Chilling Effect_A Novel

by Valerie Valdes

  And where the hell was her crew? She’d have to send them a message, a warning. Arrange a rendezvous point. Or maybe this was it, and it was finally time to cut them loose. They’d be safer without her. Running from The Fridge would be painting a giant target on her back, and in all likelihood, there would be a bounty on her big enough to make every mercenary scuttling through the fringe of BOFA space do a little cucaracha dance of joy. Glorious had made sure of that.

  She thought of her last conversation with Vakar again and gritted her teeth. She could get all sentimental later, if she survived.

  “Why did they let you bring Fjorsl out here?” Eva asked. “Why not your backup?”

  “It was intended to seem less suspicious,” Pholise said. “But when you are not apprehended, I will be distrusted regardless. So this must be made convincing.”

  “What must—”

  Fjorsl lashed out at her with their club-hand, her reflexes throwing her backward in time to feel the wind of it on her face.

  Hell, she was convinced.

  She dodged a downward swipe at her head and clicked on her gravboots, jumping backward onto the side of the ship and stomping over to the airlock.

  Shots pinged and sizzled off the exterior of the Malcolm as she settled into the pilot’s chair.

  Exterior sensors told her there were a half dozen shooters. Eva scanned the area for more action but couldn’t identify which was their ship—none of them were starting up yet. Which meant either they were a hair slower than she was, or they’d come on a shuttle and their main ship was already in orbit waiting for her.

  Bad odds. Plus she was losing time because it was taking too long for the controls to come online and go through all the automated system checks.

  Ugh, I’m going to have to jack in, she thought. Gross.

  Eva moved her hair out of the way and opened the hole at the nape of her neck with a terse thought, wishing the ship had more sophisticated controls, like the jackless implant Min used. Enough older boats still had obsolete tech like this, so her dad had insisted on the install when Eva was younger, and she was glad for it now even as she hated using it.

  Settling into the pilot’s seat, she folded her hands in her lap and sent the command to the tether. It slid into her with a soft, wet slurp and her consciousness flooded into the ship like water filling a glass.

  Peaches, she thought. It always tastes like peaches. God, I hate peaches.

  But now the ship was all hers, she was the ship, and her every thought was enacted more quickly than the processors would have managed alone. She could feel that everything was in order, ready to go, so she powered up the thrusters and sent the Malcolm into the sky so fast she could feel the tug of the air turn into a sonic boom behind her. She was free, giddy, soaring toward the violet horizon and up into the velvety black, to the stars, burning from within like a rocket, like a thousand tons of brilliant mass, a falling star in reverse, and—

  Oh crap, there was the Fridge ship now.

  The ship hailed her, and she ignored it, focusing on running through the calculations that would take her far away faster than the speed of light. But where could she go?

  Home, said a whisper in the back of her mind. You want to go home.

  And she did. Eva wanted to run to her mother and cry and eat real food and sleep in a real bed with a window that looked out on the same scrambled egg tree that had grown in their front yard since she was ten. But even though she hadn’t been home in twelve years—had it really been twelve years?—she was sure the Fridge operatives would think to look for her there. She couldn’t put her mother in danger like that. Not after what had happened to her sister.

  Oh, Mari, she thought. Where are you? Will I ever see you again?

  Now the other ship was firing on her, and her rear shields were holding up, but they wouldn’t for much longer. She had to go.

  Every evasive movement she made meant recalculating her jump, and every time she aimed the cargo ship’s single defensive cannon and fired she was wasting time on fighting instead of fleeing. Scarlet lights dazzled her external sensors; she could feel the shields thinning, flickering. The few seconds she had remaining stretched out into the queer horizon that was shiptime. Everything seemed to slow down around her as she thought and thought.

  Another weapon fired past her starboard side: La Sirena Negra had finally arrived. Her crew, her precious baby, flew to her side and put themselves between her and the guns of The Fridge.

