The Star Pirate's Folly

by James Hanlon

  Bee pulled her shirt back over the knife and breathed a small sigh of relief. Everything looked so tidy, especially the bed with its sheets tucked in all flat and perfect. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept in a real bed. Bee knelt and ran a palm over the carpet. Soft.

  Janey would be so jealous.

  Chapter 2: Midtown

  In the bathroom Bee brought her hands to her face and inhaled the fruity scent of the soap she’d used to wash off the jam. Lines of dirt and grime remained in the grooves of her skin and under her nails—that would take some scrubbing—but they smelled clean. She could get used to the Midtown. Easy access to food and a safe, clean place to sleep at night was a welcome relief from the daily grind against hunger.

  Find him, Mother said.

  “I know,” Bee groaned. “I know, I know.”

  Once Mother got going she didn’t stop. Ever since she died, her voice had lingered on, whispering in Bee’s ear to help find the man who killed her, the man with sky-blue eyes. Over the years, Bee had to learn when to ignore her and when to listen—sometimes Mother could be a bit paranoid. But that little voice had saved her more than once.

  Kill him.

  “I will, Mother.”

  Bee tuned Mother’s whispers out while she undressed. Plenty of time to clean up before Hargrove returned. After she tapped the control pad for the shower, hot water fell in neat streams to the drain below.

  Bee held her hands under the shampoo nozzle and it squirted some fragrant crimson goo onto her palms. As she lathered it in she smelled berries. Something familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She still didn’t truly believe she was taking a hot shower in her own private bathroom. It felt… rich. As she bathed, Bee wondered how much the room would have cost her—and how long Hargrove would let her stay.

  He’d said two weeks, but if she screwed up she’d be back on the streets. She’d do everything she could to keep her little room. Any kind of work Hargrove gave her she planned to do without complaint. Cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors—whatever he asked of her. Anything was better than the roiling waves of panic she felt every day.

  On the streets she had no future, only the present. Only her immediate needs. Bee had nobody to look out for her. No one to help when the dusters came looking for fresh bodies. Janey helped her for a while, but that friendship didn’t last long. Bee swore she’d never live like the slave Janey turned into, her brain rotted from that horrible poisonous dust. It wasn’t Janey’s fault. She couldn’t help herself after the dust took root. Neither could Mother. Nobody could.

  Overlookers called the stuff “dust,” even though Bee knew it wasn’t exactly. It was really made using spores from a fungus that grew out in the jungle beyond the city’s dome—she’d seen the public service announcements enough times to remember. In the wild, the fungus would wait until an animal came near them, then puff out a cloud of the spores. The animal would become calm, lie down, and allow itself to be slowly covered and consumed.

  In the same way, using the spores on people made them docile and completely willing to follow any command. This was the main draw of the dusting attacks. It was an almost everyday occurrence in Overlook City when Mother got taken. Gangs of these dusters, usually people from the outer colonies or the asteroid belt, manufactured the dust in secret labs out in the jungle. Then they’d smuggle it in and use it to make people do things they’d never do otherwise.

  Bee saw news reports detailing the victims’ devotion to following orders while under the influence of the dust. People would empty their bank accounts or steal things for the dusters—even kill other people. And they’d be happy doing it, whatever they were asked.

  A common method of infection was for the duster to ask their mark a question, carefully wafting the spores into the victim’s face, forcing them to inhale it. Before the victim even knew what was happening, they were in the grip of “the devil’s dust.” It caused chaos. Once the spores took root they did irreversible damage to the brain, even after the infection cleared. Months after being dosed, the victims would still obey any order given to them. Mother was just one more.

  Bee lost everything that day. One minute she and Mother were walking through a crowd together, hand in hand. The next, Mother was speaking to a man with sky-blue eyes and dropped Bee’s hand. Left her in the middle of all those people, right then and there. Bee had never felt terror like that before. She tried to follow them, but quickly got lost in the city. Eventually Bee ran into someone who called the police and they took back to her home on Overlook Station.

  They found Mother the next day.

