by Sara King
From his own stasis shell, Paul scoffed.
“These creatures are infesting our society,” Howlen continued. “Living normal lives. Trying to pass as human.”
“So what’s the harm?” Stuart asked. “They’re not hurting anything.”
“They’re trying to bring down the Utopia,” Howlen said.
Well, at least that’s true enough, Stuart thought. He had been expecting one of a thousand different lies that the Utopia used to cover its operations, but for the first time, they had actually hit upon the truth. “They wanna destroy the Utopia, I saw we let ‘em,” Stuart said. “Marceau is taking colonists from Penoi for his Millennium Potion. Lost my sister last year to one of their raids.” He hadn’t, of course, but he’d heard of plenty who had.
The S.O. officer snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s just a rumor that those vermin have inspired in their quest to destabilize our government, and you are incriminating yourself further by perpetuating it.” He looked irritated that Stuart would suggest such a thing.
“So what do they do with all those colonists they take from their homes in the middle of the night?” Paul demanded.
“Nobody’s taking colonists off of Penoi,” Howlen snapped, without looking at the shifter. To Stuart, he said, “But since you’re already here, I’ve been told to give you the option of joining the Utopia so you can help us locate the rest of these cockroaches.”
Stuart grimaced. “I, uh… I’d have to think about it.”
Howlen gave him a long look. “I see.” Brown eyes cold, he turned to the others. “Let’s go.”
Smallfoot, grinning at Stuart, did not follow the soldiers from the room. Colonel Howlen stopped in the doorway and gave him a questioning glance.
“Just wanna say a few words,” Smallfoot told him.
“Your nine million credits will not be awarded until they are in custody on Terra-9,” Colonel Howlen warned.
Smallfoot laughed. “I’m not lettin ‘em go.”
“See that you don’t.” At that, Colonel Howlen left.
“You’re a piece of shit, Smallfoot,” Ragnar said, without prelude.
Smallfoot plucked a set of rubber gloves from the dispenser and shrugged. “I got my reasons. I’m not as old as the Cap’in. Not as established. Woulda taken me couple hundred years ta get my own ship, if I went her route.” He held the gloves up for them to see. “See, now this is the sort of thing I wanted to see in my surgery, but what did Attie give me? Goddamned handsoap and bristle brushes. No antibacterials. Not even a proper scalpel.” He flung the gloves aside in disgust.
“You sold us for a ship?” Ragnar growled.
The surgeon grinned. “Actually, it’s more like a fleet o’ ships.”
“So who told you?” Ragnar said. “Or did you have the place bugged?”
“Athenais told me,” Smallfoot said. “Found out she’d been screwing an alien. Wasn’t too happy ‘bout that particular situation, let me tell you.”
Ragnar eyed Smallfoot critically a moment before saying, “You’re lying.”
Smallfoot shrugged. “I’d tell you to ask her, but she’s dead.” He gave a wistful sigh. “She was worth another million, but I figured the ol’ broad woulda found some way to muck things up.” He grinned and tapped on his skull with a finger. “I’m smart, see. Nine million credits is better’n ten million and my head floating in space.”
“How’d you kill her?” Ragnar asked.
Smallfoot laughed.
“Answer me.”
The surgeon shrugged. “Shot her. Gave the walls a new coat of pretty red paint.”
Ragnar scowled at him. “You’d better put that nine million to good use, because she’s gonna find you.”
“She’s deader’n dirt and I don’t put no stock in ghosts,” Smallfoot said. “Fairy might, but the flighty wench’s a bundle of nerves anyway.”
“Who said anything about ghosts?”
Smallfoot chuckled. “I’m a surgeon, shifter. I know dead when I see it.”
“So you say.” He cocked his head. “Your accent’s different.”
“Maybe,” Smallfoot said, though his demeanor grew guarded.
Stuart frowned. Now that he was paying attention, Ragnar was right. He detected a hint of Erriatian undertones in the man’s speech, instead of the Moravi brogue he had heard before.
“You were an agent from the start?” the shifter demanded.
“Agent?” Smallfoot snorted. “I’m no agent. Opportunist, maybe. Not an agent.”
