Scott Delaney
“Look, I’m telling you,” I leaned harder over the bar and tried to push my face as close to my mark as I could without seeming creepy, “my ship is one of the most comfortable in all of the sector. It’s received three luxury awards—”
The woman didn’t hear me out. She grabbed her credit ship and started holding it tighter. She looked at me primly. “Three luxury ratings? But you only have a class S ship. I’ve been on class As, you know.”
Yeah, I knew. I’d checked her out – or at least her bio – thoroughly before I’d approached her.
There was a reason I was wasting time here.
She might be clutching hold of her credit ship tightly, but people like her – people who’d been born with platinum spoons in their mouths – weren’t nearly as good at holding onto money as they thought.
I locked another friendly smile over my lips. “Why waste the money on an entire luxury ship? Why waste all that money on the crew?” I bounced my hands off my chest. “Trust me, me and my crew don’t care about immersive holograms, the best fendian wine, and hypersonic beds – we’ll leave that for you. We’re kind of greasy, but we know how to show people a good time. The luxury room aboard my vessel is one of the best you’ll ever find – and certainly for the best price. And our attention,” I smiled without making it too creepy, “is never-ending.”
I’d gone too far. She’d already looked prim before. Now she scrunched her lips together. “You’re attractive, but you’re poor.”
Ouch. I didn’t react. I opened my hands wide. “Sorry, that came out wrong. What I’m trying to tell you is that travel aboard my vessel is unlike anything else. Every member of my crew will be ready to assist you with any request you have. If it’s possible, we’ll do it. If it’s impossible, we’ll just find a way to make it possible.”
“Tempting,” she said as she looked me up and down, obviously evaluating a lot more than my offer of transport on my ship. “But the answer is no. Something better is bound to come along.” She waved at me dismissively.
I kept that smile sunk over my lips. It would’ve taken a cruiser attached to the side of my face to rip it off. I rumpled my eyebrows, pressing them close over my eyes, and I looked up at her from underneath them. “I would’ve thought you would have jumped at my offer.”
She looked at me dismissively and snorted.
Not that offer, I wanted to growl. I just kept that smile plastered over my lips and leaned in just a little closer. I wasn’t trying to get closer to her good looks. And yeah, she had them. But they would’ve been bought. And then they would’ve been maintained by money – something most people off the luxury Alpha worlds didn’t get to do. You might be born with baby blue eyes, fat cheeks, and a killer smile, but if you were out on one of the rim planets, and you had to work the mining drills to survive, your skin would soon become papery and that smile of yours would be crushed by the brutal realities of the Milky Way.
She looked at me, a slight smile turning up her lips. She obviously liked my attention. “There’s no need to be desperate—”
I scratched my nose. I peaked my eyebrows and looked up at her from underneath them. I’d practiced this look many times – and yeah, a couple of times I’d even done it in front of the computer in order to get pointers on how to make it look even more genuine. “You sure you don’t want my offer?” I said quietly. “It’s just… how can I say this politely? I heard on the street that your father is currently facing,” I scrunched my lips to the side, “economic troubles.”
She stiffened. It was like someone had shoved a pole down her throat. She grabbed her credit chip tighter.
I let my gaze flash down to it then up to her face. The whole time, I tried to look innocent and earnest – as if I was here to help her. When all I was here to do was help myself to the money on her chip. What was left of it. “I think I even saw something on the news. Your father is being investigated—”
She shoved in close and crammed her delicate thin hand against my mouth. “Shut up, okay?”
I looked shocked. “I thought it was common knowledge—” I said around her fingers.
She just pressed harder. “What is it going to take to shut you up? You want me as a passenger? Fine.” She dropped her hand and stared at me haughtily. “I expect the finest treatment, though.”
I nodded at her. I didn’t smile now – I was all business. I tugged down my flight jacket. I even smoothed some nonexistent dust off the emblem on my left breast. Because yeah, I’d paid to get an emblem. Technically, it was a copy of some old Earth space agency symbol from centuries ago. The modern galaxy didn’t know that. I liked the shooting stars, anyway. And the point was, it made budding clients think I was even more of a legitimate operation.
I nodded. “When will you be getting aboard?”
“We will leave in an hour,” she said as she stared to the side, probably checking the permanent digital time display on her neural implant. It would be fixed over the left side of her vision. I didn’t know why rich people had such a feature on their neural implants. What exactly did they need to show up regularly for? Handouts? To gloat over their money? It wasn’t like they did any real work.
