Mission Pack 3: Missions 9-12 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  Shoni took a deep breath. “So, I’ve got a chair to buy from you. Here’s the money.” She pantomimed handing over a case filled with terras.

  “Pardon me while I run a quick scan,” Archie said with a wink of one optical sensor. “I’ve had my troubles with counterfeiters in the past.”

  The reminder of Archie’s “prank” on Carl made Roddy and Yomin both chuckle.

  “Well,” Yomin said. “He certainly sounds like Carl.”

  Shoni’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute. But how are we going to pull off a face-to-face meeting? The Bellard Colony is open air. Breathable atmosphere. There’s no way we can hide Archie’s face behind a mask without making someone suspicious.”

  Roddy snorted beer out his nose. They were idiots for not thinking of that in the first place. He coughed and spluttered but finally managed to recover the power of speech. “Any fucker who isn’t suspicious has no business dealing with Carl. That’s another good one to remember: always act like you’re getting away with something.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that she’s right,” Yomin said. “We can’t have this exchange at the Bellard Colony. We need to put Archie in an EV suit and rig it with a projector to make it look like Carl’s face behind the helmet.”

  “Wouldn’t just activating the reflective screen fix it?” Shoni asked. “After all, what if the projection glitches out?”

  “Suspicious,” Roddy said. “A guy who wants to be sure he’s dealing with Carl Freakin’ Ramsey is going to want to see that ugly, peachfuzz mug of his.”

  Shoni sighed and pushed back her chair. “Fine. I’ll go find Carl’s EV suit if you break the news to our contact that we need to change the location.”

  Archie flopped down on the couch, which protested audibly under the weight of his robotic body. “I’ll just hang here. You guys have got this, right? Beer me on your way out, would ya?” With that, Archie picked up the remote for the holo-projector and began to browse Carl’s favorite holovids.

  # # #

  The Kirik Sul mining platform had long since cored all the local asteroids dry. There weren’t enough valuable ores left in the asteroid belt to make a horseshoe. But the station itself remained. Inert. Adrift. Occasionally pelted by stray debris. Yet for all its faults, it was still navigable on foot. With an EV suit equipped with magnetic boots, it was even relatively safe inside.

  Archie wasn’t buying that argument for a minute.

  The whole place had the feel of an electronic tomb. The parallel between Archie’s existence trapped in a robotic body and the mining platform’s analog to the innards of a pyramid weren’t lost on him. It seemed fitting that a robot could walk fearlessly among stone halls lined with entombed mummies. But put that same robot into a dead piece of technology filled with automatic doors that no longer opened and machinery that lacked the spark of motive force, and it was a true house of horrors.

  “Bloody hell,” Archie muttered.

  His comm was open, and back on the Mobius Yomin heard him. “This comm is secure but try to keep in character.”

  “How about a little less fucking commentary and a lot more telling me when our contact gets here?”

  Yomin’s voice brightened. “That’s more like it! Just hang tight. We’re on a separate comm with Baldwin. He’s just docked at the far end of the station.”

  The stuunji chair bobbed along behind Archie on a grav-sled. Every time he looked at the faux-ornate piece of xenocultural furniture, he shook his head. “Sooner we swap this rhino ass-cradle for terras, the better.”

  Roddy’s voice piped in over the comm. “Dial it back a little on the xenoism, chief. Carl only talks shit about non-humans to their faces.”

  “Ever get the feeling that walking in another man’s shoes is a good way to catch another man’s bullet?” Archie asked.

  Roddy’s squealing laugh carried in shrill tones into Archie’s brain. “That’s from Three Days as Chaz MacMannis, right? Great gangster flick. You neophytes should watch more of those.”

  Archie cleared his throat, which sounded suspiciously like Carl’s throat-clearing. “Yeah, and Chaz died.”

  “You’re paranoid,” Roddy said. “Carl would be cracking jokes and griping about needing a piss.”

  “You nincompoop monkey!” Archie snapped. “I’m telling you this feels all wrong. Why would someone want to deal with Carl and nobody else? Why the alone and unarmed routine for buying furniture? This stopped being contraband the second New Garrelon customs waved us through with the have-a-nice-day treatment.”

  “Listen,” Yomin said slowly and calmly. “You’re about thirty seconds from meeting up with a guy named Roger Baldwin. He’s got no history, so it’s probably an alias. Aliases suggest shady characters. That’s our stock in trade. You’re there for a simple transaction, and everything’s going to be okay. Now pull your head out of your waste reclaim and get in character.”

