Catalyst

by Jody Wallace

  “That leaves you.” Su turned to stare at him. “Tank Union doesn’t know you. We’ll set you up as an independent operator and let you make the offer. If it’s coming from you instead of me, there’s a chance the casino funds plus mine will cover it.”

  Lincoln stiffened. “Me?” He glanced down at his dirty coveralls, his nicked and scratched hands, and his dusty boots. He was a behind-the-scenes man. A mechanic. What in the hells would he say to some corporate union type to convince them to sell a ship they’d just bought? “I’m not a negotiator.”

  “This is Trash Planet, not Al’Amal,” Su said with a smile. “You don’t have to be a richie rich or act like one.”

  “It’s not a good idea.” He rubbed a hand across his chin. Most people on Trash Planet had facial hair. It was a cold, desolate place. But beards made his skin itch and then the hairs got infected. “I don’t look like the people here. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  And it would put him in the spotlight. Standing out. He didn’t like to be noticed. That was when the trouble started.

  “All you have to do is offer them a lot of money,” Su said. “If they won’t sell you the whole ship, haggle them down to a list of parts that happens to include the one you want. You can come up with a list like that, right? One you might need if you, say, lived on a gen ship in the Oka sector? Nobody here does much business with Oka, so they’ll overlook irregularities.”

  “I could do a list,” he said slowly, “but I’m not good with people.” He couldn’t look, or talk, less like a wheeler-dealer type if he tried.

  “I’ll have Wil give you a crash course,” Su said. Wil was Su’s lover. The few times Lincoln had met him, he did seem sociable. And the cats liked him, which Lincoln had come to realize was significant. “It wouldn’t hurt to butter the sales associate up. Personally, if you get my drift.”

  She raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to respond.

  “That really won’t work,” Lincoln grumbled. He’d never be able to seduce someone under false pretenses. He wasn’t even good at it when he just wanted a date.

  Su studied him a moment. “Why not? You’re not from Trash Planet which means you probably have fresh nanobots, right? And you’re young and healthy and good-looking. Got all your teeth. No scars like me. Or do you already have someone?”

  He just shook his head. “We’ll be lucky if they believe I’m a buyer.”

  “All right.” Su, to his relief, moved on. “I’ll get my cybbie hacker to set up a background for you, and we can send you over there in a hired shuttle by day after tomorrow. Make it look like you flew in through Yassa Port. The sooner we do this, the better, before the cats do anything drastic.” Her fingers were already flying across her holo keyboard, putting her plan into motion.

  “Oka doesn’t usually shop around for parts,” he warned her. “They’re tight.”

  And when you screwed up, they kicked you straight out of the tight, loyal Conglomerate. Forever.

  “I know, they don’t even recycle with us,” she said. “But this’ll work. They still need the rest of the galaxy sometimes.”

  If Lincoln insisted he wasn’t up to this, Su’s disappointment would probably lead to him getting fired. Would she be frustrated with Frank, too? She wasn’t the type to make him do anything he didn’t want to do, but she wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, either. Like keep him on staff if he couldn’t commit to saving all those people and cats.

  “Guess I’ll need a change of clothes,” Lincoln said with a sigh. “If you can find out how much they paid for it and who they bought it from, that’ll help.”

  “No problem,” Su said without looking at him. “One of Estelle Gee’s boys will be in touch about the clothes.”

  Gee was a familiar name—the Bristler Union president. Why one of her kids would contact him about clothes, Lincoln had no idea, but Su seemed confident in her plan. The least he could do, after the way she’d accepted him into her factory family, was put in his best effort.

  That didn’t mean it would work. Maybe he’d be better off if one of the cats could insert the right words into his mind. Otherwise this negotiation was going to be very, very short and very, very unsatisfying for the people—and cats—who were depending on him.

  SNEAK PEEK—Gravity by Maggie Lynch

  Cryoborn Gifts Series, Book 1

  * * *

  “No! No, no, no,” Lehana screamed as she was thrown back in the pilot seat when the qubition ejected for a third time. “What the freeze? I did not authorize that. I did not!”

