“Bad don’t even cover it,” I said with feeling. “I never, ever want to get into that kind of mess again.”
“If that’s how you feel, maybe you should quit flying.” Rex was only half-joking.
I sipped my beer. “I’ve thought about it, but what else would I do?”
“Get a regular job?”
“Sure. It’s always been my dream to work security on the Strip, or sell insurance.”
“You could find something uptown.”
“Until they find out that I turn into a wolf from time to time.”
“Goddamn normies,” Rex said. I half-shrugged, not wholly agreeing but understanding why he felt that way.
It’s not that the normies hate us. One on one, they’re great. But they expect us, in general, to behave like animals, and unfortunately the statistics back them up. Hiring algos are based on statistics, so that shuts Shifters out of most occupations right there. That’s why I started my own company. And having clawed out a niche for myself in the industry, I knew that I could never bring myself to sell the business I had built up with my blood, sweat, and tears. One day, sure, I planned to step back from off-planet operations … but right now, I just wanted to manage my risks downwards.
I tried to explain all this to Rex, but I didn’t get far before he cut me off. “Sure, sure. Fact is, you love flying. Irene’s the same. If I had a GC for every time she told me she would be happy to quit but, we’d be rich.”
I snorted beer out of my nose. “Damn you, Seagrave.”
Rex chuckled. “If she wasn’t flying with you, she’d be flying with someone else that ain’t so concerned about the lives of his crew. So you can’t quit, anyway.”
I fet honored by his confidence in me, although it came at an awkward time, considering that I had just lost a crew member. “Well, that brings me to what I wanted to talk about. I lost my admin out there. She was young, idealistic. A real sweet girl. And she was a normie.”
“Why did you even hire a normie in the first place?”
This question made me uncomfortable. “To prove that we don’t discriminate? Or just ‘cause I liked her.”
“Oh yeah,” Rex said.
“Not in that way.”
“Sure.”
“I never laid a finger on her. Swear to God. Ask Irene.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Rex said. “I know you wouldn’t. I’m just messing with you.” Grinning, he drained his lager and crumpled the can. “So you’re looking for a replacement.”
“That’s right,” I said in relief. “I wondered if you knew anyone.”
“A Shifter, this time.”
“Yup,” I confirmed, even as I wondered if it was the right call. I may have hired Kimmie because I liked her, but at the bottom of that was my dislike of Shifter-only environments. It can get a bit … intense. Kimmie had played an understated role of peacemaker on board, averting explosions just by being there. All the claw marks on the walls of the St. Clare’s lounge came from before her time.
“You want someone who can handle themselves,” Rex said.
“Exactly. That’s why I figured I’d ask you.” Rex knew the kind of people who could handle themselves. You can’t get that from an algorithm.
“Guy or girl?”
“Don’t matter.” This wasn’t quite the truth, either. I knew that Irene didn’t want to be the only woman on board, with MF hovering around and ogling her. But I didn’t want to express a preference for a woman in case Rex started ragging on me again.
“Well, let me think.” Rex got out his phone and started scrolling and muttering to it. I lay back on my lounger and sipped my lager. Lucy and Mia body-surfed on the tiny, curling waves. Groups of alien tourists wandered along the sand. Parents watched over frolicking children. Out in the bay, Shifter sea-lions and dolphins gave tourists rides. Flying cars streamed along the skyway that crossed the bay, looking like jewel-colored beetles in the sky. Right now, I felt like I’d be happy to just stay on Ponce de Leon forever … and then a cop car darted through the skyway in pursuit of some speeder, reminding me that my safety here was an illusion.
“OK, here’s a few possibles for you,” Rex said. He sent them to my phone. “The best candidate might be this guy, Robbie. He’s on my rugby team. He doesn’t have any experience in space, but he’s smarter than your average Shifter. He’d be a quick study.”
“I’ll call him right now,” I said. But then the girls dashed out of the sea, goosefleshed, with sand on their legs and inside their bathing-suits. We got them towelled off and into their clothes. Rex produced fizzy drinks. Then Kit needed his diaper changed. Yes, he still wore diapers at the age of five.
All four of us were wrestling with his powerful little arms and legs when footsteps crunched on the sand.
