“Class, we have a new student starting today. This is Bradley Ramsey, a spacer who’s going to be with us for the rest of the semester. Say hello, everyone.”
“Hi, Bradley,” a ragged and listless chorus of twenty-three teenagers replied with downtrodden obedience.
“Just Brad, actually,” Brad corrected with a self-conscious smile and a tentative wave.
The instructor was Mrs. Braeburn, a forty-something brunette with an accent that the vice principal described as Kiwi—and warned that it wasn’t to be made fun of. Brad was certain there was a story behind that warning, one he secretly hoped would be worth an expulsion if he ever needed one.
For now, he was stuck.
Truancy laws on Vega IX kicked in for children of spacers after a month planetside. Brad had dodged formal schooling for nearly six weeks before Henderson School Board officials caught up with him and gave the Ramsey family a choice: public school, correctional school, or depart the system. Brad liked to think that Dad would have pulled up stakes before he let his eldest son get sent to a youth prison over skipping out on standardized education.
“I’m afraid you’re registered as Bradley, Mr. Ramsey,” Mrs. Braeburn replied primly, prompting a few titters from his new classmates. “We have a formalized system of respect and adherence to protocols. You are to address me as Mrs. Braeburn, and I, in turn, address you as either Bradley or Mr. Ramsey. Understood?”
“Yes, Mrs. Braeburn,” Brad replied, able to keep his expression politely attentive as he added you snooty bitch in his head.
“Who’d like to make room for Bradley up front?” Mrs. Braeburn asked. She swept a sickly sweet smile across the students closest to the vid board at the head of the room.
Brad’s eyes shot wide. Ever since arriving in his first-period class, he’d been eyeing the empty desks at the back of the room.
“I don’t know what you might have heard about spacers, but I have excellent vision,” Brad blurted.
“I’m sure you do. But I do have some experience with itinerant children who’ve spent too few years in formal schooling. I think I’d like to keep a close eye on you.” She took her vulture-eyed attention off Brad for a moment. “No takers? First one to volunteer can skip Monday’s quiz.”
Hands shot up as if spring-loaded.
Mrs. Braeburn shook her head. “Sad, really. Alas, we’re here to learn civics, not ethics. But I caution you each to look inward at how cheaply you can be bought.” She tapped a finger to indicate a boy in the second row. “Alton was the first with his hand up.”
One quiet cheer and a symphony of disappointed “awws” greeted the pronouncement. Alton gathered his school supplies and made a hasty and triumphant retreat to the rear of the classroom.
Brad slunk into his designated seat, disturbingly still warm with the residual heat of some other guy’s ass. Just as he was settling in, he caught a glance from next door. His neighbor on the left was smiling at him.
With Mrs. Braeburn turning back to yammer about Vega IX’s local parliamentary system, Brad turned to smile back.
She had hair so red it had to be one of those temporary gene treatments. Vega IX was a core world, after all. Shit like that got sold at shops same as booze and hormone regulators. Same went for the striking emerald eyes unless those were simple contact lenses. Brad promised himself some deep gazing into those eyes to determine for himself. Everyone in the class wore identical white dress shirts, slacks, and ties, but some students filled theirs out better than others. This girl counted among those who made Core World Bland look good.
“Hi,” she mouthed with a coy smile.
“Hi,” Brad replied in kind.
“Bradley, eyes up front. Same for you, Amelia.”
Brad snapped his attention forward, mouth agape. He caught himself before voicing a self-incriminating question.
This teacher was no fool. She didn’t need any help indicting Brad. “The screen is mildly reflective. That’s how. Now, who can tell me the minimum age to run for District Legislature…?”
It was Brad’s first day in the class, and Mrs. Braeburn wasn’t enough of a hardass to pick on him, knowing he had no clue about local politics. Comfortably slouching into his desk chair, Brad’s mind departed the premises.
Amelia. Her name is Amelia.
Maybe this cockamamie school business wouldn’t be so bad after all.
A merry little bell tinkled as Mort entered the store. If only the bell knew the business that brought him to Bellagio & Sons, it would have tolled a dirge instead.
The wizard took a deep breath, savoring the heady scent of honest-to-Gutenberg literature. Plastic books had a reek to them, chemicals cooked up by science-knew-what, not fit for discerning noses. Datapads could get themselves covered in words arranged in the text of iconic works but could never rightly be considered books. No, only books properly smelled like books.
Bellagio & Sons was Mort’s kind of place.
On a core world, it was all too easy to get overwhelmed by the ubiquitous technology, from science-stacked towers of steel and glass to continent-spanning floaty-trains to pedestrians laden like so many pack mules with gadgets they could hardly think straight. Earth did the decent thing and carved out sizable enclaves where wizards could feel like wizards. Not many other core worlds were so accommodating.
“Can I help you?” a genteel voice inquired, laced with a hint of phony Italian affectation.
Mort meandered among the shelves, admiring embossed titles and spines filigreed with gold leaf. He didn’t seek out the speaker to address him face to face. “Doubtful. I’m more perspicacious than your typical patron.”
“That might be the case for a typical purveyor of authentic paper books, but I assure you that—”
“Ever been to Earth?” Mort asked. He ambled over to the sales counter, where a hefty ledger sat beside a quill and ink to record transactions, and rested a forearm on the authentic wood surface.
The salesman was your average sort, almost a requirement when operating such a time-honored business. He wore a dress shirt starched within an inch of its life and white enough to suck the color out of Chardonnay. The gold chain of a pocket watch disappeared into a tiny pocket in the sleek black vest, worn like a uniform. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles had lenses so petite and perched so far down the man’s nose that they’d have been useless for any purpose but needlepoint.
Mort’s question caused the bookseller to lift his chin with pride. “I daresay I have.”
“Seen the Convocation library?”
“Indeed. Finest collection of magical literature in the galaxy. I’d be remiss as a merchant of rare and exotic—”
“And the Plundered Tomes?”
The man sneered. “Oh. Bugger all. It is you.”
Mort snickered. “You don’t have to like it, but our mutual friend isn’t allowed on Vega.”
The bookseller lifted a hinged section of the counter to allow Mort into the back room as he retreated deeper into his sanctum. “Since we’re apparently spies, I ought to have you call me Charlemagne.” The suggestion was liberally doused in sarcasm.
“How’s about I call you Bellagio, since it’s on your damn sign?”
“Point taken. But you’re excising what little fun might have been available in this dreary arrangement.”
Dreary would have been the last descriptor Mort might have used to describe his exploits of the past year. Ever since twisting Azrael’s arm into taking over as Guardian of the Plundered Tomes, Mort had received privileged intel on a series of dark wizards and a blind eye toward the method he chose to employ in their demise. Aside from the gloom-and-funeral solemnity with which his handler, Anubis, delivered the damned to their fates, the rest was a hoot-and-a-half.
“Who’ve we got this time?” Mort had been to three cities on Vega IX, met with three local contacts, and killed three unspectacular practitioners of the not-for-polite-society magic. But, like any good trooper, Mort always managed to make his own fun.
“You’re awfully flippant about this.”
What was there to say to that? Mort shrugged. “Some people collect coins or paintings. I collect bounties. Everyone needs a hobby. Mine just happens to also be my job.”
Bellagio sniffed. “Well, in that, at least, we agree. The sooner I can discharge my duty in this matter, the sooner I can return to the company of my silent companions.” He swept an arm to encompass the lines of shelves.
“So… who? Where? What can you tell me about today’s miscreant? If you’re so all-bloody-fired-up to be rid of me, spit it out.”
Bellagio extracted a scrap of parchment from his vest pocket and unfolded it more times than would have appeared possible. When laid flat on the counter between the wizards, it bore no hint of a crease. The document faced Mort, not the bookseller, so Mort simply read the dossier for himself.
Attn: Mordred
There ended the familiar letters of Mort’s native tongue. The rest he was forced to read in excellently penned Sanskrit.
An esteemed colleague, Thaddius Bluth, has fallen from the proper way. He has been found guilty in absentia of experimentation on technologists involving ritual dismemberment, research goals unknown. He was last seen in the Centennial Park District of Paradise Province on the ninth planet of the Vega system. He is not to be left alive under any circumstances. If the method of his demise is horrific, certain well-placed personages would be obliged to his killer.
No. It would not result in a restoration of previous positions. You would do best not to consider that possible.
The letter went on to list Thaddius Bluth’s academic qualifications and professional accomplishments leading up to his disappearance from public Convocation life five years ago. It was the resume of a man lined up for tenure, not a criminal. Mort genuinely wondered what had sent this promising career off orbit.
Crimes be damned, this fellow sounded more a candidate for a friendship than a duel to the death. They were both Oxford alumni, former debaters, avid bowlers.
It didn’t bother Mort that Bluth had been on the lam during his watch as Guardian of the Plundered Tomes. He wasn’t a missing persons service, after all. If someone else found a dark wizard, that was one thing. But he didn’t devote library resources to looking. Once one turned up, if they were of an authorial bent, Mort or his agents would collect the books. If not, Wenling generally had more wizardly thugs at her disposal to clean up run-of-the-mill cads—the sort who bullied non-magical colonists or used their powers to commit sexual indiscretions.
Mort blinked at the page and reread it.
There was no mention of what written materials or research he might be expected to collect from Thaddius Bluth.
Sure, every once in a while, some paranoid or arrogant wizard would keep his notes in his head. But generally, it was the aspect of document retrieval that determined whether the Library of the Plundered Tomes got involved.
“You read Sanskrit?” Mort asked.
Bellagio had turned his shoulders, allowing Mort to peruse without anyone gawking. “Not well enough that I’d inadvertently spy on a confidential missive. Especially not upside down. If I might inquire…?”
“Yeah, they told me to burn it.” It was the last scribbled annotation at the end. Same as every other written communication he’d received from Earth.
“If you must, please do so once you have exited the—”
Mort halted him with a raised palm. “Not to worry. I know better than to light fires where I don’t want everything in cinders.” He passed a hand over the page, swirling it in circles without ever touching the paper.
At first, nothing happened. Then, the ink blurred, ran, and seeped to the surface of the letter. Slowly, deliberately, Mort lifted his hands, pinching his fingers together as if plucking a scrap of silk from the counter.
The ink oozed up into a glob, levitating until Bellagio took a hint and snatched up the inkpot beside his ledger.
Mort deposited the ink with a curt nod. “Waste not, want not. Hate to ruin good paper.”
The Hourglass was Chuck’s kind of place. White tablecloths. Martinis. Three-piece live jazz band that played in the background and between sets. The waiters wore tuxedos and carried drinks on silver trays. It was the kind of place that could afford to pay top-notch talent to top-notch clientele.
Chuck wasn’t about to let on that he didn’t qualify.
“You don’t gotta hang around here two hours before showtime,” Curtis mentioned in passing as he bustled, parting ways with the head chef as they crossed paths in the dining area.
“I like soaking in the ambiance,” Chuck replied nonchalantly. He lounged with his arms out wide, along the back of the leather-upholstered, semi-circular booth as if ready to encircle a pair of attractive young ladies who would join him at any minute.
Curtis Mancuso oozed core world. Every tooth in his wide smile gleamed gold. Not a strand of hair grew anywhere on the glossy-smooth skin of his head. His faux vintage horn-rimmed glasses concealed discreet datagoggles, and his suit fit him like a computer had scanned and printed it right onto his body.
For the past months, and hopefully the next few, he was Chuck’s boss.
“Naw, man. You got a ruminating look about you. And you wouldn’t be here—in the part of the day I don’t pay you for—if it weren’t something to do with me.”
Chuck snickered. “Guilty as charged.”
Curtis slipped into the far side of the booth, well out of reach of the comedian’s sprawl. “So… what you got on your mind?” He crossed his legs and tented his fingers, fixing Chuck with undivided attention.
Who knew what those datagoggles might be showing just then? Chuck had caught fleeting peeks from behind his boss, and the lenses were devilishly designed to only show data from the user side.
“Thinking of changing up the act…”
“Say what now?”
Chuck put up his hands in mock surrender. This wasn’t meant to be a radical suggestion. He wasn’t plotting a course for zheen space on this one. “Nothing jarring. Same audience demographic. It’s just… a different mix of material. The set I’ve been performing doesn’t hit any Dangerfield or Rickles. I think the Sunrise City crowd might really take a shine to—”
“Naw, naw, naaaaw… You got a good thing going here. A good thing. Don’t be messing with no good thing. You take this horse; you ride it. I got hard up for an act when Bristol passed unexpectedly—rest his soul. Agency hooks me up with this spacer with jokes older than asteroids. But it works. It works. Didn’t expect nothing but a couple filler nights till I could hire me a bona fide comic, but it works. And you don’t see me talking about shaking things up, trying something new.”
“I hear you. I hear you,” Chuck said. “But I was just thinking—”
“Thinking’s good. I like a thinking man. But a smart man is in how he does his thinking. Is he thinking long term: money, reputation, legacy? Or is he thinking short term: booze, tits, sitting on his ass in front of the holo? They both thinking. They ain’t nothing the same, neither. Which kind you is?” Curtis pushed his dataglasses down his nose and peered over them.
Chuck didn’t hesitate. “I’m my own kind of thinker. Long term. Short term. It’s all life, my man. Neglect half, the whole suffers. Holistic. That’s the word. Everything connects to everything else. Gotta keep a wide perspective.”
As the comedian rambled, Curtis nodded along. “A’ight, man. You deep. I feel that. Do your thinking. Just don’t be thinking nothing about changing that act. They billions of paying customers on this planet. Ain’t a fraction heard of you. You just keep dogging them same ancient jokes, grinning that same laughing-at-my-own-self smile. You a fortunate motherfucker even having a job on Nine. Don’t go blowing it chasing creative fulfillment or some buuull shit.”
With that, the owner of The Hourglass walked away, shaking his head.
Chuck didn’t argue. The power dynamic here was all askew. Curtis Mancuso ran the club as a hobby—the guy was made of money and could operate at a loss for the rest of his life. Chuck ran his hobbies as a business and needed every terra he could squeeze out of Vega IX. Unlike Earth, the gig-to-cost-of-living ratio was putting him ahead of the game, possibly for the first time in his career.
All he had to do was coast. The terras would build up. He could save, invest, put aside a little money in case he and Becky ever hoped to retire.
Unfortunately, Chuck was getting bored.
If Curtis wasn’t going to let him change up the act, Chuck’s idle thoughts would invariably turn to creative means of earning extra terras on the side.
Vega IX wasn’t Earth in another clear, distinct, and essential aspect. Becky hadn’t forbidden him running cons and shady deals on this particular core world.
“Let’s do another!”
Becky smiled as inwardly she groaned. This had already been their third episode of “Lady Petunia’s Magical Tea Party.” Her teacup-pinching fingers were getting cramps. Yet neither the holovid hostess nor Rhiannon seemed the least bit exhausted by the ordeal.
It wasn’t Rhiannon’s fault. She was at that age. Becky couldn’t even say for certain what invasive media conduit had injected the idea of tea parties into her daughter’s veins. But it had gotten her.
“Please, mummy? Just one more.” Where Rhiannon had picked up the faint Old Britannia accent was less a mystery than an imitation of the holographic gentlewoman in the formal pink dress who sat life-sized in their living room, attending and guiding the events of the fictional party.
The faint huff of the Radio City’s hydraulics signaled the arrival of someone returning from their day’s events out in the wider world of Vega IX.
Becky tried to hide her excitement at the prospect. “Who is it?” she called out singsong.
The pelting of feet on the deck plates in the cargo hold was an answer all its own.
Mike burst into the living room seconds later, schoolbag dangling by one strap from his hand. He wore a brand-new uniform, basically a miniature business suit with short pants. The expression on his face was wide-eyed wonderment and uncontained enthusiasm.
“Mom-you’ll-never-guess-what-we-did-today-they-had-a-fish-tank-except-it-had-no-water-in-it-guess-what-it-had-instead-it-had-a-frog-and-they-took-the-frog-out-and-I-got-to-hold-it.”
“We’re playing Lady Petunia’s Magical Tea Party,” Rhiannon proclaimed, equally proud of her accomplishments for the day.
The schoolbag slumped to the floor, forgotten. “Can I play?”
“Sure,” Rhiannon declared, scooting over to make room.
There were enough plastic teacups to go around. Not all of them matched, but Lord knew there had been enough tea parties in the history of the Radio City for the Ramseys to have a healthy stockpile.
Becky grunted as she rose to her feet, untangling legs that had been crisscross applesauce for a few too many go-rounds with Lady Petunia. Getting old sucked. Staying twenty-five forever had been such a great plan, but she’d totally blown past it and was closing in on forty.
A tiny hand caught her by the sleeve. “No, Mom! You can’t!” The make-believe accent was gone in a rush to prevent Becky’s escape. “Mike just got here. Now we can have a proper tea party with four.”
“Proper,” Mike agreed with a sage nod. Both children pronounced the word with a non-rhotic ending.
In a last-ditch effort to change the subject, Becky cornered her youngest son. “Hey. Where’s Brad? Wasn’t he supposed to walk you home from school?”
It was only five blocks from the school to the residential garage for long-term starship parking, but that was five blocks farther than she wanted a six-year-old traveling solo.
“He said it was a core world and I’d be fine.”
Becky scowled. “Now, I told him to…” Wait just a minute. What had she told that boy? What had been her exact words? It took her a moment to puzzle and stew until she came up with what she was sure she must have said at the time.
Make sure your brother gets home safe.
She hadn’t explicitly told him to wait for Mike outside the elementary school and walk him the whole way personally. She’d meant that but never came out and said it.
“Fuck.”
Rhiannon’s accusing finger shot toward her mother. “Mommy said a bad word.”
Inspiration struck. Becky pouted. “You’re right. Mommy did say a bad word. You know what that means?”
“It’s how babies are made,” Mike said in all seriousness.
“No. I mean… well, yes. But it still means I should be punished. I’ll be going to my room until dinnertime.”
Two sets of eyes stared in disbelief.
“You get punished?” Rhiannon asked, eyes agape.
Mike wasn’t buying so readily. “What if you don’t? Who’s gonna make you?”
Becky heaved an exaggerated sigh. “That’s part of being a grown-up. It’s my job to make sure I take my punishment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a couple hours until dinner and no holos or games for me.”
“You should check your datapad before your punishment starts,” Mike advised, handing her the device. “Brad said he was comming you.”
“He did?”
Becky checked, and her datapad was on silent. When had Rhiannon figured out that trick? Becky had assumed she’d missed the predetermined alert she’d set up to keep “Infinite Tea Afternoon” from black-holing her whole day. But no, she’d instead missed all the save-me timers, along with messages from both the men in her life.
Chuck’s comm was brief and to the point: Won’t be home for dinner. Don’t wait up.
Brad was getting more like his dad by the day: Gonna hang with some new friends. Grabbing dinner on the run. Be home before Dad.
All Becky could do was roll her eyes.
When the door slid shut behind her, muffling the sounds of yet another holo-guided tea party in the living room, all Becky could think was: If I leave them be, will Mike make a dinner?
Brad gave a dramatic, final tap and slipped the datapad back into his pocket. “There,” he declared. “I’m all clear.”
“Wow, that was quick,” Ricardo commented, jutting his jaw. “You spacers got it figured out, huh?”
Ivan grunted. “My mom grilled me for a good ten minutes… which is why I got started on her before Astronomy let out.”
“Mine wanted me to comm her the second we decide where we’re going, then again when we get there,” Brenda chimed in. “As. If. She’ll get one comm, maybe while we’re waiting for our food.”
Tina giggled. “At least you don’t have to use that silly tracker program.” She took out her datapad, waggled it pinched between two fingers as if it stank or was diseased, then slipped it back in her purse with a snicker.
Brad surveyed his escorts for this night on the town. They were standard-issue high schoolers out of any sitcom or melodrama. Pampered. Shallow. Self-absorbed. Their concept of spacer life fit into the same bucket as colonial farmers, poor people, and xenos from planets undiscovered by ARGO: wow, glad that’s not me.
Ricardo was the alpha male, probably just along to make sure Brad wasn’t a threat to his hunting lands. Taller, broader, and with a voice that had distinctly finished puberty, he was the prototypical “catch” that girls cooed over.
Ivan fit the very definition of a sidekick. He was Ricardo’s right-hand man, the kind who’d play wingman or quietly bow out when there was only one female target of affection around.
Brenda was Ivan’s girlfriend, though Brad couldn’t be sure either of them called it that. They didn’t hold hands, he hadn’t seen them kiss, and no one had introduced them as such. But there was a crackle between them, and if they didn’t act on it, Brad was going to have to clue them in one of these days.
Not tonight, though. Brad was just getting to know them.
Tina was the catch. While Ricardo was the football and basketball star of Shakur Memorial High School, Tina was captain of the varsity rugby team and a district wrestling champion. None of those accolades were any trouble for Brad, as a newcomer, to glean on the first day. The two practically presented resumes when introducing themselves.
And, of course, Ricardo and Tina were a couple.
Considering either of them could have snapped Brad in half, he knew better than to step in the way of raging, irrational young love.
“It was easy,” Brad said with a shrug. “She didn’t answer realtime, so I left a message saying I wasn’t coming home.”
Brad started to walk off, departing school grounds in the only available direction, when Ricardo pressed a hand to his chest, blocking him. “Whoa. Hold up. If she didn’t get that comm, then for all she knows, you could be anywhere.”
For a second, Brad thought the kid was joking. Then he caught sight of the faces of Ivan, Brenda, and Tina. He snickered. “Seriously? This is a core world. What could happen?”
They moved as a pack, carrying on the conversation as a gaggle. Brad had little experience gaggling; it felt strange. His new friends showed no sign of discomfort at the roving discussion as they herded Brad into an unfamiliar section of Henderson City.
“You could get robbed,” Ivan suggested.
“Or raped,” Brenda added.
Tina wasn’t one to sit this topic out, though Brad almost felt sorry for anyone who tried to cross this brawny goddess. “Or someone could sneak up and jab you with some kind of chem, get you hooked on a lifetime of illegals.”
“This isn’t Sol, spacer. We got real rough areas. Probably as rough as any you’ve seen,” Ricardo proclaimed condescendingly.
“Oh, sure,” Brad agreed readily. “I mean, what’s there in space? Nothing. It’s kinda right there in the name. To get into real trouble, you need a planet full of people. Am I right?”
Ricardo nodded warily. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. We’re gonna show you around a little. Show you the real Vega IX.”
Brad doubted that very much. He doubted any of these core world locals had ventured outside their protected little bubble except to visit yet another curated, gatekept, police-surveilled pocket of mass civilization. Nevertheless, he clapped his hands together as if eager to be shown the ropes. “Nebulous. So, what’re we seeing first?”
“Nebulous” was local slang Brad was planning to ditch the second he got off this phony-baloney core world. But when in Rome Prime, do as the Prime Romans do.
A quick exchange of glances among the kids who already knew one another hinted at a secret conversation being held too high-pitched for Brad’s ears. Whether it was good clean fun or a power play to exclude him from the decision-making, he couldn’t say with certainty. In the end, it was Brenda who announced the decision.
“We’re gonna head down to Lake Mohave and watch the sailboats. There’s a mac ’n’ cheese place that does a smoked fontina with a pane acido topping. You won’t get any better offworld.”
Brad blinked.
“What?” Tina demanded. “It’s oodles of yum.”
“Do they not have mac ’n’ cheese in space?” Ricardo asked.
“Kiddie food and flightless ships? That’s the best Vega IX has to offer?”
Brenda pinched her fingers delicately. “It’s fancy mac. Not kids’ stuff.”
“And the boats are… cultured,” Ivan added lamely. “Like, that’s a thing you do if you’ve got money.”
“I’m saving up to buy one next summer,” Ricardo boasted. “I’m like halfway there. A small one, anyway.”
Brad cast a disapproving stare and swept it over each of them in turn. “Have you guys ever had fun?”
Ricardo scoffed. This was the power play. He hadn’t been sure before, but now Brad saw through the facade. Whether it was to drag him out of his comfort zone or simply an attempt to show off their superior culture, these guys weren’t playing nice.
“Oh yeah? You got a better idea? Think you know Vega IX better than a bunch of native Niners?”
A sly grin spread across Brad’s face. Oh, he had an idea. Challenge accepted.
“Yeah. Follow me, and let me do the talking.”
With a practiced flick of the wrist, Chuck sent a short stack of chips spilling in an aesthetically pleasing line in front of him. “I call. What’ve you got?”
The only other player at the table with still-active cards turned over a pair of nines, giving him three of a kind when using the common cards. A smirk hinted that he’d caught Chuck playing fast and loose, not believing he had a great hand. “Read ’em and weep.”
However, Chuck didn’t weep at the sight. Pausing only for a condescending snicker, he flipped over a five and a six, both diamonds. They matched the ace, seven, and nine of diamonds already on the table. The jack of spades and two of clubs didn’t factor into either player’s plan.
“Made my flush.”
“But—but—” the guy with three nines protested. “I bet the pot, and you had nothing.”
“Nothing but an inside straight flush draw,” Chuck corrected. “Maybe you shouldn’t have bet when I hit it.”
“You shouldn’t have had any better than two pair!”
Chuck reached out and raked home his chips. They clacked and clattered in a joyous chorus of pecuniary homecoming. “Hey, they don’t call it gambling for nothing.”
“I’m out,” the sore loser replied as the dealer collected the cards from the prior hand. “I’m gonna find a card room where they respect how the game is played.”
“Funny,” Chuck remarked without looking up as he stacked chips just as good as hardcoin terras. “You’d think such a skilled and smooth operator would want to surround himself with freewheeling lucksters like myself. Arrivederci.”
Chuck didn’t care if he lost a fish. There were plenty more in the Black Ocean—or more specifically, the Orologio Casino.
The other players chatted, some about the weather, others about local commodities markets, a couple commented on poor sportsmanship in card games. One empty seat lasted for all of a single hand before a newcomer sat down with a fresh pile of casino terras.
It was the eyes of the other players that were Chuck’s first hint someone was coming up behind him.
“Mr. Ramsey, we’re gonna hafta ask you to leave.” The voice boomed while being barely above a whisper, with more bass than a Deep Purple tribute band.
Chuck turned to find one of the Orologio security guys looming. “What? I’m winning here.”
“Mr. Mancuso specifically told you not to gamble on the property.”
It wasn’t fair that one guy owned the whole complex. There were other casinos on Vega IX, to be sure, but most of them would have involved paying for transport and wasting a chunk of his evening traveling to and from. Not to mention that much of the staff knew him by name at the Orologio.
“Curtis doesn’t own me. And that was more of a suggestion than a mandate. He was worried about me losing all my money and begging him for a raise. Look. I’m doing just fine.”
One of Curtis’s pit bosses emerged from behind the wall of security goon to intervene. “Chuck… We reserve the right to remove patrons for any reason. You know that.”
It only took a moment for Chuck to recall the guy’s actual name. “Lewie, no one’s getting hurt here. I’m just blowing off a little steam before tonight’s show. And it’s not gambling. It’s poker. A game of skill. Am I right, or am I right?”
He looked around the table for support. But instead of the head-bobbing mutterings of degenerate gamblers, he found eye-averted silence. Nobody wanted to stick their neck out when the dude who kicked people out of casinos was on the hunt. They all knew nothing was going to change Lewie’s mind. He was just following orders.
With a sigh, Chuck pasted a grin onto his face. “Cash me out?”
Lewie hooked a thumb toward the teller’s cage. “Go ahead. Cash him out,” he ordered the security guy—whose name Chuck was certain he’d never gotten.
The comedian, hiding his dejection, followed Lewie toward the service exit.
“He’s not worried about you,” Lewie confided in a hushed voice. “It’s an image thing.”
Chuck tugged the lapels of his suit. “Hey. I’m plenty presentable.”
“Not that cheap rag you’re wearing. The idea of you fleecing the customers.”
“Lewie… these guys are at a poker table in a casino. I think they know what they’re in for.”
“Not from an act. They’re here to play cards. Win. Lose. Free drinks. Whatever their deal. You—” Lewie paused for effect and to thump a finger into Chuck’s sternum. “Are here to tell jokes and make people laugh. Not to lounge around the table games. Sure as hell not to be felting hotel guests and insulting them.”
“If this is about that guy with the pocket nines…”
“So long as you’re workin’ here, the only time you show your face is with a spotlight on it. You got me?”
“Is this direct from Curtis?”
“It doesn’t need to be. I got the authority myself. But yeah. You’re persona non grata anywhere but The Hourglass. Now, I wanna hear it back. Where’s the only place you’re gonna be on property?”
Chuck deflated. “The Hourglass.”
Lewie clapped him twice on the shoulder. “Atta boy. Now, to show there’s no hard feelings, you feel free to hit the buffets, too.”
Chuck cracked a smile. “Thanks, Lewie.”
The smile faded as soon as Chuck was alone on the street outside the Orologio. Could he have gone for some buffet chow? Lewie had said nothing about comping him a meal, so the answer was a resounding ‘no.’
But with fresh terras in his digital account, he was noticing that he was hungry. Almost as an afterthought, he fired off a quick comm to Becky.
She didn’t respond.
Figured. She was probably off with some new friends, finding out what Vega IX’s party scene looked like. Probably stuck Brad with babysitting Mike and Rhi.
Heaving a wistful sigh, he wondered whether it would be worth keeping his datapad on in case some of Becky’s new friends were open-minded and she called for a little impromptu party of a more private nature.
Instead, Chuck shut off his datapad and hailed a hovercab.
“Where to, pal?” the driver asked once Chuck settled aboard.
“Get me to the nearest casino not owned by Curtis Mancuso. Someplace with a steak house.”
The sky barked tram schedules. Arrivals. Departures. Line numbers. Signs that pointed the way to various accommodations and services glowed with a sickly scientific light. Mort clutched a flimsy plastic card in hand, feeling like a fool. It contained all the information one would need to complete the journey he’d paid hardcoin to take.
Centennial Park.
Line 7A.
Depart: 6:05PM
Arrive: 6:25PM
32T Fare.
The dates on the arrivals and departure were the same—October 27, 2541. A whole lot of fuss for what amounted to a bus ride between oversized neighboring cities.
Mort clutched a precious piece of plastic paper in his hand. It served as both proof of purchase and his itinerary. Lose it, or spoil the self-updating printing, and his voyage would be ruined. Being so dependent on physical technology was what got Mort’s goat. If he could have just flashed a sigil, some young lackey or another would have escorted him personally to his conveyance.
Soft.
Mort had allowed Convocation life to soften him, make him reliant on others for his mundane needs. Working in and around Sunrise City had been a warmup. Vega IX apparently had several dark wizards in need of exterminating—probably far more than Mort would ever know about—and they hadn’t seen fit to congregate within walking distance of one another.
Would have been uncharacteristically nice of them, the more Mort considered it.
Mort’s feet carried him from sign to overhead sign, following digital breadcrumbs to his tram. Public clocks kept constantly reminding him of his impending departure.
