Dangerous Data (The Meridian Crew Book 2) Read online

  “There they are!” he said, clasping his hands together as the group filed into the room. “I was worried y’all were gonna make me look under each and every one of these here fast-food wrappers to find you.”

  Sam, Benkei, and Sasha moved to Amelia’s sides, as if awaiting orders.

  “Now, now, none of that,” said the man, noticing that Amelia and the rest looked ready for a fight. “We’re not here to shoot up the joint.”

  “You’re here for the data,” said Amelia.

  “Why, that’s right as rain,” the man said. “But I do believe my manners have escaped me. We’re the Praetorians, a humble merc group out of Venus who’ve been in the employ of Geff for quite some time.”

  He pointed to the twins.

  “That’s Kieran on the right, and the handsome one’s name is Bronn. These two can rip an Ishtar Charging Ram in twain, so watch out.”

  Next, he gestured behind him to the girl.

  “This pretty little thing is Lou-Liana, fastest junction knife draw in the inner system, in my humble opinion.”

  Lou-Liana gave a feminine curtsey, and as the fabric of her dress pressed against her leg, Amelia noted the unmistakable, jointed outline of a junction knife.

  “And I’m Rodrigo Al-Azar, the humble leader of this fine band you see before you,” he said, giving a slow nod.

  “No introductions necessary on your part. I’ve extensively looked over the file ol’ Geff has on each of you. Very impressive, very impressive. An ex-Geist, a genetically-enhanced scientist, a pilot-slash-ship thief, and a former Martian colony marshal. Did I get all that right?”

  Amelia and the rest still said nothing.

  “Oh, no need for the silent treatment,” said Rodrigo. “Come on, let’s all have a seat.”

  With a grand sweep of his arm, he brushed Sasha’s food wrappers and soda cans off of the white fabric of the circular couch. But before he sat down, he spotted something among the containers on the coffee table.

  “Is that a steak quesadilla?” he asked, pointing to the mess.

  “Yeah, steak and three kinds of cheese,” said Sasha, speaking as if proud.

  “Mind if I finish that little guy off?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  Rodrigo pulled a slice of the quesadilla out of the wrapper, a white and yellow mixture of cheese dripping out of the thing as he worked it into his mouth.

  “Please, have a seat.”

  Amelia said nothing still, but realizing that she didn’t have an option, nodded to the group. They moved around the couch and sat down on it.

  “So, here’s the deal, my new friends,” said Rodrigo, plopping down onto the couch, his long arms draped over the back. “We…” He turned to Kieran, Bronn, and Lou-Liana. “That invitation to sit down extends to ya’ll as well,” he said. “Sit your butts down on the couch. Don’t be loomin’ around back there like a pack of cougars. Come on.”

  The three other members of the group then made their way to the couch, and sat on upon it to the right and left of Rodrigo, their eyes on the group all the while.

  “Good,” said Rodrigo, finishing off his slice and sucking on the tips of his fingers. “Man! They sure know how to do food here in the city.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Sasha, his enthusiasm for the food getting the better of him. “I just ordered a bunch. There’s some insane vindaloo in the fridge if you’re still hungry.”

  “Maybe, maybe,” said Rodrigo. “But let’s attend to the more pressing matter of the moment.”

  He pointed down the hallway at the visible computer monitor.

  “That data, the one you all were poring over as when we arrived, his exactly what Geff is so keen to get his hands on. Now, I can see y’all figured out that it’s more than the farming data that he hinted it was.”

  “It’s weapons data,” said Amelia.

  “That’s right. It’s data for that big ‘ol cannon that’s just floatin’ around in the sky like any other piece of trash near Icarus. The thing is, however, we were all worried you’d be getting second thoughts about handing it over now that you know what’s all there.”

  He touched his chest with his fingertips. “My job is to, well, see you through and last-minute apprehensions you might be grapplin’ with.”

  “And what does that mean, I might ask?” said Benkei, leaning forward.

