by Alex White
She leaned against the faux stone railing, letting it pull the intoxicated heat from her body. She almost jumped out of her skin when the double doors in the room next to hers opened and Nilah stepped out, wearing one of the guest sets of pajamas—some striped linen threads that’d come with the house.
Boots smirked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so frumpy.”
“These are Beton Chic, Boots,” said Nilah, obviously impressed. “That’s a nice label.”
“Keep them. I don’t get many guests out here anyway.”
Nilah came and stood beside her, both of them barefoot, leaning against the railing. They listened to the whispering crops, the soft snoring of a farming colony. Nilah’s dermaluxes went snowy white, then dimmed as the racer suppressed them.
“How’d you get the ginger weirdies to help you?” asked Boots.
“They have their reasons for hating Witts, but they’re not mine to share.”
“That’s good. Everyone ought to hate him, after how close humanity came to extinction.”
“You know, I don’t think …” Nilah began, but trailed off.
“What is it?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m being selfish.”
Boots looked her up and down. “Say what you’ve got to say.”
Nilah turned and looked her in the eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever missed anyone as much as I’ve missed you.”
“Aw, now. I’m cranky and awful.”
“I know.”
Nilah wrapped her arm around Boots and pulled her in for a tight hug. Boots jolted with the sudden contact, then rested her head against her companion’s shoulder. She let out a long breath.
“What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I be happy?” asked Boots.
“The same thing that’s wrong with me,” said Nilah. “We need to struggle.”
“No, I’m sure that’s not it,” said Boots, laughing softly and pulling away. “I was struggling on Gantry Station, and I wasn’t happy then, either.”
“Maybe you just like to fight.”
“Yeah.” Boots chucked Nilah on the shoulder. “Maybe so, kid.”
Nilah turned to face the breeze, the black curls of her mohawk dancing over her dark skin. “I don’t feel much like a kid anymore. I’m twenty-one.”
Boots guffawed, and her head ached in retaliation. She’d have Ai mix her up some medicine to stave off the alcohol’s effects. “Okay, kid. You’re twenty-one now.”
“Twenty-one can be pretty old. What were you doing at twenty-one?”
Boots nodded, conceding the point. “Watching my friends die … I guess you’re right.”
“I usually am,” she replied with a wink. The trio of scars across Nilah’s cheek crinkled up.
“When I remembered you this past year,” Boots said, searching for the words, “I always thought of the pampered racing champion who became a badass, right there in front of me. I always forgot the scars.”
“I always forgot the arm,” said Nilah.
“It’s got some tricks,” said Boots, snapping out a hidden blade. She locked back a chamber in the forearm to reveal a space for a large slinger shell—the kind used in ship-to-ship combat.
“Boots, that’s an arm cannon.”
“And so it is. If I had to replace my arm, I figured it’s best to put in an upgrade. Orna’s new bot carries around that kind of firepower.”
“One: no, it doesn’t.” She circled Boots like she was inspecting a dangerous breach in engine containment. “Two: not in a prosthetic stump. Bloody hell, Boots, do you have any kind of recoil compensation?”
“No.”
“Safeties?”
“Only mechanical. Low tech keeps it reliable. You never know when a bunch of dangerous yahoos might drop out of the sky and kidnap me.”
“Hey, now. I’m more of a hooligan than a yahoo.”
Boots snapped the hidden chamber shut. “Maybe Witts’s folks want some revenge on us. Best to plan for trouble.”
Nilah placed a hand against her chest with a theatrical flourish. “Well, darling, trouble is here. Are you going to follow it out into space, or sit at home?”
Boots leaned back against the railing. “If I lose my other arm, do you people promise to leave me alone?”
“That depends. How do you feel about those legs?”
In the early hours of the morning, Boots packed her things to go. It’d been easier than she expected. She maintained a top-quality emergency bag with cash, slinger, ammunition, clothing, and false identification, on the chance she needed to get the hell offworld in a hurry. She’d long ago given Ai instructions on how to run the distillery and schedule employees, just in case she needed to disappear for a while. There was a large sum in escrow to pay folks while she was gone, and Ai could call her lawyer about any estate troubles.
