6
C.O.D
For the rest of the day I plodded slowly from system to system, going the economical route, from Adenets to Polecteri, arriving at Hudson Ring late in the afternoon galactic standard time – otherwise known as Greenwich Mean Time. I imagine Greenwich Mean is a star system that used to be important back in the old days, though I have yet to visit it. Typical of Alliance systems, Hudson Ring didn’t have a ring at all and turned out to be just an old, battered Coriolis remarkably similar to Bloch, both inside and out.
Unbuckling my seat harness, I put the ship into standby power mode rather than shutting it down entirely and made my way back to the airlock at the hub of the ship. There I changed into civilian attire, donned a pair of RFID signal blocking gloves and disembarked from the Cobra, locking the airlock hatch behind me, taking my time as I allowed my body to reacquaint with the low gravity of a hangar bay.
I booted up a station information terminal mounted to the wall in the corridor outside the hangar by bopping the screen with my fist. “Station security office.” I drawled, suppressing a yawn.
“Connect or directions?” The flat monotone voice of the terminal enquired.
“Directions.” A map flashed up on the screen. I pressed on an icon that transferred the directions to the navigation app on my phone and set off in the direction indicated with the big red arrow on my phone’s screen. Soon enough I was in the transport and communications hub of the station, close to the rapid transit terminals that carried people and goods from the starport itself to the residential sectors. Gravity here was still low, barely a quarter of normal, but there were marked paths where electromagnetic coils embedded in the floor interacted with permanent ones fitted to the soles of compatible boots to enhance the gravity level further, just like those installed on ships equipped with similar systems.
I forced my way through crowds thronging at a market square jammed with stalls placed too closely together that sold just about everything imaginable at prices only marginally cheaper than you’d find in franchised supermarkets in the residential sectors. I kept a tight hold of my bag, wary of pickpockets and cutpurses seeking to fleece the unwary despite the presence of armed security guards at the RTS stations. Holding a phone in front of me was like a red rag to a bull for the pimps, hawkers and pushers that did their business down here. I might as well have been wearing a shirt that proclaimed me as a bewildered tourist. Nevertheless, I managed to barge my way through without having to buy a home brewed beer, a burger made with meat from God only knows what animal – or synthesised from something else generally brown in colour - or a bj from a toothless junkie, dodging past the scowling faces of RFID thieves whose scanners couldn’t get past my gloves, or if they did, came across a blocked page from my bank that demanded RFID plus one other ID confirmer before they would authenticate.
Eventually I found the starport’s security office, sandwiched as it was between a bakery and a massage parlour. I didn’t know of a station cop anywhere who couldn’t get through the day without either a doughnut or a ‘happy ending’ as they are sometimes called, so I imagine the office was ideally located for its staff. The door was a single pane of smoked, armoured glass adorned with nothing more than a lone six-pointed star and I shouldered my way through it to find myself in a small narrow space in front of a desk that reached almost up to my chest.
A middle aged man in front of me was engaged in a loud conversation with the desk sergeant who nodded, bored but sympathetic as the civilian went through a highly animated complaint about getting ripped off by a taxi pilot who had dropped him off at the starport, told him to get some lunch while he refuelled and provisioned up for the trip, then took off with all the guy’s belongings. Polecteri had been his first refuelling stop on a seven thousand parsec journey to Colonia, where he was relocating before his wife could bleed him dry in a typically unpleasant divorce, and while the victim didn’t think that the thief could hack into his bank accounts, he had been carrying a small fortune of his wife’s jewellery and on top of that he’d paid half the fee for the trip up front and was out of pocket several hundred thousand credits for what ended up as a thirty minute journey. There was so much hand wringing, hair tearing and wild arm waving going on that I had to quickly back myself into a corner of the room to avoid being elbowed in the face.
Eventually a side door opened and the retired executive who had been ripped off by his scumbag pilot was admitted to make a statement to detectives who – if they were anything like Ethgreze’s Blockheads – would file it and forget it. That thieving taxi driver was long gone.
“Where would I find the Alliance Intel office?” I asked.
The cop’s eyebrows raised at that. “Try Alioth.” He deadpanned, pointing an arm towards the doorway. “It’s that way.”
Terrific. Some comedian saying something obvious that I might probably have said myself if I had been smart enough - just what I needed. I leaned across, made a display of reading his badge number by squinting and silently mouthing the last three numbers. “You’ve been a big help.” I scowled at him, then turned and reached for the door handle.
