Story Like Spice over the Sea

[Owl Knight]

Like Spice Over the Sea


Jaro Kreel leaned against the stucco exterior wall of the cantina, just to the left of the entryway, his corded arms folded over his chest, bristling with thick black hairs. His long keffke-rifle was propped up beside him. From behind a pair of dark lenses, designed to filter the light for his incredibly sensitive Scavian eyes, he scanned up and down the street. The light from street lamps mingled with the neon glow from holographic ad panels mounted on the sides of most of the buildings to cast the dirty thoroughfare in a bizarre mixture of color and shadow. Up and down the street, where grav-transports, animal drawn carts, and pedestrians held equal right of way, merchants from a dozen worlds extolled the virtues of their wares in what sounded like every language spoken from here to the heart of the Imperium.

Tan’Desh was a city in the most generous sense. It had started as a trilinium mining colony some 200 years back, which, of course, drew the attention of the free world gangs and cartels. Turf wars were fought and territorial lines were established and Tan’Desh fell under the control of the Maindai Cartel who very quickly parlayed the profits from the mining operations into a series of unsavory business ventures. Tan’Desh became one of the few outposts for trade and discrete business in the sector. And as the trilinium digs pinched out one by one, the criminal ventures were essentially all that remained. It was a dusty backwater–a teeming milieu of refugees, enterprising street traders, and petty criminals, well beyond the sphere of the Imperium, at least for the present. Beyond the city limits were a few scattered dwellings, mostly abandoned by the trillium miners, and vast stretches of barren dust.

Jaro watched as a pair of Tan'desh security officers moved slowly along the crowded pavement, the shine of their black ceramic plate body armor dulled by the ochre dust kicked up by the pedestrian traffic. The officers paused to briefly harass a refugee involved in a heated dispute with one of the street vendors before moving on, leaving the situation unresolved. Jaro's lips parted in a bemused sneer. Tan'desh security had a reputation, and that reputation was that if you hadn't done something to get on the wrong side of the Mandai Cartel, who were the undisputed rulers of the city’s northern market district, you didn't have much to worry about from Tan'desh security.

The cantina’s batwings parted and Bana Leech, a squat humanoid with gill-like flaps on either side of his neck, ambled out and approached Jaro.

“We just got confirmation from someone down at orbital control,” he croaked. “Vasco's ship made landfall an hour ago somewhere east of the city.”

Jaro spat and his bristling face split in an unsettling grin that bared his pointed teeth.

“So she really is going to come crawling back,” he said with relish. “I guess the boss was right after all.”

“Should we get some boys together and go bring her in?” Bana asked. Jaro shifted his weight from one sinewy leg to the other. He fished a silver case out of a pocket on the crossed bandoliers that circle his narrow chest and snapped it open, fishing out a wadded bundle of bacca leaves from inside which he popped into a cheek

“No need,” he said. “She’s coming here.”


…


Maxine Vasco brought the ship to rest at the bottom of a narrow gully in the scrublands half a mile east of the Tan’Desh city limits. An ancient river had once wound its way across a verdant landscape on this part of the planet, but time had dried the waters and all that remained of the nameless river was a series of deep sweeping scars in the dirt and stone, crowned with a smattering of scrubby vegetation.

From the operator’s chair of the refit Kestrel Class light hauler, she stared out of the mouth of the gully and across the long stretch of hardpan between the spot she had chosen to put down and the lights of Tan’Desh city, flickering in the distance. She drew a steadying breath, then, with a deliberate economy of motion she unhooked her safety belts and rose from the chair, exiting the cockpit and striding down the access corridor to the rear of the ship. Her boots clanked on the deck plates as she descended into the lower hold.

Here in the belly of the ship the sound of the interstellar engines powering down sounded like a thrumming heart beat. She wondered if this was what a child heard in the womb. She punched a switch on the wall and the cold bay lights sparked to life, illuminating the space in three progressive stages. The guts of the hauler were empty–had been for the better part of a solar year. Aside from a few crates of surplus military rations stacked neatly along one bulkhead and the gravimetric bike tethered down to docking hooks in the middle of the deck, she had been flying light.


…


Eighteen solar months ago, she is something of a legend on either side of the Imperium’s line of demarcation. She is a smuggler, freelancing for whoever has the credits or cash to make the effort worthwhile. For ten years she has slipped like an oiled eel back and forth across the DMZ between Imperium space and the free worlds transporting arms, untaxed spice, even refugees of the hundreds of Civil Wars.

She doesn’t moralize her work. She leaves that in the hands of philosophers and politicians. Coin is food. Coin is fuel. Coin keeps her flying and between jobs it brings her as close as she can ever get to the thing she has always valued most. Her freedom.


Of course, those who contract with the Mandai Cartel are never really free–especially when their Cartel contact is Gan Jorell, the kingpin of Tan’Desh city.


…


She kicked off her boots and unzipped the worn coveralls she habitually wore while shipboard, letting them drop to the deck in an unruly heap. She stood alone in her plain white underwear, feeling her skin prickle at the cold air generated by the artificial atmos system. She was slender; hard. Her body lined with lean fast twitch muscle. There were scars. A rippled white scar on the left side of her waist, another across her right shoulder. On her stomach shone the faint spiderweb of fading stretch marks. Every blemish carried the story of a battle.

A sleek spacer’s bodysuit lays folded on one of the provision crates beside a pair of steel toed combat boots. She steps into the suit, hearing the creak of the reinforced material. She fastened it up to the neck where a high collar wrapped protectively around her slender throat. The boots follow.

She belted on a holster and strapped it down to her right thigh. The Kaser model 4 concentrated pulse sidearm dropped into its place with practiced ease. She cut a dangerous profile–sleek, lean, and deadly.


…


One solar year ago, she turns down a contract and vanishes. There are questionable sightings across the free worlds and even some in Imperium space, but nothing is certain. Rumors swirl. She has gone rouge, she’s fallen in love, she has defected to the Imperium, she’s been arrested, she’s knocked up, she’s dead.

…


She untethered the grav bike and mounted the saddle. A few gestures on the keypad mounted to the inner left arm of her suit triggered a magnetic thunk that vibrated through the ship as the rear hatch seals released and the hatch began to swing down, the pneumatic arms controlling its slow descent releasing jets of pressurized vapor. The visor of her helmet fogged for a moment as the arid desert air met the cool moist artificial atmosphere inside of the cargo hold.

Her fingers flexed as she gripped the handles of the grav bike. She thumbed the starter and felt the familiar rolling hum and the antigrav units beneath the bike kicked on, lifting her on a controlled field of antigravity particles. She takes a deep breath and twists hard on the throttle.

Within seconds the gully was vanishing behind her and she was cutting a line across the hardpan toward Tan’Desh city, leaving a cloud of rust-red dust in her wake.


…


Jaro Kreel clocked the grav bike’s approach long before Bana Leech. He moved the wad of bacca leaves from one cheek to the other as he watched the bike carve its way through the crowd and the market stalls. He bit down hard, and sucked at the musky stimulant the leaves released as they mixed with his saliva. He adjusted the hang of his gunbelt as the bike drew closer, the whirring hum of the antigrav generators slowing to a rhythmic thrum as it stopped beside the shallow sidewalk, kicking up eddying swirls of choking dust. One thumb hooked under the belt, the other hovering in easy drawing distance of his pulse pistol, he stepped out to meet Max as she dismounted the bike.

She pulled off her helmet and stowed it deftly in a compartment under the seat before turning to face the assembled greeting party.

“Vasco.” Jaro’s fangs were bared in a sneering grin. Though the dark lenses he wore obscured his eyes, she met his gaze cooly, the reflection of the neon signage above the cantina made her blue eyes gleam in the half dark. Her face was lined and hardened beyond her thirty-five years. Her hair, so blonde it looked white in the unnatural light, was pulled back from her face and shorn almost to the skin around her ears and neck. She was impassive, her brows firm, her lips set, she didn’t back down.

“You look like shit,” he said, leaning down to leer at her through those inscrutable black circles. “More than usual, I mean.”

“Is Gan in his office?” she asked, unfazed.

“Maybe.” Jaro made a show of adjusting the fit of his gunbelt. “But I doubt he wants to talk to you after your little disappearing act. Even if he did, he’s pretty busy trying to solve our little rodent problem.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Hang on now, you’ve been gone awhile. You don’t know. The scuttle around here is that we’ve got a rat in the works. Presumably…” he turned back to Bana “‘Presumably’ means ‘it seems like’, Leech. Presumably, somebody has been working with the Imperium, feeding them tidbits on Jorell’s operation.” He scratched at a bare patch in the black bristles on his neck with two clawed fingers. “A person would have to be very stupid to do something like that and then come walking back through those doors.” He shot a glance back over his shoulder.

“What do you think, Leech?” He asked. “If some…” he turned to lock eyes with Max, “...scumsack went running her pretty little mouth to the limpnecks at the Imperium, telling all kinds of stories, and then came crawling back here to try and make nice with the very people she had been selling out for a year, how stupid would you say that person was?”

“Pretty damn stupid,” Bana grumbled.

“Pretty damn stupid, indeed!” Jaro barked. He spat a wad of leaves in the dust between Max’s boots. Her brow darkened.

“You bought that story, Kreel?” She asked. “You think that’s where I’ve been this whole time?” He scowled for a moment, then shook his head.

“Naw, not really,” he said, wiping a drip of spittle from his lip. He leaned in close enough that she could smell the musk of the bacca on his breath. “The story I bought was that you were just dead.”

She smirked.

“Funny, Kreel. I heard the same thing, but about you. Life’s full of disappointments.” Jaro’s scowl twitched just a bit.

“Leech,” he called, never breaking eye contact with Max. “Go tell the boss that Max Vasco is here and she wants to talk.” Bana huffed wearily and trudged through the batwings into the cantina. Jaro cocked his head in the direction of the doors.

“Go ahead in,” he said, stepping aside to clear her path. “I’ll be seeing you.” She went to brush past him and as she did he reached out, securing her firing hand by the wrist and twisting her back around to face him. His lithe build belied an animal strength that was chilling to experience. Despite her own significant strength she could have pulled free if she tried. He jerked her in close and his upper lip drew back in a snarl.

“I will be seeing you, Max,” he growled. His steel grip loosened and she pulled her hand free, stumbling back. His scowl melted into a victorious sneer.

Max glared at him before turning on her heels and pushing through the batwings and into the dark of the cantina she didn’t stop moving until she knew she was beyond his line of sight and even then she felt as though he had stripped her naked.


