Mercy for Hire Mission Pack 1 Page 2

  “I see you only got a passing glance at her. Eyes bigger than your memory?”

  Despite his obvious pain, Vinnie grinned weakly. “Body like one of those pleasure pod drones. Face like an angel. Don’t fall for it, Odin. That hot piece of tail’s gotta be 90 percent cyborg, the way she went through us.”

  Odin gritted his teeth. New profiles flooded his mind, more accurate than his earlier guesswork. Retired military experiment. Youth-treated old-timer reinvesting a lifetime’s bounties into a rejuvenated career. There were even rumors of some of the megacorps being on the verge of sentient androids.

  None of that mattered. He knew who he was looking for, even if he didn’t understand what she was. “Tiffany. Where’s Tiffany? Did this combat goddess run off with her? Did she bolt in the confusion? Did she say anything about where she might go?”

  “I was out like the lights.”

  “The lights went out?”

  Wincing, Vinnie nodded. “Yeah, soon as the hottie started moving like a whirlwind and throwing guys twice her size across tables, the lights went dead. Didn’t see much even before that. Pretty quick, I tried to grab her, but everything went blank.”

  The profile snapped into place. The lights going out was the clue he needed. This wasn’t an android or a chem-fueled mercenary chasing down Tiffany.

  Odin let Vinnie slump back to the bar floor and pulled out his datapad. Opening a comm, he waited a few seconds for it to connect, then got a prompt to leave a message. “Roger, I’m in Shetland on Alpha Centauri III. The crew of the Snickersnack briefly acquired Tiffany before a third party intervened and extracted her. Someone counted their chickens before they roosted. Don’t worry. I’m on it. From the descriptions I’ve gathered, your ex-wife has hired a wizard.”

  The Breakfast Clock Diner was a cozy little place just a couple streets over from the alley where Esper and Kubu had tracked down Tiffany. It had the pervasive aroma of bacon and coffee and faux retro chrome and imitation red vinyl upholstery common to diners throughout the known planets. The former masked the fact that Tiffany reeked of artificial coffee flavoring.

  “Some shithole,” Tiffany remarked casually as they took their seats, loudly enough that one of the waitresses shot the pair a dirty look over her shoulder. “Chrono’s even broken.”

  The clock above the kitchen was indeed non-functional. It was an old-fashioned hands-and-numbers disc, minus the hands. Esper rolled her eyes as she slipped into a window-side booth across from her ornery charge. “That’s the joke. Breakfast Clock. No hands telling you it’s past breakfast time. They serve it round the clock. Don’t they teach critical thinking at Templeton Girls’ Academy?” She gestured toward the embroidered logo over the breast of Tiffany’s sweater.

  Tiffany sighed melodramatically and let her head thump against the backrest of her seat. “You got carb blockers on you? If I’m going home, cheerleading tryouts are in two weeks. I don’t want to miss the weight cutoff because you stuffed me full of pancakes.”

  “No. And if you’re worried, you could eat fewer pancakes. Or order something else. Anything on the menu. My treat.”

  Tiffany snorted. “Big spender. And it’s a fucking diner. I’m gonna eat some goddamn pancakes. Not like I’ll get anything edible once I’m back on Nephthys IV.” She swiped at the table’s built-in screen, perusing her menu options.

  “Your mom doesn’t cook?” Esper smiled, hoping to relate to the girl she’d be spending at least the next week or so with, assuming their transportation went smoothly.

  Without looking up from the menu, Tiffany blew a disgusted breath that fluttered a stray lock of hair dangling in her face. “Candace? Cook? Please. We’ve got a laaku food processor in the house, and it’s locked out so it won’t even make anything that tastes like it has meat in it. I hacked it once to make chicken tenders—all out of veggie proteins, remember—and she pitched a screamy.”

  Uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation, Esper peered through the retro-style slatted blinds to the well-lit street outside. Kubu sat on the roadside, dutifully tethered to a civic pet station alongside a terrier a tenth his size that was trying to sniff his backside.

  “What’s the deal with that dog of yours?”

