NaNoWriMo, Day 1
All was not right in the world of Ian Lockett. First and foremost, his head felt as if someone had dropped a ton of bricks on it. He actually attributed his blurred vision to the apparent migraine at first, until he rolled over and heard the grating crunch of cheap aluminum as the frames of his glasses broke beneath him and stabbed into the small of his back. Fantastic. He groaned and fumbled blindly for the lenses, which must have popped out again; when he found one, he held it up to his eye and cracked it open just enough to see an empty hallway. That is, empty other than some very bright lights, which stirred the beast of a headache and sent a spike of pain through his skull. He snapped his eye shut again, trying not to be sick. That wasn’t what a dashing hero like himself ought to do. Of course, a dashing hero like himself ought to have caught the target too, but that couldn’t be helped at this point.
Once the nausea subsided he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and pocketed the remains of his glasses. Lillian would be furious with him for losing the target, but that was about par for the course. Besides, he had too look at the bright side; by making her angry he was giving her things to complain about, and she could hardly fault him for enabling her favourite hobby. He could just barely make out the hallway as a mass of soft edges and metallic gleam, but it was enough to let him move, feeling his way along the edges until his eyes adjusted and his head throbbed a little less. When he finally found the end of the hallway where it emptied out into a throng of people, shoppers and engineers and crewmen on their days off, he pulled out the lenses of his glasses and searched for a familiar head of electric blue hair. And in the haze of the headache, he didn’t notice the slight figure in the red dress slip seamlessly through the crowd away from him.
The Blue Room was tucked away in a corner of the G atrium, farthest from the docks, and the entrance was nearly obscured by a row of potted palms that tried their best to give the space station a relaxing and tropical atmosphere. As such it was a comparatively quiet shop, and the smell of fresh bread and strong coffee wafting from behind the counter contributed to the calming atmosphere more than plastic palm trees ever would. That’s why Thakkar chose it for meetings; he would rather talk business somewhere isolated and soothing when many of his clients were on edge enough, either out of fear or aggression. These particular clients were one of each.
“You have to do it, Vincent.” Sophie leveled a glare at him over her tiny cup of coffee. She’d decided they were on first name basis as soon as she learned it and hadn’t let up for the years that they’d known each other. Thakkar suspected that it was her way of making him feel close to her and thus more inclined to do her favours-she certainly didn’t do it to anyone else, except for Emma, and Emma may as well be her daughter for how well they got on.
“It shouldn’t be that much of a problem,” Quincy said, staring into his tea. He’d been staring at it since they’d sat down, apparently afraid that making eye contact would somehow convince Thakkar not to take the deal. That, not to mention the black eye and various bruises and band-aids that covered the few spots of skin visible around Quincy’s high-collared suit jacket, did very little to instill confidence in Thakkar that this was a fair deal. It might be too much to hope that this would not get him and his crew into a world of trouble. Still, he wasn’t going to pass up a deal without listening to the terms.
“I’d like to decide that myself,” Thakkar said, stirring a bit of cream into his decaf coffee. It would never be as good as the real thing, but the Blue Room made it damn close. “Tell me where you’re going and who did that to you, please.”
There was an awkward pause while Quincy became very interested in his wristwatch, which looked a bit worse for the wear-Thakkar didn’t remember it having a broken face last time they’d met.
“Come on,” Sophie whispered, leaning in to take his arm, her long spidery fingers wrapping around his scrawny wrist. “It’s okay. It’s not like it was your fault, right? So if you don’t tell him, I will.”
“M-15,” Quincy muttered. Thakkar’s eyebrows shot up. M-15 wasn’t a particularly dangerous place to go. The problem was that M-15 was several days out of his way, very nearly out of his official jurisdiction, and he would certainly get some awkward questions from his superiors in the force if he went there. If he could make an excuse, piracy in the area, some civil uprising, that would be different, but that sort of thing would hardly be believable. M-15 was a small planet with a modest but thriving mining industry, and the local government had managed a more or less peaceful collection of company towns. Nothing much happened out there, and if anything did happen the local authorities dealt with it on their own. Quincy must have caught the look in his eyes, because he leaned forwards and began talking so fast that he was nearly unintelligible.
