“You’re going to get arrested.
You know that, right?”
“Not this time, Skipper. I have a
plan!” He gave me a knowing look, then declared proudly, “I’m going to pace
myself!”
“That’s your plan?”
He laughed. “It’s better than no plan!
So, what do you say?”
“No, I . . . might have something
else to do.”
“Like what? It’s Hades City, the
hottest night spot in two hundred light years!”
“I know, but . . . she’s here.”
“Who?” Jase asked, then his eyes
widened as he realized who I meant. “Oh no! Skipper, she’s bad news. Forget
her, come with me. We’ll show this city how to party!”
With a slight shake of my head,
he knew there was no changing my mind.
He gave me a resigned look. “You
don’t know what you’re missing,” he said before stepping through the gate.
While Jase went in search of a
good time, I went to my stateroom for a shower, wondering what Marie was doing in
Hades City. We’d discussed spending a few days together in the hot springs on
Taralis, but not a word about Hades, even though she must have known she was
coming here. So why keep it a secret? She’d obviously been surprised to see me
and would rather I wasn’t here, which normally meant she was working on a deal
and didn’t want competition.
I hoped that was all it was.
* * * *
A message arrived next morning, ship’s
time – early evening Hades time:
Charon’s in the Slot has a
rat problem. AZ
It was Zadim’s way of telling me
his spies had picked up Sarat’s trail. I dressed quickly, grabbed a ration pack
from the galley and stopped by engineering to find Izin watching his toys
crawling over the
Lining’s
hull.
Izin
Nilva
Kren had been born on Earth at the Timor Sea Hatchery north of Australia more
than a century ago. At one point two meters tall, the dark skinned amphibian was
not physically imposing, but his icy persona and penetrating alien stare unnerved
all who met him. Everything about tamphs seemed disproportionate to the human
eye: the hips and shoulders were too broad; the bulbous, blue-green flecked
eyes too far apart; the smooth, elongated head too large by far. He was small
and streamlined for underwater speed, while the bulge on his forehead housed
biological sonar that gave him sonic vision in darkness and long distance echo
location underwater. His kind were ambush predators, different to man, but
formidable on any world, in any galaxy. More importantly, Izin was an
outstanding engineer and perhaps even a friend – if tamphs and humans ever
really could be friends.
He sat in the middle of six large
screens that wrapped two thirds of the way around him. I would have had to turn
my head to see them all, but Izin, with his much greater field of vision, could
watch them all simultaneously while impersonating a statue.
He slipped his vocalizer on over
his narrow mouth and said, “The hull scan is now seventy eight percent
complete, Captain. We sustained no damage during approach.”
I expected nothing less from
Izin’s shield enhancements. “I want you to check all the ships in port. I’m
looking for a Caravel D class medium freighter.”
Izin didn’t move, blink or even
glance sideways at me, yet he knew immediately what was on my mind. “You think Captain
Dulon is here?”
“I saw her yesterday in the city,
but her ship isn’t registered. I’m wondering why?”
“It would be best if you had as
little contact with her as possible, Captain.”
Not him too! “I just want to know
how she got here. It’s important.”
“I understand.”
I’m not sure he did. Tamphs were
a matriarchal species, incapable of forming the one-to-one bonds humans did. I doubted
tamphs even understood what human love was, although the overpowering
pheromones the females exuded gave them an evolutionary power that ensured
their will prevailed over the males – without question.
“Also, ramp up security.”
“All security systems are fully
operational, Captain.”
“I know. I mean keep your eyes
open. Watch out for anyone getting too close to the ship or trying to get
inside.”
“Do we have enemies here, Captain?”
Two of Lena’s agents were dead. I
didn’t want to join their number once I contacted Sarat. “Maybe.”
“Rest assured Captain, I will eliminate
anyone who attempts to force entry into the ship.”
That’s why his kind had been
under total blockade by hundreds of interstellar civilizations for thousands of
years. “No killing. Just be on the lookout for anyone acting strangely.” A tamph
killing humans would be hard to explain to the port authorities.
“Am I permitted to use non-lethal
force?”
“Absolutely! You can knock them
senseless, just make sure they’re still breathing.”
“Very well, Captain. I will
incapacitate anyone who seeks unauthorized entry to the ship. Does that include
Captain Marie Dulon?”
I doubted Marie would try to
board the ship, but if she did, I didn’t want Izin blasting her. “Standing
order: never hurt her. Ever. You can detain her, but don’t hurt her.”
“Understood, Captain. She is your
matriarch. I will treat her as such.”
It was as close as Izin would
ever come to understanding our relationship. To him, a matriarch was higher
than a queen, definitely not a friend or partner. Tamph males outnumbered
females thousands to one, so there was little opportunity for them to ever form
close personal bonds with a female of their species.
Pitying anyone who tried to break
into the ship, I headed for the airlock. Like many pressurized habitats, Hades
City prohibited personal weapons and took precautions to prevent them entering
the city. So, I left my gun in its locker and took the tube down to the Slot, a
long narrow cavern housing the city’s red light district. Two broad avenues ran
its length: the Grand Boulevard which blazed with lights, casinos and
nightclubs; and Miner’s Road, a dark street lined with brothels, psychedelic
dealers and implant parlors. The dealers peddled chemicals designed to distort
human perception while the implanters sold an impressive range of metal devices
to enhance human abilities – not biotech like my threading, but as good as you’d
get off-Earth without access to classified hardware.
