The Star Pirate's Folly (3 page)

Bee nodded, only half-believing him.

“Wonderful,” he said again and released his grip. “First
things first, let’s find you a room so you can get cleaned up.”

Bee followed him to an elevator. While they waited for it to
arrive Hargrove began mumbling to himself, nodding his head, squinting, and blinking
rapidly. He seemed to be looking at something she couldn’t see. He must have
been wearing display lenses too.

She’d learned to pick out the people who wore them while
trawling the streets for easy marks. People distracted by the overlay from the
lenses often paid less attention to their surroundings, so Bee would trail
shoppers on their way home and wait for an opportunity to lighten their load.

When the elevator chimed its
arrival Hargrove ushered her inside. After going up a few
floors the
doors opened again and they stepped into a hallway
.
They walked to the last room on the left and Hargrove pointed to a yellow eye
symbol next to the door with a tiny lens in the center.

“Bio locks,” he said. “Look at the
eye for me and say
register
.”

Bee looked at the eye, said the word,
and a green light winked on above the handle.

“There, the room is yours. Just
look at the eye when you need inside, say ‘unlock,’ and it’ll unlock the door
for a few seconds.”
Hargrove opened the door
for her and inspected the room from the doorway. “Not much to look at, but
consider it yours until I say otherwise.”

Bee stood just beyond Hargrove’s
reach and felt for the reassuring touch of the sheathed two-inch knife she kept
clipped inside her waistband. It was Janey’s once.

While Hargrove looked over the
room Bee tugged her shirt up and let it fall between the knife’s hilt and her
hip. He didn’t seem the type, but she wasn’t about to get stupid. Not after
everything. She hurried inside, keeping the knife hidden under her arm.

“I’ll come back in an hour to show you around. Don’t make a
mess,” he called as he shut the door behind her.

Bee pulled her shirt back over the knife and breathed a
small sigh of relief. Everything looked so tidy, especially the bed with its
sheets tucked in all flat and perfect. She couldn’t remember the last time
she’d slept in a real bed. Bee knelt and ran a palm over the carpet. Soft.

Janey would be so jealous.

In the bathroom Bee brought her hands to her face and
inhaled the fruity scent of the soap she’d used to wash off the jam. Lines of
dirt and grime remained in the grooves of her skin and under her nails—that
would take some scrubbing—but they
smelled
clean. She could get used to
the Midtown. Easy access to food and a safe, clean place to sleep at night was
a welcome relief from the daily grind against hunger.

Find him,
Mother said.

“I know,” Bee groaned. “I know, I know.”

Once Mother got going she didn’t stop. Ever since she died, her
voice had lingered on, whispering in Bee’s ear to help find the man who killed
her, the man with sky-blue eyes. Over the years, Bee had to learn when to
ignore her and when to listen—sometimes Mother could be a bit paranoid. But
that little voice had saved her more than once.

Kill him.

“I will, Mother.”

Bee tuned
Mother’s whispers out while she undressed. Plenty of time to clean up before
Hargrove returned. After she tapped the control pad for the shower, hot water
fell in neat streams to the drain below.

Bee
held her hands under the shampoo nozzle and it squirted some fragrant crimson
goo onto her palms. As she lathered it in she smelled berries. Something
familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She still didn’t truly believe she was
taking a hot shower in her own private bathroom. It felt… rich. As she bathed, Bee
wondered how much the room would have cost her—and how long Hargrove would let
her stay.

He’d
said two weeks, but if she screwed up she’d be back on the streets. She’d do
everything she could to keep her little room. Any kind of work Hargrove gave
her she planned to do without complaint. Cleaning toilets, scrubbing
floors—whatever he asked of her. Anything was better than the roiling waves of
panic she felt every day.

On the
streets she had no future, only the present. Only her immediate needs. Bee had nobody
to look out for her. No one to help when the dusters came looking for fresh
bodies. Janey helped her for a while, but that friendship didn’t last long. Bee
swore she’d never live like the slave Janey turned into, her brain rotted from
that horrible poisonous dust. It wasn’t Janey’s fault. She couldn’t help
herself after the dust took root. Neither could Mother. Nobody could.

