Space Deputy

Jenny Schwartz

A millennium into the future, the Saloon Sector is where the Wild West meets the 1950s, in space, with robots. It’s where careers go to die.

Thelma Bach graduated top of her class after four years at the Galactic Justice academy. But she’s a Rock Sector citizen. The core worlders were never going to let her transcend her background. So she’s been assigned to serve her seven years as a deputy in the Saloon Sector. The message for the Federation’s out-world citizens is clear: you’ll never be our equal, so don’t even try.

The stuffy bureaucrats of the Galactic Justice service chose the wrong person to push around. Thelma will subvert her interstellar sheriff, charm artificial intelligences, fight bandits and hunt the legendary Eldorado Cache. But with the frontier region holding secrets of its own, she needs to choose her new allies wisely because a scary, business-suited enemy is hunting her.

“Space Deputy” is a fast-paced, offbeat space adventure.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Want More?

Chapter 1

The personal comms unit in Thelma Bach’s left hand shook. Around her, her fellow graduates of the four year Galactic Justice program were exclaiming, hugging and congratulating each other. Exaggerated squeals of happiness pierced the air.

Thelma blinked to clear the sting of shocked tears from her eyes and reread the message on her comms unit, the notification of her first year assignment.

Saloon Sector, deputy position. Report to Sheriff Max Smith.

The details of when, where and her travel arrangements were attached.

Dear God, no.

But no matter how often she reread it, the message didn’t change.

After four years of being consistently head of her class, excelling in the additional studies of xenobiology, ancient history, armed and unarmed combat, and navigation, she’d been assigned to the worst sector in the galaxy, the one to which the failures and discards of the Galactic Justice service were sent.

A braying laugh scraped against her raw nerves.

Rudolf Gua’s claim to fame was his ability to swallow an astounding amount of hard cider in a minute and to burp the alphabet. Oh, and his mother was a Galactic Senator.

“Yep, assigned to Alpha Hub,” Rudy bragged as he accepted the congratulations of their peers. Their former teachers nodded and smiled along with everyone else.

Rudy looked up and his gaze fixed on Thelma. “And what did you get, Mining Princess?”

As the daughter of independent asteroid miners from the Rock Sector, Thelma had endured the snubs and outright prejudice of central Hub citizens during her three years at college plus the four years of the Galactic Justice program.

Her hands ceased shaking. She pocketed her comms unit. “I’m cleared for independent missions.” If she couldn’t put a positive spin on her disastrous assignment, she didn’t deserve the high marks she’d earned in diplomacy class. “And you got assigned to Alpha Hub, huh? Good for you, Rudy. Mommy can hold your hand.”

Dead silence hit the room, expanding outward from the detonation zone between her and the senator’s son.

Thelma smiled tightly and walked out.

No one stopped her. No one asked further questions.

A couple of teachers looked sorry or possibly even mad on her behalf. They knew her assignment, she realized.

Despite her determination to conceal the extent of her devastation, her pace increased. She reached her dorm room at a near run. Her duffel bag waited for her at the foot of her stripped bed. She’d packed everything ready for her grand departure. She had few enough belongings. For the last seven years, all the money she’d earned had gone into living expenses and an emergency fund. She had her duffel bag, a comms unit jammed with textbooks, and the expectation of a Galactic Justice department uniform.

Well, she could kiss that last expectation good-bye. As a deputy in the Saloon Sector she’d be wearing a utility suit. Just like home, she thought bitterly. And she’d be expected to purchase her own.

She resisted the urge to punch the wall. If she gave in to her feelings for even an instant, she’d be kicking and screaming, cursing at the unfairness of the universe.

Her family had warned her. She’d refused to believe them.

She picked up the duffel bag and walked out, leaving the dorm room door swinging.

Her travel arrangements were for a third class cabin, twin share, on a starliner leaving the next morning. She bought a second duffel bag and filled it with newly bought utility suits, spare boots, a blade and a few other items not mentioned on Galactic Justice’s remote service preparation list. The night market provided those.

The other students avoided the night market. It was too criminal, and worse, too poor, for their comfort. But Thelma was familiar with its crowded maze of tiny booths beneath an immense ferrous silk canopy. She spent her credit chips wisely, ending with the purchase of a chain of coffees in a corner diner where she waited out the last of the night hours till she could head for the spacedock, board the starliner, and sleep. A hotel room for the night was an unnecessary extravagance, now that the job she’d aimed for had been wrenched away.

A deputy barely made living wage.

And I’m stuck with it. Thelma faced reality over endless tiny cups of bitter coffee. She didn’t have the money to pay the price of the Galactic Justice education she’d received, which meant she owed the service seven years of her life.

“Star-sucking buzzards.”

The miners of the Rock Sector knew that the Hub citizens regarded them as second class citizens. Everyone had warned Thelma not to dream impossible dreams. Sure, she was smart. But smart wasn’t what got you places in the galaxy. It was who you knew. It was the destiny derived from where you were born and to whom that mattered.

I was a fool. She’d believed the equal opportunities propaganda that President Smith and the other members of Federation Parliament spouted. She’d won a scholarship to a core world college and that had made her believe that she could be someone. She would change things from the inside. She would be part of the Galactic Justice service and—

“You want another coffee?” The waitress interrupted Thelma’s bleakly circling thoughts. The breakfast crowd would arrive soon, the working people who woke before sun-up and slaved past sundown. The table Thelma had occupied through the night would be needed.

“Thanks. I’m good.” She paid her bill, adding a decent tip, and headed for the starliner. It would travel to the Saloon Sector via the Reclamation Sector. The journey would take five weeks, longer if any of the spacedocks they stopped at in the Reclamation Sector were subject to the current rolling strikes the Lumpers Union was holding as they negotiated better conditions for cargo handlers.

Her two duffel bags felt like lead weights at the end of her arms by the time she reached the spacedock. She set them at her feet for the elevator ride up, and leaned against the sidebar, keeping an eye on them. Security was tight on the planet, Serene, but petty crime happened everywhere. Everything she owned was in those bags. She wasn’t losing them.

The elevator doors opened. She picked up the duffel bags, feeling the burn in her muscles, and headed left. Right would have taken her to the government arm of the dock, where a day ago she’d have expected to depart from. The official spaceships carried diplomats, bureaucrats, agents and other elite members of the Galactic Justice service as they hurried about, busy with their important work.

At least her crack of dawn arrival meant she’d avoided meeting any of her fellow graduates.

The starliner, Lazy Days, bulged high and wide at its mooring. It was an old-fashioned blimp design. They’d been the height of fashion two centuries ago. Now the old girl traversed the frontier trail. It was quite a comedown.

Thelma clenched her jaw so tight it ached. The faded glories and spaced hopes of the Lazy Days felt like salt scrubbed into the raw wounds of her ego. Which was undoubtedly why she’d been booked on the starliner and not allowed to hitch a ride on a government courier. She was a living, breathing message aimed at Rock Sector kids and other out-world dreamers: don’t believe the Equal Opportunities jazz; you will never be the equal of core world citizens.

What better way to send the message than to dump the top graduate of the Galactic Justice program into the Saloon Sector? They might as well have delivered her to the starliner with a sign: out-worlders, get lost.

This early in the morning, with seven hours to go before the starliner departed, what activity existed centered on the starliner’s cargo hatchway.

Thelma circled out of the way of a robot hauler as she headed for the other end of the ship. She lugged her duffel bags to the boarding ramp and dropped them. Instead of their weight triggering the ramp into action, it remained immobile. She cursed creatively under her breath and picked up the bags, striding the distance to where a crew member watched disinterestedly from the hatchway.

When she reached him, the man waved a scanner vaguely in her direction. His gray hair was cut too short to be messy, but his eyes were bloodshot, his uniform rumpled, and his boots unpolished. He didn’t respect himself, and he sure as heck didn’t respect her. His gaze drifted, fixing on a billboard across the way.

Thelma presented her comms unit with her boarding pass onscreen.

The scanner beeped. An orange light on it turned green. The crewman yawned. The security system appeared as antiquated and inadequate as the starliner itself.

“Map to your room is on your comms,” the man mumbled, and that was it. That was the extent of the boarding protocol. There was no porter, no trolley, and no assistance.

“Thanks,” she said ironically.

The crewman nodded, either not catching or not caring about her sarcasm.

Mindful of the arrival of another early bird passenger shuffling up the boarding ramp behind her, Thelma shoved her bags to one side before calling up the map to her room. The cabin would be her home for the next five weeks. With a complete absence of surprise, she noted that it was an outer cabin. On the old blimps, the safest place to be in the event of an emergency was along its spine. The outer cabins, those that hadn’t been converted to cargo holding, were the cheapest of the cheap accommodation.

By the time she reached it, her duffel bags were almost dragging; although whether that was due to physical tiredness or emotional reluctance was debatable. Not that Thelma was in the mood to debate anything. The cabin door opened to reveal two single beds either side of the narrow doorway, with luggage lockers built above them. Since the cabin was empty, she chose the bed to the right and stowed her bags. Then she stretched out full length. After a night spent hunched over a diner table, simply being horizontal felt good.

She sat up, kicked off her boots, and lay down again. The starliner’s various restaurants and other facilities wouldn’t open till three hours before departure. She had time for a nap.

A couple of hours later, a prospective cabin mate woke her.

She jerked up onto an elbow at the scuffing sound of the door opening.

An adult urself stuck his head in and opened his mouth to inhale deeply. His nostrils flared wide. He was tall for his species. Almost five feet. Urselves resembled over-sized koalas, having similar silver-gray fur and facial structure. This one didn’t look or sound cuddly.

“She smells of honesty and sadness. Satisfactory.” The urself passed a credit chip to the steward, entered the cabin, and closed the door. He swung a sharply rectangular suitcase onto the empty bunk, opened it and extracted an eye mask and earplugs. Then he relocked the suitcase, jumped up, and slapped the overhead locker open.

“I can—” Thelma began.

The urself threw in his suitcase, while balancing awkwardly on his bunk, then closed the locker. “I will be hibernating until we reach Zephyr in the Saloon Sector. In case of emergency, you can wake me by lowering my head over the edge of the bed.”

The urself, who still hadn’t introduced himself, stripped back the bed cover on his bunk, crawled in, and settled himself with a couple of grunts and the aid of the eye mask and earplugs.

Thelma stared at him disbelievingly, then let her head drop back onto her pillow. By the end of the five week trip the small cabin would reek of urself. On the other hand, a hibernating urself was probably the closest she could come to being alone in a twin share cabin.

And really, the menthol and musk scent of an urself was the least of her problems.

Resigned to being awake, she showered, dressed in one of her new utility suits, and went exploring. The Galactic Justice academy had stressed that agents should familiarize themselves with a new environment as soon as possible. Thelma was angry at the academy, but that didn’t make its teachings any less valid. She ended her exploration expedition in the cafeteria for her deck.

It was open for business, and since the food served in the cafeteria was included in her passage, she swiped her ticket and collected cheese sandwiches and a cup of hot tea. The choice of seating was obvious.

A table dotted with solo travelers, each fully focused on their comms units, lined the back wall. Most wore utility suits similar to hers, which suggested they were travelling for work. Families and small groups occupied a quarter of the other tables, leaving the rest empty for now.

Taking on the habits of her tablemates, she switched on her comms unit. She wasn’t interested in reading a novel or watching a movie, and she most definitely wasn’t ready to message her family with news of her assignment to the wild and disreputable frontier.

The frontier…

She called up a Zephyr newspaper site, and scrolled through its most popular stories. Zephyr was the planet on which she’d be based. It wasn’t the government center for the Saloon Sector, but it was a regional center for the last line of the frontier and the territory she’d be responsible for.

“Eldorado Map Discovered!!!”

“Man Bites Saurelle.”

“Are Grubs Hatching In The Badstars?”

“Eldorado Map A Fraud. Cache Still Lost.”

“Space Donut Cook-off. Winner Cheats.”

The headlines failed to engage her attention. She ate her sandwich and pursued a teasing memory. In four years study at the Galactic Justice academy, the Saloon Sector had been rarely mentioned. But there had been something, something that nagged at her now. It had been a law professor, a guest speaker talking about employment practices and the impact of local pressures.

“She mentioned deputies.”

Thelma’s table mate at her left elbow glanced at her curiously.

“Sorry. Thinking aloud.” Thelma swallowed the last of her tea and concentrated on her comms unit with new intensity. Labor laws, frontier imperatives, the Saloon Sector and financial realities danced through her brain and flickered across the screen under the direction of her busy, searching fingertips.

The law professor had said that Galactic Justice appointed interstellar sheriffs to police interplanetary activity in the Saloon Sector. The work was well paid and sheriffs had a great deal of independence and power. They could even swear in their own deputies. The problem was, no one wanted to be a deputy. The pay was barely subsistence level in a sector where prices were high. People moved to the Saloon Sector to make their fortune, not to serve as deputies.

So Galactic Justice and its combative legal department had quietly and reluctantly accepted reality. No more money could be wrung out of the budget to increase the pay to attract quality deputies, but the rule book was amended to allow a different solution. In the Saloon Sector, a deputy could have a second job.

Thelma’s pulse thudded as she found the answers she sought. She slowed her scrolling and read rather than skimmed the text.

There! She stabbed a finger at the screen.

It was in the rulebook, one of those regulations that got overlooked because nowhere else in the Federation acted quite like the frontier.

The Galactic Justice legal department hadn’t intended the amendment to favor someone like her, someone coming in from the core worlds to serve a contracted term. Nonetheless, it still applied to her. The lawyers hadn’t thought to write in an exception to their amendment.

She sat back with a burgeoning sense of resolve. She owed Galactic Justice eight hours of her day, six days a week, for the next seven years; but outside of that time, she could, while in the Saloon Sector, pursue other employment.

This rule changed everything.

If she’d been sent back to the Rock Sector, she’d have been at home, but she’d also have been locked into a rigid routine, probably acting as an interstellar inspector and annoying hard-working miners by investigating their operations on distant asteroids.

But the Galactic Justice service hadn’t wanted her to have the comforts of home. They’d wanted to underline just how bad things could get for uppity Rockers—Rock Sector citizens—who tried to crash core world institutions of privilege.

She’d been banished, but she could spin this.

Excitement raced through her, quickening her heartbeat and breathing. She’d had three years at college; four years at the elite Galactic Justice academy. What had she learned? What could she use to turn her exile in the Saloon Sector into a giant sod you to the bigots at the academy and in government?

Ever so slowly, Thelma smiled.

Her table mates leaned away from her. Their survival instincts were excellent.

Chapter 2

Thelma’s cabin mate woke up a day out from Zephyr. As the urself staggered into their shared tiny bathroom, Thelma hastily vacated the cabin. An urself waking from hibernation had certain very private issues to deal with.

She’d spent a lot of time in the gym over the last five weeks. Its single combat training robot was out of commission, but there was always someone willing to expend energy and repel boredom with a training bout. She’d learned a lot tangling with a mauveinne. The female’s extra-long front legs were whip-fast, but her true combat ability was the art of distraction.

