by Hal Archer
The one that bumped the roof reached in and took hold of the shopkeeper's collar, yanking him forward across the counter.
"No. Please don't," the man said as he floundered on top of his wares. Electronic devices and parts spilled off the display. The bruiser held the shopkeeper up with one hand and threatened him with the fist of his other.
Jake heard more alien gibberish from the thug. He felt like jumping in and sorting the two goons out, but he knew he needed to move around the city with discretion, given his purpose there. Eon Station officials expected the city's inhabitants to run on the shady side, but a contraband galactic shipping license bordered on stepping over the line.
Better to let it go. They're just scaring him. Shame. No respect for the elderly these days.
Then the second one patted his partner on the shoulder. The one holding the merchant shook the trembling man. Then he glanced to his left at his interfering partner. Jake watched a heated exchange between the two bruisers. The one on the left shoved the other. The one on the right released the old man and shoved his partner back. The merchant scrambled off the counter and ducked underneath the display table.
Jake imagined what the two partners screamed at each other for the next few seconds, but it still sounded like gibberish to him. He saw the shopkeeper scurry across the floor of his shop and rush through a door at the back, slamming it shut.
"Good for him," Jake said. He peered down the street, blindly choosing a path for himself. Might as well start walking.
He made a point of giving the two arguing thugs a wide berth as he passed them. When he crossed in front of the shop, the two men traded punches. Then one of them rammed the other one, knocking him back several feet. Jake tried to get out of the man's path, but a crowd of people behind him watching the scuffle blocked his path. The beast man slammed into Jake. He stumbled but kept on his feet.
"Easy, big guy," Jake said.
The thug whipped around toward him. He screamed something which came out with a great deal of spit. Jake figured that little nugget of alien gibberish was a well-chosen profanity. He didn't fault the man for it, but the nasty-smelling saliva he felt splash across his face wasn't so easy to ignore.
That's the problem with cities, you can't just shoot someone and be done with it.
He wiped his cheek clean and shook his head at the guy. He threw in a pretty decent scowl too. His point must've gotten across, because the hairy-backed spitting alien took a swing at him. Jake saw the move coming and stepped in before the punch smacked him in the face. He put his left forearm up and inside to stifle the swing and clocked the man on his chin with a powerful right fist. Jake felt and heard the crack of knuckles to jawbone, and he watched the lights go out in the thug's eyes. The man fell backward. Then Jake heard the gasp from the crowd behind him.
The other thug stood across from Jake, on the other side of his partner, who lay sprawled out on the pavement. He figured the guy might thank him for settling the dispute, but it didn't happen. Instead, Jake listened to more alien screaming. He still couldn't figure what any of it meant, but he was glad the sprays of saliva were falling on the guy's partner instead of him.
Jake realized this guy was bigger than the other one. And he looked even more pissed off. When the enraged beast man brandished his fists, and hunkered toward him, on the attack, Jake wasted no time taking the guy up on his offer. He stepped onto the chest of the fallen thug before him and, pushing off the man's gut with his second step, sprung toward the ill-tempered troublemaker. His full body weight hit the man in his chest, and the two flew backward, crashing into the front of the abandoned shop stand. Random pieces of the shop's offerings scattered across the ground, and the bulk of the displayed wares fell onto the shop floor behind the counter.
Jake pushed himself up with one arm and flexed his brow, trying to clear the blur from his vision. A second later he could see again. The thug's face loomed a foot in front of him. Jake clenched his hand and chambered his arm to strike, but then realized the man was out cold.
Jake got to his feet. He noticed the cracked support post behind the goon's head. No blood. He held little sympathy for his attacker, but he was glad he didn't have a death on his hands. That could complicate matters.
He turned around to work the city's puzzle once again.
Where to look?
He expected the crowd watching the fight to have fanned out by now, but they stayed huddled. He noticed slips of paper and credit markers circulating around in the group. Half the faces in the crowd wore looks of disappointment. The other half of them seemed pleased with the outcome.
"Nice," Jake said to himself. "I risk my neck, and they get to profit from it."
He spotted a couple of city officers, wearing their distinct black hats with the black and white checkered band around the edge of the wide brim. And those shiny black boots, like midnight mirrors. Each officer had a shock stick dangling from the clip which held it to his belt.
Damn, those things sting.
They started across the street, coming toward the scene from behind the crowd of street gamblers.
Since when is a good old-fashioned fist fight illegal in Eon? Maybe it's the street gambling. But that'd be a new law.
The crowd of onlookers settled their bets and peeled off a few at a time. Jake got a better view of the patrol officers. They had eyes on him through the crowd of the remaining gamblers.
Not good.
Jake walked, not too fast, and kept watch with his peripheral vision as he headed for an alley.
As the two beat cops moved through the scattering crowd, one of the gamblers stepped in front of the officers. Jake allowed himself to turn his head slightly to see what was going on. The gambler gestured wildly and pointed to another man walking away from the gathering. The patrolman raised his arm and pushed the man aside at the shoulder.
Jake kept walking as he watched. The alley, only twenty feet ahead, offered a heavy cloak of darkness. Just what he needed. No time to get entangled with the local law enforcement, he thought.
