Six lost souls, p.1
Six Lost Souls, page 1
Six Lost Souls
Copyright 2019 R. E. Stearns
Published by Near Earth Press at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Pronouns Used in This Story
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other books by R. E. Stearns
To Hannah Bowman, without whose knowledge and encouragement the stories I’ve written would never have been read.
Pronouns Used In This Story
He, She, They, Ve
Him, Her, Them, Ver
His, Her, Their, Vis
Chapter One
It wasn’t quite eleven a.m. on Ceres Station, but nobody in the bar would tell Ku Nel-Aoki that it was too early to drink. A couple of the bar’s dancers were on stage, kicking to basoelectronica that shook the ill-lit floor beneath Ku’s boots. The few third shift workers relaxing in this corner of the Jane Jacobs residential module, JJ to the locals, would’ve left Ku and her two shadows alone even without the dancers to distract them. Ku owned this level of JJ. Everyone else just lived there.
One of her shadows, Fuse, thumped her arm with the back of his hand. Although his hair was as black as Ku’s own where he hadn’t streaked it green, Fuse was too old to be doing the work they did. Ku kept him around because he showed up when and where she told him to, and he was bigger than her. He also put up with everybody calling him “fuse” when his Japanese name had two syllables.
He nodded toward the front door. “Ey, is that the rojoy?”
Rojoy, Kuiper cant for “old-timer,” was Ku’s nickname for the white police officer assigned to JJ-2, the second level of the mod. “Dah-ah, that’s him.” Midmorning usually found the rojoy in his office three streets over, waiting for complaints to come to him. Now he wavered near the door while his eyes adjusted from the bright morning sunsim to the bar’s scattered overhead lights.
Ku’s second shadow said nothing. Cedar, all purple mohawk and hooded eyes this time of morning, would’ve spotted the new arrival before Fuse. If the rojoy’s complaint was a simple one, Cedar would spend the exchange scowling and sharpening vis knives with one boot propped on an empty chair.
The rojoy’s gaze finally fell on Ku and he crossed the stained floor to her table. Every patron who saw his uniform let their conversations lapse. The AI bartender that projected from the ceiling kept on bobbing its head to the music and wiping a projected rag over the bar. On the half hour, the bar cleaned itself.
By tightening eye muscles, Ku activated the implant protected by a metal housing embedded in and around her eye sockets. The rojoy snapped into focus as the implant redirected the light entering her eyes. His uniform was as rumpled as ever. The gleaming Ceres Station police badge projected onto his chest lit a weak chin and gray stubble. A thermographic analysis came back as anxious, the word fading into Ku’s view beside his head and fading out once she read it. According to her weapons scan, he’d added a stunner to his usual combination of knives and impatience.
Ku scowled like the rojoy interrupting her gin and orange breakfast inconvenienced her. Really, she was looking forward to learning what’d made the duster heave himself out of his desk chair. Like all law enforcement officers, he had no control over the dust-fine nannites that deployed at what cams identified as crime scenes, but the slang for his job stuck anyway. There was often money to be made in sources of duster distress.
Cedar’s knife slid into a sheath and vis boots thudded to the floor, preparation for violence on the off chance the rojoy had gotten ambitious since Cedar and Ku had last seen him. Fuse smiled with friendliness that should’ve been false but wasn’t, on him. “Ey, what do you need?” he asked the rojoy.
The rojoy barely glanced at Fuse. “Ku, we need to talk.”
Ku stood and shook out hair that almost touched her shoulders, covering minor disorientation from switching off her implant’s analyses. “Aw, are we breaking up? I’ll need another drink for that.”
“Ku, this is serious.”
Fuse and Cedar stood too, but three members of the Ceres syndicate against one old duster would make the rojoy too anxious to say all he had to say. Ku waved Fuse back to his seat. To Cedar, she said “Posey minun, foro karo.” Cedar sat down too.
The rojoy stepped aside to let Ku lead the way out. “Why can’t you just speak English? Everybody else here does.”
“Cant is faster,” Ku said. “My time’s valuable.” Not allowing an old duster to overhear her every command was valuable too.
She stepped out the bar’s front door and let her implant adjust her eyesight while she scanned for dangerous faces and the wrong kind of weapons. Locals walked along the bot tracks that ran through the center of the street, looking no more wary than usual. A massive delivery bot rumbled down the tracks, stopping every few meters to shove boxes into buildings’ inventory systems.
Several blocks to her right, toward the grav acclimation tunnel that led to the port mod, Ku’s implants pinged on a group of pedestrians. They were a long way off, but coming closer. The implant applied a yellow glow to highlight them as a potential threat. She and the rojoy would walk that way and see what they found.
“What’s the problem?” Ku asked the rojoy.
“Oh, where do I start?” In anything other than an enviro emergency the rojoy had preliminaries to go through, listing all the ways that the Ceres syndicate and the delinquents who wanted to join it had inconvenienced him this week. By listening, Ku respected him for his age and implied that they both wanted the same thing: peace in JJ-2.
