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I’m a Shifter. Hundreds of years ago, extreme genetic modification was all the rage. The fad passed, but it left behind pockets of alt-humans with signficant differences from mainstream humanity. The Shifters are the largest alt-human community, and if you listen to some people, we’re the most dangerous. In my opinion, the reason people say that is because unlike other alt-humans, we’re indistinguishable from normies.

Until we Shift.

Most Shifters have one, or at most two animal forms committed to muscle memory. Me, I have a bunch. But for the past couple of years I’d been favoring my gray wolf. I liked this beast’s power, speed, and sheer scary factor.

The wolf also excelled at stealth. I flowed through the curtains of vines, carrying my backpack in my teeth. Ecosystem contamination is always a risk when you hang out your shingle as a trading post. These invasive vines, which I recognized from Ponce de Leon, had killed most of the trees stone dead. Bone-dry leaves and twigs littered the ground. My wolf did not crack a single one of them underfoot.

With a map in my head, I turned west at the corner of our pad and followed the next hedge to the south coast of our islands. I only had to break cover once, where a group of refugees had set up house in the corner of the empty landing pad. I dashed between their tents, leapt over their pit latrine, and disappeared into the next stretch of hedge before they properly knew I was there. Startled cries faded behind me. Most likely, they would not even be able to put a name to this predator from the planet their distant ancestors had come from.

However, anyone would think it was weird to see a predator lugging a tactical backpack in its teeth.

Fortunately for me, scrubby native bushes grew right down to the coast of our island, giving me an unseen vantage point to scan the mainland and the next island over. No one was driving along the coast road. I was too low down to see anything of the Sunderer ships except their scorpion tails, meaning they also couldn’t see me.

All clear.

I jumped into the channel.

Holy hell, that was cold.

For an awful minute I couldn’t find the bottom.

I can’t swim a stroke. Not as a human, nor as a wolf. Jumping into the water had been an act of faith and calculation. I had assumed the channel was walkable, based on how much of that rock in the middle was sticking out of the water. Was it deeper than I had thought?

My claws scrabbled on the sandy bottom. I raised my head and gulped air—and the next swell lifted me off my feet again.

I sort of hopped across the channel, timing my lunges to the swells that surged through the channel to break on the distant beach. It was terrifying. The swells also dragged me inshore, so I ended up crossing the channel at a diagonal angle.

I didn’t lose my backpack.

I scrambled up a low crag and crawled into the bushes. I was no longer covered with Kimmie’s blood. Instead, I was soaked and shivering, and the cut on my cheek—now a wolf’s hairy cheek—stung from the salt.

I shook myself like a dog, then slunk uphill. The bushes got thicker. The leading tendrils of the invading vines entwined their tops. Now I was slinking under a roof of green leaves, which grew higher and denser as I got in among the dead trees on the edge of the Sunderers’ northern pad.

All the way, I was sniffing the air. A wolf has a much more sensitive nose than a human being. This is one of the biggest advantages of tracking in animal form.

Unfortunately, the reek of rocket fuel and combustion byproducts that saturated the wind covered any scent of human beings, except for the occasional punch of latrine odor where someone had snuck into the bushes to do a number two. I wasn’t going to find the sniper with my nose. I doubted the Sunderers had anyone posted in these woods, anyway. What would be the point? They wouldn’t be able to see out.

Chinks of daylight showed through the green roof ahead.

A sudden impact knocked me sideways.

I danced my feet under me and dropped my backpack in a silent snarl that would be a smile, if wolves did human expressions. Even before I felt the impact, I’d smelled a familiar scent: jackal.

The jackal now standing nose to nose with me was much bigger than a real jackal would be—almost as big as my wolf, and my wolf was bigger than a real wolf, tipping the scales at 82 kilos, same as me. Nothing is gained or lost in Shifting.

“Gotcha,” said the jackal, mushily, around the strap of the backpack he held in his teeth. Our animal forms are exact replicas of the Earth originals on the outside, but not on the inside. Shifting wouldn’t be much use if you lost your ability to talk.

“Kimmie’s dead,” I said.

Dolph’s ears went all the way back. “How?”

“Sniper.”

Dolph cursed for about thirty seconds straight. Then he said, “She was just getting good at handling MF’s tantrums.”

“Yup.”

“They want a feud, don’t they?”

“He was aiming for me.”

“Sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“The only surprising part is I’m surprised. That faggot asswipe. If he wanted you he should’ve drawn down on you in the parking lot. I thought he was going to let it go.”

“He’s not a sniper. You see anyone up top of their ships?”

“Couple of maintenance guys.”

“Anything else?”

“They’re selling shit out of the back of their ships. Bootleg skins. Body-mod packages. They’ve even got a surgeon doing implants. Line’s out to here.”

“Let’s do a recce.”

We dropped our backpacks under a tree and flowed through the last few meters of the woods. Crouched flat, we parted the vines with our noses, a millimeter at a time.

I froze.

I was looking at the legs of a Sunderer drang.

The junior soldier, identifiable as such by his black gaiters, stood with his back to us, casually holding one of those fancy-schmancy assault rifles with all the gewgaws. He was watching the crowd of people—refugees, shoppers, alien tourists—around the Sunderers’ impromptu ship boot sale. The intricately graffitied ship itself, as high as two houses and resting on a pair of auxiliary engines like duck feet, blocked the wind from several large screens, on which the Sunderers were showing off their digital wares. A line of people waited outside a grimy tent. I didn’t see Zane.

I did see the “maintenance guys” on top of the ship. They were tending to the ship’s .50 cal turret.

No freaking wonder that round had taken Kimmie’s head off. Our “sniper” had been the Sunderers’ .50 cal gunner.

The good news was they couldn’t lower the elevation of that thing far enough to shoot up their own pad, even if they wanted to. It was for area clearance. The Sunderers do a lot of that.

Dolph and I retired into the woods again.

His jackal’s big rabbit-like ears twitched. His lips curled back in a snarl. “Beast mode,” he whispered. It was a statement of intention, not a question. I still could have said no.

But the memory of Kimmie’s death overrode my misgivings. The very sight of these rapacious scumbags had revived the fury I felt when we met Zane. “Beast mode,” I confirmed. My heart was already starting to thud in anticipation.

We split up.

Dolph went west around the pad, to the other side of the ship.

I went back to the drang’s location and crouched directly behind him.

I gave Dolph a count of twenty to get into position.

Then I gathered myself and leapt out of the vines, pouncing onto the drang’s back.

 

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“Where’s Dolph?” Irene said in a low voice as I reached her perch.

“Over there,” I said, pointing.

