Planet Hustlers

by J. S. Morin

  Kubu shrank back. What an awful thing to say. “Kubu would never eat a person!”

  “That’s something of a relief,” a new person said. He was skinny and taller than most people, though still little.

  Kubu gave a sniff and realized that he recognized the smell. “Mort?”

  “No,” the new person said. “Mort was my father. I’m Cedric.”

  “Hello,” Kubu said, extending a paw to shake hands. Cedric took one of Kubu’s fingers in hand and shook. Kubu turned to Roddy. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Um, sure, big guy,” Roddy replied.

  “You have four hands. I have four feet. But humans have two and two. Do I have fingers? Do you have toes? Did Cedric shake a finger or a toe of mine?”

  Roddy chuckled. “Wow. You have come a long way. That’s downright philosophical. Lemme let you in on a little secret: it doesn’t matter. If the glove fits, wear it. If you get a chance to talk to one of your own kind, ask them, but for dealing with humans, just muddle through it. Toss in an ‘upper’ or ‘lower’ to clarify when you gotta, and the rest works itself out. Don’t get hung up trying to relate physiology.”

  Bill shrugged. “I stand corrected.”

  “Bill said I had feet and toes. But I have a thumb,” Kubu said, wiggling the aforementioned digit. “Feet don’t have thumbs.”

  “Depends who you ask,” Roddy replied, rocking back on his heels so he could wiggle four thumbs at once. “Like I said, you can argue with humans all day and night, and you’ll never convince them all. Just go with what’s easiest.”

  Carl snorted. “Path of least resistance. There’s a road less traveled for us. Speaking of… how’d you guys end up coming to this remote planet?”

  Kubu cocked his head. It wasn’t a question he got asked. “Mommy and Grampa got mad. We had to leave Mars or they would have got madder.”

  “Gotten,” Bill reminded him gently.

  “Gotten madder,” Kubu corrected himself. “So we came here and told the pirates to move. Auntie Janice was happy until Mommy wanted to stay instead of giving it to her.”

  Carl reached up and scratched Kubu below the ear. Kubu lowered his head until he could scratch behind instead, where it was harder to reach. While Mommy didn’t make him wear shoes or anything, it was still rude to use his back feet for itches.

  “You’re a good boy, Kubu. Wish we could stay longer, but I’ve got business to take care of.”

  They said their goodbyes, and Carl left with his friends.

  Alone with Bill, Kubu sighed.

  “You know what time it is, right?” Bill asked.

  Kubu nodded reluctantly. “Math time.”

  Bill nodded. “Right. Now… if you started with twenty bunnies, and you ate sixteen bunnies, how many bunnies…”

  # # #

  Carl usually went to a meeting armed. In his line of work, a blaster was a simple precaution. Barring that, on the occasions where he was searched and disarmed prior to negotiations, he always had the slickest lies in the galaxy as a sidearm.

  Unfortunately, Tanny was better defended than anyone against his bullshit.

  The fact that she’d agreed to a private meeting at all was something of a saving grace. He still had enough mystique to snag her curiosity. The fact that she’d brought Carl to her gym was a show of contempt combined with showing off.

  Carl wasn’t important enough to cancel a workout over, and Tanny still worked out.

  The facility looked as if someone had purchased a Muscle Barn franchise and never opened it to the public. There were one or two copies of every modern exercise device fit for human physiology, plus a few that looked azrin made. Traditional punching bags and martial arts dummies mixed fluidly among neuromuscular stimulators, holographic sparring partners, and sonic massage stations. She had machines that simulated weights with adjustable gravity stones, treadmills that could also simulate terrain, and an exoskeleton that allowed for virtual rock climbing. Near as Carl could figure, if there was a muscle in the human body, this room had a machine to wear it out; he was even fairly certain that one of them was meant to strengthen lady parts, but he didn’t venture to guess aloud.

  “Nice digs,” Carl commented as Rico left him at the door.

  Draped across a bench press machine, Mriy watched lazily. Otherwise, the two of them were alone.

  Tanny was dressed in a sports bra and track pants, harassing a heavy bag with a mixture of punches and kicks. She was dripping sweat. “Just because I went off the pharma doesn’t mean I’m willing to let myself go.”

