Crossroads

Chapter One

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

But in the bowels of Crossroads Station – literally the bowels, as I was in pursuit through the byzantine waste reclamation facilities that surrounded the lower decks – screams echoed off of every pipe, nook and cranny in a fashion that was pretty damn disturbing.

I thought, sometimes, that I really just needed to learn how to mind my own goddamn business.

It was an easy thought to have on days like today, but if I was honest with myself (and who really was, all that often?) that if I was any good at minding my own goddamn business, I wouldn’t make for a very good Marshall. Sure, it would be a lot easier to just re-up with the Legion. At least then I could get shot at under open sky on some weird alien planet, and not be ducking behind vats filled with the noxious waste of the two hundred some-odd races that called Crossroads Station home.

An energy burst pinged off of the (thankfully) empty tank I was standing next to, reminding me to pay some damn attention to what was going on. Or the next credit-sized hole was going to be in my head, and that was not how Momma Cole’s little boy Dominic was going to go out.

“It doesn’t need to be like this, Morrek,” I called out, hoping the echo of the room would keep the Davedian from homing in on my location. The Davedians’ had underdeveloped ears, so his hearing wasn’t quite as good as a human’s. I had fairly good hearing – not like a Chiropteran or anything, but pretty good, and the echo was keeping me from tracking down where he was shooting from. So instead, I started talking like I was using the showdown script from a cheap holo.

“Look, “ I continued. “Just tell me where you hid the drive, and we can all part friendly. I’ll turn it over to StationSec, and tell them you gave me the slip. Nobody has to have anything permanent happen today.” That was a lie, of course. StationSec hadn’t hired me, the client had. And I wouldn’t be particularly upset if anything permanent did happen - Morrek was Grade A Scum - it was more a matter of sound business sense. The people you kill usually have family that comes looking for you, afterwards.

He hissed, and shot at me again. This time, I was close enough to smell the burning ozone of the tracer gas in the blast. Not to mention that it had been about an inch and half away from singeing the beard off my face. That sort of helped with the smell problem.

Well. That settled that. I sighed.

“Izzy keeps saying I need to shave,” I muttered, “but I don’t think that’s what she meant.”

I scurried around another set of vats, trying to find a quiet place to do my thing. Davedians might have had small ears, but they were also darkly furred, generally speaking, and Morrek’s coat was a jet black. Just the thing for blending in a dimly-lit automated waste processing center. So I was going to have to do the other thing that made me a good investigator - tap into my empathic talents.

I wasn’t rated very high on the ESPer scale. I was an E-2, which was only two steps away from being as headblind as the ninety-nine percent of humanity that had no psychic abilities at all. It meant, basically, that I was hard to lie to (something that caused no small amount of difficulty in relationships, which probably explained why my longest female companion was a hologram), and that if I was really lucky, and really concentrating, I could get a sense of just who was where in a room.

Morrek didn’t fire again. Possibly my cunning plan of hiding under the control panel to one of the vats had confused him. But he seemed, for the moment, to have lost track of me.

Fantastic.

I slowed my breathing, trying to remember what my instructors had taught me back in boot. The Legion had been big on using psychics and had frequently tried to train me up to make my abilities a reliable combat advantage. But at the end of the day, I just didn’t have that much potential.

But with just me and one other guy in a three hundred meter room? Yeah, that I could do.

I closed my eyes first, slowly shifting the part of my brain that managed my senses away from everything. Sound was next, and then smell. It’s harder to block out smells than you think, especially once sight and sound are gone. It’s such a subtle sense, most people aren’t even aware of when they’re using it. If you think I’m kidding, try it some time.

That left touch, which was focused on the cool grip of the gun in my hand. An old LD-72, it had been issued to me when I joined the Interstellar Legion and was one of the very few things I took with me when I left.

The rest of my mind focused on one thing: looking for the only other mind around. Registering the presence of other people is a low-level psychic ability even the headblind have. Think about it - you always know when you’re alone. I’ve read something about an innate ability to detect electromagnetic fields that humans have or whatever, but I think that’s crap. We know when we’re alone, and when we aren’t. And you always known when someone’s in your space, but you shouldn’t be. But what most folks can’t do is pinpont exactly where that person was.

In the right set of circumstances, I could. I felt the fleeting contact with the alien mind of the code-hacker who’d managed to steal something very private from my client. Thought became deed, my arm sweeping up to track where my mind told me the target was, and I fired.

I opened my eyes after my target let out a pained yelp, and dual thuds sounded on the metal deck. He’d been on the vat above me, creeping along for a good shot, no doubt, and I’d caught him by surprise.

“Cole,” Morrek growled at me, and called me something in his own language that I didn’t need translated. “You money-hungry vaccum-sucker! You shot off my arm!” He was clutching around the stump that his clothes had automatically sealed around.

