by Erin Hayes
Touching Infinity
The Rogue’s Galaxy Book One
Erin Hayes
Erin Hayes Books
Touching Infinity - © 2017 Erin Hayes
All Right Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Damonza
Edited by Lindsay Galloway of Contagious Edits
Created with Vellum
Contents
Also by Erin Hayes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the Authors
Also by Erin Hayes
The Cotton Candy Quintet
How to be a Mermaid
I’d Rather be a Witch
I Do Believe in Faeries
I’m Not Afraid of Wolves
A Billionaire Prince Romance
The Royal Trade
The Royal Pain
The Royal Mistake
The Harker Trilogy
Damned if I Do
Damned if I Don’t
Damned Either Way
The Elysium Legacies
Shades of the Gods
Blood of the Gods
Fractured
Jacob Smith is Incredibly Average
How the Ghost Was Won
Open Hearts
Head Case: A Weird Science Romance (Available on Radish)
Chapter 1
Every time I plug myself into a computer, I feel a jolt of electricity shoot up from the finger connected to the port, through my arm. It ends with an unpleasant sizzle at the back of my tongue, singeing all my taste buds. I won’t be able to taste my coffee for a week after this. Coffee is the only thing that makes me bearable at 0900 hours.
I hate this part of the job.
I must be making a face, because the second mate PC snorts loudly, putting a hand on his hip. “Not enjoyin’ that, Clem?” he drawls, aiming his zapper with his other hand at our tied-up hostages. The three men glare at him over their cloth gags—we’re super high-tech here.
“You’re not the one who’s assimilating with the ship,” I mutter, even as PC continues to snicker.
“I hope the ship makes you breakfast in the morning,” he replies, and our shipmates Taka, Daisy, and Captain Louis chuckle in answer.
Cocky bastards. All they have to do is hold out until I’ve gathered everything. Taka’s soldering the door shut, Daisy is monitoring the radar for incoming ships, and Captain Louis is keeping tabs on our own ship docked here.
“Clem, hurry,” the old man grumbles to me. He never likes leaving Orion, our android navigator, in charge of his ship.
I roll my eyes in annoyance, using my mechanical left eye to read through the streams of data that are now running through the wires of my cyborg half. I sift through the data—seriously, it’s amazing how much shit people will put on computers without proper firewalls. Sure, I can easily break through most firewalls in less than three nanoseconds, but I’m always surprised at just what people have that isn’t protected.
Here, I read all the bios of the crew members on this vessel—the STS Nautilus, how obvious!—and I can read their paystubs going back to their births. Some of the crews are employees for life here.
“Syn-Tech gives you guys great pay raises,” I say, looking at the tied-up members of the crew with my right eye. “Although, Parker,” I add, pointing at the first mate as I read his file, scrolling past the retinas of my left eye, “If I were you, I’d ask for an 11.47% pay raise to put yourself on the same scale as the second mate. Then again, you can’t really compete with the captain’s younger cousin.”
I see Parker blink in shock at my words and then glare at the man next to him. The captain, presumably, although I’m sure it’s Syn-Tech who decides what they’re paid. That’s how it goes for Lifers, as we Free Agents call them—if you’re born on a planet or a space station under the control of a corporation, your entire existence is owned by that corporation, including pay raises, promotional opportunities, even which lavatories you’re allowed to shit in.
Fuck that.
Life in outer space without the safety and protection of corporations may be rough, but we’re at least in charge of our own destiny. To an extent.
At the moment, I’m working for Farer-Prime, a rival corporation to Syn-Tech. At least until I find the information they hired my crew to downloot and relay back to them in exchange for 45 million Space Yen. And then a corporation like Yarvis-5 will hire us to downloot another company’s ship for corporate espionage, like some old Earthian game of tennis.
Not that I’ve ever played tennis. You have to have a court and reliable gravity for that.
I continue searching until I change to the directory:
/Cordinates
“Ahhh,” I breathe in satisfaction. “Your technology officer misspelled ‘coordinates’ in the folder name.” I give a mock-disapproving click of my tongue. “That actually tripped me up for a few minutes there, which is pretty good. Although I’d be worried about locating any other files with that track record.”
My mechanical side wades through the files, grabbing all the latest coordinates of every freighter, private ship, space station, and warehouse in this sector of space. The information will only be relevant for seventy-two hours at most. That’s why it’s imperative that we get this relayed to them as soon as possible. Once Syn-Tech finds out that their information is compromised, they’ll scramble all their coordinates, making it impossible for Farer-Prime to locate and destroy their property. And they’ll retaliate with a similar gambit.
Such a petty game, this whole thing.
At least it pays well. My cyborg foot has been acting up lately, and I woke up in my barracks last night with my right leg just randomly kicking the wall. It made a dent, so I have no idea how long it was doing that. But it does mean that something is fried in there.
