by Erin Hayes
He realizes I stopped and looks at me again, his expression unreadable. Of course it would be. He’s an android.
“Thank you, by the way,” I say finally.
“For what?”
“For sending me some money the other night,” I say. “You didn’t have to do that, and it helps out so much, and with the big payout for this job, maybe I don’t need it anymore—”
“I wanted to,” he says softly, and I stop blubbering, blinking at him. “I don’t need much, and I can’t imagine having a hole in my leg.” He taps his own right leg, which is in far better condition than most humans. He’s corded with manufactured muscle, making him a fine specimen of a man. If he were a man.
“Still, though,” I say, trying to fill the silence. “Thank you.”
He tilts his head in my direction. “You’re welcome, Clementine.”
The temperature in my core spikes again, and my cheeks flush red. I turn and walk out before I can say anything else stupid. He’s right—I should sleep so that I can be at the peak of mental performance tomorrow.
Everyone’s depending on me.
I can’t help but take a detour as I head back to my quarters, and I make my way to Captain Louis’s quarters. The door is open, weak bluish light spreading across the floor of the hallway.
He’s still up.
I give a rap on the doorframe with my mechanical hand, the metal-on-metal clinking sound louder than I expected.
“Enter,” comes Captain Louis’s voice from within.
I take a deep breath and enter his quarters. Like me, his space is sparsely furnished, although it is markedly bigger. He has a bigger bed than I do, and he has more succulents on the shelves and in the corners of his room, like he’s trying to make his own Earth here. I heard a long time ago that humans like to be around nature, which is hard to do because we live in the vacuum of space. Louis was the first to give me my own succulent, telling me that I had my own piece of old Earth with me. Whenever I see them at spaceports now, I snap them up, even though they cut into my water rations.
Good thing they’re hardy plants.
Louis is at his desk, and he casts a wary glance in my direction. “Ah, Clementine,” he says grimly, “I thought you’d be up.”
My mechanical fingers run along the edge of a leaf as I watch him. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“No.”
“Neither can I.”
There’s the ghost of a smile on his face. “Orion said that someone was on the bridge. I assume that was you?”
“Yeah. I wanted to remember the Nova by heart. In case something happens.”
He sighs, the smile broadening. “Good girl. That’s why I know you’ll make a great captain someday.”
My heart twists inside my metal ribcage. So that is why he’s having me lead this run. I bite back my initial response, telling him that there is no Pícara without him, that I wouldn’t able to go on in his stead if he weren’t a part of the team. Instead, my mechanical side slips some serotonin which immediately calms me down, and I can sort through my emotions, finding the nugget I need to keep this conversation going.
“I’m afraid of letting you down.”
“No, Clementine,” Louis say enigmatically, tapping his temple. “You’re afraid of letting everyone down. And that’s what’s going to make you a better leader than me someday.”
I cross my arms and lean against the wall. “PC’s upset, you know.”
A pained expression crosses Louis’s face, but he quickly masks it over. “He’s too impulsive, too selfish at the moment. He’s more concerned about himself, whereas you are more altruistic in your decisions and your reactions. You’re what makes a good captain. He’s what makes a good secondhand man.”
“He won’t like hearing that.”
Louis chuckles as he turns off the screen to his mini-tab. “Good thing you’ll be captain at that point. You can deal with him then.”
“When do you think that will be?” I blurt out, but I quickly smooth it over. “Not that I want you to stop being captain, but it’s so that I can…prepare.”
He shrugs. “Not sure, Clem. I don’t want to give up the Pícara anytime soon, but I am getting up there in my years. You can’t downloot forever, and you’d do well to remember that yourself. The more you do these runs, the bigger the chance of something bad happening.”
“That’s not comforting, knowing what’s happening tomorrow.”
He winks at me. “That’s why you’re going in doubly prepared.”
I wring my hands together, thinking about everything. “And if I don’t do well tomorrow?”
“Well,” he drawls, leaning back, “then I’ll have to make different plans. That’s the thing with life, though—it never goes in a straight line. You have to keep moving, keep adjusting to make sure you end up where you’re supposed to be. Not where you want to be—because you may not even know that yet. But I have faith in you.”
“Thank you, Louis,” I say softly.
His gaze drifts to the wall where there’s a photograph pinned to the wall. It’s one of those old-timey ones, actually printed on real paper. It shows Louis, PC, and me at Zona Rica, a corporation’s vacation world. We all look much younger, and I barely even recognize myself, with my bright eyes and bubbly demeanor.
“I’ve raised you and PC since you were children,” Louis says, describing my thoughts. “You never owed me anything for it, but I want to say that you two have done me proud. Regardless of what happens, I am proud of you, Clementine.” He turns back to me. “I’m proud of the woman you’ve become.”
Woman, not cyborg. And the distinction is enough to make me smile at him. “Thank you again.”
“Now,” Louis says, “I’m sure you’re in here because Orion told you to go to bed. And, for once, I agree with him.”
I snicker softly. “You know your android too well.”
“I programmed him to be pragmatic.”
A little too pragmatic at times. And, despite myself, a yawn comes over me, and I cover my mouth with my hand as I let out a little groan.
