“Doesn’t frequent the underbelly,” Bara says. “And sleaze is thin on the ground. Imperial patrols have been picking up a lot lately. Getting intense.”
“Think we’re in line for a raid?” Unheard of. Corona Nine was in the armpit of the Empire. That’s why I liked it.
“Finished unloading all your cargo?”
“Think about who you’re talking to here.”
“Then you’ll be fine. Anyway, I’ll see what blows in that looks like it might piss itself and send it your way.”
“Try not to scare off my meal ticket.”
Bara snorts. “If they can’t handle me, they sure as hell won’t be able to handle you, Nata.” They pat me on the shoulder and then walk away.
It’s an exaggeration. Of all Bara’s clientele, I’m the least likely to take a knife to someone. I’ve never liked fighting, never saw the point to it. Sure, I carry a vibraknife; one cut to the back of the hand and it’ll make anyone let go. But I learned at my auntie’s knee, there’s no point in having ballads sung about you if you’re not alive to hear them. I slouch down into my chair and take my time drinking while my Traveler ticks off minutes for me. I’m good enough that I get to be picky about the cargo I take, and I don’t put up with people being late, not when they expect me to be on time.
I’m just about to finish my drink and skip out when someone whose pace I don’t recognize walks up behind me. My Traveler reads the ident as Shev Haddan, and of course it’s got the same flat, sour note of every other ident here. Fake. Real ones are downright harmonious. “Nata?”
I don’t turn my head. It’s pointless, I can hear him just fine. “You’re late. Sit.”
“Sorry, I—”
“I don’t care. Sit,” I repeat.
Wonder of wonders, he does. And proceeds to fidget, all rustling clothing and the dull sound of one fingernail picking at another. One of those. Normally they wait until later in the conversation, when the fact that I’m not actually looking at them starts really getting on their nerves. “You came highly recommended,” he says.
I love it when they start with flattery. “You said you wanted a fast run. I’m the fastest. What’s the mass on your cargo, and where do you want me to take it?”
“Mass is 2,800 kilos. In-atmosphere haul; it’s delicate electronics. Going to Iota Dover Station.”
That’s three jumps out, but a straight enough shot in the backgates. The mass barely registers, comforting since it means he’s not having me smuggle ordnance for some guerilla group. And most important, it doesn’t require crossing the Seventh Satrapy blockade. War is mostly great news for people like me; all markets get smudged gray. But it also gives us a whole new array of people we really want to avoid, people who have a lot more guns and a lot more free time than us. I’ve been making my calories easy running contraband between Imperial systems and ignoring the civil war. I have no interest in changing that now.
I name a price, two times bigger than fucking ridiculous.
“Done,” he says, tone final. I hear him rustle into motion, then my Traveler informs me that Haddan’s got his hand out to shake.
He agreed too fast. Something has to be wrong. He can’t be that naïve or stupid. But the payday. The fucking payday. When you’re a smuggler, it’s all about the payday. “Cash up front,” I say, not making a move. I won’t be played. “One hundred percent.”
“How do I know you’re not going to run?” he asks, the enthusiasm finally gone.
I like knowing I’m not the only one feeling paranoid. “Go ask your friends around the station, if you have any. My reputation is solid.” It is. I’ve never welshed on a deal. Might have dropped cargo a time or two, but I refund the payment when that happens. I like my contracts clean, my work simple, and my head still attached to my neck—it’s more valuable that way.
But the bigger point is the one we both know. He doesn’t have friends on this station. I can smell the downsider on him, the cheap freshener he’s doused his clothes with because he can’t handle the permanent acrid body odor stink of budget station accommodations. And when he walked up, he sure as hell didn’t sound like someone who knew low-g or no-g. We space-born rats aren’t goddamn dancing unicorns, but we don’t shuffle every step. He’s pure dirt sucker.
“You came highly recommended,” he mutters.
“I sure did. And if you want reliable, and you want speed, you fucking give me what I want.”
