by J. S. Morin
Sephiera Kwon rested her elbows on the faux wood tabletop as she leaned across in a desperate attempt to garner an increased share of his attention. “Wizard Mort, can you please reconsider ordering work on the second astral beacon? Redundancy is essential.”
“First off, stop calling me that. Just call me plain old Mort if you like but not that namby pamby star-drive mechanic honorific. It’s like going out of your way to call an admiral ‘mister.’ My proper title is Guardian of the Plundered Tomes or Guardian for daily use. Since I’ve got no use for the Convocation these days, I’ll settle for skipping the titles altogether. As for that bloody talking rock you want to launch, it can wait until Carl gets back. I’ve got no way to tell whether this is actually anything we need to be spending resources on or some pet project of yours to advance the cause of science around here. My role until the return of our glorious leader is just to keep hell from boiling over into the realm of humanity, and unless things—”
A flash caught Mort’s eye. There was a silvery something blazing its way through the sky surrounded by a halo of fire. Mort’s poetic side imagined that it might be the very forces of hell come to set him to task after days of frustrating inactivity. The prosaic Mort reasoned out a more plausible eventuality.
“Scratch that. Looks like we’ve got guests.”
At that moment, one of Carl’s naval drones buzzed onto the patio from the beehive below. “Wizard Mort, we’ve got a ship incoming.”
“Well, doesn’t that bugger all?” Mort said with a huff. “So much for Carl’s grand plan of keeping this place quiet. I assume since you didn’t tell me who it is, you don’t know.”
“Um…”
“Spit it out, man.”
“It’s Don Rucker. He’s coming down in a shuttle. The ship that brought him here has the firepower to level the mountain. And he’s looking to visit with…”
“Tanny,” Mort said evenly. The flunky nodded vigorously. Mort waved him away with a casual flick of his fingers.
Kwon paled. “How did he find us here?”
Mort turned to offer his most condescending glare. “We’ve remundiated how many former refugees from this world? Someone was bound to talk sooner or later, and Don Rucker has the money—not to mention the persuasive skills—to get answers. Still wishing the monkey had left you in charge?”
Extricating himself from the table, Mort marched off to lie through his teeth to the galaxy’s most notorious gangster.
Collusion Course
Mission 10 of the Black Ocean Series
by J.S. Morin
Collusion Course
Mission 10 of: Black Ocean
Copyright © 2016 Magical Scrivener Press
Mort strode across the hangar, hand outstretched. There was a small gathering at the base of the shuttle’s ramp. Familiar faces all, but it was the man front and center who drew Mort’s attention and shook that welcoming hand. He was solidly built, hard old muscle gone to firm flab, with a jaw like a galleon’s prow and a jutting brow that hung an awning over his eyes. The hair atop Don Rucker’s head glistened, and didn’t budge as he moved. The pearly white smile gleamed fit to shame a shark.
“Mordecai, good to see you again.”
Mort looked the old gangster in the eye and had the satisfaction of seeing arguably the most powerful man on Mars flinch and avert his gaze. “Don. It’s been ages.”
But if the head of the Rucker Syndicate had been Mort’s primary concern, his guests were both a surprise and a far more welcome addition to their little moon-side hideaway. Chuck Ramsey was a scarecrow of a man. He had a round face perpetually fixed with a smile and a tall, gangly frame with wide shoulders and little meat. Until he spoke, it would have been hard to imagine that this man was Carl’s father. “Hey, Mort! You old hobo! Heard you finally picked a spot to settle down and I couldn’t help coming to see the world that finally had enough gravity to keep you planetside. Keeping all these starch-collared button pushers in line, I hope?”
While Don Rucker had warranted a handshake, Chuck Ramsey got a bear hug. “Chuck, they let you off Luna? I thought that’s where they—”
“Keep all the lunatics,” Chuck finished for him. “I’m not that old, Mort. I still remember my own material. And that’s not even A-list stuff. I only break out those sad-sack jokes for retirement parties and political shindigs.”
