Galaxy Run: Ibilia, page 3
Those were the threads he’d get lost in, picturing himself out there with these people, these bounty hunters. He’d play out their adventures in his head as he read their accounts.
All of it was in the hyper colors that he saw on the shows he’d watch on his reader. Impossibly beautiful women. Absurdly chiseled men. Landscapes he didn’t recognize but that still felt familiar. Blaster battles and fist fights that went on for what seemed like hours. None of it perfectly real, but all of it engrossing and exciting.
Here he was now. Back on these boards and scrolling through message after message. Looking for what exactly? He didn’t know, but he assumed he’d know it when he saw it.
He’d start by scrolling for familiar words one at a time, starting with Exte.
Message after message passes and nothing stands out. There are a couple that mention Exte, and he reads those. One is an older message about bargaining for a ride from the starport. The poster promises not to ask about what’s in your hold if you didn’t ask about what’s in her bag. That sends Nixon’s head going.
What’s in the bag? How did it get there? Where is this woman going with it?
He continues to scroll while running out the details of each new scenario he comes up with for his female poster. There is another message that mentions Exte. This one even mentions the Uzeks, and Nixon is tempted to enter his own message in response telling whoever is asking to stay as far from them as possible. That getting involved with them is the kind of trouble from which you never unwind.
There are more messages that involve Exte farther down the board, but the timeline doesn’t work. They are all from before Nixon connected with Shaine and got twisted up in whatever this is. Still, he reads the messages. They reference places he’s familiar with—a couple of them very familiar—and suddenly this is like a little homecoming.
Nixon didn’t realize how much he was going to miss that place and that life. It wasn’t much—it wasn’t anything—but it was his. He was in control of it. Unlike now, when everything feels like he’s some kind of small particle in the universe and all of these outside forces are acting on him—pushing him this way, forcing him that way, being made to make decisions that he wouldn’t otherwise. No, that little hole of a home he had wasn’t much, but it was safe. There was no one trying to kick him out of it. No one was trying to hunt him down.
Then he stops scrolling to remind himself that the way he’s remembering things isn’t true. He wasn’t safe, not at the end. Far from it. That’s why he’s here. He’d even screwed up that little hoodlum life he’d built.
He begins scrolling through the messages again, looking for the word Umel this time. But there isn’t anything that fits the dates. So, he changes boards and begins the process all over. He’s looking for mentions of Umel, but he’s also focusing on anything that accurately describes him—how he looks, his build, what he’s done.
On the fourth board he finds it. It’s nothing he was scanning for. He’d given up that tactic. He was checking all of the messages now, and in the middle of one more than halfway down that fourth board he sees an image embedded inside a bunch of text. It’s the case.
He reads the message. He studies it. The poster describes a man, a man that sounds like he looks a lot like Shaine. The ask is for help locating him, identifying who he is, and then asking for the case to be brought to them. No questions asked.
Nixon scrolls through the responses. There are plenty of the typical nonsensical responses.
“On it.”
“Done.”
Lots of people who have more confidence in their bounty hunting skills than they probably should have.
But there are messages that ask questions, the kind that would lead to figuring out things like the name of the man being described and his location.
Then. There. A couple of dozen messages down is his name. Shaine. Someone knows him. Knows where to find him, but warns that he won’t come easy. Warns to be prepared for a fight, a fierce one.
Nixon scrolls quickly again through more inconsequential messages until he gets to one with a map and an image. It’s an image of the courtyard where Nixon met Shaine. Shaine is sitting in the middle. He’s fiddling with his reader. Nixon chooses to believe he’s messaging Mira. That’s how he wants to remember his friend. There’s also a map with the location of the courtyard indicated.
The dozen of messages that follow all are some version of “I’m going after this man and this case.”
But that’s not where the messages end. Nixon keeps scrolling and reads accounts of what happened that day in the courtyard. All of them accurate, but none overly detailed. All secondhand, he assumes.
He scrolls down again and another message sends his stomach through the floor of the ship.
It’s a picture. Looks like something caught on a camera at the starport. It’s crystal clear, and it’s him.
He’s headed away from the camera. Looks like something mounted up near the ceiling. He’s just exited the elevator and is looking back behind him to see if anyone is following him. The crowd is paying him no mind as he’s pushing his way through.
He scrolls again, past that message, and finds another image. This one’s not as clear, but it’s obviously him. It’s from farther away. He’s at the starport and is about to climb inside the ship he’s on now. Again, he’s looking behind him. This time it’s at the man with the big blaster who can be seen in the bottom right corner of the image. It’s just the back of his head and his shoulders. The end of the blaster’s big barrel is extending out in front of him. Nixon can hear the whine of the gun charging. He can hear the concussive thunk of the gun firing.
