Rinn's Run TIG: Chapter 4 – Underworld (Patreon)

The instructions that Monsell had given them to find the forger took them deep into the bowels of the station and well away from the publicly accessible areas. Not that it proved much of a challenge for Kalan to get them past the minor obstacles they faced. Most of it simply involved waiting for the opportune moment, and Kalan was a patient man. The deeper they went, though, the more nervous Cera became. She gave Kalan more and more nervous looks as they went until Kalan thought she might actually explode with unspent nervous energy. When she simply couldn’t stand it anymore, she stopped and stared at Kalan. He stopped as well, looking over his shoulder at her.

“Are you sure this isn’t some kind of trap?” she demanded, looking at their surroundings with deep reservations written large on her features.

Kalan considered for a moment. “Yes.”

“How do you know? That Monsell guy seemed shifty as all the hells. What makes you so sure he isn’t double-crossing us?”

Kalan turned to fully face Cera. “Let me ask you this? Would you want me hunting you if you tried to double-cross me and failed?”

“Gods, no,” said Cera, shuddering.

“Neither does Monsell. He knows full well that I’d never stop looking for him, even if it meant chasing him halfway across the galaxy. In the end, the bit of extra money he might get from you isn’t worth what it would cost him in men and money just to get off of this station alive. In the end, he’s a businessman. Businessmen want to make money, not burn huge piles of it by abandoning everything they’ve built in a desperate bid to keep breathing for another day.”

With that, Kalan started moving again. He heard Cera start walking behind him, even if she did mutter to herself about crazy people pretty frequently. It took almost twenty more minutes before they found the location that Monsell had given them. Kalan found an oversized metal wrench that was mostly hidden from sight. He picked it up, hefted it, and then used it to bang on a sealed hatch a few times. He waited patiently and Cera fidgeted while someone took their time deciding whether or not to open the hatch. It finally unsealed and swung inward. Kalan stepped through, remaining mindful of his surroundings. The space behind the hatch could have been taken straight out of an advertisement for some kind of high-end decorating agency. There was high-quality furniture, some of it made with what looked like genuine leather. Kalan thought that it was probably just a really good counterfeit made with a plant-based leather substitute. With so few worlds permitting the production or sale of real leather, it was prohibitively expensive to buy, ship, or use it for anything. Of course, that made it one of those ethically dubious things that the obscenely wealthy used as status symbols. For his part, Kalan had never noticed a meaningful difference between the plant-copycat materials and the real thing.

The metal floors had been covered over with antique rugs. Fine art covered the walls, and Kalan suspected that those pieces might even be real. The only thing that stood out as not belonging to the space was the person standing in the middle of the room. He was a short, obese man with small eyes and an oversized mouth. He started to leer at Cera, glanced at Kalan’s increasingly stony expression, and assumed a professional air instead. He gestured for them to sit on one of the couches. Kalan nodded for Cera to go ahead and sit, while he leaned against a wall and let his hand rest, oh so very casually, on the grip of his blaster. The forger looked at the hand on the blaster, looked at Kalan’s face again, and understood the message. The forger sat down in an overstuffed chair and pulled out a tablet computer.

“I’m going to need to ask you a lot of questions,” said the man in a nasal voice that instantly made Kalan want to punch the man.

“Okay,” said Cera. “For what?”

“I need to understand your training and skills to find a job field for you. I can’t make you spacecraft engineer if you don’t have the skills for it, and I assume you want a job that doesn’t involve hard labor mining in an asteroid field.”

“That’s correct.”

“Once I understand your skills and experience, I can pick out a career field for you. Once we do that, I backfill your life story with a degree from the right kind of mid-tier school, appropriate jobs, and I can make your tax records seem reasonable based on the jobs you would have gotten in your career up to that point. Speaking of taxes, there is the matter of my payment.”

Before Cera could do or say anything, Kalan pulled a bag of hard currency out of his pocket and tossed it to the man.

