by Faye, Audrey
Bean shimmied left foot to right a couple of times, thinking. And then made a decision. If she was going around gatekeepers, she might as well circumvent them all.
Including the one at the top.
She spun around on her heels. It was going to cost most of what she had left in her pockets to do this right, and if Stardust Prime ran to the usual diurnal schedules, most of what she needed was going to be locked away for the night soon.
Bean cast one last look over her shoulder as she left and smiled at the frayed corner of the rug on the Director’s floor.
Yup, this one was calling to her.
-o0o-
The footsteps in the hallway were all the warning Bean had. Just enough time to gulp, pray, and set down her coffee cup.
The woman who strode into the reception area was a force of nature in every sense of the word. Wild black hair, flashing brown eyes, and a red skinsuit that said she might sit behind a desk now, but she hadn’t started there.
Bean tried hard not to contemplate where the seven previous occupants of her chair had ended up.
Director Mayes made it almost to the door of her office before she seemed to realize Bean was there. She turned sharply, and there was real menace in her gaze. “Who are you?”
Show time.
Bean stood up, holding up a mug in one hand, a carafe of coffee in the other. Jissa had done her a solid on the coffee connection. She’d found the mugs in a dusty back corner of the thrift store that had also produced the abstract wall hangings, the set of tribal drums, and the cool set of curled branches that she’d managed to turn into a plant stand overnight with the application of enough wire and persistence.
Yesenia was staring at the small drum on the edge of Bean’s console like it might explode. Then her eyes traveled the rest of the room in a quick, precise pattern that said the woman missed nothing and formed her opinions at the speed of light. When she made it back to Bean, the menace had congealed into something far scarier.
Willing her hands not to shake and her bracelets not to jangle, Bean poured. It wasn’t just a matter of pride—she’d spent every last credit she had furnishing the office she intended to make her own. Should that insane gamble fail, as all present indicators seemed to suggest, this might be the last real coffee she drank for quite a while.
When the cup was mostly full, she offered it Yesenia’s direction. “Best beans I could find on short notice.” Prepared black, which, as far as anyone knew, was the way the Director liked it. Scuttlebutt on her tastes had been surprisingly scarce. “I’m your new assistant, at least until you decide to toss me down the compost chute like the last guy, or find someone better. My name’s Lucinda Coffey, but everyone calls me Bean.”
For a long, terrifying moment, nothing in the room moved.
And then a glimmer of something that might almost be amusement glinted in brown eyes. “The last guy couldn’t have found the compost chute with a gold-plated map and a platoon of guides.”
Ouch. “I’m pretty good with finding things.”
Yesenia took three steps forward, reached for the mug in Bean’s left hand, and sniffed. Her right eyebrow lifted. “You apparently found decent coffee.”
She owed Jissa. Big. “I can have you better within a week.”
This time, Yesenia’s eyes traveled over Bean’s person. “You don’t look remotely like an assistant.”
One more time, Bean prayed and took a gamble. “That won’t change. I don’t shift my skin for anyone. What you see is what you get.”
Brown eyes flashed steel—and then that stealthy sense of amusement again. “What makes you think that won’t get you a quick ride down a compost chute?”
A lot of things, but she wasn’t prepared to talk about most of them yet. “One, you need a body in this chair so you can get your job done, and how I look has nothing to do with whether or not I can deliver. Two, people are going to talk about me, and if they’re talking about my hair or my drums or my parrot collection, they’re not talking about how long it might be until you fire me. And three, I’ve heard that you’re tough as nails, hell on incompetence, and demanding as a palace full of virgin queens, but I’ve never heard anyone say you were petty.”
Yesenia lifted her mug of coffee slowly and took a sip. “You have a parrot collection?”
Bean grinned. “Not yet.”
The Director glanced at the small, beat-up tablet on the console. “How are your tech skills?”
That was a throwaway question. She’d be fired in ten minutes if she didn’t have them. “Good enough.”
