by Sara King
Another general rumble of discontent reverberated through the mess hall at her words.
“No offense Capt’in,” Goat replied, “But I hired on with ya’ll ‘cause I’s tired of workin salary. I like me cut.”
Goat was called ‘Goat’ because no matter how often he bathed, his aroma was always enough to singe the nostrils. He sat off to one side, giving his shipmates a wide berth.
Even with the smell, however, Athenais counted herself lucky to have him. In her seven thousand years in space, she had never seen a cartographer his rival. He could navigate his way to safe harbor with the positioning system down and only a porthole view of the surrounding stars to guide him.
Athenais knew. She’d made him do it.
“If sixty isn’t enough, I can see what the colonists’ll be willing to give you in trade.” She hadn’t mentioned the shifter yet. There wasn’t a man in her crew who wouldn’t jump on the chance to rake in three million credits.
“Trade?” Dune muttered. “What they got but lumber and cows?”
“You might be surprised,” Athenais said. “Where do you think all Utopian gold comes from, anyway? Penoi’s got more mines than you’ve got fleas.”
Goat snorted, but he looked interested.
“They got gems, too,” Ragnar said. “Biggest ruby I ever seen came outta Penoi.” He was standing in the corner, his arms crossed as he surveyed the room. This was the first thing he had said since the conversation started. Athenais took that as a sign that he was interested, at least.
“And don’t tell me you boys ain’t never been tempted to sample the colonist wares,” Smallfoot said. He grinned. “I hear there’s somethin ta be said ‘bout them fertile gals. ‘Tis said ya can feel yer seed takin hold.”
The two other women of the ship gave Smallfoot a disgusted look, but Athenais had heard similar remarks before. She couldn’t say if they were true or not, but she wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to gain their cooperation.
“Think,” Athenais offered, “They haven’t seen a Utopi before in their lives. They prolly think Utopis are gods in the sack, enough practice and all that.”
“We are!” Smallfoot roared, grabbing his crotch. “Ask any whore in The Shop.”
In his corner, Ragnar rolled his eyes.
“So what do you say?” Athenais said. “Should I talk to these colonists?”
“Talk to them,” Goat said, crossing his arms over his chest, “But tell ‘em we want a ton of gold apiece.”
“A ton of gold!” Ragnar said, “For seven people? Are you a blasted idiot, Goat? Colonists couldn’t afford that much. Millennium is fleecing them for all they’re worth as it is.”
“Just saying I ain’t doin no job for no sixty credits a day,” Goat said. “Can’t even buy a good whore for that much.”
“Goat, you couldn’t buy a whore for all the credits in the Utopia,” Dune said. “Gotta get those AI ‘bots that can turn off their noses.”
“Got a question.” Smallfoot leaned back lazily in his chair, which threatened to break under his weight. He was called Smallfoot because of his petite size-five shoes. What he lacked in foot size, however, he made up in his upper body. From his torso up, he looked like some sort of gorilla, complete with thick black abdominal hair. His furry nature had often made Athenais wonder how he kept hairs from falling into his patients’ open wounds when he stitched them up.
“Seems ta me it’s strange you’d offer to pay our wages yerself, Capt’in. What’s in it fer ya’ll? Some side-deal we don’t know ‘bout?”
Leave it to Smallfoot to think up a way she could be cheating them.
“There’s no deal,” Athenais said. “I just wanna see Marceau Tempest’s face when we destroy his precious Potion.” She felt the corners of her lips twitch in a bitter grin, thinking of it.
“What you got against the Potion, Capt’in?” It was Fairy, the newest member of the crew. She was also the youngest, thirty-four years old, and only been brewing for the last ten of it. Normally, Athenais would have balked at hiring such youth, but the girl was brilliant at spatial maneuvering. She could pull six seven-twenty degree countermeasures at full power and still be up for calamari and fried zucchini afterwards.
Athenais knew. She had seen it, back when the little brat had been working for the Utopia.
