“We’ll probably be free and clear by tonight,” Matt said, countering his brag with a shorter time frame.

  “Impressive,” the thug said. “You must have some great connections.”

  “Oh, we do.”

  The security guards were over by the stiff corpse of the woman who had jumped three floors to grab the bag from my shoulder. Medical workers loaded her onto a floating gurney to take her away from the concourse. As soon as they were done and the gurney started drifting away, the guards came for us.

  “You,” they said, pointing to the thug. “Identification. Slowly, or…”

  They didn’t need to elaborate on the threat. Our new thug friend didn’t want to lose his head. He stood up and slowly reached into his coat, producing a smaller slab like the one Keep had lifted from the courier.

  And taken, I suddenly realized. Damn it, he was sneaky.

  The guard pulled out his own device and accepted the transferred ID. He stared at the thug for a few seconds. “Take Mister Bienvenuto to holding. I’m sure his lawyer will be here soon.”

  Two of the guards moved in on the thug. “Follow me,” one of them said.

  “See you fellas around,” Bienvenuto said to us, waving goodbye. He followed the guards to one of the elevators.

  The lead guard turned to Matt. “You. Identification. Slowly.”

  Matt shook his head. “I don’t have any.”

  The guard froze for a few seconds. “What about you?” he asked without signaling he meant me. But I was the only other detainee there.

  “No, sir,” I replied. “No ID.”

  “How did you get to Kasper?”

  Matt and I looked at one another, unsure of how much information to offer. We couldn’t just outright tell the guard we were smugglers and everything about our business on the planet was illegal.

  “We’re…” I started.

  “Insurance salesmen,” Matt finished.

  “Insurance?”

  “Starship insurance. You know, in case you have a problem…with your starship.”

  I closed my eyes, fighting back the urge to groan. This wasn’t going well at all.

  “You sell insurance, but you don’t have any identification?”

  “Well, you see, we had identification, but it was stolen sometime during our last away trip.”

  “Away trip?”

  “Yeah. You know, away from our starship. Away from space. Like a shore excursion?”

  “Matt,” I said. “Stop talking.”

  “Forget the identification for now,” the guard said, his helmet shifting so it seemed he was looking right at me. “We have three corpses here, plus a pair of women who say you hit them with some kind of tranquilizer ray or something. All of the evidence leads directly to you two. What do you have to say about that?”

  “Do we get a phone call?” Matt asked.

  “Phone call?” the guard replied, confused by the nomenclature.

  “Sorry, hypercom call,” he corrected.

  “No,” the guard said.

  “What about an attorney?” I asked.

  “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Not currently.”

  “Then no.”

  “What kind of due process is that?” Matt asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Does innocent until proven guilty by a jury of peers mean anything to you?”

  “Whose planet do you think you’re on?” the guard scoffed. He thrust a finger at me. “We caught you just after the act.” He switched his point to Matt. “We have over a dozen witnesses who say you killed that stiff over there.” He didn’t point or motion to the thug Shaq had bitten, but he didn’t need to.

  “What about the woman?” I asked.

  “Cause of death appears identical to that of victim number two. Pretty damning evidence.”

  Matt groaned. “This is all a huge misunderstanding.”

  “Oh? Maybe you can explain it.”

  Matt looked at me again. How were we supposed to explain what we were really doing without making things worse?

  Answer. We couldn’t.

  He remained silent.

  “I didn’t think so,” the guard said. He fell silent, and I could hear a muffled voice through his helmet, too low to make out the words. “And, it appears you were apprehended in possession of an encrypted slab stolen from Duke Nobukku’s private offices six weeks ago.”

  The origin of the slab piqued my curiosity, but I still didn’t speak. Neither did Matt.

  “Your silence is as good as a confession. We…” He paused again, and I heard another voice in his helmet, speaking more frantically. Matt heard it too, and he glanced over at me, wondering if I knew what it might be.

  I did my best to keep a poker face. I had an idea.

  The guard’s demeanor shifted, from serious to downright mean. “On your feet, assholes.”

  My heart sank as I hopped to my feet. Best guess, security had just found the body of the guard Alter had killed and they were blaming me and Matt for it.

  Once they realized the guard was accounted for, Alter would be compromised too.

  She was too smart to get caught like that. She had probably already made her escape. After all, she had been alone in the passage with Lurch. She had one of who knew how many other forms to choose from. Still, her well-intentioned maneuver was coming down on us.

  “This way,” the guard growled, grabbing me by the arm and practically throwing me a few feet ahead of him. “You too,” he hissed at Matt. “You both make me sick.”

  “What’s going to happen to our ship?” Matt asked, joining me in front of the guard.

  “You killed a Persephon Spaceport Security Officer, and you’re worried about your ship?” the guard raged. “You should be worried about how you’re going to make it to lockup in one piece. If you do have a ship, it’ll be impounded and sold to the Acheon for scrap. But I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Murdering an SSO? You’ll never see daylight again, and I hope you rot in hell!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Spaceport security didn’t waste time, marching Matt and me from the concourse through a restricted area of the spaceport composed of thick walls and thick steel blast doors. We arrived at an elliptical shaped underground transport with a wedge-shaped snout, where the guards shoved us onto the vehicle and down onto seats. They hovered right behind as we got underway, the tension in the cabin enough that I expected one or more of them might decide to start beating us at any moment in retaliation for Alter’s actions.

