by David Ryker
“Simpler than that — a combination. To a locker, at the spaceport nearest his apartment. We pulled his transaction history, found that he’d opened one up for himself. They’re used to store belongings when people go on trips, and—”
“I know what a locker is,” I said with a little more bite than intended.
She looked away, composed herself, and then drew a breath. “Of course you do. On Federation planets, though, Federation citizens get certain perks. Discounted travel on Federation vessels between sanctioned worlds. Free universal healthcare. Free education. And free storage while you’re off-world.”
“But you just said you pulled his credit history. So that means he paid?”
She waggled her finger at me. “You are paying attention then.” Everett smiled for a second and cast an eye over the others before returning to me. No one else seemed in the mood to jump in, so she kept her voice low.
But still, I had to admit that little bit of zeal was infectious. I could feel myself starting to come around. “So what did he pay for?”
“The locker.” She paused and narrowed her eyes a little. “Think of it more as a deposit. You pay to get it open, put your stuff inside, and then when you get back—”
“You get a refund — the credits come back to you.” I nodded, finishing it for her.
“Bingo.” She restrained a smile. “And if he had the credits taken out…”
“Then that means he opened a locker.”
“And if he never got them put back in…” She made a circular motion with her hands, waiting for me to get it.
“Then it means whatever he put inside is still there,” I said, staring into space. “Shit.”
“Shit is right.” She raised her eyebrows, grinning. “Took us a while to work all that out — didn’t have anything for Mac and Fish to go on when you called us, so your lead took precedence. But now…”
I nodded. “And we have the code.”
She nodded too. “Yup, and the locker’s just sitting there, waiting for us.”
“How do you know that he didn’t give up the locker, too? That the people who searched the garage didn’t get the code and go there to collect whatever was inside?”
“The biometric failsafe on those lockers means that only the person who took out the rental can open them again, and that immediately redeposits their credits. And the stations are heavily policed by the Guard. Plus, those lockers are pretty heavy duty. If someone was trying to break into it, then it’d cause a lot of fuss, attract a lot of attention. There’ve been no incident reports, so we have to assume that it’s still there.” She finished and folded her arms, looking at the group before coming back to me, eyes expressive, staring with anticipation. “Well?”
“How are we going to get into it then? And do we even know what locker it is?” I was looking for outs. I didn’t know if I had the energy to face anything else today… tonight… whatever it was. I glanced at my watch and tried to work out how long I’d been awake. The lack of night and day was making me nauseous. I couldn’t figure out if it was the middle of the night or the middle of the afternoon. At least on board the ships there was a universal time that was adhered to, lights that mimicked a night and day cycle. Here it was perpetual misery. An endless waking dream.
“Luckily the Federation actually have some tools for dealing with that sort of thing. The locks they use on those lockers are standard across the galaxy — they’re biometrically encoded, a little like what’s on your F-Series. All biometric profiles — at least of most Federation citizens — are stored in one big central database. That code on your arm is linked to yours, same as mine.” She pulled up her sleeve to show it off. “These lockers, though, are just basic thumb-scanners — real run of the mill. They read the biometric profile through the skin and if it matches the account that took out the policy, it’ll open. We can simulate it because we have his profile on the database, and have access to it — Volchec made sure of that. All we have to do is scan the lockers until we find the right one, and hey presto… It’ll be a cinch.” She grinned at me, but it died on her lips when she saw my bloodshot eyes and crumpled brow. I didn’t have any smiles left in me.
I swallowed, looking for any out. I couldn’t find one. After a while I bowed my head and sucked in a long breath. “You said we? Who’s we?”
“Me and you,” she said flatly. Her usually pinned-back blond hair was now falling around her ears, curling slightly against her jawline. Her blue eyes shone in the dim glow of the bulb over the table. “We can go now,” she said, her voice urging. “The spaceport will be open, but with the storm, nothing’s flying right now — the place will be quiet. We just slip in, find the locker, slip out.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. We’ll be gone and back before any of them realize. They’ll update us with any news of Alice if it comes in, but trust me, in times like this...” She nodded, looking back at Volchec, and then at Mac. “Some people just need a win, you know?”
I sighed. “Alright, fine. But… can I at least get some sleep first?”
18
“Volchec,” I said quietly, looking over Everett’s shoulder.
She looked up, but didn’t say anything.
Everett turned and motioned Volchec over with her head. She looked at the top of Mac’s bowed head and then pushed off the table and walked over. She pursed her lips and folded her arms, clearing her throat. “What?”
I rubbed my eyes and let Everett do the talking. She seemed to be the only one with her head on straight just then. Maybe it was that cold isolation she talked about and she really did just care about the mission and nothing else — or maybe she was just better at keeping it hidden than the rest of us. “We need to follow up on the Barva lead.”
Volchec stared at her as though she hadn’t just said that, and then blinked, processing it, but still said nothing, her usually warm dark skin a grayish pallor. Even her usually coifed hair had lost its bounce.