From up here, we could see over the hedges, all the way to the island next door. Irene’s tension told me she had spotted the Sunderer ships, too.

I kept climbing up the ladder until I reached the top of the bridge. Irene followed me. We squatted behind the main radar dish, automatically falling into old habits of concealment from enemy spotters. Irene had served on Tech Duinn too. Whereas Dolph and I had been in the special forces, she’d been a sniper.

She measured the vista with a professional eye. The Sunderers’ launch pads abutted the coast of the other island. The coast itself was rocky and choked with thickets. I had to figure Dolph had got at least that far by now. The channel between the islands was only about ten meters wide, choppy, laced with foam discolored by chemical runoff from the spaceport. I could tell it was shallow, ‘cause waves broke on a ridge of rock in the middle of the channel. At low tide, you could walk out to these islands from the beach. The tide was about halfway in now.

There were two other launch pads in between us and the shore of our island, one empty and one holding an Ek landing shuttle. But the shuttle did not block our line of sight to the Sunderer ships.

“I could make that shot,” Irene said.

“I don’t want any trouble with them,” I said.

“So what’s Dolph doing over there?” she said.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to lay my personal issues on her. She was blissfully ignorant about the whole Sophia saga—I hired her long after that all went down, so all she knew was that I had a daughter I was raising on my own. Matter of fact, her daughter and mine were best friends. Stripping away all egotistical pretense, I was plain scared Irene might think twice about letting her Mia play with Lucy if she knew that Lucy’s mother was a Sunderer.

“I told him to savage them ruthlessly, like the security guys should’ve done if they weren’t fraidycats,” I said at last. Irene laughed. I felt the sting of my own hypocrisy keenly.

Mercifully, the arrival of Rafael Ijiuto saved me from having to explain any further. The shock of running into Zane had driven my customer clean out of my mind. He bounced across the pad in a rented pickup. I swarmed down the ladder to greet him, and asked Kimmie to process the balance of his payment.

This far out from the Heartworlds, accepting payments is a dicey business. All transactions have to be physically cleared through the nearest node of the EkBank, which in the case of this planet was 18 light years away. It aided my peace of mind to see that Ijiuto had a credit dot: a fingernail-sized holo embedded in the skin of his left arm, which he obligingly rolled up his shirt sleeve to show Kimmie. The dot shone traffic-light green, proving that he had credit in the system. If he didn’t, the dot would go black as soon as he was within range of a wireless signal, because the daily EkBank drones that fly to all planets in the banking system carry a record of the entire blockchain. You can’t outrace your own blockchain, unless you have a ship that’s faster than an FTL drone, in which case you’d be so damn rich you wouldn’t need to. Ijiuto had gotten himself a tattoo around his credit dot, kind of like a coat of arms.

He transmitted the payment from his phone, Kimmie tapped on her holobook, and I was 120 KGCs richer. With luck maybe 10% of that would stay in my pocket as profit.

“You’re Mr. Popularity, huh?” Ijiuto with a crooked smile. He nodded at the refugee children, who were still hanging around, staring at Kimmie’s holobook like they’d never seen one before. Maybe they hadn’t.

“Give ‘em a inch …” I muttered sourly.

“Truth,” Ijiuto said. “I’ll help someone that helps themselves. But don’t come looking for handouts, know what I mean?”

“That’s it.” I had him pegged as the type of entrepreneur most likely to succeed in the Cluster: the type that looks for the sale in every situation. For an instant I envied him for his youth—he couldn’t be a day over 25—and the abounding opportunities before him. Then I put those unproductive thoughts out of my mind. “I’ll unload that cargo for you right now,” I said heartily.

I climbed the ladder once more, while Ijiuto backed his pickup closer to the ship. Irene was still up on top of the bridge, pretending to clean the laser comms array and keeping an eye on the Sunderer ships. We have a cargo handler bot: it’s a fixed robotic arm mounted in front of the cargo hold, which is the bottom two-thirds of the ship’s superstructure. I climbed into the handler operator’s seat. At the touch of a button, the door of the hold began to rise, with a grinding sound I didn’t like. It opened six inches, and then crashed shut again with a thunderous boom.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. I reached under the seat, searching for the jack to open it manually. Yes, this had happened before. It’s all part of the joy of owning a second-hand ship.

No jack. I remembered that Dolph had taken it down to the ground this morning. I went down the ladder again. “Just be a minute,” I called to Ijiuto with a smile, knowing it would take more than a minute if the motor that opened the hold door had gone.

“No problem,” Ijiuto said, gazing quizzically at me as I searched around for the jack.The back of my neck burned with embarrassment.

The refugee kids had backed off when they saw me come down the ladder, but now they drifted back to Kimmie. Evidently they had broken down her resistance. I should have seen this coming. Kimmie was a sweetheart. She liked ethereal pop music, ballet workouts, and hot chocolate with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Her black bangs hung straight across her forehead, framing a round face. She had a poster of Mt. Everest in her cabin—yes, that Mt. Everest, the one on Earth, ye olde home planet of humanity, where none of us had ever been. She said it inspired her.

Why do I remember these details now? What good does it do?

At any rate, she was showing the older girl stuff on her holobook. But then she got up (leaving her holobook with the kids, a big no-no) and came over to me. Big-eyed with sincerity, she said, “Mike, I’ve been talking to them.”

“Not now, Kimmie.” There was the jack on top of a bale of cargo. I grabbed it and started back to the ladder. Kimmie kept pace with me.

“They’re smart kids. The older girl—her name’s Pippa—she knows her way around all the standard IT tools. Says she’s even worked with AI.”

“I know what’s coming next,” I said. “You want us to give them a ride.”

“They just need to get to Ponce de Leon. You know, under the Convention, if they land on the PdL, the government’s required to help them. I think we should help them get there.”

“Kimmie, we don’t have the mass allowance.” I settled on an argument she wouldn’t be able to counter with emotion. “Look at all this crap.” I pointed at the various amateurishly packaged small-lot shipments lying on the ground around the ship. I had to load this stuff into the hold as soon as the toy fairies were unloaded. We were contractually bound to haul it all to the PdL, and given my usual practice of maxing out the ship’s dry mass capacity, there just wasn’t any room for refugees, no matter how deserving they might be.

Kimmie’s face set in the expression of mulish obstinacy that was the flip side of her sweetness. “You know what their lives are like here? They’ve got no future. No hope.” I made a move to get around her. She sidestepped, cutting me off. “All they have to do is get to PdL, then they’ll have a chance—”

That’s as far as she got. Then her head exploded.

I was standing an arm’s length from her. I closed my eyes reflexively. Warm globs spattered my face, neck, and hands. Pain stabbed my cheek, and I knew I had just been jabbed by bone shrapnel from Kimmie’s skull.

