by J. S. Morin
Only Shoni seemed to share Amy’s taste in scientifically programmed music.
Oh, and Yomin was hopelessly artisto-modern.
While Amy had a touch of magic in her, it didn’t extend to summoning crew voices by thinking about them. So it was sheer coincidence when Yomin’s voice piped over the comm.
“Got him,” Yomin replied, voice chipper. “Our smuggler boss is on Faendral Rock. Think we can get to him in time?”
Time was a relative concept. Einstein didn’t believe in objective time. Amy was skeptical, having sat through navy briefings that went on for decades in the span of an hour. But nav computers could give a common reference that allowed everyone to speak the same language.
“I’ll know once we drop,” Amy replied to the comm panel. Then switching from Yomin’s quarters to addressing the common room, she gave the all-clear. “Esper, you’re up. Get us nice and deep. We’re playing catch-up here as it is.”
“Roger. Will do,” Esper replied.
Why was everyone on the ship so perky? And why did Esper try to pretend she knew military lingo when she clearly hadn’t a clue?
Just another mystery of the universe, Amy supposed.
Amy let her eyes half close as she brought the Mobius to a halt just outside orbit around New Garrelon. She licked her lips and steadied her breathing, preparing for the tendrils of fear that crept in whenever they delved into astral space.
Alone, Amy could indulge her worries about manual astral travel. Carl didn’t understand. He tried. It was just that growing up around Mort, Carl had taken more astral drops via wizardly handicrafts than he had with proper arcano-mechanical systems. How could Amy convey the sense of dread that someone had hand-woven a parachute just before jumping out of an atmospheric craft?
The stars faded.
Amy breathed in and held it for a five-count.
The stars vanished. The gray that remained in place of the Ocean’s black was like an overcast day planetside turned inside out. The gray deepened, flattened, and eventually became utterly uniform.
Amy exhaled.
The nav computers were in their accustomed state of panic, suddenly tossed in the deep end of the astral without proper warning. There was no convincing them that any of this was normal. For once, Amy agreed with the machines.
Carl ducked inside the cockpit and swung himself into the copilot’s chair. “How are we looking?”
“Give it a second,” Amy replied, eyes on the screen. Esper was getting to be nearly as good at this as Mort. The numbers stopped moving as the astral scanners found a common reference point and triangulated their location and depth. “Looks like she pulled us down to 9.44 astral units.”
Carl nodded appraisingly. “Not bad. Not bad at all. See? At six, we’d have never gotten to this scum in time to intercept his smuggler.”
“Still up for debate,” Amy said. She tapped the readout when it finished its calculation. “We can be there day after tomorrow.”
With an accusing squint at the display, Carl grunted. “Faendral Rock, huh? Who lets people get away with naming shit after themselves? Anyway, looks like we’ve got a ride ahead of ourselves.”
Without pausing to ask, Carl reached across and tapped in a music selection. Seconds later, the cockpit sound system was blaring “Low Rider.”
Amy smiled with pursed lips.
As the Mobius rocketed off toward Faendral Rock, fourth planet of the Maelorne System, Amy realized something. She hadn’t worried since Carl stepped into the cockpit. From his lazy courage to his corny, reassuringly ancient music, Carl was just a worry vortex.
And he was Amy’s worry vortex.
# # #
Carl had been on this world a hundred times. It had different names. It orbited different suns. But in the end, it was the same podunk, barely habitable ball of minerals pumped full of an oxygen-nitrogen mix until lowlife scum could set up shop.
Faendral Rock was just the name of the latest version of this planet, with a weak blue sun dangling in the sky overhead and orange mountains forming a ring of spikes around the colony’s perimeter. It wasn’t a mining outpost or a pleasure resort. As best the omni could tell, the story of this place was that some full-of-himself petty pirate named Chet Faendral had bought it from the galactic colonial authority as a castoff, then installed a half-billion terras in atmospheric rehab to turn it into a retirement paradise.
It had only half worked.
