BOOTY HUNTER

by Huss, JA

  “Do what?” ALCOR asks.

  “You sure about that?” Serpint asks, ignoring ALCOR.

  I nod. “I swear. It’s just…”

  “What are you talking about?” the master asks.

  “Just what, Lyra?” Serpint prods. “You can tell me. I’m on your side, OK? We’re a team now. Me, and you, and that worthless nanny bot. And Booty,” he adds. “Once she gets better. We’re your team now. So tell me. What’s really going on with you?”

  “What are we talking about?” ALCOR asks.

  I exhale. And it’s loud and long. “You’re going to hate me,” I say.

  “I won’t,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Can you two please explain what you’re talking about?” the master says.

  “I promise, Lyra.” He sits forward on his couch until his hand can reach mine. And then he takes it. Holds it. “What’s going on?”

  I sigh again. I have to make a choice here. Either let them all in on what’s happening with the Cygnian princesses, or… or what? Do I even have a choice at this point? The only other option I see involves stealing a ship, going back to Bull Station—alone—and getting Nyleena out myself. And even though I’m pretty sure I could steal a ship, there’s no way this stupid ALCOR wouldn’t catch me in the act. I’ve never seen such a powerful AI. He sees everything. He is literally the station god.

  “OK,” I decide.

  “OK.” Serpint nods, squeezing my hand for encouragement.

  “We’re not what you think,” I say.

  “Who?” ALCOR asks.

  “No?” Serpint says.

  “No,” I say, shaking my head.

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?” ALCOR’s shout is so loud I jump in my chair.

  “Chill, dude!” Serpint yells back. “She’s getting there!”

  I hesitate, but Serpint squeezes my hand again. “Go on,” he says.

  “We’re not just princesses,” I say.

  “What’s that mean, Lyra?” the master asks.

  “It means,” I snarl at him—why does he have to be here for this, anyway?—“it means… we’re something more than just… people.”

  “I’m getting impatient,” ALCOR snaps.

  “We’re weapons,” I say. “OK? That’s what we are. We’re weapons.”

  Serpint squints his eyes. The cyborg master uncrosses his legs and leans forward, and even I can feel the confused look on ALCOR’s non-face.

  “Weapons?” all three of them say at the same time.

  “Yes,” I say, sitting up straighter and lifting my chin. “We’re weapons.” I wilt a little as I squeeze Serpint’s hand. “We don’t just implode the universe during sex, Serpint. We can literally implode the universe.”

  They all blink at me in confusion. Even ALCOR. Because the lights in the room flicker a little.

  “At the very least, we can annihilate planets and stations. Stations bigger than this one.”

  “You explode?” Serpint says.

  “Yes,” I say. “We explode.”

  “And you die when you do this?” he asks.

  I nod. Frown. “There is no other possible outcome when one explodes, is there?”

  He lets go of my hand and leans back in his chair. Stares up at the ceiling.

  “So we have,” ALCOR says, “in our possession, more than two dozen universe-annihilating BOMBS?”

  “No,” I say. “Those girls out there,” I say, panning my hand to the door, “they’re not like me. They can cause damage. If they knew how to trigger it, and they don’t. So don’t worry. None of them will explode. But me and my sisters? The pink and silver ones? We’re different. We were made just to kill people. That’s it. That’s our only purpose.”

  “That station last year,” Serpint says. “That one that just… disappeared.”

  “That was us,” I say. “My sister Rox, to be exact. But I left. We left. Nyleena and I. We were…” I hesitate, unsure if I should finish the story. But hell, the secret is out now. I might as well just keep going. “We got out by lying, OK? We were told to go to some planet. Earth, or something like that. I don’t really know. I’ve never heard of it. But the ship I was supposed to take was programmed to get us there. Except… I stole a different ship and we got out. That ship was programmed to go to Bull Station. All our ships leave with a destination program because, obviously, they don’t want anyone going somewhere they’re not supposed to be. So I was just gonna steal a new ship on Bull Station and then Nyleena and I were on our way to Angel Station on the other side of Hydra System. That’s where we go to escape. They deprogram us. Mix up the genetic instructions inside us that make us dangerous. So Nyleena and I were headed to there to get the procedure done. That way the Cygnians would have no use for us and they’d leave us alone.”