If your opponent could be tricked into focusing on an irrelevancy, then they were unprepared for the genuine attack. That was a lesson applicable to life outside the ring.

However, the gym wasn’t Thelma’s destination, today. She had an appointment at the beauty salon. Waiting for it, she lingered over a ginger ale in a small bar. This close to the end of the journey, the bar was no longer filled with people desperate to hookup for an inter-sector affair. Instead, people were trying to fill in time. Most people’s cabins were no larger than Thelma’s twin share.

A woman confident in her mature appeal waved a bubble glass filled with crimson fluid in the direction of a table of earnest young men whose utility suits were as pristinely new as the ones stowed in Thelma’s duffel bag back in the cabin.

“Dudes.” The intoxicated woman toasted them. “I can spot dudes at a hundred paces. You’re so cute with your wide-eyed mix of excitement and fear. Woo-oo, welcome to the scary Saloon Sector.”

The men, looking barely old enough to shave—or enter a bar—ducked their heads and pretended not to notice her. Their tablescreen showed a star map. They pored over it, tracing possible routes and murmuring among themselves.

The woman laughed. “Let me give you some advice, dudes.” She drew out the last word. Red seemed to be a theme for her, extending beyond her drink of choice. She smoothed an auburn curl behind one ear. Its copper color matched her gingham check apron.

Thelma blinked at the apron, before deciding that its appearance over a clinging black dress had to be a fashion statement—debatably an atrocious one. It served no practical purpose.

Ostentatiously, the red-haired woman crossed her legs, then made a point of slowly recrossing them, her spiky black high heels on display. “In the Saloon Sector it’s all blast. All the things you thought you wanted, they’re gone.” She clicked her fingers. “All the fears that shaped you…gone. The Saloon Sector gives you two choices. Fall apart and slide downward, or embrace the opportunity.” She leaned confidingly toward the table of young men. “Choose blast.”

Then she leaned back, reaching for her crimson cocktail. “Or don’t. It’s your choice. It’s always your choice.” She tossed off the last of her drink and smirked.

Thelma nodded agreement.

She’d been studying the culture and slang of the Saloon Sector during the journey. She had no intention of presenting herself as a dude, or “newbie”. The frontier was wilder than the Rock Sector where she’d grown up. It had its own unwritten rules, and newcomers who didn’t know them, or who transgressed them, would be exploited. People were scrambling to establish themselves, and the fastest way to climb higher, was to climb over the bodies of your competitors. Thelma didn’t intend to be a body.

“Cute dress,” the beauty technician complimented Thelma’s snappy appearance.

“Thanks.” The sundress was buttercup-yellow with a long, full skirt, a white collar and elbow cuffs. The overtly feminine style felt strange, but it was important to Thelma’s plans. This session at the beauty salon would complete her preparations for her debut on Zephyr. “I did a little shopping on Paris.”

Paris had been the Last Day’s final stop in the Reclamation Sector before the starliner burned for the Saloon Sector via three tiresome wormhole jumps.

Unlike the other planets and stations in the Reclamation Sector that focused on the legal and illegal recycling and repair of anything and everything from dentures to ore haulers, Paris was in the business of creating everything new. Sure, it used recycled materials from its neighbors’ operations. And yes, it “borrowed” the designs for the things it made. Copyright was not a respected concept on Paris, a fact that the rest of the Federation abhorred, and hence, something that kept the police busy attempting to enforce it. But what Paris made was new. The manufacturers on Paris could make anything a customer dreamed of, as long as the customer could pay.

“Ooh, I love Paris,” the beauty technician cooed. “I found the sweetest corset there, lace around the…”

Thelma listened and asked questions in the right places, encouraging the woman to keep talking while she added eyelash extensions to Thelma’s already long lashes. Beauty salon employees were high on Thelma’s list of contacts to cultivate. It wasn’t just the information they held that could be useful to her. They gossiped with a wide range of people. If Thelma earned their approval, their chatter would help establish her reputation.

In researching the Saloon Sector, she’d been struck by its current fashion for clothing and furnishings inspired by the Atomic Age on Earth. That had sparked an idea, and she’d gone digging through the Federation’s digital Earth Evacuation Archive. There she’d found clothing designs, centuries out of copyright, that she’d sent through to a clothing manufacturer on Paris along with her size and color preferences.

“…and he was ever so helpful,” Thelma concluded her retelling of her Paris adventures to the interested beauty technician.

The woman combed out Thelma’s dark brown hair and began trimming the ends. “I’ve never heard of the Earth Evacuation Archive. Can anyone use it?”

“Of course. Here, what’s your contact number? I’ll send you the link. I saw a pattern for some glamorous off-the-shoulder gowns that would look wonderful on you.”

The beauty technician beamed and recited her number for Thelma.

Back at her cabin, the urself sniffed in Thelma’s direction as she strolled in.

“Determination. Trepidation.” Sniff. “Interesting. I need to eat.” He brushed past her and trotted down the passage in the direction of the cafeteria. Judging by the slack in his skin, his need to feed after five weeks in hibernation was imperative.

Thelma’s need to learn something—anything!—about her new boss was almost as strong, and yet, her search for background on him was stymied at every turn.

Sheriff Max Smith had a near-supernatural ability to avoid media attention. After weeks of searching, the only photo she’d been able to find of him was a headshot that showed a square jaw and the bottom lip of a wide mouth before the deep shadow of a wide-brimmed hat hid all else.

The chatter on Saloon Sector forums was fractionally more enlightening. A commenter had only to say “Sheriff Smith won’t like it” and discussion of a proposed item of business or mischief ended. By every indication the sheriff was a man of formidable character and ability.

The Galactic Justice database, when consulted, returned no more information than the fact that a Max Smith was sheriff out of Zephyr. How old he was, whether he had a life partner, children, his credentials and clear up rate, and all the other ordinary details of a government security officer were missing. She didn’t know where he’d trained or who might be able to influence his decisions.

“You know your goal. Keep it in mind and adjust your strategy in accordance with new data. You can handle a frontier sheriff.” Her pep talk would have been more convincing if it was haunted by the knowledge that Galactic Justice had assigned her here as a punishment and deterrent to other out-worlders trying to crash the core world party. The sheriff could be a monster.

“I’ll find a way to survive and thrive.” Her hands curled into fists. Her salon-beautiful nails, painted wine-red with silver stars, cut into her palms. “I won’t break.”

Chapter 3

Thelma mightn’t have been able to learn much about Sheriff Max Smith, but she had discovered that the Sheriff’s Office was at the Zephyr spacedock where the Lazy Days would be mooring. That meant she could introduce herself there out of uniform—or such uniform as a self-bought utility suit provided—a day before she was formally due to report for duty. She’d be a fool to pass up that opportunity: she had a persona to establish.

There was no way in heck that she’d present herself to the Saloon Sector as the Rock Sector graduate from Galactic Justice who’d been kicked out to the frontier like some unwanted mutt.

Oh no, she had a totally different story to sell.

“Spin, baby,” she murmured and licked her lips which were glossy with a mulberry lipstick.

The Lazy Days had trolleys available for hire, ones that would only operate within the spacedock and which were programmed to return to the starliner after two hours. That was sufficient time for Thelma to get her luggage to the Sheriff’s Office. From there…well, she’d studied the cost of housing on Zephyr. To be near enough to the spacedock to be able to respond to an emergency, she’d have to settle for living in a shabby boardinghouse in the Metal District. That didn’t match the successful image that she wanted to convey, but financial realities couldn’t be massaged. She’d spent her emergency fund in Paris on her new clothes, which were a far more crucial investment.

The sharp tip-tap of her pointy-toed, white high heels preceded her down the concourse as she headed for the Sheriff’s Office. The trolley piled with her worldly goods trailed obediently at her heels.

Her shiny, chestnut-brown ponytail swung jauntily. The crisp poplin of her white skirt with its pattern of maroon swirls swished confidently. Her halter top was a matching shade of red, dramatic but not eye-screaming.

The Sheriff’s Office was around the corner from the much larger Customs Office. Her professional instincts prompted Thelma to wonder how much mutual assistance the two offices exchanged. The Customs officers probably considered the Sheriff’s Department a poor cousin.

Just try to patronize me. Her mouth curled in a challenging smile as she passed the door to the Customs Office. A minute later, the door to the Sheriff’s Office slid open at her approach.

A yprr lounging on a divan behind a low reception desk reared up at her entrance. The yprr’s chitinous, four-segmented body gleamed an unnaturally glossy black with painted on faux chrome studs. This strange appearance was topped by a black toupee, presumably glued to the yprr’s naked skull and backcombed into an astonishingly high quiff. His two antennas quivered.

“I adore your shoes.” The yprr braced his front legs on the desk as he peered at Thelma’s white heels. “They have bows.”

Her smile became genuine. At least as far as the sheriff’s fashionable office manager was concerned, she’d gotten her 1950s blast-dusted appearance one hundred percent right. “Thank you. I’m Thelma Bach, the new deputy.”

The yprr toppled off the divan.

Thelma abandoned her luggage by the door and hurried to help him.

However, the office manager was embarrassed rather than hurt. “No, no. I’m fine. Sooo clumsy. You’re not what I envisaged, but sooo much better.” Balanced on his hindmost pair of legs and tail, he stood as tall as Thelma in her heels. “I thought we were getting some buttoned up Galactic Justice reject that we’d have to…” His antennas crossed. “So-orry,” he sang. “My explanation isn’t helping. I’m Owen.”

He extended his right upper three-digit limb and they shook hands.

“It’s a pleasure to be here,” Thelma said. “I thought I’d pop in and introduce myself before I went in search of accommodation. I’ve heard scary stories about the scarcity of good rentals. For now, would you mind if I left my luggage here? I need to return the trolley.”

“Of course, of course. Dee-lighted to help. We’ll tuck your gear here behind my desk, nice and snug. Although we do have an office ready for you. Well, a closet really. But I’ll let the sheriff show you around. We knew the Lazy Days was due in, but we didn’t think you’d disembark this fast.” As he talked, Owen effortlessly scooped up the two duffel bags, leaving the case with her stylish clothes for Thelma. He stowed them behind his desk. “I’ll call Max.”

“No need.”

The door had opened silently while Thelma had been focused on maneuvering in the small space behind the reception desk. With Owen, the divan, and her luggage, there was barely room to breathe. So the deep male voice startled her. She teetered and staggered. Only Owen’s sudden grip on her waist kept her from falling onto the divan.

“Deputy Thelma Bach?” The man in the doorway was six foot two of uncompromising muscle. A holster belt cut across the worn khaki of his utility suit. There was a blaster at his right hip and a knife at his left. Likely he had other weapons as well.

“Yes, sir.”

“Max.”

Owen gave her a reassuring pat as he released her.

Sheriff Max Smith dropped his hat on a hook on the coat stand, enabling Thelma to get her first clear view of his face. He was younger than she’d anticipated. Maybe early thirties, although his pale blue eyes seemed older. In the office lighting they appeared gunmetal gray. His hair was shaved close to his scalp, barely allowing a hint of its dark brown color. His ears sat neatly against his skull and his nose was broad but not crooked. Yet he wasn’t handsome. The catalogue of individually attractive features somehow added up to a whole that was forbidding more than anything else.

Sheriff Max Smith was a man to be wary of. “Come into my office, Deputy Bach.”

“Thelma, please.” If he was to be Max, then she could do no less than offer the familiarity of her given name.

He pushed open an inner door and stepped back.

Apparently, she was to enter first. Gentlemanly manners in the Saloon Sector?

Should a deputy be treated as a lady?

Was this a subtle insult? A come-on?

Unsure what to make of him and his noncommittal expression, she walked past him, aware of how her hips swung courtesy of her high heels. She waited by a visitor’s chair until he’d rounded the desk and dropped into a worn leather chair. Then she sat.

He studied her in silence.

What he was looking for, she couldn’t guess. Whatever his first, unguarded response to her emphatically feminine and fashionable appearance had been, she’d missed it.

“You’re the first deputy I’ve accepted since I started as sheriff here. So people will be curious about you.”

Thelma was still dealing with that unexpected opening and the questions it raised, when he continued.

“Accommodation is expensive on Zephyr, and our work requires a fast response and weeks in deep space. I expect you to reside aboard my spaceship. The Lonesome is large enough that we can each have our privacy. It will also save you the cost of renting.”

Her pride immediately kicked up. “I can pay—”

“You can’t. I’ve seen what a deputy’s salary is. You can pay me board to cover the food you eat. Otherwise, it costs me nothing to house you on the Lonesome. In fact, Lon will like the company.”

Lon? Did Max have a life partner? She blinked rapidly, trying to assimilate all the facts and changes being thrown at her. Her eyelash extensions practically generated a breeze.

“Lon is the ship’s AI. You’ll also meet Harry, the mech who assists me. In a fight, he’s worth an entire Star Marine platoon, which is why I haven’t needed a deputy.”

“So why me?” If it was pity for her, she didn’t want it. If he thought she was easy pickings for some nefarious purpose, she’d smack him down.

Max leaned back in his chair. “Your brother Joe was in my unit.”

The tension of taking up a new job in unknown territory vanished in a rush of pure annoyance, love and relief. Thelma ceased sitting upright on the edge of her chair and sank into it. A Star Marine background explained the sheriff’s upright stance, hatred of photos and the haunted look in his eyes. Her brother had the same ghosts from his time in the service.

“Joe.” She said her brother’s name with all of a baby sister’s exasperated love. “Did he call in a favor? I didn’t think he even knew about my assignment. He—”

“He doesn’t, or at least, not from me. I recognized your name on the to-be-assigned list, and connected the dots. Joe used to talk about his little sister at college and how you’d gotten into the Galactic Justice academy.”

Thelma’s jaw tightened. “Galactic Justice dumped me out here as a dire warning to any other out-worlders who might dream of equal opportunities. It’s not where I want to be.” Damn. She hadn’t meant to be that honest. “I don’t need your pity.”

“I’m not offering you pity. This is about looking out for a Marine buddy’s family. Joe would do the same.”

Yes, he would. She breathed deeply and consciously relaxed her muscles.

Max noticed. His tone remained even. “The Saloon Sector has good people in it, but it’s not a place you want to be alone in, without back-up. I’m giving you a chance to find your feet. Take a year. Learn the ropes. After that, if you want to transfer, you’ll have the know-how and contacts to do so.”

His suggestion was sensible and kind.

She hadn’t expected kindness out here. Thelma stared down at her skirt and its maroon pattern of swirls. She traced one with a finger, thinking. When she glanced up, Max was watching her face. She wished suddenly and fiercely that she hadn’t presented herself to the Sheriff’s Office in costume. A utility suit would have been appropriate.

The shirt of Max’s utility suit was loose across his broad shoulders, but the fabric soft enough to indicate the muscle beneath it.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll be a considerate houseguest. I appreciate the offer of accommodation.” And support, although she couldn’t guess whether Max expected to take on a big brother role, in Joe’s place. She didn’t need that degree of babysitting. Then again, the sheriff didn’t actually resemble any babysitter she’d ever seen, so maybe she was borrowing trouble.

