Lethal Cargo

by Felix R. Savage

  “You’re as bad as he is,” I said, trying to mask my frustration with a smile.

  “If you’re accusing my husband of terrorism, that’s not a compliment.”

  Before I could answer, Lucy interrupted. “Look, Daddy.” She was on her knees in front of the holovision on a nearby table. She pressed a button and the paused holo started to play. The little figures in evening dress circled to the sound of classical music. They were dancing one of those old, old dances from Earth. Each man partnered a woman with his hand decorously placed on the small of her back. The figures were bright and crisp, but it was an amateur holo: the background was static, not responsive. It had been shot with only one holocam, and the other angles had been filled in by computer. I looked at the blue curtains behind the dancers, and the logo of an entwined PdLVA in the middle of the dance floor, and my stomach lurched.

  Lucy reached into the holo. She touched the skirt of a woman in the middle of the dance floor. “Look, Daddy,” she repeated, turning to me with a fixed, forced smile. “Isn’t she pretty?”

  I swallowed, my throat too dry to speak. I knew this holo. I was in it. I wasn’t in this particular clip. I’d been out on the balcony having a cigarette or something. In those days I still smoked. Looking at this holo, I needed a cigarette right now. This was the Ponce de Leon Veterans Association annual fundraiser, and the holo had been filmed the last year I attended the shindig. Seven years ago.

  I could date it precisely because the woman Lucy had pointed out was Sophia.

  Circling gracefully in the arms of Zane Cole.

  Parsec wasn’t in the VA. Even the army has certain standards. He’d have no reason to own this rare amateur holo. Sophia must have given it to the Parsecs herself.

  Staring at the little dancers, I remembered how surprised I’d been to see Zane there. He was already on his way to the Travellers, and if anyone was paying attention he should’ve been struck from the VA’s rolls.

  I’d ended the night yelling at him in the parking lot, ostensibly for defending the Travellers in a dinner-table debate, but actually for dancing with my wife—while at home, our baby slept under the attentive eye of a babysitter …

  That baby was now eight years old. She had paused the holo again and was lovingly running her finger along the intangible folds of Sophia’s dress, saying, “So stylish,” the word she and Mia applied to everything they liked. Her fake smile was so wide her eyes practically disappeared. She was putting on a performance, waiting for my reaction.

  I turned to Cecilia and said under my breath, “You bitch.”

  “Excuse me?” Cecilia said. “Are you aware that you have me to thank for the fact that she’s here at all? Sophia left yesterday. She was going to take Lucy with her. I refused to let her go.”

  I stared at her, belatedly revising my opinion of her character. She shrugged. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  She shrugged “I may not have children of my own, but I know what the Travellers are like. I wouldn’t sell them one of my goddamn dolls, let alone an innocent, precious child like Lucy.”

  “But—” I said. “But Sophia left the life …” As I spoke, I realized I only had her and Zane’s word for it.

  Cecilia smiled pityingly. “That’s what she said, isn’t it? And you believed her. How sweet.”

  A sudden bump shook the attic. I rushed back to the window. The security guards were milling around, gazing up, pointing—it seemed—at me.

  “What was that?” Lucy said. She clutched me, burrowing her head into my waist. “What was that, Daddy?”

  “I don’t know,” I started. Then I heard a door open—overhead.

  A hot breeze washed into the attic, and in on its heels came Buzz Parsec.

  49

  I felt stupid. Parsec might not have his own spaceship launch pad, but he did have a flying car pad: the flat top of the house’s mansard roof.

  He’d just landed on it in his flight-capable sub-limo, and now here he was, with the other Kodiak twin close behind him.

  I was still struggling to process what I had just learned about Sophia, but now I had to put it out of my mind. I pushed Lucy behind me and faced Parsec, my body so relaxed I was almost limp. If need be I’d Shift to fight him.

  Parsec, however, did not look as if Shifting was on the agenda for today. He wore, of all things, a tuxedo. The black jacket emphasized the breadth of his barrel chest. I noted the bulge under his arm that ruined its line.

  “He’s armed,” Cecilia said with a warning note in her voice, motioning to me.

