Page 7 of Spark Transform

No one with even one working brain cell crossed Director Kooga. The huge ex-Jumper and determined madwoman ran the soup kitchen with tireless compassion. She didn’t tolerate violence in her house and enforced the galactic peace with naked cybernetic fists enhanced with sharp incalloy spikes.

It wasn’t until he hung his coat in the closet that he noticed his wristcomp blinking with the pattern that meant someone had pinged him. Only four people in the galaxy had his ping ref, and three of them had no reason to ping him that evening.

He waited until after midnight to read the message, after he’d pushed the ancient cleaning bot into its rack and folded the empty delivery crates for reuse. He selected the least objectionable mealpack and ate it quickly, leaning against the wall and keeping one eye on the crowd.

The message said the annoying red angel wanted to talk to him about a job.

He had his own plans now and refused to be a tool again. If this was the purpose the universe had saved him for, he planned to tell it to fuck off.

But, he grudgingly admitted, he owed it to the red angel to listen before telling her the same.

Chapter 4

Planet: Mabingion • GDAT 3242.189

Gezi Wutala lifted the hem of her cloak as she carefully picked her way through the debris to the center of the narrow, thick-walled building. She tracked the path the accelerant had left. Sodding amateurs.

But good news for her, because it meant that under the soot and slagged fixtures, the bones of the building were sound. The burned caustic chemical stench was strong enough to get past her nasal filters, but a new fireproof interior coating would cure that problem.

She nudged aside a loose block of melted glass with her booted foot. “Any trouble with the ownership registry?”

“No,” said Khenzan as he trailed close behind her. “Usual fee, usual tip, no questions.” Her deputy chief’s stunning intersex beauty distracted people into thinking he was an attention-addicted, dimwitted joytoy. Maleness was his latest identity experiment.

“Good.” Despite her carefully nurtured reputation for enjoying a fight, she preferred things to run smoothly.

Five people stood near the door. The two enforcers watched for trouble. Gezi was telepath-immune, but her enforcer-shielders could bottle up any asshole minders with other talents who wanted to start something.

She turned to her two new prospective employees. “How soon can we be up and running?”

The tall laboratory manager shrugged. “Assuming nothing exotic, we can start production in three weeks, give or take.” He waved toward the mess. “Two days for demolition and infrastructure tie-in, a ten-day to get supplies and the equipment installed and calibrated, and a week of test runs.”

The short chemist crossed her arms. “That’s if you have production-ready formulas. If we have to refine them, that’s a longer path.” Her clear privacy mask gave her face the look of a crystalline doll.

Gezi flicked a look at Khenzan, who twitched one eye twice. She turned to the pair. “It’s an Iaslogirepan Salidyo XM3 reverse.”

A disgruntled expression settled on the tall lab manager’s face. “Better add a ten-day to the ramp-up. You’ll need supernova security. Kensabanakan Pharma is ruthless. They’ll hunt you down and send mercs to frag the lab. Especially for a hot new minder drug they just sold to the CPS.”

The short chemist smiled for the first time. “He’s right, but if your formula is legit and we skim the market before K-Pharm’s mercs or the CPS auditors find us, we’ll make a flux-load of profit.”

Gezi smiled back, happy to have confirmed the chemist’s prime motivator. “That’s the idea.”

Gezi hung her bulky gray rain cloak on the hook by the office’s main door and toed on the solardry. Pain in the ass to wear, but the cloak’s built-in tech suppressors and distortion hood had warded off trouble more than once.

Khenzan followed her in and shed his similar cloak. “I hate this thing. Too heavy.”

She laughed. “You mean it’s too concealing.”

He stroked his hands down his small breasts to his gently rounded stomach that accentuated his flared hips. “I paid a lot for this gender-plus makeover. Something for everyone. People deserve to see it.” He frowned at the damp, muddy hems of his pant legs. “I still don’t know why we had to go out in the rain to another filthy, gutted warehouse full of dead rats and roaches. We already vetted the candidates.”

She wouldn’t have tolerated the implied criticism from anyone else in her crew, but she and Khenzan had come up together decades ago from the same joyhouse. She loved him like the sibling she should have had, not the older brother who’d sold her to a sodding twist house when she was six. “New lines of business demand hands-on attention.”

The first lab was doing surprisingly well. When the first flush of leaked Minder Corps veteran health data hit the nets a couple of seasons ago, she’d been struck by the high percentage of minders still using the drugs long after they left the CPS. It made sense that the pharmas made them addictive; that was just smart business practice.

But she’d discovered a lucrative market in selling antidotes to veterans — and, surprisingly, active-duty Minder Corps — who wanted off the enhancers. They’d pay five to ten times the street value of the minder drugs themselves. She’d chosen a reverse of an older minder drug with relatively low sales volume so her crew could learn by splashing in the shallows before swimming with the sharks.

Ordinarily, she’d have ramped up slowly, but the new reverse formula had fallen into her lap in lieu of payment of a heavy debt. Besides, the local economy was sinking like a weighted corpse in the Shoruz swamp, despite the barrage of “glitter days ahead” ratshit the city government kept spinning.

“Hands-on attention?” Khenzan’s mouth and eyebrow quirked sardonically. “Like you did with the military surplus business?” He kicked off his boots onto the solardry and stripped off the rest of his clothes. The near-transparent iridescent kaftan he pulled on showed off his perfectly sculpted shape.