by Eric Vall
“Well, of course,” the A.I. replied like it was the most obvious answer. “You should be too, Colby. Every ship needs routine service, same way you and Neka need sustenance, and I need an upgrade.”
I rolled my eyes. “Nice try, buddy. If I couldn’t get you a sleeve on a Corporate salary, there’s no way in hell we can afford one now.”
For the last two years, Omni had been practically begging me to request an allocation of funds to purchase him a sleeve. It was basically an empty android, ready for programming to be downloaded into it. I hadn’t believed the universe to be ready for a bipedal, mobile Omni just yet.
There was a burst of static in my ear that I recognized as the A.I. pouting. “Fine,” he muttered, “but the ship is still in need of a mechanic. Even better, an engineer. If something were to happen to it, we no longer have Terra-Nebula’s funds for a replacement. Or an extraction.”
My heart dropped. “Crap. I hadn’t even considered that.” There were some things that I, inevitably, took for granted being a Corporate man for the better part of a decade. This was one of them.
“I know,” Omni replied smugly. “That’s what you have me for.”
Despite the A.I.’s at times trenchant attitude, he really was invaluable. In the past, I had said I rued the day I created him, but I never meant it.
“What would we do without you, O?” I asked sincerely.
“Most likely go hungry,” the AI responded cockily.
I suddenly realized I was walking again and then realized again that it was due to Neka as her tail pulled me along. Up ahead, the air above the market went hazy with smoke. Not too much, the station’s air recycling system took care of most of it, but I could smell the cooking meat from here.
“Talk while you walk, CT,” Neka mrowled and, despite the pit in my stomach, I smiled at the back of her orange head. My little cat-girl was determined when fish was involved.
We had reached the edge of the food stalls, and I watched Neka’s ears perk with delight, but the first few stalls were only selling produce and beverages. No meat of any kind. The cat-girl’s ears fell, and we continued on our quest.
At one point, I had to turn sideways to let the hulking mass of a Cuatept pass. It’s muddy red skin felt like sandpaper as it brushed by, and it snorted its three long trunks at Neka. My assistant hissed, her tail gone bushy, but she barely even paused her stride. She was on the hunt now. Fish must be nearby.
Suddenly, there was the crackle of static in my ear once again. “There’s a seafood booth three stalls up and then four to the left,” Omni directed and I braced myself for the response.
“Nya!” Neka yowled in glee, not one to disappoint. She nearly yanked me off my feet as she set off in the direction Omni indicated. She did knock a few Vabets over in her haste, the diminutive scaly creatures hissing at us in displeasure. I cringed and tried to look apologetic.
“Enjoy your sustenance, Colby,” the A.I. said, and I could have sworn he was laughing.
An hour later, we had full bellies, a detailed shopping list for the Lacuna, and a name.
While Neka and I had stuffed our faces with what passed as “seafood” in this system, we plugged Omni into a nearby information kiosk. In the time it took for Neka to pick the bones of our meal clean, the A.I. had searched the system’s database for supplies that he thought the ship needed, was able to compare the prices of different vendors, and then compiled a map of all the stalls we needed to visit.
He had also searched through the station’s registered mechanics and engineers and found us the best Theron Prime had to offer.
“Darron Loric,” I read off the handheld glass display as Omni led us to our destination. The market floor was several levels below us now as we wound our way up the interconnected walkways. Neka purred contently at my side, sated and full, her tail looped lightly around my wrist. “Says here he’s a fully accredited engineer, licensed to work on anything from escape pods to destroyers.”
There wasn’t a formal military for at least several hundred light-years, but the fact that this Loric was licensed spoke to his skill.
“Can we even afford this guy, O?”
We had only spent a handful of credits on lunch, but hiring a full-fledged crew member wouldn’t be cheap, plus we still had to restock the ship. If everything worked out according to the plan in my head, we’d (hopefully) come into an even grander payday very soon.
