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Chapter Twenty-Two

“Didn’t think they’d go in so hard for bloodsport,” Chalmers said, taking in the ranked tiers of stone seats rising from the walls of the arena pit. The place could seat a lot of people.

“You’re kidding, right?” Jackson said. “This kind of competition is just the kind of shit supremacists are into.” He gestured at the arena as they walked down the aisle from the locker rooms the fighters used.

“Jackson’s right,” Vat said. “Given the way they are trained to think, it’s quite natural to do this sort of thing. It ain’t as popular out in the back country ’cause the satraps can’t afford the wasted personnel and medical assets, but it turns out the lesser houses here are constantly looking for ways to prove themselves better than their neighbors without resorting to out-and-out warfare. Thus, the popularity of hand-fighting here among the brokerage personnel.” He gestured at the stone ring at the middle of the building. Stretches of the sandy floor of the arena were still damp with blood from the evening before.

The group of Lost Soldiers made their way down onto the sands and stood looking up at the stands and private boxes. Both were empty.

“Looks expensive,” Chalmers said, spinning on one heel to take it all in.

“It was,” Vat said, outlining some blood with the toe of one sandal.

“Was?”

“Bought it last night,” Vat said, looking him in the eye.

“I thought you said the owner refused your initial offer,” Chalmers said.

Vat shrugged. “He did. And the second. I then made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

“Wake up with a horse head in his bed?” Moose asked.

Everyone turned to look at Moose, but it was Chalmers who blurted, “How do you know that reference?”

“What, just because I’m a big fella, I don’t read?” the Vietnam-era Lost Soldier asked.

“Read?” Chalmers said, shaking his head. “It’s a movie.”

Vat started laughing first, then Jackson.

At last understanding dawned for Chalmers. “Right, the full title of the flick is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather!”

Moose blinked. “They made a movie out of the novel? Like Gone with the Wind?”

Gone with th—” Jackson started.

“More ‘sleeps with the fishes’ than ‘gone with the wind’!” Chalmers cracked.

“Puzo co-authored the screenplay, even,” Vat said, smiling at Moose.

Chalmers looked a question at him. The former arms dealer didn’t seem the type to be a movie aficionado, but neither did he seem the type to be a mob boss.

Vat shrugged. “I watched that film a lot. Young James Caan was…very watchable.”

Chalmers grinned and shook his head.

“I bet the book was better,” Moose muttered in R’Bakuun, eyes roaming the stands.

“Must be an amazing novel…” Chalmers trailed off as he realized the big soldier’s eyes were searching for threats. The exchange had been in English, and while they were supposed to be alone in here, there was always a risk someone was listening, and they were standing in an amphitheater designed to carry sound.

“Damn it,” Chalmers said, in R’Bakuun. “We need to be careful.”

The light mood of before was replaced by a moment’s steady watchfulness from all of them. When no sounds or movement came from the cheap seats or the boxes, they all relaxed, if only marginally.

“But should you be pushing in on someone else’s business like this?” Jackson asked quietly, breaking the watchful silence. “Won’t it attract attention?”

Vat winced, half-shrugging. “The nature of this society makes some notice desirable, especially power plays that are carried out with smooth authority. If it breaks no taboos or jeopardizes no one higher up the food chain, it gets me noticed. Notice means more access to power players and the opportunities they can provide. Combine this with my rapid rise to prominence on the merchant front, and people will start coming to me with information and for opportunities I might provide them. Besides, we needed to get this done before the rest of the surveyors got here. Can’t be more than a few days, now.”

Chalmers shook his head, toeing a darker patch of sand without thinking. His lip twitched in disgust as he realized it was blood.

Jackson was nodding, though. “All makes a sick kind of sense.”

“Who brought the owner the offer he couldn’t refuse?” Chalmers asked, careful not to look at Moose. He’d heard the security specialist had smoked a number of assassins bent on killing Murphy without breaking a sweat.

Vat met his gaze, held it. “Did it myself.”

Uneasy, Chalmers changed the subject. “So, what’s next?”

“I start playing for contracts serving the downport.”

“We can do that?”

