The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) (35 page)

Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

C
allum
waited at the back of the two car passenger-mover, bouncing gently as the other
passengers exited the maglev vehicle. He stepped out onto the platform and pretended
to receive a new message, looking down at his hand as new passengers boarded
and the short train hummed away, leaving the stink of ozone in the wake of it’s
faulty converter.

He pretended to scroll through the imaginary message on
until his peripheral vision was clear of movement. Then he carried on with his
charade for another twenty seconds or so before starting to walk, a casual
glance at the news panels giving him a view of the entire platform.

No likely candidates. There were a few waiting for the
southbound line, backpackers mostly. Cal grinned. You found them on every
planet in the Republic. Kids who spent a year or two wandering from world to
world, postponing the moment when they would have to get on with life.

The problem here on Chaco Benthic was that they always ran
out of money and, if they didn’t have rich parents to buy them a ticket back up
to the orbital counterweight, they’d spend the rest of their lives beneath the
cold grey waves.

It was relatively affordable to ride down on the tether, but
the exit ticket down here in Tsekoh was incredibly expensive. It helped provide
the company with an endless stream of hungry NRW employees and they reserved
pretty much every available up bound kilogram for manganese exports.

If company agents were following him, they certainly
wouldn’t do it while disguised as a backpacker. Too easy to notice. That kind
of thing might work if they were doing static surveillance - each man covering
a zone, handing off the target by radio. Static surveillance needed a lot of
manpower to work properly and it wouldn’t work in a public transit station
anyway. Sooner or later, folks would notice that you weren’t going anywhere.

Cal used a lot of transit stations when running SDRs. As an
undercover operator, he had to act as though he wasn’t trying to defeat enemy
surveillance. Looking over his shoulder would have been a dead giveaway that he
was up to something. A detection route that ran through a transit station gave
him the opportunity to stop and check his surroundings without being obvious
about it. The fake message made it harder for anyone following him to wait
around without becoming obvious.

He exited the station and moved into a medium sized shopping
district. The place was a rabbit warren of side corridors and it would force
any surveillance team to close up on him. In this environment, it was far too
easy for him to duck down a narrow side alley and disappear.

He stopped to cross the pedestrian traffic, checking behind
him as if choosing the best moment to move across the flow. Still no evidence
of a tail. He darted across and into a media shop that he used from time to
time. It had a stair connecting with the next level. He spent a few minutes
looking at the wall screens before selecting an old Tauhentan graphic novel and
sending the file to his account.

He nodded to the attendant and headed up the stairs, pulling
on a welder’s cap and stuffing his jacket into his satchel before reaching the
top step. Anyone handing him off to an agent on the next floor would have
described what he was wearing. Every little change helped.

He quickly passed through the banks of action &
adventure memory screens and exited the store, his chip authenticating the
payment for his novel as he walked under the scanner in the doorway. He waved
down a magbike cab and gave the driver an address that was close to the café
where he was ultimately headed.

F
or
most of the last century and a half, Cal’s life had been one long series of
SDRs. He’d lived as a ghost on eight worlds, never letting his guard down. It
was as natural as breathing and he often didn’t even notice when he was doing
something purely for the sake of identifying a tail.

He’d definitely had an easier existence, back on Earth, but
it was the last place he would want to be noticed. Here, he was just another
Tauhentan expat, his ancestors cut off from home when the Humans had carved
their world out of the Republic.

Back home, if you could even call Earth home anymore, he was
Callum McKinnon, the terrorist who’d almost cost Humanity it’s freedom. He’d
been convinced the Dactari threat had been a lie. He had been raised by his
parents, two former CIA operators, and they had taught him everything they
knew. He thought the UN was trying to take over the planet and he’d set up a
failed attempt to destroy key equipment at Moffet Field, followed by a
spectacular freighter-bomb in the Hudson river that completely destroyed the UN
headquarters.

Then he’d gotten pinched in Calgary where he was laying low
– working on a construction crew. The two soldiers patrolling the grayhound
station may have claimed he was ‘resisting arrest’ or maybe they didn’t even
bother. At least the long recuperation gave him something to occupy his mind
while he lay in his tiny, windowless cell.

Though
oficially
dead, his death
sentence had never been carried out. The government had wanted to keep him
alive until they managed to round up all of his known associates. He spent
three years on a small caribbean island, working as a carpenter and general
laborer at a government research station. After the plague, recruiters had
become less picky, and he found himself training on Tauhento.

C
al
was surprised at how much he missed that warm humid air. He ducked reflexively
as the magbike operator flew them under a slow delivery unit, then weaved
through a tangled mess where an accident had just occurred. The occupants of
one of the vehicles were staring down into the cold foggy depths of the central
atrium with ashen faces. A red pulsing glow indicated an emergency vehicle was
down there somewhere.

He was always surprised at the little things that crept up
on him. Why should he be nostalgic about the almost oppressive heat of his
former prison? He could hardly be nostalgic about the people, most of them
would still like to kill him, even though they now made full use of his skills.

He knew if he were ever captured or killed on one of these
worlds, he was completely on his own. Back home they’d probably declare a
holiday.

He grinned as the foot plates increased their restraint
gravity. Magbike operators were notoriously reckless but they were still
popular because they were the quickest way to get around in Tsekoh. With the
restraint
field maxed out,
the operator threw them into a right hand roll and nosed dived straight down
into the heavy fog that always filled the lower thirty levels during ore
processing shifts.

A massive ore carrier flashed past on their right, filthy
yellow paint slicked with moisture, and Cal whooped with the thrill of the
ride. He knew the operator of the bike had a heads up display and was just
trying to scare his passenger.

Cal was goading him to try harder.

