Inalienable: Book 7 of the Starstruck saga

by S E Anderson

  The sky was a perfect fuchsia as the sun set behind the tallest space-scrapers, casting rose light over the white of the apartment. The clouds glittered a stunning deep gold. In an attempt to harness the smog, swarms of nanobots had been unleashed over the city but had evolved beyond their programming and now were quite territorial. They still did their job—I had been told as much by the cloyingly cheerful tourist welcome video I watched on Kork’s data pad while crammed between his shoe shelf and sock drawer—but their swarm clouds were now thicker than the smog they had been created to destroy.

  The air always smelled like slightly toasted bed sheets as a result. Clean sheets, but again, slightly toasted.

  I glanced at the digits above Kork’s fridge: 25:35. It was still odd, seeing all those extra numbers on the clock. The planet had a thirty-hour rotation—much longer than an Earth hour, since their time was decimal-based—so quite literally a long day all in all. It would be hours until the sun rose again over our neighborhood.

  Despite being at the very heart of the civilization I wanted nothing more than to tear down, I couldn’t help but enjoy the thrill of being on an alien world once again. And a glorious one at that.

  “You’re going to have to find somewhere else to stay,” said Kork. “And I mean this in the nicest way possible. There’s just not enough room in this place for the four of us.”

  “Not enough room?” Blayde stammered. “Have you seen this place? You could probably build two extra floors without the ceiling even having a clue.”

  It was true that his apartment was lavish. If I hadn’t snuck out of the Traveler myself while we docked in lower orbit, I could easily believe I’d never left at all. All gleaming curved walls and white furniture. It was like he lived on set.

  “You will have to be careful what you say,” he continued. “If you say anything—”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I debugged the place before you even made it up here,” she said.

  “You did what? Frash! They’re going to know if—”

  “I took down the audio grid of the entire building. Veesh, calm down, will you? It’s like you want them spying on your every word.”

  “I’m on house arrest for having worked with you,” he insisted. “If they find you here, that’s going to be the least of my worries.”

  “Oh, relax,” Zander said calmly from the white leather couch, a cup of pink noodles in hand, the sickly-sweet smell of roses filling the apartment. Surly-Bop sat on the uncomfortable-looking armchair across from him, his dead button eyes gazing into our very souls. “You’re their biggest star. They can’t hurt you.”

  “They already have to recast half the bridge!” he sputtered. “They can easily write me out at the same time.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “You don’t know them like I do.”

  Zander choked on his noodles, sending pink flying over the couch. A little robot appeared instantly to clean up the mess, singing a cute jingle as it did.

  “Kork, I hate to break it to you, but the Alliance has been chasing us for centuries longer than you’ve been alive,” he said, brushing his arm across his mouth.

  “All the more reason for you to move out.”

  “When exactly did we move in?”

  “Doesn’t anyone want real food?” asked Blayde, slamming the skillet onto the table. “I worked hard on making you all something fresh, and now you’re all acting like children.”

  “I just wanted beef bites,” Kork muttered. We moved to the dining table without arguing further. Who knew what Blade would do to anyone who disrespected her cooking. “And speaking of food, if my food consumption increases dramatically, they’ll know something’s up.”

  “We’ll be gone by the morning,” said Zander. He waved a hand to Blayde, who handed him a plate of food anyway.

  “I told you not to ruin your dinner with junk food,” she spat. “Rose noodles are a bane to the galaxy.”

  The frittata was heavenly and not an actual frittata by any sense of the word, but until I got my hands on a new translator it would do just fine. The hard part was trying to eat it with a prong, which seemed to be the only cutlery available in the entire kitchen.

  Kork, as tense as he was, seemed to relax a little with every bite. I’d be tense, too, if the most powerful governing force in the galaxy put me on house arrest.

  “So,” he said, finally, “where will you go? Wait, wrong question. What will you do? Should I be worried? Do I need to find a pirate ship?”

  “We promised, no coup,” I said.

  “Hear us out,” said Blayde. “The only way we’re going to get a pardon is by doing a service to the Alliance.”

  Kork furrowed his brows. “You want to clean the streets or something?”

  “No, the Alliance would probably claim we were weaponizing hygiene.” She let out a heavy sigh. “Then they would still be going strong and probably recommend everyone throw trash out their window to scare us away. No, we need to do something bigger. Something so huge and public the Alliance has no choice but pardon us.”

  “Pardon you?” Kork stammered. “You think there’s a way for them to pardon you? You saved our asses on the Traveler, and they still thought it was some kind of act of rebellion. What could you possibly do to gain a pardon?”

  “Easy,” said Zander. “We save the emperor’s life.”

  “You mean president.”

  “I’m sorry. Slip of the tongue.”

  “And let me go back to the part where you’re saving his life? What from?”

  “Well, unless we can find actual danger to save us from, it’ll have to be from one of us,” said Blayde. “Preferably Sally since she’s a nobody.”

  “Woohoo, I mean nothing,” I said.

  Zander reached for my hand, giving it a soft squeeze. Kork’s eyes went wide. “You were gone for two minutes, and now you’re an item?”

