Dirty Job Read online

  “If he goes free …” I hesitated. “Can you let me know?”

  I didn’t think that Ijiuto was a danger to me and mine. Rather, if he escaped from legal protection, I was going to be a danger to him.

  I walked d’Alencon out to the front porch. The street was still wet. I could smell gravelnuts crushed by passing cars’ tyres. Eau de dog poop. A peacock moth fluttered down from the porch light and alighted briefly on d’Alencon’s shoulder.

  “So where are you off to next?” he said.

  I hesitated. But he could get the information from the Space Traffic Authority. It would do me no good to lie. “Mittel Trevoyvox.”

  “The Hurtworlds?”

  “Gotta make a living,” I said. “Some folks save the planet and get promoted. Some don’t even get a few K to repaint their apartment.” I smiled, trying to look less bitter than I felt.

  “I hear you. I’m doing what I can for you, Mike.”

  I believed him. He was doing what he could for me—this visit proved it—and what was I doing in return? Breaking my promise that I would go straight, after less than two weeks. I rocked on the balls of my feet, eager for him to leave.

  “This trip to the Hurtworlds,” he said. “Would that have anything to do with Pippa Khratz?”

  My heart sank. “Who?”

  “You can’t help her, Mike. We failed her, and that’s a tragedy, but it is what it is. She got infected, she got deported, and there’s no legal power in the Cluster that can bring her back, because it’s our own laws that deported her in the first place.”

  No legal power. D’Alencon’s hands were tied … but mine weren’t. “I’m not going to Yesanyase Skont.” He’d never know. “Just Mittel Trevoyvox.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you your business. But I strongly recommend that you should stay away from the Hurtworlds, period.”

  “Oh, I always say getting shot at is the spice of life,” I joked.

  He didn’t smile. “This thing ain’t finished. You were cleared, but don’t let that give you a false sense of confidence. It’s still playing out, and like I said, there’s politics in the mix.”

  “Details?” I said uneasily.

  “Above my paygrade. But this much I can say, you do not want to get mixed up with these folks. So … be careful. And keep your eyes open out there.”

  “Anything in particular I should be looking out for?”

  “Oh, you know. Travellers.”

  “Have there been any recent reports of Traveller activity in the Hurtworlds?” This was information I could really do with.

  “No,” d’Alencon said. “It’s odd. Up till a few years back, they were hitting the Hurtworlds on the regular. Now? Nothing. They’ve gone quiet … too quiet. So sniff around a bit. See what you can see.”

  “You got it,” I said, heavy-hearted, knowing that this was the price of his friendship, and his warnings. It might even be the real point of his visit. I was to inform him if I saw anything he should know about.

  Snitch.

  His car glided to a stop in front of my building. It was a crappy little sedan. “Don’t they give y’all flying cars in the detective division?”

  “I got one of those. This is my own ride. I don’t use the department’s car, they don’t know where I am.”

  “Wait,” I said, as he started down the porch steps. “The department don’t know you’re here?”

  “That’s right. It’s none of their business what I do on my own time.” He gave me a pained smile.

  “But can’t they track your personal car as well as your official vehicle?”

  “Oh, they do. There’s software at HQ mapping the movements of every vehicle on Ponce de Leon. But how does it decide what’s important? There ain’t enough humans to look at everything, so we rely on algorithms. This old beater happens to be registered in my wife’s name, and she works at Shoreside General, so the algo will just think she’s working a night shift.”

  “Ah.”

  “Now I gotta go.” He got in his car and drove off towards the glow of the Strip.

  The peacock moth whirred off the porch, away from the light.

  10

  My ship was the most valuable thing I owned, by a factor of about a thousand. The St. Clare resembled a steel plesiosaur, with four auxiliary engine pods that looked like flippers, and a “head” whose serrated jaws concealed a military-grade railgun. Her unique form factor pointed to her non-human origins. She had started life as the imperial flagship of the Kroolth, a Fringeworlds race of furry midgets, and had become mine during an adventure that I preferred not to discuss. She retained all her original armaments, plus a set of maser point defense turrets we’d installed ourselves. I believed she could safely do up to 2,000 times the speed of light if I stripped her to the bulkheads, although I’d never actually tried it.