  Bee was too young at the time to really understand what they did, but she found those details later in the police report. They used Mother all day. For fun. For money. For the hell of it, maybe. Bee didn’t know or care about their motivations. All that mattered to her was they did it to Mother.

  Over the course of that day, Mother had made a series of credit transfers to different accounts, which she did seemingly of her own free will. The money to pay for their home on Overlook Station vanished. With space so tight up there, Bee and her mother quickly found themselves booted onto Surface, suddenly homeless like so many others.

  Overlook City was packed with folks from beyond the belt looking to escape the constant threat of pirate raids. The resources of the local government were stretched thin with so many residents—more than the city had originally been built for. Overlook was supposed to be one of hundreds of dome cities on Surface, but when the interstellar gates were destroyed during the rebellion those plans went up in smoke. Now there were barely twenty domes left on the whole planet—and half those were built after the war. Bee and her mother fell through the cracks like many others.

  Mother survived for four months on the city streets before she died filthy and diseased. Her body was used to the comparative safety, comfort, and cleanliness of Overlook Station, and was in no way prepared for the uncaring manner in which she was cast aside. Bee was too young to do anything but stay at Mother’s side and cry. During her last week of life, Mother ran a high fever that seemed to burn right through the fog crippling her mind. Mother pulled Bee in close and forced a hoarse command from her ravaged body.

  Find him, kill him, Mother said.

  After that, the fever must have roasted her brain because she would just mumble and babble—to herself, to nobody. Fantasies of torture and vengeance tumbled from her cracked lips, Bee listening wide-eyed and rapt to every word. Mother's last words set a course for the rest of her young daughter’s life: Find him. Kill him. Take his life. Take everything.

  And then it was all hunger and survival. Bee tried not to think about the things she’d seen, the things she’d been forced to do to keep on clawing toward another miserable day. It was the fire in her gut that kept her going, stoked by Mother’s last words. And now she finally had some solid ground to stand on.

  She would find the man with sky-blue eyes and make him pay.

  ***

  Shortly after Bee’s shower, Hargrove returned for his promised tour. Three polite raps at the door announced his presence and Bee opened it to find the boisterous man with a folded magenta uniform that matched his own.

  “For my newest employee.” He held the uniform out for her. “Go on, I’ll give you some time to change. Meet me out here when you’re finished.”

  “Oh, I’m starting now?” Bee asked, surprised. “Be right back.”

  After showing her the basic layout of the hotel, Hargrove brought her to the kitchen and left her in the care of the head chef, Gunther—a bald-headed, thickly accented gorilla of a man. She spent the afternoon scrubbing pots and pans in hot soapy water. The guy to her right rinsed them off after Bee cleaned them, and the conveyor belt kept bringing more dishes to clean.

  Bee took immense satisfaction in seeing just how pristine the dishes looked after they came in so messy. She wasn’t used to things being clean, so what most of the other employees seemed to consider a chore was a compl
ete novelty to her. Being in the kitchen thrilled her, even if she was only at the outskirts of things. The clattering of metal and plates, the incomprehensible orders booming from Gunther, and the general chaos of making all the food was exciting and mystifying to her all at once.

  After a while, Gunther barked something at her and shooed her off the dishwashing line to the kitchen’s exit. Someone else took her place. She stood there confused for a moment, thinking maybe she had done something wrong, when Hargrove appeared.

  “Gunther tells me you’ve done well,” he said.

  Bee shrugged. “Guess so. I’ve never really done this before. And I couldn’t really understand him, so I’m glad he thought I did okay.”

  Hargrove laughed. “Well in any case, your shift is over for the day. As long as you don’t cause me trouble you’re free to do as you like now. Just come by my office in the lobby tomorrow morning at nine.”

  “Thanks, Hargrove.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean it,” Bee insisted. “You helped me today. Most people wouldn’t have done that. I’ll remember it.”

  Hargrove smiled as he turned to leave. “Goodnight child, enjoy your room. Gunther was very impressed with your work today—keep it up and the job is yours again tomorrow.”