  “That’s what I said!” interjected Blayde.

  “It’s been two months!” I said. “And that’s not the issue here! Blayde, you want me to, what? Try my darnedest to kill the president?”

  “My head is spinning,” said Kork.

  “Well, you shoot at him, one of us takes the bullet for him, and bam, we’re glorious heroes,” Blayde continued. “It’s so easy I can’t believe I didn’t think about it decades ago.”

  “That’s going to be enough to reverse centuries of you being public enemy number one?”

  “If it’s public enough a performance, sure,” she said with a shrug.

  This plan was so dumb it would have voted me president if it had hands. “And you’re sure it’ll work?”

  “Well, my second idea was to lead the revolt against the Alliance and then become heroes of the revolution. But my shortest estimation sets us at about fifty-three years’ worth of grueling effort.”

  “Time I can’t spend away from my family,” I replied. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  “That was heavily implied.”

  “I’d much rather bring the entire Alliance down, personally,” I said, “but I suppose this is a good first step.”

  “The thing is, it’s damn hard to topple a civilization such as the Alliance,” said Blayde. “While each planet is practically self-governing, there’s too much reliance on the core to sustain each world independently. To keep order on this scale, the president’s law must be absolute, so he rules by decree. We could kill him, but then what? Sure, we’ve taken down tyrants before, but they tend to be poorly organized and already have a rebellion to oppose them. The anti-Alliance groups are sparse. Killing the president just means his son becomes president after him.”

  “Except his son has been … missing,” said Kork. “It must be seven years now? Lots of theories about that, let me tell you.”

  “Rules by decree, child takes throne—yeah, sounds like an emperor to me,” I said. “So, instead of killing him, you want us to fake kill him, so we can fake save him and get a real pardon so we can make real change.”

&n
bsp; “You got it,” said Zander. “It’s going to work!”

  “Are you speaking from experience or just agreeing with her because she’s your sister?”

  He shrugged. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Kork shook his head once again. “This is the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard.”

  “Well, can you think of anything better?”

  “I said it was dumb, not that I don’t think it will work.”

  “So, you’ll help us?” asked Zander.

  “You deserve a pardon for what you did for us,” said Kork, putting down his prong on his empty plate. “And for all the other times we probably don’t know about. I even know how I can get you into the birthday ball.”

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

  “A ball for the president’s birthday?” said Blayde. “Is there going to be cake?”

  “Is there going to be—of course there’s going to be cake! It’s a birthday!”

  “That would be a golden opportunity,” said Zander, turning to Kork. “If you could get us in, that would be incredible.”

  “Well, I’m only allowed a single plus one,” he said. “I would gladly bring Sally as my date.”

  I blushed. I don’t know why; it wasn’t as if I still had feelings for him. But the whole idea of going to an interstellar ball with a starship captain at my side sounded incredibly glorious.

  “So long as you don’t mind?” he asked Zander. I wasn’t sure where the inflection was coming from. Was it friendly or was his real question, Will you rip off my face if I do? “Is it even proper for me to ask?”

  “It’s our safest bet,” he said, no face ripping today. “Considering that I’m going to have to charm someone into taking me, I have nothing to say.”

  “Two questions,” said Blayde. “One, when is this thing? And two, will you even be allowed to go?”

  “I’m Captain James T. Kork,” he said. “If I don’t show my face at the biggest event of the season, the populace will know something is up. It’s the whole reason the Traveler was brought back to Pyrina in the first place rather than rerouting somewhere quiet where we could clean up the mess we made. Besides, if they decide to dump my character, it would be in a much more dramatic way than have me, I don’t know, die in my sleep or get diarrheic space parasites. And to answer your first question, it’s sometime next week. I haven’t looked at a calendar since I got back because the three of you have been taking up every waking moment.”

  “We’re not that hands-on, you know,” I said. “It’s not like we’re Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

  “Right, so we’ve got a week to plan to infiltrate this ball,” said Blayde. “That’s a week to craft new identities, find two extra invitations and disguises, craft a weapon that’ll make it through security undetected, and find Sally a translator.”

  “Oh, Sally,” said Kork.

  “What, oh, Sally?” I asked. “Please don’t tell me I have to shave my head or something. Does my hair grow back or am I like a Barbie doll?”

  “She doesn’t know the Lithero, does she?”

  I shook my head. “Is that like the VP or something?”

  “Frash.” Blayde ran her hands through her hair. “We’re going to have to teach Sally the Lithero.”

  “She can handle it,” said Zander.

  “I’m not a child. Stop talking about me as if I’m not here,” I snapped. “What do I have to learn?”

  “It’s a dance,” he said. “You’re going to have to master it. With your charm, more than one young suitor will ask to dance with you, and you’re no Alliance somebody if you can’t dance the Lithero.”

  My heart fell into my stomach, plunged through, then ripped a hole in my gut. Ker-splat. “There’ll be dancing involved?”

  “It’s a ball. What do you expect?” said Blayde, standing. She tossed the skillet into the sink and returned to the table, looking slightly less stressed.