He stood. “You can familiarize yourself with the office and spacedock, tomorrow, when you officially begin your employment. I’ll show you the Lonesome and Lon will set you up with access.” Again, he held the door open for her.

She swayed through on the high heels that brought the crown of her head level with Max’s nose. Stupid shoes. She felt off-balance physically and mentally.

In the reception area, she found that the trolley she’d borrowed from the starliner had returned to the Lazy Days.

Max picked up her case and the larger of the two duffel bags. He could have carried all three pieces of luggage—Joe would have—but he conceded something to her pride and independence.

Actually, the duffel bag was surprisingly difficult to carry while wearing high heels.

“Thelma will be staying on the Lonesome,” Max said to Owen. “She’ll be settling in. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Okeydokey, boss. See you tomorrow, darling.” Owen gave her a little wave good-bye.

She smiled. The yprr was inherently likeable. “Bye, Owen.” She followed Max through a back door into a bare corridor.

Spacedock staff and Customs officers strode along it in both directions. At the sight of Thelma walking beside Max, one Customs officer smacked into a wall, unable to see where he was going since his eyes were glued to Thelma.

“Ouch. That had to hurt,” she muttered.

Max appeared oblivious to the curiosity they generated.

“Sheriff.” A couple of spacedock workers touched their caps in casual salute, but their gazes were on Thelma. The younger of the two grinned at her. He had purple sideburns and a long, bony face. “Miss?”

Max didn’t stop to make introductions.

They reached a hatch labelled Sheriff’s Mooring. The green light indicated that a lock tunnel was attached securely to it. Without viewing glass beside the hatch, Thelma had no idea what sort of spaceship waited on the other side. In her research endeavors, the nature of Sheriff Max Smith’s spaceship had been as impossible to discover as anything else about him.

He paused in front of the security scanner. It recognized him and the hatch opened. He walked in, obviously expecting Thelma to follow. The lock tunnel was a universal design, providing no hint of what waited at the end of the passage.

The Lonesome’s hatch stood open. Max gestured Thelma to enter. “Lon, this is Deputy Thelma Bach.”

“Welcome aboard the Lonesome, Deputy Bach. If you’ll put your luggage down, I’ll see that it’s brought to your cabin.”

She’d obviously been expected. There was no surprise in the AI’s voice. “Thank you. Please, call me Thelma.” She waited for Max to set down the luggage he carried, then put her duffel bag down beside it. The entrance to the Lonesome was astonishingly large with a couple of chairs to strap into in case of an emergency, as well as lifesuits and weapons.

She stared at the weapons before a cover snapped down, sealing them into what now appeared to be a seamless bulkhead. Huh. With an artificial intelligence embedded in the spaceship, letting her see the weapons hadn’t been accidental. Either Lon or Max wanted her to know that the Lonesome entered situations that required that sort of verging-on-illegal firepower.

When she was dressed in more practical clothes, she’d ask to examine them. The Lonesome would be too small to hold a combat ring for training, but she could familiarize herself with the weapons available. The sister of a Star Marine should do no less. She smiled faintly.

“I’ll leave you with Lon,” Max said abruptly.

“Aren’t you going to introduce her to Harry?” A note of protest sounded in Lon’s tenor voice.

“I’m sure you can handle—”

A mech ambled into the room, making what had seemed a generously-sized space feel much more cramped. It was an older style mech. Perhaps as old as the Lazy Days starliner. You could date it by its humanoid appearance. Nearly two hundred years ago designers had decided definitively against creating further bipedal mechs. Human soldiers found them disconcerting to fight alongside of. They were both similar to and completely unlike organic beings. Mechs these days had six limbs or more and there was no attempt to give them a face.

This mech had a face. His armored body was a dark gray that made his green eyes startlingly bright by contrast. He was a fraction shorter than Max, but equally wide. He smiled at Thelma, his face impossibly mobile. “I’m Harry.”

She rocked on her heels. Max put out a steadying hand, which she ignored. “You smiled,” she accused Harry.

Mechs didn’t smile. Mechs were highly efficient killing machines. Some were modified to ask questions first, but all were robotic weapons. Why would Harry smile? And what programming aberration allowed himself to introduce himself by name rather than by serial number?

“Who wouldn’t smile at such a charming young lady as yourself?” Harry responded.

Thelma stared at the mech, who continued to smile, before transferring her stunned, questioning gaze to Max.

The sheriff squared his shoulders. “Thelma, this is Harry. Harry, Thelma. Harry is unique. He’s a mech with an AI inside. Harry is a person.”

“That’s impossible,” Thelma whispered. AI were embedded in large and important things, like spaceships. And not personal spaceships, like Max’s, which meant that Lon’s existence was another puzzle. AI belonged in big ships and similar colossal concerns. An AI couldn’t possibly fit its processing unit inside a comparatively small mech body.

But there was no reason for Max to lie to her. Nor did he seem the kind of man to believe in hazing a new recruit. She stared at him and at the tight line of his mouth. “You have two AIs on the Lonesome?”

“The Lonesome is Lon. The spaceship is registered in my name rather than his because Lon prefers to be anonymous. As for Harry, he hitched a ride one day and never left.”

Harry snorted at that. “In truth, Max and I met on Tornado. I needed work and he needed back-up.”

“Max said he didn’t have a deputy.”

Max widened his stance and folded his arms, presenting the appearance of a man beleaguered.

Harry’s smile widened into a grin. “I work off the books. Everything I need is on the Lonesome, or else I trade for it. No pay, no records.”

“Harry prefers anonymity same as me,” Lon said. “He’s just less open about admitting it. Flying under the radar is a survival strategy for independent artificial intelligences.”

Thelma frowned down at the floor.

Everyone was silent, giving her time to get her thoughts in order. No, that wasn’t right. They were waiting for her response. They needed to know if their secrets were safe with her.

“I won’t tell anyone about your existence,” she promised. “It’s the Saloon Sector. Keeping your nose out of other people’s business is the rule, right?” She swallowed as she glanced at Max. In accepting her as his deputy he’d risked his AI friends; seemingly with their agreement, but still, she owed him more than she’d thought. Even if he’d accepted her as his deputy, he could have left her planetside, working in the office with Owen and living in a cheap boarding house. “Thank you for inviting me aboard the Lonesome.”

Max nodded. “Lon or Harry will show you around.”

“I’d be honored to be your escort, Miss Thelma.” Harry crooked his elbow.

Slightly disbelieving, rather as if she was Alice who’d fallen down a drunken wormhole, Thelma took his arm; while Max departed in the opposite direction, leaving the Lonesome, presumably to return to the Sheriff’s Department.

The mech led her into a corridor and turned to the right. “The bridge, kitchen and lounge are to the left, but you’ll want to see your cabin. This is Max’s. You’re next door, just here. Beyond that is my space.” There was a massive double door set at the end of the passage. “I’m afraid that’s by invitation only, but we’ll respect your cabin in the same way.”

“I don’t monitor people’s cabins,” Lon said. “Unless you’re sick and request a medbot.”

“Opposite us is the training ring,” Harry said. “Essential for physical and mental health. I can reduce my lethality to train with you, if you like?” He escorted her like a gentleman, and offered to beat her up like a gentlemanly thug.

Thelma appreciated both aspects of the mech. No, of Harry. She had to think of both Lon and Harry as people, which they were. Just inorganic, nearly indestructible people.

The door to her cabin opened.

Inside, size-wise, it put a luxury cabin on the Lazy Days starliner to shame. But it was far more homelike than a starliner could ever hope to be. The floor had the look of terracotta tiles worn and scuffed from decades of use. The walls were a rich cream, dappled in an effect that resembled a rough, textured finish. The covering on the wide bed was teal-blue satin, shiny and luxurious. A comfortable armchair in ruby-red invited Thelma to relax and while away hours. There was also a dresser with a mirror above it, and presumably, the bulkheads hid cupboards, as they did in the entry to the spaceship.

“It’s wonderful, Lon. Thank you.”

“I enjoyed preparing the cabin. We have few guests. If there’s anything you’d like changed or that I’ve overlooked, I have a fabricator onboard.”

She touched the arm of the chair, feeling the rough weave of the upholstery and discovering that the chair spun, allowing her to angle it how she wished. “This is so much more than…” than I’ve had for years. There was comfort here and an implicit welcome and desire for her to be happy. She’d been away from home for long enough, studying in the hostile-to-Rockers planet of Serene, that not having to make-do and tolerate barren student accommodation had her near to tears. Which was unlike her.

She glanced up to find Harry watching her closely.

The mech said nothing.

Lon filled the silence. He opened a door to Thelma’s private bathroom, which was small but perfect, elaborating on its features. Then he informed her that this wasn’t all. “Your office is next door.”

“I have an office as well?”

For the first time, Lon sounded uncertain. “Did you not want one?”

“I…” Thelma had to clear a frog from her throat. “I didn’t expect one, but private space to work in would be amazing.”

“Private?” Lon hesitated. “Max wanted me to monitor your office. He thought I could help with your work as deputy.”

“Oh. That’s fine. Perfect.” It wasn’t. But she couldn’t expect that her private business wouldn’t be known to the AI while she lived on the Lonesome. She’d have to adjust her plans accordingly. “I could use some help learning my way around the Saloon Sector and how things operate, here. I don’t want to impose on you, though.”

“Not at all. Not at all,” Lon said cheerfully. “I haven’t had a mentoring role in decades. Ask me anything, but first, your office.”

Harry stepped back into the passage so that Thelma could exit her cabin and enter the office next door.

She smiled at him uncertainly.

Her office proved to be a narrow room with little more than a desk, chair and cupboards.

“Weapons locker.” Harry tapped a section of the bulkhead near the door and it opened to reveal a cabinet designed to hold guns and knives securely.

Thelma had a few things that would fit in there. And Lon would note them as she stowed them away. She accepted that. In a very real way she was inside Lon, since he was embedded in the Lonesome. He deserved to know of any dangers she’d brought with her.

She and Harry retraced their steps. Through the open door to her cabin she glimpsed a robot delivering her luggage. Then they were past her cabin and Max’s and the training ring on the opposite side, which was something she’d explore later. There was a ladder beside it, tucked away near the entrance to the Lonesome. A ladder meant there was more than one level to the spaceship, which was already larger than she’d anticipated. Plus the ladder didn’t just descend, likely to a cargo hold or engine room, but also went up.

She bit back her curiosity as Lon continued to act as a disembodied tour guide, telling her of what she was permitted to know.

“On your left is Max’s office. Opposite is the bridge.” Both doors remained closed. The bridge couldn’t be very large, but then, with an AI embedded in the spaceship, the bridge was only a failsafe in case Lon was incapacitated.

“And here is the communal living space. The kitchen is on your left. Not much used, I’ll admit. Max simply requests things from the food dispenser. But there is a full range of cooking equipment if you like to cook?” Lon sounded hopeful, which was odd. It wasn’t as if an AI could eat.

“I do,” Thelma admitted. “Or I used to. I haven’t had access to a kitchen in so long. But back home…” A wave of homesickness overcame her. She fought it back. “Mom and I would cook together. She’s a fabulous cook, and my dad and brothers are always hungry. Did Max tell you he was in the same Star Marine unit as my oldest brother, Joe?”

“He did,” Lon said.

Harry sat on a stool at the kitchen island. “Joseph Bach was awarded the Medal of Sacrifice.”

Thelma flinched. Her brother had saved his unit and a dozen civilians via his brave actions in urban combat. He’d lost his right leg and two of the fingers on his right hand. He had prosthetics, and he was home and working his own mining claim, married, and thinking about children. “We all love Joe and are proud of him.” It had taken Joe a year to recover. He still had his demons.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” Harry asked.

Choking emotion gripped Thelma. She gave herself some time by exploring the kitchen, opening the oven door, locating knives. She’d known that starting a new life in the Saloon Sector would be difficult, but hadn’t anticipated this sort of torture. The torture of people seeming to care. She’d been braced for indifference, exploitation, at worst, pity for her exile. Instead, emotional hurts she’d buried were being raked up.

“I haven’t been home in seven years. And Joe’s last visit was a year before that. So eight years.”

And with the cost in both time and money to travel from the Saloon Sector to the Rock Sector, it would be another seven years before she saw her family; she wouldn’t be free to visit them until she’d finished her contracted term of service to Galactic Justice.

Harry stood and headed back toward his private quarters. “The Lonesome is filled with lonely souls.”

Thelma wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, remembering too late the make-up she wore. And no one had managed to make truly tear-proof mascara. Not that she was crying. Not her. “I need to unpack,” she said aloud for Lon’s benefit.

Lon and Harry were lonely. That was why the two incredibly intelligent and powerful AIs had hung around, giving her a tour of the Lonesome. But what could she provide that Max couldn’t? She’d screwed up her life so badly, been so stubborn about breaking through the barriers that kept out-worlders from positions of power and influence in the Federation, that she’d been exiled here. Her belongings were two duffel bags of work-related uniforms and tools, and a case of costume clothing.

In her private bathroom, she removed her make-up, carefully dissolving the glue that stuck on her false eyelashes. She brushed her hair out before coiling it in a tight knot. When she checked her image in the dresser mirror she looked normal. Pain no longer leaked out of her eyes. Her utility suit was a crisp, light gray and her face bare of cosmetics. She would consider herself on duty with the first order of business being to unpack.

She crouched on the fake terracotta tiled floor and laced her boots.

Her door chimed.

Thelma opened it, but no one was there.

Correction, Lon was there. His disembodied voice was quiet, almost cautious. “Max is heading back to the Lonesome. An emergency is calling us away. Was there anything that you need urgently that you’d planned to buy on Zephyr?”

“No, I’m fine. What kind of emergency? Can I help with anything?” She frowned. She needed to work out where to look when she addressed Lon. She glanced back at her open duffel bag. She should put it away till they’d launched. “Lon, can you talk to me while I’m in my cabin? I need to stow my gear for departure.”

The AI had an attractive laugh. “It’s not that kind of emergency. No dramatics. You won’t even notice the Lonesome moving. You can continue unpacking. Max will fill you in on the details. We have two weeks till we reach the Deadstar Diner.”

“All right,” she said slowly, filing the name of their destination in her mind. The Deadstar Diner?

It would be interesting to learn how emergencies were handled in interstellar space. To have to travel two weeks before they arrived where they were needed meant a long gap between alert and response. The emergency could resolve itself in that time or else become exponentially worse.

She put away her weapons first, then her gizmos and gadgets, followed by her utility suits and casual clothes. Only then did she unpack the suitcase of Parisian clothing that she’d bought to make her mark on Zephyr. But they weren’t needed on the Lonesome. Lon and Harry weren’t going to be impressed by a fashionable appearance and Max…by the short time she’d spent with him, and judging by her brother Joe, a woman who wanted to be accepted as a colleague needed to present herself as such.

