Set'em Up

by A N G Reynolds

  Ariadne and I were breathing hard by the time we finally made it to space. I could feel gravity slacken somewhat before the ship’s P-G system kicked in. Pseudo-Gravity was not a decent replacement for what was missing in space, but it was much better than nothing. I took big, gasping breaths as I waited for everything to stabilize.

  And then I unbuckled and ran to the bathroom.

  Five

  The trip to Meropis-C when launching from Aban at this time of year supposedly only took a few days. It took Ariadne and I nearly a three full days until we finally made contact with the stupid place. If you ask her, it was because I had read the Orbit-Time book wrong. If you ask me, it was because Ariadne couldn’t find her way out of a United-Consortium mini-market, much less figure out where to pilot a ship in the infinite possibilities of space. We argued about whose fault it was until the proximity alarm went off and the station nearly ran into us full-speed.

  Turns out, we were just a little early.

  “Why didn’t it see us?” I demanded after our narrow escape. “Isn’t the transponder on?”

  “What rock did you grow up under? A ship the size of the Lilstar doesn’t have a transponder, that’s just for cargo ships or superliners,” the princess declared. She refused to let me finish the argument by starting up a conversation with the station’s flight controller.

  “…Cleared to dock, Lilstar,” the flight controller said over the radio link as I put on my headphones and opened up my side of the conversation. It used to be that ships communicated solely through bioluminescence, which, while excellent to identify ships and convey brief messages back and forth, it was a terrible way to communicate complicated ideas across large distances. So humanity eventually invested in the Centauri radio system. It was always garbled in-system as the nebula’s gases interfered, but it was still more effective than bioluminescent communication. “Once you have docked, prepare for immediate boarding and inspection per Article 45 of the Meropis-C Docking and Cargo Regulation Handbook.”

  “Pardon me, the what—” Ariadne began until the headmaster cut her off again.

  “All contraband items will be removed and destroyed per Sub-Paragraph L of the Meropis-C Freight and Personal Item Regulatory Mandate. Visitors will be given copies of these documents as required reading for anyone staying on board Meropis-C or remaining docked with the station for more than fifteen minutes. Please familiarize yourself with our regulations and have a pleasant stay with us,” the headmaster cut off the transmission as soon as she was finished.

  Ariadne and I looked at each other with a decent amount of horror and confusion.

  “Where’s your smuggler’s hold?” I asked quietly. The princess blinked at me for a moment before springing into action without any sort of question. I followed her back into the bowels of the ship.

  Not even the purest or most innocent of ships were without a decent smuggler’s hold. Some people preferred the term “valuables chest,” but I’d rather call it as I see it. The Lilstar was no exception to this trend and, thankfully, Ariadne knew exactly where it was.

  “What is that and where did you get it?” the princess asked as she peeled back a thick layer of epidermis along a little fold near the membrane that separated the ship’s bowels from the rest of the compartments. It was a great place for a smuggler’s hold, being almost impossible to locate from a distance because it existed along a natural seam in the ship’s epidermis. It wasn’t a very big hold, not much larger than a magazine, but it could easily hold any small contraband one would wish to hide. A bag of jewels, a weapon, drugs, and even the very-contraband shock device, which I had to shove deep into the hold to keep its dark plastic from showing through the epidermis. Eventually, however, I managed to get it in there and replaced the flap, which sealed to become almost invisible.

  “It’s a shock device and Sasha gave it to me,” I said simply, returning to my seat as the ship began its docking procedures.

  “Sasha gave you that?” the princess asked with an expression so surprised it was almost disgusted.

  “Yep,” I said simply and with what I hoped was a conversation-ending tone. It apparently was.

  Or maybe Ariadne was simply too focused on preparing for boarding.

  That was the more likely answer.

  The jackbooted thugs that entered the Lilstar after the docking procedure was complete were about as far from what I had been expecting as they could get. Instead of the greasy, malnourished and thieving station rats I was familiar with from past encounters, these men wore crisp uniforms, took themselves seriously, and didn’t even loot Ariadne and my stuff as they opened up cabinets and poked at the contents with metal sticks. I swallowed as the guy in charge requested we step outside the ship for a briefing as the rest of the crew continued their ship-wide search. These guys might actually have known what they were doing in terms of finding smuggler’s holds.

