I was sitting in a diner across from the mistress’ apartment. The Mick had an address for the name and I had to be sure she was the right one this time. You don’t get follow-on business charging your clients for bad info.
Biz had been slowing in NewerYork. It was the biggest domed city on Mars. The new biodomes were going up around it, allowing the city dwellers to live in less crowded suburbia under plasteel reinforced glass. The inner city was too rough around the edges to raise children. Always had been. I watched a team of teens, two of them alien, do a bump and grab on a broker type human who had no business in this part of town. Well, no legal business. They got away with at least two M-Cards and a B-card from his suit pockets from what I could see.
This part of NewerYork was next to the space wharf. Day and night, people and goods heading into the new frontier or returning from it. NewerYork, still sexy and exciting, but with quite a few kilometers on her. Kind of like Kinky. The city still had secrets to keep and secrets traded like stocks on the new galactic market. That made me an information broker. Or a sap. Not sure which.
I had a skill set that earned me creds. The real crime is handled by the GISI’s, so I specialize in other things. Finding things and finding out things. Catching employees on the take, finding stolen or lost valuables, and catching folks doing stuff they should not be doing, including other people. The last one on the list was my bread and butter. Cheating spouses was a booming business and with the influx of other races, most of it required my background in intraspecies investigations.
I was on my second cup of Centaurian coffee. Not the stuff that actually grew there. That shit costs a fortune to import. This was the knock off stuff, grown on the moon in a hothouse from clippings of the original plants. I sipped the brew, savoring the flavor and looked out the tinted window of the diner. A lot of my job was sitting, waiting and watching.
My carefully constructed sugar packet pyramid had collapsed, so I was dividing my attention between the building across the street and the vids playing on the diner monitor system. The local news was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Another bombing at the suburbia dome construction site last night. The “Saviors of Mars”, an environmental terrorist group, were taking the blame. “Mars for Martians” was their battle cry. When asked “Where are the Martians?” they couldn’t answer, so they started blowing things up. Every age has its radicals. I turned my attention back to the building’s front door. The eyes watch and the mind wanders.
NewerYork was in its Friday lunch rush and just about every species I knew was walking, crawling or sliming its way along the sidewalks. The city was founded on the spot where the Mars rover had found a Templar sword from 1308 stuck in a dune. Yeah, that’s right, a sword that belonged to the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay himself, was sticking out of the ground here on Mars and NASA found it. Not on purpose. Everyone knew that.
Some bad code had made the rover stray off course by about 200 feet from its target path and it ran smack dab into the blade that changed everything. Well, the blade next to the “thing” that changed everything. The “thing” was an empty carton with writing of non-terrestrial origin. The pictures were broadcast all over the world and a Farkan listening post out by Jupiter intercepted the transmission.
I said that right. Farkans. They were, literally, the little green men who showed up a week later. I’m not joking. Farkans are just under five feet high, green and white skinned with black spots on their back. They’d been monitoring us since we first broadcast radio waves into outer space. They had been waiting for us to “mature” before making contact, but that went to hell in a hand basket when they saw the streamed picture of the carton next to the sword. They came to us and guaranteed they’d find out how something from Earth had ended up on Mars five-hundred years before the first rockets were invented.
It was the Denubians. Yep, if you know them, you probably hate them. They’re a younger race as far as deep space travel, but signed on to the Galactic Accords regardless. Five hundred years ago some enterprising entrepreneurs with the Denubian trade alliance had figured out a way to make a few creds off a backwater planet and its barely civilized sentient race.
Speaking of Denubians, I saw one I knew coming out of the apartment block of the mistress. I had enough experience recognizing alien features that the guy’s attributes were a match to my M-card file back at the office. It was Mr. Lefsst’s executive assistant, Syemour Shelzz. Score.
I thumbed my pay pad and left the restaurant. I tailed the assistant for a couple of blocks on foot. He must’ve taken private transportation, since he’d already walked past two trams entries. I just needed to get a picture of the car for the file. He was my choice for the go-between of Mr. Lefsst and the mistress. He turned right into a narrow alleyway and disappeared. I started jogging to catch up and reached the alleyway, poking my head around the corner, but I didn’t see him.
There was an archway about 30 meters down on the left, so I continued into the alleyway to get a peek. I was almost to the archway when Syemour stepped out of it. I heard footsteps behind me, so I turned and saw two big dockworker types. Like 130 kilo big. At least they were human. I stood a chance.
“You big troubs mister. Big,” Syemour said, his higher pitched voice making the broken Near English hard on the ears. “You deep in the slime. Gon steal from me? Want take what mine? You pay now, pinky-toy.” And there it was. Pinky-toy. The underlying rub between our races.
The Denubians are why we’re on Mars today or even allowed to travel and trade within the Galactic community. They’re humanoid in appearance, just slightly taller, slightly thinner and have a translucent blue skin. Their craniums are narrower as well, giving them a bulging-eye fish look.
