And the half-dozen decks beneath that surface were officially the “docks.” A large orbital like Guadaloop Actual would have several million cubic meters of storage in those decks alone, surrounded by spacer hotels and bars and everything else that serviced the transient spacer.
Kira and her people had booked rooms just beneath the main docks area, intentionally putting themselves outside the chaos of those working spaces. Now, however, they headed back into them.
“Ninety-five percent of shipping and ninety-nine percent of passengers are run through the digital exchanges,” Konrad reminded the others. “Most of what’s left is gray at best, with some of it being completely illegal and concealed on ships that are carrying cargos set up through the exchanges.”
“There’s basically two places to look if we’re looking for something nonstandard in a short time frame,” Kira added. “The first is the actual physical exchange office, which is usually right in the middle of the busiest section of the docks. The second is the midrange spacer bars. Cheap bars are where the crews will hang out, but we’re looking for a low-end owner-operator.
“They won’t be in a cheap bar, but they probably won’t be in the nice bars, either.”
All four of them were in civilian clothing—plain shipsuits with jackets, mostly. In Kira’s case, the jacket was real sheepskin leather from her home village over a layer of blaster-resistant webbing. The jacket had stopped blaster fire for her once.
Given that it was a gift from her not-quite-estranged brother, it hadn’t needed to do that to be special to her. She still appreciated that aspect of it—and owed her life to her brother’s paranoia.
“Do we even know what the different bars are going to be?” O’Mooney asked.
“Oh, believe me, they’re easy to tell apart,” Bertoli told his subordinate with a chuckle. He pointed out a sign that they were walking past. “See that?”
“Yeah.”
“So. Small, discreet, sign. Visible from the main thoroughfare, but nothing to draw attention to it, right?”
“Right…”
“So, that’s a top-end bar, probably requires membership in a travelers’ club or something like that,” Bertoli explained. “The top-end owner-operators are in there, as are the captains and senior officers of the big lines. The lines basically subsidize the travelers’ clubs.”
“Oh.” O’Mooney studied the sign for a moment.
“Then if you look over there”—Bertoli gestured, and Kira swallowed a snort of amusement when she saw the faux-neon sign that he was gesturing at—“that is a strip club, probably with an attached brothel. We’re going to call that a culturally cheap bar, even though it’s going to have the same prices as a higher-end drinking establishment.”
The younger commando chuckled.
“So, we’re looking for a place with a clearly visible sign that isn’t neon and has minimal implied boobs and dicks?” she asked.
“Bingo,” Bertoli said. The mercenary scanned the hallway they were in—a triple-wide, double-high corridor that likely encircled the entire station on this level—and then pointed down the hall. “Some of them are also restaurants, like that one.” He paused. “What the hell is ‘Tex-Mex’?”
“Classical Earth cuisine,” Konrad said. “So, that’s food and midrange bar. Probably a good place to start. Think they do breakfast?”
“They’re in the docks,” Kira pointed out. “That means you can get any meal you want at any time of day by station clocks. And I haven’t met too many people who can screw up toast and eggs over the years.
“Let’s go grab food and eavesdrop.”
Kira’s preferred breakfast was buried in a smaller, near-hidden section of the menu that was easy to miss next to the glittering pictures of something called “huevos rancheros.”
It wasn’t that the restaurant’s specialties didn’t look good; it was that she was generally quite specific in what she’d risk at an unknown eatery. Eggs on toast were hard to screw up—and this restaurant didn’t.
The specialties that came out to their table a few minutes after they ordered looked good, she had to admit, but her meal looked exactly as she was expecting—and for the first meal of the day, that was important.
Their server was a middle-aged man with a mustache only a few millimeters short of requiring a hair net—probably saved from that ignominious fate by what appeared to be the application of industrial levels of wax.
Kira wasn’t sure if she’d spent too long looking at the mustache or what, but she realized the man was returning her regard levelly.