  We launched on schedule with Dr. Tierney’s gene-modding materials in the hold, well-hidden amongst the legitimate medical equipment. Morale was high at first, but deteriorated after a couple of days. This was our first run without Kimmie, my former admin. She was sorely missed. Kimmie had been a normie, and when she was around, we’d felt a certain hesitation about drifting around the ship naked, or spending days on end in animal form. Martin and Dolph used to grumble about it, but I believed the pressure to act normal had been good for us. Now there was no one to offend, we felt free to let it all hang out, to the detriment of crew discipline.

  I wasn’t setting a great example myself, either. When I wasn’t on bridge duty, I spent most of my time in my berth, working on the new animal form I had in mind.

  I emerged from a practice session on Day 8 to find Mechanical Failure holding forth in the lounge. “I undertook a deep scan of my memory elements,” he announced in his grating, mechanical voice. “It is a painful process, which I do not undertake lightly. But it paid off! I found an exact match for the crown jewels of the Darkworlds.”

  I gazed at the image he was displaying on the big screen on the aft wall of the lounge. It sure looked like Pippa’s pendant, only without the chain.

  “What do you think it is?” MF said. “Three guesses! Irene first!” MF had a soft spot for Irene. Let’s be honest: he had a crush on her. It was a constant source of tension, especially now that she was the only woman on board.

  “A weapon,” Irene said.

  “Bzzt!”

  Dolph floated spreadeagled in front of the biggest fan, cooling down after a run on the treadmill. When you’re in the field for two weeks at a stretch, you have to hit the machines. “It’s the key to a long-lost vault of Urush dick jokes.”

  “Bzzt!”

  “Urush porn, then.” In his own way, Dolph was trying to manage expectations. I appreciated the effort, but his humor did not reach Irene or Martin, who were both intently focused on the screen. Damn MF. Why’d he have to hype this thing even more?

  Martin, coiled around the base of the resistance machine, said, “I’ll eat my tail if that isn’t a thumb drive.”

  “Martin wins,” MF said softly. “It is a TrZam 008 memory device, and is probably about 1,025 years old.”

  “Then it depends what’s on it,” Dolph said. “With our luck, it would turn out to be dick jokes.”

  MF’s bendy neck undulated. His eyes glowed. “The TrZam 008 was a limited production run, issued exclusively to thought-workers in the discipline of … well, you do not have a word for it. Transcendence studies might be close. I was not involved with that field of research, but I believe it incorporated elements of fundamental physics, theology, biotechnology, AI, chemistry, and astrophysics.”

  “Everything and the kitchen sink,” I said. “Come on, Dolph. We need to do that course correction in half an hour.”

  As Dolph put on his clothes, Martin and Irene swapped wild speculations about the data on the thumb drive. It might be artificial gravity technology, which would overcome the stubborn laws of physics that forced us to float around the inside of our spaceship. Nano-replication technolog
y that would make the post-scarcity society a reality. Or a revolutionary “new” type of FTL drive! The Urush had vanished, after all. Not anywhere near enough of their hippo-sized, four-legged, long-necked remains had been found to account for the population of their interstellar civilization. They must have gone somewhere … perhaps to a distant region of the galaxy, which this new technology would bring within reach for the first time! To all these suggestions, MF squeaked, “No! Better than that!” The bot was deliberately keeping us in suspense. He wasn’t being malicious. He thought we were all having fun.

  “What everyone’s forgetting,” I said, as Dolph and I drifted up the trunk corridor, “is that Pippa’s not the only person who had one of those devices. Rafael Ijiuto had one, too.”

  “Maybe no one’s guessed what it really is. Maybe even he doesn’t know,” Dolph said.

  “How likely is that?”

  The St. Clare’s background decibels were right up there, as usual. It was like living and working next to a busy highway—the white noise of the fans; the gurgling of water and liquid coolant lines; the tick-tick-ticking of the skip field generator, which was audible all over the ship, like a clock rapidly ticking my life away.

