Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex

by Stephen Renneberg

  He sat in the middle of six large screens that wrapped two thirds of the way around him. I would have had to turn my head to see them all, but Izin, with his much greater field of vision, could watch them all simultaneously while impersonating a statue.

  He slipped his vocalizer on over his narrow mouth and said, “The hull scan is now seventy eight percent complete, Captain. We sustained no damage during approach.”

  I expected nothing less from Izin’s shield enhancements. “I want you to check all the ships in port. I’m looking for a Caravel D class medium freighter.”

  Izin didn’t move, blink or even glance sideways at me, yet he knew immediately what was on my mind. “You think Captain Dulon is here?”

  “I saw her yesterday in the city, but her ship isn’t registered. I’m wondering why?”

  “It would be best if you had as little contact with her as possible, Captain.”

  Not him too! “I just want to know how she got here. It’s important.”

  “I understand.”

  I’m not sure he did. Tamphs were a matriarchal species, incapable of forming the one-to-one bonds humans did. I doubted tamphs even understood what human love was, although the overpowering pheromones the females exuded gave them an evolutionary power that ensured their will prevailed over the males – without question.

  “Also, ramp up security.”

  “All security systems are fully operational, Captain.”

  “I know. I mean keep your eyes open. Watch out for anyone getting too close to the ship or trying to get inside.”

  “Do we have enemies here, Captain?”

  Two of Lena’s agents were dead. I didn’t want to join their number once I contacted Sarat. “Maybe.”

  “Rest assured Captain, I will eliminate anyone who attempts to force entry into the ship.”

  That’s why his kind had been under total blockade by hundreds of interstellar civilizations for thousands of years. “No killing. Just be on the lookout for anyone acting strangely.” A tamph killing humans would be hard to explain to the port authorities.

  “Am I permitted to use non-lethal force?”

  “Absolutely! You can knock them senseless, just make sure they’re still breathing.”

  “Very well, Captain. I will incapacitate anyone who seeks unauthorized entry to the ship. Does that include Captain Marie Dulon?”

  I doubted Marie would try to board the ship, but if she did, I didn’t want Izin blasting her. “Standing order: never hurt her. Ever. You can detain her, but don’t hurt her.”

  “Understood, Captain. She is your matriarch. I will treat her as such.”

  It was as close as Izin would ever come to understanding our relationship. To him, a matriarch was higher than a queen, definitely not a friend or partner. Tamph males outnumbered females thousands to one, so there was little opportunity for them to ever form close personal bonds with a female of their species.

  Pitying anyone who tried to break into the ship, I headed for the airlock. Like many pressurized habitats, Hades City prohibited personal weapons and took precautions to prevent them entering the city. So, I left my gun in its locker and took the tube down to the Slot, a long narrow cavern housing the city’s red light district. Two broad avenues ran its length: the Grand Boulevard which blazed with lights, casinos and nightclubs; and Miner’s Road, a dark street lined with brothels, psychedelic dealers and implant parlors. The dealers peddled chemicals designed to distort human perception while the implanters sold an impressive range of metal devices to enhance human abilities – not biotech like my threading, but as good as you’d get off-Earth without access to classified hardware.

  My threading projected a map of the cavern onto my optic nerves as I moved through the Slot’s frenetic atmosphere, avoiding the attentions of mammary modded ladies of the night and sidestepping an obstacle course of overdressed stim dealers. Two thirds of the way down the Grand Boulevard, I slipped across into Miner’s Road and entered Charon’s Bar & Grill, as dark and smoky a dive as I’d seen anywhere in Mapped Space. The music was deafening, accompanied by strobes flashing to a tribal beat, forcing patrons to shout into each other’s ears as they drank and stimmed themselves into oblivion. Booths with small tables crammed with people lined one wall, a bar backed by mirrors and glowing lights the other, while a sea of intoxicated humanity thronged between the two. Working girls and stim dealers plied their complementary trades, while customers mingled in the kind of sexually charged atmosphere only chemical stimulants, loneliness and desperation at the edge of nowhere can induce.