  In character. Right. Archie wasn’t Archimedes Antonopoulos anymore. He was Carl “Blackjack” Ramsey, veteran Typhoon pilot and would-be mob kingpin. He didn’t need a blaster to protect himself. Carl Ramsey could talk his way out of anything.

  Archie was feeling like a pretty big man, towing his stuunji-made chair along. Then he saw his contact.

  Roger Baldwin wore an all-black EV suit with tactical armor plating. He managed to make the awkward stride of a man wearing magnetic boots look like a gunslinger’s swagger. In one hand, he carried a silver case of generic design that screamed it was filled with illicit terras. In the other, Roger Baldwin held some sort of remote.

  With a press of a button on that remote, Archie lost contact with the Mobius.

  “Thought it should be just the two of us, Blackjack,” Baldwin said, his voice coming through on a narrow-band frequency, unencrypted over Archie’s comm. “Gotta say, you’ve been a tough guy to track down these past months.”

  “That’s me,” Archie replied on the same channel. “Mr. Tough Guy. But I always try to make myself available for people looking to make me some easy money. Speaking of…” Archie waved a hand toward the case Baldwin carried. Showing off the chair seemed superfluous since it was there in plain sight.

  “Right. Sure thing.” Baldwin knelt and set the case down to open it. Just as Archie wondered at the wisdom of opening it with no gravity to keep the hardcoin from floating away, Baldwin drew out a blaster.

  “Alone. Unarmed. How the hell do you go one-for-two on such an easy list?” Archie demanded. It was growing difficult to maintain Carl’s bluster and not give up the ruse. But Carl had lived a lifetime on the outskirts of the law, dealing with men like Baldwin on a daily basis. “But if you want to renegotiate, I’m listening.”

  The blaster leveled at Archie’s torso. The weapon was a SlyTek Sidekick, the same model Yomin carried. It would have passed any scanner check that a more circumspect criminal might have run. But by the same token, it wasn’t the kind of weapon that would tear a robotic chassis to slag.

  Mentally Archie began an inventory of the systems in jeopardy if that shot fired.

  “I’m not here to negotiate, Ramsey,” Baldwin said. “I’m here to collect on a bigger prize. Did you know Harmony Bay is offering two million for your sorry carcass? Proof of death only. They don’t even want your body. So smile, Ramsey. You get to be a holovid star one more time before you die.”

  “Screw you,” Archie shouted into the comm. He activated the reflective screen on his visor, hiding the holographic image of Carl’s face from the bounty hunter’s view. “I bet your name isn’t even really Baldwin.”

  Subprocessors. Coolant system. Pectoral actuator. Archie kept running tabs on where the blaster was pointed by the millisecond.

  “It’s not. But that won’t matter to you.” Baldwin fired.

  A warning message sprang into Archie’s field of view, informing him that a left pectoral actuator suddenly ceased functioning.

  The effigy of Carl went limp.

  Archie voluntarily shut down all servo-motor c
ontrol of his robotic musculature. At the same time, he cut the feed to the life-support monitors on the EV suit. Rather than reporting a slightly out-of-shape, borderline middle-aged set of heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen level, he let it show nothing at all.

  More blaster fire lanced out. In the silence of vacuum, Archie could only watch the flashes. But Baldwin was no longer returning fire. The shots were coming from somewhere behind Archie, outside his field of vision.

  Archie cheated and used his leg actuators to lever himself upright just a little in the zero gravity. Baldwin was crouched down and hurrying for cover as best he could while his boots were magnetically sucked down to the floor. Two SlyTek Sidekicks fired back and forth between Yomin and Baldwin, with Roddy adding shots from a much higher-output blaster rifle for the side of the good guys.

  Or at least, Roddy was on Archie’s side. Being on the “good guys’” side was less important than being on the side that won.

  “You OK?” Yomin asked, crouching over Archie’s body.

  “What happened?” Roddy chimed in.

  “Exactly what I told you. I caught a bullet meant for Carl.” Archie glanced over and saw Baldwin’s case drifting in the void. “Did we at least get the money?”

  “There is no money,” Roddy said. “You’re lucky you’re not flesh and blood, or you’d be dusted. Come on. Let’s get out of here. I don’t know how Shoni will handle it if Baldwin’s ship decides to play rough.”

  # # #

  Two days later, it was as if the Mobius had never left the spot in the landing yard at Great Prairie. The traffic controllers and ground crews all thought they had been gone to arrange a surprise for Savior Carl. The fuel supplier had topped them off free of charge. The four of them—Roddy, Yomin, Shoni, and Archie—had arranged themselves carefully around the common room to look like nothing had happened.