  “It didn’t occur to you to disarm him?” Parsec said.

  “Not after he shot Tomas,” Cecilia said.

  “That loony-tune had it coming,” Parsec said. He had, of course, had to step over the body of Canuck in the attic doorway. He was one cold son of a bitch.

  I said reluctantly, “Larry?” I was just guessing as to which Kodiak this was. I got it right by chance. “I have to inform you that your brother’s downstairs. He has a couple of broken ribs, at least. He needs medical attention.”

  Although I didn’t find this out until later, one of Gary Kodiak’s broken ribs had punctured a lung. Rex had seen the blood at his mouth when he went downstairs. Deeming Gary’s condition to be serious, he had picked him up and carried him outside. Gary got rushed to the Ville Verde hospital. Rex got arrested. He was, and is, as brave as …. well … as a lion.

  Anyway, when Larry Kodiak heard that his twin was injured, he galumphed off downstairs without waiting for permission.

  Parsec shouted after him, “Let any of those asshats in here, and I’ll have your butt fur for a doormat.”

  Oh, he was a charmer.

  Lucy cringed closer to me, and Parsec turned to us with a sour smile. “How’d you get in here, Starrunner?”

  I was tempted to Shift into a bear in front of him, to demonstrate. But there was no reason to let him in on my secret for the sake of a moment’s satisfaction, so I just said, “Ask ‘those asshats’ out there.”

  “I pay Cape Agreste property taxes so I don’t have to deal with Shifters causing trouble for me where I live.”

  “If you thought that force field fences could keep me away from my little girl, you were wrong.”

  “Evidently.” Parsec glared at Cecilia. “Told you we should’ve got rid of her.”

  “And I told you, and I’m telling you again, over my dead body,” Cecilia responded, raising herself higher in my estimation.

  “You married a woman with a good heart as well as a good head,” I told Parsec. “Shame it hasn’t rubbed off. Why the everloving heck did you get involved with my ex-wife?”

  I held my breath, not wanting him to know that all the information I had about their partnership was what I’d just said.

  He bit. I don’t think he had a guilty conscience. He was just prepping his defense, like any legally clued-up crook would, perhaps already intimating that he might get dragged into court over this. “That’s not my company. It was his.” He pointed to the body of Canuck.

  “How very convenient for you, darling,” Cecilia said. “I think you owe Mr. Starrunner a favor.”

  I ground my teeth, remembering that it had been Canuck’s name on the articles of incorporation. By killing Parsec’s fall guy, I may have just given him a get out of jail free card. “True,” I said. “But you leased trucks and taxis to them. Drivers, sometimes.”

  “I lease my vehicles to a lot of customers. That may be one of them. I don’t recall.”

  “Do you usually lease your trucks with permission for special overrides?”

  “To do what?”

  “Drive the wrong way on a one-way street. Pick up hitchhikers. Run people down.”

  “Hell, no. Where are you getting this information?”

  “From doing what you didn’t do,” I said. “Looking into Mujin Inc’s business activities.” I was getting the picture now. Just as Cecilia had said, Parsec practised a policy of don’t need to know, when knowing might cost
him financially. It’s people like that who will drive the human race into the ground. “This affects me personally, because they shipped their goods on my ship.”

  “Figured I’d do you a favor,” Parsec said instantly, and Cecilia sighed. “You need the business more than I do.”

  Now that I look back on it, I think he may actually have been telling the truth. But my gut reaction was to take it as one more twist of the knife that was cutting my life apart. “Those crates contained biological weapons,” I snarled. “They still do! Every one of those lousy toys is loaded with weaponized interstellar variant kuru, and someone is getting ready to unload them in Mag-Ingat!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cecilia said. “So that’s what she meant.”

  Cecilia was smarter than her husband. It took Parsec a minute longer to add up 2 + 2, but when he got 4, his jowly face started to color.

  “It’s my ass on the line,” I said, “but it’s yours too. Hell, it’s everyone’s.”

  “No one would do that,” Parsec said.

  “Bless your heart,” I said. “You’re the one who went into business with my ex-wife.”

