Eva couldn’t help it: she laughed, loud and hard. Drunk jerks were bad enough, but this guy, in this cycle, was a rain of Jovian diamonds.
Glorious wiggled his teeth and his skin flashed bright green. “Are you making a mockery of my advances in a condescending manner?”
“Claro que sí, mijo. Get spaced.”
“For challenging my supremacy, you must now be legally bound to my—” The translation came in as “collection of sexual objects and broodmares” instead of “harem” or something similar, which told her everything she needed to know about how he planned to treat her.
Her buzz receded with distressing speed, which doubly sucked since she had neither the time nor the money to get it back. “You’re not my type. Take a walk out an airlock.”
His bodyguards began to earn their paychecks by looming with gusto. She considered reaching for her pistol, but if she shot first she’d be liable for any damages and disposal fees.
“You dare?” Glorious asked. “I will own you, you worthless offspring incubator.” He was neon green and black now, with iridescent lines between his eyes. And that grin. That big, shit-eating grin.
“Eat. Me.” Eva raised her middle finger like a beacon.
“Guards!” Glorious cried. “Seize the human!”
She didn’t even stand, just leaned against the bar and kicked him in the teeth with her gravboots. He toppled off the stool with a squeal, landing on the sticky floor in a heap. One of his goons bent to retrieve him while the other made a deep croaking sound and launched himself at her. She sidestepped, using his momentum to drive her knee into his stomach in the hopes of hitting something vital. Given his sharp wail, it seemed to work.
No me diga, Eva thought. I don’t have time for this shit.
Before the goon she’d hit could recover, she pivoted away and ran out the door.
With any luck, Pink had finished refueling, and Vakar and Leroy had found any necessary supplies instead of, well, doing what she was doing. Min should still be on La Sirena Negra. Eva shot them a quick location-query ping as she jogged away from the cantina, toward the bustling market area.
Pink and Leroy were back on the ship, but not a whisper from Vakar. She tried to tell herself not to worry, that he was fine, but her nerves were already jangling too loudly to be soothed. She pinged him again, then again, and was just about to set up a timed auto-ping when he finally responded.
((Errand. Surprise.))
The hell did that mean? Eva was in no mood for cryptic shit.
Then again, she had told him he could have shore leave. It wouldn’t be nice of her to drag him back now.
Since when are you worried about being nice to Vakar?, a tiny voice whispered in her head.
I’m nice to all my crew, she thought. Not just the cute quennians. Super nice. And the longer he took, the longer she could delay having to lie to him about why she was going to fire everyone.
Because she was going to, wasn’t she? She couldn’t tell them about Mari, not if it meant risking her sister’s life, and she couldn’t drag them into her problems. The thought made her queasy. That, or the questionable alcohol she’d been drinking, or the adrenaline rush of kicking someone in the face and running away. Or all of the above.
She decided to head back to that q-net café and sober up with another cortadito. She could wait there until Vakar—
“You will attend me, unworthy vermin,” a voice boomed over the station’s loudspeakers.
She recognized that asshead tone. It was Glorious. How was he doing that? Nobody but station security should have access to those systems. The people around her seemed to be thinking the same thing, because the usually loud main merchant drag fell almost silent.
“I demand the immediate apprehension of the human captain Eva the Innocent,” he continued. “Fail to obey my command, and my fleet will convey your ashes to the womb of the blessed mother void.”
Yeah, right. The various species’ equivalent of laughter rippled through the assembled crowds. Omicron got threats like that all the time. If he were actually dangerous, the station alarms would have gone off already.
The instant that thought completed itself, emergency lights began to flash in different spectrums. Alarms piped through the speakers, a series of triple notes along with a curt message: “Security threat. Please proceed to the nearest evacuation facilities.”
Eva’s jaw fell open. He was threatening to kill everyone? Thousands of people? Because she wouldn’t fuck him? Alabao . . . She had no words. And he wanted them to catch her and turn her over to him? No chance.