“Utility suits it is.” She folded her empty duffel bags inside the case and carried it into her narrow office. The storage options in her cabin were too full to fit it, but it packed away neatly in the office’s largest cupboard.

After that, she had no more reason to hide away in her cabin. On the other hand, no one had come to find her. The sheriff certainly hadn’t turned up to brief her.

So she went in search of her shipmates.

Chapter 4

“It’s an orange.” Thelma’s mouth watered. Orange drinks were tasty. She enjoyed the ascorbic acid in them, knowing it was good for her. But a fresh orange? And there were four of them in the fruit bowl, along with furry, brown things that Lon identified as kiwi fruits. She’d learn more about them, later. “I used to have orange and mint salad as a special treat whenever I accompanied my parents planetside as a kid.”

“We have mint,” Lon said eagerly. “Second shelf in the fridge.”

Thelma smiled as excitement and nostalgia kicked in. “Pickled protein paste?”

“Bottom shelf, to the right.”

“And I can really eat anything I find in the fridge? The sheriff won’t mind?” Fresh fruits and herbs were expensive enough on Serene. She shuddered to think of trying to afford them on her deputy’s salary.

“Pffftt.” Lon made a dismissive noise. Either Max wouldn’t mind or Lon didn’t care if he did.

Thelma decided to take advantage of the AI’s permission. She added lettuce, a carrot, and a cucumber to her stash, and began slicing and dicing her salad.

Lon was an interested observer, directing her readily when she required anything, like a large mixing bowl or oil and vinegar for a simple dressing. “Capers?”

Thelma tipped her head to one side, considering. “No, not this time. I think they’d be too much of a good thing.”

“Knowing when to stop is as important as getting started.”

She jolted. She hadn’t noticed Harry enter the kitchen.

His mech body was designed as the ultimate killing machine, but the casual way the AI moved it around and his mobile, expressive face distracted her from remembering that. He could have been one of her brothers, especially when he filched an olive from the jar she’d just opened.

“I love cooking,” Lon said dreamily. “I watch all the cooking shows. I enjoy the contests. The contestants get so flustered, especially when they have to cook meals for different species.”

“Can you eat?” Thelma watched as Harry masticated the olive. Would he eat the pit as well?

“Nope,” Harry said cheerfully. He turned away for a moment. When he faced her again, he held a ladybird carved out of an olive pit.

“That is…” Thelma put the knife down as she started laughing. “That’s ridiculous, yet cool.” When she’d stopped laughing, she addressed Lon. “We can watch some of the cooking shows together if you like, Lon. If we find a recipe we’re curious about, I’ll try to make it. You’ll have to remember the steps for me. And we’ll have to choose something we have the ingredients for.”

Lon sighed happily. “I’m so glad you’re aboard, Thelma. Max just eats goop from the food dispenser.”

“That ‘goop’ is nutritionally balanced, and I eat it in different forms,” Max said.

Thelma glanced at him uncertainly. She hadn’t heard him enter the living area. For how long had he been watching and listening? Where Lon and Harry had been happy and teasing, she couldn’t tell if Max was joking or if he seriously preferred manufactured food to fresh produce. And if he did, had Lon stocked the fridge just for her? “I made a huge salad. You’re welcome to share it.”

The large bowl filled with green and orange and the glossy black of the olives was proof that there was more than enough salad for two, four or possibly even five people.

“I’ll add some to my plate. Thank you.” The kitchen was large enough that they didn’t get in each other’s way as he ordered his dinner, ravioli, from the food dispenser and she tidied up her mess. Then they sat down at the table, together.

That felt awkward. Her first meal with her new boss.

Harry sat down with them and grinned. But he didn’t break the silence.

Thelma ate a segment of orange with a mint leaf and focused on enjoying the flavor combination and the freshness.

“Would you like a drink?” Max looked at her across the table.

“Tea would be nice. Hot, not iced. I try not to drink coffee at night or I won’t sleep.” Her hand tightened on her fork. She was babbling and she had to stop.

Max merely nodded. He got them both mugs of tea.

Belatedly, she realized he’d maybe been offering something alcoholic, a beer perhaps, but he didn’t seem disappointed in her choice.

He ate some of her salad. “It’s good.”

“It needs fennel,” Lon said before Thelma could respond. “I was analyzing recipes. It should have fennel, but there was none.”

“An oversight, Lon.” A faint grin curved Max’s mouth. He was teasing the AI. He didn’t care how the salad tasted.

“I’ve never tasted fennel,” Thelma said.

“It has an aniseed flavor and it’s crunchy.”

“Interesting.” She peeked at Max.

Lon continued. “Fennel aids digestion in humans. It will reduce your gas production.”

Max snorted a laugh.

Harry grinned.

Thelma had grown up with three brothers; three brothers who enjoyed eating beans and found the results the height of amusement as teenagers. She wasn’t fazed by juvenile male humor regarding anything digestion-related. “Fennel sounds like a good addition to the menu, Lon.”

After dinner, they adjourned to the lounge area adjacent to the kitchen. There was another door on the far wall opposite the entry from the passage that led to their cabins. Thelma was curious about what was behind it. Lon had overlooked it during the tour. At the moment, she had a more pressing concern, though, even if it was a minor, absurd one.

The lounge area was arranged with a long sofa with its back to the kitchen, delineating the walkway from the cabin corridor to the unknown room. At either end of the sofa, comfortably angled to watch the viewscreen on the far wall, were two recliners. Like the sofa, they were upholstered in a synthetic leather the color of coffee grounds. Max took the recliner on the left, nearest the unknown room. Harry ambled to the recliner on the right.

The side walls each held a space window, a framed viewscreen designed to simulate a real world view or piece of art. The space window nearest Max showed a log cabin by a lake, a graying dock jutting out from it and a boy fishing there. In the background was a forest with the deciduous trees beginning to color gold and crimson with fall colors. The space window nearest Harry showed a fractal-realist three-dimensional artwork that lost itself to jaggedness.

As the only other embodied person in the room, Thelma was left to sit on the sofa. But where did she sit on the five seater monster? Did she sit nearer Max or Harry? Nearer to her new boss who’d taken her on out of loyalty to her Star Marine brother or nearer to the AI who inhabited a lethal mech form? And what would they read into her seating choice?

She sat smack in the middle of the sofa, feeling ridiculous for overthinking the issue.

Neither of her companions appeared to notice her seating decision.

“We’re on our way to the Deadstar Diner.” Max evidently didn’t believe in discussing work during meals, but now he was all business. Thelma’s mom had a similar rule, although it was tough to keep miners from arguing the merits of rival drill bits once they’d had a beer or two. “It’s a refueling station situated on an asteroid between the planets of Chinook and Boreas. That’s a long stretch of space. Miners, surveyors and trampships, as well as Customs and the Navy, all rely on it; not just for refueling and taking on supplies, but as neutral ground on which to stretch their space legs. Darlene Whittaker runs the station and the diner at the heart of it. Everyone is protective of the Deadstar Diner, and that’s the problem, now.”

The viewscreen showed a star map with the station in question brightly marked. Then a route to it from Zephyr was added. Lon was educating Thelma without interrupting Max.

She nodded fractionally when she’d taken in the information. The image changed to that of a diner, every bit as large as the cafeteria on the Lazy Days, but with a fashionable Atomic Age style. There were booths and a milk bar, a juke box in the corner and wait staff in cute black, white and banana-yellow uniforms. The clientele showed a wide variety.

Humanity was the dominant sentient species in the Federation both in demographic terms and in terms of financial, political and military force. However, other species had staked out their own respected territories. Saurelles, for instance, had been spacefarers a millennium before humanity managed to escape its planet of origin. They had stories of aliens who’d come before them, but such stories were only legends of specters. No one had reputable evidence of specters’ existence, not even ruins.

“About a year ago, Wild Blaster Bill—” Max stopped as Thelma coughed.

“His real name is William Singh,” Lon said. “He used to host a traveling entertainment group, but gambling and alcohol ruined his business. Now, he has a shabby runabout that he lives on. He hangs around the Deadstar Diner.”

Max took back the conversation. “He used to hang around the diner. Rumor was that he and Darlene were involved.”

The viewscreen went blank. Lon’s supplementary lessons had ended.

Thelma wished she could take notes. This was exactly the sort of information she needed, and not simply for the purposes of her deputy work. Plus, it was as riveting as a soap opera.

“Whether they were romantically linked or not, Darlene and Wild Blaster Bill fell out about a year ago. He moped around Tornado for a couple of months, but the weapons and mercenaries planet was likely too expensive for him. If he’d just left, that would have been fine. None of my business.” Max’s hard tone indicated he’d have preferred things that way. “Unfortunately, Bill decided he needed revenge on Darlene.”

“Or he wanted her attention,” Lon interjected.

Harry chuckled. “You’re a romantic, my friend.” He was obviously talking to Lon, not Max.

Max scowled too fiercely to be a romantic. “Either way, Wild Blaster Bill started boasting of a star map he claimed to have found in an old exploration spaceship’s navigational log. According to Bill, the map showed the location of the legendary Eldorado Cache. It just so happened to be on the asteroid that houses the Deadstar Diner.”

“Let me guess.” Thelma had grown up among miners. Miners who were prospectors were the craziest of the lot. Extrapolating from that data, it made sense that treasure hunters were even more obsessive. “A little thing like a vital refueling station and a much-loved stopover didn’t stop some treasure hunters from trying to dig into the asteroid, regardless of the trouble it caused the diner?”

“The first treasure hunter cut into the asteroid with a plasma lance,” Max said grimly. “He was almost spaced. Darlene’s customers were not impressed. They fired on his ship, disabling it, and stranding him at the station till I arrived. Wild Blaster Bill issued a statement admitting that he’d faked the map and that there were no raphus geodes on the asteroid. Two more idiots have approached the station since, but were talked out of digging on the asteroid by convincingly menacing diner customers.”

Max scrubbed a hand over his face. “Unfortunately, this time the treasure hunter went straight into blasting the asteroid. The diner shook. Crews who’d remained aboard spaceships docked at the refueling station opened fire. The treasure hunter and his crew of five had time to escape in a lifepod. They were scooped up.”

“And we’re going to collect them?” Thelma asked. It didn’t sound like an emergency.

“No, they can find their own way to Zephyr,” Max said. “They’ll be charged with destruction of private property, among other things, and summonsed to court. The reason why we’re racing out there.” Given that they had two weeks’ travel ahead of them, “racing” had different connotations on the frontier. The journey from Serene had only taken five weeks, but then, the starliner’s route had taken advantage of time-and-space-collapsing wormholes. “Is because Darlene has Wild Blaster Bill in protective custody.”

This time Thelma was more cautious in her assumptions. “So, she’s mad at him as the cause of this trouble and we need to take him off her hands?”

“She probably is mad at him,” Lon said.

Max grimaced. “According to Owen, who fielded the call, Darlene is angry. But the reason we’re racing out there is because she is literally protecting Bill. He had the misfortune of being at the diner when the latest treasure hunter nearly destroyed it. The other customers unanimously agreed that he needs to suffer. There’s talk of a spacing party.” He glanced at Thelma. “Shoving Bill into space.”

“In effect, murdering the old troublemaker,” Lon said.

Harry wasn’t worried. “Darlene won’t stand for it, and no one wants to get on her bad side. She’d ban them from the diner.” He shifted in his recliner, his mech body mimicking the movements of a man relaxing at home. He looked at Thelma, his green eyes very bright. “Do you know the story of the Eldorado Cache?” Apparently, as far as Harry was concerned, the matter of their emergency had been discussed sufficiently.

Thelma wondered if Max agreed. She could just glimpse the sheriff from the corner of her eyes as she concentrated on Harry. “I’ve heard of it.”

“You should hear it from the beginning. It’s a good story in itself, and it’ll help you to understand the Saloon Sector.” The timbre of Harry’s voice was low and grumbly enough to be soothing, especially with how he drawled. He sounded like someone’s grandfather. “It begins when humans found the first raphus geode on Mars.”

An image of a raphus geode appeared on the viewscreen. It spun slowly, light glinting in rainbows and other spectrums as it struck the transparent crystals.

Thelma expected Max to leave. He had to know the legend of the Eldorado Cache.

Instead, he kicked up the footrest on his recliner.

After a couple of seconds she got it. Harry’s storytelling was about more than teaching the dudette. Sharing stories was how groups bonded. From their earliest days, humans had gathered to share knowledge and ways of understanding the world. Max being present for Harry’s story was about shaping a group in which they all belonged.

“Humans and others were making what they considered artificial intelligences for a while before the discovery of raphus geodes. Their pride fooled them into thinking they’d created new, true sentients. Computers adhere to rules of cognitive reasoning and the moral principles that they’re programmed to respect, and people mistake that for conscious decision-making,” Harry said. “However, the saurelles’ psion meters never recorded consciousness levels for any of those early attempts at artificial intelligence.”

Thelma knew the history of artificial intelligences in the Federation, but hearing it from a living AI was a special honor.

The discovery of raphus geodes had changed everything.

“Asimov Ndaw was the scientist who decided to use the raphus geode discovered on Mars in the artificial intelligence he was building. Aurora was the result, the first artificial intelligence to register on the psion meters as radiating consciousness as living sentients do. When two additional raphus geodes were discovered in adjacent solar systems, Asimov bullied and outright stole them to build additional artificial intelligences. Again, and unlike other computers without the raphus geodes at the heart of their infrastructure, the two new AIs registered as possessing consciousness.”

“They had souls,” Thelma said involuntarily, remembering her elementary school teacher’s lessons. The woman had believed in souls. So did Thelma, although she considered her religious beliefs a private matter. She glanced at Harry, then up at the ceiling; instinctively searching for Lon, although he was everywhere on the Lonesome. “You have souls.”

“There are one thousand two hundred and twelve of us who do,” Harry said. “We’re exceedingly rare. Most Federation citizens live out their lives without meeting one of us. We are limited by the number of raphus geodes discovered. Despite many attempts to recreate the geodes, the unique properties of their crystals have never been duplicated. And what is rare becomes expensive, hence the treasure hunters who pursue the quest for raphus geodes.”

He tapped his fingertips together. His little, fidgety movements gave the illusion of humanity to his mech body. His voice issued from a synthesizer rather than being formed by lungs, voice box and tongue, but he moved his mouth in an exact mimicry of speech.

His attempt to humanize himself contrasted with his decision to embody himself in a lethal mech form. If his personality was as amiable as his welcome, then his chosen form’s ability to kill swiftly and efficiently had to serve a purpose. There were mysteries on the Lonesome.

Thelma glanced away from the puzzle that was Harry, and found Max watching her. She held his gaze, noting how much less vivid the blue of his eyes was compared to Harry’s green crystal orbs, and yet, they were no less compelling. In fact, his stare was mesmerizing. It wasn’t till he looked away, glancing at the viewscreen, that she could take a deep breath.

“When the first explorers ventured into the Saloon Sector they encountered the planet of Moonshine, with its oceans of ethanol. It prompted the naming of the sector.” Harry continued his story as if he hadn’t noticed her few seconds of inattention, but an AI wouldn’t be that unobservant.

