Lethal Cargo Page 2

  “She’s talking to you, Mike,” Dolph said with an amused snort.

  I gave the girl a second look. Dirty blonde hair hacked off at her shoulders, dust-colored skin, charity trousers and sweatshirt retooled into something more punk than refugee. A knife the size of a machete rode at her hip. But it was her eyes that caught me—gray, smoky, smouldering with the same desperation that gripped everyone in camp.

  “Or you need a place to stash your blade? Got something just the right size.” She pumped her hips, lifted her machete an inch clear of her scabbard, and laughed. She was a child, but she had the voice of a forty-year-old smoker, and a line in cheap innuendo to rival any streetwalker.

  I practically had to put Dolph in a headlock to stop him from heading over to the stall.

  “That’s a genuine messer,” he said in anguish.

  For Dolph, it was all about the knives, not the girl.

  “Gotta find this guy first,” I said.

  “Yeah, keep on walking,” the girl shouted after us. “Whaddaya expect from a man with a toy fairy?” Her little friends giggled shrilly.

  I glanced ruefully up at the fairy whirring above my head. I’d turned it back on to keep it visible above the alien crowds. The dust had soiled its costume and long tresses. It didn’t look spooky at all now.

  We reached a crossroads in the maze of the camp. Humans and aliens queued at the eateries. A crowd surrounded a chained Kimberstine haulasaur that was doing tricks. I even saw a couple of the Travellers in the crowd. Dolph muttered obscenities at their backs. I shook my head.

  Suddenly, the toy fairy rose up to a height of twenty feet. I hadn’t touched any buttons on purpose, but maybe I triggered something by accident. The thing let out a sinister peal of mechanical laughter, and began to swoop around, scattering fairy dust. Dolph and I watched open-mouthed as the stuff blew over the crowds and stuck to faces, cilia, horns, and tentacles. It was just glitter. We were standing up-wind. Nevertheless, Dolph got some sparkles on his hair, and my watch cap would probably never be the same. The crowd let out that soft unguarded ‘oooh’ you hear when people have witnessed something unexpected and magical. Even the Travellers blinked in surprise. The Kimberstine haulasaur let out a melancholy roar.

  The wind caught a last voluminous cloud of glitter and carried it away over the tent roofs.

  “Did you mean to do that?” Dolph said.

  “Nope,” I said. “I don’t think it’s working right. I’m gonna find something different for Lucy.”

  The fairy descended towards us. I reached up and grabbed it. It struggled, its rotor trying to whirr in my hands. I found the power switch and turned it off. “Let’s eat.”

  We were in the middle of a surprisingly good meal of ugali and stewed chicken—food aid remixed into something bordering on cuisine—when Rafael Ijiuto finally showed up.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Rafe. You must be Mike.”

  I swallowed my mouthful of food and half-stood to shake his hand. Dolph hooked a free crate with his foot. Ijiuto lowered himself onto it.

  He looked to be in his twenties, hair buzzed to a quarter-inch all over, biscuit-colored scalp showing through. The hair was biscuit-colored, too, with a coating of dust. Making no concessions to the fact that he was sitting in a fast food joint in a refugee camp, he wore a suit and tie, the business-formal template that has stood the test of so many centuries it’s practically encoded in male human DNA. I have a suit myself somewhere. At the moment, however, Dolph and I were both in jeans and heavy coats. Ijiuto’s sartorial style helped to mask any anxiety he may have felt. He didn’t look scared, he just looked cold. He ordered a cup of tea. The wind snapped the awning over our heads. Aliens and humans alike shouted at each other to be heard.

  I had to lean in close to Ijiuto to catch his words. “OK to pick up the cargo directly from your ship?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re on pad one-sixty-five, out on one of the islands. You got a vehicle? We’re talking four large crates, one hundred kilos each.”

  Ijiuto nodded. “I’m going to hire a truck.”

  “I’ll need the balance of your payment at that time.”

  “No problem.” He was looking at the toy fairy. I’d set it in the middle of the table, where it had been drawing admiring stares from aliens who’d seen the fairy dust display. Dolph had spilled beer on its wings. “I love this product,” Ijiuto said. “Only humans would think of something like this.”

