The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3)

by A. G. Claymore

  Still, most neutrals would rather not marry someone like Rick and have to give up status. Status was what determined the kind of quarters you would get, what food you could claim, and what opportunities your children would have to chose from.

  And he just couldn’t get Nell out of his head, especially when she displayed such aggressive interest in him when they were out hunting. He thought briefly about heading down to his quarters to find his bow, but the weight of the capacitors were a constant reminder that he had work to do.

  Probably for the best, work usually cleared his head.

  Caution

  Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

  Callum waited at the back of the two car passenger-mover, bouncing gently as the other passengers exited the maglev vehicle. He stepped out onto the platform and pretended to receive a new message, looking down at his hand as new passengers boarded and the short train hummed away, leaving the stink of ozone in the wake of it’s faulty converter.

  He pretended to scroll through the imaginary message on until his peripheral vision was clear of movement. Then he carried on with his charade for another twenty seconds or so before starting to walk, a casual glance at the news panels giving him a view of the entire platform.

  No likely candidates. There were a few waiting for the southbound line, backpackers mostly. Cal grinned. You found them on every planet in the Republic. Kids who spent a year or two wandering from world to world, postponing the moment when they would have to get on with life.

  The problem here on Chaco Benthic was that they always ran out of money and, if they didn’t have rich parents to buy them a ticket back up to the orbital counterweight, they’d spend the rest of their lives beneath the cold grey waves.

  It was relatively affordable to ride down on the tether, but the exit ticket down here in Tsekoh was incredibly expensive. It helped provide the company with an endless stream of hungry NRW employees and they reserved pretty much every available up bound kilogram for manganese exports.

  If company agents were following him, they certainly wouldn’t do it while disguised as a backpacker. Too easy to notice. That kind of thing might work if they were doing static surveillance - each man covering a zone, handing off the target by radio. Static surveillance needed a lot of manpower to work properly and it wouldn’t work in a public transit station anyway. Sooner or later, folks would notice that you weren’t going anywhere.

  Cal used a lot of transit stations when running SDRs. As an undercover operator, he had to act as though he wasn’t trying to defeat enemy surveillance. Looking over his shoulder would have been a dead giveaway that he was up to something. A detection route that ran through a transit station gave him the opportunity to stop and check his surroundings without being obvious about it. The fake message made it harder for anyone following him to wait around without becoming obvious.

  He exited the station and moved into a medium sized shopping district. The place was a rabbit warren of side corridors and it would force any surveillance team to close up on him. In this environment, it was far too easy for him to duck down a narrow side alley and disappear.

  He stopped to cross the pedestrian traffic, checking behind him as if choosing the best moment to move across the flow. Still no evidence of a tail. He darted across and into a media shop that he used from time to time. It had a stair connecting with the next level. He spent a few minutes looking at the wall screens before selecting an old Tauhentan graphic novel and sending the file to his account.

  He nodded to the attendant and headed up the stairs, pulling on a welder’s cap and stuffing his jacket into his satchel before reaching the top step. Anyone handing him off to an agent on the next floor would have described what he was wearing. Every little change helped.

  He quickly passed through the banks of action & adventure memory screens and exited the store, his chip authenticating the payment for his novel as he walked under the scanner in the doorway. He waved down a magbike cab and gave the driver an address that was close to the café where he was ultimately headed.

  For most of the last century and a half, Cal’s life had been one long series of SDRs. He’d lived as a ghost on eight worlds, never letting his guard down. It was as natural as breathing and he often didn’t even notice when he was doing something purely for the sake of identifying a tail.

  He’d definitely had an easier existence, back on Earth, but it was the last place he would want to be noticed. Here, he was just another Tauhentan expat, his ancestors cut off from home when the Humans had carved their world out of the Republic.

  Back home, if you could even call Earth home anymore, he was Callum McKinnon, the terrorist who’d almost cost Humanity it’s freedom. He’d been convinced the Dactari threat had been a lie. He had been raised by his parents, two former CIA operators, and they had taught him everything they knew. He thought the UN was trying to take over the planet and he’d set up a failed attempt to destroy key equipment at Moffet Field, followed by a spectacular freighter-bomb in the Hudson river that completely destroyed the UN headquarters.

  Then he’d gotten pinched in Calgary where he was laying low – working on a construction crew. The two soldiers patrolling the grayhound station may have claimed he was ‘resisting arrest’ or maybe they didn’t even bother. At least the long recuperation gave him something to occupy his mind while he lay in his tiny, windowless cell.

  Though oficially dead, his death sentence had never been carried out. The government had wanted to keep him alive until they managed to round up all of his known associates. He spent three years on a small caribbean island, working as a carpenter and general laborer at a government research station. After the plague, recruiters had become less picky, and he found himself training on Tauhento.

  Cal was surprised at how much he missed that warm humid air. He ducked reflexively as the magbike operator flew them under a slow delivery unit, then weaved through a tangled mess where an accident had just occurred. The occupants of one of the vehicles were staring down into the cold foggy depths of the central atrium with ashen faces. A red pulsing glow indicated an emergency vehicle was down there somewhere.