  I had done my best to accept her nature. How could I not be accepting when it was literally part of her species’ natural order to feed that way? And I knew she had done it to help us achieve our goal to get paid. But it all felt so wrong, in part because she had crossed the line, but I also felt stupid because we had gone into the spaceport with no real plan to get back out. Maybe we had completed the job successfully, but look where it had gotten Matt and me.

  Not exactly the outcome I had envisioned. We would have been better off with a big fat ‘F’ on our mission report card and be headed back to Head Case to get the hell off this planet. Maybe it would have taken longer for me to get my operation, but at least we would have been free to make the money we needed another way.

  Instead, I had no idea what awaited us wherever we were headed. All I knew was that there would be no trial, no judge, no jury. The evidence against us was clear. Even if Keep had been the one to pull the trigger, even if Alter hadn’t consumed the essence of a guard, there was still the dead woman and the dead thug. Matt would still be in trouble, unless we threw Shaq under the bus. Which we could still technically do to get Matt off the hook. The only law he might have broken then would be knocking Bienvenuto into the pool.

  The thought of ratting out the Jagger crossed my mind more than once as the transport exited the spaceport to rocket across the landscape through the clear tubes I had noticed on our descent to the planet. But I knew Matt wouldn’t want that, especially after Shaq had saved our lives on Cestus. Shaq was tucked somewhere on Matt’s body, so he was stuck on this ride with us anyway. Besides, we had instructed Shaq to stop anyone who tried to steal the slab, so we were culpable in the murder. And the authorities had probably seen Matt drop the slab from the bridge. The guard had said the device came from Duke Nobukku’s private offices. That had to be bad.

  I grew more paranoid as the seconds passed, my mind circling back to Keep, and then Alter. What if my trust in Alter had been misplaced? What if she had lied about her relationship with Keep? The money was in our account, accessible only through our interface with the ship. While Head Case’s security was enabled and the guards had confiscated Matt’s phone, Alter had voice permissions to deactivate the system. All she had to do was return to the ship and speak the magic words. Who was to say Keep wouldn’t be waiting for her on the tarmac? Who was to say they wouldn’t reclaim the ship together, laughing all the way to the bank with our eighteen million electro and the Star of Caprum?

  Had we fallen for the long con?

  I didn’t want to believe it, but the more that concept swirled around in my mind, the more it solidified into a potentially true outcome. What if I had agreed to help Keep save the galaxy? Would he have warned me about the guards? Or would I still be in the same place I was right now? Even if I had gotten away, it would have been too late to help Matt.

  The transport slowed as it approached a dark, square building positioned in the foothills of a small, snow-capped mountain range. I spotted the thick cable of a space elevator rising from the center of the large structure, and looking up from the window, I caught sight of a satellite floating overhead. I glanced over at Matt, who had closed his eyes since he couldn’t see through the window. His hands curled around the armrests, clenching the ends tightly. It was surprising to me that he seemed more stressed about our situation than I was. Despite my other train of thought, a big part of me still believed Alter would come to the rescue.

  Or was I just being stupidly naive?

  The transport entered the building, a short distance of darkness ending when it pulled into a station inside the compound. Another group of officers waited on a small platform, their uniforms a lighter shade of gray and lined with different patches, their heads exposed. They didn’t seem to be carrying the heavier rifles of the security guards, though their utility belts had smaller pistols and batons similar to Alter’s hanging from them.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Nobody told you to talk,” the guard behind me growled. “Stand up.”

  We did as he ordered, getting to our feet and moving to the aisle. The guard behind us shoved Matt into me, knocking me down.

  The guard in front of me pulled me roughly back to my feet. “Are you trying to stall, convict?” he shouted into my face.

  Convict? The word stole my calm, reality setting in.

  The guards outside were prison guards. The satellite overhead was the prison. We were really going from scoring eighteen million electro to jail in less than an hour. My entire body turned cold, heart pounding, emotions threatening to spin out of control.

  What had we done?

  “I can’t go to prison,” I said, voice quaking. “I have cancer. I’ll die without treatment.”

  “Good,” the guard growled. “Scum like you don’t deserve to live.”

  The comment hit me hard. When Keep showed me the contract had been paid, I thought everything had gone right. But it hadn’t. Everything was going wrong.

  “This way,” he hissed, leading Matt and me to the open doors of the transport. He grabbed my arm when I got there, using it to shove me toward the prison guards. He did the same to Matt.

  One of the guards pulled out a larger slab like the one we had delivered and held it up to my face. A green laser scanned me. A red laser replaced it, hitting my neck and leaving a burning sensation. Had I just been branded? Finished with me, the guard did the same to Matt.

  “Good riddance,” the security guard grumbled. “See you in a couple hundred years.” He left us with the prison guards, stepping back onto the transport. The door slid shut and it headed back the way it had come.

  “You have a name, convict PPS12469?” the lead prison guard, a grizzled old man with salt and pepper hair, asked me.

