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Dramatis Personae

Tarn

As it turned out Wireburn was far off the beaten path, buried deep in the galactic heart and dangerously close to a star cluster where the background radiation made any kind of long term settlement tricky. Thanks to these factors it was impossible to find direct passage from Effratha to Wireburn. Tarn wound up wasting two full days moving out along the spiral from Effratha halfway to Andromeda Proxima, the closest star to the neighboring galaxy, before catching a ship that jumped directly into the galactic center. From there he made two more transfers before arriving at Wireburn proper.

He’d sent word on ahead to his new employer but he didn’t have the cash to pay for a sidereal transmission so the message would have to go via data onboard a jumpship. While courier ships for the express purpose of moving messages did exist they also didn’t get that far off the beaten path every day. There was no way to know if Lucy had gotten his message ahead of time. However even if she hadn’t Wireburn was still a well established colony and finding accommodations for a short stay wouldn’t be that difficult.

It also proved unnecessary. On disembarking from his jumpliner Tarn found a petite, short haired blond woman waiting for him in the starport concourse. She wore a tan colored, sleeveless dress and matching hat. A dataveil dangled from the hat’s broad brim, obscuring her features, but she zeroed in on Tarn almost as soon as his boots left the gangway and she waved cheerfully. The build, hair and mannerisms all suggested that this was his employer.

He quickly crossed the tennish meters between them and removed his broad brimmed metalweave cap. Lucy likewise lifted her datavail and piled it on her own hat, then smiled. Tarn came to a stop across from her and allowed himself the faintest, most professional smile in his repertoire. “Miss Luck. A pleasure to be working with you again.”

“The pleasure is mine, Sel Tarn. I was rather surprised when I heard you’d be here so soon, given the distance between here and Yshron. Then again, between the shipyards and the microfactories perhaps it’s not surprising. There must be a few hundred outbound jumps a day leaving your world.”

“True, but not why I got here so fast. I was already on business when I received your message and I was able to find a relatively direct route here. Are we meeting anyone else?”

“Not this time.” Lucy flicked a glance at the large duffle he carried slung over one shoulder. “Your usual gear? Or do we need to stop by the baggage claim?”

“This is all I brought with me. Shall we get to work?”

A smile tugged at her lips but she hid it by dropping her veil back over her face and starting down the concourse. “So impatient. All right, Sel Tarn, but first I have to know whether you’ve kept up your LAC license?”

“Of course. I’m certified to the light aircraft standard and the small aircraft standard so unless Wireburn has some kind of unusual local standard for aircraft operations I can pilot us wherever we need to go.” Tarn glanced up at the port’s skylights, which filled the concourse with the planet’s dim, orange light. He’d worked with Lucy Luck twice before. In spite of that there were still plenty of things he didn’t know about her and one of those points of ignorance was about to be very relevant to what they were discussing. “Still, if we’re going to travel a great deal it might be faster to have someone who can jump on their own.”

“If that was my concern I could handle it on my own.” Tarn nodded slightly, he’d always expected Lucy had an etheric sense given the way she popped up in different parts of the quadrant without tickets or pilots on hand in the past. “What I need from you is your talent for finding people.”

“This task requires aircraft? Is the person you’re looking for a smuggler or military officer of some kind? The Shran are not in the business of full fledged mercenary work although I can refer you to someone if that’s what you need.”

She laughed in light, tinkling tones. Tarn found it a very incongruous sound given the kinds of work she’d commissioned from the Shran in the past. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing like that. What do you know about Wireburn, Sel Tarn?”

“Just that it’s the only gas giant in the quadrant that has an etheric signature low enough it could be colonized and people have been settling here for a couple of hundred years.” Tarn shrugged. “Honestly, hunting the creatures that live on gas giants is a bit outside the Shran’s usual line of work so I never took much of an interest before now. I thought all the inhabited areas were domed, like here.”

“They are. However the person I need you to find is what the locals call a Wayfinder. They spend a lot of their time out in the atmosphere, laying the beacon network across the planet, and the person in question was out doing just that when he went silent.”

Tarn studied Lucy out of the corner of his eye for a moment. He wasn’t supposed to ask too many questions about his client’s requests but sometimes it was hard to resist the urge. Why Lucy wanted to find a Wayfinder was none of his business “I take it we need a light aircraft to safely traverse the atmosphere?”

“Correct.” She caught him watching and flashed him a brilliant smile. “I’ve arranged to rent one beginning tomorrow, so you’ll have a day of downtime to make any other arrangements you need. Do you have enough cash on hand? I have an expense account to draw on if not.”

“That depends. How dynamic a situation is it likely to be when we find your missing Wayfinder?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be happy to be found. It’s a very bad thing to go missing in the depths of the Helium Seas with no beacons to hand.” Her smile died away, leaving her with a sharp, hawkish expression. “We do need to find him first, however.”

It was a race, then. “The LAC you’ve requisitioned is up to the task?”

“Most definitely.”

“Then I should be able to handle my own arrangements.”

“Excellent.” She passed him a slip of flexiplast. “Our hotel’s beacon and reservation details. Make whatever preparations you need and meet me at the building’s landing pad tomorrow morning.”

Tarn tucked it into his breast pocket. “Of course.”