“Thank you,” she told him before turning her attention to her food.
The restaurant was decently sized, with eighteen tables of various sizes. There were some empty tables, but most of the place was full and there was a quiet burble of conversation for Kira to try and eavesdrop on.
She had to check to be certain that it was actually breakfast time by station clocks—though that didn’t necessarily mean anything for the individual clocks of assorted ships.
“The food is good,” Konrad murmured, keeping his voice quiet enough not to interfere with everyone stretching their headware’s audio processors to listen in on other conversations. “Coffee is…not.”
Kira took one sniff of the cup and chuckled.
“We’ve been spoiled,” she admitted—but she went for the glass of hydroponic orange juice as well. Like the eggs and toast, it was standard the galaxy over. If there was a civilian orbital station in the galaxy that didn’t have a hydroponics farm somewhere, with wheat and oranges in layered tanks, and chickens wandering around the floor to make maximum use of space, she’d never been aboard it.
None of the conversations she was overhearing were helpful. Everyone she could hear was a mid-ranking officer on a line freighter, reporting up a corporate hierarchy and flying on a schedule.
And mostly complaining about said hierarchy and schedule.
“I think this place is a bust, but at least the food is good,” she told her companions, echoing Konrad’s words. “Let’s finish up and see what else we can find.”
“Head toward the exchange office and buy half a dozen coffees on the way?” Bertoli suggested. “We’ll slosh by the time we get there, but it’ll give us a few chances to listen in.”
“Agreed,” Kira said. “I’ll settle up the bill while you all finish.”
The restaurant could have used the station network to handle payments, but that often required a subscription fee. A stand-alone payment terminal, like the one they were using, was a fixed non-variable connection to the network and hence cheaper.
But it required Kira to walk up to the host station and give the terminal mental instructions. Their heavily mustached server was leaning against the host lectern and nodded calmly to her.
“Your bill is loaded up,” he told her, his voice notably higher-pitched than she’d expected. “Good to go.”
That reduced the amount of work she had to do to a single back-and-forth mental confirmation with the terminal. It only took a few seconds, and she gave the server a nod.
“Thank you,” she said again. “Tell your cook they do a good job. We’re not from around here, and we were impressed.”
“Lots of visitors come through here,” the server told her. “I’ll let Cookie know. You’re Apollon, Em?”
“Syntactic Cluster, these days,” Kira said. “Galaxy moves on, you know.”
“That I do,” he agreed heavily. “That I do.”
20
The next two bars turned out to have espresso machines, at least, which allowed Kira to follow Konrad’s example of burying bad coffee under sugar and milk. She’d once been able to drink any coffee black, but Redward truly had spoiled her.
The complex flavored lattes also kept them waiting in the bars for long enough to eavesdrop around. They hadn’t heard anything suggesting there were tramp owner-operators on Guadaloop Actual at all—which suggested that either they’d misjudged which bars the tramp c
rews would hang out in...
Or that Guadaloop Actual itself was too expensive for tramp freighters. There were other orbitals for cargo transfer, after all. Guadaloop Actual was just the one attached to the orbital elevator, which made it the most efficient…and hence the most expensive to dock at.
Still, her worst-case scenario was that the exchange office’s staff would be able to tell her where to look to find captains looking for a quick charter. Most likely, the office would be able to help them set up exactly the type of booking they needed.
It was just almost certainly going to take longer than Kira liked.
“Another bar up ahead,” Bertoli said. “We’re still a good ten minutes’ walk from the exchange office, unless we want to find the transit system?”
“Walking is good for us,” Kira replied. “I don’t even want to think about how many calories are in those damn lattes.”
She wasn’t one to count calories or watch her diet or weight—she spent enough time exercising one way or another to not have to worry about it—but multiple flavored lattes sounded worrisome even to her.
“Let’s check out that ba—”
A freight truck hit her in the middle of her back, smashing her forward and sending her sprawling onto the ground. The entire dispersal net buried underneath the leather of her jacket flashed to hot, the heat almost scalding even through her shipsuit.
