Chapter 26: Syndication

Though it might conceal any number of hidden assailants, Rudy welcomed the darkness of the office.

It gave him an excuse not to meet Chloe's eyes. Not that she'd been looking his way much since his tirade in the alley. She'd followed, mute and docile as when the Feds took her ship and, she'd thought, her parents. He'd led her to a gravlev and across a span of disturbingly familiar highway to a port village, explaining as they went exactly what he planned and what she had to do to pull it off.

She'd said all of one word the whole way. When he finished his pitch, she mumbled, "Okay." She wouldn't say anything more to show she understood or even had paid attention.

Rudy didn't have the heart to ask her.

He felt he should apologize. Why, though? She did owe him, dammit, owed him through the roof. What gave her the right to get on her high horse and preach at him? She should've been down on her knees thanking him for considering sleeping with her sufficient payment for the hell he'd gone through!

Which didn't explain why he felt like the galaxy's biggest ass, and its biggest fool.

So they sat, silent and presumably alone, in an office lit by a single antique lamp. Their uncomfortable metal chairs faced an uncomfortable, unoccupied metal desk.

"Oliver Brent and Petra Jaric?"

Rudy jumped in his seat. So did Chloe, the most animation she'd shown since the alley. The names were the fakes he'd given at the desk. The voice speaking them came from behind the desk. The no longer unoccupied desk.

A man sat there in a flight suit as dark as the shadows, his face high enough to lie outside the narrow sphere of light. Had he sat there the whole time, or had he somehow entered without Rudy's notice?

Just how tired am I, Rudy wondered.

Chloe said, "T-that's us, Sir."

"Kronid," the man said, as though she'd asked a question. He extended a hand, dark-gloved like the rest of him. Chloe haltingly took it and gave a feeble shake. "Stephan Kronid."

"Petra Jaric," Chloe said, proving she'd paid better attention than Rudy expected. She rose and gave a nervous bow.

Rudy mumbled, "I'm Ollie Brent."

"My assistant," Stephan said, "tells me the two of you are seeking transport. Discreet transport."

"That's right, Mr. Kronid," Chloe said. Rudy wondered where her sudden talkativeness came from, but he couldn't complain. She sure hadn't missed a word he'd said on the gravlev. "Can you help us?"

"I certainly can, Miss… Jaric. I'm afraid it falls to you to demonstrate why I should."

"There's plenty in it for you," Rudy said. "Hell, if Petra's right, there's a fortune out there for somebody who knows how to fence it."

"Fence it, Mr. Brent?" Stephan asked. Rudy felt, more than saw, his thin smile.

"Uh," Rudy said. "Sell it, I mean."

"Very good." Stephan folded his hands on the desk. Something about his voice grated on Rudy. It wasn't just that he was a stone cold killer who probably had a fifty percent chance of knowing exactly who Rudy and Chloe were and what the Feds would pay for turning them over. The voice itself played on Rudy's nerves. It seemed familiar.

Rudy knew about the Kronistine Syndicate because he'd tangled with its low-ranking members in his academy days.

A crooked bookie asked Rudy to throw one of the illicit mecha tournaments he frequented. He threw the guy's bribe in his face instead. Come tournament day, a couple of dark-suited thugs tried to make sure he wasn't in any condition to win. He'd broken one of each of their legs and left them outside, calmly won the tournament, and walked away.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Apparently, the Syndicate respected his dedication – or, more likely, ran a background check and turned up the name Algreil –, because they never bothered him again.

Still, he kept an eye on their known haunts courtesy of the corporate databanks, just in case they ever decided to settle an old score.

Maybe, he thought, using that info to try to find someone to get him and Chloe off Wellach wasn't the brightest idea he'd ever had.

The Syndicate operated a lot like one of the Oligarchical corporations, but without the Oligarchs' legal sanction. They looked after their corporate family, they provided goods and services, they turned a profit. They even had their own fleet and mechaneers, geared up as pirates and assassins.

And smugglers.