5:47
5:52
6:01
Yes, yes. Line 7A. Line 7A. The signs kept pointing the way to line 7A, yet never hinting how close he might be getting. He’d taken a left when 7A-7F split from 7G-7M. He’d kept going straight when 7D-7F veered off to a rightward branch. All the while, a merry herd of imbeciles wandered to and fro across his path, each staring at the signs instead of aiming their feet.
Had Mort been dressed as a wizard, he’d have warranted a two-yard clear path to either side. No one wanted to be within arm’s reach of a wizard striding with purpose, let alone daring to brush shoulders with him for failure to properly gauge one’s own width in a crowd.
Incognito.
Mort’s sweatshirt and jeans were folded up inside the briefcase he carried as part of his disguise. Vega IX wasn’t the kind of planet where colonial sports fans blended in. Instead, he’d donned a core world cut business suit of middling expense, the kind expected of a cheap lawyer or a middle manager at a government office. It was an off-the-rack fit, close enough for public life but would have been the subject of snickers if he wore it anywhere upscale.
Aha!
Mort spotted the 7A tram for Centennial Park. A turnstile at the entrance to the loading area ate tickets fed to it by each passenger. At 6:03, he’d made it with time to spare.
As a last-second pang of responsibility, he caught the arm of a young man hoisting a travel bag as he prepared to head into the city after a recent arrival. “Excuse me. Can I buy a favor?”
It was an Earthling phrase, though not one common among wizards. Too cheap and commercial for the likes of a Brown. At least that’s what Mort hoped it sounded like. It marked him as core-to-the-core (as Earthlings considered themselves) and hinted at payment.
“Howzit?” the youngster asked. By the clarion voice and the ever-evolving understanding of slang he was developing, Mort pegged the lad as collegiate material, fence-sitting his twentieth year or so. Bright eyes told of a passable intellect.
“Friend of mine’s got her comms off. Mind delivering a message? There’s a centurion in it for you.”
That perked the kid’s ears in a hurry. 100T was nothing to brush aside. Especially if the young man truly was a student. “Sure, chief. I can hustle it.”
“Sunrise City Civic Hangar Fifteen. Just tell ’em Marty had a work thing come up. Overnight trip outta town. Can you do that?” Mort presented a single hardcoin hundred in the palm of his hand.
“Kein problemo, dude,” the newly anointed messenger replied with a salute before snatching the coin.
Mort scowled after the lad, wondering whether the butchered multi-heritage phrase was his own devising or yet another torment inflicted on Shakespeare’s English by the latest generation.
“Line 7A to Centennial Park now departing. Stand clear of the doors.”
Shit.
Mort had taken too long. With no time to indulge the ticket-eating gatekeeper, Mort slapped his proof of passage atop the device and quietly garbled its internal alarm for fare-skippers and hustled to the tram.
Just as he imagined he might have to perform a similar sabotage on the doors, Mort closed the distance and slipped aboard.
In an instant, the tram pulled away from the station. A faint hint of acceleration soured Mort’s expression—shoddy grav-stone work. Sure, it was planetside, and strictly a matter of comfort, but that was no excuse not to keep up with regular maintenance of a gravity field.
As the last arrival, Mort’s choices for seating were limited. Like an intracity tram, there were, of course, overhead bars and dangling straps to accommodate standing passengers. But based on the published schedule, Mort was in for about a quarter hour of transit.
Other passengers were already making use of the hanging loops of imitation leather. Mort had no intention of joining them.
Especially not when one entitled fuck was taking up three seats all on his own, slouching, legs sprawled, arms dangling over the armrests to either side of him. Never one to shy from confrontation, Mort marched right up to the offending passenger.
“You mind?”
For a fleeting moment, it seemed that the inconsiderate bastard might yap back at him. Mort would have almost admired such unmitigated gall, on par with reaching into a pot of boiling water to check whether a lobster was done yet. Fortunately for all parties, the man had the self-preservation to instead sit up straight in his seat and reel in his wayward arms.
Mort kept staring. He raised one eyebrow.
Clearing his throat and muttering an apology, the man slunk out of the seat and wove his way to the far end of the tram car. Standing passengers broke the line of sight between them.
Mort slumped into the middle of the vacated seats and set down his briefcase in the one to his right. A long breath allowed him to relax after a hectic adventure to get aboard this tram.
“Is anyone sitting here?” a young woman asked. She was perhaps the same age as Mort’s improvised messenger, blonde double-ponytail and sonic earmuffs marking her as modern, while the V.T.U. emblazoned sweatshirt suggested a trip back to the Vega Technological University campus. She carried a floppy duffel bag that couldn’t have been more than half full.
Mort took a careful scan of the vacant seat beside him. “No.”
She smiled and parked herself at Mort’s left, standing the duffel between her feet as best its lack of structure allowed. “I’m Chartreuse. But my friends all call me Shar.”
Several comments sprang to mind, each tinged with Chuck’s snappy, sarcastic delivery. A denial of the name as an accurate descriptor of her skin tone, suggestions that she was named after the liquor her parents were drunk on at the time of her conception, general denigration of the naming conventions popular outside of Earth’s gravity well.
Instead, Mort focused on the twinkle in her eyes, the coyness of her smile, the flirty cock of her head. “Hi. I’m twice your age, married, and preoccupied with business.”
“I was just being friendly.”
Mort slouched in his seat and closed his eyes. He had an all-nighter ahead of him, possibly culminating with a to-the-death struggle with Thaddius Bluth. A rest would do him some good, even if he was too alert to nap.
“Well, I was only shooting for civil.”
Dinner had been these weird sushi taco hybrids, which seemed to be all the rage on Vega IX. Once they discovered Brad had never tried one, his four new friends insisted on eating at Slow Your Roll. Brad still had the warring flavors of cilantro and wasabi coating his tongue when they arrived at the Orologio Casino.
Brad hadn’t mentioned that his dad worked there at one of the clubs. That was his escape pod. If he got into too much trouble, he could drop the name Chuck Ramsey and offload some of it up the familial food chain.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Ivan asked quietly as Brad led the pack. He gave a stifled grunt as someone hit him.
“Shut it,” Brenda whispered. “Just play along.”
At least someone had confidence in him.
Brad sauntered toward the doors, wide open to the public but flanked by a pair of besuited polar bears disguised as human bouncers.
“Hey, eighteen plus. Let’s see some ID.”
Brad paused as if this was the last thing he expected—talking polar bears. “What?”
“ID,” the bouncer repeated.
He pointed to Ricardo, placing the brawny teen at the center of attention. “Do you know who his father is?”
“No.”
Brad scoffed. “Well, you should.”
With that, Brad started forward again, marching into the casino like Ricardo’s dad owned the place. The bouncer didn’t try to stop him.
The others followed in his wake. Brad didn’t look back—it would have been out of character—but he pictured their reactions. Ivan cracked a nervous smile. Brenda and Tina giggled silently. Ricardo, if he had a gram of sense between his ears, inclined his head in acknowledgment that the bouncer made the right call.
He didn’t pause to gather his flock until they’d reached the outskirts of a food court. With the bustle of patrons waffling between cheap-and-greasy or slow-and-pricey, snagging a quiet spot was all relative. No one cared about the five of them. They weren’t casino staff. None of them was dressed provocatively. They were neither buying nor selling any good or service.
Tina broke the ice with a stage whisper. “That. Was. Greased. I almost thought Ric’s dad was somebody, and his mom is single.”
“Hey, my dad could be someone.”
Ivan snickered. “I don’t think the bouncer knowing that would have gotten us in. How’d you know that would work?”
Brad shrugged off the question. “It always works. It’s the attitude.”
“What now?” Brenda asked, making the obligatory comment her contribution to the group.
“Enjoy the casino. Craps, blackjack… I’m more a poker man myself. Remember that drinks are free if you’re sitting at a table, but you gotta tip in hardcoin. You all have hardcoin, right?”
By the glances from one student to the next, none of them did.
Brad had counted on that.
“It’s OK. I carry enough to float you guys.”
“You what?” Ricardo demanded.
Brad scoffed. “It’s a nice planet. Core world. What’s the harm keeping hardcoin in your pocket? Besides, you practically need it in a casino. The chip cashier will hook you up, but servers like hardcoin better than chips.”
Ivan furrowed his brow. “Why would they—”
“Taxes,” Brenda cut in. “They don’t report the hardcoin, but if they got tipped in chips, they’d leave a digital trail when they cashed in.”
Brad nodded as he smirked. Oh, Brenda was going to flip on Ivan sooner rather than later. “I should have enough to change you guys up for fifty apiece. That ought to cover you.”
“Fifty?” Tina echoed.
“Whatever,” Brad replied flippantly. “Toss a fiver or a ten when you get a drink or food delivered to your table. No one’s gonna toss a good tipper for looking a little retrograde of eighteen.”
Finding a spot out of the flow of foot traffic, Brad pulled out a stack of hardcoin tens from his pocket. He parceled them into fives, then whipped out a thumb scanner.
“You always carry one of those?” Ivan asked.
“Spacers. Am I right?” Brad replied evasively. “Gotta be prepared in case commerce happens. This time, it’s just a nice, neutral transaction. Nobody’s gonna owe anybody tonight.”
He took care of the ladies first. Five hardcoin tens, and Brad input fifty point zero zero terras into the scanner. Had he been the creepy and technically inclined sort, Brad could have used the thumb Brenda scanned to look up basic financial info like her full name and legal address. On a core world, it probably included a holo scan of her face the day she opened the account.
Brad repeated the process first with Tina, then Ivan.
By the time it was Ricardo’s turn, the process had been perfected to the point where, when Brad tapped in the terras, he didn’t even bother with the decimal. Without so much as double-checking the readout, Ricardo scanned away five thousand terras into Brad’s account.
A pittance compared to how much sailboats cost on a core world.
“Great. Let’s hit the tables!”
Despite its general appearance, the tram was not a ground conveyance. The linked cars flew at low altitude just above a rail that it followed as if tethered by a length of stout rope. Mort didn’t know how the information helped him, but it passed the time as a dreary techno-hellscape whizzed past his window. As he watched the unending scene passing before him, one question nagged him.
Why…?
Why did planet after planet clutter their surface with monolithic gizmo-towers and technophile warrens? Why did they build colossal steel veins to pump water and air and electricity and twelve names for elemental fire all to every home? It made every infected planet a blight. Too few pushed back against the encroachment to carve out havens for the magically proficient, for the tech-independent, for the clear thinkers who didn’t need their lives force-fed to them via tubes.
Unanswerable.
Society writ large had been making that same error for centuries without the self-awareness to even question their actions, let alone begin working toward a solution. Mort resigned himself; he was doomed to witness the folly anew with each colony he visited.
The tram lurched, forcing Mort’s personal opinion of gravity to keep him upright as all the passengers around him swayed in unison toward the front of the car.
“Arriving at Centennial Park. Stand clear of the doors.”
“My stop,” Mort muttered to his travel companion without attempting to make eye contact.
Chartreuse huffed. “Whatever will I do to keep myself amused.”
They hadn’t spoken a word since Mort’s curt dismissal of her attempts at banal small talk and misguided flirting.
A scattering of other passengers shared Mort’s destination. However, as last one onto the tram, his seat had been near the exit. In no hurry and with only a briefcase for luggage, he made it onto the station platform before any of the rest had a chance to get ahead of him.
Mort sucked in a deep breath, seeking to fill his lungs with air that hadn’t been inhaled, exhaled, and shared around the tram car like a beach ball at an outdoor concert for the past fifteen minutes.
A mistake.
The Centennial Park air might not have been recently expelled by a commuter from Sunrise City, but it was anything but fresh. It stank of chemicals that, far from nameless, suffered from gibberish nomenclature of the long-winded variety. They wailed a horror story of robotic manufacturing, electronic alchemy, and the congealment of goo both edible and inedible with little actual distinction between the two.
“Blech,” he commented to no one in particular.
“Home sweet home,” an eavesdropping local replied with a grin in his voice. “You get used to it.” The scent-addled colonist didn’t attempt to make anything more of the conversation and went on his way. Eight fewer words, and Mort would have considered the conversation perfect.
Mort was, however, becoming an expert at getting used to things. Not adapting, or appreciating, or even grudgingly accepting them. Just getting used to them. Planets sucked. People sucked. It was the same anywhere and everywhere, and exceptions existed on a limited, case-by-case basis.
Public transit was yet another unwelcome accustoming the fugitive wizard had endured. Chuck kept the worst of it from affecting him, providing bespoke transportation to destinations of professional import. Other than the Radio City, Mort was stuck with trams, transports, and…
Mort waved the hovercab down. Luckily, he knew the time-honored manner of summoning intracity ferrymen. Earthlings had their gizmos that claimed to be better and more efficient, but wizards had imprinted upon the wider populace that lifting off with a hand-waving passenger aboard sometimes came with self-awarded, seldom-audited tipping privileges.
“Where may I?” the pilot asked with a weirdly nonchalant cadence to his speech that suggested it was a local half-saying.
Mort didn’t care for the slang; it hurt his brain in the spot where he kept his grammar. But he could make use of this extreme specimen of local to his advantage. “Don’t have a place to stay the night. Find me something with decent rooms but won’t bankrupt me.” He hoped that sounded neutral and tech enough to disguise the fact he was a wizard.
“Quickie trip? Not even a slingy for your duds?”
Mort gritted his teeth against a harrumph and narrowed his eyes to keep from rolling them. “Yeah. Work shipped me off on short notice. Planning to shop in the morning. Now… where might I be sleeping between now and tomorrow?”
The hover lifted off and immediately banked. A sturdy little onboard gravity stone kept Mort from feeling the motion at all. “Be fretless, compadre. I’ll get you bunked up all smooth and fluffy before you can sing Ten Little Laaku.” That wouldn’t be a surprise, since Mort had never heard of the song. He didn’t travel in the kind of circles that sang xenoist ditties—though the content of the song’s lyrics was, at best, a guess at this point. “So, whatchadu?”
“Excuse me?”
“Whatchadu for a livelihood? That’s what I’m saying. Not from around here, that’s plump as pomegranates. Got an echo of a galactic newsfeed.” The pilot removed one hand from the controls to snap his fingers. “Ahoy! That’s that. You’re an Earthling. All the face-yaks on galactic news are either Earthlings or pose like they are. You sound just like ’em. Wait-wait-wait, can you do Broderick Mattison?” The pilot cleared his throat and affected a terrible Earth accent. “Good evening, fellow beings. You’re watching the Solar Newsfeed, all the propaganda that’s heliocentric.” He chuckled at his own joke. “So. What’s work? Whatchadu?”
It wasn’t once in a pass of Halley’s Comet that Mort agreed, but this was the first time he could recall that Chuck’s advice on lying seemed appropriate.
“I’m one of those wizards that hunts other wizards when they go bad. Work shipped me off to box up a baker’s dozen in little ash caskets and send them back to Earth.”
The pilot exaggerated a laugh that sounded as if it contained a nugget of the genuine article. Mort wasn’t familiar with the customs on Vega IX, but he suspected that tipping still existed this close to Sol. Kissing up to the passengers was part of the stage act. All that was missing was a dilapidated hat to collect hardcoin charity at the end of the show.
“Gotcha-gotcha, friend-o. It’s your vay-cay. You can be anybody, amirite? Even if it’s a corporate put-up job, can’t keep you from throwing yourself a party. Have at it. Be the wiz-snuffing super-spy of your dreams. And ya know what?” The hover veered suddenly, altering its course and diving among the lower reaches of the sky-scraping towers of Centennial Park. “I got a rent-a-bed even better than the joint I was flying you to before. Trust me.”
Great Hades’s mustache, what had Mort gone and done? This yokel was going to deliver him to some playacting camp for wannabe wizards if he wasn’t careful.
“No, no. The first place will do just fine.”
“Don’t you brain it, amigo mio. We got you covered.”
“Really. I don’t want anything fancy or exotic or in any way altered because of an offhanded jest.”
“Offhanded? Really?”
“Really.”
“You don’t want a chance to snooze like a wiz on a sleep-slab stuffed with bird feathers and all the walls are square rock stuck together with permacrete glue?”
Mort struggled mightily as his mind pieced together concepts and idiom like an archaeologist with a pile of clay fragments that might or might not have once been all the same vase. The image snapped into focus all at once.
A Convocation-owned hotel.
Mort knew of them. Boston Prime had several. In fact, Earth was lousy with them. No major city went without proper accommodations for a man who preferred his lifts to rise without dangerous technological forces and his foods prepared by adepts in command of the elements, not drones poking buttons on a contraption. Non-wizards were welcome, of course; terras were terras. But the clientele skewed heavily in favor of baggy sleeves and expensive jewelry.
It sounded perfect.
It sounded like a night where he could forget that he was on the run, his days of bunking on a run-down starship little more than a temporary setback on an otherwise stellar rise to Convocation greatness.
It sounded like a mistake.
Criminals had, throughout history and literature, been undone by one of two key flaws: hubris or laziness. Mort couldn’t in good conscience allow himself to be lulled into walking into a den of would-be enemies on the promise of a comfy night’s sleep and familiar surroundings.
“Regular hotel. I’m a good tipper; let’s not ruin a good thing.”
Without a drop of magic, Mort had used the magic word. “Your tenner, chief.”
Mort hoped that implied a ten-terra tip was in order. Had the pilot not mentioned a sum—even obliquely, and possibly in error due to cultural misunderstanding—Mort would have tossed him a cool hundred without a second thought.
Moments later, Mort disembarked at a nondescript corporate boarding house of factory-made mien and the plebeian moniker: Vacation Suites Inn. The pilot charged him twenty-nine for the ride, and Mort passed along the promised “tenner” for good service. On many of the colonies the Radio City had visited over the last year, that amount would have covered not only delivery to such a lodging but also paid for the night’s stay and a couple meals at the in-house eatery.
A charming, uniformed “Byron” behind the reception desk charged Mort ninety-five for a single night. He declined his offer of a reduced rate for an extended stay—Mort couldn’t be done in this reeking cesspit of modernity soon enough. He did, however, realize that he had an opportunity here.
Centennial Park was huge. Bellagio hadn’t given him much to go on. He needed a plan on how to find Thaddius Bluth.
What most technophiles seemed to overlook in the tale of Hansel and Gretel, from Mort’s observation and talking to several who’d brought up the concept themselves, is that a trail of breadcrumbs is a horrible method of finding your way anywhere. When you left traces like that to follow, they were destined to be snatched up by malevolent forces.
Mort was looking for malevolent forces.
He flashed the Convocation sigil, the first magic he’d used all day. It felt good letting out even such a tiny force into the world. “Charge it to my people. Throw in a three-course dinner delivered in an hour and schedule a wake-up call for dawn. I’ll be turning in early and have a busy day ahead of me tomorrow.”
Byron’s demeanor shifted from a caffeinated sort of helpful to an almost military efficiency with a suddenness that had Mort questioning which was the real concierge. “Of course, sir. I’ll see to all of it personally.”
Mort accepted the help of a porter, tipping yet another ten-terra hardcoin when the lad unlocked the tech on the door for him. It was nice being a wizard, even if it was just showing off for the unwashed masses.
Once the door sealed behind him, Mort began his scheming.
Right after he finished his dinner—dumplings, sesame chicken, and crab rangoon from a bag clearly labeled with the logo of a Rockin’ Wok he’d passed on the way over—Mort dummied up the bed to appear as if a wizard slumbered there in a nightcap, oblivious to his surroundings.
A yawn snuck up and opened Mort’s mouth without permission. Damn, it had been a long day. It would be an even longer night.
Fiddling with the knobs eventually got water to run from the mini-kitchen tap. He considered a consultation with Laurent in Mortania to get the coffee maker set up, but decided against it. He couldn’t be relying on advice from technologists for every little thing. It was just one night. The lone packet of mint tea and a touch of wizardly heat to boil water was all he needed.
The lurking wizard perched on the closed lid of the toilet, peering out from the suite’s washroom to keep a vigil on the Mordecai That Wasn’t.
If no one showed up to kill him, Mort was going to feel like an idiot.
A good casino whirled with motion. Roulette wheels, dice, cards, waitstaff, dealers, pit bosses, and most of all gamblers, gamblers, gamblers. There were certainly sullen betting parlors where glassy-eyed degenerates parked at digital slot machines or watched scrolling scores of sporting events from across ARGO space. But the Orologio Casino thumped with energy. Whether it was from the undertone of modern arctic fusion beats or the slightly oxygen-rich mix pumped in from the life-support system, Brad felt the life of the place.
As tour guide to this novel experience for his friends, he felt a duty to expose them to a well-rounded night of casino debauchery.
The five of them crowded the players at a craps table, jockeying for a view of the dice. But while throwing the dice had always been a lark, Brad couldn’t wrap his head around the finer points of the odds system. Plus, like virtually every game of chance available to the public, the house had rigged the games to always come out ahead in the long run.
Key word: long run.
Short term, any asshole could get lucky.
That said, the excitement of the table games was undeniable. The shooter at their spectated craps table was on a hot streak, and everyone seemed to be winning. Temptation to toss down a bet on the Pass line grew by the roll.
“Eleven, and another winner!” the croupier called out. Casino chips and a scattering of regular old hardcoin slid around the table.
Ricardo had muscled his way to the front by now and placed a five-terra wager. Without a view of the felt, he couldn’t see how his companion had bet. The dice flew seconds later. Brad stood on tiptoe to see how they landed but couldn’t get a vantage.
“Snake-eyes!” the croupier announced as a series of groans rose from the players.
“Aw, c’mon,” Ricardo complained. “I just got here.”
“Next shooter.”
With a crook, the croupier slid the dice to Ricardo, who hastily placed another bet and picked them up.
While the kid didn’t seem to notice the subtle salesmanship at work, Brad caught on instantly. This guy was good. A fresh-faced kid, borderline too young to even be here, might have walked away discouraged. But who could resist a chance to shoot? To throw the dice with the illusion of fate and fortune in your own hands?
Ricardo made a four, followed by a ten, a nine, then craps. It was an exciting couple minutes, wondering if he’d win himself a whole five terras to come out even. Alas, he did not.
A waiter in a tight-fitting Orologio t-shirt wandered past with a tray of drinks. Dividers carved the tray into four regions, each bearing a different selection. Brad identified it as a quick-service drink buffet and inclined his head to catch the guy’s attention.
“What you got?”
The waiter gave Brad a cursory glance that hinted he might not buy Brad being eighteen yet and just as quickly dismissed the idea as someone else’s problem. “I’ve got vermouth, gin, vodka, and beer.”
“What brand?” Brad asked, knowing that kids didn’t generally get picky about booze. “Just the beer. I’m here to have a good time, not get divorced on my honeymoon.”
“Hobart Pale.”
Brad cringed. “Martian? Fine. I’ll take one.” He pulled out a hard five and left it on the server’s platter as he accepted his drink. As the server departed, likely considering him an asshole more than a kid who snuck in underage, Brad waved over his school companions. “C’mon. I spotted a real game.”
Off in a corner of the Orologio, there were a dozen race-track-shaped tables, felted in green and surrounded by idiots. They were the smartest idiots in the casino though; they were gambling against one another instead of the house. He pointed with his tumbler of beer in grasp.
“Poker?” Ivan asked dubiously as the group congregated in the midst of the pedestrian aisle between craps tables. They became an island around which a river flowed. “Isn’t that… advanced?”
Brad laughed him off. “Everyone knows the rules. Just watch how the other players handle their chips and antes and that shit. The rest is gambling.”
Dad would have killed Brad for saying that if he thought for a second his son believed that. Poker had an element of chance to it, but it was a game of skill. It was card-counting for guys who didn’t want to get kicked off a blackjack table, psychology for the medically inept, and an arena for budding sociopaths to practice the art of deception with a safety net made of terras.
The path to the poker section, while clogged with foot traffic, bore no hard obstacle to stop the advance of the crew. One occupant at the tables, however, caught Brad dead in his tracks.
Shit, what’s Dad doing here?
While Dad could play smooth on a number of subjects, Brad had a few too many boxes checked on his “your mom better not find out” list. Drinking, gambling, swindling classmates, visiting the casino where Dad was working in the attached nightclub, lying to Mom about his evening plans. Dad could be expected to cover the occasional indiscretion, but Brad was closing in on stuff even Chuck Ramsey might deem across the line.
“One sec,” Brad declared as his friends shuffled into him in the close quarters. “We should hit the washrooms before sitting down.”
“But I don’t need to—” Ivan attempted to object.
“You think you don’t. But you do. If you’re holding it, you make bad decisions. And with free drinks…”
“You’re pretty smart,” Tina commented.
Reversing course pissed off a few roving gamblers inconvenienced by their lumbering maneuvers, but the crew made it to the nearest public washrooms. At the last second, once everyone else had gone inside, Brad doubled back.
He needed a plan.
Finding a seat outside Dad’s field of view might work, but it was risky. Plus, the five of them, still in uniforms, stood out. All it would take was someone with a better view to make a crack about the underage gamblers and Dad would have to look over.
Instead, Brad played a card he kept tucked up his sleeve.
Floor bosses stood out if you knew how to spot them. They were sharp-eyed, sober, always looked like they had a million things on their mind but were juggling them. Middlemen extraordinaire, they enforced rules with a suppressed glee and tyrannical selectiveness. But some they could only ignore so far.
“Hey, is that Chuck Ramsey?” Brad inquired after catching the attention of one.
“Who?”
Brad inclined his head toward his father. “The guy in the tux with the untied bowtie. Thought he worked for the casino. Saw him the other night.”
“So what?” This guy was a hard case. Brad would have sworn he’d heard Dad say he wasn’t going to gamble because the casino suits wouldn’t let him. He could never be certain, especially when Dad was talking to Mom at the time, but it sounded legit. Maybe Dad had been lying.
“Not a good look, don’t ya think?” Brad asked. “I don’t think I’d play cards with a guy getting his terras the same place as the dealers.”
“’Scuse me.” The pit boss didn’t confirm anything, but he headed over and conferred with a couple of the muscular chaps who worked security at the Orologio. Moments later, Dad lost an argument and left the casino under his own power.
“All set. Plenty of room for beer,” Ricardo declared as he led the procession out of the washrooms.
“Great. Let’s grab some seats and play some cards.”
The sudden surge of players created a critical mass that triggered the casino to open up a new table. Brad picked his favorite spot, directly across from the dealer, and plunked down a couple hundred in hardcoin as his stake. His friends sprinkled themselves in among other card players eager to get another table going.
“Don’t you have homework you could be doing?” the dealer asked, dripping sarcasm.
Brad could sense the unease wash over his companions. It was his job to head off the inquisition. Luckily, this was the perfect opportunity for the Woebegone Whammy. “Not you, too… Look, Ravesh, I know you have a job, and I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot here, but could you just deal the cards? I already ran through this song and dance with the bouncer. We just got off a shoot for Sacré Vous, pitching their new Joli Teen line. My agent keeps telling me I can play 14 to 24, but when I’m off set it gets a little tired, ok?”
“You’re an actor?”
“Model. Jesus, do I sound like anyone wants to give me a speaking part? I listen to my own voice auditions. I know. You don’t have to shove it in my face. I spritz the stuff on my chest, button up my shirt, and walk down a school hall. Girls turn away from their pretty-boy and jock boyfriends.” Brad indicated Ivan and Ricardo, respectively. All the while, the dealer had been distributing cards, including to the five underage players. “They trail after me. And go easy on them. I promised them this game is simple. Don’t go making me a liar.”
The night air smelled like hover exhaust but not quite. So did the daytime air. Evening air too, now that Chuck thought about it. All the locals had gone scent-blind to it, and when he’d asked, theories about what he smelled hadn’t reassured him.
Was it an acrid sting at the back of the sinuses? Probably the fuel rod refinery.
Did it coat the back of the throat and make milk taste funny? Could be the medi-cream factory.
Were there faintly purple clouds of it when he noticed the odor? If so, unquestionably he was smelling the vents from the fusion crematorium.
Harmless. All perfectly harmless, everyone assured him. He’d get used to it, they said. But Chuck didn’t want to get used to it; he wanted to get away from it. Too many local watering holes and civic entertainment facilities didn’t bother filtering the shit from the atmosphere. He needed someplace that catered to either an upper-class clientele or to tourists.
Chuck waggled a hand in the air to summon a hovercab.
“Where may I?” the cabbie asked as soon as Chuck was closed inside. The interior stank worse than the outdoors with the added odors of unwashed passengers.
He had to be on stage in two hours.
That limited Chuck’s options for a good time.
“Hoo, Baby,” he instructed his quick-rent chauffeur.
The cabbie shot him a quick look over his shoulder. A split-second appraisal later, and the guy shrugged. “Sure thing, pal.”
A million thoughts must have been going off in the cabbie’s head, trying to figure Chuck out. A million assumptions times a million guesses fired wildly and no doubt missed the mark. The day Chuck Ramsey made sense to the galaxy, the day they could get a step ahead of him and stick out a foot, he’d trip and fall flat on his face…
Possibly onto a swarm of blaster bolts.
As the hovercab whisked away moments later, Chuck stood in front of Hoo, Baby, a purveyor of unclad entertainment. Tawdry digital neon announced the attractions, the expected titillation, the prices.
Chuck locked eyes with the bouncer briefly and winked. He passed through without having to pay a cover charge.
Past the barrier of sound-dampening tech, a thumping, artificial beat pounded, felt as much in the ribcage as the eardrums. Low lighting kept the tiny round tables and more expansive leather-padded booths shrouded in darkness. Patrons were silhouettes until they were less than a meter away, and even then, only when the roving, ever-changing lights caught them just right.
Tight dresses and exposed flesh surrounded Chuck in all directions. He was prudish in his tuxedo by contrast.
Up on stage, dancers undulated and teased. Smooth, oiled skin of every hue highlighted physiques straight out of a Renaissance sculptor’s studio. Each of the performers wore a belt with pouches dangling from the hips, crotch, and buttocks and nothing else. As leering patrons catcalled from the front-row tables, they tossed hardcoin. Expertly, the performers waggled, thrust, and squatted to catch the tips in their pouches. The few that hit the stage would get swept into troughs and split among the whole staff.
Chuck knew all this because he’d been in his share of places where the performers were predominantly female.
But unlike most of the happy-go-luckies here tonight, Chuck knew how the clockwork of civilization meshed. He was no fool. Some of the guys on that stage would sneak back to a hotel or apartment or washroom with someone who tipped especially well. Most of the ladies throwing coins would go home disappointed.
Chuck was here to rescue one of them from a night of pining over a brawny aspiring actor whose charisma would evaporate the first time he opened his mouth.
A good sport, Chuck insinuated himself at a stage-adjacent table with an empty chair and flipped hard five sky-high. The nearest dancer timed the arc and caught it with admirable panache.
But Chuck was already ignoring where his coin had gone.
“Evening ladies. Hope you don’t mind a little company.”
