As soon as Coleman Ainsworth came to, he realized he was in trouble.
For starters, he was hanging upside down and he was pretty sure that was a bad thing. On top of that, someone had activated his vacsuit’s Smarthelm. He could see his own bedraggled reflection on his faceplate, and hear his rattled breathing fighting with the air cycler. His pulse pounding in his ears was startling loud in the confines of his helmet.
He could feel the synthmesh suit flexing rhythmically against his body, fighting against gravity to keep his blood pressure equalized in his arms and legs—which, apparently, he couldn’t move.
“Okay buddy, keep it together.” His grimaced at the loudness of his own voice, then added in a whisper, “You’ve been in worse spots than this.” And he really had. Nothing came to mind at the moment, but he definitely had.
Someone had opaqued his helmet—he couldn’t see a thing beyond his own reflection—and he practically sobbed with relief when a gentle thrust of his chin brought up the holocontrols before his eyes. Chinning quickly through the suit’s myriad systems, he deactivated the blast-tint.
A pale red glow surrounded him beyond his suit, leaving most of wherever he was shrouded in shadow. He was in a tensor field, suspended upside down in the g-wave trap. For a half-second he struggled uselessly against the red energy waves, cursing and panting and praying that the sweat pouring down his face wouldn’t fog up his helmet; then, still trapped, he let his body sag uselessly into the field’s grasp. He was trapped.
His movements, restricted as they were, had still told him something about his surroundings: the pressure outside of his suit was incredibly high; it felt like he was dragging his limbs through water. So either he was under water, or—
The grating hiss of an opening portal filtered through his suit’s audio system and a sickly green light bloomed around him. Jerking about in the tensor field, he could just barely make out the bright circle of an open airlock, and silhouettes of three beings forcing their way through. One of the shadows paused momentarily, and Coleman winced when a bright white light blinked on above his feet, practically slapping him across the corneas.
A slurping, wet sound broke the silence, and when Coleman opened his eyes again he was staring into the face—or what passed for the face—of the last being he had wanted to see.
The alien opened its wet sphincter of a mouth and slurped again, a long sound that reminded Coleman of the sound oil makes as it drains through a clogged pipe, and this time the dry voice of Coleman’s suit translator chimed in.
“A most pleasurable greeting to you, Ainsworth.” The alien made a burping sound and the suit continued, “Nice of you to pay me a visit.”
Grimacing and wishing he could spit at the creature, Coleman said, “How could I resist the invitation, Jendathu?”
Another belching/squelching reply. “Yes. You should be more careful, you miserable [untranslatable—probably insulting]. On the Heavenly Docks, dark tunnels don’t make good places to hide from Security. Lucky for you my [untranslatable—probably similar to ‘posse’] ran into you.”
Coleman suppressed a groan. So that was how he’d ended up here. He’d been wandering along the main branch of Dock 198, looking for easy targets for a quick pickpocket job when he’d spied a quad of Hrian Security drones angling through the crowded tunnel towards him. There hadn’t been time for a clever escape, and he’d ducked down the first side tunnel he could find—and the alien before him now was right: on the Heavenly Docks, leaping before you looked was a almost as dangerous as playing Russian Roulette.
Jendathu Seep was still sniggering at him—a sound like wet towels slapping rotting meat. The most active black market boss on Heavenly Docks was a big alien, something like a cross between an Old Earth squid and crab that would have towered a good half meter over Coleman. No head, just a long torso ringed with black-marble sized eyes that was supported by four thick legs that ended in grasping claws. The snorking laughter was coming from Jendathu’s mouth—basically a single thick, mucous-ringed lip that was situated beneath the creature’s torso and half-hidden by a thick fan of tentacles that writhed in a hundred directions at once. One his slug-colored back—like all the males of his species—Jendathu carried a clutch of thousands of pea sized eggs, and judging from their green color and the copious amounts of liquid draining from them, they were about to hatch.
In short, the Nagathian crime lord was about as disgusting as they come, even for a place like Heavenly Docks.
Coleman was getting tired of Jendathu’s chuckling, so he cut in. “Thanks for the rescue, Seep. Can I go?”
“Go?” A dozen tentacles lifted up to stroke the blunt end of the alien’s torso in an eerie imitation of a contemplating human. “Believe me [untranslatable—probably insulting], I’d like nothing more than to jettison you. You’re dirt to me, human. But my friend here”—six of Jendathu’s tentacles twinned together into a single limb and gestured to one of the two hulking aliens that were lurking in the shadows—“is one of my [untranslatable—probably similar to ‘posse’] that rescued you from the Security forces.”
