Then again, rogue traders on government-controlled worlds would usually have some sort of legal protection from an outraged mob of disgruntled customers, even if it was only the threat of theoretical arrest and sentencing after the event, while merchants with a pitch on a void station enjoyed no such luck. In addition, there was always the risk that the person you’d just cheated might turn out to be a
mafioso
or similar, in which case you might just as well walk out of an airlock without a suit and save yourself some hassle. As a result, the only sensible course of action for trade on a void station was to talk loudly, swagger noticeably, wear your weapons openly and check everything twice; or, failing that, see who the people who could manage those things bought from and do the same, on the basis that those merchants were likely to be fairly honest at least some of the time.
‘Let’s get to it, then,’ Drift said, glancing at his wrist chrono. ‘We don’t exactly have a lot of time, and if we all want to still be breathing by the time we hit the First System then we need to source some oh-two from somewhere.’ He fluttered a hand impatiently at the hatchway. ‘Go!’
The crew moved forwards, minus Jia, who would be staying behind to mind the
Keiko.
Thieves were rather more common at void stations than the regulated and patrolled in-system waystations such as the one they’d been berthed in over Carmella II, so it paid to have someone on board rather than putting their faith in security access codes alone. Apirana was, of course, needed to loom menacingly, so he shuffled along into the docking tunnel behind Kuai and Jenna. It was a struggle not to lengthen his stride and walk naturally, but to do so would mean trampling his smaller crewmates so he hung back and moved at their speed, dawdling though it seemed to him.
‘So,’ he said quietly to Jenna as they stepped out of the tunnel and into the void station proper, and Drift, Rourke and Micah headed off in the other direction, ‘you worked out where we’re goin’ yet?’
‘The Van Der Graaf Centre is a conference facility in Amsterdam,’ Jenna replied, ‘but that’s all the Spine had on it. I’ve no idea what it’s going to be used for on that day.’ She shook her head in mild frustration: despite its name, humanity’s galactic databank was essentially a fractured series of individual, static records, updated on a system-by-system basis and only when a new courier arrived with the next download. Up-to-date information was only accessible about things within the same star system and something as trivial and fluid as a certain conference centre’s itinerary was never going to be available from further afield, no matter how good a slicer you were.
‘That’s a damn weird place to smuggle something into,’ Apirana muttered, absent-mindedly rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the fingers of his left. ‘Private addresses, warehouses, bars, the dark side of moons; we’ve delivered to all of
’
em. Never done a dark run to something like this, though.’ He grimaced. New experiences were all well and good, but he preferred to be slightly more in control of them. ‘Feels kinda . . . exposed.’
‘And during the day, too,’ Jenna noted. ‘That can’t be regular for a smuggling job, right?’
‘Not usually,’ Apirana admitted, ‘Although a lotta places, once you’re through the borders you’re better off looking like you’ve got nothing t’hide; cops get attracted to sneaking around.’
‘I suppose that makes sense,’ Jenna nodded slowly, ‘but this whole thing still seems really odd to me, it’s like . . .’ She trailed off, blinking in surprise as she looked around them properly for the first time. ‘What the
hell
?’
Kuai snorted, and Apirana felt a smile playing over his lips. ‘You never been to a void station before, huh?’
The outside of a void station was covered in moving, flashing lights, mainly because they were always so far from a star and any corresponding external illumination that they wouldn’t be seen otherwise. The inside wasn’t much different as the assembled vendors tried to attract custom, and in that respect they superficially resembled the bustling, frenetic markets of any big city on any inhabited planet or moon. Once you started looking at the goods on offer, however, you realised quite how different it was.
Jenna was staring at a small stall which was quite openly displaying drugs, and illegal drugs at that . . . only of course, out here in International Space, outside the heliosphere of any inhabited system, they
weren’t
illegal. A small notice in English, Russian, Mandarin, Spanish and Swahili declared that the stallholder was not responsible for any difficulties which might arise from taking the merchandise across interstellar borders, but the rather large sign which simply read five translations of ‘WHOLESALE RATES AVAILABLE’ clearly indicated that they were geared up to provide the raw materials should you be prepared to try your luck.
‘And that’s just . . .? Well, I guess it would be,’ Jenna finished, answering her own question and tailing off a little lamely.
‘Some of the governments don’t like it, an’ the USNA tried to stamp it out a while back,’ Apirana told her, ‘but everyone else got a bit itchy about them trying to put their laws on International Space.’