Why the fuck did you give him your name, comemierda?, Eva thought bitterly.
“On second thought, no coffee,” she muttered. Time to make like a flea and jump.
Chapter 3
Universal Constants
The crowds around Eva morphed into a screaming mass of flesh, flailing tentacles, and fluids from the more sensitive types. Visitors, mostly, the miners and smugglers and pleasure-seekers who didn’t see much action in their daily lives; this wasn’t the first time the station had been threatened, so those who lived here were slower to panic, and the freelance mercs with any experience finished their drinks and shopping before they even thought about evacuating. The stores that had four walls and a door locked down quickly, but the vendors with carts were caught in the tide, trying to move to the sides of the tall corridor without being knocked over. The commlink skimmers and warez peddlers and other station rats disappeared into their hidey-holes, taking whatever they could grab in the confusion while the security mercs were conspicuously absent to guide traffic flow.
Eva sighed at the churning river of motion and odor that stood between her and the docks. Better get moving.
Pings flew in from her crew, but instead of responding, she sent an all-channel disembark signal with a ten-minute timer. Ignoring a merchant’s high-pitched whine, she clambered onto the second level of his shop and jumped to the next one over, hopping from one scrap-metal roof to another until she couldn’t go farther. With a click, she set her gravboots humming and leaped to the adjacent wall, clinging like a spider.
It was slower walking this way, since her muscles were engaged in keeping her vertical relative to her feet, but at least she didn’t have to deal with the howling press below. Still, she pulled her pistol from its holster under her coat as a precaution. Glorious’s goons were nowhere in sight, but she had a feeling they weren’t going to say hello before making a grab for her.
“Captain Innocente,” said a voice on the ground.
Eva caught the eye, singular, of Gargula Sinh, second-in-command to the administrator of the station, Armida. He gestured for her to come down with one of the four arms of his exoskeleton.
“Can’t talk now, Garg,” she said, still walking. “Some maniac is threatening to blow up the station.”
“Which he has said he will not do if you are brought to his ship,” Garg said, blinking his inner eyelid. “Come now, Captain, even you cannot be so cold as to trade thousands of innocent lives for your own.”
“I’m as innocent as they are.” He wasn’t wrong, though. Hell, if she were in his place, she might have—no, this was ridiculous. She had to get to her crew and get gone. “How about you power up your fancy station defenses instead of lecturing me about math?” she snapped.
Garg flipped a mechanical hand in her direction, and one of his mercs sauntered over with a mag knocker. He rested it against the wall, where it hummed, clicked twice, then hammered a piston at the metal, sending a gravitomagnetic pulse up to Eva’s black-red boots that neutralized them. She fell in a heap but came to her feet quickly, pistol raised. The odds of her winning a firefight against so many were bad, but—
“Isolate her,” Garg said. Another merc held out an isosphere that projected a cone of blue light, surrounding her in a shimmering bubble that would protect her from harm even as it kept her from doing more than running futilely like a hamster in a wheel. She could stick herself to th
e ground if she activated her gravboots, but they would just use the knocker again to move her.
“You can’t sell me off, you bastard!” Eva shouted.
“In fairness, Captain, I am not profiting monetarily from this transaction.” His security merc dragged her along like a fish in a frictionless net, her bubble tethered to the sphere he held by a thin cord of energy.
The bustling plaza was now practically empty as almost everyone had retreated to their respective ships or escape pods. Some folks lingered, apathetic or opportunistic; Garg ignored them, though once or twice one of his mercs fired a warning shot near a looter.
A blob-like fellow to their left extended a tentacular mass and turned charred vermin over a spit, where juice or fat escaped to sizzle on the hot metal beneath. Eva had heard of her ancestors cooking lechón outside in a hurricane, but this was a whole other level of ridiculous. Then again, she couldn’t move much, but maybe if she timed things right . . .
She flopped onto her back, aiming her gravboots at the guy’s cooker as they passed. Sure enough, it was pulled closer, smacking into the bottom of her feet—not that she could feel the heat through the shield.
