The Star Pirate's Folly (4 page)

As close as they were to the
spaceport, it wasn’t exactly uncommon to see people walking around in nullsuits.
But the only people she’d ever seen wearing them were from the Core Fleet,
which she suspected the man she’d met was definitely not. The ones she’d met
never tried to hide their armor. Whatever the case, Hargrove would know what to
do.

***

As Bee passed the bar area on her
way to the front desk, she glanced over to see if any other guests had wandered
in. Something on the bar where Slack Dog had been sitting glinted in the light.

Upon closer inspection she saw it
was a datapad. She hadn’t noticed it before while she was behind the bar, but Slack
Dog must have left it. Bee pocketed the thin palm-sized device and turned back
to the lobby, figuring she’d take it up to him once she found Hargrove. She’d
make him go in and actually give it to the old man—she shuddered at the thought
of seeing Slack Dog’s… slack dog.

As Bee left the bar, she waved
down Hargrove while he was escorting a guest out the front doors. He motioned
for her to wait and Bee followed him through the lobby to the entrance,
standing nearby while he gave the woman his usual jovial goodbye treatment. A
young doorman took the woman’s bags and Hargrove came back inside.

“Hey,” she said to him.

“Hey yourself, Bee,” he replied,
and jerked a finger toward the empty bar. “Are my customers supposed to serve
their own drinks around here?”

“Actually I need to talk to you,”
she said. “You saw that guy at the bar earlier, right?”

Hargrove curled his lip. “What is
it? Pirate?”

“Ex-privateer.”

“Phah!” he waved a hand. “I knew
it! Pirate, privateer—if there’s a difference I have yet to see it. Bunch of
ruffians!”

Hargrove harbored a deep-seated distaste for anyone who, as
he said,
reduced themselves to such barbarism.
The thin line between
piracy and privateering was merely a legal distinction—the latter was
authorized by the government, the former was not, but the work they carried out
was the same. Pillage and plunder. Pirates just didn’t follow the rules on who
to target.

“Well, some weird guy was hanging
around his room when I went to bring him some food he ordered,” Bee said. Then
she added, “Oh, and the guy—Slack Dog—he didn’t pay his tab. He kept trying to
use these. Says he’s from past the belt.”

Bee showed him the coins Slack Dog
had given her. Hargrove retrieved a pair of inspectacles from his inner jacket
pocket. He slid them onto his nose and poked at the coins in her hand with one
thick finger as the computerized lenses analyzed the coins’ markings and
composition.

“From Styx, eh? Hmmm,” he said. “Don’t
see this stuff here much. Beltway folks don’t trust digital money like we
do—they make physical money from nullsteel. See the band of metal around the
edge? That’s to give it weight, so they don’t just float away on you.”

Hargrove removed the inspectacles
and replaced them in his jacket pocket. Bee put the coins away.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know.
Pretty valuable then? I mean, they make ships out of it, right?”

Hargrove shrugged. “Well, each
coin only has a small amount. Depends how much he’s got. Why?”

“Well I’m pretty sure that guy I
told you about wanted into 302—”

“Whoa, whoa, what kind of
weird
guy
are we talking about here?”

“Tall, ugly, kind of a jerk. Scar
on his left eyebrow. He was wearing a nullsuit under his coat,” she said, and
Hargrove stiffened. “Stank like he’d been wearing it too long.”

Hargrove pointed over her
shoulder.

“That guy?”

Bee followed his finger and caught
a glimpse of the man in the brown coat before he disappeared around a corner.
He was headed to the hotel’s back exit—it was the only thing down that hallway.
His face nagged at her again. He wasn’t someone she’d seen at the hotel before.
But she couldn’t quite place him. Why would she know his face?

“That’s him,” she said.

“Well, he’s gone now. Problem
solved.”

“Let’s go check on 302,” she said,
and moved to the elevators before Hargrove could argue. He followed her anyway
with an exasperated huff.

“You shouldn’t let your
imagination get the better of you,” Hargrove chided her as they entered the
elevator.

She punched the button for the
third floor.

“No, I’m not
imagining
things, Hargrove,” she said. “You just don’t like dealing with stuff like this.
Something’s up. I know that guy’s face.”

The elevator rose with a lurch.

“Something’s up,” he repeated.
“Something’s always
up
.”