“Down, down!” Bertoli snapped.
Kira was still blinking blearily when O’Mooney grabbed her and started pulling her across the metal floor. A second blaster bolt hammered into the floor where she’d been lying—and she heard the distinct sharp buzzing of a military-grade stunner as Bertoli returned fire.
“I’m fine,” she finally managed to gasp to O’Mooney. “Help me up.”
The grip shifted, helping lever Kira to her feet—and into the doorway of the bar they’d been headed toward. O’Mooney had her own stunner out. It was an ugly-looking heavy pistol shape, with a two-part folding stock that locked onto the wielder’s forearm to control recoil.
“I’m fine,” Kira repeated. “Go.”
More blaster fire echoed in the hallway, and Kira hoped that at least some of it was from Guadaloop security forces. Her people were a long way from Redward, and she hadn’t spent the time and money to pick up new weapons licenses for Guadaloop Actual.
Their stunners were pushing the limit of what was authorized for civilian use aboard the station, but they weren’t carrying blasters at all. From the growing bruise and likely heat rash on Kira’s back, someone else was.
“Em?” a nervous looking young woman hailed her. It took her a moment to realize the local was the bartender slash barista serving the bar. “You okay?”
“I’ve been shot,” Kira said drily. More blaster fire echoed outside. “But I’m fine.”
“I called station security, but the response time is six minutes,” the bartender said grimly. “I’m…guessing none of those blasters are yours?”
A scream outside cut off with distinct finality, and Kira drew her own stunner.
“None of them,” she said calmly, locking the weapon onto her wrist. “Keep your head down, Em. Sorry to have brought this to your bar.”
“Ahem,” someone coughed, and Kira looked over to see a scrawny-looking man with a ragged white beard watching her. Like her, he wore a jacket over a shipsuit. Unlike hers, the jacket was a relatively standard plastic faux-denim material—and had clearly seen a lot of heavy wear over the years.
“I like this bar,” the bearded man noted, producing the blaster version of her arm-locking stunner and snapping it into place. “Ramirez, Martinez, on me.”
Two more people emerged from the booth behind the stranger: a man and woman, both clearly in their late thirties. All three of the strangers were dark-skinned, with similar angular features that suggested some familial relationship.
And all three were clearly armed with personal blasters.
“My name is Tomas Zamorano,” the ragged beard told her. “Would you like some help, Em?”
“My people have stunners,” Kira said. “I’d love any help you can give.”
“Thought so,” Zamorano replied. “Baile Fantasma—let’s go!”
With a hopeful smile, Kira followed the three spacers out the bar door.
The thoroughfare had emptied in the moments Kira had been in the bar. There were blast marks scattered across the walls, and a mobile repair pod had ground to a halt in the middle of the corridor. The pod’s driver was on the ground, very clearly dead, and both Konrad and Bertoli were hiding behind the vehicle.
O’Mooney was tucked into the doorway of a convenience store a few meters from the bar. She was slumped to the floor, curled around a wound of some kind but still holding her stunner level and firing the occasional blast along the corridor.
The hiss-crack of multiple blasters told Kira their attackers hadn’t gone anywhere—and drew her attention to them. There was no way in hell the black-cloaked figures with the blaster carbines had gone unnoticed prior to opening fire—but she recognized them.
The outfits were a hologram, an unidentifiable but standard image created to conceal the identity of the Kaiser’s assassins. What the hell were Brisingr Shadows doing in Guadaloop?!
She opened fire, her stunner jerking back against her hand with recoil as she shot at the lead figure. Her emergence took them just enough by surprise that she managed to land the charge. The Shadow stumbled backward, whatever defensive equipment they had insufficient to negate the full impact.
