Dirty Job Read online

  DIRTY JOB

  A CAULDRON OF STARS

  BOOK 2

  ––––––––

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  ––––––––

  Copyright © 2019 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  Cover design by Jamie Glover

  Photography by Andrew Dobell

  First published in the United States of America in 2019 by Knights Hill Publishing.

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  1

  On a humid August morning when I should have been at the office, I crouched with my business partner, Dolph, in a thicket on the old helioba plantation in the Slumps. This was the edge of Shiftertown, formerly agricultural, now mostly slums. We were watching a couple of hundred RVs circle at walking pace around a vast muddy field. Only one of the RVs interested us. The one with a satellite dish on top, screen doors on both sides, and a rubber skirt over the wheels. That was the one which belonged to Timmy Akhatli, the Ek who owed me 30 KGCs.

  I distractedly scratched the half-healed gash on the inside of my left arm. I’d got it breaking into the house of Buzz Parsec, my erstwhile rival, to rescue my daughter. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but it had only been a couple of weeks … the longest weeks of my life.

  Insects circled us and landed on our neck and arms. We were already as bit as bit can be, having left my truck on Outback Avenue and bushwhacked through the woods to get here. Our phones were back in the truck—I had an emergency burner in my pocket. The comprehensive surveillance apparatus of Ponce de Leon thought we were driving around the Slumps, appraising properties. Dolph had laid a phone trail in advance to suggest he was house-hunting. The sun rose higher in the brash summer sky. I fingered the sap-stained blade of the machete lying at my feet. Dolph scraped soil up with his fingernails and embellished the streaks of dirt on his face and mine. Proof against facial recognition technology.

  At last, just before noon, Akhatli’s RV randomly veered towards us and trundled alongside the thicket.

  I rose to my feet, still hidden by the bushes, and raised the machete.

  Dolph ambled out of the thicket directly in front of the RV. It braked, and tried to go around him. Dolph moved in front of it again.

  The prime imperative of any self-driving vehicle is not to run over people. Therefore, you can stop them by simply standing in front of them. Where would we be without advanced technology? This is the way kids in Smith’s End steal cars, and this is how we were going to pay the Ek an unexpected, and doubtless unwanted, visit.

  I took a couple of quick steps to catch up with the RV, and swung the machete at the screen door facing me. It gave way with a satisfying ripping noise. I leapt into the vehicle. Dolph dashed around, jumped in after me, and slammed both the side panels shut.

  Timmy Akhatli backed away from us and tripped over a low table. I kicked his legs out from under him. He went down with a screech, hitting his head on the lockers that lined one side of the RV.

  I dropped the machete, whipped my Machina .22 out of my waistband, and pointed it at Akhatli. The Ek now lay full length on his back, all four of his arms folded over his chest. The vehicle had tinted windows. No one could see us from outside. Dolph yanked a roll of duct tape out of his backpack and squatted to tape the Ek’s treetrunk ankles.

  Ekschelatans are the other powerful interstellar species in the Cluster. Some say they’re more intelligent than humans. This one was not acting like it at the moment. His yellow eyes rolled, circular with terror. An absolutely putrid smell filled the RV—the smell of Ek, plus the more familiar smells of dirty laundry and reheated fast food. Dolph finished Akhatli’s ankles and moved on to his four thick wrists.

  I have nothing against Eks in general, but this one was a bad guy. We had been looking for him ever since Founding Day. He had been hard to find. Living in an RV is a good way to hide among the teeming but comprehensively surveillled millions of Mag-Ingat. The trailer throng moves around all the time, splitting up and reforming, driven by the flocking behavior of automotive AIs set to avoid getting tickets. To make matters worse, all the RVs look the damn same. We had narrowly missed Akhatli in a downtown parking lot, lost him again on the wharves, and finally caught up with him here, on the edge of Shiftertown, acting on a tip from a friend of Irene’s. The whole independent shipping industry, or what was left of it, wanted this guy gone.

  “You were hiding from the cops,” I said, stooping to double-check the duct tape around Akhatli’s ankles. “Too bad for you, it’s us that caught you. We’re more motivated.”

