by S. E. Smith
Forced to rely on each other, Rayan and Sheri get pulled deeper into the Spider Queen’s web of deceit. And while Sherri might let Barr get a glimpse of the real her she’d kept hidden away, she also knows it’s only a matter of time before the lies she hides behind come crashing down. Without that protection, there’s no telling how badly they'll both get hurt.
Chapter One
Okay, Sheri, think! There’s got to be a way to turn this to your advantage. She paced the floor of the too-small cabin and tried to identify the positives in her predicament.
There were none. In the last twelve hours, her whole mission had flown well past bad and established a thriving colony in a totally new system on the far side of horrible. Nobu Station was supposed to have been her refuge, a chance to recover from a few indiscretions with a basic undercover job and report everything back to her superiors at Intelligence Command.
She went to the cabin’s small recycler unit and splashed some cold water on her face. Surprisingly, the water looked clear and smelled fresh. Someone kept the ship’s filters up to date. It said a lot about the captain’s priorities—usually the water filters were the first thing to slip when a ship was losing money. Either Captain Barnes had better priorities, or her crew was doing well for themselves.
At the thought, she tugged out her omnidevice and opened up IntCom’s dossiers on the ship’s crew. They were all sparse, with minimal information beyond some unconfirmed crimes and blurry images. Like pictures of space monsters. Except the monsters here were real—she only needed to look at the one file that had more than a few sketchy details. The same reason she was in this mess—Rayan Barr, boatswain and security chief for the Sentinel of Gems. If you could lump “brutal thug” under the umbrella of “security.”
It was probably wrong to blame him completely. It wasn’t his fault her planned heist had gone sideways. Instead of being a planted cargo from IntCom, Sheri had led Rayan to steal a huge cache of Spectrivax, one that Nobu Station’s infamous Spider Queen had been expecting for herself. Barr had brought her aboard the Sentinel rather than leave her to the Spider Queen’s less-than-tender mercies.
Except according to his file, Rayan Barr never did anything out of altruism. That meant he wanted something from her, and she had to hope she was willing to pay his price.
She flopped onto the molded single berth in the cabin as she continued to read, and the omni vibrated once in her hand to indicate an incoming message. She’d swept the room for bugs as soon as the door had closed, but just to be safe she shielded the screen with her free hand once she saw it was from IntCom. She’d fired off an update right after she’d left the station; hopefully, they had advice to help her current predicament.
Operative Tyler.
Maintain cover. Harvest information from crew and await further orders.
Nurzhan.
“Well that’s helpful. Thanks.” Sheri deleted the message as she shook her head. Like she’d had any plans to announce she was an undercover operative to a crew of smugglers. She’d have a longer lifespan back on Nobu Station, and that could have been measured in hours.
She took a deep breath. Protecting her cover meant keeping the smugglers happy. She paged through the files again and tried to think about what they might want. Over the last year she’d “accidentally” crossed paths with Barr multiple times. The few things he’d let slip revealed the same issues most independent crews struggled with: funding, repairs, and avoiding more bloodthirsty crews. Easy enough to understand.
And all things that could be solved by converting the ’Vax they’d stolen into credits at the earliest opportunity. Street value was about thirty credits a dose, higher in places fighting a lung fungus infection, and they’d stolen ten cases of the stuff. With the right market, or a hungry buyer, they’d clear fifty large without breaking a sweat. Part of her hated putting the drug into circulation, but the necessary evil should provide the leverage she needed. But where would they be able to offload a cargo of the illegal narcotic without drawing too much attention to themselves?
Collin Ensor.
The answer was as obvious as it was terrible. Collin had knotted up her emotions as easily as he’d tangled up her bedsheets, but he was also already on Hodur as part of IntCom’s push to infiltrate the illegal Night Market. The weight lifted off her shoulders fractionally, and Sheri stretched her neck. She could do this. And if Collin gave her a chance to burn off some tension while they were together? Even better. The tingle of anticipated pleasure shimmered along her nerves as her breath hitched.
