Cosmic Cabaret

by SFR Shooting Stars

  Gifted was the word some used to describe the psychically enhanced. Max came from Faik, where natives were gifted or born with the ability to find veins of precious metals in large sections of rock. As a result, he never questioned any enhanced mental talents.

  Max locked eyes with her through the mirror. “When I get back, we’ll talk about just how much he controlled you as well.”

  Ayanna choked down a lump of spicy meat as Max strode off. Thank goodness he seemed to have control of his mind again. And why hadn’t Razer—if that was his real name—done the same to her? Had he tried? If he’d succeeded, she suspected she wouldn’t have been able to walk away from him. In fact, they’d probably be checking into a room across the way right now instead.

  Did Max think she’d sat with the guy because he’d forced her to do it? She flushed with remembrance of Razer’s touch, sitting on his lap, recognizing the evidence of his attraction, then his skin against her skin when he touched her cheeks, her hands. She’d been in sexual situations with men before. No one had a shot at working on Ozan in the entertainment industry if they weren’t willing to, uh, service the males who ran the business that dominated all the productions exported across the Alliance.

  She’d known the conditions going in at the start, but had avoided the pressure to do anything beyond use her hands to pleasure the males who decided whether she got work. That’s why she’d taken lessons as a sexual masseuse before leaving Huldra. It had been enough until the very end. Even now, she shuddered, remembering the producer of the pageant forcing his hard penis down her throat. Just before she bit down, ending her career options and forcing her to flee off-planet and change her stage name to get work.

  She rubbed her arms, a small comfort that she was safe and in control of her life. She had a job, even a little professional respect, and a friend in Max. She might be stripping for money, but no man touched her without her consent. Ever.

  She brushed against her wrist and noticed her access bracelet was gone. No! Had it fallen off in her rush to get away from Razer, or….no….she moaned…had he stolen it? She hadn’t noticed when she fled backstage because Max’s bracelet had given them access to the dressing areas. All her saved credits. Gone!

  Max entered her dressing room again, shaking his head.

  “He’s gone. So is your pack and cape.”

  Ayanna gazed up at him in despair. “Worse, Max…he’s got my access bracelet, and all my credits coded on it. I just got paid this morning.”

  Max, the gentle giant, knelt in front of her and cupped her chin with the softest touch.

  “Let me take care of you, Ayanna. Give this all up. The dancing, the work. We’ll go get your family and settle somewhere quiet, leave this world behind. It’s full of conniving thieves, gossiping performers, petty jealousies, dangerous predators. Let me fix all your problems, please.”

  Ayanna’s emotions welled up and a tear trickled down her face. Max leaned in and kissed her cheek, kissed the tear away. He didn’t push for anything more. Not like Razer, she thought. A guy like Razer wasn’t interested in taking care of her, he only wanted to take from her and give nothing in return. The way he’d taken her things, her access bracelet. He’d probably already wiped her account clean of its pitiful amount of saved credits. Anyone with the know-how could anonymously transfer the credits with a simple line of code. It was one of the reasons that her boss kept her riches in physical property.

  She shook her head regretfully at her champion and protector. It would be so easy to give in to Max’s offer. But she knew that she’d never love Max the way he deserved to be loved.

  “You know what, Max? I just need you to escort me to my cabin. I need a good night’s sleep. Do you still have my cabin access code?”

  His face fell, hope dashed, then he scowled, but nodded in assent. Max was a sweetheart to her, but she knew his potential for violence. He was a trained warrior. A muscled, powerful male with a heart of soft gold. He only showed his soft side to her. All the other performers were actually afraid of the guy. It was rumored that he’d left the Alliance’s secret covert operations division after some tragedy. He lived under an alias now too. Seemed like so many working on Quantum were running from their pasts.

  “Okay, babe. Want me to tell them to take you off tomorrow’s schedule?”

  “What? No! I need to work now more than ever. I’ll borrow some of the other girl’s costume pieces until I have enough credits for more scarves.”

