by Alex White
Nilah laughed. “I think we’re worth a bit more than—”
“I said no, goddamn it!” Boots shouted, and everyone froze. “My farm was supposed to be…” Her eyes met Checo’s, and Boots found herself pleading. “That was supposed to be my sunset I could ride into. It was the reward for all of… this.” She held her broken, scraped-up prosthesis out. “The farm, too?”
“You can buy another,” said Cordell. “We’ll figure it out.”
“I bought that place with money I earned in the war! Don’t just tell me I can buy another! It was the last piece of my past he could take, and now you’re telling me it’s gone!”
Cordell raised his hand. “We’re part of your past, Boots. We’re still here.”
“Yeah.” Her voice came out hoarse. When no one else spoke, she added, “Sorry I forgot that.”
Checo regarded her impassively, clearly unmoved by the outburst. “I will arrange an escrow for any illiquid assets. My laundering fee is twenty-five percent, with another twenty for my agents. Indulge my services, or don’t—it’s up to you, and I’ll respect your decisions. Now I’m sure you have a lot of catching up to do, so I’ll leave you to it.”
The sculptor turned and strode to the water’s edge where a set of stepping-stones arose from the pool, ushering Checo to a hidden door in the far wall. Boots looked around at her companions, an embarrassed flush heating her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” she began. “I didn’t mean to shout—”
“I feel you, Bootsie,” Cordell said softly. “And for what it’s worth, you’re right—but maybe we all lost our homes in this thing. I get the sense that, over the next couple of days, we’re going to have to make some hard decisions.”
She deflated. “We’ve been making hard decisions, Captain.”
“Everyone deserved more than Witts gave them. I’m sorry.”
“Shouldn’t surviving be winning?” she asked. “This has got to be one of the worst-case scenarios. We won, but we still lost everything.”
A mousy young woman entered the dining hall from a hidden room, confusion writ large on her face. In Jeannie’s voice, she said, “Where’s Alister?”
Boots couldn’t be perfectly sure what to say in that moment, but she knew she owed Jeannie a debt. The woman had joined on with their crusade and braved unfathomable danger with her.
So Boots chose the truth, and conveyed Alister’s words as precisely as she remembered, watching poor Jeannie’s heart break as she did.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Flame
Three more days passed before Nilah stood upon the bridge of the Prism with a checklist in hand. So far, six of the systems had failed inspection, and she was only up to bullet number ten. From Orna’s reports, things weren’t going much better in the engine room. For a jump-capable ship, the poor boy had been terribly neglected.
Which was why Nilah couldn’t fathom Cordell’s interest in buying him.
Nilah’s comm chimed, and Orna said, “This drive is… like… one step above a jump dump. Half the crystals are burned out, and there’s some bad fusing in here. We probably need to mill a new reactor assembly.”
She turned to Cordell. “Did you get that, sir? The ship is a bust.”
“He just needs a little TLC is all!” laughed the captain. “We can buy an assembly. How’s the amp?”
“Probably bollocks.”
“Then we salvage another one from somewhere,” said Cordell. “Are you sure?”
She gave him a thin smile so he’d back off. “I’m sure I haven’t checked it yet, sir.”
His expression was half-crazed with excitement. “Then you can’t know. Let’s hop to it, Brio!”
“Of course, sir,” she said, turning away in exasperation and opening a private channel to Orna. “This whole ship is barmy. We are not paying for this.”
“Cheer up, babe. The captain wants to check it out, so we check it out.”
“The captain,” Nilah whispered, “needs to calm down. He’s acting like a bloody—”
“Ahem,” said Malik, and her stomach dropped.
Instead of correcting her, Malik just smiled and shook his head before busying himself with the various manuals and paperwork strewn across the bridge.
“I’m going to take five, sir,” she said to Malik, and he arched an eyebrow.
“Sounds like you’d better. I think the inspection has addled you.”