  Eva threw all her efforts into her trajectory. If she were gone, the Fridge ship would have no reason to keep up the fight, and La Sirena Negra could make its own escape.

  If everything was already screwed, there was only one place in the galaxy where she might have a chance at safety. Maybe not freedom, maybe not revenge or justice, but probably safety. Probably. At least until she could figure out what to do next.

  Just before she fired up the FTL drive, she sent a message over to her ship on the secure channel. She hoped it was working, but if it wasn’t, then perhaps they weren’t meant to meet again. Perhaps that really was for the best.

  Eva sent them a single word, and then disappeared into hyperspace.

  ((Nuvesta.))

  Chapter 11

  Going Down

  Nuvesta was impressive from space. The seat of government for the Benevolent Organization of Federated Astrostates was a giant station that had been constructed over centuries by numerous alien races coming together to ostensibly govern the galaxy in peace and mutual respect.

  That didn’t always work out, of course. With great power came a great big plate of arroz con mango.

  The various sectors of the station had grown out from each other like a wild, invasive plant, sometimes haphazardly and sometimes as part of a sporadic but focused campaign to help curb overpopulation in other sectors. Each sector operated on its own cycle, some matched to the roughly twenty-eight-hour cycle that was the average among the major species that inhabited the station, while others were geared toward specific species so they had somewhere comfortable to live and work.

  The sectors closer to the hub, where the Assembly met, were cleaner and brighter, filled with exotic plants and artwork and all the cultural detritus that builds up over generations of people trying to suck up to other people. But farther out on the edges, where new sectors were being formed, things were simultaneously barer and busier, construction causing riots of metal and dirt and the smell of things being made, whether by fire or acid or concentrated biology.

  It was easy to get lost in the crowds of the human quadrant. Near the embassy, the sidewalks were broad and lined with trees transplanted or engineered from biological data scraped from deep layers of soil, untouched by the pollution or radiation on Earth. Statues were erected to the human heroes who had made colonization and expansion possible, many of them the same kinds of people who had similar statues back on Earth, with all the baggage that implied. There were plans for a zoo, but animal rights groups from a variety of races, human and otherwise, had banded together to kill that effort. The annae hadn’t been ecstatic about the trees, frankly, but at least those weren’t sapient.

  Eva didn’t hang out near the embassy. She couldn’t afford to. But between what passed for suburbs and the hub was the Bends, a vertical and horizontal maze of elevators and prefab buildings where working-class types lived in apartments smaller than her cabin on La Sirena Negra, usually four to a room, sleeping in shifts.

  At first, she thought she would use her meager savings to get her own room there, lie low for however long it took for her crew to pick her up, then tell Pete where to collect his ship once she made it safely to the other side of the galaxy.

  That was before she found out her accounts were frozen and Glorious’s little bounty was common knowledge. The Malcolm was impounded when she couldn’t pay the docking fees, so she couldn’t even run to another planet. She was well and truly spaced. Or in this case, grounded.

  The first cycle was spent wandering
the Bends, riding up and down in elevators, trying not to attract attention while she figured out her options. She needed food, shelter and a disguise—just enough to last until her crew came for her, and not necessarily in that order.

  Aside from the apartments, there were small stores that reminded her of the bodegas in the town where her abuelos lived, except these were sanitized corporate garbage, automated to the point of being glorified vending machines, and the prices were outrageously high. Vakar probably could have hacked them easily, but Eva didn’t have his aptitude for software stuff. Someone else must have, though, because more than one person was covertly selling supplies for credit chits on random street corners.

  There were also a handful of restaurants, with tables and counter space for maybe a dozen people at a time, several of which offered weekly meal services—no surprise given that most of the apartments didn’t have kitchens. They might let her barter work for food if she asked, but no sense trying that until she was a little more desperate. Still, her stomach grumbled as the customers wandered in and out, carrying boxes that smelled way better than anything she’d eaten in months. One of the few benefits of being tethered to a station.

