“Omicron isn’t that bad.”
Leroy raised his hand. “Last time we were here, someone hacked my tattoos. I was walking around with ‘delicious meat candy’ on my arms for hours and wondering why everybody was laughing at me.”
“Right, okay, but Vakar was able to—”
“You got arrested for drunk dancing on the station commander’s table in Limbo,” Pink added.
“In my defense,” Eva said, “I did not know that was Armida’s table. Also, that was my fault, not Omicron’s.”
Vakar smelled incredulous. “There was a plague lockdown in the lower levels. They almost did not permit us to leave the station.”
“Yes, but—”
“Someone tried to sneak on board and steal the ship,” Min said, her tone less cheerful than usual. “I had to set them on fire!”
Ugh, the smell had taken ages to clear the filters. “Fine, yes, Omicron isn’t my favorite, either. If you want to stay here while I conduct my business, allá tú. Otherwise, get the supplies we need, take your shore leave, and be careful. I’ll fill you all in later.”
“You certainly will,” Pink said, both a threat and a promise. She stepped forward and held out a hand, which Eva took, drawing the woman in for their usual hand slaps and fist bumps. They’d been doing it for so long, Eva managed the complicated routine on autopilot, though the final hip bump was less well-aimed than usual.
The cat leader rubbed against her leg and looked up at her, eyes eerily intelligent. “Miau,” it said.
“Stow it, mija,” Eva replied. “I’m still selling your ass as soon as someone answers Min’s ad.”
The creature sauntered off, tail raised, its prim little butthole suggesting it did not believe her any more than her crew did.
Eva stepped into the umbilicus that led from the ship to the dock of Omicron. It ran the usual decontamination protocols and tweaked her blood-gas nanites as she rechecked her gear. Pistol, knife, garrote. Gravboots. She doubted the handler—there was that stupid word again—would be there to kill her, because why bother? If Eva didn’t comply, her sister was a popsicle. Or dead.
Or worse, if the stories were true.
She checked the coordinates on her commlink and overlaid a map of the space station. The contact was waiting in a q-net café near the least grubby arm of the ever-rotating spindle. Easy to access the galactic quantumnet from there in an instant, always full of people coming and going, and with food that probably wouldn’t give her immediate gut problems. And that arm tended to be more heavily guarded than the others; the higher class of criminals were nothing if not oppressively polite.
To get there, she had to walk through the main merchant drag with its collection of ramshackle junk stores and food carts and secondhand purveyors of parts that magically fell off passing ships. The shops backed up against the walls of the station, which rose about three stories to accommodate the taller species that sometimes wandered through, like the occasional large todyk. None of them were around this cycle—probably off negotiating breeding contracts instead of slumming it in fringe space—but it was still crowded with off-duty miners, smugglers, mercs, and the station rats who’d grown up in the nooks and crannies a place like this inevitably had.
Humans were in the minority, as usual; Omicron attracted more buasyr, with their four arms and multitude of eyes, or doglike truateg, or furry chuykrep waggling their proboscises at everything as they waddled around. There were some kloshians, which were the closest thing to humans in the galaxy so far except for their color-changing skin, tentacle hair and pointed teeth, but no quennians aside from Vakar. They rarely seemed to venture to these grubby stations for some reason; maybe it was the excess of confusing, contradictory smells. Then there were the toad-like vroak, the eac, a few tentacled ahirk . . .
Eva had loved the novelty of it all when she was younger, exploring new places and meeting people from galaxies that would be impossibly far away without Gates to close the distance. Every time she touched down on a planet or strolled into a space station, it was like she’d unlocked a door, shined a light onto a dark place on her personal map, checked off an accomplishment on a secret never-ending list. Back then, the universe was still huge and amazing, a present waiting to be unwrapped. In truth, it was still huge and amazing, but she had seen too much in the fifteen years since she’d left home to become a spacer. A present was a treat on your birthdate, but when you got presents every single cycle, it became harder and harder to be excited by what was inside.
Also, a lot of the presents ended up being a box of shit wrapped in more shit.
Eva arrived, blinking a few times as the sign outside was translated from its original language: quantumnet café, standard rates. The q-net access was restricted to small booths with chairs and an array of available jacks depending on the user’s commlink model and physical preference. There was also an actual café component, with tables and seats, and a servbot floating around taking orders while the customers waited for their turns in the data closets.
Eva sighed, wishing she were there to see what commodities were trading for, or to meet a client discreetly. Then again, she rarely made it to this area, since she usually had better things to do than tirar peos más alto que el culo. It worked for other people, pretending to a level of success and wealth they didn’t actually have, but she preferred to manage expectations—even if they were only her own.
She didn’t know who to look for, so she took a seat at one of the tables, overlooking a light installation that changed colors and configurations every few seconds. She wondered who was responsible for it, and how long ago it had been installed. If anyone still remembered.
The universe was full of that kind of stuff: beautiful, strange, and mostly forgotten. Her sister, the historian and scientist, loved it all. Eva supposed she did, too, in her own way.
