In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (23 page)

* * * *

I cycled through the airlock with a stun
grenade in one pocket and a combination scanner in the other. The grenade was
in case Anya’s horde of drunken Drakes took a dislike to me and the c-scanner
was so I could stick my nose where it didn’t belong.

A flimsy pressure tube, twisting through vacuum from
the station’s outer hull, had been attached to the ship by thrusterbots with
barely a safety check. It was old and patched and there was a disturbing hiss
of escaping air warning of an unseen pinhole leak, but the pressure seemed stable
so I quickly pulled myself along the guide cable to the station’s outer door.
Once through to hard deck and gravity, I headed toward the station’s backbone,
the massive shaft holding the cross-arms in place. The air was musty and laden
with a foul mix of human and chemical smells, but tolerably breathable.
Somewhat reassuringly, grimy maintenance bots crawled over the bulkheads
checking for leaks indicating there was some semblance of pressure discipline.

The corridor led past dozens of docking ports to a
crowded plaza lined with bars, brothels and merchants. It rang with raucous laughter,
music and loud voices and smelled of stale drink, sweat and roasting meats. Unlike
most human ports, there was not a single nonhuman among them, testament to the
fact the Brotherhood shared no secrets with aliens. One look told me I was underdressed
in my brown flight jacket, dark pants and magnetic boots – workmanlike clothes
but dull compared to what the Drakes wore.

The men dressed in mismatched body armor sprayed
in bright colors, the bolder the better. The Drakes were scroungers, grabbing
any piece of personal protection they could find and customizing it according
to their gaudy tastes. Punctuating their garish body armor were gold rings: on
their fingers; in their ears, and every possible piercing. Beneath the armor,
they wore white or gray shirts and loose black pants. Few wore space boots. Most
preferred armored combat boots painted with various decorations suggesting they
were sufficiently adept in zero-g that they didn’t need magnetic anchoring. It
was a competition of sorts, between alpha males jostling for dominance, all
armed to the teeth and ready to shed blood at any perceived slight.

By contrast, the woman came in two varieties: those
who inhabited the station and those who did not. The enterprising ladies who
lived aboard and maintained a revolving door of clients wore clothes as bright
as the men, although more skin was displayed than concealed. Bulges in the
wrong places hinted at weapons secreted about their bodies and the freedom with
which they moved from one group to another showed they did as much of the
choosing as the men. Some were young and beautiful, most were not, but all had
eyes alert to the next opportunity.

The second type of woman showed little flesh,
choosing instead to clad herself in body armor painted in matching colors. They
were the spacers like Anya, visibly armed and as lethal any man, with a
strength that ensured liberties were offered, not taken.

Many pairs of suspicious eyes followed me as I slipped
through the rowdy throng. My sniffer area-scanned them all, comparing their
signatures to my bionetic memory’s most wanted list, finding many hits. Several
times I sidestepped drunken men beating each other’s brains out. Bare knuckles,
elbows and knees flew but no matter how much blood splattered the decks, no
weapons were drawn. These were ‘friendly’ fights, cheered on by laughing
onlookers who drank, snorted, sniffed and wagered as the men – and sometimes
the women – pounded each other to pieces. A few times, derisory voices yelled
at me, but I ignored them, slipping away through the crowd before an insult could
develop into something more threatening, hoping they were too drunk to follow.

Where the open plaza met the station’s spine, a
raised platform displayed a line of male and female captives, most dressed
similarly to me, facing a large audience. One Drake stood on the podium shouting
over the jeers and laughter of the crowd as other buccaneers pushed one of the captives
forward. He was in his forties, face bruised with his hands tied behind his
back.

“Here’s a likely fellow!” the auctioneer on the
podium yelled, glancing down at the data screen in his hand. “Skilled in vacuum
welding, structural assembly and corrosive decontamination!” The auctioneer
nodded approvingly as he turned toward the man. “What experience you got?”

When the prisoner didn’t reply, one of the guards
open handed his ear. “Answer the man, scum!”

The prisoner winced, then said, “Nine years. I was
a construction worker on Onyx Four, in the Kazaris Belt.”

