Except she didn’t trust anyone.

  “Yes, I am in trouble…and, I think it would be better if you didn’t know all the details. Let’s just say, I was angry at the way the Marine…Chuck…died, and I wasn’t willing to leave it be.” It wasn’t trust, not exactly, but she knew she wasn’t getting on Belstar unless she gave the captain something. And she had a strong impression of his character. It made sense to her, at least, that he and the Marine had been friends.

  The captain hesitated, and Andi could see his expression change slightly. Was it respect she was seeing, or at least something similar?

  “You wouldn’t leave it be?” A pause. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t want to know.” He looked at her again, clearly trying to size her up. “Well, Andi, every bit of sense I’ve got inside is telling me to send you on your way…”

  She felt her stomach tense. She had to get off Parsephon, and she had no idea how else she was going to manage it. If the captain sent her packing, she couldn’t see any other way out. The authorities may have bought the burned body scam she’d pulled off, but there were still thousands of images of her floating around. If she stayed for too long, someone was bound to take a closer look.

  Perhaps more importantly, even, she just had to get off of Parsephon. She detested the place. She’d have cast the whole miserable rock into its sun if she could have, and the idea of being stuck there, of missing her only chance at escape, was more than she could bear.

  But her near-panic was needless. The captain managed something of a smile as he continued, “…but, if old Chuck saw something in you, well, he always did have a good sense of people. And I do owe him. Big.” He hesitated again, staring at her intently. “Okay, go get your stuff and meet me back here in an hour. And, don’t make me wait. I’m already sure enough this is a hassle I don’t need…so don’t prove me right, or at least, don’t make it worse.” He shook his head as he looked at her. “We’ll be stuck here about a week waiting for our cargo, but my guess is, you’re probably better off laying low on Belstar than prowling around the Spacer’s District. Am I right?”

  “Thank you. And, yes. Definitely.” Her tone was emphatic, and sincere. Andi expected nothing from anyone, save perhaps grief, and whatever faults she had, ingratitude to someone who helped her wasn’t one of them. “Truly, thank you. And, I don’t need an hour. I’m ready now.”

  “What about your things?”

  She held up the small bag that had been slung over her back. It was an answer, one that didn’t need any words. The small sack held a change of clothes, a scrap of leather she’d taken from her old knife before she’d left it in the vehicle, and her favorite book. She’d wanted to take all the volumes in the Marine’s tiny library, but they were heavy and bulky, and she’d spent weeks running from one place to another.

  Those few things, save for the handful of coins left in the small bag on her waist, were all she cared about.

  “Anyplace you need to go, anyone you need to see? Anyone you’d like to say goodbye to? It may be a while before you’re back here.”

  Andi almost laughed. “No, nothing, no one.”

  “Are you sure? It may be quite some time before you see any of it again.”

  It’s going to be a lot longer than you think…

  She almost said what she was thinking, but then she held it back, concerned it would sound more obnoxious than she intended. She was never coming back to Parsephon, and if she remained on Belstar long enough for the ship to return, at least she had no intention of ever leaving the vessel and setting foot on the planet she’d learned to hate with almost unrestrained anger.

  “There is nothing here for me.” Everything good she’d had on Parsephon was gone, and all that remained, a few memories, would go with her wherever her travels took her.

  Those memories were very few indeed for sixteen years. Her remembrances of her mother, and of the Marine, for a few pleasant moments she could recall with each. And, as for the rest of Parsephon, the less said the better.

  “Okay, then come with me now. My guess is, the sooner we get you stashed out of sight, the better.”

  She didn’t answer, she just nodded. She knew the captain was taking a risk harboring her, and she knew he knew it. She could offer appreciation, but she figured doing everything possible to avoid trouble was a more useful gesture, a more sincere way to express her gratitude.

  Better for both of them.

  The captain looked her over again. “We’re going to have a few passengers on this run, a little extra income to cover expenses. What kind of cabin steward do you think we can make out of you?”

  * * *

  “Can I bring you anything else?” Andi stood just inside the cabin door, looking over at the man and the woman.

  “No, this will be fine for now, but do try to come more quickly the next time we hit the call button.” The woman’s words grated on her, each of them clawing at her ears, as if trying to awaken her anger. She’d probably have given the woman—and her equally arrogant traveling companion—a good scare at the least, and quite possibly a few scars by which to remember their trip, but for all her rugged life and her upbringing among some of humanity’s dregs, Andi Lafarge was not an ingrate. The captain had taken her in, gotten her off of Parsephon, and he’d treated her well enough in the six months she’d served aboard Belstar, even adding her to the crew roster and paying her what small amount he could afford from the bare sustenance revenues from his meager shipping contracts.

  She would not repay that kindness by upsetting his passengers, and causing more problems for him. However much she wanted to carve her initials into their faces.

  “I will make every effort possible.” A pause, mostly so she could bite down on her temper. “I will leave you for now, but please ring if you need anything more.”

  She slipped back out of the door, as quickly as possible, staring at the hatch, trying somehow to will it to close faster. Then, she let out the frown she’d been holding back.

  Frown? It was an outright scowl, and a nasty one at that.

