Grand Cross

by Merethe Walther

  “Don’ like it, don’ play it,” barked the crotchety bartender, a balding older man. He took a long drag from a snake-like pipe, and Aralyn curled up her nose at the stench of cheap synthetic enigma as it filled the air in a dirty cloud.

  The cavern-like room was practically empty, but that wasn’t a surprise considering how little traffic Charon normally got. The low ceiling and dim lighting made the place feel exactly like the scummy pirate den it was. It was clear that it wasn’t a proper bar―and certainly not legal with such potent spirits―but Aralyn didn’t mind. They’d been crawling through the underside of every station they could get into for months now, and they finally had a reason to drink themselves stupid in one. She lifted her remaining drink and nodded to Kita and Riordan.

  “A toast,” she said, “to cowards and blabbermouths.”

  Riordan raised his pint amicably, and Kita crowed her delight as she clinked the glasses together a bit too hard and sent most of the remaining shot over Aralyn’s hand.

  “We finally got some dirt on the skeeze-ball,” Kita exclaimed, downing her remaining drink―some pink monstrosity―and letting out a satisfied smile.

  From a crusty old diner booth over on the far wall that had seen better days, Caden picked his head off of a table that had likely been stolen from the garbage and blinked at them. The space in front of him was littered with empty tumblers, but there was no celebration in his gaze.

  “We’ve got next to nothing,” he reminded them, spitting the words like acid.

  The door at the front of the bar opened and in walked a man wearing an honest-to-stars cowboy hat on his otherwise bald head and a massive modded gun at his belt. He paid them no mind as he meandered over to the bar and took a seat on a stool two down from Aralyn.

  With barely a moment’s hesitation, Kita took one look at his hat and giggled, the apples of her cheeks fresh and rosy from drink and high spirits. The newcomer turned to her with a glare.

  “Something funny?” he asked, clearly not meaning there to be an answer.

  But Kita, guard lowered, straightened in her chair and shoved her thumbs to her belt like they were dangling through loops. “Not at all, pardner,” she quipped before falling into hysterical laughter.

  Riordan, who’d retreated back to the pool table, sniggered behind his new glass of ale. Aralyn, despite her best intentions, had to bite back a smile.

  “Figures I’d wind up next to the biggest assholes in the solar system,” said the stranger, leaning his elbows against the bar. “Good thing I happened to be looking for you.”

  “Excuse me?” said Aralyn, blinking some of the disorientation of drink from her sight. “What did you just say?”

  “I think you heard me.” The man turned to her, the gun from his belt firmly in his grasp across his lap, pointed directly at her. He turned to the bartender. “Out.”

  “And who’s gonna pay for the damage?” demanded the barman. “Not on your life.”

  “How about on yours, then?” He turned the gun on the man behind the counter, who scurried out of the bar backward, eyes wide, and disappeared into a door behind him. “Now that we’re alone—”

  “Ugh,” Kita said, slapping a hand to her forehead. “The other set of bootprints at the drop point. Not a partner. A skimmer. Trying to take the delivery before anyone else.”

  Aralyn let out a sigh. The gun wasn’t as terrifying as it should have been—something she blamed largely on the alcohol blurring her vision. “Of course.”

  “Let’s make this simple: Give me what I came for, and we won’t have a problem.”

  From behind them, the pool table glitched and Riordan, who’d been leaning against it, let out a yelp as he fell to the ground cursing his bruised knee.

  The stranger let out a snort. “Y’all are the worst smugglers I’ve ever seen.”

  “We had a bit of a dry run for a while, but I think we’re back on track.” Aralyn slugged down the last bit of her alcohol, squeezing her eyes shut as it hit her gut and sent a wave of nausea splashing back upward.

  “Can you just… I don’t know,” said Caden from the table, sliding out of the booth and standing to his feet, “fuck off? Can’t you see I’m trying to be miserable here?” He swayed unsteadily but managed to stay upright and rested his hand against the gun at his belt.

  “A surprising show of self-awareness from Caden,” muttered Kita, low enough that he likely wouldn’t hear.