  Esper tore her attention from the guilt at leaving Kubu outside. Tiffany’s side of the table glowed softly. Esper hastily hit the button in the corner for manual ordering, snatching her finger away quickly lest she foul the technology inadvertently. “He’s not a dog. Same as tesuds aren’t giant tortoises and laaku aren’t chimps. Kubu’s got paperwork to prove he’s a sentient creature with full rights and Martian citizenship.”

  “Then why did you tie him up outdoors? Isn’t that pretty fucking hypocritical?”

  Esper sighed. Had she come to the point in her life where she needed moral advice from a sixteen-year-old? “We’re all playing roles here. Trying to fit in. Kubu. Me. I bet you’re not half as tough as you’re acting right now.”

  A waitress came up, datapad in hand and a look of put-upon weariness plastered across her features. “Can I help you, ladies?”

  Tiffany held up her palms. “Don’t look at me. I used the menu.”

  Ignoring the implied slight, Esper smiled pleasantly at their server—Krissy, according to her name tag. “I’d like two Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, maple syrup, a side of hash browns, and a café au lait with cinnamon sprinkled on top.”

  The waitress raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. That was Tiffany’s job. In her first sign of tact, the girl at least waited until Krissy was out of earshot.

  “Sure you’re not packing carb blockers? What are you, gene-modded so all the fat goes straight to your boobs?”

  Esper knew all the signs. She wasn’t going to rise to the bait. “Nope. Just get a lot of exercise. As for Kubu… oh, poo! Krissy! Can you come back here a minute?” She waited as the waitress reversed course.

  “What?” Tiffany cut in. “You forget to order a sundae to go with it?”

  Esper carefully avoided eye contact with the girl. “Can you add three kilos of slightly cooked bacon to my order?”

  “Three kilos?” Krissy echoed, twisting a finger in her ear as if it might not have been working properly.

  Esper poked a finger through the blinds, her nail tapping against the glass. “For him. The grease in it’s good for his coat.”

  Krissy put a hand on one hip. “Gonna have to ask you to pay upfront, miss.”

  Without missing a beat, Esper deposited a stack of hardcoin on the table. “That cover it?”

  Krissy scooped up the payment, gave it a quick count, and departed with a shrug that said, “It’s your money; we just cook here.”

  Tiffany leaned across the table. “You’re seriously going to feed your dog semi-raw bacon?”

  Esper had seen Kubu swallow a porcupine whole. She’d seen him chase down a deer and eat it, antlers and all. He ate rabbits the way a child gobbled up jellybeans. “It’s a treat. A reminder that I can afford to feed him yummier food when he’s small.”

  “Lady… that dog ain’t small.”

  Esper didn’t have time to get into the details of Kubu’s natural physiology. The girl wasn’t liable to believe her, and Shetland was no place to show off by offering proof of how monstrously huge he normally was. “Did you know those men at the Drowning Camel?”

  Tiffany shrugged and looked away. “Maybe a couple. They work for my dad’s shipping business. Marcus, Nate, Vinnie… I think Coleman was there. They were handing me off to someone who’d bring me straight to my dad.”

  Esper swallowed. “There’s someone coming for you?”

  Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Probably.”

  This wasn’t a matter to brush off easily. She took Tiffany’s hands in her own. “Do you know who your father sent?”

  Please don’t let it be a wizard. Please don’t let it be a wizard.

  “Dunno. Odin, probably. My father’s got a lot of fuckups on his payroll. Odin’s like the t
oken non-fuckup of the group. Bet he gets a cut rate on his insurance having at least one fucker working for him who isn’t a stim-freak or a plasma-brain.”

  Not good. Wizards were more prone than most to giving grandiose or archaic names to their children. “This Odin… what’s he do for your father, normally?”

  “Security consultant. Bodyguard. I dunno. Kind of a Mr. Get-It-Done. Odin is sort of the multi-tool in Roger’s pocket.”

  “Would you describe him as more… military? Law enforcement? Data tech?” Esper cleared her throat. “Wizard?”

  “Wizard? Odin? No one tells me shit, but I think he used to belong to some little syndicate that got broken up a while back. He’s a gangster at heart, even if the story’s bullshit.”

  Esper breathed a sigh of relief. A wizard would have meant exposure to Convocation justice. Even coming across one another on an unrelated matter, any wizard worth his oath would have called in backup from the nearest enclave. But if this Odin character was just a gangster… well, Esper could handle that.