She stepped off the bridge and took a deep breath, then choked on the smell of old piss. The loo nearest the bridge hadn’t been cleaned in… it had probably never been cleaned, and the freighter crew didn’t exactly have good aim. If Nilah and the others bought the ship, she’d personally pay for the hotelier to come handle that bit.
Jeannie sat at the end of the hall, arms wrapped around her knees and chin propped. Her eyes were dark—she’d been crying—and her hair frizzed out at odd angles. Nilah regarded her for a while, wanting to make her feel better, yet having no idea what she was supposed to say.
“Babe,” said Orna over the comm. “Main reactor. Get down here. I need to show you something.”
Drive access was something of a joke, since Nilah had to crawl through several boxy shafts to reach her wife. In combat, any of those tubes could’ve been crimped by damage, and that’d be that for the whole coolant system. She finally got to her feet inside the reactor chamber, a small dome lined with the twinkling pink light of injector crystals.
“Orna?”
The quartermaster was on her in a flash, encircling her with strong arms, hot breath and soft mouth peppering Nilah’s exposed neck. Nilah gasped with delight, then bit her lip as Orna’s hands roved her body. Her dermaluxes washed the space in pink, growing hotter by the second.
“I’ve been crawling through conduits,” Nilah whispered, but it came out as more of a moan when Orna pinched a sensitive spot. “I’m covered in dust.”
“What a coincidence,” said Orna, pressing her teeth to the ticklish part of Nilah’s ear as she stripped off her mechanic’s gloves. “I grew up on a dust ball. I’m immune.”
“Oh, god, I really want to do this now, I do,” said Nilah, breathless as Orna’s hand snaked under her waistband, “but we are in the middle of an inspection! You’ve got to control yourself!”
“What can I say?” Orna rumbled, her sensual voice striking Nilah’s heart to leave a hum in her belly. “You got a lot hotter after you got into a fistfight with the guy who killed my planet.”
“Which I won, might I add,” she whispered, turning to Orna and tugging at the zipper of her maintenance jumpsuit.
When they’d first woken up together, it’d been awkward and emotional to see their new faces—to recognize that they couldn’t be the same people they once were. But between the cozy environs of Checo’s mansion and all the drugs, they’d gotten accustomed to things.
“Missus Sokol-Brio,” hummed Orna.
“Brio-Sokol. First place, darling.”
“Oh, did we finally decide that?”
Nilah kept her lips pressed up against her wife’s, savoring the swirl of their hot breath mixing together. With the drugs, it’d been surreal, but sober, things were electric, and she longed to press every centimeter of her skin against Orna’s.
For the first time, it clicked that Nilah would spend her life with this woman. They had decades, not hours, to touch and savor each other. There would always be backup. There would always be love.
They had a future.
Orna grabbed her butt and hoisted her up onto a nearby block of unshielded heat sink, kissing her way down Nilah’s collarbone as she unbuttoned Nilah’s filthy shirt.
“Darling,” Nilah moaned as the fins of the heat sink folded under her rump, conforming to her curves, “you know we’ll have to replace that now.”
Orna pulled aside Nilah’s bra and bit her, lightly at first, then hard enough to send shocks across her whole body. “It already needed to be replaced,” she muttered. “I’m doing them a favor.
”
Nilah grabbed onto a pair of wiring harnesses at either side as Orna’s mouth roved lower. Pants and underthings fled before her touch. Her technique was so perfect, so practiced, so tailored to Nilah’s exact needs that she reached a whiteout climax—and ripped the wires from the walls.
“Aw, damn it!” Nilah gasped, sliding to the floor as a languid puddle of ecstasy. “Oh, my god. You absolute beast. We’ve got to… got to repair the… uh, thingy…”
Orna wiped herself off on a clean rag and pocketed it with a smile. Then she fished a crimper out of her tool belt. “Yes, you do. I’ll see you on the bridge when you’re done cleaning up your mess.”
“Oh, you manky minx!”
“I didn’t wreck the transfer cables.”
