by Clara Woods
One arm full with four pairs of shoes, Lenah backed away toward engineering. While she moved, she also had to expand her influence to make up for the added distance. Lenah couldn’t yet sprint away to do it, but easing away slowly, she could hold her influence.
Reaching the door that lead to the small engineering room, Lenah dropped the shoes there, then walked back toward her friends, trying not to feel too triumphant. The next part would be even more difficult.
When she was standing in front of them again, she changed the idea. Instead of a shared vision for each of them, she concentrated on them as two groups. She sent Cassius and Doctor Lund the memory of how Uz and Persia had taken their shoes by force and thrown them out of the airlock. To Cassius and Lund, she sent the inverted idea: Uz and Persia taking the men’s shoes and spacing them.
Doctor Lund was the first one to move. He made a jerking movement, lifting each foot off the ground for a moment, then grimaced. At the same time, the other three looked down at their feet. Lenah kept pouring into them the vivid imagery of the two ideas, spurred on by the success she’d had so far.
“Why did you throw my shoes away? What’s wrong with you?” Doctor Lund asked, storming over to face Uz and Persia and making a lot of trampling noise for someone standing only in his socks.
Persia looked down at those socks, looking perplexed.
“That’s not true. You threw our shoes away. I saw it.”
“Don’t lie, I saw you throw away my shoes,” Doctor Lund insisted through clenched teeth, even though he seemed confused why Persia would be without hers as well. Lenah realized she had forgotten to explain that little detail in her vision.
“What’s going on here? Don’t pretend.” Cassius stalked up to stand next to Doctor Lund. “And your own shoes? Did you hide them? I saw you just now throw mine out, but you were wearing yours.” He furrowed his brow. He turned around in the room as if to look for the women’s shoes behind the crates stacked against the wall. Lenah scrambled to adjust, but no good idea came to her mind. Cassius spun and finally stopped to stare straight at Lenah. “Wait a second. We’re training.”
Lenah struggled to hold her influence, but Cassius’s comment had broken her concentration. Her influence retracted back toward her, freeing their minds.
“We are training!” Uz exclaimed. Then she looked around. “You didn’t really throw our shoes out, did you?”
Lenah grinned at them. “No, they are there by the door of engineering.”
“Does that mean it finally worked?” Cassius was beaming. With outstretched arms, he closed the distance to Lenah. Was he going to hug her? But when he’d almost reached her, he hesitated and cleared his throat. His arms dropped and he patted her on the shoulder. The touch of metal felt cold through her thin blouse, and she wished he’d hugged her instead. Or had used his other hand.
“That’s amazing! All four of us?” he asked, apparently unaware of Lenah’s discomfort. That was a good thing. She wasn’t sure what to make of her wish to be hugged by him. Especially in front of everyone else.
“Yup.” She nodded, focusing on his words. “At least for a little bit.” She couldn’t stop grinning, and Cassius returned it, showing nice and even teeth surrounded by even nicer lips.
Lenah shook her head. Where had that come from? Did she want to kiss him? What would that mean? He wasn’t really dating material for someone of her station, but did that even matter any longer? Did she still have a higher station?
“I’m tired. I’m going to go rest in my cabin,” she told the group.
Everyone nodded, though Cassius’s eyes opened in question. Ignoring him, Lenah turned around and walked up to the main corridor. A few seconds later, she found herself in the safety of her room. She went to sit on her bed, trying to calm her busy thoughts.
What was wrong with her? She should be elated right now, celebrating with her friends who had offered their free will multiple times over the past few days. She was sure these daily sessions hadn’t been easy for them. Surrendering control over their minds to Lenah was a huge tribute of trust. And she had accomplished it now. What had seemed unobtainable only a few days ago, influencing four people at once, had become a reality. They were one crucial step closer to getting their explosives.
