No More Mr. Nice Girl: Mission 10
Date: 2020-03-10 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy
Description: Even the best of us has a demon locked up deep inside. Sometimes, they get loose. In the constant war against her darker side, Esper was forced to win a daily battle for control. One loss was all it took for the roles of warden and prisoner to switch. Now, with her friends as hostages, this new Esper relies on advice from her better half to keep up the illusion that this is still the Esper they know and love. When their newly acquired base of operations gets hijacked, Esper has to balance between maintaining her cover and doing what she knows it's going to take to get her ship back. No More Mr
Rights: Copyright 2020 J. S. Morin. All rights reserved.

No More Mr. Nice Girl

Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire

J. S. Morin

Magical Scrivener Press

Copyright © 2020 J.S. Morin

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J.S. Morin — First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-64355-090-9

Printed in the United States of America

No More Mr. Nice Girl

The streets of New Montreal twisted weirdly in parody of the city where Esper had grown up. Gone were the geometrically sound right angles and Euclidean predictability that had made getting around so simple as a kid. Signs were written in gibberish. Most buildings lacked entry doors.

Not that she’d wanted to go in any of them.

Bereft, Esper wandered. She was far from alone, to all appearances, but she knew that the pedestrians were mere shades, not real people. Whether it was she or her captor that had conjured them, they were solid enough but lacked some ineffable quality that separated sentient beings from holovids.

And they kept watching her.

Anywhere Esper looked, people glanced away as if guilty of spying on her. Nowhere was there a friendly face, a smile, a greeting, any sort of acknowledgment aside from evidence of furtive surveillance.

Esper tried to keep from noticing.

She tried to keep her eyes off the advertisements plastered all over the city as well. Instead of the restaurants, beverages, and trendy fashions she’d remembered growing up, each showed a different angle of Esper walking through the crowd. It was as if someone had misdirected a security feed or crossed wires somewhere, and some hapless security worker was stuck watching chic young men sling handbags over their shoulders with a winking smile and athletes slaking their thirst with glowing soda infusions.

It wasn’t that she missed the adverts. What made her skin crawl was the constant reminder that she wasn’t herself.

The Esper trekking the boulevards of Shadow New Montreal wasn’t the one who’d rescued those azrin rebels. It was the Esper that might have been, the girl whose mother handed her over to the cosmo to have her body hacked and chiseled and molded until it became—to her mother’s eyes, at least—perfect.

This Esper might never have left Mars. Certainly, she wouldn’t have become an outlaw. And wizardry? Pure hogwash.

Despite her best efforts, the spire of one particular apartment tower kept coming into view. While many of the denizens of this place seemed familiar—some even with names she dimly recalled from her youth—she knew exactly whom she’d find in Apartment 7513 of Lafleur Tower.

Her parents.

Esper shuddered.

She’d made that mistake once already. Sheer, morbid curiosity combined with boredom had driven her there days ago—as near as days could be reckoned in this asynchronous, atemporal prison.

Just hearing her mother call out, “Esper, is that you, my little princess?” had set her running for the lift.

She hadn’t been back.

This wasn’t like Tiffany with Candace. Her apprentice’s mother had been filled with what-ifs and ominous maybes. Odds were good that Tiffany would have been subjected to unknown horrors at that woman’s hands—if she’d stayed.

Esper’s horrors had been all too real. Dark Esper had recreated that woman all too faithfully.

Still, even as Esper averted her eyes from the high-rise, she couldn’t help seeking some diversion. There was nothing in this place except scraps of old memories from Mars. Even setting out in a straight line with the intent of walking over to Neo-Ottawa or Toronto III hadn’t done any good. All roads circled New Montreal.

At long last, and out of desperation for anything different, Esper set out with the intent of walking to New Singapore.

The notion should have been ludicrous. Three hundred kilometers separated the two Martian cities. And there was no evidence that Dark Esper had provided tram services, taxis, or hovercruisers that would allow Esper aboard.

Walking ought to have been a journey of weeks on foot.

Instead, Esper arrived with the simple rounding of the right corner. As soon as she stepped onto Saffron Road, she looked back.

New Montreal was gone.

Marooned in her old high-school stomping grounds, Esper felt slightly less disconnected. Her conscious memories of this place felt more real. Her life here had been measured in extremes both high and low. When she told stories of home, she focused on the reasons she’d left—that’s what people wanted to hear, after all.

But a few special places still held some part of her heart.

Esper decided to find the Saverin Galleria Mall.

The city hadn’t changed except for the gloomy sky that dominated everything that Dark Esper controlled. The streets had been laid out just as she remembered, unlike New Montreal. The signs were still gibberish, not that she needed them, but it detracted a little from the rush of nostalgia.

“This place wasn’t so bad when you weren’t around,” she said to her absent mother.

The mall was right where she expected it, clogged with shoppers as if the holidays were coming fast. Esper found herself swept along on the current, allowing herself to imagine she was fourteen again, turned loose with her friends and an overly generous stipend for the trip.

There was Paddycakes.

And Rue Rurale.

Oh, and that was the Miss Muffet where she’d gotten her dress for the sophomore semi-formal.

Navigating by muscle memory, she headed for 88 Scoops for the best ice cream she’d known before discovering laaku cuisine. If anything in this bleak mental realm could cheer her up, it was strawberry swirl with caramel sauce and fresh whipped cream.

Jostling her way through the press of bodies with only vague overhead landmarks to guide her, Esper’s mouth watered. Despite being unable to work magic in Dark Esper’s clutches, she still had a wizard’s vivid imagination. She could all but taste the sweet, sugary delight on her tongue.

She was almost there…

Whatever no-good Dark Esper might be up to out there, Esper could at least salve her own doldrums in sweets.

The crowd parted at the entrance to 88 Scoops.

But this wasn’t the place.

Instead of a glass display case of cheerily lit tubs of ice cream ranging over the entire color palette of deliciousness, she found a horror she’d hoped to bury forever.

Flatvid posters showed before and after loops of smiling models. The former had natural-looking teeth, imperfect but healthy, and appeared ashamed to be looked at. The latter had smiles so bright and uniform they looked computer-drawn and glowed with confidence.

Over the door, the sign read: Dr. Brightsmiles, Cosmetic Dental Implantation.

The door shushed open just a meter in front of Esper. A cold, sterile reception area lay beyond. Sitting behind the desk, a young woman smiled one of those inhumanly perfect smiles in her direction.

“You’re right on time, Miss Richelieu. Come on in.”

That singsong voice, so practiced and phony, set off klaxons in Esper’s mind. Those words had etched themselves in stone in her memories. She’d spent a decade heaping dirt atop this day to bury it for good. Dark Esper had dug deep and brushed away every last fleck of dust like an archaeologist.

“No,” Esper uttered hollowly.

She backed away a step. A burly body blocked her retreat.

“I just stopped by to cancel my appointment,” she said snarkily. It was the same excuse she’d used that day bubbling out of her on playback.

The receptionist tilted her head, and her ceramite smile turned condescending. “Your mother mentioned you might be reluctant. It’s OK. We’ll get you through this.”

Strong hands gripped her upper arms. Pinpricks of claws poked through the sleeves of her shirt.

The office thugs hadn’t been azrin in the real world, just a couple orderlies who may or may not have been genetically boosted. But the two captors pinning her and hefting her onto tiptoe were a pair from the rebel quarantine aboard the Errand of Mercy.

Dark Esper was tinkering with the narrative.

“There’s been a mistake. I don’t need my teeth replaced.”

As she complained, the receptionist aimed a datapad at her. Then, the woman flipped the device around and showed her a close-up flatpic taken seconds ago. It clearly showed the slightly imperfect teeth she’d grown naturally.

“I think it’s pretty clear that you do.”

Esper thrashed in the azrins’ grip to no avail.

They carried her into a treatment room that Esper remembered as a torture chamber. A clean white chair was fitted with straps that snapped and zipped as the two azrin calmly overpowered her at every step. As Esper struggled against the restraints, she felt a pair of cool metal cylinders press against the back of her neck.

With a gentle hum that resonated through her bones, she went limp from the neck down.

A clamp at her jawbones, and her mouth opened on its own.

“Stop,” Esper tried to protest but could barely form the sounds.

She couldn’t move, but she could still feel the bite of the straps digging into her flesh, the coolness of the metal probes.

“Anesthetic,” she pleaded in grunts, despairing even of conveying her request, let alone anyone complying.

A rolling chair rattled over to Esper’s side. A face that recurred in nightmares smiled down at her. She was slick-skinned and glossy-toothed, wearing med-scan datagoggles and looking like a robot wearing human skin. “Hi. I’m Dr. Andrea Brightsmiles. Your mother insisted on no nerve blockers if you tried to avoid this appointment. Said it’s the only way you learn from your mistakes. But don’t worry, we’ll have those nasty old teeth out of you in a jiffy.”

As the tooth-extractor descended, Esper screamed.

Ilsa screamed. Long, glorious, exultant. It was music to Esper’s ears, and Dark Esper was enjoying those ears and everything else about her body right then.

Crawling from beneath the bed sheets, she collapsed atop Ilsa and buried her lips to soak up the remnants of that ecstasy. When they parted, both gasping for breath, Esper stared absently at the humdrum ceiling of her starship accommodations.

“You’re getting better,” she commented offhandedly.

Ilsa propped herself up on one elbow, chest still heaving. “I’m getting better? You were amazing.” She winced. “Wouldn’t say no to a little of that healing magic if you don’t mind.”

Esper paused a moment, brow lightly furrowed. “I do mind.”

“Huh?” Ilsa slicked back sweat-soaked hair to fix her bedmate with a proper scowl. “I’m probably bruised.”

Esper smirked. “It was real. It happened. We painted something beautiful together, and you want to wash the canvas clean.”

Ilsa snorted. “I’d like to walk without a limp the next few days.”

Esper slid out of bed, relishing the crisp cool air on her damp bare skin. “Can’t just go erasing the past.”

“I mean, this you could.”

Esper scanned the floor in search of her outfit. Bent over at the waist, she collected scraps of cloth like a border colony vagrant. “Cheapens the whole thing.”

Changing the subject, Ilsa called out. “Dibs on the shower.”

With a glance at the analog wall chrono, Esper shook her head. “No time. Staff meeting’s in five minutes.”

Ilsa rolled her eyes. “Please. Staff meeting? It’s your ship, snookums. Reschedule it.”

Coming across Ilsa’s shirt, she balled it up and pitched it at her lover. “Get dressed.”

With a huff, Ilsa peered down at the floor and began a search of her own. “But everyone will know that—”

“Everyone already knows,” Esper cut in. “Even Kubu. And I can’t run a tight ship if I can’t even follow my own rules.” As she argued, Esper dressed with efficient haste. By the time she was fully attired, Ilsa was still looking for a wayward sock. She opened the door even as Ilsa scavenged the room in the nude. “Five minutes. If you smell like soap or shampoo when you get there, you’re sleeping on the couch.”

The door slid shut behind her, and Esper shook her head. Addressing her little prisoner, she muttered, “The things I put up with to be you.”

The holo-projector in the briefing room was set to a simple rotating depiction of the Errand of Mercy. It was more a backdrop than a prop. Instead of their usual in-depth look at a potential target of their next mission, the Errand had become a literal target.

The five of diamonds propelled through the air. Its trajectory was erratic, subject to the whim of tiny imperfections in the plastic, the bend from Tiffany’s grip, the air currents due to the life-support blowers.

A nudge of magic wasn’t enough to prevent it pin-wheeling off and landing in Wesley’s coffee mug.

The oversized actor took a swig from the mug without even looking. His thumb held the playing card out of the way as if it were a stirring spoon. With his other hand, he gestured with a datapad. “But they’re not getting enough nutrition in their little diets, and that’s where we’d come in.”

Tiffany had only half been paying attention to the pitch. Staff meetings were usually ten hours of boredom crammed into a two-hour can, but near the end, someone usually provided a handy summary. “So… we’d be delivering meals to orphans like some oversized charity FoodRocket.”

“Not orphans,” Wesley corrected. “Malnourished border colonist children. They have parents, but their parents lost most of their crops to a particularly nasty solar wind, and—”

“Pass,” Esper said flatly.

“Huh?” Ilsa chimed in, head cocked. “I thought you’d be keen to help feed hapless children.”

Esper sighed. “Sure. In theory. But they’re ARGO citizens, eligible for the Failed Colony Food Program. Plus, we don’t have that kind of food lying around. And by the time we bought, stole, or farmed it ourselves, the bureaucrats would have taken care of it.”

Wesley’s face fell. “But… think of the children! Those little tykes will grow up weak and flabby, with underdeveloped—”

“A few missing forms of elemental earth in their diet isn’t going to kill them. You said it yourself; they’re not starving.” With that, Esper flicked her wrist and the six of diamonds whizzed expertly through the air, passing harmlessly through the holovid Errand of Mercy to land in Tiffany’s lap. “Subtle. But not too subtle. I’d rather you affect the image than miss.”

Scowling at her teacher, Tiffany squeezed the playing card between her index and middle fingers.

Fly true. No detours. No stopping for directions. Straight to Esper.

She let fly, and the six of diamonds flew true. The room also blinked into darkness for a moment. The environmental blower coughed and chugged before resuming normal service. The holo-projector came back online with a three-dimensional error message glowing in red.

But Esper held the six of diamonds aloft with a nod of approval. “Better. Still a little too much of a blunt instrument, but I’ll take that over ineffectiveness.”

Ilsa chuckled. “A tuba is a blunt instrument. A French horn is a blunt instrument. That was a herd of stuunji at an all-you-can-eat salad bar.”

Tiffany reached down to the floor and retrieved the jack of clubs. She spun it across the room, forcing Ilsa to raise her hands to protect her face.

All the tech in the room blinked off again.

“Do I need to take my datagoggles somewhere safer?” Ilsa demanded.

“Tiff, knock it off,” Esper scolded dutifully. To Wesley, she said, “We’re not going into food service. We have things we do well, and we have things we don’t. Not to mention, dragging a load of plague victims to a blighted planet just seems… no. We’re not doing it. Next.”

A moment of awkward silence reigned in the wake of her pronouncement.

Tiffany was damned if she was going to be the one to break the stalemate. Not with Esper in one of these moods. She’d have thought getting her engine serviced regularly would have made her more relaxed. Unfortunately, that was proving not to be the case.

But if Ilsa wasn’t getting that job done, let her be the one to come up with the next plan for the “Save the Galaxy One Person at a Time” crusade.

On cue, Ilsa cleared her throat. “Well, PhanTek has been having trouble with corporate spies stealing their—”

“Pass,” Esper droned.

“But it’s going to cost innocent people their jobs!” Ilsa protested. “People with families and friends who—”

“I said pass,” Esper insisted. Pinching three playing cards between her fingers, she flung them through the holovid error message to buzz past Ilsa on close flyby. “It’s tech-on-tech crime, and the only victims are victimizers. And would you please stop dredging up potential jobs from TechWave?”

Tiffany watched the exchange with the professional detachment of a teenager analyzing celebrity romances. It wasn’t as if they didn’t make a cute couple, but the cultural friction between tech and magic was on full display.

“I’m training my news filter to show stories about downtrodden people in need of help, but it knows I read every tech article that comes my way.”

“Want to trade datapads for a while?” Wesley offered, holding out his device to Ilsa.

Esper flung the ace of spades, striking Wesley in the wrist. Startled, he dropped the datapad. At its clatter on the table, everyone froze.

“No. Last thing we need is her catching whatever computer diseases you’ve got.”

Tiffany could see the tension in Ilsa’s neck, the clenching of her jaw. She remembered that the techster had promised all their gizmos were clean and healthy.

The ten of clubs bopped Tiffany between the eyes. Though harmless, the impact startled her and broke her train of thought.

“Either propose a plan or get back to practicing your subtlety,” Esper ordered.

With the mood her teacher was in, Tiffany wouldn’t have put forth a plan if it came with a gift-wrapped Nobel Prize in philanthropy.

Collecting the playing card from her lap, Tiffany positioned it between her fingers, took a deep breath, aimed, and let fly.

Stay on target, she coaxed as it flitted toward the holograph. Stay. On. Target.

Her card bisected the ERROR message, cutting right through the middle R.

The lights blinked, and the holo-projector crapped out.

With a huff, Esper climbed to her feet. “Meeting adjourned.” Storming over to the door, she paused before exiting. Fixing each of them with a stern glare as the overhead lights sputtered back into service, she offered a parting bit of constructive criticism.

“Can you all please get your acts together?”

Kubu watched through the glassteel as the azrin quarantine patients milled around, whiling away the days until it was certain they were healthy. They certainly looked healthy. But thanks to a super-good extra deluxe medical barrier, Kubu couldn’t smell them to be sure.

“They look bored,” he commented, certain that their excellent azrin ears couldn’t hear him. After all, Kubu had good ears, too, and he couldn’t hear them.

“That’s because they are,” Dr. Haa replied. He tapped away at his datapad with one extended claw. Unlike the azrin who were just saved from being plagued, he was very busy.

“Maybe if I go in and play with them, they could—”

“No.”

Kubu flattened his ears against his head. “But you said I have a very special immune system that could—”

“Quarantine is quarantine,” Dr. Haa explained testily. “Letting you in is just as bad as letting them out.”

Kubu cocked his head. He didn’t see how that could be. Then he caught himself making a tiny, confused whine and stopped immediately.

But Dr. Haa had noticed. “It’s the virus. Smaller than you can see. Impossible to smell except by the symptoms it causes in its victims. Barring a necrotic reaction in living tissue, you’d never know it until it came up. And. Bit you.” With that, the azrin doctor bopped Kubu on the nose with the side of his claw.

Held rapt at the notion of itty bitty bugs sneaking up and biting him, Kubu was caught unprepared for the bop and flinched, blinking repeatedly to gather himself.

“They’re really that little?”

“No. They’re smaller than even that. Your imagination doesn’t go as small as these are. And it’s only by the technology of the environmental seals that we’re safe out here.”

Kubu cleared his throat, trying to sound grown up. “Unless they’re cured.”

Just as he made the suggestion, the side door to the medical office opened. Oolie entered, datapad glued to his nose. The tesud spoke around the device. “They’re cured. But we have protocols for this sort of matter.”

Kubu snickered.

“What amuses you?” Dr. Haa demanded.

“We’re outlaws,” Kubu said. “We don’t have rules. Just Esper’s rules. If the sick azrin aren’t sick anymore, we can let them out.”

A low growl issued from Dr. Haa’s throat. Without meaning to, Kubu raised his hackles in response. “We do not trifle with plagues!”

Abashed, Kubu lowered his head. “Sorry. It just… seemed like a funny time to not be outlaws.”

Oolie put away his datapad. “Doctors—especially outlaw doctors—need to be extra careful. No malpractice insurance.”

He and Dr. Haa both chuckled at that. Kubu wasn’t sure he got the joke. Or maybe insurance was just funny to doctors in ways that it wasn’t to regular people.

With a sigh, Kubu turned his attention back to watching the patients mill around their makeshift recreation area. What he saw sent a shock through his veins. His eyes shot wide. “Oh, no! They’re fighting!”

A ring had formed, azrin bodies becoming pickets in a fence caging two combatants. Kubu hadn’t learned everyone’s name, but he was pretty sure the two males squaring off were Rikall and Broii. And while he’d just said they were fighting, this looked like the just-about-to-fight sizing-up that many species engage in prior to trading blows.

“Oh, dear,” Oolie echoed Kubu’s sentiment. “I’ll start putting on my hazard suit to go treat the loser.”

“Bah,” Dr. Haa said, padding over to watch past Kubu’s low vantage. He gazed at the fighters appraisingly. “It’s a plague quarantine, not a prison. Let them have their sport. Shows they’ve got good energy.”

“But they might hurt each other,” Kubu protested.

Dr. Haa shrugged. “Undoubtedly. But it will keep the blood flowing in those lazy muscles, and everyone’s spirits will rise.”

“We should stop them!”

Oolie shook his head sadly. “Not much chance of that, short of sedative gas.”

“We should do that, then!”

“Haven’t got any,” Oolie said, unfolding his hazard gear in slow motion.

Kubu shifted his weight from one foot to the next, considering his options. He knew he could stop the fighting if he got in there. But how could he get inside the quarantine lab without getting everyone very mad at him?

Above him, hands pressed to the glassteel with claws extended, Dr. Haa’s breath quickened. Kubu could smell the raw chicken he’d eaten for breakfast. Perking his ears, he could hear the doctor’s racing heartbeat.

Inside, Broii took the initiative and lunged for Rikall, who dodged back and to his left, batting his opponent away to keep the distance. Caught up in the moment, Kubu found himself watching rapt as the expert hand-fighters squared off. This was just like watching Mriy’s holovid fighting shows except Kubu knew it wasn’t being recorded halfway across the galaxy.

This was for real.

Rikall feinted a swipe, testing the distance. Broii leaned back slightly, barely flinching. Then the two of them dove in near perfect unison. It reminded Kubu of the nature vids where rams butted heads. Except in this case, the two combatants crashed together shoulder to shoulder rather than smashing skulls. Broii, the larger of the two, kept his momentum going forward until Rikall shifted his footing and toppled them to the floor, twisting to wind up on top.

Wasn’t anyone going to stop them? Through the soundproof glassteel, Kubu watched the spectating azrin cheering without being able to tell who rooted for whom. He even considered the possibility that they were just cheering for the act of violence, a concept Mriy had explained to Kubu when he was too young to understand what that meant.

Despite himself, Kubu felt his own pulse quickening.

He didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

But it was so exciting!

The azrin grappled and clawed, snarled and snapped.

Kubu found himself rooting for Broii. His style was big and rough and appealed to Kubu’s megalodog sensibilities more than Rikall’s technical trickery.

Dr. Haa laid a hand on the back of Kubu’s neck. “Easy, boy. Keep it in.”

With a flash of embarrassment, Kubu realized he’d been growling. “Sorry.”

Dr. Haa patted him roughly. “Don’t apologize, just control it. Those are expert hunters in there. They know their limits. They focus their power.”

The grappling was a mysterious writhing of limbs and fur that ultimately resulted in Rikall clutching Broii’s throat in his teeth. The larger, losing azrin held his arms wide in surrender and was allowed to live.

Kubu put his ears back. “I wanted Broii to win.”

Dr. Haa snickered. “Broii is good, but he never stood a chance. The wily hunter will always prevail. That is why we will take back Meyang from the humans. We are Rikall. They are too big, too reliant on brute force. Guile, plus just enough force, will always triumph.”

In the corner, Oolie finished putting on his hazard suit and approached the quarantine airlock. He’d clearly been listening in on the exchange, adding, “And afterward, someone will come in and clean up the mess.”

Dr. Haa’s quarters aboard the Errand of Mercy would have been the envy of many terrestrially-based azrin. Spacious, private, and appointed with luxuries such as running water and a meat-cooler, he had all he wished and more than he needed.

To the wilderness-craving minority, the place would have been a sentence of exile.

The doctor was of two minds on the matter. Certainly, the elimination of base want held a practical appeal. But before being recruited into a program for gifted azrin students and wending his way through a human-centric curriculum of medical training, he’d been one of those wilderness-dwellers.

All his youth, Haa had hunted the mountains with his father, stalking ground fowl and rodents until he was old enough to brave the steep cliffs and mountainsides for goat. He knew that other regions prized their game quarries for their ferocity or sheer size, but Haa and the rest of Clan Nerrow would not hear of any more challenging prey to stalk than the mountain goats of the Mykral Mountains.

Now, years later, here he was, adrift in astral space, a place a younger Haa could barely believe existed, aboard a starship constructed by the sworn enemies of his people: humans.

These humans weren’t all bad. Esper and Wesley had risked much to save the lives of the azrin rebels. The canine was annoying but ultimately a predator at heart. There was potential here.

A comm alert chimed. Dr. Haa composed himself and sat at his desk with his chin held proudly high before accepting. “Speak.”

The flat comm showing a one-eared azrin with brown and gray markings appeared. The lack of immediate response suggested a significant delay in the transmission. “You wished me to alert you if I could find an appropriate situation.”

“Yes, have you found—?”

But through the delay, Ynthok had kept speaking with merely a brief pause. “I may have found something useful to you. I just said I did, you human-brained fool!”

“It’s the broadcast lag,” Dr. Haa explained. “Deal with it, or I’ll declaw you next time I see you. Now, explain what you found.”

Ynthok snarled but made no direct reply to the threat. As expected. The scruffy youngster knew his place. “Kebok colony. An azrin family lives among the humans.”

Dr. Haa waited what felt like plenty long enough to account for the transmission delay before prompting. “And…?”

Another delay, then Ynthok continued. “They have a child, she schools with the human children.”

An itch made Dr. Haa scratch behind his ear as he listened and waited for follow-up details. “Speak the whole of it at once. Quit waiting every few words.”

“There was a fight, simple play among cubs. As you may expect, the fight did not go well for the human children involved. There were only three of them. They had teased her for her poor performance in class.”

“Unwise,” Dr. Haa muttered, seeking not to interrupt the story now that it was in full swing.

“The humans arrested the victor. She was taken away by police and detained at a secure site for dangerous wildlife.”

The scruff rose at the back of Dr. Haa’s neck.

“Other than indignity, is there any sign of mistreatment?” Dr. Haa asked. He had to keep his composure. He was a medical professional. The focus had to remain on the well-being of the young prisoner.

“There is no sign at all. The parents have taken refuge offworld, and local politicians deny the event took place.”

Scratching his chin, Dr. Haa nodded slowly. “This will do. This will do nicely. I believe this is just the mission the human wizardess has been waiting for.”

Esper fought back the scowl that desperately wanted to settle onto her features. Tiffany sat right beside her, studying her every muscular twitch. Ilsa bookended her from the other side, attuned to every stray whiff of emotion. At least she could count on Wesley and Kubu to be utterly oblivious. For her two young admirers, she had to make this response convincing.

“And you’ve had no luck locating the girl cub?” Esper asked pointedly.

“Not precisely,” Dr. Haa replied calmly, the very picture of the rational petitioner.

“No acknowledgment from the colonial authorities?”

The azrin doctor bowed his head. “Not the slightest, I’m afraid.”

Esper mulled this over. They’d be heading out, essentially blind, into a situation where they only had one side of the story. For all she knew, the colonial government on Kebok was operating on a different spectrum from these primitive xenos. For all she knew, they were having technical issues, same as any wizard but without the upside of having the ear of the universe.

She’d have hated to storm a police daycare center only to find the little fuzzball perfectly fine while the parents screamed their throats raw at the wrong comm ID.

But Esper—the do-gooder Esper within—wouldn’t have hesitated.

And dear God, did she try.

“That’s not a lot of information to go on.”

Ilsa chimed in, wearing that ridiculous set of datagoggles. “I can try to do a little digging.” And yet, there was something to the way the light from the little computer screens shimmered in her eyes that was a huge turn-on.

“No need,” Dr. Haa assured them. “We have contacts planetside.”

“Have they got comm IDs?” Ilsa asked helpfully.

“These aren’t the sort of people who use the same comm IDs twice, I’m afraid,” Dr. Haa admitted.

So, either dregs or criminals. Fine. For what it was worth, Esper didn’t like the idea of broadcasting plans to storm a secure holding facility. The digital parts of the Black Ocean had too many ears. At least in person, she could size up her informants with methods she understood and could trust.

“They normally don’t trust outsiders,” Dr. Haa added, punctuated with a feline smile. “But for you, they make an exception.”

Tiffany gave an unladylike snort. “Since when do we get special treatment?”

The azrin doctor raised a finger, retractable claw carefully tucked away. “Ah, but you are now known as a friend of the azrin. All azrin who hear of your deeds will know you have the host of clans in your heart.”