“I know it’s a long way, but I can pay extra. I really need this. I’ve run out of test subjects, but a friend on M-15 has procured another set for me. I wouldn’t come to you if I could do this any other way, but I can’t fly on commercial airliners anymore.”
This sounded less appealing by the minute. Quincy was a brilliant scientist, despite his completely unimpressive appearance, but his experiments tended to be a little outside the mainstream. Up until this point he had only been sending a fraction of his work to be published, the rest kept secret and funded by questionable sources who were interested and reasonably comfortable with sacrifice for the sake of progress. Sacrifice of, say, a few morals and a couple of body parts. But if Quincy was avoiding commercial airlines now, that could only be bad news.
“You were caught.” When Thakkar said it, it was more of an observation than a question. Quincy cringed.
“Well, I…” He sighed and ran a hand through his baby-fine black hair. “One of my graduate students was a little less enthusiastic then he first let on. He’s the one who did this to me also, if you must know. I don’t have anyone terrible and vicious after me, I just got on the wrong side of a self-righteous nerd.”
A slight smile tugged on the corners of Thakkar’s lips. He wasn’t sure how Quincy got by calling anyone else a nerd, but it was good to hear that no one more dangerous was involved. The general authorities would be after him, of course, but outside his home planet he would hardly be considered a high priority case. He’d have Wolf run a check on the incident later just in case, but he didn’t expect anything to come up; Quincy was a god-awful liar. That made this a fairly reasonable deal if they could get around the problem of location. Not that Quincy needed to know what he thought of this. The longer Quincy thought Thakkar would turn him down, the more desperate he would get, and the sweeter the deal would be. He made a show of playing with his coffee for a few minutes and pretending to consider this before he looked up, locking Quincy in a stern gaze.
“That’s not near our normal patrol course,” Thakkar said. There was no need to elaborate; body language spoke clearer than words, and Quincy shrank down into his collar. If only Sophie was as easily intimidated, but years of investigative reporting had made her into a thick-skinned annoyance.
“Look, Vincent, there are ten billion reasons you could give the brass for being off course. Tell them you got a call nearby and needed to refuel on the way or something. He’s not going to attract any unwanted attention and he’s got plenty of money for fare, so it’s more than worth your while to take him on. Don’t even try using your course as an excuse. Besides, isn’t the course more like guidelines? I was under the impression that they didn’t enforce it, which is why the wealthier planets somehow end up with better surveillance. Not that you would ever contribute to that, Vincent.”
“I’d be offended if you thought I would, Sophie,” he lied. “What’s your offer?”
“Well, we were thinking that maybe-”
“Quincy, knock it off!” Sophie cut in, elbowing him in the ribs. He doubled over wheezing, but she didn’t seem to notice. “What have I told you about talking like that? To the point, okay? And louder! Jesus, man, if you need your fiancée to do all your negotiating for you-”
“Fiancé?”
The voice rang clear and smooth over the elevator music of the atrium, and it instantly stopped Sophie.
“Welcome back, Emma,” Thakkar said, not bothering to turn to face her. “Did you find everything I asked for?”
“Fiancé?” Emma repeated, pulling up a chair next to Sophie and throwing several shopping bags on the table, dangerously close to spilling Thakkar’s coffee. She had honed in on the word with eagle-eye precision, and wasn’t concerned by trivialities like her superior officer’s drink. “Seriously, you two are engaged? As of when?”
“Well, look who it is!” Sophie got up to sweep Emma into a bear-hug, just about crushing the smaller woman. “As of October. How’ve you been?”
“Not bad, I guess, but work keeps me so busy…”
Thakkar let their chatter wash over him as he peered into the shopping bags. Fresh fruit, a few books, an air filter, some antiseptic-
“It’s not nice to peek, Vincent.”