  “That means, I’m here to make sure you don’t do anything with that data that you’re gonna regret.” He slipped a slate out from the single pocket on his pants.

  “I’m just gonna scan the data, and we’ll get you all paid up, and that’ll be the end of that. And just to make sure…Kieran? Bronn?”

  The twin each withdrew a pair of slim, chrome-plated pistols and pointed them at the crew—one gun for each member.

  “Now, my hungry little scientist man—I must ask you how you keep so trim while eating all of this junk. By the way, Lou-Liana’s gonna head on over to the computer with you, grab that data, wreck that there machine, and bring the info over here for me to scan. Sound about right?”

  Lou-Liana, flashed Sasha a sensual smile, kneeled down, and pulled the hem of her colorful gown up, revealing a stretch of white thigh, a fearsome-looking junction knife tucked into a holster on her upper leg.

  “Calm it down there, missy,” said Rodrigo.

  “You never let me have any fun,” said Lou-Liana, her voice lilting and feminine.

  “Save your fun for after job’s done, missy.”

  Lou-Liana let out a huff of complaint, and pointed at Sasha with the business end of the junction knife. “Let’s go, gorgeous,” she said, that same sly smile on her lips.

  Looking at the rest of the crew, Sasha rose from his seat and walked with Lou-Liana toward the bedroom, the knife pointed at his back.

  “Well,” said Rodrigo, flashing a smile of white teeth. “I have to say that I’m glad this is all going off without a hitch.”

  “What exactly does Geff plan on doing with the Azani weapon once he has control of it, if I may ask?” asked Benkei, leaning forward.

  “You may not ask,” said Rodrigo, the twins on both sides of him. “Or, I should say, you can ask all you want. I’m just not going to tell you a thing.” A moment passed as he considered. “I’ll tell you this much, my friends, what with you all having gone to the trouble of getting the information- things in New York are going to be very, very different.”

  “Got it,” said Lou-Liana, a prideful smile on her face, a slate in her hand. “The data’s being uploaded to Icarus now. Geff should have it in a couple of minutes.”

  “Perfect!” said Rodrigo, clapping his hands together. He rose from the couch, looking over the crew. “Unfortunately, as y’all may have surmised, there will be no payout for you. Geff was very insistent that any connection to him be, well, tidied up, you might say.”

  Amelia shot Benkei a quick look, which he noticed and returned.

  “So, without any further ado,” said Rodrigo, withdrawing a pistol from his waistband as the twins rose to his side. “I believe this where y’all shuffle off this mortal coil. Better luck in the n—”

  Before he could, finish, however, Amelia and Benkei launched over the back of the couch, Benkei pulling Sam over with him, who tumbled over the back of the chair with a squeal.

  Withdrawing a pair of pistols hidden underneath the couch, Amelia and Benkei rose over the piece of furniture, taking Rodrigo’s crew into their sights and unloading their weapons into them. The apartment filled with the deafening roars of pistol fire, Rodrigo and the twins shuffling backward in strange, lurching steps as the bullets cut through them, their lifeless bodies falling backward onto the couch, the blood seeping from their bodies staining the previously pristine white fabric.

  Lou-Liana, from her place at the side of the room, watched the slaying of her crew in horror. Once the gunfire ceased, she took a second to survey the scene before turning back to Sasha, her soft features twisted into an expression of unrestrained rage as she rushed
at him.

  But before she could drive the blade into him, Amelia took aim with her pistol and fired off a cracking round, the bullet hitting true at the side of Lou-Lianna’s head, a red splash spraying out over the window, the view of the builds beyond now dappled with dark red drops.

  “Jesus!” shouted Sasha, looking over the carnage.

  “Next step, little one?” asked Benkei, standing and slipping the pistol in his belt.

  “We leave,” said Amelia. “Right now.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Their supplies tossed hastily into their bags, the crew rushed down the wide, clean hallways of the luxury condo, none saying a word.