  I pushed through the crowd towards a large fat bartender and ordered a Hades Hellfire. The label said it was distilled from hydroponic plums, but my threading told me it was twenty percent alcohol and three percent chemicals guaranteed to give me mild toxic shock if I swallowed two shots. I swiped my credit stick over the bartender’s scanner and leaned towards him.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I shouted over the chaotic music. “A Republic merchant named Sarat. Seen him around?”

  He ran his eye over me skeptically. “Don’t know him.”

  “Sure you do. Dark hair, moustache, tall. Has a couple of military clones for protection.” At least that’s what Lena’s mission briefing had said. I could have rattled off Sarat’s DNA sequence, but that would have unnerved the bartender, killing the conversation before it started. “Where is he?”

  “Who wants to know?” he growled. He was blubber on muscle, with an intimidating demeanor suggesting he doubled as the bar’s enforcer.

  “Sirius Kade.”

  “You look like a bounty hunter,” he leaned forward and sniffed, one hand vanishing below the counter, “but you smell like UniPol.”

  “And you smell like a sewerage outlet, but I won’t hold that against you.”

  The bartender’s hand whipped up from behind the counter holding a short black metal rod and swung it down at my head. If I was dead drunk, he might have connected. As it was, he moved in slow motion. I turned just enough to let the metal rod strike the counter, then I slammed his face down into the bar and drove my elbow onto his hand in one lightning fast motion. I caught the metal rod as it fell from his crushed fingers and released his head. He lifted his face, blood oozing from his broken nose, watching apprehensively as I examined his weapon. It was a simple metal club, but it could crack skulls in the hands of a big man. I turned it over once, gave him a reproachful look, then put it back on the counter in front of him, daring him to grab it again.

  Once he realized going for the crude head cracker was a bad idea, I said. “Now that we understand each other . . .” I turned, pretending to look around the bar while my threading area-scanned the room. Behind me, the bartender eyed his metal club, wondering if he could take me while I was looking away, but wisely decided not to risk it. In my mind’s eye, flashing red squares appeared around the faces of nine men and two women, indicating they were wanted criminals, while my sniffer picked up a DNA positive smear on a booth near the door. “Sarat sat over there, in that booth.”

  The bartender pressed a bar towel against his bleeding nose, wondering how I knew where the black market broker had been sitting, considering I’d never set foot in his seedy establishment before.

  “So what’ll it be, club or stick?” I said, holding up my credit stick and glancing at his metal club.

  He gave me another puzzled look, wondering why I’d offer him money after just having broken his nose. “Stick.”

  I swiped my credit stick over his personal scanner. “Remember him now?” Tip or a bribe, it had the desired effect.

  The bartender leaned towards me, speaking for my ears alone. “He’s been here three times a week for about a month. Tipped big. Didn’t drink much. Said he was waiting for a rich guy who never showed.”

  “What rich guy?”

  He shrugged. I offered my credit stick again, but he shook his head. “Save your credits. I don’t know who.”

  “How do you know he was rich?” />
  “Sarat asked if I’d seen a guy wearing diamond rings, fancy clothes and a pointy beard. No one wears diamonds down here, not if they want to walk out alive.”

  “Why does Sarat want to meet him?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “If he comes in again, tell him Sirius Kade is interested.”

  “In what?”

  “Just tell him that. Docking bay E-71.”

  Lena’s people didn’t know what Sarat was selling, only that he was attracting a lot of interest from all the wrong people. They’d tried bugging him, but their highly sophisticated eavesdropping equipment had repeatedly and inexplicably failed. That was the biggest red flag of all. It almost certainly meant we were facing alien-tech we didn’t understand and couldn’t match.

  “If he comes in, I’ll tell him,” the bartender said grudgingly.