“Oh.” Well, fuck. It was one thing busting into a plague quarantine zone anonymously to help out some victims who happened to disagree with the local occupying government. It was another when the overzealous ingrates wouldn’t keep their mouths shut about it. “I’d kind of hoped that might stay quiet. We do a lot of business in ARGO space, you know.”

Dr. Haa smiled. “This is the curse of the crusader. Someone must be crusaded against. That you have identified your own kind as the enemy of the just only proves the strength of your heart.”

Esper offered a lopsided smile. “I don’t know that we’re quite ready to come out and oppose ARGO on political grounds.”

“You do not need to join our cause,” Dr. Haa explained. “I hear the rumblings among my patients. Many are interested in joining yours.”

“They are?” Wesley asked. “Did they read the whole brochure? I’m pretty sure our little band and yours aren’t exactly simpatico.”

The doctor cocked his ears. “My human is normally sufficient, but I do not understand this.”

Esper huffed. “He’s saying he doesn’t think your rebels would be on board with joining a charity-for-hire operation like ours. We were just there to stop a plague from turning into an excuse for a xenophobic purge.”

“You showed them a better way. They owe you their lives. Some may wish to have those lives mean more than what they had been.”

Esper tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Esper’s Azrin Army” did have a nice ring to it.

Not to mention, helping break some uncontrollably violent xeno brat out of government time-out sounded way too Espery to pass up. She couldn’t afford to risk someone suspecting she wasn’t the Esper they knew.

“Well, I don’t suppose I can go letting them down, now, can I?”

On the streets of New Singapore, wedged against the base of a nondescript beige brick building, Esper lay curled into a ball. Every millimeter of her body hurt. Parts she couldn’t give a proper medical name to burned with fresh, searing memories of the horrors revisited upon her.

After feeling each tooth in her jaw yanked out by the root, she’d suffered her now-familiar ceramite implants installed by what felt like a jackhammer, one by one. After what seemed like years of agony, they’d released her and thrown her to the curb outside, sobbing.

Then, still drooling blood, she’d stumbled through the streets until another gang of med techs had cornered and abducted her. This time they’d broken both her legs, stretched them, and grafted in spacers to make her two centimeters taller.

The pattern repeated.

It didn’t matter if she ran or hid, resisted or relented. It was a different antagonist every time, yet somehow, they were all the same. Azrin, stuunji, plouph, zheen, even laaku, but never humans.

With every rib broken and wearing a corset-like restrictor vest that left her barely able to breathe, she’d refused to leave one stop along her horror parade. Almost with a shrug, the mental prison simply supplied a fresh doctor to the room who promptly tore the irises out of her eyes.

When footsteps approached, distinct from the background clomp of the faceless herds of pedestrians, Esper whimpered and curled tighter.

“Well, aren’t you a pathetic sight,” Dark Esper snarked, shadowing her from the ghostly streetlights and looming above. She wore Esper’s everyday clothes from the real world—purplish-pink hoodie, tight jeans, well-worn sneakers—as if she’d just come home after a long day at the impostoratorium.

“Why are you doing this?” Esper demanded weakly. Even talking hurt. Her wobbly new teeth were held in place by brackets screwed into her jaws.

Crossing her arms, Dark Esper shrugged. “Just a little dose of truth.”

Esper peered up, perplexity clear on her face.

“What? You don’t remember all the lies you’ve told?”

“What lies?”

Spreading her hands to indicate the fetal mass of wizard on the permacrete, Dark Esper explained, “You were so desperate to justify running away from home that you exaggerated your ordeal beyond the pale. Your off-kilter mother became a sadist. Your doctors, monsters. You lost count of the number of cosmo visits, so you decided that gave you license to make the number higher with every retelling.”

“It happened! All of it! But not like this!” As soon as she finished, she closed her mouth and covered it to soothe the fresh ache.

“You’re right. It didn’t,” Dark Esper agreed. “But this is the picture you painted in the minds of everyone you begged sympathy from, everyone you tried to shock or humble or impress with your sad little tale of abuse. I figured you deserved to know what it was you were laying claim to.”

“So… you’re here to gloat over making me suffer?”

There was no telling the depths of her depravity. Esper had spent her adult life—and multiple lifetimes within Mortania and Esperville—trying to bury that side of her for good.

“No. I need your advice.” She hesitated briefly. “Your… help.”

Esper scoffed, heedless of the stabbing pains every movement evoked. She hurt whether she moved or not; what did the degree really matter? “You want me to help you?”

“Things could get worse around here…”

Esper composed herself. Right. This wasn’t the time to antagonize her captor. Still, the idea of giving in to such coarse manipulation galled her. “I know what you’re going to ask. We’re alike enough in that regard… you can’t wrap your head around being me.”

Dark Esper crouched beside her and lifted Esper’s chin. “Things could get a lot better or worse in here depending on how things go out there. But you also need to remember: things can get a lot better or worse out there depending on your degree of helpfulness.”

For all the horrors she’d experienced in the brief eternity of her imprisonment, Esper’s blood could still run cold. “You leave them alone!”

“I will. If you help me. But if I can’t keep your relationships all copacetic, I may just have to… sever them.”

Even without the explicit threat, Esper knew that her darker self meant a more permanent solution. After all, dead friends told no tales.

“And you know I’d do it too,” Dark Esper added.

She did know. It sickened her to believe that threat.

And so, over the course of hours, Esper fed Dark Esper tips on how to deflect Wesley’s crazy machinations, Kubu and Tiffany’s curricula, and some general guidelines on how to interact pleasantly when people insisted on being vexing. The more she spilled, the less her body pained her, as Dark Esper allowed accelerated healing to revert her to her more familiar self.

All the while, she deflected and sidestepped all mentions of Ilsa. There were certain things she couldn’t bring herself to volunteer, certain aspects of her love life that still felt too personal to divulge to this sinister perversion of herself.

Dark Esper cleared her throat, fixing her with a sweet smile that promised fangs behind closed lips. “And…?”

“Please treat her gently,” Esper began by way of broaching the subject.

Dark Esper cackled. “Oh, God. That’s too good. You really had no idea what to do with that gorgeous piece of flesh you bagged. It was like giving a girl on a learner’s permit a Squall to fly to school.”

Esper gaped. “What have you done to her?” Then she clapped both hands over her mouth, flinching at expected pain that never came. Then, more quietly, she said, “Forget I said anything. I don’t want to know.”

“You sure? All this ‘being Esper’ advice has been solid gold. I don’t mind sharing the tricks you’ll need to learn to live up to the expectations I’ve set if you’re ever good enough that I let you out to use your physical body again.”

She didn’t want to hear this. And she most certainly didn’t want to see this.

So, of course, Esper was treated to a front-row seat of her own bedchamber, unable to look away.

The hangar of the Errand of Mercy bathed a motley assortment of small starships beneath the sickly glow of scientific lighting from far overhead. Today’s mission called for the use of the military shuttle they’d stolen from Meyang. Formerly known as PT0109, Wesley had spent his off-hours stripping it down, giving it a fresh coating of tint, and rechristening it Helios.

Esper might have preferred a less Convocationy-sounding name, but Dark Esper honestly couldn’t bring herself to care.

She stood in all black combat gear pilfered from storage lockers that the Cult of Ra hadn’t bothered clearing out. Tailored to fit the curves of a “SGT. PRESTON,” the belt had required a little extra cinching, and the clasp at her collarbone wouldn’t close, but it was the closest she could find. They weren’t about to go shopping planetside or order bespoke tactical gear from the omni. At least her own tac pants still fit.

Tiffany fidgeted by her side. Her uniform labeled her “LT. ALVAREZ” and could have passed for her own personal attire. She’d even gone to the trouble of buckling on the blaster sidearm that completed the ensemble.

Dark Esper had opted not to fully accessorize. There was a fine line between an anonymous disguise and playing dress-up across which she and Tiffany had taken opposite sides.

Wesley and Kubu were, as was often the case, hopeless. The megalodog simply wasn’t a shape that ARGO supported. Even fitting him for a guard dog vest would have required shrinking him to less than half his usual size, and the vest would have done little to re-imagine him as anything other than a dog—assuming he kept his damn mouth shut for once.

The overgrown lunkhead with the shady background story was another matter. He looked like he belonged in a uniform but not in the sizes left over in the supply lockers. If ever there had been a sailor or marine aboard anywhere remotely his proportion, he’d taken his spare uniforms with him.

He was also late.

Not that Wesley was ever the most together of the bunch, but he usually showed up for what he considered the “fun stuff.”

When the hangar door opened, Tiffany’s jaw hit the deckplates. “You’re not coming with us like that.”

Dark Esper had to pause a moment to consider the objection objectively. She blinked a few times on the off chance that Esper’s eyes were going faulty on her.

“Wow…” Ilsa murmured.

While he had a pair of work dungarees and matching boots that fit him to a tee, those were all he wore. Bare flesh from the waist up, he’d painted himself in an elaborate black-and-gray camouflage pattern.

“Sorry,” he boomed with a casual wave of his hand. “My bad. Had a bear of a time reaching the middle of my back to finish the old personal painting process. But I hit up Oolie for a little assistance. Hadn’t accounted for his particular brand of thoroughness in my scheduling. That’s on me.”

Dark Esper tried to cling to Esper’s advice. Goddammit she tried. She just couldn’t help herself. “Where the heck do you think we’re going?”

Wesley shrugged his oversized, overtinted shoulders. “Kebok doesn’t keep good records. I’m planning for a light urban combat zone, boom lighting, maybe some handheld cameras. You know, the usual.”

Tiffany turned to Ilsa. “This is your fault.”

“How is this my fault? I didn’t tell him to paint himself like a pigeon hunter.”

“You couldn’t crack Kebok’s security feeds.” Tiffany flung an accusing finger at the actor. “This is what you get when he has to improvise.”

Wesley cocked his head. “Too much? Should I throw on a poncho?”

“Yes,” Ilsa and Esper said in unison with Tiffany’s hasty reply of, “no.”

Dark Esper would have dragged along the muscle-brained murder machine in the buff if she had to. She doubted it would have impacted his combat prowess in any meaningful way. But Esper wouldn’t have stood for such shenanigans, she was certain. And she joined Ilsa in fixing Tiffany with matching disapproving scowls.

“What?” Tiffany demanded. She glanced from one to the other and back again, sneaking quick peeks at Wesley in between. “He’ll be fine. We’re on a schedule.”

Remembering her moral signposts, Esper wagged a finger at Wesley. “You know she’s still impressionable.” Whirling on Tiffany, the wagging finger didn’t let her off the hook. “And you. Cold showers only for the next week.”

Tiffany folded her arms. “I’d rather stink.”

“Your call,” Esper snapped. She inspected her troops. “Any more bull-poo before we get out of here?” She felt a swell of pride for remembering the euphemistic curse that everyone no doubt heard as ‘bullshit’ anyway. It was exactly the sort of equivocating pseudo-morality that Esper loved so much.

Kubu lifted a front paw as if he were in school. “Can I be painty too?”

“No.”

The megalodog hung his head.

Letting out a sigh of frustration, she forced herself to be Esper. “Maybe when we get back. But not during the mission.”

Waiting patiently at the outskirts of the group, Dr. Haa came forward and handed Esper a datapad. It had a flatpic of a dusty city street crowded with humans and a scattering of assorted xenos. “This is the building.” He tapped the image with a claw. The structure in question rose a mere three stories, squat and square, little more than a duracrete brick with security doors and barred windows. Frozen in time, armored police guards toting blaster rifles patrolled a perimeter. “Can you handle this?”

Esper made a show of studying the image appraisingly. After what she judged to be an appropriate amount of attention devoted to the amateur pictography, she gave a nod. “They won’t know what hit them.”

Towering over her, Wesley loomed over her. She could feel the heat radiating from that overclocked metabolism even without him touching her. “Easy peazy, twist and squeezy. I could do this blindfolded and solo, chained up in a box and dunked in the Nile River after someone filled it with robo-piranhas… at night.”

Ilsa handed over a datapad of her own. “It’s not much, but I at least cross-referenced the image with a satellite map of the colonial capital. Get this. They called it… want to venture a guess?” She paused expectantly, but Esper deigned not to play along. “Kebok City.”

“That should be easy,” Kubu exclaimed with a sudden wagging of his tail. “Now we only have to remember one name instead of two!”

“Super,” Tiffany deadpanned. “Now, can we all get aboard? Dibs on copilot.” She headed toward the ship at the front of the pack, Kubu close at her heels. Wesley climbed aboard in one quick bound.

“No copilot,” Esper called after her. “In fact, you’re on timeout until you get that flush out of your cheeks!”

Ilsa snagged Esper by the hand before she could follow them. “It’s harmless. Wesley won’t let her do anything she’d regret.”

Dark Esper suspected the girl would regret nothing. Tiffany had learned to put regrets behind her, to take what she wanted. While her own inclination was to allow nature to run itself to exhaustion on a course of its own choosing, she knew Esper would never approve. And while she concurred that Wesley would continue to nip any overt advances in the bud, there was the very real chance of Tiffany overpowering that hamster-powered cranium and having her way with him.

Magic was tempting like that.

Remembering her emotional checklist, Esper took Ilsa in her arms. She let their kiss linger long enough that curious heads poked out of the shuttle to see what was keeping her.

With a breathless gasp, Ilsa told her, “Be safe out there.”

Dark Esper understood that there was a secondary motive there. She had been Ilsa’s protector against a galaxy that had done more to erode her sense of safety than her cozy, techie little life had prepared her for.

“Don’t worry about me. And you’ll be perfectly safe here. That quarantine’s almost up, and you’ll have a whole army of azrin rebels who owe us their lives.”

With one quicker, parting kiss, she darted aboard Helios before anything else could distract her.

See, weakling? I can be you when I need to be. And now you’ll get to see what you’re really capable of.

Ilsa sat in Esper’s quarters, legs crossed atop the rumpled sheets. With her bare toes, she flicked at the blanket. Technically, she had quarters of her own. She kept various gadgets there, safe from Esper’s occasional whimsy with magic. But she hadn’t slept there since moving aboard. The place was more a closet than a home.

This was where she lived.

And yet, without Esper, it didn’t feel right sleeping in the bed.

Not that she wasn’t tired. Comm silence plus hours of transit time meant an emotionally draining day of waiting in the absence of status updates. She was fried.

She had treated herself to a glass of wine, brushed her teeth, and changed into clean pajamas, but nothing bridged the gap between exhaustion and the feeling that she could actually sleep. Next step was finding one of Esper’s sweatshirts and curling up with it like a lonely puppy.

“This is stupid,” she muttered to herself. Picking up her datagoggles, she activated Sudo and donned the device. “Gimme some news. Ultra-local edition.”

“Well, aren’t we the perky one after 0.0 hours sleep,” Sudo replied. “Currently, you are the only human on board the Errand of Mercy. Most recent ship’s status change was the release of the quarantine seal by mutual agreement of doctors Haa and Oolie.”

“They let the azrin out?”

“The quarantined azrin patients had already been kept in isolation for 24 hours longer than ARGO Medical Association guidelines require.”

“So, I’m like the only one on the ship who didn’t know?” Even Sudo knew, which galled her slightly. “I’m the ranking officer. Um. I think.”

“The informality of shipboard ranking here boggles the circuits. While Miss Richelieu is clearly in command, the question of who would be first officer is very much unanswered.”

“Well, I mean…” Ilsa wasn’t sure where she was going with that sentence and trailed off as she considered.

There was, of course, the fact of her sharing a bed with the ship’s putative owner. That made her something akin to first lady, if not first officer.

“Well, who do you think is second in command?” she demanded.

“Legalities apply obliquely at best, given the provenance of this vessel,” Sudo hedged. “As a matter of simple military ranking, Mr. Wesley would appear to have a credible basis for claiming the title of commander in Esper’s absence.”

“You’re not buying that load of ‘I’m too classified to verify,’ are you? That’s, like, freshman orientation anti-scam training. If I had a terra for every guy who claimed to have won the Order of Neptune or been part of Omicron Squad or the Half-Devils, I’d have—”

“According to public omni profiles on dating and social apps, you’d have 6,718,137,204 terras.”

“My point, exactly.”

“If not military ranking, then Convocation tradition would dictate that, in the absence of a designated successor, the position would fall to the apprentice.”

“Well, Princess Tiffany isn’t here either,” Ilsa pointed out. “And if she was, I damn well wouldn’t take orders from that sassy little shit.”

“In instances where pack dominance is asserted through single combat—”

Ilsa forestalled the machine with an upraised finger. “Do NOT try to justify a scheme where Kubu is in charge of anything more complicated than a catering order.”

“All medical personnel are considered to be of command rank.”

Ilsa gritted her teeth. “So, you’re claiming Oolie and Haa outrank me?”

“Dr. Haa’s status as regards the permanent complement of crew remains uncertain.”

Ilsa crossed her arms. “But Oolie outranks me.”

“Quite likely. Face it. Fucking the commanding officer confers precisely the amount of authority specified by said commander. And Esper hasn’t designated a role or rank to you—or anyone else—officially.”

Ilsa worked her jaw back and forth with her lips pursed, mulling that over.

Recovering her dirty clothes from the day, Ilsa stripped out of her pajamas and began to dress. “Well, that just sounds like the authority is there for the taking.”

“That’s certainly one interpretation.”

Ilsa tugged on her boots. She’d never been a boot girl before taking to life on board an old military starship. But with the uneven deckplates, rivets sticking out places they had no business being, and the general slipperiness of the steel, they were far more practical than her dressy heels.

“That’s the interpretation we’re using.”

She blustered out the door, heading down toward the med bay as quickly as if she’d just lopped off a finger.

For weeks, she’d had to reference Sudo’s map overlay to so much as find a washroom on this rusty old barge. Now, her feet steered her unerringly toward the heart of the ship.

“Why wasn’t I—?” she demanded as the doors to med bay opened.

The sight of a dozen or more azrin milling around squeezed her throat closed, choking off the words that would have come next.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Oolie said with an open-beaked tesud approximation of a smile.

Dr. Haa nodded. “We had not wished to disturb you, consort.”

Consort? Well, Esper had left the ranking system up to everyone’s individual imagination, after all.

Composing herself, Ilsa cleared her throat. “Well, as the senior officer on board, I expect to be notified of major events such as this one.” She smiled at the freshly released killing machines. While Dr. Haa had always low-key intimidated her, he had a calm demeanor interspersed with lightning-quick movements that reminded anyone who took note of his predatory pedigree.

These rebels could have used the doctor as an appetizer.

One of the bold, unabashed killers lifted a lock of Ilsa’s hair as she froze every muscle in her body. Taking a good strong sniff, he declared, “She smells of the wizard. This is her mate.”

“Human’s she-mate?” another asked.

“They do,” Dr. Haa put in quickly. “And they take offense quickly to being questioned about it.”

Ilsa swallowed the lump that prevented her answering in her own defense, then nodded.

Oolie shuffled over and placed a gentle hand on Ilsa’s shoulder, subtly interposing himself in front of the presumptuous azrin. “Maybe, as commander, you wouldn’t mind giving our guests a tour of the ship’s amenities.”

Ilsa blinked. Tour-guide duty? Well, as long as these hunting cats all knew she was under Esper’s protection, that ought to ensure her safety. Plus, being afraid of these azrin just because they were azrin was a little too xenoist for her liking.

Taking a deep breath, she forced a nod. “Sure. I can show you all around. Follow me.”

Sudo whispered harshly, for her ears only. “Average azrin life expectancy would be eight years longer if not for internecine murder rates. The typical azrin hunter can disembowel a human in 1.8 seconds…”

“Ix-nay,” Ilsa muttered through gritted teeth. She could only imagine what those keen ears could make out. If Wesley could eavesdrop on Sudo, it wasn’t a stretch to picture them overhearing every word.

“There have been deadly incidents on 99 percent of all planets where—”

Ilsa shut Sudo off.

Now, she was alone with them. But at least she didn’t have a paranoid computer informing her with a litany of reasons to believe her life was in danger from the very xenos—no, people—Esper had saved.

“Our first stop will be the cafeteria. I bet you’re all pretty hungry and looking for a fresh meal.”

“Yesssss,” the lead azrin replied menacingly. “So sick of that sick food.”

The others chuckled at what she assumed had to have been an azrin joke.

“You, uh, all speak pretty good English,” Ilsa commented in the hopes of opening a dialog beyond mere kiosk-grade directions.

“Smart to know the language of the enemy.”

Ilsa gulped. “Well, as an atypical human, let me just point out that our megalodog crewman has made sure we have a tasty buffet available for your first food post quarantine.” She took a deep breath. This was where she could only hope that being a carnivorous predator gave Kubu some degree of expertise. “I hope you like bunnies.”

Helios dropped out of astral with nary a flicker of the lights to show for the transition.

“Wow,” Tiffany remarked. “You’re getting better at that.”

Esper bit her tongue. The do-gooder wasn’t quite as slick with her spellcasting as she’d have liked, and this Esper needed to keep that in mind. Adding a little slop into unimportant magics might not be a bad idea either.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was better to let them think that finally getting over herself had been the key to stepping into the shoes she was meant to wear.

As much as the do-gooder liked to pretend otherwise, she had as much claim to this body, this identity, this life as the other one. The main weapon that collection of bromides and platitudes had against her was the lie that she was an intruder, an invader who didn’t belong in this skin.

Esper crossed her arms smugly. “Just because I’m better than you doesn’t mean I still don’t have to work on improving myself.”

“Geez. Way to backhand a compliment,” Tiffany snarked.

Wesley cracked his knuckles so loudly they could hear it from the passenger compartment. “Oksie doksie. I’ve got a Class IV shithole colony on scanners and no sign of orbital traffic control satellites.”

Kubu bounded past to win a nonexistent “race” to the copilot’s chair. “Just like Ilsa said!”

“Ilsa says a lot of things,” Tiffany grumbled as she followed.

Esper took up the rear. This portion of the rescue wasn’t her department, but she had to oversee it as a matter of course. A few regurgitated orders and redundant instructions ought to satisfy the military castoff.

“Bring us outside their defensive perimeters but try not to look suspicious about it.”

Wesley clasped a hand over his heart. “Moi? Look suspicious? You’re looking at a two-time winner of the Boll Award for lowest-grossing major market release. I can be inconspicuous on sixteen million holo-projectors across the core worlds and beyond.”

Tiffany snorted.

“Just… no surprises,” Esper ordered.

“They wouldn’t be surprises if we could plan for them,” Wesley countered. “Well, unless it was a party. Ira says I’m not allowed to throw surprise parties anymore after that time I invited the girlfriend of the Duke of Sussex to his wife’s fiftieth birthday party.”

There were times when even goody-good Esper had wondered privately whether this buffoon was worth keeping around. If even half of his wacky claims checked out, though, it was only a matter of putting him in front of a problem that could be solved through a combination of brute force and crude cunning.

Like a juvenile detention jailbreak.

The Kebok atmosphere rushed up to meet them. It was a greenish brown mud ball, the sort where terramancers would have told the colonists to just put on a breather rather than put in the work to actually fix an officially habitable world. Before the hull crossed into the thermosphere, Wesley swung them around to the night side of the planet.

Just before the flames of atmospheric entry bathed the vessel and washed out the view of the surface, Esper spotted their destination; pinpricks of clustered lights marked Kebok City.

Tiffany shook her head. “Every time we visit one of these back-alley rocks, I wonder how anyone can live where there’s no orbital security.”

“Anonymously,” Wesley chimed in. “There’s still a sizable contingent of humans who don’t like the idea of their every movement being tracked, cataloged, and digested by a computer to determine where their behavioral norms lie on the Svenald Spectrum of Socialization.”

Tiffany blinked. “Wait. They do that? Where do they do that? Did they do that on Nephthys IV?”

“I am a good boy,” Kubu promised. Then he cocked his head. “But I wonder if the computers know how to judge a munching giant.”

“Megalodog,” Esper murmured. Far be it from her to tell the canine his species, but the ARGO Zoological Federation had done precisely that. It was settled law. And one megalodog with no media platform wasn’t likely going to change the—already limited—public impression of the species.

“They most certainly did, do, and will,” Wesley replied jovially. “Anyplace with a couple hundred million inhabitants, you can pretty much guarantee it. If you’re on a small, rich colony with great omni service and regular transports to the core worlds, they probably tracked you there too.”

Clapping a hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp, Tiffany let out enough air to say, “Caledonia! They probably saw me sneak off to the supply room with—um, with undue haste.”

“You shouldn’t rush around,” Esper said, playing along. What did she care, as long as the girl came back safe and sound after her trysts? She wasn’t going to run around doing ID scans and background checks for a young wizard more than capable of frying the mind of anyone who pushed her past her limits. “Good way to slip and hurt yourself. Obey safety signage when you’re on a strange colony.”

“Yes, Mom,” Tiffany replied, using the term as an epithet. Given what Candace St. Cloud was planning on doing to the girl’s mind, she couldn’t blame her.

“On the ground in eight,” Wesley announced in a smooth baritone, mimicking a commercial starliner pilot.

Time to take charge. “OK. When we touch down, we stow the nonsense on the shuttle along with the snacks and beer. A little azrin girl’s life is at stake here. We’re going to find Dr. Haa’s local contact, get the ground-level details we need, hit the police lockup, and burn atmo with the girl.”

That sounded all Espery. Didn’t it?

Her three charges all acknowledged the order and made all the right promises to do just that. It remained to be seen how long after they landed one of them broke their word. They were as predictable as a sunrise, as reliable as a hammer, as self-controlled as a tempest.

Her money would have been on Tiffany breaking first, if anyone was covering such bets.

Helios touched down with a dull thump that none of them felt. If anyone had noticed her tinkering with the gravity stone, no one mentioned it.

The instant the personnel ramp lowered, the inrush of gritty atmosphere had Tiffany gagging. “Oh, God. The fuck is in the air?”

Punching briefly on his datapad, Wesley scowled. “I’d recommend just exhaling while we’re here.”

Kubu coughed. “It’s not so bad.”

“Breathe around the gunk,” Esper ordered, knowing only her apprentice had any hope of following her instruction. “There’s plenty of air here that isn’t mining byproduct or volcanic exhaust.” Taking the lead, she set out for Kebok City, just over a few foothills from their landing site. “Kubu, can you smell anything here?”

“Oh, yes,” Kubu replied. “I can smell lots.”

“The azrin all evacuated after the kid vanished. Our contact should be about the only one left. Sniff him out.”

With a snicker, Kubu took the lead.

“What’s so funny?” Tiffany demanded, covering her nose and mouth with a hand. “This place smells like someone took a giant shit and colonized it.”

“Usually azrin don’t smell super nice,” Kubu explained. “But here, they smell better than almost everything.”

Esper sighed, choosing to inhale only the part of the air that was clean, pure, and neutral-scented. She’d been wrong. Kubu had been the first to introduce bullshit chatter to their lifesaving mission.

“Just find him, all right?”

Kubu nodded without directing his nose off course. He sniffed noisily, purposefully reinforcing for everyone that he was hard at work. Esper knew he could have done just as well silently, but this was about what little professional pride the canid possessed.

The outskirts of Kebok City were like so many other scummy colonial castoffs that it was hard to imagine why anyone had bothered. Who needed another nowhere for lowlifes to start over and try again? Was there a whole industry that revolved around incompetent criminals who managed to sneak away from justice by the skin of their scrotums that entrepreneurs started new colonies just to house them?

“This way,” Kubu said as they entered a de rigeur warehouse district. It lay adjacent to a starport paved in cheap asphalt, like some sort of budget retrovert site. The whole planet reeked of shoddy construction, from crumbling brick walls to corrugated metal roofs, to coughing, wheezing pedestrians huddled in ragged coats making their furtive ways through the nighttime streets.

