A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy

by Alex White

  Checo pressed their palm to the wall and it parted like a curtain, revealing a bright back room. They ushered Boots inside, and the wall closed behind the pair.

  An hour passed, and Nilah did her best to relax, which should’ve been aided by the comfortable surroundings. They found a nook in the wall containing libations and food, which Orna ordered them not to touch, since they could be poisoned, and the ship wasn’t paying for them. The Ferrier twins cruised the Link, watching a learning series on the history of the Prokarthic expeditions. Malik and Orna called up a game of knights from the projector, where he proceeded to crush her every ten minutes. Orna’s lack of patience was anything but a tactical advantage.

  Nilah searched out the replays of the latest Ultra F series to see how Kristof had done. His new drive wasn’t the same marvel as the Lang Hyper 8, and his new team hadn’t yet flourished under his ownership. Still, he had a few podiums this season, and they were on track to place third in the Constructor Crown, so it wasn’t all bad. The rocky starts would go away, and he’d be dominating in a season or two.

  Young teams were always a dicey proposition. For a galaxy-destroying monster, Claire Asby had done a bloody good job with Lang Autosport.

  “All right, then,” came Checo’s voice, and Nilah looked up to see them pushing Boots out of the back room in a glider chair.

  The first thing she noticed was Boots’s hair, now shoulder-length and umber, with a slight curl to it. Boots’s face stunned Nilah. She was at once familiar and foreign: her brow softened, her nose thinned, her cheeks full like the curves of an apple, her ears flattened.

  “The drugs will wear off soon. She’ll need to rest until then,” said Checo as Malik helped them move Boots to one of the many cushioned couches.

  “Drugs?” asked Nilah.

  Checo nodded. “In spite of my considerable arcane skill, bones do not like to be pulled. Not to worry. I have a wide array of cocktails to suit your preferred method of relaxation. Next, please.”

  “I’ll go,” said Malik.

  And so it went: Malik came out looking even younger, the Ferriers untwinned with freckles erased, and then Orna.

  No amount of diversion could take Nilah’s thoughts away from Orna. What if they never got their own faces back? What if Orna wanted to stay this way? What if she couldn’t recognize her girlfriend anymore?

  The rear walls parted, revealing Checo and Orna. The doctor pushed their subject over to Nilah for a closer look. Gone was Orna’s midnight hair, replaced with a spiky mop of silver. The scars all over her face and arms had been massaged away, and the quartermaster’s nose had been shaped to an upturned button. All clues to the many breaks and contusions over the years were wiped out in the span of an hour.

  Without those beatings, Orna looked luminous, almost childlike.

  Checo stretched a hand toward Nilah, and in their soft voice said, “Your turn, my dear.”

  Nilah looked to the others, in various states of recovery, and sighed. She had no one to hide behind now. She arose and followed the doctor inside.

  The bright lights blinded her after so long in the peaceful antechamber. A rack of clear vials, silver caps shining, lined one of the walls. An operating chair filled the center of the room, with several lights on long, thin arms snaking toward Nilah for an eager embrace.

  “I’ve wanted to meet you for some time, Nilah Brio,” said the doctor, taking Nilah’s robe from her shoulders and gesturing for her to sit.

  Nilah gingerly settled into the chair, her stomach in knots. The lights stared at every inch of her body, bringing forth every hair, mole, and freckle on her dark skin. “A fan, are we?”

  “An employee, I’m afraid,” said Checo, drawing a sliding stool up under themself and moving close into Nilah. “I worked for the Fixers in another life.”

  “Oh, uh, sorry about your mates … you know … killing each other.”

  “No,” said Checo, gently pawing at Nilah’s cheeks, her chin, her neck. “I’m sorry we provided you such poor service. I hate that for you.”

  Nilah mustered a smile. “It’s all right. If they’d gotten me off Gantry Station and delivered me to Lang like I asked, I’d be dead.”

  “Psychotropic or sleepy?”

  “Sorry, love?”

  Checo turned and took two vials from the wall. “The drugs. Preference?”