A woman with blonde hair gave Mort a peck on the cheek. “Chuck’s been insufferable the whole way here. You should have heard him go on. Said it was going to be like old times again. If he gets on your nerves, all I ask is that you return him in working order.” She gave Mort a sly wink.
Mort hugged her as well, though more gently than he’d greeted Chuck. “Becky. Retirement’s looking good on you. I’d swear you were still 40. How’s my girl been these days?”
Becky’s smile diminished. “Nancy’s fine, best I can tell. Convocation’s getting harder and harder to squeeze for information. All your old friends are important people now, with secretaries and bodyguards to keep busybodies like me at bay. But I saw her on a news feed attending a benefit event with your Cedric.”
Mort’s next words caught in his throat. The mention of that name flashed an image across his mind of a boy in red flannel pajamas being trundled off to bed. That was how he’d last seen Cedric The Brown. Clearing his throat, he found his voice. “So, how’s the little rascal these days?”
“He’s a terramancer, apparently,” Becky replied with a tilt of the head that flounced her dyed locks. “Go figure. You burn planets to the ground; Little Cedric builds them back up.”
Mort scowled. “That jumped-up asteroid was barely habitable when we got there! Anyplace that needs gadgets to make the air breathable isn’t fit for living on.”
Sliding into the morass of reminiscence, Don Rucker insinuated himself between Mort and Becky. He reached an arm around and was inches from settling a hand on Mort’s shoulder when he caught himself. Phony glad-handing and forced familiarity were second nature, but even Don Rucker knew better than to lay hands on a wizard. “Sorry. Old habit. But, um, Mort, I’m looking to see my daughter, and your yappy-dog navy castoffs are telling me I can’t. They tell me she’s not here. Fine. Give me a comm ID where I can reach her or tell me when she’s getting back. I’m not used to being kept waiting.”
“Don, you came a long way. I can respect that. But Carl’s got the Mobius on the trail of some… oh, who the hell knows? It’s Carl. Might be a fifty-thousand terra payday or a lead on a job that’s a setup by some corporation we’ve pantsed. Flip a coin. Point is, he’s not here, and they’ve been quiet the last few days.”
Chuck wandered over to the edge of the conversation. “Let me get this straight. My boy’s set himself up as head of a new enterprise, with a hundred men and women under him, and he’s out there risking his neck working heists?”
Mort gave a firm nod. “Chuck, you always had a way with words. Lots of green wood around here, not quite fit to burn, if you know what I mean.”
Wrapping an arm around Mort’s shoulders, Chuck led the way out of the hangar. Don and Becky remained behind as the rest of Don’s entourage disembarked. “Mort, old buddy, I think we ought to do Brad a favor and spruce this place up while he’s gone.”
“Carl,” Mort corrected him.
Chuck waved away Mort’s pedantry. “Brad, Carl, whatever he wants to call himself. All the way here I had these grandiose visions of what he could do with these kinds of resources. Turns out, he’s planning to let them rot on the vine. Can’t let that happen, Mort. We’re gonna save Brad from himself.”
# # #
As Carl aimed the tip of his plasma torch at the bulkhead, it was plucked from his hands. The Mobius was in truly dreadful condition, and it was all hands on the repairs. Or at least, that was how Carl envisioned it.
“Whaddaya think you’re doing, peachfuzz?” Roddy snapped, slapping the neck of the torch against a bare hand. “This ain’t quite a wreck. Get your ass in front of the holo a
nd don’t bother the repair crew.”
“But—”
“Yes, the repair crew is everyone else but you.”
“BUT—”
“NO! We want this mess back in flying shape, and you’re… not… HELPING!”
Carl grabbed Roddy by a fistful of his coveralls, near the collar. “I know how to use a fucking plasma torch.”
“You use it on salvage jobs. Dead ships. You don’t even do much of a job then. I sure as hell don’t want you working on anything we need to live. You couldn’t weld a straight line if you had cybernetic arms, and you cut more corners than a mob accountant. You have the attention span of a stim addict, and you understand the ship’s systems only slightly better than Kubu.”
“That’s a low blow.”