  Aralyn slapped a hand over her mouth to keep her laughter in.

  “And who’s gonna make me, asshole? You?” The cowboy’s smile grew. He waved his gun. “Any one of you so much as sneezes faster ‘n I like, I’ll turn you to confetti; decorate the whole bar. So go ahead. Reach for it.”

  “Are you a betting man?” asked Aralyn, swiveling in her seat to face the newcomer.

  The cowboy stared at her, his eyes going up and down her body, making her skin crawl. “I’ve been known to make a wager or two. And I never lose.”

  With a quirk of her lip, Aralyn replied, “I’ll take those odds.” She pointed to his gun. “I’d say you probably spent about… what? Ten thousand creds tricking that out? Looks like it’s been modded say, five or six times. That’s gotta be expensive.”

  The cowboy pursed his lips in contemplation. “I’m not hearing a bet.”

  “Bet’s this, okay?” Aralyn reached behind the bar, grabbed a bottle of liquor, and poured them each a shot. She slid one down the bar to him, then sipped on hers. “I’ll wager I can kill you before you manage to get a shot off with that fancy piece of garbage.”

  The cowboy narrowed his eyes, but his smile never wavered. “That seems a little one-sided, don’t it?”

  Aralyn pretended to think deeply and sighed. “Okay, you’re right. I’ll count three-Adrastea before I draw. You win, you get your payload.”

  “And if you win, dumbass?”

  “You’ll fuck off like the upstanding citizen over there asked you to.” Aralyn jerked a thumb toward Caden, who was still glowering at the stranger.

  “And I get your hat,” added Kita.

  The cowboy looked around the room and laughed. “And what? Have one of them shoot me in the back while I’m focused on you?”

  “Don’t have guns,” said Rio, still sitting on the floor.

  “Don’t care,” said Kita, sipping her pink mess of a drink through a straw.

  Caden crossed his arms. “Whatever.”

  The cowboy’s eyes narrowed. He was thinking on it so hard Aralyn could have sworn she saw smoke pouring out of his ears.

  This might be the biggest mistake of my life, but…

  “Fine,” he said, but then gestured with his gun to Kita and Rio. “All of you move over there. Arms on the table where I can see ‘em.”

  With a groan, Kita and Rio moved over to the booth Caden had momentarily abandoned and scooted in, holding their hands up.

  “You wanna count us in, sweetheart?” said the stranger to Aralyn as he reholstered his gun.

  Aralyn narrowed her eyes. “Certainly. Count of three?” she said, putting her hands in her lap.

  He nodded, waiting, eagerness shining in his eyes.

  “Here we go. One… two…” She trailed off, expecting him to hesitate at least one more second, but before she’d finished counting “two,” he drew his gun, aimed, and fired.

  The gun clicked, but nothing went off. Eyes wide in shock, he pressed the trigger again and again, fear replacing the look of certainty that had been in his face mere moments before. Aralyn calmly pulled her shotgun out from the holster beneath her long coat and laid it on the bar, her finger on the trigger, waiting expectantly for him to realize he’d lost.

  “See, we chose this place for a reason—”

  “Well, two, really,” cut in Kita, whose arms were still raised.

  “First,” continued Aralyn, “there’s a field dampener in place. It uses a lot of power though, so he’s got it running literally at the cost of everything else”—she pointed with her fr
ee hand to the glitchy pool table—“and second, because the booze here is cheap and real.”

  The cowboy’s excitement slid down his face.

  “Unfortunately, the dampening field goes wonky sometimes; has little glitches in coverage… But fortunately for us, you’ve over-modded that gun,” Aralyn said, taking his shot and pouring it into hers.

  “Over-modded? There’s no such thing. This gun would have worked!”

  “Well… Probably not. That’s an older model; chances are good that the processor’s worn out since it was never meant to run the kind of crap you’ve got on there. I’d bet when it’s charging in your holster, there’s a hiccup when it boots back from sleep mode and trying to start up the firing sequence interrupts the process and freezes it.” She took a sip. “So that jam was inevitable even if there wasn’t a field around this place, sweetheart.”