  “Nope,” Parsec said. “You think she’s the devil incarnate. She isn’t. She’s just a mother who wants her rights.” He spoke without regard for the big ears of the little pitcher at my side. “As for the rest of them, I can’t say I approve of the way they live, but they live their way. They ain’t at war with us.”

  “Who’s us, Shifter?” I said. Then I shook my head. “Maybe it isn’t just the Travellers. There’s someone else in the picture.”

  “Who?”

  “Ever heard of a guy called Rafael Ijiuto?”

  *

  At that very moment, Dolph was telling the Bonsucesso Tower security guards that this office had been used to manufacture bio-weapons. They didn’t believe a word he said. They had already called in the bombing as a terrorist incident, and were waiting for the police to arrive. While they were waiting, they saw MF moving around in the clean room, and that freaked them out even more. They knocked Dolph around some.

  The police arrived by flying car. To Dolph’s everlasting relief, the officer in charge was Jose-Maria d’Alencon.

  To this day I don’t know if Dolph called him after he talked to me, or before. He was coy about the point, suggesting that it was before, and that he felt this to be a betrayal of me. But it really didn’t matter. What mattered was that Bones was there, and he at least was willing to listen to what Dolph had to say.

  Before that, he told him he had grounds to file suit against the security contractors for brutality.

  “Can’t file against corpses,” Dolph slurred through a cut lip. “Don’t let them go in the clean room.”

  “OK,” d’Alencon said. “Why?”

  MF interrupted. He had found an intercom in the clean room which connected with the reception area, where everyone was standing. His odd, distinctly inhuman voice boomed out of hidden speakers. “Greetings. I am the bot Krasylid Athanuisp Zha, also known as MF. I am presently in the laboratory and assembly facility of this office. I have confirmed the existence of remanent data on the virtual servers used by the former tenant, and am attempting to reconstruct the files which the humans formerly in command of these machines wiped upon their departure. I beg you to give me a few minutes.” The intercom shut off with a click.

  The security guards, the police officers, and Dolph all stared at each other.

  D’Alencon broke the silence. “All right, Hardlander. Just what in the hell is going on here?”

  Hardlander is Dolph’s nom de guerre. He didn’t like the name he was born with, either—just like MF, I guess.

  *

  “Rafael who?” Parsec said.

  Ijiuto could’ve used a different name, just like Sophia. I found a picture of him on my phone. I’d had the sense to take a couple when he was at my apartment. But Parsec shook his head. “Don’t know the guy.”

  “Everyone’s going to know him soon,” I grated. “He’s out there with the bio-weapons, in one of your goddamn trucks!”

  Cecilia said, “If this is true, Buzz—”

  “Fuck,” Parsec said. He pulled at the collar of his tux shirt, loosening his bow tie. He had been at some Founding Day gala. Now he was plunged into a nightmare. I did not feel for him. I’d been living a worse nightmare for days. His piggy eyes fastened on me, the nearest target for his rage and consternation. “Who told you to start sleuthing around, anyway? Why couldn’t you just take the fucking money and shut up?”

  He pulled off his bow tie and threw it on the floor. To me, this was a clear signal that he was preparing to Shift.

  “The money? What money? I never even got the two KGC kill fee,” I said, letting out a yelping laugh, almost a bark.

  Parsec’s answer was a wordless growl. He began undoing his shirt buttons one by one, which struck me as oddly prissy, but the look in his eyes was sheer menace. His flat coils of dark hair bristled up on his head, and his shoulders began to swell. He was starting the chain of probability revisions from the top, the way experienced Shifters do.

  I settled on my wolf. Tempting as it was to fight him as a bear, I was already wounded and tired, and needed the advantage of agility. I hunched my shoulders, licking my lips with a tongue that would soon loll long and red past lethal incisors.

  “Stop!” It was Lucy’s voice. My daughter jumped between us. She pushed me as hard as she could, sending me stumbling off balance, and then she pushed Buzz. She yelled, “We don’t Shift to get into stupid fights! Daddy! Stop it! We don’t Shift to get into stupid fights!”

  Repeating my own half-forgotten words, she pushed me back and farther back, while my head whirled, partially consumed with wolfish thoughts of biting and ripping.