What did she have against the Potion? Athenais couldn’t quite put it to words, but of the handful of Utopis as old as she, all of them felt the same way. A vague sense of wrongness, that the Potion had taken away something important and left them with emptiness. The more youthful generations—which was about everybody else—didn’t notice it, which was what worried her even more.
Fairy waited impatiently for a response. Athenais had hired Fairy after the Utopia had discharged her for ‘reckless insubordination’ and ‘unabashed arrogance.’ Athenais had experienced none of those problems.
The first time Fairy took the Beetle on an unauthorized joyride, Athenais had sealed the little wench in the air-lock and took her on a ride of her own, just the two of them, the com system switched on, grav regulators switched to Low as a sort of ‘Getting To Know You’ retreat. Between the alternating begging and careful delineation of what was and what was not acceptable from a crew member of a respectable space pirate, Athenais let slip that, should the little moron take her ship out without permission again, she would find a particularly heinous way to end her miserable existence. When she finally returned to dock, Fairy fell out of the air-lock and puked all over the reception corridor while the startled security guard looked on.
All eyes were on her, now. Even Ragnar looked curious.
“Marceau Tempest made it.” Athenais said, tracing her hand across the smooth metal-carbide doorframe she was leaning against. “That’s reason enough for me.”
“Your father.” Fairy was still in awe of that fact.
Athenais ignored her, once again regretting telling the flighty little runt.
“Captain,” Squirrel interjected, “I don’t mind the pay. Sixty credits is better than working on that rock—” Athenais had found Squirrel on a penal colony after she had been put there for crashing the combined communications systems of three planets, “—but I do want to know what you think we can do.”
“Yeah,” Dune inserted. “What do these colonists want with Beetle, anyways? We can’t sneak onto Millennium. Marceau’d hand us our asses.”
“If a couple dirt-poor colonists can find a way past Millennium’s fleet, then so can we,” Athenais said.
Goat and Smallfoot groaned, but Fairy leaned forward in her chair, the interest of brazen stupidity bright in her baby blue eyes.
“Anyway, it’s not a done deal,” Athenais told them. “I’ll find out the rest when they show up tomorrow.”
“Right, then,” Dune said, standing. “I got stuff ta do.”
Smallfoot rolled his eyes. “You need to get a girl, man!”
“Got one, thanks,” Dune replied. He pulled out a grease-stained picture of a dunebuggy bearing a winner’s cup from a grimy chest-pocket of his faded blue overalls. “Her name is Wild Betty and she just won the Moondust Marathon.” Kissing the picture, he left the mess hall.
“He really needs a girl,” Smallfoot repeated. “You, too, Goat.”
“Prolly right,” Goat said, shrugging.
“Maybe Fairy’d take you under her wing,” Smallfoot continued. “After that last batch of slop she fed us, I doubt she has a sense of smell.”
“You knucker, Smallfoot,” Fairy said, wrinkling her petite nose.
Athenais wondered again what the hell she’d been thinking hiring the delicate little twit on a pirate ship. Sure, she was a pilot that could probably face down the entire Utopian fleet, given the right opportunity, but she also had about as many brain cells as an ornamental potted plant.
“I’ll see you all tomorrow,” Squirrel said with a yawn. “I don’t care what we do. Just have someone come get me when you need me to take up com.”
“M
e too, man. I’m outta here,” Goat said. “Got me some tanga-weed to burn.”
“Keep the door shut,” Athenais said.
If Goat heard her, he didn’t reply.
“Sometimes I wonder how he manages to see straight with all the weed he smokes,” Fairy said.
“Beats me,” Smallfoot said. “What about you? How much tanga-weed you smoke, girl?”
“None!” Fairy cried, looking insulted.
“So you mean you’re naturally an airhead?”
“Shut up, Foot,” Ragnar said. Ragnar, the gentlemanly turd, backed the twit up every chance he got. Probably because, on a ship full of pirates, Fairy was completely out of her league, and not only did every member of Athenais’s crew know it, but several—like Smallfoot—would take advantage of it in an instant, given the right opportunity. Not even two years with Beetle had squashed Fairy’s bright-eyed, naïve idealism. The girl just didn’t understand the real world, much less the criminal world. She’d lived a sheltered, charmed life, and somehow, through some random, irrational act of the gods, had ended up one of the only living stick-fairies in the Utopia. The injustice of it still rankled Athenais whenever she looked at the twit’s bovine brow.