…


She is standing naked in the wide archway that opens onto the balcony of a spacious bedroom, the gauzy vermillion drapes shimmer in the warm breeze blowing up from Laharis Port down on the cape of the brilliant Leshian sea. The smell of spice rises up to her, rich and dreamlike. She savors the feeling of the balmy wind on her skin, thinking about the way it caresses the same places that Dahar had caressed an hour ago as the sun set over the ocean. The twin moons of Leshar are out now, bathing the sea in silver light. Throughout the city, cascading down towards the cape, soft amber lights gleam in the sandstone windows like constellations in the quiet night.

“Are you pining for the stars?” Dahar’s voice calls to her. He is in the bed, his golden Leshian body still entangled in the silk sheets. She turns, gracing him with a smile. Her hand goes almost unconsciously to her breasts as if she is shy about being looked at. There is something about his gaze. It pierces her every facade. Even fully clothed she feels laid bare by his quiet eyes, his disarming smile. She is conscious of the foolishness of the gesture. There are few places on her body that his hands and his mouth have not explored. The memory gives her a shiver.

“The breeze feels so good,” she says. “And you were sleeping.” He smiles, raising an eyebrow.

“A man only has so much…endurance,” he says. He speaks with that peculiar Leshian grammar that makes him feel like a child. She is drawn to his simplicity–his innocence. She has spent her life around duplicity, hidden meanings and friends who are enemies.

“You should stay,” he says. “You have been happy here.” She might have been annoyed at him for presuming to tell her how she feels. But she knows he is right. She has been on Leshan for a month, and already the thought of leaving gnaws at her. Her eyes drift to the data pad where it rests on a handmade chest, worked from some elegant Leshian wood. Dahar follows her gaze. His smile dims and it feels like a knife in her belly.

He is rising from the bed as she turns back out to stare out at the mother and daughter moons. Estar, the mother, Lita, the child. He told her their names on the first night they spent in this room, entangled in the sheets and basking in the afterglow of their love.

“2 billion years ago, Leshan had one moon,” he told her as she lay against his golden chest, listening to the sound of his breathing. “That’s the big one there we call Estar, the mother. She was struck by an asteroid, there, where you can see the crater on her side.” She saw it, a great wide circle that takes up a third of the moon's pale surface like an enormous scar.

“The dust and rock knocked loose by the asteroid developed an orbit around her and over many many thousands of years it formed the little one there we call Lita.”

The moons had loomed bright in the sky that night, so full of golden light it felt like she could reach out and touch them. Tonight they feel far away.

His hands are encircling her waist, his body feels hot and huge against her, enveloping her. His mouth is on her shoulder and her neck, soft and gentle as a whisper. She closes her eyes and just lets herself feel him there.

“You don’t have to go,” he says, his voice hums in his chest, she can feel his words in his embrace. “They don’t own you, and you owe them nothing.” He is simple, he sees things in plain terms. He has lived in the spice district nearly his whole life. His father is a man of business and respect. He is a man of books and poetry. She doubts if he has ever held a pulse pistol, let alone used one on another living thing, watching the concentrated energy bolt liquify flesh.

She loves him for that. She loves him for being so far away from the life she has known.


And there it is. She loves him.


The thought settles in a deep place in her body, heavy and hot, spreading out from her gut and bursting into her fingers and toes. She loves him, but he is simple. He doesn’t understand.

“People don’t say no to Gan Jorell,” she says. “When he sends a job it isn’t an offer, it’s a command.” Dahar’s hand brushes the scar on her waist, a reminder of a stray shot taken in a firefight on Lunus V. She swallows the urge to grab his hand and move it away.

“Gan Jorell profits very well from his stock in Leshian spice,” Dahar says calmly. “He wouldn’t jeopardize that by moving against us.”


“Us.” Now it’s “us”. The idea feels strange to her, as alien as this tall golden man who has anchored her in place.


“It’s one last job,” she says. “And then it will be just us. One job and I can walk away clean, if it goes well I can tell him I’m out of the game and he won’t–”

He turns her to face him, gentle, but firm. She won’t meet his gaze. She knows that if she does she will melt.

“One last job, 10 last jobs,” he says. “People don’t say no to Gan Jorell–until they do.” He takes her chin in his hand and ever so softly lifts her face. She hates his simplicity–how it cuts through the lies she tells herself.

She is taking his hand and leading him back to the bed.


…


She stepped down from the entry hall into the cantina. It was dark. The air filled with a haze of bacca smoke. It was a busy night. The tables along the upper level that ran around the perimeter of the room were nearly all packed with an assortment of Tan’Desh regulars, dangerous off-worlders, and a variety of faces Max recognized well after ten years taking jobs from Gan Jorell. A long bar ran down the center of the room, separated down the middle by a row of shelves full of bottles. The illuminated surface of the bar provided most of the light in the room aside from dim industrial looking sconces recessed periodically along the outer walls. On a platform, far back and to the left, a quartet of Telanian jazz musicians droned a discordant tune to match the hushed conversations of the patrons.

Max skirted the bar, moving along the raised seating area to the right, and moving towards a booth in the back corner of the room. Most of the patrons she passed minded their own business, but there were a few who’s eyes followed her as she moved past, some because of her reputation, some because of the rumors that still swirled about her disappearance. She settled into a corner booth where she could sit with her back to the wall, her hand resting on her thigh where she could have easy access to her gun.

…


Four months ago she is on a different world, walking into a different bar. The lights riot in time to the unrelenting beat of techno-thrash music that strikes her as she steps into the club like a wall of sound.

She can feel it in her blood, pumping like a relentless heartbeat. Her hand goes to the front of her jumpsuit where her swollen belly fights against the taut material. She wonders what the child hears.

She still thinks of it as “the child”. A boy? A girl? She doesn't know. Although the meld-station on her ship could provide her with answers to the many questions that she keeps pressed to the back corner of her mind, she refuses to check. She tells herself that she will, when she is finished. But even she knows that she may not be able to. She won’t let herself learn who it is that shares her body, growing bigger every moment.

If she does, then it becomes real. She’s not ready for that. Not yet.


First: one last job.


Her eyes scan the room.


…


Her eyes scanned the cantina. She could see Jorell’s personal soldiers almost at once. Some she knows already, others gave themselves away through subtle clues–a shift of posture that exposed a concealed pulse pistol, an unsubtle scanning of the bar patrons. Most glanced her way when they though her attention was elsewhere, but she saw them. She had lived the last six months looking over her shoulder. Even on the long dark endless nights alone watching the cold impassive stars through the little porthole in the bulkhead beside her bunk, she imagined the sound of approaching feet on the deckplates.


…


“Is it a boy or a girl?” Dahar asks.


“I don’t know,” she says. “What do you think?” They are on the southern beaches of Pandasar VI under a white linen canopy that flicks and billows in the sea salt breeze.

Dahar's father is here to settle a trade dispute and She and Dahar are here to lie out on the fabled beaches while he does so. She feels the sand beneath the woven blanket, holding her like an embrace. Dahar lounges on his side at her elbow. His hand is on her stomach, on a firm swelling that has just begun to hint at what is growing, slowly but surely inside of her.


…


Four solar months ago they are on Leshan, standing naked on the balcony and gazing down at the spice ports.

…


“A girl,” he says, after some thought. His hand still cups her almost flat stomach. “It feels like a girl.” She hopes he is wrong. She wouldn't find a boy preferable but she knows that the galaxy is uniquely cruel to little girls.

She can't imagine what he feels when he touches her that gives him such certainty. There is a slight firmness growing below her navel, perhaps a shine to her skin, but aside from her sickness in the morning, and afternoon, and night there have been few outward signs. Her hair has grown. She has kept it cropped close, almost shaved around the sides and back, for years. Now it hangs down past her ears, thick and silky from the hormones that course through her body and make her sick every morning. Sometimes when it is unruly the strands tickle her cheeks and nose and she pulls it back from her face in exasperation and imagines shaving it all off. But then she thinks about the cold cockpit of her hauler, the pinch of her spacer’s suit, the grainy bars of synthetic protein, and she wonders how it would look another inch longer. Dahar likes it. He would never say so, but he is without duplicity. She can read him the way he reads thick books of Kandian philosophy in bed after they make love.

She hasn’t felt movement yet. She dreads it somewhat, that fluttering squirming feeling. She wants time, she wants to adjust.


…


Six month earlier she is on the bridge of her hauler receiving an all clear from a Leshian flight control center to disengage from orbit and begin landing procedures


…


The pregnancy is a surprise. But it serves to cement a choice. She won’t take a child into the peril of smuggling. She will stay with Dahar, in his family's villa overlooking the cape and the Port, where the air in the late afternoon glimmers with the gold spice.

“It's not really a spice,” Dahar tells her. “It's from the krill that migrate to the cape three times a year to spawn.” They are walking along the coast road as they often do at sunset. His hand reaches for hers and she takes it hesitantly. She desires this closeness and she loves the feeling of his touch, but since the pregnancy began she sometimes feels that she has fallen into the arms of a complete stranger.

…


Four months ago he is a handsome stranger smiling at her from across the terrace of an open air eatery in the bread district. She is wearing a Leshian wrap dress she bought at a market stall the day before. It's the sort of thing she never buys herself, but she loved the pattern of the linen weave.


She is smiling back.


…


“When it is warm enough, the males fertilize the calm waters in the bay and the females lay their eggs in the fertile water. Once this is done, the parents die.”

“That's it?” She asks. “They just have sex, pop out some kids, and croak?” he smiles at this. He's is always amused by her when she talks like a spacer.

“So to speak,” he say. “They don't really have sex, they just swim around, fertilize each other, and ‘croak’.”

“That's no fun,” she says. Her eyes go suddenly wide “If you tell me that the spice is the krill's…you know…stuff…I'm going to puke right now.” She might do that anyway.


He shakes his head.


“No, that would be ghastly. The parent shrimp decompose so the hatchling can feed on their bodies and as they do they release a kind of mineral byproduct into the water. We sift the water and dry the minerals and that is where the spice comes from.”

“I am going to puke,” she says. But she doesn't.

“In a few months, you'll see it. The bay turns into gold and as the sea water evaporates in the heat of the day you can wave your hand through the air and come away shimmering. And at night it catches the moonlight and the lights of the city and it sparkles like a galaxy over the water”

She looks up at him as he stares out over the water. She loves him when he is wistful this way.

“It's why all of you are…shiny…isn't it?” She asks. He nods.

“Yes, especially those who grow up near the bays where the krill come to spawn. We breathe it, we put it in our food. Even our blood shimmers. The old ones most of all. My grandfather worked a sifting barge for his whole life and by the time he died you would have thought he was carved out of solid gold.”

…


They are laying on the beaches of Pandasar VI. Dahar's hand is on her stomach.

