“I’m just misunderstood.”
“It’s why I believe your interest is genuine, but my little gathering is full.”
“No it isn’t, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Or I might just want to know how you heard about my auction?”
“Jie Kang Li hired me to represent him. He didn’t tell me how he knew or what I was buying, he just told me to win.”
When you lie, lie big. Jie Kang Li was the supreme head of the Yiwu, the largest and most powerful Chinese crime syndicate in Mapped Space. That made him one of the ten richest humans alive and the only one not an Earth resident. Li was also the People’s Federation of Asia’s most wanted criminal, and considering how long he’d evaded them, their biggest embarrassment. Even the Earth Intelligence Service couldn’t find him, which meant he was either a ghost or a genius – probably both.
“You don’t know what the merchandise is?” Sarat asked.
“Not a clue,” I said, hoping Sarat would volunteer the information.
Sarat reflected on my lies briefly. “Li is at least a thousand light years from here, which makes your story impossible to check.”
That’s why Lena had picked Jie Kang Li as my cover story. “I can prove it.”
“How?”
Lena had given me an Earth Bank digital-vault with sufficient funds to play the game. It was DNA coded for my personal use and was as good as cash anywhere in Mapped Space. Digital-vaults were the only way to transfer funds between star systems that had no way of accessing a central data repository on Earth. Global banking systems may have been highly centralized in the days before interstellar travel – because distances were negligible – but interstellar banking was exactly the opposite. Distance and time dictated it. It had made Earth Bank as much an idea as an institution, and had created the most splintered, decentralized use of data in human history. Billions of digital-vaults scattered across thousands of light years – each a tiny piece of the Bank’s central repository – allowed anyone access to their funds no matter how many months or years they were away from Earth. You didn’t contact the bank – you couldn’t! – you carried it with you, wherever you went.
I retrieved the small rectangular device from the ship’s safe and swept it over my desk scanner. The credit stick checked my DNA before revealing the balance to the ship’s processing core, which then replaced my view screen’s window sim with an obscenely large number. If I was inclined to steal from the EIS, I could have taken the money and lived like a potentate for the rest of my life. Fortunately for Lena, the Silver Lining was enough for me.
Sarat took one look at the king’s ransom locked inside my credit stick and sat back, convinced. Money really does talk, in any system, in any century, particularly to men like Sarat.
“Why would Jie Kang Li trust you with so much money? Why not send one of his own people?” Sarat asked.
“Maybe he trusts me more than his own people. Or maybe he doesn’t want them knowing what he’s doing.”
Sarat sucked on his putrid fume-stick thoughtfully. “I’ve heard your word is good, Kade.”
“So is Jie Kang Li’s money.”
“You really don’t know what you’re bidding on?”
As soon as he said it, I knew he was hooked! “I’m just a hired gun with a fast ship. I get the stuff. I take it to him. He pays me a huge commission and we are done. That’s all I care about.”
“You could steal his money. It’s more than all the commissions you’ll ever earn.”
“Where would I go with it? I’m already at the ass end of Mapped Space. If I stole from Jie Kang Li, I’d be dead within a year. This way, I’m rich and alive.”
“A most desirable combination,” Sarat mused as he blew smoke across the room, his mind made up. “Welcome to the deal of the millennium, Captain Kade.” He stood and dropped a data chip on my desk. “We meet in ten days. This is the location. Be on time.”
He walked to the hatch, “Remember, if you bring the authorities with you, it won’t just be me you’ll have to deal with. The other bidders represent the richest and most powerful organizations known to man. If you expose them to unnecessary risk, being hunted by Jie Kang Li will be nothing compared to what they will do to you.”
“I’m sure Jie Kang Li feels the same. That’s why he hired me. I’m discreet.”
“Then we understand each other.” Sarat turned to leave.
“Do you want to tell me what I’m bidding on?”
“Ask Jie Kang Li,” Sarat said slyly before slipping out into the corridor.
