Chapter 93: Thief And Accelerator Coils!

Camila turned her back to hand a sack of potatoes across the cloth to an insectoid miner.

...The scavenger exploded out of the alley in a silent blur!

Its wire-thin claw flashed out like a striking snake, hooked the drawstring of the canvas pouch, slit the apron pocket with a hidden micro-blade and tore the seeds free in one smooth practiced motion.

Camila gasped and spun around, clutching at her chest.

"My seeds! He took my seeds!"

The thief was already gone.

It wheeled on its digitigrade feet, shoved into the crowded avenue, ducked between the four legs of a towering Vorn and bolted for the dark winding mouth of the residential maintenance tunnels fifty meters away.

"Thief!" Harper yelled, lunging after it, but a solid wall of alien bodies closed in front of her. "Stop that rat!"

Chloe moved.

The stone floor under her boots cracked in a spiderweb of fractures as her Blood Sovereign strength detonated through her legs.

BOOM!

Her small frame vanished from beside the stall in a streak of black and crimson as she went over the crowd instead of through it.

She vaulted off the armored shoulder of a two-meter reptile, kicked off the high stone arch of a merchant’s stall and flew across the avenue like dark lightning, and her sleeves snapped behind her like flags.

Twenty meters inside the tunnel, the scrawny thief was cackling to itself with the pouch clutched to its chest as it ducked around a thick industrial conduit... and the shadows closed over the tunnel mouth behind it, out of sight of the bazaar.

A small pale hand closed around the back of its neck like a vice.

The thief’s momentum stopped so violently that the air went out of its lungs in a strangled squeak.

Before it could even understand what had caught it, Chloe pivoted on one heel, used its own speed against it and slammed it face-first into the basalt wall.

CRACK!

The solid asteroid rock buckled inward around the impact as however didn’t bother with a punch.

With frightening effortless strength, she shoved its limbs and ribcage straight into the thick web of high-voltage magnetic cable that ran along the tunnel wall.

ZAP-SZZZZT!

The field seized the metal fibers stitched into its filthy leather tunic and locked it flat against the rock three meters off the ground, arms and legs splayed like a specimen pinned to a board as the vibro-blade clattered uselessly to the deck below.

It hung there with its naked snout twitching in mindless terror, its beady eyes bulging down at the small delicate girl standing beneath it.

Chloe rose up onto the tips of her boots.

Her skirt settled neatly around her thighs, and her long sleeves swayed in the tunnel draft as she reached up and plucked the seed pouch out of its frozen claws then she looked up at it.

Down here, in the dark, where no one from the bazaar could see, she let her eyes go red...

They burned up out of the green like coals in a stove, two pools of incandescent crimson that held a bottomless hunger and a small terrifying smile curved her soft lips.

"If you touch Camila’s things again..." she whispered, in a voice as sweet and cold as a frozen tomb, "...I’ll pull your blood out through your eyeballs and drink it like warm juice... Understand?"

The thief wet itself and nodded so hard its head knocked against the rock, sobbing in hysterical little squeaks.

Chloe closed her eyes, breathed in slowly, exactly the way Leo had taught her, and opened them again... They were soft luminous green.

She turned on her heel and walked back out into the light.

The Grand Bazaar had gone completely silent.

Hundreds of miners, mercenaries and merchants stood frozen in place, staring past her into the tunnel mouth at the scavenger pinned three meters up a sheer stone wall, and then at the tiny human girl strolling back toward the vegetable stall as if she’d just stepped out to pick a flower.

Chloe stopped right in front of Camila and held out the pouch in both hands, tilting her head with a bright innocent smile.

"Here, Camila... I got them back... None of them are broken." She paused. "...I counted."

Camila’s breath caught.

She took the pouch and pressed it hard against her heart, and tears of relief spilled down her bronze cheeks as she dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around Chloe’s small shoulders in a fierce trembling hug.

"Thank you... oh, thank you, Chloe! You’re wonderful!"

Chloe let out a soft contented hum and leaned her cheek against Camila’s shoulder, thoroughly pleased with herself.

