Overkill (27 page)

Directly across from the platform, Lockheeds’ pink-and-green sign still blinked. The bar, which had once been the tank plant’s cafeteria, used to be a friendly place that offered two-for-one whiskey with a Legion tanker ID. But Lockheed’s had been face-lifted to attract Trueborn tourists who sought a homogenized taste of North Mousetrap. The urine on the deckplates in front of Lockheed’s still smelled the same, but the customers who staggered out and deposited it were now much better dressed.

I passed Lockheed’s without a glance, and turned down the first side passage. The light got dimmer and harsher and the ceiling dropped to a Yavi-friendly seven feet.

During the last years of the War, the shipyards and armaments plants of Mousetrap’s north quadrants were the best places in the universe to go if you needed hardware to lay waste to worlds.

After the War ended the last ships were commissioned. The yards shut down. The generation of ’Trap Rats born in, raised in, and then left unemployed in, Mousetrap holed up in the abandoned mines, factories, and passages that laced the moonlet’s north quadrants. Eventually the squatters declared Shipyard a “free city.” That actually meant that in Shipyard nothing was free. But everything was available, if you paid in cash. The new anarchy didn’t disrupt the flow of commerce through Mousetrap’s south end, so Shipyard was left to fester. Or bloom, depending on one’s world view.

Shipyard soon attracted, or had dumped on it by overstuffed penal systems all across the Union, the best and brightest. Their fields of expertise ranged from prostitution to drug peddling, and bounty hunting to forgery. The hollowed-out cone that was Mousetrap’s north end became the cornucopia into which a universe funneled its miscreants. Shipyard could still help you lay waste to a world, as long as it was yours.

I peered into a familiar double wide hatch. Fatso’s had been named for its bouncer, but the half-empty bar no longer needed one.

Inside, the fog of second-hand janga was the worst—or best, I suppose—that I’d experienced since Second Platoon had mistakenly incinerated a Tassini drying shed with parachute flares.

I stepped to the bar, behind which a woman with middle-aged skin and teen-aged artificials raked empty bottles into a brown carton.

I cleared my throat. “Ms. Suarez?”

She held up one hand to shush me while she glared at a het couple squirming in the corner. She hefted an empty glass bottle labeled Imported True Tennessee Sour Mash that I was certain had never been within nine jumps of Earth. She flung it at them and it shattered on the rough iron wall behind them. “Do him in the john, honey!”

Fatso’s prided itself on offering a higher class experience than most Shipyard bars.

She turned back to me and frowned. “Nobody’s called me Suarez in a while.” She smiled. “But I can be anybody you want.”

I took a breath. “You probably don’t remember me—”

She raised her palm, shook her head. “Repeaters same price.”

“I was a friend of Hector’s.”

Her face fell.

I swallowed. “I was there. He died a hero.”

Suarez’ mother stared down into the box and slammed another empty into it while her eyes glistened. “Heroes don’ die fighting other people’s wars.”

She stared up at the crusty ceiling. “He was a good boy. You know?”

I blinked back tears, myself. “I know.”

We stood there listening to music thump down from the ceiling. Somewhere in back of the bar, a toilet flushed.

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, squinted at me, then nodded. “I remember, now. Jazen, is it?”

I nodded back.

“The Yavi Illegal?”

Crap. I had been drunker than I thought when Hector had introduced me to his mom.

She nodded. “Ah. So when’s your drop-dead date?”

The only thing more routine in Shipyard than a fugitive from sobriety was a fugitive from justice.

I whispered, “April twenty-ninth.” When I said it out loud, it seemed closer. I shuddered.

“And you came in here looking for a hub scrub?”

I looked around the bar. Nobody was paying attention. “I thought you might know somebody.”

“Honey, I know everybody. You got cash?”

“I will have. I’ll be back through here well before the twenty-ninth.”

She scribbled on a cocktail napkin and slid it across the bar. “This guy can hook you up.”

A drunk staggered up from a table and tapped his empty glass on the bar. As she turned to take his order, she said to me, “Jazen? Don’t be late. And thanks for coming in. I miss him.”

“Me, too.” I turned, walked out the hatch and back to Shipyard Platform.

