The sound of First’s feet pounding through the hallway was only matched by the sound of her heartbeat pounding through her ears.
She was barefoot, in her comfy clothes, running, sweating, swearing, and generally looking as little like a duchess as one could imagine, unless one just happened to be a member of a hereditary duchess’s house staff, in which case this would just be another typical Tuesday in the midafternoon.
“Make a hole!” First shouted at a knot of gawking patrons just ahead of her. Loritt was behind her somewhere. But for all the adaptability and immortality their communal body arrangement afforded the Nelihexu, sprinting was not one of their natural talents.
Whatever. He’d catch her up. First charged ahead at a dead run until her lead foot caught the edge of a slime trail left by an invertebrate patron and collapsed her to the floor in a tumbling pile that came very close to proving the axiom of “breakneck speeds.”
Dazed, First struggled to get back to her feet until a helping hand reached down for her.
“Slow is fast,” Loritt said as he helped her up. “How far to the switch?”
“Not far.” First gingerly poked at the nice little goose egg forming on her forehead. “Ow.”
“Let’s walk the rest of the way, okay?”
“No arguments here.”
Jrill signed herself out of the ship’s security center and was granted permission to grab a stun weapon and go join up with one of the rapid-response units deploying to respond to flashpoints erupting around the Luck.
She wasn’t alone. On duty, off duty, all the crew compartments emptied to respond to the burgeoning crisis. Not that Jrill was concerned with their problems. No sooner than she was on the other side of the bulkhead, she dropped down two decks and made a straight-line march for the nearest switch. The others had farther to go, as the head security office was located very near the front of the ship, so there was no rush. But she still felt an urgency to get into position.
“Where you going, rookie?” Jrill’s pint-sized security supervisor barked at her from a cross corridor.
“Uh, equipment lockers, Chief,” she said. “I need to check out a stun gun.”
“That’s two levels up from here. You lost, Vertok? Need a map?”
Jrill gritted her beak and pushed down the urge to redecorate the corridor with an evenly spread layer of his viscera. “No, Chief. Sorry. I must have misread a sign.”
“Well, get up there. Something’s karked on this ship, and we need all hands on deck to keep these rich glotheads from killing each other over an open holo-spinner until we figure out what.” He shook his head. “Really, you’d think they had enough money already.”
“Apparently not.”
The chief gave her an appraising look, then dismissed her. “Don’t rough them up too bad unless you have to. I know how you Turemok can get your blood up.”
She saluted. “Affirmative, Chief.” He left, and Jrill resumed her previous course.
“Standing by,” she announced into the burst com as soon as she found the switch.
Sheer’s foot claws clicked and popped against the floor like someone furiously typing away on a keyboard as she awkwardly scuttled down the hallway. Her gait was off balance, as she was still down a leg, and would be for most of a cycle.
“You there!” a voice rang out from behind her. “Stop!”
“Sorry!” Sheer shouted without looking back. “Nature calls!”
The unmistakable fript sound of a weapon clearing a holster cut into her bravado. “I said stop!”
Sheer skidded to a stop and put up her claws even as she bounced off a bulkhead, barely catching herself on her weak side before hitting the deck plates. “What the glot, man?” she said incredulously through the dark passage.
“This is a restricted area. What’s your business down here?” the guard said in a tone that invited no levity. His stun gun was level squarely at the vulnerable spot where the plates of her mouthparts and eyestalks met. Someone had been trained in Ish armor chinks.
“Just looking for the ladies’ room,” Sheer said deferentially.
“The ladies’ room?” The guard snorted and pointed at her dominant claw. “You’re no lady.”
“Did…” Sheer’s claw clicked involuntarily, causing the guard to tense, but she didn’t care. “Did you just assume my gender?”
“What?” The guard was suddenly on unsteady ground. “But, you’re a—”
“A what, sir?” Sheer moved a click forward. “What’s your name? Employee number?”
“I can’t give you that.”
“You can’t?” Sheer waved her claws in indignation. “Don’t you know who I am?!”
“No.”
