by David Ryker
The Polgarian wanded her down, stopping at her left knee when the device started wailing. He took a step back and rested a wary hand on the butt of his gun. “Show me, now,” he commanded gruffly. Everyone paused in the line and watched. I was standing at the glass partition staring at Everett’s back, my heart beating against my ribs. Had she tried to sneak something in?
Everett sighed and reached down, rolling her trouser leg up until her shin and calf were exposed. She knocked on the skin, the bone thudding dully under her knuckles. “Prosthesis,” she said blandly. I never knew. You couldn’t tell, that was for sure.
“Paperwork?” the Polgarian demanded.
She reached carefully into her jacket with her fingers, not to spook him, and pulled a piece of documentation out. She held it up for him and he glanced at it, his grip on the butt of his pistol loosening. After a second he gave it back to her and waved her through.
She appeared through the tunnel and held out her hand for her Arcram. I gave it to her.
“Since when have you had a prosthetic?” I asked, surprised.
“Since Draven — or since 63-40, I should say.” She sighed. “They did what they could on the Mansoon, but it needed replacing. Volchec got me taken care of when we went to pick up your rigs. The whole place was automated, but damn if those mechanical arms weren’t handy with a scalpel.” She strapped the Arcram on, laughing to herself. “Top of the line, too — tungsten carbide alloy.”
“Sounds great,” I said awkwardly.
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Yeah — the tibia wasn’t knitting properly. Too much damage, unfortunately. They splinted it on the Mansoon, but recommended that I have it replaced — would be better, and easier. They offered to do it, but Volchec said that she’d get it done on 63-40, that it’d be better.” Everett secured the pistol against her ribs. “And you know what, she was right. It’s as good as new — better, in fact.”
“I’m glad,” I said, smiling. “But why didn’t you say anything?”
She raised an eyebrow and shrugged before walking off toward the end of the corridor. “You never asked.”
We headed for the one with the humans in it and Everett folded her arms, taking a position behind a big guy with long hair. “This might take a while,” she muttered, looking at me. “And then we’ll have to fill out some paperwork, file for a temporary trading license.”
“I always knew the Mech Corps was where the exciting stuff happened,” I said, sighing.
She cracked a smile and laughed a little. “Trust me, Red, after a few years, excitement will be the last thing on your mind. This life gets old, fast. But not many of us do — get old, I mean.”
“I don’t know if I want to be old,” I muttered, looking at the next line over, where an old humanoid with pink skin and thick tendrils of hair was hunched over a cane.
“Guess you never know unless you try.” She shrugged. “Getting old means you’ve survived, and that’s always a bonus.”
I turned to her now. “You could always just make a run for it.”
“Make a run for it?” She raised an eyebrow. “And where would you go?”
I pursed my lips. “I don’t know — somewhere with lots of water. Beaches seem like they’re nice.”
“Too much sand.” Everett shook her head. “Too dry, and gritty. It gets everywhere, and saltwater stings your eyes.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded. “Give me somewhere quiet with mountains, trees, grass… Blue skies and rivers. Birds singing in trees, and no one trying to kill you for a thousand clicks.”
“Sounds nice.”
She smiled, miles away. “Yeah. I saw somewhere like it once. Thought, wow, now this is something I could look at every day.”
“What happened to it?”
She laughed abjectly and shrugged. “Same thing as happens to every planet the Federation wants but doesn’t get given. The whole place got blown apart. We were pulled out of the ops-zone and they hit the defending force with an orbital strike. Put a crater the size of the Athena in the ground. Obliterated the entire valley.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. But you know, couple of millennia and some of the trees will grow back — maybe the crater will fill with river water and become a lake. Who knows.”
I smirked at that. “You’ve seen a lot of worlds?”
“Enough to know that there’s nowhere that’s out of the Federation’s reach.”
I gritted my teeth. “I don’t believe that.”
“No?” She looked at me. “And why not?”
“Because if I do, then any hope I have of ever getting out, getting away — finding somewhere like that, is all pointless.”
She kept her eyes on me. “It’s not pointless, Red. Life isn’t about happily-ever-afters — it’s about moments. Taking them while you can. You spend too much time worrying about what happens next and you lose sight of the now.”
She was hammering me with wisdom. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so stupid as I did that day. I just hoped some of it was working into my skull.
We shuffled up to the desk and a droid with a plastic face vaguely reminiscent of a kabuki mask stared up at us. “How may I help you?” it asked, voice bland and without any sort of intonation.
“Temporary trade permit. Escort permits — two of them. For Mech,” she added.
“What is the nature of your trade?”
“Rare machine parts,” Everett answered sternly.
“Duration of visit?”
“Two days.”
“Processing,” it said. “Identification, please. If you are a Federation citizen, you may place your arm in the scanner.”
Everett kept her sleeve firmly down and reached into her jacket instead, pulling out an ID card. She handed it to the droid, and he pushed it into a scanner on his side of the desk. He read something off the screen, and then typed on his keyboard before reaching for a rubber stamp. He scooped up some paper off a printer and thumped the stamp down on each piece before putting them on the counter. I stared at them, at the name across the top of the Merchant’s License, and noted that it wasn’t anything close to Demeter Everett.