I kept that to myself of course as I swiveled off the chair, stood, and reached a hand out to her.
She stared at it dismissively. “I can stand on my own.” She proved that as she unhooked her long legs and stood, her jet black temper steel heels clicking against the sticky floor beneath her.
I let the first and only sardonic smile flicker over my lips before it disappeared quickly with a cough. “I was referring to your credit chip, Miss. In order to secure your booking, I need you to pay now.”
She rolled her eyes at me and shoved it into my hands. “I expect the most magical journey ever. You will not disappoint me.” She strode off.
I waited until she was out of earshot. I threw her credit chip up and caught it. “I’ve got no intention of disappointing you.”
I shoved the chip in my pocket and walked out of the bar.
It was one of those joints that was pretty much a cookie-cutter copy of similar bars across the galaxy. You got these kinds of seedy watering holes everywhere. Even on the most remote outposts where there were only miners, drifters, and undercover pirates, you could still find a pub. Hell, I’d once been deposited in what I thought was a thankless, lifeless desert, and I’d still found one of these places. They primarily belonged to the same race – the Hand-hoppers. They were about as big as a dog standing on its hind legs – and they looked a lot like one, too. They had pointy ears, long muscles, and these watery eyes. If you got drunk – or hell, if you’d just had a bad day – you tended to pour your heart out to them. Which was incidentally where they made the most of their money. There was only so much cash you could accrue from serving dejected people drinks. You could make a lot more by leaning their secrets and creating a rollicking information trade.
I walked out of the bar and into downtown Hell. It wasn’t its actual name. Well, among the inhabitants it sure was. Technically it was called Hello, but if you came across any sign that stated that, it was soon graffitied.
There wasn’t anything welcoming about this place. It was far below the glistening towers – and it was way, way out of the downtown government district.
The security division – which was the cornerstone of Alpha 12 – was so far out of sight, it was practically like the Law didn’t exist here. Which it didn’t. It took a long time for a security officer to answer a distress call from out here.
I walked past a drunk guy being frisked by a small Fe-Re rat. The guy was only ankle-height, but he packed a punch – literally. Their race was one of the strongest there was. He was currently jumping up and down on the drunk guy’s shoulder, demanding payment. Obviously the idiot had gone to a loan shark.
I glanced over, wincing in compassion, but kept hold of the credit chip and kept going.
Miss Fielding – not that she’d shared her real name with me – was currently scurrying away to one of the superfast transports out of this district. She had the credits to use it – and the identity chip required to get a quick ticket out of this hell. She might’ve played hard to get, but she’d specifically come to that bar in order to find someone like me – what she assumed would be a lowlife sucker who would be willing to give her supercheap transport with relatively luxurious accommodation.
She needed it, see. And she might have pretended that she had time to decide – but she didn’t. She had to get off this world in the next two hours – or she would be wrapped up in the same investigation that was about to swallow her father whole.
It had been a long time since I’d been a budding security recruit. I’d left that life far behind, but some of the information gathering skills were still at the heart of my seedy operation. And yeah, I was more than happy to refer to it as seedy. To survive in this galaxy, you needed to understand what you were, and you had to play on your strengths.
I wasn’t stupid enough to chuck the credit chip up and down out here. As I pushed it further into my pocket, I tapped it against my leg twice. I activated a very sophisticated – and expensive – piece of equipment. It was a small chunk of armor that ran around the top of my thigh. While it could give me a bit of extra oomph, should I want to kick anything – its primary use was to hide away small but valuable objects. I had a couple of rings in there I’d picked up from a guy who hadn’t been able to pay his fare. He’d downplayed them, but I’d glimpsed them once and realized they were insignia of the Zera tribe. You could sell these things for a couple of hundreds of thousands of credits. They were the most valuable items I owned. When the guy had come back with his fee in hand to get them, I’d told him I’d already pawned them off. I’d sent him on a wild goose chase.
Those rings were my retirement.
And the lady’s credit chip… I guess it would pay for my fuel and my ship for a couple more months.
It was getting hard to run a transport business these days. There were too many competitors. And there were way, way too many pirates.
You would think on a planet like this – the twelfth, most sophisticated, safe world in the entire Foundation – that there wouldn’t be any pirates, but as I darted my gaze up, I saw one right in front of me.
I recognized him – not because I’d ever had much to do with him – but because one of his marks had caught my attention earlier today. It had been the wide-eyed, terrified human woman who’d grabbed my hand and held it.