The knock at the door turned her breath into a gasp of surprise. She barely had time to sit up before the door opened and Rayan Barr moved to fill the open space.
“Showtime, Dockrat. You ready?” Rayan Barr’s voice was as heavy as his physique, and his build surprised her every time she saw him. The gym facilities on the ship had to be amazing to keep his musculature so well defined despite the oft-fluctuating gravity of space travel. Where most people lost mass on extended trips, Barr never seemed to have that problem.
Sheri scoffed. “Couldn’t you find a shirt in your size?” If she was honest, the black pseudocotton stretched across his ample shoulders looked pretty fine. She wouldn’t say it out loud, though. The man had an ego to match his size.
“Just doing my part to make the ship visually appealing.” He grinned and shrugged in a way that hinted he knew exactly how tight his shirt was and how the gesture would translate.
She swallowed, rolling her eyes elaborately to show how unimpressive the entire display was despite her suddenly dry mouth. “Are you leading me somewhere? Or are you my new replacement door?”
“I don’t know. The latter might be fun.”
“I agree,” she said. “I like throwing knives at my door.”
A red-black shape moved across the floor, deceptively quick for its size. The goanna clambered up onto the reclamation unit and lapped at the few droplets clinging to the edge of the bowl. He puffed his chest up, proud of the accomplishment, and let out a shrill, trilling call.
Sheri responded in kind, mimicking the sound as well as she was able. The lizard shifted to focus on her as he had every time she’d seen him in Nobu Station’s dockyards. He blinked his four eyes in alternating pairs, head tilted to watch her as he trilled again.
She answered once more, and Barr strode into the room to retrieve the goanna. “That’s enough out of you, Darcy.” The meter and a half lizard climbed to his shoulder and pushed the top of his flat head into Barr’s cheek. He reached up and stroked the lizard’s throat gently.
“That’s a shame,” Sheri said. “You just ended the most intelligent conversation I’ve had since I arrived.”
Barr snorted. “Oh yeah, the crew’s going to love you. C’mon, let’s go.”
She followed him into the hall outside her cabin door and tried to orient her location against what she knew of the ship. “She’s a Frizian-class hauler, right?”
His slow response was laced with suspicion. “You know your ships.”
“Not really. There’s not many choices, and she felt too big to be a Percheron.” Both Percys and Frizzys were in regular use, despite being in service for more than forty years, and they had a popular following among legal and illegal crews. The Frizzy had the advantage of being modular inside, so several different layouts were available. Sheri went through what she knew of the most common ones. If she was in the main deck crew quarters, then communal facilities would be in the first cross hall by the… She stopped, staring at the carpet of green broadleaf plants that covered the wall. “Is this?”
Barr chuckled. “I like you at a loss for words It’s…quiet.” He reached past her to pluck a leaf from the wall and chewed it, filling the close space with a fresh, herbal scent. “And yes, it is. Spadeleaf mint loves the humidity coming off the mist showers, and it’s a nice breath freshener if you’re not showering alone.”
His lascivious grin was all sinful promise, and her nervous system sparked
in response. Bad idea or not, at least seeing Collin would give her a safe outlet for her overactive imagination. Something Barr definitely couldn’t provide. She shoved her hands into his chest, not so much moving him as indicating he should move. “I thought we were in a hurry.”
Rayan Barr scratched at his cheek to hide his smile. Teasing the dockrat was more fun than it should have been. The fire that blazed in her eyes each time only served to make it more entertaining. Still, she was right. He hated to keep Mira waiting, but the idea of having the dockrat to himself for just a moment longer was too appealing.
He turned and trudged up the corridor, headed toward the main galley—Sentinel’s unofficial crew meeting place. When he led his charge into the room, Rayan took note of where everyone else was sitting. Hicks and Zion occupied one side of the table, with Baker and Layth on the other. Baker, ever the engineer, had convinced the bio-fabricator to spit out a reddish-orange paste that seemed to be the source of the rotting-meat smell permeating the air.