Roddy snorted and stuck the plasma torch into a back pocket of his coveralls. “Rather bruise that ego of yours than hear you swearing the same time the hull breach alarm goes off.”
The door slammed shut, leaving Carl alone with his thoughts. He stared at the crack in the wall of his quarters. It was only a few centimeters long, and there was a quarter meter of space beyond that to the outer hull. There was practically zero chance of venting the ship to vacuum, no matter how shoddy a job he made of it. Plus, if he’d done it himself, any time he had a guest in his quarters, he could show off his handiwork. Of course, with Amy sharing these quarters, those sorts of guests would probably be few and far between. But it never hurt to plan ahead.
Carl laid his head back against the foot of his bed and sighed. The air was a little stale in all three ships. The Hatchet Job, Mermaid, and Mobius were all docked together as repairs continued. Mobius had taken the worst of the beating in their battle against the Sokol, but was best designed to take one. His systems were simple, intended to weather wizardly tantrums with minimal long-term damage. Carl’s ship was providing most of the life support for crews working on the other two.
He was tempted to take Roddy’s advice, just to spite him. The couch had come through the battle like a champ, without so much as a spill or scratch. He could plop himself down, crack open a beer, and watch old flatvid horror movies about dead ships in space. That’d show them how much he cared about helping.
There was a quick knock on his door. It opened before he could respond, and Yomin’s head poked inside. “We’ve got a problem.” Her hair was soaked with sweat, and there was a smudge of grease across her cheek. She was out of breath.
“What broke this time?”
She shook her head, raining droplets of sweat onto the floor of Carl’s quarters. “We fixed the nav com on the Hatchet Job.”
“So what? Without engine power, we’re not going anywhere.” The Mobius’s nav computer was little better than a datapad, but it had been online since yesterday.
“It’s the Sokol. The wreck is drifting toward the Habogad System.”
Carl shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“Neither had I until I found out that our payday is on course to crash into its third planet.”
“Oh.”
Yomin’s eyes widened in an exasperated frustration. “That’s it? ‘Oh’? You’re the one in charge. What do you want us to do?”
That was a loaded question. Carl wanted a lot out of life, but there wasn’t a lot on his list that any of his crew could deliver on short notice. He could use a little less condescension in the repairs department and a little more attention paid when he gave orders. “I want you to fix a ship so we can do something about it.”
# # #
Chuck Ramsey chewed his steak as politely as the gamey texture and sour tang allowed. It wasn’t beef, or anything even pretending to be beef. The naval gangster of a cook said it was local, and Chuck believed him. He also said it was from a 250-kilo rodent that gnawed through rock, which was a bit tougher to swallow—almost as tough as the steaks made from its flesh. At least the local fruits fermented into a respectable wine.
Flatware clanked, and glasses clinked. At the far end of the table, Don Rucker sucked the air out of the room.
“Never can get used to Old Earth cuisine,” Don remarked offhandedly through a mouthful. His voice carried the length of the room without any seeming effort at volume. He looked sidelong at Mort as he spoke, as if the comment was for his benefit alone. “All those fancy sauces and biochemistry tricks. At least laaku food has the decency to look how you want it to look and taste how you order it. Why would I want to eat a sand-castle that tastes like a steak, you know? This…?” He waved his fork around, a bit of meat skewered on the end. “Maybe not the best I’ve had, but it’s honest. You know?”
Mort was eating what looked like a turkey leg, but Chuck doubted it had more than a passing similarity to the bird. He gestured back at Don with it as he replied, still chewing. “You’ve just got to find the right restaurants. Take Boston Prime, for example. You could walk into a Turbo Sushi and get scienced-up plesiosaur sashimi. But you can also find yourself a table at King Richard’s Tavern and get honest-to-God barbecue pork, from pigs that have never been in a starship.”
