A ghostport.
There’s maybe a dozen or so around the quadrant. Old spaceports that got abandoned when a newer, shinier one came along, so they just drift there, all sad-looking.
They’re magnets for space pirates, who love to use them as bases, but this one? This one is mine. Won it off one of Ivar Orso’s pirate crews two years back in a truly epic card game that nearly cost me my ship and a finger or two.
Hell Monkey drops back into his jump seat as I guide the Vagabond Quick toward an airlock. He scans the ghostport with sensors. Cranes forward to look at her through the viewscreen. Scans her again.
I raise my eyebrows. I can’t look straight at him while I’m trying to dock. This is delicate work. “What?”
“What what?”
“What do you mean, what what? What the hell are you doing over there?”
Hell Monkey grumbles and then sits back. “I thought I saw something. . . .”
My hands still on the controls. “Something, like, danger something? Exotic space jellyfish something? What’s the something?”
“It’s nothing. Scanners are clear. Viewscreen is clear.”
I get a flutter in my stomach. It’s not a good flutter. It’s a bad flutter. It’s a danger-danger flutter. But it’s too late now. We’re only a few meters from the airlock. So I guide her in, seal the bay doors, and push back from the dash.
“Okay, H.M. Get your gear on. Let’s do a sweep.” I poke the mediabot in its lens face as I walk by it. “Stay put. I don’t want to be fined a bunch of credits because you get yourself blown to bits.”
The thing about pirates is that, even though they tell you something is yours and they won’t touch it anymore—that doesn’t really mean anything if it’s shiny enough. So every time we come back to this place, we’ve gotta do a full rundown: survival suits on, sun’s-out-guns-out, and walk each deck to make sure we’ve got no new surprises in store. It takes a little while, but luckily there’s the constant threat of walking into the barrel of a blaster to keep you on your toes.
I’m expecting to run into something the whole way, but the ghostport is empty. A little dark. A little dusty. But we make it to the command and control room at the top without a hitch. Nothing moving in here but the two of us and an official crownchase camera drone that floats, almost silent, near the ceiling.
“She looks good,” Hell Monkey says as he pops the helmet of his suit off and slings it into the corner. “Not even a wobbly bulkhead.”
I tap the touch screens on the conn, waking up the dormant mainframe. “Can you get her talking to the Vagabond? We’re gonna need all the juice in that big-ass brain of hers to break this encryption fast. I want to get back on the trail as quickly as possible.”
Hell Monkey slides into one of the command chairs. He leans back, all casual, but his hands work fast over the controls. Linking the ship to the port and the port to the ship.
“If it’s the kind of trail we’re thinking,” he says, “we’ve got a leg up. We’ve killed it at this kind of thing before.”
I shake my head. “Don’t underestimate these prime family babies. You don’t know them like I do. They may be spoiled, but they’ve got resources—”
The ice-cold barrel of a blaster touches the back of my neck, killing anything else I was about to say.
And that’s when Faye “Better Keep One Hand on Your Wallet” Orso steps into view. Two guns in her hands, shit-eating grin on her face, and a whole world of “you’re fucked, Farshot” in her eyes.
Well, then. This oughta be fun.
Eight
THE LAST TIME I WAS IN THIS MUCH TROUBLE WITH Faye Orso, we were fourteen years old, sitting hand in hand in a Tabarti jail. We’d gotten busted for joyriding in a Tabarti dragon—military-grade fighter ships worth a hot credit and kept under heavy guard, which of course made them appealing as hell to steal. We’d made it an hour, a planetary record, before the redsuits cornered us and hauled us in. I can still picture Faye’s face the moment we got caught, warning lights crisscrossing her skin, her mouth stretched in a grin that even star devils would be wary of.
Looks a lot like the grin on her face right now.
She’s got her eyes on me but a blaster about a foot from Hell Monkey’s face. I can’t see who has the gun barrel up against my neck but I’d bet the Vagabond it’s her partner, Honor Winger. I put my hands up—see? so compliant!—and try to match Faye’s smile.