She could’ve ignored his complaints, or threatened him with violence for wasting her time, but if she pushed him too hard, he’d fight back. Get enough dusters fighting the syndicate and the syndicate higher-ups would step in to preserve the balance of power. That reality had trapped Ku into long minutes playing therapist for the rojoy.
He was still going through his list as the hour changed. The sunsim turned slightly more orange. Above the street, ceiling projectors displayed a beautiful slice of Ceres stationspace. A huge passenger liner was docked at the orbital station. It had to be a colony ship. Around it, buoys glittered red and green and yellow-white. Dots of shuttles and short hop transports zipped around the behemoth. The starscape weirded out some travelers, but this was the sky that Ceresians loved.
Ku glanced over her shoulder. Cedar had left the bar, as Ku’s cant request had asked ver to do. Despite being named after a dark green tree, Cedar was short and white. The purple mohawk, nose stud, and piercings along vis ears and the backs of vis fingers made ver easy to track in a crowd. With Cedar slouching down the street behind her, Ku could relax. If she needed help, Cedar had her back.
As the rojoy’s litany of complaints ground to an end, Ku stepped beneath an awning over the front door of a club that’d open in a few hours. The awning was an Earther affectation that matched the club’s theme. The atmo in Ceres Station was always fine. The pedestrians Ku’s implant had identified as threatening were still coming toward her. They outnumbered her and the rojoy by about five to one. From here, she could watch them while the awning blocked the street cams.
“And not that you care,” the rojoy said, “But here’s what’s coming out of the port.” Ku nodded at the right places in the rojoy’s port difficulties, listening for one that would involve her. It was easiest to let him talk himself out. Besides, everything coming from the port to JJ went through her level before it went anywhere else.
The people Ku’s implant highlighted had come near enough for Ku to turn off the tracker and evaluate them herself. The group resolved into five allies she’d set alerts on: Max Solonik’s crew, the people who did syndicate business on JJ-4, two levels closer to the station’s center than hers. Max himself had joined them, identifiable by his buzzed hair, pale skin tattooed in black, and armored jacket.
She didn’t know the six people Max’s crew herded down the street. Their blank expressions and flickering facial features meant that they were wearing projected-on false faces. Some of their projected-on skin didn’t match the color of their clenched and wringing hands. Max’s crew hurried them along the street, passing behind the rojoy on their way to the elevators. They were coming from the grav acclimation tunnel, and the port module on the far end of it.
“And one of you businesspeople is holding up that gods damn colony ship up there.” The rojoy pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the stationspace projection above the street. “Look at her. Still as death.”
Ku did not look. Her implant read Max’s thin lips: “. . . someplace peaceful. Don’t worry about a thing,” he was telling his guests, in text that appeared in Ku’s vision and disappeared after she read it. Max caught Ku watching and mouthed “Fuck off. They’re mine.” She smirked just enough to be sure he’d see it. He scowled and returned a rude gesture. Predictable people were fun to play with.
“I’ll tell you this much, I’m glad that place isn’t my problem.” Ku agreed with the rojoy on that. “Between the colony ship and the pharma printer they still can’t find, you all are going to have a lot of explaining to do when the port authority weighs in. Which they will, you know how they are.”
“Are you implying that the syndicate is responsible for all this?” Ku channeled her boss’s cold disdain into the question. Keeping all the JJ-2 residents balanced between reliance on and fear of the syndicate required a precise touch.
She hadn’t quite mastered the boss’s disdain, but the tonal shift set the rojoy gaping comically for a second. “Well . . . aren’t you?”
Of course the syndicate was involved. From the looks of things, Max had tried something stupid and failed. In the process, he’d held up the biggest ship in port. Max was greedy that way, which was why Ku never encouraged him to stop in her mod.
If a money-making opportunity led from Ku’s lap to the port, she still wouldn’t follow it there. Too many thugs were working too many angles there, and port authority agents armed themselves well enough to be dangerous. On top of that, one wrong move with explosives or safety equipment would put everybody there in the cold and the black.
But the rojoy was worried enough about the stalled colony ship that she could gain a bit more leverage over him. “Although this is not my fucking problem . . . ” Ku leaned into her cant-roughened pronunciation of the English words. “I’ll get rid of it for you. As a favor.” She managed not to smile as the rojoy’s expression hardened. Repaying syndicate favors was hard on dusters, but they’d do it, or something costly and painful would happen to them.
All she would’ve had to do was tell the rojoy to turn around. Max and his four friends in their expensive clothes guiding six disguised strangers away from port would’ve been a solid start to the duster’s investigation. The moment stretched, reflecting all of Ku’s Ceres Station life as she pretended that the law and those who upheld it mattered a good gods damn while the syndicate went on with business as usual.
Max, for all his idiocy, was still syndicate. Except for trips to and from the port, he’d stayed out of her level for years now. He was welcome to recover from his fuckup however he liked, somewhere else. Maybe those six people were all escorts under those disguises, although their plain outfits weren’t very sexy. As they rounded a corner, still heading for the elevators, a chunky brown bracelet on one of the disguised people’s wrists caught Ku’s eye. An escort would’ve worn something shinier.