  “You bitch,” he seethed. “That was a dirty trick.”

  “House always plays to win,” Aralyn replied, toasting him with shot that doubled as a way to hide the slight nervous shake of her hands. “Now I believe you had some fucking off to do?”

  Wordlessly, the cowboy stood from his seat and holstered his gun.

  “Ah-ah,” said Aralyn. “Hand it over.”

  “That wasn’t part of the deal!”

  “What, so you can wait outside the field and shoot us later? I don’t think so.”

  Jaw clenching like he was chewing something bitter, the stranger slapped his gun down on the bar and began to storm out.

  “Hey, aren’t you forgetting something else?” called Kita.

  He spun, nostrils flaring like a bull about to charge, ripped the hat off of his head, and threw it to the floor before turning and leaving, slapping the door for good measure. Kita slid out of the booth, picked the hat up, dusted it off, and put it on her head. It slid down over the tops of her ears and she had to lean it backward to keep it from sliding down over her eyes.

  “I suddenly have the urge to ride a horse,” she said, looking around the room. “Anyone else, or is that just me?”

  ****

  “I still say we should have taken the gun,” said Kita, hat still on her head.

  “It was over-modded trash,” Aralyn told her. “I wasn’t lying about that. Plus, the bartender did take it in exchange for our drinks, so at least we didn’t have to pay out any creds for hangovers.”

  Caden pressed a hand to his forehead. “Speaking of which…”

  Aralyn slipped one of the clear vials over to Riordan at his seat by the ephemeris table. “What do you take this stuff for, anyway?”

  Riordan stood from the small console and took it. His dusky skin stood out in stark contrast to the pale liquid in the glass.

  They’d built him a compact computer workstation, which had taken nearly all of the credits they’d had in order to install it on the sly. They’d also had to promise a couple of free transport jobs, just so their computer expert and all-around hacker extraordinaire could run something more powerful than the tablets they’d picked up here and there. So far, Eris was the first station Aralyn had seen their plans pay off on. They’d finally gotten a breakthrough, as miniscule as it was. Even though it didn’t lead to Eladia―at least, not yet—there was a chance that Caden was wrong and it would be useful. She’d come to learn that all roads eventually led to Eladia, and if she could just find a vague direction, the orachal kingpin would reveal herself.

  “I don’t know,” Riordan said, turning it over in his hands and studying it closely. “You’re right; it doesn’t look like orachal, but I’d bet anything that it is.”

  “Well can’t you… I don’t know, analyze it or something?” Caden asked, blearily rubbing the hangover from his eyes.

  “With what?” Riordan demanded, glaring at Caden. “What tools am I supposed to use to do that? Microscope eyes? I’m a computer hacker, not a chemistry lab, all right? Get me the equipment, and then we can talk. All I can tell you right now is that it looks a bit like… well, like orachal… but it also doesn’t.”

  “Really helpful,” Caden shot back, clearly out of effective comebacks.

  “C’mon boys,” Kita said, rubbing her temples. “Enough phallic fencing; at least until the world stops swimming, okay?”

  Both Caden and Riordan glared at Kita, who was completely unfazed, the cowboy hat resting over her face on the small couch. “Where exactly are we going again?”

  “I want to go to Makemake,” Aralyn said. “A dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt.”

  “It’s dangerous,” Caden pointed out. “The UDA isn’t really stationed there, but last I heard, security was tight with their science labs.”

  “I can get us on-station,” Riordan interjected, slipping the vial back into the case, “but once we’re there, it’s up to you. If you think you can handle it on your own, that is?”

  Caden opened his mouth to retort, but Aralyn stepped between them.

  “Look, I get it, it’s close quarters,” she said, positioning herself in the middle of the group as best as she could. “But can we maybe not argue over stupid crap for, I don’t know, a day?” Especially when my head is screaming bloody murder. She turned to Caden, where he was leaning against the wall near the doorway into his ship’s bedroom. “A moment?”

