Odd Jobs by Jason A Beauchemin

Author:Jason A Beauchemin [Beauchemin, Jason A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

My investigation hit a wall. I could not find a trace of Penny McKellen anywhere. I scoured the spaceport, wracking my brain for places she might have been and checking them out, but I kept coming up with nothing.

After the death and sex possibilities had failed to yield results, slave labor was the only real option remaining in the spaceport. Like any other industry, there was a system to the slave labor trade. Suppliers sold to wholesalers who sold to retailers who sold to consumers. In the spaceport, that supply chain began at the docking concourse so that was where I began my search.

I hit up the suppliers. They were pirates, smugglers, raiders, and merchants that did milk-runs between corporate space and outlaw territories. They brought in shiploads of product from all manner of sources... captives from raids on ships or planets, refugees who took a wrong turn and ended up in bondage, Great Bank and corporate prisoners. It was easy for creatures to lose their freedom. Oftentimes, one misstep was all it took. Sometimes it took even less than that.

The product that came here was mostly human. There were always exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, grindles were too big, kabebes were too little, sagisi were too unpredictable, yandocs were too evasive, and hammangs were too goddamn useless. The nature of the work combined with the quality of the available security translated to humans being the preferred choice for slave labor on this planet. The pink market consumed most of the imports of the other races.

I called in some favors from this shithole’s sorry excuse for a port authority. I threw a few bucks around to get some ship captains to talk to me. I only had to be laughed at a handful of times before I came to two conclusions: these business-creatures brought slaves in, not out, and it was fucking absurd to hope that any of them would remember seeing one little human that was not even part of their own cargo. The suppliers were a dead end.

The wholesalers were equally unhelpful. They bought from the suppliers, evaluated and categorized their inventories, and sold to the industry-specific retailers. They did not hunt their own merchandise. The raw product-acquisition side of the business was way more dangerous than the purely capitalist side. These fuckers were only interested in making money and snatching creatures off the Promenade was too much risk for not enough return. That would be bad business... plain and simple. Innocent, little Penny McKellen had not passed through wholesaler hands.

Time passed. I hunted for leads, called in favors, bribed and cajoled and threatened, hit dead end after dead end after dead end, and more time passed. The days began to pile up. I worked, ate, slept, shit, fixed, and worked some more. This supposedly quick and easy job was turning out to be neither one nor the other.

My investigation moved on to the retailers. There were many more of these guys than there were wholesalers. They tended to specialize, exclusively dealing product to specific industries.

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