  Chapter 3: Swashbucklers

  By the time Bee turned sixteen, she had risen from soapy obscurity in the kitchens to the respectable rank of concierge. Hargrove and the other staff taught her well, and as Bee learned she made herself more and more useful around the hotel. She made herself indispensable to Hargrove, always worried if she didn’t do enough she’d find herself back on the streets again. After her first few weeks on the job, Hargrove helped her set up a bank account and paid her instead of just letting her stay in the hotel.

  Ever since Bee could remember, business had been, as Hargrove remarked from time to time, regrettably slow. Piracy was rampant in the trading and travel routes between the planets, and fewer traders and travelers meant fewer guests. The regulars they did have were kind, generous, and loyal for the most part—but they were becoming more scarce as the years passed.

  Despite the hotel’s seemingly inevitable slide into failure, Bee felt she had a firm grasp on her life for the first time. She steadily nurtured a nest egg of credits, fed with whatever she could manage from her hotel wages. She was comfortable and safe for the first time in recent memory. But Bee didn’t waste time enjoying herself. As she worked, she kept up her hunt for the man who orphaned her.

  After two years working at the Midtown Hotel, life became a blur of familiar monotony. Bee worked, ate, slept when she needed it, and continued her fruitless investigation into her mother’s death. One of her daily tasks was checking online bounty boards for mugshots. The most important detail she retained was his face. He had pale skin, short black hair, and those striking sky-blue eyes. Unmistakable.

  Those eyes haunted her just like Mother’s voice, leering at her in her dreams. Glancing at her from the shadows. Bee spent a lot of time holding her memory of the man’s face in her head, burning it in so she’d never forget. She drew his face in computer programs, spent hours trying to get all the details right. If she lost his face she’d never find him.

  In the months after securing her job at the Midtown Hotel, Bee tried requesting old police records from the city, hoping the man had been through their system. Nothing. Then she tried looking for any files containing her mother’s name, thinking they might have a police report from the day of the attack. But there was no report at all made in her mother’s name.

  Bee found out from bank records that the bastard had gotten Mother to sign marriage certificates and fill out all kinds of official forms before he did anything. According to the police it was all somehow disgustingly legal. That was why it was so easy for him to bleed their accounts dry. He knew just what he needed, and he’d done everything through various fake identities to cover his tracks.

  Bee combed through all the new bounties in the system individually—usually it was a few dozen every day. After that she would just flick through the old ones, planning to go as far back as the records did. Some nights she fell asleep this way, and in the morning she’d wake up to the slack-jawed stare of some outer-belt meathead.

  Most bounties were easily dismissed, but every once in a while a face would make her heart jump. Then she’d check into each promising lead and find they’d never been to Surface, or they were too young, or too old, or whatever. Amazing what she could find out about people online. Everywhere they went, people left trails. Eventually she had a pretty long list going of white males with black hair and blue eyes that were definitely not the man she was looking for.

  ***

  One morning, an old man with a thick beard and a serious drinking problem stumbled into the hotel bar with his luggage and didn’t leave. Normally as a concierge, Bee would have been helping people to their rooms or standing behind the front desk bored out of her mind, but on this particular day she’d been asked to cover for the bartender after he dropped a bottle of lotus wine and sliced his hand open cleaning it up. Not long after that, the old man entered. She must have poured him nearly a dozen drinks already, and each time he ran out—

  “Another,” Slack Dog said, and pounded his empty mug down.

  He fished a black coin out of his pocket and rapped it against the bar while Bee refilled his mug. She waved away the coin—it was the third time he’d tried to pay with them. People on the Core worlds did everything in credits.

  “It’s on your tab, sir,” she reminded him. Old ex-captains always liked to be called sir. “Credits, remember.”

  “Ah, mm-hmm,” he said, clearly ignoring her words as he watched her fill the mug. “Lovely.”

