Oceans of Space (v1.0), page 19
Dave shrugged. “Damned if I know. I don’t really remember.”
“You remembered they were here; you remembered that they used my name; you remembered my drink, and I can’t even remember the last time I was in here. Come on, Dave, don’t bullshit me.”
“Hey, come on yourself. What do you care about some Heavies who came out here lookin’ for trouble and got in over their heads? It’s none of your concern. Stay out of it.”
“I can’t stay out of it, because it’s become my concern. Officially. I’ve been hired to look into this on behalf of the Committee.”
Dave sighed. “Man…What do you want to get involved in this for? They don’t care about you. You’re gonna wind up gettin’ yourself hurt.”
“I know what those people were looking for,” I said.
“I sent them here, and they wound up dead. I guess I feel at least partly responsible. Just tell me where they went, Dave, or who they spoke to while they were here. That’s all I’m asking. It’s not so much, is it?”
Dave just stared at me for a moment with a mournful look. He shook his head. “You could wind up gettin’ shoved out of an air lock. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know that you know just about everything that goes down in Little Shanghai. And if there’s something you don’t know, then you know who does. Just tell me who you sent them to. Please.”
There was a long pause. Then Dave took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “I sent ’em to see Frankie.”
“Frankie Cocklerece?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
It was my turn to sigh. “So Frankie’s into Intensity now, too?”
Dave merely shrugged. “I ain’t sayin’. But it’s like you said, if I don’t know something, I usually know who does.”
“Right. Has Frankie been around lately?”
Dave merely pointed over his head. I craned my neck back and saw Frankie Cocklerece upside down above me, seated at a table in a corner with her entourage. I thanked Dave, waited for a break in traffic among the dancers, and kicked off from my perch. I did a slow and lazy cartwheel in midair about halfway across, reversing my orientation so that I’d come drifting in feet first.
One of Frankie’s boys grabbed me around my right ankle as I came drifting in, and the other grabbed the left, arresting my forward momentum. One of them chuckled and said, “Hey, Tony, make a wish.”
“Yeah!” said Tony, and for a second, I wasn’t sure if they were serious or not.
“Leave the nice man alone, boys,” Frankie said. “He’s’ all right. Slide over, Thomas. Mr. Logan’s going to join us.”
They pulled me into the table between them and I hooked my feet and knees under the rungs. “Thanks for not breaking me,” I said.
“Any time, pal,” Thomas said. He didn’t take his eyes off me as he said to Frankie, “He’s packin’ a blade.”
I had no idea how he knew. I was wearing it in a concealment sheath and was pretty sure it didn’t show. If that was case, then logic dictated that he must have given me a quick frisk as he pulled me into the table, but I hadn’t felt a thing.
“It’s not a problem,” Frankie told him. She looked at me. “Hello, Logan. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it has. How are you, Frankie?”
“I’m good,” she replied, gazing at me thoughtfully. “I’m real good. Hear you’re doing pretty well, yourself. Official trade envoy to Earth, no less. That’s a long way from that wet-behind-the-ears Neo you were when we first met.”
“I suppose. Seems we’ve both come a long way since then. But it hasn’t been that long since we’ve seen each other, Frankie.”
She shook her head. “No, it hasn’t. But it’s been long enough. Long enough for me to know that this isn’t a social call. It’s about those dead Heavies, isn’t it? The Committee’s all bent out of shape about it, and they sent you to find out what happened.”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
“Well, I didn’t kill them.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“But you were wondering.”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Yeah? Not even just a little?”
“Well, I suppose it’s possible, but there wouldn’t have been any profit in it for you, so far as I can see. On the other hand, you might have made it easier for them to kill themselves, if they made it worth your while.”
She smiled faintly. “You’re such a charming bastard, Logan. So what are you asking me? Did they make it worth my while? Did I help them kill themselves?”
“Yeah. Did you?”
“I suppose that depends on your perspective,” she replied. “You’ll have to be more specific.” Thomas chuckled. She shot him a quick glance, and the chuckle died instantly in his throat.
I took a deep breath. “Did you sell them Intensity, Frankie?”
She shook her head. “No.” She watched me for my reaction.
“Okay, so you’re telling me that Intensity is not a commodity you handle, is that it?”
“That’s right.”
“But you sent them somewhere. In exchange for certain considerations, of course. And they wound up dead, so in a sense, I suppose one could say that you did make it easier for them to kill themselves.”
“Like I said, it depends on your perspective. But I didn’t kill them, Logan.”
“Do you know who did?”
She shrugged.
“Let me put it this way: if you did know, would you tell me?”
She thought about it for a second. “Maybe. But then you’d owe me.”
It was my turn to think about it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to owe Frankie any favors. That could get real complicated. But the trail led to her, and I seemed to have no other options. “Okay. I’ll owe you.”
She smiled like a cat about to gobble a canary. “Why don’t you go and have a little talk with Mike Hocherl?”
That name brought me up short. “Vox Hugo’s Chief of Security?”
She chuckled at the expression on my face. Thomas and Tony seemed to find it pretty funny, too. Only I wasn’t laughing. Instead, I was thinking about cycles once again.
