Drifter (4 page)

Husband and wife looked at each other. There was truth in what Wendy said. They'd be forced to deal with a smuggler eventually, like it or not. Uncle Syd nodded.

"Granted. But we must choose carefully. Most smugglers are little more than common criminals."

"Jonathan Troon could give us some advice there," Aunt Margaret said.

"Yes," Uncle Syd agreed, waving his fork in Wendy's direction. "Jonathan's our shipping agent. I'll contact him in the morning. If anyone could put you in touch with a reliable smuggler, Jonathan could."

"If there is such a thing as a 'reliable smuggler,'" Aunt Margaret said doubtfully. "Most of them traffic in arms and drugs."

Wendy smiled. "The Lord works in mysterious ways."

3

The woman screamed as the man in black leather brought the whip down across her naked back. Even though Wendy knew it was a holo, and even though the woman was okay, she still jerked in sympathetic response. Wendy had nothing against eroticism per se, or pornography for that matter, but couldn't stand to see violence used as a sexual stimulant.

She looked around. No one else was watching. The holo was nothing more than a backdrop for other activities. The background noise came close to obliterating the woman's screams.

The bar was packed, full of spacers mostly, with a scattering of enlisted types from the Imperial destroyer that had touched down earlier in the day. They moved back and forth, a living tapestry of ship suits, uniforms, and body armor. She saw very few aliens, and assumed they spent most of their time in other, more cosmopolitan establishments.

The air was so thick with smoke that it made Wendy's throat sore. She hated the noise, the smell of sour alcohol, and the feel of bodies pressing in around her.

She looked across a pair of untouched beers to Jonathan Troon. She hoped that he'd notice her distress and take her somewhere else. No such luck. Troon was watching the crowd.

Wendy tried to guess what Troon was thinking, but the shipping agent was a cyborg, with a face of rigid plastic. Some cyborgs were too poor to pay for a lifelike plastiflesh face, but not Troon. Judging from his brand new ground car, and his expensive clothes, the cyborg could buy anything he wanted.

No, for reasons known only to the cyborg himself, Troon wore an expression of eternal happiness.

Wendy considered it. What if she was limited to a single expression? Would she choose happiness? Sadness? Something in between?

The cyborg turned in her direction and interrupted Wendy's thoughts. He wore a high-collared evening cloak, matching skin-tight breeches, and a pair of knee-high boots. "Is everything okay? Would you care for another beer?"

Wendy indicated the full glass in front of her. "No, thanks." She gestured towards the rest of the room. "Are you sure this visit is necessary?"

Troon shrugged. He made the gesture seem elegant. "It's like my mother used to say. If you want to swim with the fish, then jump in the ocean."

Wendy raised an eyebrow. "And if you drown?"

Troon laughed. "Mother was an optimist. You have nothing to fear, however. I guarantee your safety."

Wendy wanted to say that her desire to leave the bar had nothing to do with her personal safety, but that would seem ungracious. Troon was trying to help. The least she could do was wait the process out. Wendy hoisted her beer and forced a smile.

"Here's to the fish."

Pik Lando entered the bar and looked around. As Lando's eyes drifted over the crowd, he saw things that others might have missed. There were roid rats, rimmers, smugglers, bounty hunters, merchant marine, mercenaries, and more.

Bounty hunters sat in corners with their backs to the wall, constantly scanning the crowd for fugitives. Mercenaries drank the same way they fought, taking possession of entire tables and defending them against all comers. And, with a few exceptions, roid rats drank alone, as suspicious of each other as they were of everyone else, glowering at people who came too close.

Under normal circumstances Lando favored the bar, where he could watch the room in the large mirror, and leave quickly if the heat arrived.

But tonight was different. Lando was hungry and they didn't serve food at the bar. The smuggler wound his way through the tables, chose one next to a group of reasonably sober engineering types, and activated the tabletop menu. Burning blue letters appeared under the table's plastic surface.

Scanning through the menu, Lando saw steak, nearly rejected it due to the cost, but thought,
What the hell, I'm fifty thousand to the good, and I haven't had a good piece of meat since my dinner with Inspector Critzer. God bless his greedy soul.

Lando grinned and touched the word "steak," followed by "medium," and "coffee, Terran."

He had just settled back, and was about to do a little woman-watching, when he saw one rise from her seat and turn his way. She was different. Not a spacer, not a bounty hunter, something else.

The short hair would look terrible on some, but was perfect for her. It served to emphasize the soft symmetry of her face. A face that looked, well, determined somehow, as if on some sort of important errand.

And then there was her body—a very nice body, which in spite of some shapeless clothes, managed to make itself known in all the right places. She wore a pin of some sort. A circle with a triangle mounted within. He'd seen that design before but couldn't remember where.

Yes, the woman had both potential
and
an escort in the form of an upscale cyborg. A borg with a plastic smile, a rather obvious blaster tucked away under his left armpit, and something else. An attitude that said, "Screw with me and you could wind up seriously dead."

What the hell? The unlikely pair were heading straight for his table. Heat? Competition? Clients? Lando had settled on the last possibility by the time they reached his table.

"Good evening," the cyborg said smoothly. "My name's Jonathan Troon, and this is Dr. Wendy Wendeen. Could we join you for a drink? Or some dinner perhaps?"

Lando made no attempt to rise. Troon, Troon. The name was familiar but he couldn't quite place it.

The cyborg spoke as if reading Lando's mind. "Your father might have mentioned my name. We worked together many years ago."

Jonathan Troon! Of course! Lando's father loved to tell the story of how he and a cyborg named Troon… had smuggled a quarter-million credits worth of black market biochips onto Terra by making it appear that they were part of the borg's motor control subprocessor.