Everett nodded to him and he stared blankly back. “Enjoy your visit to Notia.”
She folded the permits up and pushed them into her breast pocket, turning away.
“Paper?” I asked. “A little antiquated, isn’t it?”
She chuckled. “The whole place is antiquated. They don’t have any biometric scanners, nothing’s on the network — it’s the perfect place for a scumbag to come and hide. The Trading Collective are a lot more liberal with the privacy of their citizens — which is good for them, especially if they have stuff to hide.”
“And for us, when we want to pose as a merchant and her bodyguards.”
She grinned at me. “Exactly. Now come on, we should get back to the ship before Volchec decides to have you skinned, stuffed, and mounted.”
I sighed. “Volchec really doesn’t like me very much, does she?”
Everett laughed. “No, not really.”
13
Everett had gotten two escort passes for us. Mac’s HAM was really wide in comparison to either Greg or Alice’s Alpha, as well as being painfully slow, and Fish’s Panther could turn invisible on demand, so wasting a pass on him seemed stupid. In consideration of that, Alice and I were chosen to guard Everett. We were also being used as pack-mules.
The freight elevator trundled downwards. Between us, Everett looked like a mouse. She had her arms folded, her foot tapping impatiently. She was tense. I would have been, too. We were heading into the lion’s den, for one — if the Trading Collective figured out who we were and what we were doing there, we’d be done for. Secondly, if the Free had been installed there, and they’d put out a message about the crazed mercs cum Federation spec ops pilots that had raided the Telmareen tower, then they might recognize us too, and start some shit. And if that happened, Everett was unprotected — at
least in comparison to us. And thirdly, which I was aware of, but no one else was, was the fact that Everett was venturing deeper into the place she’d once called home — where she’d grown up as an abandoned orphan under an assumed name. She said that the guy she’d bought her identity from had aged her up two years, which meant that she would have been sixteen when she enlisted, not eighteen. Hell, I still looked practically the same as I did when I was sixteen, and Everett probably didn’t look that much different. So that meant that if she ran into someone she knew in her youth, they might recognize her — what’s worse is that if they did, they’d know her by another name. And worse, somewhere on Notia was a shop run by someone called Everett, the original owner of her name — and a shop that she’d robbed before she enlisted. If he recognized her… Well, I didn’t want to think about that, but as I stared down through Greg’s screen at the top of her head, I knew that whatever shit went down, I’d have her back. No questions asked.
I sat back in the chair and sighed. “How about some music?” I asked out loud.
“Whatever you would like, James.” Greg had accepted me back into the pilot’s chair, but I didn’t think he’d forgiven me. I didn’t think that he had a choice in the matter. If an AI was refusing to be piloted over something like this, then I guessed they’d just be deactivated and replaced. The Federation would brand him as a ‘faulty unit’ or something equally as vague, and then toss his core in the incinerator. It was easier than asking what was the matter, and humanoid rights definitely didn’t extend to AI cores. I remembered from the classes at the Academy, brief as they were, that AI that had gained self-awareness could qualify for rights if they fulfilled certain criteria, the most important of which was that they had a registered identity and proof of ownership of their body.
Some had been emancipated, some had run away — but in that module, they told us that there was a planet out near the dark zone that was entirely inhabited by exiled AIs living in an independent colony — something like a utopian society. Except they didn’t like biologs — biological entities, that is — and didn’t allow them on the planet. So much for utopian.
Either way, Greg’s lack of autonomy prevented him from refusing my advances, and he was being as cooperative as I could have hoped for, considering what had happened. On the flip side, he’d lost all of his warmth. It would have been easy for me to just trade him in for a new one and start over, but I wouldn’t do that with a person, and I wasn’t about to do it to him, either. We’d been through some nasty stuff already, so I kept telling myself this was just a bump in the road.
The elevator leveled out and the doors hauled themselves open. Everett went first, and Alice and I followed, our arms both full of the bags of parts that Everett had brought onto the Tilt-wing the day before.
“This way,” she said, leading us down the long circular walkway that sat beneath the promenade above. Pillars stretched around on our left, beyond them the teeming streets of Notia. We were on the main causeway that circled it, letting people move more swiftly, without having to squeeze past shops and stalls and cafes bustling with people. We were heading for one of the main bazaars, where traveling merchants came to peddle their goods. And as far as anyone else was concerned, we were just the same.
Everett threaded her way through the crowd in the walkway like a cat, light on her feet. Alice and I had a little more trouble, constantly having to wait for gaps, or for groups of people to move, for larger species to make their way past, or for other Mech to get out of our paths. We were carrying a lot of equipment — all borrowed from the Federation workshops on the Athena, to keep appearances up — and so had to be careful not to drop any of it. Greg’s arms were massive, and held it without trouble, but where I had feedback in the gloves, I didn’t in my arms, and had to eyeball the balance of them. I couldn’t feel any weight above my wrists, and had to keep adjusting to make sure a few thousand credits’ worth of gear didn’t plunge off the pile and crash to the ground, or land on someone’s head. Volchec hadn’t come out and said it, but I had the feeling I was on thin ice. And more than that, I wanted to prove to myself that I could do better. That I could be better.
