Reynard tears the clasp on the black hood; underneath he finds the unmarked garments of what appears to be a teenage girl.
He slams her against the wall, pinning her arm behind her back a mere quarter of an inch from snapping. “I don’t always bring my Calthos bodyguard, but when I do, no one fucks with me.”
“Please…” she begs. “You’re hurting me.”
“Bet it will be hard to pick pockets with a cast.” He glances at JC wondering whether they even cast broken bones anymore.
She leans against the wall herself in a drunken woozy stagger to stay on her feet.
“I guess this would be the place for a pickpocket to work. Less use of implanted DNA cards and more use of physical currency.”
The knightly armored security guards and an Aurulent, along with JarBok, surround the commotion.
“Arguments are settled in the Dracon Arena,” JarBok explains.
“No argument. This little girl just attempted to steal my credits.” Reynard tears his pouch from her hand. “I prevented it.”
“He was stealing my credits,” the girl protests.
“Smerth’n hell.” Reynard flips up his jacket revealing a spot where the pouch attaches to his belt.
“No good. Severe this is. You all will have to come with me.”
“This woman stole from me, and I caught her. Where do we need to go?”
“Disputes are settled here in the same manner—the Dracon Arena.”
“IF I’M NOT welcome to those in authority, why bring me back to Zayous?” Maxtin keeps himself poised in his chair restrained by seatbelts.
Thierry punches commands into the computer, “I don’t understand why when you had the one opportunity to send a message, you activated a bounty on a criminal.”
“I won’t let being commandeered by you stop my duties. Not sending out my bounties could arouse suspicion by those under my command who were expecting it. They would wonder why I hadn’t done it.”
“Logical. It makes sense. You were off-world secretly. By activating orders, you appear still in your office. No one will suspect you’re gone.” Thierry speculates, “You work the system too well for it to be the only reason to do it.”
“And you avoided my question. If the Zayar Counsel has repudiated me—why are we here?”
“I told you, the Qarban R16. I need to find more. You’ll soon understand why.”
“I see the effect of the Mokarran war daily. I visit the refugee camps growing outside of the Riftgate.”
“It’s different when it’s your own people.”
“In thirty years my people are doing better than most.”
The ever-changing waves of light patterns streaking, bending, and squiggling before the clear durasteel window dip back to the twinkle of a million tiny dots in the ocean of black.
The craft lurches.
The shift in gravity sends Maxtin forward. If not for the seatbelt harness, he would feel the cold surface of the windshield.
“Something’s a hazard with your disengagement buffers.”
“I’ll get it repaired. We lack the resources to maintain our ships,” Thierry admits.
“Buying new parts would lead someone to suspect your planetary resources have dwindled. Showing weakness would invite attack. Do you firmly believe someone is monitoring every purchase made by the Zayar conglomerations?”
“Don’t you have people auditing the Mokarran purchases?”
Maxtin points out, “Weapons purchases are different than cargo ship repair notices.”
“A cargo fleet needing an overhaul could mean an increase in transporting goods. If I were an investor, I’d be monitoring ship repairs.”
“Being Zayars we’ll verbally fence and get nowhere. You’re a cargo shipper. Stopping on a planet to make a repair will go unnoticed. Things break on a ship, even those from Zayous.” Maxtin notices the closest twinkling dots have grown in size and are not stars but dozens of battle cruisers hanging in space just outside the gravity well of the planet below them.
Garbled squawks blast from the comm. Thierry punches in a code, and they stop. He activates the sunshield, and the clear durasteel window darkens.
Maxtin spots hundreds of his people gathering at the windows of the battle cruiser as they drift past. Women and children crowd the front. All, even the two or three babies he spots, look like ancient men with long white hair and rough face lines. At least in the eyes of Osirians his people naturally look old.
“I hate this part.”
“I would think you bring them hope.”
“I bring them a lie. Each time I fly past, they think I’ve brought enough Qarban R16 so enough atmosphere will be purified to allow a return to the surface.”
“You have a full cargo hold.”
“You know our people. They will mathematically calculate the numbers to death. No one gets to the surface unless the number crunchers are sure life’s sustained without affecting what echo system has been repaired.”
“Won’t you bringing me mess up those numbers? Or will I have to remain in an environmental suit my entire visit so I don’t consume any extra air?”
“If they don’t shoot us both, it’s entirely possible.”
The milk brown sludge makes Zayous VI look like a micro gas giant instead of the fertile world in orbit around the green sun. The shuttle sinks into the muck.
Maxtin finds nothing familiar to focus on. His people have strict building laws, and resource management controls the population. In some areas, the ecological system was so precious that if Zayous had to reside there, they had to do so underground, saving many people during the biological attack.
“Southern Hemisphere. Lan’gore Province on the largest continent, but it was a colossal forest.”
“Lang’gore Research Center was below ground there.”
“And a geothermal power system.” Maxtin spots the plume of a cerulean flower below them as the ship levels off and nothing but the brown mud juts across the window.
A monitor on the control panel powers on. Below them are two azure domes. The large ten-mile-wide one and a smaller one centered over a landing platform some fifty miles away.
Thierry brings the ship to hover directly over the platform. The craft touches the dome. Jets of a chemical spray powerful enough to push the ship upward pelt the underbelly
