Prime Deceptions

by Valerie Valdes

  “Nah, I don’t wanna move,” Eva said. “Min, audio only, please.”

  A holo image projected from Eva’s closet door into the dim room. At first it crackled with static, but it quickly resolved into the face and upper body of her sister, Mari. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and unlike the last time Eva had seen her, she wore a dark-red spacesuit with extra armored plating over the chest. Her expression was neutral, controlled, like she’d done a bunch of deep-breathing exercises before making the call. Which she probably had, given how good Eva was at getting on her nerves.

  “Eva?” Mari asked, her neutral expression immediately slipping as a crease appeared between her brows. “Are you there? I can’t see you.”

  “I’m here,” Eva replied, slapping Vakar’s claw as he ran it up her bare thigh. “It’s been a while. What do you need?”

  The furrow smoothed out. “What’s the passcode?” Mari asked.

  Eva sighed and consulted her commlink. The key generator Mari had made her install spat out a long string of letters and numbers, which she dutifully repeated.

  “And what’s your favorite . . .” Now Mari pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes at Eva. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What?”

  “Favorite food.”

  Eva hmmed wistfully. “Paella. So good.”

  “You’re allergic to shrimp, boba.”

  Vakar’s palps tickled her face and she stifled a giggle. “Pink has been giving me a lot of allergy meds,” she said. “Really strong ones.”

  Mari closed her eyes. Eva could almost hear her silently counting to ten.

  “My turn,” Eva said. “What’s your favorite, uh, Mesozoic species?”

  Mari smirked. “Ah, see, someone who didn’t know me well might assume it was equisetites, because of the ribbed stems, but actually it’s baculites because they—”

  “Ya, basta, I know it’s you because no one else is this boring.” Eva reluctantly sat up and swung her legs over the side of her bed, wincing as her injured thigh protested. “What do you want, Mari?”

  Her sister’s face grew serious again. “My superiors need to speak with you. In person.”

  Now Vakar sat up, too, smelling as curious as Eva felt. She knew nothing about Mari’s bosses, except that they thought it was totally fine to throw Eva to the proverbial wolves if it meant taking down The Fridge. And now they wanted to talk?

  “I thought you didn’t want me anywhere near your business?” Eva said, barely concealing the salt in her tone.

  “I don’t, but I’m not in charge.”

  Eva’s smirk died quickly. “What do they want from me?”

  “That’s not for me to say,” Mari replied, smoothing a stray hair against her head. “But if you’ll agree to meet with them and discuss their offer, I’ll send you the coordinates.”

  Secrets, as usual. Great. “I assume I’d get paid for whatever this is?” Eva asked.

  “Absolutely. A fair rate, possibly including fuel subsidies.”

  Eva wrinkled her nose at Vakar, who blinked his inner eyelids pensively. He smelled minty, but otherwise noncommittal. No help there.

  “I have to discuss it with my crew,” Eva said slowly. “I’m not the only captain anymore, and either we’re all in or we’re out.”

  “How egalitarian of you,” Mari said. Her features had settled into a mask again, and her gaze flicked up like she was looking at something Eva couldn’t see. “I have to go, but please let me know within the next cycle. We’re running out of time. And options.”

  “Right, I’m never the first pick for the spaceball team,” Eva muttered. “Call me back in an hour; I’ll have an answer for you then.”

  “Bueno. Cuídate.”

  The holo image vanished, plunging the room back into darkness except for the dim light from the fish tank above her bed. Vakar’s sister, Pollea, had taken care of Eva’s fish while Eva was indisposed—okay, no need to be euphemistic, it was while Eva was in cryo after being kidnapped because of shit that was basically Mari’s fault. But Eva had gotten her ship back, and her fish, and added a few new creatures to the tank for good measure, including the orange-shelled snail currently stuck to the glass, and the hermit crab digging through the substrate. She hadn’t worked up the nerve to add live coral or anemones, but she figured she would get there someday.

  That, of course, depended on whether she lived long enough to see “someday” for herself. Her leg throbbed as a reminder that nothing was certain, that every fight she walked into was a roll of the Cubilete dice, and the other side might get a Carabina first.