Vat smiled. “Brokers are relied on for that. The brokers here are considered more trustworthy than the individual members of the surveyors on some things. In their view, the humble R’Baku are without Houses in the true Kulsian sense of the word, without a serious technological base of their own, and are therefore not considered any kind of real security threat. The brokers earn a living by facilitating the gathering of the biologicals before the Searing and then selling off whatever comparatively high-tech devices and goods the Kulsians leave behind as not valuable enough to freight back to Kulsis, give to their satraps here, or keep mothballed. Indeed, selling any real technology is more a black-market activity than legitimate trade.”

“All right, so how do we use that?” Chalmers asked, resenting the other man’s easy confidence.

“Why, we make nice with a broker or his minions, of course,” Vat said, smiling.

* * *

“Another delivery? I had thought Twin Stars had no more to give after being squeezed by Fangat,” the clerk said, standing in the door of the Fangat warehouse. House Fangat held the Chair of the Broker Principle and wielded a lot of power. So much so their lowest employees seemed to think they could speak openly about Fangat’s role in robbing a lesser brokerage like Twin Stars, even when they were only a warehouse manager, and about as far from the wealthy inner circle as Chalmers was from Earth.

“Yes, Daroz, another delivery of heavy, valuable goods from our good patron to yours,” Jackson said, glancing at Chalmers as he and Moose wrestled the crate from the back of the truck.

Chalmers caught the look and stepped between the truck and the clerk. “Daroz, I have the thing you wanted.”

“Not now, there is work to be done, you filth,” Daroz said. The clerk was a waddling little punk with an inflated ego who felt that everyone should bow before his specialness. Unless, of course, someone of greater station appeared, at which point he behaved as if there were no more loyal or hardworking servants to be had in all the world. He was…thirsty, always looking to suck up to his betters or lord it over others. Of course the disappointment when his expectations met reality had proven a fine avenue to corrupting him.

Sweating in the incredible heat, Jackson and Moose set the crate down just inside the warehouse.

“My friend, you sure you don’t want…?” Holding the manifest in the same hand, Chalmers pulled a box the size of a cigarette pack from his breast pocket and shook a dull rattle from within as he handed both to the clerk.

“Well, I’ll just check the manifest,” the warehouse clerk said, licking his painted lips and taking the box from Chalmers. “I’ll, umm, be back in a few minutes to sign off on everything.”

Jackson shook his head as the guy hurried out of the warehouse, nearly salivating over his prize. A moment later Chalmers heard the faint clack of the latrine door closing behind the clerk. If previous experience was any judge, they had about fifteen minutes.

“Hope his need for the junk you’re pushing doesn’t get him removed or, worse yet, make him OD,” Moose said, his bulk barely shadowing one corner of the vast warehouse door.

“Fuck Daroz,” Jackson said, coming up behind the other man. “You didn’t see him flog the shit out of a couple guys whose only crime was to drop a box. Didn’t even break the contents, just dented the crate. That fucker had ’em whipped till they bled. Like that scene in Roots, man. I had flashbacks and shit.”

Roots?”

“Never mind. After your time. Probably not your jam anyway.”

The sound of Moose’s knuckles popping was like a sequence of slow, wet gunshots. “I suppose I prefer a more direct approach. Saw too many legs in-country get hooked on H to be comfortable with this kind of thing.”

“Focus,” Chalmers said, uneasy with it himself. It was all too easy—far too easy—to fall back into old habits. Shaking his head, he hiked a thumb at the crate sitting just inside the warehouse. “Get that in place, and I’ll keep watch for our thirsty friend.”

Jackson and Messina picked up the crate and carried it farther into the darkened interior of the warehouse. The office was at the receiving end of the huge building. At the far end of the place the goods were transferred to cargo containers newly sent down by the surveyors. They were similar to CONEX boxes back on Earth: built to a regulation size, weight, and volume. The containers didn’t leave the island but were commonly filled at warehouses outside the downport, so they had access to plenty of exemplars.

Chalmers did his part, lounging against the warehouse’s office door and watching for the clerk’s return. It had taken months of careful work to get to this point. If his pride in the job done thus far was wounded by the methods he had to use to accomplish the mission, it was a dull ache rather than the open sore he used to contend with. He shook his head. It still surprised him how much being honest to the people around him mattered. Yes, he had to lie like a rug, cheat, push drugs, do all manner of nasty shit, but doing it for the mission, for the Lost Soldiers’ collective survival rather than for himself, made it somehow right. Like Murphy had said, “Using your dark powers for good.” He’d spent too much time like a rat, killing other rats just to get two more breaths on the sinking ship that was life. It was time to plug the hole that was sinking the ship, even if that meant swimming in some of the same old shit.