  Maybe he would, maybe not, but I swiped his personal scanner again for extra encouragement. “Get yourself a new nose,” I said, and headed for the door.

  Outside, I summoned the city’s schematics from my bionetic memory and looked for somewhere off the snooper grid where I could tap the city datanet in private. I soon discovered a place a few blocks away. Ivan’s was a dingy restaurant with several groups of stocky men sitting around tables drinking vodka and playing cards. No one was eating and the one waitress leaning against a counter didn’t bother approaching me when I entered.

  The men nearest the door glanced at me suspiciously, then one approached me with a bored look. “We’re closed.”

  It was early evening, peak time for a restaurant. My threading told me they were small time gangsters who ran the local rackets. The EIS knew all about them, but left the local UniPol forces to deal with minor criminals.

  “Anatoly told me the kalduny was good here,” I said, hoping the EIS intelligence wasn’t out of date. I’d never met Anatoly and according to my threading, kalduny was a type of stuffed dumpling that sounded inedible.

  The gangster grunted and motioned me towards a vertical screen standing to one side. My threading immediately detected an aging body scanner, the kind that used to protect secret installations on Earth more than a century ago. It was low grade restricted tech – not classified – even so, it should have been out of reach of a bunch of second rate vodka swilling gangsters.

  I stepped behind the screen and waited while Jolly Ivan studied an image of my skeleton and the few metal objects I carried. He rotated his index finger slowly, instructing me to turn in front of the scanner while he watched with a concentration that told me he knew what he was doing. Ivan recognized the synthetic bone replacements in my left shoulder, right shin and three ribs. It was the kind of high quality reconstructive surgery only the military or the very wealthy had access to.

  “You got a lot of new bones,” he growled in a heavy slavic accent.

  “I survived an orbiter crash, years ago.” It was a lie of course. A detailed bone scan would have shown the wounds were sustained at different times, but that was beyond the capabilities of Ivan’s antique scanner. If he told me to strip naked, he’d find no scars. The EIS’ skin regeneration therapy was flawless. Fortunately, the last thing Ivan wanted to see was me naked.

  Finding no weapons, listening devices or any trace of the organic network threading my body, he nodded towards the rear and returned to his card game. I walked through to the back door and knocked. Presently, a door panel dilated revealing a face that could have belonged to Jolly Ivan’s twin. The doorman received a bored nod from Ivan, then let me into a large, dimly lit room suffocating under a pall of smoke. Men and women gathered around small tables talking, drinking, shooting stims and occasionally laughing, all the time watching wall screens full of numbers, spinning wheels and a few games of chance even I didn’t recognize. The surface of every table was fitted with info panels for placing bets, reading the latest odds, and conducting whatever business they were in while they waited for the next game to run its course.

  I found an empty table, ordered an expensive drink and placed several large bets, then used the screen to access the city’s datanet. According to my threading, Ivan’s gambling den was renowned for protecting the privacy of its high rolling patrons, including not tracking their online activity. It was why the clientele preferred Ivan’s to the licensed casinos.

  Thanks to Lena, I had a high level authorization code giving me access to the city’s most secure areas which I used to run a series of searches starting with Sarat. He’d been a frequent visitor to the city over the past few years, although the details of the ship he used and his present location were blocked. Apparently Lena’s authorization code wasn’t quite high enough to pry into Sarat’s personal affairs.

  My second search found there were more than a hundred Orion Arm non-humans in the city, mostly Ascellans, Minkarans and Carolians, but thankfully not a single Mataron. Hades City had no record of any Matarons ever having visited the city, which was either reassuring if true, or an indication the Matarons had hacked the city’s datanet.

  Next, I checked Ameen Zadim’s status. Not surprisingly, he was being investigated by UniPol for a variety of nefarious activities. Considering he was more use to me out of jail than in, I wiped his file. Zadim would never know I’d made his problems go away, because being the inquisitive little scoundrel he was, he’d not rest until he figured out how I’d accessed the city’s inner sanctum.

