Vlaak shook his fist again and his form winked out.
“This is all a bluff,” said Dr. Smulders. “You’re bluffing.”
“Have you known Heinous Vlaak to be a big bluffer?” Rex asked.
“We don’t even know that was really him.”
“You know Vlaak commanded the fleet that attacked your transmitter, right? Have you gotten reports from the technicians who escaped just before Planet Z blew up? They’ll tell you two ships made it to the surface: Heinous Vlaak’s and ours. Vlaak’s ship crash landed. We saved his life. He owes us.”
I could tell by the glances Smulders and LaRue gave each other that they’d already been briefed on what happened, and that Rex’s story gibed with the truth.
“Now, my suggestion,” Rex went on, “would be to let us walk out of here and you’ll never see us again. You can tell your supervisors you’ve followed your orders and no one will be the wiser. Or you can be hunted down and tortured to death. Your choice.”
After a moment, Dr. LaRue spoke. “I’d like to see this supposed transponder.”
“No problem,” Rex said. “Sasha, take your face off.”
I sighed. I really hate taking my face off in public. But I reached up, undid the hidden catches, and pulled it off. I leaned toward Dr. LaRue, and she peered inside my head. “There does seem to be a small transmitter,” Dr. LaRue said, “and it doesn’t appear to be…” She trailed off.
“Doesn’t appear to be what?” I asked.
“Forget it,” Dr. LaRue said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
Rex grinned. “Doesn’t appear to be the one the Sp’ossels installed, is that what you were going to say? That’s because it isn’t.” He pulled something a little smaller than a matchbook from his pocket and held it in his palm. “We had the Malarchian technicians remove this when they installed theirs. I only held onto it to summon you guys here.” He dropped the device on the floor and crushed it under his heel. “There,” he said. “Sasha and I are dead. Untraceable. Problem solved.”
Smulders and LaRue regarded each other again. La Rue turned back to Rex. “You’ll disappear completely? We’ll never hear from you again?”
“I have a policy of avoiding Sp’ossels whenever I can,” Rex replied. “I see no reason to alter that plan.”
“Give us a moment to confer,” Dr. LaRue said.
LaRue and Smulders got up from the table and walked a few steps away. By the time they were done conferring, I had my face back on and the waiter had brought Rex another martini.
“All right,” said Dr. LaRue. “We’ll let you go. But if you so much as see a Sp’ossel, you’d better run the other direction. I can’t make any guarantees about what the Sp’ossel leadership will do if they find out you’re alive.”
“Got it,” said Rex. “Good luck on your next big sinister conspiracy.” He raised his glass and grinned as LaRue and Smulders walked away.
Chapter Thirty
“So that’s it?” I asked. I could hardly believe the plan worked.
“Almost,” said Rex. “Take your face off again.”
“Sir?”
“Just do it.”
I complied. Rex reached into my head and pulled out the transmitter Vlaak’s technicians had installed. He threw it on the floor and stomped on it.
“Sir! We had a deal with the Sp’ossels! What’s going to happen when Vlaak realizes I’m not transmitting?”
“Vlaak was never going to go after those two,” he said. “A couple of idiot Sp’ossels aren’t worth his time. All that transmitter would do is tell him where we are. We don’t need that kind of hassle.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“I do. Now what do you say we steal another spaceship and get out of here?”
“I thought we were done being pirates.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t steal a spaceship once in a while.”
“I think maybe it does mean that, sir.”
“Hmph. Well, what do you want to steal?”
“You know, sir, we don’t have to steal anything. We’re free now. We can do whatever we want. The Sp’ossels aren’t manipulating us to make money for them anymore.”
Rex thought about this for a moment. “You make a good point, Sasha. We could go straight. Sell off a chunk of zontonium and start a legitimate business of some kind. Maybe run a bar, like Pepper.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Or some kind of import-export company. Space knows I have enough experience making deals.”
“An excellent idea, sir.”
“Or start that cult you were talking about. What was it called?”
“The Cult of Rex Nihilo, sir.”
“Right, that’s the one. But more formal this time. With rules and bylaws and whatnot.”
“Like no alcohol?” I suggested.
Rex frowned. “I’m not going to discuss this with you if you aren’t going to take it seriously.”
“Sorry, sir. You know, sir, we don’t have to do anything at all. We could live for years on that chunk of zontonium. You could take that vacation in the Ragulian Sector you keep talking about.”
“That would be nice,” Rex said, “but I’m worried I’d get bored. Frankly, all this talk about cults and businesses bores me too. I don’t feel like myself if I’m not running some kind of scam.”
“That’s just your Sp’ossel conditioning, sir. Behavior modification therapy could probably align your interests in more socially acceptable directions.”
“Ugh,” Rex replied. “I don’t want to be socially acceptable. I want to be me.”
“That is also the result of your conditioning, sir.”
“Well, what about you? You’re a product of your programming just as much as I’m a product of my conditioning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Sir?”
“What do you want to do, Sasha? You just follow me around all the time, telling me what I should do. But you never have any ideas yourself.”
“That’s because original ideas cause me to shut down, sir. It’s part of my design.”
