Ruthless. Determined.

The Chimpect sector was solidly in Neon Red territory. No surprise that they had caught her. No surprise, too, that they couldn't keep something like her. And what Shaw said was true. Quinten was probably the only one among the cartel's even semi-regular customers that wouldn't turf them out on their ears the moment they caught sight of the cargo.

"Why would I want a Sub?" Quinten asked, idly. "Don't you think I have enough to worry about without adding one of them to my problems?"

In the back of his mind, however, there was something strangely compelling about the deal he was being offered. If there was any person, or species, more reviled than him in Republic s.p.a.ce, with the exception of shapeshifters, it was the Type B humanoids. Their ability to act with total implacability, their physiology-sometimes exceeding human norms-and their propensity to wreak havoc within governed s.p.a.ce, were legendary. Whenever a Sub community was found, the Republic either killed them all or shipped them to Bliss, depending on how much trouble they turned out to be. There was no love lost between the two groups. Only shapeshifters were treated with equal ruthlessness.

It occurred to Quinten that the solution to his nagging problems was staring him straight in the face.

Not hearing a response, Shaw put a wheedling tone in his voice. It was his equivalent of exhibiting intellect.

"She could be useful to you." He looked around. "On this ship. Pretty big for just one person to handle."

So, it was obvious to them too. That wasn't welcome news.

"As long as you keep her on the nerve-chain, she'll be as pa.s.sive as a lump of putty, and not likely to betray you. And if you get lonely," Shaw shrugged, "well, with that chain around her neck, she's not going to be too"

Quinten unlocked his harness in one movement, and vaulted over the gantry's railing, landing hard on the floor. The thick metal vibrated with the force with which he hit the deck. He had towered over Shaw by a head when he was whole, and he looked down on the pirate now from that height.

"Too what, Shaw?" he growled.

Shaw's eyes tightened and he looked away, but whether it was from the expression in Quinten's eyes, or the remnants of jagged scars that radiated from his right cheek across his entire face, didn't matter. Breit remained as still as a rodent, not drawing attention to himself. Only the Sub dared look him in the face and he was surprised to see that she was taller than he thought, the tip of her head just brushing his bottom lip. Her expression was impa.s.sive, detached, as if the men were discussing something other than her life.

"I was going to say, she's not going to be too resistant," Shaw muttered. It was a lie.

Fussy. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d was about to say, fussy.

Quinten made a show of walking around her. Probably to safeguard their own security, they had dressed her in little more than what was strictly necessary. The tight, short-sleeved suit hugged slight curves, the leggings ending above her knees. Her toes, like her fingers, were long and lean, tipped with short, colourless cuticles. Everything about her form was bland and pale, except for those huge angled, dark eyes that looked at him as if he was nothing more than an interesting biological specimen.

"We'll throw the nerve-chain in," Shaw added. "No charge. We reckon you'll need it."

"And what are you asking for in return?" Quinten took a step back and c.o.c.ked his head, watching her intently.

"Captain Mestoo wants some shield technology."

"You can buy your own shield technology."

"Not like what you got. Not the stuff that can evade the military's sensors."

"I can't evade all their sensors."

"But you can evade more than most," Shaw insisted.

Quinten considered the deal. The shields on the Perdition were his own refinements built on a very promising kernel. Even if he traded an older version of his customised technology for the Sub, there was still the slight chance that somebody could reverse-engineer what he'd done and find a vulnerability.

He shook his head. "Forget it." And turned to walk away.

"Wait!"

Shaw's frantic voice stopped him in his tracks. He slowly spun around and lifted an eyebrow.

"We don't know what to do with her," Shaw admitted with a hunched shrug. "We don't want the entire f.u.c.king government after us just because we have her with us. It's dangerous enough as it is for the cartel. Once word gets out that we have a Sub, one that murdered some f.u.c.king gentry family with more money than sense, everybody'll be wanting a piece of us."

"But you obviously don't mind if they have a piece of me?"

"Anyone with sense already knows to stay away from you." Perspiration started beading on Shaw's upper lip. He was fighting for the continuance of his, and his friends, lives. If Quinten had been them, he would have shoved the Sub back into the pa.s.senger craft the moment he'd discovered her, and given her three minutes to either take off or be blown into oblivion. Human-alien hybrids were more trouble than they were worth.