As Carl led the way through the streets of the colony’s only settlement, he marveled that it had hung on as anything but a failed experiment. Apparently, there was just this insatiable human desire not to see any planet go uninhabited.
“Two blocks ahead,” Yomin reported from the rear of the group.
Yomin was along for tech support. Carl was breaking her in easy on the planetside raids. This one, with an unsuspecting target and no local law enforcement worth mentioning, seemed like an ideal training ground. Even if Yomin blew it completely, he had Esper and Rai Kub along for the dirty work.
Their target’s name was Howie Carter. At least, that was the name he went by locally. His biography was a tangle of aliases and hacked-together fiction that read like a guy who wanted to grow up to be Al Capone but barely managed to be Kip Bladner.
“This is it,” Yomin reported, pointing to a run-down warehouse with a sign over the garage door entrance that read “Faendral Vehicular.” Beside the large door obviously meant for vehicles, there was a smaller, person-sized door—so long as that person wasn’t stuunji. “Place is scan-shielded, so we’re going in blind.”
Carl shook his head. “If I ever own my own planet, I’m ordering regular raids of anyplace that looks like a warehouse, is supposedly abandoned, or runs a scan scrambler when it’s got no imaginable need for one.”
“You did own your own planet,” Esper reminded him. “It turned out horribly.”
Holding up a finger, it was Carl’s turn to be pedantic. Without Mort around, he felt a duty to take on his old friend’s role. “That was a moon. Any we had a good run there for a little while.”
“I was stranded there six years,” Yomin reminded him in a growl.
Carl clapped his hands. “Business at hand. All right. Rai Kub, get that door open. Esper—”
There was a crash and squeal of metal as the door ripped from the surrounding wall. Rai Kub held it clenched in one fist, fingers crinkling the metal around them. Under his other arm, he held a wooden footlocker that he hadn’t bothered setting down to take care of the door.
“OK,” Rai Kub replied.
With a shrug, Esper slipped inside. Whatever her role was to have been, Carl no longer needed to explain.
The garage warehouse was a darkened mess of disassembled hover-cruisers, light transports, and personal recreational craft. How far the clutter went, it was impossible to tell by the washed-out blue star sunlight leaking in from the doorway.
“Hello?” Carl called out. “I heard you were the guy to talk to about moving goods into Sol space. Sorry about the door. My guy here doesn’t know his own strength.”
“But I—” Rai Kub started to object before Carl jerked a finger up to his lips. Then the stuunji caught on with a nod and mimicked the shush gesture.
Blaster drawn, Carl raised a fist, then extended a finger and swirled it around in the air.
“Huh?” Yomin asked in a whisper.
Rai Kub gave Esper a gentle nudge. “I think he wants you to fly up and look.”
“I can’t fly,” Esper whispered back.
Rai Kub nodded. “Oh.”
Seething through his nose, Carl clarified. “It’s hand signs. Special ops stuff. It means spread out and search.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Yomin objected. “It meant hold up and rally, which made no sense at all.”
“Well…” Carl paused, unprepared for someone to have actually studied the naval field manuals. “Just spread out and search.”
Yomin and Esper crept off in different directions. Rai Kub hun
g close to Carl and cleared a path, whether he meant to or not. Stuunji just weren’t built for stealth of any sort. Rai Kub’s quietest whisper rivaled a coolant leak. He was physiologically incapable of tiptoeing. Plus, his oversized body couldn’t squeeze through tight areas without—
A crash echoed from the steel rafters of the warehouse as Rai Kub toppled a grav bike that had been precariously perched on its kickstand. As the stuunji stooped and picked it up, the bike’s chassis grated on the permacrete floor.
“Fuck it,” Carl muttered. He shouted to his team. “Someone find the lights. Howie Carter, if you can hear me, come out and make this easy on yourself. We’re not here to kill you or even rob you.”
Rai Kub looked back and fixed Carl with a cockeyed scowl. “We’re not?”
Carl shrugged.
A lot of how things played out from here depended on Howie Carter. Sure, a firefight might get the poor weasel killed, but that wasn’t why Carl was here. And, if the grimy, waste-reclaim output of a middleman handed over his personal data, there would be no reason to steal it.