Even now I thought I felt a faint tickle of where she’d grabbed me. She had held on for dear life.
I rolled my tongue around my teeth. I tried to ignore my instincts as that guy flitted out of sight, but it quickly became too hard.
“Crap, don’t do this,” I muttered to myself as I yanked up a hand and started to use my portable neurotransmitter. And by portable I meant that I had to pull it out of my pocket and attach it to the base of my neck. I locked it there until I saw a hologram-like apparition spread over my vision. I swiped my hand from left to right. The hologram wasn’t perfect. It flickered. There was even a slight buzzing in my head. It wasn’t great – and it could leave a nasty headache. So I always used this device quickly.
“What are you doing again?” I admonished myself one last time as I flicked to the current public known pirate boards. Whoever that guy was I’d seen, I doubted he was stupid enough to be on the public pirate boards. The guys that populated them were the kind of low-grade stooges who made themselves known to the wrong people and were publicized by the security division. Depending on how much of a nuisance said pirate became, the division tended to put out bounties on their heads. And yeah, the security division understood the irony – or at least it had when I’d been there. A lot of the time the kinds of people who took up the bounties were actually pirates themselves. If it took a criminal to track down another criminal, so be it.
I admonished myself one last time as I finished flicking through the relevant pirate boards for that guy’s face.
I was only guessing he was a pirate, but it had been written all over him. His sarcastic expression – the flicker of greed in his eyes. That human female who’d been with him earlier had never had a chance.
I tried to flick my hand out to get rid of the memory of her. When that didn’t work, I wiped it on my pants. No matter what I did, I couldn’t shift the sensation. Her lingering touch was still there.
“You’ve got to prep to leave in 15 minutes,” I snarled at myself. “Go earn some credits like a good boy.”
I stopped.
Like I said, back when I’d stupidly been a security officer, I’d learned some pretty good information gathering techniques. The public boards were only one place to look for scum. I knew exactly where to go if I wanted better information.
Though I didn’t like to think of myself as a lowlife pirate, I… shall we say, still fulfilled certain bounties every now and then. And only one in 10 were from the security division. The rest were from… other interested parties, shall we put it. The kind of interested parties who wanted you to track down people for reasons outside of the law and who tended to believe the law was better off in their hands, anyway.
I logged into the In-Betweener board.
When I started doing bounties, I’d only wanted to do the good ones. I quickly learned that you had to do what you were given when you were a rookie. One of the first bounties I’d been given had been from the In-Betweener. I’d done a stellar job. So I’d quickly risen up the ranks. I didn’t do bounties for him anymore. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I stuck to wholesome – or not so wholesome – transport. But I could still access the boards. Which was precisely what I did now. It took no time whatsoever to find out the identity of the scumbag pirate I’d just glimpsed.
“Maro’x,” I muttered under my breath.
I had his name and bio now, but what would I do with it exactly? Store it away for later? I’d likely never come in contact with him again. And dammit, I had a ship to prep.
I turned. I went to leave. I stopped. I turned right around. I’d already pulled the neuro chip from my neck. I suddenly secured it back in place once more. I flicked back to the correct file. Glancing down, I realized there was a current bounty out on Maro’x’s head.
“What the hell have you done?” I whispered.
There was only a little information. It basically said that the In-Betweener wanted to speak to Maro’x because he had failed a mission and had brought disrepute on the boards. I could read between the lines. The failing a mission bit was obvious. The bringing disrepute to the boards was because he’d brought a double agent with him. I really doubted Maro’x himself was a double agent. He wouldn’t have a public bounty on his head. The In-Betweener and his horde of assassins would deal with that privately.
So it had to be someone Maro’x had been working with. A plant – and likely, a security officer from the division.
I grabbed my chin and let my fingers slide down it. Then I plucked off the neural chip and shoved it back in my pocket. Shaking my head hard, I just shrugged. “It’s not like you can do anything about it.” Reminding myself of that one more time, I finally got a hustle on. It was time to get back to the docks, prep the ship, and take precious little Miss Bethany Fielding on a trip she would never forget.
Because yeah, she was a bounty too. Don’t get me wrong – I would exact the correct fee for her luxury transport ticket, but I’d just be handing her over to the security division at our destination, Alpha Three, while I was doing it.
Maro’x – and whoever that strange human female had been with him – could go hang for all I cared.
My stomach might’ve kicked a little at that thought, but I just shoved it away. I had money to make in a galaxy that would rather see me dead at its feet than rise above its greed.