  “To humanity,” Dolph said, knocking his beer stein against Ijiuto’s tea cup. “The only species in the Cluster with the gall to charge 300 GCs apiece for a mass market drone with a frilly costume.”

  “To human audacity,” I said, wryly.

  “Huh,” Ijiuto said. “See those tattooed freaks walking around? They’re human, too.”

  “We’re a versatile species,” I agreed.

  We finished eating, paid the bill, and walked back towards the parking lot. Ijiuto was swiping at the screen of his phone. “I can’t get through to the truck rental people. Can’t even get a dang signal. I’m going to have to go over there. Catch you up at the ship. Pad one-six-five, right?” As he spoke, he was already angling away from us.

  “Yeah,” Dolph said to his back. “What kind of refugee camp doesn’t even have decent phone service?” He snickered. Dolph had a strong sense of justice, in his own way.

  His face changed. The almond eyes above his bandanna widened. He threw an elbow into my side.

  I spun around and saw someone I had hoped never to see again, and yet had dreamt of meeting again, pretty much nightly for a while. Those were bad dreams. Bloody dreams.

  The reality was worse.

  A few meters away stood a blond, heavily tattooed man in a black leather greatcoat, glowering at us.

  It was.

  Zane Cole.

  The man my wife left me for, seven years ago.

  3

  Zane might’ve walked away. Or I might’ve.

  Then he decided to recognize us, after all. He walked up to me and Dolph. We stood face to face.

  The wind gusted over us, making Zane squint. I saw the white in the frown lines he’d acquired on Tech Duinn.

  He mustered a normal voice. “Well, hey! I wasn’t expecting to see you two chunks of space debris this side of Ragnarok.”

  My palms were damp. Heat surged through my veins. Intellectually, I knew I was angry at the wrong person. Zane had not forced Sophia to leave me, after all. She had walked away of her own free will. But I still felt like punching him to a bloody pulp.

  Dolph stepped in. “Where’d you jack those ships?” He let Zane know that we weren’t buying his ‘hey ol’ war buddies’ bullshit.

  “No law against selling hulks,” Zane smirked.

  “There is if you made them into hulks.”

  “We’re contributing to the local economy,” Zane said. “You here on business?”

  Dolph ignored the question. Stepping in closer to Zane, he growled, “How many bank accounts you had yanked so far? How many postulants you burned?”

  Zane had odd scraps of leather and hair hanging off the lapels of his coat, decorated with beads and such. I could smell them from here. “You haven’t tanned those properly,” I said. “Remember how we did the deer hides on Tech Duinn? We built smoke pits out back of the FOB.”

  “It ain’t easy on board a spaceship,” Zane said with a smile that made me want to claw his eyeballs out of his skull. “How’s the shipping business these days?”

  The weird thing was how little the black coat had changed him. He always had been an aggravating lightweight, even when we served together during the war. Our war, the one that liberated Tech Duinn and killed my youthful illusions about humanity. It should not have been a surprise to me that one of our own would become a Traveller.

  It had surprised me—totally blindsided me, in fact—when my wife left me for this selfsame renegade.

  Black spots danced in front of my vision. I realized I needed to breathe. I
inhaled a lungful of dust, and felt something solid in my right hand. I was gripping the butt of my Midday Special.

  Zane had to be armed, too. But Dolph was distracting him for me. He wouldn’t have time to draw his own weapon before I could drop him. I could practically taste the blood that would gush from his wounds …

  Snapping out of my violent fantasy, I reminded myself that I was forty-four years old, responsible for the livelihoods of a dozen people. Furthermore, we were being watched by assorted beady-eyed natives, refugees, and aliens. I pictured Lucy’s face.

  I said, “So how’s Sophia?”

  Sophia. Never Sophie or Sophs. My ex-wife’s name suited her perfectly, conjuring the dark-haired elegance and pensive gaze that I had fallen in love with. I’d managed to forget the world-weary sneer more often seen on her face towards the end of our marriage.

