by Erin Hayes
A feeling of dread settles in at that last revelation. The Feds are a cross-organizational group created for the sole purpose of law enforcement. The different corporations combined to come up with something akin to a police force to cover vast swaths of space, and they’re decent fellows for the most part. They’re already bribe-able, though, and they acquiesce to the requests of whatever corporation’s territory they’re in.
A nuclear blast and killing any survivors is a last resort to keep the infection from spreading. No doubt there’d be space pirates like us heading there right now to strip the place clean of all information, a dangerous gamble even we wouldn’t take.
“So they’re really frightened then,” I murmur, feeling my stomach drop at the words.
Oliver makes a frightened little noise, and Daisy wraps a beefy arm around his shoulders. I wonder if there is a better place to talk about this, not around the mess table. I hate to give the poor kid nightmares. Stars know we all have our nighttime terrors.
PC shakes his head, oblivious to the kid’s distress. “Nothing about that.”
“Well,” Louis says, wiping his mouth with a napkin, “so long as that space port is at least a quadrant away from us, then there’s no need for us to worry about it. We’ll be fine. I think I’m done with dinner,” he says, getting to his feet. Venice’s face falls that the captain cut short his dinner, but he hopefully realizes that we’ve all lost our appetites and not just because of the food. “Daisy, Oliver,” he says softly, before turning away, “you can get your dog. But the second I find an oil slick…”
The little boy shrieks excitedly and gives Louis a hug around the knees. “Thank you, sir! I promise, he won’t do anything. Daisy!” he exclaims, looking back at the woman. Daisy only grins and nods.
“I think it’s time for you to get to bed,” Louis says, picking up the boy with a sigh. The boy hugs himself to the captain as he’s carried out, completely content with his life.
At least Oliver’s attention is diverted from the tragedy at hand. Still, though, I can’t get the thought out of my head. Half a million people, killed in just a few days. How does that even happen? I thought that we were more resilient than that, that there were more measures put in place to keep an apocalyptic virus like that from wiping out a population. And most viruses wouldn’t kill 100% of the infected.
So what the hell was this?
I shiver, even though the mess hall is hotter than a furnace. Venice likes the heat of the oven.
I look over and see Orion watching me curiously. I meet his gaze straight on, trying to read his expression, if there is anything to his gaze. Do androids think like we do? Do they worry about their own kind of mortality like we do? Is he glad he’s immune to biological viruses?
Underneath the table, both my hands make fists, and I concentrate on how different they are. Would I be as frightened as I am right now if I were more robot?
“I think I’m done, too,” I say softly, pushing away from the table. “PC, if you want, we can pull out some cards and play poker. I need to do some winning. I have a new leg to buy.” And I need to take my mind off Delta going silent.
PC grins up at me. “Sure. See you in thirty?”
I nod. “Anyone else?”
“I’ll join,” Daisy murmurs.
Taka nods. He’s a damn good poker player, mainly because he has a great poker face. At least, when he’s mentally present during the game. Sometimes he’s off in la-la land with his own thoughts.
“Why the hell not?” Venice mutters. “Maybe I’ll have better luck with that instead of my cooking.”
If I were a better person, I’d tell him that his food wasn’t that bad. But I’m not, and that food was terrible, so I just give him a thin-lipped smile, and he raises an eyebrow at my expression.
“I’m in, too,” Orion adds suddenly. Everyone else around the table groans. The android looks at them in surprise. “What?”
“You count cards, even when you’re not trying,” PC says, tapping his temple. “You’re even worse than Taka is. None of us are going to win.”
Orion manages to look offended, and I chuckle mirthlessly. “I’ll leave you to it,” I say, standing. “For now, I need to get the taste of data out of my mouth.”
I have to hobble out of the mess hall because my right leg is only working at 63.6% efficiency. I really do need to get a new leg as soon as possible. I can patch it up a little bit more, but there’s going to be a point where it falls apart around me. I won’t be able to go on downlooting runs with everyone if I’m missing a leg. And I’m the one who downloads the information to her memory banks. We all may be cyborgs to some extent here, but I’m the only one with the tech and measures in place to keep classified information safe.