A dangerous glint rippled through Jendathu’s eyes, and the Nagathian leaned closer, “He seems to think you owe me.”
The hulking alien that from Coleman’s inverted perspective seemed to be a multi-armed starfish/sea urchin shrouded in a vacsuit made a startlingly cat-like meow that his suit didn’t even try to translate and Jendathu slurped, “And I never disappoint my employees.”
The situation was deteriorating rapidly, and Coleman knew it. Desperately he twisted inside the tensor field and shouted, “I don’t have any money, Seep. You know that!”
“Who said anything about money, you filthy [untranslatable—probably a colloquial reference to excrement]? I need a job done, and you happen to be here in a position to help me with it.”
Coleman shrank back as far as he could from Seep. Anything the crime boss wanted him to do would land him in deep trouble with Security—way beyond anything he had coming his way for pick-pocketing.
“Look, Seep . . . you don’t want me. Security already has an eye on me. I’m branded. You want Geslib down on Dock 123, or Fu over in Orbit Town. They”—
Jendathu snapped two of his tentacles together, and the two aliens lurched forward into the light—star fish boy and a hulking horsey thing with four arms and no apparent eyes that wasn’t wearing a vacsuit. They were both carrying wicked looking knives as long as Coleman’s arm.
“My [untranslatable—probably similar to ‘posse’] here, they are good at getting people to do what I say.” Jendathu continued, gesturing at the knives. He shouldn’t have bothered. Coleman was having enough trouble looking away from them. “Normally, we would do a little cutting and slicing, but with you, I don’t think we’ll bother.” The alien gestured at Coleman’s suit. “These rooms are designed for my comfort, you see. Too much pressure for you, I think, and I have heard that humans like yourself don’t breathe so well in methane. Just give his suit a little cut, boys, and then we’ll throw out the body.”
The two big aliens started forward, brandishing their knives, and Coleman knew that he had lost. “All right,” he shouted, “All right! I’ll do the job.”
Seep spat something and the two aliens reversed course, shambling back to the shadows. “You are a smart man, Ainsworth. As far as you humans go.”
“My mother told me the same thing.”
Apparently the sarcasm didn’t translate, because Jendathu just went on talking. “And to show you I have no hard feelings, I’ll even throw in 500,000 in cash once the job is done. But it will have to be done quick. I need you to kill a being.”
Coleman closed his eyes and muttered a silent prayer. He’d known this was going to be bad.
“You have heard of Cly M’shtinyb, perhaps?” Coleman nodded, his stomach dropping like a rock. If Jendathu Seep was the number one thug on Heavenly Docks, Cly M’shtinyb was close runner up. The two thugs’ organizations had been at each other’s throats on and off ever since Coleman had landed on Heavenly Docks three years back.
“That piss-brained [untranslatable—possible reference to legitimacy of birth] has been cutting into my business for years. I want him dead.”
“You want me to kill M’shtinyb?” Coleman gasped, jerking in his bonds. “Are you crazy? My guts’ll end up splattered from here to planetside!”
“Perhaps you wish for me to—how do you put it?—splatter your guts right here?”
“No. No. I’ll do it,” Coleman shook his head wearily. “But it’ll take a few months.”
The Nagathian wriggled with displeasure. “Not months. Three days.”
“Three days?! I”—
“You are in luck human, for M’shtinyb is here on the Heavenly Docks as we speak. But he is leaving for Avantaer in three days. He must be dead before his ship leaves the system.”
“And what kind of resources are you giving me to work with? I don’t own any weapons and don’t have a gang of thugs like you do.”
“Resources?” the alien spat back at him. “What kind of a fool do you think I am, Ainsworth? There will be no help from me, only the guarantee that I will not kill you. I don’t want Security tracing anything back to me. Now, get going. The time it is—how do your kind say it?—ticking.”
Seep gestured, and suddenly the tensor field around Coleman vanished. Reflexively he curled into a ball, landing flat on his back but protecting his head and neck. The air rushed out of his lungs with a great whoosh, and not one second later the two thugs were unceremoniously dragging him past Jendathu.
The Nagathian slurped evily at him, eyes glinting. “Good luck, human. If you fail me, you’ll be [untranslatable—probably a colloquial reference to excrement].”
Still being dragged across the rough floor, Coleman hung his head in defeat.
He was indeed in deep, deep trouble.