After a moment, she lifted one sleeved hand and patted Camila twice on the back, as if she’d seen it done and wanted to get it right.

Before the stunned silence could turn into panic, or the station guards could arrive with stun-pikes, Leo stepped forward.

His voice rolled out across the cavern, calm and level and carrying the kind of natural authority nobody thought to argue with.

"Market justice is settled." His eyes swept the frozen crowd and found two heavily armored Guild security guards forty paces away with their hands hovering over their holsters. "The thief’s restrained and unharmed. His weapon’s on the floor... Take him into custody and process him under Guild charter. We’re packing up."

The guards looked at the pinned thief, then at the quiet young man standing in the middle of the six women, and slowly lowered their hands from their weapons with a deep, wary nod.

"Move," Leo told his crew. "We’re done here."

Ten minutes later, they’d gathered in a quiet shadowed corridor off a secondary concourse, away from the market’s prying eyes.

Leo crouched down in front of Chloe, so that his face was level with hers.

"What did I tell you on the ship?" he asked quietly.

Chloe met his eyes without flinching.

"...Nobody sees the red."

"And?"

"Nobody did." She held his gaze steadily. "Only him... In the tunnel... In the dark... He’s a thief, Leo and nobody listens to thieves."

She hesitated, and her voice dropped. "Besides they were Camila’s."

Leo looked at her for a long moment.

She’d run fifty meters across a crowded bazaar with half of Driftmark watching, and every one of them had seen how fast she was.

That was a risk too but she’d kept her eyes green in the light, she’d kept the blast inside her, and she’d broken nothing that couldn’t be explained away as strength.

"The jump over the crowd was too much," he said. "Next time you go under... Understood?"

"Under," Chloe agreed. "Agreed..."

"Leo, please don’t be angry with her," Camila said in a rush, still clutching the pouch, her eyes red-rimmed. "She only did it because of me. If you want to be angry with someone..."

"I’m not angry with anybody," Leo said, without taking his eyes off Chloe. "I’m making sure she’s alive next year... There’s a difference."

Camila closed her mouth then she knelt down beside Chloe, put an arm around her small shoulders and stayed there, the two of them side by side in front of him like a pair of guilty sisters.

"Good." His hand came up and rested on top of her head. "And thank you... For Camila."

She leaned into the touch with her eyes half closed.

Jin-Ah knelt beside the heavy transport chest with her geometric bob lit soft green by her slate.

Her fingers sorted the triangular brass tokens with speed, checking their weight and authenticity against the ledger.

Elena leaned against the bulkhead with her arms folded, watching the numbers climb.

Harper sat on an upturned crate tossing a stray washer into the air, and Camila was examining every stitch of her recovered pouch, while Chloe settled back beside Leo’s hip with her fingers wrapped around his sleeve.

BEEP-CHIME!

The slate finished its count and threw a golden total into the air.

[Revenue Summary]

[Refined Slate & Titanium Ingots (Elena): +6,200 Zuni]

[Custom Ballistic Rail-Slugs (Harper): +1,800]

[Zuni Earth Produce (Camila): +2,400]

[Zuni Total Liquid Capital: 10,400 ZUNI]

"Ten thousand four hundred," Jin-Ah said, looking up from the screen without a trace of celebration in her voice. "It’s an extraordinary sum for one afternoon but Nexus-Prime’s customs tariff is fifteen thousand, plus processing for the biometric IDs... We’re four thousand six hundred short of the landing fee alone and that’s before we buy the accelerator coils."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

"Then let’s go find out what coils cost," Leo said. "So we know how big the hole is..."

Jin-Ah magnetically clamped the transport chest to a rented grav-sled and steered it down into the lower industrial tier, along narrow catwalks hissing with steam.

Elena’s boots, Harper’s rustling cargo trousers and Leo’s heavy unhurried steps followed her through the sulfur haze.

In Jin-Ah’s head, the ledger refused to balance.

Four thousand six hundred short was the same as broke... A defense satellite didn’t grant partial clearance for effort.