  Akhatli’s blue, pebbly skin felt clammy to the touch, despite the stifling heat in the RV. Eks like it hot. This one was about to find out just how hot it gets when you conspire to commit genocide on one of humanity’s Heartworlds.

  “Is this rustbucket spoofed?” I said. Spoofing an automotive AI—constantly bouncing its signal around, so that it can’t be tracked—is pro-level hacking, as well as being illegal. But the fact that the police hadn’t found Akhatli yet suggested that he had spoofed his RV to evade surveillance.

  “Yes!” Akhatli had an unexpectedly high, squeaky voice.

  “Good.” I sat down on the bench seat and plonked my feet on the low table. It was littered with rubbish, computer equipment, and holocards. “Why do you live here, anyway?”

  “I—I—we are a nomadic species.” I knew this to be true. Eks do not do planetary colonization like we humans do, preferring to build deep-space habitats that they can move around at will. But Akhatli’s fat black tongue flickered over his lips. His gaze slewed to the underside of the table.

  I felt underneath it. Ripped velcro free, brought out a plastic bottle and a reusable injector. “Well, well.”

  “What’s that? Shabu?” Dolph said.

  “Where have you been? These days, pezka it is called.” Akhatli tittered nervously. His eyes followed the gear as I tossed it on the bench seat.

  “If that don’t beat all,” I said. “An alien junkie.” So that’s why he lived in the trailer throng. Easy access to drugs. “Guess it’s stressful, huh? Living on a human planet. Dealing with people like us. And Buzz Parsec. And Pamela Kingsolver.” I gave him my ex-wife’s alias, watching for a reaction. He just moaned in misery. “You were neck-deep in the Founding Day plot. Why the hell are you still here?”

  “I am a shipping agent! Shipments for clients, I arrange! I knew nothing—”

  “That was Buzz Parsec’s defense. It didn’t save him, and it won’t save you.”

  “Typical junkie,” Dolph said coldly. “No sense of perspective. Or self-preservation.”

  I got up and went forward to see if I could turn the air-conditioning on. The driver’s seat was a cushiony, Ek-sized throne. I perched on its edge, found the A/C, and dicked with the steering to make sure I could control the vehicle. We were looping through the center of the trailer throng. Off to our left I saw a mobile shop surrounded by denizens of the throng: normies in disposable clothes past their dispose-by date, legs splashed with mud from the puddles that dotted the field. How did I know they were normies? Because of all the dogs running around. Shifters don’t keep pets. And Shifters would rather live in a squalid shack, or in a one-room walkup in Smith’s End, than in their vehicles. We like to live somewhere.

  I steered the RV towards the far side of the field. The wheel
twitched sluggishly under my hands as the AI course-corrected to avoid other vehicles. The A/C was kicking in. The sweat dried on my face. I listened to Dolph questioning Akhatli about Pippa Khratz. The Ek denied that he had ever heard of her.

  I softly slapped the wheel in frustration. Pippa was the exiled heiress of Old Gessyria, a sweet sixteen-year-old girl whose political enemies had hated her so much that they were willing to take out an entire Heartworld to destroy her. And they had ended up destroying my life. Why? There was a big-ass missing piece in there. Akhatli had to know something.

  The field was surrounded on three sides by the woods, which were swiftly taking it back. Most helioba cultivation had moved out to Cascaville and beyond, as Shiftertown sprawled further and further inland. Mill Creek, a stagnant brown waterway, bounded the fourth side of the field. I drove the RV over the dead stems of last season’s crop, through some weeds, and into the water.

  It was an amphibious RV. On land, it rolled; on water, it floated. The nose splashed into the water, throwing a muddy wave over the windshield, and rose up as a flotation field expanded beneath the vehicle. I clicked the wipers on, off.

  “You should have run,” Dolph said, in the back, “like your buddy Evan Zhang did.” Actually, we had paid Evan Zhang to leave the planet.

  “Yes, yes! Run, I will! Just don’t hurt me!”

  “That’s not good enough. You haven’t told us everything.”

