The day after the attack on Arkial’s stasis chamber they returned to Wahib's Cantina, skirting the promenade and traveling by narrow alleys and leaving Olivia at the Phoenix of Hamura, charged with guarding the ship and their stasis-bound client while her foot injury healed. The injury was superficial, a glancing shot that left a lot of blood but little damage, and after some debate they had decided to use one of the three rapid-regen kits that came with the ship. These were expensive and they doubted they would be able to replace them soon, but given the circumstances they wanted Olivia ready to defend the ship as soon as possible. Dr. Delecta judged she would be functional again by evening if nothing went wrong.

  They wanted to spend a little time at Wahib's looking for leads for work, and they also wanted to scan for rumours of missing bounty hunters. This plan soon fell apart when Siladan managed to insult a grieving pilgrim by suggesting that his home system's mourning pilgrimage was a manufactured culture that was "not even 30 years old, and how could you possibly subject your family's memory to such a travesty? I'm fascinated by your culture's plasticity!" After Al Hamra had dragged them out of that brewing fight they retired to a private room, where they sat nursing kohol and Siladan’s bruised ego until a man sidled in to join them.

  “Salaam,” he greeted them with the traditional greeting of the Firstcome. “I heard you are looking for small work on the station, I hope I am not intruding …?”

  “Lanbik,” Al Hamra replied, giving him the expected response. “You may have come to the right place.” He gestured to the others and Adam appeared from the shadows of the private room with a basic plastic station chair, which the man took readily. Someone else slid him a small glass of kohol, and he seemed to release a wave of nervous energy immediately with a large sigh.

  “My thanks, my thanks,” he offered as he sipped the kohol. Now that he sat closer to them in the light of the table’s central lamp they could see that his left eye was cybernetic, robotic and expressionless though embedded in the socket with precision and grace. It lent a slight air of menace to an otherwise gentle-looking, middle-aged man with greying hair and moustache, who had lent his cane against the table as he sat down and now reclined in his chair, raising the kohol glass with one hand while he smoothed down a well-cut black djellaba with the other. As he introduced himself he took off a small red fez and laid it in his lap, looking around the table with his slightly unnerving cybernetic eye. “My name is Merez Alcan,” he began. “I heard from Wahib’s girl that you have an archaeologist amongst you. Insh’Ayquna, you can help me find what I am missing.”

  “Archaeology?” Siladan asked, leaning forward urgently with a tight expression. “You want us to dig for something?”

  “No no, not dig!” The old man replied, cyber-eye darting to Al Hamra as the captain gently pushed the eager archaeologist back in his seat. “Strictly Stationary work,” he added, using the standard term for affairs on the orbital. “I am seeking to buy an artifact from a young researcher who has returned from a dig on Kua, but he has disappeared. I need some enterprising people to find him, and convince him to sell the artifact to me.”

  “Why would he be in hiding?” Saqr asked, her diminutive form almost invisible at the far end of the table. “Is there a complication we should know about?” The others nodded at this question, and Al Hamra gave Merez a stern look.

  “Well…” Merez paused for a moment, as if contemplating hiding something. “I do not know for sure, but he is quite a young man, and he should not freely be in possession of the artifact. I suspect he has absconded from one of the dig sites on Kua with a liberated artifact, perhaps foolishly thinking he can sell it easily. But nobody on Artifact Alley was willing to deal with him, and perhaps his former employers are now looking for him, so he has gone to ground.” He sighed. “The temptation of these things can be too great, can it not?” He asked rhetorically, giving Siladan a level look.

  “What was the artifact?” Siladan asked, ignoring the insinutation.

  “Nothing so formidable, but valuable nonetheless. It is a Firstcome statuette of the Dancer, in the incarnation of the Shadow Monkey. Hideous, but valuable to collectors nonetheless.”

  “The Shadow Monkey?” Siladan repeated. “That incarnation fell out of favour centuries ago! It must be a very early Firstcome relic, worth a small fortune!” His eyes lit up with excitement as the topic of his banned research came to the fore.

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  “Sadly no,” Merez replied. “I wish it were so. It is, as you say, an early impression of the Dancer, but not a very high quality production, worn with age and offering no new insights into the early cults of the Icons. Of interest to collectors only, sadly, and of little benefit to scholarship more broadly.”

  “And so you have no qualms about adding it to your personal collection?” Dr. Delecta put in, her interjection drawing a sharp flick of his cybernetic eye.

