by White, Gwynn
Louis waves his hand dismissively. “I understand that. But—based on what you saw and Maas’s track record for being a scoundrel—do you think he was being forthcoming about the job?”
There’s a moment’s hesitation from Orion as he scrolls through Maas’s background once again. I’m doing the same thing, through a different lens than what I searched earlier. Now I’m looking for anything that looks nefarious in relation to spacecraft and pirates.
I find a few things that would make my toes curl in relation to labor camps and what they do to Lifers who try to escape the clutches of their organizations, but otherwise, Syn-Tech keeps their machinations under tight wraps.
“I can find nothing, sir,” Orion says.
Louis sighs and ruffles his crew-cut hair, deep in thought. “Clementine, do you think this has anything to do with Delta?”
“The spaceport that the Feds are nuking?” I ask, feeling something biological twist inside me at the thought of all those lives lost. I mull it over for a moment before shaking my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“The STS Nova is over 780 lightyears away from the spaceport,” Orion cuts in. “The probability that the two have anything to do with each other is low.”
“But you admit that there’s a possibility,” Louis says, his voice bitter. Orion doesn’t have anything to say against that—it’s not in his programming to lie outright, so he can’t say otherwise.
“There is one way of knowing,” I say a little too excitedly as I stride over to my console, my right leg dragging behind me. “We have the coordinates from yesterday’s run.”
“I thought you would have purged that by now, Clem,” Louis says, his voice laced with disapproval that I broke one of the rules he set.
“I know, I know,” I say as I call out the hub on my right hand. My middle finger transforms, and I plug it into the port. “But after getting shot yesterday, I got so, so tired, and I didn’t feel like deleting terabytes of files, Louis. I was going to do it today, but—this just seems like a good opportunity.”
I turn away from his deepening frown to look at the screen. My left hands flies across my keyboard, running a search under “/cordinates” for anything related to the STS Nova. I pull up a map similar to the one that Chairman Maas had shown us, but this one shows all of the flightpaths the ship has taken in the last six months.
I sit back with a satisfied nod. “The Nova’s last stop was the Syn-Tech Port Alpha as of three weeks ago,” I say, naming the largest, most important spaceport to Syn-Tech. It’s in permanent orbit around the planet Synthra, homebase to all of Syn-Tech. It also happens to be in an entirely different arm of the Milky Way from Delta, putting vast swaths of distances between them. There’s no way that the Nova was at Delta in any way. And based on the rest of the ship’s history, the Nova hasn’t been to Delta in years.
It’s simply impossible for the ship to have been anywhere near that death trap.
I look back at Louis. “It looks safe to me,” I prompt.
The old man shakes his head. “I just don’t know, Clem,” he whispers.
I lick my lips. “It’s 300 million Space Yen. Do you know what that kind of money could do for us?”
He meets my eyes. “Of course I do.”
“And it’s not like we’re even going against another company’s ship,” I say, pointing to the screen. “We’re hired by Syn-Tech to retrieve information from one of their own. So we don’t have to worry about fighters showing up and firing on our asses—we’re already on their side.”
Louis chews on the inside of his cheek—something that I know he does when he’s deep in thought. We almost have his approval. Just a little further…
“Orion, with this new set of information, what do you think?” he asks, grasping for one last bit of resistance.
The android doesn’t help him. “It does seem like an easy mission. The crew has done far more dangerous missions for far less. Even with the added timeline of delivering it to the Chairman in person.”
“Yes, but I feel like I had a handle on it.” Louis purses his lips together, deep in thought. “This feels…sinister. Like he’s keeping something from us.”
I clear my throat. “We can put extra security measures in place. We’ll set the zappers to kill. And I’ll have a few more firewalls in case there’s malware in the information I’m downlooting. We can handle this, Captain.”
Louis narrows his eyes at me, really sizing me up and down, as if debating if I’m able to follow through or not with my proposal. I’m 100% confident. And based on the information my computer’s relaying to me, we have 97.4% chance of success. The highest odds we’ve ever had.
It’s stupid not to take it.
“All right, fine. But this is your mission, Clementine,” he says, wagging his finger at me. “I’ll put the crew in your charge, and you’re the one responsible for getting them out safely.”
My inside thermal temperature spikes, coloring my cheeks, and I give a solemn nod. “Will do, sir.”
“Don’t make me regret it,” Louis grumbles under his breath as he pushes a button on his console. The door to the bridge opens, revealing all of the crew huddling around the door to try and get any information out of our conversation. I know for a fact that all of the doors are sound-proof, making it impossible for them to listen in on us.
Still, can’t blame them for trying.
“We’re doing the run,” Louis says, and they burst into cheers. Actual cheers that breathe life back into a crew that hasn’t been planetside for months now. It’s reinvigorating when we were getting tired of deep space. “And shut up while I’m on the com with Maas,” he adds, glaring at PC as my surrogate brother takes his seat once again.
Even though we’re calling back way too soon, Maas is still seated and waiting for us when Louis pulls him up on the big screen once again.
“Your Grace,” Louis says, as if he expected to have Maas waiting for us, “we’ll take the job.”