Before he reached the turn between the buildings, he saw the desperate gambler make the wrong move. The man lurched back toward the officer who had pushed him aside. He grabbed the patrolman by the collar with both hands. Jake heard the man's plea, echoing down the street.
Bad bet's about to become a bad night.
Jake's prediction came true as the second officer clenched his shock stick, yanked it from the hook on his belt, and brought it down on the gambler. The flicker from the charge was unmistakable. Jake could see it clearly, even half a block away. He shook his head in pity as he ducked into the alley.
His eyes adjusted after taking a few steps blindly into the shadows. He walked the alley and empty shadows revealed their secrets. Most of the dark hideaways weren't as empty as they seemed.
"Need a place to stay?" The sultry voice breathed out of a recess in the wall to his right. The face it belonged to appeared. The woman leaned forward enough to catch a soft fan of dim light.
She wore a long angelic dress, but Jake knew she would appear any way a man wanted if he paid the going rate.
"I have a place here," she said, "if you need it, even if it’s only for the hour."
Jake said nothing and kept walking.
He reached the end of the alley, but found a turn into another and took it.
More shadows. He stepped through a few puddles trying not to think what the liquid might be. The sounds of the busy streets of Eon were muffled by the buildings, blurring the silence, into a steady background murmur.
Somehow the alley felt colder. Maybe the darkness, he thought.
Some of the city light came from the signs and the lights on the buildings, and from within them. But Eon had a sky glow. That's what they called it. Made the place more like people expected it to be, like a city… on a planet. Not some cluster of stacked and welded buildings and superstructure drifting in uncharted space.
But the alleys didn't get the sky glow
. The towering cityscape created slivers of darkness, black veins running throughout the metropolis. And they ran dirty and cold.
He knew these were the places he needed to look in to get what he came for.
Trouble was, with thousands of such shadowed corridors, knowing which to search proved tricky.
He walked on, taking a few more turns.
"Not your neighborhood, is it?"
Jake stopped and gazed at the filthy man crouched on the ground beside the back wall of a building which, no doubt, appeared much brighter and welcoming on the street side. "Whose neighborhood is it, then?"
The man fidgeted his hands together, giggling in as distasteful a manner as Jake thought possible before answering. "If you don't know that," he giggled some more before finishing his response, "then you are in the wrong place."
"I'm looking to buy something," Jake said. "Who would I talk to?"
"Women? Juices?" The man pushed his sleeve up and held his arm out for Jake to see. It bore marks, from wrist to elbow.
"No." Jake turned and moved his hand near his blaster, drawing the man's attention to the threat.
The man withdrew against the wall. "No trouble. No trouble here."
Jake relaxed his hand away from his blaster. "I'm looking for some hard-to-get items. Stuff you can't find on the streets."
"Oh, I see. You want to talk to Baron Vos."
"Where can I find him?"
The man raised his arm. It shook as he pointed down the alley. "Keep going. If you make it the next five blocks, then you may find him."
"If I make it?"
The man shrugged and began giggling again. Then he curled up and ducked his head down. He mumbled and continued to giggle between unintelligible mutterings.
Jake shook his head at the wretched condition of the man. Then he left him to his choices and continued down the dark alley until he could hear the insane giggling no more.
He walked through the alleys for three more blocks without seeing another person. As he passed each adjoining alley the most persistent rays of light from the streets made their way across his path, but only slightly. The signs hanging from the buildings, affixed at the edge of the street-facing sides, blocked much of the light. A dumpster in the first intersecting alley and piles of trash stacked way too high in the next two held back a good bit of the glow from the street. It seemed to Jake that the street dwellers preferred the obstructions between them and the darkness of the back alleys. The fact that so many people busied themselves in the street and hardly anyone ventured where Jake now walked heightened his sense that he was heading into trouble.
He heard a whirring sound overhead and looked up. He let his eyes adjust for a second to peer into the long shadow from the building on his right to the one on his left. Once they did, he spotted the source of the noise. Forty feet off the ground hovered a drone. It was about the size of his hand. He figured it had at least six blades. They were spinning too fast to see them clearly, but he could see the black lines of the framework extending out to six points. He caught a reflection from what he figured to be a lens suspended below the center of the craft. He watched the drone, and it seemed to be watching him.
He stood for several seconds, waiting it out. The drone stayed above him. He placed his hand on his blaster. The drone lifted higher. Then it flew off around the side of the building.
A guy can't walk dark alleys in a crime-infested city without being spied on. What's the galaxy coming to?
CHAPTER 3
T iffin sat against the wall of the long-vacated room on the twenty-sixth floor of a mixed-use tower. The bottom two floors were various stores, some open, some shuttered, all the open stores selling stuff below and in some cases over the counter which would have the owners locked up, or worse in any other place. Above those, a storage company took up the next ten floors. Half the remaining floors were rental units, living quarters mostly, but a few offices as well. The apartment she was in, along with the rest of the floor, hadn't been officially occupied in over a year.