  “Indeed, Sahiba. It is surprisingly common for early career scholars to get carried away by their love of the work and to steal an artifact. Career-ending for them if they are caught, but in this case of almost no importance to the Academy. I would rather help him out of his predicament, and ensure that the statuette ends up secure in someone’s private collection, than see his career ruined for a shoddy likeness of the Dancer that will gather dust in the Academy’s vaults without ever adding anything to our knowledge of the early years of the Firstcome.” He tilted his head toward her in a slightly conspiratorial way. “Do you not agree, Sahiba, that young indiscretions should not be punished in life-altering ways?”

  Delecta blushed slightly and leaned back from the table, waving her hand dismissively in Al Hamra’s direction. “And the fee?” The captain asked, taking her gesture as approval to seal the deal. “Who is this boy, and do you have clues to his whereabouts?”

  “I will pay you 5000 birr when I successfully obtain the artifact,” Merez told them, as they struggled to keep their expressions blank. That amount was a large part of their monthly repayments on the Phoenix of Hamura, and certainly enough to outfit and fuel it ready for passengers and missions. An excellent hourly rate if they could find their target quickly. “The man I seek is called Lavim Tamm. I have a brief description of him and a security camera photo here,” he slid a small tag along the table towards Al Hamra, “And I have already spoken to a few people on Archaeology Alley who provided me these details. I have heard that he has something of a passion for Miran Fire Kohol, and he has been seen at least once around the Spice Plaza. These details might help you track him down.”

  Al Hamra did not even need to look around at his team to know they were in. They raised glasses to toast the agreement, and as soon as the formalities were over and Merez was out the door they set off for the Spice Plaza.

  The Spice Plaza was bustling chaos when they arrived, thronged with stalls selling spices, flavourings and delicacies from across the entire expanse of the Third Horizon. Merchants stood in front of their stalls yelling and calling to passing customers, bragging of the quality of their wares, and a million different sweets and coffees and brews of Kohol were thrust under their noses as they wandered the narrow lanes of the souk. In the mayhem they had no chance of finding Lavim Tamm, but they did discover that there was a specialist Miran Fire Kohol cafe called the White Tugur, run by a woman called Jasina and fashioned after the tugur itself, a kind of six-legged feline-like hunter found in the wastes of a planet in the Algol system, famous for its size and ferocity. Seeing few other leads, they headed for the bar.

  The White Tugur was built in the shape of a tugur, with the bar in the head and comfortable reclining seats arranged around the inside walls of the torso. It was high above the spice plaza, where the spice dust rose slowly on gentle currents of warm air from the shops below, to hang in lazy spirals and slow dancing clouds of multi-coloured fragrant haze in the air outside the windows of the bar. Lights from above and below the plaza pierced the haze, casting rainbow streaks across the spice haze outside the windows. They sat on a bench looking out over the distant riot of the plaza, breathing in all the smells of the Horizon and nursing their Miran Fire Kohol, the kind of moment that Zenithian songs brag will make even the most gravity-bound of Firstcome traditionalists fall in love with the bustling, vibrant, multicultural beauty of Coriolis station. Baklava, Miran Fire Kohol in a delicate rose-water mix, incense, the distant sound of the bustle of the greatest space station in the Third Horizon, the spice haze ... a perfect way to spend an early afternoon in space.

  But they had work to do. They broke their reverie to ask Jasina questions, and with a little inducement the loquacious owner was soon convinced to tell them what they needed to know. Lavim Tamm was lying low, terrified of something, and could be found at the Quiet Eunuch, a guesthouse in a seedy sector of the promenade. In truth she worried about him and, sensing perhaps something trustworthy in Adam’s strong, quiet manner and Dr. Delecta’s reassuring aura of high class authenticity, she asked if they could perhaps visit him there and find out what so terrified him?

  They thanked her, finished their Kohol, and gathered their things. Somehow this mission had turned sour, and something was in the air. “Could someone else be after it?” Siladan wondered as they took an elevator to the plaza.

  “Unless it’s his former boss, wouldn’t he just offer to sell it to them?” Saqr suggested. “Unless his former boss is a lot more dangerous than the old man was letting on.”

  “If it’s of value to a cult and he didn’t realize, I guess he could cause some trouble,” Siladan mused. “But the cults don’t have a strong presence on Coriolis station, and how would they know anyway?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Al Hamra said as they stepped into the Spice Plaza tube station. “Let’s visit the Quiet Eunuch and have a word with our scholar-thief. All questions are answered if you use the right tone.”

  A tube carriage hissed into the station and they stepped on. Time to explore Coriolis station.