Set'em Up

by A N G Reynolds

  Ariadne looked at me with a pained pinch of her eyebrows. I shrugged her off and walked into the hotel’s terrible lobby.

  It wasn’t that the organic structuring of the lobby was suffering any serious damage, but someone had covered every inch of the expensive falsebone lining with metal and designs. The carpet was something of an ornate tartan which was almost completely faded, aside from the metallic strands that ran through it. Those were corroded horribly. The walls were covered with more of the metal, except the corrosion only covered the top three feet, near the ceiling. The rest was half-heartedly polished, almost like they made a short person do all of their wall cleaning. The design itself was something akin to an old Greek pattern with lots of leaves and what could be taken for clusters of grapes. The entire room was also painfully orange, even faded as it was. I strode into the nightmarish room without fear, however, and reached the front desk before a pouting Ariadne.

  “May I help you?” the long-fingered clerk asked me. I tried to see the eyes that I knew hid behind her thick glasses, but gave up quickly. I settled on talking to her nose.

  “Yes, we’re looking for this man.” I showed Ottoman’s mugshot to the spectacled woman.

  “One moment,” she said, reaching into her bosom for another pair of glasses. For a moment I thought that she would replace the ones she was currently wearing with the new pair. She didn’t, instead placing the new, albeit smaller, pair on her nose in front of the other pair.

  “I recall a man somewhat like him in the hotel a few days ago. I could never read his tattoo right; I always wondered why he had the word LOVER placed so conspicuously,” the clerk said, looking at me and Ariadne from behind two pairs of glasses. “What do you gentlemen want with him?”

  I could hear Ariadne sigh even if the clerk couldn’t.

  “Our lawyer wants him for something, looks like a debt. Do you know where he is?” Ariadne asked and tapped her foot at the same time.

  “No,” the clerk said slowly. I gazed into her double-spectacled eyes. Somehow the second pair of lenses made it easier to see what they actually looked like. They would have been pretty and grey if they weren’t so distorted.

  “Ariadne,” I said, not taking my eyes off the clerk. “Got any credits?”

  “Why should we have to pay her for information?” the impatient princess demanded. I scowled in her general direction.

  “Because that is what she wants,” I said helplessly. “Just play the game, we’re good.”

  Ariadne seemed to keep her grumblings to herself and produced two fine, 10-mark credits. I plucked them from her fingertips and ostentatiously felt their metallic fibers in front of the clerk’s glasses. She looked from me to Ariadne one last time.

  “He muttered something about catching the next flight to Meropis-C,” the clerk said, placing a tired hand palm-upward toward me. I placed the credits dutifully into her fingers and led Ariadne out the door.

  The princess muttered curses accordingly.

  • • •

  “Meropis!” she spat at the slippery, organic steps. “Where is it this time of year, anyway?”

  “The South Pole, I think? We’ll have to look at an Orbit-Time book to be sure.” I slumped on to the steps, trying to calculate how expensive a trip to the station would be. More than likely we’d have to make a jump to one of the geostationary hubs and then catch a flight to the ever-moving Meropis-C. That is, of course, after we booked a ride to take us into low orbit. It would be expensive, that much I could figure out. I began to work on alternatives as Ariadne sat beside me.

  “What if… Never mind,” Ariadne started after a moment of thinking. I glanced at her, who then looked at me a little sheepishly. “It’s a selfish idea, don’t worry about it.”

  “Will it get us off the planet?” I asked. Ariadne chewed her lip as she refused to make eye contact and nodded. “Then what harm could it do us?”

  “A whole debt of harm,” she sighed. “I was thinking maybe we could take out a loan and get my ship. Then we could go anywhere without having to worry about catching flights. We could work to repay the loan with these bounties.”

  I gave her idea a good mulling before I reached a conclusion. It sounded like a reasonable way to solve our problem, though I was already indebted to someone and I didn’t relish owing a bank more money. If we had a ship, however, things might be a bit easier on the skiptrace front too. She wasn’t wrong about a ship making everything easier.

  “How quickly could we get our hands on a loan and a ship?” I asked.

