by J. S. Morin
With a choked gasp, the broker for thieves and smugglers brought up his hands to his neckline to unblock the flow of air to his lungs.
Twisting the fabric to apply a light tourniquet effect, Esper towed the hapless prisoner back to the airlock and shoved him. Carter stumbled forward, sucking huge breaths with his hands on his knees.
“Give it some thought,” Carl called out as Esper hit the control to close the door.
A honking double-buzz sounded.
The door didn’t close.
Rai Kub cleared his throat and pointed at a different button. “It’s that one.”
Esper squinted. “You sure? That one has two arrows pointing together. I figured that meant it would crush him.”
“It closes the doors,” Rai Kub insisted.
Esper blew a sigh that fluttered a stray lock of hair. “Did you know that I passed a basic programming class at the seminary?” With a cringe as if she suspected it still might crush Carter, Esper pressed the button Rai Kub indicated.
Carter looked on warily but didn’t try to slip past as the door sealed him in.
“Ball’s back in Yomin’s court,” Carl grumbled.
# # #
Within the holo-projection field, energized photons carried out a pageant of Victorian class and culture. Lillian Graves was attending her first formal ball, hoping to gain the interest of the French ambassador’s eldest son, Claude. The scene was white marble tiles and frilly, petticoat dresses.
Yomin’s teeth hurt just watching it.
While there was nothing wrong with a bit of holovid romance, the chances of those dresses coming off in this stuffy production were next to nil. This was Esper’s idea of courtship, not hers. Yomin’s years stranded in the jungles of Ithaca had worn down the leathery callus of her taste in holos, but she still would have preferred something showing some intermingling of flesh and sweat.
Yomin watched Esper from the corner of her eye. For once, it appeared the ship’s wizard wasn’t enjoying the dry-cracker romantics. Esper fidgeted and scowled. Her eyes darted from the holovid frequently.
There had been times when Yomin caught inklings that Esper might be in need of a little company. While they were undercover on the Bradbury, the two of them had shared a bed, despite Esper putting up a great deal of resistance to the ruse. Yomin daydreamed of whether her reluctance had been genuine or if those stuffy One Church morals were still responsible for the cobwebs between her thighs.
Carl burst through the door from the cargo bay. His first stop was the fridge. “What is this crap?” he asked loudly enough for both women in the common room to hear.
Esper cleared her throat. “The Education of Miss Lillian’s Heart.”
“No,” Carl snapped, pulling a pop-top bottle from the fridge and holding it up. “This.”
Yomin recognized it at once. “That’s mine. Cactus Moon. It’s a fruity peyote mixer. Looks like that one’s peach.”
“Ooh,” Esper piped up. “I love peach.”
“Clear it out of here,” Carl snarled. “No hallucinogens in the common fridge.”
“But it’s better cold,” Yomin protested. She’d tried them warm, and it was hard to get over the syrupy stickiness when it hadn’t been refrigerated properly.
“Bargain with Roddy for a spot near his coolant lines, then,” Carl retorted. “Or get a fridge of your own. We can’t risk someone looking to try off-brand booze and ending up out of their skull. What if Amy had brought one of these to the cockpit with her?”
Yomin offered a little smile and tried to lighten the mood. “We could end up someplace magical and fun?”
“I would never!” Esper exclaimed.
Carl rolled his eyes. “No shit, kid. We get it. But you.” Carl pointed his finger like a blaster at Yomin. “Keep that shit out of you when we’re working a job, and get it the hell out of my fridge.”
“Yes, sir,” Yomin replied. “I… I only do it when I need to get out of the tech for a while or see it a little different.”
“How about you get back in the tech and get working on Carter’s computer core?”
Yomin couldn’t recall seeing Carl this pissed off, at least not at any of the crew. The last time had been his standoff with Hatchet, and that had ended with Hatchet dead.
She tread carefully around her reply. “Y’see, I’ve got the brute force cracker running right now. It doesn’t need me babysitting it. It was cooling those happy little Moons off, so maybe I could see the solution from another angle.”