I knew, because I used to live on a world where this kind of thing happened. It was called Tech Duinn.

My brain said Sniper and He was aiming for me.

He was aiming for me, but Kimmie stepped into his crosshairs while he was in the act of pulling the trigger, during that long instant after you commit your body to a course of action, when it’s too late to take it back.

I heard the crack. At the same time I hit the dirt.

I yelled, “Irene!” I popped my head up. All three of the kids had also hit the dirt. I knew all about their lives, right then. I could see Pippa’s sneakers sticking out from behind a bale of local pelts. She looked to be lying on top of the littlest kid. Protecting her. Her right sneaker had a hole in the heel.

I knew none of the kids had been hit, because there’d only been one shot.

One shot, one kill, as we used to say.

Rafael Ijiuto had not been hit, either. He had made the smart decision that his cargo was less important than his life. He was driving away across the pad as fast as his rented pickup could go.

Kimmie’s body lay at the foot of the ladder. Her blood puddled on the chemically hardened dirt. Her head was gone. Correction: I was wearing it. She had been a full foot shorter than me, and my brain said He wasn’t trying for a headshot. He aimed at your center of mass.

Another crack split the air. I paid it no mind, crawling underneath the ship. I already knew the sniper was not close. The sonic boom had taken too long to get here. I also knew his weapon did not have facial recognition targeting or smart ammo that could recalibrate in flight. Because if it did, I’d be dead.

Underneath the ship, a robust lattice of metal trusses at head height supported the auxiliary engines. The underslung missile launchers blocked my view forward, but I figured there were no enemies in that direction.

The shots had come from the south. From the island where the Sunderer ships were.

If I was correct about that, the aft port auxiliary engine would now shield me from the sniper. It rested on the ground like a prehistoric whale’s flipper. Keeping it at my back, I crawled to the kids.

Their faces were white under the dirt. “Mister,” the boy said, “you got blood on you.”

Ignoring the comment, I beckoned to the older girl. What had Kimmie said her name was? “Pippa. Follow me.” I rose to a stooping crouch and led the kids aft.

The boy yelped. I turned around and saw he wasn’t behind me. He’d gone to peek out around the aft port engine, and seen Kimmie’s body lying at the foot of the ladder.

I seized him by one bony shoulder and hauled him back. “That could be you if you don’t do as I say.” I turned to Pippa. “See that ladder?”

A ladder reached down to the ground on the starboard side of the fuselage, identical to the one on the port side. Pippa nodded.

“We’re going to climb that. I’ll go first. If I get shot, y’all come back down here and don’t move until the cops arrive.”

“What cops?” Pippa said. “This’s a free-fire zone.”

I cursed inwardly, having suspected as much. If the natives believed in the concept of policing, this wouldn’t be classified as a Fringeworld, and the Sunderers wouldn’t’ve just shot my admin’s head off. “Move it,” I said curtly.

Every minute I was on the ladder, my spine tingled. But no shot came, and I heard nothing except the wind until we were all on top of the fuselage, crouching on the starboard side of the bridge. Looked like I’d figured it correctly. There was only one sniper, and now I had a three-storey armored superstructure in between us and him. We called it the bridge, but most of it was the cargo hold. The actual essentials were safely tucked away below.

I figured it wasn’t a huge risk sending the kids below. They’d be safer inside the ship than they were out here. Martin, my engineer, and Mechanical Failure were down there, anyway.

I slapped the plate of the starboard airlock hatch, unlocking it with my palm-print. The hatch cover slid back smoothly into the hull.

“Get my scope,” Irene’s voice floated down from the top of the bridge.

“Which one?” I called back.

“The 20x tactical Dayforce.”

Pippa stopped me. “I’ll get it,” she said. “Where is it?”

I started to tell her no, then reconsidered. I didn’t have time to rummage through Irene’s tip of a cabin. “Ask the bald guy.”

I sped them on their way into the airlock with a slap on the littlest kid’s rump. I just hoped they did run into Martin first, not Mechanical Failure.

In the same motion, I leaned inside the cramped airlock chamber, opened a locker, and took out my tactical backpack. I shrugged it onto my shoulders.

Irene looked down from the top of the bridge. She was lying flat on her stomach, her head and the muzzle of her second-best rifle silhouetted against the gray sky. Figured she’d had it close to hand with Sunderers in the area.

“Kimmie’s dead,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“If they come for the ship, hold them off until I get back,” I said.

“Why are they shooting at us?” she said.

“That’s the ten million GC question,” I said, not quite lying. I didn’t know that it was Zane Cole’s gang shooting at us. I just strongly suspected it. I realized that if we all lived through this, I was going to have to fill Irene in on my history with the Sunderers, such as it was.

I closed the airlock, descended the ladder, said a Hail Mary in my head, and sprinted towards the trees lining the back of our pad.

I knew that the wind was blowing onshore, perpendicular to the sniper’s line of fire, and with the amount of variation in its strength, he’d have a hard time dialing his windage up or down fast enough to shoot accurately. Especially at a moving target.

All the same, I was gambling with my life, and the only thing that drove me to it was the thought of Kimmie’s poster of Mt. Everest, and her body lying on the dirty ground of an alien planet.

Halfway there, I heard a crack. My brain said Irene and my legs kept running. I hit the treeline without slowing down, crashed into a curtain of vines, and stumbled to a halt.

I pushed the vines aside like a curtain, letting them fall back into place behind me.

Then I stripped off my clothes in record time. Stuffed them into my backpack.

Took a deep breath, hunched my shoulders, and Shifted into a wolf.

Keep reading Chapter 4

Do you like what you’re reading? Buy me a coffee! The more coffee I get, the faster I’ll put up the next chapter 🙂

“Where’s Dolph?” Irene said in a low voice as I reached her perch.

“Over there,” I said, pointing.

From up here, we could see over the hedges, all the way to the island next door. Irene’s tension told me she had spotted the Sunderer ships, too.

I kept climbing up the ladder until I reached the top of the bridge. Irene followed me. We squatted behind the main radar dish, automatically falling into old habits of concealment from enemy spotters. Irene had served on Tech Duinn too. Whereas Dolph and I had been in the special forces, she’d been a sniper.

She measured the vista with a professional eye. The Sunderers’ launch pads abutted the coast of the other island. The coast itself was rocky and choked with thickets. I had to figure Dolph had got at least that far by now. The channel between the islands was only about ten meters wide, choppy, laced with foam discolored by chemical runoff from the spaceport. I could tell it was shallow, ‘cause waves broke on a ridge of rock in the middle of the channel. At low tide, you could walk out to these islands from the beach. The tide was about halfway in now.