  The deep red-purple beverage, lotus wine, was the local intoxication of choice, deriving its properties from a psychoactive fruit called the lotus which grew exclusively on Surface. Lotus wine gave a pleasant body buzz, mild euphoria, and a sense of relaxation. Slack Dog slid the mug in front of himself with bony fingers and slurped the drink with a half-lidded look of bliss. Three bottles he’d gone through!

  Luckily, Hargrove had stocked up on lotus wine in preparation for the upcoming Fated Lovers Festival. Every five years, cities all across the planet celebrated the approach of a pair of comets with boring official scientific names Bee could never remember. Everyone she knew just called them Orpheus and Eurydice, the Fated Lovers. She liked that better.

  The two comets had shared nearly the same orbit for hundreds of years, but this time around things were supposed to change. The comet in the lead, Orpheus, was projected to orbit safely around Lux; but Eurydice would plow straight into the inferno and be absorbed by Lux. It was just like some old story from Earth and everyone always raved about the celebration. This would be the first time Bee might get to enjoy the festivities.

  A loud belch from Slack Dog interrupted her thoughts. “Used to be a privateer captain, y’know,” he said. “The starship Wanderlust. A fickle ship, she was—”

  “Yes, sir,” Bee said, nodding. “You told me all about her.”

  “Oh, howbout that. Did I tell y’about Cap’n Slack Dog’s Deep-Space—”

  “—Deep-Space Adventuring Company, yeah,” she said. “Fantastic idea.”

  He burped again and made a grunt of recognition, glancing over his shoulder at the entrance to the bar. He’d been looking for someone all day, checking anyone who walked through the doors.

  “You want anything to eat?” she asked.

  His eyes shot open wide, spindly red veins stark against the whites.

  “To eat? Yes. Food.”

  Slack Dog rummaged through his pocket for more of his odd black coins and scattered several across the counter before Bee could protest again.

  “Food please,” he said.

  Bee suppressed a sigh and tapped an order into the projection display in front of her, suspecting the intoxicated man didn’t much care what he was served. She slid most of the
coins back to Slack Dog, but left two for herself in absence of a tip; Slack Dog was apparently not used to the custom. She wondered where the inky black coins might have come from. They were all uniform in size and color but they didn’t seem to weigh enough, which puzzled her as she rolled them in her fingers. A thin silver band wrapped around the edge of the coin.

  Slack Dog noticed her examining the coins.

  “It’s all real,” he said. “G’head, take a bite.”

  “Oh, it’s just I’ve never seen these before. We do everything in credits here. Where are they from?” she asked.

  “Past the belt,” he said, and tossed another two coins down. “That’s for you, darlin’. Lemme know if you see any spacefarin’ types come in—anyone looks like they ain’t from the Core somewhere. Be a couple more in it for you tonight.”

  She nodded and pocketed the coins but didn’t ask him to elaborate. Slack Dog stumbled out of the bar. Bee tried to ask if he wanted his food brought up to his room, but her efforts proved futile—he moved with the determined, wayward gait of a drunkard on his way to bed. She’d just bring it up to him when it was ready. That way she could just leave it at his door if he didn’t answer.

  “Order up!” came a shout from Gunther in the kitchen.

  Bee pushed the door behind the bar open, grabbed the two plates of food she had ordered for Slack Dog, and placed them on a wheeled trolley. She took two chrome lids and covered the plates. Time for room service.

  “Hey Gunther,” she called to the chef. “I’m gonna take this up to 302. Bar’s empty.”

  Gunther gave an unintelligible yell of confirmation.

  After a brief elevator ride, Bee arrived on the third floor and pushed the trolley out in front of her toward room 302. The door was already open. Bee tapped a knuckle against it, peeked inside.

  “Mister, uh—Slack Dog?” she said.

  No answer.

  As she edged into the room she heard him snoring and rolled her eyes. He’d fallen asleep with the door open. Careless. She wheeled the trolley through the rest of the way. The snoring emanated from the bathroom—when Bee glanced inside she saw Slack Dog passed out on the toilet, pants puddled at his feet. His chin rested against his chest, rising and falling with each breath. Bee stifled a laugh and whirled out of the room, leaving the trolley behind.