The strike team scoured the warehouse. Ubiquitous clutter was as good as a scanner dampener sometimes, and Carter seemed to be playing this game with both on his side.
“Bolt hole!” Yomin shouted from the back of the warehouse, where an impromptu office had been slapped together from a desk and dummy terminal.
Esper, Carl, and Rai Kub rushed over, the latter toppling a tool rack and the door panel of a 2540’s Se Habla atmo cruiser.
“You gonna fit down there?” Yomin asked as they gathered around a trapdoor roughly a meter square.
Rai Kub turned to Esper. “Maybe you can magic me smaller?” he asked hopefully.
Carl clapped the stuunji on the shoulder. “You guard this exit. If he doubles back, sit on him until we get here.”
“Literally?” Rai Kub asked, widening one eye.
“If you have to, big guy,” Carl replied. “Just don’t let him get away. Esper, you—”
But Esper hardly needed prompting. She took a quick glance down and dropped through the trapdoor, ignoring the ladder that ran down one wall.
With a “ladies first” wave of his hand, Carl sent Yomin down next, then took up the rear.
The basement level of the warehouse was primarily gas, water, and power lines, crisscrossing the building and delivering various utilities to workstations as needed. The utility access corridors had no walls, per se; they consisted of passageways formed where the innumerable conduits gave way for room enough to allow mechanics access.
Yomin slipped out her SlyTek Sidekick. “Which way?”
Carl hated even saying the words. They rang the bells that foretold doom in the form of ambushes, unexpected monsters, and walking smack dab into clichés despite knowing better.
“Let’s split up and search.”
# # #
Howie Carter had experienced better days. Faendral Rock might have been a shithole, but he’d considered living there a small price to pay while he set up a cushy retirement somewhere closer to the core worlds. Sol might have been too straight-laced for his tastes, but maybe something in the Orion system might be a compromise between culture and price.
That was before Carl Fucking Ramsey showed up on his door cam. The grainy, low-res image used so little bandwidth that even halfway decent scanners failed to pick up on it, but the picture was clear enough. Plus, it wasn’t like Ramsey hadn’t starred on a holovid racing series. Half the galaxy knew him by sight.
“What are you doing out there…?” Carter muttered to himself as he squinted at the screen. Ramsey had two women with him and a xeno from a species that looked like a rhinoceros up on its hind legs.
Carter didn’t need to answer his own question. The rhino tore his front door right off the hinges. Whatever Ramsey wanted, it wasn’t friendly.
“Shit… shit… shit…” Carter repeated like a mantra as he powered down his computer and unplugged the core from his oversized display and interface console.
Fumbling in the desk drawer, Carter shunted aside documents and office clutter that he suddenly regretted accumulating over his time in residence on Faendral Rock. Then he found it.
A Thompson DK-9 Slingshot. Normally, Carter wasn’t in the blaster-toting business, but the heft of the weapon in his hand made the imminent breach of hostile forces seem a little less bleak.
It was still bleak enough, however, that Carter headed straight for the trapdoor down to the maintenance level.
“Hello?” Ramsey bellowed. “I heard you were the guy to talk to about moving goods into Sol space. Sorry about the door. My guy here doesn’t know his own strength.”
Like hell. That was an intimidation move, plain and simple. Only a fool would have answered back.
The oiled hinges of the trapdoor didn’t make a sound. For once, he didn’t feel like an idiot for keeping up maintenance on a bolt-hole he hadn’t used in the five years he’d lived there.
Climbing gingerly down the ladder with the computer core under one arm, the broker measured every breath.
After setting down the core, Carter climbed back up to conceal his escape route. Out in the garage, he overheard indistinct mutterings from Ramsey and his goons.
“Well…” Ramsey snapped. “Just spread out and search.”
That was Carter’s cue to make himself scarce. The ratty old rug that lay beneath his office chair was nearly see-through; that’s how threadbare it had become. But he had a choice between closing the trapdoor and leaving the top side of it exposed or leaving it open and dragging the rug over to hide everything.