“Relax,” I said, and pointed my gun at a point just between his eyes. “If you eat your protein, we both know it’ll grow back. Want to see if your head can? I’ve always wondered that about you people.”

Fangs flashed, but Morrek didn’t speak.

“The drive, Morrek,” I said firmly. “You’ve about wasted enough of my afternoon.”

“You won’t do it.”

“Morrek, we’re in waste reclamation already. I don’t have to go three meters to dispose of your body. Don’t be stupid.”

He stared at me, drawing on that predator instinct, or just good sense, to try to see if I was lying.

I wasn’t. He sighed and reached into a pocket. I waved the gun a little. “Slowly.”

He slowed down and pulled a small data drive from the pocket of his jumpsuit. “ You’re costing me one hell of a payday here, Cole.”

“Yeah,” I grinned. “But you just guaranteed mine. Want me to call StationMed for you?”

Morrek growled again, and I just grinned wider, picked up his gun, and headed on my way.

I might even have started whistling.

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Maybe I should tell you a little about myself. My name is Dominic Cole. I’m from Earth - and I mean I’m actually from Earth, not just human. I don’t even mean from one of the moons, or the other planets. Good old-fashioned Mother Earth.

I know, I know. If even a quarter of the people who claimed they were from the human homeworld actually were, there’d be way more than sixteen billion people living there. Earth’s nice and all. Just.. crowded. I left home at eighteen, like most folks completely uninterested in further education do. Well, that’s not entirely true - I did take six months to complete a pilot’s certification course, and then took a job as the relief pilot on a dingy, broken down wreck of a freighter that’s only shining points were that it 1) got me the hell off Earth, and 2) promised not to come back for a very long time.

That kept me in good stead for a while, and I eventually found my way to a place most drifters do: the Interstellar Legion. The Legion is an army that’s not quite mercenaries and is only loosely affiliated with any of the major galactic powers. A bunch of those powers fund it, and it enforces their interests. Or the interests of whoever’s paying, really, but how is that different from the normal Army? Most of what we did was went to weird alien mudballs and shot at people - or got shot at by people - until the Legion decided that our ‘intervention’ had served their purpose. There was no real idealism to it, despite what the Legion’s adverts claim. For us, it was mostly about getting paid.

After I did my ten, I cashed out, and set up shop here at Crossroads. Crossroads Station is a neutral base in unclaimed territory - nobody, not the Terran Alliance, not the Gozeran Federation, not the T’Kith’Kin Hive, or any of the other major powers controls it. It started as a trading outpost, being a junction point for no less than seven major jump-net routes. That was a few centuries back, and it’s just grown ever since. More than forty million people call Crossroads home, with a transient population of at least that much, or hell, probably even more. Humans, Kennick, Centaurians, Sylvan, Frawd, T’Kith’kin, any race you’d heard of and probably dozens you hadn’t. I even saw a Utopian once. All lived here. Some were born here, some died here - hell, there was at least a couple enclaves whose members had never set foot in the wider universe beyond the station.

There’s a government, too. Sort of. All diplomatically elected and everything, if you can believe that. In practice, the people with the money are the people who get elected. Doesn’t matter what world you’re from, doesn’t matter what species you are. Every civilized planet’s the same. The uncivilized ones are just more honest about it. And Crossroads’ government was about as effective as anyone’s: which was to say, not very.

That was where I came in. I had a talent for finding people, and the skills I’d learned in the Legion meant I generally had even odds of being able to handle myself. There was always too much work for StationSec to handle, and on a place the size of a small moon, there was plenty of work for me and the hundreds of other private investigators. They call us Marshalls. Makes it sound all official. Some of us are pretty much just cops who didn’t work for the government. Some of us are mostly just hired guns, some are decidedly more unsavory. Some of us fall somewhere in-between. I’ll let you figure out which one I am.

Izzy greeted me like usual when I entered the office. Which was to say, with a faint expression of surprise that I had managed not to get myself killed. Couldn’t much blame her. Just about every time, it surprised the hell out of me.

“You’re alive,” she remarked, leaving the ‘Still?’ unsaid. Her holoform glittered slightly as she stood from the desk to give me the once-over. Strictly speaking, she didn’t really have to do that. Izzy was really a floating metal ball about the size of my fist. The body she projected was a hard-light hologram, capable of interaction. And before you ask, yes, the hologram was convincing enough for that sort of thing, and no, I don’t use her for that. Never seemed right to me, using an AI for that sort of convenience. But there were plenty of folks who did. I try not to judge. Don’t always succeed, but I try. Anyway, the scanners she had built in could tell her my condition just as well from behind her desk as they could if she stood up. Izzy, however, considered herself to be “method”. “And not even shot this time. I am impressed, Mister Cole.”

