Two days earlier, in a private room at the rear of Wahib’s Cantina, Al Hamra looked around the ring of chairs at his crew and the small, ragged-haired woman who faced them. She sat in the booth’s only high-backed armchair, which placed her side-on to the entrance to their private dining room, and her eyes kept flicking around the room with the characteristic nervy intensity of someone who did not feel safe in public. She held a fluted glass of amber Kohol in one hand, the other resting on what he suspected was a cybernetic implant of some kind behind her right ear. Something about her manner clashed with her simple, rumpled black coveralls, giving Al Hamra the impression of a woman out of place in the rougher levels of the station.
“A pleasure to meet you,” he introduced himself. “I am captain Al Hamra and this is my crew, the Firebirds.” He looked briefly around at his crew for reaction. This was the first time in public that he had used the team name they had adopted for themselves, and he wondered how it sounded to them now. The woman’s elegant, too-symmetrical face showed no signs of awe or derision at the sound of their name, which was a good start, so he continued. “You told us you have a job for us?”
“Good travels to you too, Al Hamra,” she greeted him in return, touching one finger to her neck in a greeting that he did not recognize. “My name is Arkial, and I want you to freeze me for a week.”
At that their engineer, Olivia, snorted with a sudden burst of laughter, and Al Hamra had to shoot her a warning glance. Olivia covered her mouth with one pale hand and sat back, grinning stupidly, and Arkial shot her a high-browed expression of distaste. She was doing nothing that Al Hamra could see to dispel the impression that she was a spoilt rich girl slumming it in Coriolis station’s docks.
“Freeze you?” The captain asked, and she nodded.
“I am in trouble with a certain … organization …” she told him, “And I need to lie low for a week or so until my onward passage is ready. From your ship’s deck plans I surmise that you have several score of cryogenic beds and –“
“- wait! From our deck plans?” This from their gunner, Adam bin Niran Abayad. He almost yelled his interjection, and leaned forward urgently as he did so. Arkial recoiled slightly at his proximity, and Al Hamra had to reach across to restrain the big man, whose physical intensity and prodigious size could be threatening to anyone who did not know him. “How did you get our deck plans?” Adam asked in a lower voice, leaning back under Al Hamra’s guiding hand. “And why?”
“They are publicly available, you know,” Arkial replied, pulling herself a little more upright in her chair and looking primly down her nose at him. “After a fashion.”
Al Hamra could not place her accent, which was definitely not Coriolis local, but he was beginning to suspect she was from a branch of one of the Firstcome families. Becoming entangled with the older families was not the wisest move, but then again most of their members did not come scrabbling around the working docks of the Horizon’s busiest station begging to be frozen by mercenaries without a reputation.
“And how much are you willing to pay us to freeze you for a week?” He asked her. He had never heard of anyone being cryogenically frozen except for travel through the Dark Between the Stars, but he supposed it made no difference to either the cryo-bed or the human body where the freezing took place. Easy money, in fact.
“I have no money, but I can share with you some information that will enable you to become rich very easily once you unfreeze me.”
“You want to pay us in information?” This from their pilot Saqr Geroushi, sitting perched on the edge of the footstool next to Adam in a hunched, bird-like posture. Saqr was a classic spacer, born and raised in one of those tiny habitats where the gravity was always kept a little low, the lights too probably. As a result she was small and skinny with flawless olive skin and big, dark eyes that were turned now on Arkial, her thin lips drawn in a tight line. “We can’t fuel our ship with information.”
“I’m sure you’re currently doing some work here on Coriolis to fund the fuel,” Arkial replied, skewering their current predicament with uncanny accuracy. “I won’t be a burden to you in that endeavor, since I will be frozen in your stasis hold. And when you’ve raised the money and woken me up a week from now, I’ll give you the location you need and you can ship out there to get rich.” She waved her free hand in a vague gesture, as if getting rich were a trivial matter, something beneath her efforts.
“How can we be sure about your information?” Adam asked her. “We freeze you for a week, which is frankly quite strange, and then you wake up and disappear and we find out you sold us a bundle of lies. What’s the use of that?”
“Well …” She paused, looked around the group, and placed her Kohol glass on the table between them, two pools of faint amber light gleaming on its polished black surface where the Kohol caught the glow of the room’s ceiling lamps. Then she began counting off with her fingers. “Saqr Geroushi here was honorably discharged from the Zenithian Hegemony, but for inexplicable reasons her service records and flight logs are sealed or expunged. Olivia’s surname is not really Greenstar, and there is a watch notice on her name on her home planet, which by the way is not the colony she told you it was.” She lowered two fingers from her open right hand as she rattled off this information and paused briefly so that everyone could hear Olivia’s slight hissing intake of breath. “I mean really, Greenstar?” Olivia frowned furiously at this, and then shrugged, leaning back with her glass of Kohol held in one unusually pale hand and trying to look nonchalant. Her hair, gleaming like spun gold, was almost impossibly rare in the Third Horizon, but she had offered no information about what kind of colonial background she came from that could have preserved such a genetic oddity, and nobody had asked her. The group had an unspoken rule that they did not inquire too deeply into each other’s backgrounds, not when they had only been together a few weeks and in quite exceptional circumstances. Olivia was obviously from a very unique background, and the Data Djinn’s information about the dishonesty of her self-introduction did not change that.