  “Might be nice to have a bit of fun. Feeling a touch nervous,” she replied, taking the proffered liquid and uncorking it. It smelled of cherries and warm sugar. Nilah downed it in one, and it hit her stomach with a surprising burn. “So you were a different person with the Fixers?”

  “I always am,” said Checo, wiping clean Nilah’s skin with an antiseptic towel. “I’m afraid I’ve quite forgotten my own face. I’ve only kept the masculine name my parents gave me.”

  Horror crept into Nilah’s heart. If Checo had lost their own identity …

  “Don’t worry, dear heart,” said Checo. “We’ll be making a backup.”

  With that, a bright flash filled the room, and Nilah knew she’d been scanned from head to toe.

  “Now,” said Checo, “let’s get started. Any requests?”

  Nilah considered it. “I can’t lose my scars, please. Not the ones on my face.”

  “Ah. The diametric opposite of your girlfriend’s request. She told me she wanted to be as beautiful as you.”

  “She already is,” said Nilah, and little flutters caressed her flesh like the beating of birds’ wings. The drugs had started to take hold.

  “You two are so sweet. We’ll see what we can do about those scars,” said Checo, their face beginning to stretch, eyes moving apart, neck lengthening like a noble crane. Checo traced their glyph, round like a setting sun, and Nilah slipped into clouds.

  “Have a wonderful flight, and I’ll see you in an hour.”

  Nilah came to her senses to the fascinated stares of strangers. Her heart skipped a beat until she realized that these were her crewmates, and she was still in Checo’s den.

  “Projection,” she mumbled through her dry mouth, “mirror, please.”

  Hidden lenses across the den focused in on her face and spun a copy into existence before her.

  The woman depicted was pretty in the most traditional sense, plump lips, shadowed eyes, a pert nose—utterly, blandly consumable by marketing departments across all of space. Long plaits of blue hair spilled from her head, with a hard-cut line for bangs. The only exception: three short, blue brushstrokes on her right cheek, just under her eye. It was a tiny tattoo, barely noticeable, but it made a world of difference to Nilah.

  She found Orna again and gave her a worried look. “Do I look bad?” she asked.

  The newly youthful quartermaster smirked. “Doable. Let’s get back to the ship.”

  “Oh, Nilah,” called Checo, and Nilah turned to see the doctor standing in the open doorway to the operating room. “I’ve covered over your dermaluxes with a thin layer of skin. They were too distinctive. How strong are you with them?”

  Nilah looked down at her arms, dismayed to find her signature tattoos completely obscured. A faint blue haze emanated from just under the flesh, and she shut them off. “I can push them pretty far into the infrared spectrum.”

  “Good,” said Checo. “Then hopefully the opposite is true. If you need to get that skin off, ramp the light into the microwave spectrum.”

  Nilah’s eyes widened. “That sounds … unpleasant.”

  Checo nodded. “It will be. Please show yourselves out, and do travel safely.”

  That night cycle, after they departed Harvest, Cordell and Armin called for Boots and Nilah to join them in the captain’s quarters. He hadn’t stopped giving Boots a double take since she’d returned with her new face, and it was getting unbearable.

  When Boots arrived, she found the others seated around a small table, a half-full bottle of brandy on offer.

  Cordell blinked at her again, and Boots snapped at him, “Would you stop that?”

&
nbsp; He laughed. “I’m sorry, it’s just that curly hair is a weird look on you.”

  “At least they didn’t give me bangs like Nilah over here.”

  Nilah shook her head. “Please not today, darling. I’ve scarcely gotten over the shock of it, myself.”

  “Okay, Captain, this is the part where you tell us what we’ll be doing with our new faces,” said Boots.

  Armin placed the stolen data cubes from the archives onto the captain’s table. “With a lot of work, I was able to decrypt these. Sorry it took so long, but I’m nowhere near as powerful as Kinnard was.”

  Yeah, I miss him, too.

  “We’re looking at two substantial pieces of information, both of which have expiration dates,” said Cordell. “Let’s start with the Forscythe thread: the Children of the Singularity have been infiltrated, and Boots’s stolen case files indicate the Special Branch is behind it. When Miss Sokol iced Forscythe, she killed the buyer, not the seller. That person might make contact with the Children and negotiate a second sale.”