  Tiffany held up a palm and glanced away. “Look. You don’t need to get in the middle of this divorce crap between my parents and me. I can look after myself.”

  Their food arrived, and Tiffany dug directly into hers as if her comment had been about the weather or a local sports team.

  Esper picked up her fork and knife, stomach growling at the scents of waffle and strawberry wafting from her plate, but she couldn’t stuff food into her mouth yet. “I ran away from home when I was around your age.”

  Even with a mouth filled with chocolate chip pancakes, Tiffany didn’t let Esper build narrative momentum. “Poor you. Kickass bounty hunter with a perfect body and a talking dog. You must cry yourself to sleep every night after fucking the hottest guys in the galaxy. Oh yeah. And you’re a wizard. Life must be rough where you grew up.”

  There was no reasoning with a spoiled teenage girl. Esper knew this from experience. She’d been Tiffany ten years ago, give or take. There were moments when all she wanted was a chance to go back in time and slap some sense into her younger self. But facing Tiffany across the diner table, Esper could only pity her.

  “We’ll finish eating, head back to the room I’ve rented, then in the morning, we’re heading for the starport. I’ve got us booked on the Sassy Starling, scheduled to leave at 8:30 a.m.”

  “You pre-booked our trip outbound? I didn’t see you with a datapad since you found me. Ballsy.”

  Esper didn’t allow the girl to sidetrack her. “If we get separated for any reason, the Sassy Starling is picking up at the Lucius January Memorial Starport, berth 22A. Your ticket is pre-paid. If you get there without me, they’ll let you on board. If you can’t get to the starport, contact me at this comm ID. I hate datapads, but if you get lost, I’ll be glued to it waiting to hear from you.” She slid a slip of paper across the table.

  Fork and knife clattered to the plate as Tiffany regarded the note as if it were an alien artifact. “What’s this? Paper? What century are you from?”

  “Just keep it safe,” Esper instructed. “That comm ID could save your life.”

  Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Sure it will.” Nevertheless, she tucked it into the pocket of her skirt.

  Esper’s mother had once wished a curse upon her, that she’d have a daughter who was just like her. While Esper had never become a mother, she felt like she was getting her first taste of that curse.

  The Shetland streets stank of ozone fumes and cheap sausages that came from portable carts. A hint of wet permacrete and the sweat from bodies basting inside rain slickers didn’t improve the olfactory tableau. The tawdry exhaust of the human machine eventually made every colony smell about the same. On an overcast night like this one, a guy could be forgiven for forgetting what world he was on. To Odin Masterson, all that mattered was that this ball of rock had Tiffany St. Cloud on it somewhere.

  Turning his collar up against the intermittent drizzle, Odin kept his head down and his eyes scanning side to side. Shetland wasn’t the only city on Alpha Centauri III, but he had to assume until he heard otherwise that Tiffany hadn’t jumped an atmospheric to anywhere else. As it was, there was plenty of Shetland to check before he ran out of leads.

  Nearly 10.8 million poor suckers called this place home. The inner colonies were a wretched half-measure between the glitter of Sol and the loose-weave freedom of the border planets. All the crowds, all the corruption, none of the payoffs.

  Pedestrians got out of Odin’s way as he strode swiftly through the flow of foot traffic. Your average colonist didn’t have anyplace to be, and the purposeful movement of an offworlder on a mission might as well have been a flashing siren yelling to get out of the way.

  The people out and about didn’t matter. They were doing something. Their eyes were for their own menial, meaningless lives. Odin caught sight of a pair of salt-and-pepper gawkers loitering under the awning of a patisserie that had closed for the evening and knew he had a pair who viewed the streets as their own personal holovid.

  Odin reached into his pocket, pulling out a datapad and thumbing it on. “Either of you two bums seen this girl?” The flat image showed Tiffany from her school bio. It was the most recent likeness Roger had of his daughter. It was a couple years old, but by that age, kids didn’t change too fast. The girl was smiling, showing the silvery studs of magnetodontic retractors. They must have been off her teeth by now, but he doubted these two were the sort who checked out a girl by her smile.

  The stockier of the two shrugged. “I ain’t seen nothing.”

  The slim one with the digital atomizer dangling from his lips inclined his head. “What’s it worth to you if I have?”