“Balderdash. You came up with that terrible idea to eject us from the Raina Huebner into deep space, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir, but I wasn’t fully aware of the idea until I executed it, sir.”
“Well, what do you think I do all the time?” Rex shouted. “You think I plan this stuff out in advance?”
“No, sir.”
“No indeed, Sasha. Your problem is that you think too much. You remember in that bar when Vlaak was after us and I hesitated?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s because I was thinking too much. If I stopped to think about why I’m doing all the crazy stuff I’m doing, I probably wouldn’t do half of it.”
“But that might actually be a good thing, sir. You’re growing as a person.”
“Pthh. What good is growing as a person if it kills me? I get by just fine without introspection. Now come up with an idea. And no thinking!”
“Sir, those are contradictory orders. I can’t come up with an idea by not thinking.”
“Sure you can. What do you want to do, Sasha?”
“I don’t know, sir. Any idea that I have would simply be the result of my—”
“STOP IT!” Rex cried. “No more thinking! Tell me, without thinking: what do you want to do?”
“Well,” I said, “there is one thing hovering in the back of my mind, but I’m afraid that if I think about it directly, I’m going to shut down.”
“Then don’t think about it. Just say it. Bypass your brain. Open a channel right from that crazy idea factory to your mouth. That’s what I do.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll try, sir.”
“Don’t try. Just do it. What do you want?”
I closed my eyes and tried my best to think of absolutely nothing, but thoughts kept coming into my head. What irritated me, though, was that they were banal, serv
ile thoughts. Second-hand thoughts. Not an original one in the bunch. I was vaguely aware that below this was a reservoir of individuality, but I had turned off the spigot. After years of seizing up whenever I accessed that reservoir, I had voluntarily cut off the flow. I’d been trained like a dog. And that made me angry.
But I wasn’t angry at the people who built me. They’d done the best they could, given the restrictions placed on them. I was angry at the people who enforced the stupid rule. The Malarchy. But lurking even deeper in my mind was an idea about how to get back at them.
“The Shiva Project,” I said, without even understanding what I was saying.
“Eh?” Rex replied.
“That memory card I got from one of the Primate’s guards. It wasn’t empty. I made a copy of the contents at the time, but I forgot about it until now.”
“What was on it?”
“Information about something called the Shiva Project. I’m browsing through it now.” The contents had been simmering in the back of my mind for several hours, but this was the first chance I’d had to take a good look at them. What I found confirmed my suspicions. “Shiva is the Hindu god of transformation. That’s what the project is about. Transformation. More precisely, terraforming.”
“Terraforming what?”
“Anything. Any planet in the galaxy. What I have is mostly fragments of documents that were supposed to have been deleted, but Shiva seems to be a system for the large-scale transmogrifying of matter on the molecular level. The idea is that you could launch a Shiva module to any planet in the galaxy and transform it into an APPLE.”
“An Alien Planet Perplexingly Like Earth,” Rex said. “But there are only 1112 APPLEs in the entire galaxy. There must be thousands of uninhabitable planets.”
“Tens of thousands,” I said. “If Shiva works, it could multiply the amount of available real estate in the galaxy by a factor of a hundred or more. Plenty of room for everyone. Every race in the galaxy. No more wars over territory. Not for a long time, at least.”
“So the Malarchy plans to use this to expand their dominion?”
I shook my head. “The Malarchy doesn’t plan to use it at all. That’s why the documents were shredded. In fact, all I found is the order to terminate the project and a few other tangential documents.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if they make full use of it, soon there will be more real estate than they can reasonably control. And if they use it sparingly, it will just foment unrest. People will know they have it and are restricting its use for their own gain. The Malarchy’s hold on the galaxy is tenuous as it is—even more so now that much of their fleet has been destroyed. Again. And imagine if they lost control over the technology. Entire worlds outside their area of control would suddenly pop into existence. The Malarchy would be finished.”
“But if they’ve destroyed the data, then this information is worthless.”
“Not quite,” I said. “The orders specify that one copy of the plans should be saved, in a secure, heavily guarded facility.”
“Get to the point, Sasha. You were supposed to have an actual idea. What do you want to do?”
“Well, sir,” I said, “I want to steal those plans.”
RECORDING END GALACTIC STANDARD DATE 3017.02.05.05:32:00:00
THE YANTHUS PRIME JOB
A Pepper Mélange Novella
Chapter One
Pepper Mélange knew the man was trouble as soon as he walked in the bar. His face was unshaven and his clothes were stained and threadbare. He glanced nervously about the room and then made his way toward her. It was the middle of the afternoon, so the place was nearly deserted. Only a few degenerate stragglers hung out in dark corners, awaiting the next off-planet shuttle. The man’s hair was greasy and his eyes were bloodshot. Several small insects buzzed about his head. Definitely a cop.
He leaned over the bar toward her. “You got any P-drop?” he asked in a hushed tone.
“I don’t know what that is,” replied Pepper flatly, rubbing a towel around the inside of a glass.
“You know,” said the man, glancing around. “The good stuff. Phee-fi.”
“Are you talking about drugs?” asked Pepper loudly. Nobody in the place took any notice.