Maybe that’s what she hated about this life—she could leave, and no one would even notice.
As pink predawn washed over her fields, she shouldered her duffel and hiked up the gentle slope, past her warehouse, to where the Capricious lay dormant. The ship was the same bucket he’d always been, his bulbous body scarred and scorched by so many years of turmoil. In this, he was Boots’s brother.
She glanced back to her mansion: the sprawling, stark house in the valley, all flat lines and luxury trim. It was supposed to be her future, her escape. “Ai can handle it,” she muttered to herself.
Cordell shambled out of Boots’s front door and onto the porch to smoke. Even at this distance, he looked like death. She saw the short flare of a lighter, and his eyes rose to meet hers. He straightened and cocked his head.
It was as though they’d switched places for a moment: him at the homestead, her on the path to the ship.
“Well?” she shouted at him from the hill, even though it felt like a hammer on her skull. “You going to open the big guy up or what?”
Chapter Two
Flanking Maneuvers
Despite her better judgment, Boots found herself in the soaring cargo hold of her old warship—the one in which she’d ridden out the Famine War twenty years prior. The level of magical talent among the crew was far beyond that of the average slouching scribbler. Sure, everyone had a cardioid to give them magic, but the members of the Capricious were like endurance athletes, able to cast bigger, better spells, more often. It was enough to give her a complex, since she was one of the ultra-rare people born without the spellcasting organ. “Arcana dystocia,” the doctors called it. Boots simply called it a goddamned curse.
Now she was supposed to tag along with these heroes into the stars. She’d barely finished the thought when she spotted the greatest piece of aeronautical hardware ever crafted by human hands.
“There he is,” she said, dropping her duffel onto the deck of the cargo bay and staring up at the MRX-20 Midnight Runner strike fighter. It still laid in mag lock, suspended from the rafters, though Orna’s rigged scaffolding had been replaced with an actual docking system. With her Harrow salvage rights, Boots had considered buying a fighter of her own, but keeping a weapon of war at her house seemed a little foolish—especially when she didn’t have Orna doing all the tough maintenance. Most MRX-20s were scrap on Clarkesfall’s surface or carbon in its atmosphere, and finding a local mechanist would be a real pain.
Gone were all the scratches and dents of her last three sorties. They’d given him a fresh coat of paint, Clarkesfall purple with the orange half-moon of Arca slicing across the tail fins. Beams of moonlight radiated from the Arcan sigil, winding over the hull, tracing the lines of the keel. It was a bit wild for a military craft, more like an exotic flier, but Boots liked the look. If they got revenge on Grand Admiral Henrick Witts and the rest of the Harrow conspirators, by god, everyone would know who flew that Midnight Runner. Witts had destroyed her country of Arca, sucked the life from her homeworld of Clarkesfall, but looking at that strike fighter reminded Boots that she could always fight back.
“I bet you missed him,” s
aid Orna, clomping up behind her in combat kicks. The quartermaster rubbed her eyes and yawned. “Had to repair the main cannons after the Harrow. Your overcharging them scored the spell boreshafts.” Orna pointed to the keel. “The landing skids are no longer held together by patch tape and good feelings.”
“Did you make any upgrades?”
“Nah,” she replied, and Boots relaxed. “Still all standard issue. Being honest, it would’ve been easier to replace the main cannon with something newer. Arcan parts are getting harder to come by.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Boots, remembering how Orna and the crew had descended to abandoned military outposts to salvage parts for the first Runner. “How’d you get the stuff?”
Orna arched an eyebrow and smirked. “We’ve got some serious fans now. A lot of Fallen are grateful for what we did. Speaking of which, there’s something for you in the cockpit. It’s a …” There came a rummaging sound from the tool chest. “Charger!”