My threading projected a map of
the cavern onto my optic nerves as I moved through the Slot’s frenetic
atmosphere, avoiding the attentions of mammary modded ladies of the night and sidestepping
an obstacle course of overdressed stim dealers. Two thirds of the way down the
Grand Boulevard, I slipped across into Miner’s Road and entered Charon’s Bar
& Grill, as dark and smoky a dive as I’d seen anywhere in Mapped Space. The
music was deafening, accompanied by strobes flashing to a tribal beat, forcing patrons
to shout into each other’s ears as they drank and stimmed themselves into
oblivion. Booths with small tables crammed with people lined one wall, a bar
backed by mirrors and glowing lights the other, while a sea of intoxicated humanity
thronged between the two. Working girls and stim dealers plied their complementary
trades, while customers mingled in the kind of sexually charged atmosphere only
chemical stimulants, loneliness and desperation at the edge of nowhere can
induce.
I pushed through the crowd towards
a large fat bartender and ordered a Hades Hellfire. The label said it was
distilled from hydroponic plums, but my threading told me it was twenty percent
alcohol and three percent chemicals guaranteed to give me mild toxic shock if I
swallowed two shots. I swiped my credit stick over the bartender’s scanner and
leaned towards him.
“I’m looking for someone,” I
shouted over the chaotic music. “A Republic merchant named Sarat. Seen him
around?”
He ran his eye over me
skeptically. “Don’t know him.”
“Sure you do. Dark hair,
moustache, tall. Has a couple of military clones for protection.” At least
that’s what Lena’s mission briefing had said. I could have rattled off Sarat’s
DNA sequence, but that would have unnerved the bartender, killing the
conversation before it started. “Where is he?”
“Who wants to know?” he growled.
He was blubber on muscle, with an intimidating demeanor suggesting he doubled
as the bar’s enforcer.
“Sirius Kade.”
“You look like a bounty hunter,”
he leaned forward and sniffed, one hand vanishing below the counter, “but you
smell like UniPol.”
“And you smell like a sewerage
outlet, but I won’t hold that against you.”
The bartender’s hand whipped up
from behind the counter holding a short black metal rod and swung it down at my
head. If I was dead drunk, he might have connected. As it was, he moved in slow
motion. I turned just enough to let the metal rod strike the counter, then I
slammed his face down into the bar and drove my elbow onto his hand in one
lightning fast motion. I caught the metal rod as it fell from his crushed
fingers and released his head. He lifted his face, blood oozing from his broken
nose, watching apprehensively as I examined his weapon. It was a simple metal club,
but it could crack skulls in the hands of a big man. I turned it over once,
gave him a reproachful look, then put it back on the counter in front of him, daring
him to grab it again.
Once he realized going for the crude
head cracker was a bad idea, I said. “Now that we understand each other . . .” I
turned, pretending to look around the bar while my threading area-scanned the
room. Behind me, the bartender eyed his metal club, wondering if he could take
me while I was looking away, but wisely decided not to risk it. In my mind’s
eye, flashing red squares appeared around the faces of nine men and two women,
indicating they were wanted criminals, while my sniffer picked up a DNA positive
smear on a booth near the door. “Sarat sat over there, in that booth.”
The bartender pressed a bar towel
against his bleeding nose, wondering how I knew where the black market broker
had been sitting, considering I’d never set foot in his seedy establishment
before.
“So what’ll it be, club or
stick?” I said, holding up my credit stick and glancing at his metal club.
He gave me another puzzled look,
wondering why I’d offer him money after just having broken his nose. “Stick.”
I swiped my credit stick over his
personal scanner. “Remember him now?” Tip or a bribe, it had the desired
effect.
The bartender leaned towards me,
speaking for my ears alone. “He’s been here three times a week for about a
month. Tipped big. Didn’t drink much. Said he was waiting for a rich guy who never
showed.”
“What rich guy?”
He shrugged. I offered my credit
stick again, but he shook his head. “Save your credits. I don’t know who.”
“How do you know he was rich?”
“Sarat asked if I’d seen a guy
wearing diamond rings, fancy clothes and a pointy beard. No one wears diamonds
down here, not if they want to walk out alive.”
“Why does Sarat want to meet him?”
“He didn’t say.”
“If he comes in again, tell him Sirius
Kade is interested.”
“In what?”
“Just tell him that. Docking bay
E-71.”
Lena’s people didn’t know what Sarat
was selling, only that he was attracting a lot of interest from all the wrong
people. They’d tried bugging him, but their highly sophisticated eavesdropping equipment
had repeatedly and inexplicably failed. That was the biggest red flag of all. It
almost certainly meant we were facing alien-tech we didn’t understand and
couldn’t match.
“If he comes in, I’ll tell him,”
the bartender said grudgingly.
Maybe he would, maybe not, but I
swiped his personal scanner again for extra encouragement. “Get yourself a new
nose,” I said, and headed for the door.
Outside, I summoned the city’s
schematics from my bionetic memory and looked for somewhere off the snooper
grid where I could tap the city datanet in private. I soon discovered a place a
few blocks away. Ivan’s was a dingy restaurant with several groups of stocky
men sitting around tables drinking vodka and playing cards. No one was eating
and the one waitress leaning against a counter didn’t bother approaching me when
I entered.
The men nearest the door glanced at
me suspiciously, then one approached me with a bored look. “We’re closed.”
It was early evening, peak time
for a restaurant. My threading told me they were small time gangsters who ran
the local rackets. The EIS knew all about them, but left the local UniPol
forces to deal with minor criminals.
“Anatoly told me the kalduny was
good here,” I said, hoping the EIS intelligence wasn’t out of date. I’d never
met Anatoly and according to my threading, kalduny was a type of stuffed
dumpling that sounded inedible.
The gangster grunted and motioned
me towards a vertical screen standing to one side. My threading immediately detected
an aging body scanner, the kind that used to protect secret installations on
Earth more than a century ago. It was low grade restricted tech – not
classified – even so, it should have been out of reach of a bunch of second
rate vodka swilling gangsters.