Dirty Job Read online

But Dolph was right about one thing, it was a gamble, and my habitual financial caution hadn’t deserted me. I couldn’t go into the hole to fund the trip, even if I wanted to.

  So we needed someone to pay us to make the trip, such as—

  “Total Research Solutions,” MF translated, “838 Millhaven Road.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “That’s just down the road a stretch.”

  “Let’s go over there now, then. Get it over with,” Dolph said.

  “You want me to come?” Irene was kneeling at the back of the truck, one steely eye glued to the crack in the tailgate. “It sometimes helps to have a woman along, to make a softer impression.”

  Dolph suddenly laughed. “A softer impression,” he cackled. “A softer impression!” His laughter was infectious. I joined in, and finally Irene did too, folding onto her haunches, laughing at herself.

  “Well, OK, guys. Hope they don’t call the cops on you looking like that.”

  Still smiling, Dolph looked down at his weathered Fish Folk t-shirt and holey jeans. “This kind of customer, looking like shit will be a plus.”

  Something struck the side of the truck. Clattered like a stone.

  Martin flipped the bolt of the tailgate and bounded out into the sunlight. I was right behind him.

  The kids outside the tattoo parlor were laughing.

  “They threw something at the truck,” I said.

  “Goddamn normies,” Martin said. “If they touch my bike …”

  But I was thinking: They noticed us. They’ll remember us when Akhatli’s body is found in Mill Creek.

  “Let’s go,” I said, all laughter wiped off my face. “Marty, can you take MF back to the spaceport? We’ll take the truck.”

  Squeezing into the cab of the truck, Dolph, Irene and I drove up Millhaven Road to No. 838. I wouldn’t have known where it was without the GPS. There was no sign, only a narrow drive winding into the trees.

  We were now so close to Grizzly’s that when the truck stopped, I could hear faint music drifting through the woods.

  “Sounds like the bears are partying,” Irene said.

  “There’s a game today,” Dolph said. He checked his phone. “Oh, look at that, they’re losing. To the Sea Lions. Heh.”

  Irene’s husband, Rex, also played rugby, Shiftertown’s favorite sport. He was on the Wolves, even though his preferred animal form was a lion, because there weren’t enough lion Shifters to make up a team. He had taken their kids and Lucy to watch the game today. After that, we were supposed to pack Lucy and Mia’s bags and take them to summer camp for a six o’clock check-in. It was gonna be tight.

  “Irene, can you stay in the truck?” I said “There isn’t time for you to get all the way up to 90th Street and then for the truck to come back again.”

  “And also, you might need to make a quick getaway,” Irene said.

  “And also that.”

  “OK. Let’s see if I can get cloudwhale chants on this thing.” She started fiddling with the stereo. As we got out, she was folding her legs into lotus position. Meditation was Irene’s way of coping with the kind of things we did. I guess it beat my own preferred coping method of bourbon, drunk neat.

  Dolph and I walked up the drive into the trees.

  The Total Research Solutions building looked about a hundred years old. This was standard for Millhaven. The town was dying by degrees, squeezed by Harborside to the south and Shiftertown to the north. But the vehicles in the overgrown parking lot told a different story. Shiny little floaters, minicars, and a segway or two—the transport options favored by trend-setting youth. On top of that, the place was surrounded by a high fence, and security cameras roosted under the eaves.

  After considering the view for a moment, Dolph said, “Sketchy as fuck.”

  “Agreed.” If the customer had gone through Akhatli to make their shipping arrangements, there was probably a reason for that.

  All the same, I was not expecting a pudgy, scruffy boy with cybernetic eyes to step out of the gate with a shotgun. “No trespassing!” he yelled, pointing the weapon at us.

  4

  I looked down the barrels of the shotgun. It was a salutary reminder that you can die at any time, even in Millhaven on a customer call. I raised my hands away from my sides, without actually putting them in the air.

  “I think there’s some misunderstanding.” I cued up my best customer-facing smile. “We’re here about the cargo?”

  “What cargo?”

  “For Mittel Trevoyvox. Didn’t Timmy Akhatli tell you we were coming?” I put on a confused face. “Uni-Ex Shipping.”