Elisha

Elisha Hammer maintained a small office near the bottom of one of Wireburn’s great ferrovines in the domed complex known as Ashland Prominence. The airlocks there bustled with the riches brought through trade with the Great Jellies. Most wouldn’t think helium dwelling jellyfish would make anything humans could use. That was why most people aren’t the owners of interplanetary trading companies that rake in more cash than most small planets. One such owner had smelled opportunity in the market and the rest was history. With all that money moving through the locks it was the perfect place for someone like Elisha. After all, with money came greed and desperation.

Both of which led to crime.

The Lawmen could crack down on crime every now and again but they were a blunt instrument. Sometimes the demands of greed called for delicacy. Furthermore, in the locks not everything that was frowned on counted as a crime before a judge. At the end of the day, whether the Lawmen were ill suited to the task or the problem fell outside the bounds of legal crime the aggrieved who wanted justice needed some option to rely on.

Elisha was that option.

He had a license from the Theiftaker’s Hall and a sterling reputation for solving cases and never ransoming stolen property or blackmailing clients. He was quite proud of it. He also turned the occasional client who turned crooked over to the Law, which he was quietly proud of as well.

All of this is to say that Elisha Hammer was not a man given to nerves. He considered himself a tough customer. When the sector’s Director of the BaiTienLung Conglomerate marched into his office dressed in exotic furs and a skin tight dress he didn’t bat an eye, just offered her a chair.

“Mr. Hammer, is this office secure?” She asked as she settled herself in her seat.

That did get him to raise an eyebrow. “Not compared to a BTL Office, Ms. Wen.” Since they were both familiar with the other’s name he saw no point beating around the bush. “However since you didn’t message me asking if I’d come to your local branch I assume that’s acceptable to you.”

“I see you’re as well informed as I was told you would be.” She opened a clutch purse as she spoke. “I’m afraid I’m in an incredible rush so I can’t show you the courtesy or offer the advanced notice I’d prefer to. I have to be on Rainford in less than three hours and I need a matter investigated discretely. How much would you charge to retain your services for the next two weeks? Exclusively?”

Elisha bought time to think about his answer by moving back to his side of his desk, tempted to tell the woman to move along. He didn’t like be hustled like this. He’d worked with BTL foremen before on small cases but it was a different thing entirely to have a Director like Lin’yi Wen show up unannounced on his doorstep. BTL wasn’t a big firm on Ashland but neither were they so small he could just brush them off. It was bad for business. “I have one or two things on my schedule but I could clear them out for, say, twenty thousand cash.”

Wen pulled three cash sticks out of her purse and slid them across the desk to him without comment. That’s when Elisha started feeling his nerves tingle. He gingerly picked one up and looked at the denomination on it. He could rent his office and his apartment for a year for twenty thousand cash, he’d quoted the figure as a negotiating tactic and a play for more time to work out what was going on. Wen had given him half again as much without batting an eye.

He set the cash back down and glanced up at his prospective client. “Let’s hear the details of the case.”

Wen tugged a veil down over the top half of her face, softly glowing lines of text scrolling across it as she read them off. “Six days ago I hired the Wayfinder’s Guild to expand Wireburn’s beacon grid further south-southeast from Ashland. A Wayfinder named Lloyd Carter was dispatched along the projected route four days ago. Two days ago he missed his scheduled check-in and hasn’t been heard from since, a situation I find concerning for a number of reasons. I need you to find out what happened to him.”

At least three possible reasons Wen might need to find her wayward Wayfinder immediately occurred to Elisha but prying into that kind of thing wasn’t seemly unless it had direct bearing on the case. So he only asked about one of them. “Do you think it likely that your attempt to expand the network might have drawn the attention of a rival business interest? Sandpoint Mercantile? Acropolis Trading?”

“Either of those are possibilities, as are Spinward and Rasen, although I don’t know of any particular reason to suspect they interfered with our contract.”

Apparently he was going to have to do some research for this case. He’d never even heard of Rasen. “Well, Miss Wen, often times when people go missing it has a much more mundane explanation as opposed to something sinister. Although I’m not entirely sure what it might be in this case. Are you aware if Mr. Carter possesses an etheric sense? Could he have jumped back to Ashland under his own power?”

The edge of a frown showed from under Wen’s veil. “I’m afraid I don’t know. Mr. Carter was assigned this job by the Guild.”

“Of course. I’ll reach out to them to see what I can learn, then. How should I keep you up to date?”

She closed up her purse and got to her feet. “I’m afraid I’m going to be off planet for the next day or two at least. If you learn anything you can pass me word through my direct line in my office. The automated system will forward it.”

Elisha took the slip of flexiplast she offered him and slid it into his tunic’s inner pocket. “And if I should find Mr. Carter, do you want me to ask him anything? Retrieve anything? Take him any place?”

Wen hesitated. It was hard to tell with her veil down but, knowing her type, Elisha suspected that she hadn’t thought much about what to do with the man at all. Her thoughts had been entirely on whether her rivals were trying to cut off her business. To her credit, she recovered her aplomb quickly. “If he wishes to return to work, let him. However if he feels he’s in danger bring him to the BTL offices in the Skyward district of Ashland and our Security office will take care of him.”

He nodded and Wen left. The cash sticks still sat on the desk an for a moment Elisha wondered if they were going to be the death of him. BTL and its rivals weren’t just big companies they were galactic. If he got on the wrong side of any of them they’d do more than just end his career. He hadn’t asked for those kinds of problems. On the other hand, neither had Lloyd Carter.

Elisha pocketed the cash and set about getting ahold of his buddy in the Wayfinders.

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