The Trading Collective’s municipal peacekeeping force made use of Mech for security, like most places, it seemed. They were painted in red and black, with the same spiral logo on their fronts that we’d seen on the floor upstairs. They were armed heavily and patrolled like wolves, moving in little packs of three or four. Volchec had told us to keep our weapons securely holstered at all times and to not make any sudden moves around them. Though carrying weapons on Notia was perfectly legal, the municipal force took no shit from anyone, and no prisoners either. They were twitchy, and if they fired, they didn’t stop until what they were shooting at was down for good. Volchec had explained that in detail, and Everett had confirmed it. It’s what kept everyone in line there. Notia had notoriously empty jails, and famously full morgues. She’d asked that we confirm out loud that we understood, and made sure I was unequivocally sure of it. Twice.
Alice waited for a group of Trading Collective Mech to sidle by and then pushed on after Everett. I brought up the rear, listening as Greg shuffled through a bunch of songs he knew I didn’t really like. He was being careful to keep my favorites out of the queue. I didn’t have any definitive proof, so I was hardly in a position to accuse, but I had an inkling. It was pretty passive aggressive, I thought, but if it made him feel better, then it was alright by me. I figured I owed him that much, at least.
We reached the bazaar after about fifteen minutes and threaded our way over to our stall. It was a metal frame split into two parts. On the left was a counter to serve humanoids, and on the right was a ladder that led up to a raised platform and counter to serve larger species. Behind was a huge locker for the storage of goods. Everett went around the counter and spread her hands across it, sighing. She stared up at us and motioned for the bags to be stowed behind the counter. We did so, and she started opening them up and pulling out various machine parts — all of which looked totally alien to me, but no doubt fit inside ships or Mech in some fashion.
I reached up and popped my hatch, walking to the corner of the booth, where space was left specifically for the merchants’ entourage. All around us, merchants, humanoid and other, were peddling their wares. Some had human bodyguards, others had Polgarians — there were Wints, some species I didn’t recognize, and of course, plenty of Mechs, both privately owned and Trading Collective.
The hatch opened and I clambered out and down, anxious to get Everett’s update on what was happening next. Over the last few days, I’d come pretty close to losing everything more than a few times, so I’d promised myself that if anything went wrong this time, that it wouldn’t be my fault. I was determined to prove to everyone that I wasn’t just some kid who’d fluked into this. Telmareen was our first mission, and after that, even if they’d wanted to get rid of me, they couldn’t have. Risking kicking me out of the fold meant risking me talking. I mean, yeah, it was my idea to clip Kera and her gang and get our story straight, but they would have come to that conclusion on their own soon enough. I didn’t really want my major contribution to the team to be that I’d come up with the idea of killing some people, and then had done it. It was necessary, but hardly revelatory, and as things went on, I kept feeling like the odd one out. A loose end that was about to get snipped off. I had to change that. This time I was actually going to be a valuable team player.
My boots hit the ground and I started helping Everett unpack. We ferried chunks of metal back and forth from the bags to the counter and arranged them in a way that I thought looked decent. It obviously didn’t, though, as Everett stopped carrying them to rearrange them instead. I took over the manual labor after that.
I brought over something that was a lot heavier than it looked — some type of turbine or engine part — and set it down carefully. “So,” I said, watching the crowds ease past. “What’s the plan?”
Everett heaved a chunk
of metal onto its end and rotated it so that an inlet was facing the passing crowds. I had no clue whether they were actually rare machine parts, or if it was just old junk. Either way, people were starting to stop to check our stall out. They were a mixture of races, big and small, dressed in a range of clothes from long decorated saris and dresses to jeans and boots, and everything in between. I was in civilian clothes, too — boots and a fur hooded jacket to go with Everett’s woolen cap and coat. Whatever planet our cover said we came from, it was cold — that’s how it looked, anyway. Alice was still stalwart in her Alpha, not moving, but she was dressed the same.
Everett rested on the counter and scanned the passing faces. “We’ll need to find Smith, that much is for sure. I may have some old contacts I can look up, ask whether they’ve heard anything. It’s a longshot, but we don’t have much else to go on. Otherwise, we’ll just ask around. I don’t want to start flashing his picture to everyone, but if it comes to it…” She shrugged. “The Federation’s not giving us any support here, because they aren’t here. They’re staying well away, and if we get caught, we’re not working for them, and definitely not here on their orders.”
“Same old, same old, then?” I smirked a little, bringing Everett another chunk of steel.
She smiled back. “Same old, same old.” The piece of gearing clanked onto the top and she sighed. “You guys okay to man the booth while I take a look around?”
My first instinct was to say no, that I wasn’t okay with that, because my first thought was that it wasn’t exciting enough, and that I’d find it tough to prove myself doing that. But then I realized that was exactly the mode of thinking I wanted to get out of. “Sure. I can do that.”
“Well, you and Alice.” She laughed a little. “You think I’d just leave it to you?”
“Ouch.” I threw my hand to my chest. “That hurts, Dem.”