  Eva’s stomach grumbled; must be time for a meal. She did a quick visual survey of her injuries, which were recovering as slowly as one might expect without nanites. Her thigh bandages were intact, but definitely in rougher shape than they should have been for someone supposedly resting.

  “Pink is gonna be mad at us,” she told Vakar.

  “It is probable,” he agreed, tickling her shoulder with his palps.

  “Eh, worth it.” She grabbed her nearest article of clothing off the floor. “Help me put on my pants so she doesn’t see it yet, and let’s get this party started.”

  Min’s human body joined them in the mess this time. She was using the hot plate to make gyeranjjim for herself and Sue, so Eva settled for reconstituting a vague approximation of picadillo along with the last of the instant rice. Pink shoveled her own rice and red-bean concoction into her mouth quickly enough to give Eva a stomachache from watching. Vakar wasn’t hungry, and he already knew what the meeting was about, so he sat at the table and waited with a patience Eva found admirable, if baffling.

  Eva explained the situation briefly as everyone ate. The first to respond when she finished was Pink, who pushed her empty plate away with a look like she’d bitten a lemon.

  “Mari is a liar and an asshole,” Pink said coldly. “And her bosses were good with her busted-ass plan that fucked all of us over. That’s two strikes already and we don’t even know what they want.”

  “We cannot trust them,” Vakar agreed. “However, some of our goals are in alignment overall.”

  “We all hate The Fridge,” Sue said, blowing on her food to cool it. “And it seems like they have, um, you know . . .”

  “Money?” Eva supplied. “Resources? Information?”

  “Yeah, all of that, pretty much.”

  “Food?” Min asked, poking what was left of her fluffy egg substitute. She’d gotten way more interested in eating once their options had improved.

  Eva gestured at Min with her fork. “That, I don’t know.”

  Pink leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “If this were any other client, you’d tell them to go piss up a rope. Is the risk worth what we might get out of it?”

  “Mari did say they’d pay us well,” Eva said. “Maybe even a fuel allowance.”

  “Ooh, a fuel allowance, says the liar.” Pink nodded sarcastically, her eye wide.

  “We do need fuel,” Min said. “I mean, I do. The ship me.”

  Vakar smelled like ozone with a hint of incense—uncertain, concerned—but there was also an undercurrent that reminded Eva of night-blooming jasmine. Thoughtful, which meant he wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea. She considered his angle, and what he might stand to gain from it.

  “You want to know more about them,” Eva told him. “Mari’s people, I mean, whoever they are.”

  Vakar shrugged in the quennian equivalent of a nod. “As a Wraith,” he said, “I have been tasked with documenting the activities of the entity known as The Fridge, and disrupting them. Your sister is employed by yet another organization whose identity and motives are unknown, but whose reach appears extensive. Under the right circumstances, they could be a valuable asset.”

  They certainly seemed to have reached right into The Fridge itself, if Mari was any indication. How many more spies did they have, and how much information might they be willing to trade?

  Pink shook her
head, her dreads swaying slightly. “So assuming we agree to meet with them, then what?”

  “We see what they want.” Eva shrugged. “Worst case, we turn them down and walk away.”

  “Worst case, they blow us up and melt down the scraps,” Pink muttered. “I want to believe we’re all on the same side, but there’s history, and that shit repeats.”

  Sue spoke up then, in a quiet voice. “Sometimes good people do bad things,” she said, staring down at her empty plate. “They think the reasons are good and important, and it will all work out in the end. It’s not smart, maybe, but it’s . . . it happens.”

  Sue was thinking of her own past, no doubt. Her brother, Josh, had been kidnapped by The Fridge, after which Sue had robbed a few banks and an asteroid mine in the hopes of paying off his ransom. But Josh was still missing, and none of their Fridge-busting fun had turned up any leads so far. Looking at the dark-haired girl, just out of her teens, Eva would never have believed she was capable of such a thing. Sue could barely curse properly, though Eva was trying to teach her.