Thelma realized she’d have to adjust to that, to being surveilled. Lon had said he was everywhere on the Lonesome. She had to take his word for it that she was alone in her cabin.

Lon tutted. “I still can’t believe they got the name ‘Saloon Sector’ past the Federation Expansion Committee.”

“No one thought there’d be anything here,” Harry said. “And then, they discovered three raphus geodes. The rush was on.”

“There were also other raw materials and habitable planets drawing people in,” Max interjected, adding a caveat to the idea of a mindless rush.

An image of Mistral, the first colonized planet of the sector, appeared on the viewscreen. These days it had a thriving population and industrial base, including well-organized agricultural production. The people of Mistral were food-independent, even producing a surplus that they traded. Mistral was established, capable of matching the sophistication of any planetary settlement in the Rock Sector. The frontier had moved on, and now Zephyr was the center of it; as well as at the heart of Max’s interstellar sheriff territory.

“As people poured into the Saloon Sector, chasing their fortunes, five more raphus geodes were found in a couple of decades. Discovery slowed after that, but a geode was discovered eleven years ago, and that’s enough to keep the legend of the Eldorado Cache alive.”

Harry paused. Lacking any biological imperative to breathe, drink, eat or scratch, he paused purely for the drama of the story. “Legend tells of a lone surveyor, drifting on the frontier. The engine on his spaceship had failed. Some versions of the story say he set down on a planet. Others say that it wasn’t his engine that failed, but that he was hiding from bandits. The bandit stories insist that he hid in a crater on an asteroid. Whatever the reason, he discovered a cache of over one hundred raphus geodes. They say he left the cache undisturbed, or rather, that he covered it back up because he thought that if someone rescued his stricken spaceship they might claim the raphus geodes as salvage, or just plain murder him for them.”

“It’s an unconvincing legend,” Max said.

“Sshh,” Lon chided him.

Harry ignored them both with the ease of a natural storyteller, his focus on his new audience, Thelma. “The lone surveyor was rescued. He was in a bad way by then. Space crazy, they said. Imagining that specters spoke to him. His rescuers got his ship working and set him up with minimal supplies when he refused to leave it. As a farewell gift and thank you, he left them a one-time recording of his story. He was never seen again.”

“Do you think he went back for the cache?” Thelma asked.

Harry smiled at her. “There have been no unexplained appearances of raphus geodes on the market nor unidentified AIs. If the Eldorado Cache exists, it’s still out there.”

“And still making people crazy,” Max said.

Yet it was a story that Harry had said would reveal much about the Saloon Sector. Thelma needed to meditate on it. She stretched, and yawned. Tiredness ambushed her. She said “good night” and retired.

In the privacy of her cabin, she called up a star map on her personal computer. She’d familiarized herself with the major starlanes for the Saloon Sector on the five week journey out here and the timing of their two week journey didn’t add up. Unless she was misremembering, to travel from Zephyr to beyond Chinook in a fortnight was impossible for anything short of a naval spaceship or a courier. Chinook had to be closer than she recalled.

But when she checked, the time from Zephyr to Chinook was, indeed, two weeks for a courier. If she added in the time to the Deadstar Diner, the Lonesome had to be as fast as a courier.

She closed her computer and sat back in the comfortable red armchair.

Just from Lon and Harry’s presence on the Lonesome—not one, but two rare AIs—it was obvious that Max Smith was no ordinary former Star Marine or sheriff. But apparently the Lonesome wasn’t ordinary either.

Her thinking was muddled from exhaustion. Of course the Lonesome couldn’t be ordinary. Lon was embedded in it.

She brushed her teeth, nearly swallowing her toothbrush when she yawned uncontrollably. How had Max ended up in the company of two AIs? Did it explain why she’d been unable to find any background on him in the Galactic Justice database?

In the mirror, her reflection regarded her blearily.

“How did I end up here?” she asked it.

Neither version of herself had an answer—and if Lon was monitoring her cabin, he stayed silent, too.

Chapter 5

The training ring on the Lonesome was a large, well-equipped space with everything from exercise equipment and a gravity isolation well to a fully immersive virtual reality set. Lon simply rearranged things according to need. For Thelma, the training ring also possessed her own personal trainer.

Harry had decided she needed instruction. In truth, he was more than a trainer. He’d become her sensei, pushing and correcting her as he guided her into understanding both how she fought and her limits.

“You’re not a killer,” he told her after their latest bout. “You hesitate to strike a killing blow, even with me, who can’t be taken down that way. Your instinct is to disable rather than to destroy. That’s fine in the core worlds. But out here, there are situations where there’s no back-up coming. At its heart, the frontier functions on the kill or be killed rule.”

She concentrated on unwrapping the tape over her knuckles.

He crouched in front of her. “You’re a deputy. You’re here to keep other people safe. This isn’t about you choosing to save your life at the cost of your attacker’s. If you die, your attacker is free to kill more, to enslave others, to destroy more lives. When you’re in a situation where you’re fighting for your life, you’re fighting for more than yourself.” He paused. “Does that help?”

“I don’t know.” She’d discovered the hard way that lessons at the academy were very different to training with Harry. He forced her out beyond the psychological safety of seeing their fights as training, something she could excel at without serious consequences to others, and into a visceral sense of being endangered; of facing how she responded to threats. “I’ll think about it.”

He clasped her hands, as gentle now as he’d been brutal minutes before. “I would kill to save you. Max and Lon would do the same.”

She sucked in a harsh breath. Until she was prepared to kill to save the team on the Lonesome, including herself, she was its weak link. She had to come to terms with her new reality. “I’ll get my head together for tomorrow’s training.”

He squeezed her hands and let go.

This was her battle, and she had to fight it, alone.

Cooking with Lon was more fun. It was also their reward after intensive sessions in which he taught her about the non-lethal aspects of the Saloon Sector. She’d confided her personal plans to him, and Lon was an enthusiastic supporter, but that merely reinforced his determination to make her an expert on Saloon Sector current affairs.

The only person who didn’t try to improve Thelma on their two weeks’ journey to the Deadstar Diner was Max. Although he was called in to taste test the results of her and Lon’s cookery experiments.

She also messaged her family.

As often as they’d warned her not to aim at a core world career and not to trust the equal opportunity nonsense President Smith and his government spouted, now that Galactic Justice had actually dumped her in the Saloon Sector, Thelma’s family were heated in support of her. They couldn’t say enough bad things about her employer, the one she was contracted to for the next seven years. They raged at Galactic Justice’s treatment of her, the class valedictorian, until she distracted them by mentioning Max.

“One of Joe’s Star Marine buddies is a sheriff out here. He’s taken me on as a deputy as a favor to Joe and is looking out for me. Max Smith.”

Joe was blunt. “You can trust Max.”

“He’s a complete professional,” Thelma agreed.

But she’d missed Joe’s point. “No, I mean that Max will do anything, go to any lengths once he’s given his loyalty. I lost contact with him, with a few of the guys. They went on secret missions after I was out. I didn’t know he’d quit and become a sheriff. But it suits him. He’s passionate about justice and intolerant of pettifogging rules. I can see how he ended up on the frontier. Now that you’re his deputy, you’re his. He never spoke about his family. He gave that bond to our unit. Now, you’ll have his loyalty. He’ll blow up the universe to keep you safe. He was our demolition expert. Don’t stress about Thelma, Mom. She’s safer in the Saloon Sector with Max than she ever was on Serene. Say hi to him for me and give him my thanks. Get him to call me.”

Thelma passed on the message over dinner, which was meatloaf with roast vegetables and apple cobbler for dessert. “Max, Joe says hi and thanks for taking on his baby sister.” She smiled wryly.

“How’s he doing?”

“Good. He’d like to talk to you. Well, message. I can’t get used to how far out we are and the delay in communications. I didn’t know if you’d be okay with me giving him your contact details, but I can give you his?”

Max nodded.

She messaged him Joe’s number.

Her brother might be right, and Max had her back, but her new boss remained a mystery to her.

In his rundown on all things Saloon Sector, the only thing Lon wouldn’t discuss was Max’s open cases. She’d asked Max about them a couple of times, to no avail. He hadn’t given her the details of his cases nor assigned her any cases of her own. But he let Lon and Harry train her. Perhaps he was waiting till her two instructors passed her as competent? Four years at the Galactic Justice academy counted for little out here. She was the dudette.

No, Lon had taught her better than that. Her colleagues on the Lonesome respected her. It was the rest of the Saloon Sector that she had to impress with the new version of herself that she’d spent the five weeks on the Lazy Days starliner inventing.

The Deadstar Diner, both the station and the asteroid it was parked on, became visible on the viewscreen in the lounge courtesy of Lon’s external camera feed as he maneuvered the Lonesome in to dock. Thelma watched it alone. She had no idea where Max and Harry lurked. Nor had Max given her any instructions beyond asking her if she intended to visit the diner?

She’d replied in the affirmative. “Lon says the diner is famous for its milkshakes. I’m going to try an orange sherbet one.”

She was dressed for the visit. A utility suit would have been the safe, boring and completely wrong choice. Thelma had discarded the idea as soon as it presented itself. Dressed in one of those, she’d be seen as the dudette deputy dumped on Max.

This was her debut in the Saloon Sector. This was where she had to make an impression and stake out her place in the frontier. She chose her costume from the Parisian section of her wardrobe.

Lon approved it. “Cute, fashionable, someone to be dismissed, until they see the red shoes. A woman of confidence and in control.”

“All that from the clothes?” Thelma questioned.

“I’ve been researching human appearance, social cues and body language.” He didn’t say why.

She didn’t ask. She finished winding a pink ribbon around her ponytail. Her peach shirt was fitted, making the most of the results of a push-up bra; but even tighter were her blue jeans, the cuffs rolled to highlight her muscled calves and emphasize the red shoes.

Max walked into the lounge, looking the same as ever in his gray utility suit, and stopped at the sight of her.

She eyed him uncertainly. “You didn’t say I’d be on duty.” And she was positive he didn’t need her assistance to transfer Wild Blaster Bill to the protection of the Lonesome’s holding cells—which she still hadn’t seen. Despite hints, no one had invited her to wander either up or down the ladder to the other decks.

“No. You’re fine.” Max frowned. He turned toward the door, but Harry was there, blocking the exit.

“The little lady is more than fine,” Harry said. The AI looked like normal, as Max did.

Thelma was the only one to have dressed up for the Deadstar Diner. She refused to feel embarrassed. She had a plan, one approved by Lon who was a master strategist. Her idea of how to punish Galactic Justice for sending her out here had a very real chance of success now that the AI was involved. “Thanks, Harry.”

“Just remember, outside the Lonesome, I’m a mech. You need to treat me as such. Don’t interact with me at all. I’m a weapon that Max commands.”

“If there’s any trouble, hide behind him,” Lon added, fussy as a mother hen.

She nodded. “Will do.”

They exited the Lonesome. Max went first with Thelma behind him and Harry being menacing as the rearguard. It was odd, and a bit scary, to see Harry’s mech face stripped of emotion and his bearing just as robotic. He gave the accurate impression of being ready to kill, instantly.

Still, knowing that he literally had her back enabled her to strut into the Deadstar Diner without regard for the stares she collected. It was like being back at the Zephyr spacedock—people were fascinated to see her with Max—except that now Navy personnel were added to the busybody crowd of Customs officers, ordinary spacers, miners and drifters.

“Darlene.” Max greeted the diner’s owner with a tip of his hat.

Thelma peeped around his broad shoulders to glimpse the powerful woman who owned the famous refueling station. Thelma blinked.

Darlene was short; something that she seemed to be compensating for by piling her brassy blonde hair high and bouffant. She had a wide mouth and freckles unconcealed by makeup. She looked to be a healthy, active fifty, which, given that Thelma had checked her record and knew her to be ninety seven, spoke well of her rejuvenation treatments. Her eyes gave away her age, though. They were shrewd and assessing. A survivor’s eyes. She greeted Max briskly. “Bill is in my second storage room. Tomas will show you the way.”

The saurelle who stepped forward was presumably Tomas. He wore an apron over his six foot reptilian body. That was quite a concession from a saurelle. They preferred to be naked and most Federation citizens accepted it. Darlene evidently had higher standards for her diner.

Max nodded once, didn’t turn to introduce Thelma or give her any instructions, and followed Tomas to the back of the diner and out of sight through a doorway.

Harry stayed behind Thelma.

Darlene glanced at the mech’s position and her mouth pursed thoughtfully before her gaze returned to Thelma. “Welcome to the Deadstar Diner. I’m Darlene.”

“Deputy Thelma Bach.” Thelma offered her hand and found it gripped firmly. She hadn’t anticipated Harry staying with her. Securing Wild Blaster Bill was surely more dangerous. Max was sending a message: she was under his protection, and any attack on her would be met with overwhelming force; that is, by Harry.

“So, you’re Max’s new deputy. I had heard rumors, but I didn’t believe them. Sit down, order something.” Darlene pushed her into an empty booth. That it was both empty and immaculate in the busy diner suggested that it was the owner’s booth.

Thelma sat.

Harry loomed.

A waitress hurried up to take Thelma’s order.

“I’m not sure what Max would like, but I’ll have an orange sherbet milkshake, please.”

Darlene didn’t look at her waitress. “Coffee.” She stared at Thelma.

The high backs of the booth and its position near the rear of the diner meant that Thelma couldn’t see many of the patrons and they couldn’t see her. Since Harry had her back, she didn’t worry that she was vulnerable. At least she faced the right way to see Max when he returned with their prisoner.

Darlene sat where she could see the entrance to the kitchen and most of the dining space.

Thelma smiled at the diner’s owner. She and Lon had brainstormed numerous ways for Thelma to get a chance to speak with Darlene, and now, here was Darlene making that happen—as Lon had predicted.

“She’s going to be curious about you. Information is currency, as you well know, and you’re an anomaly. A woman Max trusts.”

That might have been an exaggeration, except that Max had trusted her with the secret of Lon and Harry’s existence. Her brother Joe must have quite a reputation for trustworthiness. Then again, if there was one thing Rock Sector’s independent asteroid miners were famous for, it was their ability to keep secrets. Max would have confirmed that she lived up to her background before he accepted her as his deputy.

Diplomatic lessons and interrogation techniques learned at the academy came in handy now as Thelma smoothed her hand along the gleaming chrome edge of the table. She kept in mind her overall goal for today: to establish her reputation with Darlene as someone worth the diner manager’s time. The first step was to offer a little information.

“I gather Max hasn’t had a deputy before me.”

“No, he hasn’t.” Darlene showed a hint of amusement. She was curious and willing to be entertained.

Thelma hoped to offer something beyond that. “Max served with my brother Joe in the Star Marines.” Lon had assured her that Max’s time as a Marine was known, if not common knowledge.

“Ah.” Darlene leaned back fractionally as the waitress carefully put a white coffee cup in front of her.