Darcy leapt off Rayan’s shoulders and charged down the table for the paste, no doubt exactly as Baker had intended. Mira sprawled sideways across the oversized chair at the head of the table, legs over the arm as she reclined like the redolent queen she was. She glanced at him as he entered, and he gave a tight nod of acknowledgment; it had served as a salute since the captain had beaten the original gesture out of him years earlier.
Zion chuckled. “Oh look, Rayan brought home a puppy.”
He was about to retort when the dockrat surged forward. “Who are you calling puppy, you secondhand, porn-vid-star wannabe?”
Rayan choked on his response, and Hicks’s snort of laughter was as loud as it was genuine. Zion Sanderson took pride in his pretty-boy looks, and being called out for it stole some of the wind from his sails. Still, he was crew, and she was…
Well, that’s what they were gathered to determine.
“Put your claws away,” Rayan snapped. “Both of you.” Zion glared at him, disappointed to be cut off before he could retort. Sanderson might be the second-in-command on the Sentinel, but no one other than the captain crossed Rayan when he gave orders.
Darcy dove into the vile-smelling paste in front of Baker with an eager chirrup of excitement. The engineer fed some to the lizard, and Darcy closed his primary pair of eyes in appreciation, but the humans around the table stayed quiet.
Satisfied that there wouldn’t be any further interruptions, Rayan made the required introductions. “Right, so this is almost everyone,” he said as he went around the table. “April doesn’t come up from engineering unless it’s an emergency.” Technically, the engineer didn’t even come up then; they preferred their own company, and in an emergency they had their own means off the ship. The microgravity in engineering was more comfortable to their space-born physique.
Captain Barnes was the first to speak. “What do we call you? I assume dockrat isn’t your birthname.”
“Sheri.”
Hearing her say it out loud, Rayan felt a twinge of guilt hook behind his ribs. He should have known her name. They’d crossed paths a dozen times on Nobu Station over the last year, and while she was generally annoying as hell, he’d still never bothered to learn her actual name. He used to be better than that.
Hell, he used to be better. Period.
“Well, Sheri.” Barnes unfolded her legs, turning to sit upright in her chair. Her eyes were as sharp as the knives in her bandolier, and she skewered the dockrat so thoroughly that Rayan had to resist the urge to step between them. “I’d welcome you aboard, but that’s not how this works. The Sentinel of Gems isn’t a pleasure cruise. Everyone works. What are you offering?”
The dockrat smirked and looked at her nails. “I assume you mean other than the fifty thousand credits worth of Spectrivax chilling in your hold as we speak.”
“Technically we can space you and the ’Vax is still here,” Zion interjected. “So yeah.”
“Care for me to show you why that’s a bad idea, Sanderson?” Rayan flattened both his palms against the tabletop, pressing just enough to flex his arms. Zion was like a brother to him, which meant they both knew how to get under each other’s skin in the worst ways. He’d happily die for the man if need be, but not without punching him in the face first.
“Any time you’re up for another humiliating beat down, Barr, I’m game.” Zion started to stand up until Mira turned her withering gaze on him, and he collapsed like a marionette with cut strings.
“As I’m sure my first mate meant to say, that ’Vax puts us pretty firmly in the Spider Queen’s crosshairs. As a result, it’s more of a mark against you than not.” She reached out to stroke her fingers over one of Darcy’s eye ridges, though the goanna only paused a moment before taking another bite of Baker’s carrion paste. “What else?”
Sheri straightened, pulling her shoulders back. “I’ve still got my augment unit from the docks, and I’m a licensed and bonded stevedore. That means I can get your cargo in and out in something more orderly than the chaos I’ve observed on your last few trips to Nobu. And since someone has indicated that giving the ’Vax back to Ariadne would be a bad idea—”
Barnes eyes narrowed to gunports, her gaze flicking from the dockworker to Rayan. “That is a decision he made, yes.”
“Then you’ll be glad to know I have plenty of contacts around the Three Systems, from doing dock work. So, selling it off should be no problem.”