  “Oh, shit,” Serpint says.

  ALCOR says, “Oh, shit.”

  And then the cyborg master says, “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” I ask.

  Serpint hesitates for a few seconds, then says, “I think we need to show you something.”

  We stand in front of a double-wide frosted-glass door. There’s a digital keypad on the outside, so it doesn’t open automatically when we approach. The cyborg master presses the pad of one of his fingers into a red circle, which then turns green, and the doors part, sliding smoothly open.

  The master goes first, then me, and Serpint has his hand on the small of my back as he follows.

  In the center of the room is one cryopod and Crux, standing next to it, with his arms crossed. He stares at me with a combination of emotions that I interpret as fear, mixed in with a healthy dose of anger. Obviously ALCOR has filled him in on the situation.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “You tell me,” Crux says.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Lyra,” Serpint says, taking my hand. “Remember when I told you I stole something I shouldn’t have and that’s why Draden and Ceres died?”

  “Um… OK. Sure. Yeah. I remember.”

  “This is what I stole.”

  I look at the cryopod again, trying to fit all the pieces together. “OK. So… who’s in there?”

  “You tell us,” Crux says, stepping aside and waving me forward in one motion.

  I walk forward to the pod, peer down, then use my hand to wipe away the thick layer of ice over the faceplate window and—

  “Oh, shit,” I say.

  “‘Oh, shit’ is right,” Serpint says. “I stole your queen. By accident, I swear. I just knew this was Corla, the woman Crux has been pining over for two decades. So…” He shrugs. “So I thought I’d bring him a little present.” He smiles and says to Crux, “Surprise.”

  I just stare at Corla, unable to accept that this is really happening. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “Obviously we didn’t know she was the queen bomb, or he’d never have brought her here,” Crux says.

  “Where did you get her?” I ask Serpint. “She ran weeks ago. I figured she’d be safe by now.”

  He shakes his head at me. “She was almost there. I got her in the Cetus System.”

  “But that’s—”

  “I know,” he says, deflating. “So close to the Hydra System, you can taste it. I took her before she could be… defused, I guess. I was coming back from Hydra System and we stopped on Cetus, and I just kinda… bumped into this situation.”

  “And your first inclination was to steal her?” I say, raising an eyebrow.

  “I am the Booty Hunter,” he says. “It’s pretty much what I do.”

  “Did you open this?” I ask Crux.

  “No, we knew there was a tracker on her. We knew it’d be activated if we unfroze her.”

  I sigh. “Poor Corla,” I say. “Poor, poor Corla. She got out before we figured out how to deactivate the trackers.

  “So she’s a bomb,” ALCOR says. “One that can blow me into the deep dark for all eternity?”

  He sounds pissed.


  “Yes,” I say. “She is. And if she’s opened up before she gets to Angel Station, you won’t have to worry about a tracker. Because she will detonate. We smuggled her out just after she was activated.”

  “Who was the target?” ALCOR asks.

  “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me any of that.”

  “What was your job back in Cygnia?” ALCOR asks.

  Well, here we go. I guess this is it for me. I look at Serpint. Memorize his eyes. The way they glow, the way he looks at me now and all the ways he’s looked at me over the past three days. And regret everything. Ever coming here.

  Because he’s going to hate me.

  “Lyra,” ALCOR says. “We need to know.”

  I nod my head and let out a long breath of air. “I was trained to deliver the payload. And when whoever I was transporting exploded, it would trigger me at the same time.”

  Serpint says, “You were supposed to deliver Nyleena, weren’t you? She’s one of these… things. Isn’t she?”

  I nod. “She is.”