There were two other launch pads in between us and the shore of our island, one empty and one holding an Ek landing shuttle. But the shuttle did not block our line of sight to the Sunderer ships.

“I could make that shot,” Irene said.

“I don’t want any trouble with them,” I said.

“So what’s Dolph doing over there?” she said.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to lay my personal issues on her. She was blissfully ignorant about the whole Sophia saga—I hired her long after that all went down, so all she knew was that I had a daughter I was raising on my own. Matter of fact, her daughter and mine were best friends. Stripping away all egotistical pretense, I was plain scared Irene might think twice about letting her Mia play with Lucy if she knew that Lucy’s mother was a Sunderer.

“I told him to savage them ruthlessly, like the security guys should’ve done if they weren’t fraidycats,” I said at last. Irene laughed. I felt the sting of my own hypocrisy keenly.

Mercifully, the arrival of Rafael Ijiuto saved me from having to explain any further. The shock of running into Zane had driven my customer clean out of my mind. He bounced across the pad in a rented pickup. I swarmed down the ladder to greet him, and asked Kimmie to process the balance of his payment.

This far out from the Heartworlds, accepting payments is a dicey business. All transactions have to be physically cleared through the nearest node of the EkBank, which in the case of this planet was 18 light years away. It aided my peace of mind to see that Ijiuto had a credit dot: a fingernail-sized holo embedded in the skin of his left arm, which he obligingly rolled up his shirt sleeve to show Kimmie. The dot shone traffic-light green, proving that he had credit in the system. If he didn’t, the dot would go black as soon as he was within range of a wireless signal, because the daily EkBank drones that fly to all planets in the banking system carry a record of the entire blockchain. You can’t outrace your own blockchain, unless you have a ship that’s faster than an FTL drone, in which case you’d be so damn rich you wouldn’t need to. Ijiuto had gotten himself a tattoo around his credit dot, kind of like a coat of arms.

He transmitted the payment from his phone, Kimmie tapped on her holobook, and I was 1,200 KGCs richer. With luck maybe 10% of that would stay in my pocket as profit.

“You’re Mr. Popularity, huh?” Ijiuto with a crooked smile. He nodded at the refugee children, who were still hanging around, staring at Kimmie’s holobook like they’d never seen one before. Maybe they hadn’t.

“Give ‘em a inch …” I muttered sourly.

“Truth,” Ijiuto said. “I’ll help someone that helps themselves. But don’t come looking for handouts, know what I mean?”

“That’s it.” I had him pegged as the type of entrepreneur most likely to succeed in the Cluster: the type that looks for the sale in every situation. For an instant I envied him for his youth—he couldn’t be a day over 25—and the abounding opportunities before him. Then I put those unproductive thoughts out of my mind. “I’ll unload that cargo for you right now,” I said heartily.

I climbed the ladder once more, while Ijiuto backed his pickup closer to the ship. Irene was still up on top of the bridge, pretending to clean the laser comms array and keeping an eye on the Sunderer ships. We have a cargo handler bot: it’s a fixed robotic arm mounted in front of the cargo hold, which is the bottom two-thirds of the ship’s superstructure. I climbed into the handler operator’s seat. At the touch of a button, the door of the hold began to rise, with a grinding sound I didn’t like. It opened six inches, and then crashed shut again with a thunderous boom.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered. I reached under the seat, searching for the jack to open it manually. Yes, this had happened before. It’s all part of the joy of owning a second-hand ship.

No jack. I remembered that Dolph had taken it down to the ground this morning. I went down the ladder again. “Just be a minute,” I called to Ijiuto with a smile, knowing it would take more than a minute if the motor that opened the hold door had gone.

“No problem,” Ijiuto said, gazing quizzically at me as I searched around for the jack. The back of my neck burned with embarrassment.

The refugee kids had backed off when they saw me come down the ladder, but now they drifted back to Kimmie. Evidently they had broken down her resistance. I should have seen this coming. Kimmie was a sweetheart. She liked ethereal pop music, ballet workouts, and hot chocolate with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Her black bangs hung straight across her forehead, framing a round face. She had a poster of Mt. Everest in her cabin—yes, that Mt. Everest, the one on Earth, ye olde home planet of humanity, where none of us had ever been. She said it inspired her.

Why do I remember these details now? What good does it do?

At any rate, she was showing the older girl stuff on her holobook. But then she got up (leaving her holobook with the kids, a big no-no) and came over to me. Big-eyed with sincerity, she said, “Mike, I’ve been talking to them.”

“Not now, Kimmie.” There was the jack on top of a bale of cargo. I grabbed it and started back to the ladder. Kimmie kept pace with me.

“They’re smart kids. The older girl—her name’s Pippa—she knows her way around all the standard IT tools. Says she’s even worked with AI.”

“I know what’s coming next,” I said. “You want us to give them a ride.”

“They just need to get to Ponce de Leon. You know, under the Convention, if they land on the PdL, the government’s required to help them. I think we should help them get there.”

“Kimmie, we don’t have the mass allowance.” I settled on an argument she wouldn’t be able to counter with emotion. “Look at all this crap.” I pointed at the various amateurishly packaged small-lot shipments lying on the ground around the ship. I had to load this stuff into the hold as soon as the toy fairies were unloaded. We were contractually bound to haul it all to the PdL, and given my usual practice of maxing out the ship’s dry mass capacity, there just wasn’t any room for refugees, no matter how deserving they might be. 

Kimmie’s face set in the expression of mulish obstinacy that was the flip side of her sweetness. “You know what their lives are like here? They’ve got no future. No hope.” I made a move to get around her. She sidestepped, cutting me off. “All they have to do is get to PdL, then they’ll have a chance—”

That’s as far as she got. Then her head exploded.

I was standing an arm’s length from her. I closed my eyes reflexively. Warm globs spattered my face, neck, and hands. Pain stabbed my cheek, and I knew I had just been jabbed by bone shrapnel from Kimmie’s skull.

I knew, because I used to live on a world where this kind of thing happened. It was called Tech Duinn.

My brain said Sniper and He was aiming for me.

He was aiming for me, but Kimmie stepped into his crosshairs while he was in the act of pulling the trigger, during that long instant after you commit your body to a course of action, when it’s too late to take it back.

I heard the crack. At the same time I hit the dirt.

I yelled, “Irene!” I popped my head up. All three of the kids had also hit the dirt. I knew all about their lives, right then. I could see the oldest girl’s sneakers sticking out from behind a bale of local pelts. She looked to be lying on top of the littlest kid. Protecting her. Her right sneaker had a hole in the heel.

I knew none of the kids had been hit, because there’d only been one shot.