  “I already have someone who is holding a ship for me in Theopa until I collect enough money to officially buy it,” Ariadne shrugged with a sort of fake indifference. “All we’d have to do is get a loan.”

  “Who would hold a ship for you?” I asked quizzically. Ships were expensive, especially ones that could take you into orbit. Ariadne merely scowled at me. It looked almost cute on her, like a growl on a kitten, but I ignored it.

  “Where can we get a quick loan?” Ariadne asked.

  “We can either go ask Aristotle his recommendation of banks, or we can scour the newspaper for ads on the topic,” I said, standing. Ariadne followed suit, taking a moment to think over the options I had given her. “Or I can contact this bank I know. I’m not a great credit risk, but my brother was once owed a favor by a guy.”

  “I like that last option best,” Ariadne said, and I nodded wholeheartedly.

  As it turned out, the guy that owed a favor to my brother didn’t work at the bank anymore, but he was owed a favor by the lady who replaced him at the bank, so in some round-about way Ariadne and I managed to get hold of the bank manager’s ear. She was none too pleased to offer a loan to a couple of half-employed misfits such as the princess and myself, but after a bit of coercion, and the understanding that if we didn’t pay up she’d send skiptraces of her own after us, we secured ourselves a loan. I swore when I realized the interest alone would kill us, but Ariadne assured me that that was her problem. Once I’d paid her for the radiation therapy, she’d be free to set up her parcel business and work off the loan. It would have been much easier if banks offered loans for medical procedures, which meant I could have paid off Ariadne directly without the whole skiptracing thing, but the U.C. made sure its health insurance plans were the only possible way to pay off medical bills short of directly paying the hospital or arranging for some sort of hazard pay.

  I still felt like a spider spinning a web that would later come back to haunt it. There wasn’t a thing to be done about it now.

  The next step for Ariadne and I was to pick up her ship in Theopa. It wasn’t a long trip, though it set us back a few more pretty pennies. Ariadne was bouncing in her seat the entire train ride. She didn’t seem to care a stitch about how far we were in debt, so I kept my mouth shut. She didn’t do me the same courtesy, of course, going on and on and on about her ship and parcel runs and so forth. I tried to stay awake for most of her ramblings, but once or twice she would wake me up to remind me of something exciting she had remembered. If we weren’t so far in debt, and our only means of employment were not hanging on whether or not we could catch someone who was impossibly more down on their luck than we were, I probably would have been a little infected by her bubbliness.

  Almost the moment our feet touched the ground in Theopa, Ariadne was off and running toward the nearest engine-powered cab. We could have taken the public shuttle or even walked, as I pointed out to her, given the fact the train station and shipyard were only a half mile from each other, but she tossed her head indifferently and paid the cab driver entirely too much. I frowned and wondered how easy it would be to get that extra ten-credit back from the driver.

  “Look, look, look!” Ariadne said, jamming her finger against the cab’s window as the shipyard came into view. I couldn’t tell which of the many ships she was pointing at. They all looked like boring and stationary blobs of bulbous organic material, little different than the buildings among which we had spent t
he last few weeks. Some were pulsing with a bit of life, their antennae twitching or color-shifting scales going through the entire spectrum, but it was still kind of like watching a cat while it’s sleeping. Dozens of shipyard workers and ship owners milled about, inspecting the ships applying antibiotics with massive, wheeled syringes or tending to small wounds. I watched with understanding for a minute, but then got bored and turned to Ariadne.

  “Which one’s yours?” I asked.

  “That one, the Lilstar,” Ariadne said, ramming her finger even more into the glass. I looked at the ship she was indicating and tried not to throw up a little.

  It looked like an excellent ship, if a bit used. I couldn’t tell its age or maker, and it didn’t have any real markings to designate it as something special, aside from the “Lilstar” tattooed across its bow. The problem was that it was a two-person craft, not designed to haul anything more than a pair of people and all the provisions they would need.

  “How are we supposed to bring Ottoman back in that?” I gazed at the princess almost accusingly.

  Ariadne looked at me with hurt surprise. I couldn’t tell if she hadn’t thought of the situation before or if she had and I was now insulting her intelligence. In either event I was somewhat directly insulting her ship and thus her.

