The Recovery Man's Bargain Read online

  The second threat frightened him less than the financial one. He had been a wanted man off and on throughout the Alliance most of his career.

  She must have sensed that her threats didn’t impress him. “You will pay me. Or at the end of six months, I will hire Trackers to find you, confiscate everything you own, and turn you in to the Earth Alliance. Is that clear?”

  Yu nodded. It was clear, and it was much more of a threat than she knew. If he cleared out all of his accounts, he would have enough to pay her back, but he would have nothing left. It had taken him a lifetime of work to compile that amount of money. The expenses had been fierce on this case, and he had paid them willingly because he never thought he would have to reimburse her.

  But she had the upper hand. She could do all the things she threatened and more.

  “Surely we can come to some kind of arrangement,” he said, his voice sounding timid even to himself.

  “We already have an arrangement,” she said and left the room.

  ***

  Six months was not enough time to make the money that it had taken him a lifetime to earn. He considered various options: he could find another flowering fidelia and sell it, like the Black Fleet was doing. He could track down the Black Fleet and exact some kind of revenge. Or he could hire himself out for the large jobs he had avoided until this one.

  But it had taken him three years to find the first fidelia, and without Athenia’s money, he might not be able to find another.

  He could go after the Fleet. But he was one unarmed ship against at least a dozen. And what could he do when he got there? Call the debt by asking them to return the fidelia? They said he couldn’t do that. And besides, by the time he found them, the bloom would probably be gone. He would gain nothing, except maybe the Fleet’s enmity.

  And that was if he could find them.

  He settled for the remaining option—hiring himself out for big jobs—only to learn that no one would take him. Athenia had ruined his reputation in all the circles that counted.

  So he did the only thing he could do.

  He went to the Gyonnese.

  Ostensibly, he went to have them repair his ship. He assumed the Black Fleet had done something—tapped in, ruined a section, figured out a weakness he didn’t know—and he wanted the Gyonnese to fix it.

  But his actual reason for approaching them was to see what kind of off-the-books work they could muster for him.

  In the past, he had turned down their off-the-books jobs. Those jobs always skirted the edge of Alliance laws in ways that made even a Recovery Man nervous.

  But he couldn’t afford to be so picky now.

  ***

  Yu understood the Gyonnese as well as a member of one species could understand the members of another. He had lived among them off and on for the past decade, not because he liked them (he really didn’t) but because their engineering skills fascinated him.

  It was almost as if they saw the universe differently, as if the way things worked was an additional dimension, one that humans couldn’t quite grasp. That was why he bought a ship modified by the Gyonnese, and why he did his best to gain their trust.

  New Gyonne City spread like tendrils across a flat plain. From close orbit, the city’s tendrils were impossible to distinguish from the tributaries of the continent’s only river.

  New Gyonne City was the Gyonnese’s first colony city, founded on a moon not too far from Gyonne itself. Yu preferred the city, mostly because a section had been designed after the Gyonnese joined the Earth Alliance. That section of the city had things that Yu considered necessities—chairs, tables, a variety of human-compatible food served in actual dishes.

  As he landed, he sent out word that he was available for work. He had never done that before.

  After he had gone through decontamination, customs and immigration, he emerged into the main section of the port to find a group of Gyonnese officials waiting for him.

  The Gyonnese were slender creatures, as fluid as their city. They weren’t much wider than his thigh, with long bodies and even longer heads.

  This group included some of the city’s leaders. Most humans wouldn’t have recognized them, but Yu had worked hard at distinguishing the Gyonnese’s features.

  The Gyonnese had eyes, placed in roughly the same position as human eyes, but whiskers composed the rest of their face. The whiskers were tiny, and varied in color and length depending on age and gender. The Gyonnese rubbed their whiskers together to create the sounds that composed their speech. To be understood by most humans, the Gyonnese had to use an amplifier.

  Yu didn’t need one to understand them. He also knew that speaking in a normal human tone would hurt their ears (which were hidden somewhere in their mid-torso).

  “Hadad Yu.” The Gyonnese closest to him was the one who spoke. The Gyonnese often designated one of their number to communicate with humans.

  Yu nodded toward the speaker in acknowledgement, but spoke to the entire group.

  “You have broadcast that you are available for hire. Is this thing true?” When the Gyonnese spoke, it looked like the flesh beneath their eyes undulated. In reality, it was just their whiskers as they rubbed together.

  This was the moment Yu could back out, and he probably should. To have so many high-ranking Gyonnese waiting for him did not bode well for the job they wanted to hire him for.

  But this might be his only chance at work. And the Gyonnese paid well, even if they often asked for vaguely illegal things.

  “Yes,” Yu whispered. He made sure the sound was so faint that most humans would think he was whispering to himself. “I sent a message that I am available for large jobs.”

  “You have angered someone in the Alliance,” said the speaker. The others bobbed—their version of nodding.

  “I have,” Yu whispered. “I had been warned that she was an unreasonable client. I spent three years on her job, but she would not let me finish. Instead, she is spreading lies about me.”

  “That you are unreliable,” said the speaker.