Wesley jaunted ahead of Kubu at an upcoming intersection, linking an alley they’d cut through to the main street. He poked his head around the corner quickly and withdrew. Then, he took a look at his painted body. “I feel underdressed.”

“No shit, dingus,” Tiffany snarked. “You’d be underdressed for anything but a wrestling exhibition or a bachelorette party.”

“Our urban warfare intel was limited.”

“Which way?” Esper asked wearily. Wesley could break a man’s spine like a wishbone. Tiffany had the power to summon fire and bend gravity to her will. Why did they have to behave like children constantly?

“In here,” Kubu said, ignoring the main avenue and pawing at a rusted iron door. A handle, so battered that it was a wonder it turned in Esper’s hand without magical assistance, allowed them admission.

“Great. A dark warehouse off a trash-reeking alleyway,” Tiffany grumbled. “This must be our lucky day.”

An azrin voice hissed from the shadows. “Darkness suits our business. We can—”

Esper was having none of the cloak-and-dagger bullshit. She’d brought along her own suppliers of the stuff, and this informant wasn’t going to shovel any more over the tops of her boots.

With nary an effort, conjured light brightened the cavernous space.

The warehouse could have been plucked from any poverty-stricken world with lax workplace safety laws. Plastic and metal crates teetered in slapdash stacks, threatening to topple and bury the unwary guest. Shattered bar lights dangled from the ceiling between thin chains, explaining the prevailing gloom Esper had just banished. Their host was a one-eared mongrel of an azrin, the sort that nice colonies wouldn’t have allowed planetside without a police escort and mag-cuffs.

“You were saying?” Esper prompted the stunned feline.

The azrin folded back his one good ear. “Shut the door. Don’t let anyone see the light.”

Kubu cocked his head. “I don’t think that was what you were going to say next.”

Tiffany obliged and slammed the door shut with a wave of her hand. Good. Better to practice than touch that filthy metal. Esper wiped her own hand idly on her pants at the thought.

“The girl,” Esper continued. “Cut to the chase. Where is she?”

“Her name is Miira,” the informant said firmly, as if to reinforce that this was not some random azrin but an individual.

Esper forced herself to smile as if she appreciated the correction. “Of course. We can’t lose sight of the fact that Miira is an important individual, not simply a statistic. But I’m sure we don’t want her to stay locked up any longer than necessary.”

The azrin bobbed his head along with her platitudes. “Yes. Yes… Very good. I will take you to the police fortress. I will tell you the secrets I know. When you bring Miira out, I will have a transport with engines glowing, and take her to her parents.”

This all sounded optimistic and vague. She knew that this was standard operating procedure for Esper’s crew, but something demanded at least a modicum of diligence. “How do you know the ‘secrets’ of the police here?”

The azrin showed fangs. Thanks to years of knowing Mriy, she could tell the difference between a smile and a snarl, yet this particular specimen toed the line between the two. “I worked for them. Once. Years ago. Before they grew distrustful. Human police liked having muscle that didn’t need a blaster.”

“What happened?” Tiffany asked.

“They didn’t like sitting in a hovercruiser with someone who could kill them like farm meat.”

Wesley chuckled. “Tell me about it. I actually heard on one of my bump tours that I gave some of the producers the willies. Willies! They even used that very term. I offered to show bank records to prove I’d never even owned a pair of willies.”

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “They were talking about the heebie-jeebies, not Ranger Willy’s All-Hiker Boots.”

Wesley’s smile melted. His eyes grew wide. “Wow. All these years… I owe a couple someones back on Earth an apology and a new pair of shoes.”

“The police headquarters,” Esper interjected. Hopefully, she’d allowed her goofball squad enough venting of their nonsense valves. “You can lead us to where they’d be keeping Miira?”

“Lead? No. Explain? Yes,” the azrin said with an apologetic shrug. “These human police… they know me. They… don’t like me.”

The bodies of two uniformed officers of the Kebok Planetary Police Force slumped to the ground. Esper carefully stepped across the one who’d stopped in front of the door as she pushed it open, forcing the one-way hinge past its breaking point in the wrong direction.

With a crash of protesting metal and the extinguishing of every light in the building, she made her way inside the duracrete bunker of so-called “justice.”

“Wow,” Tiffany marveled as she followed at her teacher’s heels. “Not pulling any punches today, are you?”

Wesley strode over the downed cops with nary a glance. “Head on a swivel, sport. These impressarios of impersonal injustice just might have a few sleeves around their surprises.”

Esper tried her best not to parse his nonsense into a functioning sentence but failed—the curse of spending a century or so in a wizard’s imaginary library, reading half the classical works of the human species.

However, the actor’s words were already proving true. Maybe rushing from all directions with weapons drawn wasn’t much of a surprise—it was probably the least surprising reaction to someone storming a police station. But the overarching suggestion that they were hardly in the clear was sound.

Of course, the last thing Esper was about to do was allow a blaster to fire in her presence.

Plastic clicks from all around the police station lobby told a simple story: “We are police. You are a criminal. And why isn’t this thing working?”

No version of that story had a happy ending for the officers of the KPPF.

Some tellings ended in simple bafflement suggesting that the local constabulary didn’t train to fight wizards. Others shifted to a second act wherein an equally inert but slightly less tech-reliant stun baton came into play. The most entertaining tales featured protagonists well versed in non-lethal hand-to-hand combat.

It was all Esper could manage not to simply light them all like dry tinder and be on about her business.

Instead, Esper became the heart of a storm of fists and feet. She grappled, spun, and flung her opponents into one another with verve enough to delight the jaded patrons of a spacers’ bar. It was a brawl filled with cracked bones and crashes of cheap plastic waiting-room furniture.

Tiffany, Wesley, and Kubu joined in the excitement. Tiff relied on her magic to rough up a pair of patrolmen who attempted to corner her. Wesley applied sleeper holds liberally, choking off blood to officers’ brains until they went limp in his grip. Since the maneuver only took one arm, the other was free to brawl with cops eager to free colleagues from his muscular clamps. Kubu bounded around, tackling people to the ground as they tried to flee or regroup.

All too soon, it was quiet. Tiffany and Kubu panted for breath, the former because of the exertion, the latter as a matter of due course.

Wesley dusted his hands. “Well, that’s that. Should we crack open the security system just in case they got a look at us?”

“It’s dead,” Esper promised. “It’s staying dead. Kubu, check for anyone who we haven’t accounted for yet.” The megalodog raced off to comply.

Tiffany went around, magically dragging unconscious lawmen to one side of the room. “Should we tie them up?”

Esper cocked her head. “To what end?”

Tiffany gaped. “I did not mean like that! I just… what if they wake up?”

“We’ll be long gone by then.”

Kubu returned after what had to have been only a cursory search. “I don’t smell anyone.”

“Great, then we can—”

“Nooooo,” Kubu whined. “I mean I don’t smell any azrin girl.”

Wesley cleared his throat. “There’s supposed to be a secret door under one of the officer’s office floors. McDermott… McGuffin… McGregor…” He gave his scalp a thoughtful scratch. “Something like that.”

“Sullivan,” Tiffany said, crossing her arms.

Wesley pointed one finger at her and tapped his nose with another. “B-I-N-G-O, and Sullivan was his name-O.”

“Look for name plates,” Esper ordered. “Split up. Shout when you find it.”

“You girls look downstairs,” Wesley suggested. “Me and Kubu will check the upper floor.”

Esper wiped a hand down her face. “How can they put a secret underground holding cell beneath a second-floor office?”

Wesley shrugged. “Who’d think to check there?”

“Fine,” she snapped. “Go!”

She and Tiffany scrambled down hallways marked with evidence lockers, interrogation rooms, forensics labs, and a few offices for senior staff.

Blackman. Chesterfield. Fong. Mikhailov. Running Deer.

By unspoken accord, she and Tiffany had taken the left and right halves of the building. When she chased the girl down, Tiffany was already shaking her head. “I can’t find any Sullivan.”

“That fucker better not have had a second-floor office,” Esper groused.

Tiffany blinked as if she might have misheard. Damn that do-gooder’s stuffy non-cussing vocabulary. “Um. Yeah. It’d sure suck admitting you don’t know everything.” Catching the glower Esper shot her, she quickly added, “Maybe they have a chute or a secret ladder that doesn’t show up on the building plans. Or… something.”

Esper fumed.

Amateur hour had become amateur lifetime. Esper was so used to associating with fuckups that she waited until the situation grew so dire before unleashing her magic. No more.

With a snarl, Esper tore the door off the nearest office, the one belonging to Lieutenant Moses Running Deer. At a swipe of her hand, gravity shifted, and the room’s contents fell against the far wall.

Striding inside without acknowledging the cosmological alteration, she ripped up the prefab metal floor plates with her bare hands, looking for secret stairways.

Tiffany stepped inside. “You need any—WHOA!”

Esper caught the girl by the arm as she plummeted past, stepping off a cliff as she passed the threshold. With a firm tug, she pulled her apprentice down to the proper floor and anchored her to the personal gravity she’d been using.

“Be more careful.”

Tiffany stared pointedly at the sharp, twisted slab of sheet metal Esper held in her other hand.

Tossing the panel aside to fall against the wall, she shrugged. “What? Don’t blame me just because you weren’t paying attention to the fact that everything but me was falling a different direction. What have I told you about watching what wizards do?”

Tiff sighed. “Don’t follow a wizard through the fire.” She rolled her eyes. “What’s that even really mean?”

“It means, just because a wizard isn’t playing by the rules that you can assume you’re exempt too.”

Disquietingly soft footsteps gave little warning before Wesley appeared in the doorway. “No oubliettes upstairs.”

“Told you,” Kubu called from behind him. “There’s no little azrin girl here.”

“They must have moved her,” Tiffany reasoned.

Kubu huffed. “I don’t smell her at all. No fur. No spit. No peepee. She was never here.”

“Maybe they cleaned up like one of those perfect crime shows?” Tiffany suggested. “They’ve always got zero-gram filters and nano-vacs and shit to clean up like nothing ever happened.”

Kubu cocked his head. “I don’t think the policemen who reuse their plastic coffee mugs and don’t wash up after going peepee made a whole azrin disappear.”

“Then we got the wrong police station,” Wesley reasoned. “No matter. We’ll tear up every hoosegow from here to the horizon if we have to.”

“We should contact what’s-his-name again. Actually, did we ever get a name for Dr. Haa’s friend?”

“We should hurry,” Kubu advised. “She could be in trouble somewhere else close by!”

Esper shook her head. There was a time and a place to be naive, trusting Esper, and this wasn’t it. She addressed them in turn. “There’s no other police station in Kebok City. This place is lucky to have any law at all. Our contact didn’t make a simple ‘mistake’ with such detailed insider intel. He misled us with a purpose.”

She huffed a weary sigh. “And I’m 90 percent sure that there never was a little azrin girl named Miira.”

“What?” Tiffany demanded. “Why would anyone do that?”

“We should get back to the shuttle,” Wesley suggested urgently.

Esper stalked over to one of the downed policemen. “I doubt we’re going anywhere for a bit. We got lured here, and whoever went to this trouble isn’t likely to have left the shuttle in working order.” She reached down and gently laid a finger on the man’s forehead, siphoning off the last few minutes of his memory. Then she proceeded to the next.

“What are you doing?” Tiffany asked warily.

Esper sucked the memories out of the officers one by one. They’d wake up confused as hell but unable to connect the attack to Esper and her associates with fried tech and no memory of the events.

“We just need to make sure we don’t leave trouble on both sides of us.”

Oolie read the data display on the med scanner, making sure to parse each and every bit of information before moving on to the next. It wouldn’t be the first time that his readings conflicted with the reports Dr. Haa filed in the azrin’s medical records. He noted a 0.5 percent deviation in lymph processing factor epsilon and annotated the change he registered.

The azrin, Rikall, growled in the back of his throat. “Can you tap any slower?”

“Yes,” Oolie replied calmly. “But it wouldn’t help. I’m being as careful as the task requires already.”

“I have better things to do,” Rikall protested.

“Nothing more important than good health,” Oolie said. “A few minutes now can save a lifetime of regret.”

“Lifetime?” Rikall mocked, squirming from his seated position on the examination table. “I’ve wasted the lifetimes of three generations on this ship.” He flexed the claws of one hand.

Oolie, who’d dealt with violent criminals most of his career, didn’t falter beneath the azrin’s bluster. There were many differences between a creature willing to break laws for money and one who broke laws for the future well-being of his people. The former would not endanger his life beyond a point but held no qualms about harming whoever got in his way. The latter would throw his life into the incinerator, if that’s what it took, but would not be wanton with the lives of those who supported him—even through mild annoyances like a lengthy and thorough medical exam.

“Would you like a little advice?” Oolie asked calmly, still tapping in his most recent update.

Folding his arms, Rikall seethed. “No.”

“No action is worth undertaking without understanding. Rushing ahead only leads to mistakes.”

The azrin wheezed a laugh. “Easy for a tesud to say. You were born before my great-great-grandfather and will die after my great-grandchildren return to the chain of prey.”

Oolie took a steady breath. He could be so lucky. While the difference in lifespans was as vast as Rikall alluded, his line of work precluded an easy assumption of longevity. “One might take that as reason to heed wisdom when it comes.”

In medical mode, the comm chime from Oolie’s datapad came as a mild surprise. Few people knew to contact him at all, let alone had access to his comm ID. His absence from Lodestone might prove problematic.

Carefully saving his in-progress diagnostics, Oolie switched over to the comm app and checked the sender. “Oh. Hello, Dr. Haa. I didn’t expect a comm to originate from—”

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Haa cut in rudely. “Who is with you right now? Is it Rikall?”

Rikall leaned over and spoke into the datapad. “I am here, doctor.”

“Good,” Dr. Haa stated. “It is time.”

“Time?” Oolie asked. “Time for what? I was unaware—”

He paused, eyes wide, as Rikall’s hand clutched his throat. The tips of claws poked ever so delicately into the soft, exposed flesh.

“Doctor, you have done us kindness,” Rikall said as he carefully extracted the datapad from Oolie’s unresisting hand and cut the comm. “So, if you please, do nothing to force me to harm you.”

Oolie gave a weary sigh. “Not my first time being a hostage. Hazard of this line of work.”

“Excellent,” Rikall stated, releasing his hold. “Bad business to kill doctors, especially doctors willing to help the cause. I would be indirectly responsible for the deaths of those you might one day save.”

“Glad we sing the same song,” Oolie replied as he followed the rebel out of med bay. He rubbed the spot where the azrin’s claws had gripped, satisfied when they came away with nary a drop of blood. “What do I need to do?”

“For now… nothing.”

Ilsa’s nerves had calmed to a light tremor. A nasty, sloppy meal of terrestrial carrion kept on hand for the ship’s resident omnivore had done wonders for the mood of her troupe of sightseers. Now sated, they followed in a docile gaggle, questions kept to a minimum with an impression that they were mostly out to stretch their legs rather than learn about the ship.

“And this is where we store costumes we’ve used for various missions,” she explained, sweeping a hand toward bare storage lockers scattered with discarded clothing. “We have plans to expand the inventory so we can cover most incognito scenarios and maybe install an auto-loom to fill in gaps without having to go shopping planetside. It’s not like Planetside Express makes deliveries to stolen warships.”

She grinned and waited.

No one got the joke.

Clearing her throat, she kept her feet moving. The sooner she finished the tour, the better. No one had outlined the minimum the visiting azrin needed to know. This was all unexplored territory. As acting commanding officer, ultimately the decision was just a matter of her discretion. Still, she didn’t want to open herself to accusations she’d shortchanged them for simply being a predatory species.

…with a well-documented history of murdering humans and anyone else who got in their way.

When they reached the main crew lounge, the one so large that Esper had left it vacant rather than shout across the rows of tables when someone arrived, she figured maybe she’d found a place suitable to ditch them for a while.

“This is the room where the crew of the old Earth Navy vessel used to gather to blow off steam after a long day and where the Cult of Ra used to review corporate earnings with their middle managers.”

Again, she paused, but nobody appreciated the incongruous humor of corporate cultists. Even Ilsa had come around on that front. Better than being afraid of those fuckers the rest of her life.

One of the azrin lifted his nose. “Smells like human fear.”

Ilsa’s chest tightened. “Well, that’s probably because the cultists tried to inspire terror in their—”

“Good,” the same azrin said. “I like the scent.”

Others agreed. They snarled and hissed jokes in their own language. She could tell because now they laughed.

Ilsa’s datapad played a few notes from Tick Tock Doc. With a furrow of her brow, she wondered why Dr. Haa was comming her. Maybe he had forgotten about some obscure rule for turning quarantined murderers loose with minimal supervision. Maybe he wanted to take over babysitting them himself.

Only one way to find out. She slipped the datapad out of her pocket. “Hey, doc. What’s up?”

Dr. Haa sounded calm, putting her nerves at ease. “Are you still giving the patients a tour?”

“Yeah. I thought maybe they could hang in the main crew lounge a while.”

“Excellent. I need to speak with Broii a moment. Be so kind as to pass him your device?”

Ilsa muted the mic and raised her voice. “Which one of you is Broii?”

A scraggly-furred giant approached. Patches of skin lay exposed where Dr. Haa had shaved him to close garish wounds acquired during a bout of infighting—all in good fun, he’d assured her. “I am Broii.”

She handed over the datapad. “Dr. Haa needs to talk to you.” Just as the azrin’s grip pulled it away from her, she remembered to unmute it with a slight lunge.

Broii cast her a wary glance before walking off and taking her datapad beyond a wall of furry flesh that closed behind him. Others from the tour spread out, making a show of examining tables and chairs with undue curiosity.

Despite their similarities to Earth’s housecats, azrin weren’t typically known for their curiosity.

Ilsa’s mouth went dry.

You’re being an idiot, she scolded herself. Pure xenoism. Get a hold of yourself. You’re a fucking tour guide, and they owe Esper their lives. They wouldn’t dare hurt you.

A moment later, Broii returned, grinning casually and waving the datapad to garner Ilsa’s attention. “Dr. Haa wishes an answer to a question.”

Ilsa reached out for the device, but Broii pulled up short of arm’s length with it. “He could have just asked me himself.”

“Your rude little talking goggles,” Broii continued as if she’d said nothing. “Does it turn on of its own accord?”

Ilsa reached up slowly to remove Sudo, who she’d kept off since her embarrassing tirade regarding these same azrin. “No. Look, I know some of the stuff she said wasn’t exactly polite in xenological company, but I don’t—”

One of the azrin caught her wrist from behind. So quiet. She hadn’t even noticed him sneaking up on her blind side. Then the same azrin locked onto her other wrist and twisted both behind her back.

Broii slipped her datapad inside his vest and tugged Sudo free of her face. “I don’t care about your politics, human. The favor we do for Esper and Wesley is to leave you alive. If not for their aid, we would be taking the Feast of Vengeance on your flesh by now. Understood?”

Ilsa nodded spasmodically.

“Good. Behave, and we may leave you at the site of our next massacre to be collected by relief crews.”

“Massacre?” She couldn’t help herself from asking as the lounge doors opened.

Dr. Haa stepped inside.

“Good. You have subdued her,” Dr. Haa said with a mirthless grin.

“I don’t understand,” Ilsa exclaimed. “We were helping you!”

“Don’t feed a starving hunter the scraps from your discarded bones and blame him for wishing to share the feast.”

“We saved your lives!”

Dr. Haa chuckled. “You saved our plan. Do you know how hard it was to develop a plague that would not kill? A plague I could cure but would require great effort for human doctors? We were almost undone by the heartless human garrison commander who convinced his superiors to let us all die rather than help.”

Ilsa blinked. “You… wanted to be evacuated?”

Dr. Haa looked all around. “By all rights, this should have been one of the garrison ships around Meyang, and our warriors would have been able to tear into the flesh of our oppressors.”

Rikall marched in, herding Oolie ahead of him. “I very much wished to feast on the entrails of Captain Broderick and to allow my warriors a chance to fight their ghosts and demons in person.” He ruffled the fur atop Dr. Haa’s head affectionately—and patronizingly. “But our good plan put us aboard a derelict ship with inoffensive humans so naive they tried to help. How can we kill them?”

Dr. Haa nodded along. “We have so few advocates among your kind. Nevertheless, simply allowing this opportunity to pass was unacceptable.”

Broii grunted, casting an appraising look around the ship’s lounge. “We will make do.”

Ilsa entered one of the old Cult of Ra bedchambers stumbling after Broii’s shove. As she whirled to give him a piece of her mind, she found herself face to face with Oolie. The tesud physician shuffled placidly into the makeshift prison behind her.

Rikall blocked the doorway when the tesud was out of the way, and the sight of those slitted, predatory pupils set into those yellow-green eyes forestalled any objection she was about to make. “The door will not be locked. Clever human would figure out a way to open it anyway. But Hraal will be outside. Each time the door opens without my permission, he cuts off a finger.”

In case Ilsa had any doubts about the method of amputation, the sinister azrin extended one hooked claw and made a perfunctory flicking motion with it.

“Do you understand?”

Ilsa gulped and nodded.

The door slid shut.

Alone with the tesud, she vented her frustration. “How could you let this happen? And why didn’t you get some lecture on getting pieces of you cut off?”

“I won’t be any trouble.”

“You’re a smart guy. We could come up with a way to break out of here, maybe gas them all, take control of the ship.”

“Maybe your friends could. Not us.”

“But…” Ilsa trailed off with a furrowed brow. “Fuck. Anyone who might fight them is off on some xenotarian mission.”

“Not a coincidence.”

Ilsa stalked the room, examining the squalor of their accommodations as she fumed. The cult had been purged from the ship in… well, a bloodier version of the coup currently in progress. The former occupants hadn’t moved out properly. Rumpled bed sheets had been left rather than flushed out an airlock. Same went for the personal grooming kit still littered with facial hair trimmings and half-empty men’s perfume bottles.

“Eugh. So nasty. So, you think they were just waiting for Esper’s next mission to pull this off? Delaying the quarantine and everything until the time was right.”

“I don’t think they waited.”

Ilsa pulled up short about to pull open a dresser drawer. “You mean they went out and found a job for her? I guess that explains why it was all about helping some azrin kid.”

“I suspect they invented the crisis.” Oolie perched himself on the edge of an easy chair as if afraid to get comfortable in it.

“Holy shit…” Ilsa said with a shake of her head. She opened the cultist’s top dresser drawer, then slammed it shut instantly. “HOLY SHIT!”

“What?” Oolie asked with something resembling urgency in that catatonic tesud voice.

Ilsa calmed down from her initial shock and opened it again. It wasn’t scary, per se, but she hadn’t been expecting what she discovered. “Pleasure toy for anatomy I don’t have, plus a nude flatpic of Joyce Naianti before she got the cosmo recharge.” Her eyes lingered on the image. “Nah. I can do better.” She shut the drawer.

Now wary of examining the rest of their surroundings too closely, she staked out a spot equidistant from all the walls and furniture and stood there, arms crossed, waiting. For what, she didn’t know.

For a rescue?

For someone to bring them a meal?

For an explanation of what was going to happen to them?

For the galaxy to start treating her a little better?

That was it. “Why the hell does this keep happening to me? I’m not a bad girl. Not really. Plenty of people—human and otherwise”—she wagged a finger at Oolie— “make their living outside the law and don’t get kidnapped, used as a bargaining chip, and locked in rooms. Why me?”

Oolie’s placid demeanor refused to crack. “Plenty of them just die. Happens all the time. Try to be thankful you’re one of the ones who gets leveraged.”

Ilsa huffed. “Well, I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing.”

“It would be prudent if you did.”

Ilsa wasn’t listening anymore. Heedless of the personal data overload she might receive regarding the prior inhabitant, she tore the room apart. “There’s got to be something in here we can use. A personal comm. An old datapad. A weapon…” She flung discarded clothing aside, mentally queuing up a good hot shower to cleanse any part of her that contacted the cultist’s belongings. “Aha!”

There, beneath a formal-looking white tunic with gold brocade, lay a leather sheath with a dagger still tucked inside.

Holding the hilt in one hand and the sheath in the other, she drew the two apart at eye level. Her gaze followed the gleaming edge as she let the sheath fall to the floor. The blade was copper with a simple design resembling a thin leaf. Touching the tip, her finger came away welling with a drop of blood.

“You should be careful. There is likely bacteria all over that blade.”

“Stow it,” Ilsa snapped. She didn’t know how just yet, but the seeds of an escape plan had just burrowed into the soil of her mind.

The door to the hall whooshed open without warning.

Instinctively, Ilsa hid the weapon behind her back and faced their captor.

Hraal had a gleam in his eye. He gripped the doorframe with two hands and leaned inside as if under orders not to enter. “Whatever toy you found in there, I welcome the sport. The doctor thinks you should live, but I don’t care. Fair warning, prey. If you attack me or try to make a fool of me by escaping on my watch, you will still be alive when I start to eat you.”

With a feline chuckle, he withdrew and closed the door behind him.

The dagger clattered to the floor from limp fingers.

Through the door came Hraal’s muffled voice, still laughing at her expense. “If you behave, I’ll send someone to bring you fresh clothes.”

That was when Ilsa looked down at her feet. “Shit.”

She’d wet herself.

Esper sat in Drake’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Shoppe, an empty glass boat staring up at her accusingly. It was the remains of the tenth banana split she’d eaten since sitting down.

“I’d stop if you weren’t the only thing on the menu,” she told the dish, then added: “And if you actually filled me up.”

A nagging hunger never went away, not painful but always present in her thoughts. For what felt like weeks, she’d ignored the sensation only to stumble across the former haunting ground she and her high school friends had raided twice a week alongside a handful of carb blockers.

These banana splits tasted like nostalgia.

It was a strange sensation. Happy memories of Mars had largely remained buried as soon as she’d been able to pile enough dirt to suffocate the horrible ones. She found herself missing the company of Lissi, Samandra, and Tamara. Who were they now? How had they turned out? Had Esper’s disappearance off the face of the planet affected them profoundly, or had she become one of those apocryphal tales of the snob in cheap clothing, never one of them in the first place?

Without being asked, a blank-faced waiter in a paper hat and apron delivered her a fresh banana split while whisking away the empty.

“Thanks,” she muttered, then picked up her next spoon. At least it tasted good in the moment.

As she lifted a spoonful of vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce to her mouth, the door to Drake’s burst open.

“You’ve got to help me!” a man shouted. He was dressed in a police uniform but not one that belonged on Mars—leastwise not New Singapore. It bore the initials KPPF across the chest. Unlike the other inhabitants of Dark Esper’s prison, he was distinctive, with intense brown eyes and a manicured goatee. Sweat beaded on a perfectly smooth bald scalp. His movements were quick, jerky, desperate. He shook one of the non-entity patrons by the shoulders. “Answer me! Where is this place?”

Esper set down her dessert and studied the man. With a serious lack of better things to do, she called out to him. “Have a seat, and I’ll explain what I can.”

He whirled on her. “You! You can understand me?” Rushing over, he knelt at her side, clutched her shirt collar.

Esper gently removed the man’s hands from her person. “Calm down. Sit. Take a deep breath and tell me who you are.”

Collecting himself, the man pulled his hand back with an air of guilt. “Sorry. I’m… I’m Sergeant Mitchell Cornwallis, Kebok Planetary Police Force.” He slipped into the booth across from Esper, sparing a glance at her ice cream.

“Kebok?” She turned the name over in her mind. “Not sure I know where that is.”

Shaking his head violently, Sgt. Cornwallis pushed himself out of the booth. “I need to find someone who can—”

“Sit!” Esper ordered, grabbing him by the sleeve. This might have been her prison, but it was also her own mind. And if the colonial policeman wasn’t an elaborate prank by her darker half, then she had a right to know who was in here with her.

