The Process Server
By L.H. Thomson
This title uses U.S. spellings of most common words.
Chapter One
“The old saying is that it’s crazy to expect the same actions to bring about different results. And then humanity goes out and performs the same actions again anyway – even though it should know better from experience. Turns out, there are logical reasons for this.” – from The Handbook of Joshua, Prologue, Verse 4.
The hologram at the reception desk was a middle-aged female secretary in a navy blue business suit, cordial and attentive, polite and to the point.
I’m not the only person who finds a well-programmed service-sector hologram strangely reassuring – as if an artificial construct had a choice, and secretly liked us for who we really are. She was pleasant, and she was prompt … and she was utterly unable to help, flickering slightly as she tilted her head with a look of sympathy.
She leaned forward a little, reflected in the glass desktop, crossing her fingers with a finality that suggested the answer wasn’t going to change.
“Archivist Dregba won’t be back on G’Farg Station for at least a cycle,” she said.
The departure floodlights from a long-range salvage vessel arced across the tinted wall of glass behind her, momentarily illuminating the steel-grey corridor, before the giant ship’s main thrusters fired, and it headed for the blackness of open space.
“And if I wanted to contact him, his Sat Com dialup would be…?”
She looked up, as if pondering her answer for a moment, giving it what appeared to be sincere thought. “Archivist Dregba won’t be back on G’Farg Station for at least a cycle,” she explained.
“And he’s headed to which sector …?”
She nodded sympathetically and flashed a bright white smile. “Archivist Dregba won’t be back on G’Farg station for at least a cycle.”
There’s no point in trying to punch a hologram, but I enjoy doing it: Recrimination-free stress release. I threw a straight right hand, and she crackled and shimmered a little as her electrical field came into contact with my faux-leather Wear-Tech jacket’s computer systems.
She shook her head and looked forlorn, as if she’d just figured out she was delivering bad news. “Archivist Dregba won’t be back on G’Farg Station….”
“…for at least a cycle. Got it,” I said. I turned to leave and after a few steps away from the desk, she disappeared.
It wasn’t the holo’s fault, of course. The archivist and his assistant evidently didn’t want to be disturbed, and had left her with just the one conversation path, the poor dear. Of course, there are always other options when it comes to tracking someone down. It’s a big part of what I do. You can’t serve a summons on someone until you find them.
Dregba’s office was in a cookie-cutter, all-glass office building off the central concourse at G’Farg, a station on the outer edge of Sol System. Outside the building’s main doors, a corridor crowded with visitors from thousands of different planets ran parallel to the station’s extreme east wall, its ceiling towering 30 feet above. Through the full-length foot-thick Plexinum window to the right I could just make out the fueling ship as it moved beyond view, taking the short jaunt to Dresden Station.
At the hallway’s midpoint a tee-junction headed west, into the concourse market zone, four-square kilometers of brightly lit shops and restaurants, practically stacked on top of one another, winding staircases leading from two upper levels to the central market below.
It was a glitz-and-glamor chance to stock up on essentials at predictably high prices, rubbing elbows with the reasonably well-heeled before leaving the Sector. The markups on goods here – particularly Earther friendly goods – were ridiculous, so the market attracted only the best franchises, a maze of shops and booths made of tinted glass, chrome, neon and spectacular holo shows, in a perpetual state of twilight.
The crowds elbowed through shoulder to shoulder, faces dimmed by shadows in one moment, then lit bright in the next, a constant street-level din from 4,000-odd souls, drawn from across five Galaxies. Most were humanoid and garbed in some colorful manner, some were definitely not.
They were tall, short, hair-covered, gelatinous, bald, scaled, gilled, horned, tentacled, multi-limbed, multi-headed, multi-eyed, multi-hued. Few, if any, of the species were attractive to humans and the feeling was exceedingly mutual – and even those who liked our appearance weren’t too fond of the average human’s behavior.
Not that most of them were much better.
The shops were the kind of joints a Smith like me could never afford, full of the newest licensed tech and corresponding fashions, the most contemporary looks powered by the fastest Hui-Matsumori cores.
Smiths work cheap and buy their Wear-Tech used – hell, my backup system is an old shoe drive, with almost no capacity. But it gets the job done if my other clothing goes down.
We’re process servers, delivery boys, low-grade military muscle. That’s what you get when you’re social detritus and frankly, I’ve never had too much of a problem with it. Most societies are pretty damn overrated.
As pricey as the stores were, the bars in the market only sold locally produced booze and drugs, as per intergalactic law, which meant the prices were low and the supply plentiful, and they didn’t give a damn who drank it, smoked it or shot it. People who hung around this far out in the Sector obviously weren’t getting off by logging on all day long, so they needed plenty of old-school alternatives.
And frankly, I’ve never had much of a problem with that, either.
I found a suitably lonely dive, a clapboard shack at the far end of the bar strip, well away from the trendy retail zone. This was the kind of place working travelers and local undesirables hung out; the flickering sign said Anderson’s Rest, which was a pretty sick joke: Kern Anderson was the first human killed in the two-decade-long trade war with the Jofari, back in 2145, parted in two at his midsection by a razor-sharp flying blade.
What the civilizations outside of Sol System lacked in ferocity when compared with Earthers they’d made up for in creative enthusiasm when it came to weapons production.
Still, if they had allowed form to follow function a little more and built weapons that competed with the decimating firepower Earth had thrown up against them, the Jofari wouldn’t be the intergalactic footstools they are today. A spinning blade moving at 200 miles per hour is really cute, but it can’t compete with 1,000 spent-uranium 60mm shells per minute.
The front door led into an equally cramped hallway, which in turn opened out into a typical saloon, a square bar in the middle giving the staff 360-degree access to their customers’ creds.
The bar seemed dusty, which should have been impossible, as there’s no dust in the climactically controlled G’Farg Station. But even in the half-light of the burned-out neon, it had distinct layer of filth to it.
It had the prerequisite booze, too, lined up on shelves behind the bar, along with a ventilated dope room along the back wall for smokers and users. Nearer the bar was an array of terminal signal boosters, making intergalactic and sector-wide communication a lot easier, and drawing in movies, shows and holos that played out on a variety of size of wall terminal, as well as in peoples’ personal visors.
Near the signal boosters, a reptilian Drax with a full set of gills was sitting behind a two-person table, busy smoking an old-style Earther tobacco cigarette, most of the smoke disappearing into the table thanks to a small built-in fan.
Sweet sunlight, that stuff stunk. The Earther pot was almost as bad, although at least it got you high. I never understood the tobacco thing though, and the idea that people out here had taken to it – at least a century after the last real c
igarette was smoked on Earth – was a head-shaker, to be sure.
I never did understand why they made the pot smokers stick to ventilated rooms, but the tobacco smokers could sit out among the rest of us.
But the Drax was enjoying it, blowing irregularly shaped smoke rings out of his mouth and the gills on either side of his head simultaneously.
Even though biologically they’re more akin to a lizard than a human, Draxari love the taste of tobacco. And they’re even more susceptible to nicotine addiction than Earthers. So naturally they made a much better target for the tobacco companies.
Heck, Earthers didn’t need the real thing anymore, anyway. They didn’t need the real anything anymore, for the most part.