Space Relics (Galactic Archaeology Book 1) (3 page)

Aristocrats were easy to predict, especially when they were in a port that didn’t have as many amenities as their home starbases. The only place Lord Baylor would sleep in was either the Argonaut or the most expensive suite. He wasn’t used to the Argonaut and he didn’t know if there were secondary security systems that could attack him in his sleep, so Rick only needed to wait for him in the local mayor’s home. Lord Baylor was going to pressure him onto lending him his house, and the mayor wouldn’t have the guts to say no. After all, who could say no to a lord who could crush anyone with his little finger?

Breaking into the mayor’s home was easy: Rick only needed a couple of digital lock picks, a pair of silent sneakers, and a bit of luck. While he waited, he tasted everything in the mayor’s liquor cabinet and his imported snacks. They weren’t more than overpriced rubbish that anyone could buy on Earth, but these came with designer boxes. Real aristocrats never bought any of those, but the mayor tried too hard to look wealthy.

Lord Baylor didn’t take long to arrive. The door clicked, and Rick jumped from his seat and stuck his back to the wall. The lord entered and inspected the room around him with a half-sneer. He was forcing the richest man on the port to sleep outside of his own house, but it still wasn’t enough for him.

Rick walked behind him and pressed his malfunctioning gun against one of the lord’s temples. “I’m pleased to see you again, Lord Baylor,” he said. “Next time, we need to part on friendlier terms to save us the uncomfortable reencounter.” He couldn’t stop himself from smirking; catching a nobleman by surprise had to be a new one. The man hadn’t even seen it coming.

“Richard Lewis.” Lord Baylor’s voice was tense, but way more relaxed than he should’ve been, given the circumstances. “I didn’t expect to see you again… so soon.”

“I had to leave the expedition in a hurry. My main benefactor tried to rob our greatest finding and wanted to get us all killed. I’ve had to chase after him. A pretty tiring and frustrating experience, if you ask me.”

Sometimes, dealing with the upper classes felt completely natural, even when they were about to get uncivilized and violent. Life amongst the lower classes was simple and direct: everyone said and did whatever they thought. The upper classes had requirements of behavior and manners even when they were with their mortal enemies. It was tiring at times, but a victory tasted much sweeter when your enemy had to bow at you and greet you politely. Seeing Lord Baylor’s tense jaw and uncomfortable expression wouldn’t have been the same if he’d showed his fear.

“There’s been a complete misunderstanding,” Lord Baylor said, trying to keep still. “Did you think that I’d run to take the artifact without paying? No, not at all. I was going to get a professional valuation to pay you faster.”

“Don’t bother,” Rick said. “You won’t convince me that you’re anything but a stealing rat. But don’t worry; I wouldn’t kill a nobleman. I’ve just come to get what belongs to me, and I’ll be happy to leave.”

“Richard, I think I should warn you of something,” Amy said through the intercom.

Just when he was starting to enjoy his victory? Not likely. She was always far too pessimistic; she didn’t get that humans needed to taste their success every once in a while.

“Amy, I’m a bit busy right now,” Rick said. Lord Baylor glanced at him, confused. “No, not you. I’m talking to someone else.” He shook his head to turn the intercom back on. “Why don’t you wait for a while and I’ll get back to you?”

Amy had always been too careful with risks and probabilities of success. To her, having a 10% chance of being unsuccessful meant that it wasn’t worth it. If Rick had stayed at home whenever risks were involved, he’d have starved on Earth. He had to jump in and take action; his debts weren’t going to pay themselves.

“This is far too dangerous to stand aside and wait,” she insisted. “You’re risking your life and the mission’s success. You’re unlikely to get the Argonaut back if you continue to—”

A cold knife pressed against Rick’s neck, sending a shiver down his body.

Damn it. It had seemed too easy to be true.

“I’ve told you,” Amy continued through the intercom. “You’d have an excuse if I hadn’t told you, but I have. Why don’t you ever listen? And now you’re in trouble again, and I’m not going to say anything apart from
I told you
.”

As helpful as always.

Well, at least Rick was only facing two men. It could’ve been worse.

“I’m afraid that you might find your quest more difficult than you expected,” Lord Baylor said, trying to push Rick’s arm aside. Rick held the gun firmly against him. It was the only leverage he had to delay the unavoidable.