An edge of steel in her voice might have carried a whiff of magic because Mitch returned to his seat stiffly, watching Esper like a zoo lion on the wrong side of the bars.

“This place isn’t normal. You’re not awake here. Consider it a vivid dream.”

Mitch looked all around. The counter seating with its chrome trim, the glass display case of ice cream tubs, the whimsical cotton-candy decor, he took it all in with the skeptical air of a man who suspected he might have been drugged. “This is like no dream I’ve ever had.”

“It’s not,” Esper agreed.

Mitch locked eyes with her suddenly. His breath quickened. “You’re… you’re her!”

“Oh, poo,” Esper muttered. “No. I have a twin sister. What did she do this time?”

The lie came so easily she never doubted the sincerity behind it.

Mitch swallowed. “You—I mean she—raided the station. There was a dog and a big guy and… and… shit, what the hell happened? Am I in a coma or something? I remember something hitting me in the head from behind.”

Esper couldn’t dismiss the possibility of the coma. Frankly, it wasn’t the worst possible explanation for him being here. He’d be lucky to still have a living, breathing body on the outside.

“Well, Sgt. Cornwallis, this is a memory of Mars.”

“Mars? I’ve never been to Mars. How could I have a memory of—”

“It’s not your memory. It’s mine. I’m stranded here too.”

“Stranded? What do you mean ‘stranded’?”

Esper sighed. With a raised hand, she summoned the waiter. “Get a Drake’s Special for my friend here.” When the simulacrum had departed, she told Mitch, “Think of it like getting hypnotized.”

Mitch shook his head. “I don’t believe in that pseudoscience jumbo mumbo.”

“By a wizard,” Esper finished.

Mitch clamped his jaw shut. It was one thing disbelieving in fringe psycho-science, even the kind that sort of worked. But nobody in their right mind could deny magic. Most lucky folks across the galaxy had just never been subjected firsthand to the awful side of wizardry.

“Yeah. But it’s not all bad,” she assured him in words that clung to truth by the fingertips. The waiter returned with a banana split for Mitch. “At least you can eat all the ice cream you want without getting sick or putting on weight.”

Mitch eyed her dubiously while she nodded encouragement. He picked up the spoon and sampled the treat. “It’s… pretty good.”

Esper beamed a smile.

Then, a hand slammed down on the table between them. Dressed for a special ops raid, Dark Esper scattered their desserts with a crash of glass and a clatter of spoons. “Fraternizing with the enemy?”

“Huh?” Esper asked, genuinely perplexed. “You keep me blind down here. How am I supposed to know who’s who? This is Mitch, by the way, Officer Mitch Cornwallis.”

“Sergeant,” he corrected with a tremor in his voice. He couldn’t tear his eyes off Dark Esper as she loomed over them.

“These fuckers have been terrorizing the azrin on Kebok. Someone took advantage of that to send us looking for an azrin kid who may or may not even exist.”

“What’s she talking about?” Mitch asked, not taking his eyes off their common foe.

“I’m… not quite sure. What are you talking about?”

With a flick of her fingers, Mitch vanished.

Esper gasped and covered her mouth.

“Oh, get over yourself. I just sent him to meet up with his buddies. I’ve got bigger problems right now.” She went on to explain the events leading up to the raid on the Kebok Planetary Police Force headquarters.

“OK. So, you probably got played,” Esper reasoned. “Everyone’s OK, right? You didn’t take any more than the few minutes from the raid out of their minds. Tiff, Kubu, and Wesley are fine. Pack up and head home.”

“I can’t,” Dark Esper replied with a snarl.

Sometimes, playing the role was more important than winning the battle. Esper clung to that notion as Wesley tinkered with the engine compartment of the shuttle. Clangs and clunks rang from the darkness where his upper torso disappeared inside. With a heave, he slid himself out, grimy with soot and grease or whatever coated the guts of a spacecraft.

“Well,” he said as he popped up to his feet and dusted his hands. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“We needed all good,” Tiffany commented.

“Just spit it out,” Esper said wearily. Just interacting with the buffoon socially was too much work at times.

“Well, the good news is I know exactly what’s wrong with Helios here.” He patted the hull affectionately. “The bad news: someone sabotaged it, and the part we need probably won’t be available on a one-horse colony like Kebok.”

Kubu looked all around and put his nose to the air. “There’s a horse here?”

“Fuck,” Tiffany muttered.

“How stranded are we?” Esper asked.

Wesley lobbed her his datapad. “Pretty stranded.”

Esper snatched the device from the air. Before she had to ask what she was supposed to be doing with it, she caught sight of the headline from a local omni newsfeed: BRAZEN ASSAULT LEAVES KPPF IN SHAMBLES. The feed went on to explain the total lockdown on the planet. Any ship attempting to leave would be fired upon.

When he took the datapad back, Wesley was apologetic. “Technically, we were supposed to be laying ions before anyone noticed we were gone with Miira.”

“We didn’t finish the job,” Tiffany said. “This was probably the only way to get us to stick it out.”

Forcing her jaw to unclench, Esper forced herself back into character. If they were stranded anyway, what was the harm in poking around to find the kid? For all she knew, she was being too cynical, ignoring the chance that something nefarious had happened and assuming betrayal.

The sabotaged shuttle stared at her accusingly.

Fine. An earlier betrayal.

Clearly, someone wanted them staying on Kebok.

“Fire off a text comm to Ilsa,” Esper ordered. “Let her know we’re breaking comm silence because we’re stuck here a while.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wesley replied, saluting with the datapad to his forehead. Those fat fingers moved across the screen faster than they had any business moving.

“Kubu, how many azrin can you sniff out?” Esper asked.

The megalodog cocked his head, then sniffed speculatively. “I dunno. Maybe thirty or forty? That’s a lot to count by sniffing.”

“Are any of them girls?” Tiffany asked singsong.

Even Esper was aghast at the teasing implication. “Tiff, she’s four!”

The apprentice wizard rolled her eyes. “You ought to know better. What do me, Kubu, a fifty-year-old tesud, and this azrin kid we’re looking for have in common?”

All right. This was one of the better riddles she’d heard in a while. “I’ll bite. What?”

“Teenagers.”

Esper wrinkled her nose. “But Kubu’s not—”

“Different maturation rates,” Wesley cut in with a professorial air. “Most humans don’t see many xenos except laaku, and they age a lot like us. But—”

“I know plenty of xenos!” Esper protested. “Like… a lot. And Kubu’s not…” she stared incredulously at the canine, “a teenager.”

Kubu’s ears went back.

Tiffany sniffed derisively. “Don’t get on his case about it. But his head turns every time an eyndar girl walks past.”

“Ew!”

Kubu whined and darted around the far side of the shuttle.

“Super,” Tiffany grumbled, folding her arms and fixing Esper with what she could only imagine was her best version of the do-gooder’s Mom Glare. “I hope you’re happy. It’s not like he’s got anyone helping him with this. Imagine growing up on Phabian without ever having met another human.”

Thanks to an exceptional imagination, in that moment, Esper did just that. The prospect of figuring out puberty on her own amid a population of furry, four-handed simians twisted a primal part of her mind into knots.

Whatever her feelings on the inappropriateness of interspecies attraction with an eyndar of all sentients, Esper needed a tracker right now.

“Kubu,” she called out. “Kubu, I’m sorry. I just… reacted. Without thinking. What you do with species relations is your business. As long as things are mutual, you can like whoever you want.”

An eyndar the size of Paul Bunyan flashed through her mind only to be quickly swept away as counterproductive.

She made a complete circuit without running into the megalodog. He had to have been circling the craft opposite her. With superior sensation and twice her speed without trying, there was no way she’d catch up with him short of magic.

With a gesture, the shuttle rose three meters into the air.

The sudden movement caught everyone off guard. Tiffany and Wesley recoiled. Kubu hunkered close to the ground.

“There’s no time for sulking. An azrin gir—young lady’s—life may be on the line. She’s counting on you. We either need to find her directly or, barring that, our contact again. We need to figure it out on our own.”

Wesley waggled his datapad. “Not to be alarmist, but we haven’t gotten a reply from Ilsa.”

“Esper probably just zorched the thing.”

Wesley turned the screen to face them. “Negativo. All tip-top but the empty inbox.”

“Maybe she’s taking a bath,” Tiffany suggested with a shrug.

“She sleeps with datagoggles on,” Esper replied grimly. “And if she was taking a bath by herself, she’d be playing poker on the omni. That girl has a serious tech addiction.” She swallowed. “But we can’t overreact. Resend the status update. Make it really damn clear we want a report in return. Comm silence is over.”

Wesley was already tapping. “On it.”

Kubu perked up, sampling the air, nostrils flaring madly. “I think I smell something.”

Esper cracked her knuckles. “About time. Let’s start getting some answers.”

The door to Ilsa and Oolie’s temporary prison slid open without warning. Expecting a meal of questionable culinary merit, Ilsa was shocked to find not Hraal but Dr. Haa entering unannounced. The brawny door guard stood just behind him, glowering at Ilsa in warning as if to say:

He may be scrawny, but I’m still here to intervene.

It might have been a noble sentiment if Ilsa were the “try something” sort when it came to overpowering adult azrin in unarmed combat. Or if Oolie wasn’t a member of a species rumored to have taffy running in their veins. Instead, it felt like overkill. Ilsa was the tax fraud girl stuck on the same cellblock as the murderers and pirates.

“To what do I owe—?” she tried to begin before Dr. Haa cut her off.

“We need the codes.”

Ilsa had been dreading this as she prepared her best evasive answers. “We never had a complete set of codes for the Errand of Mercy. We just run it as best we can with—”

“I am locked out of the main computers. I wish access. Now.”

Ilsa hesitated. With full computer access, the azrin rebels could take her anywhere in the galaxy. As far down as they were in the astral, in a few days they could practically be in another galaxy.

“Let me be blunt,” Dr. Haa said. “I take no pleasure in bringing harm to that which I do not intend to eat. But if you do not comply, I will begin removing pieces of you. And, as a doctor, I assure you there will be no quick end. I swear by the blood of Meyang, you will survive long enough to get us the codes we need.”

Her first line of logic, wherein she argued that only Esper had full command access, crumbled to dust on her tongue. All subsequent evasions failed to germinate. The cowering seeds of half a dozen plants froze beneath the hard-packed soil of her mind, trampled down by a threat she believed with all her fingers and toes not to be idle.

“I’ll need access to a terminal.”

“Good plan,” Oolie said with an approving nod.

Dr. Haa summoned Hraal with a click of his claws. “Excellent choice. Become of use to us, and you may find a place in the rebellion. In the future, you might even get to choose prisoners to spare as playmates. The free azrin people are fierce but not without mercy.”

Mercy.

If ever there was one to give lessons on mercy, it wasn’t any of these azrin butchers.

Hraal led her by the scruff of her shirt collar through the corridors of the ship until they reached the bridge. Every step of the way, Ilsa’s troublemaking mind suggested ways to escape.

Override a power conduit.

Snatch a weapon; not a silly knife but a real blaster, something she knew how to use.

Dive down a waste reclaim chute and bypass the lock on the compactor.

Come up with a threat that seasoned azrin killers might fear.

Luckily, Ilsa’s self-preservation mind cataloged each into a giant, centralized pile of NOPE.

Aside from the implausible act of talking her way out of this, all plans first required her breaking free of the grasp of a being ten times stronger than her. She was a kitten to Hraal despite being probably twice his age.

After an eternity that seemed all too short, they arrived on the bridge. Hraal gave her a rough shove toward the bank of utilitarian cabinets beneath the tactical station. “Get to work.”

Dr. Haa stood over her. “Navigation. Propulsion. Power distribution. Data banks. I wish master access to all.”

Ilsa popped the panel off the nearest console and peered inside. “I’ll need—”

A crash beside her made her jump. It was a mechanic’s satchel full of tools.

“Thanks,” she muttered. Digging through the haphazardly stocked mess, she found a multi-tool and power scanner, then set to work.

She wished she had Sudo with her, if only to make sure she was safe. The AI was as much a friend as a digital assistant, and even on silent, she would have been welcome company in this den of murderers.

And yet…

Sudo was derived from her own personality, for better or worse. She could anticipate the AI’s suggestions sometimes and could even hear it in that computerized voice.

“These tech simpletons wouldn’t know an astral relay junction from a tertiary thruster controller. Bin code an SOS and you can get help here before they even know they’ve been duped.”

Ilsa examined the interface options. She had back-end connections to everything from personal terminals to bridge duty stations if only she could trace the right data line.

Then, with a dull thud of insight into the obvious, she pushed herself up to a kneeling position and wiped a lock of loose hair from her face. “Why am I digging around down here?”

“Access the overrides, human,” Hraal said firmly, slowly extending a claw toward the guts of the console. “Make no excuses.”

“But I have access to the systems you want. I don’t need to override shit. Let me sit down at a terminal and I’ll create logins for anyone you want.”

Hraal snarled something in his own language, beckoning across the bridge until Dr. Haa came over.

“Is this true?” the azrin physician asked. “You have command-level access to the computers?”

Ilsa huffed. Pride warred with a collaborator’s guilt, but she couldn’t trust herself to lie to these killers. “Esper’s no good with computers. She can’t even send a message and a flatpic in the same comm. Has to send two separate comms. So, she put me in charge of all the computers. Let me access one of the bridge stations, and I’ll get you whatever you need.”

Hraal and the doctor conferred in their own language.

“Even easier,” she heard her own wandering thoughts in Sudo’s synthetic voice. “You can just tap the message in plain English and shoot it off. At your manual input speed, all you’d need would be an eight-second distraction.”

“Very well,” Dr. Haa said, jabbing a finger toward the comms station chair. “Create computer logins for me and Rikall. Full access.” He turned to leave as Ilsa slunk over to her assigned station. “Oh, and if you try to send a message for help, I assure you, we will kill you before it arrives. Understood?”

So much of her planning revolved around fooling these azrin. And so long as Dr. Haa remained in charge, she didn’t see that happening. Dupe the blundering idiots willing to murder their way to a free Meyang? Harrowing but doable. Put one over on the mastermind who’d faked a plague and hijacked the Errand of Mercy?

“Yes, sir. No messages. Got it.”

She could only hope that Esper figured things out on her own. And soon.

To Esper’s surprise, Kubu led the team away from the heart of Kebok City and into the foothills of the mountainous region surrounding it. Free of the bowl effect trapping the locally produced pollutants, the air quality improved markedly.

“Reminds me of a shoot back in the day,” Wesley remarked, hands on hips, as he surveyed the countryside. Even well outside the city limits, the colony wasn’t pretty. But with the evening drawing to a close, the clouds caught the light and tried to make a sunset of it.

Tiffany trudged past him, struggling to keep up as she occasionally paused to hack up wads of whatever lingered in the air below. “Lemme guess, one of your shittier holos?”

Far from visibly offended, Wesley chuckled at the comment. “Oh, one of the shittiest. Surrounded on all sides by inhospitable wildlife. Beset by the elements themselves. We were stranded, cut off from all support. Deadlines closed in on us like enemy troops from one of those hard-to-pronounce species we used as extras. We were debating whether to eat the fine folks from craft services when we finally got an evac out of there.”

Esper wondered how much of that story was from his acting career and how much bled in from his Omicron Squad days. Without security clearance—or watching a simply unconscionable number of Wesley’s holos—she might never know.

“How we doing?” she asked Kubu instead.

Their tracker bounded back from the trail. With his endless energy, he could have tracked the azrin kid and brought her back riding him like an elephant by now. If only he could be trusted to operate solo.

“Very close now. It’s so much easier to track without hovercabs and trams and city smells mixing things up. At least Kebok City didn’t have street cleaners.”

“Oh. Yeah. Real glad they never heard of those,” Tiffany griped. At least she showed she had the wind for sarcasm. That meant she had the endurance left to fight if this went sideways.

Kubu led them not up into the mountains but down into a valley separate enough from the city that it didn’t trap the fetid, smoggy air as spillover.

“How much farther?” Esper asked. Unlike her young charge, she wasn’t feeling the effects of the prolonged hike. Her interest was more in expediency than rest. The longer they remained out of contact with the Errand of Mercy, the more she was convinced that something must have gone very wrong on board. Ilsa wasn’t a chatterbox, but she was a little clingy. The lifting of comm silence ought to have at least produced a thumb-skyward status check-in by now.

“We’re close…” Kubu said without elaborating. He kept his nose to the ground, sniffing at a uniform centimeter from the turf as the foothill terrain undulated beneath him.

“Is she alone?” Tiffany asked. “How many others are with her?”

“A bunch,” Kubu replied. “Humans.”

A whirring up ahead grew louder as they approached. Esper hunkered into a crouch and convinced the others to do likewise. They crept up until she could take a peek around a sharp bend, view shielded by an outcropping of rock.

Shit! No…

“Poo!” Esper barked.

“What is it?” Wesley asked. “Automated gun emplacement? Android sentry? Remote-trigger bomb?”

“Ventilation duct,” she said, pointing an accusing finger for all of them to follow once they ventured into view.

Rusted and ancient-looking, the louvered bit of ductwork jutted a meter from the rocky soil and hunched like an old man as it belched forth air from underground.

“Shrink us all and jump down?” Tiffany suggested.

Wesley rubbed his chin. “Rather not take my chances on the kind of blower they’ve got at the bottom of that vent.”

“Well, the smell is coming from it,” Kubu pointed out, likely to forestall any blame for not finding them an actual entrance.

“No,” Esper said firmly. Fuck this. Fuck all of this nonsense. They needed this done and over, pronto. “Spread out. Search the countryside. There’s got to be a way into whatever bunker we’re above. Find an entrance and report back. No one goes in alone.”

Except maybe me.

Dr. Haa scratched an itch behind his ear, the sort of gesture that drew curious and derisive glares from human onlookers. For his years of medical training and practice in mixed-staff facilities, he’d suppressed the instinctive reaction. Now, free of the constraints of foreign societies, it felt good just to be himself. To be azrin.

The command chair would never be comfortable beneath his ass. None of the proportions were ergonomic for his anatomy. The General Ergonomic Standard didn’t include azrin. Nevertheless, he perched on the seat taking pride in his conquest.

“Time for a new name for our prize,” he announced to his ragamuffin crew. Not a single one of them had useful deep space experience. He was dealing with laborers, atmospheric mechanics, vagabonds, and petty criminals. All had become something greater when they joined the rebellion. None had become significantly more educated.

The bridge erupted in suggestions from all sides.

“Killer of Humans.”

“Meyang’s In the Sky.”

“Vengeance Claw.”

Dr. Haa allowed these suggestions to go on for some time, taking them as grim amusement and a limitation of the creativity among his soldiers.

Then, reclining as he scratched his claws down the arms of the human-made chair, he announced, “We will call it The Day We Promised.”

Ears cocked at all angles, attempting to hear better what they clearly had misheard.

“What have we always told the humans?” Dr. Haa asked the bridge at large. “What words did Shiy Zinaa die with on her tongue?”

The crew grumbled. Garro ventured, “Eat your own children, human!”

Chuckles. Illiterate fools.

Niffaa tried, “I will return.”

Closer in sentiment if still largely guesswork. Tiring of the ignorant chatter, he supplied the proper answer.

“I swear to you, humans. One day, azrin will be the hunter and you the prey.”

Broii hissed softly. “They sound like human words.”

Rikall shook his head. “Those were hunter’s words.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Haa said. “And this ship is the embodiment of that vow. This is the day Shiy Zinaa promised, the day our ancestors promised, the day we promised the instant we joined the fight to free Meyang. Say it together: The Day We Promised.”

A glorious chorus of ragged azrin voices joined as one. “The Day We Promised.”

Dr. Haa stood and extended the claws of one hand. “Louder!”

“The Day We Promised.”

He raised both arms. “For the ancestors to hear you!”

“THE DAY WE PROMISED!”

Collapsing into the chair, Dr. Haa grinned wickedly. “I believe they must have heard that. Shiy Zinaa will lead the revel in the Forever Hunt at our coming victory. Chaui, how long to the outpost?”

At the helm, Chaui flattened his ears and slouched. “In the excitement, I did not wish to interrupt. We arrived a few moments ago.”

Dr. Haa widened one eye. So soon? The marvels this ship could bestow. He tapped the intraship comm to fire control. “Main guns not showing online. How long to repair?”

A snarl came back. “Manual firing available. Give us a target.” Yawee was possibly his best crewman and the only one with solid mechanical skills. He would do great things in the ranks of the growing rebellion. A warship without working guns would have been of little use.

“Chaui, bring us out of astral.”

“There is no response.” On the main screen, the unnerving purple astral persisted. Button presses on the navigation console grew louder and more forceful until Chaui pounded the duty station with both fists. “There is no astral control.”

Dr. Haa drummed his claws. He keyed the comm to fire control. “Yawee, get down to engineering and check on the star-drive.”

“I’m no wizard.”

“Get down there and look at it!” Dr. Haa snapped. His chest heaved as he slammed the comm panel in his chair. Before he risked growing calm once more, he switched the intra-ship to the brig. With full control of the ship’s computers, it felt good keeping his captives in proper cells. “All right, human. What did you do to the star-drive?”

Ilsa’s voice came back timid and tentative. “Nothing. It’s never worked. Not so long as I’ve been here, anyway.”

“The Cult of Ra toured the border worlds. You yourselves ride the deepest I’ve known the astral to delve. The Day We Promised must have the finest of military-grade star-drives. So, I ask again, what did you do to it?”

Part of him hoped that the impudent human would ask about the new name for her ship. He planned to revel in the revelation of his grand plans for the vessel. That part of him ended up disappointed.

The rest of him, doubly so.

“Wesley busted it good when we captured it. Esper never needed it. It would never have gotten this deep on the old system anyway.”

Even though she’d never see the gesture, Dr. Haa shook his head in emphatic denial. “I refuse to believe she would strand you all here. She was very much a cautious one with lives. What if she were never to return?”

“We’d have been fucked. Sort of like now. You won’t get back to realspace without a wizard’s help.”

A trick? A gambit? Was this the play to convince him to bring the dangerous wizard back aboard?

If so, it was a good one. The Day We Promised was able to travel the galaxy with laser speed. Yet without astral control, it was like a hunting trip to a zoo: all those delicious animals hopelessly out of reach in plain view.

“No crew would agree to such terms.”

“We trust Esper. And with only a handful of wizards in the whole galaxy who could get down this far to find us… you’re going to have to trust her too.”

Esper bit her lip and scoured the landscape for any sign of footprints, of scrapes or trails to indicate a path for sleds or powered vehicles, of windows, vents, or—Ra forbid—a fucking door. But in all directions it was the same: scrubby grasses and shrubs clinging to life on a planet that wanted to choke them to death, jutting rocks, and the impression of real estate that lay unclaimed simply because it would have been too much work to live there.

It was part of the plan, after all. Split up. Cover more ground. Report in if anyone found the entrance. Except that Esper had bet heavily on her quadrant being the one with the hideout. Her intent had been to barge in, take Miira by force if she existed at all, punish some daft fuckers for screwing with a wizard if she didn’t.

Instead, with a trudge that stomped clods of grass and kicked loose rocks aside, she headed for the rendezvous point.

Kubu was the first one there, waiting as she and Wesley converged simultaneously.

“No surprise,” Esper said with a quick scan of the fourth search quadrant. Not that she could see far through the broken terrain. “Miss Diligence is last to get back. Either of you find anything?”

Wesley set his jaw. “Afraid not. Well, not so much afraid as chagrined. I’m not afraid of finding kidnappers. Not at all. More of a cautious eagerness to brew up a bathtub batch of benevolence—with a cocktail of justice juice on the side.” He cleared his throat. “But I didn’t find any sign of the victim either.”

“Kubu?”

The canine whined softly. “There’s a stinky in the air. It’s making it hard to smell people.”

Esper tested the air. “I don’t smell anything.”

Kubu’s ears perked up. “You either? Oh, wait. You mean regular not smell anything. Like weak-nose, not extra-special chemical-hiding spray.”

She turned to Wesley as her expert on weird tactical bullshit. “Is that even a thing?”

“Abso-lute-a-mentay! Earth Navy special ops came up with it during the first eyndar war for ground-approach stealth missions. We got a whiff of it when I was working on Smells Like Team Spirit with Chaz Muciel.”

“You know Chaz Muciel?” Esper blurted. Then she caught herself. “What’s it smell like?”

“Exactly like nothing,” Wesley reported. “Not as in no smell, but like a black hole of smell. If scent is the detection of trace chemicals in the air, this stuff went out and tackled those chemicals molecule by molecule and wrestled them to the ground.”

Esper folded her arms and fixed the half-naked actor with her mom glare. “And the odds that this magical concoction got into the hands of a bunch of xenoist rabblerousers?”

Wesley held out a hand toward Kubu as Exhibit A. “One hundred percent.”

Esper gazed up into the starry sky, intermittently visible through the smog. It was no use in determining the passage of time. “How late is she?”

“About the usual,” Wesley replied with a shrug, not even checking his chrono. “The rest of us are all here. No harm in going for a check-see on her.”

“If she sneaks past us, I might not smell her,” Kubu warned.

Esper set off in the direction Tiffany had been assigned. “The next time she sneaks past anyone except to break curfew will be the first. She shouldn’t be trying to avoid detection. It’s a rendezvous, not a cult gathering.”

“I don’t want more cults,” Kubu said glumly as he fell in beside her.

It was only a kilometer or so before they found clear signs of an underground encampment. A camo tarp didn’t quite cover all of a ground-roller, though it might have disguised it from aerial surveillance. An awning of scrub-grass-colored mesh shielded a steel doorway.

“Looks like we found the place.”

“And no Tiffany,” Esper groused. “Clearly, they caught her snooping around. Since there’s no smoke coming out of the place, presumably, they ambushed her.”

“Oh, no!” Kubu exclaimed. Then, realizing how loud he’d been, lowered his voice to a whisper. “What if they hurt her?”

They’d best not have. Tiffany was her apprentice, not just some random kid off the streets of a shit-stain colony. If that girl was dead, these kidnappers were going to suffer a severe case of Espery dissonance.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” she said instead.

“Quick-plan time,” Wesley singsonged. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “Guns-a-blazin? Shock and awe? Ninjitsu? Magical tunneling? Trojan horse? Kill ’em with kindness? Bluff an Earth Interstellar raid? Rig up some sort of—”

“Wait here,” Esper said, already making for the door. She called back over her shoulder. “Grab Tiff and Miira when I send them out. I’ll head in and cause a distraction.”

She caught a glimpse of a bare-chested Wesley saluting before turning her attention to the door barring the entrance to the kidnappers’ hideout.

Open, says me.

The door didn’t give her any back talk. It flew open at her touch.

Inside, the bunker was less a hovel and more an armed rebel encampment. Humans and azrin mixed in roughly a three-to-one ratio.

A panicked scramble ensued once Esper was spotted—which was the instant she slammed the door shut behind her. The scramble organized into a forest of blaster rifles pointed her way within seconds.

Admirable.

“Freeze!” the apparent leader shouted. He was a middle-aged human, a curious mixture of doughy and sturdy as if hiding a commando inside a double-thick layer of donuts and beer. “Who are you?” he demanded.

Pointless.

Taking the order to heart, Esper frosted the weapons in a coating of ice that crackled down the length of the barrels to engulf arms, torsos, legs. Soon, all her would-be assailants were rooted in place, in danger of imminent hypothermia.

“I’m here for a missing friend of mine. Teenage human. About yea high. Her state of well-being will reflect in the way I leave you fine people as I take her with me.”

“Sh-sh-sh…” the leader chattered.

“Someone else?” Esper called out. “These idiot Popsicles aren’t the only ones living here. Turn over the girl or I set the oven to self-clean.” With that, a ball of flame burned in her upturned hand.