  “Shit, Ayanna. I’ll buy you scarves.”

  She urged him up on his feet.

  “No, Max. I am not going to ask you to pay my way.”

  Max pushed his hands through thick, dark hair in frustration. “Why won’t you let me help you? I’m not going to take advantage of you.”

  Ayanna clutched his arm. “I know, Max. It’s just…it’s just that I need to do this myself.”

  “Okay. I’ll take you to your cabin.”

  Six

  Razer waited until he saw Ayanna leave by the front entrance of the club. The bouncer Max escorted her and he was caught between gratitude that the male was protecting her and envy that he wasn’t the one providing her safety. A quick scan of Max’s mind eased his jealousy. Ayanna had apparently turned down Max’s offer to go away together—again. He trailed them until they got to the level transporters before doubling back and checking into one of the rent-by-the-hour rooms across the way from the club.

  Inside, he dumped out and considered the various outfits in Ayanna’s pack, deciding in the end to wear just her decorative face mask and her floor-length cloak, which had a large hood to shadow his features. His horns were clearly outlined by the soft fabric of the cape, so he added a long, brown wig he kept in his travel kit for moments like this when he needed to add extra elements to his disguise. The wig was a bit scruffy and worn, but effective at smoothing the bumpy silhouette made by his prominent horns, even when hidden under the hood of the cape.

  The less he had to use his telepathy, the better, since it could be traced by special trained investigators after the fact. He checked himself out in the room’s wall of mirrors designed to add voyeuristic titillation to sexual encounters. He was slightly tall for the cape, his boots clearly showing, but then Butterfly had worn boots with her flight suit. Just as long as no one noticed his feet were twice the size of Ayanna’s.

  Cloaked in the mask and hooded cape, and carrying the now empty pack and Ayanna’s access bracelet that was too tiny to fit over his wrist, he slipped back into the club. He used his psychic ability to wipe anyone’s memories of his rough-featured face—which in no way matched Ayanna’s delicate beauty. A delicate beauty that kept flashing into his mind, distracting him from the job. He almost gave himself away a couple of times but with his talent, it was easy enough to retcon any witnesses’ current memories with earlier memories of Butterfly’s face.

  Accessing the secure area behind the club was simple enough. He entered the private passage. Employees, performers, dancers hustled around him, caught up in their own worries and responsibilities. He hardly had to retcon a single memory as he made his way into the depths of the club and closer to his target.

  Fortunately for Razer, the owner rarely stayed in the club late since she had a small child and kept regular ship hours. Still, that didn’t mean the office was unsecured. Embedded electronic security measures lined the final hallway and the door itself. Fortunately, Ayanna’s bracelet provided the necessary permissions all along the way to the last office door.

  Two meat-faced goons guarded the location. Razer slipped into their minds to insert a telepathic knockout blow, sending them to the floor, deadweights. He smirked. These rich people really needed to hire some Earthling guards if they wanted to keep out psychically-advantaged robbers. He wasn’t going to complain though, after the stressful way things had gone down on Kadis.

  He waved Ayanna’s bracket over the office lock. Nothing. He tried again. Fuck! He’d gotten as far as he could on Ayanna’s security
. Did the guards’ access work? He stripped one of the downed goon’s bracelets off his wrist, put it on and waved it over the lock and it disengaged. Razer pulled out his recently-acquired OmniShield, activating the expensive device in order to remain undetected by any sensors inside the office. He hadn’t used it yet, so he hoped it worked. The office door slid open easily and he slipped in.

  Razer rapidly located the safe. It wasn’t behind a wall, or under the flooring. It was in the ceiling, above the large old-fashioned desk positioned in the center of the room. He leaped up on the desk and shifted the secret panel to reveal a trapdoor.

  Razer slipped on protective gloves and made quick work of breaking through the door, first disabling the silent alarm, then cracking the first of several codes with an underground electronic e-cracker—tools and skills essential in his line of work. Opening the door, which swung downward in a rush, nearly cracking him in the skull, revealed a short, sliding ladder. He pulled it down and swiftly climbed up inside.

