by J. S. Morin
Wen Luu came to the fore and bowed, though not as low as Tuu Nau had. He flared his nostrils and showed a smile of square, flat teeth. “I know what you are thinking. Yes, I am small for my kind. I see that odd look on many faces. I am used to it. I am something of an expert in human starfaring equipment. I have less trouble with your seats and consoles, so I have much greater experience using them.”
Tuu Nau put an arm around Wen Luu. “Our new captain is modest. He was a hero of the great migration. He has flown more transport missions out of the homeworld than any stuunji pilot. He has more than earned this honor.” Right now, Carl’s main concern was putting the Bradbury in safe hands. The last thing he needed was Chuck Ramsey getting a hold of it and adding it to a syndicate that had grown beyond Carl’s ability to control and whose goals he could no longer support.
Carl stepped forward and shook Wen Luu’s hand. Even for a runt, he had a grip like a hydraulic ram. “Well, when Rai Kub told me about the troubles your people were having with pirates and petty warlords, I knew this was the right call to make. I mean, I’m just starting out. I can’t put ninety thousand credits a month toward maintenance costs on her. You’ve got a whole colony to defray costs.” Carl had been ready to tell Rai Kub to blow this whole idea out his waste vents before Roddy gave him the rundown on operating a ship the size of the Bradbury.
They made more introductions, and Wen Luu went down the row shaking hands, not even hesitating when he came to Archie or the two laaku. At the end of the line, Wen Luu wrapped Rai Kub in a hug. “You have done well, cousin.” Carl knew the two stuunji weren’t related. It was a term of endearment among equals. This commander of a starship, hero of his people, considered Rai Kub to be on the same level as him.
Carl might have to consider cutting the big guy a little slack. He’d probably saved Carl’s life. Probably. After all, plenty of people had shot at Carl before without dusting him. He might have gotten lucky again. It wasn’t as if hitting a scrambling human and a stationary stuunji were the same thing.
“There is another matter,” Tuu Nau said as they concluded introducing the new command crew of the Bradbury to the outlaws who acquired it.
Carl put up his hands. “It’s all taken care of. Ship’s ID is clean as a preacher’s daydreams. Nothing’s broadcasting back to ARGO space. Anything Yomin couldn’t decrypt we wiped and reset to factory specs. The Bradbury’s all yours—your people’s, that is.”
“That’s just it,” Tuu Nau clarified. “The name Bradbury no longer fits this vessel. We wished your permission to name it the Mordecai, after your friend who died in wresting it from Harmony Bay.”
Carl was about to express how much of an honor that would be. Esper cleared her throat and from the corner of his eye Carl caught a slight shake of her head. Right. Yeah. “Um, maybe that’s not the best idea,” Carl said diplomatically. “Mort wasn’t a fan of science, and this ship is practically made of the stuff.”
Tuu Nau spread his hands and bowed slightly. “Perhaps you could take it?”
Carl frowned. Harmony Bay named all their ships after old science writers—their cultural forebears. Maybe Carl could take a clip of their database. “Call it the Clapton. Personal hero of mine. I’m sure his spirit would be honored. I’ll comm you a track to play at the rededication ceremony.”
As they packed up and climbed aboard the Mobius, Carl paused and looked back. Despite all else that had happened, he couldn’t help a little smile at the thought of a bunch of stiff, polite stuunji blasting Layla over the ex-Bradbury’s shipwide comm.
# # #
Carl had been dreading this call. No one would have known it from looking at him. On Top of the World Carl stood smirking at the camera on his datapad as the comm connected.
“Brad!” Chuck boomed. “About time you checked in. Is my prodigal son ready to return home?”
“You still running things back at Odysseus Base?” Carl asked. He already knew the answer. News like a change in leadership would have leaked out somehow.
“We’ve had a couple attempts to kidnap me, thanks to your little prank call as you ran away. Not to worry. We took care of the traitors and set a couple misguided sheep straight. No big deal. You still out there hustling jobs for cash?”
Carl stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on the balls of his feet. He’d made sure the datapad had a good, clear look at him being smug. “Nope. Just sold a ship.”