  As Carl pushed through the door from the cargo bay, he stretched laboriously. “Good to be home. I eat one more well-intentioned Earth-cooked meal, I’m going to starve to death. ‘Just like your mother made’ my ass. When we were kids, meals came in a wrapper with Friendli Foods written on it.”

  “You should have had the veggie option,” Amy said, entering after Carl and toting the luggage for both of them. “They did some great stuff with eggplant.”

  Esper was next through the door. She wore a pink hooded sweatshirt with her hands stuffed in the front pocket. “Their chocolate was excellent. But focusing on the food overlooks the spiritual migration from human-occupied Garrelon to New Garrelon.”

  There was a gap with no more crewmembers following on Esper’s heels. Roddy leaned forward on the couch. “Where’s Rai Kub?”

  A slow, ominous creaking from the cargo bay marked the stuunji’s progress up the stairs. He ducked through the door to the common room. Rai Kub carried an enormous wooden chest. Judging by what Roddy had seen of the local woodworking industry, it was probably even real wood.

  “Hello, everyone,” the stuunji said with a grin. “You were missed.”

  “What’s in the trunk, big guy?” Roddy asked.

  Rai Kub tucked it under one arm and gave the chest a pat. “Creature comforts. Reminders of home. I didn’t know what life on a ship might be like, so I traveled lightly. But since the Mobius is my home now, I wanted to bring reminders of my spiritual home.”

  Roddy hopped down from the couch and gave Shoni a wink. “Well, we’ve got a little surprise in store for you, buddy. Consider it a welcome gift as an official member of the crew.”

  As Roddy led the way to Rai Kub’s quarters, Carl and Amy slipped past and into their shared bunk. After all the time they’d spent in the company of religious-minded rhinoceroses, they were probably looking to get caught up on their sinning.

  With the chest still under one arm, Rai Kub paused in front of his own door as Roddy stepped aside. “Should I be wary?”

  “Not even fooling with ya,” Roddy assured the stuunji. “Picked it up locally, just for you.”

  Giving the door a tentative push, Rai Kub peered inside, still apparently skeptical. His eyes lit when he noticed the chair. “For me?”

  “You bet, big guy. Figured you needed something around here that was your size. The four of us chipped in and got it from a local artisan with a good reputation.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Rai Kub stated in a hushed tone. “Thank you.”

  From down the hall, Carl’s shout echoed. “What the HELL happened to my EV suit?”

  Thanks for reading!

  You made it to the end! Maybe you’re just persistent, but hopefully that means you enjoyed the book. But this is just the end of one story. If you’d like reading my books, there are always more on the way!

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  Books by J.S. Morin

  Black Ocean

  Black Ocean is a fast-paced fantasy space opera series about the small crew of the Mobius trying to squeeze out a living. If you love fantasy and sci-fi, and still lament over the cancellation of Firefly, Black Ocean is the series for you!

  Read about the Black Ocean series and discover where to buy at: blackoceanmissions.com

  Twinborn Trilogy

  Experience the journey of mundane scribe Kyrus Hinterdale who discovers what it means to be Twinborn—and the dangers of getting caught using magic in a world that thinks it exists only in children’s stories.

  Read about the Twinborn Trilogy and discover where to buy at: twinborntrilogy.com

  Mad Tinker Chronicles

  Then continue on into the world of Korr, where the Mad Tinker and his daughter try to save the humans from the oppressive race of Kuduks. When their war spills over into both Tellurak and Veydrus, what alliances will they need to forge to make sure the right side wins?

  Read about the Mad Tinker Chronicles and discover where to buy at: madtinkerchronicles.com

  About the Author

  I am a creator of worlds and a destroyer of words. As a fantasy writer, my works range from traditional epics to futuristic fantasy with starships. I have worked as an unpaid Little League pitcher, a cashier, a student library aide, a factory grunt, a cubicle drone, and an engineer—there is some overlap in the last two.

  Through it all, though, I was always a storyteller. Eventually I started writing books based on the stray stories in my head, and people kept telling me to write more of them. Now, that’s all I do for a living.

  I enjoy strategy, worldbuilding, and the fantasy author’s privilege to make up words. I am a gamer, a joker, and a thinker of sideways thoughts. But I don’t dance, can’t sing, and my best artistic efforts fall short of your average notebook doodle. When you read my books, you are seeing me at my best.

  My ultimate goal is to be both clever and right at the same time. I have it on good authority that I have yet to achieve it.

  Connect with me online

  On my blog at jsmorin.com

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  Table of Contents

  Adventure Capital

  Collusion Course

  You, Robot

  Stowaway to Heaven

  Voice of Reason

 

 

 
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