“My father is suspicious,” he says, with a grin. “He asked me why you stopped drinking coffee.” She doesn't move. She lays on the blanket, on the sand, her eyes closed.

“Don't. Tell. Him.” she says, emphasizing every word. “You know what he'll say.”

Dahar has never suggested marriage. Like so many younger Leshians he sees the tradition as an outdated institution. Dahar's father is not young.

She thinks that she could marry Dahar, if it came to that. This man from another world that she met only five month ago and with whom she is about to raise a child. A child that will share the heritage of two planets that were once strangers just as she and Dahar were once strangers.

He has told her that he loves her. She believes him. She loves him too. She hasn't said it and she knows that it pains him. But he is as patient as he is simple.

Dahar's eyes are far away, down the beach. A cadre of armed Pandasan constables in white uniforms stroll down the beach, their eyes are on the water.

“They are looking for rebels from the northern province,” he says. “My father told me they sometimes bring their boats down to raid the towns along the coast.”

Max thinks about the pulse pistol in her luggage back at the cabana.

“He said the Imperium has been trying to open up negotiations for some time,” Dahar went on. “But it is going slowly. The rebels are devoted to their cause. It’s admirable, in a way. The reports I have heard are that they are holding off southern forces with almost nothing. Gunpowder rifles, improvised explosives, even hand weapons, swords and axes and the like.”

She rises from the sand and kisses him.“Let's go inside,” she says.


…


Max tapped a touch pad built into the wrist of her jumpsuit. She heard a chirp as a nearly invisible transmitter affixed to the skin behind her ear switched on.

“Argus, can you hear me?” She asked, letting her eyes rove across the cantina for what felt like the twentieth time. The transmitter hummed, stimulating the bones behind her ear she could make out the artificial voice of Argus, her ship’s onboard AI.

“Yes Captain Vasco. You are coming through.”

“Jorell has this place loaded for bear,” she said. She kept her voice low, just another murmur in the midst of the jazz and hushed conversations. “I might need to get out of here in a hurry.”

“I am attempting to establish a security scan of the cantina interior, but I am encountering some interference. Mr. Jorell likely has inhibitors installed throughout the structure.”

“Anything else you can give me?” A door at the end of the bar opened and Bana Leech trudged out, approaching one of the bartenders. Her blue eyes followed him.

“The schematics I have been able to access indicate that there may be a discrete exit through the kitchen.” The bartender was pointing in her direction. Bana Leech turned and spotted her at her gloomy corner table.

“I’ll have to improvise,” she said. She thumbed the button on her wrist and the transmitter chirped as it disconnected.

Bana sidled up to her table. His heavy lidded yellow eyes sizing her up in the pulsing light of the cantina.

“Mr. Jorell is ready for you” he croaked. Max stared him down for a moment, her cool, blue eyes unblinking. Then she stood. His hand, resting on the pistol at his side, flexed almost imperceptibly.

“Through the kitchen door,” he said. It was clear he intended her to go first.

Max obliged, striding towards the swinging kitchen door. She could hear Leech trudging heavily behind her.

…


They are in the cabana on Pandasar VI. It is night and a cool breeze rustles the leathery palm leaves outside the open windows.

Dahar lounges on the bed, his white linen shirt open over his gold chest. He is listening to a Leshian aria over the entertainment unit built in the wall of the room. She is certain the singer's voice drifting out into the night air is annoying some of the other guests, but there is rapture in Dahar's face.

They make love when they return from the beach as the white blue sun sets and paints the sky over the ocean in shades of lavender and green.

It is different since the pregnancy. Tender, slow, intimate in a way that frightens her. Dahar drifts off to sleep afterwards, worn down by the long morning under the sun and their hour entangled together in the bed. She lays awake staring at him, and she cries. She has never cried afterwards before, not even the first time with that boy from her father's crew, fumbling together clumsily in a rear bunk of the freighter. She doesn't remember his name, just his gray eyes and a pimple on his cheek that never seemed to go away.

She cries, and she wonders if the baby will have Dahar's eyes. Then she sleeps.


They wake two hours later as dusk gives way to night. Now Dahar plays his music and she peruses a resort menu on her data pad.

“All of this sounds good,” she says, “and all of it will make me throw up,” Dahar's father noticed that she stopped drinking coffee, but like a good smuggler, she has managed to keep the frequent bouts of vomiting off of the radar.


A smuggler. That life of five months ago feels like a strange dream.


She tosses the data pad onto the bed.

“You decide,” she says. “I'm going to take a shower.” Dahar picks up the data pad dutifully.

“Anything for you, my love.”

He says it so easily, as though they have had this conversation for years. She longs to say, “I love you,” to fall into his arms, to feel him pull her against that broad golden chest where she can forget herself and forget Gan Jorell and forget the cold lonely voyages with nothing outside her hauler but Imperium patrols and the deep dark crushing black between the stars.

But she does not. She retreats to the tiny bathroom where a single cold light makes her look as sick as she so often feels.

…


“Momma is sick, little peach.” She is five years old and standing beside her parent's bunk. The deck plating is cold under her bare feet and the hum of the interstellar engines far below in the guts of the freighter fill her small ears.

Her mother looks pale and hollowed out, her blonde hair, nearly white, lays sallow on the thin pillows. When she holds Max's tiny hand, Max can feel her trembling.

“Why?” Max asks. It's the kind of question a child asks and a parent can't answer. Her mother tries to reply but all that comes out is a fit of course dry coughing that seizes her with alarming violence until she is curled in on herself in the rough sheets.

Max feels her father looming behind her, filling the room. His shadow eclipses her.


“Your mother needs rest,” he rumbles.


His hand on her shoulder feels impossibly heavy.


…


The double doors opened onto the sallow light of the cantina kitchen. A hulking Thracian chef oversaw a motley brigade of five cooks who slaved over stoves, skillets, and fryers. Further back, three dishwashers ran seemingly endless racks of plates cups through an industrial sanitizer. She didn't clock any guns, but there were knives, fryer vats–plenty of unpredictable variables.

She counted the steps from the double doors to the rear of the kitchen which opened onto a service hallway. Twenty six. She spotted the door Argus mentioned. It was small, another ten or fifteen steps down the hallway to the left. To the right, two of Jorell's bodyguards stood at the foot of a wide stairwell.

One she knew, Race Caville. He was tall, broad, with a thick mullet of black hair. He was good looking in his own way save for a scar that ran from the corner of his lip to just below his eye, exposing a bit of his teeth on that side.

The other, another human, she didn’t know. Squat, thick necked. and shaved bald. In the place of hair he had an elaborate tattoo of an old-earth tiger.

The tattooed man took her roughly by the arm and pushed her against the wall, hard. He pulled the pulse pistol from the holster on her hip, handing it to his compatriot before running his hands down her back, her sides, the insides of her thighs. He let his hands linger in a few places and she ground her teeth to keep herself from grabbing his wrist and twisting it until it snapped.

Satisfied, he turned her around, handing the gun to Leech.

“No offence, Max,” Race said. He attempted a smile, but his scar made it look like a sneer. She said nothing, but glowered at him, cooly.


She took the stairs slowly, feeling Leech lurking close behind her.


There were twenty in total.


Twenty stairs. Fifteen steps to the rear door. Twenty-sex steps to the cantina. Two guards in the hall. Seven guards in the cantina. Two bartenders. Six cooks. Three dishwashers. Two or three dozen kitchen knives.


No gun.


At the top of the stairs the Leech pushed past her and thumbed a scanner to the left of the mechanized door. There was a chirp and hum as the lock released and the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

He put a firm hand on her shoulder and shoved her inside.




…


She is hearing voices. It is Dahar and someone else. She is standing in the bathroom of the cabana on Pandasar VI, staring at the mirror in the single light that makes her look hollow.

Dahar sounds upset. As if by instinct her left hand goes to her stomach. The short white-blonde hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She shuts off the light and cautiously cracks open the door.

“What do you want?” Dahar's voice, speaking to someone she can't see. From the hall she can just make out the corner of the bed. There is something in his voice that runs down her spine like ice water–a tone she has never heard before. He is angry. He is afraid.

Her pulse pistol is in a suitcase in a closet on the other side of the hall. Dahar was unhappy that she insisted on bringing it. She brings it most places.

The other voice is speaking now. It does not speak in common, and it is a language she doesn't know. It's a man's voice, barking and insistent. She thinks she hears a third voice as well, but can't be sure. The other person is repeating some kind of demand with increasing insistence.

She hears Dahar responding but his words are lost in the spike of adrenaline that pulses through her body, activating instincts that have laid dormant for five months while she stood naked with her lover on the balcony over a sea of spice and laid out on white sand beaches.

The door slides silently open, masked by the elevated voices in the bedroom and she steals across the hall like a cat, crouching low by the suitcase and opening it. She throws aside her clothes, things she has bought or things Dahar has bought for her, she kept so few clothes before, and her hand closes on the cool metal grip of the pistol.

She thumbs the safety scanner on the side of the grip and there is a high pitched whir as the weapon arms.

She is pressed against the wall, moving with measured steps towards the bedroom and peeking around the edge of the entryway.

There are two men–Pandasans, like the constables Dahar pointed out on the beach, but these men wear black clothes, dirt stained and wet with sea spray as if they have just come from the dark ocean. Their lower faces are obscured behind some kind of woven scarf or bandana.

They each carry a short pulse rifle. She recognized the make, Kaser 9s, she thinks, or something like that–nasty pieces of business.


And expensive.


One of them is pointing his rifle at Dahar, who is still stretched out on the bed. His bare golden chest suddenly looks vulnerable. Dahar's hands are raised, one still clutching the data pad.

From the bed, Dahar can see her in the shadow beyond the entryway. His eyes dart to her and then back at the strangers.


They notice.


One of them, the one who isn't holding Dahar at gunpoint is moving towards the hall.


She feels like she is going to vomit.


She rounds the corner, finds her target, and squeezes the trigger in one fluid motion. The dynamo in the pistol rolls over with a satisfying thrum and there is a crackling pop and sizzle as the left half of the Pandasan's face melts and sprays back against the cabana wall. The force of the shot pulls him in a pirouette and he crumples to the floor.

She takes aim and fires again. Too quickly, the second Pandasan is quick, pulling his head to the left so that her shot peels a chunk of plaster out of the archway that leads out towards the beach.


The Pandasan is bringing his gun around and Dahar is rising from the bed.


There is a struggle. She is searching for a clear shot.


There is a pop.


Dahar slams back against the bed, his large body knocking it askew, then he collapses on the floor beyond her line of sight.