But I was getting ahead of myself. First, we needed to get off this station. And to do that, we needed our engineer. After all, the last thing I wanted was to be stuck in the middle of space, and not be able to fix the problem. After all, it wasn’t like I could just call the company for a tow.
“I believe he will be amenable to our plight,” the A.I. said confidently.
Neka blinked her eyes in confusion. Or maybe it was sleepiness. The cat-girl usually needed a nap after we ate. “What does that mean?” she asked. Her feet were dragging a little behind her. Yup, definitely sleepy.
“Yeah,” I countered. “What plight?” I slowed down a little so Neka’s tail wouldn’t stretch taunt between us.
“Terra-Nebula, of course.”
“What?” I snorted. “Did T-N short him on a contract, too?”
The A.I. was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. “No,” he said at length. “His son, Elden, was killed in an accident fifteen years ago.”
Neka let out a gasp at my side, followed by a sad mewl. My own throat felt suddenly tight.
“What happened?” I asked. Although there were dozens of people around us on the walkway, everything sounded muted and quiet. Heavy.
“You noticed the multiple docking ports that were out of service on our approach, yes?” Omni questioned. I thought back on the darkened pads, how they seemed to outnumber the docks still in use.
“Yeah,” I responded. I didn’t like where this was going. Neka didn’t either if the tightened grip of her tail on my wrist was any indication.
“Well, back then there were still some Odrine transport ships coming in on a regular basis,” the A.I. explained. “There had also been indications of a hidden reserve that had yet to be touched, deep within the planet Oevis’ core. In anticipation, Terra-Nebula commissioned to have some old and damaged docks repaired. Some of them only needed minor modifications. Others needed more … substantial work done.”
“Hull breaches?” I guessed. It was the worst nightmare of anyone who called space “home.”
An innocuous tear, a hole the size of a pin, and whole stations could collapse, the vacuum of space ever hungry to suck the unwitting into the cold, dark void.
“Correct,” Omni replied. “Elden was barely a man at the time, but he signed the contract. The breach was larger than Terra-Nebula had speculated, and the released pressure from the security doors opening tore the starboard wall completely open. Elden and the other six mechanics died that very first day.”
A terrible, senseless tragedy. All because Terra-Nebula wanted to make a few more credits. They didn’t care if the money was steeped in blood.
“Did they ever find the Odrine reserve? On Oevis?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“No,” the A.I. said. “And Terra-Nebula effectively abandoned the station after that. It’s been left to its own devices since then.”
Anger burned in the pit of my stomach. Fucking Terra-Nebula.
But with the anger came a good helping of another emotion, one I wasn’t as familiar with: shame.
I had never been a Corporate lapdog. I knew that the Corporation was, in the grand scheme of things, probably evil. In the beginning, I hadn’t cared though. It was a meal card. It was a one-way ticket off Proto. It was my one chance to escape the cramped, meager origins of my life.
And for a while, I bought the company line. I traveled to those far-off planets, saw how each of their indigenous natives lived, and thought to myself, “We could make this better.” We gave them technology and medicine and culture even. I told mysel
f I was helping.
I never stuck around long enough to see if that was true though. Now, I wondered how those planets actually fared. If Smyria 98E, Cenerth, Iocarro and all the others were just like Theron Prime: stripped, damaged, and abandoned.
The shame curled like a living snake in my gut, roiling and heavy. The plan I was building in the back of my head suddenly came to focus with a startling urgency.
I couldn’t change what I had done in the past, but I could make sure Terra-Nebula and all the other Corporate assholes had a harder time screwing people over from now on.
“CT?”
Neka’s sweet and hesitant voice drew me out from my thoughts of revenge. I looked over to my assistant, and she pointed at a large structure about thirty meters down the walkway.
“I think I see the sign,” she said, and I followed the delicate line of her finger.
LORIC’S the neon crimson letters read. Below it was what looked to be a large roll-up door, under which a light emanated out of.
“That looks like the place,” I muttered, suddenly nervous. But I kept walking toward it, anyway.