Yet, here she was, with nothing else on her mind other than kissing the cyborg? She must be mad. Or deprived. It had been a long time for her since she had a relationship, the last one being with Mason. Lenah nodded to herself. There it was. Her infatuation was merely biological. After all, Cassius was an attractive man, cyborg or not. Lenah got up again to make a trip to the lav unit. She’d told everyone that she was going to sleep, so she’d better get her teeth cleaned and tuck herself into bed. Maybe she’d play a mindless game on her wristpiece to distract herself.
17 Smuggler Code
“Shouldn’t they have answered at this point?” Lenah asked as she watched Uz, who was bent over the Rambler’s dashboard. Cassius had comm’ed his friends hours ago to ask about the station’s coordinates. Why weren’t they answering? “Maybe they aren’t so loyal after all. Who knows with smugglers.”
Uz tapped her chin, looking up. “It’s only been a few hours. They might be far away, and the transmission takes time. Did Cassius say where his friend is?” She squinted at the proximity scanner.
Lenah shook her head. “I don’t think he knows.”
A soft bing interrupted them, and their eyes turned to the comm panel.
“That’s it! Yes! We have the coordinates.” Uz beamed at Lenah, who let out a relieved breath. Their whole plan would have fallen apart had they not gotten the coordinates to actually reach the smuggler’s market. Now it seemed that they would get to execute their plan. Lenah felt her eyelid twitch nervously.
She was more anxious about this than anything else they had done before. It wasn’t just the general risk they were taking, but also because she always seemed to stick out in these kinds of environments. The last thing she wanted was to get them all into trouble. She hoped that her time spent outside of the society of families and with Cassius and the others had rubbed off a little. She’d definitely made an effort.
Don’t walk with your head high, always try to catch every detail that’s around you. Act like you don’t want to be seen, even by someone who happens to pass right by you. So far, Lenah hadn’t been able to use her newly acquired movement patterns in public. She’d only practiced in her cabin. And she also couldn’t ask anyone here, not without admitting that she didn’t know how to behave like a commoner.
“It’s not too far away, less than half a day without a warp bubble,” Lenah said, looking up from the screen that had calculated their distance to the indicated coordinates. “If the market is tomorrow, we should probably not bother with a warp bubble. That will be better for our fuel reserves, anyway.” She shot a worried glance at the fuel meter. Less than half, and they still didn’t have money to replenish it comfortably.
This was the worst side of her new life.
“I still find it funny that smugglers open their market at 5 a.m.,” Uz said. “I always imaged them being night owls.”
“Creeping around in the dark hours?” Lenah raised an eyebrow.
“This is business not pleasure.” Cassius’s voice came from behind. A few seconds later, he squished himself into the cockpit to take up his usual spot behind Lenah. Her belly gave a little jump as she remembered how he’d almost hugged her after the training session. “If you want to be a smuggler in this time and age, you have to be a businessman or -woman first and foremost,” Cassius said.
“Just with slightly altered values?” Lenah asked, happy about the distraction.
He frowned. “Not necessarily. Families steal from poor people all the time. It’s wrong that their status gives them the right to do that.”
“I guess…if you put it that way,” Lenah muttered, never having thought of it in that way.
“Do you think you might meet your old colleagues?” Uz asked int
o the heavy silence and managed to make it sound almost like a normal question.
But if families and smugglers were alike, then the latter could also be called colleagues, Lenah supposed. She turned to see the reaction on Cassius’s face. She’d been asking herself the same question.
Was he worried he might run into his father? His criminal father from whom he had escaped? After all, Cassius had indicated that the man frequented this place on a regular basis. That’s how Cassius—and now them—knew about it. Only that Uz didn’t know it was his father that Cassius had left behind, not just some colleagues.
Cassius shrugged, but before answering, Lenah saw his gaze flicker sideways nervously. Was it possible that he, a cyborg stronger than any non-enhanced human, was afraid to confront his father? Though, as she thought about it, wasn’t she too? She was a mind mage and worried at the thought of going back home and blowing up their company’s most lucrative laboratory. And she shuddered at the thought of meeting her father, who hadn’t stood up for her at all, not with Corinna and definitely not with UPL authorities. How often had she fantasized to just randomly find that access chip to the mage farm in the last few days instead of having to go get it from his office? A hundred times? Two hundred?
