The Yanthus Prime Job: A Pepper Melange Novella (Starship Grifters)

by Robert Kroese

  Pepper grimly assessed her options. If she could scrape together the fare, she could flee offworld, but the Mafia’s reach extended across the Galaxy. She could go to Sam and explain the situation, but she knew where that would lead: the Ursa Minor Mafia would make her a lowball offer for the Wobbly Monolith that she wouldn’t be able to refuse. She’d be lucky to remain on as an employee of the Mafia, working sixteen hours a day at a mob bar for the rest of her life. No, there had to be another way.

  As she wiped down the bar, her eyes fell to the newspaper Sam Suharu had left behind. She grabbed a pen, walked to the table and sat down, hoping that Sam hadn’t done the crossword puzzle. After struggling absent-mindedly with the puzzle for a few minutes, she folded up the paper to swat one of the ubiquitous insects, which had landed on the table in front of her. The damn thing was too quick for her, though, and it buzzed away to some dark corner of the bar.

  It was only in the past few months that the insects—little green things about the size of houseflies—had become a problem. Every business in the area was having trouble with them. The insects didn’t bite, but they had an irritating tendency to buzz around customers’ ears, as if they were being deliberately annoying. Pepper wasn’t much for entomology, but the plague of insects had forced her to take an interest, so she had done a little research a few weeks back.

  The formal name for the insects was “Yanthusian swamp fly.” Apparently they were swamp dwellers who had until recently been confined to a low-lying marsh a couple of kilometers from the spaceport. The original settlers of Yanthus Prime had left the marshes alone, partly because of the intrinsic undesirability of the land and partly out of a superstitious fear of the insects. Although the flies had been declared non-sentient by the Malarchy’s Native Species Identification and Protection Bureau, a belief persisted among a small tribe of human squatters on the swampy land that the insects possessed a basic sort of consciousness at the swarm level. The squatters even claimed to be able to communicate in a rudimentary way with the swarms. Supposedly the squatters had been granted permission to build houses and farms on the insects’ land in exchange for the settlers digging ruts in neighboring tracts to make the land more amenable to the insects.

  Whatever agreement the squatters may have had with the insects went out the window when the developers bulldozed the houses and filled in the marshes to build the spaceport. The remaining marshes around the spaceport were gradually filled in over the course of the next several years as demand for real estate in the area grew. The last few acres had been filled in last year, and the surviving insects fled to nearby neighborhoods. The developers had expected the swamp flies to die off after a few weeks, but the insects’ stubborn refusal to fully relinquish their former territory gave credence to the hypothesis, posited by a local scientist a few months earlier, that they were acting out of spite.

  Having failed to kill the insect, Pepper set down the paper. Her eyes alighted on the article about the Emerald of Sobalt Prime, and she gave in to the temptation to read it. Apparently the jewelry consortium that owned the emerald had put it on a twenty-seven planet promotional tour. Yanthus Prime seemed like an odd choice for a tour stop, as it was known as a hotbed of crime and corruption.

  Pepper found herself daydreaming, and when she snapped out of it she realized she’d drawn a map of the featured exhibit wing of the city museum on the newspaper from memory. She sighed and shook her head. I swore I was never going back to that life. But it didn’t seem she had much choice. It was either go back to thieving or spend the rest of her life as an indentured servant to the mob. As it was, her efforts to “go straight” had hardly been a rousing success on the legal front, having resulted in her becoming an accomplice to the kidnappings of several police officers in the service of the Ursa Minor Mob. Sam always released the cops after thoroughly humiliating and incriminating them, but kidnapping was kidnapping. It was hard to feel bad for the wide-eyed rookies who came into her bar looking to bust a helpless old man just to jumpstart their own careers in law enforcement, but the fact was that she’d fallen back into a life of crime without meaning to—and the worst sort of crime, at that: the low-paying kind. If she allowed the Ursa Minor Mafia to take over the Wobbly Monolith, there was no telling what sorts of shenanigans they’d expect her to take part in.