‘And they liked the idea of the USNA
claiming
large chunks of International Space even less,’ Kuai put in. ‘The Red Star Confederate actually threatened war.’
‘Luckily for everyone, the Free Systems breakaway started an’ the USNA got caught up in it,’ Apirana added, ‘an’ the whole thing was pretty much forgotten about.’ He put his hand on Jenna’s shoulder and gently steered her away from the stall with its neatly arranged powders, leaves and pills, along with the machine for measuring the purity of what you were about to buy and the two serious-looking men holding starguns in case anyone was thinking of a smashand-grab of the merchandise. ‘Come on, we got a job to do.’
‘Right.’ Jenna slipped out from under his hand and hurried a couple of steps ahead. She clearly intended it to look like she was eager to press on at their assigned task, but Apirana was used to smaller people being uncomfortable with casual physical contact with him.
Then again, I
did
tell her what I did to my father . . .
They drifted through the grid-like layout of the markets, looking for useful items among the stalls and vendors. All around them were great drapes of cloth ranging from old-fashioned, plant-derived fabrics through to the most modern poly-u sheets which changed colour in line with the temperature, or the programmable weaves that could flash up brand logos, gang signs or anything else the buyer desired. Boxes of protein bars and nutrient shakes pushed up against small jars of genuine Chinese spices and racks of roasted meats, salty aromas intended to catch in the throats of travellers too long subjected to longlife ship food. Small booths offered immediate beams of the Next Big Thing in music who probably hailed from halfway across the galaxy, or a vid-scope from New Hollywood on Washington Major . . .
‘The pirates are back!’ one stall holder shouted. ‘The pirates are back!’
Apirana glanced over and saw, to his lack of surprise, racks of weapons ranging from the basic and mundane to the exotic and downright bizarre. The vendor was a large
P a¯keh a¯
man, dark stubble standing out against his fair skin, with a sizeable gut and enthusiasm to match.
‘You, sir!’ he called, gesturing enthusiastically to Apirana. ‘You look like a fighter! Best deals on shooting hardware this side of Old Earth, right here! Kit out the whole crew for a couple of grand, and you could stop Captain Gabriel Drake hisself if he came for you!’
‘Drake’s dead!’ someone catcalled. ‘The Africans killed him and captured the
Thirty-Six Degrees
years ago!’
‘Is that so?’ the stallholder retorted, turning on the speaker in a manner more appropriate for a villain in one of the Chinese melodramas Apirana knew Jia secretly watched. ‘If Drake is dead, who’s been hitting all those freighters in the Uzuri System?’
‘I heard it was Annie Eclectic!’ someone piped up.
‘Mohamud Kediye!’
Apirana sighed and turned away as the names of various pirates and ne’er-do-wells, some probably fictional, began to fill the air. Remote though it was, Void Station Pundamilia was the only stopover point in this part of the galaxy, and as such it was still busy with travellers. A glance ahead showed that Apirana’s two companions had disappeared from view while he’d been distracted, so the Maori grunted in annoyance, set his face in the stoniest glower he could muster and simply barged forwards. After a few initial angry words, hastily bitten back when the utterers turned to see who had jostled them, the crowd started to part in front of him like sheep before a dog.
He found Jenna in an alcove piled high with electronic goods and parts, face alight and looking like she needed more hands to both rummage and hold things to her satisfaction. He came up behind her and she turned towards him, two flattish metal boxes of subtly different shapes under one arm, a straggle of cables thrown over one shoulder and something small, sleek and black nestling in the palm of her left hand, which she showed him as excitedly as a naturalist discovering a new species.
‘Do you know what this is?!’
Apirana blinked. ‘No.’
‘This is a Tannheiser KK-2490! A “Truth Box”! This isn’t even
legal
anywhere except African systems, and it’s reckoned they’ll outlaw it by the end of the year too!’
Apirana frowned at the object in Jenna’s hand. He couldn’t see what it would do which was that miraculous, but then it sounded like some sort of slicer toy so he probably wouldn’t understand even if she told him. He’d picked up enough rudimentary mechanics and electronics to fix small, practical problems with various vehicles, and he could access the Spine without a second thought, but people like Jenna lived in a different world ruled by data flow and code strings as long as his arm.