  “I know nothing! Nothing …”

  I pointed the RV’s nose downstream and started the inboard engine. The helioba plantation slid away around the curve of the creek. Trees cast green shadows on the dusty water. It was a beautiful summer day. I leant my forearms on the wheel, feeling sadness open up inside me like a trapdoor. I should have been chilling on the beach with my daughter, or taking her to the zoo, instead of abducting an alien criminal.

  The bridge appeared ahead of us. This was where Outback Avenue humped over the creek to become the Cascaville road. I took manual control and guided the RV towards the bank.

  As we passed into the shadow of the bridge, I spotted a slender figure crouching in the bushes with a rifle. Irene had been stationed here in case Akhatli escaped us and tried to flee down the creek. I popped the sun-roof, our signal that we’d been successful. She lowered the rifle, picked up her backpack, and slid down to the water’s edge. I brought the RV in along the bank and backed towards her. The bank was higher here, so Irene could get one knee up on the roof, lie flat, and roll in under the edge of the sun-roof.

  I pointed the RV back into the current, got up, and went back to the living area. Irene stood on the bench seat where Dolph was sitting. “Yo,” he said, looking up her slim legs to her hiking shorts and blouse, and the sniper’s rifle she carried on a military surplus sling with extra ammo pockets.

  “He talk?” she said.

  “That’s a negative,” Dolph said. “He don’t know nothing, he was never told anything, he just took their money.”

  “Yeah, right,” Irene said. “You guys just don’t know how to do this kind of thing. Here, hold this.”

  She gave her rifle to Dolph, stepped off the bench seat, and placed one boot on Akhatli’s bound arms. He looked up at her fearfully. Quick as thought, she pulled a knife out of her boot and sliced one of Akhatli’s ears off.

  2

  Eks have very small ears. They’re just little mushroom-like knobs on the sides of their necks, and I think they work differently from ours. Convergent evolution ain’t all that convergent. Still, the wound bled like a son of a bitch, and the blood was as red as ours, soaking into the filthy carpet of the living area. Akhatli went silent. He seemed to be paralyzed. Only his eyes strained, yellow and huge.

  Dolph reflexively swept a hand through the clutter on the table, looking for something to stanch the blood with.

  “No.” Irene squatted. Blood squelched up from the carpet around the toes of her boots. She leaned forward and held the scrap of blue flesh above Akhatli’s face. “I’m going to make you eat it. And then the other one. And then, maybe your dick.”

  The inside of the RV was dead silent.

  “Oh, I forgot, you don’t have a dick. You’re not a man. You’re a fucking alien.”

  Technically, to the best of my understanding, Akhatli did have a penis. And a vagina, too. Eks are neither and both at the same time. When they live on human planets, they typically choose human monikers that align with one sex or the other, so that dirtsiders won’t have to wrap their heads around the xim / xe / xis business. Akhatli seemed more human than most Eks, so it was easy to think of him as him.

  Irene lifted the drawstring waistband of Akhatli’s shorts with the point of her knife. “OK, well, you asked for it,” she said.

  I coughed, breaking the horrified fascination that had held me leaning against the wall with my arms folded. Irene looked around and flickered me a wink. It was all an act, of course. Not one I had ever seen from her before … shocking in its intensity … but still, an act. Irene’s sneering, sadistic pose masked her trademark steadiness of purpose. I had to be equally steady.

  “The files, Timmy,” I said. “Give us your customer files, and you can leave Ponce de Leon with your … whatever … intact.”

  “Why do you want my files?” Akhatli said in a breathy, scarcely audible voice.

  “You don’t need to know that.” If he didn’t know, he couldn’t rat us out later.

  “Everything I will tell you,” Akhatli wailed. “I’ll tell you about Pamela Kingsolver!”

