An Easy Job Read online

  This cargo Perce is so sure is going to feed refugees has blood all over it.

  He covers his face with his hands. That gives me a little more time to think about what to do. I’ll have time to feel sorry for him later.

  “You have the advantage here,” he says softly. “I’m not a soldier. I can’t fight you.”

  “Technically I’m not a soldier either. But being around Ransom, it’s useful knowing how to fight.”

  He looks up, more confused than resigned. “Captain Ransom isn’t what I expected.”

  I chuckle. Ransom is never what anyone expects. “Don’t trust my memories of him. I’m biased. He’s my best friend.”

  “That’s just it, I didn’t expect him to be anybody’s best friend.”

  That gives me a moment’s pause. I’ve known Ransom since we were twenty years old. He just is. And now Perce has two different versions of him to contend with: the man’s reputation and my memories of him. It takes time to reconcile that kind of doubling up.

  I cross my arms. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to just … stop. Close up shop here, take the first transport to fifty light years away.”

  “Will you look at Cancri Delta? I was there. I saw. Look at it and tell me I wasn’t supposed to do something.”

  I show him mine, now he shows me his? I’m in charge here, that isn’t how this works.

  “Please look.”

  This sharing is the whole point of what we are. I can’t not look.

  Perce hadn’t meant to land on Cancri Delta at all. The war there—a dispute over which government entity controlled the mining rights to which moon, a nothing argument but then I wasn’t in charge and didn’t get an opinion—started while he was en route. He wanted to see some of the frontier, that was all. His transport was conscripted for the war effort. The passengers had been treated well—nobody wanted to give the Trade Guild a reason to intervene. But Perce had been curious, disturbed, and so he talked a guard into letting him see the bombardment zone. A whole coastline of cities had been bombed from orbit. Hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, cold, hungry, sick.

  Perce hadn’t known what blood spilled over steel deck plates looked like. Well, I hadn’t known what a thousand people living with no sewer system smelled like. Now I do.

  “There are better ways to help them,” I say softly.

  He chuckles darkly. “What, go to Trade Guild? This is outside their jurisdiction. The governments on Cancri aren’t letting in aid organizations. The only way to get food in is to smuggle it.”

  “Those smuggled goods aren’t getting to those refugees.”

  “You don’t believe they are.”

  I give him a look. Those goods might be getting to Cancri Delta but they’re being sold at prices that no one in a refugee camp can pay. It’s a mess. Trade Guild ought to come in, occupy the system, and clean up the whole mess. Any more ships get treated like the Speranza, it just might.

  “It’s not math. You can’t weigh a bunch of bad against a bunch of slightly less bad and expect it to come out right.”

  Perce says, “Maybe you could just pretend you never found me.”

  We can’t both do our jobs and also protect the other from our jobs. “When your pirates figure out you’ve been talking to me, they won’t let you run. You know too much about their operation.” And he knows too much about mine. I have to get him out of circulation. Without killing him.

  I can take him home. Both of us go home for arbitration. I hate to think that he’s right and that’s our best option.

  “You love your ship,” he says. “The Visigoth. But we both can’t stay where we are, not after this.”

  I do love the Visigoth, and that love is part of why we travel, to collect and send that love home. There has to be a way. I shake my head. “It’s a good compromise if we’re both unhappy, right?”

  “What’re the odds,” he mutters, turning to scowl at the wall. “That two of us would end up on opposite sides of a fight like this? It shouldn’t happen.”

  “The odds are non-zero. Obviously,” I say.

  “You’ve downloaded dozens of times,” he says. “Why aren’t you worried about anyone else walking around with all of Visigoth’s operational secrets?”

  “Because they’re not here, and I’ve always been able to trust them.”

  “But not me.”

  “Oh hell no.”

  “Maybe we could just … erase the last hour—”

  “No.” Erasing anything goes against everything we believe in. The whole point is to remember. “Hey, you have anything to drink around here?”