“The lead’s all we’ve got,” Everett said, sighing. “We don’t know about Kepler, everyone’s tired, but we’ve still got a job to do. Whoever’s pulling the strings here will be spooked, if they’re not in the wind already. And if they are, we need to chase down this lead before the trail goes totally cold, see what turns up.”
Volchec swallowed. “Don’t know that we’re in any fit state,” she muttered. “I’m waiting for Greenway to get wind of all this. He’s keeping tabs, so I’m sure it won’t be long. He’s probably going to shut us down — have us court martialed. Ejected.”
“All the more reason to get this done now. If we can pull something out of it, we’ll at least have something to stand up with,” Everett said, squeezing her shoulder. She was strong, and it was needed right now.
Volchec looked at me and then Everett, and then back. “You want to do this?” She seemed unsure. All of her confidence had been drained away.
It was a loaded question. I didn’t want to do anything except put my head on the table like Mac was, but I knew Everett was right, and the last thing that I could bear the thought of was sitting there waiting for Volchec to get word that Alice’s charred corpse had been checked in to one of the morgues. “Yeah,” I said to Volchec, nodding. “I think it’s the best thing we can do.”
She pulled her hand up to her mouth and gnawed on her thumbnail with straight white teeth. She spat a chunk of it onto the dusty floor and sighed, dropping her hands. “Fine, but stay in touch. Keep me updated.”
Everett nodded. “Great. Red,” she said, looking at me, “get some rest. We move in thirty.” She spoke with the seasoned confidence of someone who’d been doing this sort of thing for a lot longer than I had. She’d been deployed on missions from the time she transitioned into the Ground Corps, and she’d been in the field a lot longer than she’d been out. Slipping back into that mode of thinking seemed easy for her. Her quiet confidence was reassuring. I didn’t know what she’d be like on a mission, but I didn’t have any doub
ts.
I pushed down off the spool and headed toward a pile of rolls of what looked like insulation all stacked up in the corner.
Everett grabbed her coat and zipped it up to the throat. “I’ll make a quick run back to the Tilt-wing. Be ready when I get back.” She pointed at me authoritatively, likely knowing that if she gave me any wiggle room, I’d lose my nerve and just curl up like Mac. I waved in acknowledgment and slumped down onto the rolls. They were dusty, but soft. They’d do for a quick nap.
A blast of cold air told me that Everett had slipped out of the back door, and then I heard it clang shut.
I breathed quietly in the gloom for a minute or two before Fish appeared over me. I opened an eye and stared up at him. “What?” I asked, with a little less patience than I’d meant.
“I’m…” he started, fins shuddering, “coming with… you.”
I sighed but didn’t have the energy to argue. “Fine.”
Two hours later, we were standing in front of the Sazaaron Spaceport. It was in the middle of one of the residential sections of the city, and took up four city blocks. The front half was a domed structure with an arched ceiling, wide flat-tiled floors, and space for thousands of people.
The rear right half was occupied by three huge cylinders, sitting in the ground at forty-five degree angles and jutting into the sky. Passengers passed through ticket gates and descended escalators into the bowels of the ports before boarding their ships. Then the cylinders would be sealed and the huge ships fired into orbit.
When they were coming into land, the cylinders would open up to form angled pads that would catch the ships as they came in. On the left at the back was the commercial depot, where smaller trade and merchant ships came in to land. Except nothing had landed or taken off tonight. Flights were still suspended on account of the weather.
There was a spaceport on Telmareen every hundred kilometers, and it was a rare sight to see one so empty — still, it was needed considering what we were about to do.
The rain was falling in a thin drizzle and the storm had thundered itself out. The lightning had stopped and the low-hanging clouds had dumped all their heavy rain and lifted themselves into the light, beginning to thin in the ever-present warmth there. Everett stared up at them outlined in gold and squinted. We were just at the point in the city where the sun clung to the horizon.
The spaceport was aglow with neons, but the streets were quiet. I checked my watch and realized that it was the middle of the night. Most people would be sleeping, and the ones who weren’t were still shutting themselves away from what was left of the storm. We had the spaceport practically to ourselves, which was good, because I couldn’t shake off the nervous sweat clinging to my palms.
“Ready?” Everett asked.
I took a breath. “Sure,” I said, though I definitely wasn’t. Nothing had been straightforward so far, and somehow, I didn’t think this would be either.
She led, pushing through the middle set of humanoid doors, which sat next to the much larger ones suited for bigger species, and into the huge entrance hall. It took up most of the large domed building and was as big as one of the hangars on the Regent Falmouth — when it was flying, that was.
Our footfalls seemed to echo through the empty room. On both sides, banks of lockers stretched out and cafes and bars sat shuttered between them. Rows of benches cut through the lobby in long, polished lines, and all along the back, arches of bright stone separated the gates that ushered people down to the gangways, except they were all closed.
Suspended above them was a holographic projection that slowly circled, displaying the words “ALL PORTS CLOSED — ALL SERVICES SUSPENDED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER.”
We stopped twenty steps in and looked around. In the entire space, there were no more than a few dozen people, all dotted around, of a couple different species. Most were sitting on benches, sleeping, or perched on luggage near the arches.