‘Well, good,’ he said, then paused as he registered exactly how aglow her eyes were. ‘Was there—’
‘I
need
to get this,’ Jenna exclaimed, knees bending slightly in time with the emphasis in her voice. ‘This eats through Jupiter-level encryptions in
minutes
, if I had this we could—’
‘A.!’ Kuai shouted, appearing past Jenna’s shoulder and jerking a thumb back the way he’d come, ‘I’ve tracked down a backup power capacitor for the Heim generator, there’s some slight corrosion—’
‘—I mean, forget about orbital datalogs, there’s—’
‘—basically sound, I had to cannibalise the last spare and—’
‘—have
no idea
how much safer this would make—’
‘—then we’re all going to end up on the ceiling when the primary—’
‘
Turituri!
’ Apirana thundered, and both of them fell quiet abruptly. To be fair, so did the surrounding market for a few metres in all directions: some sentiments transcended barriers of language. The people around them turned back to what they were doing when it was obvious that a fight wasn’t going to break out immediately, and Apirana fingered the credit chip in his pocket programmed with a small portion of the upfront fee they’d been given for the job, and wondered why Drift couldn’t have found someone else to babysit the slicer and the grease monkey.
‘Now,’ he continued in a more reasonable tone of voice, ‘one at a time, and using words I’ve got some hope of understanding, explain to me why the Captain ain’t gonna be mad if I let you blow some of our money.’ He nodded at Kuai. ‘You go first.’
Kuai started talking about the importance of immediately accessible spare parts and how he’d had to break something on the
Jonah
down to make a running repair, which in turn meant that if something now failed on the Heim drive then they’d all find themselves unexpectedly floating when the artificial gravity failed. Apirana winced: the infamous Boreas III ‘landing’ had been one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life, and was the reason why Drift had subsequently ordered Jia to wear crash webbing at all times during a re-entry. The little mechanic seemed to have a strong case, and Apirana was about to nod his assent when he saw Jenna stiffen.
‘Y’alright?’ he asked, frowning. Her eyes were widening as she stared at him.
No, not at him.
Past
him.
Two things happened virtually at once.
First, Kuai half-raised his hand, like he was back in class somewhere in Sichuan Province, and hesitantly said, ‘Uh, A.?’
Second, someone cleared their throat ostentatiously behind him.
‘Hey! Mongrel!’
Apirana didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He’d recognised the accent and knew what he’d see. Instead he looked at Kuai.
‘Get out of here and call the Captain.’
Kuai’s face took on an expression of puzzlement. ‘But—’
‘That weren’t a suggestion,’ Apirana snapped. The little mechanic bolted away obediently and Apirana nodded at Jenna, whose eyes appeared to be trying to escape from her head while she fiddled nervously with the sleeve over her right forearm. ‘You too. Get back to the ship.’
Now
he turned, breathing deeply to fill his lungs and swell his already impressive chest, just in case it would be enough to make a difference.
The moment he laid eyes on them he knew it wouldn’t be.
There were three of them, all in designer bodysuits which looked initially like the same charcoal-grey outfit any businessman might wear if he was confident about his physique. However, Apirana could see the subtle alterations, such as the grain and thickness of the fabric which marked it as high-level impact armour. An area of the suit would stiffen momentarily when struck; it was hardly perfect protection against a blade or a bullet, but it could turn a fatal wound into a severe one, and a severe one into an inconvenience. There was something odd about the coolant lines on the suits of the flankers, too. Had he been a betting man, Apirana would have put money that alongside the devices to keep the occupant at a comfortable temperature were ones which could inject adrenaline or some other, more volatile stimulant into the wearer’s system.
All three were male and all three had the golden skin tone of an East Asian ancestry, but there the similarity ended. The one on the right was bald with decorative metal studs in his skull and had a mechanical arm, judging by the shape of it beneath the bodysuit and the metal fingers extending from the sleeve. He also had speakers in his throat to presumably replace a voice box, although it was anyone’s guess whether that was a dramatic affectation or simply a result of cigarettes like the one currently clamped between his teeth. The one on the left had dark, slicked-back hair and what appeared to be replacement legs. He also had augmented eyes, but instead of one mechanical eye like the Captain he had a narrow visor. Apirana had heard of short-range laser weapons concealed in things like that, although he’d tended to dismiss them as legend. More likely it would allow the wearer some sort of different spectrum to his vision, possibly infrared to spot body heat.