Soolie jabbed an angry finger at the handheld to approve the manifest. Not even ten thousand credits’ profit on this transfer, even if the buyer was feeling generous, which, if they wanted to stay in the game for more than a couple of months, they never were.
“Fine.” He jammed the tablet back into Rirez’s hands. “Call everyone in. We make the run in six larims.”
The meager payday wasn’t even enough to clear the already skeletal monthly payroll for his crew, those parts of it that hadn’t literally eaten each other on the trip out to Garlopin Station. He could probably still scratch up currency enough between the handful of credit lines that hadn’t gotten wise to his new financial circumstances yet and the small protection racket his crew had already established on this sector of the docks to close the gap.
The handful of kiosks and storefronts they’d “offered” their protective services to were already being milked to near capacity, but a temporary spike in the interest of “heightened security concerns” could …
Soolie stopped dead on his feet, staring out a portal into the docking bay at … he wasn’t sure what. A familiar empty space?
“Hey, dummy.” Soolie grabbed Rirez by the lapel and turned his face to the docking slip. “Are you seeing this?”
“Seeing what?”
“Exactly,” Soolie said. “There’s a ship there. Your eyes are trying to see around it. Focus on what’s right in front of you. We’ve both seen it before.”
“What, that lumpy gray shipping container?”
“It’s not a shipping container, it’s a ship. That’s Chessel’s ship, the Goes Where I’m Towed.”
“How did I not see that?”
“Probably some of that Lividite boredom magic, but it doesn’t matter now. What matters is Chessel is here now. I want to know where and why.”
“Maybe he’s just on vacation,” Rirez said. “Taking a cruise on the Change Your Luck to draw some cards and pull some levers.”
“That down-the-line prude gambling? Ha! I’d bet a million credits he’s not. Reschedule the shipment. Get everyone combing the station looking for Chessel and his group of rejects. Hit every watering hole and hotel. Talk to that security officer we put on the take if you have to.” Soolie pointed at the Towed through the portal. “And find a way to get us on board that bland box of glot!”
At second bell the following day, nearly everyone aboard the Change Your Luck got dolled up and turned out in one of the dozen huge public plazas for the ceremony marking the official start of the cruise. Glasses were raised, and a toast to their good fortune was made.
First smiled and cheered along with the crowd, then drank her nonalcoholic blue wine stand-in, Loritt’s orders. Still, the warmth she felt knowing that their good fortune would come at the expense of everyone else here was a hell of a substitute. She saw the rest of her team interspersed among the crowd, save for Jrill. They shared knowing glances, save for Fenax, but none of them approached one another. Loritt had coached them incessantly against bunching together. Their anonymity was their strongest camouflage, and the less they were associated with each other, the longer it could be maintained.
First lingered for a while after the toast was over. In the meantime, the ship cast off and got under way. First mingled with the crowd, resisting the urge to pick their pockets clean. It would be so embarrassingly easy. They were all so unbelievably unaware of their surroundings, they may as well have been crawling around in a fugue state. But then, they’d never needed to be aware, had they?
Their neighborhoods and communities were hidden behind gates and other less obvious layers of surveillance and security. The police actually responded to crimes and patrolled heavily. Petty criminals seldom bothered. Even the chance at a big payday wasn’t worth the risk. In public, the sudden loss of the contents of their pockets, wallets, or purses wouldn’t register a blip measured against their net worth. It would barely constitute an inconvenience.
Where she’d grown up, losing your purse could mean losing all your earnings for that pay period, leaving you broke and hungry until the next payday in two weeks or an entire month. Not to mention the cost and wasted time of replacing IDs, banking cards, and so on, which would keep hurting well into the next paycheck. Poor people learn quickly to hold on tight and keep keen eyes.
These people were wrapped in a bubble of privilege so thick and impenetrable that not even they knew how profoundly it affected their everyday behavior, their mannerisms, their habits. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand but that they couldn’t understand just how much easier their lives were than those of the people whose labors they siphoned from.
“Time for a small lesson,” First whispered to herself before she set her empty glass on a tray held by a passing automated waiter and headed for her stateroom. Even with transfer tubes, getting through the labyrinthine, haphazard ship was laborious. It took her almost twenty minutes to get to her stateroom, by which time her arches throbbed from the ridiculous heels, but at least she wasn’t stumbling around in them anymore, and even First had to admit a little boost of confidence at the extra height and way they recontoured her derrière.