Bee opened her mouth to say
something else, but was silenced by a
thump
in her chest followed by a
deafening roar. The elevator stopped with a violent shake, and she was thrown
against Hargrove. He grabbed her and pushed her into a corner, protecting her
with his body. All she could hear was the ringing in her ears.

Hargrove was already dialing the
emergency number into his pad. She could see his lips moving from frantic
shouting, but couldn’t hear him. He wasn’t talking to her anyway. Bee shook her
head to clear it and wondered if it was a bomb.
Then
it hit her like a slap in the face:
t
he man in
the nullsuit had outstanding bounties. That’s why she’d recognized him—she’d
flicked past his face on the bounty boards before! Stupid. If she’d made the
connection sooner she might have warned Hargrove.

“Hargrove I know him,” she said. “He’s
wanted. He’s got a bounty.”

“Hang on,” Hargrove said to the
dispatcher, covering the receiver. “The name, Bee, give me the name!”

“Jensen Lee!” she said. “His
name’s Jensen Lee!”

While Hargrove dealt with the police, Bee slipped up the
stairs to her room and sat in front of the projection display in her room. It
woke at her presence and a keyboard appeared on the desk. Bee ticked her
password in with a familiar flurry and opened the Hotel Employee Portal
program. She used Hargrove’s administrator credentials—she’d learned long ago
that he never bothered changing his password and he had more permissions in the
system than she did.

She clicked through some files and folders until she found
the security footage from the camera outside Slack Dog’s room. She sped past
her confrontation with Lee and watched herself walk into the elevator. When the
doors closed Lee used some kind of device on the lock to open the room. A few
minutes went by and he emerged from the room with Slack Dog’s luggage, took the
stairs down to the ground floor, and made his exit.

Bee thought again of Lee’s bounty and cursed herself for not
recognizing him. He’d been wanted for years in the belt—piracy, kidnapping,
murder. And now this. Slack Dog must have had something valuable in those cases
for Lee to have come all that way, but what? And why the bomb?

She’d heard the pirates were growing stronger and bolder
every year, but Hargrove dismissed such talk as bad for business. This was
different. Brazen. They’d never come to Surface before. It was always quick
strikes on the shipping lanes, one or two vessels captured or looted, and then
they would vanish before anyone could respond. Or they’d blockade some outlying
moon base and ransack it. Why a bomb? He could have just shot, stabbed, or
strangled Slack Dog—the old fool was in no state to defend himself. It didn’t
make sense for Lee to broadcast his presence when he still had to get
off-planet.

But then, Lee hadn’t been expecting anyone to see him. And
certainly not anyone who would recognize him. A bounty hunter wouldn’t be
looking for him where they weren’t expecting him—most of them stuck to the belt,
where the biggest bounties were. Maybe the bomb was supposed to be a
distraction, to allow him to escape.

If that was his intention it backfired in a spectacular way.
There was no way he had time to get back up to the station where his ship was
docked. They’d flag it and alert the station’s guards that Lee was headed their
way. Most likely, if he hadn’t been caught already trying to get offworld,
Jensen Lee was stuck in the city somewhere—
her city
, she thought—with
his stolen suitcases.

And he’d just kicked the hornet’s nest. Half the police
force would be after him. With its domed roof and airlocks, the city was
practically a prison already. The police would post guards at all the exits and
comb the city for him. It would only be a matter of time until Lee was caught. Bee
opened a browser window and searched for news on the incident.

The local media was having a field day—this was the biggest
story in years, even bigger than the Fated Lovers. Bee swiped through news
video after news video, talking head after talking head, and learned nothing
more than she already knew. Then she landed on a live feed where the reporter
was standing with his back to one of the sealed-off airlocks. Two Overlook City
officers leaned against the airlock in the background, protected from the
gathering crowd by police barriers.

Jensen Lee’s face leered at her from a graphic next to the
reporter, the same picture she’d seen on his bounty page. The one she failed to
recognize. Above his face: WANTED. Below it: 20,000 REWARD. They’d quadrupled the
bounty after the attack.