“Faye Orso, I was just thinking about how awesome it’d be to see you again. Been way too long. Those pants and your ass are an A-plus combination, I gotta say.”
She sidesteps her way around the control panel until she’s right up on Hell Monkey, hand on his shoulder, blaster at his temple. “Straight into flattery. Very Faroshti of you.”
My smile drops a little. I try to cover it with a shrug. “It’s Farshot now, not Faroshti.”
Her expression softens. “You can change the last name, but blood sticks, lovely.”
I clap my hands over my eyes, crying out dramatically, “Oh god! I just rolled my eyes so hard I think I broke something! Help! Medic!”
Honor jabs me in the kidney. “Okay, enough of that, Farshot.”
“I’m serious. I could have sustained a serious injury. Scarred for life. I may never be able to look insolent again.”
“Shut it, Alyssa.” Faye’s voice cuts through the room. “Keep your hands up and stay still.”
I throw my arms wide. “Or what? You’re not gonna shoot us, Orso, not unless you want to instantly lose the chase. Seriously, can we drop the blasters-and-pirates deal already? Or is that literally the only card you have to play?”
Faye tilts her head to look over my shoulder. “Honor, cuff her. And this one too.” She pinches Hell Monkey’s cheek. “I’ll take them down below while you get to work. And play nice, you two. One of the plasma cannons on my ship has been malfunctioning lately, and we’re parked so close to your Vagabond . . . I’d hate for anything to happen.”
Hell Monkey locks eyes with me as Honor pins my wrists to the small of my back and binds them with compression cuffs. He’s tense all over. Waiting to see if I’ll give the nod, call Faye’s bluff.
Maybe I would’ve. Back in the day. When she was past-Faye wand I was past-Alyssa and we were about as close as you could get. But it’s been a few years, and I don’t really know now-Faye. And I definitely don’t know what she’s willing to pull for a crown. So I shake my head at him, just a little, and let the compression cuffs seal themselves around my wrists. Honor moves on to bind Hell Monkey too, and then she turns to the control panels while Faye steps over and gestures with her blaster.
Forward march, we go.
She doesn’t take us to the lift—smart, I was totally planning on using the small space and the two-on-one odds to try and jump her—and she doesn’t take us all the way down to the brig, which is several levels below. No, she just herds us two levels down to where there are a number of walk-in storage compartments. Thick walls, strong sealed doors.
I’m starting to realize just how well Faye seems to know her way around my ghostport.
“You got familiar with the specs on this place real fast,” I say as she stops us in front of a door.
She laughs, eyes steady on us. Blaster steady on us. The light’s dim in the hallway, so right now she stands out more than ever, the bioluminescent lines looking like lacework across her skin.
“Give me a little more credit for forethought than that. I’ve been keeping an eye on this port since you won it off my father.” She taps a panel on the wall, the door slides open, and she waves Hell Monkey inside. He goes, his eyes on me the whole way.
I move to follow, but she throws out an arm. “Wait your turn, Farshot. No way in hell I’m stupid enough to put both of you in the same room.”
Hell Monkey turns, shouts, “Orso, hey, wait, I have a—”
She shuts the door on him. Seals the lock on the panel. Turns that sharp smile to me. “This way, lovely.”
I glare at her—attagirl, Farshot, that’ll show her—but mostly I’m focused on how empty the hallway feels without Hell Monkey in it. How exposed I feel without him at my back.
I don’t like that feeling.
But also, when did it get so necessary to have him by my side?
Faye stops at another storage compartment farther down and opens the door for me. “Home, sweet home.”
I twist, wiggling my fingers at her. “I’m gonna lose feeling in my hands pretty soon.”
“Guess you won’t be knitting me a sweater, then. In.”
I cast one look back down the hall at Hell Monkey’s door. And then I go.
“Hey, Farshot.”
I spin around in the small, empty space, and Faye’s lingering in the door. Her blaster’s still out, but the look on her face isn’t smug like I would expect. I mean, in her shoes, I’d be smug as hell. Instead she’s got this little crease between her eyebrows.