  Most of the people who lived there worked low-pay jobs around the embassy—where there was an uncomfortable prestige associated with using human labor rather than bots—or at the docks, running the machines that loaded and unloaded ships, monitoring the cargo for contraband, servicing the mechs and bots, and doing whatever else wasn’t automated. She was definitely more suited to that labor, but again, she told herself she didn’t need to rush into it; she’d be off-station well before she needed a steady income.

  What she did do, as a precaution, was pawn the stims from her med kit. That got her enough credit chits for bleach for her hair, and cheap face mods that caught her off guard whenever she saw her reflection: a too-wide nose, lighter skin, fuller lips, and eyes in a shade of purple that no one would mistake for real.

  It was only for a cycle. She’d messaged Min that she was going to Nuvesta, so they’d pick her up soon. (Did the message go through? It must have.) Pink was sour at her for lying, and her last words to Vakar had been ugly, yes, but he wouldn’t abandon her. None of them would. (Of course they would. Why wouldn’t they? After what she had done?)

  Only a cycle.

  But then what? Eva had failed her sister, failed her mother even if she didn’t know it. Failed Pete, but fuck him, he’d already been involved and he hadn’t helped, either.

  The Fridge had said they would force Mari into hard labor on an asteroid mine somewhere, but would they? Or would they just kill her? Either would be a waste, given Mari’s skills and knowledge, but maybe they didn’t care. People were hardly real to them, mere assets or liabilities, like on the balance sheets her mother dealt with. What was one human to them, more or less?

  Eva didn’t want to think about it, but she had nothing but time for thinking while she walked the streets of the Bends, head down, shoulders hunched, trying to make herself look as small as she felt.

  One twenty-eight-hour cycle turned into two, which turned into ten. She pawned her tactical flashlight for enough chits to buy a week’s worth of lunches, and did odd chores at the same restaurant for dinner whenever the proprietor—a middle-aged woman named Myriam with an easy laugh, who called everyone “my heart”—could find something for her to do. Eventually she started hanging around the docks, and after another worker was fired for showing up drunk and crashing his loader, she was hired as a temp for half pay under the table. A room was still out of the question with the few credits she was able to scrounge that way, but as tired as she got of sleeping in random ventilation shafts at odd hours, at least she was alive. As long as she was alive, there was hope.

  But her crew was nowhere to be found.

  She didn’t want to contact them directly, in case the ship was being monitored. She checked prearranged places for messages whenever she could buy a few minutes at a q-net café or steal access from an unsecured network. Personal ads, job listings, even particular message boards Min used for her own amusement. Nothing.

  Something must be wrong. They wouldn’t abandon her. Had the message not transmitted? Had the ship been damaged? Or, heaven forbid, captured? No, she didn’t want to imagine that. The Fridge couldn’t have them and Mari, too. That was a nightmare she airlocked from her mind every time it resurfaced, and yet it kept coming back, like one of the free-floating corpses spacers kept accidentally finding in the horror vids.

  Maybe if she held out long enough, The Fridge would move on. The Glorious Apotheosis would lose interest eventually and withdraw his bounty and she could move out to the fringe and get on with her life, such as it was.

  Yeah, she didn’t buy that line, either. But it kept her going.

  Until the bounty hunters started showing up.

  The first was a vroak with a vibroblade and an ugly acid tattoo on her face. She tried to corner Eva at the docks while Eva was loading cargo onto a big freighter, near the end of her shift. As tired as Eva was, years of hand-to-hand practice and actual combat experience under the guidance of Tito “Fair Fights Are Stupid” Santiago meant that within seconds, her body had taken care of the situation while her brain was still registering that there was a situation at all.

