by Alex White
“You got lucky once,” said Aaron. “Surprised them. It won’t happen again.”
“Can I shoot him yet?” growled Orna through Charger’s speakers. “He’s getting annoying.”
“Let us save your life,” said Nilah, motioning for Orna to lower her weapons. “We might be able to arrange protection. Who were you here to meet?”
She raised a hand and tentatively floated closer. Maybe she could talk him down and compel him to help her.
“No. I … I’d be killing everyone I ever loved if I came with you,” said Aaron, shaking his head. His face twisted with something like shame. “I was a Child of the Singularity. Now I’m a liability … so I have to die.”
His face darkened and he pointed his slinger at Nilah. “Just like you.”
“Down!” Orna shouted, and Charger knocked her flat against the floor, pinning her underfoot with its prehensile toes. The bot placed a single devastating shot through Aaron’s chest—and melted the window behind him.
The world went red. Charger held Nilah in place despite the sudden decompression. Klaxons screeched in her ears. Her wig was sucked away, tearing to purple strands as it caught a jagged outcropping. Through the crack into the stars beyond, Aaron Forscythe clutched his chest and struggled against the inevitable. Then, glowing nanotubes healed over the station’s wound, and the crying wind grew higher in pitch before winking out. The air pressure returned to normal.
Emergency responders would be inbound. They had to leave.
“Capricious, this is Hunter Two,” huffed Nilah. “Mission failed. He’s dead, blown out into space.”
“We’re headed for your coordinates. Get to the rendezvous,” said Cordell in her earpiece. “We’ll grab Forscythe’s body before the cops get here.”
Charger hoisted Nilah to her feet and looked her over. “Thought we were finally going to take one of them alive.”
“Yeah, well”—Nilah coughed, staring out the window at the body—“better we get the scraps than nothing.”
“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight.”
Elizabeth “Boots” Elsworth looked over her old companions, nursing her glass of clear, unaged whiskey. The crew of the Capricious had landed in her backyard on Hopper’s Hope, uninvited. Now, Cordell, Armin, Nilah, Orna, Aisha, Malik, and the strange pair of gingers were gathered in the uncomfortably large kitchen of Boots’s obnoxiously huge house; for the first time since Boots had moved into her mansion by the distillery, the place felt full.
She raised her tumbler to the crew, pointing at them with her metal index finger. She’d worked with doctors to upgrade it in the months since they’d seen her, converting it to full regraded steel. It looked a little more human—but not enough. It was nothing like a magical prosthesis. “Two weeks ago, your big plan was to extract this Forscythe character and … force him to talk? From Morrison Station, no less.” She took a long pull of her white dog whiskey and coughed. It was well and truly awful stuff.
Cordell looked just like Boots remembered him—dense black hair in spongy curls, dark skin, and a perpetual sly smile. The old Arca Defense Force captain hadn’t aged a day since the Harrow. “We’ve been catching bagmen for bad guys all across the galaxy, and you know what we find? Million-argent bank accounts. Sometimes two million. Whatever they’re doing, it’s some serious scratch.”
“You keep any of it?” Boots asked into her glass.
“They keep draining the bank accounts as fast as we can kill their foot soldiers,” said Cordell. “Three missions have ended in suicides.”
First mate Armin Vandevere hadn’t changed much either—his dour expression could still wilt a flower. “We have reason to believe Henrick Witts has a massive financial engine at his disposal—some sort of self-replicating system.”
Boots gulped her whiskey a little too hard at the mention of Henrick Witts and coughed. The madman behind the Winnower Fleet and its flagship, the Harrow, had drained all life away from her homeworld, casting it into perpetual civil war.
“And the Children of the … uh?” asked Boots.
“Singularity. We’re looking into Forscythe’s comment with all available intelligence sources,” said Armin. “It looks like a cult, but we’re not sure.”
She cleared her throat and shrugged. “If these Children of the Whatever are cultists, you were never going to get this guy to talk.”