She tried to relax, letting the sounds of the other patrons wash over her like waves on some distant shore. She caught a few snippets of conversation here and there—mostly gossip about people she didn’t know doing stuff she had no reason to care about. Colonies starting up or shutting down. Ships going missing, probably because of pirate attacks. Cops chasing criminals. Soldiers getting medals. Humans trying to finagle a seat on the High Council of the Benevolent Organization of Federated Astrostates—BOFA for short, to Eva’s eternal amusement—which was the biggest coalition of star systems in the galaxy for now. They’d been around for a few thousand years, but that was a fraction of a second in the cosmic calendar, and the stability of their rules and regulations was only as good as their ability to enforce them.
The current human government was eating that shit with a spoon—the most cohesive one, anyway, given how far-flung humanity was since discovering Gates. A seat on the High Council meant a bigger voice in BOFA affairs, which meant power, which meant money for someone other than her. Humans had only recently gotten a representative elected to the massive General Assembly, and Eva had voted for the other lady, so her interest in galactic politics was limited to whether it made her life harder.
As if most of the species in this galaxy gave a whistle what humans thought about anything. Sounded like they were getting close to the council seat, though, trying to use some commander named Schafer as leverage. The name was familiar—right, Leroy had posters of the lady in his bunk. Spacer military brat who saved some colony from raiders, single-handed if you believed the stories.
Eva didn’t, but maybe that was jealousy talking.
A shadow fell across Eva, moving as the one who cast it sat down. Eva turned her head slowly, faking a relaxation she didn’t feel. Her new companion was a tuann, green as an emerald, the layers of their head ruff lying like a wimple around their narrow skull. Their mouth was a set of overlapping folds, like the petals of an unopened rose, and they had no eyes. They wore thin clothing that could best be described as a dress, though they seemed to have multiple pieces that clung together by a mechanism Eva couldn’t identify. The fabric was tran
sparent in places, opaque in others, and had a pattern that shifted as she tried to make sense of it.
“Captain Larsen,” they said. Their soft voice was amplified by a device around their neck, and sounded like the rustling of leaves.
“I go by Innocente, not Larsen.” The tuann had no hands, not that Eva would have wanted to shake them under the circumstances.
“Apologies are tendered. Pholise Pravo is my personal identifier. Your case was assigned to me.”
Eva laughed. “My ‘case’? You people are something else.”
Pholise sat up taller, as if whatever passed for their spine had stiffened.
The servbot hovered over, round and white with a single huge lens. “Your order?”
“Cortadito,” Eva said.
The servbot didn’t move, but its lens dilated as if in confusion.
Eva sighed and rattled off the chemical formula, hoping she hadn’t forgotten it, and that the translators would get it right. Espresso, milk, and sugar were easy enough to find in certain human settlements—though coffee beans had almost gone extinct at one point, and nonhumans had a strange obsession with keeping cows as pets without milking them—but everywhere else she had to rely on the whims of molecular chemical gastronomy.
“Nothing will be had by me,” Pholise said, and the servbot flew off. “The instructions of our superiors are to be conveyed, that a mutually beneficial relationship might be entered into.”
Our superiors, hah. “And I’m here to convey that I don’t have any money.” Eva’s stomach turned as she said it, but it was the truth. All it had taken was a few bad trips and an increasingly depressing choice to do only legal work. “Have you tried asking my dad, maybe?” She hated to throw him into the proverbial rocket booster, but he could afford to take the heat.
Their head ruff fluttered. “Your male progenitor was contacted first. His assets have already been included in the fee calculation.”
Madre de dios, Eva thought. Tito had said her dad was retired from all but his standard mostly legal ship trading, which was why Tito had gone freelance. But either dear old Pete was worse off than she thought, or The Fridge was milking this for all it was worth. “And my mother?”
“The assets and limited professional exploitation potential of Regina Alvarez were deemed insufficient to warrant her involvement.”
That didn’t surprise Eva. While her mom had always been frugal, there was only so much you could save up on a galactic bank auditor’s salary. And “limited professional exploitation potential” meant either her mom’s job was too closely watched for them to take a chance asking her to do illegal work on their behalf, or they had figured out she had a diamond-hard reputation for honesty. She’d sooner get spaced than lie, though if it meant saving Mari’s life, maybe . . . It was a relief to know she wasn’t involved, at least.
“What do you want, then? My cargo? It’s not much, but it’s yours. My ship is—”
“Your ship is considered less valuable than your service, Captain Innocente.”
Eva froze. There it was. The Fridge didn’t want money from her, because they already knew she didn’t have it. They wanted someone to do their dirty work. They wanted indentured servitude.
“Eat shit and die,” Eva said. “I’m not working for you filthy bastards. I won’t even work for my own father, and he’s a saint compared to you.”
The servbot returned with her drink, placing it on the table in front of her and blinking red to indicate it had deducted the cost from her account. She ignored it, and the cortadito, such as it might be.
“If you do not, then your sister will remain in cryo sleep until after your demise, and will then be awakened and put to work mining an asteroid until her own conclusion.” The tuann said this mechanically, as if they had rehearsed it many times. No emotion, no inflection. Just that amplified susurration.
