Nuko shook her head, not liking what she expected to be coming next.
“Jetaar hasn’t made his move yet,” she said.
“I get that, but I don’t want to give him a chance to play out all his chips either.”
“Right. But we can turn that to our advantage. We know he wants into the Tacra Un.”
“Kaycee said she doesn’t think we can do it,” he pointed out.
“Regardless, he’s probably not aware of that, and if nothing else he wants us to join his cause. That means he hasn’t finished the deal in his mind, and he might still be willing to negotiate further.”
She glanced back in the direction Kaycee had gone and lowered her voice. “That means he might give us something we need, if he thinks we might still be trading at a higher value.”
“Trade at a higher value?” Nuko asked. “You mean getting him into the Tacra Un?”
She tilted her head and shrugged. “We dangle that and then, once we show him nothing will get him in, we jump to a lower value and offer to join his cause.”
Nuko shook her head.
“Yah, if he doesn’t kill us for it, what does he have that we need?” Ethan asked.
“Pirates are sneaky.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Captain Jetaar kept a very ordinary office, in a typical looking industrial building, in one of the fabrication domes at the base of the stanchion. It was incongruous to realize that a pirate would work out of a manufacturing warehouse, but Ethan realized that extraordinarily little about him was what anyone would expect.
“I’d like to talk to Captain Jetaar,” Ethan announced as walked in and across the foyer to the reception desk.
“Captain Walker, I believe he’s expecting you,” the woman said.
He glanced back at Quinn and realized that two meso types had followed them in. Quinn had apparently already recognized they’d had a tail since he’d stepped to the side and was now standing behind them. Ammo and Kaycee had stepped off in the opposite direction and between the three of them, they now had the tactical advantage if it went sidewise.
Another large mountain of muscle appeared from somewhere inside the building and nodded to the receptionist before turning toward Ethan. “Captain, if you’ll follow me,” he said gesturing toward the hallway. “Captain Jetaar is just finishing up a meeting, but he wanted me to bring you back to his office. He should be done by the time we get there.”
Kaycee and Ammo stepped up beside him and their escort frowned. It seemed he hadn’t been expecting them to tag along, but when Ethan raised a questioning eyebrow, he nodded. “I’ll make sure the boss is alright with your crew joining you, and if not, I’ll bring them back.”
“I’m sure he’ll want to talk to all three of us,” he said. Turning back to Quinn he added, “Stay here and watch the front.”
“Cando, Boss,” he said, with a wink. He walked over and sat down on a bench along the wall. He pulled out a thinpad and started to read, trying to look as inoffensive as he could.
The two who had been following them glanced back and forth several times trying to decide which direction to go, but apparently decided it might be best to watch Quinn.
Which was why they brought the handler along in the first place. To be a visual diversion.
Ethan followed their escort as he wound back through the building and up a set of stairs. They emerged out onto the roof of the building and walked across the open toward a round office that stuck up in the middle of the immense space. As they approached, he could see that the door stood open.
“Wait here,” the man said. He disappeared inside for almost a minute before he came back and waved them in.
Jetaar sat behind an old-style wooden desk. Bookshelves lined the walls behind him. Oddities he’d accumulated over his years of pillaging covered them like mementos of his conquests. It was an eclectic collection at least as wide ranging as what he’d seen in One Eyed Jack’s. There were several things that were antiques, but more than a few of the oddities were just that. Odd.
Tanis Magabi sat off to the side with his feet resting on a conference table and his hands behind his head. He hauled his legs down and sat up patting the table beside him. “Come and sit Walker-mon,” he said. “The ladies, too.” He unleashed his blinding smile and stood up to pull out two seats.
“Walker, we were just talking about you in fact,” Jetaar said, getting up and crossing the room to join them. “Tanis said you got the full tour yesterday.”
“Yah, it was eye-opening,” he said, as they all dropped into seats. Ethan made sure he took the one opposite to Jetaar. “You’ve got a serious operation here. It’s well defended too.”