Yesenia took another sip from her coffee. “Our incoming class of trainees arrived two weeks ago. One of the girls is from a large family on Effusia, and she’s very homesick. If I made it your job to help her feel more comfortable here, what would you do?”
Not a throwaway question. Effusia was one of the inner planets, with a tight, clan-based social system. Bean tried to imagine what it might feel like to be thrown out of that into a school where you knew no one and no one knew your family. “I’d check and make sure that the people who generally work with the trainees had tried all the usual things, like rearranging her room to feel more like home and helping her make a friend or two. Then I’d take a guess that she needs more of a social structure than a cohort of ten-year-old girls and see if I could find a local family that might be willing to informally adopt her.”
The Director raised an eyebrow. “And at what point in that would you consult with me?”
Bean held in her sigh of relief. Gastonia’s best greaser knew when she was making progress. “When I failed or when I succeeded.” No way this woman wanted an assistant who needed to be micromanaged.
Brown eyes pinned her like a flapping moth. “Do you fail often?”
Depended who you asked. “No.”
Another slow sip of coffee, and then Yesenia turned toward her office door. She looked back over her shoulder and offered up a regal nod. “You can stay. For now. I’ll let you know when I’ve found someone better.”
Bean managed to keep her grin fairly subdued. “I’ll make sure I know the way to the nearest compost chute.”
The Director’s lips almost twitched. “See that you do.”
A Tale of Two Ships
She was dead.
Sigrid Albrecht snatched her face off the console that had apparently turned into a pillow for her latest desperate catnap. Every damn alarm on the Skrapp was sounding, even a couple she knew hadn’t worked for at least a decade.
All letting her know the obvious. Her old, leaky nav charts had been wrong. There weren’t clear skies out this side of the Veridian ice fields—there was a fucking huge rock. And she had solar sails in full deployment.
Turning while deployed was suicide—it would rip the ship in half.
152 seconds until impact.
Her brain, suffering from traumatic lack of sleep, still had no problem doing that math. 2.5 minutes left to live.
Sigrid stabbed at buttons, ignoring the wailing behind her. Freja would just have to wait.
Freja.
Sigrid’s heart clutched. Her precious baby girl. Everything else in her life had been mercilessly snatched away, and now it seemed the universe was coming for her tiny daughter too.
It hadn’t even waited a week.
She banged her right hand on two different consoles, trying to quiet the damn alarms. Her left hand abused the sonar, radar, nav charts. Trying to find a way to take a crippled junker around a freaking huge asteroid.
One that wasn’t supposed to be there.
131 seconds.
She should have bought better charts, but charts cost money, and there had been precious little of that lately. She’d needed the cash off this trip. Pickings had been good—not a lot of junkers collected in this sector. She had a cargo hold full of high-quality space trash.
It would form her burial mound.
117 seconds.
Freja’s wailing pierced through the alarms. Sigrid gl
anced over at the tiny, mad arms flailing at the monstrous sounds that had invaded newborn sleep and felt her heart split in two. She’d never know now if her girl was going to have her momma’s straight blonde hair or the curls of the man who had accidentally helped to make her.
Apparently black market fertility control wasn’t any better than black market nav charts.
Sigrid looked back at her consoles. It was bleak. She could slow the Skrapp down a little. Enough to maybe leave their dead bodies intact instead of pulverized into ooze.
Long enough for the sky gods to find her tiny girl’s soul.
101 seconds.
She’d always had a weakness for the gods. It wasn’t reciprocal. They’d never noticed she existed.
Freja. Named for the Norse goddess of love and beauty—and of death. It had been the name that had come to Sigrid as she lay curled up on a pallet, exhausted and alone, after giving birth in the Skrapp’s cargo hold. The med bot had died right about the time her water had broken. Which was fine, because Sigrid had been about to strangle it anyhow. No damn bot got to tell her how to breathe.