His table came with two ready-made companions. One looked the part of a bachelorette partygoer, wearing a red dress like a cloth tube stretched tight over every curve from thighs to bust. She grinned at the dancers with a light in her eyes that said being here was an uncommon treat. The novelty cocktail in her hand was a half-empty half-liter, and two empties waited in front of her for a busgirl to clear.
The other woman at Chuck’s table wore a skirt suit and kept her hair pulled into an elaborate bun atop her head. Unlike her neighbor, this woman’s jaded expression evaluated what she was watching and appreciated it without going overboard. The wine glass in her hand contained a splash of red before she threw it back in a gulp.
“Sit,” the skirt suit instructed. She looked Chuck up and down. “You business or pleasure?”
He supposed he should have expected blunt from this one, given all his observations and the circumstances. Chuck’s first glance had pegged her as offworld corporate, lonely and looking for companionship on an unwelcome business trip. Now, he upgraded his estimate; she was local business, and this was a workplace. Not that he held the slightest suggestion she might be selling her own services here. Far from it. Chuck had stumbled onto someone who employed underlings—that steel tone of voice couldn’t be mistaken—and who liked her business partners distracted and lubricated as she negotiated.
Never one to get hung up on his initial plan, Chuck switched orbits. “I try to mix the two as liberally as possible.”
Skirt suit turned to wide-eyes. “Leave us.”
“But—”
Skirt suit shut her up with a casually raised finger. “Jared will make good.” Whoever Jared was, the other woman took her cue and left.
Chuck snapped his fingers in the air. It was too loud for anyone to hear it, but the gesture alone was enough to bring a young fellow in skin-tight swim trunks to take his order. “Two glasses of whatever she’s having.”
She met his gaze with a sidelong look. “I’m drinking Pinot Noir Sant’Agostino ’21.”
“She’s buying,” Chuck added without missing his timing.
Rather than take offense, his companion smirked. “Do you know who I am?”
Chuck cringed openly. “Never a good look. Because the answer’s never yes.”
The server came back with their wine lightning quick. “Angelica.” She offered a handshake with her free hand.
“Chuck,” he replied. He shook the offered hand, and they both drank.
“Oh. I’m aware of who you are. Does Curtis know you’re here before a show?”
Shit. She was connected to the Orologio. “Look. Don’t get me wrong. Curtis doesn’t know. But he’s never had reason to doubt I’ll be on stage, on schedule, on point. I’m a pro.” He tossed back what, by his guess, was about 50T worth of wine in a gulp. Then he leered at Angelica playfully.
“I don’t work for him,” she assured Chuck. “I just… keep track of the industry players.”
“I see.”
“Do you, now?” Angelica dangled the question like chum over shark-infested oceans.
Chuck did see. Curtis Mancuso was no small-timer on Vega IX. For someone to be all up in his business and referring to him by his first name—casually and in public—hinted that she wasn’t worried about word getting back that she was dropping his name.
Also—and Chuck blamed the cut of Angelica’s suit jacket for taking so long to notice—there was a hint of an extra bulge near her bustline. It was set up for a left-hander, but she had a blaster in a shoulder holster.
Chuck grinned to reassure her. “I may be the showman, but I fill in a lot of odd jobs between gigs.”
“And what odd jobs are you working for Curtis Mancuso?”
It was a minefield question—the magnetic kind that, if you didn’t veer in time, would pull itself right up to your hull before detonating. “Just comedy. Though if I wasn’t, it’s still the same answer I’d give. But you knew that before you asked.”
Angelica gave an amused little grunt. “So… if you didn’t know who I was, and you’re not looking for work—”
“Well, I’m never not looking for work, either.”
“Fair. But if you didn’t sit here to make a professional introduction, just why did you join us?”
Chuck swept out a hand toward the nude dancers gyrating on stage just a couple meters away. “I’m clearly a patron of the arts.”
Angelica’s wry grin informed Chuck that she wasn’t buying that excuse.
Chuck gave a quick yet meaningful glance toward the performers. “This lot’s a bunch of show horses. Women come in, get their engines revved, go home disappointed.”
“Some can afford to bring their treats home…”
“Even the ones who fork over the extra just get a more expensive letdown. All that smooth skin? On account of they’re barely old enough to shave. It’s like letting an intern perform major surgery or a paralegal defend a murder rap. That’s where I come in.”
“Oh, really?” Angelica asked with a suppressed chuckle.
Chuck looked deeply into her eyes. “At least one woman in here tonight deserves to get treated like the goddess she is.”
Angelica tipped her chair back and folded her arms. “Bold claim.”
There was every chance that this woman was syndicate connected. That meant that disappointing her could have deadly consequences. But while Chuck had often been a disappointment as a comedian, a father, and various other failures in his life, he’d never had a complaint as a lover.
He leaned forward to meet her challenge. “I’ve got to be on stage in about an hour and a half, and I consider that to be barely enough time to do the job properly.”
When they left, arm in arm, to be picked up by a limo, Chuck wished Angelica hadn’t turned away her cute blonde friend; she’d been just Becky’s type.
Brad’s thumb scanner rattled with digital terras as he ambled his way through the parking deck of Sunrise City Civic Hangar Fifteen. His other pocket held a much more tangible stash of hardcoin. It had been impossible for his classmates to open up and chat about the pedestrian blanditudes of planetside life surrounded by gamblers trying to believe their cover story of being advertising actors in their early twenties, which suited Brad just fine.
Just as he was within shouting distance of the Radio City, a light service hover whirred past him. Open-aired and with seating for five or six, it held only one passenger: Dad.
The elder Ramsey wore his tuxedo with the bowtie dangling loose around his neck and a dopey grin on his face. “Thanks, Victor. You’re a mensch.” He pointed a finger-blaster at the uniformed pilot as he wobbled to the permacrete. The pilot gave a polite nod of acknowledgment before zipping off.
“Oh. Hi,” Dad said upon spotting his son, blinking a few times to focus. “What’re you doing here?”
“I live here. Same as you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“I went to school, then out with friends. Geez, you’d think you’d have the decency to at least pretend you paid attention.”
Clapping a hand on Brad’s shoulder, Dad let out a cheek-flapping sigh that reeked of whiskey. “Look. Your mom and I cut a deal. She keeps track of you young’uns, I pay the bills. If you’re not interesting enough for me to remember your daily itinerary, that’s on you.” He tried to tap a finger on Brad’s nose and poked him in the cheek instead.
This was Dad at his worst. Sloppy drunk, he developed a mean honest streak.
Winning a tit-for-tat argument would lack satisfaction considering the likelihood of Dad forgetting this whole conversation by morning. “Shouldn’t your show have ended hours ago?”
“Shouldn’t you have gotten home before me?”
Well, shit. Mom had said something about a curfew when they’d first arrived on Vega IX, but it hadn’t come up before now. The whole planet had been boring as shit, and even finding trouble on his own, Brad had comfortably been home by suppertime to park in front of the holo-projector and while away the evening hours.
“Mom’s gonna be pissed.”
Crossed eyes came into focus with visible effort on Dad’s face. “We need a cover story.”
That was a no-brainer. But what? This was Dad’s specialty, and Brad wanted to see how he was coming along in surpassing his old man. “What about a Samaritan Diversion?”
Dad shook his head, placing a hand on the hull of the Radio City to keep his balance. “Nah. Can’t come in sounding like the good guys. Too suspicious. Take another crack.”
Brad pursed his lips and wished his thoughts weren’t so blurry. “Deal of a Lifetime?”
Dad chuckled at that one. “You pull that one out so often, Becky’s gonna think you’re a cat.”
“Huh?”
“Nine lives, nine chances of a lifetime? No? Fine. Maybe you’re too drunk to know funny. Wait. You are drunk, aren’t you?”
Genius. Pure genius. “No. I’m trying this new vodka perfume that’s popular on Vega.”
Dad leaned in and sniffed. “It’s on your breath.”
“Comes as a breath spray, too.”
Waggling his hands, Dad brushed aside the whole conversation. “Look. We need a collaborative plan. Something that covers both of us. Nothing as suspicious as two unlikely stories at once.”
Brad snapped his fingers. “You picked me up after school to celebrate my first day of planetsider indoctrination. Not wanting to see his boy turn into a bland, corporate lackey, Chuck Ramsey takes him out for drinks at a nudie bar.”
Dad snorted. “That might get you off the firing range…”
Brad smirked. “If you agree to actually take me, we can switch it to a sports bar.”
“What sport?”
“What’s it matter?”
“Details! We went to Savage Shots. Watched the Bronze League bout between Roper and Wong.”
“Were they even fighting tonight?”
“Your mom doesn’t check shit like that. It’s too much of a drag. If by some miracle she does call us on it, it’s an honest mistake; neither of us follows Bronze League that closely.”
Maybe it was the puddle of booze slowly being absorbed through his stomach wall, but Brad couldn’t help a warm glow of admiration spreading through his soul. God dammit, Dad was a magnificent piece of work. But Brad wasn’t losing himself in the story being woven.
“So that means you’ll take me?”
“Take you?”
“Nudie bar.”
Dad scoffed. “Fuck no.”
Brad leaned until he slumped against the hull. “Then you were playing poker at the Orologio, jeopardizing our gravy train and breaking your promise not to gamble while we’re on Vega.”
It took Dad a moment to process. Then, with a few rapid blinks, he made his counterattack. “Nah. Too blatant.”
“Wait. What? I saw you there.”
“So? Your mom knows better than to think I’d be so clumsy. I slink around breaking promises all the time. But I’d slink. Ya know?”
“I. Saw. You. My friends and I walked in just as you were getting escorted from a poker table.”
Dad poked him in the chest. Hard. Brad rocked back, and if he hadn’t already been using the hull for support, he might have toppled over. “You were gambling.”
“No. I was playing poker to cover for a scam.”
“Ix-nay on the am-scay,” Dad whispered harshly, narrowing his eyes and scanning for surveillance drones or whatever paranoid shit he imagined was eavesdropping.
With a sigh, Brad just gave in. Dad wasn’t in the bargaining mood, and the odds of him keeping to any deal seemed slim to begin with. “Fine. Bronze League. Roper and Wong. Lost track of time.”
A wink and a finger blaster sealed the deal. Brad felt honored to be on the same level as the hover pilot, Victor, in receiving accolades.
The two of them marched in together. Dad commented in medias res, as if they’d been talking all the way home. “And that guy who said Roper was washed up? I bet he’s wishing he’d kept his mouth shut until the—”
There was no Mom. Instead, the living room had been taken over by The Blueberry Gang on the holovid and an explosion of easy-make food processor desserts.
“Hi, Daddy!” Rhi called out, waving one chocolate-stained hand.
“What happened here?” Dad demanded, more dismayed than angry.
Brad could have told him. The answer was obvious, even if the details might need paint-by-numbers to come into focus.
Mike came in from the kitchen wearing an apron that dragged on the floor, tripping him with each step. “I cooked dinner.” He sounded proud. Brad kinda had to credit the kid. If no one had come home, the littles wouldn’t have starved.
“Where’s your mother?”
“She used a bad word and had to go to her room,” Rhi explained.
Brad fought back a smirk.
“You punished Mommy?” Dad asked, getting down to one knee with a wobble in his legs.
“No. Mommy punished Mommy.”
Damn. Smooth maneuver, Mom.
Dad turned and fixed a sly look on Brad. “Deal’s off due to lack of accountability.”
Rather than argue a lost cause, Brad surveyed the damage. Clearly, the younger Ramseys had relished being let off the leash, so to speak. Toys and snacks lay strewn everywhere, the intersection of what appeared to be a tea party upgraded with the addition of real food for the stuffed toys in attendance, many of which would need a trip through the clothes processor. “You know. Stuff like this doesn’t happen when Mort’s around.”
“Mort’s got to stretch his legs once in a while,” Dad explained. “Plus, we can’t be beholden to the whims of a babysitter, no matter how skilled.”
“Should wake Mom up; have her clean all this up.” Brad knew that ‘wake up’ was a euphemism here, even if what she was high on had ended up putting her to sleep when she crashed.
“Oh, I’ll check in on her, but I’m not getting her up for this.” Dad grinned a wicked grin. “That’s your job.”
Brad opened his mouth to object, but Dad was a step ahead of him. His parents’ door closed, and he heard muffled sounds of an argument starting.
Taking another look over the mess, Brad decided that this wasn’t his problem, either. “Mikey. I want you to clean this all up.”
“Me?” A hunted look crossed his brother’s face. The scope of the disaster in the living room and kitchen sank in. “By myself?”
It was a pretty big job. Especially for a six-year-old. “Go ahead and use the power cleaner.”
Mike’s eyes lit. “Can I? Really?”
Brad shrugged. What did he care? “Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”
Evander Shark’s living room was as much a place of business as it was a family refuge. Despite the lack of blood bonds between him and his underlings, he considered them to be family. He knew that none of them believed it, but the charade kept the business side running smoothly.
Smoothly, that is, as far as crime syndicates went. The Boxcar Syndicate was local and tight knit.
His captains and lieutenants had all come together tonight. On the surface, it was for everyone to enjoy Dianne’s Dijon casserole and a few bottles of Killington ’15. But while it was far from uncommon for Evander to bring his underbosses over for a home-cooked meal, getting them all together required a special purpose.
Zakk had come in from the West End, leaving naval arms factories under the jurisdiction of his own underlings. Smitty unplugged his head from the keesters of the local Convocation liaisons. Violet came upstairs from running the local street-level security collections. Chico, Ralston, and Fiona left their heist crews to their seconds-in-command to be here in person. It was going to be that kind of night.
Evander sipped his cognac. His impatience cooled as the liquid trickled down his throat, only to heat again as he surveyed his inner circle.
The presence of Thaddius Bluth kept him permanently on edge.
Where did wizards learn to be so creepy so effortlessly? Bluth wore a tailored suit from Unser Ding. He could have come across as a megacorp exec or a lawyer with his name on the side of a building. But guys like that had it in the eyes. That glossy, faux-friendly facade came naturally to guys who made a living taking terras out of people’s pockets with a handshake.
Bluth had eyes stripped of pretense. He was a killer, a predator who didn’t care about human or xeno life. You could picture him envisioning ways to kill you with every look he gave. He creeped everyone right the fuck out, and that included Evander.
But he was money.
Business had boomed since Thaddius Bluth hitched his star to Evander Shark’s wagon. Shit got done. And when shit didn’t get done, people got done.
Three whole floors of Imotakan Building, just shy of Evander’s penthouse level, had been given over to the wizard to do with as he pleased. Much as he liked knowing every twitch and jaywalk that happened in his domain, Evander didn’t want to know what Wizard Thaddius got up to. By his guess, the upper and lowermost floors were just a buffer. Some real private shit happened in between, away from windows and adjoining walls, ceilings, and floors.
“Y’all know what’s up?” Evander asked. He counted on his underlings keeping one another informed, but this was too important to count on word of mouth relaying accurate gossip.
Smitty inclined his head. “Yeah, they found him.” No one needed to be told who him was.
“Indeed.” Bluth’s voice dripped like honey. Poisoned honey, but honey nonetheless. “It would seem someone has been incautious.”
A scoff escaped Violet’s lips. Rather than play it off, she came out and said it. “You. The rest of us bust our asses keeping you a secret, and you go dusting a guy to real dust. People saw that.”
“And were dealt with accordingly,” Bluth countered.
Time for Evander to step in. He didn’t like hearing his people at each other’s throats. And while harsher words crossed a dining room table at suppertime when he had his lieutenants to dinner, those hateful words had love behind them. You can tell someone they done fucked up, but if you got a smile in your eye when you say it, there’s no hard feelings to linger. Don’t hurt when you’re passing a basket of egg rolls at the same time, neither.
“Yo. No time for that blame shit. Our friend says he got a wizard staying at a Vacation Suites Inn on the all-wiz credit line.”
The door opened. Angelica breezed in. “Am I late?” She was dolled up for nightclub schmoozing. Good. Meant she’d been working. Hustling. Planting seeds that would grow into terras.
“You ain’t early,” Zakk stated the obvious for everyone.
“I was over in Sunrise City when I got the comm. I came straight here.”
“Sit,” Evander ordered mildly. The others made room. Someone poured Angelica a drink. “As I was saying… We got us a pointy-hatted problem. Low-key wizard dressed up like a traveling huckster still can’t keep his hand out of Earth’s pocket. One of our friends working the desk made him.”
“Our insiders at the liaison’s office able to shed any light?” Angelica asked.
Smitty shook his head. “Dark. Dead dark. They didn’t book no travel for him. They don’t got a name for him.”
“So… they wouldn’t miss him?” Violet suggested tentatively.
Never good business, getting into murders. It diverted the attention of the best and most cautious in a risk-averse operation like Evander’s. At best, killings were a necessary evil, like accounting audits or building code renovations. But eliminating a wizard was… well, it was best left to wizards.
Evander couldn’t take this lightly. “We sure this guy’s not an administrative problem?”
The grim set of Smitty’s jaw made the answer a mere recitation of details. “Naw. Liaison’s got two VIPs on Vega, both getting the champagne room treatment. No chance they’re sneaking around a Vacation Suites.”
“Just two? You telling me we only got two strange wizards on all of Vega?”
“Three, counting our oddball. Plus whoever else the Convocation let slip.”
Bluth’s voice cut through the chatter, silencing muttered side conversations and forestalling anyone else who might decide to offer a suggestion. “Give me two men. Disposable. I’ll instruct them in how to deal with a wizard.”
Angelica spread her hands. “Easy now. Those are our people. Nobody’s ‘disposable.’ Am I right?” She looked around for support but found little. Evander gave her a slight nod, letting her know she was right, but that it wasn’t time for being right. “Fine. But what about negotiating? Wouldn’t be the first wizard who can be had for a price.”
It was a veiled shot at Bluth. The guy couldn’t have been slow enough not to catch that drift, but ice water didn’t warm on its way through that one’s heart. “If he could be bought, he could turn around and sell his lead for a second profit. If he refuses, he becomes an instant problem. No. Best to excise the threat.”
“What about whoever sent him here?” Angelica asked. “What if he’s not some lone wolf? What if he’s got a network?”
Bluth seemed unfazed. “I see no reason for him ever to been seen again. Let him become a mystery.”
Prudent people didn’t like being involved in a murder investigation. But prudent people had jobs with digital deposits to a bank account every Thursday, jobs where they got hours, jobs they could explain to a judge without lying.
“Hold up. She’s right. One wizard goes missing, how many they gonna send to look? Y’all look after your own. Ferocious-like, too. That mystery… that’s like… bait. You feel me?”
Bluth lifted his eyebrows, the consummate gentleman. “What, pray tell, do you suggest as an alternative?”
In that tone of voice, that sniveling deference, that phony humility… it was a challenge.
Evander had his idea, though.
“Give them motherfuckers an easy mystery. One with a body, a murder weapon, all that scratchy shit.”
“Offworld,” Angelica blurted. She blinked a few times as if to collect thoughts she hadn’t finished assembling in her head. “We kill him and dump the body offworld. Stage it to look like he found his mark on some other planet.”
“We’d need a patsy,” Smitty pointed out. “Can’t be using anyone that might trace back to us.”
Angelica smiled. She had the pieces arranged now. “I think I know just the guy for the job.”
Room service came and went. Mort’s hot toddy—purportedly to help the offworlder deal with a raw throat from the pungent air—went straight down the washroom sink. Mort’s grumbling stomach had suggested that the complimentary cookies might not have been poisoned, but he couldn’t be too safe.
Coffee.
Trying the stoic way just wasn’t going to cut it. He needed a boost in case an actual threat showed up.
Coffee came from a doodad in the room. The bellhop had made a point of mentioning it. Those numbskulls downstairs couldn’t levitate a fountain pen. Mort couldn’t imagine them slipping noxious elixirs into his mug from thirteen floors below and through a solid door.
Mort stared at the machine. It stood atop the counter of a miniature scientific kitchen beside a trio of ceramic mugs stacked upside down in a rudimentary pyramid. Each mug bore the hotel logo, a boon to those who might otherwise forget overnight where they had been lodging.
Selecting the topmost mug, Mort held it under the nozzle of the coffee maker and waited.
Nothing happened.
With a scowl, he addressed the device in a stern tone: “Make me coffee.” When that didn’t elicit a response from the machine, he added, “Now.”
Well, didn’t that just figure. Mort had poured out one beverage as tainted, and now, to acquire another, he had to barter with the devil’s clockwork like some technophile.
He studied the metallic surfaces. He examined the plastic panels. With the care of a man who expected the thing might explode at any second, he lifted the coffee maker and turned it over in his hands. Several tubes tethered it to the wall, limiting his manipulations.
They’d written all over it. On the bottom, weird, ominous scientific inscriptions invoked the wrath of something called the Consumer Safety League for tampering with its functions. That invocation was the plainest English buried in among incomprehensible jargon and out of context numerals.
Mort’s best avenue for deciphering the coffee maker’s workings came right on the front. Happy Joe Insta-Brew, it proclaimed itself. Thinking he’d solved the mystery at last, Mort poked a finger at the word “Brew.”
He stood back and waited.
Nothing happened.
Leave it to science to overlook the easy way of doing things.
There had to be coffee fixin’s inside that infernal gizmo. Mort applied the faintest pressure with telekinesis and popped the coffee maker apart.
Its innards baffled him.
There ought to have been, as best he could figure, some reservoir of powdered beans or a tank of compressed finished coffee. He listened. He’d heard technologists talk before. Those sounded like perfectly plausible techie solutions.
Instead, Mort discovered a bizarre array of plastic cards and the mechanical equivalent of intestines. He pored over the grisly remains, tracing the beast’s digestive tract in an effort to understand whether coffee was the beast’s spoor or vomit. There was no indication of origin for the coffee. Though the entrails reeked, the coffee scent played only a small role in the oily, electronic miasma.
Breaking pieces off, floating components in midair, and conjuring glowing illusory lines to show where he’d unplugged this from that, Mort dissected the machine. His experimentation eventually led to the tubes that connected to the wall.
“Egad…” he muttered without enthusiasm. “It comes in from the wall. Sucks it up from the hotel kitchen like a straw. I bet you dimes to donuts there’s some poor slob down there with a kettle on a stove, feeding gizmos all up and down this hotel. I have half a mind to—”
A noise from the door silenced Mort instantly.
What time was it?
How long had his investigation taken?
The bed was still arranged with the dummy Mort made from spare pillows. With a twinkling of fingertips, he added a faint snore.
Mort hadn’t used much magic. Would the doors work all right? He could conjure up a Mort decoy in a jiffy, but that might lock out his would-be killers.
Despite the circumstances, Mort wondered at that stray thought.
Killers.
He assumed a pair. But why?
Industrial colonies, even ones within the core worlds, were rife with crime syndicates. Earth was, too, but theirs were elected. Out here, beyond Sol, the criminals held elections with blasters and hoards of untraceable terras. Nosy wizards just seemed like the kind of nuisance that a crime boss would send a backup assassin to deal with. And not anyone important or well-loved by their colleagues.
Thinking quickly, he left the coffee maker bobbing above the counter but doused the glow.
Mort’s ponderings had taken place between heartbeats. Seconds later, the door slid open. Quietly. Good craftsmanship shone in the lack of creaks and squeaks; a mere gentle whoosh accompanied the faint light from goggles as two men entered from a darkened hall. Blasters drawn, they crept into the room and headed for the bed.
It didn’t take the pair long to notice that Mort hadn’t even rigged up a convincing fake occupant. Instantly on guard, they whirled, suspecting a trap. Blaster raised, but it was already too late. With a wave of his hand, he whooshed the door the other way, though this time it ground metal on metal in futile protest.
“What the—?”
“Sorry I didn’t set the scene to your liking. I trust you won’t be telling anyone I’m banal.”
Weapons swung around to point at Mort, but the barrels were already molten. The doomed assassins yelped and dropped their weapons, which Mort caught before they hit the floor and levitated the melted steel and plastic so as not to set the room aflame.
The pair attempted to flee, but their feet flailed inches from the floor.
“Please don’t hurt us!”
Mort stalked forward. “Bold request. You were sent to kill me, I presume.” He glanced at the radiant red puddle knee high to the hit men.
“It wasn’t personal.”
Mort shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be. This is just business, right?”
“Right!” the other assassin agreed readily.
“Good. Because, you see, I’m here to kill on business, too.”
“Oh?” A hopeful note rose in that voice. What did this idiot expect, camaraderie? Unity among wet workers? Professional courtesy?
Nodding reassuringly, Mort played along. “Yes. And obviously you two are disposable stooges that no one would miss.”
“Right.”
“Yeah. You know how it is.”
Mort smirked. “Good. So don’t take it personally when you find yourself bereft of physical form and prisoner in my mind for the rest of your miserable existences.”
They tried to scream, but Mort took hold of both by the throat with mystic forces that would suffocate the life out of them in short order.
Both died of ancient eldritch magic long before the lack of air got them.
Brad arrived at school a little achy but otherwise fine. He’d been hung over before, and two cups of coffee were enough to counteract the worst of the effects. That, and a couple of the pills Mom kept hidden at the back of a drawer in the washroom cabinet.
Others weren’t so lucky.
Brenda looked fine unless you saw her moving. She walked as if balancing a crystal vase on her head—a heavy one, too, judging by her wincing with every motion.
Ricardo had a whiff of beer on his breath, artlessly covered by the kind of cheap cologne that teenagers mistook for classy.
Ivan was completely MIA.
Tina was the only one who gave the impression she’d handled her drinking from the previous night. She spotted Brad lurking just inside the door and inclined her head. Brad matched the gesture.
“Ugh. I’m about zero this morning,” she complained conspiratorially. “You got any… dunno… pills or a spray or something?”
Rather than admit he was carrying a couple spare soakers in his pocket in case his own hangover needed a re-up, Brad tried to relate this to something the rugby star understood. “It’s like a muscle. You gotta work up to heavier weights.”
From close up, he caught a glint in the white of her eye. It was the edge of a contact lens, the sort that came with time-release saline supplement and anti-inflammatory. So, she hadn’t weathered the storm; she was just better equipped for the choppy waters.
A soft chime rang through the halls, and an overhead voice announced. “First period begins in two minutes. Report to your classrooms.”
“You seen Ric?”
Brad jerked his head. “He went in already.” He followed as Tina headed for their Human History class. “Take it easy on him. Think he’s kept his buzz going to dodge a crash.”
“Coward,” she muttered as she scanned her thumb on the attendance reader by the door.
Brad hesitated out of habit before following suit. He hated getting tagged, scanned, tracked, and traced by some stupid-ass colonial school system. Someday there would be legends told of Brad Ramsey, Ace Pilot of the Milky Way, and he didn’t want mundane shit like this in his biography. He wanted to emerge onto the race scene like a phoenix made of nothing but speed, reflexes, and nerves of titanium. No origin. No childhood. Just some demon from the depths of the Black Ocean who couldn’t be beat.
“Good morning, class,” Ms. Holstein stated brusquely. “Transmissions from last night’s homework assignments were spotty at best. I am still waiting on several of you to submit your essays. Penalties are being assessed, but I still expect those essays by the end of the night. Understood?”
“Yes, Ms. Holstein,” the class droned in sullen unison.
Brad held back a smirk. He’d have bet twice his stake in last night’s poker game that his drinking buddies were the prime offenders. For his part, the discovery of a junior who’d write longform essays for 5T a pop was one of the best quality-of-life improvements of his young existence. He might not learn a single damn thing in this school, but damned if he was going to get detention over missed homework.
The school day coughed and sputtered along like a thruster with the wrong fuel mixer installed. Brad kept his eyes forward, if glazed, and hoped that he would at least retain enough to pass along to the guy he was paying to do his homework…
Mort hadn’t slept well.
Or long.
Or in his own room.
But he hadn’t left the Vacation Suites Inn entirely. After forcing entry to an unoccupied suite, he passed a fitful night in a few short hours. To his mind, vacationing in the castle enclave of Mortania, a week came and went. Planning sessions required the conjuring of a war room, the creation of several illusory assistants who were really just fragments of his own thoughts, and long hours of considering the meanings of the actions of his target, Thaddius Bluth.
The interrogation of the two assassins had been… disappointing.
Every stray tidbit of useful information had been plucked from their minds like the choicest grapes from a bunch. Mort found all the empty stems where those thoughts and memories belonged, but that didn’t get him the grapes.
Even the absence of thoughts was a clue. Whatever Wizard Thaddius was up to, he was able to carve up a mind with the knife skills of a master chef. While he ought to have been horrified, that buoyed Mort’s spirits. He wouldn’t place his brain on the cutting board for Thaddius so readily, and few wizards were Merlin enough to specialize in multiple disciplines.
The possibility that it was an associate of Thaddius’s who’d performed the lobotomies rankled him. Cabals were so… gauche. And yet, to survive for any length of time on his own, the dark wizard must have enlisted allies. That the incompetent pair of disposable killers were affiliated with a crime corporation was no secret; neither had been disabused of their membership.
By the time morning arrived in the real world, Mort had a few tentative plans sketched out on rolled sheets of parchment but no path to reach his target.
Rolling out of a spongy techno-bed felt weird after so many consecutive nights in the king’s chamber of his private castle on a goose feather mattress. It took a moment to remind himself that this was Vega IX, not Mortania, and that he wasn’t quite omnipotent here.
Gathering his few belongings, he took the emergency stairway down to the lobby.
At the front desk, he found the same gentleman who’d checked him in the previous evening—what amazing work ethic this weasel of an informant must have held. “Room 1440 checking out.”
The concierge practically swallowed his own tongue. “Um. Yes. Of… of course. Yes, checking out. Um…” The fellow fumbled with his screen.
“Take your time. I’m in no rush,” Mort assured him, leaning casually on the front desk.
Hoteliers weren’t the flappable sort, by and large. They could be counted on to discreetly deal with the most intimate of temporary-lodging issues with disconnected efficiency. A dozen liquor bottles mysteriously shattered in the bathtub? So sorry, sir. I’ll have housekeeping up there in two shakes. Nude patron locked out of his accommodation? Just a moment, and I’ll have a bellhop escort you.
But a target for a syndicate assassination squad casually showing up to check out of his room?
Well, Byron wasn’t having the best morning, all of a sudden.
“Was, uh, everything to your liking?”
“In fact, it was,” Mort replied cheerfully. “Well, all except for one minor issue that I’m sure was out of your control.”
Byron gulped. “Issue?”
Mort patted the air between them. “Nothing major. Like I said, nothing you’re the least to blame for. Just had a couple of misguided visitors arrive unexpectedly.”
“You… did?”
“Not to worry. I explained the error and sent them on their way to Lucifer’s deepest latrine.”
All Byron could manage was a few blinks. His pupils had grown huge.
Mort leaned close. “I killed them. It’s a euphemism. Not even a vague one. Get with the program, Byron. Now, here’s what I want from you. You’re going to have that room cleaned up, repaired, whatever tech isn’t hotel-shaped, you get a tech-savvy lad to shape it up. And not a scribble of this ends up on the Convocation’s tab. Understood?”
Byron nodded frantically.
