I gave up after that. I disliked looking unkempt in front of an officer, but I was already all the way down here, and the captain wasn’t going to mind a little bit of dirt. Still, once I was done knocking, I moved my hands out of sight when the door opened and Caldswell stuck his head out.
“Morris?”
“Sir,” I said, standing at attention. “I have the first candidates for you to look at.”
The captain’s look brightened at once. “Let me see.”
I’d already sent the applications to his com, so we stood together in his door while he looked them over. In the end, he approved the whole lot, and I left to make my callbacks feeling infinitely better than when I’d arrived. There was no way the cook was going to poison the captain against me now, not that he’d had any luck before. Asshole.
It might have been childish, but that thought made me grin as I jogged back upstairs to wash the gunk off my hands. By the time I reached the bathroom, though, the black stuff was gone. I stared at my clean fingers in confusion for a moment, then I shrugged and headed back to my bunk to make my calls, whistling as I stepped around the Terran crew who were hard at work prying the bullets out of the hall ceiling.
CHAPTER 2
The repairs to the ship were due to be finished tomorrow afternoon, so I’d set all our interviews up for that morning. It was short notice, but that was the standard run for armor jobs, and considering the positive response I’d gotten from my callbacks, I had a good feeling about this. At nine sharp, I walked into the lounge suited up and ready to roll. As had become my habit, the first thing I did was glance around for the cook so I could plan where to sit accordingly, but the kitchen was empty. So was the couch. The cook and the captain’s daughter must be downstairs, I realized with a relieved sigh.
Caldswell was there, already seated and waiting for me at the table. He did not look happy, though, and my good feeling began to sour. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Caldswell said. “That’s the problem. There are only five people in the cargo bay.” He glanced at the clock. “This might be a short session.”
“Five?” I cried. I’d confirmed interviews for seventeen applicants yesterday. One or two dropping out was expected, but twelve was just ridiculous. “I guess your reputation preceded you,” I grumbled.
“More likely your accent scared them off,” Caldswell replied drolly.
I rolled my eyes and walked out to see what we had left.
It was slim pickings. Of the seventeen candidates I’d called, only the dregs had bothered to show. We had two idiots in rental armor who, despite what they’d told me over the com, had clearly never been outside of the central Terran systems, and one kid whose “combat experience” turned out to be a medical discharge from Republic Starfleet boot camp. The fourth was a veteran with a solid record I’d had high hopes for, but I could smell the alcohol on her as soon as she came up the stairs, and I didn’t even look at Caldswell before I declined her.
Thankfully, the fifth and final applicant looked like a winner. According to his résumé he’d been in the Terran Army for five years as a gunner before moving into private contract work. We didn’t really need a gunner since Mabel did all our ship-to-ship shooting, but he had some armor experience as well. Of course, by this point I was ready to take anyone who wasn’t a liar or a drunk, but when I stuck my head out the lounge door and peered down into the freshly repaired cargo bay, the man who peered back up at me wasn’t the one pictured on the application.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“I’m here about the job,” the man answered.
I scowled. The man standing at the base of the cargo bay stairs was thin and dark skinned with thick, curling black hair going gray at the top and brown, laughing eyes that made him look like he was smiling even when he wasn’t. He was older, fifty maybe, but he carried himself like he knew what he was doing, and the gun case strapped across his back looked sleek and expensive. Unlike the others, who’d been almost impossible to understand through their heavy Wuxian accents, this man spoke perfect Universal. He also bore no resemblance to any of the pictures on the applications I’d set aside yesterday afternoon.
“This is a closed interview,” I said. “We’re not talking walk-ins.”
The man looked around at the empty cargo bay. “But it seems I am the only one left,” he said. “If the position is not yet filled, surely it would be no trouble to look at my credentials at least?”
My eyes went back to the expensive gun case. “Come on up.”
The man gave me a close-lipped smile and trotted up the stairs. I showed him to the interview chair and took a seat at the table beside Caldswell.
“My name is Keno Rashid,” the man said.
“Brian Caldswell,” the captain replied, holding out his hand. Rashid shook it and then looked at me, but I shook my head.
“Not wise to shake hands with someone in armor,” I cautioned. “I could sneeze and break something. I’m Deviana Morris, head of security for the Glorious Fool.”
Caldswell arched an eyebrow at that, but he didn’t say anything. Not that he could. Way I saw it, if I was doing the hiring as well as all the work, that made me the boss, and the earlier you established rank, the easier it was to keep it. Terran mercs might not be as pushy as Paradoxians, but that didn’t mean I was going to waste time laying down the rules twice.
“A Paradoxian head of security,” Rashid said, eying my armor appreciatively. “In a Verdemont suit, no less. I like this job better and better.”
My opinion of him shot up several notches, but I refused to let it show. If the captain found out I could be won over by anyone who knew his armor, he’d never trust my judgment again. But when Rashid set his handset on the table and pulled up his résumé, my opinion only rose higher.
The man’s work history read like a military thriller. He’d been in the Republic Starfleet as a combat ops sniper for twelve years before moving on to the Free Guards, the Terran mercenary unit that was the Blackbirds’ primary competition. Before that, he’d worked security on a mining station in the K5 asteroid belt, which was about the most dangerous job I could think of. The running gag in the Blackbirds was that the reason the belt was named K5 was because you ran into five thousand pirates every time you went through. If this man had survived three years as guard in that, life on the Fool would seem almost dull.
