The Chicolini Incident by Robert Kroese

Author:Robert Kroese [Kroese, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B01MYFATZX
Goodreads: 34109272
Publisher: St. Culain Press
Published: 2017-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

“Get us in the air,” commanded Rex, fixing himself a martini in Serendipity’s cockpit. I have no idea where he found the vodka; he had either procured a bottle at the spaceport or found one he had forgotten about earlier.

“Where to now, sir?” I asked.

“Back to Chicolini City,” said Rex.

I thought he must have been confused. “Sir? We still have a cargo bay full of guns. We don’t have room for our money.”

“We’re going to sell the guns,” said Rex.

“To whom, sir?”

“Salmon Brigade.”

“Again?”

“For real this time.”

“What if they kill us?”

“Then they won’t get their guns. We’ll unload the container at the spaceport, remove the label, and then contact the Salmon guys. There are hundreds of containers like that at the spaceport. If they kill us, they’ll never find the guns.”

“What if they want to kill us more than they want the guns?”

“Those guys seemed pretty reasonable,” said Rex. “We’ll just explain that it was a big misunderstanding. Somebody switched the labels and we ended up accidentally picking up the guns and handing them a big pile of nuclear waste. That kind of stuff happens all the time at spaceports.”

I’d never heard of anything like that happening at a spaceport.

“It sounds very risky, sir,” I said. “Frankly, I’d feel a lot better at this point if we just dumped the container in the ocean and got out of here. We can make up the rental fees some other way. Those guns all have the Larviton Energy Weapons logo on them, and I’m worried that somebody is going to figure out that –”

“No one’s figuring out anything,” snapped Rex. “We’re a long ways from Larviton’s sphere of influence, and there’s nothing to trace those guns back to us. We’re not dumping the guns, so get that out of your tin-plated brain.”

I sighed. “So we’re going to give Salmon Brigade the guns and take the container with the money?”

Rex shook his head. “I don’t want that damn Chicolinian money,” said Rex. “We’re just going to give them the guns.”

“Give them the guns, sir?”

“They’re going to use them to take over Trentino, right? Well, when they’re done, we’ll just land, express our hearty congratulations, and pick up a shipload of zontonium on our way out. We’ll be light-years away before they realize what those blue stones are.”

“That plan didn’t work out so well last time, sir,” I pointed out.

“That was just bad luck,” snapped Rex. “The plan itself was perfect.”

I wasn’t nearly as confident about this plan as Rex was, but I could see there was no dissuading him. I set a course for Chicolini City.

We landed a few hours later and Rex paid off one of the crane workers to hide the container of guns in a remote corner, behind several other containers. Then we sent a message to the Salmon Brigade guys through the same secure Hypernet channel Rex had first used to contact them and waited at the ship for them.

It didn’t take long for them to show up. The truck pulled up and screeched to a halt in front of Serendipity.

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