“Words. Speak them. Do. You. Understand?”
“Yes. Yes, sir.”
Mort turned to leave but spun on his heel, catching Byron mid sigh of relief and freezing him in place once more. “One last thing…”
“Anything.”
“Whomever you told I was here, tell them to try harder next time. I’m not even warmed up.”
As Mort strode out the doors of the hotel, he regretted promising that was his “last thing.” He still didn’t have any idea where to find a decent breakfast in Centennial Park.
Angelica lounged against the railing of the maintenance catwalk overlooking Sunrise City Civic Hangar Fifteen. One hand held a datapad with specs and registry information for the starship Radio City, from the other dangled the thin nozzle of a stim inhaler. As she scanned dry data detailing the mundane exploits of a light transport that had been converted to family use, she took the occasional puff, pinching one nostril shut while sucking a deep breath through the other as she triggered the spray.
There hadn’t been much sleep for anyone last night. That psychopath wizard hadn’t wanted to sleep until they’d gotten word from the kill team. Word that had never come.
With the arrival of dawn, Evander had called off the vigil, sent everyone back to whatever else they had going on. For most of them, that had been sleep. For Angelica, she had unfinished business. Because whether or not Zakk’s team got the job done, someone was putting that nosy offworld wizard in a box.
Angelica’s job was getting someone to ship that box off Vega IX before the Convocation got wind of a wizard murder.
Some teenage kid left the Radio City early, probably for school judging by the standardized uniform.
Angelica waited.
Using her datapad, she ordered delivery breakfast burritos and a large coffee. She wasn’t budging until she got what she needed here.
The stakeout kept up another hour before a woman emerged from the ship accompanied by a pair of younger children. Ramsey hadn’t talked much about his family, but she knew he had one. If this wasn’t his wife, it was at least the woman he shared a ship with. And the departure of a caretaker-age female with minors suggested two possibilities: Chuck Ramsey was alone on the ship, or he’d never come back to it last night.
Due to Evander’s urgent summons in the middle of the comedy show, she hadn’t been able to keep tabs on him. There hadn’t even been time to delegate someone to put a tail on the comic. Given the man’s outsized personality, she imagined that tracking him down would be, at worst, an exercise in lurking around The Hourglass that afternoon. But this wasn’t a time to be lallygagging.
As soon as Thaddius Bluth got his dead wizard, he was going to want the body transported.
If Angelica couldn’t line up Ramsey for a shuttle job, she’d need to know sooner rather than later.
Once the wife was out of sight, Angelica abandoned her post—and likely her delivery breakfast—to head down to the ship.
She pounded on the hull beside the loading ramp. Without any conversation, the ramp lowered for her.
“Hey,” Ramsey greeted her from the top. “Didn’t expect to see you after you bailed on the show.”
“Business,” she replied by way of apology. She didn’t owe him anything. “Surprised you noticed.”
“Hey, gotta look somewhere up on stage. Plenty worse places for a guy to rest his eyes.” For a middle-aged nobody in a bathrobe with unkempt hair, she felt the flush in her cheeks at the compliment. “Sorry I’m not more presentable. Not being a morning person is something of an occupational hazard.”
“Can I come up? I need to discuss an opportunity.”
Ramsey chuckled as he beckoned her in. “Hey, it’s true.”
“What’s true?” She regretted her words instantly, blaming the lack of sleep. Obviously, he was setting up a joke.
“Opportunity really does knock.”
Angelica rolled her eyes. Ramsey raised the ramp behind her. She didn’t find anything ominous about being sealed in alone with him. After all, she was the one packing plasma, and he looked freshly awakened. Then again, that meant he was operating on a night’s sleep, while her blood was half stim.
“What can I do you for?” Ramsey asked casually. Everything he said was casual. Every. Damn. Thing. She couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or flippant. But after a second of frustration, she remembered that this was his cover. He was innocuous because he was so blatantly vapid.
“I need you on standby for a quick transport job.”
“When and how far?” Ramsey inquired. He looked her up and down coyly. “Cloud nine? I can take you right now.”
Angelica really needed to keep a guy on the side. Someone discreet, undemanding, utterly satisfying. Because Ramsey was getting to her in her frazzled state. “I can’t say when. Hence: standby. As for where, you’ll find out on receipt of goods.”
Contract operators were a roulette wheel. Give them a spin, and who knew what might come up. Evander’s people had a way of dealing with uncertainty. But the divorce between his operation and the coming events came with having to deal with amateurs and low-level professionals; for the time being, she couldn’t be certain which category described the comedian.
“Not a lot to go on,” Ramsey replied, scratching his stubble. “And I’ve got my contract with—”
“We’ll take care of Curtis Mancuso. You’ll get the time off.”
Ramsey bobbed his head. “What’s the cargo?”
“Do you really want to be asking?”
“I mean the basics,” Ramsey shot back. “How big is it? How heavy? I’ve only got two hard rules: nothing alive, and nothing that puts my kids in danger. Aside from that, you’ve got yourself a transport.”
Angelica set her jaw. This was her last chance. She could cut him loose now and probably let him live. If she gave any details at all and he didn’t come through, he’d become a liability.
“Rectangular. Little bigger than your typical adult human. It will be harmless, and it most certainly won’t be alive.”
Rather than flinch at the obvious description of hauling a corpse, Ramsey grinned. “What’s it pay?”
“Five huge.”
The comedian’s eyes lit. “Five million?”
“Thousand. Five thousand.”
Ramsey winked. “Deal.”
Angelica stuck out a hand. Her father had always been a believer in the handshake deal. It had become a signature of hers in a line of work where a veiled threat was often the last word in a negotiation. If Ramsey played ball, he’d get paid. If he crossed her or Evander, he’d be in the next box shipped off Vega IX.
Rather than accept the handshake, Ramsey stepped closer, took her hand, and slipped it inside his bathrobe. His chest was warm, firm… a little hairy. Her heartbeat quickened as she felt his.
“Better ways to consummate a deal.”
“I need to go.”
“Tired. I can tell. Whoa—not saying you look tired. I just know the signs of stim. You need some sleep.”
Angelica nodded but failed to back away. “Right. Sleep.” She looked up at him. In flat shoes, he towered over her. He wasn’t brawny but tall and broad. A hand slipped behind her back and pulled her against him. Fingers gripped the zipper for her dress.
“I’ve got a bed right here. Need to burn the stim out of your system first though. Say the word and I zip.”
Angelica could think of a dozen reasons why not. But she did need the sleep. And she wasn’t going to be able to rest until the stim had run its course. Who cared if Ramsey’s wife came home or his kid walked in? Those were his problems, not hers. And for some reason, her thoughts just wouldn’t coalesce to explain all the reasons why this was a horrible idea.
“Zip me.”
Ramsey pulled down. Angelica shrugged the dress’s straps off her shoulders.
As she followed the comedian to his bedroom, she snuck one boost dose of stim before discarding the sprayer alongside her clothes.
“…and so I just told him, the sandwich looked like that when I bought it.” The crowd laughed, but it was the laughter of people who’d paid to laugh and felt obliged to get their money’s worth. Undeterred, Chuck held up a hand in a static wave and exited stage left. “Thank you, Sunrise City. You’ve been swell, and don’t forget to tip your servers!”
“I could’ve paid a holograph and gotten livelier comedy,” Perez griped as soon as Chuck was safely out of view of the paying customers.
Chuck accepted a towel from a stagehand and patted his face dry. “I don’t work for you; I work for Curtis.” He hung the dampened cloth over the stage manager’s shoulder as he brushed past.
“Mr. Mancuso,” Perez corrected.
“It’s in my contract. I can call him Curtis,” Chuck replied wearily. His contract said no such thing. Then again, Perez had never seen his contract. As far as Chuck was concerned, that meant that unless Curtis said something, the matter didn’t need to keep coming up.
“People talk. Word of mouth is our fucking lifeblood.”
The door to Chuck’s tiny dressing room slid open at the touch of a palm. Perez followed him inside. “Look. It’s the same old, same old. I’m not delivering it any different. You’re just sick of hearing it. Same as those dozen regulars who get comped tickets for sitting for twenty hours at a stretch playing slot machines. Except they’re enjoying the drinks and the shape of a different chair under their asses, while you’re back here gnawing on the stage curtains.”
“You get your head in the moment or I’ll pass it upstairs that you’ve burnt your last powder.”
Chuck took a hand and firmly guided Perez toward the door. “I don’t have it in me tonight to pretend you matter around here. You’re a glorified alarm clock that’s just too annoying to ignore. Goodbye.”
“You can’t just—”
Chuck triggered the door. It wasn’t thick enough to muffle voices entirely, so Perez must not have finished that thought. Pity. Chuck liked having a nice backlog of lame comebacks to work into his act. Any “true life” story needed a pathetic villain to poke fun at.
But comedy was far toward the back of Chuck’s mind that night. All day, he’d been planning for the moment Angelica contacted him with instructions and a short-term assignment.
Chuck’s datapad was filled with hotel recommendations, places Becky and the kids could crash, maybe for a couple days. He’d placed refundable reservations for several, stretching out over the span of the next few days. Once he knew the details, he’d have time to cancel the rest and get his money back.
This was going to be great.
Five grand!
It was a scam Chuck had run before. Bereavement shipments skirted a number of customs regulations in the nicer star systems. Scan-proof linings on coffins were just respectful to the dead. Signed off and certified by a legitimate coroner, border and customs agents would be legally bound to let him deliver his cargo—no matter what might really lie inside. Oh, sure. There were ways to blow it. Give someone probable cause to think he was lying, they could crack open the final sleeping bag of the newly deceased. But Chuck knew the pitfalls. Chuck was a walking pitfall avoider. He was the epitome of slick-talking free passage. He was so smooth that blaster plasma would roll off him like raindrops on one of those adverts for starship window treatments.
It didn’t bother Chuck one iota that the contents would most assuredly be either weapons or drugs. Angelica was with a syndicate, after all. Weapons were their bread and drugs their butter—or vice versa. It didn’t matter. Chuck wasn’t going to shoot anyone or inject whatever into whomever. He was merely greasing the wheels of crime and vice; he was no cog in that machine.
As he changed out of his tuxedo, Chuck wondered whether he ought to hang around the ship or the clubs. The big guy might not want him gambling, but Curtis liked for him to mingle with the guests. A few drinks without getting blitzed. A little flirting without closing the deal. Staying within eye’s reach of the green felt tables where the non-Mortish magic happened without placing any bets.
Chuck could do that.
When Angelica commed, Chuck was determined to be ready.
Brad was a little surprised that he got invited to a party. It wasn’t the sort of thing that holovids had prepared him for. As the new guy, he’d expected his first outing with classmates to be a hazing, and thus had preemptively hazed them first. Now, rather than finding himself an outcast, he was being lured deeper into the clique of—as best he could figure—the popular kids.
It felt… odd.
Dad being a comedian, Brad was on constant guard for a punchline, one where he’d become the object of ridicule. Some crack about his spacer fashion sense (he’d heard that one enough times) or something he was expected to bring—or not bring—that the host would point out just as soon as he’d violated their weird, planetside code of unwritten conduct.
Instead, Brad toted around a red plastic cup filled with better beer than he could normally find aboard the Radio City. He made small talk with guys he’d seen in the halls and forgot their names before he finished hearing them. Drunk girls got to try out Brad’s practice pickup lines, and he didn’t care whether their titters of laughter were flattering or not.
An hour into the party, Brad spotted Brenda with a cup just like his, but his keen eye picked up on the fact that she brought it up empty to her lips and pretended to drink. When she caught him spying, she ducked out of sight into the crowd.
Brad hadn’t even learned whose house this was. It was a four-story mini-mansion on the edge of Henderson. Decor was early twenty-fourth-century core world with unironic rings and antennae in places where they served no purpose. The solid parts of the furniture were pale-tinted glassteel in various muted shades; the fabric of the upholstery felt like… nothing. Brad couldn’t sit on the stuff with how weirdly the sensation struck him.
“Yo,” Brenda called softly from behind him. When Brad looked back, she tipped her head in a beckoning motion. He followed her but balked when she slipped into the washroom. With a disapproving scowl, she grabbed Brad by his non-drink-holding wrist and tugged him inside.
The door snapped shut behind them. Brenda activated the privacy lock.
Brad’s mind whirled with possibilities. Brenda grounded them in an instant.
“What the hell happened last night?” She kept her voice down. With the din of the shitty music and drunk teenagers talking and making asses of themselves, no one possibly could have heard her.
Desperate eyes searched for an escape. There was no good that ever came from a question like that. Brad backed against the door, hoping to find the lock release without taking his eyes off Brenda. “I don’t know what you think happened… but—”
“That’s just it. I know we slummed out to some casino. After that…” She made a poof gesture with the fingers of one hand. “Vapor.”
OK. Maybe this wasn’t a disaster. This wasn’t one of Mom’s “what did you get up to last night?” interrogations. This sounded like legitimate ignorance.
Unless it was a trap.
Brad played it noncommittal. “We played some casino games. I think everyone lost. We drank. Some more than others.”
“Was Ivan drunk?”
“I was being diplomatic. We all got sloshed.”
Brenda twisted her mouth as if unsure how to proceed. “I mean… was Ivan, like, asshole drunk?”
Rather than risk words, Brad cocked his head as if that question hadn’t registered.
“You know… Like… OK, here’s the thing. I busted up my knuckles. Had to put a bone knitter and plasti-skin on them before school this morning, not even dealing with the noggin’-knockin’ wake-up from the beer.”
“You were drinking margaritas because you liked the umbrellas,” Brad corrected dryly.
That revelation only stymied Brenda briefly. “OK. So you do recall last night.”
Brad bobbed his head.
“And I was maybe… a little… unladylike?” Brenda wheedled.
A fist pounded on the door, startling Brad, who was leaning against it. “You about done in there? I gotta whizz!”
Brad turned and shouted through the door. “Fuck off. There’s twelve washrooms in this palace. Find another.” He lowered his voice. “Yeah. You were. But it’s smooth. People let loose in a casino.”
“And was Ivan… ungentlemanly?”
Brad snorted. “As much as any of us. I mean, when he told that waitress that he—wait.” He saw a look of distress on Brenda’s face and realized the question had a deeper meaning. “Naw. I don’t think Ivan was in any shape to… you know…”
Brenda held up a loose fist—evidence, not a threat. “But my knuckles.”
Brad put up both hands, even setting down his beer on the edge of the washroom sink. “Look. I’m not Ivan’s babysitter—or yours. We spent most of the night playing cards and drowning brain cells. It was fun. Maybe it got a little wet and loud. But we left together, the five of us. Took me and Ricardo to pour Ivan into the hover they shared. You rode with Tina. My ship’s not far from the casino, so I just hoofed it.”
“So, what you’re saying is…”
Brad smirked. “If you cracked up your hand decking someone, it wasn’t Ivan. Not unless him and Ric followed you home.” Brenda’s eyes widened as if she hadn’t considered that possibility until Brad brought it up. “But that probably didn’t happen,” he added hastily.
Upending the empty cup in her hand, Brenda studied her injured knuckles. “So if I didn’t punch Ivan for getting handsy…” She left the obvious question unasked.
“You either hit Tina or an inanimate object. For you to break your knuckles, I’d lean inanimate unless you clocked her right in the jaw.”
“How do I ask her something like that? ‘Hey, Tina, did I try to go Bronze League on you without a mouth guard in?’ She just got her magneto-retractors off a month ago; she’d literally pop my head off if I admitted it.”
“Assuming she doesn’t already know.”
“I mean, she hasn’t killed me yet.”
Brad shrugged. He was out of the nebula on this one. Ivan was probably just too much of a mess to make it to school. Brenda had probably just gotten mad at a door panel that she missed the reader on. All that was left was to have a little fun with her.
“There’s one way to check. Doesn’t require asking.”
Brenda perked up. “How?”
“Some people say you tell if someone’s just healed a broken jaw by getting them to smile. But a smile and a wince look pretty close. Plus, she plays rugby, so she’s probably pretty tough.”
“Maybe a hand scanner?” Brenda suggested.
Brad feigned trying not to roll his eyes. “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. No. The surefire way is to kiss her.”
“WHAT?” Brenda exclaimed. It was all Brad could manage not to burst out laughing and ruin the whole thing. It wouldn’t have been funny if she’d shown the faintest hint of attraction to her friend. “No way. You do it.”
“Nope. I’m not the kind to dismiss the chance Ricardo would pretzel me over a gaffe like that. But more important, Tina could just as easily. Not putting my life on the line for your conscience. If you do it, and she objects, it’s just a drunken misunderstanding between friends.”
Brenda didn’t sound convinced but still asked, “How would I tell?”
“If it’s a good kiss, you move your jaw a little. If she broke it last night—if you broke it—she won’t be able to hide that it hurts. If she seems fine, you’re in the clear.”
“How long will it take to tell?”
“One kiss?”
“How long’s a kiss?”
Brad gave an exaggerated shrug. “Sounds like a question for poetry appreciation class, not me.”
Brenda looked down. “But what if I really did?”
“Blame the booze. Apologize. Geez, I’m no expert. She’s your friend. But one thing I would recommend,” Brad told her as he retrieved his cup from the edge of the sink and swapped Brenda for her empty one, “is make sure both of you are at least buzzed first.”
The two latest additions to the dungeons of Mortania had their brains scooped like buckets of frozen custard long before Mort got to them. That didn’t mean they were completely useless. While one self-serving wizard, acting in the interests of the fugitive Thaddius Bluth, had excised all incriminating evidence that might have been used in a Convocation court or by anyone looking to serve legal paperwork, there remained a sizable cache of information about Vega IX: tram schedules, restaurant recommendations, traffic shortcuts…
…and entertainment options.
Left to his own devices, Mort might have taken weeks to discover where local syndicate muscle hung out between leg-breakings. Thanks to Thug 1 and Thug 2—who hadn’t even retained their own names—Mort found out about Nacho Night.
While the establishment may have suggested an appetizer order, it was a specialty sports viewing venue that also included a menu of greasy offerings. Also, to keep matters confusing, they served a platter of nachos meant for the whole table by the same name.
Mort wandered in and took a seat at the bar between a couple guys who had the look of men who were accustomed to having some space around them. Both wore suits more expensive than Mort’s and had that “don’t you know who I am” manner. To drive the final stake through the heart of Mort’s plan, they were parked in front of a holo-feed of a hockey game.
“I got terras on Blue Sky,” Mort muttered, picking one of the teams from the inset score that showed them losing 2-1 to the Caulfield Miners. He raised a hand and waggled a pair of fingers until he caught the bartender’s attention. “Loaded taters. Earth’s Preferred. Top my friends here with whatever they’re having.”
“Don’t need your charity, pal,” the gangster to Mort’s left objected. He was a square fellow with a sweaty face and a jawline so clean Mort doubted it even tried to grow a beard.
“Then mine’s on him,” Mort deadpanned, indicating the smart-mouth with a hooked thumb.
A stool scraped as his intended drinking companion stood. “You a comedian or something?”
Mort didn’t rise. With menacing calm, he looked up into the eyes of a man who, to all appearances, could have stuffed him down a waste reclaim. “Sit.”
It was a secret joy of wizardry—not using magic. Bullies thrived on fear, provoked to cow the weak, caused drama when they could use it to look tough. But as a defense mechanism, they also learned to tell when their bluster and posturing was running into a comet headed the other way.
The gangster sat. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, his tone firm but grudgingly respectful. He clearly wasn’t asking rhetorically, since if he knew Mort’s identity, he’d have either run or pissed himself by now.
Drinks arrived on the gangster’s tab, and Mort scooped up his beer and drank deeply in one fluid motion. He’d grown accustomed to the taste as a trial of willpower. If he could not just stomach the worst beer in the known galaxy but enjoy it, then he could handle any hardship nomadic life could throw his way.
“Look. Names aren’t going to help you here. I’m not even going to ask yours. And I’m not going to beat around the bush about who you work for or what you do for them. Frankly, I don’t care. What you are going to do is listen quietly for a span of words—instructions, if you will—then say ‘yes, sir.’ Because if you do, you’ll get to walk out of here without plummeting thirty stories into the sky and returning to Vega IX without the use of a hover. And I think that’s something you really, really deep down, deeply want to happen.”
The gangster’s pupils had widened with animal fear. Mort had said he was a wizard without using the word. He nodded imperceptibly.
“Now, I don’t know how—not my problem—but you’re going to get a message to Thaddius Bluth. I’m going to be at the Whitehawk Municipal Skate Park at sunset. I’d like to see him in person—public setting, so he’ll feel safe—but I’m more interested in finding out who that coward sends in his place.”
Mort paused. Waited. Raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, sir.”
The wizard smiled, putting his messenger if not at ease but at least at less distress. “Now, are you leaving, or am I?”
“I… I should probably be going.” He stood.
Mort patted the bar top. “You’re forgetting the drinks.”
A pile of hardcoin clattered to the faux wood surface.
Mort smirked as he tipped back his beer. Day drinking would have galled him back on Earth. Now, free to choose, he enjoyed the shitty brew and the shitty hockey game because fuck Bertrand, Wenling, and all the rest of them.
None of them were free.
Becky drummed her fingers.
Chuck sat across from her at the kitchen table of the Radio City, which was always covered in a tacky film that gave the sound an odd texture.
He wasn’t going to break.
“So?” Becky asked at length. “Who was she?”
Oh, so that’s what this was about. Geez. For a minute there, he’d been worried. Chuck allowed an easy grin to slide onto his face. “Business, babe.”
“Your only business on Vega IX is layin’ jokes on a bunch of core squares.”
Leaning back as if she’d taken a swing at him, Chuck put up both palms. “Hey. Just keeping the engines of commerce warmed up. My contract’s a handshake, and Curtis can chop me off at the knees without so much as a buyout.”
“And how does you getting arrested on a planet with actual cops help anyone?”
“You worry too much. I know better than to get caught doing anything arrestable.”
“You do?” Becky deadpanned, arms crossed.
Chuck tipped his chair back and spread his arms. “Suuuuure. It’s all a matter of finding the right opportunity. Something that makes use of my unique skills in a way that synergizes with the—”
“No questions asked, huh?”
The grin appeared on Chuck’s face without prompting. “Nothing dangerous. Nothing alive. Other than that, I’ll take a scan-sealed crate with the proper credentials straight to Stockholm Prime.”
A rustle of blankets and a soft thump preceded the arrival of a bleary-eyed Mike. “Hi, Daddy. You’re home.”
Becky raised her eyebrows. A challenge.
“Sure am, Sport.”
“And he’ll be here for an early dinner tonight, so go finish your nap.”
Mike nodded and shambled back into his bedroom. Good kid. Took direction. He was the first of the bunch to show any such inclination. Once the door shut behind him, Chuck lowered his voice.
“He’s too old for naps.”
“He’s four,” Becky stated firmly, eyes daring Chuck to correct her. “Too young for school.”
Chuck rolled his eyes. Reprimanding him about scams. “So, your plan is to pull him from school rather than walk him yourself? He seems to like going, plus he’s too big to pass for that young. And just what’s the jail time on falsifying school records and contributing to the truancy of a minor?”
Without missing a beat, Becky replied, “Civil offense. Total of 415T in fines. Considering the chances of getting caught, sounds like a slick gamble.”
“Thought we weren’t in favor of gambling around here?”
“I’m about to raise my voice, Charles Chaplin Ramsey. Don’t make me wake up the littles to the sound of us fighting.”
“Who’s fighting?” Chuck answered with complete—if feigned—nonchalance. “Just asking questions.”
“And don’t let’s forget that this is about you taking side work that’s shady even if it’s maybe not illegal.”
“The work is honest as a drunken preacher. It’s just the people who’re shady. And you know what I always say…” Chuck paused.
They answered in unison: “Some of our best friends are shady.”
“Exactly,” Chuck pronounced as if that were the end of it.
Becky sighed. By Chuck’s estimation, it was a sigh that it would take some sort of night on the town, five or six drinks, or some combination to weigh out. Marriage was a delicate balancing act, trickier than the most death-defying circus high-wire act. Lean too far to one side, you got trampled and henpecked into a shell of a man; too far the other way lay renewed bachelorhood.
Not that Chuck thought he’d be bad at single life. But dammit, marriages were worth a little fighting to save.
Chuck made a show of checking the chrono on his datapad. “Well, would you look at the time…”
“When’s this little delivery job of yours? And do I, like, need to bug out with the kiddos while you run it?”
“Family safe, they promised,” Chuck replied as if the word of a gangster were any better than their bald-faced lies.
“And the when?”
Chuck shrugged. “You’ll know as soon as I do. Part of the adventure.”
Mort sat on a park bench sipping coffee from a squooshy-sided cup of unknown substance—clearly some scientific monstrosity. But it kept his hand from burning on the scalding contents, so he chose not to dwell on the cup’s dark origins. His vantage was a mezzanine level of Henderson’s central outdoor recreation complex, a network of running trails, grassy lawns, painted courts for various sports, and—among other more elaborate athletic venues—a skate park.
His seat had a bird’s-eye view of the nearest running trail, a koi pond, and a series of benches with a better view of the skaters.
Mort had never understood most sports. Oh, he could certainly fathom the rules. But the appeal of many escaped him. Many seemed merely to be an excuse to run to and fro, sweating up a froth while someone racked points for the trick-with-a-ball du jour. He’d have sworn most technologists would have been happy just getting tossed inside a clear glass sphere bobbing in water, able to run in place until exhaustion. An enterprising sport creator could even find a way to assign points for some nonsense and make an industry of it.
Skateboarding Mort at least saw as a creative outlet. Some wizardly inclination in the backs of these young technologically raised children’s minds rebelled against the strictures of physics, and they fought back as best they could. It didn’t hold personal appeal for someone who could alter the local physics around him, but he understood the need to try.
As Mort idly spectated the helmeted youngsters zipping around on their slidey wheel-boards, juggling their conveyances with their feet and launching themselves off jumps, he most pointedly was not right where he told the gangster in the bar he would be found.
A guy about Mort’s general description sat in the agreed-upon spot, paid 100T to keep his ass put until Mort came and paid him another 100T to go home.
“This for some kind of omni show?” the hapless boob had inquired.
“I’m under contract not to answer that,” Mort had replied with a wink.
It was late in the day for coffee—far too late for a wake-up boost. Wasn’t late enough for a desperate bid to stave off sleep. Rather, the aroma and taste were enough to overpower the stench that pervaded Vega IX.
As the sun drooped over the skyscraper-lined valley and scientific lights sprang on across the park, Mort felt a twinge.
One of the newly lit lamps extinguished.
He lost sight of his decoy.
When the lights flickered back on seconds later, the poor fellow in Mort’s stead was headless.
“That answers that.”
Actually, Mort had more answers than he’d expected.
First, they were still intent on killing him. There hadn’t been the faintest sign of parlay, merely a setup for an ambush.
Next, it meant that Bluth had either come in person or sent a magically inclined apprentice or associate to strike Mort down. Even in a surprise attack, that wouldn’t work out well for anyone less than skilled in his deadly magics.
Lastly, and most importantly, it meant that there was someone nearby with a direct link to Bluth.
As an afterthought, Mort amended that he owed some poor slob’s next of kin 100T.
Downing the rest of his coffee in a molten gulp, he let the liquid boil his blood and set off after his latest would-be killer.
Running, as it were, did not befit a wizard of any significance. Oxford, Harvard, and all the other major, multi-disciplinary institutions of higher learning all still had track and field teams. However, camels would swim before a wizardry major joined those teams. Hence, most wizards, upon reaching adulthood, lacked both the motivation and wherewithal to break into a sprint. Memories dating back to childhood could, like the operation of a pedal-bike, be called into service in an emergency.
Short of life-threatening circumstances, a brisk walk was all one might expect from a proper wizard.
But Mort had a long stride.
Presumably whoever had just murdered Mort’s decoy expected he’d finished his evening’s work and had only the colonial authorities’ attention to evade. They wouldn’t be setting off at the pace of a footrace. They wouldn’t suspect that a dead man was on their trail and closing fast.
They wouldn’t expect that same dead man to catch sight of them slipping into the Snotty Scotty Pub, a watering hole whose mascot was a tiny terrier holding its nose in the air as it drank from a mug with one toe extended daintily.
And Mort’s latest would-be killer certainly wouldn’t be prepared for the eventuality of a ghost wearing flesh and blood to follow him inside.
When the not-remotely-dead Mordecai The Brown entered, he understood at once that this wizard who’d been sent to kill him was a man of culture and education. The Snotty Scotty could have been lifted from the streets of London Prime. It was everything the Oxford undergrad looked for in an evening out on the town in the big city. Dark, brick-walled, and scented with an alchemical stew of hops and woodsmoke—though the latter sniffed just a bit oddly, suggesting a scientific impostor. Gaelic music pumped into the air from science horns scattered around the ceiling. Still, on the whole, a wizardly welcoming place.
Mort spotted his prey easily. A gaunt, twitchy fellow seated himself at the bar and waggled a hand in the air to grab the attention of the purveyor of suds. Mort gravitated toward the man and drew close enough to hear his order. “Pint of your best. It’s been a night, if you catch me.”
The pub was doing brisk business but hadn’t filled to capacity. Not every seat was taken along the bar, and the wizard-killer had chosen one with empty stools to either side.
Mort slipped into the spot just to the wizard’s left. He forced a chuckle. “Funny that. I did catch you.”
“Pardon?” the wizard replied.
Mort shook his head. “Sorry. Unpardonable.”
The wizard turned to face him down. “Look, friend. I don’t know who you think you are, but…” he trailed off as a slow furrow settled upon his brow and a lean bent his spine backward of its own accord.
“But you were given a description, and that poor nobody you Blackbearded fit it same as me.”
Mort’s lone living connection to Thaddius Bluth gave a nervous chuckle. “Well, that’ll Teach me to measure twice before cutting once.”
The lame pun was a stretch, but Mort knew it meant they both understood. The pirate Blackbeard, né Edward Teach, was beheaded, same as the hapless sap who might have been Mort but for a casual and well-founded paranoia.
“There a problem, Keaton?” the bartender inquired as he served a towering glass mug frothing over with beer.
A twinge signaled Wizard Keaton’s attempt to crush Mort’s heart with a silent word to the universe. But Keaton might as well have tried to crush a stone in his bare fist. Mort was having none of it. When the wizard tried to play it off like he hadn’t just taken a second attempt on Mort’s life, he attempted to hide his surprise by lifting his drink to his lips.
Mort wasn’t having that, either. The glass might well have been welded to the bar top.
“You and I need a chat.”
Keaton cleared his throat. He licked his lips. When he opened his mouth to speak, he was panting for breath, on the verge of panic. “Look. I don’t know what you think I do, but I assure you that I’m looked after. I’m not without backing.”
Mort made a show of scanning the taproom of the Snotty Scotty. “Oh, yeah. You got loads of friends around here.”
“I’m well connected.”
“I’d like to meet your connections. One in particular.”