  The options, then, were to schlepp along in some way or other as a bottom-rung mob lackey or to make a conscious choice to dive back into a life of crime. Pepper was never one for schlepping.

  Stealing the Emerald of Sobalt Prime would be a challenge, but Pepper was no stranger to museum heists. She had, in fact, stolen an original work by the famous Barashavian sculptor Shaashavaslabt, from the very same museum where the emerald was going to be showcased—which was why she had the museum’s layout committed to memory. The Shaashavaslabt theft had been a challenge because the sculpture—a bronze likeness of the Malarchian Primate himself—weighed nearly four hundred kilos and was the size of a small hovercar. She’d had to hire an antigrav crane to remove the statue from the museum and locate a safe place to stash the statue until she could unload it. Pepper had counted on a big payday to compensate her for these expenses; the statue of the Primate was supposedly worth nearly ten million credits because it was the last work Shaashavaslabt ever produced.

  Pepper found out the reason for this only after completing the heist: Shaashavaslabt had been executed for the crime of “creating an unflattering likeness of the Malarchian Primate.” Apparently Shaashavaslabt had made the mistake of rendering the Primate’s proportions with scrupulous exactitude, and word had reached the Primate’s office on Sardonik Five. The statue itself was ordered destroyed; the Primate sent his chief enforcer, Heinous Vlaak, to Yanthus Prime to oversee its destruction.

  For weeks, Yanthus Prime City was overrun with Malarchian Marines looking for the statue. Malarchian Marines weren’t known for being particularly clever, but they were persistent, and their sheer numbers made it virtually impossible for Pepper to move the statue. It was clear Vlaak and his minions weren’t going to leave until they’d found it. Finally Pepper had been forced to call in an anonymous tip, informing the Malarchy where she’d stashed the sculpture. Heinous Vlaak’s Marines melted the statue with their lazeguns and were gone the next day. Pepper lost her life savings on the job.

  But the Emerald of Sobalt Prime was different. Yes, it would be under tighter security than the Shaashavaslabt sculpture, but once she boosted it, it would be easy to hide and move, assuming that she could avoid getting her legs broken by Sam’s thugs in the meantime. If she could get even a tenth of the stone’s reputed value, she’d be able to pay off the Ursa Minor Mafia and keep the bar open indefinitely. But as she thought this, she realized it was never going to happen. If she managed to steal the Emerald of Sobalt Prime, she could never go back to a normal life—both because the cops would never leave her alone, and because the taste of a score like that would ruin her for civilian life forever. It was hard enough to get out of the life the first time. No, she wouldn’t be sticking around to keep the Wobbly Monolith running. If she did this job, she’d jump at her first chance to get off-planet.

  The newspaper article said the emerald would be on display for three weeks, starting tomorrow. That didn’t give her a lot of time. There would be bribes to be paid, equipment to be purchased, and plans to be made—all without raising the suspicion of the local cops. Pepper was fairly certain they’d given up on pinning the Shaashavaslabt heist on her by now, but you couldn’t be too careful on a job like this. If anybody at YPCPD caught a whiff of her being involved in anything that smelled like a heist, they’d find some pretense to arrest her and hold her until after the emerald had moved on. Being behind on her mob dues, she couldn’t count on Sam to help her with the cops—and once the YPCPD realized she was no longer under mob protection, they’d throw the book at her. No way around it, this was a risky proposition.

  Chapter 3

  The next day, Pepper left the CLOSED sign up o
n the bar window and took the hoverrail to the Yanthus Prime City Museum. After paying the admission fee in the lobby, Pepper made her way into the museum, meandering from one exhibit to the next, trying to muster what might pass for genuine interest in surgical tools from the Yanthus Prime Civil War and fossils from the Yanthusian Interdiluvial Period. Eventually she wandered into the wing that housed the gems on display as part of the jewelry consortium tour. The main attraction, the Emerald of Sobalt Prime, was ensconced in a glass cage in the center of an octagonal room in the middle of the wing, with entrances to the north, south, east and west.