  Eva panicked, as much as one could with a mechanical heart regulating itself. There were cameras everywhere, ostensibly for theft prevention, but they were monitored by a single foreman who spent most of his time working on his fantasy league team and gambling away the half of Eva’s salary he didn’t pay her. Had he seen? Would he say anything? She cleaned the vibroblade, wondering how much she could pawn it for, whether it would be enough for a safe place to rest for a night or two. Whether she’d be able to go back to work the next cycle, or whether security would come for her. The cargo was one body heavier when it left, and Eva didn’t sleep for a cycle, but nothing came of it after all.

  The second bounty hunter was a buasyr, one of his four arms replaced with a laser chainsaw apparatus that stopped working when Eva cut it off him with her recently acquired vibroblade. He ran from her, swearing vengeance, and she was too tired to chase him down and finish the job. Besides, she was in the middle of delivering food to one of the apartment buildings, and she was fairly sure she’d taken a wrong elevator and would have to waste time doubling back to get her bearings. She hocked the chainsaw later for a fair amount of money, to a kloshian doctor who let her sleep in his operating room in exchange for a sample of her genetic material. She needed a haircut anyway, though the antiseptic smell of the room gave her a headache.

  Things started to blur together after that. An annae with petals around her head maw ambushing her in the bathroom at the docks. A pair of pointy-eared truateg and their trained crehnisk—was that outside the restaurant after a shift, or after she’d bought a spare pair of pants off the kid with the perpetually runny nose, because hers were too baggy now? Even a small todyk came for her, with an eye laser and special shoulder rifle, his feathers blue and gold but dull from age or hard living. Some hunters she fought, some she evaded, waiting for them to stop coming, waiting for the universe to move on.

  Money encouraged persistence.

  After almost a month, Eva gave up.

  It was easier than she expected. One cycle she was telling herself she might try calling her father, seeing what had happened to him, whether he could come pick her up or wangle a ship for her to escape on her own somehow. The next cycle she was milling around the docks like the rest of the laborers, arms folded across her chest, her short dyed-blond hair falling into her eyes, trying to look strong and capable but not lippy or willful, and she realized she didn’t have to pretend anymore. That was just how she looked now.

  She still worried about her ship, her crew. She wanted to believe The Fridge hadn’t tracked them down and taken revenge on them for what Eva had or hadn’t done. Wanted to believe they were okay, that at some point someone would show up with a wild story ab
out daring escapes and endless searching for poor lost Eva. That there was a good reason they hadn’t contacted her already, and that it had nothing to do with giving her the collective finger and moving on with their lives. Even she wasn’t buying her own bullshit, though. The sooner she accepted that, the sooner she could stop pretending she had anything to live for.

  And Mari. Poor Mari. She could hardly even remember Mari’s face. And in the mirror, her own face was a stranger’s, pale and thin and hollow-eyed behind the cheap mods.

  What was the point? Why was she bothering anymore? Nobody gave a shit about her, and frankly, she didn’t deserve one. It was like Pholise had said: she was selfish, and she’d put her crew in harm’s way for the sake of her sister, who could be anywhere by now, living or dead. Had it been worth the price Eva had paid? The price she was still paying now?

  Sometimes she wished she had kidnapped the damn todyk on Ayshurn after all, because at least then she would still have her people, still have a chance to get Mari back. Hadn’t she let Glorious blow up half of Omicron because she refused to sacrifice herself to him? What was the difference? One stranger’s life in exchange for hers. Would it really have been so bad?

  The thought shamed her every time it snuck up on her, in the odd hours when she was trying to sleep. Because no matter how much she told herself Omicron wasn’t her fault, she kept thinking of what she could have done differently. Ignored Glorious. Walked away. Let him do what he wanted. And then she got angry for blaming herself, when she hadn’t been the one making unreasonable demands and firing the plasma cannons everywhere.

  That was the difference: If she had loaded that todyk into her ship and turned him over to The Fridge, it would have been her choice, her actions, start to finish. Following orders, perhaps, acting under duress, with arguably pure intentions, but doing it nonetheless. On Omicron, she was one of many victims. On Ayshurn, she would have been the bad guy.