New cyborg feet cost at least 50 million Space Yen, so I have a few more runs to downloot before I can afford it.
Not for the first time, I wish I were an android so I wouldn’t have to eat. Not that they get paid anyways.
“Clem?” Captain Louis asks, glancing back at me. He’s starting to sweat.
Yeah, yeah. We tripped the alarm on our way in, so we have about T-minus 158.7 seconds before we’ll be descended upon by Syn-Tech fighters.
“I’m downloading now,” I grit to Louis as I tell the computer to copy the directory onto my local drive—me. “Files take as long as they have to duplicate. Hold your horses.”
“I’ve never ridden a horse,” Taka muses as he tears some more wires from the wall. Another airlock seals shut, making another barrier between us and the Nautilus’s crew trying to make it to the bridge. He’s a slight, wiry man with prosthetics for both arms and bleached hair. “They had them on old Earth, right? B
ig mammals, majestic creatures?”
“Apparently, they pissed a lot,” Daisy says, not taking her eyes off the screens. “Hence the saying, ‘Piss like a racehorse.’”
Leave it to her to ruin Taka’s beautiful vision of our home planet, which we’ve never seen. Daisy’s a big woman in her late forties with tattoos all over her body, her red hair streaked with gray and pulled up into a severe bun. She’s not zaftig so much as just built like a tank. Her legs are cyborg, but her voluptuous breasts are all real, and I know a great many people who lose at arm wrestling with her all the time.
“If we get out of here alive, I’ll buy you a simulation,” Captain Louis tersely says to Taka. Because if we don’t get out of here, Syn-Tech fighters will blow up our ship, and we’ll be burned to a crisp.
They usually get very angry in the heat of the moment—obviously, because we’re stealing from them. And then, in a few weeks, it’ll blow over and they’ll hire us for a similar job.
The life of a space pirate.
We have four rules: Never kill anyone, only take what you were hired to get, delete what you get after delivery so you never have to worry about blackmail, and maintain loyalty to the crew above all else. That’s why Captain Louis runs such a tight ship—it’s me as the first mate, PC as the boatswain, our navigator Orion, mechanic Daisy, engineer Taka, Venice Moon our cook, and a little cabin boy named Oliver Twist that Captain Louis took in three months ago. I have to admit, the old man has a big heart. It’s how PC and I ended up with him.
Granted, it’s also how I became a pirate myself.
My retina displays confirmation that I’ve successfully copied over all the files in the folder, and my internal diagnostics make sure that there are no viruses or malware now in my system. One time, I downloaded a trojan virus that caused my artificial lungs to stop working for a week, and I battled a case of pneumonia that antibiotics couldn’t fix.
I don’t have time to wait, though.
“We’re good,” I say, giving a curt nod to Captain Louis. I call back my middle finger, the one that’s connected to the hard drive of the Nautilus. My robotic hand swallows up the cables, and I make a fist.
Everything seems to be in order.
“All right,” Captain Louis barks, “we have T-minus 120 seconds—”
“118.78,” I correct before cringing at the reflex. I hate it when the computer part of my brain takes over my cognitive functions.
Louis glares at me for a moment we don’t have to waste before he sighs and motions for all of us to run for the far hatch. Taka touches two wires to each other, and the door irises open, just as the schematics said they would. Then all we have is a quick run to the airlock and then we’re back on the Pícara and back in FTL before Syn-Tech gets here.
That’s the idea anyways.
I get to my feet, grabbing my zapper, and I follow PC’s big form as we jog through the hatch, leaving the crew tied up on the bridge. They’ll be found and released by the Syn-Tech fighters soon, so I’m not too worried about them.
As for the rest of the crew, I just hope they don’t find us on the run to our ship. Our zappers may be set to stun, but I’m pretty sure theirs aren’t. People get really pissed when you steal their stuff, even if it is a bunch of 1s and 0s. They’ll even go so far as to shoot to kill. I lost a kidney because of that. The corporation funding us that time paid me an extra million Space Yen as recompense. Too bad a real kidney costs twice that much, so it’s another piece of me that’s machine instead of human. Pretty soon, I’ll be more robot than Orion.
We run to the airlock with Daisy leading us. For how big she is, she certainly runs through the Nautilus like a sprinter, her booming voice announcing her trek through the hallways as she shoots anyone that gets in her way. PC and I exchange glances, reminding ourselves not to piss her off. Ever. She got mad when I took her fork in the mess hall, and Captain Louis had to intervene before she pummeled me into space dust.