Overlookers
called the stuff “dust,” even though Bee knew it wasn’t exactly. It was really made
using spores from a fungus that grew out in the jungle beyond the city’s
dome—she’d seen the public service announcements enough times to remember. In
the wild, the fungus would wait until an animal came near them, then puff out a
cloud of the spores. The animal would become calm, lie down, and allow itself
to be slowly covered and consumed.

In the
same way, using the spores on people made them docile and completely willing to
follow any command. This was the main draw of the dusting attacks. It was an
almost everyday occurrence in Overlook City when Mother got taken. Gangs of
these dusters, usually people from the outer colonies or the asteroid belt,
manufactured the dust in secret labs out in the jungle. Then they’d smuggle it
in and use it to make people do things they’d never do otherwise.

Bee saw
news reports detailing the victims’ devotion to following orders while under
the influence of the dust. People would empty their bank accounts or steal
things for the dusters—even kill other people. And they’d be happy doing it,
whatever they were asked.

A
common method of infection was for the duster to ask their mark a question,
carefully wafting the spores into the victim’s face, forcing them to inhale it.
Before the victim even knew what was happening, they were in the grip of “the
devil’s dust.” It caused chaos. Once the spores took root they did irreversible
damage to the brain, even after the infection cleared. Months after being
dosed, the victims would still obey any order given to them. Mother was just
one more.

Bee
lost everything that day. One minute she and Mother were walking through a
crowd together, hand in hand. The next, Mother was speaking to a man with
sky-blue eyes and dropped Bee’s hand. Left her in the middle of all those
people, right then and there. Bee had never felt terror like that before. She
tried to follow them, but quickly got lost in the city. Eventually Bee ran into
someone who called the police and they took back to her home on Overlook
Station.

They
found Mother the next day.

Bee was
too young at the time to really understand what they did, but she found those
details later in the police report. They used Mother all day. For fun. For
money. For the hell of it, maybe. Bee didn’t know or care about their
motivations. All that mattered to her was they did it to Mother.

Over the
course of that day, Mother had made a series of credit transfers to different
accounts, which she did seemingly of her own free will. The money to pay for
their home on Overlook Station vanished. With space so tight up there, Bee and
her mother quickly found themselves booted onto Surface, suddenly homeless like
so many others.

Overlook
City was packed with folks from beyond the belt looking to escape the constant
threat of pirate raids. The resources of the local government were stretched
thin with so many residents—more than the city had originally been built for.
Overlook was supposed to be one of hundreds of dome cities on Surface, but when
the interstellar gates were destroyed during the rebellion those plans went up
in smoke. Now there were barely twenty domes left on the whole planet—and half
those were built after the war. Bee and her mother fell through the cracks like
many others.

Mother
survived for four months on the city streets before she died filthy and diseased.
Her body was used to the comparative safety, comfort, and cleanliness of Overlook
Station, and was in no way prepared for the uncaring manner in which she was
cast aside. Bee was too young to do anything but stay at Mother’s side and cry.
During her last week of life, Mother ran a high fever that seemed to burn right
through the fog crippling her mind. Mother pulled Bee in close and forced a
hoarse command from her ravaged body.

Find
him, kill him,
Mother said.

After
that, the fever must have roasted her brain because she would just mumble and
babble—to herself, to nobody. Fantasies of torture and vengeance tumbled from
her cracked lips, Bee listening wide-eyed and rapt to every word. Mother's last
words set a course for the rest of her young daughter’s life:
Find him. Kill
him. Take his life. Take everything.

And
then it was all hunger and survival. Bee tried not to think about the things
she’d seen, the things she’d been forced to do to keep on clawing toward
another miserable day. It was the fire in her gut that kept her going, stoked
by Mother’s last words.
And now she finally had some solid ground to
stand on.

She
would find the man with sky-blue eyes and make him pay.

***

Shortly
after Bee’s shower, Hargrove returned for his promised tour. Three polite raps
at the door announced his presence and Bee opened it to find the boisterous man
with a folded magenta uniform that matched his own.

“For my
newest employee.” He held the uniform out for her. “Go on, I’ll give you some
time to change. Meet me out here when you’re finished.”

“Oh,
I’m starting now?” Bee asked, surprised. “Be right back.”