"And it's much harder to just go after the Perdition than the five ships that make up the cartel. None of our ships are as fast as yours." Shaw was almost begging by now. "Give us something, Tamlan, and we'll be happy with that."

"You shouldn't have caught her."

"We didn't know there was a f.u.c.king Sub in that ship! We thought it was easy pickings for us. Looting, ransom, then a quick escape."

Silence filled the chill of the cargo bay.

"I have two military-grade sensors in storage," Quentin finally told them. "Republic sourced, version five kernels. They're still working, but I upgraded my systems three years ago, and they're now obsolete.

"They're still more powerful than any of the commercial stuff that's selling nowadays," he added, holding up a hand to forestall their objections. "That's my deal. The two sensors for the shapeshifter."

He might still need replacement sensors for the repair job he knew awaited him, but the two he was trading wouldn't set him back significantly. Besides, he still had the feeling that the current malfunction was minor.

Shaw and Breit looked at each other.

"The Harness is one of the fastest ships the cartel has," Quinten told them. "And it can't outrun a Republic striker. Help yourselves. Take the deal. Increase your chances of survival."

"There are five ships in the Neon Red," Shaw said.

"I only have two sensors." He waited for three heartbeats. "If that isn't enough for you, then take the Sub back to your ship." The alien shifted at the words, and Quinten wondered how much of the conversation she understood. "Try selling her to someone else."

"We did," Breit remarked, before Shaw could stop him. "n.o.body wanted her."

A cruel smile lifted the edges of Quinten's mouth, made even crueller by the pull of scar tissue on the right side of his face.

"Two sensors, Shaw," he repeated. "That's the offer. Take it or leave it."

"d.a.m.n you, Tamlan."

And that's how Quinten knew the deal was done.

Intrigued? Read the rest when the book is released in late 2011.

The Check Your Luck Agency.

Chapter One.

There's one thing I hate more than being wrong, and that's being right about presuming somebody is as big a sc.u.mbag as they turn out to be.

"Are you sure about this, Xiao Chong?"

A small cherubic face looked up at me and nodded vigorously.

Looking at us together, a casual pa.s.ser by-if they noticed us at all in the crush of people-would think I was merely placing a takeaway order from one of the nearby stalls. The covered open-air food court was noisy with the chatter of hungry diners and the hard surfaces of concrete, plastic, steel and melamine kept all those voices bouncing off each other until they combined and reached a crescendo of sound. It was late, I was hungry and, between my growling stomach and the clattering din, I was getting a headache.

I hate eating when everyone else does, shoving elbows out of my personal s.p.a.ce and my meal. I hated the case Fiona had handed me. But most of all, I hated that I was right.

"I was sitting next to them at the same table," Xiao Chong explained. He held up a small vinyl bag full of round bulges, his gaze guileless. "Playing marbles."

Xiao-or Little-Chong is one of my best a.s.sistants. Yeah, that's what I call him. I'm sure others might have different names for it, usually incorporating the words "child" and "exploitation", but he's smarter than a lot of adults I've met. He has the face of an angel and the deviousness of a, well, child, and he can appear completely innocent in places where I would stick out like a sore thumb. I keep such a.s.sistants in most of the major food junctions around Singapore, like Chomp! Chomp!, Maxwell, Newton's and Lau Pa Sat, but Xiao Chong is, without a doubt, the best of the lot.

c.r.a.p. What he'd just told me put a whole other spin on the situation. I almost wished I could blame everything on a ghost instead.

"Thanks Xiao Chong."

I slipped him ten dollars and walked out of the food court, glad to leave the bustle behind me.

What my little nine-year old friend had told me wasn't enough to solve the case, but it told me where to start digging to nail the real culprit. I could've gone back to Fiona with my news and that would have been the end of it, but I pride myself on my attention to detail. I like my cases closed so tight there are no little doubts hissing as they escape. In this particular case, I doubted the client would thank me, but that's just how I work.

Considering the crush at Lau Pa Sat, Robinson Road was quiet and serene. On either side of the road, tall office buildings loomed, now half-emptied of their quota of wage-slaves. I had thought to be one of their number once, ascending the corporate ladder no doubt on the heads of those slower than me, but that was in a different life. I've become a woman of much simpler needs.