Keaton tittered. “Really? I don’t think so. I very much don’t think so.” He tugged again, but his beer wasn’t budging.
“Having trouble?”
The wizard leaned in, face contorted into a genteel snarl. “You may think you’re something. But you’re nothing. Get off Vega. We can both pretend that was you at Whitehawk Park.”
This time, when Keaton attempted to make a power play and wrest his mug from the bar’s surface, Mort allowed all but one point on the rim to come unstuck. A full pint of presumably expensive beer poured into Keaton’s lap.
“Gah!”
Mort stood and dodged the splash with such deftness that one might have suspected he knew it was coming. “Aw. Now look what you did. You’re soaked. Go ahead. Hit the washroom. Get yourself cleaned up.”
Watching Mort like a mouse beneath a hawk-filled sky, Keaton shuffled toward the back of the taproom where signage indicated one might find a toilet and sink at which to at least blot a titanic waste of beer.
As soon as he turned his back and made haste, Mort followed.
Privately, Mort tried to judge whether Keaton was the pep-talk-in-the-mirror or the flee-through-a-side-door-with-my-crotch-still-soaking sort of coward.
A moment later, Mort had his answer. The lights in the Snotty Scotty flickered out, and the digital music went silent.
In the brief chaos that followed, Mort used the washroom, then left by the side door that Keaton hadn’t taken.
He had all the time in the world to conduct his interrogation of the man.
Everyone was back at school the next day. Brad had noticed that the revelry at last night’s party had been louder than the casino but leaned more toward beer than hard liquor. If there were hangovers, the students nursing them were also keeping them well hidden.
For his part, Brad felt fine. It took effort to get hammered on beer. Plus, it was more fun to flirt and dance with girls who’d gone orbital on a single red plastic cup’s worth than knock back the six or eight it would take for him to get crazy. Not only that, but just having to constantly line up for a washroom made it seem pointless. No, Brad would stick to the hard stuff when he needed to get vaporized.
That didn’t mean there hadn’t been fallout from the night.
Ivan cornered Brad on the way to first period. “Hey, man. Saw you at Lucy’s last night.”
Was that where they’d been? Whoever Lucy was, Brad hoped she was single and looking to marry young. A quick divorce and a settlement once she got control of her trust fund, and Brad would be set for life. The artwork on the walls of that mansion was worth more than the Radio City. “Yeah. It was a thing.”
No point pretending the party had been anything special.
“Did Brenda seem… I dunno… weird to you?”
For a split second, Brad thought better of voicing the first thought that came to his head. Then, a full second later, he reconsidered and said it anyway. “All you planetsiders are weird.”
Ivan slipped a hand around Brad’s back and drew him into a conspiratorial side hug. “No. More than that. Like, something off. I’ve seen her boozy. But she was avoiding me. Then she and Tina left early, giggling and shit.”
Brad shook his head. “Brenda mentioned she was worried she’d done something stupid that night at the you-know-where.” Aware that the schools might have ears he was unaware of, he avoided explicit mention of their casino adventure. “But it sounds like it was nothing.”
“What did she think happened?”
There was no point in slapping Ivan in the face with the truth. “She worried maybe she and Tina had a fight.”
Ivan breathed a sigh as they headed for first period together. “Man. For a minute, I was worried they were after it.”
Again with the Vega slang. Brad didn’t want to sound itchy, so he kept his trap shut about it.
Classes were dull and a bland sort of educational. Had Brad been paying attention, he was sure he’d have increased his knowledge of the Vega IX parliamentary system, lipids, remedial trigonometry, and Chinese philosophers. But since none of that mattered to the career of a race pilot, he brainstormed ideas for scraping together the money for his own race team and hide it from his parents long enough to come of legal age.
Lunchtime rolled around, and the four friends convened in the lunchroom. Brad had an inkling to move on, get to know some of his other classmates, maybe latch onto another clique that was maybe a little less messed up or could hold their liquor better.
Then…
“Hey, Brad. C’mover here,” Ricardo bellowed. The table seated six. With boys across from girls, that left two empty seats for Brad to choose from. He carried his tray of insta-cook miso ramen and micro-baguettes and sat on the girls’ side next to Brenda.
“It’s going,” Brad greeted them, using a phrase he’d picked up since hitting planetside but not completely comprehending.
“Going,” the others agreed, heads bobbing.
Tina leaned forward to talk past Brenda. “We wanted your opinion on something.”
“’Kay…” Brad replied hesitantly.
“She thinks we’re in a rut,” Ricardo explained.
“A spacer sees Vega different from the rest of us, isn’t that right?” Tina asked. It was one of those questions that would’ve gotten thrown out of court as leading if this was one of those legal holos.
“Everyone knew that party was limp,” Ricardo added. “But everyone else was all, you know, flapping their wings like they were flying.” The others nodded as if that made a dead fuel rod worth of sense.
“Maybe there’s something we’re missing,” Ivan concluded.
Brad studied the faces of his temporary friends. In a few days, a week, a couple months, Dad would pull up stakes without warning. The Radio City would hit orbit without looking back. These four would become memories. If that was going to be the case, he might as well try to make them memorable.
“You’re kinda putting me on the spot.”
“You don’t have to think of it right now,” Brenda assured him. “We’ve got the rest of the day. Right?”
Oh, goodie. Something to keep his mind from escaping during art appreciation, ethics, and communications classes.
But before his mind wandered completely off, Brad caught a suspicious activity out of the corner of his eye. In fact, as he lifted a sporkful of ramen, his peripheral vision caught two acts that warranted a stealthy glance aside.
First, Tina brushed a lock of hair over her ear. Innocuous. Inconsequential—normally. But she revealed a dangly earring with diamonds—possibly real ones—that glimmered in the cafeteria lighting. While Tina had the little pockmarks that signified pierced holes, Brad hadn’t seen her wearing jewelry before.
Second, and possibly more telling, was Brenda giving Tina’s thigh a quick squeeze. Had he not been looking down at the right moment, Brad would have missed it.
Like one of Rhiannon’s four-piece puzzles, the picture came together.
Shit.
What had Brad touched off at that party? The whole funny part had been the lack of any signs that Brenda was interested romantically in her friend. Just went to show that Brad had a lot left to learn about women.
Brad gulped down a bite of ramen that was still on the hot side for gulping, then held up his spork like a king’s scepter. “I’ve got it.”
“Already?” Ivan asked.
Ricardo elbowed him. “Don’t hassle him. What you got for us?”
Another scoop of salty noodles rose and filled Brad’s mouth as he shook his head. When he’d swallowed again, he smirked. “It’s a surprise.”
“What? C’mon. I want something to look forward to the rest of this mid-week blah-fest,” Tina griped.
“I promise. It’s something you’ll all appreciate.”
Four towering chairs surrounded a circular table some twelve feet across. Each was carved and sculpted from a clever mixture of stone and wood. To Mordecai’s left, in a seat fashioned in the image of a griffon, complete with sapphire eyes, sat Nebuchadnezzar. To his right, fretting beneath the ruby-eyed scowl of a gargoyle, sat Tom Ping. Mort ignored them both from his dragon-shaped throne as he glowered at the fourth attendee to this meeting.
“I call to order the first Council of Ghosts,” Nebuchadnezzar intoned formally, holding up an unrolled sheet of parchment as if he couldn’t recall those nine simple words without aid. “As such, there is no old business. Moving on to new business, the immortal fate of Wizard Keaton Whitehead, formerly of Eaton, Cambridge, the Convocation’s cultural outreach program on Vega IX, and, most recently, known associate of Wizard Thaddius Bluth.”
Mort drummed his fingers on the carved scaly forearm of his dragon seat. “Does the petitioner have any preliminary statement?”
The fourth chair was a kraken, towering and menacing, with amethyst eyes and tentacles that lashed Keaton in place. The latest aspirant to the title of Mortslayer strained against bonds that held him in place more metaphorically than physically. Even had he gotten loose, there was nowhere to flee, no action to take, no escape of any kind, manner, or form.
“It was never personal.”
At an eyebrow-raised glare from Nebuchadnezzar, Tom Ping drew a sigh and scribbled down the statement. It was, of course, entirely unnecessary. This was all a show, a sham, trappings meant to intimidate a man who appeared to need perhaps just a little more.
“I’ve found, with great experience in the matter, that rarely is anyone assuaged by that sentiment,” Nebuchadnezzar commented.
Mort continued to drum his fingers. “Oh, I don’t know… It suggests that absent a business-related motive, maybe he’d be amenable to working with us.”
“Yes. YES! Anything. Whatever you want, I’ll do it.”
Nebuchadnezzar chewed on the feather of his quill. “Not buying it. Seems a little too eager to help.”
“Point of order, this place has that effect on people,” Tom pointed out.
“Seconded,” Nebuchadnezzar grumbled.
“Fine,” Mort agreed. He couldn’t have set this up any better if he’d warned Tom and his grandfather ahead of time. “So, here’s what I’m going to need from you.”
“Name it.”
“For starters, everything you know about Thaddius Bluth and the wooden nickel gangsters he’s taken up with.”
“Naturally,” Keaton replied, licking his lips and swallowing hard. He flexed a hand, unable to lift it from the arm of his chair but for the grasp of the sculpted tentacles. “If you’ll just provide me a quill and ink…”
“Nope.”
“Oh,” Keaton said, clamping his mouth shut and awaiting further instructions.
Mort let him stew a moment. With the phenomenal rate of time passing within the confines of Mortania, he could afford the delay; it only amounted to fractions of a second. “No, that’ll come later. For now, use your imagination. I want to see what you know.” He waved a hand, and across the table sprawled a model of Henderson rendered in miniature. “Go ahead. Show me.”
Over the course of days that flew by in hours as Mort napped in a public lavatory stall, Keaton Whitehead dissected the Boxcar Syndicate in excruciating detail. He was the foremost of eight apprentices. Thaddius Bluth had a suite of apartments on the bank of the Colo River, where most of the syndicate heavies lived. Mort learned the names of everyone Keaton knew on Vega IX, plus their mannerisms, relationships, resources, and near-term plans as best Keaton was aware of them.
At long last, the coils of the sculpted kraken loosened. Keaton spilled free and sprang to his feet.
“Does this mean I’m free to go?”
“Go where?” Nebuchadnezzar asked. “There is no ‘where’ anymore. You’re barely even a ‘what’ these days.”
Keaton backpedaled. He shook his head in denial. “No. I’ve played your game. I gave you everything. I want OUT!”
“There is no out,” Mort explained calmly, appearing in front of Keaton as the panicked wizard rushed toward the door. After briefly barring the way, he stepped aside.
Keaton reached the door and jerked it open. Just before dashing through, he caught a glimpse of the yawning void beyond. “GAH!”
“You’re gone,” Mort explained. “Body’s a pile of ash at the bottom of a waste reclaim chute, probably mixed with takeout cartons and random scientific detritus. I took you out of your body. The thoughts, the memories—soul if you’re churchward thinking—and kept it. This is my mind. It can be a playground or a prison. My call.”
Slamming the door shut, Keaton slumped against the wall and slid down into a sobbing heap.
“Why?”
Mort shook his head. “What a horribly bland question.”
“What did I do to deserve this?”
“You did what you were told,” Mort replied evenly. “That’s a cardinal sin. Obedience, servility, chains of command… it’s all just abdication of personal responsibility. You went to work for that asshole who’s gone pre-Renaissance all over a bunch of hapless technologists, and then when he told you to come find and kill me, you said ‘yessir.’”
“What choice did I have?”
“You could have known better than to get involved with Thaddius in the first place. Or when he told you to chop the head off some random wizard who’d been sent to kill him, you could have told him to go fuck himself.”
“You don’t know him…”
“And you didn’t know me. I’m worse than him. By miles.”
Nebuchadnezzar nodded grimly. “Whole orbits.”
“But you tried fucking with me instead of standing up for yourself. And now…” Mort shrugged and spread his hands to encompass all Mortania. “You see my point.”
Keaton sniffed. “What now? What next?”
Mort hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to Keaton’s fate once he had what he needed. Oh, he knew he’d be stuck with the man forever, but forgetting about him in a featureless void had kind of been Mort’s default option.
“I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give you a stack of blank journals and as much ink as you need.”
“For what?”
Mort sneered. “I want you to write down everything you know. In exacting detail.”
“On what subject? Magic? The syndicate? I assure you, I’ve—”
“Everything. From your earliest memory to what you ate on the way to come murder me. From your graduate thesis to the conversation where you asked your mother ‘why’ a hundred times in the span of an hour because you wanted to know about dinosaurs. From your most profound philosophical musings to the tawdriest of daydreams, every conversation spoken aloud, and every bottled-up thought about wishing me harm in this very room.”
“But that could take—”
“Forever? Maybe. I imagine you’ll remember less than every second of your existence, but other than that, I want every shred of that mind of yours reduced to words on paper. When I’ve got what I might ever remotely need from you lining the shelves of my library, I’ll turn the rest of you loose to do as you please in some remote corner of my mind. Deal?”
Keaton slumped, staring at the floor beside him. “What choice do I have?”
Tom turned to Nebuchadnezzar and muttered loudly enough for Mort to overhear: “That should be the motto of this whole place.”
Brad sauntered down Tropicana Boulevard, his four new friends in tow. Perfectly at ease despite being a stranger on this planet, he found amusement in his classmates’ discomfiture every time he glanced back to check that no one was lagging behind.
“What’s the big deal?” he asked after catching Brenda shying away from a streetside stim vendor. “He’s a businessman. Plenty of customers around. Not like he’s gonna stim you when you’re not looking.”
“That’s how they get you,” Ivan replied on her behalf.
Brad shook his head. “No, it’s not. They come at you when you’re broke and fried, barely hanging on, and that last hardcoin twenty in your pocket looks like a good investment in making it through the night.”
“Jesus, what the hell kind of planets you visit, Ramsey?” Ricardo asked.
Brad shrugged. “Everyplace from Earth to Niven Station and in between. C’mon. It’s not much farther.”
“This place better be worth it,” Tina griped.
“You want broader horizons, or don’t you?” Brad asked. “You guys wanted to see stuff on your own planet you’d never find on your own. That’s what you’re getting.”
They rounded a corner where a gaggle of self-sellers peddled their singular ware, lingerie clad, glistening, oiled, slender, muscular, curvaceous, with numb eyes and dead smiles. A seedy venue came into view: the Hoo, Baby. A tower of biceps stood sentinel outside, watching the street with crossed arms and datagoggles scanning for trouble.
“Hang back. Lemme lay some groundwork,” Brad told his friends.
Normally, a bunch of high schoolers wouldn’t get through the door of a place like this. Yet the same could have been said of the Orologio Casino. The main security measure—often the only measure—in the way was the bouncer.
As he adjusted his walk to a swagger, Brad slyly scoped out the signage. There was no posted cover charge. That gave him his first idea. When he saw the tattoo on the bouncer’s shoulder, he had a second. Two ideas were plenty to run a basic scam.
“That’ll be me in a couple years,” Brad announced, inclining his head toward the Earth Navy insignia tattooed with the bouncer’s ship name, ENV Prague.
“Might be you in twenty-five… if you’re lucky. Ain’t an easy life, kid.”
“Don’t I know it. My sister’s on the ENV Nairobi. Junior security grunt. Told me I should practice my piloting before I enlist.”
The bouncer smirked and looked Brad up and down. “You’re a brazen little shit, aren’t you? You know the first thing about combat flying?”
“As much as anyone who’s never been in combat, I reckon. I pilot anything I can get my hands on, from atmo scramblers to freighters. I do some amateur racing to train my reflexes and nerves. Target practice with a blaster isn’t the same as gunnery, but no one’s dumb shit enough to let a kid take an armed fighter out joyriding.”
“All right kid. Good luck. Now keep moving.”
Brad hooked a thumb toward the club. “I was hoping to take my friends inside.”
The bouncer broke out in a grin at odds with his fearsome presence. “Dream on, skippy. Why would I let you in? Hold on.”
A pair of businessmen in drab suits casually scanned their thumbs when the bouncer held out his reader. Very professional. No fuss. Brad wished that being underage didn’t make everything ten times as hard.
“I’m practicing my piloting, learning the lingo, taking every chance I can on the firing range…”
“Good for you, kid. So what?”
Brad stretched an upraised palm toward the club’s sign. “Practicing my shore leave.”
Now the bouncer laughed from his belly. “Wow, kid. You’ve really got a pair. But I can catch shit for letting teenagers in.”
“Oh. Is that all? We can compensate you for your risk.” Brad saw the narrowing of the bouncer’s eyes that said without words that the guy was listening with new ears now. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Bump the cover charge. Pocket it. None of these spoiled planetsider friends of mine bother checking.”
“How much they good for?”
Brad weighed his conscience against the imagined bank balances of his companions. It was quick, dirty math and didn’t take long. “Two hundred looks like twenty if you’re glancing.”
“Seriously?”
“They go to Shakur Memorial. Sorry, make that Mandalay University,” Brad replied with a wink.
“Deal. I’m Randy, by the way.”
Brad scanned his thumb, then waved his friends over. He checked. Randy only charged him a nominal 20T cover to make it look good. “Working someplace like this, I can see that.”
Ricardo and Ivan scanned without a second thought. Tina paused in front of the door. “Is this place what I think it is?”
“Even if it is, it isn’t,” Brad assured her cryptically. “Trust me. There’s something for everyone.”
“Oh, don’t be a prude,” Brenda interjected, reaching past Tina to scan her cover overcharge, then following Ricardo and Ivan inside.
As Tina reluctantly followed suit, Brad took up the rear of the procession with a quick, sly salute to Randy.
Inside, Hoo, Baby was a sordid wonderland. Thudding music plugged the ears, artificial perfumes clogged the nose. Meanwhile, the eyes feasted.
Establishments like this existed throughout the cosmos, but Brad hadn’t been old enough to pull off a stunt like just now until recently. He hadn’t been to a core world to try his luck since puberty.
Leading the way, Ricardo and Ivan had become a roadblock to foot traffic as they gawked. Brad slipped between Tina and Brenda to prod the dumbstruck pair along. “C’mon. Have a little decorum. Grab us a table. Oh, and fair warning, don’t touch anyone. That goes for you ladies as well.” Brad made a winking point of including Tina and Brenda, as if the minority of strutting male entertainers were in danger on that front.
A server wearing nothing but a Tele-Jack on her wrist to take orders escorted them to a booth. Much as he wanted to enjoy the scenery and ambiance, he found himself distracted by his amusement with his friends’ reactions.
“They have places like this on Vega?” Tina whispered to him.
“Course not.” Brad slouched in his seat, throwing his arms along the backrest, vaguely encompassing Tina to one side and Ivan to the other. “Didn’t you notice the three-day astral drop to Mars?”
The others tittered at the joke, totally unsure how to act. Certainly, any smooth they displayed at school or at societally approved social functions had gone out the airlock. Brad had opened the gate to the garden of forbidden fruit. Now, it was time to start earning back his cover charge.
“What can I get you?” their server asked. She had a voice so sweet it could rot teeth and a body that could rot brains.
“We’ll start up a tab,” Brad answered. Then he made a show of having his arms preoccupied, buried at the center of the booth. He inclined his head toward Ricardo, “Can you scan for us?”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure.” Seated at the end of the booth, he had a full-body view of their server. When she presented yet another thumb scanner, Ricardo pressed his thumb to it absently. He never even looked directly at the device.
Damn. All Brad needed in this galaxy was a thumb scanner and a bunch of laser-brained rich kids. He’d be set for life.
But that was a musing for another day. He’d promised a good time, and it was time to have one. “A round of Kepler Snorts for the table.”
“What’s that?” Brenda asked.
The server responded, saving Brad from having to remember. “Peach schnapps, jalapeno, and B12.”
Brad leaned toward Ivan. “On Carson, they add ketamine to it.” He smirked inwardly as Ivan bobbed his head, accepting Brad’s bullshit without questioning.
When no additional orders were forthcoming, the server headed off to get their drinks.
After the first shot, the Vega Niners were coughing and gasping. After the fourth different alcoholic elixir, each with a different name and liquor, they began to loosen up. Buying songs. Tipping dancers. Laughing. Joking. Leering—around the table as well as at the staff.
Somewhere along the lines, errant looks caught sight of the other patrons as well.
“Get, Ric, isn’t that your mom?” Ivan inquired, raising his voice above the music to be heard across the table. He aimed a finger across the club.
“Oh, grow up,” Tina shot back. “No one’s going to fall for that sort of—”
“No,” Ricardo cut in. “That’s her.”
Now everyone had to look. When Brad figured out who they were referring to, he was impressed. Ricardo’s mom was elegant, sophisticated, standing out in the sea of tawdry pleasures in her all-black business suit with the skin revealed by her low-cut blouse drawing attention to the diamond necklace and matching earrings she wore.
“Why would she come to a place like this alone?” Ivan asked. It was the kind of rude question he’d never have voiced sober. Too honest. Too cutting. Ivan pussyfooted through life, and talking shit about the mother of a guy who could slam his head clean through the table of their booth was bolder than he had in him.
“She’s not alone,” Tina commented.
On cue, a dude in a tuxedo slipped into the seat across from her at a table that was little more than a perch for a couple drinks. They were too far to eavesdrop on, but Brad could read the guy’s body language like subtitles on a xeno holovid.
“Who’s the guy she’s with?” Brenda asked.
“Probably just work,” Ricardo replied, trying to play it off. “Take clients to a place like this, get ’em off guard. It’s just good business.”
“What’s your mom do?” Brenda asked.
“Middle management. Something corporate. She has a rule about mixing work and family.”
Brad didn’t ask about Ricardo’s father. All he knew was that the guy was out of the picture. He wished he could have said the same about his own.
Because Brad knew, right in that moment, exactly where his father was.
Chuck accepted his martini from one of the oiled-up young men carrying drinks and raised the glass in mute thanks. He turned to Angelica, who looked like she’d just come back from a jewelry shopping spree. “So, like I was saying before we were so refreshingly interrupted, I’m up for whenever. You said you’ve got Curtis handled—and I’m hung out like wet laundry if you don’t—so, as they say on Phabian: mi starship es tu starship.”
Angelica rolled her eyes and smirked at the same time. A tough read, but Chuck wasn’t being picky. This was business. She was putting up with him even as she was trying not to be charmed out of that Tulucci suit she wore.
“Tomorrow,” the sultry gangstress insisted. “And we’re going to need a pickup. Location TBD, but it’ll be local.”
“Thought the plan was a quick drop-off at the garage.” Chuck never liked it when criminals changed the plan once it was agreed upon. He did enough improvising on his own without having to stack improv on top of improv.
“We can’t have the cargo traced. Easier to keep the moving parts moving. Is that a problem?”
Chuck shrugged. “Course not.” He threw back his martini in a gulp, working the olive around in his mouth before giving a quick swallow. “Just want you to know that I pay attention to details.”
“Fine,” Angelica replied. She swirled the wine pooled at the bottom of her glass. “Any obstacles I need to worry about? What’s the plan with that family of yours?”
“Cargo hold locks up. Wife’ll play ball; we’re old hands at this business. Couple rug rats too small to get back there. Oldest one… well, I’d just planned on ditching him planetside. It’s only a three-day trip. I’ll spot him hotel fare. Hundred terras and he’ll be fine.”
“Don’t come looking to me to recoup the—wait, a hundred terras a night? Or for all three nights?”
“I looked around, that’d cover thirty a night, plus some rounding error.”
“Chuck, you can’t be serious. Bad enough risking a Galactic Child Services case leaving a kid alone in the city.”
“Not a kid. He’s in high school. Goes to that Shaker school. Practically old enough to fly legally.”
“You mean Shakur Memorial? My son goes there.”
“Yeah. Henderson School Board caught up with us. Turns out the ship-schooling exemption runs out after a month planetside.”
“How old is he?”
“Who the hell keeps track? Thirteen? Fourteen?” Chuck deposited his empty martini glass on a tray as a server passed by, not even checking out her naked buttocks as she swayed past.
“This is a security risk.”
“The boy?” Chuck asked, baffled.
“What’s his name?”
This warranted a moment’s consideration. It was one thing involving ‘his family,’ but it was a different matter coming out and using proper nouns. Chuck was reminded of Mort’s ramblings about knowing the names of demons giving power over them. Same thing with humanoid demons; give them your name and they had an additional measure of power over you.
“Brad,” Chuck replied.
“Contact him. He can bunk at my place until this settles. Ricardo won’t mind.”
Chuck countered with a lopsided grin. Last thing he needed was to leave behind a hostage. “Now, come on. There’s no way you’ve got a kid as old as mine.”
Angelica’s face melted into a deadly calm. “You leave my age out of this.”
Oooookay. Well, sore subject. Moving along. “Kid’s fine. Been on his own loads of times. Builds character.”
“And teens wandering at night get picked up by cops and asked a lot of questions about their parents and where they might be. No. I’m keeping an eye on this one.”
Chuck had already budgeted the terras he was making on this job. Some were even pre-spent on short-term credit. At least he put up a fight.
“You win. I’ll send him your way. Just be forewarned. He’s a handful.”
Angelica sipped her wine. “Oh. Don’t worry. I know how to handle troublemakers.”
The door slid shut behind Mort as he exited the supply closet. Good. If he’d known the dratted things closed on their own, he wouldn’t have waited so long for the coast to be utterly, completely clear first.
As the wizard made his way through the halls of Siegel Medical Center, he shrugged to get his stolen orderly uniform to settle properly on his shoulders. Far from tailored to his measurements, it had been fitted to the dimensions of one “Dolan,” who ten minutes ago had been wearing it as he performed his menial duties. Mort didn’t know whether it was a first or last name, and encountering other personnel with nametags reading “Mackenzie,” “Roy,” and “Lee” didn’t enlighten him.
Thanks to his friend Keaton, Mort knew the layout of the hospital, referencing a hand-drawn, multi-story map. It didn’t cover every inch of the towering structure, but Keaton’s plans and preparation had become Mort’s. Of course, in Keaton’s version, this part was going to be performed by an underling. Mort had converted that to a low-magic infiltration mission. Hospitals were twitchy places, filled with self-important devices and high priests of the medical sciences. Not only was spellwork devilishly tricky—like eating a medium-well sirloin with a soup spoon—he also didn’t want his presence detected. Places like this were rumored to have anti-wizard traps to keep their precious science intact.
Mort had whammied Dolan. A simple confusion charm befuddled his already-limited wits for a few hours. Other than that, Mort had been operating on Keaton’s intel and his own muscles.
As befitted a scientist of the servant class, Mort kept his head down and found an unattended repulsor cart to push in front of him.
The morgue is on the lowest level. You’re past any real security. The dead don’t need much protecting.
Mort recalled Keaton’s words and found them accurate, vague as they were. He boarded a lift, baffled by the myriad control options available.
Up and down.
Down and up.
Mort rode the lift, always giving the impression of a passenger whose ride had been interrupted by newcomers and never getting off. After seeing hallway after hallway appear before him, at long last one of the nurses chose to visit the hospital basement.
“Where you taking those specimens?” the nurse asked, glancing over the contents of Mort’s cart.
“Morgue,” Mort replied without making eye contact. He didn’t want his confusion to show, nor did he want the temptation to fiddle with her brain if she caused trouble. The less magic Mort risked, the better.
The nurse had been walking alongside the cart but stopped short. “Why would they need pathogen incubation racks in the morgue?”
Mort shook his head. “I don’t have a clue. Mackenzie said, ‘take these to the morgue,’ so that’s where they’re going.”
“Mackenzie’s having some fun with you. You’re new, I take it? Those should probably be going up to Epidemiology. Fourteenth floor, east wing. I’ll have a word with Mackenzie’s supervisor about our hazing policy.”
“Thanks,” Mort replied. “But I’ll take my chances delivering to the morgue, then check back in.”
The nurse huffed. “Fine. But don’t say I never tried to help.”
At a branch intersection, she parted ways, headed to a zone of the hospital Keaton hadn’t labeled but that the hospital’s own signage indicated as leading to Cryonics.
Mort continued onward, casting only a parting glance to make sure the nurse wasn’t doubling back to follow him. The rest of his journey to the morgue was quiet. Eerily quiet.
For many, the stillness would have felt appropriate to a horror holovid. Despite plentiful lighting, there was a pall that blanketed the region. This was a way station at the intersection of heaven and hell. Here was where mortals collected the snakeskin shed by the immortal soul. Here, the boundary of sciences grew fuzzy, where the inexplicable was a daily occurrence.
The wizard in scientific acolyte’s scrubs smiled.
A door shushed open.
“Can I help you?” a bloody-gloved human inquired as he dissected a corpse.
“Headless guy. Came in yesterday just after dusk.”
“I meant the cart. What are those? Bacterial specimens?”
Mort rolled his eyes. The cart had been his best attempt to forestall questioning by looking busy. Now, it was a liability. “Forget the specimens. I’m heading up to Epidemiology from here. All right? But first, I need a head and a body prepped for funerary transport.”
The medical examiner tapped a gadget on his wrist, and the blood on his hands poured off and into a sink. He repeated the process for his other hand and took up a datapad from a side table. “I don’t see a transport order for… Fairchild. Abe Fairchild. I believe that’s the name of the deceased you’re looking for. Let me just check with—”
“No checking,” Mort insisted, coming over to pluck the device from the man’s hand. “Just prep him. You should know the deal.”
Cocking his head askew, the medical examiner suggested that he did, in no way, know the deal. “I’m calling security.”
Mort stepped between him and the panel on the wall he was headed for. Whether it was a kiosk or a comm panel or a scientific teleporter that would summon guards to the morgue directly, the wizard was having none of it.
Still, that left the mystery of why this cannibal chef was being dense. But one explanation made sense. “You’re not Dr. Conrad Morrissey, are you?”
“Do I look One Church to you?”
Mort blew a beleaguered sigh. “Look, pal.”
“DOCTOR. I’m Dr. Vijay Torabi. And you are making a grave error thinking you can walk into my morgue and make demands.”
“Look. There’s been a misunderstanding. Dr. Morrissey is probably coming on shift in a little while. But I’m here now. And so are you. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to honor your colleague’s deal with Boxcar.”
The doctor of the dead backed up and pawed behind him until he grasped hold of a nasty-looking medical tool. “You think I’m afraid of you or the Boxcar Syndicate? Your kind peddle death. I live with it. I won’t betray my duties for fear of what lies beyond life on Vega.”
Well, chalk one up for the bravery of scientists. Mort sighed. “Fine. I’ll kill you and do it myself.”
When he headed for the drawers with electro-displays listing the former names of corpses, the doctor lunged for him. Mort’s surprise caused the lights to go dark and all the displays to blank out. Lifted by unseen hands around his throat, the doctor dropped his medical weapon and clawed at his neck in a vain attempt to free himself.
Torchlight lit the room, attached to nothing.
“So much for those oaths. Hippocrates would be ashamed. Then again, you’re less a doctor than some combination of janitor and scientific necromancer. Lucky for you, I saw which drawer contained Abe Fairchild before the gizmos went kerflooey.”