I hurried after him, thinking I should escort him down to the airlock in case Izin ambushed him, but found the passageway was empty. There were Earth-tech stealth suits, shadow suits and chameleon suits, all devised to make a man harder to see. I know, I’d worn them all, but the one thing we still hadn’t mastered was perfect invisibility.
It was simply more proof that Sarat was using alien-tech – a lot of it – although whose it was and how he got it was a mystery.
* * * *
Izin’s large blue-green eyes slid back and forth, scanning horizontally. He did that when he was irritated, as if he was constantly searching his surrounds for the source of his annoyance. It was one of the few tamph mannerisms I’d learned to read on his otherwise impenetrable amphibian face.
“Jase accessed the airlock last night at two-oh-five, ship’s time,” Izin said as he studied the security logs in engineering. “He then left the ship at two-fifty.”
“It wasn’t Jase,” I said.
“The pressure bridge’s gate and our own airlock sensor both scanned his DNA before opening, although the hull sensors near the airlock were still being repaired.”
“It was a man called Mukul Sarat, using alien-tech.”
“Which tech?” Izin’s synthesized voice was typically calm, but the way he fixed his gaze on me made me feel uncomfortably like prey.
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”
The alien-tech could have come from any of the Orion Arm Local Powers, or even one of the more distant civilizations we had sporadic contact with. They all had the technology to pick our pockets, starting with the Ascellans who were a mere ten thousand years ahead of us. They were the nearest in development to mankind, but there were thousands of others, all far more advanced than the humble Ascellans. The Matarons had the motivation to scheme against us, but they were so extremely xenophobic they didn’t trust anyone, especially not human defectors. Or was Sarat a dupe rather than a defector?
“Did you get anything from the minidrone you blasted near the airlock?” I asked.
“No, Captain. It didn’t conform to any known human device, although its technology was within human limits.”
“What about the components?”
“They were all constructed of Earth sourced materials.”
“All of them?” I asked suspiciously.
“My metallurgical analysis was very thorough, Captain.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as strange?” After three thousand years of industrialization, Earth’s industries were now increasingly dependent on off world resources.
Izin hesitated, surprised at his oversight. “It is statistically improbable that every component would be constructed from Earth sourced minerals.”
Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide who they were, down to obtaining raw materials from Earth itself to use in manufacturing the equipment they’d given Sarat.
“Slice into the city’s surveillance system. Find Jase.” If Sarat was using alien-tech to fool the airlock’s DNA scanner, the one thing he couldn’t know was my copilot’s DNA code. He could have only gotten that from the source, which meant he’d gone after Jase.
“It will take time, if you don’t want them to know what I’ve done.”
I had no doubt Izin could sneak in without being detected, but if Jase was in trouble, I didn’t have time for him to go tiptoeing around. I summoned the access key to the city’s surveil
lance system from Lena’s download and wrote it down. “Use that.”
“How did you get this security code, Captain?”
“Everything’s for sale in Hades City.”
He didn’t believed me, but he put the code to use immediately. In less than two minutes, he found Jase and I was on my way back to the Slot.
* * * *
The Cerberus Hotel in the middle of the Slot’s well lit Grand Boulevard was the third largest casino complex in Hades City. It was filled with gambling machines and beautiful woman, both adept at separating a man from his credits with ruthless efficiency. It was exactly the kind of place Jase couldn’t resist. His room was on the thirtieth floor, a suite with all the trimmings; views of the Slot’s bright lights, a spa, richly upholstered lounges, red carpets and mirrors everywhere.
When I arrived, the door was closed, the ‘do not disturb’ indicator was glowing and a pin sized hole in the door surrounded by black scoring revealed the locking mechanism had been melted. I slipped quietly inside, finding the room lit only by light spilling in from the street below. It was almost five AM local time and Jase could have been making up for lonely weeks in space with female company in another suite, but as I started towards the bedroom, my threading picked up a thermal signature and a kaleidoscope of chemical residues.