One shot, one kill, as we used to say.

Rafael Ijiuto had not been hit, either. He had made the smart decision that his cargo was less important than his life. He was driving away across the pad as fast as his rented pickup could go.

Kimmie’s body lay at the foot of the ladder. Her blood puddled on the chemically hardened dirt. Her head was gone. Correction: I was wearing it. She had been a full foot shorter than me, and my brain said He wasn’t trying for a headshot. He aimed at your center of mass.

Another crack split the air. I paid it no mind, crawling underneath the ship. I already knew the sniper was not close. The sonic boom had taken too long to get here. I also knew his weapon did not have facial recognition targeting or smart ammo that could recalibrate in flight. Because if it did, I’d be dead.

Underneath the ship, a robust lattice of metal trusses at head height supported the auxiliary engines. The underslung missile launchers blocked my view forward, but I figured there were no enemies in that direction.

The shots had come from the south. From the island where the Sunderer ships were.

If I was correct about that, the aft port auxiliary engine would now shield me from the sniper. It rested on the ground like a prehistoric whale’s flipper. Keeping it at my back, I crawled to the kids.

Their faces were white under the dirt. “Mister,” the boy said, “you got blood on you.”

Ignoring the comment, I beckoned to the older girl. What had Kimmie said her name was? “Pippa. Follow me.” I rose to a stooping crouch and led the kids aft.

The boy yelped. I turned around and saw he wasn’t behind me. He’d gone to peek out around the aft port engine, and seen Kimmie’s body lying at the foot of the ladder.

I seized him by one bony shoulder and hauled him back. “That could be you if you don’t do as I say.” I turned to Pippa. “See that ladder?”

A ladder reached down to the ground on the starboard side of the fuselage, identical to the one on the port side. Pippa nodded.

“We’re going to climb that. I’ll go first. If I get shot, y’all come back down here and don’t move until the cops arrive.”

“What cops?” Pippa said. “This’s a free-fire zone.”

I cursed inwardly, having suspected as much. If the natives believed in the concept of policing, this wouldn’t be classified as a Fringeworld, and the Sunderers wouldn’t’ve just shot my admin’s head off. “Move it,” I said curtly.

Every minute I was on the ladder, my spine tingled. But no shot came, and I heard nothing except the wind until we were all on top of the fuselage, crouching on the starboard side of the bridge. Looked like I’d figured it correctly. There was only one sniper, and now I had a three-storey armored superstructure in between us and him. We called it the bridge, but most of it was the cargo hold. The actual essentials were safely tucked away below.

I figured it wasn’t a huge risk sending the kids below. They’d be safer inside the ship than they were out here. Martin, my engineer, and Mechanical Failure were down there, anyway.

I slapped the plate of the starboard airlock hatch, unlocking it with my palm-print. The hatch cover slid back smoothly into the hull.

“Get my scope,” Irene’s voice floated down from the top of the bridge.

“Which one?” I called back.

“The 20x tactical Dayforce.”

Pippa stopped me. “I’ll get it,” she said. “Where is it?”

I started to tell her no, then reconsidered. I didn’t have time to rummage through Irene’s tip of a cabin. “Ask the bald guy.”

I sped them on their way into the airlock with a slap on the littlest kid’s rump. I just hoped they did run into Martin first, not Mechanical Failure.

In the same motion, I leaned inside the cramped airlock chamber, opened a locker, and took out my tactical backpack. I shrugged it onto my shoulders.

Irene looked down from the top of the bridge. She was lying flat on her stomach, her head and the muzzle of her second-best rifle silhouetted against the gray sky. Figured she’d had it close to hand with Sunderers in the area.

“Kimmie’s dead,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“If they come for the ship, hold them off until I get back,” I said.

“Why are they shooting at us?” she said.

“That’s the ten million GC question,” I said, not quite lying. I didn’t know that it was Zane Cole’s gang shooting at us. I just strongly suspected it. I realized that if we all lived through this, I was going to have to fill Irene in on my history with the Sunderers, such as it was.

I closed the airlock, descended the ladder, said a Hail Mary in my head, and sprinted towards the trees lining the back of our pad.

I knew that the wind was blowing onshore, perpendicular to the sniper’s line of fire, and with the amount of variation in its strength, he’d have a hard time dialing his windage up or down fast enough to shoot accurately. Especially at a moving target.

All the same, I was gambling with my life, and the only thing that drove me to it was the thought of Kimmie’s poster of Mt. Everest, and her body lying on the dirty ground of an alien planet.

Halfway there, I heard a crack. My brain said Irene and my legs kept running. I hit the treeline without slowing down, crashed into a curtain of vines, and stumbled to a halt.

I pushed the vines aside like a curtain, letting them fall back into place behind me.

Then I stripped off my clothes in record time. Stuffed them into my backpack.

Took a deep breath, hunched my shoulders, and Shifted into a wolf.

 

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Zane might’ve walked away. Or I might’ve. Nothing of what followed need have happened.

Then we decided to recognize each other, after all. Zane stopped walking. Dolph and I had already stopped. We stood face to face.

The wind gusted over us, making Zane squint. I saw the white in the frown lines he’d acquired on Tech Duinn.

He mustered a normal voice. “Well, hey! I wasn’t expecting to see you two chunks of space debris this side of Ragnarok.”

My palms were damp. Heat surged through my veins.

Intellectually, I knew I was angry at the wrong person. Zane had not forced my wife to leave me, after all. She had gone of her own free will. But I felt like punching him to a bloody pulp.

Dolph stepped in. “Did they forget to check IDs when you applied for a landing permit? Or you just lied to them?” He let Zane know that we weren’t buying his ‘hey ol’ war buddies’ bullshit.

“Who are you calling a liar?” Zane said. “We’re legit. Paid the landing fee and everything.”

“Guess it’s true what they say about the natives,” Dolph shot back. “They ain’t very freaking smart.”

“Other way round,” Zane said, still acting injured. “They’re smart enough to not discriminate. You here on business?”

Dolph ignored the question. Stepping in closer to Zane, he growled, “You scouting this place for a Sundering?”

As the trophies decorating his coat proclaimed, Zane Cole was a Sunderer. He hadn’t been one when we were in the special forces together. He had drifted over to them after the end of the war. Our war, the one that liberated Tech Duinn and killed my youthful illusions about humanity. It should not have been a surprise to me that one of our own would become a pirate … an exile from human and alien civilization, one of the Sundering tribes who gloried in a reputation so macabre, not even the Eks would mess with them.

It had surprised me—totally blindsided me, in fact—when this selfsame renegade walked off with my wife.

She had said she was bored with me. Bored.

