Sea-urchin boy and horse-face dropped Coleman in a heap at a narrow intersection of two curving corridors, each pausing just long enough to mewl and—well, horse-face shook like he was making a sound but Coleman didn’t hear anything—before vanishing back into the shadows. Not even his suit’s short list of eighteen million different alien species could hope to include every lifeform that wandered the galaxy’s crap farms like the Heavenly Docks, and apparently the two thugs that had just dropped him off were missing from that list. Not that it really mattered. Their meaning had been more than clear enough: got the job done, or get done.
Coleman watched the shadows where the two thugs had disappeared warily and let a count of ten pass before exhaling and chinning his helmet out. The Smarthelm rippled briefly and then decomposed, disappearing into his suit’s collar, and Coleman took a deep, relieved breath of air. As luck would have it, the Hrian who’d built the Heavenly Docks had evolved in an atmosphere fairly similar to that of Old Earth: 65% N2, 20% O2, 14% CO2, and a smattering of other gases. At any rate, it was good enough for Coleman to breath, even if it had taking some adjusting to, three years back. Now, cramped as he was in some God-forsaken corner of the Docks, it merely smelled slightly fetid.
Fetid like his corpse was gonna be if he didn’t find a way to kill Cly M’shtinyb.
And I don’t even own a gun.
A quick twitch of his eyelid initiated his SegVision, bathing the dank corridors in brighter light as his ocular implants painted his surroundings with a variety of info-enhancements and semi-translucent icons. Another twitch of his eye swept away most of the flashing icons leaving his vision clear save for a bright, pulsing bar of blue light that began at his feet and ran off down the corridor to his left, disappearing far, far in the distance around the scarcely perceptible curve of the Docks. The floating piss-pile was a warren no human could have hoped to navigate, and Coleman whispered quick thank-you very much to God for AutoNav systems as he lurched into a jog, following the blue line that led back to the Dock’s inhabited sectors and his current “home”.
How was he going to knock off M’shtinyb? Briefly, while he paused for breath at the next intersection, he considered screwing the job and bolting from the Docks completely—but he discarded that idea almost as soon as it came to him. He doubted there was any ship that would take a human onboard, and even if he found a captain willing to take on a passenger, where could he go? Avantaer was too close. Jendathu would hunt him down, drag him kicking and—literally—screaming back to the Docks and then smear his guts from one end of the Docks to the other.
No, he exactly three options: he could jump through an open airlock and let cold hard vacuum do the rest, or he could trot back to Jendathu, spit in the crab’s eyes and then let the Nagathian do him in, or he could track down M’shtinyb, get in a pot shot or two at the bugger, and then die. Three options—none of them particularly pleasant—and all leading to the same conclusion.
The shining blue Home Bar led him to a long bank of mold-covered elevators that looked like they hadn’t been used in ages, and he palmed the pad of the nearest, bouncing anxiously on his heels and glancing over his shoulder occasionally. He had this irrational fear that M’shtinyb already knew what Jendathu had forced him into—already knew, and was sending his goons to make sure it never happened. When the lift door finally hissed open, he nearly jumped in.
So, three options, and he wasn’t in the mood for suicide, or giving Jendathu the pleasure of ripping him open. That left only one choice: killing the second most dangerous being on the Heavenly Docks and—if possible—surviving the job.
By the time lift doors opened again, he’d moved on to planning his first—and hopefully last—murder. The elevator opened onto the wide, curving expanse of MT-100D, the local parlance for Main Tunnel 100D. As usual, the twenty meter wide passageway was jammed to the rafters with beings from every corner of the galaxy. Literally crammed to the rafters—a crowd of Hrian scuttled past on the tunnel all above his head, chirping to one another like a chorus of gigantic crickets.
Coleman’s SegVision bloomed to life again, Personal Identification Icons, or PIIs, bobbing over everybeing’s head, flashy advertisements painting the tunnel walls and ceiling, and bright public announcement messages and news flashes scrolling by in the empty air near the upper center of the thoroughfare. Coleman’s own PII, a stylized Skull and Crossbones that he doubted anybeing would know the meaning of, was a fake he’d bought three months back.
He angled through the tight crowd, shouldering past two Bo’oramai and working his way to the far wall of the tunnel, where a bank of observation blisters looked out into space. He ducked inside one, sinking gratefully into the cushioned seat that ringed the circular room.
The observation blister protruded from the planet-ward edge of the Heavenly Docks, giving Colemon an uninterrupted view in all directions. To either side, the massive Docks extended, a leviathan ring more than two kilometers thick that shrank to a silver-white, pencil thin line as it dwindled into the distance, curving down and then behind the bright, gray-brown bulk of the Hrian homeworld, Q’charu’ztxzyl—or, as it was better known and more easily pronounced, Glorious Hive. The terminator had crossed nearly half the planet’s face fourty-three thousand klicks beneath Coleman, the black of the night side revealing the honey-comb pattern of the massive Hrian worldhive. Thousands of ships of every type and make imaginable drifted between the docks and the darkening world below, shining like jewels in the blackness of space.
The view was impressive, even breathtaking. Coleman saw none of it.
How do you kill a crimelord?
Coleman would need help, that much was for sure. Professional help, if possible. Luckily, help of that kind was all too available on the Docks, and Jendathu’s promised cash compensation should prove tempting enough for Coleman to use as incentive.