I sighed. “For the thousandth time, Izzy, it’s ‘Dominic’. Or just ‘Cole’, or ‘Dom’ if you really have to.”

“Yes, but you don’t like to be called ‘mister’”, she noted. “And you know very well that I prefer Isabel over…” she sighed, “ “Izzy”.”

I sighed again. “Swear to god, one of these days, I’m going to…”

“....reprogram me to me more subservient,” she finished for me. “Flush my core out the airlock. Swap me out for an upgraded model. Which empty threat would you like to use this time, Mister Cole?”

I muttered something unkind about smart-ass A.I.s, and fished the drive I’d recovered from Morrek out of a pocket. I tossed it easily onto her desk. “I got the drive back, that’s what matters. See if you can make a copy before we contact the client. When someone pays what we just got paid to recover data, I get mighty curious about what that data is.”

“Would that not be considered unprofessional?”

Of course it would. I snorted. “Yeah, and I’m all broke up about that. I get the feeling that Morrek might have been working for the client in the first place. If I’m being played - or even just being set up, I want to know why.”

“Very good, sir,” Izzy answered, and the faux-respect made me shake my head again. I watched as she grabbed slotted the drive into the reader on her desk, and the headed for the shower.

Because.. damn. The waste reclamation level stank, and I absolutely did not need that following me around for the rest of my day.

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My quarters were on the level above the office. I had an exterior cabin, both for the office and my quarters. And let me tell you, that had not come cheap. If I hadn’t squirrelled away a significant chunk of the creds earned in my Legion years, no way would I have been able to set myself up this well. Crossroads real estate was… well “pricey” didn’t begin to cover it. Not in the survivable sections of the station, anyway.

Of course, there were plenty of sectors aboard that weren’t so survivable… and were exactly where a lot of my work came from.

After the quick shower - I splurged for a water one this time, because the sonics just never made you feel quite as clean - I toweled off and tossed my clothes into the chute for the laundry service. They’d be back, cleaned and repaired as needed, the next morning. The bots down there didn’t sleep, after all. The only thing I kept was my hat.

I gave it a curious sniff, was satisfied that the funk hadn’t clung to it too badly, and then picked out another set of clothes. Nicer ones this time, since the client was from the Upper Decks. Business-style clothes, and the more formal-styled coat that I owned. Swear to god, they kept those decks freezing-ass cold on purpose, no matter what Maintenance claimed. The other one - the comfortable one - had definitely needed to go out when the laundry service.

I sighed, and then completed the process by switching my blaster to the under-the-arm holster in the coat, and grabbing the worn and dingy leather fedora that looked at odds with rest of the clothes. Hell with it. I might have to deal with these people - and it was always more satisfying to spend their creds than anyone else’s - but I wasn’t going to completely pretend like I was one of them.

Judge me about it if you want, but rich people just plain set my teeth on edge. And the kind that lived in the Upper Decks were the absolute worst. Nobody had a good reason for living on a place like Crossroads, but here they were, just like the rest of us. Snobby bastards.

I paused for a moment, considering my quarters. I always thought they were nice. Comfortable, even. The carpeting was thick and warm, which let me walk around barefoot whenever I was home. Not something you could do much in a place like this. The furniture matched… sort of... but was worn comfortably. Shelves lined the bulkheads, filled with the knick-knacks and mementos of past cases, and photos and items from my kids - and a single photo of both of my ex-wives. My office downstairs looked a lot like it - though a bit more presentably organized.

It was comfortable. It was home.. and absolutely no one would ever mistake its occupant for ‘rich’ or ‘snobby’. I stopped over at the bar tucked away in the corner of the living space, grabbed a flask of liquid courage, and headed back downstairs.

There are advantages to working and living out of, essentially, the same space. A short commute is nice. I never had to worry about the crowd in the tubes. Not on the way to the office – but then, very little of my work was done in the office. Of course, it also meant I never really left work behind, either. A job was done, or I was on it. The setup was fairly binary.

Izzy was frowning at the display that floated over her desk when I came back in. I sighed, nipped a sip from the flask, and stowed it back away inside my jacket. “Can’t say I like seeing that expression on your face, Izzy.”

She made a noncommittal sound of absent agreement, keeping her focus on the holo in front over her.

Well, that was just downright disconcerting. “What’s wrong?”

Izzy’s simulated fingers danced over her keypad. “The encryption on this is.. strange. It’s better than I’m used to seeing.”

“For the cost of that slicing package I got you, you ought to be able to get into anything short of the Directorate’s files.”