After
showing her the basic layout of the hotel, Hargrove brought her to the kitchen
and left her in the care of the head chef, Gunther—a bald-headed, thickly accented
gorilla of a man. She spent the afternoon scrubbing pots and pans in hot soapy
water. The guy to her right rinsed them off after Bee cleaned them, and the
conveyor belt kept bringing more dishes to clean.

Bee
took immense satisfaction in seeing just how pristine the dishes looked after
they came in so messy. She wasn’t used to things being clean, so what most of
the other employees seemed to consider a chore was a complete novelty to her. Being
in the kitchen thrilled her, even if she was only at the outskirts of things.
The clattering of metal and plates, the incomprehensible orders booming from
Gunther, and the general chaos of making all the food was exciting and
mystifying to her all at once.

After a
while, Gunther barked something at her and shooed her off the dishwashing line
to the kitchen’s exit. Someone else took her place. She stood there confused
for a moment, thinking maybe she had done something wrong, when Hargrove
appeared.

“Gunther
tells me you’ve done well,” he said.

Bee
shrugged. “Guess so. I’ve never really done this before. And I couldn’t really
understand him, so I’m glad he thought I did okay.”

Hargrove
laughed. “Well in any case, your shift is over for the day. As long as you
don’t cause me trouble you’re free to do as you like now. Just come by my
office in the lobby tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Thanks,
Hargrove.”

“Of
course.”

“No, I
mean it,” Bee insisted. “You helped me today. Most people wouldn’t have done
that. I’ll remember it.”

Hargrove
smiled as he turned to leave. “Goodnight child, enjoy your room. Gunther was
very impressed with your work today—keep it up and the job is yours again
tomorrow.”

By the
time Bee turned sixteen, she had risen from soapy obscurity in the kitchens to
the respectable rank of concierge. Hargrove and the other staff taught her
well, and as Bee learned she made herself more and more useful around the
hotel. She made herself indispensable to Hargrove, always worried if she didn’t
do enough she’d find herself back on the streets again. After her first few weeks
on the job, Hargrove helped her set up a bank account and paid her instead of
just letting her stay in the hotel.

Ever
since Bee could remember, business had been, as Hargrove remarked from time to
time, regrettably slow. Piracy was rampant in the trading and travel routes
between the planets, and fewer traders and travelers meant fewer guests. The
regulars they did have were kind, generous, and loyal for the most part—but
they were becoming more scarce as the years passed.

Despite
the hotel’s seemingly inevitable slide into failure, Bee felt she had a firm
grasp on her life for the first time. She steadily nurtured a nest egg of
credits, fed with whatever she could manage from her hotel wages. She was
comfortable and safe for the first time in recent memory. But Bee didn’t waste
time enjoying herself. As she worked, she kept up her hunt for the man who
orphaned her.

After
two years working at the Midtown Hotel, life became a blur of familiar monotony.
Bee worked, ate, slept when she needed it, and continued her fruitless
investigation into her mother’s death. One of her daily tasks was checking
online bounty boards for mugshots. The most important detail she retained was
his face. He had pale skin, short black hair, and those striking sky-blue eyes.
Unmistakable.

Those
eyes haunted her just like Mother’s voice, leering at her in her dreams. Glancing
at her from the shadows. Bee spent a lot of time holding her memory of the
man’s face in her head, burning it in so she’d never forget. She drew his face
in computer programs, spent hours trying to get all the details right. If she
lost his face she’d never find him.

In the
months after securing her job at the Midtown Hotel, Bee tried requesting old
police records from the city, hoping the man had been through their system.
Nothing. Then she tried looking for any files containing her mother’s name,
thinking they might have a police report from the day of the attack. But there
was no report at all made in her mother’s name.

Bee
found out from bank records that the bastard had gotten Mother to sign marriage
certificates and fill out all kinds of official forms before he did anything.
According to the police it was all somehow disgustingly legal. That was why it
was so easy for him to bleed their accounts dry. He knew just what he needed,
and he’d done everything through various fake identities to cover his tracks.

Bee
combed through all the new bounties in the system individually—usually it was a
few dozen every day. After that she would just flick through the old ones,
planning to go as far back as the records did. Some nights she fell asleep this
way, and in the morning she’d wake up to the slack-jawed stare of some outer-belt
meathead.