Eva wanted to punch them until her fist bled.
There had to be a way to wriggle out of this, to convince them she wasn’t worth their time.
“Why me?” she asked. “I deliver stuff. There are plenty of other people with bigger ships, faster ones. People with fancy guns and armor. People who don’t care where their money comes from.”
“Those people are not the Hero of Garilia. Or the Butcher, as some would say.”
Eva recoiled, looking around to see whether anyone was listening. As if Omicron weren’t full of people talking about worse shit.
“The fuck do you know about that?” Eva snarled. Even the Garilians had kept a lid on it, for a variety of reasons. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Others are responsible for conducting research,” Pholise replied. “Their sources of information are not known to me. But it is believed you are adequate to the tasks that will be set to you.”
Garilia. Madre de dios. If they knew about that, of all things, then playing the meek freight jockey was a waste of time. Garilia was the reason she and Pink had finally cut ties with Tito, the reason she’d stopped talking to her own father for years, and she’d never wash the stink of that fucking mess off her soul. She touched the scar on her cheek, the one she’d gotten that cycle, then lowered her hand as casually as she could.
She thought quickly. “I can’t run a ship by myself, you know. And I can’t run it on no money. While I’m busy playing your disgusting game, I’m not getting paid, and I can only buy so much fuel on credit.”
Pholise sat lower. Relaxing? “Compensation will be provided for your services. How much will be put toward your obligation is for you to determine.”
“And my crew?”
“Your crew is your own concern, Captain Innocente, so long as you do not disclose the nature of your business. Our superiors are confident in your ability to execute their instructions competently.”
The light installation near their table had frozen, by either design or malfunction, forming what seemed to be words in the shadows on the wall. She blinked rapidly, her translators straining, but it was only shadows.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” she muttered.
“A choice is always available,” Pholise said. “It must be noted that The Fridge is not in the habit of procuring assets who are willing to make an undesirable choice.”
“I’ll bet they aren’t.”
“If your cooperation has been secured, our superiors must be informed. Subsequent assignments are typically issued swiftly.” They stood, their shadow once again falling over Eva. “May you benefit from a surfeit of good fortune, Captain Innocente.” With that, the tuann left, their movement nearly as quiet as their voice.
Eva sat in silence, and after a few moments, the light sculpture began to shift again, to a deep crimson. She reached for her coffee and took a sip.
“Me cago en diez,” she muttered. “This is actually good.”
Life was never fair.
Eva left the café a few minutes later. She fielded a message from Min about a buyer for the cats (“Cap, they want to know if the kittens are fresh? Do I have to answer?”), then wandered back to the seedier side of the station.
The following hour was spent trying to murder her sobriety with cheap sim-rum and something that tasted almost like soda in a grimy cantina whose name roughly translated to “Stay Hydrated” in a language Eva didn’t recognize. She’d been there once or twice before; it was about the size of her ship’s cargo bay, with a row of self-serve machines dispensing whatever fluid combinations the tech was capable of synthesizing, for the cost of materials plus a “reasonable” surcharge. A long bar on one side had seats for bipeds, while smaller tables accommodated other physiologies, all kept moderately tidy by an automated hydrosonic system that only occasionally glitched and sprayed cleaning fluid into its customers’ faces. With the base layer of acrid decontaminant, the competing drink smells that varied in toxicity levels, and the natural aromas of creatures who didn’t communicate with body odor, her still-learning scent translators had given up trying to keep the conversations straight.
All except for the guy with the big bodyguards who swaggered in like the second coming. He was bipedal, greenish-gray, and his suit made him look muscular, but he was maybe a meter tall, with a face like an excited anglerfish. Eva’s tastes encompassed a broad range of humanoids, but she wasn’t into big teeth, so she didn’t give him a second look.
Her forehead was finally starting to feel numb when the guy climbed into the chair next to hers. She assumed he wasn’t smiling like a creep on purpose, but it was still annoying.
“Hello, human female,” he said. “Your facial scarring is very exotic. I desire to solicit you for sexual gratification.”
Eva slow-blinked at him. “M’not a sex worker,” she mumbled.
“Your profession does not concern me,” he replied. “Only your ability to pleasure me to my satisfaction.”
Normally she ignored people like him, or she assumed cultural differences and cut them some slack—humans had a reputation for being willing to fuck anything, even if the truth was more complicated. But between psychic cats and kidnapped sisters and her own booze-addled temper, she was ready to unload on someone. If he wanted to paint a target on himself, who was she to stop him?
“My name is Captain Eva Innocente,” she slurred. “You can call me Captain, which is safe, or you can shut up, which is safer.”
Maybe it didn’t translate correctly, or the tonal nuances were lost, but the guy didn’t budge. Robotic hands gripped a metal flask—his own, presumably, since the dispensers used recyclables—which he used to pour trickles of fluid into his enormous eyes. “That is a splendid name. I am the Glorious Apotheosis. I want to rub my sex organs on you.”
Chilling Effect_A Novel Page 3