“—also a two thousand credit reward for information leading
to the capture of Jensen Lee. Viewers, please don’t hesitate to call. This man
has been on the run from interplanetary authorities for more than five weeks
and Overlook City’s Commissioner Norton has warned us that the fugitive will
not hesitate to kill again. Until further notice, the city’s walls are closed
to pedestrian traffic, meaning the cancellation of tonight’s Fated Lovers
festivities. We can only speculate what will happen from here—perhaps this is
just the prelude to a larger, more devastating attack.”

Bee closed the window and leaned back in her chair, bathed
in the cool glow of the projected monitor. She realized she’d been sitting in
the dark, and as she got up to turn on the lights Slack Dog’s datapad vibrated
in her pocket. She’d completely forgotten about it. Startled, she grabbed for
the pad and the screen lit up as she brought it out of her pocket.

Bee saw with horror she’d answered a video call. An older
man with a red floral-print bandanna on his head squinted at her from the tiny display,
trying to make out her face. She covered the camera with her thumb, thankful
for the darkness. It looked like he was in a kitchen. She hovered a finger over
the “end” button, but didn’t hang up.

“Well,
you’re
not Slack Dog,” he said. “You’re far
too pretty.”

So he had at least gotten a look at her. Bee considered
ending the call. She was still wearing her uniform—the gaudy dark magenta
outfit was unmistakably that of a hotel employee, and it even had her name on
it. She had no idea who the guy was, or what connection he had to Slack Dog,
but she didn’t want him to know anything more about her than he did already.

“Who are you?” Bee asked.

“An old friend of his,” he said. “And you?”

“No one. I’m sorry to tell you this, but he was the one
killed in the explosion. I guess this is his pad—I found it, I didn’t steal it
or anything. I was going to return it.”

Silver shook his head. “I called as soon as I heard about
the bombing. Damn shame. He was a decent man.”

“What was he doing here?”

Bill frowned. “Why so interested?”

She didn't want to reveal that she worked at the hotel.
Between her face and her job, he'd be able to find out who she was for sure.
She considered hanging up. Whoever the guy was, it wasn't her business. She
could feel the silence after his question growing, and a flutter of panic
brought the first thing that came to mind tumbling out of her mouth.

“I’m a bounty hunter,” she blurted. “Looking for Jensen
Lee.”

Bee had to cover the speaker as the man howled with
laughter. Embarrassed, she felt her cheeks flush. Her mouth had a way of
working on its own when she was flustered. The man wiped tears from the crows’
feet at the corners of his eyes as he shook with mirth.

“Goodbye,” she said, and went to end the call.

“Wait, wait,” the man said, still chuckling. “Please, I’m
sorry. I’m a very rude man. Name’s Bill Silver.”

“I’m not telling you mine,” she said. “Now tell me what’s
going on. Why was Slack Dog killed?”

Silver hesitated for a moment. He looked deep into the
camera, and even though she knew he couldn’t see her, she understood she was
being assessed somehow. Calculated. Again she felt the urge to remove herself
from the situation, but she didn't hang up.

“He had something very valuable,” Silver said.

“What was it?”

“A map.”

“A map of what?”

“Buried treasure,” he said with an adventurous growl.

Bee snorted. “Really.”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of Dreadstar.”

“Dreadstar,” Bee said. The name brought a bad taste into her
mouth.

The body of the ruthless space pirate Dreadstar was on
display at the public museum in Overlook City. She only saw it once as a child,
accidentally. Back when everything was still normal. Mother didn’t know what
they were walking into.

The image flashed in her mind. Every visible inch of his
pale body was covered with tiny black numbers in intricate patterns—his
infamous tattoos, the still-unbroken code that hid the location of his treasure
hoard. The Governor of Overlook had ordered his corpse to be put on display at
the museum and contorted into a snarling battle pose like some kind of morbid action
figure. He held a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, his bionic eye
still blazing with a red light—his namesake. Everyone in the city had seen him
at least once.

People said Dreadstar was a code breaker for Earth’s
Interstellar Fleet who got stranded when the gates went down during the war.
His vessel was forced into hiding in the asteroid belt Styx, where he went mad
and murdered the entire crew before piloting the ship, alone, into pirate
territory. No one knows how exactly he brought the pirate clans under his heel,
but when they joined forces they claimed nearly the whole system as their
territory. It took more than a decade for the Core planets to bring him down
and contain the pirate fleets within the asteroid belt.