I found two attractive young woman lying either side of Jase on an enormous bed. All three were naked, although only Jase was showing anything like normal thermal readings. I reached down to move one of the girls aside. As soon as my hand touched her skin, my threading got a detailed read on her vitals, instantly informing me that she was almost room temperature and had been dead at least five hours.
My threading analyzed the oil and sweat on my hand from her skin, warning me that a toxic mix of Blue Dream and Screamer had been pumped into her in doses that would have killed an Askeeri thunderbeast. The first was an hallucinogenic, the second a notorious sex drug, but together in those doses, they were poison.
I didn’t bother checking the other girl. One look told me she was also dead.
“Jase!” I shouted, slapping his face. He moaned incomprehensibly, but his eyelids barely moved. I shook him roughly. “Jase! Can you hear me?”
“Skipper?” he slurred as his head rolled sideways without opening his eyes.
My threading used my eyes to optically scan his naked body, looking for unnatural marks, but found nothing. It wasn’t until I examined the soles of his feet that a target indicator appeared in my mind, highlighting a tiny circular abrasion two millimeters across. That was where Sarat had lifted Jase’s DNA code. Whatever tech he was using to beat the spaceport locking systems, it still needed a tissue sample to work. My sniffer could take a proximity scan of a suspect’s code without contact, but it couldn’t use it to trick DNA locking systems, just track the signature.
Like the dead girl, his skin was secreting Screamer, although at a much lower rate. Fortunately, he was sweating only a hint of Blue Dream. They’d given him enough to knock him out, but not kill him. I guess Sarat knew killing Jase would have made it personal, obliging me to seek revenge, whereas linking him to the deaths of two girls would just get him locked up long enough that I’d have to leave him behind.
I dragged Jase into the shower and turned the cold water on full. He shuddered from the shock of freezing water, partially opening his eyes.
“Snap out of it!” I yelled, “we have to get out of here.”
“What . . . are you . . . doing here?”
“You were drugged. Blood stims.”
His face contorted in confusion. “No stims . . . I . . . paced . . . myself.”
“I know. Get dressed!”
“The . . . girls . . . ?”
“They’re dead.”
“What?”
“It’s not your fault.” It was my fault – for letting him out. I hadn’t realized Sarat would go after him to weaken me.
Jase rolled sideways and vomited while I returned to the bedroom and placed the first girl close to her companion, making it appear they were together. I put Jase’s key in one of their purses and filled their hand bags with Jase’s casino chips, making it appear as if he’d given them his key and money to wait for him. There were Blue Dream and Screamer stim tabs in Jase’s bags, enough to make him look like a dealer. I transferred several shots to the girl’s handbags and flushed the rest. If we were lucky, they were hookers and UniPol would assume it was self inflicted. His biotraces were everywhere, but if we left his bag and spare clothes in the room, UniPol might think he was coming back.
Jase staggered into the bedroom, clumsily toweling himself off. I helped him dress, then guided him to the door, leaving the ‘do not disturb’ indicator on, hoping we had at least ten hours before cleaners entered the room. By the time the local authorities started looking for Jase, I planned to be far outside the system.
When we reached the ground floor, I took his weight, then we stumbled between the gambling tables to the front entrance. Several security guards glanced at us, but thinking we were a pair of drunks on our way, made no move to stop us. Once outside, I carried Jase to the tube back to the spaceport, hoping there wouldn’t be a long wait for a launch window. We weren’t scheduled to depart, so if the traffic was heavy we could be stuck waiting for clearance for hours – enough time for the city authorities to stop us leaving. I wondered how much it would take to bribe the port controller to bump us up the list, but figured once word got out there were two dead girls in the Slot, the bribe wouldn’t stick. Unfortunately, the city’s blast doors were strong enough to withstand a small asteroid impact, making it impossible for us to shoot our way out.
Hades City might have been a molehill, but if we didn’t get moving, it would soon become a rattrap.