  The safe—or rather safe room—was about the size of a guest cabin. How big a treasure did a cabaret owner need? The wall’s shelves were lined with stacked and sealed green glass boxes. The Alliance seal was etched into the side of each box. When he’d scanned Max’s mind for Ayanna’s name out on the club floor, he’d flashed on images like these boxes.

  Curious, he pulled a box off the shelf and tugged it open, breaking the official-looking seal. Inside were files of paper documents that looked important, possibly in the Crannor language. Who kept paper records in this age? A question for another day. A file labeled KhaRya caught his eye. His interest piqued, he grabbed the file, folded it, and shoved it into his jacket. He placed the box back on the shelf, turning the broken seal to the back and out of sight. His job was to locate the jewels and digital credits. And soon. He’d already been inside the office longer than was safe.

  Across the room, an old fashioned iron floor safe from another era, the size of a large food replicator, was bolted to the wall with flat iron straps. Here, his electronic safecracking tools failed him. The antique unit had a double set of spinning locks with artfully-styled symbols on them. Would the guard—would anyone other than the owner—know the combination? He paced the room. It’s been awhile since Kugen had shown him how to crack these ancient safes. The code could be impossible to guess and he didn’t have the necessary auditory-sensitive tools on him to crack it. Maybe the code wasn’t that sophisticated.

  No one, including the owner, probably believed a thief would get this far past security, and a long, sophisticated code would be annoying to use regularly. He studied the symbols. The elegantly carved images of dancers and performers looked familiar. Where had he seen them before? Ah, on the schedule device attached to his club table earlier. What if the code matched the sequence of the schedule? The club ran three scheduled cycles of performances—some of the acts repeated, some of them only showing once a day. Could one of the schedules match the coded sequence?

  Razer jumped back down into the office and rummaged through the desk drawers, pulling out a similar device hopefully loaded with the schedules. He swiped the screen and it lit up briefly before going black.

  Jackpot!

  He turned it on again and huffed in mild frustration. Of course, it was password protected. But what were the chances? Remembering the cabaret owner was from Ozan, he keyed in the Ozanian word password and the device awoke. Didn’t matter how sophisticated the technology, security was always weakened by people’s laziness. It didn’t hurt that he spoke and wrote all twelve of the official planet’s home languages.

  The screen flashed three schedule icons. He probably only had one shot of getting into the safe with the right sequence before the alarms sounded. He scrambled back up into the safe room.

  Tapping the screen he reviewed each schedule, noting that Butterfly was on all of them. When did the woman rest? He decided to try the third shift schedule which had the sequence of the aerobatic troupe, then the male revue, and then Butterfly. It was the same schedule during which he’d first seen the beautiful dancer and he hoped choosing it would bring him luck. Taking care to listen for soft clicks of the lock engaging—no easy feat—he spun the knobs left, then right, then left, cycling through the matching icons, the reassuring clicks repeating until a low ping announced his success.

  Inside, as promised, he found an array of beautiful uncut stones worth an Alliance fortune. Each gem would fund the freedom of a hundred or more slaves. He loaded Ayanna’s emptied pack full until it bulged—the memory of her abandoned stage costumes rousing a bit of guilt. He never wanted to see those gorgeous eyes fill with tears. Focus, for gods’ sake. Calmly but efficiently, he closed the safe and reactivated the alarm on the now hollow safe, then jumped down to the office, closing up the door and sliding the secret panel into place.

  In moments, he was out of the room, the two guards’ minds released to wake and resume their watch, their memories altered. Razer strode down the hallway towards the front of the club, cape swinging, his heart racing slightly at the ease with which the heist was going down. He was nearly in the clear, and so far, everyone had fallen for the charade that he was the dancer Butterfly under the cape and mask, helped, of course, by a little attentive telepathic manipulation.

