Ah. She was Mrs. Meatloaf Face.
Well, more like Meatball Face, what with the puffy cheeks, but still.
“He lived?” I asked as I scratched my chin. “After that beating? He's got tenacity.”
“He owes it all to you. We all saw what you did to save him.”
“Don't mention it.”
I had contemplated killing the man. I didn't deserve a pat on the back for tossing him out of the arena.
“You can have a free meal whenever you come by,” Lissa said, motioning to the sludge she mistook for food. “My family and I will accommodate you. Anything you want. It's the least we could do.”
“Anything, huh?”
Wait, wasn't I on my way out of there? There was no need to get involved if I was not really an enforcer. Of course, showing up Lysander would be worth the effort. And if the crew of the Star Marque trusted me alone now, they would trust me later. I could always leave if things started to look questionable.
“Do you know what's going on?” I asked. “About a new batch of chems that've been killing people?”
Lissa caught her breath. She turned and gave the other two women hesitant glances. They regarded her with furrowed brows and stiff head-shakes. When Lissa turned back to me, I could almost see the fear pouring off her. She balled her hands and held them close against her chest.
“We know nothing,” she said, her voice half-drowned by the commotion of the busy market corridor.
She was as good a liar as Darryl was a fighter.
“I could have killed your husband,” I said. “And I could arrest you for lying to an enforcer. But I didn't, and I won't. If you really want to thank me for kicking Darryl off that arena, you'll point me in the right direction.”
Lissa walked back to the other women, and they argued amongst themselves in hushed voices—something about business and needing money—but I tried not to listen. I didn't actually want to cause the lady grief. Her husband had gotten thrown through a blender, and she didn't look much better. They might have both been genetic defects, given all the sickness in their appearance. Harassing her with threat of enforcer involvement would be the last bit of stress needed to complete her suicide sundae.
Lissa scrounged around the kitchen and withdrew an aluminum bag from one of the crates. She walked it over to me and presented it with her arms outstretched.
“Here,” she said.
I took the bag and ripped it open.
The shine of a quick injection needle startled me. I closed the bag, my mind grinding to a halt. It was full of chems. Needles. The reusable kind. Buyers got a quick shot, and then the dealer took it back to fill it with some more chems before the next guy came to get a hit. Disgusting practice, but it cut down on costs.
“You're the smuggler?” I asked under my breath.
She shook her head. “I was… just dealing chems on the side.”
“These kill people.”
“Only if you take too much. I told ‘em not to take more than one hit every twelve hours. It isn't fatal then. It just gives ‘em vivid dreams.”
The whole Meatloaf family apparently made idiotic decisions. Then again, who could blame them? Capital Station was a ruthless bitch that didn't take kindly to the meek and timid. People got desperate, and good judgment went out the window.
“So, the smugglers gave you a supply to sell, and you take a cut afterward?”
“Th-That's right.” She stepped forward. “You said you wouldn't arrest us.”
“Who's the guy? The one who gave you the bag?”
“His name is Slaight. He runs—”
“I know Slaight,” I said, cutting her off. “He's a dockhand.”
“That's right.”
He was a notorious gambler, too. I had met him several times across a dice table. The guy didn't understand strategy or game theory—he just liked the rush when large numbers were involved.
Slaight always dabbled in this line of work whenever he got down on his luck. It was either run chems or have his vital organs sold. Not much of a choice.
A hand came down on my shoulder. I glanced over to find Lee standing next to me. I wrapped up the aluminum bag, handed it to Lissa, and gave her one final nod. “Make sure your husband stays out of the arena next year, yeah?”
“I will,” she said.
“And no more of this.” I didn't want to see her arrested.
“O-Okay.”
I moved Lee away from the kitchen. Lee peeled back his helmet and let it fall between his shoulder blades.
“Did they have any chems?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “They're clean. But I did get a tip.” I motioned to the maintenance office built into the side of the station. “That's where our smuggler is.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah.”
“We've been on these docks for weeks. We've searched the maintenance office hundreds of times. We never found anything.”
“You weren't looking in the right places or asking the right people.”
I slid my helmet back on and slung my plasma rifle into the ready position. Lee followed my lead.
“We should tell Lysander,” Lee said over the personal comms. “He's already pissed you went off without us. And you weren't answering his summons.”
“We'll tell him as we head over there.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CYBORG
Slaight had the wits of a tire, and a spine as limp as the cardboard paste sizzling on the hot plates. I was never impressed with the man when he ran errands for the syndicate. His deliveries were late, and his goods questionable. If he was the weasel handing out faulty chems, this bust was as good as done.
“Lysander,” I said once I'd switched the comms. “We're heading into the maintenance office.”
He huffed. “What? You are to retur—”
I cut communication, switched to vocalize, and strode up to the heavy doors of the office without hesitation. Lysander could dick around all he wanted, but I knew what needed to be done.
“This is going far beyond questioning the locals,” Lee said.
I tapped on the communicator next to the maintenance office door. A screen built into the wall flickered to life, revealing the secretary with a pixelated quality that made him look like he was being censored for obscenity. I didn't even need to say anything—the guy got one look at my enforcer enviro-suit and automatically unlocked the door. A second later and the screen shut off, almost like he wanted to escape the situation as fast as possible.