  “We could…” she said, looking back at the craft. By the time we had entered the shipyard and were walking to the office of the man holding the Lilstar, she still hadn’t come up with a solution or even finished her thought.

  “James!” Ariadne shouted as she bounded across the meager distance between us and the office. The man who answered her call looked more than a little startled, but I didn’t get a good look at him right away. I was busy giving the Lilstar a better inspection.

  It was undeniably a healthy ship, only scarred enough to mark it as moderately used. Every ship has seen its fair share of asteroid hits, infections, rashes, and I’d heard that some ships even got acne. All of this just made each ship a little tougher.

  The overall outside design of the ship was a green, elongated blob, kind of like all those single-celled organisms you see through a microscope. Of course, it was about a million or so times bigger than most of those organisms, but that was beside the point. The top of the ship stood about twelve or so feet high with its six legs extended. The legs would tuck back under the ship to give it a more aerodynamic shape during launch and would extend again during landing, stretching out the webbing that was connected between each of the three legs on both sides. This webbing acted like a parachute and, coupled with an extremely shallow angle of descent, allowed the ship to glide to planetfall in a more or less gentle manner.

  Organic ship landings were not nearly as precise as their metallic counterparts.

  I kicked at the webbing gently, testing its elasticity and checking for any holes or scars that could cause it to rip while entering atmosphere. Like the rest of the ship, it was healthy and free from any kind of damage that I could see. I moved to the back of the ship to check the engines before I crawled underneath to look at the ship’s underbelly. The engines were embedded into the ship itself and, from the outside, kind of looked like giant ear canals. Deeper inside the canal would be a bladder of sorts which stored up the gaseous byproducts that were a result of the ship’s innate photosynthetic respirations and expelled it as a form of propulsion. Basically, the Lilstar sighed a lot to get from Point A to Point B. I could also see part of a Centauri-made screw embedded in the walls of the canal, which allowed the ship to travel even faster than if it was merely traveling on sighs alone.

  It wasn’t a particularly fast method of travel, but for jumping around the solar system, it was entirely adequate. Now, if you wanted to travel out of system, that required a Centauri-designed faster-than-light drive and a metallic ship. Organic ships were not, by any stretch of the imagination, designed to go faster than light. Faster than sound? Sure, that was almost easy for some of the sleeker ships, but there was no way to shore up an organic structure to handle anything faster than about Mach 20 or so, which could only be accomplished by utilizing a planet’s gravity as a kind of slingshot to build up speed.

  My next step was to crawl into the ship’s underbelly. It was actually pretty roomy underneath, especially for someone as petite as I was. Everything seemed to look fine: the epidermis was calloused and thick, like an elephant’s foot, and the faint outlines of the inorganic Pseudo-Gravity system could be seen a couple layers up. The system, like most organic implants with a mechanical or electrical component, was, of course, Centauri in origin. Our nearest neighbor seemed to be tapped into a whole wealth of inorganic scientific knowledge, but I guess that’s what it takes to survive on a rogue planet.

  I had only one last test to perform before I deemed the ship acceptably healthy. I walked over to a more or less insensate part of the ship and took my knife out to test the epidermis’ reactiveness. The slight cut I made sealed up within a few seconds. Of course, the ship’s epidermis would harden in space given how cold and dry the vacuum is, creating a near-impenetrable shell. The knife test was to ensure the ship could heal itself quickly if that shell ever took a direct hit from something.

  I was muttering things to myself about trying to squeeze three people into the Lilstar’s tiny compartments, until Ariadne’s shrill voice alarmed me. She was utilizing a loud, emotive tone and I wasn’t sure whether it was directed to the frustrated-looking James or something from the conversation I had missed. Either way, James and I let her finish a decent rant before trying to communicate with the princess.

  In that time, I gave James a better once-over. He had to be of Ariadne’s kin, given the fact he had the whole “royalty-among-rags” thing going for him. His hair was a lot shorter than the princess’s, but his overall features were just as refined. If I hadn’t spent my late teens on a break or bust quest for revenge, I might have developed the ability to swoon over cute guys. Unfortunately, I was the girl out for revenge, not a date, so encountering James meant little in the way of attraction for me.

