“She said that a mutual friend—Kira—ran afoul of the Rudds and now’s locked up downtown. She also said something about a bunch of offworld scientists being conscripted to work at Vortis. Did I miss anything?”
“Yeah, that’s the gist of it.”
He peered curiously at me. “You look exactly like—”
“I know. I get that all the time.”
We stepped into a cluttered workshop with wall-mounted benches stacked high with all kinds of components: a pair of old B3 fabbers, an array of fuel cells, stacks of displays, a TL3 module, flex cutters, and other electronic detritus.
“You have a lot of stuff to move in a couple of weeks,” I said.
“I’m not moving it.”
“You going to—”
“I’m going to blow the whole shitpile sky high. It will be my parting gift to the Mayir.”
“Ah, a kindred soul!” TenSix exclaimed. “I, too, detest the Mayir.”
“No one asked you, bot,” Tadao said. He sat down at an old HDD workstation and started flipping through screens. “Let’s start with your missing friend Kira. What’s her last name?”
“Lark. L-A-R-K. Her parents are also scientists. Thastus and Biella Lark. They’re the ones that were taken from their camp by the Mayir, four days ago.”
“Hang on. Not so fast.” His hands raced along the keyboard.
“What are you doing?”
“Building a keyword list for the sniffer.”
“Sniffer?”
“It’s a RTMA scanner. We feed it a list of keywords and it pulls audio, video, and amalga data that matches. If someone is talking about your friend, we’ll know it. But we need to beef up the search criteria.”
I spent the next ten minutes with Tadao, sharing every reference and keyword that might be relevant to Kira and her family. TenSix did the same for the Marlington research team—although it took him less than five seconds to generate a thousand-record dataset. He also fed it directly into the console. Score one for the bots.
“How long is this going to take?” I asked.
“Not long. It can grind through twenty-four hours of data in about a half hour. We’ll start with the recent stuff and then start digging backwards. In the meantime, show me this Aura you need cracked.”
I withdrew Biella’s Aura. “It’s already unlocked. I just need it reset.”
“Uh huh.”
It took Tadao less than five minutes to reset the device and re-key it to my retinas. “You want me to cloak the commerce pings?”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It means that right now this Aura is pinging the central bank on Devariin whenever it’s used to buy anything. I can anonymize it for you. No extra charge.”
“I didn’t know I was paying for this to begin with.”
“You’re not. Apparently Biella Lark is. But don’t worry about it. She’s extremely well-off.”
Great. Kira was going to have a fit once she heard that someone had raided her mom’s bank account.
“Excuse me,” TenSix said. “These commerce pings…are they present in other payment protocols?”
“Like what?” Tadao asked while he continued to work on the Aura.
“Like…me?”
TenSix went on to explain how he used his credit account at the municipal spaceport—and to pay for the taxi.
“It’s possible that the Mayir were monitoring commerce pings,” Tadao admitted.
“Especially if the Mayir are on the lookout for anyone from Marlington or Oeri who may have escaped their clutches,” TenSix said. “We’re doomed.”
“We’re not doomed,” I said. “But it’s not good.”
“It’s not. But don’t let the bot pay for anything. Use the Aura.” Tadao handed it back to me. “It’s safe now.”
“Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”
“Thank Lhiana. I wouldn’t give you the time of day if it wasn’t for her.”
“We need to return to the junk dealer,” TenSix said.
“Let me guess,” Tadao said. “Caebach. You’re shopping for a ship?”
“Yeah.”
“If you buy anything from him, I’d check it out carefully. Very carefully. You don’t want to be halfway to orbit when your helical modulators conk out.”
“That would be bad.”
Tadao said he’d contact me if the sniffer found any reference to Kira, her family, or the Marlington team. And then he sent his drone to escort us out.
When we returned to Docking Bay 49 we saw a beat-up old shuttle parked on the landing pad.
“Isn’t she a beaut?” Caebach said, wiping the main hatch porthole with a filthy cloth.
I walked around the shuttle, trying to figure out what make it was. “What is this thing?”
“Custom job. Built on a Vireo T-6A chassis, but powered by a twin—”
“Yeah, I know. I’m familiar with the T-11. I just didn’t think that something this old could still be spaceworthy.”
“Maybe under normal conditions, but this one sat in a dust-free hangar for most of its life. We can open the engine compartment so you can see for yourself. It’s pristine.”
He popped open the exterior access panels and slid back the heat shields to reveal the engine, which looked fine to my untrained eye. Like Caebach said, it was clean.
“This looks too small to be a 350,” I said.
Caebach laughed. “Not at this price, boy. No, this here’s a modified 150 twin ion, with active inductors. Not fancy, I admit, but it will get you to the TSS in one piece. Guaranteed.”
“Let me see inside,” I said.
The main hatch opened into a small cargo area that was about half the size of Kira’s sled. I pushed in to examine the cockpit itself. The console looked pretty primitive to me.
“May I plug into to the diagnostic port?” TenSix asked.
“What for?” Caebach asked.
“I need him to do a check of the systems,” I said.
“Fine. After we’ve settled on a price.”
“What did you have in mind?”
He named a figure that was about three times what this piece of junk was worth, and we went back and forth for at least fifteen minutes, haggling.
Finally, Caebach came down close to, but a little over, what I was willing to pay. “Plus,” he said, “I’ll set up the flight plan and departure authorizations—seeing as how you’re keen to avoid Mayir entanglements.”
I agreed. Reluctantly.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford it. Or, more accurately, it wasn’t that Biella Lark couldn’t afford
