

  “I have smart people working for me. It helps. Anyway, why do you suppose some low-rent pusher is trying his luck against one of my crew?”

  “I can only assume you have a suitably vast quantity of enemies.” James did not mention that he was aware of exactly how many enemies Roland had.

  “I hear I’m hard to get along with. I don’t see it. Back to the point, we dug into this guy, and holy shit is he in big trouble with a lot of serious players. He is smart enough to get into cons that are way over his head and not smart enough to get away with any of them.”

  “You believe somebody had leverage on him?”

  “Everybody had leverage on him.”

  “Your theory?”

  Roland leaned back in his chair. “Somebody wanted me to lose the best damn scout and infiltrator in the galaxy. Somebody is afraid of Manny, and I want to know why.”

  “You don’t believe they just wanted to hurt you and picked a softer target?”

  “Nah. If they wanted to hurt me, they’d try for Lucia or her father. My gut says this was about pulling Manny off the board.” That it was Lucia who had worked this out, Roland neglected to mention.

  James paused, turning it over in his mind. “It is an interesting angle, Mr. Tankowicz. Which of Mr. Richardson’s skills is it that has them nervous?”

  Roland held up his hands in surrender. “Who knows? Kid’s good at a lot of shit. Hell of a technician, but Dockside has lots of those. Damn good at penetrating secure networks too, but I’ve seen scarier comm-jockeys than him. I think it comes down to his infiltration skills. Somebody is worried that he’s going to sneak into somewhere they don’t want him to be.”

  “It’s a little thin, Corporal.”

  “I know. But that’s where I’m starting. You gonna help or just stand there looking like furniture?”

  James smiled, seeing his exit from the conversation. “DECO will be in touch with you shortly. Please send everything you have on this individual over to us and we will employ our own resources to look into the problem.”

  “You had better,” Roland added as the man turned and left his office.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Far beyond the growing network of populated worlds in conveniently placed star systems, past the frontier planets and wild depths of empty uncharted space, sat the multicolored planets of the Galapagos system. The people who had first discovered the cluster of enormous gas giants and their main-stage yellow dwarf star had decided upon the moniker for no more auspicious a reason than like its namesake, Galapagos was very far away and almost entirely useless to mankind.

  Some strange happenstance of cosmic whim had left the system with no terrestrial planets to mine and no great wealth of rare gaseous resources to exploit. Despite eleven Jovian worlds and a hospitable central star, Galapagos was rich only in those elements and compounds that were fairly common elsewhere. Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, ammonia, sulfur, and plain uninteresting water Galapagos had in wondrous quantity, yet these were not things worth much money and certainly not worth the gate fees of carting them across the hundreds and thousands of light-years between the distant system and more populous ones.

  Galapagos should have been cursed to languish in obscurity were it not for that stubborn streak of contrarian pique that plagued the personalities of a certain segment of the human population. The first colonists arrived barely eight years after the only nearby Anson Gate opened in Galapagos. From the mouth of the cosmic anomaly came a rugged group of freedom-seeking roughnecks who took up residence in an abandoned survey station that had the bad fortune to have been left behind. Orbiting at a comfortable distance from the central sun, and within easy gathering distance of a nearly unlimited supply of hydrogen for energy and oxygen and water for life support, the station grew in ungainly ad hoc sections until it became a sprawling gray and green morass of derelict gate ships and re-purposed cargo pods.

  When the station grew too unwieldy, others began to crop up. More and more people fleeing the civilized worlds and the authority of Earth’s expanding
Planetary Council arrived to seek their fortunes in the untamed wilderness of the rugged backwater.

  Therein lay the problem with Galapagos.

  The hundreds and thousands of colonists arriving every week from the rest of the galaxy were more often than not fleeing the Council in the most literal sense of the word. Gate fees to Galapagos were minimal, government non-existent, and any group with a functioning ship could set up in orbit and start a fiefdom of their own. It became a haven for pirates, warlords, thieves, and raiders. Any group so vile as to be driven away from civilization found itself at home in Galapagos. Any nascent notions of an idealized free zone died in the first decade as dewy-eyed optimists were ground to powder beneath the boots of criminal migration at a scale unheard of in human history.