Still, on balance, they weren’t worth the trade-offs, and First kicked them off the moment she crossed the threshold into her room. Back to her normal height, First paused to let her aching feet luxuriate in the cabin’s thick carpet. Some of the little perks weren’t all bad, she decided. First peeled herself out of her dress and threw it in a pile on the far end of the cabin. She wouldn’t be needing it again. She threw on some comfy clothes and grabbed her deck, then sat down at the desk by an artificial portal.
While the rest of the team surreptitiously surveyed the ship to identify their placement when the hammer came down in two days, First would be busy navigating its security system, shepherding her bots and ghosts as they chipped away at its layered defenses. A task that was impossible by any reasonable assessment, but First had an ace in the hole.
Hello, Vertok, First typed into their encrypted datalink.
Don’t be an ass. Jrill typed back. Are we ready to begin?
Ready, Freddy. Just waiting on your security login.
Login: malavertok307#b. Password: EarthIsAGlothole.
Classy, First typed back. And your biometrics mapping?
Uploading now.
A hyper-resolution 3-D scan file of Jrill’s face and claw pads appeared in First’s download queue. By itself, it was useless, but coupled with a mirroring hack First had commissioned that would, in theory, trick the security system into believing the data was being uploaded from one of its own integrated scanners in real time, it became the final key she needed to breach the ship’s own triple-redundant employee verification protocols.
It wouldn’t be the only gatekeeper First had to fool, but it was the biggest and toughest one. She smiled with a great deal of satisfaction when it all went as planned and a whole new menu of icons and permissions opened up on the display in front of her. With a song in her heart, First opened the encrypted link to CC everyone on the team.
We’re online. Stand by for phase two.
The next two days were a sleep-deprived blur of activity as First alternated between the churn of drilling through firewalls without setting off all sorts of alarms and deadfalls and making the rounds in restaurants and on the gaming floors so she was seen adequately enough not to arouse suspicion.
Honestly, First appreciated the mental break from the constant do-or-die pressure of sitting at her deck for hours on end. The food here, she had to admit, was absolutely sensational, and with a personal line of credit of a million Assembly scripts, she didn’t need to worry about splurging on herself. Loritt would just throw it all on the company expense account and get a huge tax deduction at the end of the cycle anyway.
The casino floor was another matter altogether.
“C’mon!” she shouted among a chorus of sympathetic Awwws as her four-rock tumble was turned away entirely by the house’s weak barrier. Peaks and Valleys was a Grenic game that had caught on with the rest of the galaxy at large, played on a somewhat accelerated time frame, naturally.
First picked it out of the huge catalog of table games because she thought it would be fun to learn to play with Quarried Themselves when she got home, but it had quickly turned into a minor obsession.
It was the fourth roll she’d lost consecutively. She shouldn’t care—it wasn’t her money—but this was getting personal. Someone saddled up next to her as the valley man returned her rocks with a small broom. “Rotten run of luck, Duchess,” Hashin said.
“I’m flattered you noticed, Mr. Dul’kit,” she replied, then turned her back on the table and took a step away. “I’m playing with one hand tied behind my back.”
Hashin cocked his head. “How so?”
“I’ve been expressly prohibited by our mutual friend from using any predictive algorithms.”
“Because that’s cheating and you’d be tossed.”
“How is it cheating if I wrote the program?”
“A novel argument,” Hashin said. “Remind me to have you thoroughly searched before any coworker-bonding game nights.”
First smirked. “Seems counter to the spirit of the thing, doesn’t it?” She looked around, slightly disoriented. “What time is it, anyway? There’s no damned clocks anywhere in here, and they make us check our handhelds at the entry to the module.”
“It was seven larims past when I left my cabin, maybe half a larim ago.”
“Shit,” First said. “I’ve been down here almost three hours. My little army has to be done compiling for the final assault by now. I should get back to my cabin. Join me in a larim? I could use another set of eyes. I’ve got five displays running, and it’s all a bit much. You’re the only other one on the team with the crypto experience.”
“A predinner rendezvous, Duchess Harrington?” Hashin asked with feigned shock. “How scandalous.”
First shrugged. “What happens on Change Your Luck stays on Change Your Luck. Mostly because we’re keeping her when it’s over.”
Hashin bowed. “It’s a date. Your cabin in a larim.” The crowd reabsorbed him just as suddenly as he’d appeared. First really had to figure out how he did that one of these days. The sleep-deprivation headache was coming back. First needed caffeine, alcohol, or both in short order.
She posted up at a chair at the expansive wraparound bar that served as the hub of this gaming floor and waited for one of the beleaguered bartenders to work their way over to her. She had a larim to kill and wasn’t in a huge rush, so she leaned back in her seat, set the menu to English, and tried to find a drink that would provide a buzz without killing her outright.