  They seemed intolerably efficient.

  Not that there was anything I could do about it now. I couldn’t very well eject the shock-device into space at this point. So I followed Ariadne meekly out the Lilstar’s hatch and stepped into the reprocessed air of Meropis-C.

  The inhabitants here had obviously been doing some remodeling to fit their new, rule-abundant lifestyle. Although the airlock was little more than nine feet long by ten wide, they had installed chairs along one of the walls. I didn’t understand the need until the lead searcher stepped out and gestured the princess and me to the chairs and handed each of us a bound paper copy of both the Meropis-C Freight and Personal Item Regulatory Mandate and the Meropis-C Docking and Cargo Regulation Handbook in both their technical forms and a bright, easy-to-read kids’ version. After that came the oral lecture of what each manual/mandate had inside of it.

  The leader of the searchers, a man who announced himself with a straight face as First Segen Samuel Sykes, gave the welcome-to-the-station-here-is-how-not-to-get-arrested speech with a remarkable amount of talent. He spoke with a strange sort of lilt that can only be found among space-born citizens and made the entire half-hour lecture somewhat less ponderous than it should have been. Plus, he wasn’t too hard on the eyes; his grey uniform washed out the pair of liquid blue eyes he had to the color of a thunderstorm.

  My only consolation, however, was that it didn’t take his men the entire half-hour to search the Lilstar and, since they didn’t interrupt the segen’s lecture, I assumed they hadn’t found the valuables chest.

  “…And that concludes your official briefing on the basics of Meropis-C’s cargo and personnel legislature,” Sykes said. I heard Ariadne sigh loudly and I kicked her slightly in the foot, ignoring her scowl afterwards. “If you have any questions about anything at all, please feel free to ask.”

  “We’re good—” Ariadne began.

  “Actually we do,” I said, taking advantage of an opportunity. “You see, we are skiptraces from back on Earth and I was wondering if you could help us locate a person of interest.”

  “Who is it you are looking for?” Segen Sykes asked with a slight tilt of his head.

  I forced back an odd and slightly nervous smile as I pulled out the papers we had on Ottoman. I showed the segen the picture of the debtor and told the station officer the meager information we had on him.

  “Let us check with the Meropis-C Passenger and Traffic Recording Office,” Sykes said, beginning to lead the way down the hall.

  “Just a moment, I need my bag,” Ariadne said, dashing back to the Lilstar. I rocked back and forth on my feet as I waited with the segen.

  “You seemed surprised when we first greeted you,” Sykes said in a dull tone, waiting at some sort of at ease.

  “I wasn’t expecting such officiality,” I said honestly.

  “Ah, yes, this is somewhat new to the station. We only implemented these rules two years and change ago. It often catches people off guard,” Sykes said easily. I tried not to get lost in his eyes.

  “Yeah. I have a friend from B who warned me that thing
s would be rough here,” I said.

  “They are not incorrect about Meropis-B. It is atrocious and should be evacuated and destroyed,” Sykes said without flinching…or any real emotion. I chuckled somewhat anyway. “Our controlling company, however, was displeased with the state of the station and insisted on the changes.”

  “I thought all the Meropis stations were controlled by the same company?” I asked.

  “No,” Sykes said simply. The longer I talked to him, the more I realized he only went as deep as his eyes. I didn’t say anything more until Ariadne returned with her bag. We followed the segen farther into Meropis-C.

  Although it was the same basic brownish color as every other station I had ever been on, Meropis-C seemed to actually make an effort to be well-lit and tattoo-free, aside from the periodic location markings and simplified maps. Its natural, wheat-like smell was made even fresher with some light, spring-like tones that made the whole station smell like a meadow.