Chuck’s flippant demeanor melted. “You sold the Mobius?”
“Nah. The Bradbury.”
“But isnt’s that—?”
“Yeah, the Harmony Bay ship—or should I say former Harmony Bay ship—that’s been dogging us wherever we go.”
“The scientists on there must be worth a king’s ransom. How many are you holding?”
“Oh, none. We let those poor bastards go. I’m thinking some of them may consider careers in legitimate science, now that they’ve seen the dark side of the law.” Also, it was a deplorable idea, and he wished he hadn’t heard his own father suggest it.
Chuck wiped a hand across his face. “Well, at least you sold the ship already. Better to be rich now than richer never. Nice job cashing out quick this time.”
“Got a whole two million for it,” Carl added. It was only a matter of time before he asked anyway.
“Hold on a minute.” A finger grew huge on the datapad until it tapped against the screen. “Got a bad connection. That was billion, right?”
“Nope. Million. Like taking ‘military’ and ‘onion’ and smashing ‘em together.” Chuck didn’t need to know that it was in stuunji currency, backed by an exile government, and only accepted on New Garrelon and a few satellite colonies. It was enough to keep them in fuel for years and let them buy goods to sell or trade elsewhere.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Brad? We’ve got salaries to pay, and operations are slow coming up to speed. Don Rucker’s seed money’s not going to last forever. Two million’s not nothing, but it only puts us in the black for a couple extra months.”
“Oh, you’re not seeing a terra of that. Dad, I don’t even want to look at you right now. I wanted to play gangster my way, not Don Rucker’s. Even then, I think I bit off more than I bargained for. I’ve lost friends over this business. If I crawl back to stand in your shadow or even to kick you out and do it myself, I’m going to lose most of the rest. I like being an outlaw because I get to do what I want, and what I want is to shut down the Ramsey Syndicate. I pictured us picking fights with local crime bosses and cutting them out of their businesses. I don’t want to be squeezing colonists for protection money and hijacking humanitarian convoys.”
Chuck held up a finger. “One time! That was one time I suggested that, and we decided against it.”
“Aaaand you only defend the half you’re not currently doing.”
A bottle appeared in the frame and a hand tilted it up to Chuck’s lips. “What’s gotten into you, Brad? You didn’t used to be like this.”
“Mort’s dead, Dad.”
“He’s what?” Chuck exclaimed. His brow furrowed as his jaw hung slack.
“Dead. And over a ship I wanted to steal out of spite and because it was worth a lot of money. It’s just not worth it. Someday I’ll get killed doing something stupid and dangerous, too. But I’d like it to at least be something worthwhile. And right now, stopping what you’re trying to start sounds like something worth doing.”
But if Chuck heard the threat to his budding business, he never let on. “Mort… dead? I always imagined that old spell-hound would outlive us all.”
# # #
There is no sound in the galaxy quite like the slow, grating rumble and crash of pins of an expertly bowled strike. Esper sighed and marked an X on the score sheet in grease pencil. Nebuchadnezzar The Brown cackled like a madman and shimmied backward to the semi-circle of hard plastic chairs built into the end of the lane. Isadora cheered and leaped into his arms.
“This is your fault, you know,” Mor
t said in an undertone to Esper.
Esper scowled at him. “How’s it my fault? Just because this is my head, doesn’t mean I’m going to cheat,” she replied in a harsh whisper.
She hadn’t been prepared for the annexation of Mortania. Somehow, if she’d even had time to stop and think, she would have envisioned Mort taking up residence in the little cottage in Esperville and imagining up a new place for him to live long term. Instead, she’d inherited a Russian doll of minds. Not only was Mort inside her head but so were his grandfather Nebuchadnezzar and a host of Convocation bounty hunters that had been trapped in his.
Mort tapped the toes of his shoes together. They were white leather with a black decorative panel over the bridge of the foot. “Not my style. You need a loose, airy fit and clashing colors. A whiff of rental shoe cleanser is one of the few sciencey smells that sits right in a bowling alley.”
“Your grandparents aren’t up eight pins on us because your shoes match. They’re winning because that gruesome ball of yours isn’t balanced right. I don’t know why I let you bring it in here.”