  “On to option two?” he grumbles. “You’re not my type.”

  “Yeah, I know. Too bad.”

  His gaze goes inward, his expression turns quizzical. “Do you even have a type?”

  I had to think about that a moment. “Hedonist,” I say, and wink. He looks disgusted.

  “How did home ever decide to let you loose?”

  “I tell good stories.”

  There’s a knock at the door, three quiet, unassuming taps. Someone trying to see Perce. Likely, they tried comms first, didn’t get through, and grew suspicious. This wasn’t good. Perce’s eyes go wide and panicky and he looks at me.

  “You hear that?” When it’s quiet, when I’m focused, I can hear heartbeats. Breathing. Perce should be able to as well—we have the same wiring. He might not have as much practice at it as I do. But once I’ve pointed it out, he can hear the two figures standing outside his door. “Don’t answer,” I whisper.

  His hands close into fists. “If I don’t respond they’ll know something’s wrong. They’ll know I’m compromised. You have to let me say something, just through the door comm.”

  They already know he’s compromised. Adrenaline spikes again. I don’t have time to think about this. “Yeah, it’s probably too late for that.”

  He goes pale. “So that’s it. Your whole mission is skunked. They know something’s wrong, they’ll abandon the operation, you’re back to square one.”

  I can almost forgive him for sounding happy about this. Like we can just walk away from each other now. “And they’ll need to clean up loose ends.”

  “No … we’ll all just go our separate ways—”

  “They’ll kill you.” I shrug.

  We wait, and wait. We’ve been whispering, and we both hold our breaths, listening. Two sets of footsteps move down the corridor. Heavy steps, belonging to big people. Enforcers. Here for one of us. Or both of us. We linked processors no more than an hour ago. I don’t know anything Perce has been thinking since then. I don’t know what this looks like from his perspective. But I can guess. He thinks this isn’t fair. He thought he was doing the right thing.

  He knows I can get him out of this if he just says the word.

  “I can’t just go with you, it’s not like Ransom won’t kill me too—”

  “You know he won’t.”

  “But … I have a life here. I’m not ready to leave.”

  The steps continue—and then stop. They’re still here, watching. I make the call for both of us and switch off the jammer in my belt pouch. Immediately I hack into the station’s comms and send a message to Visigoth’s emergency channel, a couple days ahead of schedule. Cover’s blown, need extraction now. Ship’s been waiting in the shadow of the next moon over. They’ll need an hour to get here. So that’s how much time we have, and that narrows my options to a manageable few. Figuring out how to explain this all to Ransom can wait.

  Perce flinches; he’s felt the comms come back on. It’s all wide open now. “What’d you do that for?”

  “You want to call your friends, try to explain all this, now’s your chance.”

  I’m monitoring for his signal. I’m assuming he’ll send one, try to explain this to his erstwhile friends, to the man who pulled the trigger on the crew of Speranza. He doesn’t, and I’m surprised. So he heard the steps outside and made his call, too.

  “Grab
what you can carry.”

  “I’m not going to call anyone,” he counters. “And I’m not going to leave.”

  “Then you can let them shoot you.” Except I can’t let them shoot him. He’s got part of me with him, and I want him to get home someday. This makes no logical sense and should never have happened and I’m in awe of the whole mess.

  He’s standing in the middle of his space, looking lost. I have a plan, and I don’t know if he’s thinking sharp enough to be able to guess what that plan is. If he’s paying attention he will. He knows everything about me. But he may still be focused on that reputation.

  “Look, I understand this is tough,” I say. “We’re both facing this massive, ridiculous conflict of interest. We both want to do what’s right, and we ought to be able to come up with a solution—”

  I grab both his hands and yank him forward, off balance. He yelps, and I grab another of the Visigoth’s helpful gadgets out of a pouch and slap it over his wrists, which are now bound. So, he wasn’t totally paying attention. Kid needs another ten years of his own experience; my memories aren’t helping him here. He doesn’t quite believe them.

  “Hey!”