It’s my job to board other ships and steal the information.
I sigh as I near my quarters.
As first mate, my quarters are near Captain Louis’s and they’re the second largest on the whole ship. Which isn’t saying much, I realize, as my door irises open. I’ve tried sprucing up my room over the years: a few succulents are underneath UV lights in the corner, my lone bunk hugs one wall, and I have a small desk and chair. A small window overlooks the vastness of space beyond. When I was younger, space terrified me, with all of its unexplored corners and mysteries. One could travel the entire galaxy their entire lives and still only see .00001% of all there is in the Milky Way. When you add in other galaxies…
I shudder as I strip out of my work suit and head to my en suite. It’s a wet toilet, meaning that the showerhead is over the toilet and I have to straddle the basin in order to wash my hair. With water rations on board, the shower will only go for about three minutes before it’s shut off.
What I would give to relax in a bath, like I’ve seen some Lifers do planetside. I try to imagine what life would be like if I didn’t have to worry about water or shitty food or my mechanical body falling apart around me.
It’s hard, as this is the only life I’ve known.
Naked, I stand in front of the mirror, giving myself a once-over. I’m twenty-four years old, with long mousy brown hair that I usually wear in a ponytail. Most of my face is human—many people, when meeting me, don’t even know that I’m really a cyborg until they shake my right hand. My right eye is green while my left eye is mechanical with a metal iris of a matching green color, and I have a few pieces of my brain that are hardwired. Then my torso becomes a mess of both flesh and metal. My left arm and leg are still biological, but the rest…
Well, that’s why I’m 52.8% cyborg. Parts of me are falling apart, and I’ll need to replace them if I’m going to be useful to anyone. I set my teeth and comb my metal hand through my hair.
“Clementine Jones,” I murmur to myself in the mirror, “you are a piece of work.” I rub at my head, where a knot is forming where I knocked it on the ship. Hopefully that won’t have to turn into a metal plate any time soon.
I hit the button for the shower, and a blast of icy cold water hits me. I shriek a long string of curses together. “Dammit, Pícara!” I yell at the ship. “I had it set to hot water! Hot water!”
The temperature increases but only a little bit. I scowl around me.
Captain Louis may not think his ship is alive. But I know it is.
And I think she hates me.
Chapter 4
“Read ‘em and weep.”
PC sets down his cards. A full house, which far outdoes my three-of-a-kind. Everyone around the mess hall table groans as they all fold. I give him a pointed glare as I throw my cards down. He cackles dramatically as he pulls the holographic chips his way. They aren’t really there, only as illusions, but the money he just won is real.
Dammit, that’ll set my new leg back by another run or two.
Daisy, Venice, PC, Orion, and I are the only ones playing poker. Captain Louis never joins in our games, and Taka said that he had something in his head that he had to get out. I suspect that, in the morning, there will be marker all o
ver his quarters as he tried to work out some sort of problem. Poor Oliver will have to clean that.
“You cheated,” Venice mutters, combing a hand through his bad combover. “You cheated, you bastard.”
“Did not!” PC glances at Orion, who has been sitting out of every poker hand. By popular vote, the android is not allowed to play tonight, so he’s just been watching our hands as we exchange money, poker chips, and barbs. “Did you see me do any nefarious shit?”
Orion’s handsome face pinches, and then his eyes flick to me, as if he senses my eyes on him. A smug smile plays about his lips as he answers. “No, there was no cheating from PC. But Daisy did.”
“Lot of good it did me,” she mutters, puffing on her vape. Tobacco has been extinct for decades now, so electronic cigarettes are the only things around. Captain Louis hates it, and she never smokes around him, but when it’s just the five of us, she has no problem blowing smoke up our asses.
“Aw, poor, beautiful Daisy,” PC croons. “You know that cheating never pays off.”
Daisy rolls her eyes, muttering a stream of curses under her breath.