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The Data Djinn continued with the exposition of her data slicing skills. With her other hand she pointed at Siladan, their sensor operator, who sat to Al Hamra’s left looking drawn and serious. “Dr. Hatshepsut here has an ethics complaint against him with the Foundation, and a Horizon-wide ban on archaeological research that still has five years to run.” Another finger down, and a ferocious frown from Siladan. “Then there is Dr. Delecta, your ship’s doctor.” Her finger moved to Banu Delecta, who towered behind Siladan’s chair, her broad face partially obscured by the glimmering mists rising from the inhaler-bowl she held. “Or should I say Ms. Delecta, since she never obtained her physician’s license and is running from certain accusations regarding the practice of medicine without one. Of course everyone knows about Adam’s run-ins with the law since he retired from military life, though I’m not sure they’ve all been fully informed about how far back your ties to the Draconites really stretch. And that, Al Hamra, brings me to you.” She rushed on before Adam could speak, all four fingers and her thumb balled up in a small fist held in front of her face as she turned from Adam to face the skinny, shaven-headed leader of the group. “A complete blank, in Coriolis on a flawless false ID tag and not a trace of you anywhere in the system.”
She leaned forward slightly, smiling smugly as she took in the sudden expressions of shock and anger on everyone’s faces. From her position behind Siladan, Banu reached forward and opened her mouth to say something, and had just started sternly announcing, “I don’t think-“ when Al Hamra held up his hand to halt the outbursts he could see coming.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to antagonize the people who you want to freeze you?” He asked, gesturing with an open hand to Adam to indicate he should sit down. They could talk about ‘how far back’ his ties to the Draconites stretched later, though given their situation and the commitments they had already made to each other they had no choice but to work together whatever their secrets. “The incentive never to wake you seems obvious, doesn’t it?”
Arkial opened her hand and lowered it, frowning slightly, and spoke in a more conciliatory and slightly higher tone. “I’m sorry if I seem too forward. I am a Data Djinn, information is my trade, and I just wanted you all to know that my information is extremely accurate and very reliable. What I tell you will be correct, and when I emerge from stasis in a week it will be very timely.” Then, by way of a hastily-assembled apology, “I’m asking you for a dangerous favour, and you all just turned up here, a newly-assembled team in a brand new ship, a week ago. Of course I did all the research I could on your backgrounds before I came here to ask you to freeze me!”
Al Hamra looked around at his crew, catching Siladan throwing a shifty sidelong glance at Saqr who was frowning up at Banu, no doubt wondering whether they would be safe in her hands the first time they needed treatment, who was probably wondering whether their expensive new armored yacht would be safe in Saqr’s control when they entered the Dark Between the Stars. “What is the information you offer?” He asked Arkial.
“I know of a small mining colony, not a long journey from here, which is about to run out of spare parts but doesn’t know it. They’ve been sabotaged, and in about…” A dramatic look to the small silver timepiece on her wrist, “… two weeks they are going to suddenly find themselves in a desperate situation. If a ship were to turn up with exactly the parts they need at that very moment, it would be very easy to strike a very hard bargain with them.” As the cold-hearted part of her plan unfolded she spread her hands wide for dramatic effect. “When you wake me I’ll tell you the location of the colony, and then you can speed to their rescue like a shining hero in the Thousand and One Nights.”
“And the parts?” Olivia asked. “Are they expensive? As an ‘information broker’, no doubt you know we are in need of fast cash right now.”
She shrugged. “Not particularly. They aren’t really even specialized parts. Just the kind of things you really, really need in a hurry when your life support systems break and the spare parts you thought you had in stock have been quietly sold off. I’m sure you’ll find a way to make enough birr to cover the cost in the next week. You all seem very enterprising. And there’s always the Syndicate, if you need money quickly.”
The looks on the faces of the crew did not suggest they shared Arkial’s assessment of their abilities. Al Hamra looked to each of them and, seeing no immediate sign of rejection, nodded the woman. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll freeze you. When you wake up, you give us the location of the colony and the parts it needs, and we will go our separate ways. Agreed?”
She picked up her glass of Kohol, ready for the traditional toast that would seal the deal. “Thank you very much, captain Al Hamra. You won’t regret it!”