Lee grabbed my arm the moment I stepped inside. “Look, you're breaking all sorts of protocols. I know you're new, and I know Endellion must have recruited you for a reason, but we don't operate like loose cannons around here. We have a chain of command and—”
“How can we help you off-station enforcers?” a dockhand asked, cutting Lee off.
I gave the dockhand my full attention. Three workers crowded around, blocking my view of the data-entry sad sacks poking away at their computer stations. I wouldn't have described the maintenance office as “large.” Five computer terminals cluttered up the space, and the dockhands themselves were bulky with muscle. The three guys surrounding us made for claustrophobic conditions.
And the grime of the area made everything worse. Dried fluid was crusted over the touchscreens, filth was piled in the corner, and my enviro-suit detected an uptick in carbon monoxide, probably from unmitigated flatulence. I was already itching to leave, even though I was protected in my suit.
“Where's Slaight?” I asked, not bothering with pretentious formalities.
Lee turned his head but remained silent. He murmured something about seniority into the comms, but he didn't articulate his disapproval.
The dockhands—all of them men with twenty years' worth of hard work blistered onto their hands—regarded each other with quick glances.
“Slaight's busy,” the first guy said. “We'll answer your questions.”
“I don't need questions answered
,” I replied. “I need to arrest a guy for distributing chems. Any of you want to take Slaight's place for that?”
“You need to wait a moment. We got procedures.”
“That's where you're wrong. I don't need to wait for jack shit.”
Again, the meatheads exchanged glances.
I placed my hand on my plasma rifle, and everyone tensed. Before I said another word, the men stepped apart and motioned to the heavy door that led into the maintenance halls of Dock Seven. They offered nothing else as I stepped past them.
Lee jumped to my side. We walked to the door, tapped on the controls, and the door shot upward in a jarring split-second. The door was solid duralumin—it must have weighed a good two tons. After we stepped through, it slammed shut behind us with the same force, sending a shiver down my spine. I swore Capital Station would be the death of me. One wrong step under that door and I would have been severed in half.
“Jeez,” Lee said with a sigh. “Lysander's going to break the comms. This isn't how he likes to do things.”
I replied with a dismissive wave of my hand. “You can wait here for him, if that's what you want.”
I strode forward. Lee hung back for a moment before jogging to catch up.
“We're not questioning the men back there?” he asked.
“They were trying to stall us.”
“Is that right?”
“Slaight's up to no good back here.”
“This is either going to be epic, or we're going straight to the brig.”
The maintenance halls acted as the guts of Capital Station. Wires, pipes, and corded cables hung exposed on all sides, each marked with yellow-and-black signs for easy identification. Years of half-assed repairs had left most of the identifying marks too worn to read, and some pipes were covered completely in emergency sealant foam. The foam was meant for temporary patchwork, but I guessed some boob didn't understand the word “temporary.”
I walked past several heavy-duty doors—the same as the one up front—but I didn't stop. I knew where Slaight would be.
Some maintenance halls had electromagnetic power generators. They were exposed and just as shitty as the rest of the hall, resulting in ambient fields of disruptive electrical power. It didn't physically hurt the workers, but it messed with nearby electronics and comms signals. It was the perfect place to conduct shady business. No one recording. No one listening.
“You're moving kind of fast,” Lee said as I rounded a corner. He kept my pace, which was good because we couldn't slow down.
I snorted. “They're going to run.”
“You've got a lot of theories.”
The dockhands couldn't get a message to the goons near the electromagnetic generators, but they would get a message to someone nearby, and that someone would run ahead and alert everyone of enforcer presence. I'd worked with the Capital Station gangs for years. I knew their tricks.
“Trust me,” I said. “We're almost there.”
Before Lee responded, I dashed forward and ducked under wires strung around the pipes.
I rounded one more corner, and I spotted two guys rushing down the hall. When they spotted me, they picked up their pace.
“Hey!” one of them yelled. “They're here! They're here!”
“Freeze,” I said, hefting my plasma rifle.
Lee readied his weapon as well. “We're station authority, hired by the overseer! Stand down!”
The men whipped around and opened fire with their hand cannons. Their laser rounds impacted my torso, the black mesh absorbing the heat. If I hadn't been wearing an enviro-suit, I would have been a dead man.
I chortled. Nothing beat having all the advantages.
Faster than the punks could comprehend their situation, I lifted my rifle, aimed, and fired. The plasma bolt ripped a chunk from one man's arm and sent him tumbling to the steel grating of the maintenance hall floors. The other guy—smarter than I took him for—turned and smashed his fist on an emergency rupture button.
The familiar red lights of the warning system blanketed the hall, and a siren rang with such piercing intensity, even the deaf could have heard it.
Maintenance workers from all directions started hustling through the area, following evacuation protocols. Before the button-pushing lunatic could disappear into the crowds, I took aim and fired. My plasma bolt ripped a hole in his neck, and the guy hit the floor, twitching.