Her next shot doesn’t miss. The Pandasan's eye socket caves inward as the shot jerks his head back. He slides down the wall leaving a trail of his own liquified brain on the white plaster.


The aria plays on.


…


She is five, she is standing on a grassy moon whose name she will never be able to remember. Her father is beside her, towering over her. His hand on his shoulder is as heavy as lead. She wants to shake it off. She stares down at the humble grave and the plain unmarked stone that serves as its marker.

“Say goodbye to your mother.”


Behind them she can hear the engines rumbling to life.

…


Gan Jorell was sitting behind a half moon desk, his blotchy purple face and the shiny rolls of blubber around his neck making him look for all the worlds like some gelatinous confection. He was a Toglyte, like most members of the cartel, a species that prided themselves on consumption. Corpulence was a sign of status on a planet where cannibalism of the lowest caste was considered a delicacy by the elite.

His shapeless body was draped in a billowy garment of some sheer material that glimmered gaudily in the dim light of the office.

It had been nearly a year since Max sat across a table from her father’s old employer and the pungent stench that hovered around him like a cloud seemed particularly noxious now as her taciturn escort practically shoved her into a chair on the opposite side of the desk.

“Max,” Jorell burbled, with the tone of a disapproving parent, interlacing his stubby fingers over the broad expanse of his belly. “Maxine you cut me, you cut me to the bone. Half a solar year and nary word. I could hardly eat a morsel for all the worry you put me through.” Max’s face was impassive.

“You don’t look much worse for the wear.”

Jorell laughed, his gut shaking like jelly.


…


She is on her third date with Dahar. They take a public transport skiff out of Laharis and out into the farm valley where she is stunned by hills, so deep green that they are nearly blue. They sample jellied honey, a sweet amber mound on a delicate china plate that wobbles in her grip. Flakes of spice glitter inside, suspended in the jelly. It is the first time she tastes it and the robust tang as the flakes dissolve on her tongue with the honey is a memory that will return to her often as she lies awake in her bunk, listening to the hum of the interstellar engines, her hands wrapped around her growing belly.

She will remember feeling like she did not belong in his world of leisure and delicate food and spice. She will remember how she never wanted to leave it behind.


…


Leech her pulse pistol on the desk with a thunk.

“This was all she had on her,” he said. He took a post close to her right hand shoulder, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body. He was armed, a heavy black pistol holstered on his right thigh, away from her. Jorell reached out and pulled the pistol over close to himself, he gave it a playful twist and it twirled lazily on the desk like the spinner in a children’s game.


“I am sorry for your loss,” he said, almost sounding sincere.

“What do you know about what I’ve lost?” She asked, terse. He glanced down at a datapad laying close to hand.

“This young man, on Pandasar VI,” he offers. “Ugly business, with those rebels.”

“His name was Dahar,” she snaps. “I loved him.” Leech shifts towards her but Jorell gives him a reproving look.

“Yes your lover, killed–”

“Murdered.”

“Murdered, yes, yes. Tragic.”

“And my child.”

Jorell was silent.

“My child, Gan. My baby!”

He was quiet for a long moment, his eyes on the chrome plated pistol laying on the desk in front of him. Its muzzle had come to rest from spinning pointed at Maxine.

“Ours is a hazardous line of work, Maxine,” he remarked, eyeing her from under a heavy brow. “People who make their living do what we do, surviving by these things…” he tapped the gun and it wobbled unsteadily, “...they take their lives in their hands. And the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to get close to them.” His eyes slid from the gun up to her face. She could practically hear the slick squish of mucus as they did. She shifted slightly in her seat. She loathed the way her skin crawled under his gaze and she despised the way he let his eyes say things that his mouth did not. “If I can give you any advice in this life,” he said, “it's that attachments are nothing but liabilities.”

“You’re not my father, Gan,” she said. He leaned back, his chair creaking under his shifting bulk.

“No. I suppose not. But I gave your father the same advice when he brought your mother around here the first time. Attachments in our line of work are hazardous to one’s health. But he was a boy and he thought he was in love.” He chuckled ruefully. “He brought her back from some podunk little dishwater colony on the ass-end of the free worlds. She was just a little barefoot hick, barely more than a girl herself. She was in the family way,” he said, as if the memory were just springing to the front of his mind, “Pregnant with you. I remember her in the cantina wobbling around after him, all swollen up like a Beltanian tick about to pop.”

Max choked down a response. She could smell Leech’s sweat in the close air of the office.

“You know,” Jorell mused, “if you would let your hair grow out just a bit, you’d be the spitting image of her.” His voice was almost wistful and it made her want to kick him in the teeth.

“Dad was always bad at taking advice,” she said with the shadow of a smile that she hoped would mask her discomfort. “It runs in the family.”


…


She is thirteen. She is standing in a Tan’Desh cargo hangar, with her single bag of belongings resting by her boots in the dirt. She stares up at the monolithic shape of the hauler, her father’s hauler, its exhaust ports steaming in the cold morning air.

She watches as her father’s old crew loads the cargo bay. Aden Tan, her father’s first mate approaches her. He is wearing her father’s jacket. He smiles down at her. His teeth are yellow.

“It’s just business, Max,” He says, bending down to meet her eyeline. “This is just us taking what your old man owed us, fair and square.” He scratches at the stubble on his chin with dirty fingernails. “If he made good before he ate his gun…” he trails off. She is still staring up at the ship. It looks like her father. Huge. Immovable.

Tan’s eyes dart back towards the ship and he leans in closer.

“Listen Max, you don’t need to stay here,” he says. His smile makes the back of her neck itch. “We can use someone to cook, clean laundry, and what not. It’d be good for the boys to have a pretty face around the ship.” He reaches out and takes a lock of her long hair, so blonde it's nearly white, between grease stained fingertips. “Just like your momma,” he says.

She wants to bite his fingers. She wants to scream. She wants to run.

The most she can manage is to drop her eyes and shake her head. She doesn’t look at him again. She doesn’t see the anger that slides like a shadow across his face for just a moment. But then he’s smiling again. He stands.

“Well all right. See you around, kid.”


She is standing, staring up at the patch of clouds where Aden Tan flew away in her father’s ship, long after he is gone.


…


Jorell spread his hands.

“So what am I to do with you?” He asked. He let the question dangle in the air between them like a baited hook before going on. “When you have treated me so badly, and after everything I have done for you.” She doesn’t reply. She stares down at the desk.

“Lest you forget, I was the one that gave you safe harbor after your father took the long walk. I was the one that financed that fancy little ship. It was me that put your name in the ear of half of your client list. I made you what you are.” His hand was resting on her gun.

“And in exchange for my generosity, my magnanimity, we made a deal, Max, didn’t we? And that deal was when I had work for you to do, that work would be your priority. Your responsibility.” He pinched his brow in a show of frustration.

“But suddenly, when I need you, you don’t respond. Not a word for months and then its rumors about dirt poor rebels and murders in a resort on the far side of the sector. Then nothing, poof,” he gestured in the air in front of his face. “Max Vasco walks into a Pandasan transport junction and disappears like smoke in the wind.”

“I had personal business,” she said, “things that I had to take care of.” Jorell ignored her.

“And now, out of the blue the Imperium is waylaying my shipments, poking their nose into my business ventures, arresting my associates, overturning every rock I don’t want overturned, and I think to myself, someone must be telling them where to look.” He glowered at her, his eyes seeming to gleam in the shadows beneath his brows.

“And now that you come crawling back to me with nothing to show for it but a gun and a dead child I should just welcome you back with open arms? The lost little lamb coming back to the fold?” The anger was feigned, and he knew she was aware of the artifice. This was his favorite game, making people do this song and dance before he pounced on them like some kind of sadistic jungle cat. She thought it would be preferable if he just picked up the gun and blew her head off.


She played along. Her steely face broke a bit and her eyes dropped.

“I had no where else to go.”

She thought about Dahar and let the memory fuel a single small tear.


…

She is stumbling towards the bed. Her body feels light, like it is full of air. Her legs are shaking and she nearly trips over the sprawled body of the first Pandasan who lies crumpled in a bleeding heap in the middle of the floor. Dahar is on his side between the bed and the front wall of the cabana. She rolls him onto his back and hears him draw a ragged breath.


He’s alive.


A black singed patch on his lined shirt smoulders and just below his chest the golden skin is melted and raw around a deep wound like a small crater, singed black flesh in a corona around a raw red wound that is already weeping his strange gilded blood.

“Hey,” she breathes, feeling her voice tremble. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, I’ve got you.” He is staring up at her, his eyes wide. Confused.

“What?” He says. “What…what…”

“Don’t talk,” she says, keeping her voice low. “Don’t talk, just stay with me, okay? You’re going into shock.” The wound seeps blood each time he draws breath, crimson laced with gold. She is tearing off her shirt and cramming it into the wound. She keeps her hand pressed there feeling the blood soaking the wadded fabric as she tries vainly to put pressure on the wound as she reaches for the blanket from the bed.

She is covering him. He is beginning to shake.

“No no no, hey, Dahar stay with me.”

“It’s cold…”

“Stay with me.”

His eyes are drifting, as if he can no longer focus on her face. His golden blood is soaking through her shirt and running through her fingers.


…


Two weeks ago they are walking along the coast road on Lashan at sunset.


“...they just swim around, fertilize each other, and ‘croak’.”


“That's no fun,”


…


He is staring at the ceiling of the cabana. He is trying to murmur something but the words don’t come. She is desperately trying to hold in the spice laced blood that flows out of him like a crimson river.

“Don’t,” she begs. “Don’t go.”



He is fading. His eyes drift away.


“No, Dahar!”


His breath is slowing.


“I love you,” she says. “I love you, Dahar! I love you!”


He doesn’t hear her.


…


“I lost myself,” she said. “Lost my head…there was Dahar, and then the baby…it all happened so fast and I just got caught up then, when he died…and then the baby…” she wiped away the tear. Jorell was watching her, his fingers tapping on the arm of his chair.

“You know as well as I do that you’ve burned that bridge, Max,” he said. “If I took you back now it would make me look weak,” his tone was conciliatory, but she could read the malice that lurked beneath the surface.

“What if,” she said, slowly. “I told you I had something with me that would change your mind?” He was still. Only the slightest movement of his brow indicated a change in his disposition.

“If you did,” he said at last, interlacing his fingers, “It would have to be of considerable interest for me to consider it.”

“I think you’ll be interested,” she said.

“Oh, do you? And why is that?” She unzipped the collar of her suit and pulled out a small data chip that she had secreted away in her bra. She dropped the chip on the table between them.



“Because, I found your rat.”