  My ex-wife. I went still. “Yeah, why don’t you tell us about her?” As I spoke, I felt a pang of dread that some further hideous revelation was about to come out. Sophia—my ex’s real name—had been the brains behind the Founding Day attack. Wasn’t that bad enough? An undercover Traveller, she’d been hired by Rafael Ijiuto, princeling of the Gessyrias, to wipe out his exiled rival … and she didn’t care if the entire population of Mag-Ingat died, too, just so she could get the job done. She had fled the planet after we foiled the attack. I assumed she had vanished back into the Core of the Cluster, where the Travellers hang out in their heavily shielded motherships.

  “Helped her to escape, I did!” Akhatli babbled. “She wanted to get off the planet quickly and quietly … so she came to me! She knew that I have contacts in the shipping industry, the work of many years, a deep pool of contacts …”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go on.”

  “A seat on an orbital shuttle departing from a private launch pad, and a temporary berth on an Ek freighter, I found for her! I do not work for free, of course. She paid me … very well, in the region of 80 KGCs, not including the cost of the shuttle ticket …”

  “Where did she get the money?” Dolph said.

  “The cops have Ijiuto,” I said. “Let them work that out. Where did she go?”

  “Valdivia,” Akhatli squeaked.

  “Valdivia?”

  A Farmworld, twenty light years Corewards from here. I couldn’t think of anything there Sophia would want. Maybe that was the only destination she could get on short notice … Then I remembered that Ijiuto had asked me to take him to Valdivia. It must have been their fallback rendezvous.

  “Where did she go from there?” I shouted. “Where is she now? What did she tell you?”

  Akhatli’s only response was wordless ululating, a creepy, alien noise.

  “Oh, dear,” Irene said. “Maybe we frightened him too much. Or maybe we haven’t frightened him enough.” She threw Akhatli’s severed ear in the air and tried to catch it on the point of her knife. “Maybe he’s more frightened of Sophia than he is of us. That would be a mistake.”

  I went back to the driver’s seat and buried my face in my hands. I had more questions than before, and still no answers. Akhatli’s cries scraped my nerves raw. I took my hands away from my face and looked out at where we were.

  Thick woods enfolded the creek on both sides. We’d drifted down into Millhaven, the old industrial town that lies in between Harborside
and Shiftertown. The odd factory roof reared out of the trees, but no other boats or amphibious vehicles disturbed the serene, almost rural view. Mill Creek is not used for transport—not of legal goods, anyway—and there are no fish in it that humans can eat.

  This would be a good place for us to get off.

  I went back to the living area.

  Akhatli was quiet now, his eyes closed. Irene sat on the bench seat, toying with her knife, looking pissed-off. Dolph slumped beside her, gazing at Akhatli’s gear. I didn’t like his expression. He used to have a problem with that stuff. He hadn’t touched it for years, but it was not good for him to be around it. I waved a hand in front of his face.

  “What?”

  “Time to finish this.” I picked my way around Akhatli’s legs and started to collect all the computer equipment I could see. Holocubes, a reader that hooked up to a holobook, the holobook itself, everything went in my backpack. This was not ideal. I had wanted Akhatli to open up his customer files for us himself. Without his help, we might have trouble getting into the files, much less finding the one we needed. But we clearly weren’t going to get anything more out of the Ek. There are many reasons torture is banned by all mature civilizations, but one of them is that it doesn’t really work.

  Stepping over Akhatli’s head, I looked down at the blood still seeping from the side of his neck. Worry burned in my gut. How were we going to get away with this? Was it really plausible to expect that Akhatli would say nothing about it to anyone, ever? I felt a spike of anger at Irene. She could have asked me before she started cutting pieces off of him …

  Akhatli rose up under me and headbutted me in the stomach. I stumbled back, flailing for balance, and fell on my ass near the door.

  The Ek surged to his feet, roaring in his own language, his eyes yellow slits of fire. He burst the duct tape around his wrists with one wrench. The tape fell in wet gray spirals. I had time to think that looked wrong. Then one of the Ek’s windmilling fists caught Dolph on the side of the head, throwing him sideways. Irene jumped up on the bench seat and swung her rifle butt at the Ek. The space was too confined. She didn’t have room to put her weight into it. Akhatli soaked up the blow, grabbed the rifle by the barrel, and grabbed Irene with his other two arms.