Carter chose the latter.
Climbing back down, he retrieved the computer core with all his essential data and slipped into the maze of ductwork and pipes. Along the way, he prayed.
“Lord, if you spare a gutless, greedy sinner like me, I swear I’ll donate half my earnings from this job. I mean…” Carter paused to orient himself in the unfamiliar surroundings. He knew the schematic of these passages like the pillow he slept on. That didn’t mean much from the inside, where they looked nothing like the clean wire-frame view. “After all, it’s not like it’s your religion we’re robbing. If anything, ripping off some filthy xeno idolaters should be a boost to your business.”
Whether his prayer was persuasive or not, Carter didn’t know. Early results weren’t promising.
“Bolt hole!” a woman’s voice shouted. Well, give her a back rub and a box of chocolates for thinking to look under a damn rug.
Carter’s feet sped up without needing to be told. What was it about a basement level with no additional outlets that had seemed secure? Why was he worried about thieves sneaking in from below when he should have been worrying about pissed-off contractors barging in the front door?
Would it have killed him to have a secret exit instead of an innocuous bunker?
It might kill him not to.
Finding an obscure corner, Carter checked all his personal electronics and made sure nothing was transmitting, blinking, or emitting radiation. The heating pipe should have helped conceal him from thermal imagine.
Maybe Ramsey would give up and go away.
In the quiet spaces between breaths, Carter imagined that he could hear footsteps encircling him. He told himself that human hearing wasn’t good enough to pick out noises so subtle against the hissing and thrum of the building utilities.
“We know you’re in here, Carter,” Ramsey called out. “You make this easy on yourself, we don’t have to have an ugly incident down here.”
The hairs on the back of Carter’s neck stood on end. His skin crawled. Beams of light hunted him in the darkness. Hand lamps. It was only a matter of time, if Ramsey was thorough, before one of his people stumbled onto him.
Placing the computer core gently between his feet, Carter clutched his blaster in both hands and whispered the Lord’s Prayer.
Just as he said “amen,” a figure appeared at the end of the hall of pipes and shined a light on him.<
br />
Fool.
In the reflected light, he made out a curvaceous form and an empty hand. All this girl was carrying was the hand lamp. Whipping his blaster up and aiming it toward her center of mass, he confronted Ramsey’s female thug.
“Freeze, Sunshine,” Carter ordered. “Ramsey, show yourself. You’ve got until the count of ten before I put a hole between these giant tits on your girlfriend.”
The woman bent slowly, setting down the hand lamp and putting up her hands. The beam of light left Carter’s eyes, and he blinked in relief. Ramsey’s girl left herself clearly illuminated, and despite being dressed in a shabby pink sweatshirt, it was still quite the view.
But there was no sign of Ramsey.
“Ten… nine…”
Before he could put a voice to eight, an arm wrapped around his neck. Carter squeezed the trigger and a blast of plasma lanced out, cutting clean through the woman in the pink sweatshirt.
Angling the blaster behind him as his breath was cut short, Carter desperately tried to put a shot into the one who’d gotten him from behind before he lost consciousness.
A deft hand snatched away the blaster and tossed it away. The pressure on his neck redoubled, and Carter faded to black.
# # #
Carter awoke dizzy.
Waking up at all was a good sign. But after getting captured, it was usually one of those “going to get worse before it gets better” scenarios. Death was a nice, clean end. Captives usually didn’t get either nice or clean.
He was in his office chair. His hands weren’t bound. Neither were his feet.
Either Ramsey was an amateur…
As his head swam into focus, Carter’s gaze drifted up, up, up.
…Or he employed a creature the size of a troop transport to intimidate captives into behaving.
“He’s awake,” the rhinoceros announced in a voice that Carter felt in his ribcage more than his ears.
Ramsey slid across Carter’s desk and let his feet dangle. “Hey, there’s my man. Really sorry that job of yours wasn’t for us. Turns out, we had a change of heart.”