Parallel Enforcers by J.S. Morin & M.A. Larkin

Author:J.S. Morin & M.A. Larkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781643550619
Publisher: Magical Scrivener Press

Maho-Saigai had originally intended Core Apartments to serve as storage wards as well as cheap apartments for migrant workers who couldn’t afford quarters on the Circuses. Kendra liked to think they had not expected it to become slums, but knowing their former soulless corporate overlords, that might be giving them too much credit.

Now, though, the off-the-beaten path hovels congested with dead mechanical lines, debris, and more dust than most planets served to offer refuge to God-knows-how many humans and xenos. The place was a dump, sure, but the vaieen seemed most interested in the heavily populated Circuses and thus paid little attention to refugees down here.

For now.

Core Apartments were the kind of place not even most slumlords would bother charging rent for, yet somehow, when she’d come to claim a room for herself, a “landlord” had demanded 50 terras for a week. If she was stuck down here for a week, they were all screwed but whatever.

And, oh yeah, she had to share the apartment with a rhshuuruv family who had apparently been staying here rent-free for almost a year because said landlord lacked the guts to try to manhandle five two-and-half-meter-tall aardvarks.

Their snorting never stopped, not even while she desperately tapped away at her datapad trying to coordinate evacuations. Problematic since the vaieen often seemed to converge on any docking bay where a ship lingered and any hangar where shuttles tried to land. No ship wanted to be there when the vaieen arrived. It meant shuffling refugees around the Circus while murderous alien gods hunted them down.

At the moment, the death toll was somewhere around oh-fuck-we-all-should-have-left-a-year-ago and still climbing.

No one could reach Zoti, either, so he’d probably blown out his comm. If he was still alive. Security was in shambles. She’d heard one of the hardened mercenaries Triple-3 had brought with them had donned an EV suit and jumped out an airlock, maybe planning to take his chances that some passing ship would pick him up.

“Look,” she said to the damnable datapad and the security goon on the other, “if you can’t find me Zoti, get me Samurai!”

“He’s dead, ma’am. We found his … body.” That hesitation. The guard meant they found part of his body. “Juggler? Vixen?”

“No one knows.”

Kendra briefly considered hurling the datapad out the window.

The rhshuuruvus continued to snort, snuffle, and—she guessed—complain in their own language.

“Yeah, well, why don’t you arrange the evacuation,” she grumbled at them. Some of the rhshuuruvus had learned to understand English since coming aboard, true, but they were unable or unwilling to speak it. Kendra mostly communicated with them through grunts, gestures, and when she was really mad, showing them her fingers.

The datapad blinked with an incoming call.

Anonymous.

“I swear to God if this is another solicitor trying to sell us a security system …” She flipped the connection.

Roland Kane’s face appeared with such a shit-eating grin Kendra could only raise a brow at him. What. The. Actual. Goobley hell?

“Howdy, Espresso,” the former Engineering Chief said. “Hear you’ve got a bit of a situation on your hands.

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