“And it seems that he was more than right in your case,” Louis muses.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, turning to leave. “All right, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“And, Clem?”
I look back at him.
He opens his mouth to say something—and I suspect that it’s three words I’ve only heard him say once, and that was when I had the meningococcal bacteria so bad, they all thought I was going to die from necrosis. I lost more of my upper arm thanks to that little sickness. But Louis’s mouth shuts with a snap, and he only nods at me.
“Good luck tomorrow.”
I want to say those words, too, but it doesn’t feel appropriate. “Thanks, sir,” I say.
And I head back to my quarters, where I lie awake, looking up at the ceiling and wondering how I’ll handle being a captain with everyone depending on me 24/7, when I’m freaked out about one mission.
Tomorrow is going to be…interesting…
I just hope I’m ready.
Chapter 8
“Clementine, come to the bridge.”
I swim out of an uneasy sleep. No dreams last night, for which I’m glad, as I don’t want to have nightmares about the crew dying. I didn’t sleep very well, but at least I had nothing lurking in the shadows of my brain, computer or otherwise.
I roll on my back with a groan and rub a palm over my eyes to wipe the sleep away from my right eye. The left eye is already alert and feeding me information, such as the temperature in the room, the humidity, the time, and how much sleep I’ve had.
At first, I think I just dreamt Orion had called me. Then his voice fills my quarters again, more insistent this time.
“Clementine, please come to the bridge. Immediately.”
I glare at the ceiling like he can see me there.
“Why?” I ask. It’s 0915, making us at least an hour out from the STS Nova. My alarm is set for twenty minutes
from now—and I had planned on a breakfast to keep all of us sharp and ready.
So why the hell am I being woken up early?
“We have come out of FTL earlier than planned,” Orion tells me. “There is something that you and Captain Louis need to see.”
I hesitate. “What is it? Is it life threatening?”
“You have to see it.”
So, obviously not life threatening, but then what is it?
“Cryptic android,” I mutter to myself as I pull on my work clothes that I discarded on the floor from the night before. Laundry day isn’t for another few days, so I’m relegated to wearing my clothes more than once. Such is the life of a space pirate.
I pull my hair back into a ponytail and quickly check myself in the mirror. I look like shit. Great way to start today.
I hobble to the bridge, running my fingers along the hallway. No one else is up yet to intercept me, so Orion must have called only Louis and me. Just great.
The door opens to the bridge, revealing that Louis is already there, looking out the window with Orion. The captain’s expression is pulled into a deep frown as he looks outside. If I look like shit, he looks even worse. I don’t think he got a wink of shut-eye last night.
“What is it?” I call out.
They both whirl to me, as if they had been lost in their thoughts.
Orion is the first to recover. “It is what we do not see.”
“What do you mean?”
Orion’s fingers fly across the keyboard, and the map that Syn-Tech supplied us for the location of the STS Nova is overlaid on the window in front of us, showing a translucent hologram meant to label where we are in the galaxy. I freeze, seeing what is supposed to be there, and I shake my head as it doesn’t make sense.
“There’s supposed to be an asteroid field here?”
“Yes,” Louis says grimly. “This is where the Nova was supposedly crippled by an asteroid. This is supposed to be why the ship can’t fly on its own.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say. “Why isn’t it here?”
“I doubt there ever was an asteroid field here,” Louis says. He frowns even deeper. “Which means that Maas lied to us. Orion, overlay the flight path for the Nova.”
A few clicks and an orange streak draws itself right over our own trajectory, showing us that we’re on the exact same route the Nova had taken. Towards the blackhole.
A strange feeling seizes me. Fear? Or something else.
“What do you make of it?” Louis asks, looking at me.
“I…” I fumble for words. “I don’t know.”
That’s apparently not a good enough answer for him, as his gaze shifts to Orion, who clasps his hands behind his back. “Given the information that Syn-Tech supplied, we are walking into a situation with a great many unknown variables. The odds of success for this trip are currently unknown.”
“That’s what I thought,” Louis grumbles, nearly growling at the map in front of us. “And I don’t like it one bit. Who knows what else they’ve been keeping from us?”
This isn’t the first time the crew has been given only half the information for a mission. A downlooter’s life is only collateral for a corporation, so a lot of what we have is on a need-to-know basis. This is different, though. This means that something else happened to the ship to cripple it.
“What do you want to do?” I croak to Louis, feeling that 300 million Space Yen slipping through my fingers. There’s no way he’ll want to go through with this. Not with the odds stacking up against us.
Still though, I reason, we’ve been through far worse. And it’s 300 million Space Yen.
“What do you want to do?” Louis asks, catching me off guard. “This is your run, Clem.”
I glance at Orion, and his expression is blank. No reassurance there. I gulp. But this isn’t a decision for one person. “Let’s ask the whole crew. This is something they need to weigh in on as well.”
Louis’s lips pull up in a smile of half-approval.
“And,” I say, “we can still veto whichever decision we come to. But we should all talk about it.”
“Orion,” Louis commands.
The android doesn’t wait for the order from the captain. He presses a button for the intercom, relaying it to the entire ship. “All hands on deck,” he says. “All hands on deck.”