“Something stinks to high heck,” said a deep and unpleasantly familiar voice. “Oh, it’s the kid. Heh, heh, Starrunner, thought it was you.”
I looked up into the face of my worst enemy.
18
Buzz Parsec was a fellow independent freighter captain. Naturally, we hated each other’s guts.
I’m pretty sure Parsec wasn’t his real name. Heck, Starrunner isn’t my real name, either. It suited him, though. He had a bullet-shaped head on a body so bulked-out, he made Rex look positively slender. A layer of fat covered the muscle, and a pelt of dark hair covered his chest and back. His wifebeater and football shorts didn’t hide enough of him for polite company.
Parsec seldom went anywhere alone, and I recognized the equally sizable gent loitering a few meters away as one of the Kodiak twins, either Larry or Gary. I could never tell them apart. Both of them were bears, as was Parsec himself. See what I mean about people selecting their animal forms for psychological reasons? Fat, bad-tempered, territorial—even if you didn’t know that folks called this crew the Bad-News Bears, you’d be able to guess.
Squinting up at Parsec, I said, “Ever thought about going on a diet? Your personal mass allowance has got to be eating into your profit margins.”
He scowled—well, he was already scowling, but he scowled more—and plied the electric fan he held in one fat fist. He was sweating heavily from walking his bulk around in the heat. “Worry about your own profit margins, Starrunner. Mine are just fine.”
Unfortunately, I figured that was true. His ship was twice the size of mine, and he took more risks than I was comfortable with, principally in the area of customs avoidance. Not to put too fine a point on it, Parsec was a smuggler. He should have been in jail. He had come close to it a couple of times, but it hadn’t made him change his ways. It just made him more sickeningly smug.
“Well, hey there,” he added, to Rex. “If it ain’t the King of the Beasts.” He made the sobriquet into a taunt. A low, leonine growl crept out of Rex’s throat, and I tensed.
But Rex had more sense than I did in some ways. He slapped Kit on his now clean-diapered rump. “Go play.” Kit trotted off towards the water, and Rex followed him.
I rose to my feet, putting myself between the bears and the girls. As I stood up, I saw a black sub-limo illegally idling on Shoreside, its tinted windows seeming to stare across the beach at me. That would be Parsec’s ride. He must have spotted us and stopped on purpose to say hello. How sweet.
“What can I do for you today, Parsec?” I had a tricky line to walk. I wanted to get rid of him without scaring the girls. “Wanna borrow a bathing-suit?” I gestured to the ones Lucy and Mia had just taken off, which were hanging over Rex’s lounger. “Might not fit …”
The girls giggled at the thought of this enormous man squeezing into a little girl’s bathing-suit. Parsec surprised me by reminding me that he had a human side. He played along: he picked up Mia’s bathing-suit and held it in front of his chest, lumbering from foot to foot like a performing bear. The girls laughed louder than ever. “Try it on, try it on!”
“Naw,” Parsec said. “I ain’t in the mood for a swim today. Too hot. Matter of fact, I wanted to talk to your dad.
” It wasn’t too hard to tell which child was mine. Parsec focused on brown-haired, sturdy Lucy, not blonde, sprite-like Mia. “Is Mike your dad?”
“Yes!” she said, smiling openly, under the mistaken impression that Parsec was nice. Maybe I had bent over backwards too far to avoid unpleasantness.
“What’s your name?”
I intervened. “Well, it’s good to see you around, Parsec.” I gestured towards his car. “Wouldn’t want you to get a ticket.”
“Never got a ticket in S-Town yet.” Parsec fanned himself and looked out to sea. We could see the blue hump of Space Island at the mouth of the harbor. A ship was taking off on a pillar of fire, pale against the afternoon sky. The rumble carried faintly across the water. “Heard you had some trouble on your way home yesterday.”
“It was nothing.” Of course, that’s why he was here. He was fishing for any information he might be able to use against me. There were only two Shifter captains flying out of Ponce de Leon: me and him. We were in competition with the normie captains, too, and there was enough business to go around. But Parsec didn’t see it that way, and I, too, had often fantasized about the longed-for day when he wound up in jail and I inherited the less distasteful portion of his customer base.