Most bounties
were easily dismissed, but every once in a while a face would make her heart
jump. Then she’d check into each promising lead and find they’d never been to Surface,
or they were too young, or too old, or whatever. Amazing what she could find
out about people online. Everywhere they went, people left trails. Eventually
she had a pretty long list going of white males with black hair and blue eyes
that were definitely not the man she was looking for.

***

One morning, an old man with a
thick beard and a serious drinking problem stumbled into the hotel bar with his
luggage and didn’t leave. Normally as a concierge, Bee would have been helping
people to their rooms or standing behind the front desk bored out of her mind,
but on this particular day she’d been asked to cover for the bartender after he
dropped a bottle of lotus wine and sliced his hand open cleaning it up. Not
long after that, the old man entered.
She must
have poured him nearly a dozen drinks already, and each time he ran out—

“Another,” Slack Dog said, and pounded
his empty mug down.

He fished a black coin out of his
pocket and rapped it against the bar while Bee refilled his mug. She waved away
the coin—it was the third time he’d tried to pay with them. People on the Core
worlds did everything in credits.

“It’s on your tab, sir,” she
reminded him. Old ex-captains always liked to be called
sir
. “Credits,
remember.”

“Ah, mm-hmm,” he said, clearly
ignoring her words as he watched her fill the mug. “Lovely.”

The deep red-purple beverage, lotus wine, was the local
intoxication of choice, deriving its properties from a psychoactive fruit
called the lotus which grew exclusively on Surface. Lotus wine gave a pleasant
body buzz, mild euphoria, and a sense of relaxation. Slack Dog slid the mug in
front of himself with bony fingers and slurped the drink with a half-lidded
look of bliss. Three bottles he’d gone through!

Luckily, Hargrove had stocked up on lotus wine in
preparation for the upcoming Fated Lovers Festival. Every five years, cities
all across the planet celebrated the approach of a pair of comets with boring
official scientific names Bee could never remember. Everyone she knew just called
them Orpheus and Eurydice, the Fated Lovers. She liked that better.

The two comets had shared nearly the same orbit for hundreds
of years, but this time around things were supposed to change. The comet in the
lead, Orpheus, was projected to orbit safely around Lux; but Eurydice would
plow straight into the inferno and be absorbed by Lux.
It
was just like some old story from Earth and everyone always raved about the
celebration. This would be the first time Bee might get to enjoy the
festivities.

A loud belch from Slack Dog
interrupted her thoughts. “Used to be a privateer captain, y’know,” he said. “The
starship
Wanderlust
. A fickle ship, she was—”

“Yes, sir,” Bee said, nodding.
“You told me all about her.”

“Oh, howbout that. Did I tell
y’about Cap’n Slack Dog’s Deep-Space—”

“—Deep-Space Adventuring Company,
yeah,” she said. “Fantastic idea.”

He burped again and made a grunt
of recognition, glancing over his shoulder at the entrance to the bar. He’d
been looking for someone all day, checking anyone who walked through the doors.

“You want anything to eat?” she
asked.

His eyes shot open wide, spindly
red veins stark against the whites.

“To eat? Yes. Food.”

Slack Dog rummaged through his
pocket for more of his odd black coins and scattered several across the counter
before Bee could protest again.

“Food please,” he said.

Bee suppressed a sigh and tapped
an order into the projection display in front of her, suspecting the
intoxicated man didn’t much care what he was served. She slid most of the coins
back to Slack Dog, but left two for herself in absence of a tip; Slack Dog was
apparently not used to the custom. She wondered where the inky black coins
might have come from. They were all uniform in size and color but they didn’t
seem to weigh enough, which puzzled her as she rolled them in her fingers. A
thin silver band wrapped around the edge of the coin.

Slack Dog noticed her examining
the coins.

“It’s all real,” he said. “G’head,
take a bite.”

“Oh, it’s just I’ve never seen
these before. We do everything in credits here. Where are they from?” she
asked.

“Past the belt,” he said, and
tossed another two coins down. “That’s for you, darlin’. Lemme know if you see
any spacefarin’ types come in—anyone looks like they ain’t from the Core
somewhere. Be a couple more in it for you tonight.”