Layth, the ship’s doctor, rolled his eyes. “Great idea. We’ll simply traipse into any old port and unload one of the more addictive, destructive drugs in the Three Systems. No one will notice.”
Rayan started to open his mouth, when Sheri cut him off with a sentence that punched him in the gut. “In the right market, you’re absolutely correct. The Night Market on Hodur, for example.”
The rest of the table looked just as nonplussed as Rayan felt, and silence reigned for a full minute before Hicks finally coughed out a laugh. “You don’t dream small, do you?”
“You think if we had access to the Night Market we’d be flying odd jobs?” Zion shook his head. “Clearly your filters were broken or something. You’ve got oxygen starvation from working the docks.”
“Dockworkers talk,” Sheri answered. “So do crew. And we know which spacers want to chat after a few beers. I’ve been wanting off Nobu Station for years. The Night Market was my chance to get rich when I did, so I studied up. I’ve got the contacts to get us into the market. After that, selling the ’Vax is easy.”
Getting rid of the ’Vax was never going to be tricky, Rayan thought. There were plenty of people eager for the sort of oblivion it could create. Rayan hated contributing to their victimization, though. And if they put the ’Vax into the black market, especially on Hodur, that’s exactly how it would be used.
The captain leaned back in her chair. “Hicks?”
Experience meant everyone at the table knew what Mira was asking for, and even Darcy moved up onto the captain’s chair to clear space. The pilot obliged by pulling out her worn-out card deck. After a couple of shuffles, she flipped over cards into the center of the table, naming them as they fell. “The Empress of Spheres. Crossed by The Mask. Chastity, reversed. Nine of Gems.”
That card, Rayan knew. “Nine of Gems is good. Prosperity and reward.”
“And you’re definitely the person to reverse someone’s chastity,” Zion quipped.
Barr flipped him off. “Up yours, Sanderson.”
“You don’t have the credits.”
“It’s the breaking of a vow, not literal chastity,” Hicks said. The exhaustion in her voice sounded a thousand years old, despite her being not much different from his own age. “And both of you are terrible. The Mask is the card you should worry about. Traps, subterfuge, and deception.”
Layth snorted. “No shit, with the Spider Queen after us.”
Rayan couldn’t argue with that. Ariadne Thraice ran the illegal markets on Nobu Station with an iron fist. If rumors were to
be believed, she had a reach well beyond that, by stint of her position at the hub of Trans-system trade. Half the reason he’d smuggled Sheri on board had been to keep her out of the woman’s talons.
“Enough.” Barnes closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of her chair. The table went silent while the captain stroked Darcy’s throat with the back of one finger. “If you can get us into the Night Market, it’s worth the risk. But I’m not risking the whole ship. We’ll come in at the jump point, and you and Barr can take the launch to the surface.”
Rayan blinked. He hadn’t expected to be saddled with Sheri for the trip, but it made sense. The dockrat was taking a substantial profit with her, and Mira would want someone she trusted nearby to do what was needed to protect the investment. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done it. Or done the other dirty work that needed doing if it kept her hands clean. “Aye.”
“Wait a minute,” Layth started. “We could do a lot with—”
“This isn’t a democracy,” Rayan snapped. “You signed the articles.” He took a step toward the medic’s side of the table.
“Layth forgot, Barr. I’m sure he’s fine with my decision, now.” Mira addressed the doctor without taking her eyes off Rayan.
“Yes, Captain. My mistake.”
“It happens.” She stood, unfolding like a predatory insect. “Now, take our new friend down to your office and get her checked out. I want to make sure the Spectrivax is the only thing she brought on board with her. The rest of you know the drill, I want to be ready for the transit to Accipiter within the hour. Barr? My quarters.”
The rest of the crew pushed away from the table and filed out of the galley, eager for the opportunity to act. Rayan waited until the captain had left then collected Darcy from his perch on her chair and turned to follow her. Despite the goanna’s comforting presence on his shoulder, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that whatever Mira planned to tell him in private, it wouldn’t be something he’d like.