Words like “growth” and “potential” are thrown around as are “deal” and “development costs.” But the prevalent feeling is more poker game than startup. Everyone’s holding cards and no one’s showing just yet. There’s something there. But no one really knows what, or they’re not saying. Everyone may be bluffing. That’s happened before. Fortunes have been won and lost on dead worlds out along the edge that were supposed to become the center of galactic commerce. But when galactic fortunes are to be made, it pays to sit down and play even if there’s nothing in the pot. Yet. And so everyone has come to the Grand Intergalactic to see and be seen. To get their cards and play their hands.
Jack Bowie met his contact by prearranged signal in the lobby bar. An ornate teak and marble affair accented by artistic renditions of ancient Kublaren tribal masks and a Utopion show-worthy display of Granadian tequilas.
It’s all very colonial, but new, and uber chic. That’s how you let people know they’ve arrived at the place where deals are made. Where the wealth is traded and acquired along with a couple of million souls.
The Team Nilo contact is someone familiar. Bowie crossed the crowd to reach the window table that looks out on a wide terrace gazing out across sweaty, seething Soob City at midmorning, filled with minarets and slum housing and the distant ship-hulks of the breakers district. He smiled at the man he is supposed to meet.
But it’s not a warm or friendly smile, though it’s made to seem so. Or it can be taken that way. No, the smile is there to cover the realization that could have crossed Bowie’s face when he calculated how much deep sket he currently was in.
Reiser.
Reiser is the contact. Reiser is working for Team Nilo. So things just got a whole lot murkier.
Whenever Reiser is involved… voodoo black magic intel is going to get weird. Bowie had crossed paths with the man back in Naval Intel when they’d worked an op, kicked over a rock and found Nether Ops hiding underneath and up to no good, as usual.
Reiser is who Bowie’s smiling at. And who Bowie’s contact is today. He slid into the chair, and a waiter from some edge world looking to make a killing in hospitality is there lickety-split with fresh kaff in a silver and bone china service so hot the steam rises from the delicate cup.
It’s aromatic and fresh. Probably Kandarian Red Mountain. The most expensive in the galaxy.
“So you’re working for him?” asks Bowie cutting to the chase and forgetting deft formalities. The left unsaid identifier of “him” clearly indicates Nilo of Team Nilo.
Best to get these things out of the way upfront and try to figure out who’s playing for whom, when really everyone knows everyone’s only playing for themselves. No one in this line of work is a true believer. Maybe a fool. But never a true believer.
That’s the worst kind of fool to be.
Or at least, the worst kind still living on the other side of an op. Rumor was the last true believer got croaked during the end of the Savage Wars. But no one misses that old fraud except the other old frauds who’d spent their best years getting legionnaires killed and navy ships shot to pieces or occasionally outright blown to kingdom come like the destroyer Chiasm.
“Yeah,” says Reiser. “We all are, Bowie. We’re all working for him now.”
Bowie stares at the man he knows as “Reiser” for a long moment, looks away and seems to come to some agreement with himself about what needs to happen next. Whatever it is, it remains hidden behind sunglasses. But so does whatever crosses Reiser’s mind in that brief interval of measuring.
“This isn’t Nether Ops?” asks, no, demands Bowie.
“Damn, Jack, you always were a ball buster. Just start swearing like an engineering chief on an old Vindicator-class destroyer and straight invoke all the devils of the Nether, why don’t you. Ain’t you worried one of them might appear right here and swallow all our souls, Jack? Words like Nether Ops ain’t s’posed to be used in polite company, or classy places like the Intergalactic.”
Reiser laughs good-naturedly and tastes his kaff.
Bowie follows suit. Then…
“I’m not kidding, Reiser. If this is Nether, then consider last night a freebie and I’m moving on. I’m dirty, but I don’t wanna get that dirty. So be straight with me—if only because of what went down on Cerdo’s Run and how much you owe. Copy?”
Reiser thought about this for a long moment as he savored the next sip of kaff. Then he sat back in his chair. He was smaller than Jack. Older by a few years and a lot of hard living. He’d probably retired out of Naval Intel. But he was still young enough to be dangerous. And the scars on his face mixed with the craggy texture gave him the appearance of a mean alcoholic.
That kind of dangerous.
“Yeah,” he said clapping his hands together suddenly and ginning up some faux enthusiasm that was little more than thinly disguised sarcasm. “Ain’t like that anymore, Jack. Nether’s dead and gone. Ain’t ya heard? Buried in a deep, dark hole no one should ever go looking in again. You got my word on that for whatever my word—yes, an ex-Nether lizard word—is worth these days. Okay. Nah, this…” He threw his hands wide to encompass the bar, and all of Kublar was caught in the implication. “This… ain’t that, Jack. This is something completely new. Something better is about to happen for everyone.”
Reiser looked around to see if any of the fine suited business types making deals for everything possible that Kublar could provide were listening in. Near