“What are you—” said the merc holding her, followed by an inhuman screech as she rotated and hit him in the head with the cooker. He dropped the isosphere, which bounced twice against the ground and rolled away, the blue shield around her winking out of existence. Eva fell onto her butt and scuttled around a corner as the merc pinwheeled his arms.
She didn’t wait to find out whether they’d seen her crawl away. Eva raced toward the end of the alley, taking a left at a T-junction and then another left farther down, assuming it would bring her somewhere closer to the docks. What it did, however, was lead her to a ramp that went down to a lower level of the station, where the smells of organic waste mingled like a combination toilet and perfume store. Exhaust vents from the floors above piped in more exciting aromas of fear and anger, as well as the increasingly muted sounds of escaping ship crews like hers.
“Unworthy seekers of death,” boomed Glorious through the speakers again. “My patience evaporates like the seed of an ice flower in starlight.” He paused as some transmission burbled through his comm, too dim for Eva’s translators to pick up. Status report? Probably Armida trying to calm him down. It must not have been enough, because as soon as it finished, he said, “Your incompetence will be your doom. As a token of my ill will, I give you the gift of decimation.”
Moments later, the station keeled sideways like a drunk, sending Eva stumbling into the wall that was now the floor. The alarm shifted to a series of triple notes, and the emergency message changed: “Shield efficacy is diminishing. Proceed to evacuation centers.”
“Madre de dios,” she murmured. “All this because I turned him down?”
A few half-hearted exit signs flickered on in floors and walls. Meanwhile, she pulled up the map on her commlink, which indicated that the docks were farther along the corridor she’d entered. She pinged her crew with a stern ((Stand by)) and started to run again. She didn’t want to get them killed waiting for her, but she wasn’t keen on being stranded, either.
And where the hell was Vakar? If he died on this station, she was going to kill him.
A series of response pings came through from Pink. ((Can’t leave. Ships maglocked. Armida’s orders.))
Eva cursed thoroughly and with relish. Their ship’s own highly illegal mag knocker had been damaged a year earlier, and she hadn’t gotten it fixed because other expenses had taken priority. And now here she was, stuck on a shitty backwater space station being blown to pieces by a jerk with delusions of grandeur, while a bunch of mercs chased after her with an isosphere and—
A mag knocker. Convenient. But how to get it away from them?
She started back up the ramp to where she’d left Garg. Naturally, the mercs weren’t there; must have gone down the other branch of the junction and ended up somewhere else entirely. And that stupid alarm was getting on her last nerve.
“Captain, what are you doing?”
She spun around, pistol raised. Standing in the middle of the empty bazaar, holding a small black box like a lost street vendor, was Vakar.
She wasn’t sure whether to kiss him or kick him in the crotch. Not that his crotch was sensitive; his genitals were closer to his abdominal area. And they weren’t external, per se.
Why was she standing there like a comemierda thinking about his genitals?
“What are you doing?” she retorted. “Where the hell have you been?”
He released a smell like fresh-cut grass. Bashful. “You were so upset about the cats, I . . . That is, I thought perhaps . . .”
His box was the kind of indestructible material used in vaults or to protect fragile cargo. “Vakar, did you get me a present?”
His palps twitched. If her heart weren’t mechanical, it might have skipped a beat.
“We have to get to La Sirena Negra,” she said. “She’s locked down, but I have a plan. Most of a plan. Garg was chasing me with his mag knocker, and I lost him, but now I need to find him. Any ideas?”
Vakar wagged his head in the equivalent of a shrug. “If I were chasing someone trying to escape a space station, and I lost them, I would simply—”
“Wait by their ship,” Eva finished. “Of course. Come on, let’s get off this hunk of scrap.” She ran toward the docks, Vakar beside her.
“Is there anything I should know?” Vakar asked as they went.
“Like what?”