  She disliked the two passengers because they were arrogant and condescending, but even more because they were posers. Booking passage on a small freighter like Belstar was hardly the first choice of the spacefaring elite. There were liners that plied the star lanes in obscene luxury, with prices to match. The people in stateroom two were there because that was all they could afford, and however much they shit on the freighter’s crew—and Andi, mostly, as their cabin steward—they were bargain travelers, plain and simple.

  It took all Andi had not to remind them of that fact. Hell, I killed a man who could have bought and sold both of you a million times over…

  She almost chuckled at the thought. She knew she shouldn’t draw so much satisfaction from killing, but now that she was away from the scene and out of immediate danger, she realized just how pleased with herself she was. The bastard had deserved to die, and laws that protected someone like him were not fit to be obeyed.

  In truth, Andi felt very little obligation to do what she was told, whether she was being bullied in some back alley or bludgeoned with laws passed in the middle of the night by corrupt politicians. She had a moral code, certainly, and she followed her own sense of fairness. But most politicians were so detached from morality and justice, she wondered why anyone heeded their diktats.

  Save only out of fear. Laws were imposed, almost always at gunpoint, whether directly or indirectly, and she was well aware of the dangers of ending up on their wrong side. She’d come a hair’s breadth from the scaffold already, and she was barely seventeen. She knew why people were subjugated by such laws, but she felt sorry for those who somehow believed in most of them.

  Andi hated the fact that Belstar often carried passengers. She understood why the captain took the fares, and she knew there wasn’t much choice, but she’d become accustomed to the crew, and she was as comfortable with them as she ever really was with anyone. If the four staterooms had been empty instead of occupied with difficult fools who were never happy with anything she did, she’d almost have enjoyed her time on Belstar. She had enough food, a climate-controlled environment, and freedom from most serious danger. That alone might have been paradise, but she had something else, too. A bed. A small cot, really, in the narrow back cabin that housed more than half of the crew. It was a top bunk, and she’d lain there many times now, listening to the rest of the crew complaining about the sparseness of Belstar’s comforts or the narrowness of its cots.

  Andi always smiled when she listened. She thought she had found heaven. She’d never had a bed, not for one night in her sixteen years, and to her, the thin, hard cot seemed the ultimate luxury imaginable. It was so foreign, so alien, that she’d found, for the first few weeks, at least, she’d been unable to fall asleep. She’d almost wandered off to find some floorspace somewhere, something that more closely matched what she was used to…but she’d never been able to tear herself away from the decadent comfort. It was inconceivable to leave her cot behind, and she’d lain there night after night, fitfully slipping in and out of sleep, immovable, as though her body was almost part of the dingy metal bunk, welded there, immobile.

  She’d quickly come to understand the realities of the freighter, and the ship’s ragged and haphazard economy. Belstar was typical for a small, individually owned ship. She couldn’t compete with the massive vessels of the large freight lines, nor with the luxurious liners that traveled back and forth across the Confederation’s heavily-traveled commerce lanes. So, she carried small cargoes, specialized shipments—occasionally ones straddling the line of legality—and she supplemented that revenue by carrying a few passengers. The four staterooms were small, but they were considerably more luxurious than the crew quarters.

  The captain owned Belstar, after a fashion, but the vessel carried a considerable mortgage, one that its freight runs barely covered after other expenses. Usually. Captain Hiram was wealthy, in a somewhat hazy and ephemeral way. The ship was worth more than he owed, usually. Assuming he sold in a good market, and that no massive repairs came up, and that he didn’t lose the ship to the bank after a series of bad runs.

  Hiram would retire comfortably, as long as he hung up his stars in the right port at the right time, when he could find a legitimate buyer for Belstar, one who could qualify to assume the ship’s mortgage, as he had done himself years before. Otherwise, he’d have little or nothing to show for his years of work. Andi had gathered that the captain had little in the way of conventional savings. Constant repairs and upgrades made Belstar somewhat of an ongoing cash drain, and the bank accounts that might have held his thin profits had proven to be theoretical in the face of the realities of owning and maintaining a spacefaring vessel.

  Belstar was his savings. Assuming he could sell out when he was ready.

  Andi had always been aware of the difficulty of life in the slums, of the crushing pressure on the poverty-stricken denizens of places like the Gut. Now, she saw something else, a man she once would have considered rich, privileged.

  But Captain Hiram was running every day, even as she always had, in his own way perhaps, and in somewhat more comfortable circumstances, but running, nevertheless. He struggled, with every trip, with every patched repair, and with every extra passenger he could book, to keep his head above water, and Andi respected him for it.

  She genuinely liked Hiram, and Belstar was a far better place to be than the Gut. But she’d come to realize, it wasn’t where she wanted to be. Where she needed to be. Grinding out credits, making one or two percent profit on a run—if nothing went wrong—that wasn’t what she’d left Parsephon to find.

  No, there was more out there, somewhere. She knew she’d find it one day, a new life, a place she could begin building her future. Her fortune.

  Then, one day, Captain Hiram took a different job, a longer one, and riskier, too. One designed to help him get a few credits ahead for once.

  One that would take Belstar—and Andi—someplace where fortunes were made.