…


She is on another planet, in another bar. In the center of four pillars which supported the arched roof, a band of four Deltans in wild black costumes sway and bob violently to the driving rhythm of the techno-wave music they seemed to be beating out of their strange instruments. On a dance floor that wraps around the platform, a writhing stew of creatures, some humanoid, others less so, thrash and gyrate as if carried on the ocean of thundering sound.The pounding music beats down on her, as the club-goers lose themselves in an orgy of thrashing sound down on the dance floor. The child in her womb shifts, as if responding to the cacophony. She lays a steadying hand against it. She ignores the crowd. Her eyes scan the room, slowly, searching for a particular face.

She spots him in the back, at a booth, a slight man in a red jacket. Two young Deltan women draped themselves over him, one massaging his crotch through his leather pants, the other lifts a bottle, mixing a technicolor shot in his mouth. He is laughing raucously as she begins her approach, stalking towards him like a hunter, her hand on the gun at her hip. She moves quickly, despite her swelling belly.

He spots her when she is some twenty paces away. At first he seems confused, then his eyes go wide enough that she can see the panicked whites even in the dark of the club.

She weaves to the left before he is able to throw one of the girls aside, drawing his gun and firing. His shot flashes bright in the dark of the bar and there is a sudden noise of panic as those close enough realize that a firefight has started. She fires off a warning shot that goes well above his head. She has no intention of killing him, but if he thinks she does, all the better.

He is up, stepping over the Deltan girl he threw to the floor and racing towards a rear exit. She doesn’t give chase. She pushes through the crowd of club goers who are scattering in confusion. She catches an elbow to the stomach and yells, throwing a hard punch at the offender and sending them sprawling. By the time they get up she has already reached the entryway.

“Argus, do you have him?” She asks, tapping the touch pad on her inner arm.

“I have a lock on your target,” the ship's mechanical voice responds. “He has exited the building and is moving down the rear alley, heading east. He appears to be running.”


Her grav-bike is still running outside.


She spots him after two short blocks. He is running down the pavement beside an old warehouse, illuminated by tall angular streetlamps. The tail of his red leather coat flaps behind him as he looks back, hearing the hum of her grav bike. He picks up speed, his boots flying beneath him as skids to a halt and dives left down a narrow lane. She doesn’t follow him. She takes the next left, rounding the block and catching him just as he emerges from the lane. He flails and stumbles as he sees her coming, trying to correct but too late. His gun is in his hand but he is off balance.

She draws her pistol and takes a shot. His left leg spins out from under him and he collapses as she flies by. She negotiates a drifting stop some eight yards down from where he is struggling to get to his feet.

She dismounts, her changing body makes this difficult to do quickly. Then she is moving towards him up the pavement, shining with recent rain. He is crawling towards his gun which lies between them on the concrete, his maimed leg is dragging behind him.

His fingers are eight inches from the weapon when she kicks it aside, into the gutter, leveling her own chrome plated pistol at his unruly fringe of brow hair.

He looks up at her, moving slowly, his hands raised as he lays like a turtle on his belly.

“Max?” He asks. “Max bloomin’ Vasco? Bloody hell, love, I thought you were dead.” He braces his hands on the ground and tries to roll over.

“Take it nice and slow Riggs,” she says.

“No fear, m’dear, no fear,” he grunts, doing his best to grin through the pain. He manages to roll into a seated position against the wall of the building where he had collapsed. The streets are mercifully deserted at this time of night. He looks up at her, blinking as if to clear his vision. His brows leap as he sees the ballooning front of her jumpsuit.

“Blimey,” he says. “Look at you, you’re…well…positively glowing. Shit…I’m going to owe Banon Marul so many credits…” He flashes a disarming grin, his hands still hovering in the air beside his thin face. He winces as a fresh wave of pain shoots up his leg from where her shot had maimed his ankle.

“Shut up,” she says.

“Shutting up, yes, of course, by all means. I just…I hope that as you are…erm…mounting your little campaign of…whatever this is, you would keep in mind the very pleasant and fruitful working relationship you and I have enjoyed for so many–” she leveled the pistol at his forehead.

“Shut. Up.” Whatever he had planned to say next, he swallowed it. Jaxon Riggs is good at precisely three things in life, gun running, talking his way into the beds of undiscerning women, and talking his way out of the trouble the first two so frequently introduced into his day. Choosing not to talk, however, is not one of his strengths.

Max reaches into a pocket on the side of her suit and pulls out a small metal device about the size of a bean. A rubber cap covers a thumbtack sized hypodermic needle that protrudes from one end.

“Your leg is hit bad,” she says. “It’s going to take a city medical team a while to get here, if they come at all. This stimulator will keep you alive until they do. You might not even need a prosthetic support put in.”

“Well,” he said, trying to move his affected leg slightly and immediately thinking better of the idea. “Such a rosy prognosis. I imagine there is a catch?”

“You have information that I need. Not just hearsay and rumor, hard proof. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

Riggs swallows hard. Any of the winning charm he has tried to muster draining from his face.

“Max,” he says, his voice gone dry. “Max, let’s be reasonable. I can’t just…” She shifts her aim from his head to his undamaged leg.

“Woah!” he cries, raising his hands in protest, rather than surrender. “Woah woah woah! Okay! Okay! Just…uuuugh.” He reaches down for his jacket pocket. She tenses, moving her finger to the trigger.

“I have what you want,” he says, pointing towards his inner pocket. Slowly, he reaches inside.


…


Gan Jorell’s eyes gleamed as he stared down at the chip, glittering in the light from his desk lamp.

“You didn’t really think I’d come empty handed, did you?” She asked, a smile creeping across her face. Jorell looked from the chip to her and then back to the chip and a hearty chuckle rose in his throat.

“You are a sly fox, Vasco,” he said, reaching for the chip. “I should have known you’d be holding out an ace,” he held the chip up to get a better look. “What exactly do you have on here?” He asked, shrewdly.

“Proof,” she said. “Hard proof.” Beside her, Bana Leech was leaning in to get a better look himself.

Jorell slid his datapad from the desk and slid the chip into the receiver slot on the side. The pad chirped as he opened the single data file stored inside. He read for a moment, his face impassive, then his eyes went suddenly cold. They seemed for a moment black and glassy as the eyes of a shark about to bite.

He moved with a deft speed that belied his girth. In a flash, her gun was in his hand aimed at her, point blank. He squeezed the trigger.


…


She is seven and her hands are ringing from the kickback of the shot she has just missed. The empty whiskey bottle sits on a stump ten yards away, still and unbroken. The gun lies at her feet.

Her father is looming over her. He bends down to pick up the gun and she can smell the alcohol that hangs around him like a cloud. He is shoving the gun back into her hands. He is on one knee, looking her in the face. Even bending down to meet her eye, he is impossibly huge, he reminds her of a fierce wild bear from the only picture book she has. Her mother used to read her the stories, slow, halting, sounding out each word as if she were a child herself.

“It’s you, or them,” he says. His voice rumbles in his barrel chest like low thunder. “And sometimes it just comes down to who is holding the gun. Now try again.”

She is aiming. She fires.


…



There was a bang and a flash and the smell of burned flesh. Something hot and wet splattered on her face. Then Gan Jorell was screaming.


The gun had overloaded and exploded in his hand the instant he pulled the trigger, exactly as she had intended. She had made the adjustments to the weapon’s internals carefully the night before she dropped orbit and descended towards the planet.

Gan was clutching at a charred and shredded stump of half melted flesh where his hand had once been. What remained of it was splattered across his desk, his silver shirt, Max, and the datapad he had dropped when he went for Max’s gun.

Max kicked her chair back with all the strength she had, sliding three feet back across the stone tile floor. Before Bana Leech could even process what was happening, she had snagged him by the belt and jerked him hard to the left, bringing his gun within reach. She rose as he stumbled in front of her, grabbing the gun, jamming it into his side and firing off two shots that sounded flat and muffled by his thick body. The gun had a stronger kick than she was used to and she very nearly dropped it after the second shot, but she held on, her father’s wild and rugged face hovering in front of her like a phantom. Leech crumpled, hitting the floor like a sack of tubers dropping off the back of a market wagon.

She bounded across the desk like a panther. Jorell was still gaping in frantic disbelief at the charred meat that had once been his right hand when he felt her pressing the barrel of Leech’s gun between the folds of his neck. She was kneeling on the desk, one knee pinning him back into the chair which threatened to capsize under their combined weight. “I was me, you piece of shit,” she growled. “I’m your goddamn rat!” She drew the gun back and struck him hard across the face, his thin skin splitting and spurting thick dark Toglyte blood.

“Maxine, please…” he burbled. She struck him again and he began to weep. She crammed the barrel of the gun between his lips, pushing it in until he gagged.


…


She is sitting on the edge of the edge of the bed, her hands still gleaming with Dahar's drying blood. A Pandasan constable in a white uniform is asking her questions. She gives answers but she feels as though the voice she hears is not her own. It is as if someone else is speaking, far away, in another room or another world. Dahar lies beside the two dead rebels, zipped up in neat, identical bags. Beside the bed his blood dries like gold leaf on the tiles.

Another constable is holding one of the rebels’ rifles in gloved hands and he is examining it closely. He says something in Pandasan, diverting the attention of the constable that has been questioning her.

She does not understand the words of their conversation, but she sees the confusion, sees them gesturing to the gun, looking down at the rebels where they lie neatly arranged beside the father of her child, piecing something together that doesn't fit.

For the first time, she feels something flutter.


…


“I knew it was you,” she said. “The second I watched the light go out in his eyes I knew it was you.” She scraped up the data pad from where it had dropped on the table, still splattered with what used to be Jorell's hand. She pressed it against the side of his face.


…


She is standing over Jaxon Riggs, whose blood mingles with the rainwater on the sidewalk of another city on another world. He is drawing a small data pad from his inside pocket and shakily thumbing the biometric scanner to unlock it.

“Pandasar, yes? Five months back?” he asks. She feels Dahar’s offspring press an elbow against her ribs and winces.

“What do you know about Padasar?” She asks. Her gun still draws a bead on his forehead.

“I know a few things,” he says, navigating through the files on his pad. He sniffs and scratches his nose. The air around them is damp and cold. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know how the rebels got their hands on top of the line military rifles,” she said. “I want to know who supplied them and why.” Riggs coughs, thinks for a moment and begins quickly tapping his way through a series of embedded files.

“Why do I get the feeling there is a particular name you are looking for?” he asks. She does not respond. It takes him a few moments. “In my line of work, it pays to keep certain records in a triple encrypted folder, just in case one of my colleagues decides that they need to pin some…misconduct…on a convenient scapegoat.” He holds up the data pad in a shaking hand.