  Then again, the same things could be said about Eva, or Pink, or anyone else on the ship. Eva most of all, given some of what she’d done back when she worked for her father. She had enough regrets to fill their cargo hold, and more.

  Eva didn’t seem to be the only one following that plutonium exhaust trail of thought, so she cleared her throat to bring everyone back to the table.

  “Vote time?” Eva shifted her butt, wincing at the pain that shot through her leg. “I say we check it out, with another vote to decide whether we take whatever offer they make.”

  “I also believe we should investigate,” Vakar said.

  Min brushed her faded blue hair out of her face and smiled. “Fuel sounds good to me.”

  Sue hesitated, then said, “It can’t hurt. Can it?”

  “It certainly can,” Pink said. She rolled her eyes. “I feel like I’m having to be paranoid enough for all y’all, but whatever. At least we’re being foolish together.”

  “Look at it this way,” Eva said, “if you’re right, we can burn them for good.”

  “If I’m right,” Pink said with a scowl, “we’re the ones who are gonna be hosed.”

  Eva really, really hoped Pink wasn’t right this time.

  Chapter 2

  Forging Fates

  The coordinates Mari provided sent them to Suidana, a dying binary star system two cycles from the nearest Gate. Pink insisted on collecting their Fridge bounty first, and Eva was only too happy to do so, since they needed enough credits for the fuel to get to Mari’s mystery site. Their client was grateful, if nervous about possible repercussions, but Eva assured them The Fridge would be more pissed at her than they would at him.

  “Squirrely little guy,” Pink said as they were leaving. “Are we sure he’s legit?”

  “Min and Vakar both checked him out,” Eva said. She smiled as the account-transfer notification pinged into her commlink. “We did our good deed for the week, and now we can sleep like babies all the way to Casa Carajo.”

  Pink’s lip curled. “Sure is a long flight for a big question mark.”

  Eva had wondered about that as well, but she didn’t want to back out now. “Should give you plenty of time for your patients, though,” she said.

  Pink had joined a pool of remote doctors to handle the massive medical needs of a far-flung universe, the kinds that sophisticated virtual intelligences weren’t adept at diagnosing, or that wanted a pseudo-personal touch. It meant more work for her, but as Pink had put it, “My résumé won’t pad itself.” Besides, she loved helping people, whether by figuring out what ailed them or putting a foot up the right person’s ass.

  As pressed for time as Mari had said her employers were, Eva wasn’t inclined to hurry. She let Min proceed well within safe speed parameters, even dropping to sublight a few times so Sue could repair a particularly fussy ship component. Vakar caught up on reports for his Wraith bosses, Eva caught up on administrative bullshit, and together they caught up on each other as much as her healing leg would allow. Sue fixed Eva’s gravboots again and worked on some new mass of metal in the cargo bay, Pink doctored or fiddled with her latest sewing project, Min piloted and played the strategy games she defaulted to when her q-net access was laggy. During the late meal, Min queued up the most recent Crash Sisters holovids, so they could all watch former crew member-turned-star Leroy “The King” Cooper stomp around kicking asses and pretending to be a villain. There was even time for Min to help braid Pink’s hair, which had to be done in stages because it had gotten so long, and for Min and Sue to hang out, chatting about giant mechanical creations and other girly stuff.

  It was as close to a holiday as they had gotten for as long as Eva could remember, and she savored every minute of it, because she wanted to be well rested when the shit hit the air filters.

  They arrived at their destination during the third cycle out from the Gate. The station was uncomfortably close to the system’s red supergiant, which had already swallowed the planets closest to it. Some of its mass was being stripped by its companion neutron star, but even so, it would collapse into a white dwarf at some point in the near future as cosmic time went, which was at least a few thousand years away.

  Eva hated thinking on that scale. It reminded her that the universe was a vast ocean, and she wasn’t even a tiny fish: she was an amoeba. One person on one ship drifting through the black between points of light, her life’s only purpose and meaning whatever she made of it. It was simultaneously liberating and disheartening to be so relatively insignificant. And it didn’t help that people like Mari went around having a huge sense of self-importance about their goals, like every choice they made could wipe out entire galaxies or whatever.