  And where people died trying to make them.

  Chapter Eight

  Spaceport, Port Royal City

  Planet Dannith, Ventica III

  Year 299 AC

  “Are you sure, Andi?” Hiram didn’t sound surprised, in fact his tone suggested he’d expected just what Andi had told him. But the sadness was still there. “I will really miss you on Belstar. I know you don’t want to be a steward for the rest of your life, but maybe we could start training you in navigation.” Even as he spoke the words, it was clear he knew Andi was going to leave no matter what.

  “Captain, I can’t express to you my appreciation for what you did for me. If I can ever repay you, all you have to do is ask. But I’ve got things I need to do, and I can’t do them on Belstar.”

  And I’ve already figured out a lot more than you think about navigation, and piloting and engineering, too. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for my time on Belstar.

  Hiram looked like he was going to try again to convince her, but then she saw the resignation take hold. He’d come to know her, well enough she suspected, to realize she was ill-suited to spending years hauling routine cargoes.

  “I’m sorry to see you go, Andi. I took you in because I owed Chuck, but you never gave me reason to regret it. It was a pleasure having you as part of the crew, and I know the others will miss you as much as I do.”

  “Will you say goodbye to them for me, Captain?” He voice was a little shaky, the strength that almost always drove her failing for a moment. She had become part of the crew, and she knew it was cowardly to just disappear, to let Hiram tell them all she was gone. But she was afraid if she delayed any longer, she’d allow herself to be persuaded to stay. Dannith was her real chance to strive for something bigger, and if she let it pass by, there was no way to know when another opportunity would come.

  “I will, Andi…and good luck to you. Remember, go to the Shooting Star, and try to find Captain Lorillard of the Nightrunner. I used to run some of his contraband cargoes back in the day.” He paused, and he smiled at her. “You see, I wasn’t always as timid as I am now. Back when I was scraping up enough to payback the loan sharks who gave me the down payment for Belstar, I ran just about anything profitable.” He hesitated again and then added, “Age can take something out of you if you’re not careful, Andi. Keep your eye out for that…because even you’ll get old someday.”

  Andi just nodded. She was seventeen, young by almost any standards, but a lifetime spent scavenging in the Gut did something to wear away youth.

  “I haven’t seen Jim Lorillard in years, but tell him I sent you, and maybe he’ll take you on his crew.” Hiram paused, clearly struggling to hold back his emotion. “And, be careful. Things are rough out here.” The captain knew she’d been trained by the Marine, and before that, he understood she’d survived alone on the streets of the Gut. That she’d faced and defeated deadly adversaries. She was capable of taking care of herself, and Andi had no doubt her friend realized that. But there was still concern in his voice.

  “I will find him, Captain.” She stood and looked at him for a few seconds. Then, she leaned forward and hugged him. “And, thank you again, for all you have done for me. I will never forget it. Or you.”

  She turned, and even as she did, she felt pressure behind her eyes, tears welling up. She hurried her pace, determined to get farther away before the water escaped and ran down her face. She knew what she had to do, but that didn’t make it easy to leave the safest environment she had ever known…and the third person in her life who’d been kind to her.

  She just couldn’t turn her back on the opportunities the Badlands offered.

  Those opportunities hadn’t registered entirely, not when Hiram had first told her Belstar was going to set course for an alternate destination, a change from the milkruns that constituted the freighter’s normal route. Moving small loads of routine cargoes through the heart of the Confederation had become too unprofitable, at least to pay the bank and the crew, and have anything at all left over. Hiram was a risk averse captain, and the run to Dannith was a gamble of sorts, but one that offered the potential of two or three times normal delivery rates.

  Ten times or more if Belstar’s captain was willing to stash some contraband old tech in his ship’s hold.

  Andi wasn’t sure how much financial pressure was weighing down on Hiram, or whether the captain was prepared to step clearly over the line into outright illegality, or if he was just hoping to benefit from frontier rates on more standard freight.

  But she knew the answer for herself.

  She’d killed already, multiple times, and she’d fled from a world to escape from the law. She’d knelt beside her mother’s body, looking down through a mask of tears, and again next to the Marine who’d taken her in and taught her almost everything she knew. She had nothing but resentment for those in positions of authority, people she’d only seen abuse their power. They could drop dead as far as she was concerned, and they could take their rules and their laws and shove them.

  She didn’t think of herself as evil, nor even criminal, and she followed her own code, with significantly more consistency than she’d seen laws enforced. She’d long ago promised herself she’d always be loyal to her friends, and she’d tried to do just that. But she had no respect for burdens she knew existed to keep people like her down.

  Dannith was on the frontier, the planet closest to the region of space known as the Badlands. There were hundreds of systems, thousands, in that dead and haunted stretch of space, the ghostly remnants of imperial worlds, once prosperous and massively populated…before they were destroyed in the Cataclysm.

  The people who’d lived on those planets were long dead, their cities reduced to ruins and dust. But in the debris, covered over by resurgent jungles and deserts, remained imperial technology. Bits and pieces of various instruments and machinery, creations of mankind that were now well beyond the understanding of humanity’s survivors.