Turns out, drunk Fitz is awful at giving directions.
The Processing district of Agreus colony, outside of the central complex, is a web of tunnels and corridors connecting hundreds of small private shops. Hundreds of services. Mechanics, machinists, welders and parts shops, whatever kind of gear you're running, if you need something fixed, fabricated, tuned, lubed or calibrated, you can find a shop that'll do it.
I was driving the cargo lifter from the hangar area, dodging my way through cramped access corridors and across long commercial strips. The big off-white “Mother of Mercy” medical crate was balanced lengthwise on the forks. It had a few new dents and scrapes since I’d started. I’m better at cutting salvage than I am at driving forklifts.
And I was lost.
“Fitz, I’m already at Yateman’s Lubeworks.” A yellow neon sign over a tall arched doorway lit the wide passage. It cast odd shadows that crossed with the bright blue lighting that ran along the top of the tunnel, and the low red-orange strip-lighting around a tiny noodle shop across the way. Fitz was drunkenly repeating himself, and I was doing my best not to tell him to do something unprintable to himself.
Fitz slurred, “wait, that’s a three-way junction, right?”
“Ludd’s own hairy asshole, Fitz, I thought you said you knew where Gifford’s shop was–”
“Okay, okay, you wanna head southwest from where you’re at! Okay? Got it? Sou'west. There’s a maintenance tunnel, it’s marked ‘A4-R,’ Gifford’s shop is right through there.”
Navigating here hadn’t been fun, what with Fitz in his cups and me with an itch at the back of my neck, expecting a security drone to run me down any second. I was getting tired, and I was having a hard time focusing on navigating.
That crawling, hunted sensation hadn’t gone away after that encounter with the thugs. No, it was far worse now.
Tunnel A4-R did indeed lead me to a set of big bay doors. So that’s one point to Fitz for eventually getting it right. The doors were open, I stopped the lifter just outside.
What I saw through those doors could only be described as a mad mechanic’s playground. Like a cartoon villain’s lair.
A tall set of shelves along one wall groaned with machine parts of all descriptions. Manipulator arms, engine assemblies, computer consoles and what looked like a fully-intact atmosphere processor, among other things I couldn’t identify.
The main body of the shop was a confused mess of workbenches and heavy machine tools. It looked like Gifford could have fabricated just about anything in there.
I spotted a meter-cube nanofabricator unit, plugging away at fabbing what looked like a hydraulic manifold. Nanofabs are rare treasures, and are highly illegal on Agreus. You can print guns with them, after all.
It confirmed that Gifford was a serious grease monkey, and was a bit loose with the law.
One corner of the room – past a tall shelf full of pipe fittings, bolts and fasteners – was clearly set up to be a living area. A long grease-stained couch faced a coffee table towering with paper noodle boxes and soda bottles. A tiny kitchenette unit that must have come from a small spacecraft galley was laden with dirty dishes and stained with a decade’s worth of ill-advised cooking projects.
Gifford himself popped into view, looking just as I’d imagined him. He was tall and lanky like a tree, dark-skinned, wearing a faded set of mechanic’s overalls and a well-worn leather cap. He stepped over a pile of trash with the practiced grace of a lifelong bachelor, and waved at me as I pulled the lifter into the shop.
I leaned out of the roll cage. “You’re Dale Gifford?”
He nodded, “Yah! That’s, uh. That’s me. Friends call me Giff. You’re early, man. You’re Hal Doon?”
I nodded back. “Yeah, sorry, shit got time-sensitive allasudden.”
“Uh-huh.” he frowned a little, then shrugged. “Whatcha got?”’
“My salvor rig, some tools.” I rolled the lifter into a likely-looking spot and set the crate down with a reverberating clank on the floor plating. “This is an interesting place, Giff. How’d you put this together? This obviously isn’t prefab, nothing like Ko Combine construction.”
He smiled proudly. “Aw, that was my granddad. I inherited the shop from him. This place is the flight deck from a carrier, I think it was a Drover class.”
“Hunh!” I grunted in appreciation. “No shit? A whole-ass carrier flight deck?”