Boots turned to see Orna’s new battle armor comparing wrenches to the bolts on its chest, its head cocked to one side as it considered them.
“Charger, no!” shouted Orna, and it looked up at her. “You leave that plate on! I know it causes you to run hot, that’s what I’m counting on. No, I’m trying out a new engine spec.” Her circlet flashed around the edge, almost like the light spoke to her. “Well, you’ll get used to it!”
It tested the fit of the wrench and gave one of the bolts a half turn.
“Damn it, Charger!” Orna clenched her fists. “Never should’ve upgraded his intelligence,” she mumbled, stomping after him.
Boots watched Orna chew out her own battle armor before snatching the wrench out of his hand and chucking it back in the tool box. She then locked it with a palm print.
“I’ve got to show him his design spec again,” Orna called over to Boots. “You’ve got a present in the cockpit.” The quartermaster and her battle armor disappeared into the bowels of the ship.
At least Orna had learned to put her tools away.
Boots walked to where the scaffolding ladder was before and found that Orna had replaced it with a more traditional “rocket rung” ascender. Boots grasped the metal and put her foot on the kickplate, then hit the go button. The ascender rose with such violence that it nearly tore her off, and when it stopped at the ship, Boots held on for dear life, quivering.
Had she really used it one-handed back in her military days? Even in full grav or plus halfs, she could remember leaping onto the rocket rung with one arm and leg hanging off. She huddled close to the rung, not daring to look down at the deck fifteen feet below.
When she felt steady enough, she slowly stepped onto the catwalk, then made her way to the open cockpit. She looked inside, spotting exactly what Orna had meant.
Boots lifted the yellow polybuff jacket from the seat, holding it up in disbelief. Emblazoned across the front pocket were the swooping red letters of Rook Velocity Corporation’s logo. She turned it this way and that, admiring the way the light caught inside the raised type. She inspected the black trim and piping, still unable to wrap her head around what she was holding.
She’d seen those jackets on the flight lines as a child, when she went to air shows in Arca’s capital. RVC mechanics used to run around the bays in Brandenburg Base wearing them while they serviced the MRX-20s, much to the envy of all the fighter jocks. Only five-year employees of RVC ever got a jacket, and they’d never part with them. She turned it to look at the shoulder patch, where a name should’ve been stitched.
It said, BOOTS.
“What the hell?” she mumbled. It didn’t look new. She opened it up to check the country of origin, just to see if it was Arcan, and found a note made of real paper pinned to the inside:
We had a few of these lying around after we evacuated Clarkesfall. I thought you might like one. Thanks for keeping the stars over Arca. Forever your fan.
—Jack Rook
Boots admired the note for a long while, enjoying the feel of it in her hands. She’d held a lot of paper in her day, but a handwritten note from the legend himself was something else. Jealousy needled her heart; someone on the crew had to have met the guy. She tried the jacket on, and it fit like a dream. She wished she had a mirror.
“He threw us a big party at his place on Taligola. You could’ve come if you hadn’t run off,” Cordell called up to her, and she peered down to find him standing on the deck, hands on his hips. “It was a veterans’ benefits thing. That jacket is the real deal.”
“I can’t believe you did this,” she said, trying to hold her elation inside. She couldn’t stop beaming.
“Well, now … you actually look happy for once in your life.”
“It’s only the greatest article of clothing ever made.”
“Girlie, there is nothing better than an Arcan captain’s jacket—giving orders and breaking hearts. Don’t even come with that weak sauce.”
“Yeah, all right, Captain. Sure,” she said, gingerly straightening out her cuffs and savoring the weight on her skin. “I’m never taking this thing off, you hear me? I want to be buried in this.”
“And just think,” said Cordell, “all you had to do to get one was save the damned galaxy. Now stow your crap. I want to brief the crew in thirty.”
“Gather round, boys and girls!” Cordell called, stunning Nilah’s hungover ears. “We’ve got work to do.”
