Transference Station (3 page)

‘Money,’ said Lana. ‘
Serious
money being dangled in front of us. Come on, nobody loves money more than a skirl…’

‘You’re an ape-evolved racist. This is one skirl who loves living as much as social advancement.’

‘Living free, Skrat. Living
free
.’

‘Dollar-sign Dillard has lived a long time,’ noted Polter. ‘Surely the will of the devine had seeped into his bones over the centuries. Perhaps in this matter, he is a tool of God’s volition?’

‘There’s not much bone mass left in DSD’s body,’ said Lana. ‘Zeno’s lived a lot longer than our slimy broker friend… and how divine do you see our android acting?’
Will of the devine. Shit.

CHAPTER TWO

— Top Cats —

With the
Gravity Rose
clamped to a spur off Transference Station’s central ring – one of dozens of docked starships – Lana waited as a station passenger arm extended towards their airlock. It was always deathly silent inside her airlock. The sounds of the vessel sealed behind her, the sounds of station life still walled off by vacuum. Polter, Skrat and Zeno waited alongside her. On many worlds, a man-sized crab, a humanoid lizard and a golden-skinned android with a wiry Afro might draw a few stares. Where her crew were heading today, they would pass as thoroughly pedestrian. A whir sounded from the heavy door behind Lana. It slid open and Calder Durk joined them. He still looked like a greenhorn in his ship overalls, as worn as the pass-me-downs were by their previous occupant. Well, a month of sim episodes and tape learning couldn’t make up for the man’s first twenty years of life stranded on a medieval hellhole of a world. Calder was a rescue cat, a favour, an exile. But there was a little bit of that in all of Lana’s crew. Maybe that was why Lana had acquiesced quite so readily to that son-of-a-bitch Matobo’s request for her to rescue the barbarian prince from burning by his political enemies.

‘Mister Durk,’ said Lana. ‘I presume from the fact you’re standing here on your lonesome that you couldn’t inveigle the chief out of the drive rooms for a spot of shore leave?’

‘He just laughed every time I mentioned the word Transference Station, captain.’

There was a little too much naval bearing about Calder for her taste now. Lana could see that the new boy was having to resist the urge to salute every time he saw her; the hesitancy in his voice from choking off a “sir, yes sir”, each time he spoke. But she could blame that on Zeno – the android getting their latest recruit fixed on sim shows like
Hell Fleet
and all. The
Gravity Rose
wasn’t a jump carrier or a missile ship, and apart from the chief, none of her crew had ever been career fleet. That was a deliberate choice on Lana’s part. There were always ex-military types looking for work across the civilized worlds, but they were too buttoned-up for the relatively casual regime she ran on board her vessel.
Be honest with yourself, girl. Too honest for some of the dicey trade you have to take on, as well.

‘Don’t take it too personal. The chief wouldn’t leave the engine room even if we were orbiting his home world.’

‘I didn’t realize the chief had a home world,’ observed Skrat, laconically. ‘I always thought the prickly fellow might have been a cloning accident on board a carrier.’

‘That’s an act,’ said Lana. ‘The chief was born on Quin Hon.’ She pointed Calder’s empty waist out to Skrat. ‘Get the man dressed.’

Her first mate placed a scaly hand on the weapon locker plate and the bin swung open as it recognized his biometrics. Skrat pulled out a rail pistol attached to a tangle of black webbing and tossed it at Calder – a twin of the gun the rest of the crew were wearing for their shore leave. Well, not Polter, but with the vestigial fighting claws tucked on top of his carapace, Polter could cut his way through a steel deck if he had a mind to. A five-foot tall amphibious tank wasn’t something most humans took it into their mind to anger. You didn’t have to have been nipped by their nearest Earth analogue – a crab – to show the Kaggen race a healthy measure of respect.