“Fine,” Smallfoot said, raising his hands at Ragnar’s scowl, “I’ll just head back to The Shop then, if you’re done with me. I’ve got me some unfinished business with them gals in the back.” He grinned wide enough to show his perfect teeth. “Them girls just love ta play doctor.”
Thinking of Smallfoot naked, Athenais tried not to shudder.
When no one objected, Foot gathered up his coat and left the mess hall.
“You were pretty silent through all this,” Athenais said, eyes catching on her first mate. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a great idea!” Fairy began. “The Millennium fleet couldn’t hold a candle to—”
“I was talking to Ragnar, girl.”
Fairy deflated. “Oh.” After a long minute of pointed silence from Athenais and Ragnar, her copilot looked around. “Uh. Guess I’ll be in my room, then?”
“Make sure Goat’s door is closed when you go by,” Athenais said. “I can’t stand the smell of that shit.”
Fairy’s nose twisted in a pert little pout, but she got up and left.
Ragnar watched Fairy depart, her curvaceous little hips swaying. Once she was gone, he said, “I think we should hear ‘em out.”
“You don’t care about the money?”
“You know my feelings. Marceau is playing God.”
Athenais had caught Ragnar stowed away on her ship almost four hundred years earlier. They had just unloaded a shipment of tanga-weed on a buyer on Millennium and were on their way to a job on Terra-7 when Athenais caught him crawling around in the ventilation. How he had gotten on the ship was still a mystery to Athenais, and she still hadn’t been able to wrench that little bit of information out of him.
Once she had forced Ragnar out into the open at the wrong end of an overcharged semiautomatic flesh-seeker, Ragnar had eaten like a starving man but refused to mention how he had gotten on Marceau’s bad side. All he told her was that he had had to get off planet right then and didn’t have any money to pay her.
That had been an interesting development. Athenais had made him cook for the rest of the trip, and when she tried to boot him off at the first inhabited planet she found, she found him in the ventilation again as soon as they left port.
At that point, Athenais could have thrown him into space with no regrets, but instead she surprised everyone and gave him the permanent position of ship’s cook. He had gradually climbed the ranks as crewmembers grew old or Athenais retired them, landing the position of First Mate after only thirty years.
The crew liked Ragnar. He was honest, hardworking, and, though he didn’t specialize in any one thing, he could fill in for any one of the crew if they got sick or needed a day off. Sometimes, when she was bored, Athenais wondered who would wind up on a deserted planet if she and Ragnar ever had a falling out. The odds never came out in her favor.
That fact alone should have made her put a concentrated blast of photons through his brain years ago, but things with Ragnar had gotten more…complicated…than she liked. She was still sorting through that particular blunder, but in the meantime, Ragnar made a good bedwarmer, and space was a damned lonely place.
“I want to do it,” Ragnar said, his big arms crossing over thick pecs. “This might be our chance.”
“It might,” Athenais agreed, “But they better have a damn good plan. Otherwise it’s a no-go.”
“It’ll work.”
“You’re a fool,” Athenais laughed. “You haven’t even heard them out yet.”
“Yes I have,” Ragnar said.
Athenais sobered.
Ragnar saw her piercing look and hesitated. “The man with the missing finger.”
“What about him?”
“He’s my brother.”
Athenais’s jaw fell open.
“Our ship crashed on Penoi,” Ragnar went on quickly. “Twenty-three of us in all. Fourteen died in the crash. Paul and the others escaped the wreckage before Marceau found it. He took me an’ five others to labs on Millennium.”
“You’re a shifter?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“And here I thought there was a ventilation duct that I didn’t know about,” Athenais cried, disgusted. “Hell, you probably walked right past me.”
Ragnar nodded.
“I’ll be damned.” Athenais stared at him. “No wonder you’re a shitty cook.”