“Be careful out there. You’ve been out of the politics game for a while. And just because you stopped paying attention to us doesn’t mean we stopped paying attention to you.”
She hits the panel. The door closes. And I’m in the dark.
COYENNE JUMPS OUT AS EARLY FAVORITE
The media darling dazzles the public as the crownchase begins
FARSHOT ALREADY SIDELINED
Camera footage shows the explorer trapped in an abandoned spaceport by Faye Orso
WYTHE: “THE COURSE OF OUR FUTURE IS SUN-BLESSED”
Steward Wythe declares he will push forward with an agenda for the empire, not wait for the crownchase results
WHO IS EDGAR VOLES?
An inside look at the mysterious crownchaser and heir to an android empire
WORLDCRUISER S576-034, DESIGNATED START COORDINATES
EDGAR VOLES DIDN’T GIVE HIS WORLDCRUISER A name.
The crownchase outfitters told him this was bad luck. They’d even gone so far as to make recommendations.
Call it the Justus Roy, they’d told him. After the last emperor before the war. Nice, right?
He hadn’t responded. Instead, he’d just stared them down until they’d gotten nervous and hurried back off to work.
He doesn’t need their luck or their superstitions or any of those soft, intangible concepts others like to carry around. He’s a Voles. And the Voles family believes in only one thing: clear, measurable results.
Edgar kneels on the floor beside an array of robotic parts, neatly separated and organized, and next to them, the half-gutted shell of the mediabot that had been unlucky enough to be assigned to Edgar Voles’s ship.
It had wandered around after him as they’d waited at his designated coordinates, squawking questions at him, trying to provoke him into an interview that could be streamed back to the Daily Worlds for public consumption. All the other crownchasers submitted at some point, even for just a minute or two. He’d watched them on the media feeds, studied all their familiar-unfamiliar faces. He’d managed not to think of any of them much over the past few years, but now here they are. In a constant parade. It left a hollow ache of sadness in his chest, but he pushed it forcefully aside. Voleses didn’t feel sad.
And Edgar had work to do.
When the red light had dropped and the chase started, he’d swept the mediabot into his quarters, where there was privacy from the onboard cameras, and disassembled it in only a few minutes.
And now, with quick, sure fingers, he puts it back together, although not quite the same way. A change in the wiring here. An adjustment to the circuitry there. And a brand-new processing core installed right into its neural network.
He reassembles the mediabot’s shell, reenables the power. And waits.
A glow fills the bot’s eye sockets. It sits up, metal parts scraping against the floor, and looks down at its spindly, articulated fingers, then up into his face.
“Hello, Edgar Voles.”
Edgar almost smiles at the sound of the familiar voice. “NL7. Welcome back.”
NL7 stands, swivels its head around, taps the mediabot’s feet. “How unusual.” It looks over at Edgar again. “We doubt this is within the contest’s rules.”
He shrugs. “It’s not explicitly forbidden anywhere. I just didn’t want to bother with the hassle of asking. I’ll point out the loophole to them later, after we’ve won.”
NL7 moves around the room, feet ticking along the floor, trying out its new body. “And your competition?”
“Scrambling. Playing exactly the game the crownchase wants them to play.”
The android turns to him. “But we have a different plan?”
This time Edgar does smile, tight and strained. Like his face has forgotten how. “Yes, we do.”
FOUR YEARS AGO . . .
ALYSSA FAROSHTI’S PERSONAL QUARTERS, THE KINGSHIP, APEX
COY DROPS ONTO MY BED, DUMPING A DOUBLE ARMFUL of decadent sweets and sugar-laden goodies across the rumpled covers.
I push up from the sprawled-in-despair position I’d assumed for several hours now. “Is all of that really necessary?”
“It’s your first breakup. Best to just cover all the bases.” She snags a package from the middle of the pile—a chocolate-covered pastry—and shoves it into my chest. “Start with your favorite. We’ll get weird from there.”