“T-Minus 47 seconds until we are intercepted by Syn-Tech fighters.” I grit my teeth as I hear Orion’s silky, calm voice in my ear. Whoever programmed him initially must have thought that having a navigator with a sexy voice would be a nice change. He doesn’t sound hurried or concerned. If anything, he sounds almost bored.
Captain Louis doesn’t, though. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he barks back at us.
We’re running out of time, and I know that everyone will blame me if we get fired at. I couldn’t help it if the damn technology officer had misspelled the folder name and that the folder was several terabytes large. Not a huge file by today’s standards, but my bandwidth is only so much. I feel those terabytes in my stomach, like I’ve just had a huge dinner. I can’t wait to purge and upload this shit, as it’s making me feel bloated and lazy.
I touch my earpiece. “Be ready to take us into FTL, Orion.”
“Already have the coordinates set as per Captain Louis’s orders,” he tells me.
Smug bastard, I think to myself. As First Mate, I can’t command him to do anything, especially if it goes against Louis’s direct orders. Orion takes every chance to remind me that I can’t just order him to do something.
We turn the corner, and I nearly hurrah at the sight of the airlock. Taka is already inputting the information for the airlock to open. It does iris open, and Daisy is the first to reenter our ship.
I hear voices in the hall behind us, coming up ever so quickly. I don’t tell PC or Captain Louis, but I shift my trajectory just a little bit so that I’m blocking everyone from our assailants, just in case we’re fired upon.
Hopefully it won’t come to that.
We have just a little further and…
A blast fires behind me, and my sensors on the cyborg half of my body go off. I don’t feel pain necessarily, but I can feel the sparks in my right leg as a blast from an enemy zapper shreds through my right thigh. Alarms and warnings go off on my retinas, and my leg stops working.
I stumble into PC, who catches me by one arm. He mutters a curse under his breath as he shoots behind us, catching my assailant in the chest and stunning him.
Yep, even though my leg is as good as a bench right now, we still don’t shoot to kill.
“You stupid, stupid, stupid—” he mutters.
“You’re welcome,” I tell him through gritted teeth as he drags me along. “Just think, if this hit you, you’d be bleeding out right now.”
I see a muscle in his jaw twitch as we finally cross the threshold onto the Pícara, and Taka pounds on the airlock, sealing us away from Syn-Tech’s forces.
“Get us out of here, Orion!” Captain Louis thunders into his communicator.
“Sir—” Even to me, the android sounds a little concerned. We’re not buckled in for FTL speeds…
“I don’t care,” Louis shouts as he wraps his hand around a stray strap and turns on his Grav-Boots as his only restraints. “If we wait any longer, they’re going to fire on us, and we won’t have a ship!” Daisy and Taka do the same, grabbing onto anything they can to secure them in the initial speed boost.
“Roger that,” Orion intones, all concern gone from his voice.
I watch as PC grabs onto a handle, his teeth gritted. I try reaching for it and turning on the Grav functions in my cyborgs, but I’m too late, and my right leg still isn’t working.
The Pícara hits FTL, and I’m flung from PC’s grip. Of course, when I bump my head against the unforgiving metal ceiling, it’s the biological part, and stars dance across my vision before I’m thrust into a darkness deeper than any black hole.
Just another success for the crew of the Pícara.
Chapter 2
PC is still calling me stupid when I wake up. He’s very creative with it, too.
“Clementine, you stupid, stupid, stupid…”
I grimace and manage to stick my tongue out at him. “Nice to hear that you care, Popcorn,” I say amusedly, using his real name.
It’s only fair since he just used my full name. I see his cheek
s flush deep red at the mention of his parents’ horrible name for him. Our names are Clementine and Popcorn, following a trend to name kids after exotic foods from old Earth.
PC told me when he found out that it was a buttery, greasy snack, he was mortified and immediately shortened it. Clementine is only marginally better, but at least it’s a fruit.
I think it is, at least. I’ve never seen one in person.
I put my cyborg hand to my forehead and groan. “What happened?”
“When we hit FTL, you conked your head,” Captain Louis says grimly. I hadn’t even known he was in this room. “You blacked out.”
“Yeah, yeah. Story of my life.” I try pushing myself to sit up, but PC puts a big hand on my chest and forces me back down. I can see why.
Taka is working on the giant gaping hole in my leg, so entranced by all my inner workings of my robotic pieces. I see the data flashing in his own cyborg eyes as he tries to analyze what’s broken in my leg. “Thanks, Taka,” I murmur.
He merely gives a disinterested wave. Taka lives in a fantasy world where we can’t reach him most days. He’s either fully immersed in robotics and computers or dreaming about life on old Earth. He’s rarely ever in the here and now.
And with how crappy the here and now can be, I don’t blame him. Whereas I struggle with how much of me is human versus robot, I think he wishes he’d been assembled instead of born. Life may have been kinder on him in that case.