  Things rarely worked this well, but Razer wasn’t leaving without concerns. He had never felt guilty about leaving someone else under suspicion in previous jobs. But he couldn’t shake a feeling of guilt and impending doom. Something deep in his soul was revolting, even as he manipulated yet another performer’s mind in the hallway that she was passing Butterfly, the dancer, in the hall, instead of a thief. He’d exit using the guard’s bracelet instead of Ayanna’s just in case someone tried to implicate her in the theft. If anyone was accused of the crime, he didn’t want it to be her. It would already look bad that he’d used her bracelet to enter the backstage area. The owner wouldn’t want to lose a performer of Ayanna’s caliber, would she? The earlier thought that Razer could just take Ayanna with him reformed. No. It was impractical for so many reasons. That’s why he’d abandoned his plan to seduce her too.

  Razer refocused by thinking of all the helpless slaves his extended family saved on every rescue mission. A few betrayals along the way were worth the hundreds, the thousands, of innocents freed in their operations. They’d single-handedly crippled the intergalactic slave trade in just a few galactic years. Still, as he exited the employee area with the guard bracelet’s code and made his way out of the club, through the ship’s passageways and down to the docks where his transport ship waited, his chest ached. He couldn’t help but wonder if he was leaving behind the greatest jewel of all.

  Seven

  Ayanna apologized for the third time as she and Max headed to the club. She’d decided that it was better to report the bracelet stolen before her next shift just in case that scoundrel Razer did more than swipe her credits.

  As they turned the corner to the club, she saw her long red cape and tall feathered mask disappearing in the opposite direction. What the hell? She caught Max by the arm and pointed. He frowned, looked down at her and they must have read each other’s minds. They both took off at a run after the culprit.

  “Stop thief!” Max’s voice boomed down the corridor. The individual in the cape turned and Ayanna could see it was Razer dressed up in her dancing mask and cloak. The ludicrousness of a scrappy long wig—sitting high and full on those horns—and the sideburns framing his face nearly made her laugh out loud. Who would ever think that he was Butterfly?

  But Max stalled besides her and came to a halt. She grabbed his hand, tugging.

  “Come on, Max, we have to catch him!”

  Holding his ground, Max looked down at her with a strained face. He seemed to be fighting something in his mind. He removed his hand from hers, sighing.

  “Look, lady. I don’t know who you are, but leave Butterfly alone. She’s got a right to a night off.”

  Ayanna gaped at Max. Oh no. Not again. S
he looked up and saw that her feathered mask and headdress were bobbing away, quickly disappearing down the passageway.

  “Frakking bastard!”

  She left Max behind as she sprinted after Razer. She wasn’t in her platform shoes now and she could move fast when she wanted to catch up to or escape someone. Let’s just see who could run the fastest, she thought, as she gained on the con artist.

  Still, she barely kept him in sight. The male could move, despite his large body. He seemed able to clear the path as he broke into a surprisingly graceful run, a path clogged with people that parted and then inconveniently bunched back together, resuming its leisurely pace as soon as he passed them, while getting in Ayanna’s way as she chased after Razer. But she stayed with him, determined to catch him and retrieve her bracelet.

  He sprinted. She followed. They traveled down the emergency routes, the stairwells that were rarely used. Without the crowds in her way now, she gained on him. At first, she was pleased, but then she grew suspicious. Did it seem like he was deliberately slowing to let her catch up? Why would he do that if he was trying to escape her?

  Suddenly, warning sirens blared into the stairwell. Ayanna could hear doors opening on multiple levels and the sounds of shouting.

  “Get them before they reach the docking bay!”

  Them? Didn’t they mean him? Why would they be after her?

  Suddenly, Razer stopped one landing short of the docks. A half dozen security guards coming through the door in front of him stepped aside and held the door open.

  “What are you doing?” Ayanna cried. “Stop him!”

  She caught up and grabbed him by the arm and tried to gesture to the guards to hold him, but they just shook their heads in confusion.

  “Careful, lady. There are fugitives on the run and they may be armed,” one of the guards told her. “A male and a female.”