Death Drop (32 page)

All other runners were a threat. “Everyone except Rilek,” she said under the kranos. “The admiral and his fleet always fly with honor.” And Dezmara had plenty of experience with Rilek. She and the
Lodestar
were always battling it out for first as the rest of the pack appeared to float lazily along in their exhaust. Most of their races were extremely close, but Rilek never once made a move that was anywhere near debatable. Dezmara could tell he looked at each run as a chance to prove who the best pilot was that day—no weapons, no tricks, just pure flying skills pitted against each other—and she preferred it that way. So far, she had proven the better flyer, but Rilek was a hell of a pilot and Dezmara had the utmost respect for him.

She composed herself as best she could and walked toward an empty seat where the bar met with the back wall. As she got closer, she noticed the place was decorated in a similar manner as the rest of the port. There was what Dezmara assumed to be a life-sized Triniton statue carved in the back wall. It was standing in a pool of blue, phosphorescent liquid with two arms outstretched. In its hands it grasped two pitchers that tilted toward the pool and replenished its contents with never-ending streams of glowing fluid. Bottles of liquor stretched out on shelves to both sides of the sculpture and shimmered in the blue light, luring the weary and lonely like twinkling lanterns. The bar itself was rather plain—consisting of nothing more than a large, flat expanse of carved stone—but the craftsmanship Dezmara had come to expect at Luxon revealed itself, once again, in the form of statues. Surrounding the bar was an arc of thick rectangular blocks that reached halfway to the counter top and were held up by a myriad of intricately carved statuettes. Dezmara swept back the sides of her flight jacket and sat down on one of the cold, stone bar stools.

No sooner had her gloved hands touched down on the ledge than a stocky, round figure with a well-worn towel over his shoulder waddled up to the opposite side. “What’ll ya have?” he shouted gruffly over the noise as he stroked several days’ worth of black stubble on his chubby face. He eyed Dezmara suspiciously as he waited for a reply.

“Talsey,” she said through the kranos.

She caught the slightest upturn of the bartender’s mouth before he turned and disappeared to the other side of the fountain, only to return a few moments later with a decanter and a small cylindrical vessel clutched in his hands. He uncorked the bottle with a deep thoonk and carelessly tipped it onto the rim of the receptacle. The encounter gave out a sharp sound as the liquid glugged slowly from the bottle and inched its way up the sides of Dezmara’s glass. She made a sideways movement with her hand and the bartender yanked the neck of the container upright and then leaned over the bar so she could hear him. “Fifty tolocs,” he said as he flashed a crooked grin and ran a thickly fingered hand through the black, greasy hair on top of his head.

“You must be Buego, right?”

“If you gotta a problem with the prices, you can get the fuck outta my place,” he said with a scowl, “
after
you pay for that one.” He reached a hand behind him and pulled a small pistol from his waistband. He placed the gun on the counter facing Dezmara and stared blankly into the viewports of the kranos. “You got about three seconds to pay up, shitbird. You get my drift?”

Dezmara chuckled loud enough so Buego couldn’t mistake the sound for anything but amusement.

“What’s so goddam funny, asshole?”

“I just figured a waistband like
that
could carry something a little bigger, but I’m sure you hear that a lot.”

“What’d you say, you son of a…” Buego reached a pudgy hand for the little revolver lying on the bar, but before his fingertips could come close to the cold metal of the gun, Dezmara snatched his wrist and twisted it around until he yelped. His thick lips curled back in a grimace, revealing a large, sharp tooth on his lower jaw that was flanked by several rows of smaller, jagged teeth. His big cheeks puffed in and out as he tried to breathe through the building pain now shooting up his arm. “You’re dead, asshole! Nobody comes into my place an’—AAAARRRGGG!”

“You still have something to say—that means I must not be twisting quite hard enough,” Dezmara said as she wrenched Buego’s arm a little more. She could feel the tissues straining under his skin, and he looked like he was about to pass out. “Now, if you’re finished, I would like to speak.” She paused for emphasis, and when he didn’t answer, Dezmara turned his wrist just a fraction more.

“YEEEAAAH!” he screamed.