He’s sticking his hand out again, my Traveler informs me, now amused. And I can hear Haddan huffing his displeasure. Taps of pressure like a maneuvering jet guide me in smoothly for a handclasp, and the deal is done. I’m nice enough about his ego that I don’t quite smirk. “Deliver your cargo to berth 257. Sooner you get it to me, sooner I can run it out.”
“I’ve been by that berth,” he says. Checking up, maybe. Doing a little research. Not a complete moron. “Ugliest ship I’ve ever seen.”
I give his hand a vicious squeeze before I let go, smiling all the while. “You paid for fast. You didn’t pay for pretty.”
• • • •
My ship’s been voted ugliest on Corona Nine Station ten years running. Her name is Goodluck Gray Pearl, after my parents and my auntie, the way my auntie named me after her auntie, Chrysanthemum. No one but her calls me Chrysanthemum—to everyone else I’m just Nata, because I didn’t want anyone getting weird botanical ideas. I don’t know what the Pearl looks like, and I don’t care. She’s my elephant: Each of her parts feels random, unrelated, and adds up magically to spaceship. All that matters is that I can weave them together into a set of wings so we fly across the void, faster than anyone else.
I’m waiting with her when the dockworkers show up with the shipment: 2,800 kilos, packed in a lot of weirdly big boxes. I skate my fingers over the smooth, unremarkable shipping containers to get a handle on their size and where they are in the hold, and note the raised maker marks have been filed off, but that’s normal in my line of work. My Traveler sniffs them over for flagged biologicals and radiation sources and quietly murmurs the null null null result through my jawbone, but beyond that, it isn’t any of my business. For all I know, I’m running the most expensive empty boxes in the system. Plausible deniability is a shield I’m not too proud to use. Saved my ass on more than one occasion, playing the confused and naïve woman who’s just trying to save up for an operation.
Cargo gets one final count; I check all the netting and sign off for Karis-dee, the dock boss. She knows me well enough that she slaps me on the shoulder on the way out. “See you in a week, Nata.”
“And I won’t see you, Kay-dee.” The cargo doors closing cut off her silvery laugh, the send-off I’ve gotten at Corona Nine for the last year and a half. I wish I could bottle up that laugh, roll around in it, feel it flutter against my throat. Maybe next time. Maybe I’ll set aside some money and get her a present. (I never do. All my love tokens go to the Pearl.)
I slide my fingers along the bulkhead until I find the lighting control. The front panel is already missing, since I didn’t think there was a point to having multiple lighting settings. Full on or full off covers the bases, since I only use the lights for the dock loaders. I pull out the thumb-sized control pack—they last slightly longer if you take them out of the circuit since they don’t get hit with the tiny power plant variations that occur during flight—and stick it in one of my thigh pockets. I learned how to pinch credits on Auntie’s knee, and it’s not like I or the cargo need the light. That power’s better off diverted to the engines.
I keep my fingers on the wall as I take the short passage, head ducked precisely because I’m too damn tall to be in a ship under gravity, up to the bridge. It’s like running my fingers along the arching back of a happy cat. I slide into the waiting couch, worn and grooved to match every muscle of my back, ass, and legs, and trigger the sensory feedback links for the skinsuit I always keep under my regular clothes. I pull the Pearl on like a second skin. The power plant hums its readiness, a vibra
tion that I feel in my gut. My Traveler nudges the onboard dumb AI out of sleep mode with the kind of fondness you get from someone waking up a pet. As the AI handshakes with the smart station system and Corona Nine spins us off into space, I find the sensor pad and pin it between my front teeth. I taste the wash of Corona’s solar wind like curls of orange peel on my tongue.
“Station course accepted. Exiting local control zone in eleven minutes, thirty-six seconds,” the onboard AI informs me in a genderless voice. I settle in against my safety netting as gravity finally fucks off, and absorb location tones, taste washes of mild radiation that splash across the ship’s skin—now my skin. The shift and hum of maneuvering jets and steadily warming impulse engines echo through my fingers and palms.
And eleven minutes, thirty-six seconds later, I stretch my wings and fly.