Mike Hocherl didn’t look like a guy who would kill anybody. He was creeping up on thirty, but he looked about ten years younger. Even in the black uniform and ball cap of Hugo Security, he still looked like a fit and clean-cut college athlete who always played by the rules.
“You asked to see me, sir?” he said softly, as he came into the office.
“Yes, Mike. Have a seat,” Vox Hugo said.
The security chief quickly glanced at me and Ric, then looked back at Vox. “That’s all right, sir, I’ll stand.”
“I said have a seat, Mike,” Vox repeated, without altering his tone at all, but Hocherl sat down as if he’d cracked a whip. He did not glance at either Ric or me again.
Vox looked down at his big amethyst crystal desk for a moment, as if deep in thought, then looked up at the security chief, sitting across from him. “Tell me about those tourists, Mike,” he said.
I had to give Hocherl credit. He didn’t even blink. Nor did he try to play dumb or finesse his way out of it. “They weren’t really tourists, sir,” he said. “They were here as representatives of several major Earth-based drug cartels. There was no question about that, sir; my intelligence was excellent. They came here looking to negotiate the export of Intensity to Earth. That would have had very serious consequences, especially after Mr. Logan had just successfully concluded negotiations for a new trade agreement.” He gave me a quick glance, then looked back at Vox Hugo. “I felt I had to make a decision, sir, and I accept full responsibility.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Vox said, very softly, “I see. Well, I appreciate your frankness, Mike.” He put his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands together tightly. He compressed his lips into a tight grimace, took a deep breath, and said, “Damn it,” very softly.
“You going to just sit there and let him take the blame all by himself, Ric?” I said.
Vox Hugo jerked his head around so sharply I thought his neck was going to snap.
Ric could not pull it off as coolly as the security chief did. He blinked several times and paused just a shade too long before replying. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” he asked, a bit too offhandedly.
“Yeah, you are,” I said, “because Mike’s a pro and he’s not going to admit that Hugo Security doesn’t do anything unless a Hugo tells them to. Usually, it’s Vox who gives the orders, but in this case, it was you, Ric.”
Ric snorted. “You’ve got a lot of balls, Logan, I have to give you that. I always knew—”
“Be quiet, Ric,” said Vox. He glanced at Hocherl briefly, then turned to Ric and me. “I know you two have never liked each other,” he said, “but I find it difficult to believe you’d make an accusation like that out of simple animosity. So let’s hear it.”
“It’s all about business,” I said. “Recycling, to be exact. It’s a political necessity for Earth-based governments and corporations to recycle, only they can’t do anything with the stuff they recycle because there’s just too much of it. They can’t use it for landfill anymore or dump it in the oceans, all they can do is export it. So on paper, they send us their recycled garbage and we send them ours. Of course, we produce much less, and our process is more cost efficient and much cleaner. They’re getting a better grade of recycled product, supposedly, and we get their recycled product, which we can then reprocess more efficiently and use in construction or else in trade with the habitats.
“Except in practice,” I continued, “and correct me if I’m wrong, Vox, what’s going to happen is the product we receive from them will get mixed right back in with the product that we sent them. So they get back a little more each time, but then they turn right around and fire it back to us. It’s a neat little cycle that allows them to claim they’re recycling and exporting their recycled product when in fact all they’re doing is putting it into a continuous massdriver-powered loop that’s going to have a big snowball effect a few years down the line. But that’s all right, because by then it’ll be someone else’s problem, which is how they got into this whole situation in the first place. Everybody passes the buck down to the next generation. Only in our case, we don’t mind so much, because we turn a nice profit on the deal. Except there’s one small problem…
“With everything all set to work so smoothly and profitably for the next decade or two, the last thing anybody needs is the added complication of a brand new drug trade between Sargasso and the Earth cartels. Sooner or later—most likely sooner, because you cannot mass manufacture Intensity on Earth—someone’s bound to notice this new little import/export business and that would lead to investigations. But we don’t want investigations, do we? Because then somebody would probably figure out that this whole trade deal was nothing more than a political snow job. And, coincidentally, it would also hurt our tourism, because why should well-heeled tourists shell out all that money for exotic drug junkets to Sargasso when they can just conveniently pick up the stuff at home at a considerably cheaper dealer markup?” Ric gave a derisive snort. “Are you seriously accusing me of being a drug dealer?”
“No, Ric, nothing so dramatic as all that,” I replied. “I’m just accusing you of being a travel agent who books cruises. The Heavies come here for the exotic, rough trade thrill of it all and drugs aren’t the only things they spend their tourist creds on. Creds, which you are in the business of redeeming, after all, since we work on barter points that are meaningless to tourists. I don’t really think you have anything to do with the manufacture of Intensity and I’d be willing to bet that you don’t know who does, either, because you want plausible deniability or else because you simply don’t care. Frankie Cocklerece probably knows where the stuff comes from, but she wouldn’t tell me and I didn’t want to force the issue, because I wasn’t in any position to try.”