  He was always surprised at the little things that crept up on him. Why should he be nostalgic about the almost oppressive heat of his former prison? He could hardly be nostalgic about the people, most of them would still like to kill him, even though they now made full use of his skills.

  He knew if he were ever captured or killed on one of these worlds, he was completely on his own. Back home they’d probably declare a holiday.

  He grinned as the foot plates increased their restraint gravity. Magbike operators were notoriously reckless but they were still popular because they were the quickest way to get around in Tsekoh. With the restraint field maxed out, the operator threw them into a right hand roll and nosed dived straight down into the heavy fog that always filled the lower thirty levels during ore processing shifts.

  A massive ore carrier flashed past on their right, filthy yellow paint slicked with moisture, and Cal whooped with the thrill of the ride. He knew the operator of the bike had a heads up display and was just trying to scare his passenger.

  Cal was goading him to try harder.

  The operator obliged. He headed for the pinch. It was a narrow point in this section of the atrium, only two meters wide for ten levels in either direction and it was the corner of a seventy degree turn. If anyone was coming in the other direction, the heads up display wouldn’t know until it was too late.

  They entered the pinch at full speed. No vehicles struck them but a foot grazed off the operator’s helmet as they sped through the narrowest point. A chorus of cheers and shouts followed them out and Cal looked back to see the daredevil who had jumped across the two meter gap. He was outside the railing, but his friends were holding him by the arms, pulling him in as they disappeared around the corner.

  Definitely no sign of being followed. No sane operator would be willing to follow a magbike cab down here. They
dropped another five levels and came to a swerving stop at a roughly cut hole in the railing. It wasn’t a standard debarkation port, but it was left unrepaired in order to reduce congestion at the proper stations.

  Cal authorized a twenty percent tip for the driver before hopping over to the pedway. A pretty standard gratuity in return for getting the passenger to his destination in one piece.

  He strolled back towards the pinch for a few hundred yards before reaching the café. He walked in towards the back and took a table near a rear exit that opened onto a relatively busy hallway. He ordered a couple of signature house drinks before pressing his palm to the glass surface of the table, activating his own little corner of the city’s data hive. He selected the graphic novel he’d just purchased and lifted the display up into the space above the table.

  He slowly worked his way through the holographic pages while watching the pedestrians through the café’s open front. He used a spoon to eat the layer of algae at the top of his drink before taking a sip of the heavily caffeinated beverage. The cooking process burst the cell walls of the algae, releasing their caffeine into the broth. It was a popular post-shift snack that helped keep body and soul together until the evening meal.

  A medium build Ufangian walked in and headed for the table. Cal gave a barely perceptible nod of approval. Five minutes early. The guy took things seriously and he always made sure he got to a meeting place early to scope out any potential problems.

  “Good story?” The Ufangian – Cal didn’t know his name and wanted it to stay that way – asked as he sat down and took a big gooey gulp of the drink that had been waiting for him.

  Cal shuddered. He didn’t mind the algae on it’s own, and the remaining beverage was palatable enough, but he just couldn’t bring himself to consume the two together like the locals. “It’s all right.” He looked away from the blue mess at the top of the other man’s mug.

  He didn’t bother to ask if the Ufangian had been followed. He wouldn’t be sitting here if that were the case. “What did you find out?”

  A long slurp. He leaned back. “There’s been a lot of spicewood items showing up in Tsekoh lately. Not many, down this way, of course,” he amended with a grin, “but up in the money levels folks are showing off some pretty expensive items. Boxes, hairpins, slate covers, vehicle trim…”

  Cal nodded. The latest fad among the wealthy corporate elite was spicewood. The only reason for an expensive product to even exist was that it allowed the rich to differentiate themselves from those who weren’t. He’d heard there was even a restaurant up top, near the tether anchor, that had started grilling fish in thin sheets of spicewood.

  It was incredibly extravagant, seeing as there were only a few plantations in the Republic that could keep spicewood trees alive and they needed incredible amounts of terra-conditioning equipment to eke out a few trunks a season.

  It was the first time he’d ever heard of spicewood being used as a consumable. “So where is it coming from?”

  The man took another deep drink, following it up with a sigh. “I began tracking it from several different vendors, posing as a backer who had some credits to invest. I ran into a lot of dead ends, of course, but you don’t get the grains without the husks…”

  Cal held his tongue. He appreciated the Ufangian’s skill at investigation but the guy had a dramatic streak that was better left un-encouraged. He loved to play up the difficulties in his assignments. Ninety nine percent of the time, he was a complete sleeper. The rare occasions when Cal had to make use of his abilities were probably the high point of his dreary existence and he liked to make the most of it.

  A chuckle. “All right. Onto the harvest.” He leaned in towards Cal. “The one commonality in all this is a warehouse, five levels up from here. A place owned by a registered smuggler by the name of G’Maj Tumela. Folks say he bought up an old supply of whole trunks from an estate sale, which is complete eel-droppings of course.”