With a chuckle, Mort held up his new bowling ball. Esper scrunched up her face and cringed back. Through the translucent urethane, the rictus grin of Bellamy Blackstone’s skull leered. The finger holes of the ball lined up with the deceased wizard’s eye sockets, and the thumb hole went into the mouth. “Just need a little practice and it’ll be fine.”
“Well, then don’t complain about losing.”
“Hey!” Nebuchadnezzar shouted. “Next up. We haven’t got all day.”
All day… Time was one thing they had in abundance. Esper was twenty-five years old, and even at her current state of practice, nights in Esperville were lasting over a month.
Three lanes down, there was a crash of pins. Mort glanced uneasily over his shoulder. “You sure you don’t want to reconsider this league?”
“Once we’ve practiced, the Holy Bowlers are playing the Screw You Crew.” Esper, Mort, Nebuchadnezzar, and Isadora all wore matching short-sleeve button-downs, powder blue with their names embroidered at the breast. Across the backs, their team name arched over an image of ten pins set up with little halos over their heads. The Screw You Crew wore all red and had a similar logo on the back, except the pins in theirs all looked like Mort. Their team consisted of Kevin Stenson, Marcie Mako, Heidi von Brunner, and Lloyd Arnold—all wizards who, at one point or another, had come hunting for Mordecai The Brown.
“Think maybe we could just finish up our intra-squad friendlies and call it a night?” Mort asked sheepishly. He kept glancing over at the team of would-be Mort-murderers.
“No one’s going anywhere until we have our game,” Esper said firmly. For the time being, she still let him have free reign of Mortania. If for no other reason, there just wasn’t the room in her head for all the personalities Mort had collected. But while he was in Esperville, he was as much a wizard as he was a whale.
Mort gave a resigned sigh and hefted Bellamy’s encapsulated skull. “Thanks for the save the other day. Glad I don’t have a scientific monstrosity as my legacy.”
“Well, the last thing I needed was a memorial to a dead man trapped in my head,” Esper snapped back. “And as long as you’re in here, you’re going to learn to get along. It’s well past time for bygones with you, and I won’t get dragged down to hell by you when my time comes. It’s redemption or bust.”
Voice of Reason
Mission 12.5 of the Black Ocean Series
by J.S. Morin
Voice of Reason
Mission 12.5 of: Black Ocean
Copyright © 2016 Magical Scrivener Press
Reptilian monsters bellowed and crashed through the jungle brush. The low, throbbing hum of ion pulse engines wended its way overhead, safely out of reach of the behemoths fighting to the death beneath them. On the couch, Roddy slurped back a beer and took one of Shoni’s lower hands in his own.
“Can you reduce the volume on that noise-a-majigger?” Archie shouted over the holo-projector. He lacked the vocal distortion Roddy had grown accustomed to and sounded like a newsreader from the omni. “We’re performing delicate work over here.” The robot was hooked up to a tangle of cables that Yomin presided over like a priestess.
Shoni snapped the remote out of Roddy’s hands before he could tell the robot to go to the cargo bay if he wanted some quiet. She reduced the volume to the point where it hardly felt like megafauna were cracking bones and tearing the flesh off one another a few meters away.
Archie harrumphed in his newsreader voice. “Acceptable.”
“Would you knock it off?” Roddy snapped. “You said you wanted to make him sound human, not like a news drone.”
Yomin didn’t look up from the computer core on the table. “Play your cards right; I can synth you a human voice, too.”
Archie chuckled in a pleasant baritone. “Wouldn’t that beat all? Make the whole lot of you sound the same.”
“I’ll opt out,” Shoni said without taking her eyes from the prehistoric jungles in the holo-field.
It had been like this for hours. The four of them were marooned on New Garrelon. Of course, the engines of the Mobius were working just fine—ship-shape for once.
Carl, Amy, Esper, and Rai Kub were off on a retreat, being shepherded around like quasi-religious pilgrims. Carl could hardly refuse the honor—an exception to the stuunji rebels’ embargo against humanity. Amy had gone for moral support. Esper and Rai Kub had seemed genuinely interested in the trip based on its own merits.
