Outrageous Fortune
Chapter 1
A tone chimed in my ear just as I started on my third beer. They had a really excellent Mexican beer on tap at Jimmy’s Number Five, with a sweet start and a spicy, hoppy finish. An indicator in my deep right-hand peripheral showed an incoming call from Ray-Ray, so I took it right away. When one is verging on broke, one does not refuse calls from the guy that finds one jobs.
I pulled the Airware commlink off of my belt and set it on the counter, activating the trideo phone feature. “Tell me you’ve got something for me, Ray,” I said by way of greeting.
Ray Ray’s face always looked like he’d just accidentally eaten a bug. It very nearly put me off my beer, filling up most of the field of vision on my image-linked lenses. I zoomed the window out - way out - and Ray’s picture soon rested comfortably to one side of the news I was half-watching on the screen behind the bar.
“How’s your Mandarin, greenskin?” he asked. Ray was an equal opportunity offender, as likely to call an ork like me ‘trog’ as he was to call a dwarf ‘halfer’ or to find fault with a human for their gender, skin tone, or perceived sexual orientation. I swallowed my irritation, and hoped that the gig paid well enough to warrant putting up with him. Again.
“Right now?” I asked, rhetorically. “Terrible. But I got a ‘soft that’ll help some. Who’s the Johnson?” I figured I had a good idea, but sometimes Ray Ray would catch me off guard.
“Name’s Kwang Lu, works for the Golden Triangle Triad,” he said, confirming the general direction of my suspicions. “No more details than that, but they need both muscle and brains. I couldn’t find either, so I rang you up.”
Not waiting for me to laugh at his stale joke, or even agree to take the job, a new window opened with a comm ID and a blurred still of the Asian man I was supposed to make contact with, a chronograph counter showing that I had about ninety minutes before I was scheduled to meet him, at the Orchid of Outrageous Fortune up in Boulder, in the PCC.
“This better pay out, Ray. My barstool is awfully comfortable, and crossing borders in this town ain’t exactly a picnic.”
He gave me what I’m sure he thought was a reassuring smile, but came across as a rictus grin. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised,” was all he said before he broke the connection.
Now, I’m not so old fashioned as to eschew augmentation - in this day and age, with people putting whole ‘links into their skulls, and the kids coming up who can use their own hypothalamus as wireless antennae or however it is they do it, you can’t afford to forgo an edge - but I liked to keep things simple, and to be able to purge out whatever data I wasn’t using when it had lost it’s utility.
So I spent my last few minutes at Jimmy’s multitasking. I slotted a linguasoft that promised to give me facility with half a dozen Chinese variations. Funny thing about ‘softs like that one is that they work on a bunch of neural connections right into your brain, so sometimes they have interesting side effects. In this case, I suddenly smelled lilacs, and had a brief but vivid memory of my third grade teacher. Weird.
After I had my languages all sorted, I set an agent to pulling down every bit of data I could find on this Triad who wanted to hire me and my people. And I pinged the rest of the team with the news that we had a potential gig, with the location and time of the meet.
Oh, and I polished off that third beer.