‘There’s only one rule, Mister Durk,’ said Lana, watching Calder finger the malevolent, icy cold slab of weaponized ceramic, the green light from its magazine readout pulsing across his hand to indicate a full charge and a hundred shot magazine. ‘You draw it, you better be prepared to kill someone with it.’

‘You can ignore him,’ said Lana, arching an eyebrow in the direction of the ship’s android. ‘The broker we’re going to see is a media geek. Zeno here is just getting himself in the zone.’

‘Dollar-sign Dillard is the only chap within a hundred parsecs who actually cares that Zeno played Lando Calrissian’s son in the remake of Galaxy Wars,’ noted Skrat, dryly.

The android’s wiry Afro bristled in indignation. ‘It was the reboot of the remake of the
Star Wars Golden Republic
TV series, you skirl heathen. And if your species hadn’t got lucky by buddying up with humanity, you’d still think No Theatre was state-of-the-art entertainment.’ The android formed his hands together and made the shadow of a rabbit on the wall, wiggling the animal’s ears under the bright airlock light. ‘Hey, look, viewers, I’m a mighty skirl sand baron, and my nest is entangled in an indecipherable political turf war with a lower hierarchically-placed nest.’

Skrat’s tail swished angrily behind him. It sounded a lot like a fencer testing the air with a foil before a duel. ‘Dear boy, I think we can safely classify sim addiction as cultural pollution, rather than an actual art form.’

‘Play nicely, boys,’ ordered Lana. ‘Or you can spend your shore leave with the chief inside one of his reactors, sponging down our anti-matter injectors.’ She saw the look on Calder’s face. ‘Just a little horseplay, your highness. We’re every bit as tight as a Triple Alliance carrier on board the
Rose
.’

‘I can tell.’

That was the trouble with civilizing the barbarian nobleman with Zeno’s hand selected sim episodes and tape learning… you never got your facts in the round, and too many of the subtleties went straight over your head.

‘Finding sentients whose chain you can actually jerk is a rare and precious thing in this universe,’ said Lana. ‘Not everyone has a sense of humour you can understand.’ Lana tapped Polter’s elaborately tattooed carapace. ‘With the kaggenish, humanity also shares its belief in the one true God and the hope that we can be better than we are. That and the fact that kaggens inexplicably find humanity as cute as we think we are, ourselves.’

‘You mean there’s only
one
god?’ said Calder, but Lana ignored him.

‘It’s not inexplicable,’ said Polter. ‘You are just like a pet tree monkey, only larger.’

Lana ignored her navigator, too. ‘And with the skirls we share a love of money, and given our relative propensities for violence, some would say the taste for a good war as well.’

‘Shit, I guess that’s why you call them
human
rights.’

‘You’re always as a good as human to me,’ said Lana.

‘Now you’re just being nasty,’ said the android.

Lana watched the docking arm drawing close to them, less than ten feet away now. An accordion-like passage of reinforced grey plastic, it was cheap, functional tech, but worlds rarely got rich by building better. ‘So, Skrat and myself will go and visit DSD and find out what he’s got that’s so hot he’s willing to stake our docking fees up front. Polter, I take it you’re off to the local cathedral?’

The navigator signed agreement with one of his bony hands. ‘As a lay preacher, it is my duty to share the blessings of crossing heaven with my fellow believers.’

Lana looked at the android. ‘Zeno?’

‘I have a few errands to run, too,’ said the android. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’

‘I thought you might want to take our new boy and show him a good time.’ Lana regretted saying the words almost as quickly as she had spoken. But that wasn’t trying to bribe Calder into staying around, was it? Just a common courtesy a captain would show to anyone new to the ship. New to the goddamn civilized universe, for that matter.

‘Ah, to feel the needs of the flesh and have flesh with needs. Thanks but no thanks. Given the gang problem on station, I though it might be safer if Calder went along to meet DSD with you. Everyone should meet Dollar-sign at least once in their lives. If only to see why getting pickled isn’t as much fun as the adverts make out.’