“The Trader’s Anne usually comes by only once per month,” Cassius said. “To the last market of the month and we have the first one tomorrow. I don’t think they’ll be there.”
“I hope not. Do you think they would be mad at you?” Uz asked.
“Mad?” He barked out a laugh. It sounded slightly strangled. “Yeah,” he said with a creaky voice.
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. But why would they? Wouldn’t it be possible that you’re innocent? That instead of you kidnapping us, you could have been kidnapped? Maybe Lenah controlled your mind and took you.” Uz gestured toward Lenah’s head.
Always seeing the good in people, Lenah thought. For someone who had experienced great injustice herself, Uz actually tended to be overly positive.
“Me being kidnapped?” Cassius lifted his enhanced arm and made a fist. “Are you sure anyone would believe that? Unless it was someone with a nano-stunner, and those are really hard to get.”
“Mmh, I guess not,” Uz trailed off. “I’m sorry. I hope we don’t see your colleagues. I’ll go check on that temperature control issue you mentioned, Lenah.” She got up and squeezed by Cassius to leave the cockpit. “Then I’ll try to sleep some. I spent way too much time trying to make that drone speak.” She yawned.
“You don’t like Zyrakath much, do you?” Lenah asked.
“Oh, he’s barely even talked to me. He seems to think that a cut Cassidian is even worse than a primitive human.”
“He doesn’t seem to like anyone if that’s any consolation. Maybe with the exception of Lorka who happened to be sufficiently awed by his presence,” Lenah told her.
Uz sniffed. “I think he was more impressed by Lorka’s bow than my ability to revive such an ancient piece of technology. In five seconds, Lorka received more gratefulness from him than me after fixing him up for two weeks.”
“True. But the rest of us are grateful. In any case, I think it will be useful to have him here. He does know a lot more than we do about the Cava Dara and the Muha Dara.”
“He does,” Uz said nonchalantly. “Which is why I didn’t press together his two off-cables.”
“He has cables?” Cassius asked. “I thought it—he—is made from stone.”
“They are stone cables. Gem nodes strung together,” Uz answered before turning and leaving.
“She really doesn’t like him, does she?”
“You weren’t there,” Lenah said. “He is a handful to listen to. I have a suspicion that he wouldn’t like you either. He kept mentioning the value of elderly wisdom and seemed to imply the worthlessness of physical strength.”
“Mmh,” Cassius said, folding his long limbs into the copilot’s chair Uz had abandoned.
“I guess I’m glad I wasn’t there.”
They sat silently for a few moments, Lenah feeling her belly flutter once more.
“How sure are you that you won’t run into your father?” Lenah finally asked. He had looked very worried earlier.
Cassius sighed. “He’s a stickler to his routine. I don’t think he’d change his schedule if he doesn’t have to.”
“But you’re worried he might have to?”
“I’m not sure. He used to rely heavily on me. Not me, specifically, but this.” He lifted his cyborg arm. “And probably making deals got harder for him without it. So, it’s possible he’ll have to frequent the market more often, try to make more deals. Less dangerous deals with less profit.”
“If he saw you there, what would he do?”
“Not sure, but something between trying to mock me for failing my mission and kill me.” He grinned, and when Lenah didn’t join him, he bit his lip. “He’d probably nano-stun me and try to get me back. I was expensive.”
“And what mission was that?” Lenah asked softly. He’d never mentioned one, and she’d never found out why he’d specifically wanted to go to Oscuris. Maybe this was the explanation.
Cassius shrugged. “More complicated family stuff.” His constrained tone made it clear that he didn’t want to discuss it.
Lenah was about to comment that no one got their own child killed, but the memory how her father’s smuggler allies had tried to shoot the Star Rambler kept her from doing so. “Family is not easy. I hope we don’t see him,” she said instead. And she meant every word.