Mothers and sons shared the same something everywhere in the universe.

I glanced at a bar down the platform, then at my ’puter. Still eight hours until
Midway
closed her hatches. I’d go have one whiskey. For Orion. I had all the time in the world.

Seventy-two

The grezzen felt Jazen as the human sat in a dark and noisy space drinking tiny containers of a bittersweet liquid that dulled his consciousness and made his vision blur. The human stared at a tiny image that glowed from a box he set on the table in front of him. The image was a female whose tufting bore the grayness that marked human aging. Orion. Jazen identified it as his mother. Orion was not the female who bore him, but she had raised and taught him.

The situation was not unheard of among grezzen. A female might perish, or suffer injury or illness.

The grezzen had never reflected on human upbringing. They existed in roiling hives, like the nest within a nest within which he presently found himself. So he had assumed they were raised communally, like larvae in a log.

The grezzen had felt emotion well up during Jazen’s visit to the birth mother of the dead human, Suarez. Jazen’s emotion had momentarily replicated what Jazen now felt for Orion. The grezzen retrieved the ongoing thread of the female, Suarez, curious.

She remained in the dark place where Jazen had sought her out, but spoke audibly to another, who had not been present during Jazen’s visit.

“Petey, I got a job for you. Tube over to the Nasty Nurse. This time of day you should find a guy at the third table from the corner on the left side.” She extended a forelimb. “Give him this note. Tell him the guy’s an illegal whose drop dead date’s comin’ up fast. And tell him this tip squares us. I don’ owe him no more.”

The prepubescent male called Petey wagged its head up and down. Then it audibilized. “How will I know it’s him?”

“They don’ call him One-eyed Jack for nothin’.”

The grezzen leaned back and scratched its jaw with a forepaw. The female called Orion had clearly accepted a transferred bond from Jazen’s birth mother. The female, Suarez, had also seemed to feel a tender bond toward Jazen.

But as she contemplated the task she had set to the prepubescent male, Petey, Suarez didn’t project tenderness. She projected guilt.

Seventy-three

Three lines had swollen up in front of the
Midway
’s boarding hatch by the time I got back. The longest line was for transfers from other ships and for Mousetrap locals boarding for the first time, who had to go through ID vetting and carry-on bag inspection.

Reboards from the clean, touristy south destinations just got their passes scanned and walked aboard.

There weren’t many of us reboarding from the north. But our line moved slow, because we got scanned for sexually transmitted diseases, and searched for weapons and dope. I shuffled forward, my head pounding. It had developed into more than one whiskey.

Something poked my back, and I stiffened.

“You don’t look like the headache got better.”

I turned and saw Kit beside me, a duty-free bag dangling from one hand. I said, “I stepped out for a drink.”

She leaned close and sniffed. “Several.”

Good. She didn’t suspect that I’d done more than I had just said. I hated withholding the truth about my status from her. But if Orion had taught me anything, it was that Illegals told nobody—nobody. On the other hand, I had apparently outed myself to Suarez and his mother a couple of years ago, in a drunken stupor, and that indiscretion hadn’t come back to haunt me.

Kit said, “Well, if you’re feeling better later, we could have dinner. Captain’s mess. My treat.” She stepped across to the line waiting at the reboards portal.

I fingered the cocktail napkin with the ID doctor’s name on it that honesty, rather than deceit, had just bought me.

I was almost home free. One of the things that made Mousetrap the crossroads of the Union was that Earth was only one jump and a medium-short sublight run away. Motherworld-to-Mousetrap was the most traveled route in the Union, with cruisers outbound daily. As soon as we delivered the grezzen to Kit’s senior spooks, and I got my bonus out of escrow, I’d grab the first ship back here, get scrubbed, and then—what?

I stared at Kit, pert and lovely in her civvies. She was a Trueborn, a field-grade officer, and had enough mysterious stroke to order cruisers around. If—if—I got scrubbed, I would be nobody. But that was a step up from being something so subhuman that it was never supposed to have been born.

They say that relationships forged during extraordinary trauma collapse when the participants wake up back in the real world, with bills to pay and toilets to scrub. But she was the best thing that ever happened to me.

