And God forbid you wanted to send a message out-system. This system didn’t have a wormhole, which meant that the only way to get a message out was to store it in the communications log of an outgoing starship and pay them to transmit it in the first system they came to with an InStell ComSat.
Lucky for me, the message I was sending didn’t have that far to go.
The clerk behind the front desk looked up from a scansheet as Vicky and I came through the door, clearly not happy at the interruption.
“You folks need something?” He was, I thought, not ex-military. I don’t know how I could tell, but I could. He was Corporate, about as low on the ladder as it got, stuck on this backwater world, hating his life, and probably blaming us for it personally.
I shut the door behind us before I answered, pausing to take one last look behind to make sure no one was watching. A light rain fell on the street outside, barely enough to justify the jackets Vicky and I wore, but you never knew when it would cut loose.
“I want to send a message to the Corporate Council station at Eos,” I told him. “To the Corporate Security Force.”
The clerk gave us both the sort of look reserved for idiots who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.
“You know you could have just sent the message to the automated systems here with your ‘link, right?” He gestured at a bank of servers sitting in the corner of the shack. He’d left an insulated drink cup sitting precariously balanced on the edge of one of them. “I mean, I don’t even come in here half the time. No one ever comes in this place.”
“I don’t want to send it over my ‘link,” I told him. I dug in my pocket and fished out a Tradenote, tossing it down on the counter. The clerk’s eyes widened slightly and he covered the plastic chit with his hand, sliding it off the surface of the desk and into his pocket. I fought back a wince. Tradenotes weren’t easy to come by out here. “I don’t want there to be a record of this in your outgoing logs. Comprenes?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. He reached back onto the server stack and slid a folding tablet out from beneath a pile of what looked like dirty T-shirts, tossing it onto the countertop in front of me. “You can write the message yourself if you want. I’ll just go back here and finish my breakfast.”
If Vicky’s glare was a laser, the clerk would have been a pile of ash on the floor, but I didn’t care if he was lazy. Lazy was good at the moment. It took me ten minutes to figure out the menu system in the tablet, then another ten to reach the address for the Corporate Security Force message system and by the end, I was beginning to side with Vicky’s assessment of the man.
Once I actually had the message form on the screen, I paused, thinking one last time about what I should say. I’d considered it all the way into town, from the morning hopper flight right up till the walk downtown. Would Torrey and Clines miss us at the noon flight? We’d already cooked up a story about wanting to do some shopping, but the problem was, I was a shitty liar.
I shook the worry away, coming back to the message.
To: Corporate Security Force local director
From: Lt. Cameron Alvarez and Lt. Victoria Sandoval, Commonwealth Marine Corps (retired)
Subject: Criminal activity on the Hausos settlement
Message Body: Illegal weapons smugglers have taken up residence at the Hellnick farm. Have seen at least one proton cannon and know they have much more cached at the property. They have multiple cargo shuttles and an unknown number of starships in orbit. We need enforcement support immediately. Known parties are a Captain Eld and a Tahni former infantry colonel named Zan-Thint. Recommend you contact Commonwealth law enforcement.
It was short and to the point, and the part of me that had been trained as an officer who loved nothing more than to add one report on top of another wondered if I should have added another four paragraphs of detail, including descriptions of everyone I could remember, but I was dealing with Corporate Council types here, people who could ignore memos from unimportant schmucks like a farmer colonist. Better to keep it short and make sure someone read it from beginning to end.
I touched the send button, then closed the tab and folded the tablet. I shrugged at the questioning look from Vicky.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Dave could be right. They might not even bother to read it, and even if they believe it, they might not give a shit.”
“But you’re right, too,” she told me, pulling me along out the door, back into the petulant, nagging sprinkle of rain, spitting just infrequently enough that I couldn’t justify raising the hood on my rain jacket.
I walked quickly, trying to get away from the transmission shack before anyone we knew spotted us there. The streets weren’t quite deserted, but there was no one coming our way, much less paying attention to us. I knew I was being paranoid, but it was the only mindset my life experience had prepared me for, so I thought I might as well go with it.
“Brad thinks we can handle this internally,” she went on, her voice low enough no one else could have heard it without stepping between us, “but that’s just because he’s in charge of the Board and doesn’t want to admit it’s too big for him. This isn’t the military, no matter what Brad says, and we don’t have air or orbital support. Hell, I doubt anyone on the Board even owns a handgun, much less any heavy weapons.”
There were, I noticed, none of the strangers on the street this morning. Every face I saw was, if not familiar, then at least not out of place. The workers, the shop owners, the cargo truck drivers for hire waiting on the farmers to come to town and arrange a pickup, they all belonged in Gamma Junction. I hadn’t seen any shuttles on the landing field during the flight in, and I wondered if that meant Eld and his people had relocated them to Hellnick’s property or if they’d just vacated the planet altogether. I assumed they had a ship in orbit, so maybe they’d taken it back to wherever they were buying or stealing their weapons.
“They’re not around,” I mentioned to Vicky. “Maybe what happened last night spooked them. Maybe they’ll pull in their horns and lay low for a while and hope we forget about them.”
“You dealt with gangs just as much as I did when you were a kid,” Vicky said, shaking her head. “Does that sound like the way they’d react to a bunch of self-important locals challenging their authority?”
“No, it doesn’t,” I admitted. “But it’d be real nice to be wrong one of these times, wouldn’t it?”
“We did what we could. Let’s grab breakfast at Torrentinto’s Place. I could go for one of her Southwest omelets.”
“Sure.” I offered her my arm and she slipped hers through it. “Then we get to watch the show.”
7
“Where the hell have you guys been?” Dave Clines demanded; arms spread like we’d stood him up for a date.
The acoustics of the meeting hall were well engineered, designed so that the board meetings could be held without the use of sophisticated electronics, which we could have afforded to buy anywhere else but couldn’t afford to have shipped out here to the middle of nowhere. So Clines’ booming voice wasn’t just his normal slightly-too-loud-to-be-polite, it was enough to echo throughout the hollow building and make several heads turn from the tables arrayed in a semicircle around the central podium.