Don guffawed from his belly. “Even I don’t have the kind of money to throw at eating Earth-raised meat. Now if you want to talk about Martian food…”
Don blathered on, but Chuck knew it was a habit, and there was little chance of interesting conversation listening to that end of the table. Don Rucker damn well had the money to blow on overpriced meals, but he was pathologically averse to looking like he was that sort of rich. Chuck knew the type long before he’d met his son’s father-in-law. Some men are born to money, some earn their way to the top, but it was a peculiar specimen who both inherited blood money and put in his time at the lower rungs of the operation. Don wanted to be one of the boys—a working man, an honest businessman—and still own a piece of half the cops and judges on Mars. But he rarely left Mars and was dull as toothsoap if you weren’t pinned under his glare and on the wrong end of a business deal.
Chuck leaned over and whispered to the woman on his left. “So, what brings a nice girl like you to a primitive moon like this?”
Her name was Sephiera, and Mort had introduced her as the senior officer from the ship they now dined within. She had that weary, haggard look of someone who’d been hitting the gym too often and the buffet line not often enough. It probably made her look older than she really was, but that only kept Chuck from feeling quite so guilty about being twice her age. “We crashed. I thought someone might have mentioned it.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin as she glared at him, then leaned slightly forward to look at Becky.
It was an effort not to laugh at the thought that Becky gave a hoot who he flirted with. They’d worked out ground rules ages ago, and Chuck wasn’t even toeing the line yet. “Aw, that’s not what I mean. Look, I heard all about this backwater from my daughter. Hot, miserable, overrun with weird carnivorous animals, which frankly don’t even taste as good as she said. Plenty of your colleagues took my boy up on his offer of a free ride back to the galaxy.”
“This isn’t outside the galaxy,” Sephiera snapped. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed. “But you knew that. You know, you and Ramsey don’t look anything alike, but you sound just like him.”
Chuck scratched at his jawline. “Funny, always thought I was Ramsey. I’ll have to run a background check to see about that. But seriously, who gives up a career in science to play jungle liaison? You could have gone back, gotten some fake credentials to line up with your real ones, and started working under a new name.”
There it was. The realization. Reproach faded from her eyes, replaced by suspicion. Any attention she might have spared to the blowhard gangster at the head of the table diverted to Chuck. “So what? Ramsey’s got you vetting officers now?”
“Brad? He doesn’t even know I’m here. Look, I heard stuff from Rhi, and I’ve had my feet in your gravity for a couple hours. But I can see Brad’s left this place fallow. Sure, you got the lights working and mopped a few floors, but this is just a nicer
refugee camp. What are you even working on? What was your assignment before we got here?”
Sephiera pursed her lips a moment before answering. “Waiting. I have a backup astral relay to install, but Wizard Mort put it on hold until Ramsey gets back. He doesn’t want me doing anything of significance until then.”
Chuck spared a quick glance over his shoulder and saw that Becky was deep in conversation with the officer to her right. He slipped an arm around Sephiera, feeling her stiffen under his touch. “Good thing Ramsey’s here then, isn’t it?” he whispered and gave her a wink.
# # #
The hover-cruiser swung around and sped off into the jungle. First, it was a crash of underbrush, then a hum of engines, then it was gone. It was just going to be the two of them, this time. Mriy extended her claws halfway and scratched the scruff at the back of Kubu’s neck. “Come. Time to find Tanny.”
Kubu bounded along, matching the pace Mriy set. “I know Mort has to stay because he’s important now. But where are Parker and Dough Hurty?”
It was growing ever easier to converse with Kubu. His thoughts were simple, but every day he seemed to better grasp the words to convey them. “Mort slows us, but his value lies in his magic, not his speed. Parker and Doherty were along for Mort’s benefit, not ours. They made camp for him, kept him company while we scouted, gave him someone to complain to.”
“Mort likes to complain,” Kubu agreed.
“And my ears can only take so much of it. This way, we can set our own pace instead of being slowed by the humans.”
“Kubu goes… I go slow for Mriy… for you. You can think like Mommy and you know better words for talking to Mommy-people. Kubu doesn’t need you to hunt.”
Mriy pulled up short, and Kubu bounded around and circled back to her. “What do you mean?”
“I am fast. You are slow. Not slow like Mort, or Parker, or Dough Hurty but not fast like Kubu either. You like to hunt, so I let you hunt so you feel good. But I can hunt enough for both you and Kubu.”