He pulled up a data screen on his SegVision and ran a search for M’shtinyb. Nothing came up. For a half-second he stared at the blank screen, fear knotting his stomach. Then he cursed and slammed his head against the neoglass window. Of course the crime boss wouldn’t show up any public search. What was he thinking? He was going need professional help just to figure out how much professional help he needed!
Calm. He needed to be calm. Squeezing his eyes shut and taking deep, calming breaths, he forced himself to relax. So he needed help, big deal. He’d known that from the beginning. Obviously, that was where he needed to start.
And, as luck would have it, the place for getting the kind of help he needed was right around the corner.
Sliding out of the observation blister, Coleman turned left and pushed back into the crowd. The main tunnels up in the higher levels had sliding walkways and trams and auto-piloted taxis. But they also had higher security, and Coleman had learned long ago that picking a dozen poor beings’ pockets and packs was more profitable—and more healthy—than riding the walkways and dodging private security. So he spent most of his time down below, where beings walked and pockets were looser.
Two hundred meters up the tunnel he turned left through a permanently broken portal and a pair of seedy looking Ch’ogan bouncers into The Underbelly—a hole in the wall tavern/cantina/fiazzen/whatever-a-being-happened-to-call-the-dive-where-he went-to-get-drunk-and-forget-that-he-was-stuck-on-the-Docks.
Coleman had frequented the Underbelly enough to know that there never was a ‘slow-time’ in the cramped tavern; ships were constantly arriving and departing from the docks, and the crews of those ships were always ready to down a cup full of the local moonshine. As usual, the place was crowded cheek to cheek with beings. Pausing just beyond the entryway, Coleman lifted his arms and let the small Feieen waiting there give him a once over with a handheld scanner. As the waist-high creature did his routine, Coleman eyed the crowd.
The Underbelly had been built into the outer wall of the Docks, conveniently utilizing the abandoned nest of some metal-digesting parasites that had somehow snuck onto a grain transport made it from the planet surface up to the docks ages ago. Thus, carved out by non-sentient bugs as it was, the Underbelly had a strange organic feel that followed no particular plan that the Coleman could see. The serving center—on Old Earth Coleman would have called it a bar—dominated the far left of the curving, pitted ‘floor’, and even extended partway up the left wall, where a crowd of Hrian were clustered, standing parallel to the floor and chittering loudly. A group of grub-like creatures that Coleman had never seen before occupied the rest of the tavern floor—he couldn’t tell if the rhythmically contorting slugs were dancing or communicating via body language. Frankly, he didn’t care.
The rest of the walls were pockmarked low and high with deep holes that had once been nesting sites for the parasites, but were now private booths crammed with tables and benches. Some of the booths were sealed with transparent airlocks for the convenience of the Underbelly’s non-oxygen respirating clientele.
The Feieen nudged him forward, its search complete, and Coleman angled through the undulating crowd of sluggish grubs, carefully avoiding touching any of them. The Underbelly’s lights rippled through a wide spectrum of colors—half of which Coleman was sure his eyes couldn’t even see—and a low pulsing beat filled the air and thumped against his chest. The slug things were definitely dancing, he decided.
A small potato-shaped booth bored into the far wall behind the bar was vacant, and Coleman slid into it as quickly as he could, putting his back to the empty, far end of the booth and watching the Underbelly’s entrance nervously, unable to shake the feeling that M’shtinyb was already having him tailed.
He was so intent on watching the entrance that the AI waiter had to speak twice before Coleman even noticed it.
“Sir,” the AI said again, in good old-fashioned English—a sound as sweet as any Coleman had heard in a long while. “Sir, what may I serve you?”
“I’ll take whatever’s being served to my type,” Coleman said, knowing the AI had already scanned him to be sure that no potentially toxic drinks were mistakenly passed his way. The short, rusting robot turned to go, and Coleman quickly added, “Bring me back a writing pad with the drink.”
“Of course sir. Enjoy your afternoon at the Underbelly.”
So it was afternoon, Dock standard time. Coleman hadn’t even thought to check since being dumped by Jendathu’s beings. He brought up a clock on his SegVision, and gulped audibly. It had been roughly half an hour since Jendathu had ‘dismissed’ him, which still left him exactly seventy-one and a half hours to kill M’shtinyb; but, on the other hand, that only left him seventy-one and a half hours to kill M’shtinyb.
He had to get moving quickly.
The AI returned with a tall neoplast glass filled to the brim with a drink so brilliantly green that even Coleman—who’d hardened his gut with many an alien concoction—raised an eyebrow before passing his credcard to the robot. Accepting the payment, the AI swung its second set of arms around and handed Coleman a blank datapad.
“Will that be all, sir?”
Coleman nodded absently, already typing furiously on the data pad. He stopped writing twice to erase everything he’d written and start over. He wanted to attract a very specific type of being—something crooked enough to be of help in planning and carrying out a hit job, but at the same time something dumb enough to not try and simply knock him off and take the job over. After another minute of writing, he paused and studied his short advertisement. Then, satisfied, he ordered the datapad to translate the message into a half dozen of the major trade languages common on the Docks, and then propped the datapad up at the end of his table using his untouched drink as a stand.
The short message read:
Crew needed.
Likelihood of physical harm high.
Reward: Equal shares of 500,000 credit payment.
Amateurs need not apply.
Then, scooting as far back into the shadows as possible, Coleman waited.