She wasn't the only squatter on the floor. Three other people each claimed one of the two-room apartments, but all of them took a corner unit. They had an unspoken agreement to keep to their own part of the building, each separated by six similar apartments.
Hers was the best unit on the floor. Most of the wall dividing her two rooms was already collapsed when she had claimed the space six months previously. She knocked the rest of the framing and panels down her first week there. The open space was more to her liking, and she liked the cross breeze it created. She had grown quite fond of the large room. Much better than huddling behind a dumpster in an alley. The room only had two windows busted out, one on each outside wall. With just one floor above her and no adjacent buildings quite as tall, she had a penthouse view of the grimy city she'd known since birth.
The wind blew in through the south-facing broken window and out the west-facing one constantly, but she had grown used to it. North had been fixed to City Hall when Eon outgrew its trading post status and became a city. She slept near one of the interior walls to avoid the gray polluted mist she and most city-dwellers called rain. Her bed was the tattered couch she'd pulled from behind her former residence, a dumpster five blocks away. It was a bitch hauling it up the stairwells, took her two days. It was worth it, though. All the springs had worn out in just the right places. She couldn't sleep on anything else now. She knew it meant she was spoiled, but hey, if she didn't look out for herself, who would, she thought.
She maneuvered the two joysticks on the controller to her favorite drone, Birdy. Watching the view Birdy's cameras beamed to the screen on her controller, she guided the craft away from the stranger below it. She flew it higher and then around the corner of her building.
She looked up from the screen of the controller in her lap, her legs stretched out in front of her on the floor. She wore long green shorts with cargo pockets on the thighs. She had her ankles crossed, one clunky brown lace-up boot resting across the other. Peering over the tips of her boots, she spotted her drone outside the glassless window. She moved the toggle stick on the controller box and Birdy flew into the room, settling to a hover a few feet in front of her.
She heard the patter of tiny feet to her right. "Oh, did that startle you, Squeakers?" She looked over at the mouse peering out a hole at the end of a doubled-over scrap of carpet on the floor. Leaving the drone controller on her lap, she reached into the pocket of the tan vest she wore over her brown t-shirt and pulled out a tiny chunk of cheese. "Here ya go." She tossed it across the room toward the mouse. The crumb settled a few inches in front of the loose carpet. Squeakers twitched his nose. He scampered out of his hiding spot and plucked the cheese from the ground before scurrying back under the carpet. She watched him nibble the morsel. Then she took another piece from her shirt pocket and popped it into her mouth. She rolled it around with her tongue for a moment before chomping it up and swallowing it. "You're right. Not bad."
She glanced around the room, taking a second to admire the torn poster tacked into the crumbling plaster on the wall to her left. It was an advertisement for some place called Erith. She liked the picture, even if she had no idea where Erith was. There were oversized greeners, more than a hundred, she figured. They weren't the two-foot-high ones that grew in the air-making factories. They were so much bigger. She knew the picture was probably a fake. No place made greeners that size. Still, she thought, wouldn't it be cool if they weren't fake. What if she could go there someday? What if she could leave Eon, she thought. Deep down she knew she'd never see it. She knew it wasn't possible. She was born on Eon and would die on Eon. But looking at the image, she often allowed herself to imagine she had plans to go there soon.
"I'll take you too, Squeakers. I'm sure there's lots of cheese."
She drew in a deep breath and sighed. "Right. Let's see what else is going on out there today."
She placed her thumbs onto the two toggle sticks on her drone controller and flew
Birdy back out the south-facing window.
The sky was dim, most of the light came from signage on hers and the other buildings, but much farther down than her floor. The other glow, the sky glow as she knew it, shone from halfway across the city, an area she'd only been to a few times. The glow was always in the sky, but it didn't do much to light up her neighborhood.
She guided Birdy by the view on her controller's screen. She knew the neighborhood well. She could've flown the drone around every building within ten blocks without more than an occasional glance at the screen. But she watched the image Birdy's camera sent back.
Scouting—knowing what's going on in the streets and alleys below—is how she stayed alive on her own for as long as she could remember. She did it on foot, or hands and knees really, hiding and scampering like Squeakers until she was nine.
That's when she ran into a lady she came to call Nan. She spent six months living with her. She liked it. She'd heard about family. It was good while it lasted. Nan showed her how to take things apart and how to make things. She got good at turning scraps and broken bits into gadgets and tools. That's what Nan did. They had a lot of fun creating gizmos and mechanical tricks.
One night Nan went out looking for scraps. She told Tiffin she was going to bring her some good parts, and they'd make something great together. Tiffin waited three days before she realized Nan wasn't coming back. The next week, after she'd gathered up the best bits and scraps from the small place Nan rented in a line of two-story buildings made into apartments, Tiffin moved out and went looking for her own place. That was eight years ago.
She flew Birdy along the street that ran in front of her building, and down past the next four buildings. Then she backtracked, guiding the drone past her place again and the street the other direction, about the same distance. Nothing looked out of place. Dozens of people, this race and that. Scaled. Hairy. Tall. Short. Four arms. Two arms. Making deals. Heading places. Causing trouble, but not enough to draw the attention of the checkered hats. The usual traffic, she decided.