The Process Server

  ***

  It hadn’t taken Harrison long to track Resko down.

  “He’s on the NTC, making a bunch of inquiries about Vance Vega. Kid, what the hell are you getting mixed up in? These are about the heaviest hitters out there. I mean, Fesker is small-fry dangerous compared to Vega.”

  I sighed. “Bills are piling up, pops. I’m not being left with too many choices.”

  “You’ve always got choices, kid. Like I said, you could just hang it up for a while, keep an old retiree company.”

  “What, and stare at your ugly mug all day long?”

  He chortled. “Very funny. Keep your head down, OK?”

  A few hours later, we were docking on North Form. If there was one thing I knew about senior executives, it was that they didn’t travel second-class. All those frequent flyer miles meant it was first-class all the way, and on the NTC, that meant they had to stay here.

  Its beaches weren’t as nice as the private frontage on the south continent, but the North Form had been specially constructed for tourism and convention business: fully two-thirds of all available living space was dedicated to hotel rooms or conferences, and within 20 square kilometers lay a formidable collection of beaches, casinos, clubs and restaurants – all commanding top prices.

  The cabbies here were all old contacts from my local hustling days – and those that weren’t still always had a reasonable price when it came to giving up the info. After talking with a helpful young guy from Deneleth who’d just gotten his license, I pulled my collar up against the drizzling rain and rejoined Jayde on the sidewalk, the background neon casting reflections across the growing puddles. “He’s at the Hilton North Quarters.”

  She peered through the drizzle. “Really? The Hilton? You’d have thought he’d have rolled a little pricier.”

  The walk over to the Hilton only took a few minutes. We dropped a few creds on one of the bellhops, always the best sources of information and he pointed us to the ninth floor. “How many guys has he got with him?” I asked the kid.

  He shrugged. “Not exactly an army. Four of them, all big, doorman types.”

  Jayde smiled. She loved knocking down really big guys.

  Up on the ninth, the double doors slid open into a small waiting area with three corridors, one each running east and west, the other north behind the bank of elevators.

  I peeked around the corner and checked the latter. Sure enough, the door at the end of the hall was manned by two of his staff.

  “Can you handle this?” I asked Jayde, regretting the question the second it left my mouth. Of course she could.

  She shot me a derisive look then unstrapped her thigh holster. “Gotta do it quiet.”

  I’d seen this routine before. A little girl with a pistol walks up to you, you shoot first and ask questions later in this wacked-out universe. But without the pistol? That’s just a little kid, looking for help.

  Well, either that or the two goons played the parts of dirty old men. Neither scenario ended with either of them conscious, so it didn’t really matter which route they chose.

  I waited for a few seconds before hearing murmured voices, Jayde talking to them about 20 meters away at the end of the hall. Then, a series of high-pitched thuds, the sound of palm and heel strikes from distance then two large thuds as they hit the carpeted floor.

  I bolted round the corner as quickly as I could without clomping my feet as I ran and joined her.

  She put a finger up to her lips and we both waited for a few seconds to see if anyone inside had heard the fracas.

  Nope.

  Jayde reached down and pulled out the security guard’s keycard, swiping the door open.

  We quietly pushed our way inside, where a short corridor turned left in to the rest of the room.

  I peered around the corner. One of the two had his back to us.

  I quietly pulled Jayde’s pistol out of her holster, then crept up behind the man, and held the barrel to the back of his skull. I whispered in his ear. “Shhhhh….”

  In the room, the ambassador was watching holos, while the other guard smoked a cigarette on the patio, the sliding glass doors closed behind him.

  Sloppy. I pushed his partner into the room with my foot, so that Resko couldn’t fail to notice us.

  “Ambassador.” I tipped my head to him.

  “Process Server Smith. A rather surprising way to make an entrance. You could have just made an appointment, you know.”

  I smiled. By now, the other guard had realized he’d blown the job and re-entered the room, red-faced.

  I said, “I rather doubt that, ambassador. Not after that load of crap you gave us on Barrowman.”

  He smiled. “As I believe I said at the time, diplomacy sometimes necessitates unreasonable discretion.”

  “That’s an interesting way of admitting you lied to someone.”

  Resko smirked. “Comes with the title. Besides, everyone in the galactic trade game has a little bit of the old-style politician in him.”

  “Lots of places were smart enough to get rid of them a long time ago.”

  “True enough,” he said. “But some things are just intrinsic to human nature.”

  He was clad in a sort of robe, the light from the holos playing across the bottom of the bed. But there was something odd about the light, the way it was tracing, brighter red, towards him….

  Shit.

  I bolted towards him and grabbed his arm. “Off the bed, now! Hit the deck!”

  Jayde didn’t need to be told it applied to her, but the two guards weren’t so lucky.

  I’d realized the laser sight was tracing a path across the room from through the patio window, plotting a course of maximum destructive efficiency, just in time to get Resko G’Deevar flat on the floor before the chain gun opened fire, large-caliber bullets shredding everything in their path, including his men.