Nilah yanked her pants back up and started working on her buttons. “Well, it was your bloody idea, love! And what are you going to be doing while I’m stuck down here?”
The quartermaster tugged on her mechanic’s jacket and buckled the straps. “I’m going to beg the captain not to buy this piece of crap. We don’t have anywhere to be—no reason to rush through buying a ship.”
Nilah did a double take. “Orna Brio-Sokol is counseling patience? Who the devil are you?”
“We all have to grow up someday, babe.”
When they returned to Checo’s mansion, nestled deep in the hidden grottoes of Harvest, they found Jeannie already packed and ready to go. Nilah had suspected that the remaining Ferrier wouldn’t stay with them after Alister left, and Boots told her not to ask. Whatever had broken between the twins, it didn’t look as though it could be fixed.
In the magnificent foyer of Checo’s lovely house, they exchanged embraces and farewells.
“You’re going to stay underground, yeah?” asked Nilah, pulling away.
“I think there might be others,” said Jeannie. “Others like me. I want to find them, and I have to find Alister. He can’t be out there alone.” She averted her eyes. “And you don’t have to be a reader to know when no one trusts you. I can barely get the captain to look me in the eye.”
Nilah shook her head. “Jeannie, you know we’d get to the bottom of it if you stayed.”
With tired eyes, Jeannie said, “Maybe it’s better if you don’t. I can’t promise you’d like what you found.”
“Will we ever see you again?”
Jeannie shouldered her rucksack and gave Nilah a smile that reminded her of the dying sunlight before a storm. “Part of me hopes so.”
After a few more brief farewells, Jeannie followed a servant down the hall toward the motor pool, and Nilah watched her go with mounting sadness.
“Feels wrong,” said Orna, coming astride her.
“We’re not qualified to take care of those two.” Nilah sighed. “Whatever was going to happen between them, maybe it’s best we let it play out without us.”
“What if Alister just lost it, and we’re totally abandoning Jeannie?” asked Orna.
“Their stories don’t line up,” said Nilah. “I don’t know why, but I’d always thought Jeannie killed the nanny. Then, I hear it was Alister. I don’t know who told me it was her, and I can’t prove anything—but I don’t trust her. Something is very wrong there.”
“She’s a sister in arms. Don’t we owe her help?”
“And we have to let her ask for it,” interrupted Boots. “We need to be moving out, ourselves. Did you and Orna talk it over last night? My proposal?”
“We did,” said Nilah. “And I think it makes a lot of sense. Count us in.”
“Seems like it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to watch one another’s backs,” said Orna.
“No Alister and Jeannie,” sighed Boots. “Keeps things neat, I suppose.”
Orna grimaced. “Wait, you got the captain to agree? How?”
“He’s tired of fighting, Orna,” said Boots. “I think… Maybe new face, new life for him. Said he wants to start over.”
“I’m in,” the quartermaster replied with a shrug. “You’re the people I hate the least.”
“Ah, that’s the girl I married,” said Nilah, playfully throwing her arms around Orna’s shoulders.
They adjourned to their rooms and packed what few things they had. Checo briefed them on the particulars of their transitions to new identities, coaching them on all the ways they might be found out. The spy offered to dispatch contractors to retrieve any precious objects, and Nilah gave them a prioritized list from the Brio estate on Taitu.
The crew met with teams of shady accountants and lawyers, each skilled in laundering and black-market transactions. They detailed their old lives, their prized possessions, their next of kin, and then they began the arduous process of signing their holdings into escrow. Of the cars and villas, yachts and land, Nilah was amazed how little she would miss.
When all was said and done, Nilah could only escape with the equivalent of one year’s salary in the PGRF—a lifetime of money to some, yet paltry to her. The rest would have to go into a series of trusts for deconstruction and cleaning over a decade. Orna and the others had fared little better.
Now missing their powers of attorney and substantial chunks of their fortunes, they were allowed to adjourn to Checo’s sumptuous cocktail lounge—though being honest, Nilah was tired of the entire estate. Their only adventure off the grounds had been to inspect the Prism, and that had been far too short.