* * * *
Back aboard the Lining, I poured Jase into his bunk to let him sleep it off, requested the first available launch window from port control, then went to my stateroom to find out where we were going. Before I read Sarat’s data chip, I called Zadim.
“Sirius, did you find your little ratman?” Zadim’s voice asked as his plump face appeared in my holo display, blinking back sleep.
“He found me, but that’s not why I called. Someone working for you doesn’t know how to keep a secret.”
“How do you know this?” Zadim asked suspiciously.
“A competitor found out about my interest in Sarat.” It was the only way Vargis could have known I was trying to buy into the game. “Now that we’re blood brothers again, Ameen, I thought you should know.”
“I will attend to it at once,” Zadim said with a heavy tone. “It is most regrettable when one cannot trust one’s own relatives. Safe voyage, my friend. I look forward to your return, and our future ventures together.”
Zadim’s face disappeared from the space above my desk, then I scanned Sarat’s disk and watched as an Earth-sized world appeared in its place. Astrographic data floated either side of the planet’s image, giving me its vital statistics at a glance. The northern and southern hemispheres were almost identical, covered in white sheets of snow and ice. A thin band of blue ocean separated the two frozen hemispheres, marking an equatorial zone seven hundred kilometers wide, where temperatures remained barely above freezing year round. The equatorial ocean was filled with icebergs and a few island chains, while in the western hemisphere, a thousand kilometer long strip of green marked the northern tip of the only continental land mass not entirely buried beneath ancient glaciers.
I could scarcely believe my eyes. It was the same planet Marie had been searching for contracts to at the Exchange. Now I knew why she was in Hades City. She was either a bidder in Sarat’s auction, or she was going to steal whatever he was selling!
I stabbed the intercom. “Izin!” I yelled in a rage, wishing just this once, she’d trusted me enough to tell me what she was doing.
“Yes, Captain?” Izin replied as calm as ever. If he could tell I was angry, his artificial voice showed no sign of it.
>
“Has Vandray’s Promise left port?”
There was a moment’s silence as he checked if Marie’s disguised ship was still docked. “Yes, Captain. She undocked three hours ago.”
“Where’s she headed?”
Another brief silence as Izin processed my inquiry. “Her flight plan indicates she’s headed towards the Arkina Nebula.”
“The hell she is!” There was nothing in the Arkina but H-miners and Ravens. “Any word on our launch window?”
“We’re eighth on the departure list,” Izin replied. “Launch is scheduled to occur in one hundred and forty three minutes.”
I switched off the intercom and stared at the bleak world floating in front of me. It resembled a spinning top of snow and ice, where the richest scum in Mapped Space were gathering for a black market auction that put at risk mankind’s future as an interstellar civilization.
It was a world known throughout Mapped Space as Icetop.
Chapter Three : Icetop
Marginally Habitable World
Creshan System
Outer Lyra Region
1.03 Earth Normal Gravity
1,204 light years from Sol
42,000 inhabitants
The voyage to Icetop was one of the riskiest a human ship could undertake. It was located four light years beyond the astrographic data gifted to mankind by the Tau Cetins over two thousand years ago, data covering half of one percent of the galaxy. The TC navigational charts enabled human ships to travel safely out to twelve hundred light years from Earth, giving us a freedom we could never have achieved alone. Approximately a quarter of all mass in the universe was dark matter, slow moving and practically undetectable by Earth-tech, yet with enough gravitational influence to catastrophically collapse fragile spacetime bubbles. The faster a ship travelled beyond the speed of light, the more extreme was the curvature of space caused by its bubble and the greater the risk of gravitational collapse. At the Silver Lining’s top speed of one thousand three hundred and fifty times the speed of light, ambient spacetime curvature caused by local gravity would collapse the bubble in an instant. It was why dark matter posed a constant threat to navigation, which the Tau Cetin charts solved by identifying the locations of billions of dark matter hazards with infallible precision.
Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex Page 7