“6 months ago I was commissioned by an interested third party to arrange the transport of two thousand and ten crates of military ordinance to the front lines of the civil war on Nejelus Prime,” he says. “The large cargo hauler that I was asked to commission for the delivery was scheduled to make four stops along the free world side of the Imperium border to drop off humanitarian aid packages arranged by the Imperium ministry of mercy, on their way to Nejelus.”

She takes the data pad from him and skims through the itinerary displayed on the screen.

“Delta Prime, Asalius II, Jalus Prime…and Pandasar IV.” She scowls.

“Ten crates of medical supplies were signed for in the northern Pandasan province of Rilu,” Riggs continues. “Then…keep scrolling…” she does. “2000 crates of military ordinance were signed for at military outpost 127 in orbit above Nejelus Prime. Precisely as ordered.”

“They ordered 2010 crates,” she says. Riggs shakes his head. “I was told to ship 2010 crates,” he replies slowly. “And after the delivery was completed, I was told that there had been an error and that, to avoid having the Imperium sniffing around by business, I was to ‘fix’ the numbers on my initial invoice and that I would be paid for the difference.”

“And the ten missing crates you shipped, those ended up in a northern province on Pandasar IV.”

Riggs nodded.

“And this third party that made the arrangements,” she says. “Who was it?” He shrugs and coughs.

“Some representative of a shell company without all that much of a paper trail behind them,” he said. “You know how it works. Standard practice when you want to keep the Imperium off the scent.”

“So you don’t know anything I haven’t already figured out,” she says. “You know, I'd think twice about wasting so much of someone’s time when they’ve got their gun to your head, Riggs.” She’s angry, and she is exhausted, she is running out of time. Riggs rolls his eyes and laughs, a genuine laugh that tempts her to squeeze her trigger.

“Max,” he laughs. “Max, love, I didn’t think you of all people would need this much hand holding. I can’t tell you who contacted me directly, but there are enough breadcrubs there. Look who commissioned the hauler that made the drops.” She does, scrolling back through the documents on his screen.

“Astarion Corp,” she says. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“Nor should you have, because they didn’t exist before 6 months ago, and they don’t exist now, as far as I can tell. But they didn’t actually provide the payment to the captain of the hauler directly. They were a middle man for…scroll down…” she does and her vision blurs like she is walking into a tunnel.

Trilinocorp Banking Services. It is a name she has seen on a thousand credit transfers into her own account. It is the name of the preferred anonymous financial institution of Gan Jorell.


…


She is standing on a balcony overlooking the spice ports of Laharis. Dahar’s hands encircle her waist, inches away from the child she does not even realize is already growing there.

“Gan Jorell profits very well from his stock in Leshian spice,” Dahar says calmly. “He wouldn’t jeopardize that by moving against us.”


…


“You couldn’t risk losing the profits from your spice investment, right? Is it really that venal?” She asked. “You couldn’t risk sending Kreel or Leech or any of these other scum-suckers to do the job so bribed those rebels with guns to take care of it for you? That’s it, isn’t it?”

She knew that Race Caville or his bald partner with the tiger tattoo had to be on their way up the stairs by now, but she had started and she couldn’t stop. There were hot tears rising to her eyes and all of the memories of the last year were flooding out of her in heavy pulsing waves.

“I was happy,” she said. “I was out, and I was with him and I was happy, for the first time since she died, but you couldn’t take that. You couldn’t give up just one little bit of your control.” Jorell was trying to say something around the barrel of the gun. “What we did was wrong, Gan. The things you made me do…”


…


“It’s wrong.” She is standing in a hangar bay, staring at twenty Nejelan refugees, some men, some women, some children. They huddle close to one another, looking around the vast sterile room with uncertain expressions. They speak to each other in a language she doesn’t understand, in hushed tones. Some of them look at her, their eyes filled with fearful wondering.

Gan’s hand is on her shoulder.

“It is the best anyone can do for them,” he says. “On Regulon they will have homes, they will have work, and food. The company will see to their every need.”

“Shacks,” she says. “Cold protein bars they can choke down while their fathers work themselves to death mining Ogontium until it poisons their lungs.”

“It’s survival,” he says cooly.

“It’s servitude. I won’t do it–not anymore.”

“You will, because that is the arrangement we made,” he says, the edge of his patience wearing thin. “When I have a job available, you work for me.”

“Then I quit,” she says, obstinate.

Jaro Kreel’s iron claw is on her shoulder. Even through the thick fabric of her jumpsuit she can feel the bite. Jorell is close to her, she can feel the grotesque squish of his gut as it presses against her arm.

“What makes you think you have a choice in the matter, you ungrateful little bitch,” he hisses. “After I took you in, gave you a place, a vocation. I could have sent you to the pleasure halls on Virnum Prime where they would have found so many uses for your tight young flesh.” He caresses her arm and she shudders. She feels as though she is watching the interaction from outside of herself, as though she is floating in the rafters of the hangar and watching the scene play out far below.

“Now,” Gan says with all the soft hiss of an adder. He squeezes her arm hard. “You will load these poor, destitute people into your cargo bay, show them where they can bunk down, and transport them to the mining camp on Regulon. And for this service you and I will be paid very, very well.” He releases her arm and she realizes she has been holding her breath. “And when it's done, you’ll buy yourself a nice vacation, somewhere warm and sunny, Pandasar, perhaps, or by the coasts of Leshan. And then you’ll come back and do your job.”

All of this, she does.


…


Gan was trying to say something again. His soft bulk shaking violently beneath her. He retched and choked on the barrel of the gun. She could hear feet pounding up the steps outside of the door.

“I quit,” she hissed. She pulled the gun out of his mouth, slick with drool and pressed it between his eyes. “Any last words?”

“Max–” she squeezed the trigger.


…


She sits in the pilot’s chair of her freighter, staring out at the cold and impassive stars. Deep deep below the decking under her bare feet, the interstellar engines thrum low and slow as the shop idles out in the deep dark nothing.

The ship's portable medical tablet lies in her lap–what little of her lap is left. Her belly rolls out in front of her like an inevitability made flesh. It is inexorable, inescapable.

She detaches a small scanning doppler from the side of the pad and runs it over the bare expanse of her belly. Every part seems to be in place, the tiny body, limbs that twitch and experiment with motion, the glimpse of a face. She has the unsettling feeling that Dahar is there, staring at her, and she quickly stows the doppler back in its slot on the side of the med-tablet. A foot or an elbow presses against the spot where the doppler had compressed her tight skin and she lays a calming hand on the area, feeling the unsettling protuberance slowly recede.

From another slot on the tablet she retrieves a syringe the size of a thimble. She draws from a vein in her left wrist, seeking a spot amid the marks left by countless previous draws. She attaches the syringe to its slot and watches as the blood is absorbed by the device.

She does not know why she does this every day. She always expects to finally see a problem, an abnormality, a hazard to her life or to the life that absorbs more and more of her being each passing day. But the tablet returns only ideal results.

She deactivates the tablet and sets it to the side. She pulls down her white tank to cover her cool belly and reclines her chair, closing her eyes with a heavy sigh. She wonders why she keeps looking for something to be wrong, but the answer eludes her.


…


Someone was at the door. She could hear the door code being punched in. She shoved Jorell’s lifeless bulk as hard as she could and the chair that had been valiantly holding him up finally gave way, toppling backwards. Jorell’s head flopped back against the floor, blood and the liquified remains of brain beginning to leak out in a puddle on the cold tiles.

She scrambled down behind his desk just as the sliding door to the office gave way with a hiss and booted feet stomp into the room.

“Shit…” a low voice grunted. “It’s Leech.”

There are two, she thought. Race and the bald one. She very slowly lifted Leech’s gun, clutching it in two hands. Her heart pounded in her throat. The booted feet moved closer to the desk.

“Boss?” She was only going to have one chance. She drew a sharp breath and rose above the desk, swinging the gun out in front of her. In a split second she saw the bald bodyguard leveling his gun, the tiger on his head seeming to leap as his eyes sprang open in surprise. She fired and his jowly cheek seemed to vaporize in a red mist as the shot pulled him to the left. He fired and his shot went well wide, sizzling against the rear wall of the office. She steadied and fired again, catching him in the right temple and tossing him to the floor. As he fell she caught a glimpse of Race Caville diving behind the doorframe outside of the office.

She dropped to her knees, crawling to the right side of the desk. A few wild shots streaked over the desk and struck a harmless pattern on the rear wall.

Race is firing blind, she thought. Quickly, she drew a deep breath and uttered a pained groan. To add to the effect she threw herself flat and let the gun hit the ground hard enough to clatter. She could make out a shuffle of booted feet in the doorway.

“Max?” Race called. “Max you’d better be dead or I swear to–” She grabbed the gun and sprang from behind the desk, turning and taking aim. Race saw her emerging a few seconds too late to avoid the two shots that took him square in the chest. He stumbled back through the doorway, gasping, his shirt smoldering from the heat of the concentrated energy bolts. Before he could regain his footing he stepped backwards into the thin air above the stairway and tumbled backwards. She could hear his body crashing its way down the staircase.

Shit, no way I’m making a quiet exit now. She was already rising and moving towards the doorway as Race took the backwards step that ended his life a few seconds before her two well placed shots could have. She hopped over Leech’s still prostrate body and the blood pooling beneath it and hurried to the doorway, taking cover behind the door frame and risking a peek around it into the stairwell. Race lay at the foot of the stairs, his shirt still smoking. His body was still draped over the last four steps while his head had come to rest on the floor of the hallway leading back towards the kitchen. There were red splatter points on at least two steps where his head had likely struck hard in his wild tumble.

She held her breath and tried to ignore the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears. There was no sound from below save for the muffled noise from the kitchen. She lowered the gun to hip height, her thumbs aligning along the barrel and began moving quickly down the stairs, her body turned sideways to present a smaller target.

Twenty-six stairs, fifteen steps to the rear exit–

A cook in a stained white apron stumbled into the hall, his eyes wide at the sight of the spreading pool of blood at the foot of the stairs. He stares up at her, hsi eyes wide. He was a Neo-Human, like her, young and pimpled, he carried a long kitchen knife in his hand. As their eyes locked and she watched the fear illuminate his young face, something snagged inside of her and it was as though she was trying to lift the gun through neck deep mud. With a deft motion he pulled back the knife and sent it whirling in her direction.


…


She is falling to the floor, dodging the bottle as it whirls towards her, heavy and blunt and propelled with blind rage. It sails over her head and through the door, smashing on the wall of the corridor beyond her father’s bunk. He is rising unsteadily from behind the table where he was sitting when the argument began and stumbling towards her as she scrambles away from him on all fours.