She went through the pass reader, then turned and gave me a wink and a wave before she disappeared inside the ship.

I set my jaw, and my headache seemed to throb less. I
would
meet her in the Captain’s mess tonight. I would tell her that I thought she was special. No, I would reach across the linen cloth between us, take her hands in mine, and tell her that I was in love with her. I would tell her the truth about me, and I would ask her to wait until I could start fresh. It would be like stepping out that jump door at four thousand feet in Airborne Basic, except that this time I wouldn’t have a chute on. But maybe . . .

The throbbing that had been in my head shifted to my chest. I shifted from foot to foot, willing the line to move faster. Didn’t these people know I had an appointment to finally take control of my life?

I turned and glanced at the even slower transfer and local boarding line, thirty feet away across the platform. A guy with his back to me was checking a couple gun cases at the steward’s table. The guy, who had black hair that hung in strings over the back of his collar, unbuckled a pistol belt from which dangled a flap-holstered gunpowder automatic. He got back a claim chip from the steward.

He coughed. It was a squealing wheeze. And one I could never forget. My heart skipped.

Then he turned around and faced me. A salt-and-pepper moustache curled around his lip, then dangled below his chin like grezzen fangs. He nodded while he stared right at me, then winked one eye. The other was covered by a black patch.

The two lines converged as they passed through the ship’s hatch. We were fifteen feet apart, then ten, then five. My heart hammered.

He eyed me like a wolf eyes hamburger.

This was no time to level with Kit about my past. It had just caught up with me.

Seventy-four

Parker’s flight reaction swelled within him as he approached another male among the mass waiting to pour into the ship. The other male was unremarkable, except for a damaged eye.

The other showed his teeth, and audibilized, “Well, well. Some days the fish jump right into the boat.” The other male continued, his voice low and hissing, “I’d know you anywhere, Parker. The bitch only left me one eye to see you with, but that’s just enough.”

Parker dipped his head and audibled, “Jack.” Simultaneously he thought, “This can’t be. In a whole universe! He can’t have found me. How? Suarez’ mom ratted me out! It had to be. Now what? Think, Jazen!”

The two humans moved side-by-side into the movable nest.

The one-eyed male said, “Guess we part ways here, my friend. Third class this way, for poor me. Wouldn’t the bitch be proud to see you up in second class?”

“If Lupe Suarez tipped you off, you know I’ve got Legion immunity, Jack.”

The one-eyed male thought, “Not for long.” But he laid a fore-claw on Jazen’s shoulder. “Of course, my friend. You have a pleasant trip.”

Their paths diverged. The one-eyed one moved closer to the grezzen’s prison, while Jazen moved in the direction where the grezzen had last located Kit.

The grezzen found her again, and brought her thread forward. Kit was audibilizing melodically while she bathed herself. Whatever so troubled Jazen apparently did not trouble her.

The high-pitched whistles sounded again, then the great nest healed its openings again, as it did when it prepared to move through the vast emptiness.

The grezzen sifted among the human threads until he relocated Captain Halder. He had first encountered Halder when the male clashed with Kit, immediately after she and Jazen had brought the grezzen into the
Midway
.

Halder had proved fascinating on many levels. Though he was a male, he directed the
Midway
in the way that a grezzen matriarch directed her far smaller family. Remarkably, Halder’s control extended not only over subservient males, but over females.

Halder’s dominance seemed perverse to the grezzen at first, but Halder seemed to have performed competently. It had, in fact, occurred to the grezzen that there was really no reason that a male, given training and hard work, could not and should not be afforded the same opportunities as females.

“Take her out, Ms. Farini.” Halder, at that moment, in fact, had delegated the complex job of moving the
Midway
out of the great nest of Mousetrap to a female. Halder simultaneously directed subservients of both genders by spoken exchanges, manipulated so that they covered longer distances.

“Mr. Thompson, how’s my girl configured now?”

The first time the grezzen had heard Halder refer to his female, the grezzen had been confused. The grezzen could find no such female’s thread. But he had come to realize that Halder was referring to the
Midway
as though it were a living thing.