I snort like I don’t think any of this will help. But I also tear open the package and cram half the pastry in my face. Hey, no harm in trying, right?
“If anyone asks,” I mumble with my mouth still mostly full, “I broke up with her.”
“Done and done.” Coy twists a piece of taffy into a spiral almost as long as one of her horns. “You want me to talk to my mother? She’s got a new life-and-society editor. We could plant something. ‘Faye Orso spotted in tears after Faroshti heartbreak,’ maybe?”
“Gross.” I throw my empty wrapper at her, bouncing it off her nose. “That’s gross, Coy. No way I play that dirty, even after being dumped.”
“Your funeral. No guarantee she won’t.”
She won’t. Coy’s skepticism—and the Orsion family reputation—aside, Faye won’t strike that low.
Her face flickers into my mind. Wild. Wicked. Totally enchanting.
Ugh. Where did that other chocolate-covered pastry disappear to?
Coy clambers over to stretch out next to me, snuggling her shoulder into mine. “What happened, anyway? I thought you two were delightedly crashing into love and delinquency.”
I jam my hand under her back, extracting a mostly flattened pastry. “That’s the problem. I mean, that last part. The delinquency part. Uncle Atar isn’t a hard-ass or anything, but I know I’m starting to stress him out a bit with all of this. So after we got bailed out on Tabarti, I told her we should cool it for a bit on the troublemaking—”
Coy raises an eyebrow. “You said that?”
I elbow her. “And she said, ‘I’m an Orso. What you call trouble, we call creating our own legacy.’ Then she touched my face, told me, ‘It was always gonna be a short run with us,’ kissed me, and walked off.”
Coy whistles. “I know she broke up with you, but be honest. You’ve got to appreciate her style.”
I scowl at her and haul the covers up, dumping her off the bed and onto the floor. “Traitor. These pastries are my only true loves now.”
Coy lies there, laughing, pelting me with whatever she can reach, until I finally laugh too.
Nine
Stardate: 0.05.16 in the Year 4031, and from here on out I think we can pretty much just assume that we’re all blossoming under the stewardship of His Great Douche-ness, Enkindler Ilysium Wythe
Location: A stupid storage compartment on my own damn ghostport. Yay.
THIS MAY COME AS A SURPRISE, BUT THIS ISN’T MY first time in compression cuffs.
Total shocker. I know.
It’s actually my fifth because I don’t count that one time on Divinius IX. (I don’t even like to talk about Divinius IX.) The first two times were by actual
law enforcement on whatever planet I was on, and I got bailed out anyway, so no big. The last few instances, though, have been run-ins with pirates, and I’ve had to get a bit more . . . creative when it comes to getting out of them.
I’ve learned how to dislocate my shoulder.
It hurts like a bitch. It’s not pretty. But it works.
I take a few moments to move around the small room, scanning the walls, stamping at the floor, and nudging panels with my boots. Kinda trying to psych myself up. Kinda hoping there’s a different option. But this room is exactly what a storage compartment should be. Self-contained, tightly sealed off from temperature or humidity variations. Door locked from the outside. It really is about as good as a brig, and dammit, Faye Orso, for being two steps ahead of me on this one.
We should’ve waited before we docked, done a more complete scan—like subatomic-level. Something that would’ve picked up on a mirrormask or whatever modification she used to hide her engine signature. But that would’ve taken so much extra time, and who else would’ve even known or cared about a dusty abandoned spaceport that no one paid attention to anymore?
I mean, the obvious answer is Faye. Faye knew. Faye cared.
Just because you stopped paying attention to us doesn’t mean we stopped paying attention to you.
How’s that for some ominous shit?
I don’t want anyone paying attention to me. I just want to get clear of this and get back to being a cruiser jockey for the science nerds at the Explorers’ Society.
My fingers are starting to tingle. Compression cuffs—air-inflated synthetic cuffs wrapped in a plastic shell—are generally considered safe if you use them correctly, but I don’t think Honor was worried too much about correct sizing when she was slapping them on.
I’m gonna have to suck it up and do it.
Crownchasers Page 5