A piece of tech like that, a remnant of a lost age, was worth a year’s supply of food at least, and Torvald was just giving it to her. Tears welled in Bianca’s eyes, and she dashed them away, then slipped the treasure onto her finger. She held out her hand and tilted it to and fro, as if she was a girl admiring a real promise ring. “In that case, sir, I accept your proposal.” She frowned. “Torvald, you’ve got such treasures down here… this ring, that database… if the Letnev found the bunker where I was born, or made, or whatever, won’t they find this one?”

  “I asked the database that, too,” he said. “There are working countermeasures in place to keep this bunker shielded from detection, and the tons of junk upstairs should baffle their sensors even further. They only found the chamber where you were born so easily because it was cracked open and exposed to the air. I don’t think they’ll notice me down here.” He shrugged. “Which isn’t to say I don’t worry about them noticing, but the Letnev were so excited about finding the place you came from I hope they got distracted from looking too closely for anything more.”

  “You should clear out anyway,” Bianca said. “Pour concrete in the opening to the elevator, so if they do find the bunker you can pretend you didn’t even know it was under your house all this time.”

  “That is a wise proposal, and if it makes you feel better, I can tell you I’ll consider it.” Torvald rose. “I reckon you should be on your way to the up-and-out. It’s been nice knowing you, Bianca Xing. I’ll give you the same advice my father gave me the first time he sent me out to the woods to search for salvage on my own: ‘Be careful, but not too careful; be bold, but not too bold.’”

  She stood up too, and started to twist the ring, then stopped herself. That was a habit of fidgeting she’d better not fall into. “You talk like I’m never coming back, Torvald. Of course I will. Whether I’m a princess or something else, I’ll come back.”

  “I believe you intend to, and I hope you will, Bee. But the world is big, and you’re going beyond the world, into something a whole lot bigger. You don’t need to make me any promises, except to take care of yourself as best you can.” He embraced her and kissed her on the cheek, his whiskery chin tickling her. He’d never done that before. Torvald pulled back and winked. “Go on, then. Make a name for yourself, earn your fortune, conquer the galaxy, or whatever other damnfool thing you’ve got a mind to do.”

  The ride back up in the elevator was long, and the walk over the dark hills to her house was longer still. All three moons were up, so it was bright, but she knew the way well enough to traverse what obstacles there were even in total darkness. She wouldn’t be traveling paths that familiar again for a long time – if ever. She was going where everything was new.

  When she reached the field closest to her house, and saw the lights still burning there, waiting for her, she stopped, and looked up at the sky, and the black patch between that triangle of stars. I’m on my way, she thought.

  •••

  Her parents went with her to the village – there was no stopping that – but otherwise there was no seeing-off party. They’d acceded to her wishes and promised not to tell Grandly or anyone else she was gone until tomorrow at the earliest. The village was sleeping, except for the shuttle from the Grim Countenance, crouched like a predatory insect in the clear space behind the Halemeeting hall. They had wrestling matches and dances in that spot when the weather was fair. Everything really had changed.

  Voyou emerged from the shuttle, strolling down the ramp to meet them. “Right on time, even though as far as I can tell no one has an accurate clock on this entire planet. The punctuality is appreciated. Perhaps it’s your Letnev heritage asserting itself.”

  I’m no Letnev, Bianca thought, but she only smiled. “I learned to be on time from my parents. It’s only polite. And we don’t need clocks. We have the sun, the moons, the stars, the animals, and our bellies, after all.”

  “All quite alien to my experience, I’m afraid,” Voyou said. “Except for my belly. We should really get going. Say your farewells and come aboard.”

  Bianca hugged and kissed her parents, and admired them for not breaking down; they’d done plenty of breaking down earlier, but it wasn’t as if they would exhaust their supply of worry anytime soon. They bore up, though, and soon Bianca lifted her small knapsack, waved, and walked up the ramp to whatever her future held.

  Chapter 9

  Heuvelt sat in his cell and contemplated his dinner. There was a mound of something gray that smelled like fish, and a mound of something green that smelled like brine, and a mound of something yellow and gelatinous that smelled acidic. He had his doubts about whether any of it was meant for human consumption. The tray itself honestly seemed more edible than anything on top of it.

  The Winnaran bartender-turned-officer walked in and peered at him through the bars, her arms folded across her chest. She still wore her pull-tab necklace, which he’d assumed was an affectation for her undercover role, but now she was dressed in a sleek, black, well-fitted uniform.

  “Hello,” Heuvelt said. “Have you come to bring me my change? I paid far too much for that drink.”

  She smiled. “Your story checked out, Mr Angriff. You really did have a run of terrible luck, though it seems a rich kid like you could have bought your way out by now.”

  “I am in my thirties, officer,” he said. “In human terms, that no longer qualifies as a ‘kid.’ I also no longer qualify as ‘rich.’”