“How about you do a little of that babysitting, just in case,” Carl admonished. He pulled three more of the Cactus Moons out and delivered them into Yomin’s reluctant arms.
“Want me to pause?” Esper asked, holding up the voice-activated remote Yomin had procured for her. She cleared her throat. “Please pause The Education of Miss Lillian’s Heart so we can watch it later.”
The holovid froze. Esper grinned.
Carl pressed his lips together to hold back a smirk.
Yomin sighed and shut her eyes to keep from rolling them. “Thanks, but you go ahead. I’m thinking my theory on Lillian ending up with Samantha isn’t going to pan out.”
Esper cocked her head. “She’s going to marry Claude. That’s just how these holos work. Samantha’s just the rival for Claude’s love.”
Yomin couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Well, I guarantee you this. If Lillian just wants a bunch of ambassador grandbabies, Claude’s the man for the job. If she wants a lover who knows what goes where and can get her out of that straitjacket dress in under a minute… Well, let’s just say Claude’s probably better packaged the way he is, and Samantha would only get better with a little unwrapping.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” Carl said, studying the frozen image. “Assuming the one in the blue is Samantha.”
“That’s Lady Chesterfield,” Esper corrected.
“Also a better suitor than Claude,” Yomin added.
Esper scowled and glanced away. “Not funny.”
Carl clapped his hands sharply. “Hey, enough of the Jefferson and Torvald routine. Less holo critique; more figuring out this job before it runs off with our money.”
Yomin jerked a quick nod. “Aye aye, captain.”
Juggling her peyote mixers, Yomin opened the door to her quarters and headed back to work.
# # #
“Don’t keep it paused on my account,” Carl said, sticking his head back in the fridge. “The omni’s filled with better-looking women wearing a lot less overbearing clothing.”
Esper sighed at the remote in her hand. The little fellow understood her without making her poke and prod at buttons. Restarting the holo would have been as simple as asking it. But it wasn’t a companion, and watching holovids alone was the province of the lonely and desperate.
“We could watch something else,” Esper suggested. “It could even have carnal sinning and explosions.” After all, she could avert her eyes for the juicy parts if she wanted to be good.
“How about Waterloo?” Mort suggested, leaning against the glass separator between the kitchen and the rest of the common room. “Something we can all appreciate.”
Esper clenched her jaw and continued to ignore the wizard. Carl had a mild magical sensitivity. So did Amy. But neither of them had shown any inkling of awareness regarding Mort’s presence.
She hoped to keep it that way.
“Love to but can’t,” Carl replied. “I’m taking a turn watching the cockpit, and I don’t wanna risk losing a rotation. Just need to find a couple beers worth drinking.”
“Or…” Esper said. “You could try not drinking while flying us around.”
“It’s astral space, kid,” Carl replied. “Not like I can hit anything. This isn’t that shit Yomin had.”
“Best steer clear of that cactus excrement,” Mort advised. “Stick to beer. Takes a good six or eight before the universe starts thickening up and getting obstinate.”
“More like two,” Esper mutter
ed, hoping only Mort heard her.
She still wasn’t sure just how real Mort was in this context. Was he standing a couple meters away, watching and interacting as if he were real just for Esper? Or was Mort merely residing somewhere in Esper’s mind, manipulating this illusion as a puppeteer?
“What’s that?” Carl asked, peeking over the fridge door.
“Nothing,” Esper replied.
Stomping over to the common room comm panel, Carl mashed one of the buttons. “Roddy, we’ve got an emergency up here?”
“What’s up?” the laaku replied from the engine room. Esper could only guess, actually, but it seemed a safe bet.
“We’re out of beer up here,” Carl replied. “And I won’t drink that hops-flavored tea of Rai Kub’s.”
“Oh, gettin’ picky now, huh?”
“Just grab me a six-pack from the hidden cache you think I don’t know about, and I’ll get you back next time we’re planetside.”