An azrin emerged from a side tunnel, holding Tiffany before him as a shield. She was bruised and had a trickle of dried blood down one side of her face. Her mouth was stuffed with a crude gag, and one eye had swelled shut. The other looked dazedly toward Esper.

“Oh, this isn’t looking good on Santa’s list,” Esper said with a cluck of her tongue.

With a flick, the azrin had his claws at Tiffany’s throat.

Foam. Nice, soft, sciency foam claws.

Let him try to rip out her throat with crate-packing fluff at the tips of his fingers.

“Release the ice, wizard,” the azrin threatened. “Or your daughter dies.”

Good guess? Bad guess? Or had Tiffany threatened them with the visit Esper was currently paying them?

Nonplussed, Esper continued her demands. “There’s also an azrin girl, Miira, being held hostage. I’m taking that human with me and returning the azrin girl to her parents.”

Another azrin poked his head from the chamber beyond. “Miira? What do you want with my daughter, human?”

Click. A piece of a puzzle fell into place.

Of course, the ruse had included the name of a real azrin girl. Ilsa was too good a snoop with computers. But records of azrin off human-controlled Meyang were spotty. There was only so much blood to be squeezed from that stone no matter how good the techster.

“I want to see her.”

“You will see no one,” the azrin holding Tiffany said with a snarl, jerking his captive and evoking a whimper.

Esper wagged a finger. “Bad play.” With no further warning, the azrin’s neck twisted. And while felid species were known for extremes of flexibility, 540 degrees was more than even an owl’s spine could survive.

Already dead, the azrin captor fell away as Esper flung him into the far chamber, simultaneously rushing over to catch Tiffany. Delirious, she collapsed against Esper’s shoulder.

“Everything’s fine,” she cooed in the girl’s ear. “Just close your eyes.”

Cuts close, bruises fade; three weeks healing done today; bones knit, pains ease; cleanse the body of disease.

Even after all these years, the words came to mind readily when she used her healing magic.

As soon as Tiffany was able to hold herself upright, Esper shooed her for the door. “I’ll be along soon.”

Once Tiffany had gone, Esper slammed the door shut behind her.

Cracking her knuckles, she looked over the hideout’s inhabitants, daring any to meet her eye. “Now, it’s about time I got some answers.”

Without any other pressing objections, Esper scoured New Singapore in search of Mitch. The policeman from Kebok had been the first signal from the outside world since her darker half had taken control of her body.

Somehow, with a mission, the place seemed less a prison and more a pocket-sized world. Even if it were only the two of them in here, there was still someone in need of saving.

Faceless, mindless masses milled past as flora more than fauna now. No malevolence flowed from the flowers, the trees, the fleshy robots that populated Dark Esper’s vision of their hometown. All the evil in this place was the will of the warden, not the furniture.

Esper turned down a street she didn’t recognize in the hope that it led to someplace outside her experience. It boasted the same retrovert brickwork that New Singapore used to give the air of culture and sophistication beyond its bourgeois origins. It was an imitation of Old Earth, and most Martians knew it for the farce it was. But to a certain brand of nouveau riche transplant, it was the height of class.

Now, Esper simply rolled her eyes at the pretension. “Was I ever really impressed by this place?”

The thought of asking for help came so naturally that she had to fight back the impulse whenever it rose. Anyone here who could give information would be speaking Dark Esper’s words regardless of the voice. Any “help” would only lead her away from the center of the labyrinth of a city she now sought to solve.

“I hope she didn’t actually destroy him.”

Mitch had seemed so human he had to be real. Her dark impostor could barely handle acting like one human, let alone believably puppeting another. And if he was human, and this was her mind, Esper was ultimately responsible for his safety.

He had to be all right. He just had to.

Snarls from a nearby alley drew her attention. The real version of New Singapore had never been so riddled with dirty little stretches of shadow-bathed road, like gaps between the teeth of buildings. Or had it? Had Esper simply overlooked the dark side of the city that had sheltered her even as it protected her tormentors?

Nevertheless, she couldn’t ignore the signs of a struggle.

When she paused at the alley’s entrance, a dozen pairs of eyes turned toward her, dripping a mixture of fear and menace.

“It’s her,” an azrin said through bared fangs, speaking his own language.

“Get her!” a burly human yelled. “Quick!”

Thinking quickly, Esper fought the impulse to run. Instead, as the horde barreled toward her, she flung her arms out to the side and tensed every muscle in her body, bracing for a potential impact. Her would-be assailants dimmed to hazy figures glimpsed between slits as she couldn’t quite bear to shut her eyes completely.

“I’m not her! I’m not her!” Esper screamed.

Rough arms wrapped around her and a crush of bodies swung her to slam against the decorative bricks. They manhandled her against the wall like a police brutality case, mashing her face against the rough stone as they wrenched her arms behind her back.

“I’m her sister! I’m a prisoner like you!”

“A hostage,” one of the azrin said.

“A plant,” a human woman suggested.

Whiskey breath blew in her face from centimeters away, hot and cloying. “How we know you’re not her?”

“You’re hurting me.”

The azrin holding her snickered. “What if we don’t care?”

Esper wasn’t done. “If I were her, I’d never have allowed you to.”

“She has a point,” another woman said. “What if she’s really that crazy bitch’s sister?”

“What is this place?” Whiskey Breath demanded.

“A wizard’s prison,” Esper explained. “She caught me off guard and trapped me here. Out there, I’m a wizard too. Her equal. But in here, I’m helpless. Same as you.”

With a final shove against the wall, Esper found herself released.

Spinning to press her back against the wall, she worked the feeling back into her limbs and joints, expertly twisted into painful poses. They’d blocked her in on all sides. There would be no escape without bull-rushing at least some of them and outrunning the ones who’d no doubt race to catch her from behind.

Trapped.

“How can we be sure this isn’t some big trick?” Whiskey Breath demanded. “You messing with our minds or something wizardy?”

“Because I’m the one you’re afraid of,” came a voice from the street.

Esper’s erstwhile captors broke and ran, but there was nowhere to go. The alley now had no exit. Brick formed a perfect box canyon. The doors and even second-floor windows that had lined the passage had all vanished.

Dark Esper stood back-lit by street lights at the alley’s only exit. She stalked forward with deliberate menace. “I want answers.”

“Don’t hurt them!” Esper ordered, rushing to interpose herself.

With a casual bat of her arm, Dark Esper flung her against the wall. Lights flashed in her skull as her head cracked against the bricks.

“There was no kidnapping.” It wasn’t a question. “There was no mission. There was a distraction. And I’m going to have answers RIGHT NOW!”

The sky above turned red as thunder rocked the streets.

Screaming and cowering, the captive souls crushed themselves into the far end of the alley.

“This place can either be a bad dream or an endless hell,” Dark Esper promised. “But it doesn’t have to turn out badly for all of you. I want to know which one of you jerked me around. The one who rats out the asshole is free to go.”

Fingers couldn’t point fast enough.

One finger, claw extended, identified Esper as the culprit.

All the others indicated that one azrin.

With a poof, the rest of the shades vanished. Dark Esper hoisted the azrin by the scruff, shrinking him until he was no larger than the housecats his species evolved from.

“You and I have so much to talk about. Start with your name.”

“Ynthok,” the azrin squeaked in a tiny voice.

Dark Esper’s smile showed fangs. “Excellent. Well, Ynthok, I want to know everything. And you will experience decades of agony, beyond the lifespan of your people if I have to, in order to extract every last secret in that puny skull of yours.”

Head still swimming, Esper croaked, “Leave him alone.”

Dark Esper spared her a glare. Then, conspiratorially, she leaned close to Ynthok, whispering just loudly enough to ensure she was overheard. “But not here. Not in front of my squeamish ‘sister.’”

As Esper reached out a hand in a futile effort to intervene, Dark Esper disappeared without a sound.

Ilsa sat tied to the chair in the ship’s cafeteria, a length of data cord cutting off circulation to her hands. She had on a pair of datagoggles, but they weren’t Sudo. The azrin had been too savvy and paranoid to allow her access to her own tech.

Strike that. Dr. Haa was too savvy and paranoid. The rest of the thugs in his crew were, at best, a raw sort of cunning best suited to the wilderness and active firefights.

That azrin doctor stood a meter away, right behind the crouching rebel holding up the datapad in front of her face. Sneaking a claw around to the front of the device, the rebel tapped to accept the incoming comm.

Esper’s face appeared on the datapad screen. Ilsa’s heart leapt in her chest.

Words scrawled across the datagoggles, shielded from reverse view by privacy mode.

HI, HOW’S IT GOING? YOU GET THE GIRL BACK TO HER FAMILY?

It galled her that those were pretty close to exactly the words she’d have chosen. The smiley icon reminded her to look pleased to receive the comm. At the sight of her lover, her hero, her savior, that part didn’t need faking.

“Hi. How’s it going? You get the girl back yet?” she read dutifully, trying to make it sound like she wasn’t working from a teleprompter.

The look in Dr. Haa’s eyes was reason enough to remember to sell this act. Even with her hands tingling from lack of circulation, she clenched all her precious fingers, hoping to have them all through the remainder of this ordeal.

Esper snapped at the screen. “Someone’s been jerking us around. And why haven’t you been answering my comms?”

Dr. Haa’s fingers flew.

THOUGHT WE WERE COMM SILENT. YOU COULDN’T FIND HER?

“Thought we were comm silent. You couldn’t find her?”

How many of her personal comms had the doctor read to give such reasonable approximations of what Ilsa would have replied?

“No. I found her. She was hiding with her parents in a bunker outside Kebok City. According to her, there was never a kidnapping. The azrin political refugees on Kebok have always kept a low profile. And her family was asked by a well-placed rebel operative to pull her out of school for a few days.”

Dr. Haa was already formulating her reply before Esper finished speaking.

DOES THIS MEAN YOU’RE GIVING UP?

Ilsa cast him a fleeting glance. That one didn’t sound like her at all. His own agenda was slipping in, probing, poking at Esper’s weaknesses in an effort to delay her return.

She hesitated before continuing with the ruse for lack of anything else to substitute. “Does this mean you’re giving up?”

Esper huffed a sigh. “Sweetie, does your ass hurt?”

Ilsa blinked. Not only had the comment come out of nowhere, hearing that language coming out of Esper’s tender lips had the effect of a slap across the face.

I’M FINE. WHY DO YOU ASK?

“Um. I’m fine. Why do you ask?” She was just as curious as the azrin.

“Because that doctor has his hand so far up there, he’s moving your mouth. Either that or he’s tapping messages onto that cheap pair of datagoggles you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.”

Ilsa froze. Oh, God. Esper was supposed to figure it out and sneak aboard for a rescue, not blow the whole operation. Her breath came shallow and shuddering.

“Put him on,” Esper ordered.

While she was in no position to comply, the azrin rebel holding the datapad relinquished it at a gesture from Dr. Haa.

“The vessel is mine,” the azrin leader boasted, chin raised. “You had your chance to aid the azrin people.”

“I don’t see any dead plague victims,” Esper countered.

Oh, please. PLEASE don’t antagonize him.

Dr. Haa hissed at the screen. A shiver ran up Ilsa’s spine and lodged there. “A half measure. You fight with your claws in when it’s your own kind. The Day We Promised will not be so cowardly.”

Ilsa could just imagine the incredulous blinking by the pause. “Is that a new name for my ship? You renamed my ship?”

The doctor showed a hint of fang. “Indeed. It refers to the final words of—”

“You had the nerve to rename my ship?” An edge of madness tinged those words, one off-key singer in the beautiful chorus of Esper’s voice.

Ilsa’s imagination failed to register the visage on the screen as Dr. Haa recoiled, holding the datapad at arm’s length. “I would think you would be more concerned for the fate of your sleeping companion.”

No kidding, Ilsa added silently.

“Oh-hoho-ho,” Esper said with menace. “You started out on thin ice already taking her captive. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to come park the Errand of Mercy in orbit of Kebok. You’re going to gather in the cargo hold with your hands behind your heads, and you’re going to march quietly onto Helios. And if you manage to pull off all of that without hurting Ilsa or Oolie—Ilsa, is Oolie still alive?”

“He is!” she exclaimed hastily, then cowered as Dr. Haa’s datapad-holding assistant snarled at her.

“Indeed,” Dr. Haa added, cutting in before it became a private conversation between lovers. “And both will remain so as long as you do not seek to reclaim the vessel.”

Esper’s words were a funeral dirge. “I wasn’t finished. If you comply with my conditions, I will return you safely to the surface of Meyang.”

Despite the grim circumstances, that drew a belly laugh from the doctor. “What makes you think we’d ever want that?”

“Because,” Esper replied. Chills rumbled in Ilsa’s belly. “The alternative is being marched off the ship in orbit of Meyang.”

Da. Haa blinked several times. He poked at the datapad. “She terminated the comm!”

Both azrin turned menacing gazes on her.

Ilsa gulped. “No hard feelings?” She angled her shoulders to give them easier access to her bindings.

Dr. Haa shook his head. “Untie her. Take her back to her cell. That seemed unlike the human wizard who watches mating ritual holovids all day.”

Ilsa bit her tongue. Esper wasn’t even the sort to watch real mating holovids. But at the same time, she’d noticed the same inconsistency as Dr. Haa.

“I think you pushed her just a little too far.”

For everything else going on around her. For all the peril of her present circumstances. It still felt good knowing there was someone willing to take on an army to save her.

The rebel azrin dragged Ilsa back to her cell by the back of her collar. Her toes barely touched the floor along the way. He had his orders. She had one last chance to plead her case before whatever was about to happen reached the present tense and it was too late to plan.

“Esper’s super lenient,” Ilsa promised. “If you guys back off this plan, I’m sure she’ll hook you up with whatever rebel cell you need to get in the big fight.”

Barefoot, the claws of the azrin’s feet scratched the floor. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. The sound resonated in the back of Ilsa’s brain, halfway between dragging fingernails across slate and sharpening a kitchen knife. It had to be intentional, a form of psychological warfare. They could retract those things, couldn’t they?

“She’s been irritable lately though. Lots of stress. This probably isn’t the best time for a hijacking/kidnapping double feature. If you could just maybe put in a word or two with Dr. Haa about—”

The rebel shook her by the collar.

“You talk much, human.”

Fabric dug into her armpits as the only thing keeping her from falling. Part of her wished that the fabric was some shoddy, pre-Kovarlex rag that would rip or tear away, leaving her torn garment behind in her captor’s hand as she made a mad dash for safety. She’d disappear into the bowels of the ship, popping out to retrieve Sudo and formulate a plan of counterattack. In the days that followed, she’d wage a guerrilla campaign of computer malfunctions and ambushes, slowly whittling down her foes until the ship was hers once again.

That part of Ilsa was an idiot.

“Sorry,” she replied meekly.

“You lucky,” the rebel told her as he allowed her to walk with her heels touching the ground.

“I am?”

Why did I ask that? WHY did I ask that?

“Ya. I ate human once. No good. Prey tastes best when eats best.”

“Like Organi-Fed Certified Beef?” Ilsa ventured. It was a long-shot way to make a connection with her captors, but she found herself craving a little Stockholm Syndrome for comfort.

“Ya. Humans eat shit food. Taste like shit. I not eat you.”

The same idiot region of Ilsa’s brain found itself mildly offended. She watched what she ate. In all likelihood, this philistine of an azrin had cannibalized some slovenly core-worlder assigned garrison duty on Meyang. Ilsa, on the other hand, had it on multiple authorities that she tasted wonderful.

Biased sources, but testimonials, nonetheless.

Fortunately, the self-preserving portion of her mind was doing the talking. “I can’t help it if I like junk food. It’s a species weakness.”

They’d arrived at the brig. Ilsa wished she’d found a way to give the hijackers access to the rest of the ship without adding that little gem to the amenities. Even a cultist’s quarters had been posh compared to the plasticized steel-box-with-a-cot package provided for the unwilling guests of Earth Navy.

With a shove from behind, Ilsa stumbled and caught herself against the far wall. The door slid shut behind her before she could turn to look back.

The azrin’s footsteps echoed in the security corridors beyond. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. The sound receded as Ilsa’s body drained of tension. Slumping against the wall, she slid down until her ass hit the floor.

She sobbed.

Why couldn’t she have been Wesley? That half-cocked plan she’d daydreamed en route would have been child’s play. Or Kubu for that matter? She’d seen him turn huge. She’d heard the story of him eating an azrin whole and coughing him up like a hairball. But what galled her was wishing she could have been Tiffany.

That snotty, spoiled teenager had it made. Esper doted on her. Taught her magic to bend reality to her will. Tiffany didn’t have to worry about losing her edge in the tech race. Why? Because she’d never retained a fact beyond the quiz she’d learned it for. The passcode to the universe got handed over because someone couldn’t be bothered to learn the ins and outs of science. The math. The physics. The latest trends in cryptography, quantum entanglement processors, bio-lock data storage.

Because Tiffany was a helpless dunce, Esper had trained her as a fledgling goddess.

Because Ilsa was a gifted computer tech, Esper had left her out of the club.

And as she cried, Ilsa could only picture the horrible fates these azrin scum deserved.

All the while, she knew that Esper would let them off too easy.

The streets of Kebok City were a war zone. Not that there were firefights in progress or bombardment—orbital or otherwise—but the whole civic core had turned into an open-carry powder keg waiting for a science-injector to fill it with fire. Open-top ground-rollers patrolled with armed civilians piled in like troop transports, sporting cloth masks and industrial protective gear in place of gas masks and armor. Streetlights were sporadic; many had been shot out, and the occasional sizzle of blaster fire heralded additional tiny blackouts.

Only the idea that everyone else was armed kept the city from being an open riot.

Esper led her charges through the streets. Of all those currently on the surface, she had the least to worry about personally from the chaos. But the clutter of would-be rioters was in the way of her getting off this rock.

“Maybe we could just steal a ship,” Tiffany suggested in a whisper nearly lost in the din of a low-flying hovercruiser swinging by overhead.

“I spotted a Zenith QuadPro on the way in,” Wesley remarked. “Looked like a 2560 model year with the extra crew extended cockpit. Seats six. If they opted for the entertainment system, we could even watch some holos on the way back.”

“No,” Esper declared. She measured her breaths, reminding herself that while the do-gooder could fly off the handle with a carefully worded excuse or two, she had to operate within certain limits. “They grounded our ship. I’m not trading a high-performance military shuttle for a short-hop recreational transport. Plus, we’d just be passing our misfortune onto some poor innocent ship owner.”

Esper watched the street from the shelter of an alley. The broker they were looking for was just a block away, backing onto an outdoor scrapyard.

“Yeah. I’m sure the guy we’re robbing deserves it,” Tiffany muttered.

Ground-rollers rumbled past. One headed their direction as self-appointed interim police hooted and shouted for people to return to their homes. Esper ducked back to avoid being spotted. “Stolen goods. He’s not innocent in this. Fuel regulo-doozies don’t fall off for any stray azrin to find and sell.”

“Fuel conversion regulator,” Wesley corrected. “Keeps the military from having to stock custom fuel for every model of ship. You could power Helios with anything from a Typhoon fuel rod to a plouph-made blaster power cell. Although I don’t think we’d get far on a single blaster pack. But none of it matters if we don’t have the conversion regulator.”

Esper took stock of their contingent.

Two women—being generous, it was hard to credit Tiffany with being underage—who frankly looked a little too well kept to be stranded on this black-lung trap of a colony. One dog who blew his cover by rarely managing to keep his yap shut—or at least learning how to bark without literally shouting “bark, bark, bark.” One backlist actor with a credible look of a military man even if his whole life story was a delusion.

The choice was all the clearer when adding in that only one of them knew what they were looking for.

“Wesley, you go in. We’ll keep things clear on the outside. Go in. Find our fuel converger. Acquire by any available means. Got it?”

Wesley’s salute lacked its usual flippancy. “Yes, ma’am. You can count on me.”

Slipping into the shadows beneath a blasted-out light pole, Wesley darted off in the direction of the salvage broker. He moved with a lithe grace that belied his bulk. So often, Esper convinced herself that he was a galaxy-grade liar with a talent for acting best kept off the holo-projector. The history he’d given was impossible to verify, but he clearly had a few tricks up his sleeve that suggested he wasn’t full to the brim with bullshit.

Tiffany shook her head as she watched, peering out below Esper’s vantage point on the corner. “Watching that man go ranks only second to watching him come.”

Esper cuffed the girl in the back of the head.

“Ow!”

“He’s twice your age with room to spare. And don’t think that I miss those little double entendres.”

Tiffany rubbed the spot where she’d been struck and changed the subject. “Lucky for us that azrin sold the part instead of just busting it. How’d you get him to cough up the location?”

“I had to badger him a little.”

Kubu’s tail whacked the back of Esper’s legs as it wagged. “Badgers are like angry bunnies. I like badgers.”

A flash of Ynthok, furless, bleeding, groveling at her feet came readily to mind. The azrin spilled the ID on his fence and so much more.

“He didn’t.”

Wesley kept to the shadowed side of the street, easy since the only “sun” at work was a giant holo-billboard on a rooftop two streets over. And he wasn’t trying to avoid detection. At his size and with the relative ease of picking up light-amplification goggles, he knew that was pointless. He was trying to avoid standing out.

At comfortably over two-meters tall and showing a natural grace with the Mil-7-SE blaster rifle he carried, there was no reason for anyone to pick a fight if he didn’t give them a reason. The urban warfare camo skin tint probably didn’t hurt either. He gave every appearance that he was the one spoiling for trouble.

In a way, he was.

Just not the sort these yahoos expected.

A ground-roller pulled alongside him. The cultured gentleman at the controls leaned out the opening where a side door ought to have been. “Yo, brother. You looking to keep the peace?” He swatted the empty passenger seat beside him.

Instead of a direct answer, Wesley raised a fist. “Kebok strong! Kebok free! Hoo-rah!”

That seemed to either satisfy the would-be vigilante or scare him a little. He ducked back inside and raised a fist in return. “Hoo-rah, brother. Hoo-rah!”

As the ground-roller spun out amid a cloud of dust and tore off to keep the peace somewhere else, Wesley had to wonder just how many of these rioters were legitimately convinced they were helping the situation. The assault on the police headquarters had dredged up the patriotic feelings of the local armed populace.

No further obstacles presented themselves as Wesley made his way into Baptiste Salvage. The plain storefront with corrugated steel in place of windows needed to work on its mass-market appeal. When he tried the door, there was no response.

“Downright unfriendly.” He pounded on the roll-up garage door with a sheet-metal rattle. “HEY! Customer out here!”

“Git! Ain’t open today! Come back when there’s law. Right now, murder’s legal.”

With a thoughtful scowl, Wesley stepped aside, taking himself outside the “shoot through the door” line of fire. A mental image formed of what lay on the far side. Metallic channels with wheels to guide the door; an ancient design that hadn’t changed since the invention of space flight. Possibly a chain-pull or actuator to raise the door automatically though he wouldn’t have put it past a backwater like this to have a manual garage door. Welds visible from Wesley’s side hinted at a lock accessible from Mr. Friendly-Pants’ side.

Flipping the blaster rifle from stun to max lethal, Wesley squeezed off a few surgical bursts.

On cue, return fire perforated the garage door.

Shaking his head, Wesley knew he was dealing with an amateur. Though the elongation would have been slight, the angle of his shots would have left oval holes, not round. Anyone paying attention would have known not to shoot straight through if he was looking to hit his assailant.

Either Wesley was dealing with a scared scrap dealer who probably also did a little shady work on the side, or he was dealing with a cool and collected operator who’d fired seventeen warning shots through his own front door out of professional courtesy, knowing he’d never hit anyone.

Wesley liked to give folks the benefit of the doubt, but this one was a stretch.

Time to put his holovid star talents to good use.

“AAAAAAAHHH! Oh. Ahh. It burns! It burns! Call a medic! Call my dad! He’s a general! He’ll get them to send someone into this mess down here!”

When no help was forthcoming, Wesley laid it on thick. “Mister, I can make you rich! Just don’t let me die out here!”

He hadn’t seen any security cameras. And Wesley had a particularly good eye for picking up the presence of hidden surveillance ever since Ira started having his “surprise reaction” scenes recorded candidly. This guy was operating strictly on audio.

Quietly as he could, Wesley eased his blaster back into stun.

He counted in his head. At eight, he stepped up and jammed the muzzle into the hole he estimated most likely to have a junk buyer peeking through it to check on a wounded Wesley.

ZAP.

There was no mistaking the sound of an adult male body collapsing limply onto permacrete. Lifting from the bottom, Wesley raised the door whose locks his earlier shots had blasted.

As the door rolled up, he noted with a smug grin that he’d even disconnected the chain hoist that would have fought back against his efforts had he missed.

Allowing the door to fall closed behind him, Wesley kept the rifle in one hand while the other deprived the junker of his Flashfire-10 light infantry rifle and hoisted him by the shirt collar.

The door had eaten some of the stun blast, so it wasn’t long before Mr. Took-The-Bait came around. Groggy eyes struggled to focus, and when they did, they widened in fear.

“Take whatever you want! I’ve got hardcoin.” As best he could, the man curled into a ball in Wesley’s grasp.

“I’m here for a navy surplus fuel conversion regulator. Part number FR-G007-373-5963. And don’t tell me you don’t have it. That would make me very sad.”

“You want… a fuel regulator?”

“A fuel conversion regulator and that exact part number. I know you have one, because the furry little fella you bought it from stole it from my ship.”

“I… I…” the man stammered.

“This isn’t about you,” Wesley said mildly. “This is about a fuel conversion regulator. Part number FR-G007-373-5963. Where is it?”

The shaking ball of junk dealer extended a finger into the warehouse. Racks of metal shelving extended into the distance, far larger than Wesley was planning to search on his own.

Holding the man out like an orienteer’s compass, Wesley navigated the maze of what he suspected were intentionally disorganized shelves. It didn’t take long for his little helper to guide him to where the missing fuel conversion regulator rested.

A cursory visual examination suggested it was unharmed.

Good.

“How much did you pay for it?” Wesley asked.

The man cleared his throat. “Six hundred.”

Wesley snorted derisively. “I ought to buy aftermarket more often.” Setting the man down with his back pressed to the far wall of shelves, Wesley pawed at his jacket until he found the man’s thumb scanner.

The junker didn’t protest as Wesley claimed the device and his jaw hung slack when Wesley pressed his thumb to a completed transaction for 750T.

“But…”

“For your trouble and the door. I was never here. This whole day you just overslept and didn’t open. I’d hate to have to file a customer service complaint. We copacetic, amigo?”

The junker nodded vigorously. Then he glanced at the fuel conversion regulator. “You want me to grab you a grav sled? That thing’s pretty—”

“I’m in a hurry. Thanks anyway,” Wesley replied as he slung the 70-kg device onto his shoulder and made his way for the door.

Esper seethed as she paced the washroom. Shuttle-based accommodations being what they were, she could only manage two steps by mincing her gait. It made the venting all the more difficult.

Six hours? SIX HOURS! That was how long ago that furry varmint of a science doctor had admitted to having her starship. Her base of operation was being run by azrin! Not that Esper knew how to operate the vessel herself, but wizards were an exception. The idea that a bunch of uneducated thugs and a lone, science-educated turncoat were crewing the Errand of Mercy tasted like vinegar on her tongue.

Her fingers curled until the nails drew blood from her palms.

She only noticed when the blood welled up like she’d crushed a ketchup packet in each hand.

“Shit,” she mouthed, mindful that the door was only so thick and that excellent ears lay just the far side of it. Wouldn’t be Espery of her to go cursing alone in the washroom.

Being the do-gooder’s version of Esper had gotten her into this mess.

If she hadn’t been so preoccupied with finding charity work, she might have been properly suspicious of one of her passengers having just the sort of problem the do-gooder liked to solve.