“Yeah,” Ragnar said. “No taste buds.”
“A cook without taste buds.” Athenais would have laughed if the joke hadn’t been on her. “So what’s your role in this? You plan to take Beetle from me if I don’t help you?”
“Beetle’s yours,” Ragnar assured her. “Just listen to my brother when he comes. He’ll tell you everything.”
Athenais considered that for some time. Finally, leveling a sober look on Ragnar, she said, “He older or younger?”
Ragnar frowned. “What?”
“Just answer the damned question,” she growled. “Who’s older?”
“It doesn’t make any differen—” Ragnar started, then he saw her dark look and cut off. “We are the same age.”
She raised a brow. “Oh yeah? Who came out first?”
“We hatched at the same time.”
“Hatched? So you guys lay eggs?”
Ragnar peered at her. “We’re off subject.”
Athenais laughed. “That’s what your brother said.” She eyed him. “So go on, shift. Show me something.”
“Shifting is a survival technique, not a freak show.” Ragnar said.
Athenais fought a surge of fury. “You’re asking for my help, so the least you could do is shift for me.”
Ragnar gave a wary glance at the entrance to the mess hall. “Not here.”
“My room, then.” She grabbed his elbow and tugged him down the hall. Ragnar dragged his feet and balked at the entrance.
“Really, Athenais, this isn’t necessary.”
“Get in there,” Athenais told him. She gave him a shove, then stepped in behind him and shut the door. She locked it with a few keystrokes, then turned on him. “There. Your secret is safe.”
“Attie…” Ragnar began.
“Don’t ‘Attie’ me!” she snarled, surprising herself at the viciousness that surged up from her stomach. “Shift!”
“You’re angry.”
“Oh?!” she cried. “My paramour—the only man I’ve gotten into bed in centuries—turns out to be an alien on the Utopia’s Most Wanted list! Damn it!” Athenais caught herself on the impact-safe bedroom wall and lowered her forehead to the padding with a laugh of disgust. “Before I met you, I knew I had man trouble, but Jesus Christ! You’re not even a man. You’re a goddamn alien!”
“Yeah,” Ragnar said, “I wanted to tell you.”
“You wanted to tell
me?!” She couldn’t stop laughing. “At what point? After you learned enough to rat me out to your brother?”
“My brother didn’t even realize I was alive until a few months ago.”
“What about those other two thugs?” Athenais demanded. “Those shifters, too?”
“No,” Ragnar said. “Colonists.”
“So how long you been planning this?” she asked, looking sideways from where her forehead was still pressed to the padded wall. “Since before you got on my ship?”
Ragnar shook his head, his thick brown locks falling almost to shoulder-length. Athenais found herself wondering if it was really hair, or something else. Cilia, maybe?
“Back then I just needed a way off-planet,” Ragnar said.
“So what do you want from me now?” she demanded, lifting her head to glare at him. “You’ve already outed me to your friends. Really outed me, not just ‘oh, that’s the pirate who runs Beetle,’ outed me. They know about my dad. That means I’ve either gotta kill ‘em, do what they want, or go back into hiding for another forty years.”
Ragnar sighed. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I got on Beetle just looking for a chance to escape Millennium. When I realized who you were, I knew I couldn’t get off or we’d never find you again.”
Athenais felt her skin prickle in irritation. “Who I ‘was?’”
“One of the first Utopis,” Ragnar said. “The ones carrying the original technology.”
She scowled at him, wondering what his face would look like when introduced to the side of her nightstand.
Ragnar touched her hand with callused fingers. In the back of her mind, Athenais wondered if they were really calluses, or something else. It was all she could do not to yank her hand away in disgust. She was so upset that she barely heard Ragnar when he said, “The Potion that Marceau gave you was different than the one he gave everyone else. It was unrefined, strong. Completely self-sustaining.”
Then Athenais did pull her arm away, glaring.
“Okay, let me put it a different way,” Ragnar said. “You remember everything that has ever happened to you since getting that injection, right? Crystal-clear?”