  Even the people seemed to hold to this standard, usually well-dressed, well-groomed, and in no fear of being caught dawdling. If I had known the station was so formal, I probably would have dressed a bit more nicely, though I was far from slovenly in my wrinkled-but-stain-free shirt and clean pants. My hair was even brushed and done up properly. Ariadne, of course, looked like she had just come back from a luxury spa. Even after a week of living with her, I had no idea how she was able to keep so neat.

  Overall Meropis-C was clean to nearly a fault. There were no parasites, no molds, not even a speck or two of lichens to ruin the pristine walls. In fact, the deeper the segen took me into the station, the more it smelled of disinfectant and natural oils. Whoever was running this particular station had no idea what they were doing. Keeping an organic structure healthy, be it a small ship or an entire city, was an artform. Kill too much good bacteria and you invite infection. Don’t kill enough bad bacteria and the same thing is bound to happen. It was better to look at organic vehicles and buildings like they were their own ecosystems, not just one singular organism.

  Despite this, I had little room to judge: Meropis-C seemed to be parasite and infection free, although I was willing to bet that its immune system was significantly weaker than a normal station of this size. All this sterilization could still cause a superbug down the road, costing the station up to millions in antibiotics and production delays; it was not as though people could still inhabit a sick organic structure without the risk of the virus or bacteria becoming zoonotic.

  Segen Sykes took us all the way to the station’s official center, called, unimaginatively, ‘Meropis-C Station and Administrative Center.’ There, he took us past the main waiting room and two long-lined desks entitled Station Help staffed with what appeared to be very overworked and dull-eyed personnel. Down the hall two more doors, a left, two rights, and what was left of the soles of my shoes, we finally made it to the Passenger and Traffic Recording Office.

  “If you need anything, please feel free to inquire at the Station Help Desks,” Segen Sykes said blandly before bowing stiffly and walking off. Ariadne and I looked at each other as we strode into the Recording Office’s waiting room.

  “So, did you get his number?” the princess demanded with a stupid grin on her face as she cautiously handed me the shock device. “I saw how you looked at him when he gave the speech.”

  “Nah, he’s dead on the inside,” I said plainly, pocketing the shock device and striding up to the closed window of the office, beginning to knock against the thin falsebone door.

  “Actually, I have this one handled,” Ariadne said, beating me to the knock.

  Someone rustled papers inside and it wasn’t a moment before an ancient man slid the door back. His nametag read “Frederick,” which I thought was fitting.

  “Yes?” he said around a sagging nose.

  “We need help finding a person of interest; would you be able to oblige us?” The princess delivered her lines smoothly and with just the right amount of flirtation to keep any man a little off balance. It was immediately after that that she made the fatal mistake. Well, perhaps fatal is an exaggeration, but with any other person aside from Frederick, it would have been.

  “Are you trying to bribe me, young lady?” the ancient clerk asked, eyes shifting from the credit mark in Ariadne’s hand to a random corner near the ceiling. I rudely leaned over to see what he was looking at carefully. There it was, a station eyeball. Nowhere near as sophisticated as a human eyeball, being more of a mechanical sensor than a biological one, it was nonetheless a useful tool in ensuring that one’s clerks and station workers were seated well within the law. I plucked the credit obviously from Ariadne’s hand, waved it in front of the eye, and then shoved it down the front of my shirt. I hoped that was enough to get Frederick off the hook. With his sigh, I assumed it was.

  “No sir, she was not trying to bribe you, that’s for our lunch and she just happened to have it in her hand,” I said smoothly. I pitied Ariadne somewhat as her face flushed with embarrassment and she backed away from the desk in apology. At least she hadn’t been thrown in jail overnight like I was, after the first bribing mistake I made.

  “We are looking for this guy,” I said confidently, showing the picture of Ottoman to Frederick, keeping the paper well away from the other side of the falsebone door. It wouldn’t do to make the station heads believe we were trying to bribe the ancient clerk more subtly now.

  “Name of this…artfully tattooed fellow?” Frederick said, already thumbing through some files.

  “Ottoman Lee,” Ariadne piped up over my shoulder; she seemed resolute to make amends.

  “Humph, no wonder he got the tattoo,” Frederick commented as he thumbed through the station’s new files with an amount of dexterity no one could possibly expect from his wrinkled hands.

