It was hard to argue when I didn’t know the details and most likely never would. “I’ll do my best.”
He smiled. “I know you will. I made sure they know about you so as to…well…not make things unnecessarily difficult. Also, you can practice more at being charming.” Burke turned away from the ocean to look at the small settlement nearby, now lit by a few man-made lights, as the sun had set. “Cute little planet. Just out here all by itself. Few people, no strong ties to any major governments. You know what would happen if I decided to wipe it out?”
That was an easy one. “Nothing.”
“Not a thing. They exist because I don’t feel like destroying them. How do people live like that? Existing only by staying beneath the notice of someone more powerful?”
“They don’t think about it. I find that much of life for most people is just a shared delusion of stability.”
“Ignorance is bliss.” Burke turned to me. “If there’s anything more, I’ll send it through Vito. You’ll probably be getting most of your info from the others on planet, though. So…” He looked like he was searching for the proper words, but settled on, “be careful.”
“I always am.”
“You may not be a wild animal, but you are reckless at times.”
“Not reckless. I take calculated risks.”
“Well, maybe you don’t know all the risks to calculate. I’ve got to get going now. Good luck, Rico.”
Was he really concerned for my well being or just worried I might fail? I never quite knew where I stood with him. “Thanks.”
Burke walked off, and I stood alone by the sea looking at the card in my hand. The job was apparently very important, but I don’t know why I needed to know that. I always try to complete each job to the best of my ability. There seemed to be another message in Burke’s visit, but if so it was beyond me. The crucial thing was that I had a job to do. Once again, all was right in the universe.
CHAPTER 4
“Time to leave, Dip.” I buckled myself into the cockpit.
“Have you become bored with this planet already?” Dip started the takeoff sequence. He usually handled communications with traffic control.
“Yes, but that’s not why.” I took the data card out of my coat. “I have my next assignment.”
“You received it directly on planet? Am I correct in remarking that this is unusual?” The ship lifted off the landing pad.
“They are somehow tracking me.” The ship began accelerating forward. This would be a much more gradual approach to orbit than our previous takeoff.
“I deduced that as well. I often scan for bugging devices but have found nothing.” The sky darkened as the atmosphere thinned. Within moments, we were back in the blackness of space.
“As long as they are the only ones tracking me, I guess it’s not worth worrying about.” The operative word was “guess.” Logically, it shouldn’t be a problem for my employer to know where I am. Still, known unknowns can bother me. I like to have a vague idea of how everything works, from my blasters to my ship’s engines to Dip. You never know when that information will be important. “Decode this for me.” I inserted the data card into the console.
“I can verify this as originating from the Nystrom syndicate.”
“I didn’t ask for verification. Just decode it.”
“Certainly, Rico.” He was silent for a moment. “Interesting. There isn’t a job on this disk.”
“Excuse me?” My train of thought and conversation were interrupted by an explosion outside the ship. “What the hell?”
“It appears to be a warning shot. The ship that fired it is now hailing us. There are three ships, in fact. From the available data, I would guess that they are pirates. Would you like to take their call?”
I had been stupid. Being on my own for even a day had made me reckless, and in my eagerness to get off planet I had disregarded the officer’s warning. I know I wouldn’t have made this mistake were I already on a job, because an encounter such as this could ruin a mission. On my own time, it was hard to focus like that. Now I had a job—at least I thought I did—and very much wanted to focus on it but instead had a nuisance to deal with. “Are the ships armed?”
“I detect armaments on all three ships.”
I was usually better armed than anything I might run into, but nothing was guaranteed. Most likely, pirates would not have the best kept ships, as they tend to be desperate people, but they did spend well on weaponry. Dip gave me a view of the ships, and they were decently large—a few times bigger than mine—with visible weaponry. Didn’t look too maneuverable, though. Added to the equation was that I did not feel I was officially on a job at the moment, so I wanted to keep to my no-killing rule. “Put them on, Dip.”
“Surrender your ship,” the pirate leader said. By his accent, I could tell he was most likely human. “Make things easy, and we’ll put you safely back on the planet. We never kill unless we have to.”
Having to kill. That was an odd thought to me. Civilized people like to think they don’t have to kill, but I don’t know of any sentient species that didn’t evolve from predators. Hunting and killing are very difficult, much more so than fleeing death. They require complex instincts that eventually lead to the development of intelligence. In a way, all of man’s highest creations—from art to literature to science—only came about because of his basic need to kill.
But philosophy was just as useless in this situation as it is in any other. “I’ll give you some advice: If you don’t want to have to kill people, you probably shouldn’t run around threatening them with weapons. It’s pretty much inevitable that you’re going to wind up in a kill-or-be-killed situation.”
“Are you going to be trouble?” He had a threatening tone. A very good one. He wasn’t new at this.
“Very much so. I don’t think anyone has ever encountered me and not been the worse for it.”
“Your ship doesn’t look like any trouble.”
