CHAPTER 1
The Mirror is a preposterous spaceship. The soap bubble of plas-glass coated with iridescent finish doesn’t look like it could survive an emergency landing, an impact with a piece of space trash, or even a kick with a moderate-weight boot. It looks like exactly what it is, the pipe dream of a society woman possessing more money than sense.
My ship—the Hermit—floats just outside radar range as I assess the points of entry to the Mirror. The bounty for Geni Etienne, recent ex-wife of Sarah Etienne, flashes on a console in my peripheral vision. This is supposed to be an easy retrieval—fools aren’t difficult to track down—and Geni is a fool if nothing else. After a mutually agreed-upon divorce, the woman got absolutely shit-faced, broke into her ex’s private dock, and stole the pleasure ship and everything within it—including Sarah’s prized genetically engineered flying lizard.
Goes to show, it never pays to trust. Either you wind up stealing a ship from your estranged lover or hiring a bounty hunter to track your lover down.
I’m Cyn Khaw, said bounty hunter.
When I get within range, the sentinel-override protocol provided to me by Sarah will deactivate the thrusters and the security system, leaving the Mirror helpless in the void. All I have to do is enter the ship, locate and restrain Geni, and plug in coordinates to take us back to Sarah Etienne’s private dock—where a tidy sum of credits awaits me. Research indicates that Geni wouldn’t know a blaster from a bouquet, so she’s unlikely to be armed or dangerous. Only vapid.
She was a foot model before she met Sarah. I’m sure a lot of foot models offer things besides excellent pedicures to society, but Geni isn’t one of them.
I should be able to take on one socialite with a grudge. I’ve certainly faced worse. You don’t work as a bounty hunter unless you’re mostly inured to violence and some kind of desperate.
I’m less inured than I’d prefer, but more desperate, so it evens out.
The desperate part will only come into play if the sentinel-override code doesn’t work. If the code doesn’t work—because Geni was unexpectedly clever enough to change it—then I have to break in. Which means I’ll set all the alarms off and lose whatever element of surprise I have.
I really hope she didn’t change the code.
I brush a hand through my newly cropped blond hair. I grew it out for my last mission—embedding with a cult on a desert planet so I could approach and retrieve one of their members for deprogramming. I managed to get her off-planet safely despite a few hiccups, including the meddling of an irritating scouting crew who insisted on trying to save me from myself.
No time for reminiscing, though—I have a bounty to retrieve.
I zip up my space suit, close the secondary-seal flap over the zipper, and slip my blaster-belt around my waist. It fastens snugly and the thigh strap ensures that nothing flies around if I go zero-g. The blaster fits perfectly in its holster and my helmet locks into place with a solid click.
A shiver works its way through me, but I shake my head once, a sharp negation of the sensation. This is a precaution. I will not be untethered in space.
I won’t.
I flex my hands in their gloves, familiarizing myself with how they slow my reflexes. I probably won’t need fast reflexes. Geni seems like the type to wallow. Probably she’s watching holos of her wedding ceremony and weeping into the scales of her ex-wife’s luxury lizard.
I nudge my ship into range, activate the sentinel override, and grimace as I wait for it to work or fail. It takes a bit. Long enough that I start to wonder how likely I am to get dead in the next few minutes. Eventually, I am rewarded by a whole array of sensors pointed at the Mirror registering dead signals and the happy green light of a successful connection on my ship’s display. Go time.
I’ve never been so happy to have a lazy bounty.
Instead of a boarding ramp, I have a flexible connecting tube, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’ll shoot out from my ship and, if I’m both very skilled and very lucky, will attach in a clever little airtight seal around the Mirror’s hatch. It’s only failed twice in the last standard year, which makes me fairly skilled and extraordinarily lucky.
Today is not attachment failure number three. My luck continues. The tube locks against the Mirror’s hull and the memory-metal floor stiffens to support it. With the memory-metal structure activated, the link between ships will even withstand towing force. I breathe a heavy sigh of relief that I expect to fog the faceplate even though I know my suit is calibrated to prevent that sort of thing.
I provide the verbal command to open the air lock and unholster my blaster as I step inside, thumbing down the intensity to stun because people frown on accidentally shooting holes through spaceships—or through bounties. Sarah wants her ex returned to face justice alive, not riddled with laser holes.
Who knows? After all this they may get back together. Stranger things have happened.
The air lock is larger than the one on the Hermit. No different than any other air lock, with the exception of the ridiculous crystal chandelier that some overachieving designer placed smack in the middle of the ceiling. It’s … a choice. I close the exterior hatch behind me and cue the pressurization sequence via my backdoor remote access. As the room equalizes with the rest of the ship, I grip my blaster, preparing for a hatch to fly open and a squadron of cheaply purchased security to shoot at me and test the resiliency of my armored space suit.