  “Wait.” Cyborg boy vanished back inside, locking the gate after him. A few minutes later he was back with an elderly gentleman, who struck me as potentially more receptive. He had unruly white hair and wore a pair of imaging goggles around his neck, instead of having the hardware built into his face.

  “Looks like our signals got crossed,” I said, moving forward, hands out, unthreatening. “Dr. Tierney?”

  This had been the contact name in Akhatli’s files. I was just guessing, but I was right. “Call me Jim.” The elderly gent shook my hand. “And you are?”

  “Mike Starrunner, and this is my business partner, Dolph Hardlander.”

  “With names like those …” Tierney chuckled, spreading creases around his piercing blue eyes. “You must be Shifters.”

  “Got us,” I said with a grin. Shifters are physically indistinguishable from normies in human form, but to locals, names like ours are as big a giveaway as fur and flippers. Starrunner and Hardlander are the kind of moniker that Shifters choose when they no longer want to be associated with all the other Wildes, Foxes, de Leons, Waterses, and Wolfes. If I had it to do over again I would pick something like Smith.

  “I can always tell,” Tierney said, thumping his chest proudly.

  “You must be from around here.”

  “That’s right. Born in Millhaven, way back before the neighborhood went to hell.” Tierney threw a dark glance in the direction of the music drifting through the woods.

  “They been giving you trouble?” Dolph said.

  Tierney scrutinized him. Dolph braced his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, unsmiling. I intervened, “Let me give you my card.” I tapped my phone, and a holo card flew through the air, heading for the phone in Tierney’s pocket. He stalled it with a gesture, read the words: Uni-Ex Shipping. Delivery Guaranteed. Discretion Assured. Our certifications and licenses unfolded from the card like a bouquet of semi-translucent flowers. Tierney looked from the official, holo-sealed documents, to me, and back again.

  “Where’d you get my name?”

  “Timmy Akhatli. He decided to pass on this cargo at this time.” I went out on a limb, implying that I knew what their “machine parts” actually were. In reality, I didn’t have a clue. “According to him, your items are too … hot.”

  Tierney gazed narrowly at me. As Irene had pointed out, neither Dolph nor I presented a very professional image. Dolph had a graze on his cheek where Akhatli had punched him. He had a strung-out aura, as if he lived on coffee and cigarettes, although his leanness was all muscle. I usually presented a more clean-cut image than Dolph, but not today. I had not been eating or sleeping properly, but I’d been making up for it with liquid nutrition, and it showed. Stubble, red-veined eyes, and a paint-splattered Wally’s Seafood t-shirt completed the picture of a hard case with one foot in space and the other in the gutter.

  But as I had been banking on, that’s exactly what Tierney was looking for.

  “Well, all right,” he said grumpily. “Eks, Shifters, it’s all the same to me.”

  He led us inside, while cyborg boy lagged behind and suspiciously read the small print of our landing license. I could have grabbed the shotgun off him at any time while he was doing that. They were paranoid, but they weren’t professionals—at least when it came to violence.

  “Cargo’s been ready to go for two weeks,” Tierney shouted, as he opened an inne
r door. “Hope you boys can fly on short notice.”

  He had to shout over the noise. Machinery whirred, whooshed, and hummed, and something was going thump-thump, thump-thump, like an overloaded washing machine. It was almost as bad as being on board a spaceship. Unlike a spaceship, however, the A/C was set so low that my skin goosebumped. Pitiless bright light flooded a cavernous room. It was a complete contrast with the dilapidated exterior of the building. The noise came from giant fridges, freezers, and other battered, cabinet-sized tools with screens displaying cryptic readouts. Close-set plywood shelves spilled boxes, bottles, vials, binders, and office supplies onto work surfaces. Individual workstations were tucked in wherever they’d fit. There was a strong smell of stinky socks, with overtones of lemonade.

  “This a lab?” I said.

  “Ding dong, you win the prize,” cyborg boy said.

  Fifteen or twenty young employees, many with cybernetic augmentations, stood in groups, chatting and talking to the AI assistants on their computers. It was the kind of behavior you see at creative offices, where work takes the form of hanging out and waiting for inspiration to strike. I could feel the energy in the air, all of it now bending like electricity to Tierney, as our entrance caused a momentary hush in the midst of the noise.