  Finally, I ran a search on Marie. There was no record of her, yet I’d seen her using her Trader ID at the Exchange. Those tags were issued by the Beneficial Society with encryption so complex, only the EIS could crack it. It had to be that way. The consequences for interstellar trade of not knowing who you were dealing with would be catastrophic because no contracts could be enforced, no trader could be trusted. Could she possibly be using someone else’s ID? That was not only illegal, it would get her blacklisted by the Society – which was far worse.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Marie,” I whispered to myself.

  I waited until my two bets were complete, losing on both, then caught the tube back to the spaceport. At Gate E-71, I touched the door sensor. While it was confirming my identify, my sniffer spotted two contacts moving towards me. It quickly matched their engineered DNA, warning that they were augmented muscle-jobs, tough as they come with at least twice my physical strength. Their bulky bio-engineered muscle would make them slow, but if they got one hand on me, I’d never get free.

  The gate unlocked as I stepped sideways a moment before a metal dart struck the bulkhead with a dull thud and fell to the floor. There was a wet spot where the dart’s tip had hit, telling me it was an injector, not an electro-paralytic. If I hadn’t moved, it would have taken me straight between the shoulders.

  Turning towards my attackers for a first look, my sniffer illuminated them in my mind’s eye with red threat indicators. I was two meters tall, yet they both towered over me with upper body muscle that threatened to burst out of their tight fitting, elasticized black shirts. If it was a uniform, it wasn’t one I recognized. They had no insignia, no markings of rank. One had a shaved head and a faded scar over his left eye; the other a buzz cut and a massive, protruding jaw. Above the threat indicators, my sniffer flashed a tiny green marker indicating neither were on the mad-and-bad list.

  I DNA locked them both and rolled sideways as Scarface fired a second sleep-dart, narrowly missing my shoulder. He might have been a lumbering beefcake, but he had good aim and I was unarmed. I guessed they were off a ship inside the spaceport, as they couldn’t have got the dart gun into the berthing area through port security.

  Scarface slipped a silver dart into his little pistol, while Jawbones stomped towards me, being careful not to block his companion’s line of sight. His move told me they were a team, contract muscle used to working together. Not being on any wanted list meant they were either nobodies, or smarter than they looked.

  I edged sideways, keeping Jawbones between me and his companion’s dart gun. He clenched h
is fist and took a deep breath while still three steps away, telegraphing what was coming. He charged forward like an angry rhino, completely confident of his physical superiority – and completely ignorant what ultra-reflexed modding could do.

  I froze, feigning fear, raising my hands as if to protect my face while offering him my head on a plate. He took the bait, throwing the punch with enough force to crush bone if it connected. Halfway through delivering his slow motion pile driver, I darted forward, slipped effortlessly under his trunk-like arm and drove a hard, precise punch into his lower abdomen. My blow had half the power of Jawbones’ haymaker, but I hit my target precisely while his bulging arm flailed uselessly through the air.

  Jawbones coughed, unable to breath, then took a step forward and swung his other arm wildly at me, ignoring the pain. He might have been a lumbering elephant, but he was tough. Most opponents would have been on their knees, gasping for air, not coming back for more. He pivoted off his trailing foot as his fist chased me, so I kicked his advancing leg just enough to throw him off balance and send his second pile driver sailing over my head. Before he knew what was happening, I spun and snap-kicked him in the groin with the same foot that had taken out his leg. Jawbones doubled over, his forehead begging for an elbow strike that would have finished him, but my sniffer was flashing a warning that Scarface had shifted position and was now behind me.

  Ignoring Jawbones’ gift coup de grace, I rolled away from the crippled muscle-job, expecting to see a dart flash over my head, but Scarface was marginally smarter than his bonehead partner. He held fire, anticipating my roll, firing only as I came to my feet.