“Wait up,” The suddenly concerned cop said before I could pull the door open. “What’s this with regard to?”
I considered his question for a moment before answering, my voice laced with impatient exasperation. “Just get Max.” Sometimes less is more.
The cop tapped the screen of his comms terminal. “Visitor for Max,” he said, then lowered his head to his datapad and pointedly ignored me thereafter. About a minute later the side door opened and a tall, long haired guy wearing jeans and a t-shirt promoting a notorious heavy rock band’s recent intergalactic tour beckoned me further into the building and guided me down a labyrinth of hallways. He stooped to stare into a doorway’s retina scanner, pushed the door and held it open for me as I stepped past him.
It was nothing more than an interview room, much like the one I had been interrogated at on Bloch. I took a seat and pulled Si’s datapad out of my inside pocket, then I turned as the door behind me clicked shut. My guide was nowhere to be seen.
“State your business.” An electronically altered voice announced in a flat monotone from a loudspeaker in the ceiling.
“This datapad is from Simon Reid.” I said to the walls. “He left me instructions to hand deliver it to Max at this station upon his death.”
“Wait.”
It took about a minute, but the door behind me clicked open and in came a short, slightly obese man with an almost bald head decorated with the wispiest of comb-overs. In his shabby, worn out and ill-fitting business suit he looked like a particularly hard up used ship salesman. He sat opposite me at the table and held out his hand for the datapad.
“Can I see some ID?” I asked.
The man amusedly raised an eyebrow and reached into his jacket, pulling out a gun. A proper gun. One that fires real live bullets, not the non-lethal weapons that are tentatively deemed safe for cops to use on orbital installations. An illegal firearm that could punch holes through solid metal and vent the atmosphere of a starport out into space. One that was pointed approximately at my chest. He inspected its magazine, then set it down on the table between us. I hoped the safety catch was engaged. Next, he pulled an old-fashioned leather wallet out of his jacket, opened it, and slid a laminated business card onto the table.
Alan Adail, acquirer of alien artefacts and archaeological antiquities, it said. I frowned at the excessive alliteration.
He slapped down another card, one that this time declared he was Justin Love, importer and exporter of recreational relationship augmentation devices. Sex aids, I believe the slang term is. Next, he pulled out a cop’s identification and rights card, stating that he was Derek Crane, detective inspector. Finally, he produced a gilt-edged card that proclaimed him to be one Carson Wells, executive assistant to Edmund Mahon, who we all know is prime minister of the Alliance Assembly.
“Do you always pull a gun before showing ID?” I asked.
“It’s official Alliance policy to shoot first and answer questions later.” Max deadpanned. “And then only when we run out of ammo. Do you know who James Bond is?” He asked.
“Never met the guy.”
“Double oh-seven?”
I blinked. “Is that a pilot salute with both hands at the same time?”
He laughed at that. “James Bond was a field intelligence agent from old Earth vids. It was a long running series of movies and the actors playing the character obviously aged as the years went by and eventually became too old to be ‘action men’ and thus no longer suitable to play the role. As the actors were pensioned off, their part would be taken by a younger actor who would adopt the 007 James Bond persona. In effect this gave the role continuity across generations of different actors and extended the vid franchise for centuries.” Max explained patiently. I simply nodded, perpetually bemused as to why some people seem so obsessed with thousand year old movies. Most of them needed so much upscaling to watch on a Vu-wall without appearing pixelated that the cooling fan noise almost drowned out the dialogue. “At Alliance Intel we adopt a similar approach. For example, the head of department responsible for the Alliance internal security is known as Alice/Alex, the one concerned with the Duval Empire is called Erin/Eric and for the Federation we have Felicity/Felix. I shan’t bore you with names and job descriptions of the rest of the staff here, but I will tell you that I am the current military affairs executive for the Alliance Defence Force. You can call me Max. I’m only known as Maxine when I’m off duty.” He smiled.
“Si was one of yours, then?”
“Yes.” Max admitted. “When he reached a certain age, we put him into semi-retirement. He was a good operative, but his skills and health began to decline, and his mental aptitudes and attitudes weren’t deemed suitable for promotion out of the field and into the back office. We used him for odd jobs that needed a high degree of separation from Alliance Intel so that our activities could not be traced back to us and for ‘in the field’ help with operations that weren’t going to plan. You know what’s on the pad?”