Esper stewed, watching as Mort poked his head in the fridge and had a look around.
“Sorry state,” the wizard reported. “This is what you get, letting techsters overrun the ship. Weird, peyote concoctions taking up valuable beer space and criminal varmints plugging up the airlock.”
With Carl standing, arms crossed, waiting by the door for Roddy to arrive with beer, Esper couldn’t very well respond aloud. Instead, she spread her hands.
“Oh, tongue-tied? Afraid Captain Oblivious over there might notice that I’m not dead?” Mort taunted.
Esper gave a quick shake of her head. Mort was dead. He existed as dust in a sample jar, safely tucked at the bottom of Esper’s footlocker, awaiting a diplomatic time to ship it to his family back on Earth.
“This ship barely has a wizard anymore,” Mort groused. Esper tried not to take it personally since he was intentionally digging at her for a reaction, but it still hurt to hear. “If you were half the wizard you were pretending to be, you’d march down into that cargo hold, fuzzle open the airlock, and scare that sorry department-store clerk of a criminal until the bullshit came out both ends.”
This merely served to illustrate in plain black and white just how much Esper and Mort differed. The notion of torturing him into submission—which is what the dead wizard’s suggestion amounted to—curdled her stomach.
Roddy slipped through the cargo bay door with a plastic-bound rack of beer cans and pressed it into Carl’s hands. He was out of breath. A seventh can, already open, headed for the laaku’s mouth.
“Thanks,” Carl said curtly. He pulled a can free and tucked the rest under his arm, and he popped it open.
Roddy eyed their captain. “What crawled up your ass? That Carter guy gettin’ under your skin?”
Carl chugged.
And chugged.
When the can was empty, he let out a gasp and a belch like an alphorn. “Under my skin? That guy could crawl under a tattoo. I spent half an hour having an argument through an airlock door. At the touch of a button, I could have spaced that asshole and heard that split-second shriek. But no, he just throws it in my face that the stuff in that computer core is a volcano that erupts gold, and that I’ll never get the access code out of him.”
Roddy shrugged. “Yomin’ll get in there.”
“Maybe not in time,” Carl pointed out.
“See?” Mort said. “You don’t deserve that sweatshirt if you can’t do better than Fly-Boy and the Computer-Eye-Girl, the galaxy’s two most useless superheroes.”
After Carl and Roddy had parted to their various duties or recreation—Esper could never be sure which was more likely—she turned her attention to the remote for the holo-projector.
“You can start up the holo again, please.”
In the projection field, dancers frozen in time began to whirl with the music. Their whorls and intricate patterns mirrored the machinations in Esper’s mind—her part, not the squatters’ colony of vacuumed-up minds.
Carl, for once, was trying hard to do the right thing. Even if he saw the pot of terras at the end of this, their captain was going to save heartache for a culture about to lose a piece of its spiritual identity. Esper had a chance to be a part of something good and noble.
“Stop the holo,” Esper told the remote. “I want to get off.”
# # #
Moments later, Esper was alone outside the airlock.
She hadn’t announced herself, so if she had any second thoughts, no one would ever know what she had considered doing. Except for Mort, maybe. These days Mort counted for a little more than he had any right to, but it still wasn’t much.
Out of politeness, Esper knocked. “Hello? Mr. Carter?”
The voice from within dripped sarcasm. “Am I in here?” Carter mocked. “Of fucking course, I am. You psychopaths haven’t even left me a bucket to piss in.”
Esper cleared her throat, looked to the ceiling, and offered a quick prayer in the hopes that she wasn’t about to do something horrible. Even for a good cause, sins were sins. This was going to be a borderline case, and without a proper priest to ask for advice, Esper was on her own.
“I was hoping we might have a little time together,” Esper said, hoping her voice didn’t waver.
“Huh?” Carter grunted. “You can do whatever the fuck you want. I. Can’t. Get. OUT OF HERE.”