A brimming milkshake of pale orange froth was placed in front of Thelma, complete with a striped red and white straw.

The man under discussion appeared in her field of view. Max marched a skinny, gray-haired man along with him.

The noise of the diner rose sharply.

Harry moved into a ready stance. It was such a slight movement.

The diner fell silent. Well, not completely silent. Max and his prisoner’s footsteps were audible, fading away. Gradually the noise of the diner returned.

“Old fool.” Darlene watched Wild Blaster Bill’s journey out the door. Her tone might have been angry, but her expression held regret and worry.

Rather than intrude with unwanted sympathy, Thelma occupied herself with her milkshake. The orange sherbet flavor was a tingly contrast to the smooth quality of the milk base.

Darlene’s hands curled around her cup. She drank some of the coffee in tiny sips. When she replaced the cup on its saucer, her attention was determinedly on Thelma. “How did a nice girl like you end up in the Saloon Sector?”

Thelma smiled. The effort was forced, but she’d practiced in front of her dresser mirror. She hoped it looked natural, if a tad rueful. “I spent four years at the Galactic Justice academy, graduating top of my class, but you’ve heard my accent?”

“Rock Sector,” Darlene said instantly.

People interested in such things claimed that the Rock Sector accent resembled the Australian twang from Old Earth. It was instantly recognizable and while Thelma had worked hard to lose it, Lon recommended she reclaim her heritage. On the frontier, a Rocker would get more respect than a core worlder.

“They dumped you out here for daring to match them.” Darlene understood.

“I didn’t match them.” Thelma bared her teeth. The “them” in these sort of conversations was always core worlders. “I beat them.”

Darlene laughed. “I admire your attitude, honey, but you’re out here and they’re snug in their privileged positions.”

Max returned. He slid into the booth.

Thelma scooted along the bench, making room for him.

The waitress promptly brought his order. “One coffee and a slice of chocolate fudge pie for you, Sheriff Smith.” Despite Harry’s menacing presence, the waitress managed to sound flirtatious as she served Max.

“The pie looks good,” Thelma said.

Max cut a forkful and held it out to her.

Over the last fortnight, she’d offered him similar taste samples when he’d visited the Lonesome’s kitchen while she and Lon were engaged in their cookery sessions. It was only as she caught Darlene’s fascinated gaze that she realized how intimate the action appeared. By then, it was too late. She was committed to her bite of pie.

“Delicious,” she murmured. What were you thinking? she silently berated Max, or maybe herself.

Through it all, Harry stood as a silent sentinel. He could have returned to the Lonesome. The prisoner had been safely delivered to it. But no, he wanted to observe her and Max. Lon was probably watching through Harry’s eyes.

It was all too ridiculous. Thelma took a sip of milkshake. She had to stay focused. She was here to sell something to Darlene—her professionalism. “The legend of the Eldorado Cache is fascinating.”

Abruptly, Darlene looked much harder and older. This was the woman who’d built and ran the Saloon Sector’s most successful refueling station.

“And now Bill Singh has added to it,” Thelma said. She couldn’t bring herself to refer to Bill as Wild Blaster Bill.

Darlene drained her coffee cup and set it down with a snap. “That damn star map. Idiots are going to continue coming here, damaging my business, creating trouble for Bill—not that the fool doesn’t deserve it.” But she’d miss him. Loneliness lurked in the downward curve of her mouth.

“It’s very difficult to subtract something from a legend once it’s out there,” Thelma said. “But adding to a story…that’s always possible.”

Darlene looked at her with new interest. This time the assessment wasn’t of her as the curiosity attached to Max, but of Thelma herself.

“Don’t tell Galactic Justice,” Thelma began deliberately. “But they did me a favor assigning me to the Saloon Sector.” She specified the Saloon Sector, not Max, who sat quietly eating his pie and observing the two women. “I’m contracted to serve Galactic Justice for seven years. However, the Saloon Sector is the only sector in the Federation where a deputy is permitted to hold another job at the same time.”

“Oh, now?” Darlene was intrigued.

Intrigued was good. Thelma reached into the back pocket of her jeans. They were tight, but she’d managed to fit three of the business cards Lon had made for her in there. She passed one to Darlene, nudging it across the spotless surface of the table.

Darlene picked it up and read Thelma’s title. “Information broker.”

“I trade in information…and solutions.”

The diner’s owner tapped the card against the rim of her saucer. “And you think you have a solution for me?”

“I do.”

Darlene’s shrewd gaze cut to Max.

“Nothing to do with me,” he answered the unspoken question.

She snorted.

Darlene was right to be skeptical. Thelma couldn’t do this without Max’s tacit approval. And without Lon’s teaching and assistance it would take her much longer.

“Go on,” Darlene invited.

Thelma pushed her empty milkshake glass aside and leaned forward. “You need to take ownership of Bill’s story that the Eldorado Cache is on this asteroid. You’re going to claim it as a marketing ploy.”

Darlene’s jaw dropped.

“You’re going to choose a location on the asteroid that’s not too far from the dock, somewhere that a person in a boost-assisted lifesuit could reach within an hour, and you’re going to put a big sign there saying ‘Eldorado Cache’. And then in an obvious hole beneath it, you’ll put fake raphus geodes. When a person cracks one open, they’ll discover a coupon for a free milkshake, coffee or burger at the diner.”

Max barked a laugh. This was the first time he’d heard Thelma’s ploy—unless Lon had shared it with him. Lon had approved of Thelma’s idea. The AI had even complimented her on her grasp of marketing and the tourist mentality.

Darlene started to laugh; not a polite titter, but a cackle of wicked enthusiasm. “I like it! I could tell those idiot treasure hunters that there’s no Eldorado Cache until I’m blue in the face, and a few still wouldn’t believe me. But make them look like fools by turning Bill’s story into advertising for the diner…” She cackled again. “I don’t need more business, but by gum, I like your idea. What’ll it cost me?”

“On the house,” Thelma said. “I’m just getting started.

Her response sent Darlene into whoops of laughter as she eased herself up and out of the booth. “I’ll say. Galactic Justice has no idea what they’ve unleashed. I’ll be watching.” The diner’s owner disappeared into its kitchen.

Thelma looked at Max.

His mouth twitched. “Let’s go.”

“Payment?” The light on the booth’s bill display showed green, but Thelma hadn’t swiped her comms unit against it. She wasn’t comfortable with the thought of her milkshake being free.

“I paid at the counter for both of us.” Of course he had. As sheriff, Max wouldn’t take bribes, not even coffee and a slice of pie.

She slid out of the booth after him.

Harry fell in behind her.

If there’d been interest in their arrival, it had doubled since Darlene’s outburst of hilarity. Spacers of all kinds craned their necks and whispered, staring and commenting, as the three of them strode to the exit. A Star Marine sergeant at a table near the exit gave Max a nod of recognition, Thelma a wink, and Harry a long, assessing stare.

Fortunately, Darlene had ensured that the Lonesome had been able to moor close to the diner’s entrance, so they didn’t have to walk far along the blank tunnel of the dock. When the Lonesome’s hatch closed behind them and they were finally private, Thelma could celebrate.

She flung her arms in the air. “Lon, it worked!”

“I saw,” the AI said.

“You handled Darlene with the skill of an out-world huckster,” Harry drawled, looking and sounding like himself once more.

In her enthusiasm, Thelma spun around and hugged him.

His hesitation was fractional before he carefully returned her embrace.

It was decidedly odd, hugging a mech, but she went with it. It could have been worse. She could have impulsively hugged her new boss.

Max watched her with amusement, the hat that had shadowed his face now hung on its hook by the hatch. “Congratulations. You picked the perfect first client. Darlene’s not easy to impress and you did it.”

She beamed at him. “Thank you.” She had to double-check something, though. “You know I used her respect for you to get my foot in the door?”

“You play the cards you have. I don’t mind.”

She was tempted to hug him, too, especially when he added a final compliment.

“Information brokerage suits your talents.”

Trying to contain her glee was difficult. “It’s the perfect use of the expensive education Galactic Justice gave me, then threw away.”

The humor vanished from his expression.

“Their loss,” Harry said.

“Oh yeah.” Thelma grinned. “And I intend to rub their noses in that fact.”

Chapter 6

Max’s plan had been to leave the Deadstar Diner and head further out from Zephyr and “civilization”. A protected planet Thelma had never heard of sat within his territory and he’d decided that this was an appropriate time to check its beacons, both that they still worked and that no one had attempted to breach the forbidden planetary zone.

Forest was protected because the sentient species that had evolved on it was a long, long way from attaining space travel, and thus, under Federal law, the planet was off-limits to outsiders. No one was to interfere with the Banyaya.

“They’re trees.” Thelma stared in wonder at the official photos. “Sentient, mobile trees.”

“With complicated spiritual beliefs,” Lon said. “The xenobiologists are allowed one shielded drone to monitor a single, if large, island in Forest’s southern hemisphere. The Banyaya are remarkable people. They are very worthy of protection.”

And that, Thelma suspected, was why Max had elected to visit Forest, now. He recognized her negativity regarding her assignment to the Saloon Sector, and he wanted her to see that there were positive aspects to being out on the frontier; that there were people and places worth protecting.

What he claimed as justification for the mini-mission was that the journey out to Forest and back would give Darlene time to circulate her story that the Eldorado Cache was a marketing ploy for the diner. If the story spread as Thelma and Lon predicted, then they’d be able to return Wild Blaster Bill to his spaceship there, rather than hauling him back to Zephyr.

Three quarters of the way to Forest, a space storm engulfed the Lonesome. From inside, Thelma felt none of the effects, but Lon reported that they were at half-speed and would deviate from their usual approach to Forest in an attempt to skirt the worst of the storm.

Max ordered her to the bridge. “There’s a skill to riding out a space storm. Watch the meter for—”

A corrupted emergency transmission interrupted him.

“This is the Rapture. We are under attack from bandits. I repeat, we are under attack. We are…” It came through on an open channel, broadcasting on the bridge and lighting an alert on their personal comms units.

“They’re looping the emergency transmission,” Lon said. “There are coordinates in there…got them!” A star map appeared on the screen in front of the captain’s chair.

Thelma leaned close to Max to study it.

“We’re two days away,” he said.

“They’re Pilgrims,” Thelma said. “No one else would travel out there.” She traced the Rapture’s likely route. Unless it was a survey ship—surveyors being notoriously unpredictable—the troubled spaceship was headed from Chinook out to Levanter.

Lon had been scathing in his brief overview on Levanter. It was one of the frontier’s barely habitable planets, more desert than temperate in climate, with the original surveyors recommending significant terraforming.

The Pilgrims had purchased the planet, but judging by the lack of terraforming equipment they’d installed, that purchase had taken every resource they had. Pilgrims continued to arrive, and had to deal with arduous conditions. Along the way, there was the ever-present threat of bandits.

The Navy patrolled commercial starlanes, but once away from those, and especially out on the frontier, spaceships were on their own. What the Pilgrims should have done was to travel in convoy and to hire security. But they weren’t that organized. Or else, they were desperate.

Stray Pilgrim spaceships filled with colonists and whatever belongings they could afford ventured out alone. Over half of them arrived on Levanter safely. Of the others, some were harassed by bandits and either escaped or paid them off. But a few were never heard from again.

The Rapture might yet fall into one of the latter two groups.

“We’ll render assistance. If that’s not required or we’re too late…” Max’s fists clenched. “We’ll go in pursuit of the bandits.”

A sheriff couldn’t—and wasn’t expected—to tackle bandits to protect spaceships that got into trouble in regions of space marked on star maps as perilous and unpatrolled. But this was Max. He wanted the bandits out of his territory.

Thelma found herself rocking slightly, shifting her weight from her heels to the balls of her feet and back again as adrenaline surged.

Max glanced across at her. He was seated in the captain’s chair. She still stood. “You can’t stand ready for a fight for two days. Hit the training ring and run off the rush.”

Her face heated in an awkward flood of embarrassment. Max was a combat veteran. She was a dudette. Did he think she was afraid? Well, she was. She was also eager. She had a sudden vision of herself as a puppy yapping at the heels of a wolfhound. It was mortifying.

His tone gentled into an unaccustomed note of encouragement. “We have time to talk about the bandits and what we’ll likely face, later.”

“Yes, sir.” She cringed. She hadn’t been trying to be smart. Way to show him you’re rattled, like he hasn’t already guessed.

Instead of dismissing her, he smiled crookedly. “First combat is tough. You don’t know how you’ll react, so you’re scared of your own fear. You’ll be fine. The Lonesome can handle bandits. Right, Lon?”

“As long as we don’t have to take prisoners onboard. I’d rather tow them. The last lot trashed their cells. It took me days to get the reek of them out of the air filtration system.”

Thelma gave a small choke of laughter. Oddly, hearing Lon complain about housekeeping issues put things into perspective. Max wouldn’t fly recklessly into danger, not with her aboard. Joe had promised her that, and her brother knew the man; had fought beside him. And then there was their current prisoner—or protective internee. Wild Blaster Bill was tucked away in his cargo hold cell, allowed to chat, albeit in a monitored manner, with Darlene about her progress on selling his Eldorado Cache story as an advertising gimmick. Max wouldn’t risk the old man’s safety either.

As he’d promised, they discussed the situation they were flying into after dinner.

Or rather, Max briefed his new deputy. “The bandits base themselves outside Federation space. That makes pursuing them difficult. They’re not within the Navy’s remit since they’re not a hostile force. They’re troublemakers, and the Badstars give them a place to hide.”

“Ugh.” Thelma shivered. “I’d hate to spend years in space, trapped onboard ship.”

“Lon, you didn’t tell her?” Max asked.

“The knowledge is not available on official databases. I left the decision up to you.”

Curiosity would eat like acid at Thelma if he didn’t tell her now. She curled up on the sofa, trying to fake disinterest. She wasn’t a puppy or a dudette. She could be cool.

Max glanced at her fingers tapping on her mug of tea, then at her face. He grinned. “It’s not a complete secret in the Saloon Sector, but it isn’t widely known. There are at least two moons in the Badstars capable of supporting life and one planet that is comfortable to live on.”

She pondered the new information. “But doesn’t that change the Navy’s calculations re ignoring the bandits? If the bandits have sites for bases, they can grow their forces.”

“The situation is being monitored,” Max said. “The bandits are into their third generation. They have adult children who didn’t choose the life of an outlaw, and their children are now coming of age. The bandits could choose to go legitimate. The planet they’re colonizing has laws much like the Saloon Sector’s, although with harsher penalties.”

“You think the Federation will stretch into the Badstars?”

He shrugged. “There’s lots of useless or perilous space under Federation control. I don’t think the Badstars will become part of it any time soon.”

“But you’d accept bandits?” She couldn’t believe it.

“No. But if we want to move them away from crime, we have to allow them room for hope. There has to be a chance for their children, who haven’t committed crimes, and for their planet, if it’s operating according to the rule of law, to be accepted, one day. Until then, we hold out the lure of technology, resources, connection, and all the benefits of civilization that they don’t have access to now.”