  I yawned as we waited for Frederick to finish sorting the files. Ariadne tapped her toe, arms still crossed with embarrassment. I tried to smile at her, a gesture she returned rather weakly.

  “Ah, ha!” Frederick finally coughed in triumph. I tried to peer over the file he held and see what had turned his victory expression into one of confusion. “Well, at least, that’s his name. The picture is all wrong, though.”

  A beyond-wrinkled hand presented me with an image that made me more uncomfortable than I had been in a long time. Although both pictures looked incredibly alike, the man whose picture sat in Ottoman Lee’s Meropis-C file had the word “LOVER” tattooed along the right side of his face instead of “LOSER” being tattooed down the left side of his face like Aristotle’s file. My jaw dropped somewhat as I tried to figure out what in the world was going on.

  “Aahhmm…” I said in confusion. “Maybe this is the wrong file? Or the wrong Ottoman Lee?”

  “Tell me, darling, how many Ottoman Lees do you think there are in existence, much less have visited Meropis-C in the past three weeks?” Frederick had a more than sound point.

  “Can we have a copy of this?” Ariadne said. Frederick shrugged, stood up, and disappeared into the back of the office with the picture.

  “Maybe Aristotle set us an old picture. Ottoman could have had his LOSER tattoo removed and the new one put in,” I suggested. Ariadne simply made a confused gesture.

  “I guess we’ll just have to show both pictures around until someone says they’ve seen him,” the princess said. I agreed, but something didn’t smell right.

  “That fellow,” Frederick pointed to the guy with the LOVER tattoo. “checked in to the station about two weeks ago and just left about four days ago.”

  “Anyone know where he went?” I asked, my stomach turning just a bit. I had two weeks to catch this guy before Aristotle got angry and I’d never be able to pay off Ariadne.

  “His file says he boarded a U.C. transport bound for the Asteroids, by way of Myrkheim,” the ancient clerk shrugged. “You can check with Station Security, though.”

  I perked up a little at this information. If the princess and I were very lucky, and more than
a little quick, we could make it to Myrkheim and its near-perpetual darkness in a week. Then we would have some padding to catch Ottoman. Of course, that would leave us very little time to make it back to Aristotle’s, but the man never did say that bringing him back within the month was part of the bargain. In fact, he only said that I had to catch Ottoman before the time was up.

  Of course, Aristotle was the lawyer between the two of us. I’m sure he would have an excellent counterargument for that idea of mine. But, as long as I held the skiptrace license, I was legally able to do anything a skiptrace could, and there was no real remote deactivation of a license, especially given that the cross-system communications was crap even with the Centauri radio systems. It’s hard to communicate through the equivalent of space pea soup. That was why couriers and parcelmen were so popular.

  “We need to leave about now,” I turned to Ariadne.

  “After we resupply; Myrkheim is kind of far,” the princess determined with a nod, and almost began to dash toward the door. She stopped and turned back to Frederick with some confusion.

  “Map’s at the end of the hall. You’ll want to speak to the Resupply and Provisions Department,” the ancient clerk said. With a nod, Ariadne dashed off again. I turned to give Frederick a thank you, but he stopped me first. “Are you sure you gals need to be looking for this Lee fellow?”

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. Frederick had a dark expression hiding under his wrinkles. He reached out a hand as if to grab my arm, but thought better of it. I could see old tattoos and scars peeking out from under his sleeve.

  “Just, well, make sure you are prepared for anything,” Frederick said, pursing his lips. I nodded carefully and finally thanked him.

  Crap.

  Six

  It took Ariadne and me about four days to reach Myrkheim, mostly because half of the trip was spent in the nebula’s empty pocket. Though we hadn’t truly escaped the gaseous soup and wouldn’t for about ten light years in the forward direction, the sky was clear enough of brightly ionized particles to see a handful of stars. I spent a good hour after we reached the Corridor simply staring at the little points of light. They made me feel very empty and uncomfortably small, but it was a good kind of feeling. Sometimes it’s okay to feel just a little insignificant, as long as you don’t let it swallow you whole.