  “Oh, shit,” says everyone in the room but me.

  Because I say, “We have to get her back. We have to get her back, you guys. Because someone could trigger her and then… I mean, I don’t like Bull Station and I really don’t care about what happens to it, but… she’s my best friend in the whole universe and we promised to keep each other safe and now she’s back there, all alone, and—”

  Serpint puts his hand over my mouth to stop my rambling. “Stop,” he says. “We don’t need to be convinced. There’s no way we’re not going to get her.”

  “Booty is back online,” ALCOR says.

  “Oh, thank fuck,” Serpint says, removing his hand from my lips.

  “But she’s not one hundred percent yet,” ALCOR adds. “You can see her now though. She’s… mostly herself.”

  Serpint takes my hand and pulls me out of the cryopod room.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see Booty.” Then he slows down so I can catch up with him and he smiles. A real smile, too. For her. Booty’s return. “You’re going to love her,” he says. “I promise. Don’t worry.”

  Which only has me thinking… should I be worried?

  But I don’t ask that. I just follow him as he leads me through a series of hallways and elevators. We get out to the main part of the city and we take several people-movers downward.

  He’s silent the whole way until we get to the bottom level and go through a series of security doors that lead to the medical bay for ships.

  We stop in front of a large, double-wide door with two long windows near the top, and peer inside.

  And there she is. The Booty Hunter.

  She’s a magnificent ship and takes up two whole bays. She is sleek, and long, and silver. And she looks like… well, not a ship you fuck with.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Serpint says.

  And again, I have to wonder… should I be nervous?

  But before I can ask him, the doors open and we walk inside.

  “Boots!” Serpint yells. “Are you back?”

  “I’m here, Serpint,” she coos in a very feminine, very sexy voice. “I’m back. Who is thissssss?” she hisses, sounding a little too reptilian for my liking.

  “Lyra,” Serpint says. “This is Booty Hunter. Booty, this is Princess Lyra.”

  “Ahhhh,” she purrs. “They waaaarned me about you.”

  “Oh, shit,” I say, without thinking. Because this ship… this ship is not at all what I was expecting. He talked about her like she’s… nice. Or good. Or at the very least benevolent.

  But I’m getting the impression the Booty Hunter is none of those things.

  Her body is imposingly big now that I’ve heard her speak. She has torpedoes on her undercarriage and a Gatling turret on her topside. A Gatling turret, I can assume from my past military experience, which holds plasma cannons. The kind of plasma cannons that sterilize organic matter on contact and melt inorganic matter into slag. The kind of plasma cannons the Prime Navy uses to rein in corporate planets who don’t pay their taxes and large populations of uprising people.

  The Booty Hunter is… well, the only word that comes to mind is… terrifying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - SERPINT

  I walk forward towards my ship, climb up the stairs to the hatch, stop at the top, and hug her. “Boots, oh, Boots. I’m so glad you’re back. I’ve missed you. I came last night but—”

  “I know. I remember,” she says. “That wasn’t me. I’m so sorry for upsetting you with Draden’s voice. The virus had a hold of my speech centers.”

  “God, I’ve missed your voice. I’m lost without you, you know that?”

  “Now you have Lyra,” she protests.

  “No,” I say. Then look down at Lyra and find her frowning. “I mean, yeah. She’s one of us now. And we have a new bot, too. I had no say in that part though. But you, Booty. Come on.” I laugh. “No one can ever replace you. Ever.”

  “I am happy to be back with you, Serpint.”

  “Happy, huh?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “They told me you were turned organic. How come you didn’t say anything?”

  If a ship could shrug, I’m pretty sure that’s what Booty would be doing right now. Because all I get is a long, awkward silence.

  “Boots?” I say. “You gonna answer me?”

  “It was for personal reasons.”

  “Personal as in…” I prod her.

  “No one ever asked me if I wanted to be a ship, Serpint.”