"We turn here," she said, and steered the sled onto a recessed gantry that hung above one of the station’s internal drydocks.

The air turned hotter and shook with the shriek of plasma arcs and the deep ringing of hydraulic frame-straighteners.

Sixty meters below, three battered mining tugs and an unaligned gunboat hung in magnetic cradles with their bellies stripped open like gutted fish while gantry cranes lowered ceramic-insulated engine manifolds into their drive bays.

At the end of the gantry stood a wide workshop front built from reinforced hull plate, with a flickering hologram of three interlocking ion coils over its arch.

"Torv’s Specialized Propulsion and Heavy Drive Fitting," Jin-Ah read. "Per the trade registry, they handle sub-light overhauls for haulers and racers... If high-yield accelerator coils exist on Driftmark, they’ll be here."

"Let’s hope their mechanical standards exceed their hygiene," Elena said, eyeing the soot-blackened shopfront.

"It’s a machine shop, not a perfume counter," Harper grunted, though her eyes were already darting hungrily over the crated parts stacked at the entrance. "Smells like fresh flux and hot ceramic... That’s the smell of real work if you ask me."

HISS-PULL!

The heavy counterweighted curtain slid aside, and they stepped into a cavernous grease-slick vault crowded with the towering carcasses of dismantled starship engines.

Behind a raised titanium workbench stood the proprietor, a massive four-armed reptilian biped with pebbled hide the color of tarnished copper.

Multi-layered magnifying loupes were strapped over his lower pair of yellow eyes, and two of his clawed hands were delicately balancing an injector pin in a sonic cleaning bath.

He set the pin down, wiped his upper hands on a coarse leather apron and looked down at them with unhurried curiosity.

"More bipeds," he rumbled with his translator rasping. "Word on the concourse is you sold twenty bars of consolidated slate to the Syndicate and nearly started a riot with red fruit. I am Torv... What brings the new corvette to my grease pit?"

"Speed," Leo said. "Our ion thrusters are reliable, but we’ve got long corridors to cross, and we can’t afford months of drifting between jump points... We need high-output accelerator coils that’ll fit a fifty-meter Graventhal chassis."

Torv gave a low whistling grunt like an old kettle.

He reached behind the bench with his upper left claw, hauled on a pneumatic hoist chain and swung a long cylindrical case down out of an overhead cradle.

CLANK-THUD!

It slammed onto the bench hard enough to rattle every tool in reach.

Torv punched the release studs, and the casing hissed open like the petals of a metal flower as inside, on a bed of magnetic suspension cushions, lay four paired accelerator coils.

They were breathtaking.

Each was a dense ring of polished superconductive iridium alloy jacketed in clear ceramic, with plasma ribbons spiraling through the sleeves like strands of golden DNA.

...Even powered down, they glowed with a faint violet light and hummed with stored potential.

Harper let out a soft gasp. Her hands rose toward the case before she caught herself.

"Look at that winding density... Cap, those are pulse induction rings."

"Precisely, female mechanic," Torv rumbled, with a trace of pride. "Tier-2 military surplus out of the Core shipyards... They sit ahead of your ion reaction chamber, capture the exhaust, compress the stream fourfold and fire it out in a synchronized pulse."

He tapped a ceramic jacket with one thick claw.

CLINK!

"Fit these to a fifty-meter hull," he said, his yellow eyes fixed on Leo, "and your cruising speed goes from six kilometers a second to nearly twenty-eight... A crossing of several star systems, for example three that should take you weeks of drifting becomes about four cycles."

Weeks to days.

Jin-Ah’s fingers tightened on the grav-sled’s handle.

Days meant less exposure to void beasts, fewer consumables and a far smaller window for the Federation to set up an intercept along the known lanes.

...It was more than a luxury, It might be the difference between living and dying.

Leo rested his hands on the edge of the bench and looked down at the gleaming violet rings.

"How much?"

Torv wiped his claws on his apron and blinked very slowly.

"...Eighteen thousand Zuni."