Thakkar snatched his hand back just before Sophie’s red-painted claws tore into his flesh.
“She might have her own things in those bags too, you know. You should have more respect for a lady.”
Thakkar felt a twinge of pity for Quincy, who had been slumped in his chair, visibly searching for an escape since Emma had arrived. He had enough trouble dealing with just Sophie, and the two of them together was exponentially worse.
Once the nausea subsided he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and pocketed the remains of his glasses. Lillian would be furious with him for losing the target, but that was about par for the course. Besides, he had too look at the bright side; by making her angry he was giving her things to complain about, and she could hardly fault him for enabling her favourite hobby. He could just barely make out the hallway as a mass of soft edges and metallic gleam, but it was enough to let him move, feeling his way along the edges until his eyes adjusted and his head throbbed a little less. When he finally found the end of the hallway where it emptied out into a throng of people, shoppers and engineers and crewmen on their days off, he pulled out the lenses of his glasses and searched for a familiar head of electric blue hair. And in the haze of the headache, he didn’t notice the slight figure in the red dress slip seamlessly through the crowd away from him.
The Blue Room was tucked away in a corner of the G atrium, farthest from the docks, and the entrance was nearly obscured by a row of potted palms that tried their best to give the space station a relaxing and tropical atmosphere. As such it was a comparatively quiet shop, and the smell of fresh bread and strong coffee wafting from behind the counter contributed to the calming atmosphere more than plastic palm trees ever would. That’s why Thakkar chose it for meetings; he would rather talk business somewhere isolated and soothing when many of his clients were on edge enough, either out of fear or aggression. These particular clients were one of each.
“You have to do it, Vincent.” Sophie leveled a glare at him over her tiny cup of coffee. She’d decided they were on first name basis as soon as she learned it and hadn’t let up for the years that they’d known each other. Thakkar suspected that it was her way of making him feel close to her and thus more inclined to do her favours-she certainly didn’t do it to anyone else, except for Emma, and Emma may as well be her daughter for how well they got on.
“It shouldn’t be that much of a problem,” Quincy said, staring into his tea. He’d been staring at it since they’d sat down, apparently afraid that making eye contact would somehow convince Thakkar not to take the deal. That, not to mention the black eye and various bruises and band-aids that covered the few spots of skin visible around Quincy’s high-collared suit jacket, did very little to instill confidence in Thakkar that this was a fair deal. It might be too much to hope that this would not get him and his crew into a world of trouble. Still, he wasn’t going to pass up a deal without listening to the terms.
“I’d like to decide that myself,” Thakkar said, stirring a bit of cream into his decaf coffee. It would never be as good as the real thing, but the Blue Room made it damn close. “Tell me where you’re going and who did that to you, please.”
There was an awkward pause while Quincy became very interested in his wristwatch, which looked a bit worse for the wear-Thakkar didn’t remember it having a broken face last time they’d met.
“Come on,” Sophie whispered, leaning in to take his arm, her long spidery fingers wrapping around his scrawny wrist. “It’s okay. It’s not like it was your fault, right? So if you don’t tell him, I will.”
“M-15,” Quincy muttered. Thakkar’s eyebrows shot up. M-15 wasn’t a particularly dangerous place to go. The problem was that M-15 was several days out of his way, very nearly out of his official jurisdiction, and he would certainly get some awkward questions from his superiors in the force if he went there. If he could make an excuse, piracy in the area, some civil uprising, that would be different, but that sort of thing would hardly be believable. M-15 was a small planet with a modest but thriving mining industry, and the local government had managed a more or less peaceful collection of company towns. Nothing much happened out there, and if anything did happen the local authorities dealt with it on their own. Quincy must have caught the look in his eyes, because he leaned forwards and began talking so fast that he was nearly unintelligible.
“I know it’s a long way, but I can pay extra. I really need this. I’ve run out of test subjects, but a friend on M-15 has procured another set for me. I wouldn’t come to you if I could do this any other way, but I can’t fly on commercial airliners anymore.”