  I thought over whether or not I should fix that when I’d paid off my debt to Ariadne. I mean, any human person should think about dating at some point, right?

  “I’m Marcie Dunn,” I said, introducing myself to James, who hadn’t acknowledged my presence with much.

  “Ariadne’s partner with the skiptrace thing?” James said.

  “Technically I’m the skiptrace, she just won’t let me do it by myself,” I commented. James nodded as if he were familiar with that kind of behavior.

  “That’s because you are still suffering from radiation poisoning,” Ariadne said. She seemed to have moved beyond her swear-fest and into pouting.

  “Actually I’m suffering from the effects of radiation poisoning, and at this point I’m almost as healthy as that ship back there. What’s the matter now?” I asked the princess.

  “James says he has to report me to the Ship Commission Board for my questionable transit choices on the ride back here. Plus he doesn’t want me to get involved with the whole skiptrace thing.” Ariadne scowled greatly. James didn’t even try to act indifferent.

  “Your little stowaway stunt is entirely your fault! And no, I’d rather not have to tell Mother you’re out chasing down who-knows-what scum of the universe for a living,” James said. For a moment I looked between the two. Ariadne had a brother and he was not so unlike mine. Suddenly I was thrown into the past, remembering that same sort of terse tone in my own brother’s voice whenever I was about to do something stupid. Of course, Ariadne was neck-deep in stupid with me and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it to protect James from it now.

  “Look, James, the guy we’re going after right now is just a debtor. He’s not even that deep into debt anyway, so I doubt he’ll put up a great fight. Besides, all I need is for Ariadne to drive the ship; I’ll get the guy myself,” I said, trying to smooth everything over. I stuck a hand in Ariadne’s face as she tried to speak up. I wasn’t finished yet. “A
nd you’re bluffing about the SCB issue. Ariadne and I were on board a United-Consortium ship and they’ll sue your little behind to Proxima Centauri and back for exposing information pertaining to a stowaway incident. Unless of course you are after the settlement they’d grant you for keeping your mouth shut.”

  “James, how dare you—” Ariadne started to accuse. I spun her to face me and put a finger in her face.

  “Shut up,” I said simply, not giving Ariadne’s shocked expression much merit. I turned back to James, who was sporting just about the same expression.

  “Who is this?” James pointed an accusing hand in my direction. Ariadne made some sort of undefined shrugging motion.

  “Does it matter?” I asked. “I owe your sister my life and she’s not going to let me pay up without help. So you may as well assist us for the time being. I’ll keep Ariadne out of trouble until I’ve paid her back.”

  For a moment, each of the Kings looked at me in some kind of strange and mutual emotion I couldn’t figure out. They weren’t wholly disgusted with me, that much I could tell, but they were a bit perturbed, which I didn’t mind. It united them somewhat and kept down the squabbling.

  “I’ll go get the paperwork for the ship,” James finally said, raising his hands in resignation. I nodded in affirmation and turned to Ariadne.

  “Ow!” I exclaimed as she punched me in the arm, hard.

  “Don’t ever insinuate my brother would use my position to get underhanded money like that,” she hissed. If she had been the princess I assumed her to be, with the weight of an entire nation behind her, I might have been intimidated. As it was, I was more touched by her loyalty to her brother.

  “Okay,” I said, shrugging with faux indifference. So far I really liked the Kings.

  Three

  I could almost physically measure the room’s emotional dynamic as Ariadne signed the title for the Lilstar. At first James was a bit tense, but as long as he held on to the ship’s paperwork, Ariadne couldn’t go anywhere. Ariadne, on the other hand, was tight as a fiddle string until she put her mark on the paperwork. Before the ink even had a moment to dry, she began to bounce with indescribable glee, nearly knocking me over into a vat of used ship antiseptic. I watched James as he grew more and more solemn and displeased, but he could only manage that for so long. Before Ariadne even had a chance to inspect her new ship, James was breaking out some very expensive soft drinks to toast his sister’s new purchase.