The auctioneer turned to the audience, impressed.
“You hear that boys? A construction worker from the Kazaris Belt! He’s trained.
Send him out to fix your hulls when you don’t want to risk a crew brother or a
hullbot. Do I hear a thousand credits?”

“How much for the girl?” someone shouted from the
crowd.

“More than you can afford, Gadnar Pit! Now get
back down to old Lulu on K deck where you belong! Thirty seconds with her is
all you need!” the auctioneer declared, followed by jeering laughter from the
crowd. “Brothers! How much for this highly trained Kazaris ‘roid hugger?”

“Five hundred,” a man declared in a vaguely
familiar, Afro-east accent. He was a tall, dark skinned cutthroat with braided
hair and a face half melted from plasma burns. In spite of his gruesome scars,
I recognized him instantly. It was Gwandoya, a regional leader of the
Brotherhood I’d had a run in with a year ago. I’d left his ship a fiery wreck, which
almost certainly made me responsible for his face. A single lifeboat had
launched, which I now knew had carried him to safety as he abandoned his crew
to their fate.

Knowing I’d be a dead man if Gwandoya saw me, I
hurried away from the auction, regretting again my spacer clothes. After
slipping through a large corridor equipped with an auto-sealing safety door, I
entered the station’s spine, listening for any sign I’d been spotted. Here the
riotous sounds of the plaza faded into the muted thrumming of machinery
essential to the drift station’s life. While the cross-arms had grown
organically from derelict ships and salvaged parts, the spine had been
carefully engineered to sustain a complex and ever changing artificial habitat
deep within the Acheron’s freezing darkness.

Satisfied I wasn’t being followed, I caught the
transit tube running through the station’s spine to the next cross-arm, then
headed out toward the maintenance dock where a Super Saracen was being
transformed. The only people on this level were dock workers, and pairs of Orie
mercs dressed in light and dark gray fatigues manning access checkpoints. The
guard’s quiet discipline was a stark contrast to the chaotic Drakes and the
thoroughness of their identity checks told me they wouldn’t let me anywhere
near the Super Saracen.

Before I attracted attention, I headed back to the
spine, then walked up a series of broken conveyor ramps to the level above. It
was poorly lit, used by cargobots carrying sealed containers to and from the
storage facilities located there. I immediately fell in beside a fully laden cargobot
as if I was supervising its delivery. When I was back out to where the Super
Saracen was docked, I pressed my combination scanner against a sealed pressure
door and hoped Drake security locks weren’t deviously encrypted. It took only
seconds for the hatch to unlock, revealing a dark compartment full of storage shelves
stacked with equipment. I slipped inside, pocketing the c-scanner and easing the
hatch shut behind me.

“State your part number!” a mechanical voice snapped
from the darkness.

I spun around, hand going to my gun as a conical spotlight
blinked on and swiveled toward me. Out of the darkness, a metallic column twice
my height glided to me on a circular base. Below the spotlight were two thin,
telescoping arms that independently slid up and down its sides as if on rails.

“What?” I asked uncertainly.

It came to a stop in front of me, aiming its light
down into my eyes. “I require a UniLog Catalogue Number to access your required
part.” The spotlight narrowed from a cone to a tight beam. “You do know your
part number, don’t you!”

“No,” I said slowly, “can’t you tell me?”

“I am a Universal Logistics Support System able to
catalogue, store and access over ten billion components manufactured by more
than two million industrial facilities on fifty one human worlds. I am not a
mind reader!”

Either a bored station tech had been tinkering
with the Drake logistics system’s interactives or this warehouse bot was about
to short circuit. I decided to play along. “I’m looking for a Superdyne
Vectorex thruster assembly.”

The tight beam flashed back to a cone. “We do not
carry that component!”

“Yes you do! A shipment came in last week, to this
location. I ordered it especially.”

“Impossible! No such delivery was received.”

“You lost it? A UniLog SS lost my component?”

“No components have ever been lost, except for when
humans failed to transmit the correct dataset – which was not my fault!”

“Maybe you were affected by the power failure?”

“What power failure?” the machine asked
indignantly.

“The one that caused you to lose my thruster
assembly.”