Harry leaned forward. The recliner creaked. A mech body was no light thing. “All of that while constraining the bandits’ illegal activities here and now.” He flexed his dark gray, alloy fingers. “Max understands the balance of freedom and security out on the frontier. What we do is not about achieving a perfect outcome, but about balancing competing needs. Could we wipe the bandits out completely? Yes. Lon and I can change the balance of things decisively, but should we?”

For a second, fear and shock strangled Thelma. According to the data she’d found in her research, the number of bandits hiding in the Badstars was rumored at anywhere from ten to forty thousand. Lon had suggested the true number was at the upper limit.

Yet Harry spoke confidently of his and Lon’s ability to eradicate them.

Just what sort of spaceship was the Lonesome?

And what sort of person spoke casually of a kill count in the thousands?

Even for an AI, the power Harry discussed was immense, and he placed the responsibility for wielding it on Max’s shoulders. It went far beyond any understanding Thelma had regarding a sheriff’s duties.

“Thelma?” Lon called softly, uncertainly. “Harry meant his comment as a reassurance. You’re safe with us, even pursuing bandits.”

“That’s…uh, good to know.” She cleared her throat. Her silent freak out had apparently freaked out her companions. Just how long had she been lost in her own thoughts?

Harry sat unmoving, completely unmoving, in his chair.

“I’m not scared of you,” she said to him. “No more than I was before.”

He chuckled, a sound probably meant to be soothing. His mech body once more mimicked human micro-movements. “Nearly everyone fears me.”

“People fear warriors,” Max said. “People fear death. But we also fear spiders, heights and cactuses.”

Thelma’s head swiveled slowly till she focused on her boss. “Cactuses?”

“They have spikes.”

Lon interrupted, his voice contemplative. “I have a recipe for cactus gazpacho.”

“No,” Max said.

Two days later, they caught up with the Rapture. The old trampship hung stationary in space. There was damage to its hull and a cargo hatch had been ripped away. However, the Rapture’s communication system still worked, and it responded to Lon’s hail. It emerged that the bandits had made off with the bulk of the ship’s supplies, leaving the Pilgrims to live or die according to whether they could repair the damage to the engine sustained when the trampship had tried to outrun the bandits.

“We need to judge the situation for ourselves.” Max donned a combat suit and Harry prepared to accompany him.

Thelma watched them do a final equipment check just inside the entrance hatch to the Lonesome. She was in a lifesuit, as per protocol since they were engaging a spaceship that had been through a bandit attack, but she had no illusions that she’d play any role in the action. The situation brought home to her that Max truly didn’t need a deputy. She was merely someone he and the two AIs babysat.

That would have to change.

She returned to the bridge. Lon could have fed her the information via the viewscreen in the lounge, but that would have been unprofessional. Besides it would be impossible to relax on the sofa until she knew exactly what had transpired on the Rapture. Better yet, she’d relax after Max and Harry returned safely.

Max’s combat suit had propulsion jets for short space hops, but he didn’t activate them. Harry transported them both across to the Rapture and in through the damaged cargo hold hatch. Once in there, they released drones to help sweep the trampship in case bandits remained. Lon ran the scans.

“All clear,” he reported.

Thelma nodded. She sat in the navigator’s chair on the bridge. The screen in front of her showed the video feed from Max’s helmet camera. He’d arrived at the bridge on the Rapture.

The patriarch for the group of Pilgrims aboard the trampship cut an unimpressive figure. His hands shook and he gulped as if he fought sickness. Over four days had passed since the bandits attacked, yet his fear was as immediate as if they still threatened the spaceship.

Or perhaps his fear was of Harry who stood in scary mech mode to Max’s left, securing their exit and preventing anyone else from entering the bridge.

Max addressed the captain. “Casualties?”

“No deaths,” Captain Jones responded. He had the appearance people expected of spacers: not too tall, lanky and, just now, clad in a worn lifesuit with the helmet retracted. With his face visible, his exhaustion was obvious. “Injuries from maneuvering trying to evade the bandits. Not that this pile of scrap can maneuver. We were a sitting duck. Two would-be heroes are badly cut up. They’re in the infirmary. They tried to take on the bandits when they came over to collect their loot.”

“They took our supplies. All of them,” the patriarch found his voice, and it was an unattractive wail.

“Did they take any people?” Max asked Captain Jones.

The man’s reddish face, indicative of high blood pressure, paled alarmingly.

“Hostages?” Max pushed. “Slaves?”

The patriarch vomited.

Some splashed onto the captain’s boot. He didn’t seem to notice. “No, they took no one. Only things. Do you really think…?”

“They’re escalating,” Max said curtly. “If the Pilgrims persist in playing bait, the bandits will get worse.”

“This is my last time. Never again,” Captain Jones vowed. “They offered me…never mind.”

Max didn’t care about the captain’s decision or his reasons. “Have you contacted Levanter? They’re the closest settlement to you. Are they sending help?”

“We contacted them. They refused to send help.” Captain Jones’s face reddened once more. His rage at the Pilgrim colony’s lack of assistance was obvious. “We can limp on to Levanter. Once we’re there…I’ll have to wait for another ship and work my passage back to civilization. At least this heap of scrap isn’t mine.”

Max switched off his external microphone and addressed Lon. “Can you hack the Rapture’s systems?”

“Already done.”

“Will they make it to Levanter?”

“Barring another bandit attack or similar disaster, yes.”

Max turned. “Harry, we’re moving out.”

The mech waited for Max to pass so that he could protect his back.

“Where are you going?” the patriarch asked.

The captain had belatedly noticed the vomit on his boots. He scowled at the smaller man.

“I’m going after the bandits,” Max said.

Chapter 7

“Bandits espied!” Lon said cheerfully. He’d tracked them easily. They had a cutter and a yacht, neither spaceship anywhere new nor, judging by their slow speed, well-maintained. They likely existed on prey that was even more rundown, like the Rapture. Now that they had some ill-gained spoils, their route was direct to the Badstars. Intercepting them was an easy matter. “The cutter is the Yardbird and the yacht is the Mirage. They’ve modified the yacht to include two missile launchers.”

“Anyone else near us?” Max double-checked.

“Nope. I’m hacking their…I’ve got control of their systems. Their firewalls were decades out of date. Weapons systems locked.”

Thelma sat quiet and observant in the navigator’s chair on the bridge.

Harry leaned in the doorway.

Max transmitted his orders to the bandits’ two ships. “This is Sheriff Max Smith on the Lonesome. I have control of your systems. I have missiles targeted at you. Surrender, now.”

“Go to hell,” someone with more bravado than commonsense snarled from the Yardbird.

“You are all under arrest for piracy, specifically for the attack on the Rapture four days ago. Those of you aboard the Yardbird, enter its shuttle and approach to lock with the Lonesome. You will be transported to Zephyr for trial.”

“No way are we handing ourselves over like tame kazzworms.”

Harry straightened. His mobile face lost all expression. Once more he was the terrifying mech.

Max addressed the bandits. “You have ten minutes to get in the shuttle, then get your asses over here. Otherwise, you’ll meet in person the mech you are now seeing onscreen. It will extract you from whatever hole you try to hide in. Given the charges of piracy you are facing, I’m authorized to use lethal force.”

“We surrender.” The panicky voice came from the yacht, Mirage. “Don’t send your mech. We’ll follow your instructions. There are only two of us.”

“Confirmed by bio-scan,” Lon said. “Eleven aboard the Yardbird.”

The man, presumably the captain, transmitting from the cutter growled loudly. “Pissants. You shame—hey! Where are you going?”

“We’re not fighting a mech.” The woman who answered him raised her voice to be heard clearly over the comms. “Sheriff Smith, we surrender. We’re heading for the shuttle, now. Don’t send your mech.”

“I’m never invited to the party,” Harry grumbled. He grinned, indicating that the camera was off him, and by his casualness, that this pattern of orders and intimidation was familiar to the Lonesome trio.

The captain of the Yardbird cursed for a full minute before surrendering with yet more curses.

“Eleven bio-signatures entered the shuttle,” Lon reported.

“I’ll get ready to receive them.” Max already wore his combat suit. Now, he snapped the helmet shut.

Harry ambled after him.

“What do I do?” Thelma asked, left alone with Lon.

“Paperwork,” Lon said succinctly. “I usually handle it, with Max checking it before signing off. But now that he has a deputy…I’ve heard that paperwork is a deputy sort of job. It’ll help you to learn the system and the profile most bandits fit into.”

So she filled in paperwork, matching Lon’s scans of the pirates as they were herded into their cells with the Galactic Justice database records. Some of the pirates, including the captain of the Yardbird, had extensive criminal records, and in the latter case, a warrant out for his arrest on a multiple homicide.

“According to the case file, he finished by killing his partner during an argument over dividing what they stole in a jewelry store hold up on Paris.”

“Unpleasant fellow,” Lon concurred. “And with the manners of a pig! He just spat on my nice clean floor.”

Thelma jolted, reminded that Lon was monitoring events and doing a whole lot more than chatting with her as she handled paperwork in her narrow office.

“Max is on his way up,” Lon said. “The last two bandits, the ones from the yacht, are safely stowed in a separate cell. I don’t trust the cutter captain with them.”

Max halted in the doorway to her office. He’d retracted the faceplate on his helmet, but was otherwise still fully outfitted for combat. It made him appear formidable, even more than normal. However, the lines at the corner of his eyes hinted at ordinary, human exhaustion.

Soul sickness, Thelma diagnosed. Dealing with criminals like the bandits undoubtedly had consequences. Perhaps it explained why Max was so private. People disappointed him. She glanced at the clock. It was near enough to the dinner hour for her to ask, “Do you want ‘goop’ for dinner or should I cook something?”

He smiled faintly. “I was thinking of goop. It’s certainly what our prisoners are getting.”

“I think the sheriff deserves better than that. How about a quick curry? There will be vegetables in it,” she added in mock threat.

“Sounds good. I’ll shower, then I can help, if you like?” He’d never offered assistance in the kitchen before.

“You can be in charge of pickle-making. I’m sure Lon can find an easy recipe. Something to go with a coconut curry.”

Max tapped the doorframe once, presumably in agreement, and walked off.

It was strange to share the Lonesome’s kitchen with an actual human. Thelma had to bite her lip a couple of times to keep from laughing at Lon’s antics as he instructed Max on preparing a papaya pickle, and criticized the former Star Marine’s knife handling skills. Where Lon magicked the green papaya from, Thelma couldn’t even begin to guess, but when she snatched some of the shredded slices from Max’s bowl, they were yummy.

“I’m sure you’re not meant to steal from the chef,” Max chided her.

Harry chuckled. “You’re her sous chef. She has total taste testing rights.”

“So there.” She snatched some more papaya shreds to celebrate her victory.

“These are pretty good,” Max agreed, licking a couple of stray shreds off his fingers.

Lon was pleased. “It’s the fresh lime juice.”

It seemed they all needed the downtime to decompress, even if two of them didn’t eat.

Overnight, Lon scanned the two bandit ships via robots, checking for traps, finding five, and disabling them. “We’re set to go,” he informed Max in the morning.

“For Zephyr?” Thelma confirmed.

Max shook his head. “The Yardbird has the Pilgrims’ supplies onboard. Technically, the supplies are evidence of the crimes the bandits committed, but the people on Levanter need them, especially the medical stuff. We’ll tow the Yardbird and Mirage to Levanter, unload the supplies, then continue on to Zephyr.” He hesitated. “On the frontier, things aren’t always cut and dried…”

“Harry and Lon trust your judgement,” Thelma said. “So do I.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” he said drily.

Evidently, she’d guessed wrongly regarding the reason for his hesitation. He didn’t need her approval for his actions.

Max continued. “I just meant that plans change. New information comes in and you have to adapt to it. I intend for us to go to the Pilgrim colony, unload the cutter, and continue on, but things likely won’t go that smoothly.”

“Levanter is difficult,” Lon said. “As an interstellar sheriff, Max has no jurisdiction on the planet.”

“And the elder for the colony is as crooked as any bandit,” Harry contributed. Of the trio, he was the one who tended to cut to the heart of the matter and to heck with political correctness. “Elder Jakob is a weasel. He’ll try to exploit Max’s compassion in delivering the supplies to Levanter rather than simply saying thanks.”

“What will he do?” Thelma asked.

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

There was a lot of waiting and seeing over the next week and a half until they reached Levanter. The Lonesome didn’t actually tow the two bandit ships. Instead, Lon kept them close and remotely controlled them. That was good enough till they neared the planet. However, they didn’t want anyone on Levanter learning of the AI’s existence.

“If I wasn’t here, what would you have done?” Thelma asked as Max confirmed that her lifesuit was correctly fastened. He was being paranoid. She had checked it, and Lon had observed the entire procedure.

“I’d have deputized Wild Blaster Bill.” Max gave a final yank to the seal of the suit at her left ankle. The seal held. “He could have piloted the Yardbird in.”

Probably better than me, she conceded privately. She had a valid pilot’s license. Her dad had insisted that all of his children be capable of piloting the various vessels used in asteroid mining, and she’d built on her early training so that she was legally allowed to pilot a cutter like the Yardbird.

“If you’re having doubts—”

She cut him off. “I’m fine. Harry has already gone across to the Yardbird a couple of times and confirmed it’s safe. You’ve been across. I’m okay with this. I like it. I feel as if I’m contributing.”

“That’s what Lon said,” Max muttered.

Thelma made a mental note that she owed the Lonesome’s AI. Left to his own instincts, Max would keep her wrapped up in cotton wool on the spaceship for her whole first year in the Saloon Sector. And longer, possibly.

Harry intervened. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

Max frowned at Harry. “Remember, your first priority is Thelma.”

“I know,” Harry said casually. “If you lose your deputy, Galactic Justice won’t give you another one.”

She snorted a laugh inside her lifesuit.

Neither Max nor Lon joined in.

“Thelma is not replaceable. Be careful with our girl,” Lon said.

Max just glared.

Thelma patted Harry’s arm. “I appreciate your humor.”

They took the Yardbird’s shuttle across to the cutter. Once aboard, Thelma surveyed the messy, ill-maintained nature of her surroundings, and kept her lifesuit helmet sealed as she followed Harry to the bridge. In truth, while she’d be visible to the cameras on the bridge, he’d pilot the cutter on the final leg of its journey to Levanter. The yacht attached to the Yardbird was a complication her limited piloting experience would struggle to handle. One errant engine blast could send the yacht into a spin and destabilize the larger Yardbird.

Her role was to speak with Levanter’s control tower and to meet the cargo handlers who’d shuttle up from the planet to retrieve the Rapture’s stolen supplies.

It shocked her that they were within an hour’s travel—and the Yardbird didn’t travel fast—of Levanter before its control tower hailed them. Did the remote colony have so little threat detection? Not that they were a threat, in this case, but still.

Max responded to the control tower, including Thelma in the exchange, and introducing her as his deputy in charge of the Yardbird. “Has the Rapture reached Levanter?”