  The great rafts of ships and rough-hewn orbital platforms immediately set to brawling and clashing for supremacy of the system. There was no great wealth to compete for, no shining empire to build. The clans and crews fought like madmen over nothing more than a hollow title and the meaningless throne of a distant and unwanted land, disparate packs of rangy wild dogs barking and bleeding for no other reason than that was all they understood.

  From his own meager seat of power, Iron Sven Paulson considered the painful irony of his own folly. He had almost wasted much of his own life in that selfsame race for power. Yet the spark of wisdom, or a streak of animal cunning at the very least, had illuminated to him an obvious truth before he died a vainglorious fool like so many of his peers. No one could ever win this prize.

  Sovereign power over people required two ingredients: a person strong enough to stand above the others, and a group of people willing to be ruled. Strong people Galapagos had in spades. Life in this system broke the weak and soft, leaving only diamond-hard men and women to continue on and populate the brackish puddle that served for its gene pool. It was that second ingredient that would forever remain elusive in their violent frontier system. No one would ever rule Galapagos because Galapagos could not be ruled. This bleak truth made the pursuit of a kingdom a strategic dead end. No people existed in Galapagos who would consent to bend the knee to anyone. They could not. Violent self-reliance was burned over generations of accelerated evolution into their very cultural DNA. Without subjects, there could be no king. For every tin-pot warlord that raised an army, there were two more with an army to match. Alliances were forged and broken with a frequency that mocked the very existence of ’trust’ as a social construct. Unity, obedience, trust, and a sense of greater community were as antithetical to the ‘Galops’ as it had been to the ancient Vikings whose society they co-opted.

  Sven Paulson had no ambition to rule his system, but deep inside his heart he still lusted for something bigger. Perhaps he did not need ownership of Galapagos, but he absolutely craved supremacy. In reflection of this, he accepted that supremacy was the greater prize. The difference between a throne and a prison cell was merely the quality of the accommodations. A man shackled to either was still a captive. On the other hand, to be the strongest, most feared, most terrifying man in the system would yield nearly all of the benefits of rulership with none of the drawbacks.

  Sven was a sly man. Unlike many other Galapagos mercenary leaders, he possessed a certain innate gift for objective observation. He watched everything with a keen eye for detail and he learned as much from observing those around him fail as he did their successes. This mental agility had made him the kind of man to accept jobs from The Brokerage when other, prouder, men turned them down. The last job had been an expensive disaster, but he had learned much from it and he was not the sort of leader who let failures cloud his judgment. The Brokerage paid well, and they made plans that had long-term ramifications. Sven approved of their ambitions and was content to accept another meeting when they had contacted him.

  He had insisted upon meeting in Galapagos this time. Power dynamics were tricky things, and he was quite finished with dancing to their tune. The Brokerage, feared and mysterious, could come to him if they wanted his services. He would make sure that his competitors and rivals saw them do it, too. He would let them whisper and let them talk in hushed tones over home-made vino about how the shadowy syndicate of underworld financiers had come crawling to the feet of Iron Sven Paulson when they had need of a real warrior. He would have no trouble repopulating the benches of his boats when that word began to filter through the platforms. There existed an uneasy respect between the space-faring marauders of Galapagos and the corporate raiders of The Brokerage. Their weapons and tactics were very different, but their goals and aspirations were distressingly similar. What Galapagos mercenaries achieved with the gun and the blade, The Brokerage did with a computer and a lawyer. The average denizen of Galapagos lacked the sophistication to articulate whether this was cleaner or dirtier than their own methods.

  Then again, most Galops have the philosophical sophistication of a grilled cheese sandwich. The thought was wry, and Sven Paulsen regretted it instantly. He reminded himself that philosophy was overrated and smart men avoided it. The connection between their peoples was simple enough. We get along because they are rich as all hell, and the only thing a Galop loves more than war is money. That made sense, and the simplicity of the resolution served to move his thoughts away from dangerously complex ideation.