Denubians are conniving, greedy and self-centered as a race. They’re also meticulous record keepers. It took the Farkans, appointed to head the adjudication, less than a month to figure out that the Denubians had a penchant for three things that Earth had in abundance. Gold, people and chocolate. They had stolen what legend calls the Templar Treasure and divvied it up at a temporary base here on Mars, leaving the valueless sword. No big deal. Ruling number one: They had to return the value of the treasure with interest.
They’d grabbed a group of people to use as sex slaves. Seems humans will “do” anything and are always ready to try new things. The Denubians only mate with each other once a month. It’s a biological clock thing, but their sexual appetite is legendary. We are physically “compatible”, so they were thrilled to find us. Those early people and their descendents died on the Denubian home-world, from some sort of virus, hundreds of years ago, so there was no real way to determine who was owed compensation. We all got a little. Human and Denubian interactions, transactions and disputes were closely monitored. Ruling number two: A “Tie” always went to the human.
The chocolate. That was the big one. Seems the Denubians had taken the native cacao plants and built a small empire growing, processing and distributing chocolate. It’s the most popular product in the Galaxy. It’s also a wholly unique product of Earth. Ruling number three: The Farkans declared all past and future profits, royalties, facilities and distribution rights the sole property of the human race. A lot of Denubians went broke overnight. It all went into the Earth Reconciliation Trust Fund and we used the proceeds to buy ourselves into the Galactic community. Denubians sort of held a grudge over all of that. Pinky-toys was their version of the “N” word.
“Well, pinky-toy, m’gon make you sorry. M’gon make you pay,” Syemour said, in his squeaky voice. “ M’be sell you organs on black market?”
“Look, I don’t know you and I was just coming in here to take a leak. No harm meant,” I said. “Not lookin’ for any trouble here.”
“That lie, pinky-toy,” Syemour said. “M’be my friends convince truth from you?”
“Now, there is no need for violence,” I said raising my hands up. I could take on one of these guys, maybe the Denubian as well, but I had no doubt about the outcome if they all three jumped me.
“Hey, bruisers,” I heard a familiar voice say. “Why ya messing with that mook when you could play with a pretty girl?”
I turned my head and saw a vision of sexy womanhood in a short mini-skirt. Kinky was standing just inside the alleyway. She held some shopping bags in one hand and had her hip in the other. She walked toward the dockworker types, their mouths hanging open. The clicks of her knee-high stiletto boots echoing down the narrow passage. She’d pulled her hair into pigtails held by pink ribbons. The top three buttons on her blouse were undone and the cloth was having a hard time keeping her from spilling out. I’m sure that every man there prayed for a weak fourth button. She lowered the bags to the ground.
“So, boys, here’s the deal. Ya’re gonna let the man walk and we can talk about having some real fun, ‘kay?”
It took a few seconds of watching her breathe in and out before the Denubian recovered.
“Well, m’be we jus’ finish him and you be next playtime. Huh? M’be make look like he do you in? Know how do that. M’good at settin’ up things. Make GISI think what want. Sound good?”
“Now, boys, that wouldn’t be fun for me, would it?”
“Who cares?” one of the bruisers asked. “I agree with fish boy. Let’s put an end to this asshole and have some fun with hers.” They all laughed. One bruiser grabbed my shoulder and spun me toward him. I saw the molecule knife in his other hand. I grabbed his wrist and turned my head to tell Kinky to run.
The other bruiser lunged for Kinky, who was only a meter away from him.
“Oopsie. Wrong answer,” Kinky said.
His hand was a centimeter from grabbing her thin blouse when she moved so fast her hands were a blur. Kinky brought her left arm up and brushed his hand away, grabbing his wrist and twisting it over and up at the same time. His elbow popped. She drove the palm of her other hand into his nose and then stabbed her manicured nails into his eyes. Using his eye sockets as a handhold, she jammed a stiletto into each of his kneecaps, stood, released her grip on his face and wrapped her arms around his head. There was a pop when she twisted it.
Someone might have been inclined to ask “How could she do that?”. That was easy. When Kinky’s career in Holo-porn ended, she swapped out the sex-skillsets programs in her implants E-ram. Out went the sexual moves and acting, in came four forms of marshal arts and hand weapons use. Hot and deadly. Meanwhile, I still had the detuned E-ram from my GISI days. Well, it wasn’t exactly stock anymore and all of the stuff the GISI’s had turned off when I left the force was actually back on, thanks to a hacker buddy of mine.
The bruiser on me realized I was less of a threat than the large breasted, pigtail sporting, sex goddess, and turned toward Kinky. He stopped in his tracks, the handle from a tactical molecule edge knife protruding from his right eye. He dropped like a rock. Kinky shot forward and drop kicked the Denubian in the chest, sending him into the wall and then down onto the ground. She landed on his chest, knees on his shoulders and a knife over his eye. He wasn’t staring at the blade, though. Kinky doesn’t wear underwear, so he had something much better to look at.
“Hey, Mista, ya might want ta get out of here before the GISI’s show up. Me and this loser are gonna have a quick chat and then I’m outta here,” Kinky said over her shoulder to me. I got the hint and took off out of the alleyway.