Behind Rick, the mayor had turned out to be less trusting than the lord. With that move, he’d earned several brownie points from Lord Baylor, enough to move him up a step in the otherwise static social ladder. Nothing like performing special services for a nobleman to get a proper reward. And what was better than saving his life?

It was a pity that Rick’s corpse was going to be the mayor’s stepping stone. He wasn’t good at bleeding, and he didn’t like it either.

Rick hadn’t seen much action in years. Back when he’d been on Earth, people had always threatened him with knives, guns, and all sorts of creative weapons. He’d left Earth a long time ago, and he’d lost practice. If only he’d brought a proper gun, he’d be able to stun them, or to try to get away with his head still attached to his shoulders.

“You’ve become very quiet, Lewis,” Lord Baylor said with a light chuckle. “All because you have a gun that doesn’t work and we’ve caught you off-guard.” He pushed Rick’s arm aside and Rick lowered the gun. It was broken; there wasn’t much he could do. “Is it that you expected to defeat me so easily? Such a pity… Capable of finding a lost tomb and an invaluable artifact, but reckless and far too ambitious for your own good.” He walked around the room, inspecting the image cycles in the holographic frames. He ran his finger along the shelves to check for dust and frequently glanced back at Rick to enjoy the situation. “I wonder what your friends will say once they read that you weren’t happy with your expedition’s failure, so you set fire to the whole planet, killed your workers, and got drunk before crashing your transport shuttle against an uninhabited asteroid.”

A nice story, but nobody was going to tell it if Rick had a say in it.

A knife to his neck, an inexperienced fighter holding it, and a large man on the other side of the room. There was just about enough space for a hand to get between the mayor’s elbow and Rick’s neck. Enough to stop him from hurting anyone.

Neither of the men were professional fighters, but the mayor was probably used to getting into occasional fights in taverns. Noblemen spent their days sparring, but their teachers were in awe of their rank and didn’t dare to teach them properly.

“Tell me,” Lord Baylor said. “Would you like to crash your ship against an asteroid, or would you rather die in space?”

Okay, that wasn’t the time to think about ways to die. Rick shrugged and started to raise his arms. Lord Baylor’s grin broadened with his perceived victory.

With a swift move, Rick placed an arm between the mayor’s arm and his neck and used the other arm to elbow his nose. He immobilized the knife hand and turned around to kick his stomach, then his lower guard. The mayor bent forward in pain and Rick threw the knife away, then punched him in the head and knocked him down. He ran towards Lord Baylor and tried to kick him too.

The lord blocked him and his eyes widened with the adrenaline. He turned around and opened a drawer to fetch something.

A gun!

Rick tried to hit him again, but the lord blocked it. Rick grabbed a chair from the room and threw it at the lord to buy some time. He ran out as fast as he could. His breath echoed in his ears, but there was no time to rest.

He reached the door, and a piercing pain spread from his shoulder through the rest of his body, followed by a loud bang. He didn’t need to check; he’d been hit, and it wasn’t by a gun in stun mode.

Rick opened the door and headed for the suburbs to lose the lord. Warm blood trickled down his shoulder. The pain barely let him move.

He kept looking back, but Lord Baylor wouldn’t risk following him in case he had reinforcements somewhere. Lucky.

Once Rick had reached a small alley in one of the quieter regions of the port, he turned on the intercom. He tried to catch his breath and leaned his back on the wall to get some oxygen to his brain.

Amy didn’t wait for him to speak. “I told you it was a bad idea,” she said.

“I need help,” Rick managed to say. He was tired, his eyelids weighed too much, and he needed to sleep for two days.

“Of course you need help, you need a mental therapist,” she said. “What kind of man breaks into a nobleman’s house with a broken gun and expects to survive? I don’t know who gave you your captain’s license, but they should be more careful. You’ve been reckless. Can’t you see that they could’ve killed you?”

“Thank you for the lecture, but I’m hurt. Can you keep complaining after you’ve sewed me up?”

“I’ll take the shuttle there,” she said, “but don’t think, even for a minute, that I won’t let you know what I think of your infallible plans.”

That was Amy: ruthless and unstoppable whenever someone didn’t follow her suggestions. Rick chuckled and his shoulder hurt even more. He groaned in pain, and Amy continued complaining and reprimanding him as the shuttle approached him. She wasn’t going to shut up easily this time.