  Caden agreed with a stiff incline of his head and moved into the dark room, waiting for Aralyn to enter before spinning around to face her, ready to spit venom. She cut him off by pressing a kiss to his lips as the door closed behind them. His fingers brushed the barely-there black hair on the sheared left side of her scalp and he let out a frustrated sigh.

  “Okay,” Aralyn said, taking a step back and locking eyes with him. “We need a plan. This orachal—if that’s what it is, isn’t getting us where we need to be just yet. We’ve been hunting Eladia non-stop, and maybe it’s time to follow this lead. It’s small, but it’s the only thing we’ve got—”

  “We have to keep going for Eladia, because she’s the only one with dirt on my father,” Caden interjected. “It’s the only way to connect what she knows about what my father was doing when he was in charge of Tartarys for all those years. I can’t imagine how many people he sold into slavery through that goddamn prison planet, I―”

  “I know,” Aralyn told him. “Look. Makemake’s our closest option apart from some of the other dwarf planets or moons around here, and it’s the best chance we have to get that weird liquid analyzed. One side trip won’t derail us. And if we can find out what else she’s into, maybe it’ll give us some potential customers who know which rocks to look under for worms.”

  “Well,” Caden said, sitting on the bed behind her, “I suppose…” He gave an aggravated shoulder shrug. “I don’t have any other suggestions.” He ran a hand through his hair, his face frantic for a split second before he recovered it.

  No one wanted to admit the truth, but it was an unspoken fact that the longer it took them to track down Proctor, the more people were being ripped out of Tartarys and sold into orachal slavery while being passed off as dead to their relatives. Caden must have felt the weight of each one of those on his shoulders. He’d spent so much time running from his father, that to be the one who stood the greatest chance of stopping him was hard to bear. It was a tough subject to swallow.

  “Look, we’ve all been arguing about this for hours. Everyone’s tired and cranky. Let’s just make this trip as quick as possible, and then we can keep at that list if this doesn’t yield results.”

  “Okay,” he agreed.

  “Once we get there, we need to find a way into the older science labs. Maybe this will give us a clue of what she’s up to.”

  And give me a trail to Kragg, Aralyn stopped herself from adding.

  “I’ll input the course.” Caden nodded distantly and kissed her forehead before slipping back into the ship’s cabin.

  “Love you, too,” she whispered once he was gone. She touched her fingertips to her forehead where the kiss lingered.

  Caden had
become a man consumed, lately. Most of the time now, if it didn’t have anything to do with catching the bad guys, he didn’t care. It was like he was lost in a fog, only able to burn his way through with sheer willpower and rage at his bastard of a father. Not that she could blame him, really. It wasn’t every day you found out your father was one of the higher ups in the slave trade. She wished for a moment that she could talk to Kragg; have him reassure her to do whatever she thought the right thing was. But she didn’t even know what that was anymore. Was this really to help others? Or would she still be doing this if Eladia hadn’t gone and made things personal?

  Pris’s voice entered her thoughts without warning. “We’re the same. We don’t get involved in something unless someone makes it personal.”

  She did her best to shove the guilt away. Pris may have been a conniving bitch from Helios, but Aralyn couldn’t deny that she’d been at least partially right. She rubbed her temples, wishing away the looming threat of a headache. She couldn’t help feeling responsible for the mess they’d all gotten entangled in, even though she knew that everyone was there of their own volition.

  If I knew almost a decade ago what my life would have been like now, she wondered, would I have made the same decisions? She didn’t have an immediate answer. Would never getting into running have made life better for everyone involved now, or ruin their chances at happiness completely?

  The ghost of Eladia still haunted Aralyn at every turn, and for once, they’d finally gotten the chance to turn the tables on her, even just a little. She’d been so good at covering her tracks that it was almost alarming that they’d been able to find the vials to begin with—but Eladia’s people weren’t as good as she was. Everything was hanging on an uncertain thread, and there was no way to make it any easier to deal with. If the vials were medicine, they’d be worse off than back at square one. And if they were actually orachal—would that even help them find Eladia? Instinct told Aralyn that there was something far more sinister in the vials but proving it and doing something about it were two separate issues.

  It’s not like I can get any answers standing here.