If she hadn’t been so smitten with the idea of azrin rebels turning over a new leaf and joining her crusade, she wouldn’t have left them in charge of the ship’s security. Tiffany and Kubu could have kept them from so much as trying anything as stupid as a mutiny. And if they hadn’t, the rebels would have found out how big a mistake it was messing with a nine-ton omnivore and a wizard with impulse-control issues.

A gentle rapping preceded a voice calling though the door. “You OK in there?” Tiffany asked.

Bumping the sink control with the back of her wrist, Esper stuck her wounded hands under the tap. Near scalding water gushed over the wounds even as they closed. A swirl of red blood slurped down the drain.

“I’m fine. Lost in thought.”

“There’s only one washroom on this ship,” Tiffany reminded her.

Scrubbing her nails, she checked for signs of blood or skin trapped beneath.

Clean.

Drying her hands on a towel likely to undo all her newfound cleanliness, she double-checked her palms. No sign of the fingernail punctures remained. Squinting close, she couldn’t make out any blood she’d missed in the lines of her skin.

Good.

The door shushed open. Tiffany jumped back a step as if she’d expected Esper to remain cloistered inside the whole trip. The look she gave expressed a mixture of shock and worry.

“What?” Esper snapped despite not meaning to.

Without a word, Tiffany pointed to the floor.

Several droplets of fresh blood marred the floor.

“I’m fine.”

Tiffany reached below the neckline of her blouse and tugged on a thin silver chain, shooting Esper a meaningful look.

Closing her eyes so she could roll them in private, Esper played along. “Yeah. I’ve been preoccupied. No, I don’t need the pendant back.”

“Just saying…” Tiffany left the words hanging, then slunk back to the couch Wesley had installed as an alternative to the jump seats that filled the rest of the vessel.

Kubu sprawled on the floor. He could smell what’s what. There was no scrubbing the faint whiff of blood out of the air. But the canine had the sense not to put his nose where it didn’t belong.

That left Wesley. Their pilot, mechanic, and purchasing agent had no doubt done everything he could in timely fashion, but that didn’t make up for how long it had all ended up taking.

They could have herded a whole flock of wild geese by now. And that someone had set them unwittingly on just that goal gnawed at her thoughts.

She stormed into the cockpit. “How much longer?”

“Five hours.”

Too long. Unacceptable. Those filthy ingrates were living it up on her charity. “I’m putting us deeper.”

“Whoa!” Wesley called out, reaching for her as she headed back to the crew cabin but stopping short of grabbing—which they both seemed to realize would have been a mistake. “We can barely navigate from here. Much deeper and we’ll be playing Polo without Marco. Don’t worry. We’ll rescue Ilsa and Oolie, and those azrin will be stacking up regrets like cord wood.”

Esper would rather be stacking the azrin like firewood. Fuel for their own pyres. No, set some of them on fire in a great pile and throw the others atop it to burn alive.

“Hey,” Wesley said with a measured calmness. “We’ve got the tracer signal. Either Ilsa turned it back on or those feline felons didn’t know enough to shut it down. But so long as that keeps broadcasting, we’ll catch up with them.”

“Catch up? They’re moving? Why is this the first I’m hearing of it?”

“You were indisposed.”

Fair point. She had been camped out in the washroom quite a while. “Can we tell where they’re heading?”

“Looks like an upscale backwater.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, it’s intentionally retrovert. Bunch of rich nostalgia addicts living historically anachronistic lives with the safety net of modern medicine and Earth Navy security behind the curtains. It’s called—”

“Peractorum,” Esper finished for him. “I’ve been there.”

Wesley grinned lopsidedly. “So, that wasn’t your first time dressed up as an Egyptian queen?”

Esper crossed her arms and raised one eyebrow. “I was an Arthurian princess, thanks. And I think I pulled off the look. The question is: why do these azrin want to go there?”

Wesley scratched his chin. “Lotta wizards like pretending the world’s the way it was a millennium or three back.”

Eyes wide, it clicked. “They can’t get out of astral.”

“Fastest ship in the fleet but nowhere to dock. If they don’t find a friendly wizard, they’re eventually going to starve to death. But before that.”

“Turtle soup,” Esper said glumly. “Followed by…”

She couldn’t even say it? What had the do-gooder done to her? Ilsa was a fun bedmate, but the azrin turning to cannibalism would work itself out over the course of a few months. The ship would be hers again. But she couldn’t contemplate the idea of the rebels feasting on that beautiful, sweet creature without a stabbing pain in her heart.

“But there’s plenty of time before that,” Wesley assured her. “We know where they’re going. We know what they need. And we can get there before they leave.”

“You’re sure…?”

Wesley’s grin nearly got Esper to break into one to match. Almost. “You ever try to hire a wizard?”

Through the course of her search, Esper found her way back to New Montreal without even trying. Possibly, she admitted, the lack of effort was a key factor in her successful retreat to the cozy little metropolis of her earliest memories.

Was Mitch here? Was that why her mind had allowed her back? There was no way to be certain unless she kept looking.

After the horrors of New Singapore, she was prepared for nearly anything.

And she hated herself for thinking that the instant the notion crossed her mind.

Of course, Dark Esper could come up with something worse. At a whim, her childhood haunting grounds could become a factory to bring her worst nightmares to life. She hesitated to dwell on just how that might come about, lest she give her dark impulses ideas.

She turned down Rue des Fleurs for no better reason than she remembered coming here as a girl. With no better guide, she allowed reflex and nostalgia to aim her feet.

It was springtime in this memory. The drab monotone of pedestrians clogging New Singapore’s streets had been replaced here by a rainbow assortment of ponchos and hats. The rain fell lazily, puddling on the whorls in the decorative permacrete walkways. The protective outerwear was a fashion statement more than a necessity.

Small children stomped the puddles.

Street vendors hawked roasted peanuts and cotton candy, filling the air with scents that gnawed at Esper’s hunger.

A calliope played in the distance, and that siren’s call tugged Esper forward through the crowd.

The whole of Rue des Fleurs styled itself after an old Earth carnival. Every effort had been made to recapture the feel of that lost time that Mars had been too young to experience firsthand. Although Esper was likewise far too young to recall the original festivals of pre-spaceflight Earth, she had a feeling that they’d recaptured the magic.

Magic…

If only hers worked here. Irony was the power of her wizardry being turned against her to deny her magic. If she were less gifted a wizard, there would never have been a Dark Esper in the first place. Her vast power was responsible for her helplessness.

Homing in on the calliope music, Esper found a sight that brought a genuine smile to her face. Pastel colors, merry ribbons, and horses carved from real Earthwood, the carousel at the heart of the carnival was a relic imported from Earth.

Esper’s mother hadn’t been a lost cause back then. She’d explained to a rapt six-year-old that ancient wizards had preserved the wood and workings, frozen in time so that it would work forever. Mars would be gone and nothing but dust remain, and still the carousel would spin and sing its song.

A precocious and sassy young Esper had proclaimed that without the air, it wouldn’t make sounds. Her mother had claimed otherwise. Magic, she’d claimed, could do anything.

“Well, Mom,” Esper said to nowhere in particular. “As an accomplished wizard, let me tell you this: magic can make someone think they hear a sound in vacuum. It can cause sounds inside your head remotely. It can fill a void with enough air to allow sound. But even magic can’t make sound in a vacuum. That’s just not a sound at that point.”

All the while, Esper ambled toward the carousel. Somewhere along the way, she acquired a paper cone topped with cotton candy and grazed at it absently.

“Ticket please,” said a man in a red and white seersucker suit and matching straw hat. He said it like he was part of the show, a larger-than-life character part of the experience.

Trying not to think too hard, Esper handed him one. She knew that if she dwelt too long on it, she might not have one.

Even though she couldn’t work proper magic, this was a carnival. It held a touch of magic all its own. So long as she believed that—much as a snotty little six-year-old Esper might have, despite her protests to her mother—she could borrow a little of that magic.

“C’mon, buddy. You’re gonna make it…”

That was Mitch! He was aboard the carousel. Esper dashed through the maze of plastic chains that formed the queue and leapt onto the spinning platform.

Instantly, she wobbled, struggling for balance at the sudden shift in her frame of reference. Catching hold of one of the painted wooden horses, she bobbed along until her feet caught up.

The street was a blur. This merry-go-round was rotating far too fast for a kiddie ride. She grew dizzy as her eyes attempted to latch onto distant objects that refused to hold still.

Squeezing shut her eyes, she opened them with a focus entirely on the ride and riders.

“Mitch!” she called out.

Children in colorful rain slickers ignored her as they rode.

Interspersed among the horses were a number of wooden sleighs. An answer rose from one just ahead of her. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Esper replied. Mort had taught her long ago that the answer to that particular question was always yes, along with the equally rhetorically useless ‘are you there?’ and ‘can you hear me?’ But this wasn’t the time to get all linguistically technical with a man who sounded like he had enough troubles already. “I’m on my way over!”

She wished she hadn’t.

Mitch was there, still kitted out in his police uniform. He was attempting first aid on the azrin from the alley. At least, Esper was pretty sure that’s who it was.

Shaved and torn to shreds, the only thing keeping the poor creature alive was the fact that the laws of physics and biology didn’t apply here. Dark Esper hadn’t wanted him dead, so the horrific wounds weren’t fatal.

Mitch looked up at her, hands bloody from a cloth that he’d soaked through trying to apply pressure to a wound that must have gone clear through the azrin’s chest front to back, piercing the heart.

“Can you help him?”

Esper could barely force the word out.

“No.”

She backed away a step. The careening spin of the carousel nearly flung her to the floor. One of the overhead straps broke her fall when she caught it.

“Please…” Mitch moaned. “I’m losing him.”

Esper closed her eyes. For heaven’s sake. Whatever he did to you, he doesn’t deserve this. Being trapped here is punishment enough.

Whether it was a concession from Dark Esper or a fraction of her own omnipotence sneaking back into what ought to have been Esperville, the sound of a hacking cough brought her eyes snapping open.

“You did it!” Mitch cheered. “I don’t know how, but you did it!”

On the floor of the sleigh, the azrin fought through a wracking cough to turn himself over and rise to his hands and knees. Vomiting blood, the mistreated prisoner wiped his mouth on the fur of his forearm and wobbled to his feet.

“Gah!” the azrin exclaimed, then hissed at Esper. He raised both arms to shield his face, claws extended.

“I’m the other one,” Esper promised. She swallowed. “The good one.” Knowing that Dark Esper was a figment of her own imagination made her doubt the truth of those words.

Mitch wiped his bloody hands on his uniform shirt. After one attempted step, he grabbed one of the poles for support. “Whoa! How do we get off this thing?”

Esper surveyed the streets of the carnival through the vertigo. “Tuck and roll,” she declared. She took hold and braced herself for a launch. “Follow me on three… two… one… go!”

She dove. All she hoped was that she’d land somewhere soft.

The pavement rushed up to meet her as her angle of escape misaligned. As the wrought iron safety fence promised to stop her with a crunch of bone. As a little girl in a bright red rain poncho screamed as she was about to be crushed, Esper squeezed her eyes shut.

The noise of the carnival vanished.

Esper hit soft turf covered in clover. She rolled and skidded, cringing the whole time as she anticipated an impact. Instead, she skidded to a halt with a glorious damp grass stain the length of her pants and shirt.

“Where are we now?” Mitch asked in exasperation.

The azrin sniffed the air. “No prey anywhere.”

Esper stood and brushed herself off. She had to be sure before she said anything. Rolling wildflower meadows. Lush lawns. A placid little pond with a wooden dock perfect for whiling away sunny afternoons.

When she looked down at herself again, she wore a frilly pink dress. Turning to catch her companions’ reaction to the sudden shift in attire, she noted that they’d altered as well.

Mitch wore a dark blue coat and a tall hat. His holster was gone, replaced with a quaint leather truncheon. The badge on his chest read Constable Mitch.

His azrin tagalong wore a gentleman’s waistcoat and top hat. The sight of the monocle nearly had Esper bursting in laughter despite recent events.

“Welcome to Esperville.”

Tiffany scrunched down behind the pilot’s chair, casting a furtive glance back at the passenger cabin before leaning forward and putting her mouth close to Wesley’s ear.

“I think Esper’s losing it,” she whispered. It felt strange putting a voice to those thoughts. Esper had been a rock, a planetary force in an asteroid field. For the first time in her life, Tiffany had watched those meteorites burn up in the atmosphere instead of desperately having to dodge for survival. “Does that not scare the shit out of you?”

“Calm your jets, sport,” Wesley replied softly, not quite a whisper of his own. He didn’t look back at her either. Smart, considering he was visible from the cabin. “Stress is a Molotov cocktail served with ticking time bomb pretzels.”

“And an olive made of ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’”

“Kiddo, there’s a time and a place for action—right after the director yells, ‘action,’ for instance. And there’s a different time and a different place for sitting around comfortably without a worry in the galaxy.”

“Uh huh…” Tiffany was struggling, as usual, to anticipate where this was heading.

“Well, Esper’s in a third place. It’s got all the worry and none of the action. She’s got places to be and people to save, and there’s nothing she can do in the meantime except boil her cerebral fluids and pace her feet raw.”

“Yeah. But that’s dangerous shit for a wizard.”

“Everything’s dangerous about wizards. Par for the course, and we’re caddying for a Grade A hero of a wizard. Don’t let a fuzzy slipper day put a snake in your socks.”

Tiffany blinked. “Huh?”

Wesley cocked his head.

“I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get?”

“What’s a fuzzy slipper day? Who the hell has snakes in their socks?”

The actor chuckled nonchalantly. “Ever had a day where you didn’t feel like going anywhere? Just want to sit in front of the holovid in your slippers, eating Snakki Bars?”

Tiffany recoiled slowly. “I have. I’m surprised you—”

He waved away the notion. “You don’t have to have gills to swim, kiddo. Anyway, Esper’s having a fuzzy slipper day without any slippers and without a holovid to park in front of.”

“And the snakes?”

He shrugged and returned his attention to the controls. “If you’ve never experienced the utter shock and terror of pulling on one of your socks to find a three-meter whip-snake coiled up inside, I’m not sure I can convey it in words.”

Tiffany’s brain hurt. It was like unlearning high-school chemistry tables in favor of elementalism all over again. Wesley had some crazy ratatoret brain or something.

So, she focused on the important part. “So, you’re saying Esper’s going to be OK?”

“Thumb skyward, sport,” Wesley pronounced along with the accompanying gesture. “I’ve had a colorful life. Met all kinds of people, human and otherwise. I don’t think I’ve met anyone more OK than Esper.”

Tiffany glanced into the passenger cabin. Esper perched atop one of the rear-facing seats, feet up on the cushion—the sort of thing Candace would have pitched a screamy if she caught Tiffany doing it. She was fidgeting with her whole body.

With a sigh, Tiffany realized what she should have from the start. “I hope someday I love someone that much.”

“Oolie? Oolie, can you hear me?”

Ilsa waited with her face by the floor-level vent that connected the two cells. The cynic in her suspected that the navy’s engineers had bugged the vent system to eavesdrop on exactly these sorts of illicit conversations. The bitter techie who’d stripped down the computer systems knew better. And while part of her resented the obvious oversight, for now she was just grateful for the chance to contact her cell neighbor.

“I can hear you. Just fine.”

The tesud never grew agitated, never panicked, never cared, it seemed. Under normal circumstances, that callousness was annoying. Given their current predicament and the uncertainty of a rescue, Ilsa wouldn’t accept it.

Esper might not get here in time.

Much as it pained her to admit, Esper wasn’t perfect. She shaved her plans too close to the skin. Ilsa wasn’t about to become one of the nicks on that flawless skin.

“Oolie, we need to break out of here.”

“Sit down. Try some meditation. Or yoga. I can talk you through it if you’re unfamiliar with—”

“Knock it off! This is serious! As a doctor, what can you tell me about azrin anatomy that I might be able to use against one? Is there a trick, like rubbing a crocodile’s belly?”

“Azrin find belly rubbing culturally insensitive. I wouldn’t recommend—”

“STOP! Quit trying to deflect. Come on. You spent days in their medical records, buried in scanner readings. You had to learn about their biological quirks even if you had to look it up on the omni.”

“I do know one fact that could prove vital.”

Ilsa’s heart leapt. Yes! This was what she needed. “Yeah? What? What can you tell me about azrin that I can make use of?”

“They have truly magnificent hearing.”

Ilsa slumped, bonking her head on the wall.

“Be careful.”

A manic laugh bubbled up from her belly. “Be careful? Is that all you can say, doc?”

“Repeated minor sub-concussive impacts can result in chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”

Bonk.

“That was what I just advised against.”

Bonk. “That syndrome you mentioned sounds better than getting eaten.”

“Don’t cause long-term brain injury over a temporary frustration.”

Bonk. “If Esper rescues us, she can heal anything. But she can’t heal the chewed-up remains of an azrin meal.”

“If you lose higher brain function, it increases the odds that our captors will choose the food option over keeping you as a hostage. As you’re the one who is safe so long as Esper is a threat to them. I’m expendable.”

Bonk.

Ilsa paused to consider. As soon as she stopped the rhythmic impacts, a wave of dizziness caught up with her. “Fine. But it’s killing me sitting here doing nothing. No tools. No access panels to pop open.”

“No omni link,” Oolie added.

“Yeah. Thanks for reminding me. Add that to the list.”

“You have a clinical addiction.”

Ilsa scoffed. “Addiction to modern life? Convocation lobbyists keep that diagnosis on the books. Surprised a smart guy like you can’t see through that.”

“You should seek treatment once this is all over.”

“If lifestyle tech integration is a disease, I don’t want to be cured. I just want OUT OF HERE!” she shouted the last words toward the door.

Mere seconds passed before the door slid open. A blue haze of forcefield shielded the opening from escape, but the guard stood in the doorway with a smirk. “You should listen to Dr. Soups. Your life is safe. His is not. If you do not behave, you will be punished, not killed. Understood?”

Ilsa gulped.

“Good. If you make trouble, we will hurt him, not you.”

“But you just said—”

“That will be your punishment. We will eat Dr. Soups while you watch. And you will eat the soup we make from his bones.”

She shook her head and backed against the far wall of the cell.

“If you don’t want to eat turtle soup, sit. Remain quiet. Do only as you are told.”

“Yes, sir,” Ilsa replied meekly.

The door slid shut.

Oh, Esper, please hurry!

Dr. Haa spread his best human-friendly smile across his face as the comm connected. On screen was a woman in a blue smock with the letters PPS stitched across the pectoral muscle. He knew from checking ahead of time that she was with the Peractorum Preservation Society. His prior missive had been text-only in advance of The Day We Promised arriving at the intentionally primitive human colony.

“Doctor, so good to see your friendly face,” the human said with a smile of her own. Her name was Dr. Lara Mansfield, and she was a doctor of sociology, not medicine. The double use of the honorable term for one who busied herself about other sentients’ personal lives grated on him.

Not that Dr. Haa allowed that professional pique to show through.

“Good to see you as well, Dr. Mansfield.” If there was one skill he’d mastered as a medical student among humans, it was ingratiating himself and behaving counter to the unfair stereotypes of his people. “I trust you have news from the wizards’ enclave?”

“I’ve checked with several Convocation members living throughout Camelot, as well as a wu from the Jade Empire and two oracles practicing their craft in Delphi.”

Dr. Haa leaned closer to the screen. “And?”

“No takers.”

An involuntary hiss escaped him before he could catch it. “Excuse my manners. We are desperate. We were stranded by a spiteful wizard and fear that we will never return to realspace.”

The connection flickered. Rikall had rigged up one of the astral buoys the ship kept on hand and dropped it to bridge the distance. Otherwise, they’d have had little chance of completing the link at all.

“It’s not a lack of willingness—except maybe Dark Lord Shadovere, but I won’t get into that—it’s that nobody knows what to do about it. You’re operating in… what did they call it?… theoretical astral space.”

“It’s not a theory!” Dr. Haa insisted. “We are here!”

The human sociologist’s smile tightened. “You admit that you were the victim of a wizard’s vengeance.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Yes…”

“Have you considered that it’s more likely you’ve been tricked into thinking you’re trapped in astral space? The Convocation has a storied history of elaborate deceptions in the name of justice. Count Morseau was written out of history entirely and lived his final thirty years of life thinking he was a milk cow outside Lyons. We didn’t have access to Convocation records until the Revelation, but they showed that he was never actually transformed. He just wallowed on his hands and knees and ate grass.” She blinked. “I hate to imagine what happened when he thought they were milking him.”

A low rumble brewed in the back of Dr. Haa’s throat. This was more than he could take. “I am not deluded! We flew our ship here. I can have others attest to the crime. We are victims here. I plead for your assistance.” He clasped his hands in view of the camera.

Better to debase himself in the service of the plan than put Rikall or one of the others on the comm. He had little dignity remaining in the eyes of humans, and what he had left he would burn to ash on the altar of Meyang’s freedom.

Dr. Mansfield shook her head slowly. “It’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s a matter of expertise and availability. Not every wizard even has friends who’re willing to take a comm and pass the message along. Peractorum is a place cut off from ships and star-drives and all the problems of the modern galaxy.”

She danced around the words, but Dr. Haa would force her to confront them. “Modern problems like azrin. There were no azrin on Ancient Earth. Is that not correct?”

“It’s not personal,” she assured him. The sweat beading on her forehead signaled her nervousness. But as liaison to the colony, she was customer service. Her job was to mediate between the modern world and the permanent vacationers living in their own planet’s past. “Look. I can contact some people back in Sol. They’ll have someone qualified to perform the rescue. How are your supplies?”

“Three days,” Dr. Haa lied. Without the monstrous eating machine aboard, the food would last weeks. “Five if we cut to starvation rationing immediately.”

The tight smile returned. “Might be a good idea, just in case. Listen, I don’t know how quickly we can get someone out to you, but I’ll do whatever I can.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Haa said with as much grace as he could muster.

The comm winked out. Then he smashed the screen with both hands. Luckily, he wasn’t the brute that Broii was; his tantrum didn’t so much as crack the glassteel. With one final roar of defiance at the impertinent rectangle of glossy black unhelpfulness, he composed himself and tried to order his thoughts according to logic, not emotion.

There was someone who could get him loose of this mess.

Someone he could reach.

Someone who would jump when he snapped his jaws.

Someone he had dearly hoped never to see again.

He punched in the comm ID for the military shuttle carrying Esper Richelieu.

Kubu lay as flat as he could manage on the cabin floor, in between two rows of seats. Despite what his human friends considered a thorough cleaning, he could still make out the scents of the azrin they’d saved. Mean, tricky azrin, they’d been rowdy and playful but seemed plenty nice. Kubu had wanted to wrestle with them. He’d even have picked a size where it was fair.

But the azrin had stolen their big ship.

Esper was mad. This was madder than Kubu had ever seen her.

Tiffany was scared of Esper. Kubu had seen her afraid plenty of times, but aside from the time they caught her as a runaway, she’d never been scared of Esper.

Wesley was… well, he was Wesley. That much was a relief, and there wasn’t a lot of relief around for Kubu to take advantage of. If Tiffany hadn’t been sneaking up to talk to Wesley about how worried she was about Esper, Kubu would have gone up and sat in the people seat beside him.

Perched above him, sitting wrong with her feet on the seat and her bum on the top of the backrest, Esper loomed like a bird of prey.

Without a proper education in the ways of his own species, Kubu suspected that munching giants didn’t appreciate creatures watching them from out of reach.

But it was Esper.

That should have been more comforting.

But Esper had been turning more and more into Angry Mommy. One of the big reasons that Esper took him from Mommy’s house and Mriy was that they weren’t nice people. It wasn’t as if Kubu didn’t realize they weren’t nice people. Kubu had met and befriended lots of not-quite-nice people. Looking back on it, Carl wasn’t exactly nice most of the time. Mort, who’d always been nice to Kubu, wasn’t nice to whole lots of other people. Roddy rarely acted nice; even though his jokes were funny, they usually made one person feel bad.

Esper had been different. Sweet, thoughtful, and relentlessly nice, she’d given everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Kubu wanted to be like that.

He wanted to be good like Esper.

He wanted to be kind like Esper.

He wanted all the nice people and most of the not-nice people to like him the way they liked Esper.

This Esper was always grumbling and reeked of anger. Worrying about Ilsa was one thing; Ilsa was almost as nice as Esper even if she struggled with the idea of a dog who could talk. She’d come around to the notion of calling a munching giant a megalodog and not confusing either with the domestic pets so many humans kept.

Once Ilsa was safe, Esper would be Esper again.

He cast a baleful look up at her. She laced her fingers together so tightly that the skin whitened beneath her fingernails. Her chin rested atop. Jaw clenched. Eyes stared blankly. Nostrils flared with each breath.

Without intending to, Kubu allowed a soft whine to escape him.

She scowled down at him. “What?”

Reacting on instinct, Kubu sat up and rubbed the side of his head against her shin.

“Fine,” Esper muttered.

With his eyes closed, Kubu felt the fingernails scratching behind his ears. If he was less sturdy, the aggressive gouging of those nails might have hurt him. A nice little doggy would have yelped and cowered.

However, as Kubu often pointed out, he wasn’t a dog.

Leaning into the rugged affection, he loosed a sigh. “Ilsa’s going to be all right.”

“Yeah,” Esper agreed. The scratching stopped. He opened his eyes. She wiped her hand on her pants. “You need a bath.”

“OK. After we rescue Ilsa.”

Well, poop. He’d gone in with the goal of cheering up Esper or at least reassuring her. Mission accomplished, he guessed.

But it had cost him the promise of a bath.

Maybe in the excitement, she’d forget.

“Yo,” Wesley called from the cockpit. “Incoming comm.”

Esper perked up instantly. Hopping down from her perch, she raced for the cockpit. “Did Ilsa get a message out?”

Best to keep her outward worries focused on the hostage. That’s what everyone seemed to expect from the do-gooder. They overlooked that Esper had a degree in mathematics from the seminary. And when weighed with even the slightest degree of logic, the ship was by far the more valuable commodity.

Even if Ilsa was one in a million—a generous designation to begin with—she could find thirty thousand replacements on Mars alone. With the human population of the Milky Way edging into the trillions, there were Ilsas galore out there.

Navy warships were rare treasures.

“Care for a second guess?” Wesley offered.

Tiffany didn’t give her time. “It’s that ship thief doctor!”

A cold intravenous infusion chilled her to the core. She narrowed her eyes with menace. “Clear the cockpit. Close the door behind you.”

Wesley and Tiffany scrambled out of her way.

The comm panel of the ship stared up at her, blinking, dazzling with so many buttons and commands asking to be input. A moment of reflection, and she’d sort it out by carefully reading little boxes of light and following vague instructions.

She caught Wesley by the arm on the way out. “Which button?”

A corn-dog finger aimed down at a glowing orange ACCEPT button without quite touching.

Esper wiggled into a comfortable position in the pilot’s chair, roasting warm from Wesley’s body heat. As soon as the door slid shut behind her, she tapped the button.

Dr. Haa’s smug face appeared, begging to be punched from twelve systems away. “Greetings, Esper.”

“Decided to surrender? Smart move.”

The azrin shook his head, never taking his eyes off hers through the screen. If only her mental magics could work with that kind of connection. Alas, the filtration of technology stripped away the power of her gaze. It couldn’t transmit that kind of raw, primal control over vast distances.

Frankly, she was a little glad technology couldn’t manage that trick. But it would have been handy this once.

“I wish to make you an offer.”

“I’m listening.”

“I will trade you Ilsa for bringing the ship up to realspace.”

Esper barked a laugh. “You’re stuck!”

The azrin curled a lip, showing one fang. “Should not be laughing. I have your ship, your lover, your doctor friend.”