  Tierney held up one arm and yelled, “Shipping company. I’m just gonna show them around.”

  He led us to a desk cluttered with screens, kitschy knick-knacks, and 3D models of molecules. Cyborg boy set out folding chairs. Tierney plonked himself into his executive ergochair. “Welcome to the future.”

  “So what you’re producing here is … what, exactly?” I said.

  “Genetic rewriting agents.” Tierney held my gaze, challenging me to flinch. I just about managed not to. “Total Research Solutions is the name of our company, and that’s what we sell, total solutions, so we ship autoclaves, centrifuges, photospectrometers, all the other tools used in lab work. We’re a reseller for those devices, and officially, that’s what this company does. So 99% of the tonnage will be off-the-shelf medical devices, but the other 1% is our own unique products. That’s the reagents, crisper genes, and rewriter viruses which we make right here. Obviously, those items will not appear on the manifest.”

  “Obviously,” I murmured. Those items were illegal. Maybe not to produce, but to export? Oh hell yes.

  I wondered what drove an apparently successful scientist like Tierney to risk his career on exporting genetic engineering materials—to the Hurtworlds, of all places! It couldn’t be money. The answer stood out for me in the faces of the young people grouped around us. They were grim-faced, bright-eyed true believers. They clearly saw themselves as warriors for one of humanity’s most unpopular causes.

  “We are saving lives,” Tierney said, perceiving hesitation in my and Dolph’s silence. “In the years since we left Earth, humanity has encountered thousands of alien bugs, viruses, every kind of disease. Some of them came near to wiping colonial populations out. But in the vast majority of cases, we have beaten these diseases back, thanks to genetic engineering. It’s an ongoing war, made unfortunately more challenging by opposition to our methods.”

  “At my daughter’s school,” I said, “they teach them that genetic modification is unethical, because the only truly valuable and unique thing we have is our humanity.”

  “And I agree. But there are two distinct schools of gene-modding. Germline gene-modding alters entire populations, as was done in the past, with consequences that we are living with right now. That is no longer considered ethical. Somatic gene-modding is a medical technology that we all benefit from every time we go to the doctor. It’s very unfortunate that the public is consistently unable to understand the distinction.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but it’s the same technology, right? Once it gets out there, how do you know what people are going to do with it?”

  “Saving lives,” Tierney repeated. “Much as we may like to think it, Ponce de Leon isn’t the center of the universe. Our fellow humans on other planets should have the right to do their own life-saving research.”

  “Our fellow humans on Mittel Trevoyvox?” I rubbed my temples. “Have you ever been there?”

  “Have you?”

  “I have.”

  “Good. I told Akhatli to get me someone with experience flying to the Hurtworlds.”

  I forced a laugh, remembering how we had left Akhatli’s mutilated body in Mill Creek. Tierney didn’t have a clue what had just walked into his lab. But that cut both ways: we hadn’t had a clue what we were walking into. I picked up one of the models of human RNA and turned it in my hands.

  The truth is, no Shifter can think about genetic modification without acute ambivalence. We’re all too aware of how many thousands of lives were lost to pernicious mutations during the Big Shift. Some of those mutations—such as Chimera Syndrome—are still with us.

  If not for germline genetic modification, we wouldn’t exist … and yet, would I want gene-modding to take off again on a population-wide scale? Oh hell no. There are too many kinds of alt-humans already. We don’t need the competition.

  “I could name you a hundred diseases that we’ve licked with somatic gene-modding,” Tierney said. “But there’s still a lot of work to be done. For instance, I’m sure you remember the scare we had last month. Interstellar variant kuru?”

  My gut hollowed out. The reaction was involuntary and internal. I put down the RNA model on Tierney’s desk to hide a sudden shudder.

  “Yeah,” Dolph said, leaning forward. “What about IVK?”