  I take a minute to shove a handful of items in a knapsack, the stuff he thinks he needs, that I think are reasonable. A change of clothes, a handheld terminal, a plastic cat he’s had since he was a kid. I claim one of the guns and replace the power cell, check the readings.

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  “This is all a misunderstanding,” he repeats.

  “Sure. We’ll work it out later. Right now, be very quiet.” Weapon in hand, I open the door, hold Perce back from it, and wait.

  “If you let me talk to them—”

  I can still hear the heartbeats of the two muscle staking out Perce’s room. Their breathing is stressed.

  “Maybe they just want to talk.” He so wants to believe it.

  I put a finger over my lips. He’s not going to listen to me; his gaze darts out to the corridor, like he thinks he can make a break for it. The tendons in his hands tighten. I ought to let him run out there and get shot. Except I can’t. This frustrates me. Maybe I can put him in a box and ship him home, where he can’t do any more damage.

  Just as he launches into a run, I bar my arm across the doorway and he crashes into it with a whoosh of breath. The footsteps down the corridor charge toward us. I lean out and fire, two electric blasts, and catch the two heavies in the chest. They’re enforcer types in unmarked armor. They go down, writhing with the sudden shock. The armor keeps them from dying. They’ll be back up in a few seconds, so I grab Perce by the back of his shirt and move.

  Around the next corner, a maintenance access door lets us disappear, briefly. Once the bad guys figure out we’re not in public thoroughfares anymore they’ll look at the maintenance security footage, so this will only last for a little while. The door slides shut, and we’re locked in a closet with dim utility lighting that gives everything this blue cast. A hundred meters, four more doors, and a ladder ought to get us back to the market level.

  “So this is what you do, is it? Go around, busting up stations and ships—”

  “No, I’m usually in a scout runner so I don’t have to talk to people like you.”

  We have to squeeze past ducts and piping to move. I keep him in front of me, hand around his biceps. He’s holding his bound arms like he’s injured them.

  He keeps talking. “No one knows. You love your ship. You love Ransom. But none of them know what you are. You basically lie all the time.”

  Mostly, I don’t think about it. I mean, if nobody asks…

  “And then you come here on some kind of moral high ground … You’re as much a mercenary as the people I work for.”

  I chuckle. He’s just saying this to get a rise out of me.

  “If you try to take me aboard the Visigoth, I’ll tell Ransom. I’ll tell him everything.”

  “No you won’t.” Because then he’ll have to explain how he knows. And we don’t tell anyone. Even more important than going home, or sending ourselves home, we keep the secret.

  “It bothers you. Not keeping the secret, but what would happen if they ever found out. It’s the one thing you’re afraid of.”

  In fact, I’m worrying over that one possibility: What if he tells Ransom? He might. The state he’s in now, that he’s worked himself into over the last half hour—he might just tell Ransom. And what if Ransom believes him?

  I can either hesitate on that, or let it make me angry. Kid doesn’t get to scare me like that.

  I shove Perce down the passage. I wish we could just go for coffee to wait for Visigoth’s signal. But these pirates will shoot us in public if they have to. Won’t even blink. We have to go up another level to get to the docks, where Visigoth will berth. We can’t use the public lifts, and we’ll eventually have to leave the maintenance passages.

  Up ahead, there is movement. Might be someone who belongs there, a worker just doing a job, or an inspector. If I think fast I can explain what we’re doing here, even with Perce’s hands in binders. But the approaching steps are too fast, too purposeful. Not a bystander, then.

  I grab his collar and pull. When the shot comes, I’m expecting it and haul Perce down. Sparks ricochet off the steel piping over my head.

  “They’re shooting!” he exclaims.

  “Told you.” I unclamp the binders on his wrists because it’s only fair. “This way—”

  “You … you put yourself between me and them.”

  “I did?” I guess I did. Didn’t even think of it. Perce swears and seems to suddenly lose his breath.