Mort yanked open a drawer clearly meant for automatic operation. Metal scraped and scratched. A waft of fetid air escaped. Abe Fairchild, parts A and B, lay cold and pale on a glossy steel slab. Mort found a somber black bag of heavy plastic—perfectly suited to the size of an adult human—and levitated the body to pack it up.
Before closing the bag, Mort used his finger and traced an elaborate pattern that glowed sickly green for a moment before fading. The tracking glyph would allow him to find the body again anywhere on Vega IX. As he pinched the sides shut and searched for a zipper, the bag sealed itself up.
“Convenient.”
Gasping attempts at breath and the rustle of fabric made Dr. Torabi’s presence impossible to avoid.
“Now. What to do with you?” Mort scratched his stubble. Murder didn’t bother him in the slightest. But he struggled to find the advantage in it. There would be yet another investigation, one that pointed even more directly his way than the stray terras that would have been in Abe’s pocket thanks to Mort’s payoff. Coming to a conclusion, Mort patted the scientist reassuringly on the cheek. “I think you get to hang around a while. When Dr. Morrissey arrives to relieve you, I suggest the two of you have a long talk. If I ever see you again… etc. etc. You get the idea.”
Mort piled the bag onto a gurney and trudged out of the morgue with it.
Now, all he had to do was get it to the Boxcar flunky coming to pick it up.
The door slid shut behind Brad. He had a backpack loaded with a change of clothes and a toothbrush but little else. Considering his surroundings, he wasn’t going to need much.
“Nice place you’ve got here.”
Ricardo grunted. “Yeah. It’s all right.”
They were on the 88th floor of the Imotakan Building. Not quite penthouse level, but close. The living room was all window on one side, with a sunken area surrounding the holo-projector amphitheater style. The furniture was cold black and chrome. Everything had a sheen, kept like new.
“It’s just for a couple nights,” Mrs. Basset said as she breezed into the kitchen. “I can smell the booze on you boys. You should have something to eat.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Basset.”
Her head snapped around, sending her hair billowing like a fancy ball gown. “Don’t call me that. It’s Angelica.”
“Sorry, Angelica,” Brad replied with all the contrition he could muster. What the hell was it with adults hung up on being old? She didn’t even look old. Either she’d gone to the cosmo like a zillion times or she’d had Ricardo when she was in high school. Either way, Brad wasn’t complaining.
“It’s fine,” Angelica replied. She tapped a few buttons on the food processor, then checked in the fridge. “We don’t have much in the house. I’ll have Penny stock the larder for feeding two black holes. In the meantime, order in. Pizza, tacos, maybe that new sushi place up on Forty-First.”
“You sticking around?” Ricardo asked.
Angelica had already gone into the washroom and turned on the faucet. “Can’t. Business. I want you boys to stay put until morning. No staying up past one; you’ve still got school in the morning. No sneaking out the building, and no parties.”
“Got it,” Ricardo replied.
Ricardo’s mom blew through the apartment like a missile from an Earth Navy cruiser. She’d changed jewelry and lip shader colors to be less conspicuous—but she was still a knockout. When she reached the door, she pointed to each of them in turn. “Love you. Nice to meet you. I’ll be home after you’re in bed.”
With that, Angelica was gone.
“What now?” Brad asked. “I’m not picky. I’ll eat whatever.”
But Ricardo was just staring at the door. “Probably off to go fuck that guy she was with at Hoo, Baby.”
“Nah. It’s business.”
“Whadda you know?”
Brad dropped his backpack by the couch and headed to the window to appreciate the view. It was… nice. Eighty-eight stories was pretty high up, but for someone accustomed to seeing places from an orbital descent, it was the scenery that intrigued him, not the vantage. He could see into an open-air stadium and watch the flow of local traffic like blood in the city’s veins.
“That was my dad with her. It’s how we ended up stuck together. He’s running some delivery job offworld, and I’ve been staying on the family starship. I offered to fly it, but he wants me staying in school.” It was a bullshit move by a guy who never respected education except as a convenient place to dump Brad when he was in the way.
“Doesn’t mean they’re not fucking.”
Dad had a type—women—and if the two of them weren’t sleeping together, it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part. But that wasn’t what Ricardo needed to hear just then. “You kidding? My parents are sloppy sappy. Plus, he’s all about the terras.”
Ricardo shot Brad the side-eye. “Whatever.” He blew a sigh. There was a noticeable wobble in his legs before he plopped onto the couch; he’d had as much to drink as Brad and packed an easy ten or fifteen more kilos on his frame. But he didn’t have the practice. “What you wanna order?”
Brad made use of the sunken sitting area to vault the back of the couch and land heavily on the cushion beside Ricardo. “I’m done being tour guide. It’s your planet. Pick the best shit that comes delivered and let’s pig out.”
“Smooth.” Ricardo fished out a datapad.
Brad found the remote for the holo and scanned the startup menu. “Hey, you’ve got games on this rig.”
“Yeah.” Ricardo glanced up briefly before returning his attention to finding them a late dinner. “I’ll dust you on any of ’em.”
That claim sounded more like a challenge than a warning. If their evening’s entertainment was going to be competitive, then Brad wasn’t going to start off losing in the trash talk department. “Look at you, Mr. Basketball Basset. Probably run around gymnasiums and shit. All I’ve got to do for weeks on end is sit in front of the holo, and mine’s got games too. Plus, I see you’ve got Cannonball Raceway. Since I’m an actual pilot—”
“You’re not the only one who gets to fly around underage,” Ricardo cut in, breaking the flow of Brad’s bragging.
“Oh yeah?”
Ricardo nodded back in defiance. “Yeah.”
“Prove it.”
“Oh. I’ll prove it.” Ricardo tapped on his datapad several more times. “I just got us the Jaguar Warrior Platter from Aztec Tacos. Whoever loses has to eat the ghost pepper taco.”
Brad grinned. “Deal.”
Little did Ricardo know, but Brad would eat just about anything.
That night, in the wee hours of the morning when Vega had yet to consider rising over its ninth planet, Brad rolled over and considered a third trip to the washroom since going to bed in a camping sleeper on Ricardo’s bedroom floor. A gentleman would have offered the guest his bed. A guy comfortable with his own sexual preferences would have just shared the damn bed. But Ricardo had been smug in victory, and with Brad’s ghost pepper taco causing havoc up and down his gastrointestinal tract, he wasn’t allowed near anything of Ricardo’s.
Could Brad have held out? Suffered through it? Let his slumbering mind clench his guts and leave him the few hours’ sleep he had available until it was time to wake up for class?
Yes, he could have. Instead, keeping quiet to avoid a ribbing from his host, Brad slid silently out of his puffy, thermally insulated bedroll and tiptoed in his socks to the door.
The doors were quiet in this place. Expensive. Well made. He was probably in the clear.
Before he tapped the door panel, Brad heard a voice on the other side. Casting a glance, he could see by the light spilling in from the window overlooking Henderson that Ricardo was sound asleep, sprawled with arms akimbo and snoring softly. He pressed his ear to the door.
“I don’t care that you got it if it’s the wrong body. Are you sure the guy isn’t a wizard? … Well, how would I know? … Yeah. Bring it in. If we have to dummy it up, that’s what we’ll do … Know what? If you want to explain it to Bluth, be my guest. Maybe he’ll magic you into something smarter.”
The comm ended. It sounded like Angelica. She was keeping her voice low. In fairness, if he’d been asleep, the noise from that conversation wouldn’t have been enough to wake him.
Brad was about to slip back to his bedroll when his stomach clenched.
“Not again,” he mouthed.
There were two choices: shit in Ricardo’s room or find a way to get to the washroom with Angelica talking about dead bodies and angry wizards. That should have been an obvious choice. But, since Brad was a Ramsey, he had to look at the big picture.
If he shit himself or took a dump in the corner of Ricardo’s bedroom, the question would have logically followed: why not go to the conveniently located washroom not three steps from the door?
Brad didn’t have a ready answer for that one.
Instead, he shuffled over, clutching his gut, and gave the sleeping sack a good kick. Then, walking heavily, he made his way back to the door. He slapped the door release and headed straight to the washroom.
“Everything all right?” Angelica didn’t sound mad. Frazzled, maybe. That alone was disconcerting, since she was clearly mixed up in organized crime. Those people needed some serious shit to scare them.
“Ghost pepper taco.”
She nodded. “Go. There’s no arguing with those.”
“Thanks.” Brad ducked inside, and for the fourth time evacuated his bowels all the way from his uvula on down. He couldn’t bring himself to look, but there were probably internal organs floating around in there before he flushed.
When he exited, Brad peeked out the door first.
Angelica inclined her head in silent greeting. She sat atop the back of the couch, crossed legs resting on the cushions. A glass of liquor was impossible to identify in the gloom of muted city light that shone from outside. “You all right?”
“Probably. It’s a core world. If I turn inside out, docs here can probably fix me.”
She smiled. “What possessed you to try one of those tacos? They include one with every sampler platter, but it comes in its own sealed wrapper with a warning label. It’s a joke. It’s on all the adverts.”
“Like swallowing the cricket at the bottom of a bottle of tequila?”
“Traditionally, it’s a worm,” Angelica corrected him.
Well, shit. Brad should have known that wasn’t supposed to be in the bottle. Rather than admit an error that was months old by now, he distracted her with an answer to her original question. “Lost a bet. We were playing Cannonball Raceway.”
Angelica threw back her head and stifled a burst of laughter that might have woken Ricardo. “He suckered you. Ricky plays so much of that he’s going to get cut from the varsity team if he’s not careful.”
“Or lose his girlfriend.”
Ricardo’s mom cocked her head. “Pardon?”
Dammit. It was the middle of the night and Brad’s verbal filter had probably been sucked down the toilet drain along with his intestines and spleen. “Nothing. Sorry. In case my dad didn’t warn you, I’m a smart-ass.”
“He did warn me. And that didn’t sound like a crack. What do you know? Is Tina cheating on him?” She paused and scowled. “Is he cheating on her?”
Brad puzzled a moment for a way to put this. “You know how you said Ric might lose his spot on the basketball team?” His mother nodded. “Well, I think Tina’s thinking of switching teams.”
“Giving up rugby?”
“Or dudes.”
Angelica sighed into her glass, shaking her head. “I warned him…”
Brad hooked a thumb toward Ricardo’s bedroom. “I should probably get back to sleep.”
“I’ve got some Tubbins Seltzer if you want to settle that stomach first.”
Much as Brad wanted to crawl back to sleep before his groggy brain made him say something he’d regret, he also knew that he needed something to quiet the active volcano in his guts. “Thanks.”
She poured some into a tumbler just like hers, then refilled her drink. Brad caught sight of the label. It was brandy, labeled in what looked like an Earth heritage language. In fact, “brandy” was the only word he could read.
The Bassets had a tiny table at the edge of their kitchen. She slipped into the chair across from Brad’s seltzer. As he joined her, Brad tried to keep two competing thoughts in his brain.
First was the one he had to hide. He’d overheard Angelica on the comm with someone collecting wrong bodies and possibly pissing off a wizard. She was clearly involved in some crime syndicate or Dad wouldn’t be working for her, and that other matter hinted at wizard hunting. Whatever the relationship, the only wizard Brad knew who got hunted was Mort. He couldn’t lose sight of the possibility that she was working with bounty hunters trying to collect Mort’s head for the terras.
But he also couldn’t let on that he suspected, which led to…
Thought two, the cover story. After his first sip of the seltzer—nasty stuff that drew a wince but felt good in his stomach—Brad offered Angelica a grateful smile. “Can I ask you something personal?”
She snorted in amusement. “Like what?”
“Like are you even Ric’s mom? I mean, are you like an older sister raising him or something?”
“Why would you ask that?”
To keep you off guard and suspecting me of different motives, Brad chose not to say aloud.
“Mine considered kidnapping me and going that route. I talked her out of it. She’d have ruined her career in the navy. She’s only twenty. I’m guessing you’re a little older but not a lot.”
Angelica looked at him differently now. Appraising. Calculating.
“Or maybe I’m off base, and you’re just the hottest forty-year-old in the Milky Way.”
“Thanks,” she said quietly into her drink. “It hasn’t been a good night.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
She raised an eyebrow.
Brad rolled his eyes. “I know you and my dad are mixed up in stuff. You don’t need to say anything incriminating. Just… vent. Go ahead. I can listen.”
The brandy disappeared in a gulp. Angelica refilled the glass. “Whatever. Who could you even tell? Ricky doesn’t know, but he knows. You know?”
“Must be hard having no one to confide in.”
“I don’t want him mixed up in this. Don’t you wish you thought your father was just a regular guy?”
“Hell no. As a comedian, he’s a comet impact—and not in the good way. I can at least respect him getting his hands dirty to feed us and keep fuel in the ship.”
Angelica shook her head and took a deep breath. “Well, this business will suck him in like a bird into a ramjet intake.” Brad snickered at the thought of her flying antique racers. She took his mirth as something else. “He’s not cut out for it. I should be getting him set up so he doesn’t have to deal with shit like… like…”
Brad gave her his full attention and waited, sipping at his seltzer so he could get back to sleep soon.
Angelica huffed. “Ever go to a restaurant, and they get your order wrong?”
“Sure. I usually just eat it anyway.”
“Why am I not surprised?” she replied dryly. “Well, imagine if it mattered. If you ordered something for your boss, maybe. You’re just doing the delivery. And they get it wrong. And they try to pass it off as fine. Oh, you can just pick off the onions. Oh, the bioenzyme beef tastes just like the real thing; he’ll never know the difference. Except it’s my ass on the line bringing back the takeout.”
Brad bobbed his head. “I get what you’re saying.”
The little table couldn’t contain Angelica’s worries any longer. She sprang to her feet and paced. “And it’s not like I can go into the kitchen and cook it myself. It’s too late for that. I don’t know where they keep the ingredients, and my boss is hungry.”
Brad tossed back the rest of the seltzer in a gulp, nearly gagging on the bitter taste. Then he got up and intercepted her pacing, blocking her path, putting his hands on her shoulders.
“Hey. It’s going to be OK.” He looked right into her eyes.
Angelica stopped short. She looked back.
Brad had overplayed his hand. In that cursed second of realization, he knew his mistake.
People always told him that he took after his mother. He had her face, her coloration, her build. But they also said he had his father’s eyes.
Angelica kissed him.
Brad could have pushed her away. He didn’t want to. He kissed back.
Half an hour later, Brad lay beside her, unsure where he’d left his underwear, panting to catch his breath. Angelica’s bedroom was swanky but small. Black silk sheets and pillows you could practically disappear into, but the bed itself was small enough that there was no avoiding physical contact.
“Ugh. I’m pathetic.”
Brad rolled onto his side and brushed tangled hair from her face. “Hey. You were great.”
She rolled her eyes. “No offense, but like you’d even know the difference.”
“Part of living outside the law is knowing what you think is right and wrong,” Brad told her. “At this point, seriously, just tell me what’s really bothering you?”
She craned her neck to glare at the closed bedroom door. “You mean aside from Ricardo finding you in here?”
“Don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine as long as you live through this shit with your boss. Now, since I’ve got a personal stake in this, too, tell me what’s going on. You’d be surprised how helpful I can be.”
Angelica studied him. There was no way he could be certain what she saw there, messed up as she was right then. But he must have passed some kind of test—or she’d given up caring.
Angelica talked.
By the time he had the full scope of what was going down, he needed a hit of her stim to replace the night’s sleep he’d lost.
Brad took a shower before Ricardo woke up. His new friend made fun of him for the troubles he had with the ghost pepper taco the night before. Brad used all his paltry willpower not to counter with having slept with Angelica.
But once they both got into school, Brad and Ricardo parted ways.
“Where you going?”
“I’m cutting today.”
“You can’t do that.”
Brad snickered. “Really? Watch me.”
“But—”
“I got some shit to do today. The school will barely care, and anyone else will be fine thinking I’m in class.”
“Shit to do? Like what?”
Brad shook his head. “Just tell them I’m out sick. Food poisoning. It’s practically true.”
What he couldn’t tell Ricardo—well, one of a growing number of things, now that Brad thought of it—was that Angelica’s people were hunting for a wizard who was coming to collect a bounty on the Boxcar Syndicate’s wizard, Thaddius Bluth.
And Brad had to warn Mort. But first he had to find him.
Dawn arrived like the rat bastard it was—right on schedule and bringing with it nothing but annoyance and irritation.
Mort sat at an open-air cafe terrace on the fourth floor of Gemerald Plaza. From his vantage, he could survey the comings and goings at the QuickMed center across the street. Keaton’s bullshit plan had popped a cog like some dysfunctional techno device.
The fine criminals who’d come to retrieve the body of Abe Fairchild hadn’t taken it back to Thaddius Bluth. They hadn’t even taken it to the syndicate the dark wizard had tucked in his pants pocket. No, they’d brought it to a purveyor of medical quackery of even less prestige than the Mayonnaise Clinic back on Earth.
And they hadn’t come back out.
From what little Mort knew of how science worked in medical matters, dark-science devices could divine identity via ritual bloodletting. Even if Wizard Thaddius didn’t know who was trying to kill him, or even suspect, simple process of elimination would conclude that if Poor Old Abe had an identity other than being a wizard, then, ipso facto, he was also not the wizard trying to collect Thaddius Bluth’s head.
Which meant that the supply chain linking the body to Mort’s target was broken.
Probably.
There was still a chance they’d move it again, and Mort’s chase would glumly resume.
“Mordecai?”
Hearing that name chime out across a modestly crowded public cafe ought to have filled him with dread. Instead, it conjured ten thousand memories. He turned in the direction of that lilting Earth accent. Dressed like a Victorian debutante, hair spilling down both shoulders in ringlets, was a woman he’d never fear.
“Sarajah? What are you—?” Mort lowered his voice as she approached his table, hands concealed within an ermine muff. He leaned toward her. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?” He scanned past her, both visually and feeling in his bones for the subtle shifts in reality that announced the presence of another wizard.
Sarajah crinkled her nose as she sat, sliding the chair back without touching it. “Really, Mortie… you’re so… stompy with your magic. Subtle as a marching band traversing a canyon. It doesn’t take an Oracle to—”
“Who else knows you’re here? How did you get to Vega IX?”
“Well, you certainly didn’t steal any manners from that dratted library. I came on my own private transportation, personally funded, and scheduled by my own people. I haven’t so much as invoked credit since touching down. I’m carrying money.” She seemed utterly tickled at that fact. She jiggled her muff, and terra coins rattled.
“You’re very resourceful,” Mort allowed. “But how’d you know to come here in the first place? Don’t tell me your friends at Delphi figured out how to scry across planets.”
“I followed Azrael Copperfield.”
Mort had taken a sip of coffee after speaking and spat it back into his mug.
“Gracious, Mortie! What’s gotten into you?”
“Azrael’s here?”
“I assumed you knew.”
“I did, in point of fact, not know. What’s he doing here?”
Sarajah gave an innocent shrug and looked into the distance. “Posturing to take credit for whomever you’re hunting here, I presume.”
Mort’s jaw hung open.
Sarajah instantly brightened. She withdrew her hands from her muff and clapped daintily. “Ooh, I was right! I knew it!”
“How?” was all Mort could ask.
“Well… maybe others were fooled by Wizard Azrael’s sparkling competence since your dubious letter arrived on Earth. Begging the Grand Council to just leave you in peace. Abdicating your title. None of that sounded like you, Mortie. Ever since you ran, I assumed you’d be depositing inquisitors on Wenling’s doorstep like Felix used to do with dismembered mice.”
“You fed him those mice.”
“And yet he still had to make his show, prove what a marvelous hunter he was. That sounded more like the brother I knew.” She tapped her lip with a crimson-painted fingernail. “But what of this underestimated librarian? This bookish Morpheite who’s suddenly exploding skulls and burning down buildings with dark wizards trapped inside? That sounded like my big brother, too.”
“Whom have you told?”
“Why, no one, of course. I think puzzling out your scheme—even if I’m dying to know the details—ought to have been enough evidence that I’m not dim-witted.”
“I never said—”
“You implied it. Now, apologize, or I might be forced to reconsider your invitation to the wedding.”
Mort gawked. He was just on such unfamiliar footing that he couldn’t react with any certainty. Sarajah had dropped in like Titania appearing in the second act of Macbeth. None of it made any sense. “Justin finally proposed?”
“Justinian,” she corrected him offhandedly. If there had been any thought of impostors lingering at the back of Mort’s devious mind, that minor comment, almost a verbal tic in any conversation regarding Sarajah’s intended, laid them to rest. “And it was foregone. Everyone knew it. If I’d wanted to marry for love, I could see the surprise. But he’s rich and influential and a friend of Father’s.”
“They’re practically the same age,” Mort added in a grumble.
She sneered playfully. “Don’t be like that. It’s just for a decade or three. We’ll summer separately, conjoin for a few heirs. Eventually it’ll fall off or shrivel up or dry out of whatever… juice you boys concoct. Meanwhile, I’ll take up horseback riding and hire a stablemaster hung like his charges.”
“Nice that you’ve got a plan.”
“Well, I finished my doctorate and pursuing another would be gratuitous. What else is there to do but get on with it and start interviewing riding instructors? And you simply must attend the wedding.”
Mort was shocked at his continued ability to become flabbergasted. He glanced around for eavesdroppers. “You are aware of my current circumstances.”
She leaned across the table with glee and mischief in her eyes. “That’s why it would be so scandalous.”
“What?”
“Weddings are dull. Formulaic. You could practically have them by post if everyone wasn’t so enamored of the theatrics. Well, I’ll show them theatrics. I’ll be the talk of Boston Prime. Not all of us can be scandalous by marrying our age.”
Mort slumped in his seat. Nancy. His Nancy. Oh, the hell she’d caught for marrying “scientist style.” Though unspoken, it was traditional that one wizard in a couple be the protector. Of old, it was commonly the gentleman. In more modern times, the old ways clung like barnacles to the side of society. Sarajah was strong enough to cow a young wizard from a nothing family, a dilettante academic or a lesser light of one of the lower orders. But because she was Sarajah The Brown and not some Carvey or Pao or Copperfield, people expected better of her spouse. The list was short and dreary of socially acceptable matches.
Nancy hadn’t cared.
She hadn’t waited for a wizard to “come into his power” in his mid-fifties or late seventies. Mort was power incarnate—that was the literal line she’d given her mother to quell her objections.
“Have you seen Nancy? How is she?”
“Dating again.”
A knife twisted in Mort’s gut.
“Oh, don’t worry. She’s awful at it. I suspect she’ll give up before long. I don’t think she’ll get her knickers parted properly until there’s been an open-casket funeral for you in the middle of Boston Common. Don’t you worry.”
“I can’t come to your wedding.”
“I’ll make sure a few close friends are there. You’ll be protected.”
Mort barked a laugh. “You’ll protect me.”
“It’s not worth getting married without you there.”
Mort scowled. He was missing something important here. “Back up a moment. You figured out Azrael is here. Where is he?”
“Slumming, I imagine. He can’t well lie around a hotel or an outreach center now, can he? He’s got to pretend he’s working at—” Sarajah fluttered a hand. “Whatever it is you do.”
“Find him. Tell him I need to meet with him.”
Sarajah harrumphed. “I rather think not. I went to some trouble arriving in secret.”
“Well, then, find me the corpse on borrowed time named Thaddius Bluth.”
“I’m not your hunting hound.”
“It’s got to be one or the other, or I’m not coming to the wedding.”
“You’ve no intention of attending,” Sarajah accused, drawing herself up tall in her seat.
“I will if you can get him to me without anyone else from the Convocation noticing.”
Sarajah extended a hand across the table. “Deal.”
The windows surrounding Sunrise City Civic Hangar Fifteen were cloudy with atmospheric grime that neither man nor drone had been tasked with cleaning regularly. Morning sunlight produced a sad yellow glow tinted orange by the contaminants. The Radio City’s windows were somewhat cleaner thanks to port inspections and visual navigation guidelines. But by the time the light got to Chuck Ramsey’s eyes, it barely registered.
The comedian pawed blindly until he found his datapad on the bedside table and lifted it to an angle where he could view the screen.
“Nothing.”
Becky blew a cloud of smoke that smelled of the good marijuana they kept on board, not the everyday stuff. “Good. Time to start the morning right.”
She held out the hand-rolled joint unlit end first within easy reach of Chuck’s lips.
Chuck pushed her hand aside and rolled to a seated position. “They said we’d be hearing from them overnight. I shouldn’t have even slept.”
“Chill, babe. You earned that shut-eye.” Becky crawled up behind her husband and wrapped an arm around him, pressing her bare breasts against his back. She took another puff and again offered Chuck a toke.
Distracted, Chuck took a draw.
He breathed out, waiting for the high to hit him. He didn’t need to be strung so tight when the comm from Angelica came in. A little mellow would do him some good.
Becky inclined her head toward Chuck’s datapad. “That thing louder than me?”
It would take a lot more than a single puff for Chuck to miss her implication. He fiddled with the device, turning up the alert volume to near max. “It is now.”
The bedroom swam. A dizzy second later, Chuck found himself flat on his back looking up as Becky tossed a lock of hair from her face. He might have practiced the art of love with amateurs and professionals alike. But there was a reason he kept coming home.
Becky was a virtuoso.
Brad felt the warm wind down the skyscraper canyons and wondered how anyone tracked someone without the aid of nature or scanners. Nature wasn’t an option because core worlds didn’t believe in nature. Footprints, broken twigs, all that stuff from the holos didn’t happen when the planetary surface was paved in permacrete. Scanners wouldn’t help because they didn’t believe in wizards.
No wonder wizards got away with murder.
Frankly, if Brad could get past all the reading and learning ancient languages and not playing computer games, he could have gotten used to a life where tech had no hold over him.
Once, Brad had remarked offhandedly about how wizards must have had no trouble getting girls. He’d never come so close to believing Mort was going to kill him. But while Mort had thought he meant using magic as a means to drug potential romantic partners, Brad had quickly clarified that wizards were made of smooth, like fighter pilots or Bronze League champs. In the time since, Brad had found that simply ignoring personal insecurity and fears of rejection was magic enough for his purposes.
But what Brad would have given for a spell that sniffed out wizards like a bloodhound just then.
He needed a plan.
He needed a t-shirt with “I need a plan” emblazoned across it.
There were two types of people in the galaxy: mindless drones just pretending to be alive and guys with plans. Anyone could get on board and follow someone else’s plan. Brad could have just gone to school, bunked at Ricardo’s house a couple nights, and let the adults in his life do their thing their way.
What happened would happen.
Fuck that.
Mort wasn’t exactly Mr. Damsel-in-Distress, but it sounded like a pretty big outfit had him in their blaster sights, even if they didn’t know who he was.
I could tell them who he is. Based on Angelica’s reaction, they weren’t fans of their wizard.
That was a backup plan.
I could let Dad know that the people he’s involved with are out to kill Mort and have him ship the body offworld to throw off an investigation.
Strangely, Angelica had entrusted Brad with that info but not Dad. Some part of him felt profoundly uncomfortable with how that night had gone. Undeniably, he’d gotten what he needed from her. The rest he tried to push to the back of his brain. But while Angelica didn’t have Dad’s best interests at heart, Brad couldn’t argue with the notion that he wasn’t going to be any use sorting it out. If shit went bad, for the sake of the family, Brad was going to have to live with the knowledge that they’d shipped Mort’s corpse without Mom and Dad the wiser.
Cutting Dad in on the scam was out of the question. Brad would carry that burden alone. Dad might get over it, but Mom would freak.
There’s just no getting around it. I have to find Mort.
Easier thought than done.
Vega IX was huge. Not Earth or Mars huge. Not even quite Orion huge. But it was the sort of planet where flashing a flatpic around town wasn’t going to turn up leads. Not that datapads could capture pics of Mort. He wouldn’t give the devices that satisfaction.
Brad needed to figure out where Mort would be. That meant understanding what had gone wrong.
Two facts from Angelica’s drunken, frazzled ramblings stood out. Someone who wasn’t the wizard hunting for Thaddius Bluth had been killed. The wizard who was supposed to have murdered the right guy—i.e. Mort—had gone missing.
Mort was an expert. He was too blatantly proud of his work as Guardian of the Plundered Tomes to even disguise the notion that he was a maestro of murder. Snuffing out the wrong guy? That wasn’t his style. But picking off the asshole who’d been sent to kill him? That fit the bill.
Why Mort was involving himself in planetside messes didn’t matter. Mort had disappeared with a vague promise of “being around” if the Ramsey family needed him. Now a whole syndicate was up in arms over a wizard bounty hunter coming after their top spellslinger. Too big a coincidence. HAD to be Mort. It just had to.
And Mort had to know they were wise to him. He must have been the one to get the wizard who killed the wrong guy. Even Angelica’s people suspected that much by now, and they were syndicate idiots.
So, if Mort killed the underling, why hadn’t he gone after the big fish?
The stories Mort told all had him marching up to dragons like he was Saint George. Not sneaking and picking off minions.
He must not know where to find the guy.
Angelica’s people had commed from a QuickMed. Brad had checked while she was sleeping. Dad had always warned Brad never to enable location-based convenience zones where you didn’t need passcodes or bio-encryption lockouts. But Angelica had left the Bassets’ apartment as a safe haven, and Brad wasn’t too proud to break her trust.
Mort had to be hoping they’d bring the body to Bluth.
But they weren’t going to. Brad knew that because Angelica had forbidden her crew from getting near their bosses with the wrong body.
That meant…
It only took twenty minutes on foot to find the place. QuickMed was a chain with multiple locations across Vega IX, but this was the only one close by. Brad stopped beside the front door and scoped the area.
East Flamingo Road was sprinkled with shops and restaurants, hotels and civic offices. Mort could blend in with a crowd if he dressed for it, so Brad’s bio-visual scanners swept slowly to be certain. After ruling out everything at ground level, his gaze was drawn to a bunch of colorful umbrellas shading the tables of a balcony eatery.
There he was!
Mort was having coffee with a blonde in a fancy dress. A date? Breakfast the morning after? Brad had never paused to consider Mort’s romantic life aside from the fact he had a family back on Earth. But Vega IX was a long way from Earth, and Brad was presently in no moral frame of mind to cast judgment. Given the circumstances, interrupting a breakfast date was a risk Brad was going to have to take.
The hotel where the cafe was located didn’t have any security to speak of. This was a public addendum to a warren of private rental lodgings. Brad simply rode a lift up to a floor labeled Cafe Tuileries.
There was a lady at the top of the ride, standing guard at the cafe entrance. She stood behind a tall desk with a terminal facing her. “Hi, welcome to Cafe Tuileries. Can I help you?”
Brad could tell corporate scripting when he heard it. There was probably a recording device counting the number of times she said that phrase versus the number of times the lift doors opened. It was probably tied to her paycheck. He didn’t hold it against her. What crawled up his ass was how she said it.
Like he didn’t belong here.