The rest of them had opted out. And Shoni’s offhanded comment was the eighteenth attempt among them to turn it into a running joke.
During the lull before Roddy could reclaim the remote and resume the evening’s entertainment, the couch began to play music.
Yomin and Archie exchanged puzzled glances.
Shoni raised an eyebrow at Roddy as if he’d programmed the unusual feature into the green upholstered seat.
By the time the lyrics kicked in, Roddy knew what had happened.
Money… get away…
He dug a hand in between the cushions and withdrew a mistreated electronic device the size of a human hand. “Carl left his datapad behind. Someone’s calling.”
“I thought it played Smoke on the Water,” Yomin said.
“That’s for people he knows. This one’s mentioning a job.”
“What sort of job?” Shoni asked, leaning to read over Roddy’s shoulder.
Roddy angled the datapad away, wary of the sort of lifestyle surprises the Mobius still held for Shoni. Despite occasionally desperate circumstances, they didn’t take every job that came along. But that didn’t stop people from occasionally trying to hit up Carl for slaving, piracy, and wet work from time to time. Shoni didn’t need to see the discard pile for Carl’s game of contraband rummy.
Shoni lunged for the datapad.
Roddy jerked it out of reach, falling over sideways onto the couch in the process. “Hey! Quit it. There’s people here,” he said as she landed atop him.
“I want to see what you’re hiding.”
“I’m not hiding anything,” Roddy protested. “I haven’t even looked yet.”
Shoni climbed over Roddy, reaching for his outstretched arm. “Then why won’t you let me see?”
“It’s Carl’s datapad,” Roddy said. He grabbed her by an ankle with his lower hands. Eyes wide, he switched to an urgent whisper. “Get your hand out of there!” His face warmed as he grew uncomfortably aware of their audience at the kitchen table.
# # #
Twenty minutes later, everyone had calmed down. The four of them sat around the kitchen table, staring at Carl’s datapad. Subtle glances passed from one to the next as each of them waited for someone else to speak first.
Yomin finally broke the silence. “This guy wants a chair?”
Roddy smoothed down the fur across his scalp with his two upper hands. “Sounds like it. I mean the guy’s got a point. It’s not like the stuunji a
re trading with humans these days.”
“The guy” in this case was Roger Baldwin. He’d sent a voice comm to Carl, looking for a particular type of handmade stuunji lounge chair. Word had apparently begun to leak into the galaxy that Carl was on the stuunjis’ list of acceptable humans to trade with.
Shoni picked up Carl’s datapad and wagged it for emphasis. “We should get this to Carl. If we contact Tuu Nau, I’m sure he can get it passed along to the pilgrims.”
“To what end?” Archie asked. His voice was back to its usual unmodulated snarl. The robot spread his arms to encompass the table. “Do we look like furniture deliverymen?”
“We don’t look like lots of things,” Roddy said as he cracked open a can of Earth’s Preferred. “But I sure like the look of those zeroes in the price this guy’s offering.”
“A hundred large sets off alarm bells,” Yomin said, then broke into a smirk. “But I’m willing to hit the bypass and work around that sort of number.”
Shoni slapped the datapad down on the table with a crack. “Which is why Carl needs to see this. He’s the one with the criminal instincts. Not you, you, you, or me.”
“Delete it,” Archie said, tipping back his chair to balance on two legs. “No point bothering Captain Busypants and his gaggle of boot polishers. And we’re certainly not going to pull the job ourselves.”
Roddy and Yomin shared a long look. She was on board. He could see the gleam of avarice even through the datalens that covered one eye.
“And why not?” Roddy asked. “Like you said, it’s delivering furniture. All we have to do is find some stuunji furniture store that sells this junk. From there it’s easy money. Hell, we wouldn’t even have to cut the VIPs in on this little side job.”
Shoni crossed her arms and legs in unison. “I don’t like where this is heading.”
Of course, she didn’t.
Smuggling was low-end commerce. There was nothing daring, flamboyant, or otherwise fit to make into a holo. In short, Shoni didn’t get to see Roddy being a bad boy. Sooner or later, she was going to have to get used to the idea that long shots and armed raids were best avoided.