  Yu wished he knew their names. When he was speaking to humans, he tried to use names to put them at ease. But the Gyonnese did not use names.

  Instead, they had honorifics, which were based on what stage of life the Gyonnese was in. Some were Elders, others were Apprentices, and there was a whole list of honorifics in between.

  “She has said I am unreliable,” Yu whispered. “But an unreliable man does not work on a job for three years without payment. You know me. I have always worked well for the Gyonnese.”

  “That is why we are here. We need to hire you.”

  He figured as much. Normally, he would suggest a private place to discuss the work, but the Gyonnese did not meet aliens in private. Carrying on the discussion in the port was the best they would do for him.

  “Tell me the job,” he whispered, “and I will tell you if I can help you.”

  “We will pay your debt to this liar,” the speaker said as if Yu hadn’t spoken. “And then we will pay five times your normal fee.”

  He felt cold. His normal fee for the Gyonnese was always ten times larger than the fee he charged human clients. This job had to be huge.

  “And,” the speaker said, apparently taking his silence for reluctance, “we will pay your personal expenses in advance. Any change in the cost will work to your advantage. If the expense amount is more, you will submit a final bill. If it is less, you will keep the difference.”

  The muscles in Yu’s back were so tight that they ached. He had to turn this job down now, before he heard their proposal. Because he knew the Gyonnese. They understood that this job wasn’t one he would want to do. They were trying to bribe him.

  And it was working. He would be able to keep his private funds, pay off Athenia, and have money enough to return to the small work that he preferred.

  “What’s the job?” Yu was glad he was speaking in whispers. He wasn’t sure his voice would be steady enough to ask the question.

>   “We need you to recover a Fifth,” the speaker said.

  It took him a moment to understand. They didn’t mean a measurement. They meant a type of Gyonnese. The Gyonnese had great trouble having children. Most Gyonnese only had one child, which was called the Original. But at the larval stage, the Original Gyonnese divided into several other matching Gyonnese. Humans couldn’t tell the others apart. Biologically, there didn’t seem to be a difference. But the Gyonnese could tell. A Second, Third, Fourth or Fifth was, to the Gyonnese, an inferior creature, subject to greater rules and stricter living conditions than the Originals.

  Yu knew enough about the culture to understand that the Gyonnese who faced him now were all Originals. He was stunned that they had even mentioned the existence of a Fifth to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered—and he truly was. He would have loved the money. “But while I am familiar with your culture and respect it a great deal, I am not sure I could tell a Second from a Fifth.”

  He knew better than to say an Original from a Fifth, which was the actual truth.

  The Gyonnese surrounding him raised their whiskers over their eyes. The gesture made a whispery clicking sound, which was their version of laughter.

  “We do not send you after a Gyonnese Fifth,” the speaker said when after the whiskers had returned to their usual position. “We send you after a human Fifth.”

  Humans don’t have Fifths, he nearly said, and then he realized what the Gyonnese meant.

  “You want me to go after a clone?” He spoke out loud.

  The Gyonnese scuttled backwards. He had done the equivalent of shouting.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I did not mean to speak so loudly. But by law, clones are humans, not items to be recovered.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Within the Alliance, clones were considered human for some parts of the law—if one was killed, it would be considered a homicide—but in other parts, clones were just as insignificant as the Fifths of the Gyonnese. In many parts of the Alliance, clones had no economic legal standing. The original child received the inheritance and all the protections accorded to a child in a family. The law considered the cloned child as if it were an orphan.

  As far as Yu was concerned, however, clones were humans. He did not recover humans.

  “You’ll need a Retrieval Artist to find this Fifth,” he said. Retrieval Artists usually hunted for Disappeareds, people who went missing on purpose, usually to avoid prosecution or death by any one of fifty different alien cultures.

  “We have contacted seven such highly recommended ‘Artists,’” the speaker said, “before it became clear to us that none will take our money. They work for humans only.”

  Of course. Yu hadn’t thought of that. Retrieval Artists worked against alien cultures, not with them.

  “A Tracker then,” Yu whispered. “Someone used to finding people. I find things.”

  “A Fifth is not a person as we understand it,” the speaker said.

  That statement was accurate as far as it went. “Person” as the Gyonnese used the word only counted the Original.

  “Does this Fifth live within the Alliance?” Yu asked.

  “Yes.” The speaker scuttled toward him. He realized that the Gyonnese thought the question meant he would take the job.

  He took one step back, which was the Gyonnese equivalent of putting up his hands. “The reason I ask is this. If I recover a human Fifth that lives within the Alliance, I am breaking human laws. The action would be called a kidnapping. I could go to prison for the rest of my life.”

  He wasn’t sure they understood what a kidnapping was, but they did understand prison. The Gyonnese had something similar for their own people, which was, he had heard, degrees worse.

  All of the Gyonnese turned away from him. They merged into a small circle. They were discussing something, but he couldn’t hear because they had shut off their amplifiers.