“Half now. Half on delivery,” said Kalan.

“That’s not how I work,” complained the forger.

“Take it up with Monsell. He said that’s how it works, so that’s how it works today.”

The forger stared at Kalan for a moment, seeming to weigh how far he could push things. The forger apparently decided that he’d already exceeded Kalan’s limited tolerance because he turned back to Cera.

“First things first, what was your career before you found your way to me?”

Bit by bit, the forger pulled relevant pieces of information out of Cera about her career, the extent and limitations of her training, and even her leadership experience. Kalan listened attentively, storing away the information for possible later use. He was pretty sure that he’d let his paranoia get the better of him by the time the forger finished going through his line of questions. It was simply too detail-oriented. The man was asking specific questions about Cera’s technical skills that Kalan couldn’t answer, and he had a better-than-average working knowledge of the kinds of systems those skills applied to. Cera answered them all with rarely more than a pause. When she didn’t know, she just said she didn’t know. The longer it went on, though, the more obvious it became to Kalan that the only thing she was really qualified to do was work on a ship. It was the only thing she’d ever done or been trained to do.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were all kinds of ships flying all over the galaxy, which meant there was work. Kalan knew from personal experience, though, that ship captains hated taking on people with no relevant experience. You also couldn’t fake that kind of experience. People who captained ships were a strange lot and all of them belonged to a special subculture. When people applied for positions, captains asked what other ships they’d served on, and then they followed up with the captains of those ships. The bad news for anyone trying to fake their experience is that captains would almost always take a call from another captain. The forger could invent plenty of fake jobs for tax purposes, but those weren’t going to do Cera any good in terms of getting an actual job on a real ship. She could always decide to go into something else, but that would mean finding a training program or attending a university, and those usually had admissions periods. At least, that was what people had told him.

Cera might need to wait months or years before she could even apply to something like that, let alone start, and people needed to eat. That isn’t your problem, Kalen reminded himself. You’ve already done way more than you should have. Once she has new ID, she can make her own way in the universe. You have enough problems of your own. Kalan started paying attention again when Cera suddenly got cagey and defensive.

“Why do you need to know that?” she asked.

Kalan tried to remember what the man had asked. Something about what kind of place she grew up. The forger gave Kalan a baffled look. Of all the questions that might have prompted a hostile response, that wasn’t the question that Kalan or, apparently, the forger had expected. The forger took on an even more businesslike tone.

“Miss, I don’t care where you actually grew up. In fact, I’d prefer not to know. I need to know what kind of place it was so I can make your backstory plausible. If you grew up in a major city, your experiences will be one kind of thing. If you grew up in a rural area with a sparse population, your experience will be something else. My goal is to make your background generic enough that people won’t ask a lot of specific questions you can’t answer, while also making it plausible that you don’t know there anymore. It’s harder than it sounds.”

Cera sighed. “It was a smaller city. I did mostly keep to myself, so it won’t be hard for me to sell the idea that I left the first chance I got and never looked back.”

The forger nodded. “Family?”

“Dead.”

The forger looked up sharply at that. “All of them?”

“All of them,” she said, her hands bunching into fists.

“That actually works out better. Most people don’t ask more questions when the answers are that obviously painful and awkward. You’ll want to keep the story simple and generic. That makes it easier to remember and doesn’t invite a harder look. Maybe some kind of vehicle accident?”

Cera just nodded. Kalan could see the muscles working in her jaw. If she was putting on an act, it was a good one. The questioning continued for another hour before the forger finally put down the tablet he was using to take notes. He stood up from his chair and gestured toward a door.

“Now, we just need to get some biometric data.”

Kalan looked from the forger to the door and recalled the leer that briefly crossed the man’s face when they first arrived. The forger froze at the sound of the blaster sliding out of the holster.

“She doesn’t leave my sight,” said Kalan.