18 Neeth Station
Carefully, Lenah navigated the Star Rambler into the cargo hold of Neeth Station. Or rather, the parking lot, given the whole interior seemed to have been taken out to accommodate two decks of marked parking spots. Cassius had recommended they come late, to be last in line, and Lenah could see why.
If they had to leave abruptly, it would be impossible to do so parked in the first row with four lines of other ships tucked behind. It was probably a good mechanism to control misbehavior.
As the makeshift station had come into view, Lenah had marveled at the ingenuity of it. It was a pretty massive place but entirely made out of specially modified spaceships. There was a large center ship, with the market and entertainment areas Cassius had explained, then four wings attached from it. The parking wing was just one of the areas. Two others were for private trading bays—their destination—and the final one held a canteen with decent beer. At least, according to Cassius.
Lenah wouldn’t mind having a second sample of the beverage, but that wouldn’t happen today. She grimaced to herself. Her hands were sweaty, and she thought she could hear her heart racing. Tonight was going to be a challenge.
She turned off the engine, got up from her seat and made her way into the cargo hold. Cassius and Persia were waiting there, and by how Persia was clutching her hammer, she felt at least as nervous as Lenah. Laser weapons weren’t allowed on the station, to avoid violent incidents that could potentially lead to hull breaches. Though selling weapons apparently was an everyday activity, so they’d be bringing their more primitive weapons today.
Cassius was sporting his big knife, almost like a machete and one of the tranquilizer guns from UPL station. Both were tucked into his belt loops. Lenah knew that he had other knives on him too, but those were hidden away somewhere. Lenah herself had also brought a tranq gun and a thin, but long-bladed knife. Not that she truly knew what to do with it.
Cassius had tried to show her, but without dummies to practice on, she hadn’t advanced far in the last few days. Lenah didn’t even have the nerve to stab his cyborg arm, despite his insistence that she couldn’t do him any damage, and that the knife was much more likely to break than penetrate. To her, it was still his arm.
“Are we ready?” Lenah asked, and both nodded. Cassius took one of his favorite relaxed stances, all emotion wiped from his face, and Persia clutched her hammer harder.
“You’re leaving already?” Uz’s voice cam
e from behind.
“Better get it over with before someone else buys all our explosives and leaves with them,” Lenah said, turning around.
Uz nodded. “Good luck. We’ll be waiting, ready to depart.”
“Comm me if something comes up,” Lenah told her, lifting her arm with the wristpiece. Then she turned again and opened the hatch without letting her fear get the better of her.
They had to make their way around several rows of closely parked ships, and Lenah stumbled, practicing her new mannerisms intended to avoid notice while trying to pick up as much detail around her as she could. She hadn’t paid attention to the ground in front of her.
Lenah cursed under her breath, and Cassius gave her a curious once-over. Lenah pulled herself together and looked around again, this time focusing on where she was walking.
The ships in here were a curious mixture of modern cruisers and older models, similar to the Star Rambler. This might be the first time she had landed her ship somewhere without drawing attention to how old it was.
What all the ships had in common was a wide array of weapon upgrades. One was a civilian transport shuttle, but someone had modified the sides so they could stick one laser cannon next to the other. Compared to all the weapons power displayed, the Rambler was still the crappiest ship in here. It only had front lasers; the back ones had probably fallen off at some point.
Reaching a large hatch that opened on a motion sensor, they passed through and into a short tunnel that ended in a similar hatch. The crossing from one ship to another, she realized. They must be in the center ship now, the one that held the market and entertainment facilities. Sure enough, smells and loud voices soon started drifting toward them, and as the second hatch opened, they were immediately swallowed by the intense noise from up ahead.
Like the parking ship, most of this ship had been hollowed out. The market lay situated in one large and several-story-tall room with gangways leading up to the higher levels. Tables filled the area, with large holosigns praising the offered goods. Lenah saw knives, clothes, food, and even toys on display.