“Yeah, all right.” The rojoy slumped into his typical slovenly street posture, now that Ku had agreed to check out what was keeping the colony ship in port. He extracted an ecig and she dug a tin of catch out of her pocket. The cig had a fierce orange and black cat design, and it smelled like it contained a nicotine derivative. Her tin bore her boss’s symbol, a pink peony blossom. The streak of magenta gel she brushed onto the skin of her throat calmed her and kicked her into high gear at the same time. The rojoy pointedly blew a sour breath toward the stars, away from the illegal substance.
“I hate when those big ships come in,” said the rojoy. “At least it’s not a cruise liner, or one of those hibernation transports from the Kuiper colonies. It’s not even noon.” The rojoy looked at his comp in its blue glove. In the open square on the back of his hand where the comp projected information, something was flashing. “Ah, great. Gotta go. Tell me . . .” He glanced up like he was checking to see if his near order had insulted her. She frowned, mostly for effect. “Sorry,” said the rojoy. “Please tell me if you find anything out about that colony ship. It’s been a hell of a week already.”
“Sure.”
The rojoy set off at a brisk walk toward his office, swearing the whole way. When he’d moved out of hearing range, Cedar slouched into the cam free area beneath the awning, watching everyone on the street. Ve took a more proactive approach to Ku’s protection than Fuse ever thought to do.
“All right?” Cedar asked. Ku offered ver the gel tin. Ve brushed a line of magenta on vis pale throat, drawing a long breath as the effect kicked in.
“I shiret.” Ku wouldn’t know that until she had more information. It’d be interesting to see what Max had gotten himself into. With luck, the damn colony ship would shove off before she had to investigate what’d held it up, and the rojoy would still owe her one.
* * *
Ku, Cedar, and Fuse dropped by a debtor’s apartment to scare him into pay his installment, then moved on to JJ-2’s public terminals. They hadn’t come for an “experience,” so they bypassed the rentable rooms and took out three pods with hard mattresses that stunk of industrial cleaner. Once they got their headsets on and connected to the syndicate’s virtual space, they were lying on their backs in a small ship’s main cabin.
Stationspace slid by in wide projected windows. Its speed proved that the real ship this sim represented moved too slowly to generate the grav Ku and her shadows enjoyed. They stood using the pod controls. A real ship like this lurked somewhere in Ceres stationspace, but Ku had never seen it in person. The virtual version was functional and comfortable, and it worked well as a hub where Ceres Station’s whole syndicate operation coordinated. The virtual space had gotten the stars just right. No gigantic silicate haulers or colony ships blocked them here.
She didn’t come here for the view, though. A recordkeeper ran the place, and their body language and tone told her a hell of a lot more than the sloppy reports published for everybody to read. Between the rojoy’s visit and that stalled colony ship, she wanted a clearer pic of what was happening around the station.
Fuse and Cedar each took a different part of the report to the boss and composed it using built-in projection stages. The boss wouldn’t read the reports, but her analysts would. Ku raised her voice over the familiar drone of a small ship’s atmo handlers to dictate her account of Max’s parade through her level. Her shadows could list everything else the three of them had done in the syndicate’s name over the past few days.
A recordkeeper was always logged in here, screening everything before it went to the bosses. Usually they found something wrong with the reports. Ku, Cedar, and Fuse waited around in the little ship after they sent in their combined report, watching the stars.
Sure enough, the recordkeeper of the day, a guy named Vhren, walked into the main cabin from the ship’s tiny bridge while looking at his comp. He liked to use a storybook alien avatar, with green skin and antennae sticking out of his forehead. English was his second or third language, and nobody but the syndicate would’ve hired him to manage English records. That was what the syndicate did, though: train up people nobody else would.
“Hey,” Vhren said to Ku, “you see the old JJ duster today?”
“Dah-ah.” This was the kind of question that Vhren wouldn’t have had the opportunity to ask if Ku had been writing her own reports. “Why?”
“Rumor says he does not work there now. So, there is the new duster in JJ.”
“What?” Ku’s question was higher and louder than it needed to be in the small cabin, and the even smaller public terminal pod she lay in. “I talked to the old guy a couple hours ago, and he was in uniform and everything. Did that just happen?”
“Yeah, today,” said Vhren. “New duster is in JJ-3 asking, like, who are the gangs.”
“Oh my gods. Where did he come from?” Except for some port trash, the syndicate didn’t allow street gangs to form in Ceres Station.
“Nobody knows.” Vhren chuckled. “Who are the gangs. Your stuff is okay. I am sending it.”
“Thanks.”
If the rojoy had gotten reassigned or fired, then Ku would have to break in a whole new duster. She’d never done that before. The boss had reached an understanding with the rojoy, and Ku had taken over where the boss had left off.
Interesting as that challenge would be, reaching an understanding would take time from things that made Ku money. Making money kept the boss and ambitious up-and-comers off her back. She’d have to send up-and-comers to do the delicate collections she currently did herself. Sending Fuse or Cedar in her stead would mean walking around the mod on her own, and that was asking to get jumped. She swore in cant.