Ragnar gave him a cold, deadly stare. “Athenais is going to feed your guts through the air-lock when she finds you.”
Smallfoot peered at Ragnar a moment, then shrugged and said, “She’s dead, but it won’t make no difference either way. I took the energy core offa Beetle.”
That made an impact. Stuart watched Ragnar’s head droop against the stasis shell in defeat.
“So anyway,” Smallfoot said, “Somethin I’ve always wondered since I first met ya eight years back.” He thumped his knuckles against the shell beside the shifter’s head and paused. When Ragnar did not lift his head, he continued. “Man ta man, or man ta alien, whichever ya please… Let’s be honest. Yer not much ta look at. How did you get inta her sheets? Whaddja use?”
Ragnar looked up. “What are you talking about?”
Smallfoot lifted his hairy hand, palm-up. “I tried everything. Gave her every drug I could think of whenever she needed ta be patched up. Nothin worked, not like it did on the others. She never looked at me twice.”
Ragnar stared at him. Finally, he said, “You piece of shit. You’re a space-rat.”
Smallfoot shrugged. “I’ve been called a lot of things. Men in my trade, we get used to it.”
“And you tried this on Athenais?”
“Oh come on,” Smallfoot laughed. “She’s a pirate. You steal from a pirate and you’re not really stealing, you’re just redistributing the wealth.”
“And you were gonna kill her. Take her ship.”
“I did kill her,” Smallfoot reminded him. “But yeah, Beetle was the only ship I never managed to get the access codes to. Kind of irritating. Took the longest time and didn’t get my ship.” Then he grinned. “But I got you three, so I’m happy.”
“How many ships have you stolen?”
“Enough,” Smallfoot said with a shrug. “Thirty, forty. Never anythin as nice as Beetle, but I got by.”
“It must be killing you to leave Beetle behind, then.”
“Nah,” Smallfoot said, “I still have one on Helius I haven’t sold yet. Nice pleasure yacht.”
“How nice?” Ragnar demanded.
“An eight-thousand-footer. Named Bird O’ Paradise. Real sleek ship. Fully automated. Equipped with AI bots, the whole works.”
“What did you do with the captain?”
“Led her on until we were out of port, then chucked her into space.”
Ragnar’s face drew into a snarl. “And we’re the ones in stasis.”
“Hey,” Smallfoot said, spreading his hands, “Man’s gotta make a livin. Happens most women are real suckers for some good lovin, so I figure why not make the most of it? Get them moanin and they’ll give you all the access codes you wanna hear.”
Ragnar stared at Smallfoot for long minutes, then burst out laughing.
“What?” Smallfoot demanded.
“Look behind you,” Ragnar said.
Smallfoot did, and paled. When Stuart twisted to see, Colonel Howlen was standing in the doorway. The room was silent for long minutes. Trapped inside his shell, Stuart snickered.
“You realize,” Howlen said finally, “That government bounties cannot be awarded to convicted felons.”
Smallfoot scowled at the colonel and straightened. “I ain’t been convicted of nothin.”
“Yes you have.” In one crisp motion, Colonel Howlen drew his pistol and fired, a single shot between the surgeon’s eyes.
Smallfoot’s body was still sliding to the floor w
hen Howlen holstered his weapon and said, “I hate scum like that.”
The four of them were speechless.
The S.O. officer looked up from the body and frowned at them. “He took the energy core off of that ship?”
“That’s what he said,” Ragnar replied, hope clear in his voice.
The room was silent as Colonel Howlen considered that. “That’s unfortunate. We’re too close to T-9 to turn around.” Then the S.O. officer clipped the strap back over his gun and, his eyes locked on Smallfoot’s body, said, “If anybody asks, he was trying to free you.”
“You got it,” Ragnar agreed.
With one lingering glance at Stuart, Colonel Howlen grunted and walked off. A few minutes later, two Utopian soldiers came to drag off the carcass. The process left a long, glistening red smear on the non-slip metal surface. Then the cell door shut, leaving the four of them alone.
“Well,” Ragnar said. “That was cool.”
“Cool?!” Paul demanded. “They caught Morgan,” he said, looking at Stuart. “He was the only one who could get us out of here.”