He shrugged. “We do a lot of things and there are always those that would take it away from us if we let them. It’s a continuous effort to support it.”
“I’m sure it is,” Ammo said, establishing her place in the conversation. “How do you manage without your ship?”
Jetaar’s eyes flashed before he smiled. “I’m flying a console since my last ship had a run in with an uppity freighter captain and a batshit archaeologist.” He leaned back and nodded. “Now I hire out contractors like you. There are a lot of freighter captains willing to take my money. And the Blackwing wasn’t my only ship.”
“I want to talk to you about other business opportunities,” Ethan said.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“We need a way in and out of Tamilis Two without being seen,” Ammo said.
“She’s right to the point, isn’t she?” Jetaar asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Crazy Cantos wasn’t much good, nojo?” Magabi asked.
“Actually, he was,” Kaycee said. “But we need to get some eyeballs on to see if we can figure out what he saw that he’s having trouble articulating.”
“Not gonna swing.” He shook his head.
“Tanis is right, the Coalition has that system locked down,” Jetaar said.
Ammo shook her head. “The whole Coalition is technically locked down to a privateer like you. But somehow you pop up on Escabosa and even on Proxima. I’d wager you’ve got a ship or two that are sneaky enough to run a blockade.”
He swung his chair back and forth as he thought about it. “Let’s say, hypothetically, I have a stealthy fast-ship that could get you there and back. What’s in it for me?”
“I can haul anything you need,” Ethan said.
“Walker-mon don’t smile at yourself too big. Freighters fly cheap, yah?” Magabi said.
“Enough money and anybody moves,” Jetaar added. “You’ve got to do better than that.”
“I think I can get you something you really need,” Ethan said.
“Put it on the table, Walker,” he said.
“You’re after the Tacra Un, yes?” Beside him, Ethan could feel Kaycee tighten up. He hadn’t told her what he was intending to pitch, only that they were after some help getting to Tamilis.
He nodded. “That’s obvious I assume.”
“What if I could help you with that?” She reached out to link with his Urah Un and he pulled his hand away crossing his arms in front of his chest so she couldn’t reach it. He didn’t need the distraction. Nor did he need her trying to talk him out of it.
Ammo had coached him on what to expect. The plan was to knock Jetaar back by leaping forward rather than resisting going further together. It was apparently working.
The pirate captain leaned to the side and rested his elbow on the arm of his chair, stroking and pulling the hair on his chin. He sat in silence and stared at Ethan for over a minute as he tried to decipher the changing topography. Finally, he asked, “Why would you do that?”
“Like my first officer said to me yesterday, we’ve had our reality dumped on its ass a lot lately. The more I think on it, the more I’m seeing that maybe you’re right and we might be on the same side.” He looked over at Kaycee and she nearly shot him dead with her expression. “Even if some of my crew isn’t ready to admit that yet,
” he added.
“That enemy of my enemy thing is making a lot more sense?” he asked, chewing his lip and frowning. There was still a layer of skepticism in his eyes. “I’m surprised you’d throw that on the table already.”
“I am tired of the game altogether,” Ethan said. He stood up and paced behind his chair. He didn’t want to make it obvious, but he was trying to get a better look at the objects on the shelves.
“How do I know you can do it?” Jetaar asked, turning his attention to Kaycee. “I’ve been working on it for years and I understand that it takes a certain skill set to get a Tacra Un to respond.
“It does,” he said, stopping. He’d found a piece of Shan Takhu Technology nested between two human artifacts. Walking over to the shelf, he pointed at the object. He watched Kaycee’s face and her eyes widened.
“Don’t do it,” she mouthed.
“What is this?” he asked, touching it. Kaycee and Jetaar both flinched.
“It’s supposedly a Shan Takhu tool, but it doesn’t do anything because we can’t make it work.”
“You really can’t make it work?”