He started to pull at his lip but stopped with his hand halfway to his mouth. The sunblock paint jobs were a pain in the ass, but they did allow a certain amount of built-in disguise. That, and they were supposed to prevent skin cancer, an illness he wasn’t eager to try on for shits and giggles. Not after watching his grandfather’s nose get cut and recut to remove a tumor.

At least the paint, unlike so many sunscreens from his time, didn’t smell like coconuts, which smelled like Malibu—the rum, not the place, which always summoned to mind a certain night puking his guts out in a Cabo gutter.

A rumble in the western sky announced a lighter on final approach. He resisted the urge to look at a watch he didn’t wear while on the island and pretended a disinterested squint at the heavy security gate that kept the riffraff out of the downport proper.

The huge, angular craft thundered by high above the gates, held aloft by nacelles that rotated its vastly powerful engine into a VTOL attitude as it slowed for landing and eased out of view below the fence line.

Chalmers suppressed the urge to gape. Since arriving just days ago, the so-called surveyors had been flying in and out of Downport at one hell of a tempo, dropping off personnel and their gear—all of which made him feel like he was in the middle of some sci-fi flick. He dragged his gaze from what was definitely some Star Wars–level shit back to the gate. None of the security contingent had even looked up. He’d have to look elsewhere for distracting the guards, some of whom were Kulsians who’d been on the first wave of landers. And those who weren’t from off-world didn’t want to get caught gawking.

Port traffic had steadily increased since his first visit with the crew of the Loklis, but, unlike his previous experience with smuggling, that increase in traffic had made security tighter, not more lax. He’d run the questionable behavior by Murphy, who’d asked their allies. The SpinDogs had a ready, if unwelcome, answer: the increased security measures were motivated more by the internal conflicts that so plagued Kulsian-style rule than by any real concern over threats posed by a given satrap or, more laughable still, the barbaric nomads. That was the reason they’d placed their downport here, so far from the mainland. It certainly wasn’t convenient, but it was safe. An entire town of brokers and traders had grown up around the inner port. Not Kulsian, not satraps—they were a class unto themselves, sourcing and shipping those goods not seized outright by the reavers in the long lead-up to the Searing and then living off the proceeds in between.

Still, that they were so meticulous in guarding against internal threats meant problems for the operation. Penetrating the downport—he wanted to call it a starport, even though actual starships didn’t land there—would be a lot harder than getting past security on the seaport. He’d tried to imagine how cutthroat Kulsian politics must be to generate such paranoia, but even films like The Godfather left him wondering if the mafia was paranoid enough.

The rumble of the lighter’s drives eased back to a heavy drone and then ceased altogether. The security detail on the gate, a squad of painted men wearing what he’d been told was the gray of survey security uniforms, passed a small convoy of trucks onto the port property. Probably preparing to load the ship with cargo. The lighters usually took a day or two to refuel and prep, but they could speed that up in an emergency. It was pretty amazing when Chalmers thought about it. It had taken months for NASA to plan and execute shuttle launches into Earth’s orbit, and here these assholes could turn a truly interplanetary ship around in a matter of hours. Probably less if they were in a real hurry.

“A hive of scum and villainy, indeed,” he muttered.

“Just your kind of place, Obi-Wan,” Jackson said from behind him.

“Who?” Moose asked emerging from the shadows behind Jackson.

“Never mind,” the partners chorused as the latrine door flew open. Daroz staggered when the door’s rebound clipped his shoulder as he walked out into the light of both suns.

“Must be scratching that itch pretty good, Chalmers,” Jackson murmured, nodding at the clerk, who had a dope-happy smile pasted across his face.

“Maybe too good,” Moose said, equally quietly.

“He’s where I want him,” Chalmers muttered.

Coming to an unsteady halt, Daroz thrust the manifest back at Chalmers.

Seeing the signature crawled across the bottom, Chalmers bowed over it. “All is in readiness, Daroz,” he said aloud, silently adding, You thirsty fuck.

“Then why are you still in my sight?” Daroz asked, dismissing them. He wheeled away to walk, loose-legged, back into his office.

“Mount up,” Chalmers said, reflecting that some assets served best by being burned sooner rather than later.


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