  Pepper entered from the west and strolled slowly around the display, taking it in from all angles. She smiled at the guard standing at attention in the corner, and he regarded her quizzically. Whoops, thought Pepper. I really need to avoid smiling. She had stuck plastibone inserts in her cheeks to confuse the facial recognition software used by the museum’s security systems, and they had the effect of making her look a manically cheerful squirrel when she smiled. The important thing was that they would prevent the museum’s security from flagging her visit—as they undoubtedly had her on a list of theft suspects. Fortunately there were enough visitors to the exhibit that she didn’t draw much attention.

  She glanced around the room just long enough to get a comprehensive 360 degree view, making a note of the plasteel shutters that would slam down in case of an attempted theft. Then she meandered through the rest of the wing, forcing herself to linger at a few other exhibits before returning the way she had come. The entire visit took less than an hour.

  Back at the Wobbly Monolith, she climbed the stairs to her tiny apartment, made herself a sandwich, and popped out her contact lenses. She placed the lenses into the nanoplug interface reader connected to a computer. A light went on, letting her know that dozens of cilia-like tendrils were connecting to microscopic interface points around the edges of the lenses. A paper-thin screen unfurled like a sail from the computer, expanding to its default size of nearly a meter in length and two thirds of that in height. The screen showed a circular progress indicator that was filling up with blue as data was downloaded from the lenses. It stopped a few seconds later at eighteen point six terabytes. She had bought these ultra-high-resolution recording lenses nearly two years earlier, when planning another heist that had fallen through at the last minute. They weren’t cutting edge anymore, but they would certainly give her the information she needed.

  Both lenses had been recording the entire time she’d been in the museum, producing a complete stereoscopic record of the wing that housed the emerald, as well as much of the rest of the museum. The traveling exhibit wing was her main concern. She tapped a few buttons on the image processing interface on the screen, telling the computer to render a three-dimensional model that she could explore in real time. The program would extrapolate from the data it had received, making it possible for her to view the wing from any angle. As it began to render, though, a warning appeared:

  Audio data missing. Proceed to render without audio?

  “Whoops!” Pepper exclaimed. She’d forgotten to remove her earrings, which had recorded stereophonic audio from her trip to the museum. The audio data was of little direct use; its value lay in what it could tell the software about the interior of the museum. The echoes of the ambient noises—the hum of the ventilation system, museum visitors chatting, the shuffling of feet—would be interpreted and added to the visual data to determine the thickness, texture, and composition of the surroundings. Pepper pulled off the earrings and put them in the receptacle along with the contact lenses. The reader connected to them and downloaded the data. When it was finished, she restarted the rendering process.

  By the time she’d finished her sandwich and a bottle of Peg-Leg Monkey (the best beer on Yanthus Prime), the rendering was complete. She tapped a key to enter the simulation, and the screen showed the foyer of the museum, where she had begun recording. Hand motions allowed her to navigate the museum as if she were walking inside it. As she strolled around the simulated museum, she took note of the security features: the guards, the cameras, the heat sensors, the motion detectors, the plasteel shutter doors. Pepper leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  The main problem was the cameras, which were mounted in every room in the museum—in fact, most rooms had several visible cameras, and many more microcams were hidden throughout the wing. There were so many cameras, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible for someone to monitor them all. Creating a diversion of some sort to focus attention elsewhere might be helpful, but that was a tricky tactic: make the diversion too compelling, and it would summon the YPCPD and trigger a complete lockdown. The other problem was that no diversion would draw attention away from the completely automated motion detectors that would trigger an alarm if Pepper entered the exhibit room after hours.