Ignoring the strong implication that he ought to go away or at least wait for an adult to come along, Brad pointed past her, through the indoor section of the cafe to the balcony overlooking the street. “That’s my aunt and uncle. I’m supposed to be meeting them.”
“Oh. Go right ahead.”
Brad didn’t even thank her. Damn right he was going to go right ahead. He had plans bigger than anything she was doing today. The nerve of some people.
As Brad approached, the woman with Mort stood and exchanged parting words he was still too far to overhear. On instinct, he took a sudden turn, veering down a row of tables completely the wrong direction just to avoid crossing paths with her.
Brad zigged and zagged and doubled back until he emerged onto the balcony to find Mort alone at a table meant for two. “Mind if I join you?”
“What are you doing here?” Mort asked, sounding more annoyed than surprised. “Isn’t this a school day?”
“Couldn’t. Not knowing what I know.”
Mort lifted a menacing eyebrow. “You ought to know better than to utter a sentence like that.”
“I know what’s going on and I’m here to help.”
“Better. I’m skeptical, but better.”
Brad pursed his lips and considered how to phrase this for public discussion. “You’re here to break some bad news to a new friend, but there was a case of mistaken identity. Now you need to meet the right person. But no one gave you an address. And you don’t have a comm ID. It’s supposed to be a surprise, so you can’t just ask around in case they hear and ruin it.”
Old-man eyes bored into Brad’s skull.
Brad cleared his throat. “But I may have a theory on where your friend lives.”
Mort reached into a pocket and deposited a handful of hardcoin on the table without counting. “We’re going.”
“I haven’t said where yet.”
“You’ll tell me on the way… to school.”
Brad had already been standing by the time that word hit home like a plasma cannon blast to his shields. “Whoa! I helped you. Why the bum rap?”
“I need you out of the way. Safe. This isn’t business for—” Mort paused, and Brad expected him to add ‘kids’ right then. Instead, he said, “Uninvolved parties.”
They kept silent as they rode the lift down with another pair of patrons who’d finished a meal. Alone on the crowded streets, Brad picked up where they’d left off.
“But I’m not uninvolved. And I can’t walk back into school right now.”
“Give me one good reason why not?”
Brad looked up and down the street. There were hundreds of pedestrians but none that paid them the least attention. Nonetheless, he muttered through clenched teeth. “I’m. Carrying. A. Stolen. Blaster.”
“What the bloody hell for?” Mort demanded loudly.
So much for keeping their conversation private. If nothing else, disguising their spat as family drama suited Brad fine so long as he kept things nonspecific. “Protection. Guy’s gotta look after himself.”
Mort looked him over as they walked. “Where are you hiding it? In your bookbag?”
“Why would I carry a bag full of books? I’m not a wizard.”
“Then where? I don’t see anyplace you could be hiding a—”
“It’s a ladies’ model. Discreet. Meant to be concealed under a dress.”
“That why you’re walking funny? Thought you were just trying to strut or swagger or whatever damn idiotic notion Chuck put in your head. Wasn’t going to embarrass you by drawing attention.”
“Don’t ask where I got it.”
Mort grunted. Fair enough. He wasn’t usually one to pry.
“But I also can’t get through a school security scanner right now.”
“Then what do you propose I do with you? I can’t very well leave you roaming the streets.”
Brad stopped in his tracks, jostled instantly by portions of the pedestrian swarm who didn’t follow suit. In short order, the flow of people accommodated a tiny island of discord that wasn’t playing by their rules. “Why the hell not? You didn’t know where I was an hour ago.”
“An hour ago, I didn’t know you were poking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
“There’s nowhere my nose does belong. School? As if. I’m a square peg in a world with all its holes already filled. Home? They’re getting prepped to transport a no-questions asked cargo that they don’t even realize is supposed to be you-know-who.” Brad dared poke Mort in the chest and was gratified to receive only a contemplative scowl instead of being turned into a newt.
“Fine,” Mort grumbled. “Give me the address. I’ve got plenty of groundwork to lay, but don’t dawdle. Once I have my reckoning, I don’t think we’ll be long for this planet.”
Brad didn’t need to be told twice. He had work to do, too. He told Mort the name of the building where the Boxcar Syndicate’s leaders lived and worked. With a parting “bye” and remembering not to call Mort by name in public, he was off into the streets of Henderson like a plasma bolt.
He had a debt to repay.
Mort stood in the flow of foot traffic a moment, like a rock in a raging river. Yet in this case, it was the rock that raged. That bastard. That stinking, no good, lying bastard.
Eyes glazing over, Mort retreated to his castle refuge. His comatose body remained as a minor impediment to the pedestrians of Henderson.
In a darkened, silent room, the scratch of a quill was the only sound. Mort’s pounding footsteps were the roar of a dragon.
“How dare you! Lying to me? In your situation?”
Keaton’s hand slipped, a scratch of ink marred a page in the open journal in which he diligently wrote. He attempted to rise, but Mort increased the gravity in his realm until only he was strong enough to withstand it. Keaton, by contrast, crumpled to the floor.
“I don’t understand! What did I do?”
“Thaddius Bluth lives in a goddamn skyscraper along with his syndicate cronies. How did that not come up?”
A heap of wizard cowered on the stone floor, curled in the fetal position. “Does he?” Keaton’s eyes hunted for an escape from their sockets. “Makes sense, I suppose. But he wouldn’t let me walk around knowing something like that. Why would he?”
Muddy pond water had to settle and allow Mort to see clearly beneath the surface. “I get ironing out the minds of those half-wit plasma salesmen they sent to kill me in my sleep. But a wizard? What good are you as an imbecile?”
“But I’m not!” Keaton protested, then made a feeble attempt to push himself upright before collapsing flat to the floor. “I know so much. I’ll tell you all I can. But not that. I can’t tell you what he kept from me.”
“He wouldn’t tell you that he lives in a gigantic public building that apparently mid-grade thugs from the Boxcar Syndicate are fully aware of?”
“I don’t know where I live,” Keaton admitted in a tiny voice. “Probably means I live there, too.”
Reaching down and grabbing a fistful of Keaton’s robes by the collar, Mort hoisted the man aloft. Gravity being ten times Earth Standard, the lesser wizard sagged limply toward the floor like the rope of an anchor, stretched between an irresistible force and an immovable object. “I refuse to believe he lobotomized you for a surprise attack that ought to have worked. Why sacrifice an apprentice so callously? It’s not merely cruel, it’s wasteful. Trigger fingers come ten to a box, but wizards take decades to go from grape juice to wine. You’re just not that expendable.”
“I’m… I’m sure he’d give them back. I remember his name. And that he has them—my memories, that is. He left me that much. He wanted me back.”
“Just what is it that Wizard Thaddius does in that skyscraper of his?”
Keaton cringed in anticipation. “I wish I could help you.”
Mort dropped the wizard, waiting until he and the stonework had snapped together like a pair of magnets. Keaton couldn’t die. Not here. Mort wasn’t sure if he could truly destroy the man if he tried. “You can help. Get up. Get back to writing.” Mort returned gravity to normal, and Keaton readily complied. “That inkpot will never run dry. That quill will never dull. Each time you place a completed volume on that shelf over there, a fresh blank one will appear in its place. Shout my name when not a single thought exists in your head that isn’t cataloged. I’ll check your work, and if I think you’ve summoned me frivolously, I’ll burn this place to the ground and start you over from scratch. Understood?”
Tears streaming down his face, Keaton nodded furiously.
Mort turned to leave, but as he was thinking of an appropriately grandiose exit, he felt a tug at his arm. His real arm. In the real world. Time being relative, he knew he had minutes in this realm before he had to deal with whoever dared manhandle him.
Glancing back at Keaton, already frantically jotting down the contents of his mind, he had second thoughts about the terms of the man’s punishment. “For every volume you add to that shelf, a book will appear to pass the time,” Mort told him, and with a wave of his hand, another set of shelves appeared. Then, he added a long, empty table. “And also one type of food will appear on this table. Don’t start with your favorite; you’re bound to get bored with the first one. If you want variety, get cracking.”
With that, Mort opened his eyes in the physical world.
Azrael stood in front of him, dressed in a charcoal gray business suit and fedora. He growled through clenched teeth: “Get off the streets.”
Mort jerked his arm free. This wasn’t the time to be getting huffy; he just couldn’t help it. “Mind your mitts, ‘guardian.’ I see she found you. What happened to ‘I’m not permitted to travel to Vega?’”
The pair walked in silence until they found a bench at a hoverbus stop. No one else was waiting for the 11:15, so they had an anonymous-in-the-city sort of privacy. “That was a convenient lie you were meant to see through. Better question: What was that woman doing knowing you’re here?”
“You got sloppy,” Mort accused. “My sister’s smarter than most, but not the pinnacle of the pyramid. Keep up like this and more Clever Clarences are going to assemble the same jigsaw.”
“I have to keep up the impression that I’m handling these incidents.”
Mort set his jaw. It was a pickle. “You’re just going to have to take a break from some of the worst cases.”
“Unconscionable! That’s the whole reason this arrangement works.”
“It works for now. It crumbles if you overplay it. I’m going to finish this one up, but you’re going to need to do some explaining afterward. Maybe a sabbatical.”
“Sabbatical? How long?” By the degree of incredulity, this was a prelude to objecting to any length of time Mort proposed.
“Couple months.”
“Months!”
Mort swallowed. He was creating a monster not of evil but of ego. “I’ve been making you look too good.”
Azrael scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself. Some of them are thinking I’m a menace. That I enjoy this sort of work a little much for their comfort.”
“That’s the only part that’s good news. But they’re also starting to think you’re operating too much like I would. You need to show your inexperience, your clumsiness.”
Azrael folded his arms. “You’re not exactly Mr. Judgment and Restraint.”
With an insincere smile painted on his face, Mort patted Azrael on the shoulder. “Whatever comes next, you’re going to take credit. Then, you’re going to get Chuck Ramsey’s employment on Vega IX cut short. Then you’re going to go home, debrief the Grand Council, and request some time to reflect and meditate.”
“My political backing is tenuous at best. I can’t afford to be away other than on offworld assignments. If I step away—”
“They’ll think you’re reasonable, in control, a welcome contrast to the previous guardian.”
Azrael paused a moment to consider.
“Oh, and while we’re strategizing, before your presentation to the council, sneak Mayakovsky’s Sixth Journal out of the vault. After you’ve spoken, return it in the middle of regular library hours.”
The Morphean wizard’s eyes held perfectly still, a sure sign of deep thought. “Wasn’t he the one who tried to weaponize Luna?”
Nodding, Mort replied. “Imagine if they’d been able to get to the moon in those days, the tidal wave he’d have conjured if he could have touched that gravity with his two hands.”
“Whatever it is you’re planning to do, I don’t like it.”
Mort wagged a finger. “What you’re planning to do.”
Chuck waltzed into Curtis Mancuso’s office in a blazer and turtleneck with stubble from a full day without shaving. He had his hands in his pockets and a smirk on his face.
“Hey, big guy. What can I do you for?”
Two taps on a terminal produced beeps that Chuck’s ear heard as closing out of a comm program. Curtis then laced his fingers and fixed Chuck with his undivided attentions. “Unavoidably offworld, they tell me.”
Chuck shrugged. “I don’t make the—”
“UN. AVOIDABLY. Motherfucker, do you know the meaning?”
Chuck spread his hands. “Look, I know—”
“Means ‘cannot be avoided.’ Inevitable. Inescapable. Y’alI hear unavoidably offworld and be inclined to think: well, can’t be holding old Chuck Ramsey to blame. Be unfair expecting a man to honor his contractual obligations, ain’t that right? If he got something can’t possibly get out of.”
“I couldn’t.”
Curtis pressed his palms to the surface of his desk and leaned forward. “And yet you still here.”
“I can explain.”
The casino owner and nightclub front man relaxed back into his chair with a creak of expensive leather. “By all means. Do.”
Chuck opened his mouth, then realized that Angelica had been quite clear on the exigency of keeping this matter under wraps. Yet, on the one hand, it wasn’t like Chuck knew anything. He’d been quite clear himself on that front. However, on the other, he had strongly implied that he could clear this up to Curtis’s satisfaction.
“I was on call to be unavoidably summoned offworld.”
“On call…?”
“Yeah. We’re both just adrift on a solar wind,” Chuck said, making a whooshing gesture with one hand for drama. “At the mercy of fates beyond our ken.”
“My ken is starting to feel a little ill-used. You feel me? You hearing the words I’m speaking here? I am not a man accustomed to drifting, certainly not with the likes of a sorry-ass comedian who can’t even show up for his own damn show.”
This was it. Chuck might not have been the galaxy’s heaviest operator, but he wasn’t acting on his own incompetence here. “Whoa. That’s out of line. Look. I didn’t ask to get involved in any of this. I’m a victim here. I was even looking out for your interests.”
“My interests? Explain to me how you think dogging out backup acts—while my headliner’s fucking ’round doing God-knows-what—be looking out for my interests.”
“I tried to refuse.”
Curtis inclined his head, eyes narrowing just the slightest bit. “What they got on you, fool?”
“Money. Same as you, I figured.”
“I ain’t getting shit for this.”
Circuits in Chuck’s brain rerouted to include this new information. The lying machine rebooted. “Really? I heard they leaned on you, but on most divvied-up planets, the outfits pay for inconveniencing businessmen who play the game.”
“Ain’t how it works here.”
“Want me to set some people straight? I can be very persuasive, and I’ve seen behind the curtains of organizations from Orion to—”
“Get out my damn office before I toss your ass out a window.”
Chuck backed toward the door. “Just keep it in mind. I’ll be back on stage as soon as—”
“Motherfucker, consider your contract deleted. Sitting here, listening to your rambling-ass, self-serving bullshit, I can’t imagine anyone sticking they neck out over pain-in-the-ass you.”
In that moment, Chuck saw a pile of terras just sitting in an open waste reclaim chute. He could take one last chance to save them, but the reclaim cycle was about to start. Maybe he’d get his terras. Maybe he’d get his hands compressed into atoms. Much as he loved money, Chuck was fond of not dying.
Especially since plenty more terras were on offer and just waiting on a simple comm from Angelica to get things started.
“Best-o-luck. Don’t be a stranger. You won’t hear from me again.”
The doors couldn’t close behind Chuck fast enough.
Once Chuck was on the far side of the door, he allowed his demeanor to shift. His scurry melted into a swagger. His contrition became confidence. Now it was time to quickly convert rejection into reward.
“Hey, Tony!” Chuck called out, raising a walking wave as he caught the attention of one of Curtis’s behind-the-scenes guys. Then he spotted the events coordinator. “Yo, Yolanda, looking fine today.” The Hourglass’s security chief headed straight for him. There was no telling what Curtis might have said in the minute or so since Chuck had left the office, but Finn didn’t look any angrier than usual. Chuck shot him a quick finger gun and a wink and kept walking.
As he passed through the stage prep area, Chuck snagged an unattended bouquet of flowers and discarded the attached note atop a crate of cheap, drink-mix-grade booze. Knowing that at any given moment, his actions might be observed, he immediately took a deep whiff of the fragrance—Daffodil #7, if he was any judge of industrially manufactured apology flowers. Letting out a satisfied gasp, he forced a grin that most of the galaxy would have mistaken for genuine.
The casino layout kept patrons and back-of-the-house employees well separated. Chuck was an employee, allowed access to anywhere the entertainment staff was permitted. While that didn’t include anything in the security or terra-handling zones of the building, it did include personnel and accounting.
Chuck breezed past the front desk, where Manuel glanced up from his sudoku to incline his head in greeting.
A maze of offices and cubicles presented no challenge to a man who’d made a career of learning names and faking personal relationships with strangers. It didn’t hurt that everyone had their monikers on nameplates and office doors.
Chuck gave a quick double tap on the wall beside Francine Kroniger’s office before ducking his head inside.
In a heart-stopping moment, Chuck’s plan crumbled to dust before his eyes.
The nameplate still said Francine, but it was Glenn Constantine behind the desk, poking diligently at Francine’s workstation. He caught the motion at his door and smiled when he spotted Chuck. When he saw the bouquet, he said, “You’re a day late. Maternity leave started today.”
Not being in the casino the previous day, Chuck had missed the comm on that one. He also realized that he hadn’t been as friendly around the office end of the operation as he should have been. But neither was he blind. Either Francine Kroniger had been the skinniest pregnant woman ever, or there was something else going on. He took a leap of faith.
“Adoption finally went through? Felt like it was never coming.”
“I know. Right? It was Bethany. Grapevine has it, her uncle was convicted of piracy, and the agencies wouldn’t let up on it. But I couldn’t be happier for the both of them.” The beatific smile at the thought gave Chuck an alternate plan.
He waggled the bouquet. “These weren’t for her, anyway. Congratulations.”
“For little old me?” Glenn replied, pressing the fingertips of one hand over his heart. “You shouldn’t have.” That didn’t stop him from finding a vase in one of Francine’s desk drawers as soon as he accepted the flowers.
“Hey, don’t let the little victories in life go unremarked,” Chuck said with mock gravitas. “Maybe it’s just temporary, but careers have been built from less.”
“You’re the only one who’s said boo about it,” Glenn confided transparently, holding the back of his hand aside his mouth and not lowering his voice one iota.
“Mind if I get the door?” Chuck asked.
Glenn didn’t answer; he just tapped a console in an exaggerated motion. The door slid shut. Temporary senior accounts payable supervisor Glenn laced his fingers and perched his chin atop them. He watched Chuck expectantly.
“Look, I was wondering what you’re doing for dinner tonight?”
Glenn’s look was knowing and sly. “You’re a married man.”
Chuck shrugged. “So are you. We can both bring our spouses… or… not. I just don’t want to have any regrets before I ship offworld tonight.”
“You’re leaving?”
Excellent. Glenn’s surprise was too well-timed to be fake. Anyone with that kind of natural acting skill was either in Hollyworld or making money in the con game, not pushing qubits in data entry.
“Yeah, Curtis found someone better, and I’m getting the boot. No hard feelings; that’s show biz. But I need to get my ship shipshape before Vega IX eats up my payout from this gig. Any way you could release my last paycheck ahead of the batch run? I’ve gotta get fuel rods installed, docking fees paid up… then I was thinking dinner and drinks at Enrique’s, then… well, I don’t have to hit orbit until morning.”
As Chuck was explaining the plan, Glenn was tapping away at his terminal.
“It’s a date.”
“Great, and about the—”
Glenn’s smile lit the room. He winked. “Already taken care of. See you, say… 8:00?”
Chuck matched the wink and headed out. He had the final payment that Curtis would be putting the kibosh on as soon as his next staff meeting. It was one of the nice things about Curtis; he was a creature of habit, of meetings and order. Chuck was the one who’d interrupt the flow of the casino’s operations to throw his own agenda to the fore.
Now all he had to do was collect Brad and Mort.
It was time to leave Vega IX.
It had taken Mort longer than he’d someday admit in recounting this incident, but he finally found where starships got their magical repairs. Braunfeld Arcanatorium lay on the outskirts of Centennial Park, a wasteland of giant steel carcasses indistinguishable between buildings and vessels. The type of whirligig science contraptions in the air degraded markedly, sinking below the clean, sleek abominations of technology by losing both their sleekness and cleanliness in equal measure. Here, bricks of metal wobbled through the sky coughing trails of chemical flatulence on their dark-science errands.
Given the friendliness—or utter lack thereof—Mort was unsurprised to find nothing in the way of a customer entrance. The main gate was protected by thirty feet of vertical chicken wire topped with sharpened steel rotini pasta. A slovenly human in a drab uniform stared vacantly at a datapad, his feet up on a desk.
Mort didn’t bother with the gate. The universe hadn’t invented chicken wire—no matter how thick or gnarled—that could impede an angry wizard. And while Mort was more miffed at the inconvenience of the locale than properly furious, neither was he a typical wizard. Thin steel webbing melted along the outline of a man taller and broader than Mort, allowing ingress without resorting to the indignity of ducking or turning his shoulders.
Inside the compound, Mort found himself atop a substance that was the bastard child of charcoal and stale birthday cake, crumbling and pocked with ankle-twisting pits just small enough not to draw the eye. Mort navigated what he had to assume was some form of low-grade defensive earthworks.
When no intelligent opposition stopped him, he continued onward until he found his way inside one of the structures.
“Can I help you?” a voice called out, echoing to the vaulted ceilings of a corrugated-steel cathedral to megascience.
Mort had heard variations of that greeting many a time. It was an invitation for an intruder to politely correct his mistake in entering someplace he didn’t belong. However, Mort had never been one to take that particular bait. He was a bluff-caller. If some asshole was going to passive-aggressively attempt to trick him into self-evicting, he was going to refuse to read the context and accept the question at face value.
The speaker had been a woman in a plain gray uniform similar to the sleepy watchman out front, albeit with the dark stains of an unknown technological substance that spoke to a day’s hard work in the lair of evil.
“In fact, you can. I’m looking for a star-drive mechanic.”
Those were, in fact, words Mort had never expected to hear himself saying. The need of a star-drive mechanic was akin to the need of a busboy or janitor. You just assumed that someone hired them, kept them on staff, and that sooner or later their job would get taken care of. Unless you were the supervisor of such a worker, you simply left their entire sphere of endeavor to those who cared.
“That’d be me,” the grease-stained mechanica replied, wiping her hands on a rag as she closed the distance between them.
Mort nodded, accepting this fortunate turn of events. The fewer people he had to deal with face to face, the fewer he’d need to incinerate if this plan wasn’t popular with the locals. “Excellent. And this manufactory also provides gravity stone servicing?”
“Installation, tuning, and repair,” the mechanica replied. “We’ve got a form on the omni that gets you straight to sales. I don’t normally deal with—”
She choked off her final words when she saw Mort flash the Convocation sigil. “The omni doesn’t like me, and the feeling is mutual. My name is Azrael Copperfield, and I have a special request that will require discretion and haste.”
Confusion set in, the temporary sort wherein a surprise is laid bare, examined, and concluded upon in the span of a few seconds. Mort waited.
“You’re that new Grand Council member, aren’t you? You don’t look like your picture.”
“I’m here incognito. And the sketches don’t do me justice.”
The mechanica shook her head. “I don’t think so. You got any proof?”
Mort heaved a sigh. “Madam, you’re in a poor bargaining position to be picky about names. If I told you I’m the High Cardinal of Phabian, you’d pretty well be forced to play along for your own safety.”
She took a step back. “Are you threatening me?”
Enough of today had gone to waste that Mort wasn’t looking for another delay. “If I must.” He cleared his throat. “Either you help me with a simple task, or you’ll spend the rest of your days getting spoon-fed pudding and unable to recall the alphabet, let alone any aspect of your identity.”
“Wh-who are you?”
“Azrael Copperfield. Believe that one hard. Hard as you can. It’s your best chance of living to tell stories about this, one day.”
She gulped. “What do you need?”
“First, your name. I hate dealing with strangers I’m not planning on killing. Second, we’re going shopping.”
Despite the peace offering, she didn’t sound any less frightened of him. “Daphne Irons. And shopping for what?”
Mort smiled without showing teeth. “Don’t worry. I’ll know it when I see it.”
Brad fidgeted as he sat on the railing of stairs leading down to the subterranean tram station. His perch was the last flat portion before the railing doubled back and headed downward. The vantage gave him a view of the front entrance to Shakur Memorial. His main worry was that the view worked both ways, and any school officials who might care could spot him if they stepped out front.
None did.
It was a weird daytime prison. They could have let students out for lunch, or errands, or just to let their brains cool down after being force-fed more information than anyone ought to ingest in a single sitting. Even with a good reason, he felt like an escapee rather than a temporarily grounded spacer passing the time.
“Bullshit,” Brad said softly to no one in particular.
He checked his datapad. The chrono wasn’t busted; time really was moving along at a crawl.
“Hey, shouldn’t you be in school?” some busybody asshat commented on the way by, stopping as if Brad owed them a response just for being of legal not-going-to-school age.
Rechecking the chrono, Brad held up a finger. “Wait for it. Wait… for… it.” He dropped his finger just as a bell like an amplified door chime boomed from across the street. “Nope. School’s out for the day. Now get lost.”
The passerby grumbled something about the state of modern youth and meandered down to the tram station below. Good riddance. This was going to be enough of a bitch without narcs floating around sticking their noses in his business.
Brad went over the plan in his head.
It sucked.
It was the best he had.
That didn’t keep it from sucking.
School doors opened. Students flooded out. Brad perked up, tucking his datapad away and gripping the railing with both hands to keep his balance. He watched for his planetside friends among a stream of strangers and vaguely familiar faces with no names attached.
Ivan was the one who spotted him. By the time Brad caught sight of his companions, Ivan was already pointing across the street. As the students dispersed into the city to be picked up by waiting vehicles or traveling on foot, four broke away and crossed directly toward him, ignoring the designated pedestrian crossings in their haste.
“What was that about this morning?” Ricardo demanded. “And why’d you duck my comms?”
“We were worried,” Tina added.
“All of us,” Brenda agreed.
Ivan shrugged. “I figured you’d be fine. I was more worried you’d skipped the planet without saying goodbye.”
“Relax. Everything’s copacetic,” Brad told them, patting the air. “Just had to take care of a few things.”
“So, where to?” Ivan asked eagerly. “I got some ideas if you don’t have an adventure planned for us.”
“What kind of things?” Ricardo asked, ignoring Ivan’s change of subject.
“Private stuff. I’ll tell you later.”
Tina elbowed Brenda, and both giggled.
Ricardo whirled. “What’re you two laughing about?”
“Nothing,” Tina insisted.
Brad briefly considered pointing out the innuendo to Ricardo—and why the pair were thinking along those lines and finding it funny. But that wasn’t his place, not his secret to share. Not even as a diversion. Somewhere along the way, these planetside kids had crossed over from being marks to being ancillary friends.
“Listen, can we take a replay on tonight?” Brad asked. “I’ve got some stuff at Ricardo’s place I need to grab before I go anywhere.”
“Whatever,” Brenda said. “We can catch a holo, maybe.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Tina agreed with a twinkle in her eye that Brad may or may not have been imagining.
“What should we see?”
Brad suppressed a smirk. “The Martian theater company is doing Ode to Aphrodite at Westminster Repertory Theater tonight.”
Ivan balked. “Um, what?”
Brad shrugged. “I had some time on the omni while I was waiting.”
“I don’t wanna see some kind of Old Earth play.”
“Martian,” Brad corrected. “It’s a bold new take, a tour de force.”
Tina and Brenda exchanged a look. “Sounds good,” Tina said. “You in?”
Brenda nodded. “Sure. We can get a little cultured.”
“Pass,” Ivan stated with a period strongly implied. “What’re you two gonna do tonight?”
Brad pursed his lips. He had to look like he hadn’t spent a couple bored hours staked out and browsing the omni for diversion. “You know what? Find us a place with real pool tables, not holo mock-ups. Comm us when you’ve got one, and me and Ric’ll meet you there after a quick stop at his place.”
From extensive frustration at the prevalence of the holovid version of the game, Brad knew it might take Ivan a while to locate a spot that fit the bill.
“What’re we even bothering about?” Ricardo asked. “Can’t we just shoot pool first?”
Brad gritted his teeth. “I’ll. Explain. On. The. Way.”
Rolling his eyes, Ricardo gave in. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
“Let’s take the tram. Make it quicker,” Brad suggested.
“It’s like five minutes faster.” Ricardo shrugged. “It’s not worth the fare.”
“My treat.”
With a huff, Ricardo just headed down the steps.
Brad considered making his move right then, but Ivan, Brenda, and Tina had barely parted from them. He didn’t want them involved if at all possible. Brad didn’t know what their parents did for a living or how much they knew—or didn’t—about the Basset family’s syndicate ties.
Shelling out two fares for a one-stop trip was a minor extravagance. After all, Brad was still way up on the trip. If he retroactively felt bad about draining a little off Ricardo’s bank balance, he knew it was going to be worthwhile in the end.
They sat side by side on the ride. As the tram doors closed, Ricardo struck up a halfhearted conversation. “You missed it. Mr. Galloway let off a huge fart in the middle of Art Appreciation and just kept on talking like it never happened. Then he got all offended when Ivan called him out on it. If we didn’t all stick up for him, Ivan probably would have gotten detention.”
The tram decelerated. Their trip was all too short. As passengers jostled and jockeyed for position in anticipation of the doors opening, Brad leaned close. “Look. I know what’s coming. Just don’t tell them it was me, and tomorrow you’ll thank me.”
“Arriving at Banquet North Station. Stand clear of the doors.”
“What are you talking—?”
There was no ‘about.’ The word was forestalled by the muffled report of a low-yield blaster set to stun. As Ricardo convulsed, Brad fired twice more. In the din of passengers disembarking, no one even noticed.
Brad quickly confiscated Ricardo’s datapad and fired off a comm that took seconds to write. “He’s gonna shoot me. Help.”
He hit send and joined the throng getting off at Banquet North Station.
The delivery hover plowed through the sky. Despite the cacophony of growling science, the ride was gentle as pudding. Mort watched through the windows as towers of dark science drifted past. Other vehicles spread out in a line before them, orderly, mindless drones of the technocracy, ferrying their semi-conscious passengers to and fro in an unchoreographed ballet of mediocrity. When a member of their itinerant convoy broke away, it wasn’t to glorious freedom, it was merely to swap to another line of drones.
“Must be something big,” Daphne commented without taking her eyes from their course.
Mort glanced pointedly away. “Best not to think about it.”
“Not much happens on Vega.”
Mort chortles under his breath. “Oh, what a life it must be, believing that.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Point of fact: I do. You choose to work in a science mausoleum. Old, broken technology, rote tasks of science, a routine in spirit even if your daily tasks vary by shape and color.” Mort shook his head. “Dealings with people are what keep it interesting, not jobs booked through black spreadsheets on the omni.”
“Is that how you keep things interesting? You work with people?”
Mort couldn’t resist. “Actually, my job is to make the galaxy a tiny bit less interesting.”
Daphne gulped. “Sorry. Right. Even if you really are Azrael Copperfield, that’s what a librarian does, I suppose.”
The view through the window swerved. To Mort’s smug satisfaction, no sensation accompanied it but the phantom vertigo of the mind trying to impose an inertial frame of reference.
Imotakan Building rose up before them, racing toward the heavens as they sped for the delivery entrance. Daphne paused at a techno-greeting kiosk, opened a window, and scanned her hand. A light blinked green on the display—science’s happy color.
Daphne pulled them to a halt near a doorway marked “stairs.”
“You need me to wait for you?” she asked. There was an oddly earnest complicity in her eyes.
Mort shook his head. “We’re leaving your conveyance right here, and I suggest you be elsewhere, pronto.”
“I need this hover. We use it for—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mort cut in. “Charge the Convocation. Use the name Azrael Copperfield. It’ll all get taken care of with undue haste. Invoice them for anything you like, and don’t forget to include your time and trouble in the mix.”
“But what if they audit me?”