I was used to convincing people to do what I wanted, hell I was good at it, the best in fact, but I did not feel sure-footed here. This man had lost a son to a Corporation. My Corporation, and while I hated the greedy bastards, I still wore their colors. Darron Loric might not be so welcoming. I wished I had opted to go clothes shopping first, but it was too late now. Time to bite the bullet.
I took a deep breath to fortify myself and then turned to my assistant with a smile that was ten times as confident as I felt. “Let me do the talking,” I told the cat-girl. “All you have to do is stand there and look cute.” I shot her a wink and reached out to rub her ear affectionately.
Neka smiled and nodded and, together, we ducked under the roll-up door …
… and straight into what sounded like a cacophony of metal and screaming.
I instantly stepped in front of my assistant as my body slid into a defensive crouch that it hadn’t used in almost twenty years. The cat-girl was cringing toward the floor, hands clamped tight over her ears, and her tail lashed like a whip made of orange fur.
“WHAT IS THAT?” Omni all but shouted into the gray matter of my brain. I cringed and wanted to bat at my own head to shut him up.
“YOU’RE NOT HELPING,” I shouted back instead. Already, my ears rang, my head pulsed, and my teeth ground against each other. I took a step farther into the mechanic’s garage, and I must have tripped a presence sensor because once I was half a meter into the room, the lights flashed, once, twice, and finally the awful noise shut off.
I stood there frozen for a moment and tried to regain my bearings. At my back, Neka still mewled pathetically in pain.
“You need something?” a muffled voice called out from somewhere in the shop.
I blinked and glanced around. About five meters away, a figure had come out from behind a hulking mass of metal that I had first assumed was a wall. Now … well I actually didn’t know what it was. It dwarfed the figure beside it though.
The mechanic wore a pair of gray coveralls, the material worn and stained in so many places with grease, it looked more black than gray. His jumpsuit was buttoned up all the way to the neck, right up to the lower edge of the welder’s mask/helmet combo he wore over his head. He had some sort of cutting tool in his hands, the edges molten red, and I realized that terrible noise had been him shearing through metal.
“Hey!” the mechanic suddenly exclaimed. I still couldn’t hear their voice properly through the welder’s mask. “I don’t have all day. What did you need?”
Neka slunk to my side and glared at the mechanic. The cat-girl was still cupping her ears, and her pupils were slits of agitation. I sensed the oncoming storm and, before she could say something sharp-tongued, I stepped toward the mechanic.
“We’re looking for Darron Loric,” I said. I slid on my most charming smile and tried not to feel self-conscious in my crew flight suit. “Are you him?”
The mechanic didn’t respond right away. He stared at us unnervingly from beneath his mask for a silent minute. Then, he walked over to a work table and set his tool down.
“Darron Loric’s dead,” the mechanic stated with his back still toward us. He reached up and worked at the straps of his mask. He set it down with a thud and turned to face us.
Then I gasped when I saw that the man in the overalls was actually a woman. A beautiful woman, in fact, and my head spun for a second when her silver hair caught the bright lights of the garage, the left side matted to her head with sweat. The right side was shorn down in an undercut, and metal hoops flashed in the curve of her ear. Her face was sharp and angled, her nose elfin above a full, sensuous mouth.
Her eyes, though, arrested me. My eyes had been given this compliment numerous times, but I had never known what it meant. As I looked into her violet, almond-shaped eyes, I finally understood.
“Name’s Akela Loric,” she snapped curtly. “I own this shop now. So, what the fuck do you want?”
Chapter 3
Akela huffed as her eyes swept over us. “I said, ‘So, what the fuck do you want?’”
The question hung between us, serrated and hostile, and I groped for something, anything, to say.
If I had felt less than sure-footed before, this is what falling flat on my ass was like.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered, cleared my throat, and tried again. “I’m sorry.” This time my voice was even. “We didn’t know. Our condolences.”