  A single injection of just the right amount of qubition stabilized the wormhole. But the Phoenix had just released her entire Q supply, enough for at least seven transits. She had no idea what that would do. At best the hole would start closing behind her and she’d exit before it closed. At worst it would collapse and she’d die. Or she’d be thrown somewhere else in the multiverse and she’d never make it back to the Salty Way.

  None of those scenarios were great for a pirate who’d just changed identities, ship registration, and purloined enough credits from a systems hacker to set her up for a year without having to trade anything for income.

  Painful starbursts of light exploded on the forward viewscreen. Lehana screamed again as the ship accelerated through the wormhole, seeming to fall without control toward the other side.

  “Kali!” she screamed at the ships AI. “You just pissed in the vac and I’m the one who’s going to pay for it. Where are we? Where can we land?”

  “Calculating,” the AI responded.

  Lehana held back a string of additional curses as the ship shifted abruptly several more times, throwing her against the cushions of the pilot’s chair until her entire body felt like she’d played with by a 500kg jellicant that rolled over her several times. It wouldn’t do any good to curse at the AI. It had no feelings and had no comprehension of guilt.

  “Anytime,” she said to Kali through gritted teeth. “It would be nice to know where we’re crashing before I pass out.”

  “Reverse thrust. Aligning for re-entry,” Kali reported. “Fuel expended.”

  “What do you mean expended? We need to slow to subsonic speed!” Lehana screamed. “Dump the cargo bay.”

  “Cargo bay not releasing. Aerobraking in three…two…one…now.”

  Lehana was thrown back in her seat, and the increasing pressure on her chest pinned her there as the Gs climbed.

  “Prepare for atmospheric re-entry in five…four….three…”

  “Drakh! Drakh! Drakh!” Lehana hit the enclosure button on her chair. The padded headrest and seatback extended into a circle enclosing her in a shell that would cushion her body in the crash.

  “Brace for impact,” Kali instructed.

  She felt the ship bounce three, no, four times along the surface of something and then impact. Everything went dark.

  Lehana woke to a headache worse than the last time she’d had a hangover from a bad batch of vac alky. Though she could see nothing in her egg cocoon, she heard all kinds of alerts and warnings heightening the pain.

  Kali said, all too loudly, “Starting repairs. Estimated time for first level systems is two planetary days.”

  “Shut off all audible alerts,” Lehana instructed, her voice a scratchy whisper as if she’d been screaming for days.

  The welcoming silence helped her take a deep breath and center her thoughts. “What about second and third level repairs?” She didn’t need so many noises echoing in her head. “And open my egg so I can see what the hell is going on.”

  “Egg opening is a second level task,” Kali said without inflection. “Task scheduled on day four.”

  “Like hell I’m staying in here for four days. Make it a first level, high priority, right-this-minute task!”

  “It will take a minimum of— ”

  “I. Said. Now!”

  The padded egg creaked open about one third of the way.

  “That is all I can manage until other first lev
el systems are operational,” Kali said.

  Lehana manually released the harness holding her, and then snaked an arm out the opening. She braced her hand against the outside shell casing and groaned as she leveraged herself up to stand with one leg out and one leg inside. She balanced for a moment checking her steadiness. Though she was petite, her frame barely fit through the opening. Satisfied with her balance, she slowly extracted the other leg and arm, this time biting off a whimper.

  The viewport to the front of the ship showed nothing but sand and rock. “How bad is the hull?” Lehana asked.

  “The structure is stable,” Kali responded.

  Was that a note of pride Lehana heard? No it couldn’t be. AIs didn’t show pride.

  “And the cargo bay?”

  “Structurally stable though repairs are needed on individual units. It is not pretty,” Kali added. “Exterior repairs, outside of hole patching, are not in my purview.”

  Lehana sighed. Not that she cared if the ship was beautiful, but she’d just paid a good two-hundred million credits for a brand new hull. When she’d left dock on the other side of the galaxy, it had been reinforced with the latest technology and the skin honed to a nice matte finish that absorbed light instead of letting it bounce off the hull. That helped mask her travels across the Salty Way. Perhaps that investment in the hull, along with heat shield upgrades she didn’t think she’d ever need, were what saved the ship.