“We absolutely were,” said Cordell, leaning forward with his unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, “because we had something you didn’t figure into your calculations.” He wore the same gold captain’s jacket as usual, and he adjusted the cuffs with a flourish. He might’ve dressed like the veteran of a dead world, but he still swaggered like a cadet.
“That’s where we come in,” said the male ginger, subdued confidence on his face. “We’re here to change the game.”
The pale, freckled pair had to be in their twenties, and Cordell had scarcely introduced them when he’d arrived, just calling them “the Ferrier twins.” They cut their hair in the same short fashion, and Boots had to do double takes to remember which one was the woman and which one was the man.
Boots gave them a bemused glance. “I don’t mean to be rude, but ‘change the game’? Unless you can conjure an armada and unlimited resources from thin air, you’re not changing much.”
The young man froze, silenced by her rebuke. His sister pursed her lips.
Cordell raised an eyebrow. “Really, Bootsie? Be nice. These two still have a twinkle in their eyes. No need to undo all the kind things we been saying about you.”
“She can be a bit spiky,” said Nilah to the twins. She sported the sort of formfitting athletic clothing she always wore, but her muscles filled it out more than they once had. “Don’t worry about it, loves.”
Boots narrowed her eyes and surveyed the crowd. “Never known you to be gentle with tenderfoots, Cordell. What’s the angle?”
“Another time,” said the captain.
“What my brother was trying to say,” said the female twin—Boots was pretty sure that one was “Jeannie”—“is that we both have the reader’s mark.”
“So you’re not siblings?” asked Boots. “Because you can’t be if you have the same spell, right?” She wasn’t an expert in arcane physiology, but she knew that siblings never shared a mark.
The twins exchanged glances.
“We are,” said Jeannie.
Boots narrowed her eyes. “Then … how?”
“That’s not your concern right now,” said the male twin, clearly annoyed with her for shooting holes in his “change the game” bravado.
“Listen, Alan—” said Boots.
“Alister,” he corrected. “And what’s important right now is that we’re both mind readers.”
Boots eyed them warily—these legendary telepaths. A reader never had to resort to torture or bribery. All they had to do was ask simple questions, and the target’s answers would come to the top of their mind—or so the rumors went. The closest Boots had ever come to one was the hack mnemonimancer who’d helped her make Kinnard, her old AI. A true reader was supposed to operate at another level. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Cordell raised his eyebrows, his signature grin widening. “That’s right, Bootsie. We’ve got the tools now.”
She leaned back in her chair. “Okay, but how did you straight-up murder someone and then get off Morrison Station? That’s Nilah’s old stomping ground, and I know how security must be.”
Armin steepled his fingers, leaning back in one of Boots’s overpriced chairs. “That’s where it gets interesting. The Taitutian Special Branch has become … amenable to our extrajudicial operations. After we took down Dwight Mandell, Prime Minister Bianchi cleaned house. Current leadership loves asking us for favors, and they’re willing to turn a blind eye to our activities.”
“Yeah, but they might still be compromised, sir—” Boots said, halting as she accidentally addressed Armin as an officer. She wasn’t a crew member any
more. Judging from Cordell’s chuckle, he was thinking the same thing.
“Look,” said Boots. “We don’t know how deep Henrick Witts’s network goes, or who’s a part of it. You’re trusting intel agencies with your plans.”
She hadn’t said Witts’s name in months, and it was like ash in her mouth.
“We … may have told them after the fact this time. We didn’t want interference,” said Armin. “But the Taitutians came and covered for us in the two weeks since then. The public thinks it’s a suicide, and Forscythe’s body was never found.”
“And the splattered goons in the park?” asked Boots.
“Taken care of,” said Cordell. “That’s all you’ve got to worry about.”
“That’s some dubious reckoning, at best,” said Boots. “They might just squirrel away these murders and have a case against you when they need it. I don’t get much news out here, but I know they could spin a fall from grace story about heroes like us.”
The rest of the crew quieted down, but Cordell pressed on. “I know that, but honestly, we need all the friends we can get.”
“Yeah, you do,” said Boots.