  Carl glanced down at his spacers’ paunch and knew the “letting myself go” crack was a commentary on it. “Well, wouldn’t want to interrupt your routine, so just keep on at it.” He watched as the bag shook with each impact.

  She didn’t have the power she used to. Unless that was a hundred-kilo bag instead of the typical fifty, she probably wasn’t much stronger than Carl anymore. Sure, she could run him ragged, dodge his punches, and knock the crap out of him, but she wasn’t the physical presence she used to be. The old Tanny wouldn’t have bothered keeping Mriy around for protection.

  “You wanted the private meeting. Talk. You know I’ve got no patience for your snake oil pitch.”

  “I want the Poet Fleet off New Garrelon,” Carl said. “I’m willing to make a deal.”

  Tanny unloaded a five-punch combination that ended in a kick. “You think I’ve got any interest in dealing with you? You’ve never made a straight deal in your life.”

  “I don’t mind coming out on the short end of this one,” he assured her.

  “Right. I’m supposed to believe you about that. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the thousandth time, shame on me.” She set her feet and let loose a hellacious punch that still barely rocked the bag. Tanny must have shed fifteen kilos of muscle since he’d last seen her.

  Inspiration struck. Mriy’s head lifted at the sudden motion as Carl removed his jacket and hung it from one of the rock climbing simulator’s many protrusions. She relaxed again once he pulled off his shirt and realized he was merely disrobing.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Tanny asked, pausing her routine.

  Carl sat back onto a machine with a gravity stone–weighted bar and took a deep breath. Wondering whether he’d lost his mind, he lifted the bar out of its cradle and pushed it overhead.

  God, it must have weighed ten thousand kilos.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” Tanny warned him.

  Carl grunted as he extended his arms, then lowered the weighted bar toward his collarbone. “Nah. I’m fine,” he gasped out. He pushed the weight up again.

  He could imagine the Earth Navy fitness coach from the academy berating him for his sloppy technique. Fifteen-year-old memories rose to the surface after a long thaw in deep ice.

  “You trying to prove a point?” Tanny demanded, abandoning her workout to watch him struggle from a meter away. “What? You think you’re tougher than me now?”

  “Nope,” Carl forced out between held breaths as he performed another rep.

  Tanny practically straddled him as she came over and confiscated the bar, lowering it back safely into its cradle. “How the hell can’t the galaxy tell how full of shit you are? You’re completely transparent.”

  Carl flashed a grateful smile and attempted to reach for his shirt. His arms weren’t ready to retrieve anything above shoulder height just yet. “Most of them are awed by my innate charms.” He sat there dripping sweat down his bare, flabby chest.

  “You can’t have come up here with a plan this bad. Just cut to the chase and tell me what you’re proposing. You looking for muscle? This a metaphor? You want Don to rattle some sabers at this fleet admiral? You’d have better luck with him than me, I think.”

  “I want to give them back Freeride,” Carl said.

  Tanny gave a single, mirthless chuckle. “Fat chance. We let them muscle Janice out of here once, we—”

  “We did more than let
them,” Carl pointed out. With just Mriy here, there was no secret that they’d been working on behalf of the poets back then. Even if it had only been to get Esper back.

  “They had leverage,” Tanny replied, walking over to retrieve a towel and a can of EnerJuice.

  “We still picked Esper over Janice.”

  “And I would again,” Tanny said with a shrug. “Wouldn’t mind seeing her again. I’d guarantee safety for everyone on the Mobius if she stopped by for a visit. Presumably, she’s standing guard since you got Mort killed.”

  Carl wanted to punch her for that remark. Right now, one of his rubber-armed punches wouldn’t even be considered assault.

  “Esper’s not on the Mobius right now,” Carl said.

  Tanny’s eyes narrowed. Mriy sat up.

  “Wait!” Carl blurted. “She’s not on Carousel at all. This isn’t one of our ‘let Esper pretend she’s a secret agent’ plans. We tried negotiating with the Poet Fleet and Chisholm took her hostage.”

  Tanny crossed her arms. “Seriously? Did you learn nothing from our run-in with them?”

  Carl shrugged. At least his shoulders were working.