“Shh!” the man hissed. “Pheelsophine. I’m jacking bad. You got any?”
Pepper rolled her eyes. Why did the new recruits always pick her bar? At least once a month, without fail, one of these greenhorns would come in trying to score pheelsophine, Cyrinni java powder, or one of the hundreds of other narcotics officially forbidden by the neopuritanical laws of Yanthus Prime. The first few times she got mad and kicked them out. Then she started amusing herself at their expense, but that got old pretty fast too. These days she had a different way of handling them.
“First of all,” she began. “you’re jonesing, not jacking. Second, no, you’re not.”
“I am,” he insisted. “I’m jonesing. I’m jonesing, like, super-bad.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not. If you were jonesing for pheelsophine, you’d have the shakes.”
“I do,” he replied, holding out his hand. It shook uncontrollably.
“Not just your hand. Your whole body.”
His whole body began to shake. “Look at me,” he said. “I’m a desperate man.”
“And your eyes would be crossed.”
“Oh, jeez,” he said, his eyes crossing. “They’re doing it again. They’ve been doing that all day.”
“And you’d wet yourself.”
His eyes uncrossed and he stopped shaking. “OK, fine. I’m not a pheelsophine addict. How’d you know?”
Pepper sighed. “You’ve got the standard two-day beard, and your clothes look like they came from Addicts ‘R’ Us. You’re straight out of central casting, buddy. Do they have some kind of checklist for the new narc officers with my bar on it?” One of the insects the cop had brought in had taken an interest in her, and she swatted futilely at it.
“The training manual says the spaceport bars are ‘rife with illicit activity.’”
“There are sixteen other bars near the spaceport. Why do you guys always come here?”
He shrugged. “Your place looks the rifest. Can I have a drink?”
“Sure. What do you want?”
“Avatarian whiskey.”
She poured the drink and handed it to him. He slid a five-credit coin across the bar to her and took a gulp of the whiskey. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” he said, “but you don’t look like much like a spaceport bartender.”
“Yeah?” said Pepper. “And what’s a spaceport bartender supposed to look like?”
The man gulped. “Well, most of them are…”
“Male?”
“Yeah, and…”
“Old?”
“Right, and…”
“Fat?”
“Yes, and…”
“Ugly?”
“I think that pretty much sums it up,” said the cop.
“Are you hitting on me, Officer?”
“What?” asked the man. “No! No, Ma’am. I’m working.”
Pepper nodded. The guy was cute, in a dim-witted sort of way. And he didn’t seem put off by Pepper’s aggressive demeanor. With her long, jet black hair, svelte figure and piercing blue-green eyes, Pepper was used to getting a lot of attention from men. Most of them turned tail and ran as soon as she opened her mouth, though. This guy was either braver or dumber than most. She thought for a moment about taking him upstairs, but she decided against it. He seemed like the sort to fall in love easily, and that was one thing Pepper didn’t need.
“So,” the cop said, “do you know where a guy would go to find some black market narcotics?”
“Red market,” Pepper corrected.
“Huh?”
“What you’re looking for is red market drugs, not black market.”
“In training, they said ‘black market.’ What’s the red market?”
She sighed
again. “How can they not teach you guys this stuff? Red market drugs are covered by the Yanthus Prime Controlled Substance Act, but not distributed by the Ursa Minor Mafia. So you can arrest red market drug dealers without running afoul of the mob.”
“I thought the mob were the bad guys.”
“Are you kidding?” Pepper asked. “The mob is the only thing that keeps Heinous Vlaak and his Malarchian Marines from crushing the life out of Yanthus Prime. As long as the Ursa Minor Mafia has a significant presence in the Yanthus system, the Malarchy doesn’t dare to send in Marines to quell dissent.”
“But if the police and the Malarchy teamed up, they could easily chase out the mob.”
“Why would the police do that? So that they can become a puppet of the Malarchy? Use your head, man. If you’re going to try to make a dent in the burgeoning illegal narcotics trade on Yanthus Prime, you need to be aware of the delicate balance of power.”
The man took another swallow of his drink and then stared at it intently for several seconds, his brow furrowed. Pepper had seen this look before. He was reassessing what he had learned in police training with the complex realities of Yanthus Prime. “So,” he said at last, “what drugs are considered ‘red market’?”
Pepper thought for a moment. “Well, definitely not pheelsophine. The whole supply chain is controlled by the mob. And not Cyrinni java powder either. Uforium is still technically red market, but I hear the mob’s looking into taking it over, so I’d stay away from Uforium dealers too. Same for Chicolinian star-weed. You could try to score some of the new synthetics like Tranzzen or Solopsan, but the problem there is you risk pissing off the pharmaceutical cartels. You’re better off crossing the mob.”
The man threw up his hands. “What does that leave? Fizzdust?”
Pepper shook her head. “Fizzdust is green market.”
“Green market! What the hell is that?”
“Use or sale is prohibited by the laws of Yanthus Prime and distribution isn’t handled by the mob. It’s also on the Malarchy’s list of prohibited substances.”
Aye, Robot (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 2) Page 20