  “Hondo,” I replied.

  His eyebrow twitched slightly, probably wondering what kind of name Hondo was. He turned to Matt. “What about you?”

  “Stang,” he answered.

  “Hondo and Stang. I’m Sergeant Grist. Welcome to the Persephon Penal Satellite intake station.” He glanced at the slab. “It says here you were convicted of theft of a confidential government slab, two counts of general murder, and one count of…” He trailed off, looking at us coldly. “Murdering an SSO.”

  “We didn’t kill the officer,” Matt said, speaking out. “They blamed us for it, but there’s no proof.”

  “Did I ask you to speak?” Grist said, putting his face in front of Matt’s.

  “No, sir,” Matt replied sharply. I had heard him take the same tone with his father in the past. As former military, Matt’s old man had always responded well to the subordination.

  Grist smirked. “You a soldier, Stang?”

  “No, sir,” he replied. “But I do know the meaning of respect, sir.”

  “Good. I won’t hate you as much, then. So, if you didn’t kill the security officer, who did?”

  “Enigma, sir.”

  Grist’s eyes narrowed, showing he knew the name. “Enigma? That’s impossible.”

  “No, sir. Enigma is back in business. Have the SSO do their homework. They’ll find the cause of death is consistent with Enigma’s other hits.”

  “And how do you know that?” Grist asked.

  “We were working for Enigma. She hired us as extra hands and set us up for the fall. And you took the bait, wasting your time on us while she makes her escape.”

  I glanced at Matt, impressed with his approach. He had gambled that Grist would recognize the name and won. While I had panicked over things I couldn’t control, he had been thinking ahead. How far could we ride it?

  “Did you meet her?” Grist asked.

  “No. Everything was set up through a Dark Exchange.”

  “Then how do you know she’s here?”

  “This is where she said to meet her.”

  “What was the job?”

  “Pick up the slab, deliver it to Duke Sedaya. We’re smugglers, not killers.”

  “A crook is a crook,” Grist said. “But killing an SSO isn’t the same as killing a civilian.” He turned away from us. “Corporal Nanji, send a communique back to SSO HQ. Have them run forensics on Kassu’s injuries and match them against the Hegemony files on Enigma.”

  “Yes, sir,” the light-haired woman behind Grist replied. She lifted out a smaller slab and moved away to make the request.

  “So Duke Sedaya has an interest in Duke Nobukku’s private matters?” Grist asked.

  “It seems that way,” Matt answered. “The job was to pick up the slab and deliver it to a contact for the Duke. Since you seem to know a little about the DEX, you probably understand how little information was shared with us.”

  “I see. And why didn’t you tell any of this to the SS officers?”

  “Like you said, killing an SSO isn’t the same as killing a civilian.”

  Not that Matt or I had actually killed anyone during the job, but Matt clearly didn’t plan to turn Shaq in. And there was no way I would be able to convince anyone I hadn’t shot Lurch. Not with the way the SSO had discovered me.

  “Well, shame on you for getting caught. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now,” Grist decided. “But if the forensics report doesn’t come back with Enigma’s MO attached, you’ll be on the line for mining deployment before you know what hit you.” He pointed to a door on the left. “This way for processing.”

  We followed Grist and the other prison guards to the door. Nanji rejoined him with a nod, suggesting she had filed the request for information on Enigma.

  The room adjacent to the transport platform was simply furnished. A metal table sat against the wall, a pair of bright yellow uniforms stacked on top. A door opposite the entry connected it to the larger station. The guards circled us in front of the table.

  “Take off your clothes, put on the unis,” Grist ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said.

  “Yes, sir,” I added, though without the same practiced sharpness of his reply.

  I removed my jacket, shirt, belt, boots and pants, leaving my boxers alone as I reached for the prison garb. Matt did the same, positioning himself slightly sideways in an effort to hide any potential signs of Shaq beneath. We both held our breath, waiting for Grist to order us to go fully commando, thankful when we managed to slip into the uniforms without further instruction. My coveralls fit surprisingly well, baggy but not too oversized, PPS12469 in black lettering across the chest.

  I glanced back at my jacket as Grist moved to the next door, thinking about Keep’s card resting in the pocket. Matt grabbed my arm to make sure I kept moving behind the guards, before I could get out of range of whichever one of them was linked to the detonator on my neck.

  We walked down a long, drab gray corridor to yet another door, stopping outside. Grist raised his arm, glancing at his wrist computer.

  “A few more minutes until the lift arrives,” he said.

  We waited in silence until the door finally slid open, revealing a capsule with a bench on either side, big enough to carry four people max.

  Grist walked over to us, circling behind. Something sharp bit into the back of my neck, followed by warm moisture. He moved to Matt next, removing the detonator with enough skin for the wound to bleed.

  “In you go,” he said, motioning to the capsule. We stepped in and took a seat on opposite sides. Grist stood in the doorway. “Have either of you ever been on a Nobukkian penal satellite before?”

  “No, sir,” Matt replied.

  Grist smiled. “You’re gonna love it. No organic guards. No surveillance. No rules. No escape. Good luck.”