Now the balance of probabilities seemed to be tilting the other way: I was closer to the edge than he was. I had to find out how much he knew about my troubles. “How’d you hear about that?”
“Got sources,” Parsec said.
“Yeah?”
“Heck, it was on the news,” Kodiak made his first contribution to the conversation. “Spaceship crashes in the Tunjle? It was on all the feeds.”
“I missed it,” I said. “What did they say?”
“That it crashed,” Parsec said.
“I coulda told you that,” I said.
Parsec glanced around, an unnecessary move as there was no one else nearby. He did it on purpose to telegraph the information value of what he was about to say. “Is it true they were Travellers?”
“Now that I couldn’t tell you,” I said, too quickly. Parsec smirked. Inwardly, I kicked myself. My verbal flinch had confirmed his guess. But it couldn’t have been a guess. No one would guess Travellers, not in the Ponce de Leon system. He really did have sources. Maybe even in the police. It had crossed my mind in the past that that might be one reason he displayed such agility at staying out of jail.
Well, so he knew I had tangled with Travellers; so what? D’Alencon had already given me his blessing. If anything, it made me look good to have struck a blow for the defense of our planet. It was more than Parsec had ever done. Recalling d’Alencon’s words, I said, “If you have any information about the Travellers, don’t keep it to yourself. ”
Parsec’s eyes went little and bearish. “Why would I know anything about those scumbags? Unlike you, I never been married to one.”
I inhaled sharply. Of course, he had been acquainted with Sophia, in bygone days when he and I were friendlier than we were now. He had witnessed my anguish when she went over to the Travellers. But he wouldn’t dare to talk about that in front of Lucy … would he?
I turned to the girls. “Let’s pack up.” I didn’t care if Parsec took offense at me for cutting our friendly chat short.
As I tossed stuff into Rex’s beach bag, Parsec moved around me. He bent down and smiled at Lucy. “You’re a cutie,” he said.
She shrank towards me, having picked up by now on my ill will towards Parsec.
“What’s your name?”
“Lucy,” she whispered, speaking when she was spoken to, like Nanny B and I had taught her.
Parsec did not really know how to talk to children. He said, “Good, good,” and straightened up. “She’s gonna be a heartbreaker,” he said to me. “You look after her, Starrunner.”
I gritted my teeth and fantasized about Shifting into my wolf and clawing Parsec’s back to bloody ribbons as he and the Kodiak twin finally shambled away.
Although Lucy was dragging on my arm, I did not take my eyes off the bears until they reached their car.
“Daddy! What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?” I said, watching the sub-limo disappear into the Shoreside traffic.
“What’s a heartbreaker?”
I smiled in relief. She had not picked up on Parsec’s reference to her mother. “When you grow up, lots of boys will want to date you, and your daddy will break their legs.”
“So it should be leg-breaker!” said Mia. She was a year younger than Lucy. No one had called her a heartbreaker, but she took for granted that it applied to her, too. She had her mother’s confidence, and a bubbliness that was all her own. She twirled around. “I’m a leg-breaker, a leg-breaker!” She rushed up to her father as he returned, hauling Kit, and karate-kicked his legs.
“Sorry about that,” Rex said to me. “If I had to look at his ugly face one more minute, I’d’ve …” He trailed off, shaking his head.
“You would’ve broken his legs!” Mia said. “Daddy’s a leg-breaker, a leg-breaker!”
Rex and I looked at each other and roared. The funny part was that “leg-breaker” was in fact a fairly apt description of Rex’s former line of work. He and Irene had even worked with Parsec a time or two. Of course, that was ancient history now. Rex’s reaction to Parsec proved it.
We picked up pizza on the way home. Irene was not best pleased to have us all pile into their apartment, bringing pungent odors of garlic and pepperoncini, in the middle of her me time. My weapons officer had a thing for meditation with scented candles. She would draw the curtains and put cloudwhale chants on the sound system. Me, I preferred three fingers of cask-aged bourbon. To each their own.
