Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure Read online

  “Good thing,” said the other man, the one who looked part Eridani. “This commission is far too important to be entrusted to a child.”

  “She didn’t look like a child the last time I saw her,” the shorter man retorted. Again Miala had to force herself not to react, although right then she felt sick to her stomach.

  “My daughter is a decent programmer,” Lestan said. “In five years, maybe she’ll be in a place where she could take on something like this. Right now, though, she won’t be involved at all.”

  “She home?” the unpleasant one asked. “Maybe I’d like to ask her myself.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Lestan replied, and this time he seemed unable to hide the edge to his voice. Normally, Miala liked hearing him speak, because he had the smooth, cultured accent of his home world of Gaia, rather than the flatter timbres of those who’d been born out here on the fringes. In that moment, however, she feared that his tone only betrayed the nervousness and fear he was trying so desperately to hide.

  “Leave the daughter out of it,” the part-Eridani man cut in, sounding annoyed. “As her father pointed out, she’s not capable of handling this commission. But you, Fels,” he went on, words becoming brisk, “what do you think your timeline will be for the project?”

  “Shouldn’t take more than a week,” Lestan said, and Miala experienced a sinking sensation somewhere in her midsection. Her father was always being far too optimistic about when he thought he could deliver a project, a trait that inevitably resulted in both him and his daughter having to work around the clock to meet his employers’ unrealistic deadlines.

  “A week?” the man echoed, sounding impressed despite himself. “Well, it sounds as if we’ve come to the right person. Then let’s move forward. Two thousand as a deposit, and the rest upon completion.”

  His words were followed by a faint metallic clink, and Miala guessed he’d deposited the promised units on the shabby plastic table in the dining area. The vast majority of financial transactions in the galaxy took place electronically, but on Iradia, people preferred cold, hard cash. It was a hell of a lot harder to trace.

  “Thank you, Mor — ” her father began, then stopped himself. Clearly, he’d been about to say the man’s name, and cut the word short before Miala could overhear. She might be included in her father’s programming work when necessary, but he did everything in his power to keep the identities of his employers from her.

  “We’ll check in three days from now, see how the work is going,” the part-Iradian said. Then he added, the words carrying an ominous weight of their own, “We expect great things, Master Fels.”

  “You won’t be disappointed,” Lestan promised.

  No reply, but Miala could hear movement, followed by the tired whoosh of the front door. Its hydraulics had needed servicing forever.

  She hurried back to her chair and sat down, then returned her attention to the display in front of her. The subterfuge probably wouldn’t fool her father, but she figured she might as well pretend that she hadn’t been eavesdropping. Besides, he would wait a little bit before coming into her room, just to make sure the men were truly gone. That would give her some time to ease back into her work, even though this particular bit of coding was so simple, she could have done it four or five years ago. She’d only taken on the job because Nala had asked for help, and the elderly coffee house owner had slipped Miala free drinks on enough occasions that she figured helping out was the least she could do.

  As she’d thought, her father entered the room not quite five standard minutes later. Since there was no place else to sit down, he took a seat on the bed.

  “I suppose you heard all that.”

  She didn’t see the point in lying. For too long, it had been just Lestan and her. They didn’t keep a lot of secrets from each other…except the ones that might get them into trouble. “I did. They sounded like a couple of choice specimens.”

  “The one isn’t too bad.” Lestan paused there, as if he knew there wasn’t a single thing he could say to defend the shorter of his two visitors.

  “I suppose.” Miala swiveled her chair partway so she could face her father. He looked back at her with a sort of tired acceptance, and it seemed to hit her then. Lestan had always been there, the one fixed object in her universe, but for the first time she really noticed the gray in his hair, which had long ago overtaken the original dark brown, and the worry lines around his eyes. Sometime during the past few years he’d slipped into middle age, and only now was she beginning to realize what a toll living on this world had taken on him. Because he looked so weary, she bit back what she’d been about to say, that he needed to be more discriminating in his choice of commissions, no matter what their financial situation.

  He truly believed they had no other choice.

  Tempering her own dismay, Miala went on, “At least it’s just a standard data security setup, right?”

  Her father let out a sigh, then ran a hand through his hair. It needed cutting, and stuck out in all directions. The effect wasn’t comical, though, but instead only served to intensify the aura of weariness that surrounded him. “Not exactly.”

  Despite herself, Miala’s voice sharpened. “Not exactly how?”

  “There’s more than one facility involved. And the person paying for the commission wants a layered system.”

  Of course he did. Not that these crime lords didn’t have a lot to hide, but still. Building the sort of electronic fortress they all seemed to require took time, and time was the one thing Miala and Lestan didn’t have, thanks to his overly optimistic assessment of how long this would all take.

  Well, she’d pulled all-nighters before. And they did have two thousands units of actual cash sitting there in the flat with them, which meant the rent would be paid and the refrigeration unit could be stocked again. She hadn’t really been looking forward to yet another evening meal of leth, a cheap grain-based dish usually relegated to breakfast fare and the only thing they’d been able to afford for the past few days.

