1
I dock Glory in bay ninety-four at the outer Oort station and ping my contact. I know it won’t take him long to get to me, but also I’ve had nothing but recycler worms for the entire journey away from the Roundabout wreckage, so I hop out. Stations always have a variety of food and people selling them, and this one is pretty big, with lots of cruiser transfers. I grab some skewers of something brown and crunchy as an appetizer—surprisingly sweet—and then get closer to the center, where the good stuff is.
My contact finds me bent over a cart, picking a flavor of a protein drink. “There you are,” he says, his voice low and gruff. “Why did you leave the bay?”
“I’ll take a purple one, with some of those cold cubes,” I tell the vendor, pointing. “And he’s paying.”
The vendor bends into her cart, scooping out the squishy cubes into the reusable cup I hand her.
“No, I’m not,” my contact says. I don’t know his name. He told me once before, but eh. I ping him with the code word, and he shows up; that’s all this ever needs to be.
“You are paying,” I say, my voice betraying a bit of an edge. “Because I have your stuff. Want anything?” I grin at the vendor as I take the cup back.
Grudgingly, my contact taps his cuff against the vendor’s scanner. “Come on,” he growls, leading me back to Glory. When we’re far enough away from others, he says in a low voice, “You got all three items we need?”
I slurp the purple drink. “Yup.”
He frowns and looks like he wants to say more, but a group of people walks close by. I motion for him to follow me into the docking bay and on board the ship.
He looks around at my little Glory as if she wasn’t the best ship in the entire galaxy, which says a lot about how bad his taste is. Even with a hole in her side that I have to seal off behind the bulkhead doors, Glory’s lovely.
“You have comms down, right?” he asks.
“Obviously,” I snap. Everyone knows that all communication runs through the portal network, and the portal network is run by the government using the same system base. The law-abiding types tend to point out that comms are on private relays, but it doesn’t take much figuring to guess that “private relays” are only private as long as no one wants to listen.
And there are a lot of people who want to listen to what my contact has to say.
“Speaking of security, you do know that the code word Jane Irwin is, er, how shall I put this? Too well fucking known.” I head toward the bridge, the contact on my heels.
“We know,” he says.
I shoot him an exasperated look over my shoulder as I lean down to the bridge box and get out the data recorder that has all the information from the cryptex drive on it.
“It’s a base code at best, and a way to recognize who may be working undercover. We let the law think they know the right code so they don’t dig deeper, and we weed out some low-levels by using it.” He looks down at the box as I hand it to him. “This is useless without the key and the prototype.”
“Sure is. Just like
you’re useless until I see the payment in my account.” I pointedly look at the data band on my wrist, already glowing with my financial info.
The contact heaves a sigh. “Some people would help us because it’s the right thing to do,” he says. “I am not getting paid. Knowing that I could save billions of people is payment enough, and—”
I clear my throat and tap my band.
His jaw works while he pulls out a data pad, punches a code on the screen, waits, taps a few more times. In moments, the sum we agreed upon flashes in my account.
“Wonderful!” I say brightly. I reach into my pocket for the small box that contains the cryptex key and the nanobot prototype and toss it to him.
He fumbles, dropping his data pad to catch the box. “Hey, this is sensitive material!”
“It’s fine,” I say. “If that little nanobot is supposed to figure out a way to clean up the pollution on Earth, then it’s going to have to take a bigger beating than just being tossed a few meters.”
He stares down at the box as if it holds the answers to life, the universe, and everything.
Maybe it does.
No, who am I kidding. It just holds a key and bot.
“Any trouble?” he asks.
“Some,” I say. I was already in place when Roundabout came into view. I watched as the crew inside evacuated and got picked up by another ship in my contact’s network. I suppose there’s some sort of cover for the crew. They were all Earthers; I know that much. Anyway, after the crew left, they set a crash course for Roundabout onto the terran protoplanet.
“You were supposed to crash the ship neater,” I point out. The plan had been to wreck the Roundabout, then let me loot the goods the operation needed and be gone before anyone else showed up. It was the best plan to keep the crew alive and still get the data, and with the crash, there was an excellent chance it would be weeks before the government even knew the material was missing. With a freighter like that, any pause to open up a cofferdam or allow outside boarding would have sent immediate alarms through the system, and probably the United Galactic Systems Navy would show up, guns blazing. But by crashing the ship, communication was just cut off. No one would know about the evac crew until they
saw the crash site. And the government agencies monitoring the Roundabout would believe they’d have to gather up a salvage crew, wasting valuable time.
Time that I could have spent getting the goods and getting out.
Had the ship’s crash site not been quite so bad.
“We did what we could,” the contact says. “And it can’t have been too difficult. You got the stuff.”
The crew of the Roundabout knew the drive was in the bridge box, and they suspected the key was in one of the cargo crates—but all the cargo crates had been linked to the security system, so they couldn’t locate it before the wreck.
“It was a hassle, is what it was,” I grumble. “I deserve a bonus. I have to pay for repairs that I incurred running your job. Which was also in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
“You knew that going in.”
I did. The Roundabout’s course was set on an unusual path that was supposed to be off the charts. But it was heading to a nanobot factory on one of the little unnamed worlds with no atmosphere. Safer to produce something directly designed to interfere with water cycles on a world without water. If it malfunctions, you just scrap the design without risking ruining the whole freaking planet.
Bots are wild. I don’t really mess with them, because I don’t like the idea of someone programming something invisible to the naked eye that can mess you up. People used to use them for everything, including biological and medical issues, but some regs came out limiting their use. Thing is, bots work like a virus—they can replicate, and they can infect other bots with bad coding. No one volunteers these days to infect themselves with nanobots that a coder could bust into and hack your own body. But for things like the environment? I guess the government cleared that.
Infect a whole planet, see what happens.
My contact tilts his head back, looking down his nose at me as if he has me all figured out. ...
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