“Get th’ fug back here, Luna,” he slurs, stumbling and falling to one unsteady knee. He calls her by her mother’s name when he blacks out. By the time he is able to find his feet she has already made it to the corridor. She feels the sharp bit of a glass shard in her palm but she ignores it. She rises and runs, runs as fast as she can.

Aden Tan is emerging from the crew quarters and she nearly collides with him. She stumbles, sidesteps, one of her boots is loose and she feels her ankle almost give way.

“Woah there, Max…” Aden is reaching out for her. She feels him snag her arm but she pulls away. She turns long enough to glare at him before she flies down the stairs to the cargo hold and then she is out under the stars, her feet thumping away like wings beneath her as she tries with everything she has in her to leave the great hulking monolith of her father’s ship far behind.


…


She threw herself hard against the wall, feeling the knife slice through the air mere inches from her face. The cook, now unarmed, stared up at her for a frantic moment before turning and darting back the way he had come. He slipped in Race’s blood, falling and scrambling to right himself, but he was sprightly and managed to rise and belt in the direction of the kitchen, leaving a wild red smear in his wake.

Max bounded down the remaining stairs, clearing Race’s body in a leap that threw her bodily against the far wall. The instant before she pulled the trigger, the cook spun to glance back over his shoulder. She saw the dread in his eyes and she felt white hot rage and sorrow swelling up inside of her body like a geyser. She fired and watched as the cook’s half turn became a wild pirouette. He seemed to hang suspended for a moment in the air as his body twisted wildly and then crashed to the ground and skidded towards the kitchen doors.

Her vision blurred with thick painfully hot tears as she raced towards the door, her bounding steps turning fifteen strides into ten. She could hear the cook groaning behind her as she crashed bodily through the door and stumbled out into a narrow alley smelling of garbage, kitchen smoke, and the dusty Tan’Desh night. She stumbled against the rough stucco wall on the far side of the alley.

They’re already coming, she thought. You can’t stop here. You have to go. You have to run. But here in the cool open air, beyond Jorell’s club, she felt as though she had been dreaming–as though those five minutes that had felt like hours or days had been the feverish stirrings of a nightmare and she was suddenly awake, staring wide eyed at the world beyond sleep. Her legs shook and she almost collapsed, supporting herself against the rough wall of the building. She closed her eyes. She breathed.


…


She is standing outside of a medical center in a city some five miles from the resort on Pandasar IV. Dahar’s father is in town making arrangements to transport his son’s body back to Leshan. It has been two days since the Cabana. She still can’t bring herself to think of it as ‘the night of Dahar’s murder’ so it is just ‘the night of the cabana’ in her mind. She has told Dahar’s father that she needs to have a few hours to herself, to clear her head. He insisted on sending one of his personal bodyguards with her, but she politely refused.

Now she stands outside of the med-center doors, staring up at the sterile white building. She wonders what lie she will tell. ‘I was walking in town when I suddenly felt ill. The doctor at the medical center said that stress must have caused the miscarriage…’ she feels the fluttering again. She has been feeling it since the night of the cabana. Her hands go hesitantly to her abdomen. It feels larger, as if she has been ballooning for the last three days.

Dahar’s face flashes in front of her, as clearly as if he is standing there. Dahar’s face, but as she last saw it, pale, afraid, drifting away, his eyes staring into the air somewhere beyond her.

She stumbles back from the medical center doors and bends double, standing in the middle of the wide pedestrian walkway, bent double, her arms wrapping around her midsection as she tries to release tears that won’t come to her. She wants his arms to find her, to feel him behind her and enveloping her, and the cold emptiness where he should be cuts like claws.

Her breath comes back to her slowly. She is shaking and she is exhausted. The tourist and window shoppers who move past her on the walkway either cast her pitying glances or conspicuously ignore her. She looks around, uncertain if she is more embarrassed by the pity or the indifference.

That’s when she sees him. A Male Deltan, his green scaled face impassive as he stares at her from the far side of the thoroughfare. He is wrong. She senses it at once. An instinct she has forced into a passenger seat in her mind for the better part of the last five months wrenches the steering wheel from her.

‘He’s wrong. He’s wrong. He’s wrong.’ He glances left and right and begins crossing the thoroughfare towards her. He isn’t rushing. He isn’t drawing unneeded attention. It’s his clothes. All around her are resort patrons and wealthy Pandasan’s. It is the height of summer. They are clad in flowing garments of Pandasan linen, bright pastels, sea blues. He is dressed in spacer-gray, his boots are heavy, he is wrong.

She is moving away from him, up the sidewalk. She is unsure if he caught her gaze, so she moves at a pace that is brisk, but controlled. He is behind her. She is sure of it. But the street is busy and he won’t risk trying to attack her with so many witnesses.

‘He’s going to kill us,’ she thinks as she turns quickly and moves towards an open air market. It will not be until she is far away from this street that it occurs to her that she has never thought of herself and the child as ‘us’ before.

She risks a glance back over her shoulder and she sees him, ten or fifteen meters back. Their eyes meet. He smiles.

‘Shit.’

The market is crowded and she maneuvers as close as she can to the more crowded stalls, weaving as naturally as possible in and out of the throngs of tourists, making his job as difficult as possible. She scans the market for a constable, but none of the distinct white uniforms are visible.

As she passes by a stall that has a number of perfume atomizers on display, she subtly pockets one, not missing a step. She curses herself for not bringing the gun. She hasn’t been able to touch it since the night in the cabana. The Deltan is still dogging her, moving closer every several yards, but still distant enough not to arouse the suspicions of the crowd.

She is nearing the end of the market and feels her heart soar as she sees a pair of constables striding towards her. They appear to be off duty, their white collars loose, laughing to one another. They are unarmed.

“Officers,” she says, breathlessly. “Officers, please help me. There’s someone following me, back there, a Deltan, male, I believe…” She points a trembling finger back towards her pursuer. She catches a glimpse of him disappearing behind one of the more crowded stalls. The constables hurry off in the direction she indicated. She doesn’t wait for them to return. She is sure that they won’t catch him, but she hopes that he will have to evade them long enough for her to slip away unnoticed.

She runs.

…


She moved along the alley towards the front of the cantina. Her grav-bike should have still been parked close to the entrance, but as soon as she drew close enough to steal a glance in that direction she could see that it was gone. In addition, Jorell’s men were already mobilizing. A few of the one she had clocked when she was in the bar were already emerging from the front entrance, weapons drawn. She didn’t see Jaro kreel among them, but she imagined he was already out on the hunt. She didn’t dare trying to make a dash across the main drag. She would have to hoof it through the backstreets until she could reach the city limits and then make her way back to her ship on foot.


…


She is moving quickly along a small street beneath the long track of a monorail that runs parallel to the main thoroughfare of the city. She glances back occasionally to see if the Deltan has resumed tailing her, but she doesn’t spot him.

She has spent the last two days trying to believe the official story, that Dahar was the victim of a raid by northern rebels–that what happened to him was not her fault. She has spent the last two nights reliving the moment over and over in fitful dreams, watching Dahar and the rebel as they struggle over the rifle.

She hates that she would prefer it if his death were just a random and chaotic act of violence. But she can no longer hold onto that belief. He had died because she was being targeted. He had been collateral damage. And now whoever had armed the rebels and sent them after her were coming back to finish what they started.

She is approaching a stairway leading up to a boarding platform for the monorail when she looks back and sees him again. He is emerging onto the street, still moving at the same relentless pace in her direction.

‘Shit’. She bolts for the stairs.

The platform is empty as she emerges from the stairwell. It is fifteen or twenty feet wide and runs some eighty feet between two tracks bound in opposite directions. Wide pillars are dispersed down the center of the platform supporting a canopy to protect waiting passengers from the elements. She dives behind one of the pillars as he emerges from the stairwell behind her.

She can hear the crunch of his boots on the concrete as he stops and scans the platform. The pillar is square and wide enough that she is fairly certain he can’t see her. She slowly fishes the stolen atomizer out of her small shoulder bag.

She can hear the crunch of his boots as he moves slowly towards her. She can’t tell from the tread if he is moving slowly because he still hasn’t spotted her or because he is trying to scare her. Either way, she is suddenly more afraid than she has been in a long time. She feels fluttering in her belly and she can’t be sure if it is the child or her nerves.

He is closer now. The sun is behind them and angled just enough that she can make out the hint of a shadow.

‘Wait,’ she thinks. ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ The platform is rumbling. A train is approaching. She can see it moving towards them from the east end of the city like a streak of silver curving along the horizon.

Closer now, but not close enough. The rumble of the approaching train grows louder, filling her ears. She watches as the shadow looms longer. Closer. Closer.

She wheels around the pillar and thrusts the atomizer up into the face of the Deltan as he reaches towards her, his reptilian claws like great barbed fishhooks in the sunlight. She sprays the perfume directly into his bulging yellow eyes. The Deltan hisses and snarls, wincing at the sudden sting on his sensitive optical organs. He thrashes and claws wildly at her as she ducks and weaves. His claws catch her arm and she feels a white hot pain blooming there. The train is almost at the platform, slowing some but still moving at deadly speed. She roars and thrusts herself against the Deltan’s midsection as hard as she can. He stumbled back, teeters on the edge, and then falls. He doesn’t even hit the tracks before he is caught and thrown violently by the conical nose of the monorail, bursting like an overripe fruit.

She stumbles back as the monorail slows and a crowd begins to pour out onto the platform, their faces dazed, staring in shock at the splattering of green blood across the westbound platform. By the time they have the wherewithal to look around the platform, Max has moved to the far side where an Eastbound train is already approaching.

She moves to the rear car, where she tears a strip from her linen dress to bind around her lacerated arm. She feels the fluttering again and knows without a doubt that it is the child. She feels bright, alert, and awake for the first time since she watched the medical examiners carry Dahar’s body out of the cabana. She is alive. Her child is alive. And no matter what she is going to make sure it stays that way.

That night, she is boarding a transport away from Pandasar IV. That night, she disappears.


…


She made her way to the end of the alley and stepped out into the dark street behind the Cantina. The street was mostly empty and none of Jorell’s soldiers had made their way there–at least none that she recognized. She heard the cantina’s side-door opening and a chorus of rough voices barking orders and she rounded quickly onto the backstreet, moving across and ducking down another alleyway and out of sight.

As an old mining town, Tan’desh had been built primarily around a single main street which had then sprawled outwards as more and more miners, refugees, and traders had settled in the area. As she moved hurriedly away from the market district, the organized streets gave way to a maze of tight dusty alleys and lanes between squat miner’s hovels of stone and stucco. Doing the best she could to keep her bearings she kept moving in what she thought was a westerly direction, avoiding the wider streets and open areas as much as possible.