He scrolls again, and there’s another image from just a few moments later. It’s of just the ship this time, it’s only a second off the ground and just above the other ships around it. It’s another crystal clear shot. Every detail of the ship is visible, all of its distinguishing marks visible. It’s everything someone would need to pick EHL out of a line up of the dozen other ships that came off the line before and after it.
He sits back for a moment. This explains it. This is why it wasn’t just the Uzeks who were pursuing him back on Umel. It explains these ships pursuing him off planet.
For good measure, he goes to a half dozen other bounty hunter boards. He finds some or all of the images there too.
That effectively puts his picture and the image of his ship in front of anyone in the galaxy who’d even consider tracking people for credits.
The ship still rattles and grinds. Everything sounds like it’s shaken just a bit looser. It all feels more unstable.
Nixon knows there’s not much he can do to disguise himself. He looks how he looks. He sounds how he sounds. He’ll try to keep his cloak hood over him and pulled low. He’ll wear a mask over his nose and mouth when he can. Doing that and he can be somewhat unrecognizable. As long as he doesn’t stop and linger anywhere too long he might be able to get by.
But his ship. There isn’t much he is going to be able to do about that beyond get a new one. But where do you go for a new ship when you’re this far out?
He discards the bounty hunter boards and pulls up a star map of the galaxy.
“Is there something I can help with, sir?”
“Find me the nearest planet with a bit of population.”
“Population, sir?”
“Yeah, we need to …” He hesitates. He doesn’t want to tell the ship it’s being replaced. “I need to make a transaction.”
07
The ship offers Nixon three choices. All of them close. All of them small.
Nixon reads the brief descriptions of each then says “Give me more on this one.”
He points to the second choice. “This one labeled Ibilia.”
The screen in front of Nixon goes blank for a moment then is filled again. On the left is an image of a spinning planet. It’s covered mostly in clouds, but what Nixon can see of the surface is mostly a light brown.
Not more sand and dirt.
A description of what he’ll find if he lands there is on the right.
The planet is almost fully industrialized. There is no native population, but it’s far from empty. Like Umel, things got crowded once it was discovered how rich in resources Ibilia was. And was it rich. Most of those clouds above its surface aren’t clouds at all, but the result of mining operations.
“Tell me more about the population,” Nixon asks. “How much of it’s human? What percentage?”
“There’s no official count.”
“Any Uzeks?”
“Of course.”
Nixon hesitates but looks again at the details the ship has been able to find. Other than the Uzeks—knowing now that he’s being tracked on two fronts, he’d like to avoid them if he can—Ibilia has everything he’s looking for. It’s industrial. It’s populated. He’ll be able to find someone looking to off-load a ship for cheap.
“OK,” he tells EHL. “Put us down there.”
“Yes, sir.”
++xxx++
The surface of Ibilia is crowded. Large groups gather around the bases of buildings that stretch impossibly tall and disappear into the smog-filled skies.
EHL fought its way through three different layers of sky traffic to get down this low, dodging haulers loaded with minerals and ore that were screaming out of the atmosphere, shooting up from the surface like darts toward a board.
Also dropping through the lanes of transport ships bringing new workers to the surface and taking old ones away. You didn’t last long doing work on a planet like Ibilia. You came because of the promise of riches, and, technically, the promise was there. If you hit a good vein. And if you were working with someone reputable. And if you’d read the fine print on that agreement that was written specifically to limit your take home. If. If. If.
So those transport ships—big blocky things that were usually just retrofitted old haulers stripped of any interior comforts so they could hold as many fresh or broken bodies as possible—weren’t flying anywhere other than to the big stations that Nixon and EHL had to avoid floating out at the edge of Ibilia’s atmosphere.
They park just off planet and the transport ships shuttle up and drop off the worn and broken bodies packed tight inside. Then they pick up sets of fresh arms and legs.
Nixon’s found a map of Ibilia on some public server somewhere and is trying to plot out where EHL can park itself, but this map is horribly out of date.
“The next left,” he says to the ship. “Then down to the end of the block. Should be some open space where you can stowaway.”
The ship turns, and Nixon struggles to see out the front windscreen. The block stretches out in front of him, all piecework construction stretching high. He’s looking ahead as far as he can, waiting to see a gap in the glass and metal and brick, but there isn’t one. This little gap he was expecting isn’t there. He kicks a heel hard into the dash and the thump reverberates quickly through the cabin.
He turns off the map and tells the ship “I don’t know if you can find something better than that map, but you’re welcome to try.”
“One moment, sir.”
They circle the block and Nixon watches the city pass. Lighted signs hang in many of the windows advertising all kinds of services. Some reputable, most not. But all appreciated by the workers who are wearing themselves to nubs.
The ship suddenly turns upward ninety degrees and shoots high above the traffic at the ground level then slides itself sideways onto the top of a building five stories up. It settles gently, all four corners touching down in quick succession.
“Where have you put me?” Nixon asks.