“Hah! Yeah…” he looked around the place a little wistfully. “After they stripped the ship down Granddad bought the hulk from the Combine, rented one of those frigate-size starship tugs to haul the thing over to Central in one piece. It still sealed up good, so they just had to rig it up to electrical, air and water and boom, here it is.”
I gave another appreciative grunt. I think I’d have liked Gifford’s granddad. “Fitz said you had a loader?”
“Yeah! It’s out back, she’s about ready to fly but, y’know, I ain’t much of a pilot.”
“Neither am I, Giff. Guess we really did need Mag.”
Fitz and Mag chose that moment to arrive in a frankly adorable little cargo truck. Mag, thankfully, was the one driving. There was a mess of plastic crates in the back. Salvor suit and tools, Mag’s flight suit, hopefully food for a few days. Provisions, damn it, I realized I’d forgotten to pack a lunch.
Mag is tiny, but Fitz doesn’t stand much taller than her. Stocky but not quite rotund, Fitz looked like a smaller version of one of those Viking marauders from the ‘vids. Long dirty blond hair with a beard to match.
Fitz looked half-drunk and tired. Mag was buoyant. “Hal!” she called. She leapt out of the little truck. “Hal, what the hell?”
Fitz came over, rubbing his neck with one hand. “Yeah Hal, what the hell? What happened, what’s got you wound up?”
Gifford was standing nearby. I jerked a thumb at Giff and asked Fitz, “You can trust this guy?”
Fitz nodded once, sharply. “Known him years, he’s solid.”
“Well good,” I said, “because I’ve got two bodies back at Hangar 27.”
Mag backed up a half-step. “Bodies, Hal? The fuck happened?”
I told them.
Her eyebrows shot up. “Shit, Hal.”
“Yeah. Two of ‘em are dead. One got away with the goods.”
She looked stricken.
Fitz shook his head at me. “Damn, Hal. Still got it, huh? Why didn’t you pick up the spare?”
“He was a kid, Fitz, I’m not gonna shoot a kid.”
Mag shook her head a little, but didn’t argue.
Fitz made a greedy, grumbling noise somewhere deep in his throat. “Dunno, Hal, I think I’d have taken him out. Eighty Credits, fuck.” He scratched at his beard. “How’d you take on three men with your leg like that?”
“Modified plasma torch.” I said.
Mag’s eyebrows went up again.
“Hoo! Yeah, that’ll do it,” said Fitz.
Mag shook her head, frowning. “You said ‘shoot’ a minute ago, what did you do to that torch…?”
I reached into my duster and pulled out the Lassiter. “One of the goons had this.” I looked pointedly at Gifford. “Fitz said you were solid. So far you’ve heard about a bunch of stolen Credits, two dead men and an illegal firearm. You solid enough for all that?”
Giff laughed a little. “You solid enough for the shit I’ve got?”
In that moment I decided I liked him.
Fitz whistled his appreciation at the hand cannon. “That’s a nice piece. What poor fuck did he steal it from?”
I pocketed the gun and shrugged into my duster. “Dunno. If I’m quick and smart, maybe it won’t be some other criminal carrying it next.”
“Heh, true.” Fitz laughed.
Mag spoke up, “all right, let’s get on task. We’ve got two bodies to get rid of and then we need to be out of town for a while. Those men need to turn up missing, not dead. Right, Hal?”
I nodded. “Right. Let’s see this loader. Giff, where’s our chariot?”
Gifford snapped to. “Yup, over here.” He strode over to a button panel, and mashed it with the side of his fist.
The hangar door opened, accordion-folding into the walls on either side of the shop, and gave way to the flight deck.
This guy didn’t just have a shop, he had a whole garage and then some. The flight deck was a massive rectangular space littered with over a dozen shuttlecraft of various descriptions and in various states of disassembly.
I recognized a standard “jollyboat” shuttle, one of those used for making quick runs to orbit and back. It had a nasty-looking gouge along one side and a somewhat crumpled wing and nose. It looked like Giff had pulled the engine pods out the back end and salvaged what he could of the avionics. Sensors and computers were sprawled with trailing wires next to the crashed hulk.