  “If that happens,” said Armin, “we can assume the double agent is dead. This person likely has lots of information on our adversary, and we want it.”

  Boots folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “So what’s ‘Pinnacle’? That was in Forscythe’s message, right?”

  “In good time,” said Cordell. “The other piece of intel pertains to Maslin Durand’s case file. Turns out, unlike the other bagmen, Durand didn’t just have unsigned bank accounts. He also maintained a small vault on Mercandatta Station.”

  Armin nodded. “The Special Branch has been surveilling him for some time. They know which box, how many times he visited, and that he was alone when he made whatever drops he made. That means he was likely the only one with access, because no one else has shown up yet.”

  “And Mercandatta is outside of Taitutian jurisdiction,” said Cordell, “so the Special Branch can’t beat us to it without creating an intergalactic incident with the IGF. If their intel is to be believed, the Children either don’t know about it or can’t get inside. There’s a real chance that we can get to the contents before the Children figure out how.”

  “And you think these leads hold the keys to the Money Mill?” asked Nilah.

  “The Children are bound to want both leads,” said Cordell with a laugh, “so I want them first, damn it. Mister Vandevere, let’s talk mission parameters.”

  Tapping a few buttons on the table, Armin dimmed the lights. “Miss Brio, your martial prowess is known and respected among this crew. That’ll come in handy where you’re going.”

  Nilah straightened. “To Pinnacle?”

  “The Pinnacle, yes.” Armin tapped a hidden switch on the table and the room’s projectors spun a galaxy into being before them. “Straight into the mouth of the beast. Meta-analysis of the data cubes yielded seventeen long-range active Taitutian surveillance orders on this world here.” He gestured to the projection, and a small planet in orbit around a gas giant lit up. “Hammerhead.”

  “Does it have a lot of sharks or something?” Boots chuckled, and Armin gave her a nasty look.

  “I can tell you what it lacks, which is much daylight. There are thirty minutes of sun in each of its four-hour days. It’s a homestead world,” he continued. “No major jurisdiction, no registered residents, but there is a settlement on it.” Armin pulled the planet closer and spun it, revealing a tiny red dot on one side.

  “That’s the Pinnacle?” asked Boots.

  “The case file called it ‘Point of Interest A,’” said Armin.

  “Catchy,” said Boots.

  “We now know this is a training camp for the Children of the Singularity,” said Cordell. “According to the case file, if you can find it, you can join up.”

  “That’s it?” asked Nilah. “Hardly a secret.”

  “Not quite,” said Armin. “In the time since I’ve started aggregating Link activity on the Children, I’ve never heard mention of this place or seen any other references to it. The closest thing I could find was their constant refrain of ‘Only the strongest fighters can ascend the mountain.’ It wasn’t until I got this dossier from Boots’s stolen data cubes that I was able to put a couple of clues together.”

  Nilah folded her arms. “What kinds of clues?”

  “There are a ton of references hidden in their mythology,” said Armin. “Different significant numbers that translated to galactic coordinates. You’d have to be obsessed to figure out that code.”

  “So we’re going to smash up one of their bases?” asked Boots, hopeful.

  “Don’t be so bloodthirsty. Rescue op, remember?” said Cordell. “The insider was able to return some information before they were cut off: this settlement moves around every so often, holding ten ‘ascensions’ before disappearing to the next location. That’s probably how they keep people from simply sharing the coordinates on the Link.”

  Boots frowned. “What’s an ascension?”

  “No clue,” said Cordell, “but the intel report indicated that they might move soon, and it’s already months old. We might get to Hammerhead and find nothing.”

  The projection pushed in on the landscape, the edges of the planet peeling away to show a topographical map of the settlement. There were two structures, one at the bottom of a mountain, and the other at the top.

  “We believe the lower structure is the recruiting station,” said Armin. “That’s where we’ll insert Miss Brio’s team, undercover as recruits.”

  “And that’s why you need my Flicker?” asked Nilah.