  Cecilia caught Buzz’s arm, saying, “Out of the mouths of babes. Stop it, for God’s sake.”

  Buzz reversed his partial Shift. That is not easy. It’s like pulling a punch in mid-swing. His shoulders quaked and his face flattened back out and his spine returned to the human vertical and he said, watching me, “I was just gonna change.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I can’t stand this goddamn penguin suit.”

  “Right.” I let my own Shift go. I ran my hands through my hair, confirming that it was floppy again, not bristly.

  “We don’t Shift to get into stupid fights,” Lucy repeated once more, her eyes fixed on my face. “Right?”

  “Right,” I said for a third time, and then I had to smile. I hugged her quickly. “My brave girl.” She was, too. To get between two adult male Shifters intent on ripping each other’s throats out? That takes guts. She would have got that from me, of course.

  Parsec squeezed out a smile of his own. It was about as sweet as lemon juice, but I’d take what I could get. “Rain check on the fight to the death thing, Starrunner?”

  “Rain check,” I agreed, holding out my hand.

  We shook. Parsec tried to pull a clasp o’ death on me, but I evaded it by pushing my hand far enough into his clasp that my middle finger touched his pulse point, so he couldn’t crush my knuckles. It behooves a freighter captain to know these tricks.

  Our eyes met across our joined hands. I read in his cold gaze that he wasn’t finished with me. I sure as hell wasn’t finished with him. “Rain check” meant exactly what it sounded like. But I judged that self-interest would force him to work with me until the immediate threat to his livelihood was removed.

  “So, this Category Ten shitstorm,” he said, releasing my hand. “I can track my trucks. I got the software in my home office, too, but we might as well do it from the car. Come on. We’ll find this Ijiuto fucker and shred his ass.”

  He started for the door of the attic. I hesitated.

  “Leave the kid with Cecilia,” Parsec said. “We ain’t going to ship her off-planet in the next half an hour.”

  I had hesitated because I was thinking about how to get Lucy out of the room without forcing her to step over a corpse. I
had not for one second contemplated leaving her here, and I did not contemplate it now. “No thanks,” I said curtly. “She’s coming.”

  Parsec snorted. I picked Lucy up. She wrapped her legs around my hips like a much younger child.

  “Wait,” Cecilia said. She was gathering up Lucy’s sewing project and her Blobby doll. She swept them into a tote bag, which already held a bulky package of fabric. “I’ll put in some more material for you … Here. Keep your stitches neat, Lulu.”

  Lucy nodded hard. She reached out her hand for the bag and held it against my back as I carried her out of the room, stepping over Canuck’s corpse. His eyes stared up sightlessly. He wasn’t the first and he would not be the last to die today, if we couldn’t find Rafael Ijiuto.

  50

  A short flight of steps led up to the roof. An automated trapdoor slid back, and we climbed into the sunshine. Parsec’s sub-limo stood on a reinforced landing pad in the middle of the roof. He paced to the edge of the roof. The tails of his tux blew in the wind. “Panic’s over,” he yelled down to the security guards in the street. It was actually just beginning, but Parsec had the skill of projecting reassurance. It’s another of those tricks a freighter captain needs to know. “Everyone’s OK up here. Y’all can disperse.” An unintelligible shout came back. “I’m paying you to guard my property,” Parsec yelled. “And now I’m paying you to go the fuck away.” He came back to us. “That oughta do it.”

  Lucy was agog at the flying car. “Are we going to ride in that?”

  Gazing at the view over the jungle to the city, I had second thoughts. Get her up high and keep her up high, Sophia had told the Parsecs. It seemed like a good precaution. I was thinking that the toy fairies would be in one of the trucks Parsec had leased to Mujin Inc, most likely the same one Rafael Ijiuto was in. To stop him, we’d have to go down to wherever he was. And it could so very easily go wrong …

  Parsec got into the driver’s seat and started tapping on the dashboard computer.

  I let Lucy into the back and got into the passenger seat. The black leather upholstery cushioned my ass like a hug. The car smelled not of wet fur, as Shifter vehicles usually do, but of expensive air freshener. Parsec knew about the importance of keeping up appearances.