Black spots danced in front of my vision. I realized I needed to breathe. I inhaled a lungful of dust, and felt something solid in my right hand. I was gripping the butt of my Midday Special.

If you’ve been in the army, you know you don’t need to be walking around encrusted with macho leg jewellery. A .22 is sufficient for most close-quarters situations. Especially when it is loaded with soft points.

My Midday Special would suffice to put Zane Cole on the ground right now. I could practically taste the blood that would gush from his wounds.

Snapping out of the fantasy, I reminded myself that I was forty-five years old, responsible for the livelihoods of a dozen people. Furthermore, we were being watched by a hundred beady-eyed natives. I pictured Lucy’s face.

I said, “How’s Sophia?”

Sophia. Never Sophie or Sophs. My ex-wife’s name suited her perfectly, conjuring the dark-haired elegance and pensive gaze that I had fallen in love with. I’d managed to forget the world-weary sneer more often seen on her face towards the end of our marriage.

“She’s good, man, she’s good.” Zane managed a weak smile. Pirate or not, at least he had the decency to feel awkward about the situation.

What I really wanted to know was if they were still together. But I was too proud to ask.

“You treating her right?” Dolph said bluntly.

Zane pushed back the left sleeve of his ghastly coat, making both of us twitch. But there was no weapon sheathed on his forearm. Instead, a slender lady’s watch glittered amidst his arm hair. “Got her a present. Genuine Urush fortunometer.”

Well, there was my answer. He wouldn’t be buying Sophia presents unless they were still together. I wondered where she was right now. Jomborg? Calthutitan? That still wouldn’t tell me much, as the Sunderers’ nomadic fleets of hellships seldom stay in one place for long.

“That the kind that tells your fortune as well as the time?” Dolph said.

“Yeah. Got it for 15 KGCs.” Zane was simultaneously boasting about what a good price he got, and bragging on his spending power. I wouldn’t clear 15 KGCs in profit this whole trip.

Dolph flicked the watch contemptuously with a fingernail. “Don’t need a fancy timepiece to tell your fortune,” he said.

“How not?”

“I can read the future,” Dolph said. “It holds a severe ass-kicking for you if you don’t get outta our faces right now.”

Zane drew back. His fair face flushed an angry red. “Shifter assholes,” he said. “Shouldn’t be allowed off the leash.” He walked away, the bits of dead people on the back of his coat bouncing.

“You got ripped off,” I yelled after him. He kept walking, but I thought his ears turned redder. “That’s a fake for sure,” I said to Dolph, forcing myself to speak in a regular tone of voice.

“Yeah.”

The Urush—the extinct alien race who are thought to have been the first intelligent species to conquer the Messier 4 Cluster—left behind odd bits of tech that still work after all these years. I had heard of their fortunometers, but no way had Zane scored a genuine one in a refugee camp for a mere 15 KGCs.

“What kind of Sunderer is he anyway,” Dolph said, “buying shit instead of just taking it? That’s gotta be against the pirate code of ethics.”

I made a gesture that meant I was grateful to Dolph for having my back—always and forever, amen, bro—but I needed him to shut the heck up right now.

He got the message and fell silent, after spitting out one more comment: “Makes me think less of the natives.”

I nodded. Even if the Sunderers had promised to be on their best behavior, the natives shouldn’t have let them land. Most spacefaring species don’t even allow them in-system, at least not willingly.

Admittedly, these little furry guys were not quite a fully-fledged spacefaring species. They contracted out their planetary security to a human outfit, one of the private military companies that flourish in the Fringe, beyond human territory proper. I guess this outfit didn’t want to risk any of their brittle old military surplus ships by telling the Sunderers no.

We saw the Sunderer ships as we drove in our rental buggy across the causeway connecting our island to the mainland. There were two of them. They peeked out from behind a hedge on the lee side of the next island over, about one klick away. Dust hazed the scene, and ships were constantly landing and taking off, rattling the bones in my head and stirring up even more dust. But there was no mistaking the angular dragon-heads of the hellships—sculptures welded together from steel plate—or the whip-like tails coiled over their backs. These “tails” were actually HERF masts, illegal weapons that could paralyze an enemy ship by killing its electronics. Illegal is no barrier to the Sunderers. Some people were moving around outside the closer hellship, setting up what looked like tents.

I strained my eyes, trying to see if one of them was Sophia. She might have come here with Zane. But it was no use. The figures could have been men, women, or even human-sized aliens. There are a few alien Sunderers, and they wear the same baggy, handmade crap as the human ones.

“Dolph?” I motioned towards the hellships.

“Uh huh.” He was staring in that direction. He’d seen them.

As we bumped off the end of the causeway onto our island, Dolph said, “Let me out here.” He reached across me and killed the buggy’s electric engine. The little vehicle drifted towards the shoulder.

“Dammit.” I spun the wheel to stop us from going into the ditch. “What’s the idea?”

“I’m just going to take a look around.” He popped his door. “They won’t even see me.”

What should I have said? Don’t? He was doing exactly what I wanted to do, and both of us knew it. I had trouble, oftentimes these days, stomaching my own petty hypocrisies. For better or for worse, my frayed sense of my own dignity prevented me from telling Dolph to get back in the car like a good little Shifter. I settled for, “Don’t kill anyone.”

He grinned at me. “I’m shocked, shocked, that you would feel the need to say that.” As he stretched to grab his backpack from the back seat, I glimpsed his gun inside his coat. It was a pocket Gauss of Ek manufacture. Of course he had it on him, just like I had my Midday Special. Uimphathat was known to be a dangerous place. “Couldn’t ask for better cover,” he said, raising his eyes to the horizon, and slipped out of the buggy.

What he meant was that this spaceport was a Godawful mess. Located about four klicks from the refugee camp, it had grown without a plan and with only minimal infrastructure. There were hardly any real landing pads. Mostly you were just putting down on hardened dirt. In many places, rocks poked through like bones sticking up from a dried carcass. Most spaceships can cope with less than perfectly flat surfaces—mine certainly could—but all the same, it was an accident waiting to happen. Furthermore, tenacious local greenery had been allowed to grow up between the pads, and around the water and cryo-fuel tanks on the coasts of the islands. This was a heavily forested planet—from space it looked green. It was just around the refugee camp that every last sprig had been uprooted, presumably by the refugees themselves. Nights can get cold out here.

Anyway, these untended, house-height hedges, blanketed by invasive vines, blocked my sightlines as soon as I drove onto the island. Tents filled in the gaps in the hedges and encroached onto the launch pads. Some of the refugees apparently preferred to live here, despite the noise. Having seen the housing provided for them further down the coast, I couldn’t blame them.