  “Finding the buffet?” I frowned. “Wait, no, scratch that. I’ve had some disagreements with Alliance gala food before.”

  Zander snorted. “Understatement of the century.”

  “You may not understand this, coming from your time and place and all, but dancing is probably the most important lie detector test in the universe.” Blayde was awfully close to my face now, one hand on the table, her other on the back of my chair. I’d never seen her like this. This wasn’t anger, not exactly. This was fear. Actual fear from the most fearless woman in the universe. Was she genuinely—hold your shock and awe—afraid for me? “You can only dance when you are completely honest with yourself and others around you. Your feet will always give you away. In a single week, you are a human of noble Alliance upbringing, not an unemployed Terran from one of their backwater annexes. And your feet will have to believe it, too, or you’re as vulnerable as if you walked in there naked with one of Willowcrest’s signs.”

  “Wow,” said Kork. “You are really into dancing.”

  Blayde was already storming off to his room before he could even get out of his chair. By the sounds of it, she was ripping it to shreds.

  “Don’t you have any dress shoes?” she shouted. Kork was already there and said something that quickly disappeared into a marble of alien words as they left my range of translatability.

  I turned to Zander. “She can’t be serious about this dancing thing.”

  “Trust me, she is,” he replied. He stood, starting to clear the table but barely had time to stack the plates before Kork and Blade emerged, holding up what I could only assume were BDSM manacles for claws. A long, black leather tube, closed at one end, with a sharp blade jutting almost parallel. Covered in ribbons, I should add.

  “Put these on,” she said, tossing them to me.

  “Sorry, not my kink,” I replied, tossing them back.

  “Fine, do I have to do everything myself?”

  She dropped onto the sofa, slipping her feet into the tube, and it hit me in that instant that these were shoes, shoes so tall and thin that they were unrecognizable, high heels so high the foot was on points. She laced the ribbons up all the way to her knees and stood, pushing the coffee table away. She was a whole head taller now, eye to eye with Zander and Kork.

  “Don’t scratch the floor!” Kork stammered. “I’ll never get the deposit back on this place!”

  “I need a partner,” she said. Kork and Zander exchanged cautious glances. “Come on! I’m the only one in the shoes. This shouldn’t be hard for any of you.”

  “Wait, everyone is wearing these?” I asked. I still hadn’t moved from my seat at the table, so overwhelmingly confused I couldn’t find the controls for my feet.

  “Well, it used to be just the men,” said Zander with a shrug. “But then people argued that most species don’t even have a concept of male, and most species either don’t have feet or they have too many feet, and it’s so time-consuming to put them on that they never take them off in the first place. And the smell. But I’m getting off point. The real point is that they’re very in right now, and everybody who is anybody wears them.”

  “They make the booty pop in dress uniforms,” said Kork. “I think that’s part of the reason they invite us captains in the first place.”

  “Right. Kork, give us some music, please?”

  “Computer—oh, right, you killed my AI.” He pulled out a phone-shaped device, and an instant later an ethereal sound filled the room, a soft wind instrument with an electronic beat in the background.

  She ushered her brother over with a movement of her hand, taking her stance in front of him in the open space of the living room with the rigid severity of a strict tutor. They both stared into each other’s eyes with stern faces, chins out, hands behind their backs with index fingers interlocked. Zander had ditched his shoes and was standing on the very tips of his toes, as effortlessly as if he were suspended.

  “Watch,” she said, shooting me one of those telling looks. “Because you have a week to master it.”

  A ba
sic, almost primitive beat pulsed into the room, the siblings clapping on the first and third beat as they circled each other, eyes still locked, heads still high, legs stiff as they rose to bend at the knee, then stomped back down on the last beat. Clap, clap, stomp clap and repeat until more instruments were added.

  I sat on the sofa as what sounded like a base—an elephant hyped on caffeine and a theremin—joined in the music, the dance as the sibling joined hands moving across the floor with grace as their arms dipped, their feet kicking away to the side as they relied on their partner’s strength to keep their balance. They separated and moved away from each other, seeming to dance with invisible partners for what had to be the moment of the dance when everyone danced with each other, their hands returning to their backs, index fingers crossed like little daggers, their feet leaping like in a strange form of Riverdance.

  And, suddenly, they were back together, kicking and twirling and clapping to the odd beat in a complex pattern of perfection, both partners relying on each other’s moves to finish the dance, their parts like a puzzle coming together over the course of the song.

  The music ended, and they returned to their initial position, bowing deeply to finish their piece. I felt like they had just completed a work of art, the colors fading from my memory with every single one of my blinks. Blayde turned to me, her arms akimbo.

  “So, you get the picture?”

  “I’m never going to be able to do that. You realize that, don’t you?” I replied honestly.

  “You haven’t even tried yet,” said Zander. “I swear it’s fun!”

  “Oh, trust me, I’ve tried it. In my head. Where it belongs. Even in there, I’ve already tripped at least three times.”

  “Come on, you’re going to have to give it a go eventually,” he said encouragingly. “That or we have to get Kork to take a shot at the man, and that’ll kill his very convincing military film career.”