“If I have to sign one more contract,” said Cordell, rummaging behind the bar. “Oh, now looky here… I have missed you, baby.” He arose with a small wooden chest and removed the hasp, revealing fermented brown leaves inside, as well as rolling papers.
“That’s conduct unbecoming an officer, Captain Lamarr,” said Boots. “Smoking in a host’s home. For shame.”
“Ain’t a captain without a ship,” said Cordell, pinching out some tobacco and attempting to roll it by hand. He came up with the saddest, most malformed cigarette Nilah had ever seen.
Malik tended bar while the others sat around and reminisced, their conversations stretching long into the morning hours. It reminded Nilah of the time they’d done the same thing in Boots’s living room, save that Armin had been there. When she looked over to Orna, she knew from the nostalgia in the quartermaster’s eye that she was thinking the same thing.
They discovered that many of the objects in the room hid mechanical puzzles—a fascination of Checo’s. The crew whiled away the hours trying to get into the chest cavity of a silver egret before giving up, declaring it too difficult.
One by one, the others began to wind down, until only Nilah and Orna remained. She eyed Orna, then surreptitiously traced her glyph with a wink and pressed her palm against the egret. The chamber popped open to reveal a diorama of swaying reeds, set against a carved marshland. In the distance, contrails signaled the launch of ships.
Orna smirked. “Cheater.”
“Let’s tell them we figured it out.”
“Yeah, they’ll never guess a mechanist used magic.”
“At least we got to see what was inside,” said Nilah, triggering the puzzle’s reset. It clinked shut with the most pleasant ratcheting noise. “Shall we retire, love?”
Orna’s icy eyes remained unchanged by Checo’s magic—a familiar anchor in a new life. “What are we going to do with ourselves?”
“Pottery? Watercolor?”
“I was kind of thinking prosthetics. I could help people.”
Nilah sat up. “Oh, come off it!”
“What?”
“‘I could help people,’” she mocked, bobbing her head and pulling a face. “Babes, listen to me: you must never, never turn into a sentimental softy.”
They listened to the tick-tock of a replica mechanical clock for a few beats—the only sound in the sleeping mansion.
“Are we really doing this thing with Boots?” asked Orna.
“Having second thoughts?”
“No. I’d never considered it, but with everything that’s happened, it seems kind of ideal.”
Orna smiled and held her close. “I promise: if a great evil arises, we can rush after it.”
“Thank god.”
Epilogue
Landing Zone
Atmospheric chop rocked the little ship, and Cordell startled awake with a snort. Boots checked to make sure he hadn’t drooled on her shoulder, then adjusted in her seat. He gave her a mortified look, but she just shrugged it off. A lot could be excused in the close quarters of Checo’s blockade runner.
Enica was like most human-habitable worlds: some forests, a few deserts, mountains and oceans, with a pair of desolate ice caps to round out the whole affair. It’d been discovered at the end of humanity’s big settlement push, and so lay mostly empty. There wasn’t a lot of law around, but there might not be much fun, either.
A dull life would suit Boots just fine.
She reclined in her crash couch and stared out the window at the Enican stratosphere. It was charming, with its overactive borealis and underactive colonists. The developers were practically begging people to settle out there. That usually meant desperate folks, willing to take a bargain chance on paradise—and the predators that inevitably followed those settlers.
Still, as they passed over green coastline and sandy beaches, she had a good feeling about this place.
They’d been cooped up in Checo’s blockade runner for the better part of a week, and it was starting to grate on her. A private bunk on the Capricious had been so much better than being jammed into bed tubes like bullets into a magazine. When they weren’t snoozing away, they could enjoy drinking, drugs, or the Link in extremely close proximity. It made their old marauder look like a colony ship in comparison.
Their things had been smashed to bits on the surface of Origin, so at least they didn’t have much unpacking to do.