  All the same, I caught the farting noise of compressed air spurting from nozzles, and spun to see MF behind us.

  “Go scrub the toilet, bot,” I said. I didn’t know how angry I was until I heard it in my voice. “You’re not helping.”

  “You need me to check the course correction burn calculations,” he pointed out, googly-eyed.

  “We can do it,” I said. But the fact was I would feel better if MF checked my calculations. Our speed had peaked out yesterday at 1,650 times the speed of light. I was a seasoned captain and yet my hair stood up on the back of my neck when I thought about all those zeros. Mittel Trevoyvox was 57 light years from Ponce de Leon. Most people reckoned the journey at a month each way; I was aiming to do it in half the time, by using a scary-high multiplier, and flying in almost a straight line, instead of making a nice wide circle around the Core.

  You can’t go through the Core. Too dangerous. There are toxic old stars in there, pumping out gamma rays and X-rays. There’s the M4 black hole, smack in the middle of everything. There are Travellers.

  But you can brush past the Core, and that’s what I was doing. It meant several ticklish little course corrections, to account for the gravity of the Core, the Cluster’s spin, the galaxy’s spin, and the inertia imparted by interstellar dust building up in our skip field. These maneuvers might be small, but every fraction of a second and millinewton of thrust counted. Get it wrong, and we’d end up off course by several light years … that’s if we didn’t bump into a star.

  Dolph and I floated in our straps, speaking in acronyms, in the bright cave of the bridge. It was a low-ceilinged metal slot in the ship’s belly, lined from floor to ceiling with consoles and mechanical readouts that backstopped the augmented reality (AR) data in our headsets. MF held onto the back of my couch.

  “We’ll burn for fifteen seconds, on my mark,” I said. My palms were wet, my mouth dry. At moments like this you remember how dangerous this business is.

  “Sixteen,” MF said. “Actually, fifteen point sixty-eight. We shall have to compensate on our next burn.” He made a clucking noise. “When we are rich, I will retool the drive with state-of-the-art exhaust controls for improved precision. It is also high time we replaced the main engine nozzle and upgraded the plasma chamber.”

  So that’s what in it for you, I thought. Endless upgrades, making the St. Clare a safer and safer haven for you. At what point, I wondered, will you decide we’re dispensable?

  The timer in my HUD area blinked. “Starting burn in five. Four … three … two … mark.” I opened the throttle.

  The port auxiliary engines roared. The ship shook like a beaten drum. Precisely sixteen seconds later, the thunder died away into the usual whoosh of fans. We were back on course … presumably. We wouldn’t know for sure until we got there—or didn’t get there.

  I stretched my tense muscles, took off my headset, and ran my hands through the sweat-damp spikes of my hair. I needed a drink.

  Alcohol tastes different in freefall. Fine bourbon is wasted on stuffed-up sinuses and dulled tastebuds, so I normally stick to vodka on board. There’s a reason it has been the preferred tipple of astronauts going all the way back to the first rickety little space stations in orbit around Earth.

  I drifted over to the dispenser on the aft wall of the bridge, tuning out MF as he quacked at Dolph about the Lorentz factor and spontaneous quantum errors. I think he was warning him not to try going any faster. It was bullshit—MF was just a coward. Theoretically, you can go infinitely fast. Just skip more Planck lengths.

  Of course, theory isn’t reality. Skip technology isn’t infinitely powerful, and more importantly, ships are required to have limiting hardware built into their skip generators, to prevent them going so fast that pilots go FTL-blind and crash into stars. The speed limit for civilian ships is 1,500 c. Fleet ships can go up to 1,800 c. But the St. Clare had been built by MF himself. And he had not added limiting hardware to the skip drive.

  I dispensed vodka into my zero-gravity mug, keeping one eye on the mechanical indicators, dials, and screens. More than any ship I’d had before, the St. Clare felt like a piece of me. It would kill me to sell her.

  But that’s what I was going to do.

  That was my secret backup plan.