  We take a branch in the corridor, but still have a ways to go before we can get to a ladder to the next level.

  “Not that way,” he says.

  “What?”

  “This way.” He scuffs his foot. There’s a hatch in the floor. It’s not on the floorplan I skimmed off the station’s feed. I should have the most detailed plan, even the classified security plans.

  “You sure?”

  “Who’s been moving smuggled goods through the station?”

  “Then go.”

  I have my weapon leveled, waiting for our pursuers. They’re close; only a turn in the corridor shelters us. Kneeling, he twists a purely mechanical, analog bolt and the hatch slides open. He climbs down the ladder, watching where he’s going past his feet. My heart is racing in that throat-clenching artery-clearing way that means things have gotten just a little too exciting.

  I follow, slip the hatch closed over my head. Perce is waiting for me at the bottom. I mostly expected him to flee. Instead, he’s got a handlight out, shining it down a clean metal passage. Looks like an annex to a cargo hold.

  “It’s just fifty yards to short-term docking from here,” he says, which lines up with my floorplans once I get oriented. We jog in that direction.

  Visigoth crew thinks I have an implanted comm that sends and receives messages. They don’t need to know it’s a much more complicated system than that. They just need to talk to me. The message goes straight to my brain.

  Graff. Bay 3-16. Five minutes.

  The station traffic channel is alight with news that Visigoth is coming in fast and not taking no for an answer. Security wants to know why and Visigoth isn’t telling them. This is all my doing, and that’s a power I really didn’t want.

  We’ve traversed several cargo bays, and now we’re at another hatch. This should open straight to the docking level, a few berths down from where Visigoth is moving in. Perce uses his code to open the maintenance door, which will flag our location to the bad guys, but in a few minutes that won’t matter. It’s a race now.

  “Do you trust me?” I ask.

  “Absolutely not,” he says.

  “Seriously, I need you to trust me.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You could get us both killed instead.” His silence could mean he’s actually considering it. But I don’t think so. He didn’t
have to show me that hatch. “Wait for just a minute. We need to open that door at the last possible moment. I’ve got it all timed out. We go too early, they’ll get us.”

  He keeps his hand on the hatch. Bites his lips. Says, “Tell me when.”

  Five minutes. Four. Four and a half. Three…“Go.”

  The hatch pops and we step out into the world. The normality of the docking level, the signal lights and loader carts and station announcements, is almost too much.

  Graff, you have pursuers.

  Yeah, sorry about that, I send back. I take hold of Perce’s arm and don’t give him a choice about running. Just another minute. The walls are closing in. I like a little more breathing room with my excitement.

  Graff. Go.

  We go, pounding down the docking ring.

  Shots fire and an energy nimbus reflects blindingly off a girder. A blaring, constant alarm has started up. I make sure Perce is ahead of me. Try to keep crates and columns and tractors between us and them. Might be station security, might be pirates. Doesn’t really matter so I don’t look back to check. We’re on a schedule.

  I don’t have to see dock numbers to find the right berth. Three Visigoth marines, all armored up and anonymous behind faceplates, are outside the docking tube, guns leveled. Once the marines are in view, the shots from behind us stop. I’m counting down in my head. Two seconds to show myself, arm raised. Xun salutes. I recognize her by the markings on her armor.

  Five seconds to cross the space. I keep my grip locked on Perce’s collar the whole time. He leans into me to keep his balance. The shouting from station security starts up at four seconds. We just need to get behind that wall of marines. And we do.

  Three seconds down the docking tube, and Xun and her soldiers are right behind me, and Visigoth’s deck crew is already undocking the tube before we’re even in the airlock. The critical bit happens in less than a second, all of it at once: five of us in the airlock, the tube detaching, the hatch slamming shut. A fraction of a second when I don’t know which way the air is gusting—out into space because we mis-timed it, or in through the vents as we equalize atmosphere with the Visigoth. My ears pop. I breathe. We’re all breathing. Perce is in fetal position, gasping. He may never uncurl.