Esper drummed her fingernails on the arms of the chair. She wasn’t fool enough to think Wesley and Kubu couldn’t hear her through the door. This needed to sound like it came from the do-gooder if she was going to come through this fiasco with her cover intact. Stress could be a wonderful excuse. After things calmed down, she could spend more time transitioning to a more jaded, practical version in line with her true self.

“Thanks for the reminder. Don’t think I was going to let you keep Oolie. I want him and Ilsa safe before I astral drop you a single unit. And I’m not bringing you back to realspace. I’ll leave you around four or five AU. You can hire a star-drive mechanic to get you back the rest of the way.”

Dr. Haa’s ears flattened back against his head. “We are not beggars! Realspace or the tesud remains with us.”

“I won’t condemn Oolie to work for you as a slave. You’re a doctor. Even if your credentials are fake, you were getting the job done. Or are you too big a deal now to heal your own soldiers?”

“I worked YEARS for condescending humans to earn this title!”

“Then you don’t need Oolie. He comes with me.”

The azrin slouched. “Two units. I don’t want to wait weeks for rescue.”

“Two-ish. I’m not an astralometer. And you’ve got a deal.”

Esper hit a button to end the comm, but instead she merely muted the audio. Dr. Haa’s mouth moved without sound.

She punched another button, and the flatvid screen expanded, wiping out adjacent ship status screens to create one giant image. The azrin doctor continued yammering unheard, growing visibly confused.

Flustered, Esper hovered a hand over the screen. The picture wobbled, then went dark.

Leaning back, she hit the door control. At least that science device was straightforward.

“We’re getting our friends back,” she told them, allowing relief to flood her voice.

Inside, she continued to seethe.

I’m getting my fucking ship back. You made a fatal mistake, Haa.

Despite her inability to alter the surroundings, the little village of Esperville was large enough that she could repurpose a local cafe and antique shop as a makeshift refugee camp. There was room for dozens, maybe a hundred if things got cozy. But first Esper was going to need to find those lost souls.

“Think hard,” she told Mitch from across the coffee shop table where the smells of French vanilla and hazelnut wafted to fill the room. It was harder to worry surrounded by the pleasant and comforting aromas of such a quaint morning ritual. “Pick one of them. Any one. What’s his or her name?”

“Gina Barret,” Mitch said. He sat with his oversized, anachronistic policeman’s hat on the seat beside him. Something about the decor seemed to make him mindful of his manners.

Esper kept her eyes on his. “Picture her. Don’t describe her out loud. Just envision her as best you can.”

A hazy image formed of a woman in her late twenties. Short dark hair. Short, untinted fingernails. Freckles on her cheeks. Dimpled chin. Esper doubted the proportions Mitch remembered but kept in mind that memory was a fuzzy entity. Her own twisted recollections of Mars were sufficient evidence of that.

“That’s good,” Esper coaxed. “Now, think about the sound of her voice. The way she moves. The times you’ve spent together.”

Mitch squirmed in his chair. “It’s not like that.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Esper assured him. “I’m searching for a mental image of her. If I can just… AHA!”

The empty seat at their table suddenly acquired a visitor. Gina Barret arrived with her Kebok police uniform in tatters, blood crusting a nasty gash in her side and soot blackening her skin.

“Gina!” Mitch exclaimed, reaching out a tentative hand to touch her shoulder and make sure she was real.

Which she wasn’t.

Real was relative, though. Here, she was real enough.

Gina took in her surroundings like someone who’d awakened from a nightmare. “Mitch? Where the hell are we?” Her chest heaved. Her pupils nearly engulfed her irises. “What’s going on?”

Esper had her spiel prepared, aware that if things went well, she’d have to repeat it over and over again. “This is a mental prison constructed by a wizard. I realize she looks like me. She’s my sister. I’m trying to help. We’re going to find the rest of your colleagues.”

Mitch took her by the hand. “We’re safe here.”

There was a time and a place for volunteering unnecessary information. Today wasn’t one of those days. Their safety lay in Dark Esper’s inattention. Whatever befell out in the real world, it was enough to divert the evil twin’s focus from her prisoners.

“I need another name,” Esper said. “Someone who was in that alley when she ambushed us.”

Gina turned to Mitch. “My brain’s on the Nope Channel. Who was on shift today?”

Mitch rubbed a hand down his face. “I mean, Sarge was duty officer.”

“Full name?” Esper asked.

“Sergeant Olney,” Gina supplied.

“Good. Now, both of you think about Sergeant Olney.”

Esper led the pair of them through the process once again, repeating her prepared speech when Sergeant Olney appeared among them.

In her mind, it felt like hours. Out there, who could tell anymore? But eventually, all the summoned peace officers agreed that she hadn’t missed anyone.

“What do we do now?” Mitch asked, having become their official spokesman in defiance of the traditional ranks among the force.

What indeed? She’d already tried to break free and regain control from Dark Esper. That process hadn’t even had a beginning, let alone a resolution. She’d attempted to access her real-world senses. While Mort had been prisoner, he’d manifested externally, pestered her incessantly, eventually forced her to compromise. She couldn’t even peek out from her own eyes.

Esper swallowed. She put on her best smile. “For now, just have some coffee and pastry. Enjoy being free.”

At least someone should get to.

There it was. Against the backdrop of violet astral space, the dark military hull looked more like a flatpic on a teenage boy’s bedroom wall than a real object. The sense of scale and depth perception evaporated entirely.

But the Errand of Mercy, temporarily misappropriated as The Day We Promised, lay just ahead.

“Hail them,” Esper ordered as she cracked her knuckles absently.

“Already hailing like a summer day on Ganymede,” Wesley replied from the pilot’s chair.

“What’s the plan?” Tiffany whispered, all too aware that the comm could open any second.

Esper shushed her. Dammit. If there was a time for that, it was during the interminable hours getting here. Waiting until the last second wasn’t merely thoughtless, it was nearly guaranteed to hatch a disastrous plan.

“Little vessel, wait where you are,” a voice belonging to an unfamiliar azrin replied.

Wesley perked upright in his seat. “HELL-o! Weapons going hot on the Errand. We’ve got a target lock on us.”

“Weapons?” Esper echoed skeptically. “We don’t have any working weapons.”

“Maybe shmaybe,” Wesley said. “But that wasn’t a big goal of ours. These fine furry felons are motivated by more than mercy. If they wanted the light show of Uncle Sol’s justice to put on a performance, who’s to say they didn’t get them fixed up.”

Tiffany snickered. “THOSE idiots?”

Esper cuffed her upside the head. Not hard. Just enough to get her attention. “No xenoism. They’re rebel soldiers fighting for their planet’s freedom. It’s perfectly reasonable that they’d have learned to fix capital ship weapons systems.”

Reasonable but unlikely. They’d probably Roddy’ed together something that would show up on scanners but be more dangerous to use for them than the target.

Esper leaned in and hesitated. Wesley keyed the comm for her. “What’s the deal? You need me.”

Her eyes widened.

Or do they?

Was Haa smart enough to pull off a ruse to lure her in for a coup de grâce?

“We will send a shuttle. Just Esper. The rest will remain in range of our guns.”

Esper waggled a finger toward the comm panel.

“It’s not listening,” Wesley assured everyone.

Esper huffed. “Well, that’s a problem. We don’t have a contingency for this. If I drop them into the shallow astral, you guys will still be here.”

“We’ll be out of range of their guns,” Tiffany pointed out. “Right?”

Esper bit her lip. “Yeah. I guess. OK. Maybe this does work. We’ll just need a ride coming back.”

“Negotiate,” Wesley suggested. “They’re not going to want you onboard any more than you’re going to want to be there. Have them throw in something easy to fly.”

She looked past the patronizing suggestion that she couldn’t fly a simple starship. Not to mention the fact that Ilsa would be piloting just about anything for a short hop. “Open the channel.” Wesley nodded when it was done. “We accept your terms. But I’m going to need a ride back. I know you have shuttles to spare.”

The silence on the other end lingered.

Eventually, it was Kubu who spoke up. “I don’t think they’re talking anymore.”

“Did we piss them off?” Tiffany asked.

Wesley chuckled. “Those kitties have been pissed off for generations. I don’t think asking for a derelict incense-reeking shuttle pushed anyone over Niagara Falls.”

“What falls?” Tiffany asked.

Wesley clucked his tongue. “Colony kids… Earth geography. Brush up sometime. You’ll sound smart.”

“I am smart.”

Wesley put up his hands in mock surrender.

“They’re coming,” Esper said beneath her breath. The forcefield glow of the hangar airlock birthed a tiny vessel into the greater universe.

Tiffany dogged her steps as she headed to the shuttle’s troop airlock. “What do you need us to do from here?”

“Not get shot.”

“No, seriously.”

Esper stopped and took the girl by the shoulders. “Seriously. Don’t get shot. You handle that, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Should we have a signal in case you need a rescue? Backup? Evacuation plan?”

“No. No. And let Wesley use his judgment.”

“HIM?”

“Yes, him. Think! For one second, think, Tiff. You’re not even old enough to enlist. Leave the tactical decision to the retired marine.”

Tiffany craned her neck back, then lowered her voice. “You’re not buying that bullshit that he was some commando, right? He’s just played that guy so many times in so many holos that it gunked up his brain.”

“He’s still better qualified than a high-school dropout.”

Tiffany’s face went flat. She blinked.

“Yeah,” Esper said. Pointing to one of the jump seats, she added, “Go sit your tushie down in that chair. Don’t come up with any crazy ideas. I’ll be back with Ilsa and Oolie.”

She was fairly proud of mixing in the “tushie” reference. That softened all the rest to do-gooder-having-a-bad-day levels. There might need to be an apology or two later, but this was no time for mushy feelings.

“They’re about to dock,” Wesley announced from the cockpit, using his own booming baritone in lieu of the intraship comm.

“Good luck,” Kubu said.

Damn earnest mutt. He meant it too.

“Thanks,” Esper said somberly.

With a clunk, the two shuttles joined together.

Luck was about to get a boost from a heavy dose of magic.

Esper had been inside the shuttles belonging to the Errand of Mercy as a matter of course. Thoroughness, she’d called it. If the ship was hers, she felt a proprietary responsibility to make sure it was all safe, proper… and free of dead bodies.

The Cult of Ra hadn’t exactly been the best caretakers of a ship.

And so, it amazed her that in the course of their brief stint in charge, the azrin had managed to make a vessel stinking of human body odor, incense, and tawdry off-brand cologne smell of rotting meat and cat dander already.

She recognized the two azrin escorting her by sight if not by name. They’d been lying comatose when she’d first encountered them on Meyang. Look at them now. All healthy and mutinous. So heartwarming.

“You don’t reek of fear,” the one who wasn’t busy piloting the shuttle told her with a flare of her nostrils.

“You’re not my type,” Esper deadpanned.

A slight snarl in response might have injected that fear into most humans. But Esper recognized it as humor. “You’d have made a good freedom warrior.”

“Are we friends?” Esper demanded. “What part of ‘you stole my starship’ made us friends? Was it threatening my lover? Was it giving the ship a new name? Which of those was supposed to be this special bonding experience where you feel like you can comment on my life choices?”

The nosy azrin flattened her ears and shied from Esper.

Azrin culture respected bluster but only if the listener was willing to believe the boastful one might back it up. These hunters turned zealots knew that Esper wasn’t the least bit afraid of them physically and for good reason.

Excuse me?

Esper blinked a few times. That sounded like her own voice.

Can you hear me?

Oh, fuck. The boot was on the other foot now.

“Shut up,” she whispered through clenched teeth.

“No more talking,” the azrin agreed. “I shut up.” There was no sneaking any words past those keen azrin ears in these tight quarters.

Aha! You did hear me! Wooo!

The do-gooder had managed through stubborn persistence and—oh, shit! She’d gathered up the bits and pieces of minds captured in their shared mind and cloistered them in her little happy place.

This was a problem to address later. “Go away.”

“Go where?” the pilot asked. “We are going to The Day We Promised.”

“ERRAND OF MERCY,” Esper shouted. “You don’t get to rename my goddamn ship! Call it whatever you want. Call it kyantak for all I care when I’m not around.”

The azrin both shrank from her, hackles up.

“Oh, you didn’t think I knew any of your language. I used to fly with Mriy Yrris.”

The nosy one cocked her head. “The Silver League fighter?”

Esper nodded.

“My grandmother told me stories of her.”

Esper sighed. It was hard at times, remembering that these rebels were mostly under ten years old.

“Well, she taught me worse curse words than kyantak. And she was afraid of me. Last time I saw her, I threw her like a doll. I only spared her because we were friends once.”

Don’t be mean. They’re taking you to the ship, right? That has to be so you can rescue everyone.

She ignored the voice.

Who’s in trouble anyway? My new friends accounted for everyone but Ilsa and Oolie. Are they still on the Errand?

Ignoring the voice sucked.

She wanted to scream her little internal passenger into submission. But right now, she needed the cooperation of these azrin, and spooking them only helped to a certain point.

“Look, you two. Wizards talk to themselves. Got it?”

Both nodded quickly.

“Well, I need to yell at myself for a little while. This doesn’t involve the two of you.”

Both nodded more vigorously.

Esper took an abbreviated deep breath. “Look, you little bitch. Stuff it, or so help me I’m coming in there to make you suffer. Intelligas?”

The comm opened. Dr. Haa’s voice carried through the whole shuttle. “Status. Is the wizard with you?”

“Yes,” the pilot reported. “And she’s mad as a squirrel.”

Esper had been called worse.

The threat had done its job.

The two azrin and her sickly-sweet alter ego remained silent the rest of the short trip.

Tiffany clapped her hands as soon as the shuttle ferry with Esper disappeared into the Errand of Mercy.

“OK. What’s the plan?”

Wesley and Kubu turned to her in unison.

“What plan?” Wesley asked.

“You know. The one where Esper tells us not to come rescue her, we ignore her, show up in the nick of time, and she admits that she needed us after all?”

Kubu shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Wesley aimed a finger at the larger vessel. “That thing is packing the Neutron Systems BFC-9000-series, capable of blowing our ship clear out of the Black Ocean. Poof. No more us. None of those dramatic ‘shields are down, one more hit will finish us’ moments. There won’t be fires in the cockpit and a harrowing emergency landing. And unless we’re paying close attention, we won’t even see the aperture flash of the shot that gets us.”

Kubu sat through the whole speech, tail drooping lower by the second. “I had wanted to plan a rescue until just now.”

“Unless they’re lying. And those guns don’t work at all.”

“Gun,” Wesley corrected with a raised finger. “If they had the whole ship armed for a full-on naval engagement, I too would suspect the fruits of the bovine pasture at play. But one BFC-9000 with a motivated crew of desperate rebels? All it would take is one with better-than-azrin technical skills to rig something for limited use. Considering the trouble Dr. Haa—the least funny doctor to be having a name like that—has already gone to, I wouldn’t put it past the sly surgical separatist.”

Tiffany chewed the inside of her cheek. “Well, we can’t just do nothing.”

Wesley popped open one of the little storage cubbies in the cockpit. Probably meant originally for blaster packs or explosive storage or some equally military nonsense, the actor pulled out a small rectangular package. “Go Fish, anyone?”

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Can we at least play something a little less childish?”

“Three-handed bridge with a dummy?” Wesley suggested without missing a beat.

Folding her arms, Tiffany raised an eyebrow. “Which one of us is the dummy?”

Wesley slid the cards back into their cubby. “Fine. We can sit quietly and wait.”

“We could make snacks,” Kubu suggested. “Then, we could eat the snacks.”

“We didn’t pack anything to—”

“Yes, we did!” Kubu exclaimed, wagging his tail. “I packed cookies and cheese.”

Tiffany struggled to imagine the combination of flavors. “What kinds?”

“Chocolate ship cookies and cheddar.”

“You mean chocolate chip cookies.”

Kubu shook his head. “Nope. They’re shaped like little ships.”

“Fine,” Tiffany relented.

Five minutes later, the three of them were munching on weird-tasting chocolate cheddar ship sandwiches.

“I still think we should have a plan to help Esper,” Tiffany said with her mouth full. “One that doesn’t involve barfing up weird food combinations.”

Wesley popped whole cookie sandwiches into his mouth at once. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned working with Esper, it’s that she’ll figure out a way to get everything sorted out in the end. Probably with nobody getting seriously hurt.”

He gave her his signature thumb-skyward gesture. And he was right. Esper did have a particular gift for reassembling a million shards of razor-sharp glass into a vase.

Somehow, this time felt different.

Dr. Haa raced through the ship. The time was drawing near. His victory was at hand. He would have the ship, access to realspace, and the means to bring the fight to the humans holding his homeworld prisoner.

But not if everything didn’t go perfectly in the next few minutes.

He skidded into the crew barracks, formerly the cafeteria. “Rikall, come with me!”

The soldier fell in behind him without question, and the two of them hurried down to the brig.

Ranya was posted at the door. He straightened at Dr. Haa’s approach.

“Open the doors. The prisoners are coming with us.”

“You want me to bind them?” Ranya asked.

Dr. Haa paused a fraction of a second to consider. Then he shook his head. “No. There is no fight in them. You take the tesud. Rikall, the human.”

“My name is Ilsa,” Ilsa protested. “And you’re panicking. That must mean Esper found us. You’re in so much trouble. Maybe if you let us go, she’ll go easy on you.” She winced as Rikall twisted a wrist behind her back.

Dr. Haa entered the cell behind his lieutenant.

“We are releasing you. But not without careful measures. Remain placid, and you will survive the day.”

Oh, this one barely had civil in her head. To expect docile compliance was, perhaps, too large an ask. So long as Esper accepted her condition in trade, he would content himself to endure her impudent words.

Ranya met them in the hall, prodding Oolie to downright un-tesud-like levels of haste. He’d worried they’d need a grav sled to lug the xeno doctor to the bridge.

“Is all well?” Rikall asked. With neither prisoner showing signs of understanding them, it was safe to speak openly.

“All will never be well when inviting a human wizard. I’ve sent word. A free azrin wizard named Shawiy will arrive soon to repair the star-drive. We won’t have to ever deal with a human again. But this once, we must deal with the most dangerous sort.”

“You two must be shitting kittens right now,” Ilsa taunted.

“Break her arm,” Dr. Haa ordered in English, adding a quick aside of, “not really,” in his own tongue. He couldn’t risk offending Esper at the final moment.

Rikall twisted. Ilsa screamed.

“No! Don’t! I’ll shut up!”

“Then do so. Do not claim to,” Dr. Haa ordered.

Rikall exchanged a knowing smile with him behind the prisoners’ backs.

Dr. Haa’s heart was not in the effort, however. He would not feel relief until all the non-azrin were off his ship.

Tiffany pondered the remains of her snack. Crumbs littered her lap and the floor around her. Kubu was giving her that “are you going to eat that?” look before taking it upon himself to lick the floor clean. Her vantage from the cabin had a view clear through to the cockpit and out the front window, where the Errand of Mercy loomed.

If only there were a way they could get to Esper without that gun holding them at bay.

But there was no way they could move fast enough to avoid incoming fire.

Or was there?

“I’ve got it!” she shouted, jumping to her feet.

Kubu took advantage and slithered in to de-crumb her surroundings.

“Got what, sport?” Wesley asked casually.

“Stop calling me that,” Tiffany snapped. “I know how to get aboard to help Esper.”

“Please don’t,” Kubu said with a whine.

“I can take us astral!”

“We’re already—”

But Tiffany wasn’t in the mood for Wesley’s condescension. “Shallower. We maneuver around the Errand, drop back to this level, then board them.”

“That… could work.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“Just get to the cockpit,” she ordered.

Kubu watched the exchange with his ears down. Fine. So long as he kept his nose out of it. This was between her and the big lug.

“Esper left me in charge of tactical decision-making.”

“Then decide to help me help her.”

Tiffany was done taking orders from a guy who struggled to form a cogent sentence and whose claim to fame was fucking up being semi-famous.

Astral lift, going up. Medium level: women’s outerwear, military couriers, and sneaking around hijacked warships.

In her head, she played a soothing nonsense of bland music. Esper had always stressed that visualization was a key component of directing the universe to do what she wanted. And if a mega-mall lift was how she pictured an astral drop, so be it.

As long as it worked.

And Tiffany felt in the pit of her stomach that it had.

The Errand of Mercy vanished like an apparition as the fog of lighter-colored astral set in around them.

“Your turn. Maneuver us around so the guns aren’t pointed at us.”

“Will do, little lady. Inaction’s never been my favorite in-activity.” He paused as if to consider. “Inebriation’s got to rank up there. Not sure it’s number one, though. Sure not introspection. AHA! I know my favorite ‘in’ activity.” As he said this, the ship swung around their invisible quarry.

Tiffany was feeling magnanimous now that he was following her orders. Esper always indulged his idiocy when she was running the show.

“Ooh! Ooh! Can I guess?” Kubu asked. “Indigestion? Income?”

Wesley shook his head as he broke into a grin. “Invasion.”

Esper marched through the corridors of her ship, flanked by two prisoners who thought they were escorting her. It felt good being back. Authority flowed through the very life-support vents of the place. Every breath taken on board was thanks to her permission.

“This way,” one of the prisoners informed her at the next intersection.

Knowing that now wasn’t the time, she bit back her retort. She wanted them deeper in the trap. Spring it too early and some might escape their well-deserved justice.

So, Esper kept her outward calm as her thoughts boiled.

Um, there’s an earthquake in here. Everything OK?

The do-gooder couldn’t help herself, worrying over her when there was a whole prison full of tormented souls to look after. Dirty cops. Azrin thugs. Rebel sympathizers. Exactly the sorts who needed an ultra-absorbent shoulder to cry on.

She declined to answer.

If you need anything, I’m literally at your disposal.

Oh, if only it were that easy. She couldn’t be rid of that part of her mind. If there was a way—and she’d considered the matter at length—it would involve methods even she couldn’t bear.

Oh, hey! I can see! We’re back on the Errand. Everything back to normal. Oh, those plague victims look healthier but not quite happy. What’s been going on there?

Once she had control of the ship again, Esper planned a thorough trip back inside her own head to deal with the pest.

The doors to the bridge opened as they approached.

Inside, what Esper saw made her heart skip.

One of the azrin held Ilsa with his claws to her throat. Another kept a hand on Oolie, who seemed like he didn’t need special attention to restrain. Around the room, more than half the azrin rebels aimed blasters in her direction.

In the middle stood Dr. Haa.

“Welcome.”

“Power down that cannon,” Esper said.

Ilsa tried to catch her eye, but now was no time for distraction. Little enough in this galaxy could melt her heart, and the last thing Esper needed right now was to go soft in front of all these killers.

“Insurance,” Dr. Haa told her. “You will take us to shallower astral. The main gun cannot hurt them, then.” He smiled with ‘gotcha’ written across his pointed teeth.

“Problem!” one of the azrin shouted from a duty station, taking his attention—but not his blaster rifle’s aim—off Esper. “The ship is gone.”

“Gone?” Dr. Haa echoed.

Esper smirked. Oh, those stupid, reckless rascals. Tiffany had taken them ahead to the shallow astral, denying Haa his only real leverage.

“New deal,” Esper said calmly. “You drop your weapons and march down to the escape pods. I’ll drop to realspace before sending you all to Earth Interstellar.”

Dr. Haa barked a laugh. “You think you have the upper hand? I still have your lover’s life in my grasp.” He pointed a claw at Ilsa. She offered a brave smile through her terror.

The only safety for her was through indifference. So long as Haa and his minions believed Ilsa to be valuable to her, they wouldn’t let their guard down about threatening her.

“So what?” Esper asked with a shrug. “If you kill her, your deaths will be all the more painful. As for me? I’ll pick up a new whore on the next planet.”

Ilsa’s eyes widened. A tear trickled down her cheek.

Dr. Haa shook his head. “You’re bluffing.”

“And in five seconds, you either take my deal, or you’re all dead.”

Ilsa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Dr. Haa might believe Esper was bluffing, but the words pierced her right through the heart.

The callousness.

The distance.

She was a commodity.

“Five,” Esper said, voice flat as a machine’s.

How many nights had she lain awake post-coitus, wondering how in the galaxy she’d ended up with a goddess like Esper? Well, now she had her answer: she was a disposable bedroom toy, as replaceable as a depleted power pack. Esper’s anger was at the destruction of her personal property.

The theft of the ship bothered her more than the rebels holding her captive.

“Four.”

The azrin tensed all around the bridge. Rikall tightened his grip on her throat with his fingers, and the tips of his claws pricked her skin.

No. No… don’t.

She mouthed the words, afraid to spook the already terrified azrin.

“Three.”

“Our deal may still stand,” Dr. Haa insisted. “Just—”

“Two.”

“STOP COUNTING!”

Ilsa tried to pray but had never learned how.

Sudo, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’ll happen to you when I’m gone. But I hope you get turned back on by someone nice.

“One.”

“KILL HER!” Dr. Haa bellowed.

The bridge erupted in sizzles of blaster fire.

The lights went out.

Ilsa felt a quick tug at her neck. Then she was falling.

She couldn’t breathe.

Released from Rikall’s grip, she put a hand to her throat and felt the blood gushing.

Lightheadedness swept in like the bursting of a dam.

Then nothingness.

Those bastards had killed Ilsa.

The ones on the bridge died too quickly.

She wouldn’t make that mistake with the rest.

Waving a hand to chase away the smoke as she exited the bridge, Esper lit the corridors ahead of her. Lines of fire reminiscent of the safety lighting along the aisles at a holovid theater burned angry red.

The fury matched her mood.

Freedom tasted bittersweet. Ilsa’s death was the perfect catalyst for vengeance, the perfect cover for a new-and-improved Esper that her friends couldn’t help but accept as authentic.

How many righteous souls had drunk from the darkness at the violent death of a loved one?

Fuck.

She had loved Ilsa.

Plenty of people found love throughout life. In her middle twenties, Esper would have time to love again. Then again, it might take some coaching from the do-gooder to find another one like that. Her boast to Haa hadn’t been entirely idle. The next companion she took was probably going to be paid for the job.

As Esper made her way through the ship, she kept a mental tally of the bodies she needed to collect. The quarantine had kept the total number of charges under the doctor’s care at the forefront of her mind. Twenty-two. Nine had died quick deaths on the bridge.

That left thirteen. Lucky thirteen.

A pair of them was on her before Esper heard them coming.

Heavy azrin hunters, silent and lethal, bore her to the ground with feral snarls.

Skin of iron. Bones of water.

The death locks they practiced on live prey in the wilderness took no hold. Claws found no purchase. Limb and joint locks slipped loose.

In seconds, Esper had them pinned supine to either side of her, fingertips pressed to their skulls.

Those fingers sank in and drank deep.

Essences of who they were, their memories and vital energy all flowed in and left the mortal vessels that soon lay dead on the corridor floor.

Esper stood and cracked her neck, now back to its normal biological composition. Those two would pay. No need to begin their torment now. Time was one commodity that would ever be in plenty within Esperworld.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty,” she called out, voice echoing into the distance as the bare plasticized-steel walls bounced the sound around without interference from life-support vents or the ever-present hum of the engines.

The ship was, for now, dead in space.

Soon, the thieves would be likewise.

Wesley snapped his fingers and pointed to a blank spot in astral space ahead of them.

“Hit it.”

“Hit what?” Kubu asked.

“Not you. Tiff, hop to it!” he called out from the cockpit.

“You’re sure you know where we are?”

Wesley chuckled. “Well, I’m sure where we are. No telling where that misappropriated mass of medical miracles might have meandered in the meantime. Spit spot. Sooner we get a look-see, the safer.”

Tiffany took a long breath to steady her jitters. The fluff and fire had burned out of her after her brief bout of initiative. Now that they were committed to their course, she was happy to hand the steering yoke back to the guy who enjoyed this sort of thing.