Getting one’s tissues repaired was a strange experience: nobody used anesthetics anymore, so most of the pain had to be absorbed by nanobots that segregated endorphins and other pain-countering chemicals. That made anyone tingly and euphoric, but at the same time with bursts of pain in the wounded area. The nanobots were supposed to neutralize pain, but programmers had never been too good at keeping things constant.

Amy had put her nanobots at the lowest setting for Rick’s wound, so it hurt like mad whenever they repaired a tissue before flooding it with their relaxing serums. She’d done it on purpose, and now she was enjoying her
I told you
moment.

The shuttle’s robotic arms pinched Rick.

“Ow!” he said, and he instinctively jumped away. He’d tried to keep quiet to avoid reminding her of his own stupidity, but this was far too much.

The robotic arm pushed his shoulder back into position and continued burning, peeling, and removing affected tissues. The nanobots would soon go back and start rebuilding flesh over those regions.

“Will you keep still?” she said. “I can only fix you up temporarily, and you’re making it very difficult. You’ll need to grow some tissues in the lab or you’ll end up with health consequences for the rest of your life.” She sighed and continued inspecting his wound. “Don’t you realize that it isn’t worth it? Why do you always end up risking your life in stupid ways?”

“Are you kidding? I almost got the stone back. It was a small miscalculation.”

The robotic arm burnt too much and its laser pierced through Rick’s arm. It hurt, it left him a mark, and she’d definitely done it on purpose.

“Hey!” he said.

“I won’t be able to fix you if they cut you in half.” She acted as though she were moving the machines and reading their reports on a tablet. They both knew she was a hologram, but it was a psychological thing: it reassured patients and made them forget that they were being treated by artificial intelligences.

“I don’t plan to let them kill me,” Rick said. “I know whom I’m facing, and it’s going to be easy. I’ll steal a gun before approaching them and they won’t see it coming.”

“Are you affected by the nanobots, or are you really that slow? Don’t you see that your chances of success are very slim? Lord Baylor will have hired bodyguards and he’ll be ready for round 2. Unless you can think of an infallible plan, he’s going to crush you. And if he crushes you, they’ll sell me and the Argonaut as scrap. I’d rather keep my pieces together, mind you.”

“Thank you for your concern,” Rick said sarcastically. “But I’ll have to sell you anyway if I don’t get some money to pay back my loans. You know how these things work…”

“I think I do,” she said, bringing a forefinger to her mouth to think about it. “A young and naïve entrepreneur asks for money that he can’t repay, and he wants to use it to start a business in a sector that he knows nothing about. Am I getting close?”

“You’re getting more cynical by the minute.”

“Thank you,” she said flatly. “At least you could let me help you, you know? Two minds, one of them more agile than the other, will always work better than a single mind alone.”

Was she calling him slow again?

“I can infect their systems with a virus that almost killed me off,” she said.

No, that wasn’t a good idea. The last time the virus had been unleashed, it had almost destroyed an entire fleet over a planet. Releasing it could incapacitate Lord Baylor’s systems, but it could also end up destroying the planet’s life support.

“I’d rather have you as a backup plan,” he said. “Just in case I need you to pick me up while I’m running away.”

“I can also use incapacitating sounds,” she insisted. “A loud, high-pitched tone that you humans can’t hear without going mad. They’d drop unconscious within seconds.”

“I’m going there too!” Rick said. “I’d rather stop my ears from bleeding, thank you.”

“You’re the most closed-minded man I’ve ever met,” she said. “My alternatives are far less risky than your plan of running there and risking your neck. Why are you so stubborn?”

She was right. Her plans were better, but they were also riskier. If she approached the region and they had EM pulses, he could lose her memory and her programming. He hadn’t backed Amy up in years. She needed far too many hard drives to keep her conscience alive, and Rick had been broke for too long. He didn’t want to risk losing her.

“I’ll be fine,” Rick said. “And I won’t do anything stupid until I’ve
borrowed
a proper gun. I’ve done this a hundred times; it can’t be that difficult.”

“You’ve done it once,” Amy said. “You worked with others and you were younger and not affected by the nanobots’ endorphins.”

“Look at the bright side: if they shoot me, I won’t even feel the pain.”