I look down at the digital counter for my holographic poker chips. I’m down. By a lot. Maybe I should call it a night. Not that it’s never not night when you’re in space. But the ship’s lights flux with artificial light to simulate daylight hours. We may have been born and bred in space, but we’re still stuck with the circadian rhythm of old Earth.
I take a swig of Venice’s homebrewed moonshine and grimace with a cough. The old man watches me amusedly. “Don’t like the grog, Clem?”
“It’s pretty foul,” I admit through tears in my eye. “I think it fried some of my circuits.” My still-human stomach roils as the liquid sloshes around. A warning sensor pops up on my retina, telling me that my blood alcohol content is .007%. That’s what happens when you have less than 50% of a body for blood to flow around in.
“I think I’m going to head to bed,” I say, clicking off my poker chips. With that, I know that the money PC won from me is deposited from my bank account directly into his, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.
I give a small wave of defeat and hobble towards the door. “Night, you assholes.”
“Sure you don’t want to stay, Clem?” PC asks tauntingly.
“Fuck you, too.”
He only laughs as I step through the door, and it closes behind me. I finally let out a sigh, the tightness in my chest loosening. It was stupid to play for as long as I did. It’s just that, once I got down by a few chips, I thought I could win it back. After all, Orion wasn’t playing tonight, and I thought that maybe…
The door irises open next to me, and Orion ducks through the doorway. I feel my pulse quicken at his stealthy, beautiful frame. “Mind if I join you?” he asks.
I shrug. “You want to hang out with a sore loser?”
“Defeat is such an interesting concept,” he muses, sticking his hands in his uniform pockets as we start walking.
“What, they didn’t program you to feel shame and guilt?”
“They did not program me to lose.”
I laugh softly. “At least they gave you a sense of humor. Venice could use some of that.”
He quirks an eyebrow, and if I went just off his face, I can almost believe that he’s fully human. “So much of Venice’s personality is his angry disposition.”
I have to give him that. Trying to imagine Venice Moon with a smile is like trying to imagine a corporation with a soul. It just doesn’t happen.
I lick my lips as I look down at my feet. I’m wearing slippers, although the slipper on my right foot is too big. I haven’t upgraded my mechanical foot since I was fifteen, so there is a two-size difference between my feet. Most of my parts are hand-me-down or secondhand or cobbled-together by Taka to work somehow.
I’m like a mismatch of different parts. And do I make up a unified whole?
That remains to be seen.
“You know,” I murmur softly, “I thought I had a chance to make up some ground tonight.”
“How do you mean?” Orion sounds genuinely curious.
I pat my right leg, which is working, but I still have that noticeable limp. “I thought I could win enough of the other’s wages so that I could get a new leg. You weren’t playing tonight, so I thought...”
He nods sympathetically. “Ah, I see.”
“And I blew it.”
“At least Daisy still gets her robo-puppy,” Orion says amusedly. “Oliver will not be disappointed.”
I snort. “She cheated, though.”
“Just on that last hand.”
Lot of good it did her indeed. I guess I’m glad, though. Oliver truly will enjoy having a puppy running around. And galaxies know that we need to have some more laughter and play around here. We tend to get a little grumpy with each other if we’re in deep space too long. We need a vacation and to be planetside for a while. We spend 95% of our time on the Pícara, but every once in a while, we go to a planet to remember what it feels like to stand up with real gravity.
I don’t know how much more of these metal walls I can take.
We reach my room. “Thanks for walking me back,” I say with a small smile.
He inclines his head, giving me a better, more devastating smile. Dammit, I wish he weren’t so good-looking. I just find myself mesmerized at times, and I have to blink to bring myself back to reality.
“Have a good night, Clementine Jones,” he says blithely as he backs up and walks down the hallway we just came from. “Hopefully your luck holds out in different ways.”
I stare after him for a bit before I sigh and open the door. I flop down on my bunk and wince as I have to pick up my right leg and put it on the thin mattress, because there’s not enough power to lift it up that high.