Speaking of which, it was high time I went home. At this time of night, just past seven-thirty, most of the Malaysian workers would be back across the border and at home, enjoying an evening meal with their family. The Causeway joining both countries would still be busy, but would have lost that anarchic edge from a couple of hours ago. I walked to the nearest MRT station and took the train up to Kranji.

Kranji is a strange kind of place, an anomaly in super-populated Singapore. Its only edifice of any note is the immaculately landscaped racetrack complex that takes up hectares of valuable land. The station and its surrounds were built with only one purpose in mind, and that's to divest punters of as much money as possible as fast as possible. Competing with the long gleaming row of automatic turnstiles at the station's boundary is a long row of ATM machines just beyond it. Having had opportunity to use one of them in the past, I noticed that they hand out more money than the machines in the rest of Singapore. I suppose fewer trips to the machine means fewer betting opportunities missed.

Usually the area is as quiet as a graveyard but, when my travel schedule coincides with race day, the truth is that I can hardly move in and around the station. The huge paved area that I normally consider obscenely large gets turned into a tightly squeezed ma.s.s of excited humans. People spill in and out of the brightly-lit shops along the short arcade and even the s.p.a.ces along the walls are marked out by hawkers. Unfortunately, such people are not easy to spot until I'm almost on top of them, especially when there's a crowd obscuring my progress.

The budget-price entrepreneurs are usually elderly. The women dress in their Chinese floral pyjama outfits and the men in their white singlets and navy blue shorts. They stake out their s.p.a.ce with a rug or sheet of plastic about a metre deep and a metre and a half long and arrange their knick-knacks on top of it in an orderly fashion. Packs of tissues, wind-up toys, herbal tinctures, small gee-gaws. I've never seen anyone actually stop and buy anything from these grandparents, but they appear like clockwork every race day, so they must be able to make a living somehow. I'm sure that it's actually against the law to sell things from a cheap synthetic blanket on the floor of a public thoroughfare, but if the Singapore government decides to turn a blind eye to the practice, who am I to complain? I have enough gripes about what they do notice.

Tonight was not race day, so the station was its usual eerie quiet. Only three of us got off on the platform and the two young boys in front of me, laughing and still in their high-school uniforms, were energetic enough to make me feel old and jaded. They bounded down the stairs while I took the elevator, listening to the rhythmic whine of each mechanical wheel as it bore me down to the ground floor.

By the time I reached the turnstile the boys were long gone, although I could still hear their good humour receding into the distance. I slapped my card on the access panel, walked around the corner and came across a large food place, its white fluorescent lights obscenely blinding in such stillness. I called it a food place because calling it a restaurant, or even a cafe, would be gracing it with more ambience than it had. It was a place of cheap food on cheap furniture in cheap surroundings. I had pa.s.sed it numerous times without a second glance but tonight was different. My stomach was rumbling and I was still an hour from home.

I looked in through the large windows and noticed that, as usual, the place was three-quarters empty. Dallying for a while with indecision, I finally succ.u.mbed and entered.

The floor was cheap vinyl, blackened at the edges where it met the walls. The few customers already in the shop didn't even look up as I walked to the counter. Behind the stretch of scratched white, the serving woman jerked her head sharply upwards in the universal signal for "what do you want?". She looked tired and angry. I didn't blame her.

After a quick perusal of the menu on the back wall above her head, I ordered a nasi lemak and iced lemon tea, figuring it was a combination that was hard to screw up. The food came while I was still fishing for change and I took my tray to an empty table next to the wall but still close to the counter. From that angle, I could see everyone entering and leaving through the door and even movement at the cash register. Of course if someone decided to climb the gla.s.s display case at my back, they'd be in a great position to ambush me, but I figured they'd slip on the ever-present layer of grease and do themselves an injury before they got within striking distance.