“I can’t believe you guys didn’t tell me you were aliens,” Stuart said. “They might have thought I was a shifter.”
“Oh shut up,” Paul growled. “You were on a need-to-know basis.”
Stuart glared. “You were using me just like you were using Athenais.”
“I wasn’t using Athenais,” Ragnar growled. “I met her for the first time in The Shop by accident. It’s run by a guy called Rabbit. He introduced me to her. They were really good friends from childhood, and he insisted I buy her a damn drink. Who was I to know Athenais and I would fall for each other?”
Rabbit, huh? That was good to know. Stuart cocked his head at Ragnar. “Too bad she’s dead. She might’ve been able to get us out of here.”
“Yeah, Rabbit’s gonna take her death real hard. He’ll go out looking for Beetle as soon as he finds out. Athenais was really important to him.”
Which meant help Athenais first.
“Will you shut up about Athenais already?” Paul snapped. “It’s always ‘Athenais this’ and ‘Athenais that.’ Your stupid Athenais and your screwed up love-life got us into this mess in the first place!” He was glaring at Ragnar, but his eyes weren’t angry.
“No, Smallfoot got us into this mess!” Ragnar shouted back. “He was a space-rat. You heard him. No more honor than a jackal.”
“Haven’t you been paying attention?” Paul yelled. “None of these humans have any honor. Not even Stuart.”
Stuart cocked his head at Paul. What was he trying to say?
“You’re such an asshole, Paul,” Ragnar snapped. “Stuart is in as much trouble as we are. He’s not gonna turn on us.”
So there was the meat of it. They wanted him to use any and all means to get out of his stasis shell.
Paul and Ragnar continued arguing until Morgan shouted at them to shut up.
A soldier came in to scrub away the dried brown stain several hours later.
“Hey,” Stuart said, “Come here.”
His three friends looked up sharply as the soldier gave Stuart a nervous look. “Yeah?” the pale, unassuming blonde corporal asked.
“Tell that Colonel Howlen I’ve got a deal for him.”
“I told you!” Paul shouted. “That’s what you get for trusting a human!” He spat at Stuart and it landed in his hair.
The corporal gave Paul a nervous look before turning back to Stuart. “Colonel’s getting ready fer landin. Prolly won’t be available ‘till we’re docked. Whatcha wanna say?”
“Tell him I’ll tell him all about where I found these shifter bastards,” Stuart said. “Just get me out of here.”
“Sure,” the soldier said. He went back to mopping.
“Aren’t you gonna tell him?” Stuart demanded.
The soldier shrugged. “I’ll tell him when I’m done.” At that, he went back to cleaning the floor. When he was finished, he left the cell without so much as glancing at Stuart.
Stuart could only bide his time and hope that his message got through.
The silence on the other end of the comm system bored into Athenais’s eardrums like a pickaxe.
Everyone was going to die. Except for her.
“Damn it, Fairy, where’d you put us?” Athenais tossed the headset aside in disgust, turning to glare at her copilot. “I haven’t heard a single crackle. Nothing.” She turned to Fairy, who was leaning over the darkened controls like a woman leaning over a dead lover’s casket. Despair tugged at the her features.
“Fairy!”
The girl jerked and looked up.
“How far are we from the road?” Athenais repeated.
Fairy leaned back against her chair with an explosive sigh. “I don’t know. Two, three thousand.”
Athenais glanced back at the headset. Her com array was good for five hundred Standard Intergalactic Distance Units, or SIDUs. Squirrel could probably boost that up to seven-fifty, maybe eight hundred, tops.
As it was, some mining armada on its way to an unexcavated planet would probably find Beetle drifting a thousand years from now amidst a string of space debris. Inside, they’d find four frozen skeletons and one very pissed off pirate.
Oh, she was going to make Smallfoot pay. No one crossed Athenais Owlborne. She would hunt him down and skin him and throw his carcass to Uresian tree bats, right after she—
“Captain.” Fairy’s low voice interrupted Athenais’s thoughts. She turned to look at her copilot. Fairy was staring down at the lifeless controls.
