Chapter 3
Jayce and Kay walked along the edge of a massive barge. The vessel was three levels high. Open archways gave glimpses of bars, games of chance, and scantily clad workers on the uppermost level. Music and laughter spilled out like a siren’s call to sailors with too much money and not enough restraint.
“Amazing how the pleasure boats always show up around the big paydays,” Kay said. “We spend months earning on the docks and the waters and then the Syndicate shows up to claw it all back.”
“Yet we never learn,” Jayce said. “Where’s this contact of yours? I don’t want to go in there, but I’m getting hungry and I saw a curry shop.”
“Down, down.” Kay pointed to a ladder hanging over the edge of the walking deck. Jayce peered over the edge. Smaller tender boats were moored against the under-level of the barge. Syndicate guards with the same double-star armbands milled about.
One of the guards looked up to blow smoke from a cigar into the air and saw Jayce. He removed the cigar from his mouth and pointed it down the row of boats and flicked ash away.
“I don’t like this,” Jayce said quietly.
“Like? There’s no liking. There’s making money or not. Which do you want to do?” Kay poked him in the back.
“This goes bad and I’m going swimming,” Jayce said and swung a leg down to the ladder.
“That goes without saying,” Kay said. “Steel carp aren’t attracted to the noise and all the trash from a party like this. At all.”
Jayce froze on the ladder for a moment, then kept descending. When he reached bottom, an alien Syndicate member with rubbery red skin and bristled orange hair patted Jayce down, then sent him on with a tilt of his head. More guards carrying slug throwers milled around beneath the upper deck. Thick metal walls separated the machinery and storage areas that made all the fun above possible.
Jayce and Kay went to a boat docked beneath the upper level where a pair of human Syndicate thugs stopped them on the pier.
“This him?” a lean woman asked, her eyes on Jayce.
“Yes, yes, best river rat on Hemenway,” Kay said. “If there’s nothing else, then I’ll take my money and be—”
“You stay,” a man called out from behind them. The speaker was well built, with dark hair slicked back behind his ears. He had a pistol slung low on one hip and the Syndicate binary-star symbol sewn into his jacket. A slight woman covered in a deep purple veil followed behind him. The gold threading around the binary marked him as an underboss, responsible for enough Syndicate business that his word was law most anywhere on the planet.
“You said there was a finder’s fee.” Kay hunched slightly and clutched his arms to his chest.
“What? Really?” Jayce gave his friend a dirty look.
“Of course there’s a finder’s fee.” The underboss walked around the pair. “But what if you’ve brought me a dud? That’s not fair to me and my interests if you hop back to your warren. Hard for me to collect on a bad debt.”
“This is Boss Grellen’s flotilla,” Jayce said. “I’m not a prospect or even an associate to any boss. I don’t want any trouble with the families.”
“Smart kid.” The man put a cigarette in his mouth, then lit it by scraping two fingernails together. Hidden cybernetics sparked and a tiny flame burnt the tip. “I’m Carotan. This is my barge. I paid the docking fees to Grellen and he’ll get his cut of my profits. Everything’s on the up and up, so I’m fine and that means you’re fine. But there’s something else I’m here for. Bellarra?”
The woman under the veil stepped closer to Jayce.
“You know the Ancients’ Shrine up the Tangief Estuary?” Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
Jayce took a step back and bumped into a guard that grabbed him by his shoulders. His heart pumped harder and an old, almost forgotten fear, filled his chest.
“He knows,” the woman said.
“It’s been years,” Jayce said. “The path there’s almost always impassable because of—”
“The signs tell me it’s open,” the woman said. “We can get there, but we do not know the way.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Jayce shrugged off the guard’s touch. “I can’t get there in any of these scows.” He waved a hand at the docked tenders.
“How’d you get to the Shrine?” Carotan narrowed his eyes at Jayce.
“Pilgrims took my mother and me to the Shrine . . . We never made it inside, but we got to the entrance. I remember the way. What it looks like,” Jayce said.
“Never should’ve let the Pilgrims get off-world,” the Syndicate woman said from the boat behind Jayce. “Freaks are too valuable.”
“You interfere with the Pilgrims and the Adherents come to balance the scales,” Carotan said. “It’s never worth it. The Founders know this and that’s why anyone with the colors is forbidden to bother the Pilgrims. Get smarter, Norva.”
Norva slapped the top of the gunwale and shook her head.
“I need a guide to the shrine,” Carotan said to Jayce. “That’s all. You get us there, you get us back. You don’t even have to go inside. Then you never mention this to anyone ever again. Deal?”
He held a hand out to Jayce.
Jayce looked at the hand. “I don’t work for free.”
Carotan raised an eyebrow, then glanced up at the ceiling.
“It won’t be as easy as potting up eels or ’dines. Say two thousand quanta.” Carotan smiled.
Jayce’s eyes went wide. The Syndicate underboss had read him like a book . . . or Kay had told him about Jayce’s desire to get off-world.
“I’m feeling generous. Two thousand two hundred.” Carotan turned his palms up. “Only way you’ll make any more than that this fast is if you get lucky on my tables. And let me tell you a secret: no one gets that lucky on my tables.”
