Chapter 14

Havik:

He followed the smuggler’s freighter at a distance, keeping the ship at the edges of his long-range scanners. He did not worry about the freighter detecting him. Commercial scanners did not have the range or the sensitivity of the one he installed in his ship. Much of his ship had been upgraded, including the shields, and had been further improved by the installation of weapons. While his vessel appeared to be of humble origins and sought to be unobtrusive, it could defend itself.

The smuggler’s freighter had similar modifications. He noted the hidden gun ports and the upgraded shields. The energy signature indicated that the original engine had been replaced with a more powerful drive. The freighter traveled at a rate that neared what the upper limit of speed that could be traveled safely. Anything faster and the ship’s integrity would degrade.

He hoped the smugglers were not so foolish as to endanger his mate, or they would suffer the consequences.

Thalia:

Being the new person on the crew sucked. Thalia got all the menial and disgusting tasks. Naston claimed he was too “fragile” to do his kitchen rotation that week, even though Thalia caught him and Dray playing a boisterous game of kicking and chasing a ball up and down the corridors.

She might have added too much salt to his portion, but no one could prove it.

Dray continued to be an ass as he foisted off any chore to her that he could without arousing the captain’s suspicion. The only other human on the ship, Butcher—because of course that was his name—simply didn’t trust her and watched her like he expected the worst when she entered a room with her mop and bucket.

Yeah, a mop and bucket. The space pirates had her swabbing the deck. Or corridors, as it were.

The upside to being the newbie was every place had to be mopped. Dragging her mop and bucket let her learn the layout of the ship and snoop better than trying to be sneaky because that mop and bucket made her practically invisible. Every door opened with her custodial code.

Every door but one.

Clever people probably had some educated explanation about the invisibility of menial labor and class structure, but Thalia felt anything but invisible. Clad in the bright yellow flight suit she inherited from Paadric, she was hideously visible. No one had any excuse to ignore the giant banana suit.

While she felt bold enough to open every door and poke in supply closets, she did not feel confident enough to send a message to Havik. First, there was nothing much to report. The freighter was headed to an auction, but Havik and Ren would figure that out by following the tracker embedded under her skin. Second, every outgoing message would be scrutinized, so her comm unit remained unused.

Sure, she could send a message with a false destination to a friend back on Earth and bounce it off relays to obfuscate its ultimate true destination, but she didn’t have the skills to pull it off. That was more of a theoretical option she saw in movies and shows. Even if she leveled up her tech skills and got a message to Havik, it would have to be written in code. Not an obvious code like numbers and symbols, but the real message would have to be written between the lines.

She just didn’t know if the rigidly truthful and too-good-for-his-own-good Havik would even realize the message had a code. He’d be confused as to why the message was addressed to a dead man, Doc, and might discard it as a joke. Ren might recognize the code. There were so many factors to consider, and so much could go wrong.

No, getting a message out was too risky. She had to wait, keep her ears open, and hope that the tracker worked.

“Newbie!” Naston shouted down the corridor, breaking Thalia out of her thoughts. “Bring the cleaning solvents and a lot of towels. You are required.”

“The name’s Thalia. You might try it, you know, since I saved your life!” Thalia shouted back. While he made a rude hand gesture, she unlocked the bucket wheels and followed. “You really should have better manners. Everyone on board knows how to kill you now and make it look like you’re too much of an idiot to read the label on a bottle of beer.”

Naston spun on his heels. Before she could blink, he had a utility knife pressed to her throat. A hard, bitter expression settled on his face. “Dray told me about you.”

“All good things?”

“He doesn’t like you,” Naston said.

“I get the impression that he doesn’t like anyone.”

He blinked, a slow grin spreading on his face. Up close, his lavender complexion appeared washed out. The harsh lighting showed every scratch and smudges of oil on the decorative horn caps. His teeth were brown, and his breath had the yeasty smell of beer. Delightful. Drinking on the job.

She filed that nugget of intel away. Another advantage of being the invisible cleaning person was she saw all the crew’s bad habits. They might put up a good front with the captain around, but she saw their true natures. Every one of them was a selfish, conniving bastard who would slit the other’s throats if there was profit to be made.

“Oh,” she said, not able to keep her sudden revelation to herself. “Someone already knew about your allergy. It wasn’t an accident.”

She hadn’t saved his life. She interrupted his murder.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get her before she gets me,” he said.

There was only one other “her” on board: the captain. Thalia should not have been surprised. Sue bragged about murdering the old captain to gain the ship. What did Sue gain from Naston’s death? Insurance money, or just the satisfaction of taking a life?

Thalia misunderstood the situation at the bar. What else did she misunderstand since coming aboard?

Desperately needing a distraction, she rattled the mop in her bucket. “The mess?”

He blinked again, pulling the utility knife away. “The automatic cleaning system broke this week. You’ll have to haul in the water in buckets. I hope you don’t mind shit,” he said with a giggle.

Naston brought her to the one door she could never open. He pressed his palm to a scanner, and the door slid open to the cargo hold.

The stench of urine made her eyes water. She coughed, covering her mouth with a handkerchief. “What the hell? Did the sewage treatment tank leak?”