  “It is?” Cal raised an eyebrow.

  “Of course.” The Ufangian waved off the possibility of any other answer. “Stuff like that is supposed to be old pre-Republic stock. There hasn’t been any undocumented trunks since the imperial days, so we’d be talking about wood that sat in a warehouse for at least a couple thousand years.”

  Cal shrugged.

  “A full, commercial size trunk loses half it’s aromatic compounds every two hundred years.” The investigator explained. “Anything from the imperial era has some antique appeal, but the smell is almost completely gone. You pretty much only see small boxes made from an imperial trunk because they accumulate some odor between openings and the owner can get a decent sniff of it.”

  He nodded back over his shoulder. “The stuff I’ve seen here in Tsekoh is fresh – damned fresh. It’s not legacy wood – it’s stuff that got harvested in the last century at the most.”

  “So, it has to be coming down on the tether,” Cal mused. “I don’t imagine there’d be a secret plantation down here.” He closed his graphic novel. “And it all goes through this Tauhentan’s warehouse – G’Maj was the name?”

  A grin. “Planning on paying a visit to your planetman?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well he’s off world right now. One of his sons is looking after the place while he’s gone.”

  “Then there’s not a second to waste.” Cal stood, his comrade following his lead. “It’s the perfect time to pay a call and suggest we’re interested in doing business. With the kid, we probably won’t be expected to finalize anything so we can just blather our way in the front door, steal their data and get the hells out.”

  Another grin from the Ufangian. First an investigative assignment and now a field trip with the big guy himself. “I’ve got a sticky.” He patted his chest pocket. No need to stop anywhere along the way.”

  C’al’s pleased chuckle was all the reward the man needed.

  Predators

  Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

  The denizens of the small pedway diner grew quiet as Graadt Fell and his two comrades stalked in through the gate. Graadt shoved an inattentive greeter aside and headed for a table by the railing.

  The small establishment was completely full but that was hardly a problem if you were in the right frame of mind. He walked up to the table and grabbed the slate from it’s occupant, flinging it over into the roiling mists of the atrium. “Time’s up.”

  He pulled the Eesari out of his chair and handed him off to Kaans who enjoyed throwing people out of places. He turned to claim the still warm chair when his eyes lighted on the object on the table.

  “Kaans,” he growled sharply. Looking up, he saw his man still holding the Eesari near the gate. “Bring that back over here.” He dropped his bulk into the seat as the frightened patron was shoved back over to his former table.

  Though the Eesari were a relatively large race, this one showed no inclination to resist. Graadt and his cronies weren’t exactly lycohunds themselves. They were at least twice the size of their Dactari ancestors and they had an almost feral air about them.

  After six generations living on Oudtstone and mixing with the local primitives, his people had become something new. They’d lost their tails generations ago. The gene was a recessive one, and Dactari tails would have had little impact on the balance of such large bodies.

  It wasn’t their mixed heritage that made them so frightening. It was their training. Standard Dactari training on Oudtstone had been tempered by the traditional tribal rituals of the natives. Graadt had needed to spend a full solar cycle on Oudtstone’s second moon, Chokbaan. He, like all his kind, had been dropped on the surface with nothing but the clothing on his back. Each year, a shuttle would pick up a limited number of successful candidates.

  If you couldn’t fight your way into one of the pickup pods, you never saw home again.

  Long months of survival in the deep walds had given him the raw edge that instilled such fear in this big Eesari and Graadt simply ac
cepted it as the normal way of things. Prey feared the predator.

  He picked up a small wooden bracelet. “How does a dung heels like you get his front paws on spicewood?” He’d been noticing the steady increase of spicewood objects in Chaco and it was constantly nagging at the back of his mind. If you weren’t attuned to your environment, it wouldn’t be long before you became the prey, and this sudden profusion of luxury items represented a change he couldn’t put his finger on.

  The Eesari’s mouth moved but no sound was coming out.

  The corners of Graadt’s mouth twitched up - half grin half snarl. “Boys, help him find his slate.”

  Kaans and Nid dragged him over to the grimy railing and bent him over it. A slag carrier passed beneath in the fog, greyish white eddies in its silent wake. They reached down and grabbed their victim’s feet, lifting them up so he slid over the rail and hung upside down over the nine story drop.

  The Eesari found his voice. The other patrons guiltily ignored the screams and concentrated intensely on their meals.

  Graadt got out of the chair and leaned over the slick graphene rail, shoving a mouthful of half eaten fish into his mouth. “You don’t expect me to eat with you hanging there shrieking, do you?”

  “You were asked a question,” Kaans shouted down at him. “Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”

  “It’s cheap,” their victim screamed. “Some shops on twenty three, near the pinch, they carry stuff like this.”

  “How much was it?” Graadt brought the bracelet to his nose. His eyebrows shot up.

  “Thirty two hundred credits,” the Eesari whined. “You can have it…”

  Graadt held out the bracelet for Kaans to sniff. “Thirty two hundred is cheap for old wood, but this is fresh from the trunk. No way you paid so little for something this new.”