The food, presented in the traditional pyramid of a folded banana leaf, was surprisingly good. The ikan bilis sambal, made from dried anchovies, was the right mixture of hot and sweet. Of course there weren't enough peanuts to accompany the coconut-milk rice (there never are) and the egg was fried. That bothered me because I'm a traditionalist who likes my nasi lemak with a hard-boiled egg, not this quick and dirty fried version but, for a couple of bucks, what could I expect? The iced tea was too astringent, with a bitter after-taste. Either they were using low-quality tea or it had been sitting there for at least half a day. No matter, it filled a hole and meant I didn't have to go scavenging when I got home.

I left my tray on the table after I finished and walked out towards the road. The air was still hot, with little relief from any stray breezes, and there was the ever-present aroma of diesel fumes in the air. The road around Kranji is always busy with buses and lorries plying their route between Singapore and Malaysia, and a lot of the vehicles were not that well maintained, but the smell always made me feel nostalgic. It's the smell of home, a scent that was written into my very psyche during my formative years, just before my parents emigrated to the United Kingdom, taking me with them. I breathed in the smoke. Between the heat, lush greenery and the smell, it somehow felt...right.

It was getting dark fast so I hurried to the tall pedestrian bridge and descended to the far side of the road just in time to catch one of the fuel-belching monsters on its way back across the Causeway. Mine was the last stop in Singapore so it was obvious I wouldn't get a seat. I stood, jammed up against other impa.s.sive workers on their way home, watching the monotonous darkness go by.

There are two points of near-panic during any journey across the Strait, both at the border points. It doesn't matter which way. In this particular case, the first occurred as the bus neared the Singapore Customs & Immigration stop. There are always the craned looks from the pa.s.sengers up front, sizing up how many buses are ahead of theirs and how it will translate to waiting times inside the building.

Sometimes the bus will stop metres away from the platform and people will dash madly from the exits, dodging between scooters and other pedestrians on their way to the checkpoint. On the approach to the Singaporean checkpoint, eagle-eyed officials stand and watch the hordes mill past. Sometimes the guards are accompanied by several German Shepherd dogs straining on the leashes beside them. Everybody is careful not to run if the dogs are there.

I've always wondered why the young men with severe crew-cuts care so much. After all, we're leaving the country. But this is Singapore, so appearances must be maintained. After navigating the concrete pathway, there are the escalators. At least they work, which is more than can be said about the Malaysian side of the border, and we are finally disgorged into a giant processing area.

Despite the number of people wanting to get out of the country, not every Immigration booth is manned. Sometimes the officials like to toy with the crowd, making it appear that they are getting ready to open another aisle. They have their little cases of stamps with them, a clipboard, maybe a binder or two. They approach a vacant booth, stare at it for a few minutes, then move off. The more experienced travellers will shuffle their feet and take furtive looks around, calculating their chances of being first at the new queue, should it open. I've seen old white-haired grandmothers wrestle with the best of them in such a melee. With age comes sharp elbows. And surprising nimbleness. Must be all those tai chi cla.s.ses.

In the meantime, the Immigration official can feel the desperation in the hot air as something tangible, something to feast upon. He or she will cast a bored look around, as if contemplating the architecture, then retreat to a point near one of the far offices. Sometimes this ploy of forward, pace, touch barrier, retreat, can occur several times, an exquisite torture for all those waiting in lines that easily stretch fifty or more individuals long. And while we wait, the buses fill up outside the complex and carry on their journey across the border to the next Customs and Immigration complex, but this time on Malaysian soil.

I had only come to Singapore that night on a hunch, so I wasn't carrying any bags or backpacks with me. That meant that, once I was through the formalities, I could dodge through the workers who were more exhausted than me.

As I reached the top of the queue, I took a look around. Towering above the majority of people were Western tourists, pale and sweating even in their strappy tops, thin t-shirts and cotton shorts. They looked sh.e.l.l-shocked, as if they had been expecting the cool efficiency of Changi airport and had instead got...us. I remained impa.s.sive while the Immigration official checked my pa.s.sport before waving me through.

The air in the transport bays felt even hotter after the feeble air-conditioning in the building, compounded by the smoking exhausts of the idling buses.

I scrambled my way onto the closest one taking pa.s.sengers, flashing my paper ticket at the driver as I boarded, sank onto the nearest seat and headed home.

Want to read more? Read the rest when the book is released in October 2011.

ISBN: 978-0-9871445-0-8.

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