  Finally, Sam broke the silence as they turned the corner toward the dock where the Meridian was parked. “They’re definitely going to come for us for that one,” she said, her tone strangely upbeat.

  “I can’t think of how else Geff would respond to something like that,” said Benkei, the rest of the crew struggling to keep up with his long strides.

  “Can you guys at least let me know when you stash weapons like that?” asked Sasha. “That girl was about two centimeters from slicing my face open.”

  “Need-to-know basis, Sash,” said Amelia, the blue-light-outlined door of the dock growing closer and closer.

  The crew rushed down the hallway, taking care to not draw attention. They reached the Meridian, the ship looking just as they had left it. Amelia sighed with relief, expecting it to be surrounded by heavily armed mercs.

  They climbed into the ship, the crew all gathering on the flight deck.

  “Where to, cap?” asked Sam, sliding into the pilot’s chair and warming up the engines.

  Amelia though hard, knowing that heading away from the city limits wasn’t an option.

  “Queens,” she said after figuring a more run-down part of the city would be a good place to hide out for a time.

  “Where?” asked Sam. “Is that a person?”

  “No, ‘Queens’ the neighborhood.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Find the river with the ship flying over it, and turn around to the river on the other side of the island.”

  “Oh. Okay!”

  The engines powered up, Sam pulled the ship out of the dock just in time to see a squad of security forces from the apartment, their squad leader gesturing wildly at the Meridian. With a whine of the throttle, Sam pulled the flight stick back and aimed the Meridian at the cloudless blue sky above. Looking down at the city, Amelia let out a quiet gasp as she saw the length of the Basileus from a vantage point that allowed her to see the true size of the ship. The massive craft nearly stretched the entire length of the island, the rows of bristling cannons a grim reminder that they wouldn’t be leaving the city anytime soon.

  “There,” said Amelia, pointing at the area of the city on the opposite side of the East River, a curved peninsula swathed in a dense covering of buildings.

  Sam drove slowly and carefully, and within minutes they were over the borough of Queens, the blue of the sky above now darkened with a tint of grime from the dense pollution below. She then flew downwards, the flight deck screen now filled with the dingy, urban grids of Queens, a borough packed to capacity with run-down tenements that towered over the lower levels, haphazard lines of traffic made up of dilapidated, decades-old cars, and garish, neon advertisements in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and even some of the Venusian and Martian dialects that had developed over the last century. The borough was a sharp contrast to the clean, ordered design of the upper canopy of Manhattan. And from their vantage point, they could see that the sprawl went down along Long Island as far as they could see, the endless urban wastes only broken up by billowing, black smokestacks or a particularly large tower.

  “Are we going to be safe here?” asked Sam as she pulled the Meridian into a ship lane, the tenements of the borough now towering above them, the blue of the sky above barely visible.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Amelia. “It’s worse than it looks. Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  They waited in traffic for a while, the din of the traffic an assault on the senses. After a time, they arrived at a dock whose exterior was festooned with neon signs of purple, red, and orange- Mandarin characters that Amelia couldn’t even pretend to understand.

  “B, can you read that?” asked Sam.

  “Wrong country,” said Benkei. “I’m Japanese, not Chinese. Though, the history of the Japanese language does have an interesting shared heritage with Mandarin characters. you see, the co—”

  A blinding light filled the flight deck, cutting off Benkei, and the vidscreen lit up and was filled with an ugly man with a shaved head and a lack of a neck that gave him the look of a thumb with a face.

  “Name, destination, point of origin, all that crap,” he said in an accent that sounded to Amelia’s ear to be a combination between Queens and Mexico, not looking at the screen as he spoke.

  “Any chance we could skip all of that?” asked Amelia.

  This got the man’s attention. He looked at the crew with beady, narrow eyes.

  “Sure can. Just make a five-thousand credit transfer to this number.”

  “Clearly not the first time he’s done this,” said Benkei.