  She carefully turned from side to side and stretched. Nothing seemed broken, even though she ached from the beating of the landing. The egg had done its job.

  “What the freeze happened with the Q injection? Why did you dump the entire load?” Lehana asked. They’d had some scary wormhole traverses before but this one could have let her spaghettified and never to be found again.

  “Instruction for Q injection was exact,” Kali stated.

  “Like hell it was. Dumping eight loads is not exact.”

  “Checking log…log states one load was injected.”

  “But clearly that isn’t true,” Lehana bit out the words as she held back the desire to pound something.

  “It is false data,” Kali agreed. “I will perform a full diagnostic on my injection code. Shall I give that priority over first level tasks?”

  “Drakh,” Lehana swore. What was an AI good for if it couldn’t accurately prioritize? “We aren’t injecting Q soon. We don’t have any Q onboard anymore because you dumped your wad in the hole. So what do you think? Of course, it is not a first-level task. But you damn well better have it figured out before we get off this planet and make another jump.”

  “The rise in your voice indicates a level of frustration that is misplaced,” Kali commented. “I am not capable of making mistakes. If there is an error, it is a human in error in my programming and I will identify and correct it. If it makes you able to better make decisions, I will await your sting of curses before your next instruction.”

  Lehana paced back and forth, cursing in her mind. She was not going to let the AI tell her how to respond.

  “Where, exactly, are we?” Lehana finally asked. May it please the stars they were in friendly territory.

  “Ydro-Down.”

  Lehana knew QueCorp, the mining company that ran Ydro-Down. Was it two or three transits ago that she’d picked up a full load of Q to deliver to a space station on the other side? “I know the station here. Have you already sent the request for assistance?”

  “We are not at the primary trading station,” Kali said. “Request for assistance was rejected without proof of advanced payment for a gravity lift to the catapult and payment for the catapult to space dock. The cost is one million DICs per one-hundred kilometers per ten thousand tons for the gravity assist to the catapult, and two million per ten thousand tons for catapult payload.

  Lehana shook her head, unable to comprehend what she just heard. “I know we are not in the station. We are obviously buried in rock on the planet. But we are near the catapult station. Right?”

  “Negative. We are closest to mine 154893, approximately 274 kilometers from catapult to space dock.”

  Lehana did a quick calculation in her head. She had approximately 5.2 million DICs left in her accounts after expenditures to get the Phoenix in shape. No way could she afford a gravity lift to the station and still be able to purchase Q to get her through the next wormhole. If she was lucky, she might negotiate a single load of Q for five million DICs. That’s assuming she could get a fifty percent reduction from the current market rate, leaving her almost nothing for repairs beyond what Kali could make using what materials already on the ship.

  “Will level one repairs get us airborne?” she asked. “Enough to get us to the station?”

  “Negative. Level one repairs are to backups for life support, the medical bay, and sanitary systems. Level two will include significant repairs to achieve cruising control and enough escape velocity to leave the planet and get to space dock with the help of the catapult.”

  “Concentrate on getting us off planet,” Lehana instructed. “I’ll work on negotiating a Q load and advanced credit for repairs.”

  “Estimated time five days,” Kali said.

  “Make it three.”

  “That is not possi—”

  “That is not a suggestion,” Lehana reinforced. “I can’t afford to stay here any longer than three days. This is not a friendly place. It will take all my persuasive powers, and likely a good amount of bribery, just to make sure my ship isn’t impounded by QueCorp. I had no permission to land and they will certainly take offense at the fact I crashed into a current or future mining line.”

  “I will attempt to complete needed repairs in three days,” Kali affirmed.

  “Not attempt. You will do it.”

  Kali did not respond.

  * * *

  https://maggielynch.com/book/gravity/

  Also by Jody Wallace

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  Survival of the Fairest (Realm 1)

  1000 Kisses (Realm 2)

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  Pack and Coven (Shifter 1)

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  WTF

  Earthbound Passion (Adventures of Mari Shu 1)

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