“That’s so pathetic,” I mutter to myself, rubbing my eyes. I have a leg that I can’t even lift that high, I have a dull headache from my injury earlier, and I just lost 5 million Space Yen.
I’m such an idiot.
I roll onto my side, facing the wall, wondering if I’ll dream tonight. I rarely ever dream, and I’ve been curious if it’s because I’m mostly machine now. Wasn’t there a writer on old Earth that asked if robots dreamed? Or something like that.
Does Orion see things when he closes his eyes? That assumes that he ever goes into sleep mode, which I’ve never seen before, so I doubt it.
I’m settled for only a few minutes when I hear a beep on my mini-tab, alerting me that a message had just come in.
I groan, roll over, and grab the tablet, bringing it close to my face. It’s a message from my bank, saying that I’ve just received 5 million Space Yen. The exact amount I lost in poker tonight. My heart pounds against my metal ribcage as I swipe the screen to see what happened. Did PC feel bad and give me back my money?
I don’t think so, because the accompanying message doesn’t have his usual snark. Instead, there’s a small note that says, “I do not have repairs to make, and I do not require food. This is only fair. -O.”
I blink a few times as my right eye starts to burn with unshed tears—the left one doesn’t have tear ducts anymore. Orion…gave me this money? Why? There are plenty of things that an android could use that money on. He could buy himself from Captain Louis and live a life as he pleased. He could upgrade himself. Or, hell, go on vacation. I know androids feel relaxation to some measure.
Instead, he gave me his sum.
I bite my lip as I look at the total in my bank account. I’m at 43 million Space Yen. Two more runs ought to do it. Two more runs and I should be able to get a new leg. A strangled cry escapes my throat at how close it seems. I hold the mini-tab to my chest and roll on my back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Thank you,” I murmur softly. “Thank you.”
We’re eating breakfast in the mess hall at 0900 hours when Captain Louis gets an alert that there’s an incoming message waiting to be received. His methodical chewing stops as he glanc
es down at his mini-tab, and he scrolls through it.
“PC, Clem, Orion—to the bridge,” he says suddenly as he wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Now.”
Everyone else pushes away from the table too quickly, even those that weren’t called. Breakfast isn’t any better than dinner, and based on Venice’s hurt expression, he put two and two together that we’re all eager for the excuse to get away from our meals.
“What is it?” I ask as I get to my feet. I didn’t dream last night, so I either fell into too deep of a sleep or I didn’t sleep well at all, but I feel groggy this morning.
“We have another job,” Louis says.
I blink. Usually there’s a wait time between jobs, lasting anywhere from three to six weeks. We’ve been known to even go months without hearing from a corporation. So to hear from one the day after a job is completely unheard of. We’re tired from all the work and planning from the job before.
Still though, a job is a job.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Who knows?” Louis says with a shrug. “But here’s the interesting part. It’s from Syn-Tech.”
I hesitate.
Okay, this is heading into uncharted territory now. Usually the corporation that we literally just stole from is mad at us for at least a while before they contact us for a gig, usually in retaliation against their rival company. So if Syn-Tech is contacting us the day after we hit the Nautilus, well…
Something just isn’t sitting right in my stomach about it.
“Is that wise?” I ask, my voice hitching in my throat.
PC gives me an incredulous look as he walks by me. “It’s a job, Clem,” he exclaims, as if I’m crazy.
I flip him a vulgar gesture before hobbling the rest of the way to the bridge. The Pícara isn’t a big ship, but the mess hall and the bridge happen to be on opposite ends of the craft, so it is still a bit of a trek, especially with a leg that isn’t working properly.
I arrive just in time for Captain Louis to accept the incoming message as everyone else straps in, including Taka, Daisy, and Venice. They’re as curious as the rest of us to find out what this job is about. Oliver isn’t allowed at these meetings, as there are sometimes some harsh words that are exchanged between us and our prospective employers. I also think that Louis is trying to steer Oliver’s moral compass towards not being a space pirate, but I don’t see how there could be any other future for the boy.