Kalan hadn’t tried to put any particular menace into his words, but the forger started sweating almost immediately as a guilty look crossed his face. Kalan wasn’t sure exactly what the man had planned on doing, but he suspected it would have involved some song and dance about needing Cera to undress to get a quality biometric scan.

“Of, of c- c- course,” stammered the forger.

Cera gave the forger a hard look, clearly having drawn a similar conclusion to Kalan’s.

“Let’s get on with it,” she said.

The forger went white at the dagger-sharp look that Cera was giving him. There was no foolishness after that. They went into another room that was set up with high-quality equipment for biometric data gathering. The forger quickly took the scans he needed and ushered them toward the hatch. He was clearly ready to have them gone before one or both of them decided that the forger needed some kind of violent correction to his behaviors. When they reached the hatch, Kalan stopped and looked at the still-sweating and frightened man.

“When will it all be ready?”

“Tomorrow. Midday.”

“Good. I’ll be back for it then.”

The man just nodded, shut the hatch, and sealed it. Kalan looked over Cera, who was giving the hatch a disgusted glare. She noticed his gaze on her.

“What a creep,” she said.

Kalan nodded but didn’t add anything. It wasn’t universally true, but he’d found that many of the people who ended up on the wrong side of the law got there because they couldn’t function as part of regular society. The criminal underworld would tolerate behaviors that didn’t fly in normal company, assuming someone could provide a valuable enough service. Forging good fake identifications was one of the very valuable services that would get someone a lot of forgiveness for things like being a creepy pervert. At least, that would hold as long the forger didn’t act like a creepy pervert toward the wrong person. If they did make that mistake, their life would likely come to an abrupt and agonizing end. He started leading them back the way they had come. They walked in silence for almost twenty minutes before Cera spoke.

“I really don’t want to come back down here and deal with him again,” she said, sounding a little defeated.

“You won’t have to. I’ll come get what you need tomorrow. He isn’t likely to pull anything stupid with me.”

“Thanks. I’ll pay you back when we get somewhere a little safer.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“That was a lot of money.”

“Yeah, well, you’re paying for the rest.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because getting you a fresh identity isn’t going to help either of us if you’re so broke that you can’t even book passage off of this station. You know, the station where everyone is going to come looking for information. If you are who you say you are,” started Kalan.

“I am!” shouted Cera with genuine anger.

“If you are who you say you are,” continued Kalan in a measured tone, “then we both need you to be gone before those people arrive. Frankly, I’d have stuck you on the first outbound ship I could find if you didn’t need a new identity. It’s not ideal that this will take until tomorrow.”

“You have very serious trust issues,” said Cera.

“I came by them honestly.”

“So, what now?”

“Now, we go find you somewhere to hole up until tomorrow, while I go deal with the ten thousand other things that need my immediate attention.”

“Like what?”

“Like finding a skeleton crew for that Zeren ship. Getting it here with just the two of us was one thing. I’m not going to try to take it where it needs to go with a crew that consists of just me.”

“Won’t assembling a crew be hard to do?”

Kalan laughed. “No. People want to be on my ship. The problem will be keeping the numbers reasonable. Then, I need to secure a cargo that will let me pay them. It’ll be a hassle.”

“You’re going to take a military vessel that’s armed for war and use it as a cargo hauler.”

“I’m just a freighter captain. What else would I use it for?”

Cera was quiet for most of a minute. “I don’t know what you really are, but you aren’t just a freighter captain.”

“That’s the thing, Cera. I really am just a freighter captain. All of this other stuff, I’m making it up as I go. I never wanted a part of any of this.”

“For a man who’s making it up as you go, you sure look like someone who knows what they’re doing. And the last time I checked, freighter captains weren’t generally trained to launch one-man assaults on military vessels and succeed.”

“If your captain had been less stupid, I might have failed. Then again, it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place if he’d been less stupid.”

“He was a half-wit. There’s no question about that. But, somehow, I think you still would have succeeded.”

“You’re overestimating me,” said Kalan.

“If you say so.”