  Further complicating matters was the fact that the main cameras in the exhibit room were 3D-enabled and oscillated at random intervals to get a full view of the room. That meant the infamous Kokovoric Stamp Heist trick of unrolling hi-res displays of the room in front of the camera wouldn’t work. Reproducing an image of the room on a screen would be easy enough, thanks to the comprehensive recording Pepper had taken; the trick was getting the appropriate image on a screen in front of the camera. With 3D oscillating cameras, even if you could somehow position a large enough screen in front of a camera to cover its full range of view, the camera’s 3D calibration algorithm would detect the lack of perspective in the image and trigger an alarm. Fooling these cameras would require more finesse.

  The obvious solution to the camera problem was to go smaller with the screens, rather than larger: She knew the company that manufactured her recording contacts also produced augmented reality lenses that were capable of projecting a hi-res image directly into the wearer’s eye. If she could have lenses engineered to the specifications of the apertures of the security cameras, there was no reason they couldn’t be adapted for this purpose. It would require some programming to match each camera’s movements to the image displayed on the lens, but she was fairly certain the rendering software she was using to tour her virtual model of the museum could be adapted for the purpose. She’d essentially be applying custom-designed contact lenses to the cameras.

  The tough part was going to be getting the lenses over the apertures of the cameras without drawing attention. The guy behind the Kokovoric Stamp Heist had used dragonfly-sized bots to move the displays in front of the cameras, but there was a bigger margin of error with screens than with lenses. Lenses would have to be placed accurately to within a tenth of a millimeter or the image would be noticeably off. Additionally, the museum had recently installed sensors that would detect bots larger than a gnat. To further complicate matters, every ten minutes a weak electromagnetic pulse was sent out from a device below the museum’s floor, in order to fry the electronics of any bots that were too small to be detected by the sensors. The only reason the electronics in Pepper’s lenses had avoided being melted was that their electronics, being a few years old, were just large enough to be immune to the EMP.

  So: how to place tiny lenses on the apertures of the cameras without anyone noticing, and without using bots? Pepper considered the matter for an hour and came up with nothing. Eventually she fell asleep in her chair, only to be awakened by one of the insects buzzing near her ear. She woke with a start and smacked herself on the side of the head, missing the insect. “Damn you!” she yelled at the little green bug as it buzzed away. “You’re not getting your swamp back. Just die already!”

  The insect landed on the wall a few feet away, watching her, as if assessing its options in light of her words. It was hard not to feel a little bad for the thing. Like Pepper, the insect was a victim of forces beyond its understanding or control. And like Pepper, the insect was acting out of desperation, doing the only thing it could think of to do—lashing out at those in power. “If only you knew how little power I have,” Pepper mused. “If you w
ant to strike a blow against the establishment, you’d be better off buzzing around the mayor’s office or the…” She trailed off as she imagined the little bugs buzzing around the ears of the city’s movers and shakers at one of their fancy events at the City Museum.

  She stared at the insect on the wall, and the insect stared back. Was there an intelligence behind those tiny, multifaceted eyes? It seemed doubtful. And yet, the squatters had been convinced that they had been able to communicate with the swarms. Pepper was also struck by the apparent spitefulness of the insects’ actions. There was no apparent biological reason for the flies to hang out at her bar. They didn’t bite, and they weren’t interested in the food or drinks. Their only purpose seemed to be to annoy her and her customers. But why? Were they attempting to exact some small amount of vengeance for the destruction of their habitat? Or were they trying to communicate something?

  “What do you want?” she asked the insect.

  The fly took off, buzzed around the room for a moment, and then landed on a napkin on the table in front of Pepper—the same napkin on which Pepper had drawn the interior of the museum. The insect was standing right in the middle of the octagonal exhibit room.

  “Well, aren’t you an ambitious little bug,” Pepper said. “If you want the emerald, you’re welcome to it. You have a better chance of getting into that room that I do. If you need somebody to help you unload it, I can hook you up with my fence. Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement.”