  “All right,” Miala told her father. “Then I suppose we’d better get to work.”

  * * *

  Thank God she actually had inherited her father’s facility with computers. Sometimes Miala wondered what Lestan would have done if it turned out that she’d gotten more from her mother genetically than just her red hair, and didn’t have the skill to replicate her father’s efforts. Would he have kept on trying to teach her the tricks of his trade, whether or not she had the talent for it?

  As with so many other topics that skirted her parents’ past, Miala had never worked up the nerve to ask her father that question. He never spoke of her mother; the few tidbits Miala had gleaned over the years were due entirely to listening to neighborhood gossip. Apparently, even in as jaded a town as Aldis Nova, it was something to take all your husband’s money and disappear off-world, leaving him with an infant daughter.

  But since Miala had never known her mother, she couldn’t really miss her. Occasionally she’d wonder if there was anything about her own looks or speech or mannerisms that might be similar, besides her hair, but again, she knew better than to ask. Lestan Fels was a mild man, but prying into his past was one of the surest ways to arouse his slow-burning anger.

  The job was just that, a job. Harder than some, not as tricky as others. If they’d been given a full two weeks to work on it, or, even better, an actual standard month, Miala might have said she even found the task enjoyable. Numbers and code were a lot easier to deal with than people, after all. You knew how they were going to react. Plug this formula in here, get that result over there. Oh, occasionally something would blow up, but again, tracing the problem back to the original input would usually give you a solution.

  Too bad real life was a whole lot messier.

  Its current messiness was a direct result of not having enough time. She knew better than to reproach her father for that, though. They’d had this argument several times in the past, and his response was always
the same: “You don’t know these people the way I do.”

  It was a truth she had to acknowledge, although she didn’t like it very much. Maybe if she hadn’t lately been engaged in the mildest of flirtations with young Captain Malick, who’d recently been posted to the Gaian Defense Fleet’s station here in Aldis Nova, Miala might have felt differently about the corruption that powered the place…and the way she’d gotten sucked into it because of her father’s activities.

  Her father didn’t like her connection with Captain Malick, tenuous as it might have been. Of course he wouldn’t; Lestan Fels had dealings with some very questionable individuals. He justified the work and the people who paid him by saying all he did was write programs. It wasn’t as if he was hired muscle, paid to break heads in alleyways or take out business rivals with a well-timed pulse bolt. Miala still thought the services he performed inhabited a very gray area, but since she didn’t have the freedom to leave, she mostly kept her protests to herself.

  Still, she couldn’t help but experience a sinking sensation as she built their unknown client’s system piece by piece and wondered how they could possibly get it all done on time. She’d stay up tonight, and tomorrow as well, but any more sleep deprivation than that, and she had a feeling that she’d end up with her face planted right into her keyboard.

  It was very quiet. Their neighborhood was shabby, but still one of the more peaceful sections of the city. Its inhabitants worked at the town’s bars and restaurants, or in the warehouses and factories that stored and processed the precious moon-moth silk that brought Iradia most of its income. At this time of night, if people weren’t at work, then they were sleeping, trying to store up their energy for another day laboring away in the desert world’s blistering heat.

  For some reason, though, Miala could feel the skin on the back of her neck crawl. A shiver went over her. Stupid, because her room was uncomfortably warm, even at just past midnight. Their landlord kept promising to service the cooling system, but he never did, so mostly what blew through the vents was barely processed hot air.

  The numbers on the screen in front of her blurred, and she blinked. Maybe it was time to take a break. A cold glass of water from the refrigeration unit might help to combat the heat, which was something she couldn’t seem to get used to, even though she’d never experienced anything else, had no idea what a world whose average daytime temperatures were below forty degrees Celsius would even feel like.

  Miala pushed her chair away from the worktable where she sat, then got up and headed to the kitchen. It wasn’t much, just the refrigeration unit, the dish sanitizer, and a tired old convective oven, all bordered by plastic countertops that had begun to delaminate years ago. Despite the dilapidated surroundings, the hum of the fridge calmed her a little. Silly, she knew. She wasn’t the type to jump at shadows. There were far too many of those on Iradia.

  She glanced over at the door to her father’s room. Shut, of course. He claimed that any noise distracted him, so Miala was used to tiptoeing around when he worked, and forget about knocking if she needed something. Long ago she’d learned to fend for herself unless it was a dire emergency.

  The water soothed her dry throat. She’d read about worlds that were mostly water, had seen holos of them, but even so, she couldn’t quite imagine what that would be like to see water stretching out free and blue on every side, for the air to be thick with its moisture, instead of so dry that it made your skin feel as if it had been stretched across your bones like the hide on a drum.

  Maybe one day, she thought. With the balance of what’s due us, and if Lestan can get another commission that pays as well —

  She cut herself off there. Now she was starting to sound just like her father. It was always the next score, the next job. One day the payoff would come that would get them away from Iradia and the long, hot, desperate days.

  Problem was, that day never did seem to come.