They’d all assembled in the Capricious’s ready room, otherwise known as the mess. Cordell hadn’t wasted a second once Boots came on board, rousting everyone from their hangovers and cajoling them onto the ship. He’d ordered them into orbit and summoned everyone to the mess without a second’s reprieve. Armin, Orna, and the twins—Alister and Jeannie—stood beside Nilah, all blinking the boozy sleep out of their eyes. Aisha and Malik appeared stone sober, much to Nilah’s jealousy. Boots was surprisingly alert, sporting a flight jacket twenty years out of style and preening like a princess.
Cordell nodded at the party. “Mister Vandevere has worked his magic on the data cube we found on Forscythe’s body, and he’s got news.”
“It’s just as we suspected,” said Armin. “Aaron Forscythe was a bagman for Witts’s financial engine, which I have dubbed the ‘Money Mill.’”
Boots smirked. “Money Mill, sir? Are you sure a silly name fits the situation?”
Armin scowled, and Nilah didn’t envy Boots in that moment. “Are you sure you want to get off on the wrong foot with the first mate right after boarding his ship?”
Boots reddened. “No, sir.”
“As I was saying,” Armin continued, “Aaron Forscythe was a bagman for the Money Mill. Once again, we weren’t able to liberate his funds before someone drained them—someone knew he was dead and took immediate action … but we got two key pieces of intelligence. First, Forscythe was there to pay off someone in the Taitutian Special Branch. He carried this missive, and the crypto was pathetic. Took me a half hour to crack.”
Armin waved his hand, and the projectors spun out a set of light spells. Text formed, garbled at first, then sorting into the words:
Children infiltrated. Pinnacle. Buy identity. Liaison to follow.
“Told you we couldn’t trust the Special Branch,” muttered Boots.
“Who’s the liaison, sir?” asked Nilah, and Armin shook his head.
“No idea,” he replied. “That’s the only message I could get out of the crystal. Most of the rest of its contents had been zeroized several thousand times.”
Cordell patted down the sides of his hair and glanced at Boots’s ugly jacket. Nilah could swear the two were competing over something—maybe the world’s worst fashion show.
The captain stroked his chin. “But that ain’t the whole story. Mister Vandevere, you found something else?”
“Yes, sir,” said Armin. “All of Forscythe’s bank accounts were unsigned IGFs, but … one of them lined up with an account used by an arms dealer, active during the Famine War.”
; “This ugly cuss,” Cordell began as the lights in the mess came down, “is Maslin Durand, and he’s our next target in the Money Mill chain.”
The light of the text dispersed and formed anew, crafting something that looked like a human head for all the crew to see. Nilah didn’t have the words to describe the horrible visage that appeared; he looked as though half of his head had been blown off and chewed on by rats.
“God, he looks like a marpo threw up on another, uglier marpo,” said Orna.
“Not everyone wears their scars as well as you, Miss Sokol,” said Cordell.
Nilah thought of how she’d chosen her own scars, and a pang of sympathy came over her. Without thinking, she touched her cheek, then put her hand down when she caught the captain’s eye.
Cordell cleared his throat and gestured to Armin. “Thanks to Mister Vandevere, and a bit of extra access from the Taitutian Special Branch, we found a ton of anomalous bank activity around the same time Miss Brio was framed for Cyril Clowe’s murder. We believe there’s a good chance that Durand was selling weapons and laundering money for the Gods of the Harrow. His transactions line up precisely with the locations and dates that Mother popped up and …” He paused a moment to chew on the sentence. “It’s highly likely that he contributed materiel for her battlegroup and arranged transport for her.”
“That means he helped kill Didier,” said Boots. “And almost killed us.”
“Do we have to call them the ‘Gods of the Harrow’?” asked Nilah. “It sounds so dreadfully complimentary.”
“They have godlike power, and there’s not a word awful enough to describe them,” said Cordell. “Besides, it’s going to make it that much sweeter when we kill their sorry asses.”