I glanced at the youthful-looking security chief, whose face betrayed no emotion. “I don’t know if you did the job yourself, Mike, or else had some of your people do it for you. Either way, I figure you had no real problem with it because a) they were just scumbag drug dealers and b) Ric gave the order. It wasn’t hard to figure that they’d go to Floaters or that Dave would hook them up with Frankie. Maybe you just picked them up from there, or else had Frankie set them up for you. Maybe you made sure that they OD’d. I don’t know the details of how it went down and I don’t really want to. I just hope your intelligence was as good as you say, because it would be a shame if any of those dealers you spaced turned out to be innocent tourists who only came out in search of a new high. But then maybe you think that doesn’t make them so innocent. Bottom line? It wasn’t really about drugs. It was about protecting a somewhat shady trade agreement and the Hugo Brothers’ stake in the growing Sargasso tourist industry.”
“It’s a very nice theory, Logan,” Ric replied, dryly, “but you can’t prove any of it, can you?”
I shrugged. “Who says I have to? It’s not as if anyone is going to get arrested, is it? This whole thing was just a show for the Committee and anyone from Earth who might start asking questions about a bunch of missing tourists. ‘Hey, we tried. We appointed a special investigator, the same guy who was our trade envoy, that’s how much we thought of this. But you know, Sargasso can be a dangerous place to visit.’ The truth is, I don’t think anyone’s going to ask too many questions, because that would not be very good for business, would it?”
“No, I don’t suppose it would,” said Vox. He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and glanced from me to Ric and back again. “One of you is a bit too smart and the other isn’t nearly smart enough,” he said. Ric’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. “I like you, Logan,” Vox continued, “and I respect you. A lot of people here do. And that’s part of the problem. Even if you did choose to work for me full-time, and I know better than to ask, it just would not work out. I’ll have your fee and a sixty percent bonus credited to your account. You can use it to relocate to any habitat you like. Mike will escort you home and help you pack.”
“No, don’t bother, Mike,” I said. “I think I’ll just leave straight from here and catch the next shuttle out.” I checked my watch. “There should be one in about twenty minutes.”
Mike looked at me and held my gaze for a second, then nodded. “Whatever you say, Mr. Logan.”
I looked back at the Hugo Brothers. “I’ll just see myself out, guys,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, I was shipping out and leaving Sargasso behind for the last time. I’d grown accustomed to the place and I would miss it. I wasn’t sure I’d like life in the habitats. But I wasn’t going home again. All I had were the clothes on my back and some barter points in my account. As an ancient Chinese named Confucius said once, “In the course of a long life, a wise man learns to abandon his baggage many times.” I hadn’t left behind very much in the way of baggage, but I was sure it wouldn’t go to waste. Someone would probably find a use for it. And if not, it could always be recycled.
COMMODORES AND
COMMANDERS OF THE COSMOS
The high seas whether on Earth or in space are always dangerous and in dispute whether it be between humans and aliens, officers and crews, or men and machines.
Nautical engagements, shipboard mutinies, and tales of glory and combat of the past, all have their place in the annals of the cosmos.
A MATTER OF FAITH by Robert Greenberger
From the Captain’s Log of the starship Sojourner:
We’re just about a year away from Arcadia and l find myself faced with an unexpected and most unpleasant turn of events. While on the Bridge, I made a decision to abort a rendezvous with an asteroid belt to collect needed raw material. From all the projections it looked too dicey to risk the crew. As I was giving the order…order, an interesting concept.
Society is built around order. Without it we would never have made it from Earth to find Arcadia. It was order and adherence to same that allowed us to take the world and make it our own. And now, generations hence, following our orders from Earth, we’re on our way to another star, another planet to spread humanity’s seed. Order, they say, inhibits creativity. Chaos is what allows true artistic genius to surface or to allow a scientist to make a leap of faith and find something new and extraordinary. Those philosophers I studied…none seemed to feel it was possible to house both order and chaos within one’s mind. And yet, that’s expected of a captain—to follow orders and protect the crew. Still, when the unexpected arrives, he must harness the chaos and channel it, forced it to help provide a solution.
My life is ruled by order. As 1 was giving the command, Midshipman Nicole Wright tried to countermand it. She tried to convince the crew that I was in error, had lost the nerve to command and therefore should not be followed. Some of the duty personnel were her friends, and they hesitated. Our words escalated to shouts, and I finally called security to escort her off the Bridge. Wright is a woman of much conviction, and she is to be admired for such passion. Sadly, though, her actions have consequences and now those convictions may, in turn, convict her of mutiny. I am about to head below to our first court-martial. It is not an experience I am particularly looking forward to.
“Prosecution calls MP Chief Suzuki.”
“Do you swear to present the truth, the entire truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.”
“Proceed, Lieutenant Mahomes.”
“Chief, walk us through your preliminary investigation.”
“Yes, sir. When Lieutenant Wright first made her accusations, I spoke with our chief engineer, our chief medical officer, our first officer, the morale officer, and Wright’s bunkmate. Wright had specific concerns, and I checked each of those with the above-named officers. At that time, I made a report, as you know, to the first officer.”