“Who is so angry with you that they took over the station communications and are attacking with disproportionate force?”
“Some comemierda I shut down in a bar. The Glorious Apotheosis.”
“Is that who it is?”
“Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “What kind of a name is that?”
“It is hereditary,” Vakar said. “He is emperor of a thousand worlds in the Triskel cluster. Very powerful, and rich.”
“And an asshole. He wants me for his collection of, uh, broodmares? Something shitty like that.”
Vakar didn’t respond, but his angry wildfire smell gave her step an extra bounce.
She heard the crowd before she saw it, all the people who had rushed to escape now crushed together on the docks, screaming at security mercs who ignored them or waved their weapons to maintain an order getting more ragged by the minute. When the station had listed, many of them had fallen onto each other, leading to awkward tangles and fights.
As frosting on the crap cake, a few gas pipes had cracked in the middle of it all. Helium, Eva guessed, because everyone with lung equivalents sounded like a hamster having a temper tantrum. And methane, because it smelled like the hamsters had all eaten beans for lunch.
La Sirena Negra was about five ships down on the left, but Garg and his mercs weren’t there. They could be hiding in the crowd, or watching from the control room, or they could have boarded her ship to ambush her. Luckily for her, Eva was a head shorter than many of the people milling about; even the ones who normally slithered around were standing on tip-tentacle to look more intimidating. Anyone trying to find her from above would be hard-pressed to see her.
She ducked and weaved as best she could through whatever gaps she could find, sometimes making room with a well-placed elbow or stomp. Every few steps she made sure Vakar was behind her, and as if by magic, he always was. Him and his indestructible box.
A present for her. Hot damn.
Four ships to go.
The loudspeakers crackled. “Insolent waste disposal units, you believe your inferior defenses will overcome the might of the Glorious Apotheosis? You shall tremble at my awesome power before the black envelops you.”
Chunks of debris pelted the station, few large enough to cause damage, but with disturbing frequency. More screaming commenced in earnest, piercing Eva’s ears until she sent a thought to engage her helmet. It popped into existence around her head, the outside sounds dulling to a whimper. Even the b
ean-fart smell disappeared once she calibrated the air filter.
Three ships to go.
The mercs abruptly lost any semblance of authority. The crowd frenzied, so that now Eva found herself unable to move forward.
Someone grabbed her hand: Vakar, whom she couldn’t smell, which was more unsettling than she cared to admit. He tugged her through the crowd as if they were both ghosts. Even though she was watching him do it, she couldn’t quite figure out how he managed to move people aside, to find spaces between them that hadn’t appeared to exist a moment earlier. She’d have to get him to teach her that trick later.
The booth that held the lockdown controls was being attacked by a gang of pirates and residents who had found a common purpose. Anyone with a knocker had already escaped, though by the looks of things outside and the continued pitter-patter of ship pieces hitting the station shields, they hadn’t gotten far.
Two ships to go.
“There she is,” a voice said. “Step aside immediately.”
The crowd parted around Eva and Vakar. Bobbing gently in front of La Sirena Negra, glowing a vibrant purple, was Armida. The administrator of Omicron rarely descended from her seat of power in—well, no one knew where it was, for security reasons. Eva had heard it was Limbo, but that was ridiculous. Nobody could administer a space station from a giant bar and strip joint.
In one swift movement, Eva found herself upside down, tightly wrapped in tentacles thin as wire but twice as strong. Vakar was grabbed by appropriately beefy goons, one for each of his arms, and dragged a few meters away.
“Captain Eva Innocente,” Armida said. Her voice was smooth as a surgical knife through skin, piped directly into Eva’s head since she was basically psychic gas in a suit like a huge jellyfish. “I have prepared a shuttle for your delivery to His Gloriousness. Please convey to him my gratitude for his hasty and permanent departure.”
“Go fry ice,” Eva retorted.
“I am sure we will miss your colorful personality,” Armida replied, towing her captive along.
Chilling Effect_A Novel Page 4