“It was here or fly around the rest of the night. And you seem anxious.”
Nixon nods. “Fair.”
He pulls on his cloak. He tugs the hood down low over his head and covers his eyes. He goes into the medical cabinet in the galley and pulls out a mask that he can wear over his mouth while he’s out. He looks at his reflection in one of the metal panels. Not bad. If you don’t know exactly who you’re looking for you won’t recognize him. That’s all he can ask for. And with the ship stored up this high, there’s little chance anyone will see it and know he’s here.
The ramp unfolds from the side of the ship, and Nixon steps off. The air is warm and thick and sticky, and he struggles to pull a breath through his mask. He crosses the roof and opens a small door that leads into a tiny room. In front of him are the sliding doors to an elevator. He hits the call button and waits. His ears fill with the sound of a whirring unit that’s keeping this cramped space cool and the air inside dry.
The light above the elevator blinks off, and the doors slide open a moment later. Nixon steps on and uses the heel of his hand to push the button to take him to the first floor.
The elevator jerk-starts, and sends a wave of pain up through Nixon’s knees and into his chest, a reminder that it hasn’t been that long since the Uzeks had him pinned to that alley wall back on Exte.
The elevator jerk-stops and Nixon winces. The doors open, and he steps off into a lobby that’s much bigger than the small space up on the roof. It’s all glass and tile. And it’s clean. Cleaner than it should be, and cleaner than he expected considering what he saw while flying through the streets. There’s a Snapsit man in a tight-fitting dark suit sitting on a stool near another bank of elevators. He’s staring at something on his reader and doesn’t look up at Nixon.
The door to the outside squeals as Nixon exits and steps into the crowd on the sidewalks. Traffic buzzes a few feet above Nixon’s head and his cloak ripples in the jet wash coming from the ships’ engines.
A mover blows its horn in the distance, and everyone walking in the streets crowds onto the sidewalk, all bumping shoulders as they make room. Voices grumble as the crowd gets tighter.
The horn blows again and a moment later the mover whooshes by. Nixon steps to his right and out of the flow of traffic. He takes a moment to read the lighted signs in the windows, and it all looks wrong. Everything here is too clean. The names of the shops in the window are too clever. Tychon’s bisected T dots the windows of several buildings. But there, at the far, far end of the block, where the dust looks to be a little thicker and the people walking out of it a little dirtier, that’s where he needs to be. That’s where he’ll find someone who’s looking to off load a ship.
So, he walks. Head down. Weaving through the crowd, bumping shoulders and mumbling apologies. And as he walks he sees—emerging from the dust and debris in the air—a tall arch made with rough hewn stone. It marks the hard edge of this developed area.
There, Nixon thinks as he looks through the arch and into a part of Ibilia that he hadn’t expected to see, is where I’ll find my people.
His people. Those who understood work. Those who understood compromise. Those that were still rough like the stones on that arch. Tired from a full day’s work for too little pay. There was where he needed to be.
He pulls his hood down a bit lower and stoops his walk. He rolls his shoulders a bit and tugs his mask up higher on his nose, trying to disguise himself just a bit more in case anyone has seen video of him somewhere. He doesn’t know for sure if it exists, but if it does, through that arch are the people who’d pay attention to it. They’d be the ones looking to cash in a bounty. He knows that, because it’s what he would do.
He passes through the arch, head down and looking to the ground. But eyes are on him. He can feel them, even through the cloak he’s pulled up and gathered around his shoulders.
He doesn’t stop for a block, but when he does he looks up and the buildings around him are all low and squat and mismatched. This is the part of the planet that was forgotten after Tychon and all of the big corporations caught wind of the opportunities and moved. Back when everyone on Ibilia was just a wildcatter betting all of their credits on gut feelings and speculation.
Everything is made out of whatever the people who needed shelter could find. Often, they were the containers they used to bring gear to the planet with them. Nixon recognizes wood from large shipping crates as the outside walls of several buildings. Others are made from cheap metal sides, likely pulled off the outside of cargo haulers that were abandoned by crews that no longer needed them.
Every building is different, but above every door in a dark red paint is a name. Some are clever and descriptive. Others are straightforward and functional, little more than a label—Mining Equipment, Sundries and Dry Goods. Nixon sees what he wants a few doors up on the left: Cold Drinks.
++xxx++
He’s sitting at the counter. The place is mostly dark. Just a couple of bare bulbs hang on loose wires that drop from the ceiling and pools of light cover the middle of the floor. The place is narrow, and the lights leave small pockets of dark along the wall. Nixon looks at the others here with him. The place is moderately crowded. There are a pair of Snapsits sitting near the entrance. A lone Uzek nurses something in a tall glass at a table on the right. And there’s a crowd of half a dozen Erealles making what Nixon has chosen to believe are deep belly laughs at a table nearest the counter.