Through the commotion, I spotted Slaight. He had a shaved head and tattoos along the back of his neck and ears. He ran for the generator room, so uncoordinated that I suspected he might have been soaked in chems himself.
I fired and clipped Slaight in the calf. He tumbled face-first into a pipe, blood exploding from his nose and coating his green jumpsuit.
Eh. He would be fine. The Star Marque had a healing vat. And now he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Then valves opened all around us, and it took me a moment to realize the station was going through emergency procedures. I jumped out of the way before a geyser of cement foam gushed out of a nearby pipe. The opaque substance, thick and lumpy, coated the corridor. It was meant to protect against breaches, to seal cracks and holes that would lead to the vacuum of space, or to stave off radiation. The damn stuff dried within a fraction of a second, so I could stand on the new, lumpy section of corridor, but there was less room now, and everything had become uneven.
A few maintenance workers got hit with the initial jet stream of sealant. The foam got into their mouth, hardening before they could scratch it out, choking them while they staggered away. One unlucky bastard fell into a hardening pile, trapping himself in a cage of suffocation.
Although I'd dodged the foam, Lee wasn't as quick. He stumbled and got his leg stuck in a mound by the wall, trapping him in place. No matter how hard or frantically he yanked his leg, the cement foam wouldn't release him.
Maintenance workers ran around in droves, the hall filled with their presence. I headed for the generator room, pushing people out of my way as I walked.
“Hey, wait!” Lee said through the comms.
I glanced over my shoulder. Was Lee really in any danger? Lasers wouldn't damage his enviro-suit, the thugs weren't using plasma bolts, and the foam had stopped gushing into our section of the maintenance hall.
With a sigh, I hung back.
As I dwelled on the situation, a passing maintenance worker pulled a plasma knife, clicked it on, and swung. I leapt aside faster than he'd anticipated, and I slammed the butt of my rifle across his pockmarked face. Unlike lasers that did no harm to a high-quality enviro-suit, active plasma would slice clean through just about anything.
Three other workers—likely thugs in disguise—headed for Lee. One pulled a four-shooter plasma pistol from his jumpsuit pocket.
I leaned away as my attacker swung a second time, despite the swelling around his right eye. The glowing edge of his plasma blade, made of whitish-blue ionized gas, seared the air. The information on my visor highlighted the weapon in red and warned that the temperature at the edge of the blade was 2,700 degrees Celsius and dropping at a slow rate. That scorching ionized gas wouldn't last more than a few hours, but that was long enough to gut me.
And my attacker aimed to do just that. I could see it in his frantic mannerisms, his wide swing, and the tight grip he had on his blade.
We must've stumbled into the right nest. That was the only explanation for this level of desperation.
When I went to shoot, the man stabbed the barrel of my rifle, melting the steel and warping the weapon beyond use. I grabbed the madman and shoved him into the pipes, busting his forehead open.
The pistol gunman took his opportunity to fire at me, but his four rounds missed everything, almost like he was afraid he would hit one of his buddies instead. And four shots meant he would need to reload.
I wheeled around and found Lee struggling to stave off two attackers. He fired his rifle, but because of his predicament, he couldn't aim properly, and his bolts pierced through
pipe after pipe, spilling heated water into the area. It hindered his two attackers, who slipped on the slick, bumpy surface.
Much to my frustration, I needed to concentrate as I ran to Lee's side. The floor no longer gave me adequate footing. A man with a knife, a guy with a pistol, some random brawler, and their backup punk wouldn't be a problem under normal conditions, but here I was struggling.
When I reached Lee, I ripped the brawler off him and punched the guy across the face. The impact hurt me more than him thanks to the metal skull beneath the brawler's skin.
He was a cyborg.
He swung once, and I leaned out of the way, but I slipped. When he swung again, he struck me across the helmet, his iron-hard knuckles undeniable, and the blow crumpled the flexi-glass of my visor. I stumbled, the display screen on the fritz. Information flickered in front of my eyes, blocking a good portion of my view.
Stabby the Knife Guy came up behind me, his plasma blade at the ready, but I pushed his scrawny ass back with a quick jab to the throat. He staggered and tripped on the hardened foam, allowing me enough time to return to Lee.
The last punk wrapped an arm around Lee's neck and pulled a Federation-standard steel alloy knife. He got it close to Lee's throat, but Lee held him off—he was strong for such a short guy. I reached the pair with enough time to wrench the weapon from the thug's grasp. I was stronger, despite the obvious mechanical finger alterations the guy had.
However, he punched me square in the face, messing with my display screen even further. I couldn't see, and the follow-up strike to my gut made me nauseous. I ripped off my helmet, knowing I would be in trouble if more laser weapons got added to the mix, but it was better than fighting blind.
I caught my breath.
Endellion leapt over a pile of cement foam, kicked off a pipe, and fired her plasma rifle mid-jump. She struck the four-shooter gunman, killing him while he was in the midst of reloading.
Endellion hit the floor, whipped around, and fired another round, leaving the brawler with a gory hole through his chest. When the knife guy stood, she shot him through the back of his head, her aim on a level I had never seen before.
Star Marque Rising Page 5