  “Listen. I might be willing to help you get Esper released, but they won’t want anything to do with me. Have they offered a ransom demand? I hate even putting this on the table, but if I can have one of my own guys courier the money, maybe we could—”

  “They haven’t,” Carl said. “I’m gonna just have to work on the assumption that once we come to an agreement, Esper will be part of the bargain.”

  Tanny shook her head warily. “That’s not a great assumption. You know, Carl, you’d do better in this business if you did more contingency planning. Things have never gone so smooth since I took charge of my own business. Planning’s a major part of that.”

  With effort, Carl held up his hands. “What can I say. If I could plan like that, I wouldn’t have needed to come here.”

  Grimacing and trying to hide it, Carl got up and struggled into both his shirt and jacket.

  “If you hear anything, let me know, OK?” Tanny said. “I mean, no hard feelings.”

  Carl nodded and headed for the lift. “Yeah. Of course. Forgot how tight you two had been.”

  Even after the lift doors closed, Carl Who Was Worried About Esper kept up a front. That girl was in as much danger as Tanny was, even surrounded by pirates instead of loyal thugs. And Carl hadn’t come close to forgetting how cozy Tanny and Esper had been, back in the day.

  A plan was beginning to come together in Carl’s mind. That plan was counting on Tanny’s bond with Esper.

  # # #

  Mommy arrived at the playroom, and Kubu immediately discarded his oak log toy, giving it one final shake before bounding off to greet her. She was wet and smelled of sweat. That meant she had been exercising, just like Kubu. The only difference was that Mommy was little, and her exercises made her a lot more tired than Kubu’s made him.

  “Hi, Mommy!” he shouted as he approached. His outdoors voice echoed from the high ceiling.

  Mommy wiped her face with a towel. “Hey, Kubu. How’s my boy? You been paying attention to Bill?”

  Kubu nodded. “Today we learned mul-ti-pli-cay-shun.” He sounded out the overly long word carefully. “Which is a funny word. It’s long because someone mul-ti-plied the letters.” Kubu giggled at his own joke.

  Wandering past him, Mommy looked around the playroom. “Did Carl say anything to you while he was down here?”

  Kubu nodded. “Yes. He asked about us coming here.”

  “And?”

  This was still a point of confusion for Kubu. What did she mean? His sentence wasn’t made to put an “and” at the end, but she wanted one. “And… then he said I was a good boy and he had to go. Carl didn’t stay long. I did get to ask Roddy the hands question.” He grinned, tongue lolling.

  Mommy rolled her eyes. “What’s the verdict? Have you got hands or feet?”

  “Roddy says it doesn’t matter. We’re not humans, so we can call them anything. I think he meant just hands or feet, not flippers or wings or—”

  “I get it,” Mommy said before Kubu could list off all the things his feet—or possibly hands—weren’t. “Did Carl, Roddy, or Cedric talk about pirates at all, or Esper, or a different planet?”

  “We talked about Mars a little.”

  Mommy nodded.

  “Who is Cedric? Wait, I know. That was the one who smells like Mort.”

  “You’re sure that he’s not actually Mort?” Mommy asked.

  Kubu cocked his head. That was a very good question. Usually, Mommy’s sense of smell wasn’t good enough for her to even think of asking a question like that. “Well, he didn’t look like Mort. But I thought he was Mort. When he said Mort was his daddy, I thought to myself ‘oh, that makes sense now.’ Because he didn’t smell just like Mort, only mostly like Mort. Mort smells more like mustard.”

  “And beer,” Mommy muttered.

  “Oh, he smelled like beer, too,” Kubu said.

  “So… you’re sure it wasn’t Mort?” Mommy asked. Kubu couldn’t tell whether this was supposed to be a trick, because he’d already answered that question. Sometimes Bill did things like that, but Mommy usually didn’t.

  “Yes. I’m sure. It wasn’t Mort playing a trick.”

  Mommy breathed a sigh of relief. “Maybe I’m just getting paranoid. One of these days, Carl’s going to pull some stupid crap, and I’m going to get sucked into it. I just want to see it coming.”

  # # #

  Carl sat with the flight yoke of the Mobius clutched in his hands. Astral space wended its way past with that ineffable stillness that never seemed to change. Autopilot did the flying. The course was locked in for New Garrelon. They’d be there too soon for his liking. He didn’t have a plan yet.