“Which either means it’s as light on defenses as it appears to be, or it’s such an advanced ship that it’s able to hide its weaponry from most scans. And a ship that expensive would probably have some very deadly ordinance—the sort of weapons that are likely to make your last words something like, ‘Huh? What’s that?’”
“Are you saying you can take on all three of us?”
“Perhaps not. I’d like to think so, but you might win. But you’d be forced to destroy me—so no profit for you—and I’d most likely leave your ships severely damaged or completely crippled—probably leaving you stuck in this orbit. And pirate hunters are coming to this system soon, so you might as well be dead in that condition. Maybe they’ll treat you like the pirates of old and leave your corpses hanging out in the open as a warning to others. So there’s the bright side: You’ll get to help influence others to make better decisions than your own.”
He was quiet for a moment. Hesitation in a situation like this is weakness. It’s hard to score a verbal battle, but I would say I was winning. “You’re bluffing. Now don’t try to escape, or we will obliterate your little ship.”
It was hard to show my weapons without using them in a way that wouldn’t panic the pirates into retaliation. It would have been nice to have a “teeth baring” routine in this situation—perhaps something for Dip to look into later—but it was unavailable to me now. “No, I am not bluffing, and I don’t think you want that realization to be the last bit of knowledge you glean from the universe. I am going to head away now and plot a jump. If you continue on your approach toward me, this is going to be a bad day for you. Be smart, and wait for a weaker target.” I cut the communications. “Dip, get me some alone time, and keep watch on how close our new friends get.”
It took a few minutes for Dip to move the ship into place and make the jump calculations. The pirates hung back and didn’t try to hail me again. We jumped, and I was back in the quiet and safety of deep space. “Well, the peaceful solution worked that time.”
; “Threats of violence aren’t always considered ‘peaceful,’” Dip said.
“No one died. I don’t know what more anyone would want. Now, before the interruption, you were saying there isn’t a job on the disk?” Something I found potentially more alarming than silly pirates.
“Correct. There is just a time and location—a café in the capital of Nar Valdum.”
“No job details.”
“I’m afraid not.”
This I did not like—going into a situation without knowing what I’m supposed to be doing. I assumed I would be meeting someone there to get further details, but it would have been nice to have some idea of whom I was supposed to meet. I let it go for now, though, and focused on the few details I did know. “I heard someone mention Nar Valdum recently. Is there some sort of conference going on there?”
“The Galactic Alliance is having a conference on increasing its power. The general public’s interest in the conference has intensified, presumably in response to the situation on Zaldia and the different governments’ inability to take direct action under current treaties.”
And the syndicate wanted me in the middle of that. I didn’t like the lack of details so far, but it did promise to be interesting. “Know anything about the security?”
“There is extensive scrutiny for anything coming near the planet. There will be many high-ranking officials from numerous governments affiliated with the Alliance, so they want to avoid any incidents. This is the biggest meeting in Galactic Alliance history.”
“So I’m heading into the middle of heavy security with no details? Not my preference.”
“I will once again suggest a change of occupation. I could make up a list of possibilities based on your skills and interests if you like. What has your experience been with food preparation?”
“I once killed a man with a fork…no, twice.” And, considering the security, a fork might be all I’d be able to bring with me on this job. “Well, this is not how I like to receive an assignment, but I’m curious where this is going. Who do you think they’ll want me to kill?”
“That’s not something I’m programmed to speculate about.”
They only ever sent me somewhere when they wanted a big scene. So a high-profile kill during the biggest meeting in the history of the known universe—this was no small thing, and it was going to have large and perhaps disturbing ramifications. It both excited and frightened me. “Set course. Let’s go be a part of history.”
CHAPTER 5
Sentients like governments. It’s better than doing everything yourself. Governments are a big part of civilization, and civilization is what separates sentients from lesser animals, as it changes their focus from day-to-day survival and moves people forward toward social and technological advancement. Of course, having a direction is not the same as having a destination, and the ultimate destiny of any civilization is to flounder around, unsure of what to do with itself. It starts out seeming very grand as it conquers barbarians and increases its wealth. But when the everyday challenges end, things begin to fall apart. A civilization starts to lose confidence in itself, feels bad for all the lesser beings it crushed along the way, and finds it hard to act unless there’s an immediate crisis. Eventually it falls victim to a more motivated civilization on the rise. And the cycle continues.
At least, that’s how I see things. Anyway, the Galactic Alliance (which, despite the common name, spans multiple galaxies) is only different from previous civilizations in its massive scale. It had a lot of trouble getting started and getting so many varied cultures and people to work together. There were arguments, conflicts, and wars of a scale hard for the human mind to comprehend.