“I said that,” Jetaar confirmed, nearly snarling.
Ethan picked it up and walked back toward to the table. As he crossed the room, the thing uncoiled and started glowing. “I can.”
Tanis slapped his hand down on the table and grinned. “Like I said, yah?”
Ethan dropped it in front of Jetaar and the glow went out. “By the way, I think it’s a scanner,” he said.
“I know,” Jetaar whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jetaar had asked for some time to think over his offer, so Kaycee and Ethan sat on a bench outside a small food shop looking across the main dome of Tortuga. He watched as kids played in the distance and an old man walked by slowly. If he didn’t know he was in a pirate stronghold, this could have been any of the mid-sized colonies on Earth’s moon or Mars. It was seductive to think that was the reality when it looked so normal everywhere he looked.
Ammo and Quinn were inside the restaurant getting something to eat for all of them. Tanis had loaned them some doubloons so they could eat and had even given them the recommendation on where to get the best food. Their escorts sat across the boulevard at a respectful distance watching them.
“You can’t give him what he wants,” she said. She leaned forward, hanging her head, and staring at the yellow banana grass that lined the edges of the sidewalk.
“Don’t you want to know what happened on Tamilis?” he asked.
“Not at that cost,” she said quietly.
Ethan could tell she wasn’t certain enough to say it with conviction. In the last few months, she’d seen the naked face of her god and it was not something she could easily swallow.
He reached out and squeezed her arm. “I know this is tough, but the more we dig into this, the more it looks like there’s something else much uglier going on. It might not be the Institute itself, but they sit close to the center.”
She nodded. “They have to know what’s happening even if they aren’t the cause.”
“Exactly. The thing is you’ve got your first hard evidence that something is twisting the reality out there.”
She turned her head in his direction and raised an eyebrow.
“The Trappist Syndrome part of the situation is a real lead. You detected a transuranic contamination in the survivor’s system and that means there has to be something causing it,” he said. “An antimatter accident would be easy to confirm because if nothing else, it would leave a big frakking crater.”
“I don’t know enough about the process.” She shrugged. “But probably.”
“Then that leaves us only one other possibility for where the TU-142 could come from. A Shan Takhu singularity power plant.”
“That’s still a leap and you know it.”
“Maybe it is.” He nodded. “Regardless, STI wants us off the playing field. That might be coincidental too, but they think we know something, and they will not stop until we’re out of the game. Not knowing the truth isn’t a defense we can hide behind.”
“You’re saying that you really want to make Jetaar an ally?” she asked. The skepticism in her voice dripped like acid. “Unfortunately, now he knows you might be able to get him into the Tacra Un. Nothing says he’ll keep his end of the deal. Hell, nothing says he’ll be able to keep his end of the deal if the STI comes at us. They’ve got things a lot more dangerous than what we’ve seen them pull out so far.”
“I think you just called it square, right there,” he said. “We’re facing something much more frightening than our petty political differences with him.”
Ammo and Quinn walked up holding four cylinders of shiny metal. Ethan looked at the food and shrugged. It smelled of smoke and sharp herbs.
“What is it?” he asked as he took the one that Quinn held out to him.
“They call it Year-ohs,” Ammo said. “I tried a sample before we bought it, but that’s good since I might not have ordered it if I had heard what they made it with.”
“You’re supposed to peel back the wrapping,” Quinn said, sitting down on the grass and demonstrating. He took a big bite and moaned in obvious pleasure.
“I guess that’s a good enough endorsement for me,” Ethan said, ripping into his own and echoing the handler’s opinion.
“The further into the hole we dig the more it looks like STI is doing something that’s worse than anything Jetaar could do,” he said around a mouthful of food. “The institute is potentially frakking all of humanity, but at least Jetaar is just in it for profit. That’s something we can understand and predict.”
“He’s got a point,” Ammo said. “The STI is unfathomable to any of us.”