Pad 165 was much like the others: a dirt field equipped with water sprinklers and a movable fuelling stand. My ship sprawled in the middle of it like a beached plesiosaur. Around the ship lay bales and boxes of this and that which we were contracted to take back to Ponce de Leon. Kimmie, my admin, sat on a crate, writing up our manifest. There were several other people around, who I barely looked at, assuming they were the owners of all this crap. Then, as I swung my legs out of the buggy, one of them accosted me. She was a ragged, undersized female. I had to struggle for a minute to place her.

“Mister, you got a minute?”

That voice. Throaty, husky. It was the teenager from the knife stall.

“Sorry, kid,” I said. She had brought two of her little friends. “I’m kinda busy.”

“Where’s the other guy?” She stayed with me as I walked up to my ship. The other kids straggled, regarding the ship in awe.

“Irene,” I yelled.

The girl persisted, “Gonna let you in on a special deal. Two for one. I shouldn’t be saying this, but it’s hot stock, know what I mean? Gotta move them.” She grinned. The grin stopped me in my tracks. It was so … joyful, despite her awful life circumstances. And yet when it went away, I could still see that hint of desperation in her eyes. “Just have a look, whaddaya say?” She opened a cruddy plastic case and brandished a knife to show me as we walked.

I grabbed her hand and twisted the knife out of it. “I say don’t wave a goddamn blade at me. Or anyone.” I seized the case, fitted the blade back in, closed it, and tossed the whole thing to one of the other children. “You pull a knife, you’re just bumping the odds of getting stabbed yourself.”

She stared at me, nursing her fingers, and said quietly, “I live here, mister. I know.”

Irene, my weapons officer, looked down from the top of the ship’s fuselage. She was wearing a coverall and surgical mask, and holding the business end of a high-pressure air hose. She said, “I tried to get them to go away, Mike.” She shrugged and went back to cleaning out the barrels of the hull-mounted guns. We had two rotating large-caliber Gausses, plus a maser point defense system, and dual missile launchers on the belly for 360° coverage. Better to have ‘em and not need ‘em, than need ‘em and not have ‘em.

Irene was as tough as they come, but I would bet she hadn’t tried very hard to make the kids go away. She had two children of her own. Moreover, her shrug said the same thing as Kimmie’s silence: You’re the captain. Your responsibility.

“Kids, we’re not buying,” I said, heading for the port-side ladder. “Try the next pad over.”

“Mike? Is that your name?” The girl changed tack. “You heading back to PdL after this? Matter of fact, we’re looking for a ride. You take passengers?”

Her tenacity would have made me smile, on a better day. Now it exasperated me. “No passengers,” I grunted, starting up the ladder.

Another of the kids, a boy of maybe twelve, spoke up for the first time. “Mister, this is an awesome ship.”

I didn’t disagree. My ship actually looked enough like a Sunderer ship that we got grief from folks who’d never seen a real one. It had a ‘head’ whose serrated jaws concealed a powerful energy cannon—but my ship’s head was rounded, with a sort of a goofy grin. The cuddly lines continued through its fat fuselage. Its four wings looked like flippers, although in fact they were auxiliary engines. Up top, a jumble of retrofitted point defense systems and a cargo crane resembled a bunch of luggage tied on top of your minivan. No doubt its first owner had been mightily disappointed. I suspect he had asked for something that looked like a hellship. What he got was this, and now I had it, second-hand. It could do half a gee of constant acceleration for days, or turn on a dime in FTL, and you wouldn’t feel a thing. I shrugged off the kid’s praise, but I was keenly aware that I must look to them like the possessor of impossible riches.

A man with his own spaceship.

And bills to pay.

And the ex-wife from hell.

And Zane Cole’s gang of Sunderers, coincidentally on this planet at the same time as me? The Cluster was too big for that to be a coincidence .

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I strolled along the main drag of Uimaphathat Refugee Camp with my old Panama at a jaunty angle and a sparkly fairy flying two feet above my head. Dust blew like smoke on the wind of this unmemorable Fringe planet, which rattled the cat’s cradle of power lines overhead, and tangled the banners hanging out in front of the stalls. A herd of horned, seven-foot yuriops rudely cut in front of me and my business partner, Dolph. I frowned at the remote control bracelet around my wrist, punched a button, and jacked the fairy up to a height of ten feet, to keep it visible above the crowd. Many aliens are much taller than humans.

And it seemed like every species in the Cluster considered Uimphathat to be a hot shopping destination.

I was never going to find this guy.

“I want one of those,” Dolph said through the bandanna covering his nose and mouth. I followed his gaze to a stall selling knives. Big, little, electrified, poison-tipped, auto-barbed, with grips made for hands that had five fingers, four, eight, or none. Uimaphathat really did have everything. You wouldn’t take it for a refugee camp, but that’s what it was. The people manning the knife stall were as human as we were, probably more so. The youngest of them was no bigger than my own daughter, eight-year-old Lucy. The eldest looked about sixteen. Thirty years ago, a human colony had fled a Sundering in the core of the Cluster, wound up here—and here they had stayed, and multiplied. The furry, long-nosed natives were signatories of the multilateral Refugee Convention, and also knew a money-making proposition when they saw one. With typical human ingenuity, the refugees had transformed this barren swath of coast into a shopping mall.

“Yo, big guy,” the teenager at the knife stall called out. “Wanna put some steel in your holster?”

“She’s talking to you, Mike,” Dolph said with an amused snort.

I glanced at the girl. Dirty blonde hair hacked off at her shoulders, dust-colored skin, charity trousers and sweatshirt retooled into something more punk than refugee. A knife the size of a machete rode at her hip. But it was her eyes that caught me—unexpectedly dark, smouldering with a hint of something like desperation.

“Or you need a place to stash your blade? Got something just the right size.” She pumped her hips, lifted her machete an inch clear of her scabbard, and laughed. She was a child, but she had the voice of a forty-year-old smoker, and a line in cheap innuendo to rival any streetwalker.

I practically had to put Dolph in a headlock to stop him from heading over to the stall.

“That’s a genuine metalforma,” he said in anguish.

For Dolph, it was all about the knives, not the girl.

“Gotta find this guy first,” I said.

“Yeah, keep on walking,” the girl shouted after us. “Whaddaya expect from a man with a toy fairy?” Her little friends giggled shrilly.

I looked up ruefully at the fairy. It had four wings, two for gliding and two that acted as a rotor. Its costume and long tresses had been sparkly before the dust of this planet turned them gray. It could sing nursery rhymes, although I had it on mute, figuring the humiliation of walking around with the thing was bad enough as it was. Basically, it was a fully functional drone masquerading as a toy. I was planning to give this one to Lucy, if it didn’t get too wrecked—and I had 8,999 more of them to deliver to one Rafael Ijiuto, wholesaler, at Uimaphathat.