I hope that between the eight of us, we’ll be able to find a solution we can all live with. And hopefully not die on a fool’s errand.
“So you’re telling me,” Daisy says, pointing at the overlaid map of the bridge, “that there’s supposed to be a whole asteroid field here and there isn’t? Isn’t that a good thing?”
“No,” PC mutters, “it means that something else crippled the Nova. It means that we don’t know exactly what’s going on.” He scrutinizes me. “Isn’t that right, Clem?”
“That’s correct.” I lean against Louis’s console, my arms crossed as I face the entire crew. They all listened to my story with disbelief etched into their faces. I’ve been mulling it over myself and it doesn’t make sense. What could Syn-Tech have gained by lying to us? What are they trying to hide?
Furthermore, what are they wanting us to retrieve from the Nova? Should I believe that they still want their patents, when clearly they’ve lied to us up to this point?
I don’t know.
“What if we just contact the chairman?” Taka reasons. “Ask him if he handed us the wrong information.”
“No,” Louis says gruffly. “The chairman hired us for our discretion, and to contact him before the job is done is to forfeit the job. And I don’t want to do that without coming to a conclusion about the risks involved with this job.”
“So…what do we do?” Daisy asks.
“It’s 300 million Space Yen,” Venice reasons. “I mean…” His voice trails off, and we are all thinking the same thing.
With that amount of money, are we willing to go through with it? That’s precisely why Maas offered so much—so that we wouldn’t turn it down. Maybe it’s reassurance to get us there and finish the job.
That may be giving him too much credit. Then again, he does want something from us—and I’m sure he’s completely willing to do whatever it takes to retrieve that information—even if they are just patents. I’m not so sure now.
“What if we continue on our course?” I say. “We have a little over eleven hours until the Nova reaches the edge of the blackhole. That gives us plenty of time to get there and assess the situation before we enter it. If we show up and we see something we don’t like, we don’t follow through with it. If it looks clear—and we’ll scan the ship for any malicious activity—we stop and get the fuck out of there.”
Granted, that’s if we can say no to 300 million Space Yen at that point. Something tells me that the closer we get to the Nova, the harder it will be to turn it down.
And maybe that’s what Maas wanted.
Louis’s jaw clenches as he considers my words. “What does the rest of the crew say?” he asks.
“Aye,” PC says immediately, his gaze locked on me.
“Aye,” Daisy says.
Venice nods. “Aye.”
Taka hesitates, and I can understand why. There are plenty of unknown variables ahead of us, and even if we are all right with boarding the Nova, there are still a great many things we won’t be able to account for. For someone as analytical as Taka, it would kill him to try to figure it out. “Okay,” he says, his voice soft.
“Oliver?” Louis asks.
The boy makes a surprised eep as all our attentions focus on him.
“Me?” he asks, confused.
Louis nods. “Yes. You’re a part of this crew, Oliver.”
Daisy smiles amusedly at the inclusion of the boy. Meanwhile, he looks terrified to have been singled out.
“Clementine, Orion, and I will abstain from the vote if you say aye,” Louis prompts.
I exchange glances with Orion, and for once, the android looks unhappy. I f
ocus on it a little too long, wondering what’s processing in that head of his, but then I force myself to look back at the cabin boy.
Oliver chews on his bottom lip, as if seeking validation from the rest of the crew. Finally, he nods. “Aye.” It comes out as a meek whisper, but it’s enough for all of us to hear it.
Louis lets out a shaky breath. “All right. Then we continue to the Nova. I suggest you spend this time getting ready. We’re going into something we don’t quite understand, and I don’t want us to get lazy. PC, Daisy, Taka. You’re boarding with Clem.”
“Aye,” PC says. “Will do, Captain.”
“Breakfast is nearly ready,” Venice says, and we’re all so freaked out that no one comments on the state of that breakfast. Venice almost looks relieved about that.
I’m lost in my own thoughts as the crew moves to leave the bridge, getting ready in their own ways for our run. PC passes by me and leans in, whispering in my ear, “Thank you.”
I give him a slight nod as he walks through the door. I meet Orion’s gaze, and I notice that muscle is twitching in his cheek again.
“Here’s to hoping that we’re worried for nothing,” Louis mutters to himself, shaking his head. “I’m going to see what that breakfast is about.” He pushes himself to his feet, and he heads out as well.
Leaving me alone with Orion.
“You would have said no, wouldn’t you?” I ask him point-blank. My pulse is humming in my temples, already giving me a headache. So much for getting some rest and being in peak condition.
Orion is so still, I wonder if he turned himself off rather than speak with me. “Based on the data that I have,” he says slowly, “it is inadvisable to proceed with the run. At least until we have further information.”
“That’s why we’re going to run reconnaissance when we get there,” I say.
“There are some things that cannot be accounted for, even with reconnaissance.”
“That’s how they did it for wars on old Earth,” I say. “They used to send scouts to see the enemy before making their attack plans.”
“And that was back when the average human lived to be thirty-five,” Orion quips. “You would think for having a finite amount of life, you would think you would be more careful with it.”