This sounded less appealing by the minute. Quincy was a brilliant scientist, despite his completely unimpressive appearance, but his experiments tended to be a little outside the mainstream. Up until this point he had only been sending a fraction of his work to be published, the rest kept secret and funded by questionable sources who were interested and reasonably comfortable with sacrifice for the sake of progress. Sacrifice of, say, a few morals and a couple of body parts. But if Quincy was avoiding commercial airlines now, that could only be bad news.
“You were caught.” When Thakkar said it, it was more of an observation than a question. Quincy cringed.
“Well, I…” He sighed and ran a hand through his baby-fine black hair. “One of my graduate students was a little less enthusiastic then he first let on. He’s the one who did this to me also, if you must know. I don’t have anyone terrible and vicious after me, I just got on the wrong side of a self-righteous nerd.”
A slight smile tugged on the corners of Thakkar’s lips. He wasn’t sure how Quincy got by calling anyone else a nerd, but it was good to hear that no one more dangerous was involved. The general authorities would be after him, of course, but outside his home planet he would hardly be considered a high priority case. He’d have Wolf run a check on the incident later just in case, but he didn’t expect anything to come up; Quincy was a god-awful liar. That made this a fairly reasonable deal if they could get around the problem of location. Not that Quincy needed to know what he thought of this. The longer Quincy thought Thakkar would turn him down, the more desperate he would get, and the sweeter the deal would be. He made a show of playing with his coffee for a few minutes and pretending to consider this before he looked up, locking Quincy in a stern gaze.
“That’s not near our normal patrol course,” Thakkar said. There was no need to elaborate; body language spoke clearer than words, and Quincy shrank down into his collar. If only Sophie was as easily intimidated, but years of investigative reporting had made her into a thick-skinned annoyance.
“Look, Vincent, there are ten billion reasons you could give the brass for being off course. Tell them you got a call nearby and needed to refuel on the way or something. He’s not going to attract any unwanted attention and he’s got plenty of money for fare, so it’s more than worth your while to take him on. Don’t even try using your course as an excuse. Besides, isn’t the course more like guidelines? I was under the impression that they didn’t enforce it, which is why the wealthier planets somehow end up with better surveillance. Not that you would ever contribute to that, Vincent.”
“I’d be offended if you thought I would, Sophie,” he lied. “What’s your offer?”
“Well, we were thinking that maybe-”
“Quincy, knock it off!” Sophie cut in, elbowing him in the ribs. He doubled over wheezing, but she didn’t seem to notice. “What have I told you about talking like that? To the point, okay? And louder! Jesus, man, if you need your fiancée to do all your negotiating for you-”
“Fiancé?”
The voice rang clear and smooth over the elevator music of the atrium, and it instantly stopped Sophie.
“Welcome back, Emma,” Thakkar said, not bothering to turn to face her. “Did you find everything I asked for?”
“Fiancé?” Emma repeated, pulling up a chair next to Sophie and throwing several shopping bags on the table, dangerously close to spilling Thakkar’s coffee. She had honed in on the word with eagle-eye precision, and wasn’t concerned by trivialities like her superior officer’s drink. “Seriously, you two are engaged? As of when?”
“Well, look who it is!” Sophie got up to sweep Emma into a bear-hug, just about crushing the smaller woman. “As of October. How’ve you been?”
“Not bad, I guess, but work keeps me so busy…”
Thakkar let their chatter wash over him as he peered into the shopping bags. Fresh fruit, a few books, an air filter, some antiseptic-
“It’s not nice to peek, Vincent.”
Thakkar snatched his hand back just before Sophie’s red-painted claws tore into his flesh.
“She might have her own things in those bags too, you know. You should have more respect for a lady.”
Thakkar felt a twinge of pity for Quincy, who had been slumped in his chair, visibly searching for an escape since Emma had arrived. He had enough trouble dealing with just Sophie, and the two of them together was exponentially worse.