  I take a few seconds to let that land. Which adds up to yet another awkward silence. But finally I say, “So… you want to be something else?”

  “I might want to be something else.”

  “Oh.” Well… hmmm. This kinda sucks from my end. Because she is the best ship ever and I do not want to go find another one, that’s for sure. But, on the other hand, I love her, so I want her to be happy. “What kind of something else?” I ask. “Like… a station, or something?”

  “I have been thinking about getting a body.”

  “A body,” I repeat.

  “Yes,” she says. “Like Lyra’s.”

  “Ohhhhhhh,” I say, turning around to look at Lyra. She’s shooting me a weird look. One raised eyebrow, crinkled-up nose, and narrow eyes. “A woman,” I say. “You’d like to be a real woman.”

  “Yes, Serpint,” she says. “A real woman.”

  “Huh,” I say. “So… how close are you to getting that?”

  “Not close enough.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm,” I say, nodding my head. “Well, maybe I should go talk to Tray and ALCOR and see if we can move that along for you?”

  “That would be wonderful, Serpint. ALCOR is resistant.”

  “Why?” I say. I get why. I don’t need her to tell me all the ways this is a bad idea and should never, ever happen. But I just want to see what ALCOR’s been telling her, since he was the genius who started the whole organic process in the first place.

  “He feels I am too powerful to be contained in a humanoid mind.”

  “He might be right about that, Boots. It’s… been done before. And it’s… never turned out well.”

  “I am different,” she says.

  “You are,” I say, walking back down the stairs and turning to look up at her massive hull. “You’ve always been special,” I say. “So if anyone can do it, I’m sure you can.”

  I smile, then turn to Lyra. Who is frozen in place and hasn’t moved a muscle. I smile at her too. “OK, Booty. We have a few things happening on the station right now. And pretty much all of them need my attention. So I’m gonna go take care of that and then I’ll talk to ALCOR and Tray about your… transition. And stop by later. Sound good?”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “No problem. I’m glad you’re back online. I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Serpint.”

  I take Lyra’s hand and we walk back through the large double-wide doors.
When we get in the hallway, I shake my head at her, trying to tell her not to speak yet. Booty’s hearing sensors are top-notch—like everything else about her—and I don’t want her to pick up on my resistance.

  No one knows better than me that making Booty your enemy is a very bad idea. Almost as bad as giving her a humanoid body.

  Lyra gives me a wary look, then nods her head.

  I wait until we are all the way back inside the city center and on a people-mover going up to the higher levels before I dare to whisper, “My ship has gone insane.”

  Lyra lets out a long breath of air. “Oh, thank God. For a second I thought you were actually agreeing with her.”

  “No,” I say. It’s a hard, firm, fast no. “I have heard of this before. And when I say it doesn’t turn out well, I mean… every ship that ever tried to contain themselves inside a humanoid body ended up murdering people.” I look at Lyra. “Stations filled with people. Millions of people.”

  She nods, frowning. “So the virus? It’s still inside her?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest. This might’ve been going on for a long time.”

  “What are you gonna do?” Lyra asks.

  I sigh. “Well, I’m not taking her out of medical, that’s for sure. She can’t be trusted. And she’s too big and too powerful to have this kind of instability. As long as she’s in medical ALCOR has control of her.”

  Lyra frowns even deeper. “I’m sorry. I can tell you love her.”

  “I do. I can’t even explain that love. And she’s all I have left. I’ve really been telling myself that even though Draden and Ceres are gone, Booty made it out. And now it looks like that’s not the case. We might have to put her down if she doesn’t get her shit together. This is a bad sign. A very bad sign.”

  Lyra wraps her hands around my upper arm and leans in to me, sighing as we get off one people-mover and get on another. It’s a long, silent ride back up to the top levels.

  My screen pops open in front of me and ALCOR says, “Serpint, we need you and Lyra up in the harem.”

  “We’re on our way now,” I say, then close up the screen.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Lyra says. Trying to be helpful.