  His stomach ached. He hadn’t eaten well since Athenia ruined his life, and now the stress of this encounter was making him both hungry and nauseous. He wanted this meeting to end. He couldn’t help the Gyonnese, and he wasn’t sure how long it would take to convince them of that fact.

  After a few minutes, they separated. They formed around him in a semi-circle. The Gyonnese used circles as their primary meeting formation, and to include him inside one was a great honor.

  “We understand kidnapping. We have studied much human law,” the speaker said to him. “We did not realize that such an act would apply to a Fifth. Our apologies.”

  Yu felt his shoulders relax. He would be able to leave soon. “I accept your apologies.”

  “We have another proposition for you instead,” the speaker said.

  Yu had a hunch he wouldn’t like this one either, but he couldn’t very well leave the circle.

  “What’s that?”

  “We need you to recover a human criminal.”

  He was so nervous he wanted to make a joke: would any human criminal do? But he said nothing. He waited.

  “Her name is Rhonda Flint. She has murdered generations of Gyonnese. She has been found guilty in Alliance court, but she has not complied with the court’s orders.”

  “She’s Disappeared?” he asked.

  “No,” the Gyonnese said. “She must turn over her Original child. But she has not done so. That child has Disappeared or so we believe.”

  “And no Retrieval Artist will help with this either, I suppose,” Yu said. “But I know for a fact that Trackers will.”

  “Trackers believe the child dead.”

  Despite himself, Yu was intrigued. “You don’t?”

  “We think the Original might indeed be dead. But Rhonda Flint lives with a child which we believe to be a Fifth. If the child is not a Fifth, we want that child. If the child is a Fifth, then Rhonda Flint is in violation of her court order. She has hidden the Original in such a way as to invalidate our legal rights. We want to take her to court, but the only way we can do that is to bring her ourselves.”

  “Trackers,” Yu whispered. “They are your only hope.”

  “Trackers must be hired through a human government. None will cooperate with us. We have a human lawyer who claims that such refusals negate Alliance law, but as we said, we cannot bring the case without her. So bring her to us. The same terms as before.”

  “I don’t understand,” he whispered. He had never seen the Gyonnese so serious. “The court can compel her to come forward.”

  “The court believes circumstances have discharged her debt,” the speaker said.

  “For mass murder?” The shock almost made him raise his voice again, but at the last second he caught himself.

  “That is the problem. The Alliance—the humans within the Alliance—do not believe that she has committed a true crime. That is the problem with this system all along.” The speaker crossed his long arms over his torso. It was an attempt to mimic the human gesture, but every time Yu saw it, it looked like sausages wrapped around a stick.

  “I still don’t understand,” Yu whispered.

  “You humans allow what you call Disappearance Services for people like Rhonda Flint—”

  “I thought she hadn’t Disappeared,” Yu whispered.

  A nearby Gyonnese touched the speaker behind his back. The speaker’s whiskers flailed slightly, making a sound that didn’t reach the amplifier.

  “She did not Disappear, because the court and her corporation protect her. But let me be clear. It is the same thing. You humans commit crimes, serious crimes, and they do not fit in your customs, so you allow those criminals to escape, to build new identities. It is causing rifts in the Earth Alliance, one that may lead to the exclusion of humans from the Alliance if the situation isn’t remedied.”

  Yu’s head hurt. This was much more complex than he was used to.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “By your standards, she’s a criminal.”

  “By anyone’s standards,” the speaker said. “She has committe
d mass murder. She is not going to be punished. We are going to demand punishment.”

  “Or what?” Yu asked. “Cause an interstellar incident?”

  “That is not your concern. Your concern is recovering this woman for us.”

  It sounds like you never had her, Yu almost said. But he knew better.

  “I’m not licensed for human trafficking,” he whispered. No one in the Alliance was.

  “It is simply the recovery of an unwilling criminal,” the speaker said.

  “Which I’m not trained for either. I work with things. Hire a Tracker.”

  “This woman works for one of the largest corporations in the human universe. No human government is going to cross it.”

  Which, Yu realized, was the crux of the problem.

  “We will double the fee we initially offered you,” the speaker said.

  The coldness grew worse. Clearly, he was their last hope.

  “Show me what she did,” he whispered, knowing he was already lost.

  ***

  Rhonda Flint worked for one of the largest corporations in the known universe. Aleyd developed products all over the Alliance. Twenty years ago, the corporation had leased a lot of land on Gyonne, and had negotiated various deals with the Gyonnese to market the Gyonnese’s farming techniques to poor regions of planets with difficult environments.

  The Gyonnese had a terraforming technique that worked extremely well with unusual environments. Aleyd would market that in exchange for permission to lease Gyonnese land for its work on colonial products.

  One of those products was a new fertilizer designed by Rhonda Flint. It was an aerial spray, which she tested near one of the Gyonnese’s larval beds.

  The spray was lethal to Gyonnese larvae. Sixty thousand Gyonnese larvae died. Had these larvae grown, they would have been Original Gyonnese. One hundred and twenty thousand families probably lost the ability to reproduce. The effect to the Gyonnese was devastating. It was as if an entire section of the planet had been wiped out.