She nodded and pocketed the coins
but didn’t ask him to elaborate. Slack Dog stumbled out of the bar. Bee tried
to ask if he wanted his food brought up to his room, but her efforts proved
futile—he moved with the determined, wayward gait of a drunkard on his way to
bed. She’d just bring it up to him when it was ready. That way she could just
leave it at his door if he didn’t answer.

“Order up!” came a shout from Gunther
in the kitchen.

Bee pushed the door behind the bar
open, grabbed the two plates of food she had ordered for Slack Dog, and placed
them on a wheeled trolley. She took two chrome lids and covered the plates.
Time for room service.

“Hey Gunther,” she called to the
chef. “I’m gonna take this up to 302. Bar’s empty.”

Gunther gave an unintelligible
yell of confirmation.

After a brief elevator ride, Bee
arrived on the third floor and pushed the trolley out in front of her toward
room 302. The door was already open. Bee tapped a knuckle against it, peeked
inside.

“Mister, uh—Slack Dog?” she said.

No answer.

As she edged into the room she
heard him snoring and rolled her eyes. He’d fallen asleep with the door open.
Careless. She wheeled the trolley through the rest of the way. The snoring
emanated from the bathroom—when Bee glanced inside she saw Slack Dog passed out
on the toilet, pants puddled at his feet. His chin rested against his chest,
rising and falling with each breath.
Bee
stifled a laugh and whirled out of the room, leaving the trolley behind.

She shut the door behind her and
nearly plowed into a tall, square-jawed man in the hallway. He wore an
oversized brown trench coat and made no effort to move out of her space. For a
moment she thought she recognized his face. Then the man’s stench reached her
nostrils—stagnant sweat and something like pickled vegetables. A glint of metal
underneath his coat caught her eye—a black armored nullsuit.

“Can I help you?” she asked,
trying not to breathe. She didn’t think it was possible to stink through a suit
of armor.

“I’ll bet you can.” The man’s lips
parted in a lecher’s grin, and his beady brown eyes spent too much time looking
her up and down. “Full service, eh?”

Bee glared and crossed her arms.
Spacefarin’
types
, Slack Dog had said. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She
wished she still had the safety of the locked door between them. She’d dealt
with men like this before in her old life—but she’d stopped carrying Janey’s
knife during her shifts a long time ago.

“This room’s occupied,” she said.

“Oh, I was just looking for
something to eat,” he said. He leaned closer to her and drew in a deep breath
through his nose as he put his arm out to block her in. “I smelled something
delicious and savory. You wouldn’t know where I could find something like that,
would you?”

Bee gagged as he leaned closer,
waving his stink away from her face as she backed away as much as she could.
The muscles in her gut clamped tight as she retched and yelled, “Ugh, did you shit
yourself?”

Caught off guard, he backpedaled
as if she’d struck him. “Wh-what, no?”

Bee sidestepped out of the
doorway, well out of his reach, thumbed the button for the elevator without
looking, and kept her eyes locked on him. She knew his face. The doors slid
open with a chime.

The man stood outside Slack Dog’s
room, shaking his head with envy, leering at her chest and legs even in the
more or less formless magenta uniform. Bee committed his face to memory,
searching for defining characteristics—a chipped front tooth, crooked nose, and
a naked patch in one eyebrow from scarring. She’d seen that face somewhere
before. His eyes finally made it back up to hers and he straightened up a bit
when he saw the look on her face.

Bee grinned at him as the elevator
doors slid shut before he could move. She selected the ground floor and her
stomach dropped a bit as the elevator started with a slight jolt. She took a
deep, trembling breath. The Midtown had its share of shady customers from time
to time, but generally the clientele was pretty mellow.

She’d gotten used to the relative
safety of the hotel and felt a twinge of wounded pride. A few years ago if a
guy had gotten in her space like that she’d have been more than ready to defend
herself. But it had been weeks since she even set foot on the city streets. The
hotel had everything she needed, had become a kind of sanctuary for her.

First Slack Dog, and now the man
in the black nullsuit—outliers in the boring existence she’d come to enjoy. As
the elevator doors opened to the ground floor she resolved to find Hargrove.
The old bear had chased out belligerent guests before. She didn’t think it
would come to that, but worry gnawed away in her gut as she thought about the way
he wore that coat to hide his armor.