The operator obliged. He headed for the
pinch
. It was
a narrow point in this section of the atrium, only two meters wide for ten
levels in either direction and it was the corner of a seventy degree turn. If
anyone was coming in the other direction, the heads up display wouldn’t know
until it was too late.

They entered the pinch at full speed. No vehicles struck
them but a foot grazed off the operator’s helmet as they sped through the
narrowest point. A chorus of cheers and shouts followed them out and Cal looked
back to see the daredevil who had jumped across the two meter gap. He was
outside the railing, but his friends were holding him by the arms, pulling him
in as they disappeared around the corner.

Definitely no sign of being followed. No sane operator would
be willing to follow a magbike cab down here. They dropped another five levels
and came to a swerving stop at a roughly cut hole in the railing. It wasn’t a
standard debarkation port, but it was left unrepaired in order to reduce
congestion at the proper stations.

Cal authorized a twenty percent tip for the driver before
hopping over to the pedway. A pretty standard gratuity in return for getting
the passenger to his destination in one piece.

He strolled back towards the pinch for a few hundred yards
before reaching the café. He walked in towards the back and took a table near a
rear exit that opened onto a relatively busy hallway. He ordered a couple of
signature house drinks before pressing his palm to the glass surface of the
table, activating his own little corner of the city’s data hive. He selected
the graphic novel he’d just purchased and lifted the display up into the space
above the table.

He slowly worked his way through the holographic pages while
watching the pedestrians through the café’s open front. He used a spoon to eat
the layer of algae at the top of his drink before taking a sip of the heavily
caffeinated beverage. The cooking process burst the cell walls of the algae,
releasing their caffeine into the broth. It was a popular post-shift snack that
helped keep body and soul together until the evening meal.

A medium build Ufangian walked in and headed for the table.
Cal gave a barely perceptible nod of approval. Five minutes early. The guy took
things seriously and he always made sure he got to a meeting place early to
scope out any potential problems.

“Good story?” The Ufangian – Cal didn’t know his name and wanted
it to stay that way – asked as he sat down and took a big gooey gulp of the
drink that had been waiting for him.

Cal shuddered. He didn’t mind the algae on it’s own, and the
remaining beverage was palatable enough, but he just couldn’t bring himself to
consume the two together like the locals. “It’s all right.” He looked away from
the blue mess at the top of the other man’s mug.

He didn’t bother to ask if the Ufangian had been followed.
He wouldn’t be sitting here if that were the case. “What did you find out?”

A long slurp. He leaned back. “There’s been a lot of
spicewood items showing up in Tsekoh lately. Not many, down this way, of
course,” he amended with a grin, “but up in the money levels folks are showing
off some pretty expensive items. Boxes, hairpins, slate covers, vehicle trim…”

Cal nodded. The latest fad among the wealthy corporate elite
was spicewood. The only reason for an expensive product to even exist was that
it allowed the rich to differentiate themselves from those who weren’t. He’d
heard there was even a restaurant up top, near the tether anchor, that had
started grilling fish in thin sheets of spicewood.

It was incredibly extravagant, seeing as there were only a
few plantations in the Republic that could keep spicewood trees alive and they
needed incredible amounts of terra-conditioning equipment to eke out a few
trunks a season.

It was the first time he’d ever heard of spicewood being
used as a consumable. “So where is it coming from?”

The man took another deep drink, following it up with a
sigh. “I began tracking it from several different vendors, posing as a backer
who had some credits to invest. I ran into a lot of dead ends, of course, but
you don’t get the grains without the husks…”

Cal held his tongue. He appreciated the Ufangian’s skill at
investigation but the guy had a dramatic streak that was better left
un-encouraged. He loved to play up the difficulties in his assignments. Ninety
nine percent of the time, he was a complete sleeper. The rare occasions when
Cal had to make use of his abilities were probably the high point of his dreary
existence and he liked to make the most of it.

A chuckle. “All right. Onto the harvest.” He leaned in
towards Cal. “The one commonality in all this is a warehouse, five levels up
from here. A place owned by a registered smuggler by the name of G’Maj Tumela.
Folks say he bought up an old supply of whole trunks from an estate sale, which
is complete eel-droppings of course.”

“It is?” Cal raised an eyebrow.

“Of course.” The Ufangian waved off the possibility of any
other answer. “Stuff like that is supposed to be old pre-Republic stock. There
hasn’t been any undocumented trunks since the imperial days, so we’d be talking
about wood that sat in a warehouse for at least a couple thousand years.”

Cal shrugged.

“A full, commercial size trunk loses half it’s aromatic
compounds every two hundred years.” The investigator explained. “Anything from
the imperial era has some antique appeal, but the smell is almost completely
gone. You pretty much only see small boxes made from an imperial trunk because
they accumulate some odor between openings and the owner can get a decent sniff
of it.”

He nodded back over his shoulder. “The stuff I’ve seen here
in Tsekoh is fresh – damned fresh. It’s not legacy wood – it’s stuff that got
harvested in the last century at the most.”

“So, it has to be coming down on the tether,” Cal mused. “I
don’t imagine there’d be a secret plantation down here.” He closed his graphic
novel. “And it all goes through this Tauhentan’s warehouse – G’Maj was the
name?”

A grin. “Planning on paying a visit to your planetman?”

“Something like that.”

“Well  he’s off world right now. One of his sons is
looking after the place while he’s gone.”

“Then there’s not a second to waste.” Cal stood, his comrade
following his lead. “It’s the perfect time to pay a call and suggest we’re
interested in doing business. With the kid, we probably won’t be expected to
finalize anything so we can just blather our way in the front door, steal their
data and get the hells out.”

Another grin from the Ufangian. First an investigative
assignment and now a field trip with the big guy himself. “I’ve got a sticky.”
He patted his chest pocket. No need to stop anywhere along the way.”