19
I was still mulling uneasily over the conversation with Parsec when I went into work the next morning. The office of Uni-Ex Shipping was on the eighth floor of an old building near Mag-Ingat Harbor. This side of the city, straggling out along the eastern headland, feels like a whole different world. It’s industrial, lightly populated, tuned into the relentless rhythm of Cluster-scale commercial logistics. Road and rail and sea and space connections all meet where the East Causeway to Space Island vaults over the deep-sea harbor. There are other continents on Ponce de Leon, and other cities in Tunja, although I can think of no reason to bother visiting them. Dirtside freight mostly moves by sea, owing to the near-total lack of overland networks. Notice I said near-total. There are some roads in the interior, serving remote colony towns. The truckers who drive those routes had my respect. Their job made mine look like a walk in the park.
Our office overlooked the main freight railyard, where cargoes are loaded on and off the mag-lev that shuttles back and forth across East Causeway. It was noisy if we opened the windows, and stifling if we closed them. I preferred the noise. Mary, our receptionist, preferred the heat. She, being a mainstream human and worth her weight in gold, usually won. She had pictures of her teenage children on her desk, and a phone manner that made us sound like a much bigger company.
I spent the morning in a self-imposed bubble of normality, speaking on the phone and v-mailing with customers, juggling shipments for our next run, and in between times checking in with Dolph. He was out at the spaceport, dispatching our cargoes from Gvm Uye Sachttra on the final stages of their interstellar journey. Some of the stuff went by rail across the causeway to the very same freight yard outside my window, where it would be sent onwards by truck, plane, or ship. Other cargoes were picked up by their owners at Freight Terminal 1028. We carried a lot of small shipments. It wasn’t worth putting them on the mag-lev, so customers often chose to pick them up and clear customs themselves.
Dolph said, “So, about the toy fairies.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“Yep. Hang on.”
The picture tilted as Dolph moved over to the mountain of cargo which had now migrated out of the St. Clare’s hold and onto the floor of the hangar. The mountain was smaller now, but still considerable
. Dolph would have spent all yesterday afternoon and this morning shifting it. He was stripped to the waist, his sixpack gleaming with sweat. I ruefully considered that I spent all too many days sitting on my rear, making phone calls. I was in decent shape, but that was due to Shifting, not exercise.
Dolph had placed the crates of toy fairies nearest the entrance of the hangar. He vaulted onto the nearest one and sat on it. “The supplier is a company called Mujin Inc. They’re located at 12100 Bonsucesso Tower.”
“That’s a nice building,” Martin’s voice shouted from out of shot. “There’s a patisserie on the mall level that does the best croissants on the planet.”
“Maybe so, but guess who owns Mujin Inc,” Dolph said. “I had to do some digging for this.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” I said.
“Tomas Feirweather.”
“Who’s that?”
“Better known as Canuck.”
“Whoa. OK, that’s interesting.”
Canuck was a skinny ginger bastard whose animal form looked like an oversized fox, although he insisted it was a cinnamon bear. He was known to be one of Buzz Parsec’s less savory groupies. In fact he’d gotten banned from Grizzly’s for fighting. That takes some doing.
“Since when does he own a toy company?” I said.
“It’s not a manufacturer, as far as I can tell. In fact, their internet portal says it’s a taxi company.”
“A taxi company?”
“Yeah, and I had to look up their articles of incorporation to even find that. It’s not on the portal. It’s like they don’t want anyone to find out what they do. But I do know one thing about that company …”
“Canuck ain’t the real owner,” I said.
“That’s how I figure it.”
“He’s fronting for a certain someone who, as a matter of fact, I ran into yesterday.”
I told Dolph about my little chat with Parsec on the beach.
“That motherfucking crook,” Dolph murmured, in an almost prayerful tone, but the intensity in his voice was loathing, not love. However much I hated Parsec, Dolph hated him worse. He had had a chance to put him in the ground once, but I had talked him out of it on principle. Thou shalt not kill, y’know? What a hypocrite I was. Dolph was not a hypocrite, at least when it came to killing. I had had to listen many times since then to what he shoulda, coulda, woulda done—with the implication, unintended by Dolph, but palpable to me, that I was to blame for arguing him out of it. “You shoulda decked him,” he said now.
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