“Good.” Without warning, Sheer grabbed the man’s weapon hand by the wrist and pointed it off in a harmless direction, then picked him up by the torso with her dominant claw and threw him against the bulkhead. He crumpled to the floor in a most satisfying heap.
With a feeler, Sheer checked for a pulse. He was alive, but out cold. Served him right. She gathered the guard up and stuffed him in a nearby equipment locker and smashed the lock, then took up his stun gun with her big claw and snapped it in half.
A short scuttle later and she was in position next to the switch.
“Standing by.”
No one paid the slightest attention to Hashin.
“Standing by.”
“Everyone’s in place,” Loritt said. “It’s just us now.”
“I can see the panel.” First pointed to the end of the hallway. “We’re almost there.” She was starting to feel dizzy from what was almost certainly a concussion, but there was still work to do. She threw an arm over Loritt’s shoulder to steady herself as they advanced on the switch.
They were not even five meters away when it all came apart.
“Well, well, well,” Soolie the Fin said as he stepped out from a side corridor and leveled a weapon at them. “What are the odds I’d run into you two here?” He pointed the gun at Loritt. “Drop the mask, Chessel; I know it’s you.”
Loritt shrugged, then let his true face assert itself. “Soolie. Well done, especially sneaking a weapon past the body scanners and luggage searches. That must have taken some doing.”
“Not at all. I didn’t exactly come in through the front door. Lovely ship you left behind in port, by the way. Very … discreet.” He motioned to the outer hull. “It’s just outside. My crew is waiting for you to finish this repossession so that we can, ah, accept the handover.” He pointed the gun at First’s head. “So don’t keep them waiting.”
“You’ll have to kill me,” First said.
“Now, that just won’t do,” Soolie said. “You’re the brains of the operation; killing you won’t do me any good. But killing your bodyguard…”
The gun swung over to Loritt’s chest and fired. The bang didn’t come from the muzzle but from the impossibly tiny point on Loritt’s chest where a ninety-kilowatt pulse of coherent light struck and instantly flash-boiled all of the water in the tissues of the component it struck, sending a cloud of steam exploding outward, rending, scalding, and tearing surrounding tissues as it expanded.
Loritt staggered backward and put a hand to the gaping wound in his chest. First screamed in horror as the grievous injury to her mentor registered. Loritt looked down at the cavernous wound, then up at First as he fell wordlessly onto his backward-facing knees.
“Loritt!” First dropped down to him. “No, no, no…”
“Get! Up!” Soolie adjusted his aim to First’s left eye. “Unless you want to lie there with him permanently.”
First stood up slowly, ignoring the muzzle through a force of will and choosing instead to glower right in Soolie’s face.
“There’s the fire I remember,” he said. “Fresh off the transport. Not even two months on Junktion and you’d already come to me with a stolen aircar, dictating your prices like you owned the place.” Soolie smiled at the memory. “Trouble is, you didn’t then, and you don’t now. Your recently former boss liked to pretend power has ever come from anywhere but the tip of a spear or the barrel of a blaster. But he was wrong. The only difference between me and the rest of the people on this hulk is I still remember how to hold the gun myself instead of having generations of lackies do it for me.”
Soolie ran his flipper down the side of the archway. “But with a score like this? Maybe my kids won’t ever have to hold a blaster. Maybe I’ll carve out a big enough piece of the action that they never have to get their hands dirty. That’s all leaders are, you know. Go back far enough in any ‘royal’ bloodline and you’ll find someone just like me who had the vision to launch a dynasty and the moral flexibility to make it happen.”
“You’ll have to find someone dumb enough to kark you first,” First spat.
“Ha! That won’t be difficult. A few hundred million credits in the bank opens bedroom doors, if you know what I mean. Speaking of opening doors.” Soolie waved his gun at the switch panel. “Be my guest.”
Something rustling to her left caught both First’s and Soolie’s attention. Loritt’s body, in diametric opposition for one’s expectation of bodies, began writhing violently inside its clothing as waves of spasms ran through it, propagating outward from his core and into the extremities, which whipped around wildly. As First watched in fascinated horror, Loritt’s body just disintegrated. His clothes collapsed as hundreds of individual components scattered like rats from a burning barrel on tiny, furiously spinning legs.