“Drop the money in a Goodman account before we leave or no deal,” Jayce said. A glimmer of hope rose in the back of his mind.
“This little shit thinks he can leverage us?” Norva hissed. “Let me give him a good kicking to remind him who he’s dealing with.”
“Now, now. The Founders insist that everyone that does business with the families gets paid. Bad business if creditors end up dead. Harder to get anyone to work with us, particularly in these trying times.” Carotan poked a fingertip into a wristband and a holo screen appeared between them.
Jayce’s eyes darted over the contract as Carotan filled in forms.
“Wait, is this an AI contract?” Jayce asked.
“They’re only illegal in the Federation. I keep my AI core in an EMP shell with plenty of kill switches. Don’t worry. No repeat of the Collapse on my watch . . . There. We get back and you cash out. No matter what we find.” Carotan pressed a thumb to a blinking field.
Jayce’s thumb hovered over the blinking field. “This contract is for ‘services rendered.’”
“The numbers are what’s important. I don’t want my brother to have any worries about what we find in his territory. He might want a cut,” Carotan said.
“Fair enough.” Jayce put his thumb to the blinking field. “Boss Targ’s skimmed plenty of money off of me.”
“Inked and filed.” Carotan flicked his hand through the holo and it vanished. “Get aboard. I’m told we can’t take our time on this one.”
“That scow?” Jayce looked back and forth from Carotan and the tender with Norva on it. “There’s no way it has the range to get to the Shrine and back.”
“Get up here, river rat.” Norva stomped the deck. Jayce stepped onto the boat and followed Norva to the engine block at the stern. More Syndicate members came aboard; the alien bruiser had Kay by the scruff of the neck.
“Just give me my finder’s fee and I’ll go!” Kay’s webbed feet kicked back and forth. “I’ll—I’ll hit the tables before I leave! Even the rounder game with the triple zeros. Everyone knows that’s a rip-off!”
“You get paid when I know you’ve delivered what you promised.” Carotan poked Kay in the chest. “You want to be a problem or you want a day’s pay added to your fee?”
“You’re getting paid to deliver me?” Jayce asked. “I’m hurt, Kay.”
“I’ll work! I’ll work!” Kay squealed. The guard dropped him on the deck.
“Look here.” Norva slapped Jayce on the arm. She glanced around, then lifted up a panel. Pale white light illuminated her face.
“It can’t be . . .” Jayce looked into the engine block. An ivory sliver no bigger than a fingertip glowed within a power cradle. “Where’d you get a phase crystal? Is it Attuned?”
“If it was Attuned it would be in a hyper ship, not down here.” Norva slammed the panel shut. “Any worries about our range now? No? Good. Then add this to your list of things you never saw and get to the conn and tell Gorgi the course to the Shrine.”
“A blessing.” Carotan sent his men to the outer edge of the tender’s deck with the words. “Bellarra, roll the bones.”
The veiled woman touched a cloth bag tied to her belt.
“I rolled this morning, sir . . . we may anger their spirits,” the mystic said.
“Can’t leave the dock without a blessing.” Gorgi, a rail-thin man with a cybernetic right arm, leaned out of the conn. The rest of the crew grumbled. Everyone on Hemenway lived and died on the seas and rivers and sailors’ superstitions were ingrained.
Jayce reached up and gripped the upper edge of the conn booth. He heaved himself onto the top. He tested the grip of his shoes on the metal. The last lookout had kept the top free of mold and had scratched up the metal for better footing.
“As we wish.” Bellarra pressed her palms together in front of her chest, then chanted as she raised her hands up overhead, then let them separate as she kept her gaze to the sky. She went to one knee, then drew the small bag. She held the opening to her mouth and exhaled, then overturned the bag.
Small flecks of what looked like silver and ivory spilled onto the deck. Each lacked the luster of the phase crystal powering the engine block, but kept a hint of internal light. The fragments rolled about . . . then oriented of their own accord, all pointing straight at Jayce.
The Syndicate crew looked over at him.
“Due east, three degrees off declination until we pass Widower Rock.” Jayce pointed the same direction as the flecks and out across the water.
“Our quest is true.” Bellarra did a double take at Jayce, then she hurriedly scooped everything back into the bag.
“Unmoor, get us out of here.” Carotan slapped the railings. “The sooner we get there . . .” He rubbed his hands together.
Jayce bent over the front of the conn booth and looked through the window at the pilot. “What’re we even looking for?”
“You’re getting paid to guide us. I’m paid to steer,” Gorgi said. “Mind your own business then, yeah?”
“You don’t know,” Jayce deadpanned.
“No. But the boss wouldn’t risk so much for something unless it was worth a hell of a lot,” Gorgi said.
“Head-down-mouth-shut sort of thing.” Jayce gave the side of the conn two slaps. “Watch for strangle kelp out past the first buoy. It’s thick this season.”
He hopped back on his feet and grabbed a bit of molded plastic around a guy wire. He leaned forward as the boat chugged away from the dock and out into the fog.