“Good. Now, before you got all bent out of shape, I was gonna give you this,” she said and a gold coin flipped through the air, skipped across the bar, and rolled on its edge in a wide circle before spinning to a halt between them. Buego’s eyes widened when he realized that the shiny medallion was a large, one hundred toloc piece. “Not only that, but I was going to buy a barrel of talsey and a half-barrel of stout—at full asking price—to stock my ship. But now, I’m afraid, the only thing that’s going to rectify the situation is if I snap your arm in two.” Dezmara had just about reached her limit with the portmaster and his cronies. She seriously considered putting all of her weight into breaking Buego’s arm just because he deserved it.

“NO, PLEASE! It was a misunderstanding—I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “It’s on the house…all of it…just, please—LET ME GO!”

Dezmara held him in the excruciating position for a moment and considered his offer. She decided she didn’t want to hurt him and risk a fight with that monster of a doorman, or any other lackeys that might be called for back-up, before she had a chance to gather information on the Humans. She needed to make nice so she could recon the tavern.

“You’re right,” she said as she pulled him closer to distract him and carefully slid the pistol from the counter and slipped it into her jacket. “This has been a terrible misunderstanding. Forgive my overreaction—I’ve been in deep space for too long.” She gently released Buego’s arm, plucked a bar napkin from its holder, and offered it to him. He hesitated for a moment, still staring at Dezmara with a look somewhere between rage and terror; then he reluctantly took the small square of material from her hand. He dabbed at the beads of sweat that had collected at the base of his shiny mane and rolled down his nose and cheeks without taking his eyes off of his assailant.

She flipped another one hundred toloc piece onto the stone, and it clanked to a stop just a few inches from its twin. “Keep the change,” Dezmara said as she slid back into her seat, pulling her glass with her. Buego eyed the money intently and Dezmara could see the struggle between greed and fear on his face, but it didn’t take long for his lust to win out. He quickly swept the coins from the bar and then wobbled away without a second look.

Her ruse had worked. If he had noticed the gun was missing, the hefty sum of money jingling in his pocket convinced him it didn’t matter—he could buy ten revolvers for that price. Satisfied that she wasn’t in any immediate danger, Dezmara took an easy breath and lightly touched her covered fingers to the glass in front of her. She very much wanted to taste its contents—she hadn’t had a strong talsey in a long time. But the drink was renowned for clouding judgment in just a few sips, and if that weren’t reason enough, she wasn’t able to drink anything when she was wearing the kranos. She would have to enjoy a nice glass of the hard stuff back on the ship—this one was just for show.

Dezmara adjusted the controls on the kranos to filter out the background noise as she scanned the characters sitting around her. Space ports were melting pots of the universe. There was always an eclectic mix of individuals to be found crowding the markets and lining the walls and bar stools in their pubs. Luxon, as secure as it was, was the busiest port she could remember visiting, and she hoped the recent buzz about Humans, coupled with the concentration of travelers, would pay off in reliable information.

Dezmara’s helmet was an excellent tool for spying. The blackened eye ports concealed where she was looking and made it much easier to analyze whatever and whomever she pleased. Of course, with the kranos’ high-tech programming, she could detect conversation quite easily, even in a crowded room, but the fact that she could look covertly at the speakers was essential. She could usually tell how much of a story was complete bullshit by looking at the storyteller—especially their eyes. Very young pilots and old dusters were guilty of the heaviest exaggeration when they told a tale: the rookies hoping to make a name for themselves and the old-timers hoping someone would remember them when the end finally came. There also was the drinking to consider, but Dezmara had overheard her fair share of stories through the years. She had good instincts for what was valuable and what was drunken jabber.

She turned casually to her left and glanced at the packed dance floor for a moment before fixing her sights on the duster sitting closest to her. He swayed unsteadily on his stone perch, holding tightly with both hands to the large mug in front of him. Bushy, white brows and a scraggly beard curled out from underneath his leathery cap. He winked a dizzy eye at Dezmara and smiled warmly. She nodded politely in return and continued on. The spaces between the stools were full—mostly with people nodding their heads in time with the music and trying desperately to catch the attention of one of the bartenders—but these patrons weren’t there for the conversation. In fact, Dezmara doubted any of them had lived long enough to have heard the legend of Humankind; although, she admitted, it was tricky to assume the ages of so many different species—she didn’t even know her own age.