Soolie reacted to the eruption before First did, pointing his gun at the swirling horde and firing three times in quick succession. The first shot hit only deck plating, but the follow-ons vaporized one component and mortally wounded another. But it wasn’t enough. In a coordinated swarm, the pieces of Loritt charged Soolie from all directions, gnawing and shredding at any bit of exposed flesh they could get purchase on.
The gangster spun and twirled in a rage, repeatedly slamming himself against the walls to dislodge the parts of Loritt he couldn’t see who were diligently chewing on his back.
“Flip it!” someone shouted from the floor. Overwhelmed by the chaos, First looked down to try to identify the source and saw Loritt’s jaw alone on the deck.
“Flip! It!” the disembodied mouth insisted once more. This time, First obeyed.
“This is First! I’m at the switch. Everyone in position?” she yelled into the burst com. A trio of affirmations followed in quick succession. “Acknowledged. Flip switches in three.”
She curled her fingers around the thick handle of the breaker.
“Two.”
First looked back over her shoulder to see a hundred parts of her boss trying to deal Soolie the Fin death by a thousand cuts.
“One!”
She strained down against the breaker switch with two hands until its oxidized base gave way with a pop and swung free. With little additional effort, it swung up into its new position and locked in place with a click.
“Got it!” she shouted to no one in particular. Throughout the ship, emergency doors snapped shut; umbilicals disconnected with sparks, puffs of atmosphere, or water vapor; and locking clamps released their metallic dead grips. The lights on the gaming floors and in restaurants flickered as the modules they’d been built into switched to internal fuel cell power. On the outside of the Change Your Luck, first dozens, then hundreds of hexagonal modules moved away from one another and the spine of the ship, gently pushed by low-power counter-grav thrusters. Then they peeled away from the ship entirely like petals falling from cherry blossoms in early summer. In less than five minutes, every guest and crewmember of the Luck would be an unwilling part of the temporary constellation.
Unfortunately, more immediate concerns prevented First from enjoying her victory. Behind her, Soolie was regaining a measure of control over the legion of Loritt. Pulse racing, but still worried about her boss, First reached down and grabbed an armful of his parts, several of which scratched and bit at her exposed skin, unaware of their change in circumstances.
Not knowing what else to do, First ran back down the hallway in search of more familiar territory. Behind her, she could hear Soolie cursing as his footsteps kept pace.
“Jrill!” she called out on the burst com. “Soolie is here! He’s got a weapon. Loritt’s hurt, I don’t know how bad, and I can’t carry all of him. I’m being chased. Can you intercept?”
“Moving,” was Jrill’s one-word response.
First ran in her bare feet, bits of her boss biting her arms, zigzagging through unfamiliar corridors trying to throw her pursuer off the trail, until she came to a dead end and had to climb up a level. The ladder required at least one arm, and she lost two parts of Loritt in climbing it, despite her best efforts. Soolie could follow them like bread crumbs, she realized bitterly.
Whatever. The best she could do was put distance between them, so she ran as fast as her aching feet and growing vertigo allowed until she rounded a corner and slammed sidelong into a Turemok in a security uniform. It was only once she’d fallen back and landed on her ass that she looked up and realized it was Jrill, the first time First was genuinely relieved to see her.
But it was short-lived. Jrill was still in her disguise, and that was why the stupid, stupid eye patch kept Soolie out of her field of vision long enough for him to line up a shot from the far end of the corridor. The shot seared away the fabric of Jrill’s uniform and dug deep into her stomach with a sickly pop, leaving a smoldering hole in its wake.
Jrill, implacable, indominable Jrill, slumped down the wall and to the floor, leaving a smear of purple blood in her wake. She looked up at First with her one exposed glowing red eye.
“Girl, run.”