A few other things I didn’t quite recognize. The frame of a little personal shuttle of some sort, which had a power pack and a few maneuvering jets built onto it, but was otherwise bare. A burned-out hunk of metal that might have been a loader, once. Nothing in this shop looked like it could fly, except for the centerpiece of the collection.
It was a loader, all right. A big one. From above she’d be a blunted diamond shape with a rounded nose and a loading ramp in the rear. Her stubby triangular wings sat high on her, above a pair of side doors, each wing carrying a pair of winches and a remote laser turret. Her four engine pods sat in gimballed mounts at all four corners of the fuselage. Under the nose, a matched pair of grappling clamps reached out, ready to grab onto something with the force of a hydraulic press.
Really, it was just a few sizes up from the ship Mag and I flew on the daily, but that gave it a lot more interior room to work with and a few more mounting points for tools and equipment. I’d seen these in action around Hegemony military stations, manipulating missile racks and magazines for giant hull-cracking cannons. They pulled these things out when they needed to move a lot of very heavy ordnance around very quickly.
Giff looked lovingly upon his pride and joy and said, “It’s an Orion Shipworks SL-60. Biggest workhorse of its series. Can you believe those jokers were going to throw her into the Yard and cut her up? I put her back together a couple of years ago, took her out a couple times but with these big engines she’s just too touchy for a novice to fly. Been trying to get better at it but honestly I feel like this things’s gonna kill me if I slip up just once.”
Mag nodded, “yeah, you don’t want to fuck around with a bird like this if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Maggie Murphy would know, she’d survived a few bad bets as a pilot, and thankfully she’d lived to learn a few lessons. I had personally pulled her out of one of her mistakes. Something I tried not to bring up too often. Old ghosts lay that way.
Maggie walked up to the bird like she owned it, started going over it, opening panels, inspecting every little thing like a thorough pre-flight check. She asked Gifford a rapid series of questions and he did his stammering best to answer to her satisfaction.
While they were at that, I went to Fitz and nudged him. “You got any idea what we’re going to see out there? Any idea how long we’ll be out? You gotta have some idea how much we’re going to need in fuel and supplies.”
Fitz waved a hand at me, “we got rations for days, fuel for days, and you brought tools, right? We’re good, Hal. Quit worrying. Fuck.”
“Worrying is what I do, Fitz. I’m coming along to make damn sure this expedition doesn’t get any of us killed.”
Fitz grunted wearily. “Yah, that’s why I wanted you along.”
I raised an eyebrow at that.
Fitz could be an impulsive and restless man, a creature of boundless curiosity. He was a technical wizard, knew his way around software and electronics like nobody else, but even that didn’t absorb all the energy of his mind. Exploring the unknown was irresistible to Fitz Malloy. He wanted to have all the secrets, see into all the dark places, and know all the magic runes.
But he was smart enough to know his own shortcomings. He wanted me along to make sure he didn’t delve too greedily, and too deep.
Understanding that, I warmed up to the expedition by a couple of degrees. He didn’t just want another pair of hands to hold tools. Fitz honestly wanted my input. He thought we stood better chances with me along.
I understood, and accepted the implied compliment. It meant a lot, coming from him.
We stood watching the flygirl and the gearhead for a minute. I took off my leather duster and made a sort of nest out of it, into which I settled the sleeping Testicles. He happily curled himself around his bone and kept softly snoring. I envied him. We'd both had a long day.
My pad beeped. I was getting a call.
“Fuckdammit” I growled. Damn thing had startled me, made me jump. I dug it out of my pocket, and swore harder when I saw who was calling.
Fitz, in the middle of perching himself on a stool, perked up and raised an eyebrow at me. “Problem? Someone find you out?”
I shook my head, “Worse. Family.”
Fitz grinned, “Shit, that is worse.”
I grunted a laugh, then thumbed the green button to answer.
The face of Lieutenant Colonel Ulysses Lafayette Doon, officer of the Armed Forces of the Hegemony, filled my screen.