“And we need air support,” added Orna. She was clad in a casual yet fashionable suit, all soft fabrics free of grease stains. Boots almost didn’t recognize her, but her face was still hard as ever, covered in scars. And she still wore a silver circlet for her new battle armor, which she’d dubbed “Charger.” “No one’s taken the Midnight Runner for a walk since you left.”
“Come with us,” said Cordell, just laying it out there. “There’s more cash in it, if that’s your thing. Those bastards are rolling in dough, and we can keep what we find.”
Boots had to admit that she missed the feel of a flight stick in her hand and the thrusters at her back. “I’ve got money, and I barely know what to do with it. You know this is a fool’s errand, right? We nearly wound up dead last time.”
“The job ain’t done, Bootsie,” said Cordell. “Witts and his pals destroyed our planet, and a man who’d do that doesn’t just walk away because we screwed him up once. No one is safe until he’s dead. We’re already prepped to go after the next bagman.” He pulled out his lighter and gave her an expectant look. “If we can catch one of these bastards alive, we can take apart Witts’s funding.”
Boots wanted to tell Cordell to go smoke outside, but the truth was that she didn’t want him to leave. She missed all of them so badly, but she’d be damned if she said so. “They’re going to kill every last one of us,” she said, watching him with disgust as he lit up his smoke.
He exhaled a huge cloud, looking away. “You know … I didn’t even ask how you’ve been doing. Everything okay out here in paradise?”
“Of course you didn’t ask!” said Boots. “You just busted up in my place and destroyed my staging area.”
The captain made with his innocent eyes. “Well, I’m asking now.”
Boots gave him a scowl. “You can’t just change the subject from planet-killing to distilling!”
“The hell I can’t.” He drained his glass and put it in front of her. “Damn, that’s good,” he sighed, obviously lying. “Any chance I can get another?”
She filled his tumbler and, in her quest to calm her nerves, poured herself another, too. She added some sugar and a crushed basil leaf in an effort to wipe away the mouth-incinerating taste, but it did little.
“Come on, Boots,” he said. “We can talk business soon enough.”
He always did that when she got too gloomy—tried to distract her with chitchat. It didn’t help that she wanted to share the details of her new life with them. Before long, the rest of the crew asked for seconds, even Nilah. Boots had never seen her tipsy and hoped it’d be funny.
Boots told them of her new hires, the bums who manned the distillery, and of the easy life on Hopper’s Hope. She told them how she didn’t know how to spend her money, and how she’d given a bunch away to the various veterans’ memorial funds. Her house was too large and too luxurious for her tastes. She asked Cordell about Silas and some of the other Fallen refugees from Gantry Station, and learned that Silas had beaten a man for insulting Boots in the Widow’s Watch. They’d put her portrait up on the wall, and some folks had taken to saluting it.
They’d even put up a portrait of Kinnard, to commemorate the human voice of Boots’s lost AI. It’d been just as much a part of that mission as anyone.
Boots tried to muster some saltiness at Silas, the idea of him touting her glory after years of antagonism, but it touched her. The Fallen had found a measure of closure in her actions.
Her speech became slurred as the night wore on. She belted out a rendition of Arca’s national anthem with Cordell, Doctor Malik Jan, and Armin. Nilah and Orna started making out in the corner, suffused by the pink light of dermaluxes. Armin tried to explain his datamancy to Boots, saying it was “no big deal, anyone with the mark can do it.” Aisha Jan, the ship’s pilot, said little until Alister bet her twenty argents that her marksman’s magic wouldn’t work while intoxicated. Jeannie begged Boots to stop them, but Boots wanted to know as badly as Alister. The rest of the night turned into Aisha casting spells and throwing knives while piss drunk. Malik fell asleep on a couch, his glass still in his hand. The ship’s doctor may have possessed powerful sleep magic, but he had no trouble napping without it.
Seeing the crew of the Capricious lose all sense of decorum or orientation got Boots thinking about all the Arcan crews that had come before. She had her favorites. There was Pete Masters, who could whistle so loud the cargo bay would ring; he’d been transferred, and she never saw him again. There was Anna Fenton, who’d convinced Cordell to let her keep a dog on the ship; she’d kicked the bucket on a resupply mission, and the dog got lost shortly after. Some of those crew members had been happy. Plenty were dead. The ghosts of people she’d tried to forget came riding in on the memories of ship life, and old fears mixed inside her stomach with the whiskey. No one had mentioned Didier yet. Kinnard was just a portrait now, hung on the wall of a dried-up bar in Gantry Station.