‘Okay then. We’ll meet up at the Fantasma Blanco later,’ said Lana. Part of her was pleased. She could keep an eye on Calder and make sure he didn’t get into any trouble, and the plan hadn’t even looked as if it was her idea. ‘We can chew over whether the risk-reward of this job is actually worth the potential burn.’

Calder nodded cheerfully, just as though he knew that the Fantasma Blanco was a spacers’ bar named after the effects of a popular drug banned centuries ago. As if he had half a clue about who it was they were going to meet and how crafty DSD could prove. Well, pretending you knew what you were doing was as much a part of being crew as anything else. Bluffing had worked well enough for Lana to date.

‘Doesn’t the chief get a say in what cargo we take on?’ asked Calder.

‘I’m the skipper,’ said Lana, ‘nobody gets a
say
. You just get to voice your thoughts, is all, so I know I’m examining the situation from all the angles. And as far as the chief is concerned, one system looks pretty much the same as the next when you won’t even leave the engine room.’

The screen next to the door indicated a safe seal had been formed by the station’s gantry, so Lana pulled the lock open. There was a slight sweet smell to the air on the other side. Transference had low traces of methylene in its atmosphere, the station running their environmental systems just like mamma had baked below. It was about the only sweet thing spacers found in Transference Station. They walked through a thin cloud of dust filling the corridor, decontamination nano – imperceptibly testing the visitors’ blood and DNA to make sure their health matched the ship’s pre-arrival check-up data. Pity the authorities never scrubbed the billions living in the station. Lana was more likely to catch something from Transference’s citizens rather than the reverse. After the decon cloud, they passed through the entrance into the habitat. Transference Station’s main ring was divided into six levels, if only to give the property realtors something to justify their price differentials. Anyone buying bottom on six didn’t need a mortgage, they needed a laser fence to keep the locals out. Lana found herself on one of the midlevels, a plaza scattered with fountains and public art taking up the full volume of the chamber. It was a good attempt to make the station look civilized to visiting eyes, but the station cops in twenty-foot high exo-armour couldn’t be mistaken for modern art, even with the fountains’ water foaming into all sorts of creative rollercoaster shapes under focused gravity compression. There was a glass-viewing gallery in front of Lana, aluminium rails to clutch onto while watching the spin of the world below. She glanced down. It was just as she remembered it. Transference Station locked to its parent planet’s spin, a circlet set above the oceans. Nobody in the Edge had the money and resources to build space elevators – that was strictly alliance tech – so cargo and passengers shuttled between ground and station the economic way, little motes of light exploding across the seas below as craft powered their way into orbit. Engineless craft, little more than water-filled cones riding beams from super-lasers up to space. Going down it was heat shields and gravity brakes and biodegradable parachutes. The fortieth century and steam power – albeit liquid reaction mass under laser ignition – was still going strong. You had to hand it to humanity; no good idea went to waste. Everything ended up being recycled – metals, plastics, technologies, politics. No wonder near-immortal sentients like Zeno ended up jaded.
The merry-go-round of history just keeps on spinning.
Lana’s thoughts turned to Dollar-sign Dillard waiting for them in his office.
Some people cling to the ride just a little bit tight
. Yeah, everyone deserved to meet him once. Trouble was, for Lana, this visit was once too often for her taste. There were benches on the other side of the viewing gallery, a gaggle of women in colourful dresses gossiping there in a language she hadn’t learnt. A Brazilian derivative, maybe, if their dark features were any guide. They had children playing around their feet. Lana felt a tug of conflicting emotions as she observed the kids enjoying themselves.
Forget it, girl. A starship is no place to bring up a toddler. You’re living proof of that. Your whole family dead on a foreign world, leaving you to be raised by a ship’s A.I and an android.

Lana watched her navigator head off to church, while Zeno slipped away to do whatever the hell her secretive android did during his shore leave. ‘Come on,’ she sighed. ‘Let’s go and see DSD.’
And let’s see if I can walk away without being pooch-screwed this time.