• • • •
Five hours out from the rickety backgate that’ll take us from Corona to Tauric as long as it hasn’t fucking fallen apart, and I’m relaxed into a border-smudging ooze with my ship. Like a nap, but better. That’s when I feel the air in the cabin shift—impossible—and catch an acidic whiff of synth strawberry flavor—fucking impossible, I can’t stand that shit. I rip my arm free and go for the knife on my belt as I feel a shiver of heat cross my face, a hand light maybe. And then the couch shakes as someone grabs hold and something cold, broad, and metal presses against the top of my head. It takes my fumbling brain about two seconds to recognize the metal barrel’s the right size to be a neuroscrambler. I freeze.
I very carefully release the hilt of my utility knife and raise my hands, fingers spread. I’d rather not startle anyone. That I can move, and think, and cuss myself out means they haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I just need whoever it is on the other end of the scrambler to realize they can’t afford to turn my axons into an unrecognizable knot. The way I can feel the scrambler trembling doesn’t give me a whole lot of comfort, but—
“What the fuck?” a woman says. She’s not the one with the gun; she’s in front of me, and there’s her leg brushing against mine. “What the fuck did you do to the control panels?”
Oh, there we go. I grin, hands still held out, and spit the sensor pad out to swing on its tether in front of me. “You dumb assholes picked the wrong ship to try to jack.” Lights and pretty visual display panels? Waste of power that could go to the engines instead. First thing I scrapped the day Auntie loaned me the money to buy the Pearl.
I feel the warm tickle of the light beam sweeping over my face again. I can practically taste the char of realization dawning.
“Darn,” the man behind me says, in the same tone normally reserved for motherfucker. The scrambler’s muzzle pulls back slightly.
“Then you’ll just have to take us where we want to go,” the woman says.
“No, I don’t .” Now that they’re getting the measure of the situation, it’s the moment to keep hitting before they can try to come up with other solutions. “You need me a hell of a lot more than I need you. Sure, you can shoot me, but then however many there are of you”—2,800 kilos worth of people, apparently, how many is that? —“get to asphyxiate, or drift into a star, or get hit by some space junk, or—oh. Yeah, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get picked up by pirates. I hear they do some amazing shit to their prisoners.”
“Shut up,” the woman says, the words sounding squeezed through clenched teeth.
But no, I’ve just gotten rolling. “Or, no, you know what would be even better than that? You could get picked up by an Imperial patrol if you figure out how to set off the emergency beacon. And then you get to explain to them how you ended up in a ship that none of you can fucking pilot, and you have contraband weaponry, and you spaced the owner’s corpse, and—”
“Shut up!” the woman shouts.
I feel like I’ve made my point. I spread my hands a little wider. “Tell you what, out of respect for pulling one over on me, I’ll drop you off on the nearest station and I won’t even tell anyone. No hard feelings. We just go our separate ways.” Hell no, I’m spacing these fuckers into the vacuum at the first opportunity. They came into my fucking ship, crawled under my skin like parasites, and now nothing is ever going to smell right again. It’ll stick in my brain.
“Lydia—” the man behind me starts.
“You shut up too, Ayren,” she snaps. “I need to think.”
But Ayren just keeps going. “We can’t go to the next station.” His tone is calm, reasonable, and I’d buy it more if I didn’t still feel the barrel of that scrambler brushing against my close-cropped curls.
“Cargo manifest said you were going to Iota Dover station. It’s on the way.” Bullshit, of course, that’s obvious now. But I can play dumb to keep him talking and figure out the scam.
“We can’t stay in the Empire,” he says. “We need to go to Selanor VI. Or any Seventh Satrapy world. A planet, though.”
I don’t need him to spell it out for me. “Sounds like you’ve got a problem, then.” Fuck Haddan-the-parasitic-wasp-in-human-form. And fuck these people. I don’t know which side they’ve managed to piss off in the rapid disintegration of the Empire, and I really could not care less. I’m not getting killed for them.