Why did she always end up hanging around a bunch of fools?
“Don’t know why you want to team up with the Taitutian Special Branch, Cordell,” Boots said, rising to her feet, attempting to keep her level of intoxication a secret. “Bastards never gave me back my computer. Bunch of lying double-crossers, I bet. I want Kin back.”
The party stopped.
“I miss Kin,” she added before sipping from her glass.
Nilah put a hand on her shoulder, concern in her eyes. “Boots …”
Of course Boots had ruined the vibe. She’d always been the exact opposite of fun.
“I’m …” she mumbled. “I’m going to bed. Y’all are free to sleep where you can find a spot. It’s a mansion. Beds and crap everywhere.”
Then she hobbled off into the darkness of her house, cursing every wall she fell against.
A distant snore roused Boots from her slumber, and she pulled the sheets tight around her shoulders. Her head swam from the white dog, so she was still a ways away from a hangover. Most nights, she found it difficult to sleep on such soft bedclothes—the ones made from rare fibers. Those were for rich people, and Boots sucked at being rich.
She shouldn’t have gotten wasted on her own supply. She needed to bottle it one day, and Kinnard’s Way was far from mature enough for copious consumption. Most nights, she’d taken to downing a quarter of Flemmlian Ten just to get some sleep.
Hadn’t this been the dream: get money and cash out? Her room was too big, sprawling overhead with intricate designs of stars and nebulae. The furniture was too nice, lacking the dents and dings that had always marked her things. The architect had called her house “Cozy, for its size” and encouraged her to spend more money decorating the place, but Boots had gotten accustomed to living in a garbage studio apartment, a crew bunk, a cockpit … and this mansion made her skin crawl.
At least she had some nice paper archives at th
e house—not that she had to sell legends anymore. There had been a time when every scrap of paper, every old auction note, every invoice, every report had represented a piece of her livelihood. Those papers had been the seeds of lies and the keys to selling salvage maps. Even after accumulating her wealth, Boots hadn’t broken the habit of snapping up any old records she could find. She’d built herself an archive and taken to searching for the clues to lost treasures. She hadn’t stumbled upon any great finds, but there was bound to be more out there for her.
She’d told herself not to let Cordell and his clowns inside her home. He hadn’t come there to visit, and both of them knew it. He just wanted to recruit her so he could fill out his roster. But then, he could’ve gotten any jackass fighter jockey; why choose her?
Boots swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, maybe a little too quickly. The room spun, and she felt the familiar cold sweat of sickness bead up on her forehead and upper lip.
“Ai, open the windows,” she grunted.
“Yes, ma’am,” came the voice of “Ai,” the AI, its vocalization lacking any personality or identifying characteristics.
Boots couldn’t envision what Ai would look like as a person—not male or female, not old or young. She hadn’t even given it a real name. She couldn’t bear to, after what’d happened to Kin.
The floor-to-ceiling windows slid open. A gentle breeze wafted into the room, and her gauzy curtains danced in the moonlight like ghosts.
“Ai, water.”
It dinged an acknowledgment, and a recess on her dressing table slid open, a glass of cold water ready and waiting. Boots took it, drained the contents, and replaced it, where it disappeared into the cycler. Then she stepped out onto her back porch into the fresh night of Hopper’s Hope.
The twin moons of her planet shone brightly overhead, washing everything in their thin light. Grasshoppers sang their chirping love songs to the stars. Green waves of rye undulated before her in all directions like an ocean, and she sighed. This, and the hard work of running a still, were the only parts of her new life that gave her peace. A shack, a tractor, a still, and a warehouse would’ve done the trick—no need for a fancy mansion. The fields were enough: all that green food, healthy and perfect. It was as far as she could get from the dusty world that almost killed her.