Inwardly, Athenais thought ‘despair’ was a good look for the little twit. It was certainly a welcome change from the bright-eyed, energetic, ratlike scurrying naïvete that the Utopi airhead usually beamed around in a blast of youthful exuberance.
“What,” Athenais barked.
Hunched over the controls, Fairy hung her head. “I told Smallfoot about the shifters.”
Athenais froze, suddenly wondering what it would be like to scramble the young pilot’s brains on her own control panels. As calmly as she could, she said, “You did?”
The girl nodded miserably. She kept her eyes on the console in front of her. “That night in The Shop, right before we left port.”
Athenais fought the sudden impulse to strangle the little snoop. “You were spying on me again.”
Fairy flinched. “I heard Ragnar say it after we left the meeting in the mess hall.”
Athenais slammed a fist down on the console, making her copilot jump. “I told you to stop spying on me,” she growled, rage bubbling up from deep within. Of course it had been the sneaky little twerp. Of course.
Hunched over the controls, Fairy hung her head. “I didn’t think it would hurt…”
She didn’t think… It was all Athenais could do not to introduce her pretty face to the dash a few times in her fury.
Gripping the com unit to keep from reaching for the little blonde’s throat, she said, “So it was you. I told Goat and Dune and Squirrel, but I couldn’t figure out which of them would be dumb enough to tell Smallfoot.”
Fairy looked up, surprise etched on her face. “You told those three, but not me?”
Athenais snorted. “Lookin’ at what happened, you see any reason I should’ve done differently?”
Shame began to redden Fairy’s face and the girl looked away.
“I keep my new recruits on a short leash,” Athenais growled. “Smallfoot was the newest, after you. He’d only been with us for eight years, since my last surgeon retired. You’d only been with us two. Truth be told, I thought you had been the one to turn us in, then they turned on you.”
Fairy looked up, horrified. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just overheard you and Ragnar and then I got drunk and Smallfoot…” She glanced back down at the controls and lowered her voice. “I ain’t no turncloak, Captain.”
Athenais gave the girl a level stare. “So what are you, girl?”
Fairy’s face flushe
d. “I may be stupid, but I’m no turncloak.”
“Maybe,” Athenais told her, “but I don’t suffer fools on my ship. You’re lucky there’s no power, ‘cause if there was, I’d put you in the airlock and open the doors and be done with you.”
“But,” Fairy stammered, “you keep saying I’m the best pilot you’ve ever seen…”
“I’m the best pilot I’ve ever seen,” Athenais snapped, irritated that the girl had latched onto that one misplaced sentence, two years ago, and run with it. “And I don’t care if you shit diamonds and vomit osmium ingots. You’re no use to me if you can’t keep my secrets.”
It took the girl a moment to digest that. When she did, Fairy’s pert little lips parted in horror. “Does this mean I’m off of Beetle?”
“If we get back to port, you’re getting off my ship.”
“But I stayed,” Fairy whined. “Doesn’t that prove I’m loyal?”
“It proves you felt guilty for getting the rest of us killed,” Athenais snapped, her anger flaring again. She stood, her fingers digging painfully into her palms. The only reason she didn’t slug the little twerp was because it wouldn’t be a fair fight. “I’m going to go get something to eat. If I were you, I wouldn’t be here when I came back.” At that, she picked up a flashlight and walked through the security doors, ignoring Fairy’s whimpered complaints.
Damn her. Athenais should have known that the girl was too young to take aboard, regardless of how gifted she was. Not only were her snoopy, borderline-klepto tendencies huge warning bells that should have gotten her ass dumped on a desert planet years ago, she was too cocky.
Her gut had warned her, but Athenais had seen too much of herself in the young pilot to pass her up. Watching Fairy at the wheel was like taking a spin down memory lane, and Athenais missed being that young and exuberant about everything. The very first week, Dune had suggested that she let Fairy ‘ripen’ a few more years, but Athenais had been too bullheaded to listen to him. She insisted they give the little brat a chance. Now everyone on Beetle was going to pay for her mistake.
Colonel Howlen came stalking into the cell immediately after docking, looking ruffled. “What is it, colonist?” he snapped, glaring at Stuart. He ignored the other three entirely.