6
Excellent,” Maas says a little too cheerily. “I knew you’d come around. You are no fool, Captain.”
Louis doesn’t look very happy about the chairman’s reaction, and I wish he’d wipe the sour expression from his face before Maas changes his mind about hiring us. “Well, money talks, doesn’t it?” is all he says.
“It does indeed,” Maas says without skipping a beat. “I’ll upload the finalized brief to your ship now. I expect the next time I hear from you to be in person within the week. There’s no need to wish you luck, so I will see you then.”
And just like that, the screen goes blank as the Chairman cuts off communication with the Pícara. Louis swears under his breath and simply looks as if he swallowed a rotten space slug. “I don’t like this,” he mutters under his breath. “Don’t like this one bit.”
Meanwhile, I can’t keep the smile from my face. I’m leading this run, something that Louis has never let me do before. I’ve been with him since I was a child, watching him lead the various crew members over the years on different runs. I know that he’s been grooming me to take over the Pícara when he retires.
Maybe this is the first test to see how I’ll do. And his portion out of that payment will go a long ways towards his retirement.
My console beeps as the brief is fed through to our ship. I accept the package and scroll through it as it extracts. Plans for the Nova, a manifest, all known activity in the area—what Syn-Tech gave us is a treasure trove. I haven’t realized how little we’ve had to go on in the past until now. Usually, when a corporation is going after a competitor, they have vague schematics and maybe an idea of where the target is located in the galaxy. As it’s one of their own, they know everything about it.
Really, this is going to be the easiest job ever. And I’ll be able to get my new leg.
“PC, Daisy, and Taka,” Louis says, his voice gruff like he needs to drink some water, “Clem is heading up this run. She’ll be your leader and your point man. What she
says goes. Treat her like you’d treat me on missions.”
“So completely ignore her, then?” PC quips, causing another glare from our surrogate father. “Can do, pops.”
“I’ll send everyone the brief,” I say, flicking the folder over to their individual avatars. “Be sure to read it from beginning to end. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean that we need to let our guard down.”
“But it is really easy.” PC is already looking through the files before I can stand. “Basically, a proverbial milk run.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Taka muses softly as he scrolls through his own data on his mini-tab. “But I assume it’s as easy as this looks?” He indicates the schematics of the Nova.
“Don’t get cocky,” Daisy mutters. “Cocky’s when you get killed.”
PC snickers as I get to my feet, swaying softly as the gears and wires in my leg adjust to standing. “Orion, set course for the Nova. Try to get us there in ample time, in case there are any projections that are off about the strength of that blackhole.” The android’s face is pensive as he nods. I hope he doesn’t have remorse about not agreeing with the captain more. Remorse is impossible in an android—they simply agree or disagree with their programming. Then again, Orion’s always been a bit different. Like the Pícara.
Maybe he just doesn’t like receiving orders from me.
“I shall run the diagnostics for the most direct course,” Orion says. “I will alert you once we are ready to enter FTL.”
I nod. That should give me a little bit of time to work out the kinks in my own programming. “Taka, I could use your help,” I say, curling my finger towards him. He looks over at me, curious. “I’m going to need some help putting up some firewalls in my data banks.” I’m a great hacker myself, but if Taka and I combine forces, we can put up something impenetrable by any virus.
The engineer blinks dazedly. “Why the need for more?”
I tilt my head to Louis so he knows this is for him. “I’m trying to avoid being cocky.”
* * *
“Why do you think he turned it down in the first place?” PC asks, idly tossing a red ball and catching it. The ball floats to meet his hand, a sign of the Pícara’s weaker gravity. Planetside, it would fall much quicker. I can’t help but be hypnotized by the motion, even as Taka works on his mini-tab, which is plugged into my right arm.
“I think he believes it’s too good to be true,” I tell him blithely.
“Well, it is,” PC admits. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s not true.”
“I’m not sure that’s how that saying works,” Taka says as he quickly types along the screen. After working with him for a little over an hour, I can see how the engineer is even more brilliant than I give him credit for. He approaches code like a virus, trying to find ways to break it. I thought I was good—within five minutes, he had already come up with ways that something malicious could break through it. I’ve only had a little trouble in the past, but now that I see how he works, I’m glad that he’s helping me out.
It will make future runs easier on me, too.
“He’s just trying to protect us, PC,” I say empathetically. “His concerns are for the crew.”
PC tosses the ball up and down, deep in thought. “I know that, but…shit, Clem, it’s 300 million Space Yen.”
“I know. And we’re doing it, aren’t we?”
A small grin plays at his lips. “I guess that’s true. Can you imagine?” He sighs. “After we collect, I’m going to take a loooong vacation on Pan Sun Werks.” Pan Sun is another company, known for their advanced gravity systems and Earth-replicating products. Their planet base is a vacation hotspot for all tourists—if they have enough Yen.
“Well, you’ll be laying on a beach soon,” I say. I jolt suddenly and grimace as Taka gives an apologetic chuckle.
“Sorry,” he mutters, though there’s amusement in his voice. “Didn’t think that would do anything to harm you.”