It isn’t all that resilient. My credits aren’t unlimited, and I have to eat and pay off family debts as well as invest in armor. So when the door finally slides open, I’m pressed against the wall alongside it, waiting to see a blaster nose its way inside. Nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief as I step out of the lock. Still nothing.
Maybe this job will actually be as easy as it seems.
The ship continues its ludicrous opulence on the inside. An opalescent sheen coats the rounded white walls, ceiling, and floor. I’m sure everyone likes living inside an iridescent egg. I don’t know why people say the wealthy are out of touch with the common person. Seems totally normal and easy to keep smudge-free.
At first, I think the ship is filled with surreal sculptures. A collection of spindly legged half-hatched shells perch in a corner, gleaming in the golden ambient light. Fragile scales line a wall, flaring at waist height.
It’s furniture. Wildly impractical furniture that will break the second you try to use it, but furniture, nonetheless.
I creep through the quiet ship, blaster out, waiting for someone to pop out and try to murder me. According to the schematics Sarah provided, the orb is subdivided on the inside. The hall I’m following now should open on a large central chamber that mirrors the shape of the ship itself. Three bedrooms surround the central chamber, and a staircase winds its way around the dome to a hatch in the top that accesses the helm. I came in via the hold, which is beneath the central chamber—and large enough to contain a small personal vessel as well as random supplies. A backup chandelier, maybe?
Good design if you want your ship to be difficult to secretly infiltrate. Rotten design if you’re the secret infiltrator.
Essentially, I must traipse through this whole vessel just to steal it. Rude.
As I approach the central chamber, noises start to filter into the hall. Wet smacking noises. The kind that are only fun to hear if they’re coming from you and even then not if you stop and really listen to them. It appears Geni has moved on romantically. I calculate the odds that I get all the way up that staircase while they’re distracted and I come up short. By the pace of the panted breaths, this little interlude is nearing its climax. Pun intended.
I hate to kill the mood. Then again, people are rarely armed while in the heat of the moment, so they’re less likely to kill me in retaliation. Besides, if I wait around, it smacks of voyeurism, and I really don’t want anyone to think I was creepily watching them prior to making a capture. Despite the oxygenated ship, I keep my face mask down as I round the corner, blaster raised, and nearly shit myself.
Geni has, indeed, moved on. She’s presently moving on a prone male form, hands in her hair like she’s posing for an advertising campaign instead of enjoying herself. That’s not why panic is poking little spines into my guts. It’s who she’s moving on. Carmichael Pierce. Not the current Pierce in charge, which would be catastrophic, but his heir, which is just short of catastrophic. Carmichael works as his father’s head of security, which means me popping up will be extra humiliating. He is the face of the Pierce Family, their bright new future.
I guess all that luck had to run out sometime.
Also, this is a very stupid choice for Geni if her goal is to remarry rather than just get her rocks off. Someone placed that highly can’t afford to marry someone like her who doesn’t bring any political clout. Pierce has their hands in all sorts of quasi-legal shit and makes alliances to keep it on the quasi side rather than fully illegal. If it’s energy, its pulse is Pierce. Solar, wind, nuclear, atomic, algae, fission, or anything else.
They’ve gobbled up star systems like a particularly gluttonous stray cat does mice. At this point, Pierce territory includes eight star clusters, at least thirty additional planets of value, one binary system, a research pulsar, and approximately two-fifths of the trading lanes. Maybe three-fifths now that Nakatomi is gone. And I have to interrupt his sexy-time to serve a warrant.
No one likes that. Powerful people even less than normal people, I imagine.
Pierces are brutal, ruthless, and—apparently—quite well-endowed, which I discover when Carmichael tosses Geni from his lap to the plushly upholstered bench seating—in an iridescent white, of course—and reaches for a blaster that’s been left on a side table. His hair is long, wavy, and blond. His eyes are dark. His face is rodenty despite the clear signs of facial surgery that arched his cheeks, strengthened his chin, and angled his jaw. Something about the eyes and the shape of his nose, maybe.
I put on my big-bad-bounty-hunter voice. It’s mostly my normal voice but less scared sounding. “That would be a bad idea. My bounty is for everything present except you, Carmichael. Geni Etienne, formerly and soon to be Geni al Astal, there is an open warrant for you in Pierce-Etienne border territory and I’ve been contracted to retrieve you. If you come with me without resistance, no harm will come to you.”
I’m smart enough to not give my name. Families love to hold grudges but there are a lot of bounty hunters out there. I sidle to the side table and retrieve Pierce’s blaster, tucking it in my belt.