There were two people cleaning in the middle of the floor, a droid just beyond them buffing the section of tiles they’d just mopped. Otherwise, it was just a couple of security guards milling by the doors and near the arches on the far side. Security seemed slack in the absence of any incoming or outgoing flights — though I didn’t think that’d last.
Everett nodded to me and I nodded back, peeling off to the right side. She went left and Fish went with her, stopping next to the doors and leaning back against the wall. He folded his arms and stayed there, staring aimlessly into the room.
The guards on the other side of the entrance watched him for a minute, but then got bored and went back to their conversation. Telmareen was a melting pot of species. An Eshellite ducking in out of the rain wasn’t anything to raise their suspicion. And though it looked like that’s what he was doing, he was actually watching our backs in case anything went down.
Communication between Everett and me was easier, anyway, and if we opened the locker and found something we weren’t expecting, and it attracted some attention, we figured we’d have more chance of explaining it away than Fish would. And that was just it — we had no idea what we’d find when we opened the locker up. We had the combination, we knew we were in the right place, but we didn’t know which locker it was.
I strode toward the right-hand side of the room and sighed, feeling the biometric scanner heavy on my belt and my Arcram stiff against my ribs. I swallowed and approached the first locker.
They were three high — knee height, waist height, and chest height, and were about half a meter by half a meter wide and high. I couldn’t fathom what was going to be in there — files, pictures… Barva’s severed head. It was anyone’s guess and all we had to go on was an emptied-out garage and a combination scratched into steel with the point of a knife.
I sighed, trying not to look at the thousands of lockers on my side, and pulled out my scanner. At least a portion of them were out of reach, far too high up and large for a humanoid to get at. I could discount those and focus on what was in reach. Everett had already set them up to read the signatures coded into the lockers.
All I had to do was hold them up to the pad, wait for the name to pop up, and let her know when I found Barva’s. I looked over my shoulder at Everett, a dot on the other side of the room, doing the same, and corrected myself. If. If I found his locker. “Fucking hell,” I muttered, flicking the scanner on with my thumb.
I bent over and held it against the first pad next to my knees, watching as some random, barely readable name and a series of numbers and symbols appeared under it — their Federation genetic signifier, Everett had called it. That first one was a no go, and the next six hundred proved not to be the right ones either.
I checked my watch, my eyes heavy and bloodshot, arms aching from holding the scanner up for hours. Another random name flashed up and I let it fall to my side. I swallowed, my throat dry and scratchy, and turned to look at Everett. She was sitting against the lockers on the other side of the room, head back.
She’d been moving much better, I’d noticed, since we picked up our rigs. She’d dipped away when Alice and I had headed up to Medical, and when she got back to the ship seemed like she’d been completely healed. I hadn’t had any time to ask her about it. I made a note to, wondering if they’d done anything to her on the space station. I didn’t really know much about the Federation’s medical procedures.
There were thousands of levels of clearance for as many sub-divisions of Federation technology, but who knew, maybe she’d just tell me if I asked. I let my eyes drift from her across the hall. Fish was still near the door and seemed relatively unphased. I stared at him and wondered what it was an Eshellite thought about — what they were like on the inside. I’d barely gotten two words out of Fish, even with our chips.
I stood there for a second, thinking I should spend more time getting to know him — getting to know everyone, considering what we were doing. And then I realized that I was just procrastinating and that there were still hundreds of lockers to scan, and th
at we didn’t have a lot of time before the place started getting busy again.
The weather had cleared and the sign above the arches had changed to display the words “NORMAL SERVICE WILL RESUME SHORTLY,” and even now people were starting to funnel into the main hall.
I let my eyes rove back until they came to rest on one of the benches level with me. There was a guy sitting there, reading something off a pad. He was looking at me, but as our eyes met, he looked down, coughed and shifted. I narrowed my eyes, studying him for a second.
I shook it off. I was just procrastinating again. I went back to the lockers and knelt to scan the next one. There wasn’t anything off about him. And yet…
I turned back to look over my shoulder and he quickly looked down at his pad again. I bit my lip, trying to figure what it was that was striking an off note. I looked at the others in the room. Moving with bags, or in suits — going on vacation, or traveling for business. And yet, this guy wasn’t either. He was in a dark jacket that looked loose, but was covering what I could see was a well-built musculature. He was human, but looked comfortable, sitting back, looking at his screen. He wasn’t wearing anything formal, and he didn’t have a bag with him either — no luggage. Everyone else was either sleeping, or looked grouchy, having been forced to wait hours for their flights. But the guy in the jacket was contented. I stared at him for a while longer and after a while he looked up, saw that I was staring at him, and then immediately looked back down again.
I turned back to the lockers and touched my finger to the dot behind my ear. “Everett.”
“Yeah,” she said, her tone dreary. “What’s up?”
“Probably nothing. Fish, you on the line?”
A gurgle rang through.
“You see this guy sitting behind me? Dark jacket, no luggage?”