  Odin gritted his teeth. He hated the selective memories of the common street lowlife. “I’m not a cop.”

  “Girl work for you or something?”

  “I work for her father.”

  Both men leaned away. A man with a financial agenda could be bargained with, bribed, maybe conned a little if he wasn’t too tough a mark. Odin hated the idea that they might think he was new enough to this planet’s gravity that he’d take easy bait. But once this became a family issue, these two wanted no part of him.

  The smoker puffed an acrid cloud in the space between him and Odin. “Ain’t seen her, pal.”

  “Best ’o luck,” his chum added.

  Odin didn’t bother teaching the two deadbeats manners. There was more at stake here than his pride.

  Tucking away the datapad, Odin swept onward with his search.

  He hadn’t gone a block before he pulled out Tiffany’s picture again. God dammit. When the hell had little Tiffany grown up? The picture wasn’t even as old as she’d looked when Odin caught up with her, and yet she was the spitting image of Candace. Last he’d seen the girl, she’d been playing sprite-league football and wearing Rainbow Sparkle earrings.

  “You!” Odin said, catching a somber-clad figure retreating into the shadows of an alley, out of the cone of a street lamp’s glow. “Hold up a minute!”

  The guy scurried, and Odin wasn’t having any of that. Not tonight. With a limp and a hacking cough, the bastard didn’t make it five steps before Odin caught him by the collar of his trench coat and spun him around.

  Mr. Alley Rat put up both hands, trembling. Pulling him into the light, he had a face like a meteor-pocked asteroid. “I’ve got hardcoin, buddy. No buyers tonight. It’s the rain.”

  Odin tore open the man’s trenchcoat and fished in the pockets. He found a plasti-bag stuffed with stim packets. “You a dealer?”

  “Me?” the man asked incredulously. “Fuck, no! I got a prescription! I’m a medical case. See?” He held out a quivering hand.

  Odin threw the bag to the puddle-spattered alley pavement. “I don’t give a shit how you earn. You been out here. Scoping out customers. Eagle eyes on the prize. Seen this one?” He held the flatpic in the stim dealer’s face.

  The dealer blinked and craned his head back. Farsighted. Uncorrecte
d. If this was any indication, the stim business in Shetland wasn’t paying well enough. “Cute thing. Sure. I seen her. Thought about making a barter deal with that pimp of hers. Figured two packs might get me a song or two on the flute. But that dog gave me the willies, and I—”

  Whatever tawdry thoughts came next, they lacked the words to put unwanted images into Odin’s head. Odin’s forearm was across the dealer’s throat. The dealer’s head slammed against the wall of the retail church next door. “You’re talking about my boss’s little girl. She’s like a niece to me. You’re gonna tell me which way she was headed, and you’re gonna forget you ever saw her. Keep those filthy urges of yours someplace else. Got it?”

  “I just—”

  Odin leaned in again, choking the dealer. “I don’t want to hear anything but where she went!”

  The stim dealer raised a feeble hand and aimed it toward a side road by a pizza shop, still aglow from within and open at this late hour. “Turned there. Now let me be. I won’t even think about those sweet—”

  Growling through gritted teeth, Odin drove his weight behind the thrust of his forearm. There was a crack, and he recoiled instantly. The stim dealer fell to the puddles, working his mouth like a fish on shore with no sound but a stifled sucking. His windpipe had been crushed.

  Heart pounding, Odin took out his blaster and squeezed the trigger. It was set to stun, but at least the poor fucker wouldn’t be awake while he suffocated.

  Probably better than the bastard deserved.

  On the word of a dying man, Odin headed for the corner and took a turn. When he saw the diner with a huge dog tied up outside, he suspected he’d tracked down Tiffany’s kidnapper.

  Turning back in the direction of the alley, he raised two fingers to his eyebrow in salute. “Thanks, asshole.”

  Over the clatter of tableware and muted chatter that pervaded the Breakfast Clock Diner, a single dog’s bark sounded from outside. While she’d been wishing for a subject that would break the tension of conversation burgeoning with teenage angst—Esper had been subjected to everything from fashion nightmares to the latest chemical dietary fads—the signal bark wasn’t how she’d wanted to divert the girl’s attention from her own navel-gazing.