The other two Shadows were readjusting their fire already—but Zamorano and his crew had also been identifying the threat. Blaster fire cut through the Shadows like a sword of deadly plasma. One of them went down instantly—and more stunner fire from Kira’s companions caught the same Shadow she’d shot.
She could hear running footsteps in the distance—hopefully station security—as she slid in behind the wrecked pod with her boyfriend and bodyguard.
There was another crackle of blaster fire from Zamorano’s people, and then silence fell in the corridor.
“Clear,” a voice declared.
“Clear,” Zamorano replied. “Check on the wounded woman, Martinez.”
“On it,” the young woman agreed.
Kira gestured for Konrad and Bertoli to follow her as she headed for O’Mooney. The redheaded mercenary looked up at the four people converging on her with a pained smile.
“I’m not fine,” she whispered. “I think I’ll live, but…”
“We’ll get you a doctor,” Kira promised. “Let me see.”
“I have a medkit,” Martinez told them, the spacer woman producing the case from inside her coat. “Should be able to patch you up until medical gets here.”
O’Mooney nodded, winced and lifted her arm from where she was covering the blast wound. It looked bad—a direct hit had burned through her concealed dispersal vest and shipsuit alike. Her skin was just gone across a six-centimeter chunk of her stomach.
“This will hurt,” Martinez warned—and had a plasti-skin spray going before O’Mooney could say a word. “Just covering muscle,” she continued after the mercenary had finished swearing. “Guts weren’t burned through; your armor did its job. Not as well as we’d like, of course, but it did its job.
“Station security will get you to a doc. You’ll be fine.”
“Thank you,” Kira told the woman. “And your…boss?”
“Boss,” Martinez confirmed. “Third cousin twice removed, something like that? Really just my boss.”
“Thank you, Ercilia,” Zamorano said, materializing out of nowhere. “Josue is talking to the security; I wanted to let you deal with your woman. She okay?”
“She needs a doctor,” Kira replied. “Which means I need to talk to security anyway.”
“That’s how it goes,” he agreed calmly. “Lieutenant Sanna is decent folk; she’ll take statements while you rush the Em to medical. I’m going to be the one in real trouble, a
nyway.”
“They came after me,” Kira argued.
“Yes, but I killed two people and you didn’t,” Tomas Zamorano said calmly. “You’re going to make that up to me, aren’t you, Em…”
“Riker,” Kira told him, carefully using the fake name she’d used in the past. “Kira Riker. And yes, I owe you, Em Zamorano.”
“It’s Captain Zamorano,” he told her with a chuckle. “And good. I like people who recognize their debts.”
21
Lieutenant Sanna was an older Black woman with strange patterns of paler skin visible across her face and hands. Dressed in pale blue armor to stand out in crowds, she was giving direction to the rest of the Guadaloop Actual security people when Kira stepped up to her.
“You have a wounded woman, I understand?” Sanna asked sharply.
“I do,” Kira said. “We need medical attention.”
“A rescue pod is on the way; they’ll be here in two minutes,” the Lieutenant replied. “Will she be okay that long?”
“Someone got a medkit to her; I think so.”
“All right. Your name?”
“Kira Riker,” Kira replied.
“All right,” Sanna repeated. “Walk with me, Em Riker.”
The blue-armored vitiligoed woman led the way over to where the Shadows had fallen. Their holograms were down now, revealing an ordinary-looking pair of spacers in gray shipsuits.
“Any idea who these people were?” Sanna asked.
“I saw the holograms they were wearing,” Kira said grimly. “I’m from Apollo, Lieutenant. I know Shadows when I see them.”
There was a long pause.
“Assume I don’t, Em Riker,” the security officer finally told her. “Because I don’t have a damn clue what you’re talking about.”
“Brisingr Shadows,” Konrad interrupted, the big engineer stepping up to Kira’s right hand. “The elite assassins of the Kaiser’s covert operations departments.” He shrugged. “Supposedly, anyway. In practice, my understanding is that they’re any Brisingr espionage agent given a kill order.
Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 12