Geni grumbles under her breath like I’m an inconvenient paparazzi. Her blue-greenish hair is still perfectly styled, draping over her shoulder. As I watch, the roots shift to a brilliant magenta that slowly makes its way down the rest of her strands. Optical-coating dye. No wonder her hair stayed in place. Her eyes are wide, hazel, and lacking intelligence. “What is it going to cost to make you go away?”
I kick the pile of clothes slightly closer to them. No need to do this naked. We can all be civilized. I don’t want to stun-blast them. For one thing, sometimes stunning has side effects. For another, stunning a Pierce would embarrass him, and embarrassing a Pierce is a great way to inspire him to make my life a living hell.
“Keep your hands in view as you dress.” I snap the command while keeping my distance across the room. “You seem to be unclear about how bounty hunting works. I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the glamour.”
“Glamour?” Her lip curls. “I can give you glamour. I can get you admittance to all the best social clubs. Esoterica. Makewells. Thorn and—”
“Who would even want to go to a social club? What do you do there? Drink? Hobnob? Socially hit people with actual clubs?” I shake my head. It says something about Families that her only thought of glamour is some sort of location where people can view her being fancy. Also, she can’t recognize a joke. “Carmichael Pierce, you are free to leave the ship in your own vessel. The Mirror and its contents are owned by Sarah Etienne and shall be returned to her.”
Please just leave the ship. It’s easy. Take the easy way.
He doesn’t take the easy way.
Carmichael lunges at me with arms spread and I stun him with a shot to the torso. He flops on the floor like a dropped pile of laundry. Only without any clothes. So, I guess, the opposite of a pile of laundry.
Geni squeaks.
I’m far too professional to squeak. My nervous panic is on the inside because I just shot a naked Carmichael Pierce and watched him helplessly flop on the floor, and now I’m going to have to restrain him. A hidden security force would have been better because security forces, like me, are nobodies. No one gets upset if you stun them and they usually understand that the job comes first.
Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck.
Yes, this is Etienne business, but that’s like trying to explain to a tornado that you just had an earthquake so it will have to try again later. It doesn’t give a fuck. I just shot a human tornado, and he probably bruised his very exposed winky when he fell on it.
I’m so screwed.
Instead of pacing frantically trying to figure out what to do, I turn to face Geni. I toss a pair of plastic tie cuffs to the floor. “Put the cuffs on him. Nice and tight.”
When she’s done locking Pierce’s wrists behind his back, I throw her another pair of the cuffs. “Get dressed, then cuff yourself.”
“You k-killed him.” She’s crying, or at least that’s what she wants me to think she’s doing. No actual tears, which ruins the effect. She’s complying with my requests, though, which is what I really care about. She spends an inordinate amount of time fussing with her collar for a woman who’s headed to prison for spaceship theft.
“I didn’t kill him. Why would I ask you to restrain him if I killed him? He’s stunned. He’ll be just fine in a couple minutes.”
Probably.
After scanning the room for possible weapons, I drape a blanket over Pierce, raise my face shield at last, and search the rest of the ship. The ship is even more blindingly white without the slight tint of the face shield filtering the light. No other living creatures are present except a chubby winged lizard, small enough that I could hold it with both hands cupped, in a cage in one of the bedrooms. It gnaws on the drool-coated bars of its cage. The aforementioned pet of Sarah’s. Something smells like sulfur and, when I approach the cage, I see that slivers of metal have been pared off the bars. Flakes of it decorate tiny fangs and the lizard belches at me. A spark flies out.
Well. That’s a wildly impractical creature to bring on a spaceship. I stow Pierce’s blaster on a shelf behind the cage, because if I keep it stuck in my belt, I’ll probably shoot myself in the butt.
“I’m here to take you back to your mom,” I tell the lizard. It belches again and sticks out a narrow, forked tongue. I’m going to assume that means “yay.”
It’s kind of cute. Reddish-gold scales near its spine fade to brass on its belly. Small, diaphanous bronze wings are folded tightly against its back. Brilliantly golden eyes. Black gums, which I see when it bares its teeth at me. I bare mine back. The bars look like they’ll hold for a while yet, so I leave the lizard where it is and turn to the main area.
A fist comes out of nowhere and nails me directly in the nose. I stagger backward, stars pinwheeling in front of my eyes, and reflexively snap a kick to my left. I hit something, but not hard enough to stop a second blow that strikes the edge of my helmet rather than my face. I fall back against the doorframe, trying frantically to get my head back in the game, except my head is exactly the problem. You don’t quickly bounce back from getting hit in the face unless you’re a professional actor.
Copyright © 2024 by Constance Fay