If I could find him.

“He’s still not picking up,” Dolph said, pocketing his phone in disgust.

“So we’ll do this the old-fashioned way.” I peered at the screen of the remote bracelet and punched buttons. “Extreme mode: engaged,” I intoned.

We had reached a crossroads in the maze of the refugee camp. Humans and aliens were queuing up at the eateries. A crowd surrounded a unicylist doing tricks. The fairy rose up to a height of twenty feet, let out a peal of mechanical laughter, and began to swoop around, scattering fairy dust. I hadn’t actually tried this function before. It was impressive. Dolph and I watched open-mouthed as the stuff blew over the crowds and stuck to their faces, cilia, horns, and tentacles. It was just glitter. I had made sure we were standing up-wind. Nevertheless, Dolph got some sparkles on his hair, and my Panama would probably never be the same. The crowd let out that soft unguarded ‘oooh’ you hear when people have witnessed something unexpected and magical. The unicylist fell off his machine.

The wind caught a last voluminous cloud of glitter and carried it away over the tent roofs.

“If that doesn’t get his attention, nothing will,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

We were in the middle of a surprisingly good meal of ugali and stewed chicken—food aid remixed into something bordering on cuisine—when Rafael Ijiuto finally showed up.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Rafe. You must be Mike.”

I swallowed my mouthful and half-stood to shake his hand. Dolph hooked a free crate with his foot. Ijiuto lowered himself onto it. He looked to be in his twenties, hair buzzed to a quarter-inch all over, biscuit-colored scalp showing through. The hair was biscuit-colored, too, with a coating of dust. Making no concessions to the fact that he was sitting in a fast food joint in a refugee camp, he wore a suit and tie, the business-formal template that has stood the test of so many centuries it’s practically encoded in male human DNA. I have a suit myself somewhere. However, at the moment Dolph and I were both in jeans and heavy coats—it was chilly on this planet. Ijiuto looked cold. He ordered a cup of tea. The wind snapped the awning over our heads. Aliens and humans alike shouted at each other to be heard.

Ijiuto declined to raise his voice. I had to lean in close to him to catch his words. “OK to pick up the cargo directly from your ship?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re on pad one-sixty-five.”

The refugee camp’s spaceport had grown in step with its fame as a shopping emporium. It now sprawled for miles along the coast, and over the rocky barrier islands.

“We’re out on one of the islands,” I said. “You got a vehicle? We’re talking four large crates, a hundred kilos each.”

Ijiuto nodded. “I’m going to hire a truck.”

“I’ll need the balance of your payment at that time,” I mentioned.

“No problem.” He was looking at the fairy. I’d turned it off and put it in the middle of the table, where it had been drawing admiring stares from aliens who’d seen the fairy dust display. Dolph had spilled beer on its wings. Guess I wouldn’t be giving it to Lucy, after all. “I love this product,” Ijiuto said. “Only humans would think of something like this.”

We drank to that. “To humanity,” Dolph said, knocking his beer stein against Ijiuto’s tea cup. “The only species in the Cluster with the gall to charge 300 GCs apiece for a mass market drone with a frilly costume.”

All joking aside, human solidarity matters in a place like this. If your fellow humans don’t have your back, who will?

“But it isn’t just a mass-market drone, is it?” Ijiuto said, his flat young face suddenly creasing with concern. “It’s got parental controls?”

“Of course it has,” I said, shifting into salesman mode. I took the bracelet off and showed him. “Here’s where you can lock it, and I guaran-freaking-tee you the firmware is secure against hacking. You know who’s got the hardest network security in the Cluster? Not arms manufacturers. Not governments. Toy makers. They know no parent is going to touch anything that could be vulnerable to malware.”

“He would know,” Dolph put in, jogging my elbow. “His daughter doesn’t even get to have a phone.”

“Maybe when she’s sixteen,” I said, thinking fleetingly of the girl at the knife stall. In a few more years, my Lucy would be that age. But what a gulf lay between this world and ours. “Or maybe when she’s sixty.”

Ijiuto laughed, but now I was wondering where I’d be in another few years. Still hauling cargoes to the most dangerous, unsavory, and politically non gratis worlds in the Cluster? Still hustling to make payroll for my crew and salt away a little something for Lucy’s education? At least I did not have a mortgage on my ship. I owned that baby free and clear. That’s not to say I had no problems in that area—but I kept my thoughts from straying to what Dolph and I called our “mechanical failure.”

“Bottom line,” I said. “This is the hottest-selling toy on Ponce de Leon this year.” Our home base, Ponce de Leon, is one of the Big 3 worlds of humanity in the Messier 4 Cluster. It sets the tone for human colonies throughout the Cluster, and the more impressionable alien species as well. “You’re going to be able to name your price.”

“Oh, I’m sold,” Ijiuto said, with the first smile I’d seen out of him. I relaxed. The 1,200 KGCs he still owed me were as good as in my pocket.

We finished eating, paid the bill, and moseyed towards the Uimaphathat parking lot. At this end of the main drag, the natives had more of a presence. They cowered in the booths of various relief and aid agencies, their cuddly appearance belying the most relentless bureaucratic minds I had ever encountered. I had had to pay an outrageous landing fee to these little teddy-bears. “We also brought a shipment of food aid from Help the Hungry on PdL,” I mentioned to Ijiuto.

Did I want him to think I was not just a mercenary bastard like most indie freighter captains? The truth was, Help the Hungry had paid me market rates to ship their cheap and nasty protein bars. I’m not in the business of helping people for free.

“You wonder how much of it is going to reach the refugees, you know?” I said, motioning to the Help the Hungry booth, where a congregation of natives were chomping on what looked suspiciously like my protein bars.

“Yeah, it’s a shame the way these people get exploited,” Ijiuto said, in a completely uninterested voice. He was swiping at the screen of his handheld. “I can’t get through to the truck rental people. Can’t even get a dang signal. I’m going to have to go over there. Catch you up at the ship. Pad one-six-five, right?” As he spoke, he was already angling away from us.

“Yeah,” Dolph said to his back. “What kind of refugee camp doesn’t even have decent phone service?” He snickered. Dolph has a strong sense of justice, in his own way.

Then his face changed. The almond eyes above his bandanna widened. He threw an elbow into my side.

I spun around and saw someone I had hoped never to see again, and yet had dreamt of meeting again, pretty much nightly for a while. Those were bad dreams. Bloody dreams.

The reality was worse.

A few feet away was Zane Cole.

The man who stole my wife.

 

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