Best of all, though, was his equipment. We’d advertised this as an armored position, which usually meant a heavy suit of some sort, but Rashid was packing what the Terrans call tactical armor. I called it padded clothes, but it was an intriguing setup nonetheless.
His “suit” was a steel woven polymer lined with ballistic gel instead of plates. It wouldn’t stop an ax, but it was light, mostly bulletproof, and extremely nimble, especially with the reaction net added in. Since it didn’t have a real motor or strength augs, the whole thing only weighed about twenty pounds and rolled up small enough to fit in a small duffel, which in my mind put it miles above the hulking idiot boxes Terrans had the nerve to call heavy armor. But interesting as his armor was, what really sealed the deal for me were Rashid’s guns.
The sleek, expensive case I’d admired earlier was only the beginning. He had four guns in total, starting with a gleaming 5000 Series Jakob’s sniper rifle so modded I didn’t think a single piece of the original hardware remained. Next he showed us his two pistols, a heavy Republic Army slugger that was nearly as customized as my Sasha and a cannon of an energy weapon I didn’t recognize.
“It’s called a disrupter pistol,” Rashid said when I asked him about it, hefting the big handgun with practiced ease. “And I’m not surprised you haven’t seen one before. They used to be the standard anti-xith’cal weapon for the Republic a few decades ago, but they’re not used much these days.”
My ears pricked up. “Anti-xith’cal? How so?”
Rashid smiled and turned the pistol so I could see the two-notch meter on its side. “It’s a heat weapon. Since xith’cal scales are about as easy to shoot through as a ship hull, the idea was to cook them from the inside. Highly accurate and destructive, especially against lizards.”
I stared at the gun in his hands. I’d never even heard of a weapon like that, but now that I’d seen it, I wanted one in the worst way. “Why isn’t everyone using them?”
“Because they’ve only got two shots,” Caldswell said. I glanced at the captain, but he wasn’t even looking. He was still studying Rashid’s résumé, paging through the projected screen thrown up from the merc’s handset with his thumb.
“Two shots?” I said, dismayed. “Why?”
“It takes a prohibitive amount of energy to cook a xith’cal warrior,” Rashid answered. “Far too much for a sidearm. Two shots are all the battery can manage before the gun needs to recharge.”
I sighed. So much for my gun lust. A weapon that could down a lizard in one hit without lining up a head shot was amazing, but with such a small clip, it was practically useless. In my experience, xith’cal came in tens, not twos. “Why bother carrying it, then?”
“Habit and sentimentality,” Rashid said as he carefully returned the disrupter pistol to its nook. “It has saved my life enough times that I’m willing to overlook its eccentricities. We are both of us old guns, after all.”
Considering that I would probably hold a funeral when Sasha broke, I couldn’t argue with that logic. Rashid’s final gun was an automatic assault rifle he claimed was for crowd work. I approved of any merc who used the term “crowd work,” and by the time we’d moved to his weapon repair kit, a five-tiered behemoth that made my rack look like a toy, I was ready to hire him on the spot.
“You seem to have a gap in your work history,” Caldswell said, flicking back to the beginning of Rashid’s résumé. “You left active duty with the Free Guards five years ago but stayed on as a special agent and consultant. Then, three years ago, you quit your consultancy contract without notice. According to your record, you haven’t had a job since. Why is that? What were you doing these last three years?”
“Taking care of a family emergency,” Rashid said calmly. “But I think you’ll find my qualifications are still up to date.”
Caldswell nodded, waiting for more, but Rashid just smiled. I was about to ask if he wanted to do a combat test when Caldswell suddenly stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Rashid,” he said. “Would you mind waiting outside?”
Rashid’s smile didn’t waver. “Certainly sir,” he said, standing in a graceful motion. “I will be happy to wait while you discuss my employment.”
Caldswell smiled back, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He didn’t say anything else until the lounge door was closed and Rashid’s footsteps had vanished down the cargo bay stairs.
“Well, seems like we have a winner,” I said. “Clearly experienced, fantastic equipment, doesn’t seem crazy. If he had a real suit of armor to go with those guns, I’d call him a gift from the king.”
“I don’t like the gap in his history,” the captain said, scratching the stubble on his chin. “And I don’t like how much better he is than everyone else. It seems too convenient.”
“A family emergency isn’t the same as running off to be a pirate,” I pointed out. “And with all due respect, sir, perhaps you’ve gotten a little too used to bad luck. We’re in desperate need of another security officer, and you’re looking to reject the best candidate because he’s too good?”
The captain glared at me, but I held my ground. I couldn’t take another round of double shifts like the one I’d done from Falcon 34, and even though hiring a light suit meant I’d be doing the frontline work, Rashid looked like exactly the sort of teammate I loved working with: experienced, polite, and he clearly took great pride and care in his equipment, the surest sign of a true professional. It was wrong to speak ill of the dead, but after three months of dealing with a skullhead like Cotter and all the dominance bullshit that went with it, working with a career soldier who could be trusted to do his job and not make a fight out of every order sounded almost like a vacation.