“For all the Canelian Ale, Liam,” I said, “you must have been hitting the heavy stuff hard to seriously go for this. There are kindergarten classes who use maps like that to keep the infants busy. Every living and breathing being on the system has seen one of those and I never heard any of them paid or been paid for one of them. You get them for free with a portion of green beans in the local, man.”
“No?” He said looking sly. “Perhaps they never had the right one or they never looked in the right place for the right one. You know where this is?” He pointed at the map.
“Liam, what you show me might be round the corner, the far side galaxy, outside the system or in Up Nebula for all I know.”
“If you knew what Medium this was,” he pointed at the map again, “could you read it then?”
“I might,” I said more out of curiosity to hear his arguments than anything else. “If I knew the Medium and the close by molecular stands. And if this isn’t too old, the space changes Liam, you know that.”
“But not that much,” he said somehow surprisingly comfortably. “If I can take you to the exact Medium and molecular stands, can you work it out from there?”
“I might,” I said carefully, “It depends on how it’s changed.”
“That’s all I want to know,” A new Liam was emerging, a more good-old-days Liam. “Let me buy our next drinks,” he said and nodded to somebody I could not see.
“You better hold on a while,” I said. “All this has been just talk. Suppose I could find the place. I’m not going back t the Nebula and let myself eaten by the gangs, aliens or get jammed by the flats like an idiot falling into a treasure hunt con.”
“Jon, Jon, Jon.” He leaned back and started to purr. “That’s just it. This ain’t a treasure hunt con. You think I’m the kind of guy what falls for that kind of stuff?”
I wanted to say yes but I let it go by.
He leaned over confidentially. “This isn’t any smugglers treasure, Jon. This is the stuff that makes you mythically rich and it has a dead man’s pitcher on it.”
“And nobody has seen this map before?” And how the hell found its way where you think it is?”
He sat back and got cunning again. “You will never guess in a million years…”
“I’m not going to guess,” I snapped. “But you are going to tell me Jon.”
“sure. Sure Jon. I’m going to tell you.”
But there was something I wanted to know first. “Why me, Liam? If you knew where it is why not go yourself to get it? And did you know that I was going to be here, at Broker’s tonight?”
“I don’t know the damn Nebula, Jon. Period. And I don’t know how to fly inside a Nebula, Jon. And I didn’t know that you will be here tonight. I was hoping you will be, you’ve been seen around. And it might takes two to find the damn thing.”
There might be an explanation here. “There is somebody else, Liam. It isn’t just waiting there to be found, is it Liam? There is somebody sniffing around it or sitting on it, Liam.” I was feeling angry and irritated.
“Maybe.”
“That means we have to take it away from somebody?”
“That’s the way things are sometimes, Jon.”
“And if this guy or whatever it is, doesn’t want to give it?”
He just sat there and looked at me and let me think about it myself. I did. The more I thought about it the less I liked it.
“I don’t want any more fights and I definitely don’t want to put somebody down,” I said in a voice full of anger.
“Hell, Jon, you were in the army man.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah? And a million credits is different. Hell, you knock off guys you never even saw before, guys you got no beef with, and you did it for dimes and duty, and now you start talking like a dustgas. “Who’s the guy, Liam?”
“It’s …hell, you know the guy, Jon.”
“Who?” I almost shouted.
“Cold T’Jinj, Jon.”
Read all Blood Bayou chapters in order, HERE!
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