  “Sophia!” Zane said. “Man, I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, man. She left the life.”

  I was speechless. All these years I’d been picturing them together.

  “She washed out?” Dolph said. “Or you burned her?”

  “Her? No way,” Zane said. “She just decided it wasn’t for her. It happens. I guess we’d all like to get in touch with her, but …”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why’d she leave? Search me. You can’t make this kind of money in the Temple.” This was how the Travellers referred to civilization: the Temple, with them on the outside, going their own way. Having insulted us, Zane pushed back the left sleeve of his ghastly coat. We both twitched. But there was no weapon sheathed on his forearm. Instead, a chunky silver watch glittered amidst his arm hair. “Check it out. Genuine Urush fortunometer.”

  “That the kind that tells your fortune as well as the time?” Dolph said.

  “Yeah. Got it for 60 KGCs.” Zane was simultaneously boasting about what a good price he got, and bragging on his spending power. I wouldn’t net 60 KGCs in profit this whole trip.

  Dolph flicked the watch contemptuously with a fingernail. “Don’t need a fancy timepiece to tell your fortune,” he said.

  “How not?”

  “I can read the future,” Dolph said. “It holds a severe ass-kicking for you if you don’t get outta our faces right now.”

  Zane drew back. His face reddened. “Shifter assholes,” he said. “Shouldn’t be allowed off the leash.” He walked away, the bits of dead people on the back of his coat bouncing.

  “You got ripped off,” I yelled after him. He kept walking, but I thought his ears turned redder. “That’s a fake for sure,” I said to Dolph, forcing myself to speak in a regular tone of voice. The Urush—the extinct alien race who are thought to have been the first intelligent species to conquer the Messier 4 Cluster—left behind odd bits of tech that still work after all these years. I had heard of their fortunometers, but no way had Zane scored a genuine one in a refugee camp for a mere 60 KGCs.

  “Yeah,” Dolph said. He glanced at me.

  “I thought they were still together,” I said.

  “Maybe she wised up,” Dolph said.

  We got in our buggy and drove back through the residential part of the refugee camp. Ragged tents surrounded open fires where people were cooking their messes, reminding me that the smell of woodsmoke was not only the smell of home but also of extreme poverty. It was terrible to see humans living like this. But I’d seen similar scenes, and worse, in a dozen different parts of the Cluster. Space colonization ain’t easy, even without Travellers preying on the weak.

  A few klicks brought us back to the spaceport. As we drove onto the causeway that connected the mainland to our island, the Ek shuttle that had been parked next to us took off, drenching the world in noise and filling the air with dust. We bumped through the racket onto our island.

  I stopped the buggy.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, over the fading thunder.

  “What?”

  “Zane. I think he was lying.”

  “He lies every time he opens his mouth,” Dolph said, “but why would he lie about that?”

  “Because he didn’t want me to know she’s here.”

  “He said she left the life.”

  “Yeah, and as we’ve already established, he’s a liar. I’m gonna go see if she’s here.” I opened my door.

  Dolph reached across me and held it shut. “That’s about the most boneheaded thing you could do.”

  I didn’t wrestle him. We weren’t kids anymore. I stared out the windshield at the alien foliage pressing in on the road. “She left me without a word of explanation, Dolph. I deserve some kind of a fucking explanation. And so does Lucy. I haven’t told her anything. But she’s eight. She already wonders why she doesn’t have a mommy like other kids. Pretty soon she’s gonna start asking me questions, and what the hell am I supposed to tell her? I tell her enough goddamn lies as it is.” The words nearly choked me. “About what it’s like, what we do out here.”

  “We don’t do anything bad,” Dolph said uncomfortably.

  “Oh, not that bad, no. We deliver our cargoes. No contraband within five light years of the Heartworlds. We occasionally kill people, but only if we’re paid a lot of money for it, and no one will ever find out. I agree, nothing that bad.”

  “You left something out,” Dolph said. “We try to help other human beings. In some ways, that’s the worst job of all.” He popped his own door and stretched into the back seat for his backpack. “Those motherfuckers bring the whole species down. I’ll go.”