"Explain to me, Miss Jaric," Stephan was saying, "why exactly you want to go to this defunct battlecruiser, and why you require unusual discretion in getting there."

"I'm looking for a mecha," Chloe, as “Petra Jaric,” answered. "It's not acceptable for me to have one."

"Why not?"

She leaned into the light and opened her eyes wide. "What do you think, Mr. Kronid?"

"You're a noble," the Syndicate man said calmly.

Chloe nodded. "Don't mistake me. I take my Limiters every day. I claim no special privileges. I am a good citizen."

Rudy had apparently sold her on his idea. She presented herself as the daughter of one of the small cadre of aristocrats who’d agreed to the Senate's terms, giving their ancestral lands to the government and taking nanomachine injections to suppress their psychic powers.

Stephan asked, "Why do you want a mecha, then?"

"Because it belonged to my father," Chloe said. The best lies contained a germ of truth, but in this case, Rudy thought it was easier to sell the idea of a nobleman's mecha rather than a noblewoman's. He wasn't sure if the nobs had been desperate enough to allow their wives and daughters to fight by the end of the Civil War. Why give the Syndicate an excuse for doubt?

Chloe continued, "I want the logs from the ship he served on and the machine he piloted. My mother tells me nothing of him, fearing I will dream too high, but I must know of his exploits."

"Federal law forbids members of the former aristocracy from owning mecha, though," Stephan said. "You understand you are risking a great deal of trouble just by asking someone to perform this service for you?"

"I'm quite aware of that," Chloe said. "But Ollie –" Here she reached over and squeezed Rudy's hand. "– tells me you can help."

"What gives you that idea, Mr. Brent?" Stephan asked. "I hope no one has told you I am not a law-abiding citizen."

"I hear stuff," Rudy said. "You know, on the street. I'm pretty plugged in."

Rudy played the role of the boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, the poseur rebel who landed an upper-class girl by pretending to be ten times cooler and more badass than he was. The kind of guy who thought he could get in good with the Syndicate if he just got his big break, and who was very wrong to think so.

"I'm sure you are," Stephan said, not bothering to hide his condescension.

Mission accomplished, Rudy thought.

"Please, Mr. Kronid," Chloe said. She aimed her big stratosphere blues at the darkness where the Syndicate man's face should have been. "I so want to learn about my father, to have something to remember him by. When I found out where he'd been killed, I…"

She looked down, bit her lip. "Please," she whispered.

He reached across and patted her shoulder. "There, there, Miss Jaric. I sympathize with you more than you may realize. Family, you see, is very important to me, too."

"Then…?" Chloe hesitated.

She was a hell of an actress when she set her mind to it. Her dad was supposed to be a legendary fast-talker, so Rudy supposed it made sense.

"It takes a lot of marks to fund an expedition like this, Miss Jaric," Stephan said. "Especially when it must remain off the official books. Are you sure you are willing to spend so much on what, by your own admission, is ultimately a mission of sentiment?"

"Money is no object," Chloe said. She smiled nastily, a look Rudy would never expect from little lost puppy Chloe Hughes but seemed perfectly natural for spoiled, sentimental brat Petra Jaric. "I rather like the idea of spending my stepfather's marks to get a memento of my real father."

Rudy snorted a laugh. Ollie Brent would dig that cruel streak in his girl. Rudy Kaine Algreil might not mind it, either.

Stephan Kronid apparently didn't care for it, judging from the forced politeness of his chuckle. "In that case, Miss Jaric, we may come to an accommodation. If you'll give me your financial transaction code?"

Chloe gave him the one Rudy had told her to, instead, recently filled with marks he'd drawn from personal accounts he expected to see frozen within the day. He'd taken out two megamarks of spending money, but he planned on saving that for close encounters.

Besides, Stephan would probably get suspicious of someone who could flash that kind of cash.

Chloe's eyes widened a little as the marks Stephan was charging counted up on her flight suit's screen. Rudy couldn't tell if it was part of the act or if she was genuinely shocked.

"Well, Mr. Brent, Miss Jaric," Stephan said, "it seems we have equivalence."