82 seconds.
Breathing. Oxygen. The cargo hold had an evac pod. A junked one she’d scooped up in an asteroid field three days before Freja’s birth—and hooked up to her systems long enough to verify its life support still worked.
Worth more that way.
Sigrid bolted for the port to her cargo hold. The evac pod wouldn’t fly, and she didn’t have a door to push it out of, but it was a tough, padded cylinder. One with oxygen.
The closest she could come to a womb on short notice.
No time.
She reversed herself back through the port hole and grabbed Freja, wrapped in a batik scarf and remnants of an old skinsuit. Poor kid. She’d had a weird life in her six days in the galaxy.
Fortunately, the med bot’s single auto-diaper had still been functional.
61 seconds.
Sigrid kissed the top of her daughter’s head and propelled them both into the cargo hold. She tucked Freja into the evac pod, batik scarf and all. And then, heart rending, touched one finger to her sweet girl’s red, yowling cheek and slammed the door of the small capsule shut.
Two steps and she had both hands on the cargo hold console. It worked better than most on the ship, and it would let her spend the last 61 seconds of her life close enough to see her baby girl through the evac pod’s tiny window.
Frantically she re-programmed the code, running shunts around the systems that were already broken and the ones unlikely to survive impact.
Impact. She couldn’t think about that now.
46 seconds.
Sigrid’s fingers flew, echoes of when she’d been one of the best programmers in the Federation’s fleet. Before Antonio. Before the handsome man who had pulled her over to the dark side.
Before she’d sold her soul to try and save him.
Her luck with men had never changed—Brag had only been the latest. Named after the Viking god of music and poetry, and he’d been a master of both. His voice had seduced her in one long, slow evening over mugs of spiced mead in between sets at the bar on Heimili Station.
A bard with a golden voice. Maybe his daughter had inherited some of his fortune.
She would need it.
22 seconds.
Sigrid cursed and locked in the last two lines of code. All oxygen would route to the evac pod on impact.
Which would likely only mean that her beautiful, innocent, defenseless baby girl would die slowly and alone on the side of an unforgiving astral rock.
Sigrid’s eyes filled with hot tears. She slashed them away with the back of her hand, knowing she had to be able to see. Had to time the execution of the code just right, or Skrapp’s sense of self-preservation would override the suicide script.
8 seconds.
She watched the view screen and the oncoming, rushing horror of the rock. Watched the evil numbers counting down, her finger hovering over the execute command. Looked one last time at the red, screaming face of her tiny girl, about to be birthed yet again into an unfriendly world.
And pushed the button.
-o0o-
Eight Years Later…
“Hey, kiddo. Keep it under three gees, okay?”
Lakisha Drinkwater, eight and already one of the best pilots on Halkyn VII, rolled her eyes. “I can fly faster than that and you know it.”
Her father ruffled her blonde, wavy hair. “I know. But the pressure hull can’t handle it.”
She sighed. “Is the patch failing again?” That meant they’d be grounded until they could borrow Tivi Malcolm’s blow torch. Which, given how mad he was at the Drinkwaters right now, might be a while.
Everyone was kind of mad at the Drinkwaters. Her oldest brother Jingo was the newest full-fledged digger on the rock, and he’d been assigned the pile-of-crap shaft to mine. Or at least, that’s what everyone had called it until he’d found the vein of iridium in the back right corner.
Iridium was the most valuable thing they mined in this sector, and a new vein would earn a hefty finder’s bonus. Maybe Jingo could buy them a blow torch.
Whatever. Kish’s mind swerved away from the boring issues of iridium and money and petty digger-rock politics and surveyed the horizon. It was a big treat to be out here, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her for a second. Even if she had to fly at the speed of a slow turtle.