Naston tossed her a mask with a small filter. “Don’t open the cages. Hose the animals down. Mop up the floor. Refuse goes down the drain. Simple enough for a Terran.”

Cages stacked on top of each other lined the cargo hold, arranged around a large drain in the middle of the floor. Alien animals she did not recognize screeched and cried and growled and called to each other. One cage held a flock of bird-like creatures that bounced from branch to branch, the talons of their back legs gripping the wooden dowels. Their front paws moved from their mouths to their round ears as they cleaned themselves. Green with white bellies, their wings fluttered. They were lovely, and it made Thalia sad that the floor of their cage was a thick layer of empty seed husks and shit.

Not in a cage but chained to a wall, an animal the size of a moose stamped its feet. Tawny with a black mane and tail, black stripes decorated its neck. A thick black stripe ran down the length of its face. She recognized it from a documentary about endangered animals she watched with Havik. Turns out Danger B loved animals, the scarier, the better.

Looking over the cargo hold again, she recognized more endangered animals from the same documentary, like the smugglers used the film as a shopping list.

Endangered animals.

That they were bringing to auction.

Fuck.

Her stomach turned from more than the stench.

Thalia approached slowly. From this distance, she could see its coat caked with mud—probably shit but she was going to call it mud—and blood. The shackles on a hoof had rubbed the skin raw.

It reared back to lash out with a hoof, but the chain jerked back, obviously programmed to snap back if the animal pulled too much. With a squeal, the animal fell to the ground.

The sound made her heart hurt. She wasn’t sure how she could get close, but she had to help the poor thing.

With her attention focused on the large animal thrashing on the ground, a paw reached out from the cage closest to her and grabbed onto the pant leg of her flight suit.

Thalia jumped, knocking the paw away. “I’m so sorry! Are you hurt?”

She crouched down, only to find that the animal had retreated to a far corner. She coughed again at the unbelievably bad smell of ammonia. Had the cages even been cleaned? How long had the animals been kept like this?

She had no idea what to do. Opening the cages was not only dangerous, but pointless. The animals would still be contained in the ship, heading toward the auction. Any chaos or confusion that resulted would give the mean-tempered crew a reason to kill the animals.

Thalia immediately rejected the idea. Maybe she could sneak in and free the animals when they reached the auction. No, the result would be more of the same. She needed to alter the course, to return the ship to the planet from where the animals had been stolen.

Except she didn’t know where that was.

And she didn’t know how to fly a spaceship.

She did know how to clean up a mess and doing that would improve the animals’ lives, albeit temporarily.

Thalia found a hose with a spray nozzle and a waterspout. She rinsed off the floor, directing the worst of the filth into the center drain. At least the ship was generous with water. The potable water was on a different supply tank than the recycled gray water used for almost everything else.

Wet and up to her knees in filth, Thalia did not hear the door open.

“Who let you in here?” Sue demanded.

Thalia released her grip on the hose’s nozzle. “Naston.”

“Lazy bastard.” Sue narrowed her eyes. “I suppose you’re some bleeding-heart animal lover and you want answers.”

“You’re poachers.”

Sue grimaced. “Nah. Smugglers. I don’t do the actual poaching, just transportation.”

“These are endangered animals. Don’t you care that you’re destroying something special and rare?”

“What did you think we smuggled, sugarplum?” Sue’s fingers brushed against the blaster on her hip.

Thalia held up her hands in surrender. “I don’t know. Overtaxed goods. Luxury cheese. Drugs. Weapons. People.”

Sue laughed, almost barking. “You didn’t think we smuggled people? There’s no profit in people. I’d have to stack them tip to tail, and there would be no way to keep the inventory healthy in those conditions.”

“People are not inventory,” Thalia said, knowing full well that other smugglers had no problem with the conditions Sue described.

“People are not profitable inventory,” Sue clarified.

“What about stasis chambers?”

“Do you want me to traffic people? Is that what you’re getting at?”

“No! No. The cages are cruel and difficult to clean. Stasis chambers seem more humane,” Thalia said.

Sue shook her head. “The tech is controlled too tightly by the military and planetary governments. Any working units you can find are ancient or cobbled together from decommissioned parts. They’re finicky and the failure rate is too high.”

Thalia nodded, remembering what the warlord had said about the backup batteries failing in the recovered chambers. “What’s going to happen to the animals?”

“I’m sure I have no idea. Whatever the collectors want: a new pet, to eat them, to fight, grind up their bones for tea, or maybe even fuck them.”

Thalia’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “So, no people?”

Something cold flashed in the captain’s eyes. “Not unless they’re profitable. I’m going to need your comm unit now.”

Thalia swallowed the lump that seemed to have lodged itself in her throat but complied.

Sue continued speaking as she slid the comm unit into a pocket. “It’s really fortunate the way you fell in my lap. I had a whiny little man—Toddy, Timmy, something boring—to bring to the auction. He owed my boss a lot of money, but some idiot paid me twice what Tommy was worth. You’re just pure profit.”

Thalia was wrong. She had never put her plan into action. She had been bait the entire time.