The woman’s face was a study of harsh lines, her mouth a razor’s edge, the clenched line of her jaw etched from metal. But I could see something flash in the depths of her amethyst eyes. It looked almost like pain.
“Don’t need your condolences,” she said coolly, stiffly. “And I don’t really want your business either.” She sniffed and looked down her elfin nose at us, quite a challenge given that I was a good sixteen centimeters taller than her. “But it’s not like I can refuse you, right?” she continued. “So, state your business, corpsmen.”
I cringed at the word. It was a derogatory slur for Corporate men or corp. men, with the added implication that we left corpses in our wake. I could suddenly feel every single place the Terra-Nebula flight suit clung to my skin. We really should have bought new clothes.
Neka bristled at my side, and in my ear, Omni helpfully supplied, “Ah. It seems that some of the station’s databases are a little out of date.” I internally rolled my eyes at the A.I. Externally, I took a deep breath and tried to smile again.
“Okay, I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. Can we try this again?”
The mechanic, Akela I recalled, didn’t so much as blink, so I pressed on.
I laid my right hand over my heart. “My name’s Colby. Colby Tower.” I gestured with my other hand to the cat-girl that glowered at my side. “This is my assistant, Neka. Please excuse her. She’s not a fan of loud noises.”
“Or rude people,” she muttered under her breath. I ignored her.
“I know the flight suits are a little confusing,” I continued. “But we aren’t with Terra-Nebula.”
Something like interest bloomed in Akela’s eyes. “Did you steal them?” she asked bluntly. The look on her face made me want to say yes. It made me want to say yes to whatever she wanted.
Focus, Colby, I berated myself.
“Ahh … no,” I admitted. For half a second, I had considered lying. I was well versed enough. But something told me the mechanic did not appreciate dishonesty and could detect it no matter how silver-gilded my tongue could be. “We didn’t steal them.”
The interest quickly transformed into suspicion. The mechanic leaned her lower back against the work table behind her and crossed her arms. She had shed her welding gloves, and I watched her fingers tap an irritated rhythm against her bicep.
“So how’d you get them?” she asked.
“Didn’t you want me to state my business?” I tried
to joke. I wanted to steer this conversation back on course. I wanted her to hear my proposal first, before our back story.
A muscle in the mechanic’s jaw twitched, but she nodded at me to continue. Well, at least we were getting somewhere.
Now, this is the part I was good at. I felt some of my old confidence settle back in my bones. I stood up a little straighter, relaxed my shoulders, and adjusted my smile. I was Colby Tower, broker, again. Except, this time, I was brokering for myself. And client satisfaction is my number one priority after all.
“Thank you, Akela, was it? I apologize for our … faux pas earlier. We’ve just arrived on Theron today, and it seems the information we received is out of date,” I explained in my most professional voice.
“Yeah,” the mechanic snorted. “By like eight years. That’s how long ago my father set out on a Terra-Nebula contract and never came back.”
I winced. That was two strikes against Terra-Nebula and, by association, me. I hope I didn’t get to three before the mechanic had heard me out.
“For what it’s worth, I truly am sorry about that. I … I know what it’s like to lose a father,” I admitted.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Neka glance at me with surprise. She knew the story, at least the highlights: a dead mother, absent father, and then dead father. I didn’t talk about it much, obviously, but I needed an in with the mechanic. Anything to get her to trust us enough to hear out my crazy, but genius, plan.
At my admission, I saw something shift in the woman’s face. Her jaw softened a degree, and the fire in her eyes was banked. She uncrossed her arms and sighed.
“Thanks,” she reluctantly muttered. I could see she was uncomfortable with the heavy mood that had settled over the room. She began to fidget minutely. First, she shifted from foot to foot, and then she reached up to rub the bridge of her nose. She left a fine smear of black grease in her wake, the color stark against her pale skin and silver hair. I tried not to stare at it, and I definitely tried not to imagine wiping it away.
“You’re welcome,” I said honestly and then reminded myself about the plan. “Now, to business. You said you owned this shop?”