She glanced over at the man in the co-pilot seat. Pops looked happy. There was no one better in the driver’s seat of a flitter, but that wasn’t the reason she’d been willing to get up before skybreak to come flying with him. Out here, he treated her like an equal—or at least like someone who might be worth his while one day. At home, she was just the smallest and scrappiest of eight kids, and if she got noticed, it was usually because she was in trouble. Again.
There were a lot of ways to get in trouble on a digger rock when your heart yearned to be somewhere else and there was nowhere else to go.
Kish looked out at the stars and wished, like she always did, that the clunky old tin can under her hands could carry her there.
“Don’t be wishing for what you can’t have.” Her dad’s voice was gruff, and a little impatient—they’d had this conversation before.
She could feel her lower lip popping out. “It doesn’t hurt anything to look.” But it did. She could see the small caldera coming over the horizon—the one that marked the spot where they’d found her DNA mother’s ship.
The man who had rescued a squalling baby out of an evac pod and taken her home laid his hand on her shoulder. “Head right, kiddo. No time for sightseeing today. We need to run the lines. If we’re not back by dinner, your mom will make us eat cold potato flakes.”
That wasn’t much worse than having to eat them warm. Payday for Pops was still four days away, and there would be a lot of potato flakes between now and then. And soy paste.
Kish scowled. She hated soy paste. She banked carefully to starboard—it wasn’t a hard maneuver, but the left thruster had been acting up lately, and if she broke that, they’d definitely be grounded. She hummed a little to the flitter under her breath.
“Stop with yer singing already. It’s a machine, not a baby.”
Pops sounded annoyed. She glanced over at him, hoping he was just teasing.
He winked at her. “Think you can hold that patch on with a little ditty, do you?”
Not likely—but sometimes she thought her singing made Pops happier. Even when he scowled. Kish kept humming and swept her eyes over the instrument panel with a practiced gaze. Everything was good except for the auto-stabilizer, and that had been broken since she was three.
Fortunately, Kish had an iron stomach—so long as she didn’t feed it soy paste.
She jumped as the radio squawked and dumped out a bunch of gibberish.
“Damn.” Pops leaned forward, tension in his voice. “I thought Jingo fixed this thing.”
Kish gripped the yoke under
her hands until her knuckles turned white. They always left the flitter radio on the emergency frequency. Chatter on that channel meant something had exploded or someone was dead.
Or both.
Pops jimmied with the radio controls, trying to get a better signal. The squawking got louder—and then suddenly cleared. “… the Federated Commonwealth of Planets trader ship Ios. We have crashed and need immediate assistance. Repeat—we have crashed and need immediate assistance.”
Kish and her dad gaped at the radio.
“We caught their signal. We must be close.” Pops yanked an ancient pair of binoculars out of the net above his head and jammed them against his eyes. “Take her up. Now. Fast and hard.”
He wasn’t Pops now. Those were the terse orders of one of Halkyn VII’s finest first responders.
Kish’s chest nearly blew up with pride. He was letting her fly. In an emergency. Only the best pilots got to do that. She pointed the flitter’s nose almost straight up. Height first—Pops needed visibility. The old machine stuttered, but it went up. Kish pushed a little more, and started to sing.
The stutters evened out a little. She watched the rising coolant temperature—much higher, and they’d have impeller issues.
Pops still had his binoculars glued to the window. “Nothing. Swing right. Head past that caldera first—I want to see the far side.”
Kish gulped and headed straight for the place where her DNA mother had died. No one ever went there. Ghosts. Bad juju. Darkside cold.
A flash out the left window caught her attention. “Pops. Over here.”
He swung himself to the other side of the flitter in one quick motion. “Where? I don’t see it.”
She didn’t either—not anymore. But something inside her knew where it had come from. “I know where to go.” Kish wrenched at the controls, suddenly frantic. In an emergency, speed mattered. Seconds mattered. People died in seconds.
Pops said nothing. He just stared out the window.
Kish couldn’t look—she had her hands full holding the flitter steady. But she could feel the right way to go. There was a rope now, reeling her in.