“I have no record of any power failure!”

“Well my thruster assembly’s here. You better find
it or you can catalogue yourself as a spare part for your replacement!”

The columns’ arms slid up and down its sides
alarmed. “I will conduct an immediate stocktake of all components.”

“How long will that take?”

“Twenty six hours, thirty one minutes.”

“I’ll wait.”

The erratic warehouse bot turned sharply and glided
off through the darkness to the far end of the compartment, giving my eyes a
chance to adjust. While it busily counted nuts and bolts, I hurried down an
aisle between crowded shelves to an industrial sized airlock flanked by a row
of thrusterbots. Beside the airlock was a grimy viewport overlooking the Super
Saracen.

The ship was bathed in beams of light and anchored
to the maintenance dock by gantries extending from the station. Thrusterbots
floated around her, guiding heavy naval turrets into indentations in the cargo
doors precisely engineered to match the weapon mounts. Other thrusterbots attached
armor and installed ship defenses, all supervised by human engineers in
thruster suits. It was an efficient, automated process my threaded optics
recorded for later analysis, although it didn’t take a naval architect to realize
the Super Saracen and its various armaments had been manufactured separately, perhaps
in locations hundreds of light years apart, then brought here for assembly far
from Earth Navy’s prying eyes.

A thrusterbot lifted off its cradle behind me and glided
toward the airlock door, rotating and twisting its two articulated arms as part
of its carefully choreographed preflight readiness check. Emblazoned on its
side were the words:
SHINAGAWA STATION, UNIT 5076
, although I doubted the
machine had ever seen service at the giant Japanese shipbuilding orbital in
Core System space. More likely, someone was using Shinagawa as a cover for
building thrusterbots prior to shipping them to Acheron Station.

An operation on this scale required coordination
and access to construction facilities across Mapped Space, all under the noses
of Earth Navy, UniPol and the EIS. It was something that could only have been
done by the Consortium and might have gone unnoticed if not for one dead EIS
agent who was never far from my thoughts.

After imaging every part of the Super Saracen for
Lena and her EIS analysts, I slipped quietly back into the corridor, unnoticed
by the eccentric UniLog warehouse bot, and headed for the
Merak Star
. I
gave the prisoner auction – and Gwandoya – a wide berth, then when I was
halfway across the plaza, a bearded Drake with thick, tattooed arms and wearing
a dark purple chest plate stepped in front of me.

“What have we got here?” he slurred drunkenly, grabbing
my arm as he looked me up and down. The bearded bully carried a metal jug sloshing
with ale that splashed over the sides as he turned to his crew mates sitting
around a table. “Looks like he should be on sale!” The other Drakes and their
female companions laughed, smelling blood, then he turned back to me. “You
wouldn’t be escaping now, would you?”

“I’m off the Cyclops,” I said, trying to wrench my
arm free of his vice-like grip without overly provoking him.

“The Cyclops! You?” He belly laughed. “What’s it
like taking orders from that tight assed bitch?”

“I take orders from Rix,” I said, shifting my
position.

“Rix?” the Drake declared in surprise. “Does he
even exist? I’ve never seen him.” He turned to his crew mates. “Any of you ever
seen Rix?”

They shook their heads, impatient for blood. One
of the woman yelled, “Anya made him up so she could be captain!”

The big brute in front of me took a swig from his
jug, then turned toward the auctioneer and yelled, “Hey Skunkweed, I got one of
your boys here trying to run!”

A hundred heads turned toward us, leaving me no
quiet way out. I stepped back dragging the Drake’s arm after me, caught his
wrist and twisted, locking his elbow then drove my palm into it. There was an
audible crack as the joint snapped, then rage exploded across his face.

“I was just being friendly!” He declared angrily, throwing
his mug onto the deck and reaching into his trouser pocket with his good arm. Instead
of a gun, his clenched fist emerged holding a knuckle stunner. The curved metal
knuckle shield glowed to life, warning one punch would land with ten times its normal
force. In the hands of a drunken mountain like him, one blow would be fatal –
if he could land it. His eyes narrowed menacingly. “Now I’m going to be
un
friendly!”