  “How did you get mixed up with a data smuggling operation?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Heuvelt said. “I merely went to a bar to have a drink, and a strange Hylar tried to steal my briefcase full of empty data sticks. I tried to get away from the chaos that ensued, and you hit me in the head with a sink. Be glad I’m not a rich kid anymore. Rich kids have voracious lawyers.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. We checked all those data sticks, and there’s nothing on any of them, so we don’t have any legal grounds to keep you.”

  He stood up. “I’ll be going, then?”

  She smiled. “We were going to process your release, but it’s all a bit complicated, because of how muddled your history is. It seems you’re still technically a wanted criminal in the Barony of Letnev – their bureaucracy takes forever to update their records, and they really hate admitting they were wrong about anything. While we don’t have an extradition arrangement with them, my superiors think this could be a good opportunity for a trade. We give them something they want, and we get something we want, like that.”

  Heuvelt slumped. “I see. Please, tell me what action I can take to inspire your superiors to release me instead of handing me over to a notoriously punitive militaristic nation.”

  “You’re pretty smart, for a rich kid. If you happened to know the location of a data stick with stolen cryptographic keys on it, the sort of thing that a criminal consortium might pay medium-good money for, why, we’d be so busy and excited by the news that we’d probably forget all about handing you over to the Letnev.”

  “Perhaps there might even be a reward for this information?”

  “I’ve always found that freedom is its own reward, Mr Angriff.”

  “Have you really?” Heuvelt knew when he was beaten. He had lots of practice. He gave her the coordinates of the buried data stick, and she went away. Four hours later she returned and personally escorted him out of the facility, into the cold, dark, desert night.

  “You’re free to go, Mr Angriff.”

  He looked around. “Go where? What happened to my sand-skidder?”

  “Your vehicle was impounded. It won’t be processed and ready for release for eight or ten weeks. But it’s a lovely night for walking, isn’t it?”

  “A lovely night for many things.” He gave her his most charming grin, which was a shadow of its former self, but not without some lingering potency. “What’s your name, officer?” She really was quite attractive, and perhaps something could be salvaged from this disaster.

  “My name is Sergeant Get Off My Planet and Never Come Back.”

  “I suppose that means you won’t let me buy you a drink?”

  “You already bought me a drink, rich kid. I kept all your coins, remember?” She sauntered back into the long, low building, and Heuvelt was alone.

  The authorities had returned his comm bracelet, at least, so he called the Show and Tell, half expecting an “out of range” error message. That would be a suitable new chapter in the saga of Heuvelt Angriff, outcast scion of the Angriff Industries fortune, gentleperson adventurer turned scurrilous rascal: stranded on a desert planet controlled by an aquatic race, with the local criminal element doubtless highly motivated to show him the opposite of hospitality.

  To his pleasant surprise, the growling voice of Ashont, his Rokha first mate, said, “Heuvelt? Are you all right?”

  “I am alive,” he said. “I suppose that counts. Can you come pick me up?”

  Once he was back on board the Show and Tell, Heuvelt just wanted to retreat to his cabin with his last bottle of sorghum whiskey, but he had to debrief his crew first. Ashont and Clec were waiting for him in the galley – together, of course, because they were always together.

  Ashont was Rokha, and Clec was Naaz, but of course the species were seldom spoken of as individuals: they were the Naaz-Rokha Alliance, physically dissimilar aliens who shared a culture and history as well as a symbiotic relationship that Heuvelt sometimes envied, when he wasn’t feeling too misanthropic: the Naaz-Rokha never had to be alone. Oh, it wasn’t like they were physically or psychically bound together, but by culture and preference they seldom spent much time or distance apart, and it must have been a comfort, knowing you could really trust someone like that. Heuvelt absently touched the scar on his face.

  Ashont was a panther-like humanoid, all sleek black fur and round green eyes and bright white canines. Heuvelt’s family had pet cats growing up, and it was tempting to think of Ashont as a giant housecat… but her eyes had round pupils, not slit ones. Ashont had helpfully explained that cats with slit pupils were ambush predators, and cats with round eyes were “Active predators. We chase down our prey.” The Rokha were relatives of the lion-like Hacan, but evolved in the jungle rather than desert or savannah climes, and the two species had diverged countless millennia before and didn’t share much in the way of culture anymore. The Rokha were known as mercenaries, and for most of their history had been nomadic wanderers, traveling from place to place and job to job, without a homeworld to call their own. That changed when they met the Naaz.

  Clec often rode around in a sort of open-weave harness Ashont wore on her back, but at that moment, the Naaz was perched on her shoulder. Clec was diminutive, smaller than a human toddler, with four arms, a bulbous head, and large eyes. Two of the arms clung to Ashont, and the other two were busily disassembling some small engine component. Clec was Heuvelt’s first mate too – they’d insisted on sharing the rank equally, as their peoples shared everything – but in practice Ashont was the pilot and navigator and Clec was the ship’s engineer. The Naaz were a highly intelligent race, adept at science and engineering, but they had a long history of falling prey to powerful oppressors. In ancient times their homeworld had been invaded by a Winnu corporation, then conquered by deserters from the Federation of Sol, and so on, changing hands countless times over the centuries, their people always under the heel of a new overlord who wanted to exploit their world and their population, until the Naaz finally had enough, and hired the vast Rokha military army. With the help of those famous soldiers, the Naaz finally won their freedom, and they offered the nomadic Rokha a place on their homeworld in exchange. Their reasons had doubtless been practical: a way to keep the army without paying mercenary prices, and to make the Rokha more invested in defending their now-shared homeworld. Yet, somehow, that pragmatic arrangement had blossomed over the centuries into a true shared culture.