  From behind her, Miala heard the faint whoosh of the front door opening. She startled slightly, then realized it had to be her father coming back into the flat. Sometimes Lestan Fels would walk the neighborhood at night to clear his head, to enjoy a brief few moments when the temperatures dipped to something more tolerable. No one ever bothered him because he had nothing worth stealing.

  She turned, about to ask if he wanted a glass of water after his walk. Only that wasn’t her father advancing toward her, but the short, swarthy man who’d come to visit earlier that morning. The overhead light in the kitchen was just bright enough to reveal the glitter in his close-set dark eyes.

  Her first impulse was to scream, but what would that do? They didn’t own any weapons, unless you counted the dull knives in the kitchen drawer. And while her father could hold his own against any programmer she’d ever heard of, she knew his skills didn’t extend to hand-to-hand combat, so she doubted he would be of much help. Right then she could only thank God or whatever power guided the universe that she’d been working and was still dressed, rather than wearing the light knit shorts and sleeveless top that was her usual sleeping attire.

  Willing herself to remain calm, she crossed her arms and stared at the intruder. “It’s a little late for a business call, don’t you think?”

  The question seemed to puzzle him. He looked at her, taken aback for a second or two, before he recovered himself and said, “I just wanted to talk.”

  “‘Talk’?” she repeated. “Kind of a strange hour of the night to talk.”

  The man grinned at her. He did have good teeth, straight and white, but even that asset wasn’t enough to make him remotely attractive. “It’s nice and cool outside. Why don’t we take a walk?”

  Her pulse began to accelerate, but Miala forced in a breath and told herself not to panic. At least he was talking, instead of coming for her and dragging her outside by brute force. She couldn’t allow herself to glance at the door to her father’s room, because she worried if he tried to interfere, he’d end up hurt or worse. All the same, she was surprised he hadn’t come out to investigate, considering the smallest noise was usually enough to make him tell her she needed to be quiet while he worked.

  “I’d better stay,” she said carefully. While her father had lied and said she wouldn’t be doing any of the programming on this particular job, Miala didn’t see a problem with trying to make it sound as if she was indispensable in her own way. “My father usually asks me to bring him something to drink or make him a snack when he’s working. What if he comes looking for me and I’m not here? It’ll break his concentration — and that’ll put him behind. I’m sure your boss wouldn’t like that.”

  The stranger regarded her for a moment with narrowed eyes, clearly weighing what she’d just told him. Then his shoulders lifted. “We won’t be gone long. He’ll never notice.”

  “But — ”

  Her protest was cut off as he crossed the meter or so that separated them and took her by the arm. His whisper came harsh in her ear. “You wouldn’t want to do something that would disturb him, would you?”

  That was just the problem. Even the conversation they’d just shared, spoken as it was in more or less hushed tones, should have been enough to bring him out to the living room, complaining that they were making an unholy racket. Getting interrupted while he worked was about the only thing that could make him angry — well, that and asking about her mother. That he hadn’t emerged already worried Miala more than she wanted to admit.

  Worse, fear of the stranger thrummed along her veins. She wasn’t naïve enough to pretend she didn’t know what he wanted. Aldis Nova had plenty of dark alleys, quiet corners where anything could happen. About the most she could hope for was that he wouldn’t kill her afterward.

  Something hard and cold pressed into her side. She swallowed.

  “You just come with me, and he won’t have to know anything. No one will have to know anything. You play nice, I’ll play nice. Okay?”

  Since she didn’t trust herself to speak, she could only nod. The stran
ger dragged her toward the door, pistol grinding into her waist the entire way. Maybe she should have screamed. It was remotely possible that her father could have done something to defend her. What, exactly, she didn’t know, but wasn’t that what fathers were supposed to do?

  Go along for now, she told herself. This guy obviously isn’t all that smart — maybe you can get away while he’s distracted or something.

  Right.

  But since having a pulse pistol blast a hole in her stomach sounded even worse than letting this man do as he willed, she kept quiet as he pulled her outside. The night breeze now felt pleasantly warm, rather than oppressively hot, but Miala was in no position to enjoy it. If only this part of town had a pub or restaurant — anything that might still be open at this hour. That way, it was possible someone might see her. But the streets were deserted, illuminated faintly by the light of a single moon, with not even a glimpse of the scavenger reptiles that usually flicked their way from sheltered spot to sheltered spot as they looked for food.

  The stranger was quiet as well, guiding her along with an inexorable pressure on her arm. Miala had no idea what his destination might be. Some seedy hostel where no one would bother to see why she was screaming? Or would he not even make the effort to go that far, but instead find an isolated corner that suited him, and take her there?

  I will scream, she thought then. I’ll scream and scream, even if no one is around to hear me, and I’ll knee him so hard he won’t be able to piss for a week. And then I’ll run.

  Brave words. Whether she’d have the courage to do such a thing when the time came, she had no idea.

  Miala had her answer soon enough, because after being hauled along for several blocks or so, the pistol in her side the entire time, the stranger pulled her into an alley where even the dim moonlight couldn’t reach. In a way, maybe that was good. Maybe this would be easier if she couldn’t see his face.