Sub-basement level, please. Going down. Wine cellar, oubliette, and stolen medical frigates. Mind the doors.

A mental ding accompanied the sensation of astral slippage.

Ducking up toward realspace was one thing. Where they’d landed was pretty arbitrary. A few astral units in any direction and they were still out of range of the Errand’s gun.

Emphasis on the stolen ship we’re looking for. Not stopping at the wrong floor.

Esper liked to point out that magic was an art, not a science. But even at that, there was a difference between the Renaissance masters and the Pre-Data cubists. And even that was giving herself too much credit. Tiffany was more of a Jackson Pollock of a wizard to Esper’s Rembrandt.

She was just splashing around with paint and hoping someone else agreed that it was art.

“Jackpot, suckers!” Wesley cried out.

Tiffany opened her eyes and let out a shriek.

The Errand of Mercy lay mere meters ahead. Wesley aimed the nose of the craft alongside the hull, running fast and close, dodging scanner antennae, docking umbilicals, and a number of other protuberances she couldn’t name.

She raced to the cockpit.

“Looks dead,” Wesley commented as if they were out for a coastal flight along the Caledonian beaches. The idea that they were rocketing alongside a hostile craft large enough to splatter them if it twitched didn’t seem to faze him. “Someone’s been up to a little mystical malfeasance, methinks.”

“So, Esper’s fighting them in there.”

“Hooray! Get ’em, Esper,” Kubu cheered.

“Find a hangar, maybe?” Tiffany suggested.

That infuriatingly condescending chuckle echoed back to her. “Negativo, squirt. Only a greenhorn performs a tactical insertion through a workplace-safety-compliant entrance.”

“Umm…” No part of his statement stuck Tiffany as reassuring. “Airlock?”

“Sort of.”

Kubu cocked his head as Wesley swung their transport around, the view of the Errand whipping past wildly. “What’s ‘sort of’ mean?”

With a clunk, the Helios locked onto its prey like a Chihuahua biting the pant leg of a stuunji.

Wesley stalked past Tiffany and Kubu en route to the transport’s airlock, grabbing his blaster rifle on the way.

“Hey,” Tiffany called after him before relenting and following him. “What’s sort of mean? What don’t you want to tell us? Are you ditching us? Going EV? What?”

Wesley punched buttons on the door panel. Without understanding what was going on with the tech, Tiffany realized it was a lot more involved than the usual slap-to-open, additional slap-to-unlock kind of operation normally involved with a simple exit maneuver.

When the airlock cycled, Wesley fixed them both with a grin. “Ever wonder where shipboard waste goes before it’s compressed into easily transported rods?”

Tiffany backed away a step. “No. Oh, no. Don’t you dare!”

“I’ve wondered,” Kubu replied sagely. “I’ve wondered lots.”

“Well, bathe in ignorance no longer,” Wesley declared as he opened the hatch.

A wash of reeking air flooded the Helios even as Wesley lobbed her a breathing mask.

Tiffany knew she ought to have refused. Simply breathing the fresh air left in the waste compactor would have left her fine. It’s what Esper would have done.

Mid-gag, it was all Tiffany could do to slip the strap behind her head and pull the seal as tight against her face as possible before taking her next breath.

“We will, of course, be bathing in the regular sense once this is all over,” Wesley assured her before slipping on his own mask and heading inside.

Kubu sniffed the air.

“Don’t!” Tiffany warned. “You’ll get sick.”

Kubu snickered. “It’s a big smell but not a bad one. I recognize lots of these smells. There’s pizza grease, people poop, my poop, lots of azrin poop, bananas… bananas? YOU TOLD ME YOU ATE THE LAST BANANA!”

“They went bad,” Tiffany retorted. “I threw them away!”

“I’m going to find them,” Kubu replied indignantly. He bounded into the waste with a sickening splash.

“That was five days ago and—eep!”

Wesley had grabbed her and yanked her inside.

Elemental water had been added as a softening agent or possibly as a byproduct of the rotting vegetable matter disposed of by the crew. Either way, it soaked through Tiffany’s pants to halfway up her thigh.

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Buck up, kiddo. Breathe deep from that clean, filtered air, and pretend it’s just mud.”

Tiffany slogged through semi-solid waste as Wesley trudged ahead, clearing a path to the access hatch. “I’m going to burn these clothes.”

“I am going to roll on your bed,” Kubu said gleefully. “Banana-stealer!”

After what had to have been the grossest three minutes of her life, Wesley boosted her out the access hatch and into a random corridor of the Errand of Mercy. Only the emergency bio-phosphorescent lights kept her from tripping over her own feet. Nothing was sufficient to read signage.

Wesley flashed around a palm beacon. “Okie dokie. We’re five levels down from the bridge. A hundred meters back. No problemo. Show of hands: who’s afraid of a few azrin rebels?”

Tiffany dropped her hands to her side, clenched in fists.

“I will play rough if azrin try to be mean,” Kubu promised. Despite her own bluster, Tiffany felt a chill down her spine at the thought of what the megalodog might do if anyone ever really pissed him off. Hurting one of his friends might be enough to do it.

“Super,” Wesley declared. “Then we split up, look for Ilsa and Oolie, and get them to safety.”

It had been a long time since Esper had gotten good and drunk. Mort had warned her in no uncertain terms of the risks incurred with each progressive drink. Never mind the number of times she’d seen him with a beer in hand. Time and again, he’d warned her that she was no Mordecai The Brown.

But, oh GOD did this rush of power feel so much the same.

Esper laughed as she marched through the ship. She didn’t have to cry over the body of her lover. There were perpetrators aplenty to punish. And until she ran out of those, she would revel in the free ticket to destruction.

As power coughed back to life along the length of the ship, so too did the weapons of her adversaries—no, her victims. These azrin were prey. For the first time in their lives, they felt not the boot of an authoritarian ARGO garrison at their throats but the claws of a superior predator. One of the hijackers poked a blaster rifle around a corner and fired off a few ineffectual splatters of plasma. Red fireflies of errant death parted like waves before an ocean liner.

The azrin tried to withdraw behind cover, but a sweeping gesture from Esper’s hand hauled him into full view.

Feral instincts took over. Where a human or laaku might have fled in panic, the hunter knew only to attack when cornered.

Her attacker hung in midair, limbs pulled taut in all directions like he was practicing to be a rug.

It was an idea.

“Hi. You may remember me as the wizard who risked her life and the lives of her friends to rescue you from a death sentence on Meyang.”

“Yes,” the azrin replied through what no doubt must have been excruciating pain. “I know you.”

“Well, your life was a gift, and you’ve misused it. I’m taking it back.”

With that, she took the azrin’s skull in both hands and drove her fingertips deep.

Despite magic that tore at the fabric of the heavens, the lights didn’t so much as blink. She was in control. Subtlety was hers to wield as she saw fit. Focus and clarity hardened in the fires of her rage.

She drank the hunter’s mind. A snack more than a meal. A mere eight years or so of life, and not one prone to study or introspection, barely filled the gnawing hunger the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts had saddled her with.

But she’d have time aplenty to teach him the cost of crossing her.

She’d wear Ilsa’s face while she did it. This pitiful creature didn’t deserve to be part of the same afterlife, but she never had to know. She’d be the overseer of his personal hell.

Wrenching her fingers out of the azrin’s head gave off a whiff of smoke and a scent of burnt cat hair.

Discontinuing her levitation, the corpse crashed limp to the floor.

And past it, unseen for the mass of muscle and fuzz blocking her view, was Tiffany.

The girl looked at her wide-eyed, disbelieving. Her mouth hung open, emitting the pained moan of a broken heart.

Without thinking, Esper incinerated the dead azrin. The ash dissipated as if a swirling dust storm had visited the Errand of Mercy.

She smirked. “Sorry. Bad joke. That wasn’t really an azrin.”

“You… you…” Tiffany stammered.

Esper slumped. “Fine. It was. I just wanted to spare you the unpleasantness. But after what they did to Ilsa—”

“What happened to Ilsa?” Tiffany’s demand carried a manic edge.

Esper cooed softly. Spreading her arms for a hug, she approached Tiffany with the mien of a young girl hoping to pet a wild deer, fearful of scaring it off. “There, there. It was quick. I don’t think she felt it.”

“THEY KILLED HER?”

And there she saw her apprentice, a meter away, sob into her hands. Esper took one more step. Tiffany peeked. The glare Esper received could have burned villages. She turned and fled into the ship.

Instinct warred with instinct inside her. To chase Tiffany down, grab her by the shoulders, browbeat an explanation into her. To allow the girl her space to grieve and at least get through the denial phase before confronting her with the horrible reality.

Both failed her. “They had it coming!” she shouted after her apprentice. “These bastards deserve everything they get!”

She shouldn’t have seen that.

“No shit,” Esper muttered for the do-gooder’s benefit.

Because it should have been me out there, not you. You’re not fit to—

“Crate that shit up or I cut them loose.”

What?

“You heard me. I’m not you, and you’re not Mort. I’m not putting up with your bullshit. If you can’t keep me from sounding like a lunatic, talking to myself in front of them, I’ll have to cut them loose.”

You wouldn’t…

The do-gooder didn’t sound convinced.

“Try me. They’re your friends, not mine. If you want to play house in that pastel atrocity you love so much, be my guest. But bottle up that sass or I sprinkle your friends across the borderlands in escape pods.”

Silence met her ultimatum.

She smiled.

“That’s more like it. Keep that up, and your friends will be just fine.”

Except Ilsa.

Esper swallowed. “That hurt me just as much as it did you. And you damn well know it.”

It took an effort of will to open her eyes. Despite rarely visiting the med bay outside of the quarantine spectator area, Ilsa knew where she was as soon as she could focus.

“What—?” she began to ask. But her mouth was dry, her voice raspy.

Oolie shuffled over from outside her view. His beak parted in a smile. “You had a nasty scare. Had to act fast.”

Ilsa tried to think. Thoughts floated in a jumble. Fear, chaos, and whatever medications Oolie had pumped into her warred with reason and logic. When she tried to sit up, the tesud laid a firm hand on her shoulder to keep her in bed.

“Rest. Everything is fine now.”

Fine? Struggling to put the shattered fragments of her most recent memories together, she couldn’t find a single piece that resembled “fine.”

The door to her recovery room slid open. Esper rushed in, eyes wet. “I thought… I thought they…”

Ilsa forced her lips into a smile.

Of the pieces she had gathered from those frantic moments, two stood out.

I’ll pick up a new whore at the next planet. The coldness in that voice didn’t strike her as feigned. Always one to wear her heart pinned to her sweatshirt, Esper hadn’t ever struck her as a gifted actress. Her cover identities were always new clothes atop the same woman.

The other memory with datacrystal clarity was that of a vain attempt to staunch the blood gushing from her torn throat. It was like plummeting from atop a skyscraper, feeling the wind rush past and measuring the distance to certain doom.

Yet she’d woken up again.

Now, Esper was crying at her bedside. But which Esper was it? The one who lit their nights together with passion and talked about all the places they’d visit together, the wonderful people they’d meet, the lives they’d change for the better…

Or the one picking up whores like groceries?

The one who opened fire—literal fire—with a hostage in danger.

Either Esper was a better actress than she’d ever have guessed, or she didn’t know this woman as well as she’d imagined. And if Esper was such a convincing actress, who was to say these tears, dampening the hand Esper clutched to her cheek, were genuine?

“Hi,” she managed weakly.

Esper laughed through a sniffle, then leaned down and hugged her gently. She whispered into Ilsa’s ear. “I thought I lost you. Don’t worry. Those azrin won’t be able to hurt you ever again.”

Ilsa held perfectly still.

What had Esper done?

That sounded awfully final for a woman who went out of her way to protect even the vilest of killers as she brought them to justice. She’d burned a giant casino to the ground without any casualties, and they’d enslaved hundreds of women. She’d marched cultists into escape pods.

A hand brushed Ilsa’s hair out of her eyes. Esper grinned at her from millimeters away, nose to nose with her. “Everything’s going to be fine.” Flecks of blood marred her face near the hairline and ears, places that a cursory scrubbing might easily have missed.

“Yes,” Oolie agreed. “Ilsa will be fine. She’s out of danger. But she could use some sleep.”

Science had saved Ilsa. Why wasn’t Esper using her magic to speed her recovery? Was this convalescence an opportunity for her lover to take care of more unpleasant business while Ilsa was incapacitated?

Esper backed away. “Of course. Feel better, my love. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

The doors closed behind her.

Ilsa was alone with her doctor.

“Oolie?” she whispered. The buzz of her voice felt funny, like everything hadn’t quite healed up in here. “Can you get me my datagoggles?”

The tesud inclined his head at a disapproving angle. “You really should take this time to rest and maybe break free of that addiction.”

“I’ll feel better,” she told him. “I just need the feel of tech against my skin. And I don’t mean this collection of medical monitors.”

What she really needed was a friend, someone she could trust implicitly.

And Sudo might have been the only one she could trust anymore.

Esper arrived at the briefing room in good spirits. Cleanup efforts had been proceeding nicely. All the corpses were gone. Most of the blood had been cleaned up; Kubu had taken on the duty of sniffing around for traces of the azrin presence. Ilsa had been released from med bay just a short while ago and sat beside Esper’s accustomed seat at the head of the holo table.

“Morning, everyone,” Esper announced. She met Ilsa’s eye with a twinkle in hers. This would be her last night spent alone for a good long while. If modern medicine hadn’t cleared her for strenuous activity by the evening, ancient magic would have her in tip-top shape. “Nice to see everyone on time today.”

They looked at her in silence. Furtive glances flew back and forth across the room as an invisible game of volleyball took place with Esper the only one unable to track the ball.

“What’s going on? We have a problem?”

“No problem,” Wesley assured her. “Ship’s shipshape. We’re the only ones on board. Just about everything is right back to the old grindstone.”

Esper nodded as she headed for her seat. “Great. Now if we can just—”

Tiffany sprang to her feet and placed herself between Esper and the chair. “We need to talk.”

Esper studied the girl, then examined the rest of the crew. Everyone looked… off. “Seriously, what’s the deal here?”

Tiffany swallowed. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “You slaughtered all those azrin.”

“You just need a good night’s sleep. The worst is over. Hey, you did great getting around that target lock, even if you ignored my orders. We’ll talk about that later.”

Kubu cleared his throat. “You always say not to hurt people if we can avoid it.”

Esper spread her hands. “They stole our ship. They almost killed Ilsa. I thought they had killed her. I’m taking a mulligan on Thou Shalt Not Kill for Friday. My bad. Won’t happen again. But you can clearly see what all of you mean to me. Today is Sunday. It’s a good day for giving thanks for what we have and starting fresh.”

“Ira always said Sunday was a workday, just like any other.”

Esper arched an eyebrow. “Regular workday? Fine. First order of business, we need to properly crew and supply this ship.”

Wesley grazed from a bowl filled with candied dates. “The azrin shock troops didn’t work out so well.”

The do-gooder had spent the night coaching her on what it would take to maintain her cover. Their deal was a smooth transition to being herself in exchange for continuing charitable work. “We don’t need troops,” Esper clarified. “We pack plenty of punch without ground troops. We need support. We’ve got one doctor.”

Oolie opened his beak in a smile and waved slowly.

“We don’t have any med techs.”

“There are only six of us,” Tiffany pointed out. “How much medical staff do we need?”

Esper plowed onward, hoping the scope of her vision would make it obvious. “We need mechanics, a bridge crew to fly the ship, shuttle pilots, buyers who can find us supplies and parts…” She hefted a tray of assorted jerkies and processed cheese cubes. “We can’t just eat random garbage we find. I want us to have a cook, multiple cooks, maybe even a chef. Wait staff. An accounting department. A B-team for those little jobs that are important but don’t need us doing them. A legal team so we don’t end up outlaws on every planet in the galaxy and so we can use the law to our advantage once in a while.”

Wesley raised a hand like a good student but spoke without being called on. “How we going to pay for all this? I’m sort of seeing us as a shoestring operation, and not a lot of folks out in the big ol’ Milky Way accept shoestrings as currency.”

Esper shrugged. “We’re going to have to run a few missions with the primary goal of supplying us with liquidity.”

“So, being thieves,” Tiffany said, sifting the nugget of gold from the pan of mud Esper had slathered over the topic.

“We can still steal from bad guys,” Esper assured them all. “But we can either live like vagabonds and get mauled by ungrateful, traitorous azrin once in a while, or we can roll up our sleeves, build some infrastructure, and really start making a difference in this sorry Black Ocean.”

She bit back the temptation to add a “who’s with me?” at the end. Just reading the room, Esper could tell they were all skeptical.

No matter.

She was in charge.

This was her ship.

They were her crew.

Once they saw how much better life got aboard this twice-repurposed medical ship after some proper staffing and generating income, they’d come around.

A playground for Kubu in one of the cargo holds.

Drinking buddies for Wesley to regale with ridiculous, overblown, probably true stories.

A selection of nice young men on hand for Tiffany to find companionship.

And for her and Ilsa, a suite to rival the posh stateroom of Admiral Emily Chisholm of the Poet Fleet.

“For now,” Esper said. “Everyone back to your duties. I’ll write up a list of jobs we need to fill and post it in the kitchen. Find candidates. Old acquaintances. Ads on the omni. I don’t care how you find them. I want to start interviews by the end of the week.”

As she blustered out of the room to preserve the last word on the matter, she cast Ilsa a wink.

Ilsa lay with her eyes closed until Esper’s breathing came slow and regular. Edging the sheets off of her without exposing her lover’s damp skin to the cool air of the bedchamber, she scooted slowly aside. The hand resting on her abdomen was stuck by a light film of perspiration.

Luckily, Esper slept like the dead.

Something about being a wizard, she’d explained once.

Tiptoeing to the closet, she selected her favorite outfit, dressing swiftly and quietly. Casting a glance over her shoulder to make sure Esper hadn’t awakened, she donned multiple sets of undergarments. The straps of her bras rested across fresh bruises at her collarbone. Those, along with the bruises at her wrist, would be child’s play for Oolie to remedy.

He had before. It was the simple wreckage of hours of over-enthusiastic lovemaking.

Just the memory of that body, that energy, that ferocity, nearly broke Ilsa’s resolve. Her legs wobbled beneath her as she struggled into pants. Her fingers shook as she laced her boots.

But there was no time. No time to wake Oolie for a quick subdermal tissue regen. No time for reminiscing, for doubt, for anything that might crash this plan back into that inviting prison.

As she threw on a jacket, a rustle of sheets and a grunt made her whirl.

“Come back to bed,” Esper ordered groggily.

“Can’t sleep,” Ilsa said.

Eyes barely open a crack, Esper smiled. “I could make that an order, sailor.”

Ilsa tried to contextualize that as a joke, but the notion that Esper could enforce that command with magic terrified her. They’d tried it once. She’d agreed. Esper had held her utterly motionless with her magic as she’d pleasured her. After the panic attack that ensued, Esper had promised never to do it again.

But she could.

And the longer Ilsa remained, the more likely a total breakdown of those ironclad morals became.

Breezing over to Esper’s side of the bed, she kissed her deeply, lingeringly. She gingerly batted aside the encircling hands that would have drawn her back to bed fully dressed.

“I just need to be active. I’m heading down to the hangar to work on security for Helios.”

Esper mumbled something that sounded like “wear you out better tomorrow night,” then rolled over and curled among the sheets.

Outside in the corridor, Ilsa’s heart hammered. She forced her footsteps to a casual pace, but her thoughts raced ahead of her.

I did it. I really, REALLY did it!

She wasn’t in the clear just yet.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her datagoggles and donned them. There was a pause as the AI booted up and scanned the ship’s records for an update on what had happened. She knew this because that’s how she’d programmed it.

“Told you so,” were the first words Sudo said after catching up on the news.

“I deserve that,” Ilsa admitted, keeping her voice down. “But we’re done. You win. We’re getting out of here.”

Stopping in the kitchen, she grabbed a tub of jelly-infused peanut butter, a cartridge of kale bread, and a butter knife.

“Not the most nutritious of provisions.”

“I don’t have time for a shopping trip.” The longer she lingered here, the greater the risk of someone stopping in for a midnight snack. Kubu, in particular, would be a likely suspect.

She kept her plan on the move.

The hangar was lit. Safety measure. Just enough illumination to see her way around the clutter of mismatched vessels they’d either inherited or acquired along their adventures.

The best equipped vessel—with the highest black market resale value—was the Helios. There was no sign of anyone else around. She made a laser line for the crew ramp.

It opened as she approached. For a microsecond, she figured Sudo had gained access to the systems and prepared for their approach. Then she remembered the safeguards she’d installed to prevent anyone from gaining that kind of access remotely.

Wesley came out with a stretch like he’d been napping inside. “Heyo, girlfriend. Didn’t expect to run into anyone down here.”

“Hi. Me either,” she admitted.

He glanced at the makings of sub-standard peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and nodded sagely. “I get it.”

Ilsa chuckled nervously. “Yeah. You caught me. I had a hankering for some kiddie comfort food. Please don’t tell Esper. I don’t want her thinking I’m ruining my figure.”

“It’s OK,” Wesley assured her, laying a massive hand on her shoulder. She winced in anticipation, but the gentle touch didn’t hurt.

“Thanks,” Ilsa said, breathing a sigh of relief. “If you need a favor, hit me up.”

Wesley nodded. “If we ever see each other again, I’ll keep that in mind.”

Ilsa backed up a step. “Huh?”

“You’re headed for our best small craft at 0200 hours, carrying five days’ worth of food and wearing extra underwear beneath your shirt.”

Ilsa backed away. “I’m not… I just…”

“Need a hand?”

She blinked.

“I told you. It’s OK.” He stepped forward and relieved her of the tub of peanut butter. Without comment, he carried it into the transport.

“But why?” she asked.

“Esper’s not acting like herself lately,” Wesley said. He tapped the tip of her nose with a fingertip. “And you’re bearing the brunt of it. Nothing honorable about sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night but plenty of smart. Good luck.” He drew her into a giant hug.

It was all too much. Ilsa began sobbing.

“Time for that later,” Wesley scolded mildly. He released her. “Anything else you need from me?”

Lifting her datagoggles, she wiped her eyes. “I need to get one of the astral buoys aboard. Only way I’ll find help once I get away. Otherwise—”

“You’ll end up like Dr. Haa.”

Whether he meant it as simply stranded in the astral too deep to get back on her own or hunted down and murdered by a furious Esper, Ilsa couldn’t risk either one.

And so, carrying a device that Ilsa would have needed a grav sled to move, Wesley loaded the astral buoy into the ship and strapped it into a seat like an unconscious passenger.

“Come with me,” she implored as he exited the craft. Ilsa remained aboard, afraid to put so much as one foot back on the deckplates of the Errand of Mercy. She couldn’t risk second thoughts. “You see what’s going on here.”

Wesley’s lopsided smile reassured her. “No can do, little birdie. Esper’s always had a compass that points true north. If hers got a little stuck, it’s my duty to ride out the storm until she knocks it loose. Besides, I’ve dealt with petty tyrants for bosses before. Way worse than Esper’s little doldrums.”

Ilsa felt brave for a moment. She tested a theory Esper had floated in passing once. “You mean when you were in Omicron Squad.”

“Hollyworld directors,” he replied with a wink. Then, reaching into the ship, he thumped the control to raise the boarding ramp. Helios was ready to spirit her away to her next life.

Five minutes later, Ilsa was piloting through the deep purple astral on a course for Sol. There, she’d send out a distress call and take her chances with whoever was willing to come get her.

“One wizard to fish us out of the deep end,” Sudo said. “Then, no more dealing with magic.”

Ilsa sniffled through tears. “We’ll move to Phabian if we have to. But on a scale of one to never, I’m about an 11 for ever wanting to see a wizard again.”

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Books by J. S. Morin

Black Ocean

Black Ocean is a fast-paced fantasy space opera series about the small crew of the Mobius trying to squeeze out a living. If you love fantasy and sci-fi, and still lament over the cancellation of Firefly, Black Ocean is the series for you!

Read about the Black Ocean series and discover where to buy at: blackoceanmissions.com

Black Ocean: Astral Prime

Co-written with author M.A. Larkin, Black Ocean: Astral Prime hearkens back to location-based space sci-fi classics like Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Astral Prime builds on the rich Black Ocean universe, introducing a colorful cast of characters for new and returning readers alike. Come along for the ride as a minor outpost in the middle of nowhere becomes a key point of interstellar conflict.

Read about the Black Ocean: Astral Prime series and discover where to buy at: astralprimemissions.com

Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire

Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire follows the exploits of a pair of do-gooder bounty hunters who care more about saving the day than securing a payday. The series builds on the rich Black Ocean universe, centering on a couple of fan-favorites and introducing a colorful cast for new and returning readers alike. Fans of vigilante justice and heroes who exemplify the word will love this series.

Read about Black Ocean: Mercy for Hire and discover where to buy at: mercyforhiremissions.com

Twinborn Chronicles: Awakening

Experience the journey of mundane scribe Kyrus Hinterdale who discovers what it means to be Twinborn—and the dangers of getting caught using magic in a world that thinks it exists only in children’s stories.

Twinborn Chronicles: War of 3 Worlds

Then continue on into the world of Korr, where the Mad Tinker and his daughter try to save the humans from the oppressive race of Kuduks. When their war spills over into both Tellurak and Veydrus, what alliances will they need to forge to make sure the right side wins?

Read about the Mad Tinker Chronicles and discover where to buy at: twinbornchronicles.com

Robot Geneticists

Robot Geneticists brings genetic engineering into a post-apocalyptic Earth, 1000 years aliens obliterated all life.

These days, even the humans are built by robots.

Charlie7 is the oldest robot alive. He’s seen everything from the fall of mankind at the hands of alien invaders to the rebuilding of a living world from the algae up. But what he hasn’t seen in over a thousand years is a healthy, intelligent human. When Eve stumbles into his life, the old robot finally has something worth coming out of retirement for: someone to protect.

Read about all of the Robot Geneticists books and discover where to buy at: robotgeneticists.com

Sins of Angels

Co-written with author M.A. Larkin, Sins of Angels is an epic space opera series set 3000 years after the fall of Earth. With the scope of Dune and the adventurous spirit of Indiana Jones, it delivers a conflict that spans galaxies and rests on the spirit of brave researcher Professor Rachel Jordan. Follow the complete saga, and watch as the fate of our species hangs in the balance.

Read about Sins of Angels and discover where to buy at: sinsofangelsbooks.com

Shadowblood Heir

Shadowblood Heir explores what would happen if the writer of your favorite epic fantasy TV show died before the show ended—and the show was responsible. If you wonder what it would be like if an epic fantasy world invaded our world, this urban fantasy story might give you that glimpse.

Read about Shadowblood Heir and discover where to buy at: shadowbloodheir.com

About the Author

I am a creator of worlds and a destroyer of words. As a fantasy writer, my works range from traditional epics to futuristic fantasy with starships. I have worked as an unpaid Little League pitcher, a cashier, a student library aide, a factory grunt, a cubicle drone, and an engineer—there is some overlap in the last two.

Through it all, though, I was always a storyteller. Eventually I started writing books based on the stray stories in my head, and people kept telling me to write more of them. Now, that’s all I do for a living.

I enjoy strategy, worldbuilding, and the fantasy author’s privilege to make up words. I am a gamer, a joker, and a thinker of sideways thoughts. But I don’t dance, can’t sing, and my best artistic efforts fall short of your average notebook doodle. When you read my books, you are seeing me at my best.

My ultimate goal is to be both clever and right at the same time. I have it on good authority that I have yet to achieve it.

Connect with me online
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Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- No More Mr. Nice Girl
- Email Insiders
- Books by J. S. Morin
- About the Author