  Heuvelt found their history astonishing. The Naaz looked like something the Rokha would hunt for sport, but the two species were by now so closely associated that if you saw one without the other, you knew a terrible tragedy must have occurred. Even on their homeworld, they lived in mixed households, a Naaz couple and a Rokha couple cohabiting together and rearing one another’s young collectively. Heuvelt didn’t like to imagine what it was like for such a species to date, but maybe it was all arranged marriages or something. He’d deliberately never inquired about the details of Naaz-Rokha love lives.

  “I take it things went badly?” Clec said.

  “It could have gone worse, but it went bad enough.” He sat down and told them the tale of woe.

  Once he was finished, Ashont clucked her tongue and put a bowl of protein mush in front of him. “Eat. They never feed you right in jail.” She treated Heuvelt like he was one of her cubs, sometimes, but right now he didn’t mind.

  “We have the half of the payment we were given up front for the delivery,” Clec said. “So we can, at least, afford the fuel to get off this planet. We need to line up another job, though, and soon.”

  “We should be transporting a hold full of ice-mink furs, or sun-spice, or the singing beads of Halcyon-IV,” Heuvelt said. “Not grubbing around like lowly smugglers.”

  “We are smugglers,” Clec said. “Not lowly ones, though. Excellent ones. I’ll point out, you did your job exactly as you were hired to do, except for the last bit, and that was outside your control.”

  “Carrying any cargo at all is a waste of our time and talents,” Heuvelt grumbled. “We should be exploring new worlds in search of treasure, seeking our fortune among uncharted stars!”

  “It’s hard to seek your fortune that way if you don’t already have a fortune to start with,” Clec pointed out. “Financing that kind of expedition isn’t cheap. How about we make some more money this way, and then we can go... out there.” She waved one of her nimble-fingered hands vaguely skyward.

  “Or not,” Ashont said. “Treasure-hunting didn’t work out so well for you last time, Mr Scar. Making an honestly dishonest living will be good for you. It builds character.”

  “I have quite enough character already, thank you. If anything, I have too much.” He looked up from his bowl. “I was a day late returning, and didn’t send you any messages. Why didn’t you two leave me?”

  Clec and Ashont glanced at each other, and Heuvelt sensed that a vast quantity of information was silently shared in that look. Ashont was the one who spoke. “Our people understand loyalty, Heuvelt. We aren’t like Dob Ell. We won’t betray you.”

  “We also won’t spend your entire life pretending to be your best friend when, in reality, we were just paid to do that by your parents,” Clec added. “So we won’t have any pent-up decades of grudges to take out on you when those payments stop coming. See the difference?”

  “Now that you point it out, the distinction does seem clear.”

  “We are partners,” Ashont said. “We own half the ship, and you own the other half, and we are stronger together. There was no question of us leaving you.”

  Clec made a noise of agreement. “We were already tracking down your location and planning a jailbreak, in fact. I’m glad we didn’t have to follow through. Even my best calculations showed only a seventy-three percent chance of success. But we would have tried.”

  Heuvelt lowered his head so they wouldn’t see the tears welling in his eyes. They were a fine crew, and more than that, they would be his friends, if he let them. Did he dare hope they might someday become… family? His own family had always been cold, until they cut him off, and then that cold had plunged further, to absolute zero. His closest other relationship, with Dob Ell, had proven to be a sham. “I don’t have much practice with this sort of thing,” Heuvelt said. “But I will try to be worthy of your loyalty.”

  “Good,” Clec said. “You can start by not arguing when we tell you what we have to do next.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We need to take that job from Sagasa,” Ashont said.

  Heuvelt groaned. Sagasa was a Hacan who ran a shady shipyard, scrap, and salvage operation near Vega Major. Nicknamed “The Disciplinarian” , Sagasa was trustworthy as far as criminals went, but he was also famously unforgiving when it came to failure. Ashont was connected to him vaguely through a series of cousins, and an offer for a high-speed transport job had come through recently. Clec and Ashont had argued in favor of accepting the job, but Heuvelt had resisted, because working for the Disciplinarian meant fully immersing himself in the criminal world, a fate he still half-hoped to avoid. “There has to be another job we can take.”

  “Not one this simple and lucrative,” Clec said. “More importantly, this job would lead to more jobs.”

  “It’s basically the work you planned to do when you first bought this ship,” Ashont added. “We’d just be transporting high-end goods for wealthy clients.”