She dove down behind a low wall surrounding a bare looking rear garden as a Tan’desh security patrol moved past. She had no doubt that another member of the cartel had mobilized most of the security officers in the city. Despite the evening cool she felt sweat beading on her brow and pooling uncomfortably in every crease of her suit. When she was convinced they had moved far enough up the street she rose, vaulted the wall, and moved like a shadow along the next alley.

At the end of a narrow lane up ahead she could see the hazy line of distant mountains beyond a vast stretch of desert, purple in the fading dusk. She cast a cautious glance back over her shoulder and then she rose and sprinted as swiftly as she could down the lane and out into the cool violet night.

She ran as fast as she could, feeling the hardpan sailing away beneath her as she left the lights of Tan’desh in her wake. She knew it was only a matter of time before Jorell’s men gave up searching the city and started to fan out into the surrounding desert. She needed to make sure she put enough distance between herself and the lights of the city by the time that happened. If they pursued her in any kind of vehicle she would be a sitting duck. Her heart thundered in pace with her pumping legs and her breath came in short rhythmic gasps.


…


She is in Dahar’s bed, her naked flesh warming the silk sheets. Her breath comes in short gasps. He is over her, on her, in her. His body envelops hers under the light of the mother and daughter moons. She wraps her legs tight around his waist. She clutches his vast shoulders so tight she wonders if he can feel her need. She is terrified to let go. Through the doors opening onto the balcony she can smell spice on the warm night breeze.


…


She slowed as she came to the narrow opening of the gully, the red-rock cliff faces looming up out of the desert in the gathering gloom. She gazed back across the desert. Half a mile back she could make out the lights of Tan’desh, gleaming in the darkness where dusk had given way to night. She couldn’t see anyone approaching across the hard-pan. She turned and made her way down into the gully. The ship was there, waiting silently in the deep dark. Her eyes had adjusted somewhat and she could just barely make out its hulking shape amid the tall rocks. She touched a few buttons on the keypad at her wrist and there was an electrical hum as the ship’s outer lights kick on, illuminating the gully.

Her heart dropped. The grav-bike was there, parked just behind the ship.

She raised the gun and whirls around, aiming it into the shadows cast by the ship’s lights. She can’t see anything. Beyond the range of the illumination cast by the ship, everything looks impenetrably black.

Someone is here, she thinks, her eyes wide, fresh sweat beading on her forehead as she stood rooted in fear to the spot.

The unmistakable crack of a keffke-rifle broke the silence and a plume of red dust bloomed by her feet as the shot landed inches from where she stood. She whirled in the direction the shot had come from, high and to her left, just in time to see the muzzle flash of the second shot, from an impossible perch high on the wall of the gully and feel it as it ripped through the meat of her thigh. She gasped and cried out in sudden agony, falling to her knees.


…


She is on her hands and knees in her bunk, her tank top plastered to her body by coating of sweat despite the cool damp artificial atmosphere in the ship. Another contraction washes over her relentlessly pursuing the last, squeezing her until she feels like she can barely breathe. She groans and clutches the blanket beneath her until her knuckles go white.

‘Something is wrong’ she thinks. ‘It’s too much–too intense.’ As the contraction reaches its peak she looks up and sees Dahar standing in the entryway to her bunk. His face is distant, he is not looking at her, but stares past her, through the narrow porthole at the cold impassive stars outside of the ship. She calls out to him raggedly. She reaches for him. But the pain momentarily recedes, and he is suddenly gone. She is so very alone.

She catches her breath and looks down between her knees. Her sheets are stained with blood.


…


She could feel the blood pooling in the leg of her suit. The shot had punched directly through her thigh, leaving two neat holes through her suit on either side of her leg. She could feel the suit's emergency response kicking in, a cable running through the pantleg just above the thigh drawing tight to cut off blood to the wound. Within the next fifteen minutes she would barely be able to feel that leg, but it might keep her from bleeding out.

She looked up through eyes that had gone hazy with pain and saw a shadow bounding down the rock face with impossibly feline grace. Whatever it was landed with a thumb in the dirt at the base of the rockface and strode menacingly into the pool of light cast by her ship’s outside lamps.

Jaro Kreel held his Keffke-rifle over one shoulder, his grin barely visible in the gloom. He stood before her, silhouetted by the lights from her ship. His tall lythe form and bristling black hair make him look for all the world like some kind of boogeyman out of a child’s nightmare.

“I told you I’d be seeing you, Vasco,” he almost purred. She tried to rise, but her leg screamed and she fell face first against the dirt. The gun was in front of her. She reached out for it but drew her hand back sharply as Kreel whipped the rifle from his shoulder and fired off another shot mere inches from her outstretched fingers. “Ah, ah, ah, Vasco,” he chided. “Let’s not do something stupid….that is, more stupid than the rest of the shit you’ve done tonight.” Her leg was beginning to tingle as the tourniquet effect of her suit’s emergency response did its work. She groaned and huffed, feeling the red dust filling her nose and mouth. She had to roll over. She felt like she was suffocating.

“Now. I imagine you think I’m going to kill you,” Kreel said, hefting the gun back over his shoulder. “And, I’ll admit, it is very tempting. But do you know what I think would be so much more fun, Vasco?” He took a step towards her. “I’m going to keep you alive. I’m going to truss you up like a Vanerian hog and throw you over the back of that grav-bike. And when I take you back to town I’m going to serve you up to the Cartel like a juicy choice haunch,” he smacked his lips for effect. “And the shit they are going to do to you Vasco…you’re going to wish you were dead.” He took another step towards her, his voice becoming menacingly low. “You’re going to wish that you’d never been born.”

As he was talking, Max’s had moved her hand slowly towards the keypad on the wrist of her suit. She tapped a button.

“Argus, ta ta for now.” She heard a chirp as the AI acknowledged her command and she thrust her face into the dirt, wrapping her hands over her head.

The impact was immediate and deafening, the sound bursting and ricochetting up the walls of the gully as Max’s ship exploded in a ball of white hot flame.


…


There is a rush and a burst and something gives way. She feels something on the bed between her knees, something warm and alive that wriggles and kicks and suddenly lets loose a hearty wailing cry. She reaches down breathlessly and lifts it up. A tiny face, flushed and waxy and twisted up in a tiny fit of rage appears in her grasp, the little fists raised as if ready to fight. This little being, still bound to her by its curling cord, emerges into the world vital and vigorous, full of a strength that takes her breath away.

It is a little girl, a little girl whose tiny body glitters like gold in the cool light of the bunk. Max clutches her against her breast, feeling the tiny heart thundering away. It is Dahar. It is her. It is someone altogether new. She weeps.

“I love you,” she sobs. “I love you, Lita! I love you! I love you!”


…


She laid still for a long time, listening to the crackle of fire in the still of the night and Jaro Kreel’s keening agonized cries. When Argus activated the self-destruct trigger the shockwave was so intense that, for a moment, she thought she had been caught in the fireball as well.Her ears were ringing and she could feel the sting of burns on her exposed fingers and the back of her neck.

She rose, groaning as she tried to put weight on her injured leg. She reached a trembling hand into a side pocket on her suit and fished out a small syringe. She jabbed it into her thigh just below the gunshot and sighed as she felt the pain-reliever dulling the searing pain. She picked up Leech’s gun and stood shakily, favoring her uninjured leg. She looked around the gully. The light of the fire that burned in the skeleton on her old ship was bright enough for her to glimpse Jaro Kreel laying face down some yards away amid the scattered wreckage. She hobbled towards him, barely putting any weight on her injured leg which was all but useless between the limited circulation and the numbing effect of the painkiller.

It was hard to make out in the firelight, but by the smell alone she could see that Kreel’s back had been roasted by the heat of the blast. The clothes and hair had been burned away and all that remained was a smoldering mass of half charred flesh. His groans had given way to slow wheezing breaths that sounded almost like a soft whine.

“Ill ee…” he croaked. She could not make out his words at first. “Ill ee…” he tried again. Louder this time. He didn’t need to repeat it a third time. The shot from Leech’s pistol echoed up and down the gully.


…


She moves slowly out of the gully and into the desert beyond. Kreel’s rifle is the best she can manage for a walking stick and she clutches it tightly in both hands as she inches, step by step further into the stony hills.

The destruction of her ship has always been part of the plan. It was, of course, supposed to occur as the ship’s autopilot brought it into the lower atmosphere, an elaborate way to fake her own demise and satisfy the Cartel’s inevitable vendetta for the death of Gan Jorell, but she supposes that the way things have shaken out will be enough to throw them off of her trail. Besides, she muses, soon enough the Imperium will use the information she has been feeding them for months to move against their operation. They will have a lot more to worry about that one rogue freelancer.

It takes her an hour to reach the small shuttlecraft, still nestled in the hiding place she selected for it three days ago. It is a small shuttle. Small enough to avoid detection from any orbital tracking satellites. She climbs onboard, falling back into the pilot’s chair with a weary groan.

She is leaving the planet behind. She doesn’t look back. There is a familiar jarring rattle as she pierces the atmosphere and then a sudden still calm as she moves into orbit. She punches in a few commands and feels the orbital thrusters kicking in, moving her towards a small white speck that shines just a bit brighter than the rest against the deep black of the sky. What looks like a bright star draws closer and soon she sees the sleek outline of a Leshian passenger ship moving towards her above the quiet planet. It feels like hours go by as the shuttlecraft maneuvers itself into position to dock. She hears the thumb of the magnetic seals locking into place and a hiss as the pressurized doors slide open.

She moves onto the quiet ship, bracing herself against the walls as she makes her way slowly down the corridors towards the common room at the vessel’s rear. She feels the hum of the engines as the ship disengages from its orbit and the stomach dropping sensation as it drops into an interstellar channel.

The old woman is waiting for her, sitting beside a small table in the dim light of the common area. She is Leshian–an elder, her skin gleaming like she is cast from solid gold, and the baby lies asleep in her arms, swaddled in Leshian linen. The old woman smiles as Max moves slowly into the room, her eyes sparkling. She stands and cradling the baby in one hand, offers Max support with the other. She guides Max to a chair by wide window that opens onto the vast black and she gently places the child into her arms. Max takes her daughter tenderly, her tired eyes sparkling as fresh tears well up, hot and heavy.

“Lita,” she hums. “Lita.” The child wakes. Dahar’s eyes gaze up at Max from the tiny glittering face and a small hand breaks free from its swaddle to reach up and touch her cheek.

“I love you,” Max says softly. “I love you, Lita.”

They rest there in happy silence, mother and daughter by the wide window, and outside the stars glitter like flakes of spice over the deep blue sea.