“Can I buy you a drink?” a masculine voice asked from behind her.
She turned around to shoot the intruder down like she was defending sovereign airspace, but the words froze in her throat as her eyes fell on a familiar face.
“Actually,” Eagle Independence said, “I think you owe me one.”
“Caleb!” First blurted out before her jaw could bite down on the name. “I mean, Eagle…”
“First,” Eagle said.
First pushed her palm down in a “Be quiet!” gesture. “Lady Harrington.”
“Ah, moving up in the galaxy, I see.”
“You can’t be here, Eagle.”
“I most certainly can. We have a show tonight in the auditorium module.”
“Cancel it.”
“No way, babe. They already paid. A lot. The show must go on.”
“Eagle.” First squeezed his wrist. “Please, listen to what I’m saying. There’s not going to be a show tonight. You’re not feeling well. Your voice gave out. Beast Mode ate a battery. Whatever. Cancel the show and get on your tour bus and get clear of here.”
“The bus you ejected me out of as a prelude to stealing it, you mean? Never did get to thank-you for that.”
“Who do you think arranged to have it ‘donated’ back to you?” First slapped her chest. “That politician who showed up to party in your bus a couple of months ago wasn’t a coincidence.”
“And the tentacle monster that appeared backstage with the all-access passes I gave you, I suppose that was just a coincidence.”
First cleared her throat. “Oh, so you’ve met Bilge.”
“Yeah, two stops ago. It was a little alarming at first, but he’s a really nice guy in spite of appearances. Great taste in alien tunes. Hired him on as our new manager. We’re using some of his recommendations as mood music while we write our new album.”
“You really fired your old manager like I told you to?”
“Fat lot of good that did us,” Eagle said. “Who do you think had all the contacts with the venues and event bookers? We’ve been wallowing around in the vacuum for weeks. We’re just dumb-ass kids from Michigan. We don’t have any idea what we’re doing out here. This is the first big gig we landed on our own, and as long as we’ve got a stage under us, we’re going to play on it.”
“You’re not hearing me,” First said. “I’m here on my own big gig. There’s. Not. Going. To. Be. A. Stage.”
A penny of doubt left on Eagle’s mental tracks derailed his building tirade train. “You’re here to steal this whole damned ship, aren’t you?”
“Repossess,” First corrected.
“Fuck,” Eagle said. “You’re really moving up in the galaxy.”
“Only if a big stupid lug stays out of my way.” First expected him to get angry, to get in her face and make a scene. Something, anything to give her an excuse to call security over to remove “the help” accosting her. But there was no anger in his face, only embarrassment.
An insidious thing, privilege. Not three days on this ship just pretending to be a duchess, wrapped in the dress and pomp of royalty, and she already expected to be treated like one. Then it was First’s turn to feel ashamed.
“Look,” she said quietly. “We’re both just dumb kids from nowhere. You Michigan, me Proxima.”
“Proxima?” Eagle said. “Damn. That’s a real armpit.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m trying to be macro with you here, so don’t push it. Okay?”
Eagle grimaced. “What the hell does ‘macro’ mean?”
First’s face dropped into her hands. “I don’t even know. I’m losing it out here. I’m trying to level with you, be straight, real, honest, got it?”
“Tubular.” Eagle waved his thumb and pinkie finger.
“The fuck?”
“I don’t know, it was a 1980s thing.”
First’s hands clenched. “Can we meet in the middle here, please? Somewhere in, I don’t know, the twenty-two hundreds?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Just get clear of here as soon as you can. Things might get weird.”
Eagle spread his arms and motioned to their surroundings. “We’re on a space casino the size of a small city, surrounded by tens of thousands of aliens and cyborgs. How much weirder can it get?”
“Trust me, it’s all relative,” First said tiredly. “I’m trying to help you, Caleb. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”
“Why not?”
“OpSec. You could blab to someone and blow the whole job.”
Eagle held up two fingers like a Boy Scout. “My lips are sealed, promise. But we’re sticking it out. Worst case, we get paid for a blown show. If we bolt, we’re in breach of contract and get squat.”
First sighed and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. “Evelyn,” she said. “My real name is Evelyn. But I have to go. Be careful.”
He reeled back from the kiss as if had been a punch. “You, too,” he said, awkwardly leaning against the bar, staying as far from her as he could without breaking his own spine. “Evelyn.”
She got up and made her way to the entrance. On a whim, she glanced back and saw Eagle rubbing his cheek where she’d kissed him.