“And thanks to the peerless nature of my artificial intellect, I can get into a good deal of those as well,” she confirmed. “Which makes this even more… confounding.”

I picked up the drive from the desk, bouncing it slightly in my palm. “You’re sure the copy didn’t damage it?”

“Please,” Izzy said derisively. “I know better than to leave fingerprints. The individuals who set that up may be good, but they are not that good,” she said with emphasis. “It’s clear. The client will be waiting for you at the Finnegan’s on Level 22.”

“Same place we met before,” I nodded, and tucked the drive into a pocket. “Keep at it, Izz. Call me if you figure something out.”

She nodded. “Mister Cole… do be careful. I would not like to find new employment. And… “

I cut her off. “Careful, Izz. You go developing something like intuition, and they’ll take your code apart line by line to figure out how you did it.”

She shuddered. I wished I was joking. A.I.s got a raw deal in the universe, no doubt about that. But when you’ve tried to wipe out all known life in the galaxy three or four times… well, let’s just say it was kind of amazing that A.I.s even existed at all.

I patted the holster under my coat. “Relax,” I reassured her. “I do this every day.”

----------------------------

Finnegan’s was the type of place that seemed to survive no matter where humanity set down roots. It was a chain restaurant, supposedly founded on Earth more than a thousand years back or so. Twenty-first century? Twenty-second? Whatever.. That’s what their adverts claimed, anyways. I don’t know how true it is, I’ve never bothered to really look into it.

The thing to know about Finnegan’s is the exact key to why I think they could have been around for a millennia. They’re all the same. They may not have identical floorplans, but they’re designed around a familiar look. The same entryway, the same dining area, the same bar filled with cheap booze at the center, the same kitschy wall decorations that reference the popular culture of a hundred worlds, and the same damn food. I’ve eaten at a lot of Finnegan’s across the known galaxy, and the food was the same no matter who cooked it. It was also cheap. Not too cheap, but decent. It was just respectable enough to accept all comers. For a single guy like me, it was a more affordable option that cooking for myself, sometimes. It was… not just comfort food, but a comfortable place. Familiar, no matter where you found it. Maybe not that valuable on it’s own, but…

I nodded at Jan, the Finalian hostess, as I approached. A part of me started dredging up what I knew of her by reflex: Married, six hatchlings in her clutch. Breeder worked in StationMed as a nurse, husband was part of the Ops Staff, a mid-level Legion officer that helped keep Crossroads running. Crossroads had a civil government, yes, but it was also a Legion outpost, and they technically shared command. Her wings looked like they were getting ready to molt. One last burst of new plumage before menopause, maybe? Shame she was married, I mused, and then shook my head. “Hey, Jan,” I grinned.

She raised a feathered eyebrow. “Mister Cole. Business or personal today?”

“Business,” I nodded. “Can I get the back booth?”

“After what you did for Petrovic? I’d kick the Administrator himself out of it.”

I grinned. Petrovic Dobrensky was the owner of this particular Finnegan’s. His kid had been kidnapped by two scumbags freelancing for the local organized crime outfit. Just like bad governent, no matter where you went, organized crime was a galactic constant. Dobrensky had some creds - he owned about a dozen businesses on the station. He’d hired me for the recovery. The kidnappers had been new to Crossroads, and they hadn’t realized that I don’t take kindly to threats involving kids. No one does, but I had reasons for taking it personal. If something happened to a kid on Crossroads, though…

Well. I’d been speaking from experience when I’d threatened Morrek with how I’d dispose of his body earlier. Svetlana Dobrensky had been an adorable eight-year old girl, and now she was a preteen who would go on to drive her father crazy for the next few years. I could live with that rate of exchange.

Jan sent one of the new waitresses by right after I settled in - Anna-Marie? No, that was the brunette. This was the Sylvan, the redhead. Her name was on the tip of my tongue before she showed up, and her nametag made the efforts to dreg it out of my memory unnecessary. Denva.

“Hi, Denva,” I smiled. She smiled back, but a little stiffly. Well, shit. She’d talked to Carrie, then. Oh, well.

“Mister Cole,” she said. “Do you know what you want?”

“Just a drink for now - New Tanlith Tea - a little light on the vodka, though, and for God’s sake, make sure it’s not that crap that Dobrensky distills in the back room. I want something to strip the deck, I’ll get some of that.”

The stiffness cracked a little bit. Dobrensky’s in-house vodka was really horrible. I mean really, really horrible. You know what it takes for a Russian straight from Novvy Moskva to screw up vodka?

Denva actually smiled at that. Maybe all was not already lost. I started turning a few things over in my head while I waited for the client.

I did not expect to hear the sound of a blaster powering up as the tip pressed against my very nice hat.

“Crap,” I muttered. It was one of those days.