But that’s all in the past, and the Alliance is clearly in the floundering stage. With agreements among thousands of planets, the Alliance coordinates law enforcement and commerce within its reach—at least theoretically. It’s a loose confederation of a lot of separate governments without a strong central power, and it trips over its own bureaucracy more often than it actually does anything useful. Plus, it’s trivial for anyone with a ship (like me) to quickly step out of Alliance-controlled space. The Alliance never goes beyond its boundaries, because that can be looked upon as a belligerent invasion, and civilized people don’t do that. I’m starting to wonder if we’ve seen the upper limit of civilization, as the far-reaching Alliance struggles to stay relevant.
In come the syndicates. In a way, they started like the Alliance, as loose agreements between a number of groups who…let’s just say weren’t as concerned about local laws as most people. But as disagreements arose, the stronger factions weren’t afraid to assert themselves and crush anyone they could. And as the stronger groups consistently won out, eventually an undisputed central power arose in each syndicate. It makes a big difference having a power ready to make rules and enforce them by any means necessary. Plus, the syndicates are better suited for a universe with quick interstellar travel than traditional governments, as they don’t care about borders or who thinks they control what regions of space. They feel they have a right to enforce their rules against anyone weaker than them. That’s what the Alliance lacks the will to do, so people with the will to get things done—like those in the syndicates—are the only ones who keep some semblance of order nowadays. And I am one of the syndicate’s tools in enforcing that order. In that capacity, there are two types of people I am sent after: the really honest and the really corrupt. The really honest can be too stubborn and may have to be removed to keep things from being upset…and I guess I don’t need to explain why the really corrupt may need to be violently killed.
Anyway, I hardly ever kill honest people.
The point is there are a lot of bad people who could run around and murder and steal without consequences if it weren’t for other “bad” people like Nystrom stopping them. People would get upset about being ruled by murderous thugs, though, so that’s where entities like the Galactic Alliance become somewhat useful. They look like they’re in charge and keep people feeling like they’re all soft and civilized, while lots of murdering is done for their benefit in faraway places they’ll never hear about. They live under an illusion, but if there is any public action by a syndicate, that illusion begins to fade. Public action such as a murderous siege on a technologically backward planet. Or a hitman let loose in the midst of a high-profile conference on government power.
“Dip, I am growing impatient.”
My view of Nar Valdum currently took up most of my ship’s windshield. Blue and green with white at the poles, it was the stereotypical habitable planet for my species. It was not a home world for any sentient species, which meant it was in much more pristine condition than many other planets, having only been developed with modern sensibilities. It’s not like planets are the most limited resource anymore, but people only like to strip-mine the ones that aren’t green. It seems a little discriminatory.
Being so civilized, Nar Valdum fully monitored all traffic entering its atmosphere. Landing on the planet was not simple. Pretty much everything about being civilized is unnecessarily cumbersome. That’s why I stick the edges of civilization. I don’t really fit in with civilized people.
“Would you like to play twenty questions, Rico? You think of something, and then I’ll try to guess it. It will help me learn.”
“No, Dip, I want ground control. Any indication of how much longer we’ll have to wait?”
“They simply say we are in a queue, and they will get to us soon. So do you want to play twenty questions?”
Didn’t have much else to do. “Fine. I thought of something.”
“Is it animal, vegetable, mineral, or other?”
“Other.”
“Is it violence?”
“Yes.”
Dip processed silently for a moment. “That game did not help me learn anything.”
“Life is full of disappointments, Dip. Perhaps you learned that.”
“I previously derived that knowledge, Rico. I
have good news for you, though: Ground control is hailing us.”
“Patch them through.”
“This is Nar Valdum ground control,” said a male voice over the ship’s speakers. “What is your business here?”
My guess was that a normal person would be a little irate at this point, so I decided to go with that…since I actually was quite irate. “Landing…not just floating here all day.” I was starting to worry I’d be late for my meeting with my contact (contacts?), and I had no idea what would happen then. Very frustrating.
“We are sorry for the wait, but security measures have been increased for the conference. Are you here for that?”
“Yes.” So many species in one area would be something. I imagined firing into a crowd full of diverse species and making a rainbow of blood splatters. It would be like art.
“How long is your planned stay?”
Once again, I had no idea. “Seven days.”
“How many sentients are aboard your vessel?”
“Just me.”
“Species?”
“Human. Haven’t you scanned my ship?”
“Just confirming data. Does your ship have weaponry?”
None they would find. “Just basic defensive measures…if you’d call them weapons.”
“Your course for landing and your ship identification are being sent to you. Please keep the ship identification in your memory bank for the length of your stay.”
I checked the onscreen map. This was not good. “That’s a completely different continent from the conference!”
“Security measures,” ground control answered. He sounded weary.
“It’s good to know I’ll be safe, at least.” I did not hide the sarcasm as I cut communications. Whatever I would be doing down there, I would lack an easy escape. “Dip, take her down. I’ll need you to find out as much as you can about their aerial security and whether you might be able to bring the ship in closer if needed. I’d like a better escape plan than having to tunnel straight through the planet to get back to you. I think I’ll need your full pretend intelligence on this.”
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