“Unless something on Tamilis can give us a clue,” Ethan added. “Then maybe we can anticipate what comes next.”
“Nothing says it will,” Kaycee said. She hadn’t started eating and fiddled with the thin metal sheeting that wrapped it.
“If it is the same thing that happened to Starlight, you need to think hard about this,” he said. “What happened to Elias’ reports on that? You said someone buried them.”
She stared down at her food.
“The Institute hunted us down. They blew up the Elysium Sun and they intentionally let him die. They killed him. Did they do that because he was a plusser, or because he was asking questions about his work being gone?”
“That seems pretty extreme to keep a secret.” She looked up at him and the pain in her eyes smoldered as she weighed out that possibility.
“Could it be that extreme a secret?” Ammo asked.
She shrugged and went back to pulling at the edges of her meal again. “I don’t know.”
“And you never will, if we don’t go get the answers,” he said.
“But Ethan, you’re giving him—”
“Nothing,” he said cutting her off. “Not for sure anyway.”
“He’s right,” Ammo said. “You said you think this Tacra Un has been lobotomized. It might not ever work.”
“And even if it did, with the best minds in the Coalition all working together, how long did it take to learn enough to get to where the Institute is? If we threw the door open and let him in right now, he’d never catch up with them.”
“That’s a damned thin justification,” she said, the resistance all but gone from her voice.
“It’s valid though,” Ammo added.
Quinn bounced up from his seat on the grass, nodding toward the corner of the food shop. Twisting to look back over his shoulder Ethan realized that Jetaar stood back several meters. He had stopped at a respectful distance and waited before he approached.
“Captain Walker, will you take a walk with me?” His usual tone had shifted subtly.
Glancing at Ammo, Ethan read on her face that she’d caught it too. He handed the rest of his meal to Quinn and stood up.
The escorts across the boulevard also rose and Jetaar held up a h
and to call them off. He flashed some quick hand signal, and they both sat back down. They were well disciplined and not simply heavy muscle.
As the two captains strolled, Jetaar clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at the sidewalk. They’d walked several dozen meters before he spoke. “I will let you use the Jack Sparrow, but before I agree to that, I want to know you’re in this all the way.”
“If you’re asking me to go on a killing rampage for you—”
“No. We leave that to people with a taste for blood,” he said, smiling. “I just want to know that when you get back here, you’ll do your part. You have to know you just hung the brass ring in front of me.”
Ethan shrugged, unsure of the significance of a brass ring.
“You promise to treat me right Walker, and I’ll get you and your doctor in and out of Tamilis.”
“I don’t go without my crew,” he said. He wasn’t about to consider leaving someone behind as ransom.
“Fine. My engineer and your crew,” he said, surprising Ethan that he’d agreed so easily. “It will be a tight ride but it’s a very fast ship.”
“I’ll leave the Dawn in drydock here as collateral,” he offered. Since Marti was mobile now, it wouldn’t mean stranding her as a hostage.
“I’ll take that offer as you meant it, but we do need to start trusting each other, so holding your ship as an assurance isn’t necessary,” he said. “When you get back, we’ll have that ‘come to god’ meeting we both know we want.”
Ethan nodded. “Thank you, Captain.”
Jetaar offered his hand. “Good luck, Captain Walker. I hope you get the answers you and your crew need.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Jack Sparrow was a yacht. Outfitted in dark wood with shiny brass and copper accents, it looked like what any wealthy industrialist would want as a play toy.
But where it counted, it was a predator. Fast, sleek, and mean.
The ConDeck was barely more than a cockpit. Three workstation consoles squeezed so tightly together that there wasn’t room for anyone else to stand if the emergency doors weren’t open. The pilot sat in front with an engineer and a second support station situated behind on an elevated midlevel. Two stools folded down from the back bulkhead and allowed observers to watch over the operations from a third tier. The rest of the upper deck consisted of three small crew cabins and an emergency airlock.
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 98