  Ending even one life was a big deal, and the farther away from that notion a person got, the more lives became expendable. Numbers in a chart. Collateral damage. Acceptable risks and the cost of doing business, of finishing the mission, of doing what needed to be done according to very particular parameters of need.

  Maybe Eva was only one person, but she wasn’t keen on being a statistic, or turning anyone else into one.

  La Sirena Negra arrived at a station large enough to house thousands of people, drifting serenely along a trajectory that kept the red giant behind it like a huge, watchful eye. Its hull was putty-colored and smooth, broken only by cameras and other instrumentation, and the docking-bay doors that opened to receive their ship. Eva let Min handle all the standard handshakes and code-swaps, because she was busy ogling the thing being towed along by the station like a toy on a string.

  It was a Gate. At least, it looked like one, except it was inactive and covered in construction crews. But the idea that someone had stolen a Gate, or more incredibly, was trying to build a new one? Impossible. Gates were ancient Proarkhe tech, and no one knew how they worked, only how to use them to open holes to other parts of the universe.

  Then again, The Fridge had managed to make a pair of guns that created portable Gates, which Eva knew because she’d stolen them and hidden them as well as she could. They didn’t work anymore, but no way did she trust anyone to use tech like that for good instead of super naughty.

  Except apparently Mari’s secret club had gotten enough information on their own to do this. And if they could build a whole damn Gate out here, what else might they be able to do?

  They finished docking protocols and Eva disembarked slowly, still leaning on the mighty Fuácata since her leg wound wasn’t fully healed. Vakar and Pink followed close behind her, both suited up like they were walking into a fight. The docking bay had enough room for a dozen ships or so, the largest of which was a Standard Reliance Mk II cruiser. It looked familiar, but Eva had seen a lot of similar ships in her time, especially in the BOFA fleet. This one was sleek and white with black-and-red stripes, and Eva coveted it instantly, despite her love for her own ship.

  “Are those antiproton thrusters?” Eva asked Vakar quietly.


  “Yes,” he murmured back. “And it has kloshian heavy armor in addition to its kinetic barriers.”

  Eva gave a soft groan of jealousy.

  Mari intercepted them before they made it any farther. She still wore the same red armored spacesuit Eva had seen during their call, and her light-brown eyes were wide from whatever stimulants she was using to stay ahead of fatigue. She hesitated in front of Eva, her expression guarded.

  Eva swallowed her pride and stepped forward, kissing her sister on the cheek. They might not be back up to hugging yet, but they had to start somewhere.

  “Welcome to The Forge,” Mari said.

  “The what?” Eva cocked her head to the side and squinted.

  “That’s what our group is called, The Forge.”

  Eva snorted. “You know that sounds a lot like The Fridge, right? Who names this shit?”

  “Our group came first,” Mari said defensively. “Anyway, thank you for coming.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Eva replied. “I haven’t agreed to anything.”

  Mari nodded, glancing at Eva’s cane. “I think this will be a lot less dangerous than . . . last time.”

  “We can handle danger,” Pink said, putting a hand on her hip. “It’s secrets that get us all riled up.”

  Mari opened her mouth like she was going to launch into a lecture, but stopped herself and held out a hand. “Dr. Jones, it’s good to see you again.”

  “The pleasure is all yours,” Pink replied coolly. “Nice suit, it really brings out the bags under your eyes.”

  Eva choked on a laugh, which she turned into throat-clearing. “You remember Vakar.”

  “Of course.” Mari lowered her hand and offered him a curt bow. “Your work against The Fridge last year was greatly appreciated.”

  “I did not do it for you,” Vakar said. “But you are welcome.” His smell and face were hidden by his armor, his voice distorted and gravelly.

  They all stood around awkwardly for a few moments, Eva making a fish face and raising her eyebrows, Pink glaring at Mari, Mari almost starting several sentences, and Vakar just looming since he was taller than all of them. Finally, Mari broke the silence.