“They won’t. Not for this one. And no megacorp has pockets deeper than the Convocation.”
Daphne snorted derisively.
“You make a decent living with a toddler’s command of magic. The business of peddling miracles and cataclysms. Don’t believe the cries of poverty when the Order of Hephaistos negotiates a bump in the standard rate. Just write this off as an unproductive day and let accounting fraud be your muse.”
They exited by opposite doors from the vehicle’s cabin. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but best of luck.”
“Sentiment appreciated, but the less luck I need, the better things usually turn out.”
Mort watched her go, then turned his attention to the delivery hover.
The vehicle was an ornery piece of hardware, but it didn’t take a bloodhound to sniff out where it was keeping its gravity stone. Even with a stronger field nearby, Mort found it nestled in the squat, stubby nose of the flying machine. Rather than futz with the panels in search of doorknobs or shoelaces or whatnot to let him open it without harm to the technology, Mort clawed a hand and reached out.
A circular bulge grew on the hover’s hull, expanding and stretching, lifting the hover’s whole front end briefly before bursting and revealing a perfect stone sphere, gray granite swirled with veins of unknown minerals.
Reaching into his coat, Mort withdrew a bowling ball bag, freshly purchased in hardcoin just that morning. He snapped the bag open and let the gravity stone drift down inside. The size wasn’t perfect; in fact, he preferred the loose fit for his purposes.
Zipping the bag closed, Mort headed up the stairs to the lobby. In the stairwell, he enacted the capstone magic to his ruse. When the door opened to the main floor, it wasn’t Mordecai The Brown who emerged.
It was Keaton Whitehead.
Evander Shark held court at the dining room table of his penthouse suite. On the table, a five-star, seven-course dinner kicked off with crab puffs and caviar that no one was touching except the boss himself.
“C’mon, y’all. This spread ain’t going to waste, and I ain’t eating the whole damn building. Bad news don’t stop the planet spinning.”
Thaddius Bluth scooped caviar from a bowl with his finger. “No amount of news is so unwelcome as none at all. This is not my area of expertise, but I am willing to send out modified searchers if it is required.”
“Stop it,” Angelica snapped. “You’re not helping. It’s been days. Whoever may have been out there, he’s probably gone. No news is fucking wonderful news.”
She was losing her calm. The signs of stim use lingered in her every mannerism and feature on her face. Taut, wound up, and ready to explode, she was teetering on the verge of a breakdown. Evander liked her. She was a good soldier. It heartened him to know that if she needed putting down, pissing off the wizard would remove the burden of ordering her death from his shoulders.
Zakk paused his fooling with a toy blaster, spinning it around a finger by the trigger guard and holstering it repeatedly. Evander had nixed playing with the real thing like that in his apartment. “Ain’t nothing good about a hitter wandering loose who ain’t got a hand on his leash.”
“Wizard news is still quiet,” Smitty chimed in. “My guy assures me there’s nothing up on official parchment.”
Angelica scoffed. “So… what? Do we have bad intel? A snitch of an informant?”
“My guy never done me wrong,” Smitty insisted.
Bluth raised an eyebrow. “Oh, that so reassures me. Have you paused to consider that given my skills, the investigation is above your informant’s clearance level?”
Around the room, other lieutenants were on their datapads, coordinating via codes and veiled jargon with their crews. The search had put the organization on the back foot. But until this matter was resolved to the wizard’s satisfaction, Evander wasn’t going to get any work out of them. Bluth was a diva, but he was a diva that made terras fall like rain.
Wasn’t that always the way.
No one got to be such an ever-loving pain in the ass without being God’s gift to crime. The ones who tried to pull that shit without the value to back it up ended up in an industrial waste reclaim, compressed and molecularized along with the trash.
“Holy shit!” Angelica blurted.
“What’s up?” Evander asked between crab puffs, trying to finish off at least one of the platters before the soup course arrived.
“Ricardo. Someone’s threatening to shoot him. I gotta run.”
“Take a couple of—”
“I got this!” Angelica snapped, drawing her blaster and heading for the lift.
Evander took her insubordination with a grain of salt—and added a shake of salt into his tomato bisque. Ricardo was an only child, and she’d refused all help since his father’s death. To be fair, she’d killed him herself before Ricardo was born, but she’d joined the Boxcar Syndicate at fifteen and made a life for the two of them.
Evander respected that. Just not as much as he feared Thaddius Bluth.
Once she disappeared into the lift, he caught the rest of his people idling, just watching after her. “Yo, if you got a hunger, dig in. If not, get your asses back beating the perma looking for our mysterious eraser.”
A comm alert came from building security. Since the guys manning the front desk downstairs knew the price of bothering him with trivial shit, Evander answered. “Speak.”
“Sir, we have a Mr. Keaton Whitehead insisting on seeing Thaddius Bluth.”
“Wizard,” a second voice added. “My father was Mister Whitehead.”
Evander looked to Bluth.
The wizard drifted over with a thoughtful frown on his features. “That sounded like him.”
A security camera feed showed the lobby. People coming and going. At the front desk, a lackey Evander didn’t know by name spoke with a blur. One thing most people knew about wizards was that they didn’t let tech capture pictures of them. Whoever was at the desk was a wizard.
Despite the blur, there was a small handheld sack that was clear enough to make out.
Evander tapped to allow the front desk to hear him. “What’s he got with him?”
“He won’t say, sir. Says it’s above my station to ask.”
Bluth tapped a finger to the divot above his lips, more thoughtful than shushing. “If it’s not Keaton, it damn well sounds like him. I’ll be very curious to know where he’s been.”
Evander nodded as he pondered. This was wizard shit, and he was tired of wizard shit mucking with his business. Let Bluth deal with this, once and for all. “If that ain’t a wizard’s head in that bag, I expect you to take his and put it in there.” He commed back to the front desk. “Escort him up.”
Mort rode the lift, sandwiched between two thick gentlemen that reeked of cologne and low upbringings. He clutched the bowling ball bag in both hands by the handle. To all appearances, he was a humble lackey returning home to a glorious reward that only his master could bestow.
They rose and rose. It was a tall building, and the lift wasn’t one of the hyperactive ones they loved so much on Earth, lifts that catapulted a hapless rider the height of an eagle’s flight between heartbeats.
As they ascended, Mort felt something. Something arcane. Something… distasteful.
“Stop here.”
“We’re supposed to take you to—”
With an outstretched hand, Mort stopped the lift himself. It groaned to a halt, science fighting against Mort’s grip briefly until it faltered before the physics-warping effects of his magic.
His escort of unthinking muscle clung to the lift car walls as if they’d find shelter if Mort decided to allow the lift to plummet. At another gesture, the doors scraped open.
Neither goon followed him.
If nothing else, it was nice when the hired meat knew its place.
In the short hallway beyond the lift, only one door bore magical glyphs inscribed to keep out intruders.
Mort harrumphed in Wizard Keaton’s voice. “Amateur work. Well, I know what Azrael’s not worried about from this one.”
Crack these pathetic wards. They were meant to keep sheep at bay, not wolves.
The universe agreed. Eldritch sparks flew as the glyphs objected and were perfunctorily overruled.
Beyond, Mort found what Azrael had sent him to find.
No one lived here. No one would have wanted to. Wherever Thaddius Bluth rested his head, this was the laboratory where he stored the heads of others—or, at least, pieces of them.
Mort had seen dark wizards aplenty. Many bore the name as a matter of official records alone; they were little more than bad apples in need of unbunching. As he toured blood-stained tables and bodies abandoned mid-dissection, he knew this was the type of deviant the Convocation collectively prayed the general public would never associate with them.
Scattered notes were written in a mix of Renaissance medical jargon and pidgin Aramaic. Obviously, Bluth was at the limits of his linguistic barrier. Mort found other notes scribbled in English, French, and Norse that were more in keeping with their respective grammar and vocabulary. He leafed through and discovered varying methods for translocating living flesh between creatures. Mort had been wondering how many had been purely theoretical and which might have been attempted on live victims when his eye wandered to the shelves at the side of the room.
The specimens were labeled, some with animals—cow, bear, pig—and others with human-sounding names. Mort was no coroner, but from the scattered literature, the pale, grayish chunks floating in formaldehyde ought to have been brain tissue. As Mort was staring at an ice-cream scoop worth of “Abner,” a side door opened.
“Who are you?” the newcomer demanded. “You’re not Keaton.”
Instinctually, Mort wanted to defend his cover identity. But when he saw that his accuser was a woman with eyes that had been replaced by amethyst gemstones, he suspected she was more than merely suspicious.
“Where is Thaddius Bluth?”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Ms. Amethyst warned. She backed toward the door by which she’d come.
“My choice. Where is he?”
“I won’t trade my life for his.”
Mort stalked forward and allowed the illusion to drop. “Who said sparing you was on the table? My menu’s only got death, and it comes in quick, slow, and wishing you’d never been born.”
“Lucinda?” a voice called from behind Ms. Amethyst. “What’s going on. Who’s—?”
“Keban, run! Find the master! I’ll hold him off.”
Mort scratched stubble that had been hidden in his guise as Keaton. “Well, that’s neighborly of you.” He closed the distance, stepping around operating tables that would have looked cheesy in a horror holo. Leather straps and white sheets splattered with dried blood. In shallow steel trays, traditional hand-surgery instruments intermingled with butcher’s cutlery and historical carpentry tools. “But I think you’d have fared better running.”
Lucinda of the Amethyst raised a paltry defense, but her instinct was wrong. As she attempted to fling one of those trays of torture and dismemberment toward Mort, she found that telekinesis was beyond her strength.
My presence. My rules. No one gets home turf advantage here.
“How much of this do you understand?” He waved a hand around the room.
“I… am…” Lucinda struggled for breath as Mort decided what fate awaited her when he crushed her ribcage flat. “Just…”
Huffing a sigh, Mort settled for what he had. She wasn’t the Rosetta Stone to this holocaust. But she had, presumably, an intact mind that contained information about Thaddius Bluth—who might arrive any moment to defend his workshop.
Mort plunged his fingers into Lucinda’s head.
Seconds later, he allowed flames to incinerate her flesh.
A moment of quiet reflection represented an hour-long interrogation in Mortania.
He could have learned more, but a voice snapped him awake.
“So. You deliver yourself to my lair.”
Mort knew the man from a likeness Lucinda had sketched. She wasn’t a loyalist so much as a worshiper of power. Once she understood her circumstances and who’d claimed her mind, she was only too eager to switch sides.
“Thaddius Bluth, I presume,” Mort greeted him with a shallow, phony bow.
Bluth entered cautiously, circling the outskirts of the laboratory as Mort ceded the territory, backing before the host wizard as his other apprentices filed in.
Shit. Where did a rat bastard like Wizard Thaddius get a staff larger than the Plundered Tomes? There were a dozen of them. Unless they were hiding their powers, none was the equal of Mort’s library aides, but that was a damn lot of wizards to bear down on him all at once.
“Who might I say has come to collect the bounty on me?” Thaddius asked. He had the manner of a cat playing with its food. Mort wasn’t going to get far trying to run. Everyone present knew that.
Mort shrugged. “Why not? I am Mordecai The Brown. Secretly still Guardian of the Plundered Tomes, descendant of—you know what? I’ve got to know; where do you people get off thinking any of this is a good idea? You’re not even subtle about it. This place is a cartoon version of hell, something out of a nineteenth-century science magazine.”
“Mordecai The Brown?” Thaddius asked, continuing to circle, stalling for time as his apprentices—or mind slaves—filtered around to box Mort in. “The Mordecai The Brown. You’ve some nerve accusing me of anything? The number of wizards you’ve slain… At least I restrict my experiments to the sheep.”
“What about Keaton?” Mort countered. “He wasn’t whole of mind.”
Thaddius shrugged and plucked a jar from a shelf. Floating in the sickly green liquid was a pinkish gray chunk of living tissue. “It was for his own protection—and ours. He knew he’d get it back once his task was complete. I take it… he will not be available to receive the rest of his mind back.”
Mort sneered. “That’s fine. I got what I needed from Lucinda.”
Thaddius’s face fell. “What did you do to my Lucinda?”
Mort stooped to pick up two eyeball-sized amethysts. He smiled with menace.
“Destroy him!” Thaddius ordered.
“Stay back!” Mort countered. Juggling the gemstones, he unzipped the bowling ball bag and let it fall away. With his free hand, he clutched the floating gravity stone he’d plundered from the delivery hover. “I want answers, and your stay of execution lasts for as long as I’m getting them.”
Bluth snickered. Then he chuckled. Then he laughed from his belly. “I don’t care what you may have read in that literary dungeon you oversaw. You think that minor stone will allow you to overpower all of us?”
“No.”
“I thought not.”
“And you know what? I don’t think there’s any merit to saving a single scrap of paper from this place.”
The grin on the dark wizard’s face promised pain and misery delivered with glee. “Oh, I am so looking forward to examining the contents of that mind. I may even put them into a creature that’s more… manageable. Let’s say, a cow. Or perhaps a sloth. Something slow and helpless.”
Mort shook his head. “This whole building is a cesspit. Inhabited by syndicate lowlifes and the likes of you. One could be forgiven if they just razed the whole thing and started over.”
The one Lucinda had called Keban scoffed. “With that little thing?” He pointed to Mort’s gravity stone.
“No,” Mort said with a pause for drama. “I’ve coupled this one to the 90-ton stone salvaged from a TransGalactica starliner that I’ve got in the basement of this building.”
No one was laughing now.
Thaddius Bluth went white. “You can’t possibly. You’re bluffing.”
“Good enough final words,” Mort replied. Rather than banter with corpses, he bid the stone clutched in his hand to call its mother.
The floor groaned beneath their feet. Terrified, shrieking metal gave way. Terrified, shrieking wizards found themselves helpless to resist the crush of a planetary force yanking them faster than free fall toward the surface of Vega IX.
Gore and goo exploded upon impact, but the splatter could barely hope to escape the exponential gravity wrenching it downward. The rubble drove itself into the planet like a javelin hurled by the celestial gods. As Mort let up, he found himself at the eye of a storm of dust that billowed forth. His patch of laboratory floor remained unscathed, untouched by the spray of remains both more and less recent.
As he picked his way across the hellscape of shattered lives and steel debris, Mort chose to breathe in only the clean air that the dust otherwise polluted. Having no further use for the thing, he tossed the gravity stone over his shoulder to crack in twain.
“You don’t want a sabbatical?” he said to an absent Azrael Copperfield. “Try keeping your job without taking one now.”
Brad raced into the Radio City, huffing for breath. He’d run from the tram after switching lines, not pausing the whole way. He burst into the kitchen to find his parents and siblings sitting around the table eating a dinner of peanut butter and jam crackers.
“Hey, Sport,” Dad called out. “Pull up a chair.”
“We gotta lay ions.”
“What’d you do?” Mom asked, more weary than demanding.
Brad shook his head, still gasping for air. “Not me. Mort. I think they’re after him. We gotta swing by the Imotakan Building and grab him. Or maybe we find a way to comm him from the next planet.”
Dad snickered. “Comm? Mort? We’d do better sending the Pony Express. And I mean that across interstellar space.”
“Mort can’t use the food processor,” Mikey pointed out.
Brad put two and two together—or in this case six and six. “Did you make dinner?”
Mikey beamed. “Yup.”
With the younger boy unable to see, Mom glared at Brad with wide eyes and spoke in honeyed words. “And it’s very delicious.”
“Yummy!” Rhi declared, throwing her hands in the air.
Brad jerked a thumb toward the cockpit. “Really. We gotta go. Imma go fire up the engines. Can you… I dunno, make sure we’re paid up and stuff? I don’t want actual police chasing us.”
“We’d never make it,” Dad assured him. “And whatever. If you wanna go looking for Mort in rush-hour traffic, fine. I settled up with the hangar about an hour ago. Didn’t you get my comm?”
Brad deflated. “Did you send it to my comm ID or the old one from Mom’s datapad?” Rather than wait for an answer, he found Mom’s device lying unattended beside the fridge. He spotted the notification and waggled it accusingly. “Dad, I’ve got my own datapad. You gotta stop doing this. What if it’s important?”
“What’s not important about ‘Get home right now, we’re leaving Vega?’”
Brad read the message for himself. “Jesus, Dad. What if I wasn’t coming back on my own anyway?”
Dad shrugged. “You’re a smart kid. We’d have crossed paths. Next planet, right? Same as Mort.”
“Mort. Right.” Brad dashed for the cockpit. “We really do need to get going.”
“You want some jellybutters?” Mikey called after him.
“I ate on the way,” Brad shouted back as he strapped in and ran through the atmo pre-flight. The orbital stuff he skipped in the interests of time.
Brad knew the way. He’d walked it and trammed it. As the Radio City swung its ponderous way out of Sunrise City Civic Hangar Fifteen, he aimed at a familiar point in the skyline and feathered the throttle.
It wasn’t far.
It wasn’t even far on foot.
Sunrise City and Henderson shared a border, and Hangar Fifteen wasn’t far from either.
Catching sight of Imotakan Building was merely a matter of getting past the Blue Diamond Insurance building to take a visual.
Brad didn’t know what Mort had planned there. A rooftop or even a mid-floor evacuation might be on the table. Given local traffic patterns, either would have put him at risk of a civil piloting ticket. So, until he had a signal from the wizard, he swooped low to get into a ground-level lane and loop the apartment tower.
As the Radio City approached, Brad saw something he’d never imagined. Imotakan Building crumbled before his eyes. It was as if the building had been nothing but a paper bag painted to look like steel and glass… and someone had just stomped it flat.
One second, Imotakan Building was there. The next, there was just a squat pile of rubble.
As ships closer to the cataclysm plummeted from the sky, a blast of dust rushed up to blind and buffet the Radio City. Brad took immediate evasive maneuvers. Remembering a clear path in the pattern above them, he pulled up.
In near-zero visibility, he reacted on instinct and anticipation. The window-cleaners auto-activated but did nothing to abate the cloud from the destruction.
There was no way in hell this was anything but magic.
“Hey, what’s going on up there?” Dad inquired testily. “I just got jam on my tuxedo jacket.”
“Not now!” Brad snapped.
He jerked and veered, then spied a clear spot at the center of the storm. He could just make out a lone figure disappearing into the dust on the far side. Gambling was one thing, but this was as sure a bet as anything. No one but Mort was walking away from that.
Putting the Radio City into a dive, he brought the ship down just ahead of Mort. Hitting the attitude lock, he raced back through the ship.
“Don’t run in the ship, sweetie. How many times do I have to tell—”
“Not right now, Mom,” Brad cut her off without breaking stride. Just because she was sober right then didn’t mean she knew what the hell was going on. With the outside window shades in the living room and kitchen habitually closed, it was a perfect metaphor for her willful ignorance of half the shit that happened in the family.
Brad caught himself on the doorframe as he reached the cargo hold. His shoulder socket twinged as it bore the force of stopping him at the cargo ramp controls. Slapping the button, he waited as wisps of dust billowed in.
Mort climbed aboard as surprisingly little of the cloud followed him.
“We about done with Vega IX?” Brad asked.
Mort dusted himself off. “Safe to say.”
Brad didn’t have time to ask any of the million questions rollicking around in his head. He sprinted back through the ship.
“You’re grounded,” Dad commented as he rushed past.
“As long as I’m grounded in the Ocean and not here,” Brad shouted back. He didn’t bother buckling in before retaking manual control and angling the nose of the vessel toward the stars. Fiddling with the voice modulator, he opened a comm. “Orbital control, this is vessel Radio City. That’s two words despite the registration typo. Requesting an exit vector.”
The reply was prompt and professional in a woman’s soothing voice. “Vessel Radio City, I have your location as Henderson City, Grid G7. Please take caution. Emergency response vehicles are active in the area.”
Sirens wailed in a discordant symphony. Police, fire, and med-evac hovers shot past from all directions.
“Yeah, yeah. I hear them. I see them. I’m keeping clear. Have you got a vector for me?”
“Public gate or star-drive?”
“Star-drive,” Brad lied with a smirk. It was quicker than explaining a third option.
“Transmitting vector.”
Brad adjusted course to the clear path orbital control provided. Opening up the throttle, he blazed toward the stars.
Home.
Putting the Radio City into a slow barrel roll, he watched overhead as Vega IX receded behind him.
“It was fun, guys. Sorry, but planetside’s just not my style.”
Ricardo sat upright in bed. The hotel holovid was playing a surreal news story. All of Vega IX was up in arms over the sudden, mysterious collapse of his whole damned apartment building. It was hours ago, and the fast-twitch news people hadn’t gotten bored of it yet. Theories abounded. Everything from terrorist attack to an undiscovered xeno species tunneling up from the center of Vega was on the table.
But mostly, people blamed the Convocation.
Wizards, they said. Had to be wizards.
Ricardo didn’t know what had happened, but he knew who did.
Brad Ramsey had saved his life. And if Angelica hadn’t rushed to the hospital when she tracked him down there, she’d have been dead, too.
A spasm in his stomach reminded him that he still hadn’t tried eating. The full plate of nachos growing cold on the nightstand attested to his reluctance to try anything.
Angelica breezed in from the washroom in a fresh change of clothes. Rather than her typical jewelry and skirt suit, she was buttoning a fresh blouse over an ablative armor vest. Her slacks had pockets for spare power packs. She wore combat boots. Before donning her jacket, she slipped into a shoulder holster with the biggest blaster he’d ever seen a civilian carry.
“You’re not thinking of going out there,” Ricardo told her when he realized she wasn’t just prepping to hunker down here with him.
“Business just got… complicated. I have to help stabilize.”
“Let the cops worry about that shit.”
Angelica smiled and stopped by to kiss him on the forehead. “You should know better than that.”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. “Yeah.”
“Hey. It’s a good life—it just has a price. And I’m not leaving you alone.”
Exasperated, Ricardo stuffed a nacho in his mouth, consequences be damned. He scolded as he chewed. “I don’t need a babysitter. I worry about you.”
“I didn’t get shot today. I don’t plan to get shot today. It’ll just be—”
A door chime sounded, and Angelica drew her weapon in a flash. She edged to the door and checked the visitor camera. Returning the blaster to its holster, she opened the door.
“Thanks for coming on such short notice.”
“No problem at all. It’s bedlam out there. This’ll be like a vacation. Is this your boy?”
The woman asking was dressed in pink scrubs and white sneakers, blonde with a headband holding back the hair from her face and carrying a briefcase-sized med kit.
“Yep. Stunned three times today.”
“Ouch.”
“I only felt the first one,” Ricardo replied, unable to stop staring.
Angelica lingered at the door. “Look, I’ll check back in the morning. Order room service. Don’t leave under any circumstances. Got it?”
Ricardo wanted to be mad at her but lacked the spare brain cycles at the moment. “Sure.”
The door slid shut.
“I’m Petunia. Your mother wants me to check you over and make sure—”
“The docs already cleared me.”
Petunia pouted. “Oh, that’s just to make sure you’re not going to die or anything.”
“Um. Yeah. That’s a big deal. And I’m gonna be fine.”
“Hold up your arm.”
Dammit. Gritting his teeth, Ricardo extended an arm to his side. It jittered like he’d been eating nothing but coffee beans all day. He didn’t resist when the nurse pushed his arm back down.
“It’s getting better,” he replied lamely.
Petunia brushed the hair from his forehead. “Your mother insisted I keep a close eye on you. Help you with anything you need. And make sure all of you is in perfect working order.”
“Well. That’s… nice.”
She reached a hand under his pajamas and ran it up his chest.
“What are you—?”
“Shh. I’m checking your heart. It’s beating a little fast.”
Ricardo gulped. “Are you even a real nurse?”
“Yes.” She crawled onto the bed and put her knees on either side of his. She whispered into his ear. “You’ll be in good hands.”
With rising panic, all Ricardo could think to say was, “What if my mom comes back?”
Petunia sat back, her weight pinning Ricardo’s lower legs to the bed. “Well, she’d better find us both doing what she expects. Now, this top you’re wearing has six buttons. Let’s have a race. By the time I unbutton the last button, let’s see if you can have my bra off.”
“I have a girlfriend.”
She put a finger over his lips. “Do you even want to find out what you’ll be missing if you lose?”
Ricardo’s brain flat-lined. He’d been shot for the first time in his life, rushed to a med center, seen on the newsfeeds that his house had been destroyed. And now… this. This wasn’t his life. It was surreal. It was a dream. It had to be. What galaxy was he in?
The last thought that crossed Ricardo’s mind before Petunia dominated every last thought in his head was: Thanks, Brad. I owe you one.
Azrael stood stiff and formal at his chair in the Grand Council chamber. The entire room had been cleared for his testimony. Only the archivist remained, jotting down the words spoken here on parchment that was pre-warded against anyone not present today ever reading them.
“It was… necessary.”
“Necessary?” Bertram demanded. His incredulity rang to the domed ceiling and echoed. “Explain to me how the destruction of a ninety-story building was necessary to kill one wizard.”
“He’s dead.”
“And so are eleven hundred innocent civilians,” Wenling snapped.
Azrael projected an outward calm only possible through his mastery of mental magic. “Point of order, I would contest that not many innocents were harmed at all. The building was known to local law enforcement as a headquarters for the Boxcar Syndicate. Also, Thaddius Bluth had taken a number of apprentices. They were disposed of as well. Less… extreme measures may have resulted in an incomplete reckoning.”
He glared subtly around the table to both sides. Bad enough Wenling and Bertram were piling on; he didn’t need allies joining on their side. Silence was their best support right now.
“Do you have any idea the costs incurred in keeping this from reaching technologist courts?” Bertram asked.
Without breaking his outward stoicism, Azrael breathed a sigh of relief. They were talking about money now. No one ever got in serious trouble over money.
“Some. However, I was not made aware that my position was one intended to be cost neutral.”
Bertram held up a sheet of parchment and slapped it with the back of his hand. “Cost neutral? If that building had been condemned and empty, the distortions to the surrounding block would still be enough to put the library’s budget in the red for the next decade. Hospital expenses. Ruined flight-wagons. Pets running off. Lawsuits, Azrael. People are talking about suing the Convocation. We’ll settle them all, of course, but it’s expense compounded atop expense. I expected better of you.”
I hate you, Mordecai. I loathe and revile you.
He owed his whole position to the renegade, but this catastrophe dumped with his nametag on it was intentional. Nevertheless, it would be for naught if he gave up the ruse now.
“I have, perhaps, lost some perspective.”
“There is another matter,” Wenling added. “That I would like to discuss while the Grand Council is meeting in closed session.”
Azrael raised an eyebrow as if he hadn’t been waiting since the chamber was cleared for her to get around to this.
“It has come to my attention that you returned Mayakovsky’s Sixth Journal to the Vault of the Plundered Tomes several hours after your return to Earth. What do you have to say about that?”
Azrael counted to twenty in his head, allowing silence to grow uncomfortable before making his reply. “It is a longstanding tradition that the Guardian of the Plundered Tomes arm himself with the weapons at his disposal.” He glanced around with feigned nerves at his colleagues. “That said… perhaps I need some time to myself to regain a proper perspective.”
“You want a sabbatical?” Bertram asked warily.
Azrael nodded once. “I think it would be prudent.”
A collective sigh escaped the gathered grand councilors. Crusty old Bertram broke out in a grin rusty from disuse. “Thank Merlin. A guardian who knows when he’s crossed a line. Granted. Take as long as you like. That everything?”
Wenling turned up her palms. “I have no other business for a closed session.”
Neither did anyone else.
The Grand Council allowed the return of the gallery of spectators and hangers-on that clogged the chamber on a regular basis, and everyone resumed the mundane operation of the august body.
Hours later, Azrael exited in a daze, his sabbatical formally recognized at the end of the proceedings.
As he strolled through the Harvard Quadrangle, hands in his sleeves, unemployed yet still drawing a hefty salary, he was approached from behind.
“Wizard Azrael?” a voice inquired.
He paused and turned, in no hurry to be anywhere. It was Nancy Brown approaching him, wearing a deep blue frock and fur stole against the autumn chill in Boston Prime. “Wizard Nancy, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
She walked, and so Azrael fell into step beside her. Her path suggested a meandering trip rather than a destination. “This may be an awkward question, but it’s to fulfill a promise.”
“With that preamble accepted and understood, what is your question?”
“I have been invited to my sister-in-law’s wedding, and it was a personal request of hers.” Nancy cleared her throat. “Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to said wedding?”
Azrael halted at once.
Nancy took another pace before turning on him. “I know it’s awkward and weird and… political. But that’s how she put it. It’s political. And she made me promise.”
“Made you…?”
“Fine. Tricked. Wheedled. However you want to put it.”
“She tricked you? Pardon my insolence, but I find it hard to believe that the wife of Mordecai The Brown was tricked into such a promise.”
Nancy ground her teeth. “Fine. She threatened me. She said if I came unescorted, she’d track down my husband and get him to come instead. It doesn’t have to be a date. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Just arrive together.”
“Simply find someone else.”
Nancy barked an unladylike laugh. “Good one. I’m toxic. Since you people stopped promising to kill him, any dates I’ve had all come with Mort looming over us, the dessert course with a jealous temper.”
“I don’t find her insistence upon me comforting in that regard.”
Nancy resumed walking, and Azrael followed. Damn that Sarajah. She was nearly as much trouble as her infernal brother.
“That’s the problem, see? Sarah’s under the impression that you can stand up to him. From what I hear about Vega IX, she may even be right. So, out of a duty to a promise, will you please accompany me to Sarajah and Justinian’s wedding?”
“Justinian McGowan?”
Nancy perked up. “Yes. You know him?”
“He’s a bloodless, inconsiderate cad. Two wives ought to have been enough.”
“You’re just being obstinate.”
“Skip the wedding,” Azrael snapped. Egad, what was it about Brown, by blood or marriage, that squirmed beneath his skin so?
“Family is politics when you’re a Brown.”
“No. And let me speak plainly for a moment. You will scarcely find two individuals in one place who know Mordecai so well, yet so differently. You know the depths of a heart whose very existence many would dispute. But I now understand the power wielded by a mind sharper than atoms. A will more stubborn than stars. A knowledge more terrible than Babylon. The suitors who avoid your affections are work-a-day cowards lacking the imagination to comprehend their peril.
“While I am not seeking any romantic connections to this world, I would under other circumstances find a social evening in your presence a welcome prospect. You are cultured, intelligent, worldly, and—in a summary—interesting. Yet were I the most desperate of romantics and you my Helen of Troy, I would sooner cast myself bodily into an active volcano than risk a kiss or a glimpse of any part of you not presently visible. Your husband is ruthless, vindictive, mighty beyond measure, and worst of all, knows me by name and appearance. Thus, I hope you comprehend the depth of my final answer…
“No.”
Nancy sighed. “I miss him. Everyone else is terrified of him. Maybe I should just hire an escort for the evening.”
Azrael stiffened. “Have some self-respect. All that I said is true. Eventually, Mordecai’s life choices will catch up with him, and you’ll be free once more.”
Nancy shook her head. “Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think.”