The bystanders dabbed the perspiration from their brows with their shirts’ sleeves before grabbing a drink or two and heading back to the floor to work up a sweat again. Dezmara shifted her gaze steadily around the bar as the kranos analyzed the various noises, strange clicks, and foreign words projecting loudly from alien mouths and adding to the clamor of the pub. Most conversations were either about the band—which was getting rave reviews—or shouts for beverages followed by curt responses for payment. Dezmara’s heart sunk as her search closed in on the opposite end of the stone shelf. There was nobody of interest standing or sitting there, just somebody sporting a t-shirt with a picture of the band on it waving his money in the air.

She felt like all the hope she ever had of finding out who or what she was had been sapped from her body by cruel fate. She was out of time and she couldn’t risk losing her spot as number one runner in the universe—and the opportunity for searching that it afforded—on a rumor, even if it was the best lead she had had in eight long years. “Dammit,” she said as she pushed against the bar and slid backwards from the stool. She felt her feet, heavy with the tingling buzz of loneliness, fall to the floor one after the other like discarded ballast from a star freighter. And then she froze.

Heldepar
. The word hung in glowing orange letters on the right side of the kranos’ display, and Dezmara curled one corner of her mouth in a brief moment of confusion before taking a sharp breath of disbelief. The word flashed three times in its native tongue and then transformed into something that had appeared in the helmet only twice before. Dezmara couldn’t help but feel a growing surge of energy charge through her body as it flashed in its translated form. It was a word that meant so much to her, even though she didn’t truly understand what it meant to be
Human…Human…Human
.

Dezmara tapped the helmet controls to amplify the conversation and locate the source. The kranos gave out a tiny hum followed by numerous clicks as shutters fanned out in succession to encircle the eye ports and then telescoped outward several inches. They moved back and forth—making several adjustments—before finally settling into focus. A small stitch of white fabric appeared in her view from behind the elaborate fountain, only to disappear again, but she couldn’t see anyone sitting in the second to last stool on the opposite side of the bar. She guessed the person was balanced on the edge of the square stone and leaning forward as far as he could, rocking with the ebb and flow of banter as he spoke to someone sitting exactly across from Dezmara on the opposite side of the Triniton carving. The kranos was picking up everything they said, but she
had
to see them or the words just wouldn’t seem real.

Dezmara quickly moved down the length of the countertop and stopped just short of its apex. Unfortunately, she couldn’t see the figure behind the fountain, but she didn’t want him to spot her and become suspicious either, so this was as far as she dared go. She shouldered her way between two youths waiting for their next round. They scowled at her, each of them ready to fire a caustic challenge at the intruder encroaching on their hard-fought territory. Both turned their bodies toward her to make their respective stands and were simultaneously dumbstruck. They stood as still as Triniton statues, ogling at the oddity of the kranos and the peculiar protrusions extending from its face. At the same time, they decided that another drink wasn’t that important and scurried away with several backward glances before melting into the crowd. Dezmara hadn’t noticed them. She was plugged into a conversation about Humans, and she now had a good view of the character wearing the white shirt.

His neck and shoulders were thick, which gave him an almost hunchback appearance. But Dezmara could tell this man had lived his life on a ship, and his shape was the result of countless hours of toil before the mast. His attire gave it away. His white shirt billowed at the sleeves from under a red vest, and his dark pea coat lay on the bar next to him. Billions of planets in the universe had seas and, in a time before the Durax, shipping goods across vast stretches of water had been routine on any number of them. Of course, sailing a ship that was bound to a planet was far more dangerous when creatures with almost limitless power want to destroy you—there are only so many places to go. And that is why so many sailors traded their love of the sea for wings to the heavens, for the infinite ocean of space and a chance to remain free. Most planets fell long ago to Duraxian rule, but sailors were men of tradition—not to mention deep superstition—and no matter how long they flew among the stars, no sailor would ever refer to himself as a pilot, although—technically—that’s what they were.