  “We don’t know what weapons you’d be allowed to keep, and you’re the best martial artist on the crew,” said Cordell. “In a worst-case scenario, you’re not completely unarmed. You’ll have Malik running control and the twins as backup. Your job will be to infiltrate the camp and get any information you can find, most importantly, keep your eyes on the double agent.”

  Malik nodded at her. “I’ll be living in a blind near the base for observation. I’ll also have contact with the ship, so you can report problems to me through a hidden transmitter.”

  “Looks cold,” said Boots.

  “The ambient temperature is below freezing,” said Armin. “I don’t imagine the good doctor will be taking in the sights. It’ll be a long, boring surveillance, only suited to someone who can remain still for many hours at a time.”

  Malik smiled. “I can enter a trance, so I’m the ideal candidate.”

  “What about Orna?” asked Nilah.

  Cordell shook his head. “I’m afraid we’ll need her for Boots’s mission.”

  Boots jammed her hands into her pockets. “And what might that be, sir?”

  “We’re going to break into a bank.”

  Chapter Seven

  Discord

  Nilah’s quarters had become less than hospitable after hearing the captain’s plans.

  “Quit being a dumbass. I’m going to talk to him,” said Orna, slamming down her conduit iron. Their shared workbench shook, and the meter-long disperser cannon nearly tumbled from its mounting bracket.

  “You’re going to burn yourself,” said Nilah, “working in your skivvies like that.”

  “My quarters, my comfort. I do what I want.” Then she pointed to the copious scars across her bare leg. “Not like they were pretty before. Wish Checo would’ve healed them.”

  The quartermaster had hit a snag in her designs; the disperser rifle still wasn’t working. It’d put her in a foul mood for the past few hours, which hurt, since they’d be splitting up soon.

  Nilah sat up in bed, hugging the sheets for warmth. “No, babes, let’s not talk to the captain. It’ll be all right. I’ll have Malik working control, and the twins are supposed to have some kind of fighting experience. It’s like the captain said, they’ll probably take our weapons, but we won’t be unarmed.”

  Orna stood up and snatched her pants from the nearby dresser, yanking them on over her legs. “That’s crap! You’ve never seen them
fight!”

  “I haven’t seen them—not—fight.”

  But in truth, Orna was right. Nilah knew next to nothing about the capabilities of the twins, and now she’d be relying upon them for life-or-death protection. It wasn’t exactly ideal.

  “I should be with you,” said Orna. “That’s that. We can do these missions one at a time, with the full support of the entire crew.”

  “It could take weeks for us to build up their trust, and we can’t all go in there together or it’ll be suspicious,” said Nilah. “Besides, this is perishable intelligence—we don’t know how long the Children will remain on Hammerhead. We’ve got two good leads, and we need to take them both.”

  “No. Unacceptable.”

  But when Orna returned an hour later, she was pale as a ghost, and it took Nilah a couple of tries to get her to open up about what was said. Cordell had ripped her a new one, and when Orna rose to meet his ire, he’d doubled down, threatening to eject the quartermaster from her longtime home. When Nilah scoffed that Cordell wouldn’t do that, Orna simply replied, “You don’t know him like I do.”

  Of course Nilah didn’t. She wasn’t a refugee, after all.

  Orna was far colder than Nilah would’ve liked during their last few cycles together.

  The ship came out of the Flow a day later above Hammerhead. Nilah regarded the world through the bridge windows, and cold fear crept into her stomach. A hard shadow cut across its surface, cast by the methane gas giant, churning beyond like an ocean. The shade creature of the archives came stalking back into her memories.

  “Prepare for planetfall. Skids down in twenty,” said Aisha.

  “Mister Jan,” said Cordell, “take Miss Brio and the twins and report to the cargo bay. I want this to be a seamless drop—down and up. It’s a long way to the jump gate, and without the dump, we’re going to need to get underway ASAP.”

  Malik nodded. “Yes, Captain.”

  They followed Malik to the bay, where Orna lay waiting with the portable shelter folded up in its transit case. It was a larger version of the ones they’d used on Blix, with full climate systems and pressurization. Nilah and Orna had spent the previous night cycle checking every seal and valve, making sure that Malik wouldn’t freeze to death in there.