Lando smiled and got to his feet. His slug gun slithered into its holster. The smuggler held out his hand. "I'm pleased to me you, Citizen Troon. My father has mentioned you many times."

"And I him," Troon replied politely. "Tell him that since our little adventure I've moved into a safer line of work."

"Consider it done," Lando replied, turning his attention to the woman.

The cyborg nodded, acknowledging Lando's comment and Wendy's presence at the same time. "Dr. Wendeen, and the people that she represents, have need of your services."

Lando took the woman's hand, noting the short, utilitarian nails, and the firm grip. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Wendeen. Citizen Troon glossed over the matter of my name, but it's Pik Lando, and friends call me Pik."

Suddenly aware that the handshake should have ended some time ago, Wendy released Lando's hand. He smiled.

Wendy felt flustered. Outside of the ugly-looking gun, the smuggler was nothing like the slimy underworld type she'd imagined. Just the opposite in fact.

Lando had shiny black hair pulled back into a ponytail, quick brown eyes, and a slightly hooked nose. The nose gave him a slightly predatory air, which Wendy found both exciting and alarming at the same time.

"Please call me Wendy.
Doctor
Wendeen is off duty."

Lando nodded and gestured towards his table. "Please… I ordered some food. Would you care to join me?"

Wendy selected a vegetarian dinner, and Troon ordered a fruit salad. Lando wondered if he'd eat it. Some cyborgs ate, and some didn't, depending on how they were put together.

Once the others had finished making their selections, Lando smiled and looked from Wendy to Troon. "So here we are. You mentioned a business proposition."

The cyborg nodded. "Yes. Wendy's aunt and uncle are friends of mine. And when they told me Wendy had a rather special cargo to move, I thought of you."

Lando looked from Troon to Wendy and back again. Was this for real? Or part of a scam? They seemed sincere, but as dear old Dad liked to say, "Appearances can be deceiving."

"No offense, Jonathan, but how did you know that I was on HiHo? And why me?"

Troon shrugged. "I'm a shipping agent. I ship most of my cargo via legitimate hulls. But not all of it. Some of my clients have shipments that require special handling. I make it my business to know who can help them, where they are, and what it will cost. Information, like everything else in this universe, is for sale. I buy it, mark it up, and sell it. As for you, well, your entire family has a good reputation."

Lando nodded. It made sense. The Landos were pretty well known in smuggling circles.

A shiny robo-waiter brought dinner to their table, paused while they took their food, and whirred off towards another table. Lando waited until everyone had been served, took a bite of steak, and caught Wendy's eye.

"So, tell me what you want to move, where the cargo is now, and where it's supposed to go."

Wendy looked at Troon, saw his nod of approval, and turned towards Lando.

"The cargo consists of fertilizer concentrate. It's stored on Weller's World. I want it delivered to a planet called Angel."

Lando raised an eyebrow, checked to make sure she was serious, and broke into laughter. "Fertilizer? Weller's World? Angel? You've got to be kidding!"

Wendy was annoyed. What was so funny? She frowned. "I enjoy a good joke, Citizen Lando… but I fail to see any humor in what I said."

Lando struggled to get the smile off his face. "I'm sorry, Wendy. I meant no offense. Your comments took me by surprise, that's all. It's the first time that anyone's asked me to smuggle fertilizer. Precious metals, body parts, and electronics, yes, but not fertilizer."

Wendy relaxed slightly and took a sip of her tea. Looking at the request from Lando's point of view, it
did
seem sort of funny. She smiled.

"I see what you mean. But your words serve to illustrate our situation. On Angel, fertilizer
is
as precious as gold, to us at least, and that's why we need your help."

Lando looked thoughtful. "If fertilizer's as precious as gold, then Angel must be made out of solid rock."

Wendy smiled grimly. "Angel isn't quite that bad… but it
comes pretty close. Up until roughly
one hundred thousand years ago, Angel was a perfectly ordinary Earth-type planet similar to HiHo, but wetter. Then a nickel-iron asteroid came along, hit the planet, and bounced into space.

"Our scientists say that the asteroid was about fifty miles across, weighed in at a couple of quadrillion tons, and was moving at roughly thirty miles a second when it hit. You can still see the scar along Angel's equator. It's two hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long.

"Needless to say, the collision threw a tremendous amount of matter into the atmosphere. Enough to drastically reduce the amount of sunlight that reached the planet's surface, kill off most of the vegetation, and the animals that fed on it.

"In the meantime the impact triggered major volcanic eruptions, creating even
more
dust and smoke, not to mention rivers of molten lava."

Wendy put down her fork. "There wasn't much left by the time the whole thing was over."

Lando tried to imagine what it would look like as an asteroid hit a planet, caromed off, and disappeared into space. The scale was so huge, so awesome, that he couldn't quite grasp it.

"So what's Angel like now?"

Wendy's eyes lit up. "It's beautiful, not in the ordinary sense perhaps, but beautiful nonetheless.

"The impact scar filled with lava soon after the collision, and with water after that. From space it looks like a long, narrow canal. We call it the Finger of God, because for reasons known only to her, that's where she touched our planet. There's no life in it, due to the sulfur compounds which bubble up from below. It's beautiful, though. The water is always warm, and the beaches are made of black sand…."

Wendy paused for a moment, as if remembering something long past. She was back a few seconds later.

"I should also mention that there's some primitive plant life in the oceans that cover about eighty percent of Angel's surface. That, along with some pre-collision ground cover that managed to survive the long twilight, provides us with plenty of oxygen. Our volcanos outgas enough CO
₂
to keep the biosphere in balance.

"The continents are rugged, extremely mountainous, and largely barren. There's very little soil along the ridge tops,

or on the slopes for that matter, because wind and rain push most of it downhill. That's where we live, in the valleys, or on small plateaus."