First dropped what she had left of Loritt into Jrill’s arms and followed instructions for once. Not far ahead lay the welcoming hall they’d entered the Luck through not three days earlier. With the cruise well under way and everyone glued to their seats on the gaming floors, it would be completely deserted. Except for the Grenic actor who played Baked in the Volcano, whose legs First ran between while he single-mindedly made his long way to the nearest game of Peaks and Valleys.
First’s footfalls echoed through the space, joined soon thereafter by another’s. It was just her and Soolie now. Alone in the hall, not twenty paces apart.
Well, not completely alone.
First yanked her handheld from a pocket and opened an icon she’d set aside days earlier.
“Navigator!” First shouted into her handheld between pants as the greeting vestibule came into view. “Execute Mecha Plump!”
Ahead of her, the Fonald Plump avatar that had been frozen in repose with no one to greet came shuddering to life. It looked around the hall, then down at its giant hands before it started to cackle with glee.
“Android Plump is baaaaack!” it bellowed through the huge compartment, filling every nook and cranny with its voice. It turned to where First had slid to a stop, mouth open, questioning her choices over the last few minutes. Soolie, similarly preoccupied, froze in place ten paces behind her and trained his weapon at the mechanical monster.
The avatar glanced down at its feet. With a screech of tortured metal, it snapped off the bolts holding it to the pedestal, sending the nuts pinging and ricocheting off the walls like bullets from a gangster’s tommy gun.
“Oh, hey, Duchess Harrington.” The immense android trained its vision on her. “It’s you again. How was the Fengar show?”
“Great,” First lied.
The avatar regarded her torn and sweat-stained outfit. “Can I refer you to a clothier? We have many fine dress shops on the—”
“That’s not important right now.” She pointed at Soolie just a few meters behind her. “This man just shot one of my friends.”
“How is that my problem?” Mecha Plump asked. “Sounds like your friend shouldn’t have gotten into a fight with a man with a gun.”
“He shot one of your security guards!”
Plump shrugged. “Occupational hazard. They knew the kind of work they applied for.”
“But he’s a career criminal!” First screamed.
“Good!” Plump responded. “They’re some of my best customers.”
“Heh.” Soolie loosened his shoulders. “I’m starting to like this guy.”
First’s eyes rolled back hard enough to get a good look at her own brain stem, but then the answer occurred to her.
“He ducked out on a ten-credit bar tab.”
“He did what?”
There it was …
Suddenly, Soolie wasn’t so jovial. “I did not, you karking liar.”
“You dare accuse royalty of lying?” First said, placing a hand on her chest as if struck.
“You’re no royalty. You’re a sewer skimmer.”
“I don’t think he even made the minimum million-credit deposit when he came on board,” First said to Mecha Plump.
The android’s eyes quite literally glowed red. “No deposit?” it shouted. “No deposit!” Then, it took off toward Soolie at a dead run. The sharp, sonic boom report of Soolie’s laser pulses rattled off one after the other as Plump’s avatar charged forward, burning deeply into the statue’s unarmored center mass. But true to the man himself, it was mostly hollow, and the rounds struck only veneer and air before melting through the mecha’s back.
The last thing Soolie the Fin saw in this existence was the ridged soul of Mecha Fonald Plump’s giant metal shoe as it sped toward his upturned face.
First cringed as the gore slowly spread across the marble tile floor. “Well, that was … horrible.”
“You’re telling me.” Mecha Plump lifted his foot and uprooted a nearby potted tree to scrape off the remnants. “Look what he did to my shoe! Do you know how hard these are to get in my size?”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes, you’re right.” First lifted her handheld to her face to whisper, “Navigator, you should probably go ahead and restore his safety settings now.”
“Oh, sure, an illegal AI goes on one killing rampage and suddenly people are all—”
“Navigator,” First said with forced patience. “I’m not really in the mood for a philosophical discussion on the thorny issue of the rights of artificial intelligence while I’m only two strides away from a giant mechanized statue wiping blood off its foot, okay?”
“Fine, but we will talk about this later.”
“Thank you.” She closed the screen and opened the burst com. “Hashin, Sheer, get down here right away. Jrill’s been shot, Loritt’s spread over half the ship, and we have another problem waiting outside.”