  Not all of one, anyway.

  “Thought I’d find you up here,” Amy said, easing into the co-pilot’s chair. “Still trying to come up with a solution to a military and political crisis using nothing but three cups, a marble, and quick talking?”

  Carl slumped back. “Something like that. No one’s happy with this whole arrangement. You can feel it. Chuck might be an asshole, but he taught me that if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that until everyone’s happy, there’s always a deal out there somewhere that you can pull.”

  “You make deals,” Amy pointed out. “You pull con jobs.”

  “Potato, shmatato,” Carl replied with a flutter of his hand. “Point is, the pirates don’t want New Garrelon. For them, it’s a runner-up prize. Tanny doesn’t want to be running a mining and money-laundering op on Carousel. But she’s on the outs with her old man, and this is her way of showing him she knows what she’s doing. The pirates won’t give up the easy catch unless they can put their manpower to better use on something more lucrative. Tanny can’t afford to look weak to her father.”

  “You could offer her a job,” Amy suggested.

  Carl’s head snapped up. Then he saw her smirk and relaxed. It had just been a joke. “Gimme a heart attack, why don’t ya? Nah. Things have been great around here. Not like the old days but great in their own way. Used to be, we were digging through the waste reclaim for hardcoin terras, but no one messed with us. Nowadays, seems like everyone’s in our business, but we’re making it work. Plus, we’re not killing people every five minutes. Tanny might claim that she was the planner, but us all collaborating seems to wind up with lower body counts and more cash.”

  “Be nice to just buy ‘em both out, shove ‘em back where they came from, and walk away dusting our hands, wouldn’t it?” Amy asked.

  There was something romantic, even Ancient Western in that notion. Two sides come to blows. A lone stranger wanders in, knocks some heads, and makes everyone see reason. They’d have to throw in some gunfights and maybe a love interest, but that had the makings of a cheap holovid.

  “Maybe I just needed to steal those stuunji a bigger ship,” Carl griped.

  �
�I did some digging into Tanny’s story,” Amy said. “Looks like Don Rucker may have pulled some strings to get an Earth Navy carrier group to perform fleet maneuvers in the Freeride system. The Poet Fleet had no choice but to bug out. They might pack impressive firepower for the dark side of the law, but they’ve got nothing on ARGO’s finest.”

  Carl whistled. “Didn’t know Donnie-boy had that kinda pull. Wonder what admiral got recorded fucking below his pay grade and got blackmailed.”

  “Her pay grade,” Amy said. “That’s Admiral Candice Griswold’s outfit. And if you’re right, that’s damned impressive. She’s sixty-two. Hell, if she’s been performing docking maneuvers with the ensigns, more power to her. If she lost her job over it, I’d register to vote just to put her in parliament.”

  Carl had never met Admiral Griswold, but he’d met a Captain Griswold years ago that sounded familiar. Fishing out his datapad, he ran a quick search. Her image was public omni access, so it was easy to find. Griswold was fit for her age, with tight skin save for some wrinkles at the eyes, jawline like a spade, brow knit in a permanent scowl, eyes and hair both steel gray.

  “A looker.”

  Amy snaked a hand across and closed the image. “That’s not the point. If Don Rucker got dirt on her, just think about it. Maybe we can use that to get her to come to New Garrelon. Use the same trick to drive the pirates out.”

  “They’d be idiots to fall for it twice,” Carl said as he tucked his datapad away.

  “It’s not like a carrier escort group counts as a trick or the Eyndar have been falling for it for years.”

  Carl raised a finger. “And there’s the catch. The Eyndar ARGO Demilitarized Zone.”

  “I thought it was Disputed Zone,” Amy argued.

  “Whatever. Point is, ARGO ships just can’t sashay in there and pretend nothing’s going on. The Eyndar will have puppies over it. There would be another shooting war, and the way I hear it back in Sol, we haven’t even got our own house that clean. No, the Poet Fleet wasn’t stupid enough to fall for the same trap. They went where Earth Navy can’t follow them. Sure, it’s the sticks, but for now, that’s where they can afford to operate.”