  “A challenge,” Tierney said. I had already got the picture that when he said something was challenging he meant it was impossible, but he refused to use that word on principle. “Prion diseases are a toughie, and IVK is the most challenging of all. I shouldn’t say this, but I almost wish the terrorists had succeeded. Then we might finally get some funding.” He laughed, cyborg boy laughed, they all laughed.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Be right back.”

  Dolph followed me outside. So did cyborg boy and a couple of the other youngsters. They stood by the gate in the fence. Cyborg boy held the shotgun. Dolph and I walked off a ways into the weeds and lit cigarettes. Was this place being watched? I looked up at the trees outside the fence. Blowsy summer foliage hung over the roof of the factory, hiding the facility from satellite or drone surveillance.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “I wish it was anything but gene-modding.”

  “We don’t have to do it.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Mike, we are not gonna find Pippa. She was deported to Yesanyase Skont. That planet has a population of millions. How do we trace her? And if we do, then what? We rescue her? That’s a felony.”

  “So’s murder,” I muttered.

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right. We fucked up, but we aren’t going to improve the situation by taking a cargo of genetic engineering materials for sixty KGCs. Thirty down, and thirty on the back end? That’s hardly enough to cover our costs.”

  “It ain’t about the money,” I said. It never was about the money for Dolph. He was just saying that because he knew me. He himself had higher ideals. That seems odd to say about a certified gun nut and adrenaline addict, but he did.

  “It’s all about the money for Irene and Marty.” Dolph’s lips twisted. The Hurtworlds job had brought out a crass side in our crewmates—Irene, Martin, and even MF—that he didn’t like.

  “I know.” I shared Dolph’s skepticism about the crown jewels. That’s why I had a secret backup plan to cover our asses financially. But I couldn’t tell him about that. Not yet. “Anyway, who said thirty?” I smiled crookedly and trod my cigarette out. “Bet I can get them up to seventy.”

  “Old man Tierney won’t go over fifty.”

  “Seventy, at least. Loser buys the drinks.”

  We went back inside. I heard Dolph say to cyborg boy with an unpleasant laugh, “I met another cyborg recently. Shot his six-figure metal hand off.”
Dolph was not a fan of cyborgs. He saw augmentation as a crime against humanity—the same way, indeed, that many normies saw us.

  But Tierney did not, and for that I liked him. We found him at his desk, and bashed out the details of the contract. I haggled him up to sixty down, and felt kind of bad about it. But business is business, and as I pointed out, he was not likely to find anyone else to take his cargo. The capacity crunch resulting from the collapse of Parsec Freight had temporarily created a seller’s market. No one was gonna take a cargo for the Hurtworlds when there were other, safer jobs available.

  No one except me.

  Tierney walked us outside. “You boys got a ride?”

  “Left my truck on the road,” I said.

  The afternoon was waning. Honey-colored light bathed the parking-lot. The music from Grizzly’s had gotten louder. “They been bothering you?” Dolph said.

  “Nothing too bad. Couple of my employees got mugged last week. Lost their electronics, their wheels.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Dolph said. “Shifters aren’t supposed to act that way.”

  Tierney cocked a curious eye at us. “I might be wrong, but you boys don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  He’d picked up on our San Damiano accents. “We aren’t,” I said. “We’re from San D. But this is our home now, and we want to be good neighbors.”

  “I always wanted to visit San Damiano,” Tierney said. “See the Big Shift memorial. A professional pilgrimage.”

  “So, you’re the expert,” I said. “What do you think of the Big Shift? Was it a big mistake? Is what you’re dealing with now, this crap, is it the logical outcome of a huge ethical blunder?”

  “A blunder?” Tierney grinned. “Son, my own profession would crucify me for saying this … but the only trouble with the Big Shift was it didn’t go far enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed his index fingers at me and Dolph. “Y’all are the pinnacle of biotechnology, products of the greatest genetic engineering experiment in human history. Every one of you is a walking miracle wrapped up inside a quantum-mechanical triumph over Newtonian physics. That don’t mean anything to you, do it?” Smiling, he placed a hand on each of our shoulders, fatherly-like. “You’ve been genetically gifted with the power to manipulate reality itself. That is spooky shit. And yet you still piss around flying spaceships, shitting in people’s back yards, and carjacking harmless strangers. That’s what I mean.”