Dreadstar’s body was mounted in a display case just inside
the museum’s front doors. It was the first thing Bee saw after she walked in. He
seemed to be charging forward, straight for the door, posed as though he were
perpetually in the midst of staging an escape. Six-year-old Bee immediately
vomited from sheer terror, making for a short museum trip.

That was the same day Mother left her in the crowd.

Bee clapped a hand over her mouth, dropped the datapad onto
her desk with a clatter, and scrambled for the bathroom. Before she could quite
make it to the toilet she puked, and some of it streamed through her fingers
and down her chin. The rest splashed into the water, chunky soup that stuck to
the bowl. Bee dry heaved, but nothing else came up except bad memories.

She flushed the foul contents down the drain, washed her
hands and face, gargled some water, and dried herself with a hand towel.
Luckily she hadn’t gotten any on her uniform or in her hair. She heard Bill
Silver’s deep baritone on the pad in the other room, but couldn’t make it out
over the noise of the toilet.

Bee flicked on the lights. She picked up the pad again, but
didn’t bother covering the camera this time; he’d already seen her, what did it
matter? She peered into the small display. Silver had set his pad down on a
metal countertop. He had his back turned to the camera, and seemed to be
engaged in a conversation with himself as he chopped a bulbous green vegetable
of some kind on a cutting board.

Bee took the opportunity to study the man and his
surroundings. It looked like a ship’s kitchen—from this angle she could see stars
just beyond a round window in the wall. Silver had a white apron tied around
the great girth of his belly, and Bee noted with some curiosity that his left
hand appeared to be bionic. She saw glints of metal shine off the hand in the
artificial light of the kitchen. He used his real hand to cut.

The kitchen itself was clean and organized, with spices,
herbs, and other ingredients arranged in neat rows behind glass cupboard doors.
Silver lifted the cutting board and slid the edge of his knife across it,
sending the diced vegetables tumbling into a large tub, and glanced over his
shoulder at his datapad’s screen.

“Ah,” he said. “The bold bounty huntress returns.”

Bee’s ears burned at the jab. “So, Slack Dog got blown up
for a treasure map,” she snapped, and saw Silver flinch. She regretted her
sharp words.

“Yes, back to business. The long-lost treasure of the space
pirate—well, I’d better not say it,” he said with a grin and another glance at
the camera. “Of course you must know the story. You can’t live in Overlook City
without hearing about him.”

So he did know where she was—of course. He probably knew
which hotel Slack Dog would be staying at if they were supposed to meet. The
thought that he knew her location made her uneasy. He’d revealed it on purpose,
she was sure.

“I grew up there too,” he said, and took on a reflective
tone. “Spent most of my young days on Surface. Best times of my life.”

“The map,” she said. Her voice was quiet.

“Of course,” Silver said. “It’s an encoded list of
coordinates. Dreadstar’s crew spent months spreading their stolen goods across
a vast, complicated network of asteroids in the belt. But before they could
finish, some members of the crew mutinied. No one knows which asteroids are
filled with loot and which ones are just rock, ice, and ore. Total chaos out
there. However, we do know the orbits of many asteroids have been, ah, bumped,
shall we say, which is very common, of course, due to illegal mining operations
and the like—unavoidable, unpoliceable, that kind of thing out there—”

Bee’s heart started pounding as Bill Silver continued to
elaborate on the significance of the map, and she couldn’t concentrate. His
voice droned out and her ears started ringing. Why was she still talking to
him? He was right up there, probably parked at Overlook Station. What if he
already had more men on the way to get this treasure map and he was just
stalling her?

“Hey, little bounty hunter,” Silver snapped. “Don’t you
see?”

“See what?” she said.

“You’re
holding
the map,” Silver said. “Well, a copy
of it.”

Bee looked at the datapad, confused. Silver’s impatient face
scowled back at her. She asked, “If it’s so valuable why are you telling me all
this?”

“You have it. I want it. No need to involve anyone else.”

“Whoa whoa, I am in no way
involved
here. Why don’t
you just come down here and get it?”

“That wasn’t the plan. Slack Dog was supposed to bring it to
me this afternoon. Things always work better when you stick to the plan,”
Silver said. “And besides, you can scurry it up to me just as well as he could
have.”

Bee laughed. “Yeah, except that he was
killed by
a bomb
because he was carrying this map of yours. Jensen Lee is still
out there, you know, and if this is what he’s after—”