  “Jesus, no! You can’t—”

  “I’ll just go and see if she’s there.”

  “If she is—”

  “Then I’ll pop her,” Dolph said, “for having the bad taste to leave you for that fucking faggot.” He grinned. “Just kidding.”

  “Douche,” I said, with feeling. We had known each other since we were five, playing with stick guns in the forests of San Damiano.

  “You’re the captain,” he said, “and that’s why you get to go back and make nice with the customers, while I have all the fun.”

  He melted into the thickets.

  I drove on, cursing violently.

  4

  My guts knotted with worry as I parked beside the St. Clare. It looked like we were dishearteningly far from ready to go. Power lines still trailed from the ship’s belly across the dirt field, feeding ship’s power into the grid. Places like this, you pay your landing fee with electricity. At least the refuelling stand had been rolled away. Kimmie sat on a bale of pelts beside the ship, writing up our manifest.

  As I swung my legs out of the buggy, a ragged, undersized female accosted me. I had to struggle for a minute to place her.

  “Mister, can you help me?”

  That voice. Throaty, husky. It was the teenager from the knife stall. She was still clutching her cruddy plastic case of knives.

  “Sorry, kid,” I said. “I’m kinda busy.”

  “They got my cousins, mister. Please.”

  “What happened?”

  “They did a sweep along the main drag. I hid. They took Jan and Leaf.” Her eyes were huge with desperation. Her brash patter and precocious attitude had melted away. Now she was just a girl—scarcely more than a child—in mortal panic. “Please!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said tiredly. “They took them to their ship?”

  “Yes. It’s over there,” she said, gesturing, as if I might not know where it was.

  “Irene,” I yelled.

  Kimmie trotted over to us, leaving her holobook on the bale of pelts. “Mike, she says they came through and took all the children. It’s the most heinous thing I ever heard of.”

  “You are young,” I said. I walked towards the port ladder.

  Kimmie walked fast to keep up with me. Her face set in the expression of flinty judgement that was the flip side of her sweetness. “We’re really asking for it,” she said.

  I slowed my pace, making a show of patience. “Askin
g for what, Kimmie?”

  “When the shit hits the fan, you know who’ll be to blame? Us. Humanity. For what we do to each other. For what we do to ourselves.”

  “People are horrible to each other, Kimmie,” I said. “We were horrible to each other with stone knives and catapults. We were horrible to each other with revolvers and cannons. And now, we’re horrible to each other with spaceships and nanotechnology. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  The girl understood humanity better than Kimmie did, She yelped, “I can pay you, mister!” She fished in the neck of her charity sweatshirt and lifted out a pendant. It looked like a three-inch, slightly curved dagger in a sheath studded with diamonds. “These are genuine diamonds!”

  “Sweetheart, I got bigger diamonds than that in my ship’s bearings.” I started up the ladder.

  As I climbed, I scoped out the next-door island. The coast was rocky and choked with thickets. I had to figure Dolph had got at least that far by now. The channel between the islands was only about ten meters wide, choppy, laced with foam. I could tell it was shallow, ‘cause waves broke on a ridge of rock in the middle of the channel. At low tide, you could probably walk out to these islands from the beach.

  Irene came to meet me on the top deck, wearing a surgical mask, holding the business end of a high-pressure air hose. She must have been cleaning the dust out of the barrels of the Gausses. She believed in being prepared. “Where’s Dolph?”

  “Over there,” I said, pointing.

  “Oh, for the love of God, why’d you let him do that?”

  I hesitated. Irene was blissfully ignorant about the whole Sophia saga—I hired her long after that all went down, so all she knew was that I had a daughter I was raising on my own. Matter of fact, her daughter and mine were best friends. Stripping away all egotistical pretense, I was plain scared Irene might think twice about letting her Mia play with Lucy if she knew that Lucy’s mother was a Traveller. Or had been one. Which was it?

  “That kid says they got her friends,” I said at last. “Where’s Dolph’s binos?”

  “I left them up top.”