“No. It gave me access to a video clip that told me to bring it here but nothing else. As soon as the vid finished playing the pad powered itself down.”
“May I see it?”
I handed it across to him. He tapped the screen, waved it in front of his face then turned it over for the DNA sample, then pulled another card out of his wallet that had nothing but an optical glyph printed on it and waved that over the screen again. He scrolled through whatever was on the display with his fingertip and nodded approval. “Looks to be in order, no tampering alerts so I guess you qualify for your ten thousand credit reward, mister….?”
“Kerr.” I told him.
“Joe?” He enquired.
I replied with a nod. “He mentioned me?”
“We thought he made you up,” Max laughed. “A guy named Joe Kerr? Comedy gold. You were the inspiration for one or two of my field IDs.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.” I admitted, struggling to stop my eyes from rolling. “Do you have any knowledge as to who might have killed him?”
“The investigation is ongoing, but we think we have linked the suicide bomber to the Xendes Mafia and that’s pretty much all that we have right now. We have reason to believe that Simon may have had an intimate relationship with the wife of one of their enforcers – it certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him, as you probably know.” Max smiled. “I would caution you against any acts of revenge. The Xendes are a particularly unpleasant race of thugs that grow up on a world where Darwinism really is the be all and end all, and when things quieten down in the Pleiades we may take action ourselves to balance the score sheet. He had friends here too. We all feel his loss.
“Right, I’ll get Amy – that’s our administration and accounting manager – to sort out your reward for delivering this pad to us. I can’t authorise that large a sum out of petty cash, sorry. A couple of hours, maybe?” He said, rising to his feet and offering me his hand.
“I have nothing else to do.” I told him as I slipped the glove off my right hand and shook his firmly.
“Good grip.” He winced. “If you really are looking for something to keep you amused, we do have a small delivery job outstanding that nobody around here seems to want to pick up. Our own courier is off on an intelligence dissemination run down to Witch Head that’ll take a day or two and this delivery has suddenly taken on a high degree of importance that we hadn’t anticipated. Time has become a factor. Interested?”
“What’s the job?” I asked.
“Two VTS cans of… well let’s call it bio-waste for want of a better term, to be ferried to a ground installation called Phillips Base, a quarter of a million light seconds out from the A star of a system called Lakho, which is around ten parsecs from here.
“Bio-waste?” I smiled knowingly. The catch-all term for anything you didn’t want identified, from a colony of roach like insects carrying deadly bacteria stolen from an alien Earth-Like-World to be made into virologic weapons, to illegal pronography. Or it could have been actual bio-waste – human faeces and urine from the sewage tanks that couldn’t be further reclaimed and recycled for food cartridges, or biological waste from the station’s medical facilities that also couldn’t legally be recycled for food cartridges. “What’s the fee?” I asked.
“Fifty big ones. What’s your pilot’s federation rank?”
“Harmless.” I admitted.
“Hmmm,” Max frowned, mulling that confession over. “Normally I would insist on at least a Master rating for an Alliance Intel job. In fact, I think I might be in breach of protocols for letting a job get taken by anybody less than Expert. But,” he shrugged, “needs must and all that.”
Well, it was better than spending my dwindling cache of money in a starport dive bar and getting fleeced by the locals, and would help toward the expenses of upgrading the Cobra or make a down payment on a medium sized ship that could carry better weapons and armour, not to mention more cargo. I wasn’t surprised nobody would take the job, though. An in-system haul of a quarter of a million light seconds would take significantly longer than a multi-jump hyperspace jaunt to a system that lay one hundred light years away, which would pay far, far more, and there would be less chance of picking up a lucrative cargo at the destination drop point. There would be cargoes, as systems that distant from the main star would be visited rarely by pilots so jobs would accumulate, but they wouldn’t be worth much.
“So, do we have a deal?”
“It’ll pass the time.” I said.
“Excellent. I’ll get the ground crew to transfer it to your ship. The cargo should be on board by the time you get back to it. Don’t lose it, by the way, or you can kiss goodbye to the fee and the ten K reward for the datapad.”
Max guided me back out to the station lobby and shook my hand again as we parted. “Fly safe, commander.” He said.
tbc