  “Five-th-!” stammered Amelia.

  But the man said nothing, instead, allowing a creeping smile to spread across his face. He knew that anyone who needed to land without signing in was likely willing to pay any price for the privilege.

  “Fine, fine,” said Amelia, pulling out her slate and dialing in the transfer.

  “Pleasure doing business with you, ah, ship Tomahawk, out of, hmm... let’s say ‘Deimos, ID number 54966.”’

  “Thanks,” said Amelia.

  “Anytime,” he said, shutting off the feed.

  The Meridian glided into the hangar, a dirty, dingy place in the vein of every other building around them. Sam pulled the ship to a stop, and the four crew members got off the ship.

  Smell was the first sense that screamed to attention as soon as Amelia stepped off the ship. Along with the greasy, mechanical smell she’d expect from a dock like this, the scent of burning trash wafted into her nose, a raw, putrid smell that seemed to travel in through the stale breeze from beyond the entry port.

  “Nice place,” said Benkei.

  “It’s a shithole,” said Sasha.

  The four of them exited the dock through a pedestrian walkway that connected the hangar to an adjacent multi-function tower, a building that served as a run-down tenement and a crime-infested marketplace at the same time.

  Eventually, they made their way to a small bar that was, thankfully, devoid of everyone but them and the bartender, a surly, middle-aged woman with an off-brand arm augmentation that looked to Amelia as though it hadn’t been properly maintained, the skin around where the arm connected to her body red and raw.

  They ordered a round of beers and considered their next move.

  “They got the data, right?” asked Sasha.

  “It appears that way,” said Benkei.

  “Then what’s the dilemma?” he asked.

  “Dilemma is figuring out how to get out of here without that battleship ripping us to pieces,” said Amelia.

  “Why don’t we just hide out here for a while?” asked Sam. “It’s not the best place in the world, but we can lay low.”

  “No way,” said Benkei. “You saw what this data was. They’re not just going to forget about us. And when Geff gets the cannon online, New York might not be a safe place to be.”

  Amelia nodded, considering her options. “Best plan would be to contact someone in the New York government and see if we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

  “That might work,” said Benkei. “You got anyone in mind.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Amelia, bringing her beer up to her lips in preparation of a long, deep draw. “Yes. I do.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “Alain Rickert,” said Benkei, looking over the profile that
Amelia pulled up on her slate.

  Amelia looked at the picture. It was a flattering one that he’d chosen for his social media default picture, one with him in his New York Officer’s Corps uniform as he stood on the balcony of one of the super scrapers on Manhattan, the city stretching out behind him, a pair of friends in similar uniforms at his sides.

  “Handsome guy,” said Sasha, scanning the picture and determining whether or not Alain was as attractive as him.

  “Yeah, he’s gorgeous!” said Sam, swiping the slate out of Amelia’s hand and looking at Alain with dreamy eyes.

  Amelia snatched the slate back and swiped through his information.

  “So, this is your contact with the New York military? The guy from the bar,” said Benkei, holding his beer next to his face, his elbow on the small, round table. “Does this mean you’re going to tell us what the story is with him?”

  “Ohh, gossip,” said Sam, she and Sasha exchanging conspiratorial glances.

  “There’s no ‘gossip’,” said Amelia. “Alain and I were…involved for a while back when we were both in the Federation. That’s all.”

  “’That’s all’?” asked Sam. “How long were you involved for? Were you in love? Who broke up with who?”

  “None of that’s important,” said Amelia, clearly hoping to put a stop to the conversation before it got out of hand. “What is important is that he might be able to help us out of this mess.”

  “How?” asked Benkei.

  “We tell him we have the data, and that Geff has a copy of it. The data’s encrypted, so unless Geff wants to brute force it, he’ll just have the one copy. So, we can give Alain the data, he can turn it in and get the Basileus out of the Hudson River, and they’ll be able to retrieve the copy Geff has. Allowing us to make a clean getaway. Hopefully.”