  I was 99% sure that we would either not find this TrZam 008, or it would turn out to be junk. Therefore, after this journey, I planned to put the St. Clare on the auction block. I’d get 15,000 KGCs for her, maybe more. That’s not fuck-you money, but it’s a lot. I would gift a nice fat severance package to each of the crew. There’d be enough left to pay Lucy’s tuition at St. Anne’s through graduation, and leave a nest egg to launch her into adulthood, when I wouldn’t be around anymore.

  The vodka burned down my throat. I drifted back into the lounge. Snake and panther were still gloating over the blown-up Urush thumb drive on the screen.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if the TrZam 008 could be real? I wouldn’t have to sell the St. Clare. I could … I could pay Dr. Tierney to put all his bright young scientists, his supercomputers, and his own brilliant intellect on the trail of a cure for IVK …

  I pushed off from the ceiling, angry at myself. There was no goddamn cure. This disease had been deliberately, maliciously weaponized to be incurable. Time to go fix something to take my mind off it.

  At the door of the lounge, I met MF and Dolph coming back from the bridge. “Hey, bot,” I said, giving his housing a shove with my free hand, which spun us apart. “Aren’t you old enough to know how dangerous fairytales can be?”

  “Fairytales? Dangerous? Says the man who turns into a wolf.”

  Everyone laughed. MF somersaulted in the air, creaking with delight at the success of his line.

  “Stop playing dumb, MF,” I said. “Even if we find Pippa, and even if she still has the gizmo, and those are big ifs … the Ponce de Leon prosecutor’s office has one, too. So we wouldn’t have an exclusive claim to any IP that’s on there. And that means we would have nothing.” I clicked my fingers as the faces of the others fell. “It’s all in the legalities.”

  MF turned himself right way up to me. “Oh, but Captain,” he said. “Having a data storage device is one thing; reading it is something else. And there is only one machine left in the Cluster capable of reading a TrZam 008.” He tapped his own housing with a gripper. “Right here.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “See?” Martin said to me. “There’s a reason we keep him around apart from his extensive porn collection.”

  “If you’re blowing hot air up our butts, suitcase, you’re gonna take a one-way trip out of the airlock,” I threatened halfheartedly.

  “Mike, what if someone else finds it first?” Irene said suddenly. “Do we have to go to Mittel Trevoyvox? Let’s go str
aight to Yesanyase Skont.” Her claws worked in the padded wall of the lounge, tearing new rips. Tension thrummed off her. “That damn Ek already cost us two weeks. Mittel T would burn another week. Let’s change course. Deliver the cargo on the way back …”

  “Or, stick to the schedule that we promised the customer. We gotta dance with the one that brung us.” I had built my business on a promise of reliability. I wasn’t letting my standards slide now. “Forget about the gizmo for the time being. I want everyone focused on Mittel Trevoyvox. And if you need any extra motivation, ask me or Dolph about how we got shot at, nearly eaten, and thrown in a river by Eks last time we were there.”

  11

  Our last trip to Mittel T had been hairy. But that was seventeen years ago, and I didn’t know what to expect when we dropped out of the skip field in the Mittel Trevoyvox star system.

  It may seem odd that in an age of FTL comms, I was so short on information about our destination. Couldn’t I just have looked it up before we left Ponce de Leon?

  Not on my data plan. Information is money. To get solid, up-to-date information on Mittel T, I would have had to pay … as much as it costs to keep a network of FTL drones flying. And if you guessed that would run into eight figures, you’d be right. Data may be a cheap utility on any given planet—or not, depending on that planet’s infrastructure—but it’s anything but cheap to send data from one star system to another. The EkBank does it. That’s how the Cluster’s economy keeps ticking over: the EkBank’s FTL drones deliver up-to-date versions of the blockchain ledger to major planets on a daily basis, to lesser planets at intervals of anything from days to weeks. Similarly, planetary governments fly FTL drones to exchange news and views. But that’s pretty much it. The biggest companies in the shipping industry buy subscriptions to the news from the governments of their home planets, for prices that run into the millions annually. Nothing, however, would induce them to share their planetary dossiers with minnows like me.