Hands—must be Lydia, she’s a charmer—yank my safety netting off. “Whoa there, whoa, no need to—” I start, and then my Traveler shrieks a warning half a second before Lydia punches me in the jaw. My teeth slam together, I swallow blood, and go limp. Lydia pops me off the couch like she’s ripping an innocent, slimy sea creature out of its shell.
“Get her out of here,” Lydia snarls. “Put her in one of the containers. I’ll figure something out.”
Ayren grabs me by the back of the neck and shoves me toward the door. I have to reach for the frame or go into it face first. But it’s fine. I can play the cooperative prisoner for now. Because I know my work, I know my Pearl, and Lydia isn’t going to be able to do shit. Not even my auntie could unfuck the puzzle I made of the nav systems when she tried to repo the Pearl eight years ago. All I have to do is wait.
• • • •
And wait. And take a nap. And then wait some more. And listen to my Traveler huff about the entire situation. The container isn’t uncomfortable; it’s probably not fun if you’re packed in here with a whole lot of other people like they were, but there’s room to stretch. I just wish Ayren hadn’t picked the one that smelled like farts. Hell, maybe they all smelled like farts. That’s something that happens when people get nervous.
Outside, I hear the muffled sounds of people talking, singing. Whatever little toy they had interfering with the station sensors while they were hiding in here, it must be some kind of control module instead of pure shielding. I’m itching to find one of those and take it apart. Too bad Ayren was smart enough to net my hands together.
A scrape, and the top of the container comes off. I catch a whiff of the synth strawberry scent again—speak of the devil and there he is. I can hear the talking more distinctly now, shit like, “Lydia will figure it out” and “How does anyone live in this?” and “The first crop we’ll plant is . . .” The singing, though, I don’t recognize, which means it’s not one of the half dozen most common languages in this neck of the galaxy. Small religious or ethnic group, probably, pried out of the planet they’d colonized fair and square centuries ago. The Empire always liked shitting on the little guys.
“I want to talk to you,” Ayren says.
“I was listening to the music.”
“It’s not for you.” He slides into the container and pulls the top shut behind him.
• • • •
“You’re singing in my ship.” And in case that isn’t pointed enough: “Which isn’t for you.”
A long pause, followed by a long sigh. “Songs for the Sabbath.”
Yep, religious sect. It’s not something that’s ever signified to me; everyone’s credits spend the same. Questionable privilege of living in the underbelly, I guess. The only people I automatically don’
t like are megarich fucks. They’re the only ones who have ever tried to stiff me on a payment. “And my ship’s named the Goodluck Gray Pearl.”
Another long pause. “Okay.”
“I figured, since we were talking about ourselves.”
I feel the temperature shiver of that hand-light beam passing over my face again. He doesn’t know what to make of me. Most people don’t. “We need your help.”
“And my name is Nata.”
“Okay. My name’s Ayren.”
“I know. Sorry, Ayren, I can’t help you.”
“You mean won’t,” he says.
“Can’t. If you wanted to make it into the Satrapy, you should have hijacked something with more mass. Then you might have a chance in hell. But they’ve got all the gates sewed up tight.” Something with enough mass could at least try to skip without a gate. There was a slim chance of making it , and to someone desperate enough to try to hijack a ship to start, maybe that would be enough.
“Haddan was supposed to get us on a blockade runner.”
“Haddan fucked us both. We should go complain. Or let me guess . . . you told him you needed fast, when you really meant big.”
Silence. Finally, “We never wanted to leave our homes. The only reason we even have a pilot is because Lydia . . . she’d left and wanted to stay out in the world. But her parents . . .”
That shouldn’t have felt like a little prick at the base of my spine, but it did. “Well, Lydia’s not going to be able to pilot this ship. Offer stands. I’ll take you to the next station. You guys can regroup, think of your next move. Don’t try to hijack another ship. It’s bad for your health.”
“Going to the next station would be bad for our health! We barely got out of Corona Nine alive.”
“I’m a criminal. We’re not known for our sympathy.” I like being alive. I don’t want to get blown to atoms in the space between stars. That’s not my kind of flying.
“You’re a smuggler, not a murderer.”
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 14