  He sat with one leg thrown casually over the arm of the captain’s chair and stared through the central view screen at the intimidating frigate drifting lazily off the bow of his command ship. Despite being outgunned many times over, Paulson was not intimidated. Every knorr, corvette, missile platform, gunboat, and fire-support ship in the system was watching that frigate, and no amount of hull armor would make the ugly vessel a match for five hundred enemy ships crewed by veteran spacefarers.

  Paulsen knew his cohorts and peers bore him no special love. Most would gut him as soon as look at him. Nevertheless, they all understood that no out-system enemy could be permitted to open fire on a Galop ship without repercussions. The Frigate would be torn to pieces at the first sign of aggression. Its weapons then salvaged and fought over, its crew subsequently placed as thralls until their weregild was paid. This would be never, of course, but “slavery” was a dirty word even in Galapagos.

  With a sigh, he slapped the comm panel on the arm of his chair and opened a channel to the other ship.

  “This is Captain Paulson of the free ship Totenkopf. Are you guys here to talk or just float around out there? I’m a busy man.”

  A monitor to the right of the view screen flashed to life with the image of a stern-looking man with black hair and a sharp widow’s peak. While his face was blankly congenial, the steel gray eyes remained distant and expressionless. It made Sven a touch uncomfortable, as if the muscles of his face had been taught what to do but the lesson remained lost to his eyes.

  “My apologies, Captain.” The man spoke with a smooth and effortless baritone. His words flowed easily, each seemed carefully chosen and crafted to be devoid of anything but bland affability. “We were unsure as to what protocol would be appropriate for this meeting.”

  “You are in Galapagos now, buddy. We don’t do protocol so good. When we got something to say, we say it.”

  “How refreshing.” The man on the other end of the connection did not sound refreshed. “Then I suppose we should just get on with the business, then.”

  “Oh, do let’s.” Paulson let the sarcasm twist his words in a show of overt disrespect. Half the ships in the system would be listening in on this conversation, and he needed to come off as the one in charge. “I assume your bosses have fucked up again and they need someone to go get dirty fixing it?”

  If Paulson’s contemptuous tone bothered the man on the screen, it did not show in his impassive expression of bland condescension. “Hardly, Captain Paulson. My employers are interested in securing your services for a matter that is likely to align very well with your own goals.”

  “You don’t know shit about my goals, pal.”

  “Then we are m
istaken? You have no desire to avenge the death of Torvald Haraldson?”

  Paulson’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. “Fucker, you don’t even get to speak his name, you hear? Torvald wouldn’t be dead if you jerks hadn’t sent us after that... that... thing.” His breath hissed as he hunted for composure. “I’m owed both blood and money for that job, and you got a lot of nerve bringing it up on my turf.”

  “Captain Paulsen, my employers are prepared to provide you with both of those things in great quantities if you are interested. This includes the opportunity to take another shot at Roland Tankowicz. We would like you to secure some cargo for us, and we expect Tankowicz to come looking for it when you do. You will know it is coming, and you can set any trap you like with one condition.”

  Internally, Sven Paulson was reeling. On one hand, he desperately wanted to kill Tankowicz, and that crazy blond bitch who had broken his arm as well. On the other hand, he knew better than most how tall an order doing either was going to be. Torvald had been a seasoned veteran warrior mounted to an enormous cyborg armature. His very name caused grown men to soil their pants in fear. Tankowicz had beaten him to death in front of the whole crew with a hammer, of all things.

  But Tankowicz cheated, he reminded himself. They fucked with his cooling system. Torvald should have beaten him!

  This was all irrelevant now and Paulson forced himself back into the conversation at hand. He did not know what to say, so he asked the obvious question.

  “What’s the condition?”

  “You must promise not to kill him or destroy his head.”

  Paulson did not understand the machinations of giant criminal syndicates, and he lacked the education or imagination to surmise any other reason to want the head beyond the most morbid one.

  “You guys are some seriously sick bastards, you know that? You want him alive, with his head intact? Fine by me.”