Studying the door panel, Esper struggled to find the right patterns of buttons to press. They weren’t planetside anymore. A wrong command wouldn’t drop Carter two meters onto the permacrete of a public starport. He’d die in seconds out in the vacuum.
It occurred to her that Yomin or Roddy might approve of her plan. They’d help with the buttons. But if things went badly, Esper would rather not have the I-told-you-so witnesses around. She’d never cared for being the butt of jokes. Crude comments about her looks she’d learned to ignore. Questions about her moral compass cut a little too deeply for Esper to take the chance of ruining her reputation among the crew.
“That’s just what I was hoping you’d say,” Esper called through the door. Unless the little pictographs were crazy, she knew the combination to press.
First button. The airlock door unlocked.
Second button. Re-enable controls inside.
Third button. The door opened.
A shocked Howie Carter stared as Esper hopped inside the airlock with him. Before he could react, she hit the button to close them in together and blocked the panel with her body.
Esper licked her lips. “Hi.”
In the uncomfortably close quarters, with their bodies pressed together, Esper could tell exactly what Carter was thinking. She was counting on that.
“What… ahem. What’s the idea?” Carter asked, voice suddenly dry.
With a small act of contortion, Esper grabbed the hem of her sweatshirt and pulled it over her head in one smooth motion. She let it fall to the floor at their feet. The thin undershirt Esper wore beneath was damp with sweat that had just broken out as she considered what she was doing.
“Like I said. I was hoping we could spend some time together.”
Carter’s mind had gone a very male form of blank. He was actually a hair shorter than Esper, and all she saw of his head was the bald spot on top.
The broker’s hands slid around Esper’s waist, surprisingly gentle. If he weren’t a lowlife and a smarmy weasel, he might have had a serious shot here.
Good Lord. How far gone was Esper that this human poop even registered in that part of Esper’s brain?
Esper licked her lips. Now or never. “You know… I heard if you can look a girl in the eye for four minutes, she’ll fall in love with you.”
Carter swallowed. The hands against the small of Esper’s back pulled her tight against him. He didn’t look up right away, mesmerized by Esper’s t-shirt and what lay beneath.
Taking matters into her own hands, Esper grabbed Carter by a handful of greasy hair and slipped the other under his chin.
“Do you want me or not?” Esper asked.
Then he looked. Carter opened those milky brown eyes of his and stared straight into Esper’s.
Then she had him.
# # #
One minute, the hot stuff babe in Ramsey’s crew was putting the full-body press on him. The next, Howie Carter was standing in a grassy field on some sunny little planet who-knows-where.
Instantly, Carter felt the relief of no longer being cooped up in that cramped, stinking airlock on Ramsey’s ship. The next instant, he was regretting not having a chance to stay stuck in there a little longer. Even half an hour could’ve been nice.
“Where am I?” Carter asked aloud. Whatever that temptress had drugged him with, it had erased his memory of how he’d gotten off the Mobius. He was standing upright, and there was no one around helping him, so he’d gotten here on his own.
“It’s called Esperville.”
Carter whirled at the voice, the same one from the airlock. Standing behind him was the woman from the airlock. The broker’s next word’s caught in his throat.
If she’d looked stunning in a sweatshirt and a damp t-shirt, that was just a warm-up. Though he was far from an expert in antique women’s fashions, the wizard from Ramsey’s crew was decked out in some ancient Earth getup like she expected a prince to stop by and ask for a dance. Her ball gown was pink and lacy, umbrella-shaped from the waist down and clamped around her middle like it wanted to squeeze her out through the neckline.
The wizard stalked toward him, twirling a pink parasol that rested over one shoulder. Hair that fell in ringlets bounced with each step, brushing the tops of her exposed breasts.
Carter should have run.
There was open grass in every direction. To one side, there was a leafy green forest that promised cover and possible escape. To the other, a placid lake shimmered in the afternoon sun with a dock. Probably too slow an escape, but it was another option. Anything was what Carter actually did.
Which was nothing.
“How did I get here?” Carter asked, managing to retreat just a single step during the wizard’s advance.