I scratch at my collarbone with my left hand where the metal of my prosthesis meets my flesh. It itches from whatever he did. “It felt…strange.”
“I rearranged some of your inner components,” Taka says, tapping his mini-tab, and I wonder how the hell he did that without actually opening up my arm and poking around in there. “Now there’s a physical barrier between your data banks and the rest of your cyborg parts. If there is something malicious, it won’t get past your elbow.”
I grin. “Nice one, Taka.”
“It does require a new process for accessing it, though,” he says, and he flicks a packet to me. My retina screen scrolls through the various steps that I now have to use to access my right hand’s data banks.
A small price to pay. It really comes down to an extra step for opening up a valve. I’ve already committed the changes, and it will take an extra second of my time. No biggie for peace of mind.
“So you’re running this, eh?” PC says, and I hear a sour note in his voice, causing me to look up at him.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask with a helpless shrug. “I’m first mate, PC. Do you think he was going to do these runs forever?”
His expression falls. “No, I just—”
“We’ll talk about it after this run,” I tell him. “Just…let him get used to the idea that he needs to let go of a little of his control and then we can see about you getting more responsibility. It’ll just take him some time.”
“I know, but…” PC pauses and gives me a hard look. “Why you instead of me? I mean, we found him at the same time, so how did you get ahead?”
“Well, for one, I don’t interrupt him when he’s speaking to a chairman.”
He snorts and shakes his head.
“And I’m more responsible than you.”
PC bares his teeth. “Are not!”
“Oh yeah.” I nod. “Remember what happened at that bar when we were all planetside? You still have a dent in your head plate from that big guy.”
“Hey, he was the one who started it!”
I roll my eyes, and I’m so glad that my mechanical eye is advanced enough to follow the movement. “And we had to pick you up from the Feds’ jail cell. That left a great impression on Louis, let me tell you.”
“You’re the one who always gets shot during runs.”
I level him with my gaze. “Yeah, trying to protect you guys.” I pat my leg. “This last one, I stepped out in front of you, because there’s more machine to me than you. And I knew that I could handle it.”
That shuts him up, at least for now. “I suppose you have a point then. Since you always know what’s best,” he says softly before turning on his heel and leaving my room.
I watch him go, frowning after him. There’s always been this rift between us, ever since Louis found us years ago on Dark Horse-1, a cobbled-together spaceport that’s only accessible to Free Agents. And the best way to tell a Free Agent is if they have cyborg parts.
I have little memory of life before Dark Horse-1. I was just one of the vagrant children on the street with old cyborg pieces holding me together. I remember I was missing my left eye at that point, and my child-cyborg parts were much smaller. I only had the name “Clementine,” the only thing I owned. PC found me first and took me under his wing, standing up to the other kids in the slums when they tried picking on the too-small, too-frail girl.
It was that way for a few months. Just life in the dark alleys, digging through dumpsters to see what even the food recyclers deemed as inedible, sleeping under trash. My stomach was biological then, and I remember the constant hunger. PC would always give me some of his scraps and didn’t protest when I cuddled up next to him at night.
We were like brother and sister. And when Captain Louis was thrown out of the brothel across the street—even to this day, I don’t know what he was doing there or why he got thrown out, because he hasn’t been to one since—he saw us, two shivering children.
And for whatever reason, he took us in. The Pícara had a dif
ferent crew back then, and there has been a constant revolving door of downlooters since then. Some gave up the life and decided to go down a different path. Others…well, they just left.
But Louis, PC, and I were the only constants. Even down to Orion. With all his Space Yen saved up over the years, Louis bought Orion a few years back to take the guesswork out of navigating deep space. Eventually Venice, Daisy, Taka, and Oliver made their way onto the ship as well, and we fell into our respective roles.
And for whatever reason, I was named first mate while PC was delegated to boatswain. Even though PC is three years older than me, Captain Louis deemed me to be a better fit as his second-in-command.
I never understood it either, except that PC can be impulsive sometimes. Then again, can’t we all?
“Ow,” I mutter, the electric shock that zips through my body bringing me back to the present. Taka has moved on from my arm, and he’s now poking around the hole in my leg with a solder.
“If you’re leading this run, you should do something about this,” he says, poking again. I’m prepared for it this time, and I hold my teeth clenched.
“After this run, I’ll be able to afford a new one,” I tell him.
“Yes, but…this could be dangerous,” Taka says. He turns to his tool box and rummages around. “Let me see what I can do about it.”
I open my mouth, but Orion’s voice comes on over the intercom. “Course has been set for the STS Nova,” he says, his voice even and measured, sounding every bit like the robot he is. “T-minus five minutes until ignition.”
Immediately, my left retina shows a red timer, counting down the milliseconds until we need to get to the bridge and get strapped into our seats.
I give Taka an apologetic look. “Looks like I’ll have to take a raincheck on that. Let’s get to the bridge.”
He appears to be disappointed as he packs up his equipment, and I feel a tinge of sympathy for him. I can imagine that he’d love nothing more than to open all of me up and see how my biological parts interact with the mechanical ones. Trust me, I do too.