  The glass patio doors exploded in a hail of glass shards as the bullets chewed through wood and plaster walls, shattered the mirror above the bureau, destroying chunks of wall and mattress.

  I chanced a quick glance up, out the window. A Telaxian was manning a gun mounted on a hover platform, his yellow-and-black skin illuminated by the lights from dozens of hotel rooms.

  I grabbed Jayde by the wrist.

  “Head for the door on a double-time crawl. He’s going to have to land that thing, and he’s going to have to go down to street level to do it. If we luck out on the elevators we might still catch him before he gets through the building to the street.”

  Then I looked at Resko, prone and shaking. “Stay here. We’ll be back in a couple of minutes, so just keep your head down. If you can, crawl to the bathroom and lock the door.”

  Terrified, he said nothing, staring at the dead guard, his blood pooling around the hotel room debris.

  The Telaxian was going to run out of ammo pretty soon. “Hey! Ambassador! Snap out of it. Can you make it to the bathroom?”

  By the time we’d both crawled across the room, Jayde was already on her way downstairs and the hitman was out of ammo. Jayde just made one of the two express elevators, but the door slid shut before I could get here. She knew better than to wait for me.

  A split second later, the second set of elevator doors opened. I rode it down as far as the fourth floor before a family stopped it to load on their copious luggage, with one of the kids holding the doors open button.

  “I’ve got it daddy!” he said.

  “Sorry sport, no you don’t,” I said.

  I picked the kid up and tossed him out of the elevator, into the hallway, then hammered the door closed button as the two parents and a sister stood there, mouths open in shock. The doors closed, and a few seconds later, the elevator was heading back down to the lobby.

  By the time I got there, Jayde was across the expansive lobby with the situation well in hand.

  Well, sort of.

  She’s a hell of a martial artist, my pilot, and just a good all-around brawl
er. But the Telaxian obviously was, too, and she was barely holding him off with speedy, well-calculated blocks as he rained down a flurry of punches.

  “Nice…try…kid,” he said breathlessly.

  “Try this,” Jayde said, dropping low in a splits, then hammering blows into the Telaxian’s groin.

  He laughed. “Hah! Natural armor plating, little girl,” he said, grabbing her by her hair, then sidekicking her back 10 feet.

  “Ow!” Jayde got her wind back then back-flipped twice quickly towards Breck, finishing just short enough to lineup a perfect kick to the stomach.

  Once again, she hit mostly armor.

  She wasn’t having much luck.

  Breck still didn’t know I’d caught up, and I tapped him on the shoulder. I shouldn’t have, because he was a pro, and 50-50 he’d react without thinking and kill my butt.

  But he didn’t; instead, he momentarily dropped his guard and looked my way.

  Stupidly, I hit him fist closed, instead of with the palm of my hand, like Jayde had been teaching me. The middle finger made a popping noise, and I hardly staggered the tough Telaxian, his skin like thick leather.

  Still, the blow pushed him back towards Jayde, who hit him with a sharp elbow to the solar plexus, followed by a leg sweep, followed by a decisive elbow drop off his forehead that actually made his skull recoil off the cement.

  He was out.

  I said, “OK, I gotta admit, that was pretty bad ass. But I think I fractured my finger.”

  She crossed her arms, mad at me. “What’s the point in me teaching you how to fight properly if you don’t remember it when it counts? Open palm, boss. Open palm!”

  I would have loved to have questioned Breck, but the Sector Police were there with surprising and rare efficiency. Perhaps they knew a diplomat was staying in the hotel.

  By the time Resko had been retrieved by a constable from his room and confirmed our story, an hour had passed.

  He motioned for us to join him in the adjacent restaurant. It only served synths, but it had a great view of the starlit night skies through its glass ceiling, and we all sat there for a few minutes, grateful to be alive.

  Resko waved the waitress over and ordered Jayde a Nickel Glory.

  “In retrospect, I’m rather glad the two of you knocked out my guards, or three more of us would have been dead.”

  I nodded towards Jayde. “Her doing. I was hiding by the elevators.”

  She nodded. “It’s true, he was.”

  “Either way,” said Resko, “I owe you my life.”

  “Great,” I said, throwing one last bluff his way, “then, aside from getting us out of any mess with the SPs, perhaps you can tell us why you were meeting with Vance Vega at Barrowman station.”

  The ambassador sighed. “Fine. I concede, Vega approached me to sell the engine. I’m supposed to put together a list of potential bidders for him, but of course my people would prefer that I simply expropriate the drive.”

  Jayde said, “In other words, double cross him.”

  He smiled. “Realpolitik is a messy, messy business sometimes.”

  “What now? How do we go about getting the holo drive off Vega?”

  The ambassador turned his glass nervously a couple of times. “I don’t think he has it.”

  “What? But I thought you said…”

  “He did approach us. And I was working with him.”

  “So?”

  “So why would he have his hitman try to kill me tonight? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Jayde said, “We’re missing something here, boss.”

  She had that right. We needed to talk to Vance Vega and find out what the hell was going on. Given that we’d just taken down his hitman, that wasn’t going to be easy.