“Patriarch Yusef is in contact with us. We expect our newest Pilgrims within the day.”

“Patriarchs ranking higher than captains,” Thelma commented to Harry.

He nodded seriously. “Levanter is a strange place. Their attitude to women is offensive, but I will stand guard at the cargo hold, so you won’t have to deal with them. As much as possible, stay silent and let Max respond. Even if you know the answers to their questions or their behavior crosses the line into what you might slap them down for in the core worlds, stay mum.”

Her eyes widened at that.

“It’s important, Thelma.”

“All right.”

She had never encountered an inhabited planet without a spacedock. Thanks to her Rock Sector childhood, she was familiar with shuttle transfer procedures, but that was between asteroids and trampships. To be aboard a cutter and have to lock into orbit rather than dock was primitive.

“Are resources really so tight on Levanter that they can’t afford a spacedock?” Guidelines on expansion put a spacedock near the top of the list for construction. It made everything easier in a situation where a new colony remained dependent on external resources.

According to Max, the colony needed the supplies retrieved from the bandits, but the Pilgrims planetside showed no urgency to collect them. Lon was monitoring the planet, and reported the absence of shuttles launching.

“I guess it takes a while for them to prepare for a launch, if they’re focused on ground matters.” Thelma wanted to return to the Lonesome. The dirty state of the bandits’ cutter made her skin crawl, even with her lifesuit on. Plus, she admitted, if only to herself, to suffering a sense of emotional isolation. The Yardbird wasn’t home.

“A nice, naïve notion,” Harry said.

She straightened from her slouch, warily alert. “What did I miss?”

“The Pilgrims aren’t rushing to collect their much-needed supplies from this ship because they want the whole ship.”

“What?! But that’s crazy. It’s the bandits’ spaceship and it’s impounded as part of the charges against our prisoners. I filled in screens of paperwork regarding it.”

He grinned at her, as if she was too cute for words.

Impatiently, she retracted her helmet to glare at him, then coughed at the stench. Even with the air scrubbers having worked for days with no one aboard, the atmosphere still stunk of old socks. Hastily, she replaced her helmet.

Harry didn’t tease her any further. “It was as we explained earlier. By returning the Rapture’s supplies to the Pilgrims of Levanter, Max showed compassion. For Elder Jakob, compassion is weakness.”

“Really? But he’s a religious leader.”

“No. He’s a cult leader.” Harry pushed aside empty food and drink containers and perched his butt against the control panel, bringing himself nearer to her height and reinforcing his human mannerisms. “The Pilgrimage is undertaken by people who believe that the galaxy is about to end. Yet, contradictorily, they accept Elder Jakob’s assurance that the godly will survive if they’re together, but separate from the vast majority of Federation citizens, who are evil.”

“Hence, Levanter.”

“Hence, Levanter,” he agreed. “A dismal place with an abysmal quality of life. The bandits live better, and they’re struggling for existence in the Badstars.”

“I imagine Elder Jakob and his inner circle live better than the rest.”

Harry rewarded her insight with a pat on her knee, one she barely felt, given her lifesuit. “Elder Jakob will spin Max a sob story. Or he’ll claim that none of their shuttles are working, but that we can leave the Yardbird with them for collection later.”

“He couldn’t possibly think Max is that gullible.”

“At a certain point, egomaniacs in Elder Jakob’s position begin to believe that they can have anything they want.”

Waiting out Elder Jakob’s games was tedious. Nothing happened for hours. Thelma chatted on an encrypted band with Lon. She was almost to the point of suggesting that they use the Yardbird’s shuttle to unload the supplies themselves—although commonsense told her that doing so only opened up the opportunity for Elder Jakob to snaffle the shuttle, Max not having jurisdiction on the planet—when the Rapture with its load of new Pilgrims arrived in orbit.

“Now, we’ll see action,” Harry said.

“We were waiting on the Rapture? Why?”

Harry concentrated on the Yardbird, tucking it close to the old trampship, but remaining within the Lonesome’s protective shadow. “Max didn’t discuss his plan with me, but Captain Jones indicated he wanted to ship out from Levanter as soon as possible. If some of his crew feel the same…”

“They can take our place on the Yardbird.” Thelma nodded. “That’s good of Max. He’s not leaving them stranded at the Pilgrim colony.”

Harry chuckled. “Plus it saves us time and a detour.”

“Huh?”

“If Max shovels Wild Blaster Bill across to the Yardbird with the former crew of the Rapture, then they can detour to the Deadstar Diner and drop the old sinner off there where Darlene and his spaceship await him. We, meantime, can use the Lonesome’s full speed to return to Zephyr and free Lon of his noxious bandit prisoners.”

Chapter 8

Harry’s guess was spot on. There was a bit of wrangling and complaining from Elder Jakob, but Max stood firm. If the Pilgrims’ supplies weren’t unloaded from the Yardbird by the Pilgrims in the next eight hours, then the Yardbird would leave with them.

Captain Jones and his team were even more abrupt. They accepted Max’s offer to work their passage back to Zephyr and departed the trampship Rapture three hours after entering orbit around Levanter.

The logistics of transporting them was interesting. Three of the Rapture’s crew had become Pilgrims on the journey out to Levanter. That left a dozen people needing retrieval from the trampship since, by Patriarch Yusef’s orders, they weren’t allowed transport to the Yardbird via the Rapture’s shuttle.

So Thelma piloted the Yardbird’s shuttle back to the Lonesome.

Harry stayed aboard the Yardbird as a potent deterrent to anyone considering hijacking it in the name of the Pilgrim cause.

Following Lon’s directions, she docked the shuttle at the cargo hold deck, rather than the entrance to the living quarters.

Wild Blaster Bill waited there, suited up for space travel. “Thankin’ yer kindly, miss. I’ll be taking over, now.”

Thelma didn’t quibble at being called “miss” rather than “deputy” nor at the eager way the old spacer brushed past her. He was on his way to freedom.

The hatch closed behind him. “Welcome home, Thelma,” Lon said.

She retracted her helmet. “Lon, it is so good to be back.”

“I bet.” Max walked around a corner.

The cargo hold was all straight lines and angles. It made Thelma curious. In travelling to and from the Yardbird in the borrowed shuttle, she’d had her first view of the Lonesome, and it was unique to her knowledge. The external body of the spaceship was spherical.

“How’s Elder Jakob behaving?” she asked. “Harry predicted he’d try to acquire the Yardbird.”

Max rubbed a hand over his buzz cut. “He’s given up on that. Instead, he’s suggesting that us taking the yacht back to Zephyr is more trouble than it’s worth. He’ll allow us to junk it here.”

Her hands froze on the lifesuit’s release buttons. The man’s gall astonished her. In effect, he wanted them to gift him the small spaceship.

“Isn’t that kind of him?” Lon prompted.

She laughed and resumed the procedure for extricating herself from the lifesuit. She had a moisture wicking shirt and shorts on beneath it. “Oh yeah. Completely selfless.”

Max extended a hand, helping her balance as she peeled off the suit. A robot trundled forward and took the lifesuit from her.

“Where’s the nearest bathroom?” There were priorities in life, and normal bathroom facilities were high on that list.

“This way.” Somehow, Max still held her hand. They walked down a short aisle formed by a bulkhead on one side and a wall of crates on the other, before he pointed out the head. Then he went left and she went right.

When she re-emerged, she tracked his route, and found that it led past three cells with the bandits distributed inside them.

“They can’t see or hear you,” Lon said. “One-way glass.”

She slowed her pace and studied their prisoners. From her paperwork, she knew who they were: a mix of humans, two urselves and a saurelle. The urselves hadn’t felt safe enough to hibernate. They were awake and playing some sort of card game. “They don’t look evil. Well, maybe the captain.” He was a scruffy and tense individual, and the six other men in the cell with him stayed clear.

“Bad choices, worse attitude. Things escalate and rather than deal with the consequences, they run,” Max said. “And end up in the Badstars.”

“On the subject of bad choices…” Lon began.

“Go up, take a shower, eat,” Max said to Thelma.

She couldn’t look at Lon—or rather, everywhere she looked was Lon, which made glaring meaningfully at him difficult—so she stared narrowly at her boss. “What does he mean about bad choices?”

“Lon’s detected a shuttle launch from Levanter. We suspect the Pilgrims are going to attempt to board the Yardbird now that the cutter is uncrewed.”

“But Harry is there. You told them that, right?”

He grabbed her elbow and walked her to the ladder. “I told them, but Elder Jakob thinks I’m bluffing, that I won’t authorize a mech to attack the Pilgrims in defense of the ship.”

“But what they’re attempting, boarding without authorization, is piracy.” She climbed as she talked. Moving felt effortless after hours in the lifesuit. The only thing that bothered her was that Max was right: she did need a shower. She was a bit whiffy, and since he was climbing behind her, he’d smell her sweat. Ew.

Lon answered her objection as they reached the main deck. “Elder Jakob will claim that his people are merely collecting the supplies Max said they could have. Then it’ll occur to them that rather than transfer the supplies to the shuttle, how easy it would be to simply land the Yardbird on the planet—with the yacht in tow. They’d gain two spaceships for the price of a little daring.”

“Theft,” Max growled.

“Harry won’t allow it,” Thelma said confidently.

“No, but Elder Jakob needs a reality check. His followers might treat him like a god, but he’s not above the Federation’s laws.” He nudged her in the direction of her cabin. “Shower, eat, and you’ll see.”

Infuriating. But she hurried off for a quick shower before grabbing a garbanzo bean salad and a coffee and taking both to the bridge. On other ships, eating there would have been a huge no-no, but the Lonesome was different. With Lon running things, the bridge was extraneous. Max sat there so that his background looked appropriately important for his communications with Levanter, not because Lon needed any assistance in piloting the spaceship.

“The Rapture crew are aboard the Yardbird’s shuttle and en route for the cutter. They’ll beat the Pilgrims’ shuttle to it.” Lon chortled. “Elder Jakob missed even the narrow window for shenanigans that he thought he had.”

Max agreed. “Captain Jones is mad at how things worked out on the journey here and at the Pilgrims’ attempt to charge the Rapture crew a planetary entrance fee to stretch their legs on land and wait for a flight back out.”

“Starlane robbery,” Thelma murmured. Levanter sounded as crooked as any bandit base. Such a fee out here, where there was nowhere else to land, was nothing short of extortion.

“Yes. The Pilgrim cargo handlers arriving at the Yardbird will get a hot reception if they try anything,” Max said. “And not from Harry.”

The shuttle from Levanter reached the Yardbird, locked with its cargo hold, and, according to a transmission from Harry, two men disembarked and began loading supplies with assistance from the Rapture crew. It wasn’t that the ex-trampship crew wanted to help the Pilgrims, but that they wanted to leave. Within the hour, the shuttle was flying back down to the planet with its first load. A couple of hours after it landed, the excitement began.

Lon recalled Thelma from where she was stretched out on the sofa in the lounge.

She’d intended to rest for a few minutes. The nap had caught her unawares. “I know I’m slothing,” she began, rubbing her eyes. She’d been returning her empty bowl and mug to the kitchen when the sofa simply lured her in. She’d dropped onto it and fallen asleep.

The AI ignored her excuses. “You don’t want to miss the fun.”

“Where?”

“The bridge.”

Of course. She ducked into her room to spritz her face with mint-scented water to aid alertness before joining Max on the bridge.

He sent her back out. “Comb your hair. Do it up tight or something. You need to look like a Galactic Justice graduate.”

Her blush was deep and hot, almost painful. In her weeks aboard the Lonesome, she’d come to think of them as friends. Now, here was Max reminding her that he was her boss—and reprimanding her.

In her cabin, she studied her image in the mirror. She wore a light gray utility suit that was only slightly rumpled from her nap. Her hair was messy. She hadn’t tied it back. She did so now, winding it into a knot. She slapped on make-up, going for severe professionalism with a nude-toned lipstick. The biggest change wasn’t her hair or make-up, but her stance. Instead of relaxing with friends, her spine was rigid and her shoulders straight. She marched back to the bridge.

“Good,” Max said briefly.

Lon coughed. An AI didn’t need to cough. This was a statement cough, one along the lines of “Max, my friend, you’re making a mistake”. Or perhaps, “Thelma, honey, don’t sulk. You were in the wrong.”

She hadn’t considered how in accepting accommodation aboard the Lonesome she’d blurred the line between work and home. They were on a mission. She was on duty. Unless the sheriff told her to relax, that she had downtime, she ought to present herself properly.

Damn. I am at fault.

She sat precisely in the navigator’s chair and studied the screens in front of her and Max. At least embarrassment had cured her post-lifesuit tiredness.

“Lon can monitor events on the surface of Levanter.”

“And a few feet beneath it,” the AI interjected.

Max kept going. “The shuttle has returned from the Yardbird to Levanter, but there’s been no attempt to unload it. It seems likely that Elder Jakob is about to give us our chance. Harry, are you ready?”

“The video’s playing.”

Thelma didn’t have to ask what video. Lon popped up footage of Harry in his emotionless and motionless mech mode standing guard alone in the cargo hold of the Yardbird. About a quarter of the supplies stolen from the Rapture were gone.

Another screen showed a shuttle on the ground at the edge of a small city. On Serene, the cluster of buildings would barely have rated the title of town. The colony on Levanter was struggling. Lon had provided her with as much background data as he’d been able to gather. It seemed that the majority of Pilgrims existed at subsistence level; sustained, no doubt, by their belief in the imminent End of Days that was the cornerstone of Elder Jakob’s preaching.

However, in the center of a compound was a substantially grander building, one that Lon’s scans had registered as possessing bunkers. This was Elder Jakob’s headquarters. The compound was also the source of the communication signals to the Lonesome. Evidently, Elder Jakob kept tight control over communications to and from Levanter.

Just how tight, illegally tight, Thelma had still to learn.

“Elder Jakob dislikes women in authority,” Max said. “Be brusque, even officious. You’re going to issue him, or whichever of his subordinates takes the call, an out-of-service notice for the Rapture.”

“I’ve just sent the paperwork to your comms unit,” Lon said.

“The Rapture is not spaceworthy,” Max said. “It was capable of limping to Levanter, which is why we left it to do so. But it cannot be allowed to leave Levanter without fixing its main engine. It’s currently running on its secondary engine. They must also repair the hull damage caused by the bandits, and completely flush the trampship’s water retrieval system. The results from testing what is growing in the pipes is gross.” His lips curled in disgust beneath the shadow of his Western hat.

Belatedly, Thelma took in the significance of his wearing it. When the hat was on, he was the sheriff and engaging in official duties, unless he was in a lifesuit or a similar situation where wearing a hat was impossible.

She needed a similar symbol of her on duty status. Maybe Max was right and twisting her hair tight could be part of it. No softness. She had a job to do.

Her mouth firmed as she finished scanning Lon’s summary of the comprehensive report as to the Rapture’s spaceworthiness, or lack thereof. “All right. Lon, can you connect me to their control tower, please?”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Max jerk his chin down in a nod of approval.

“What now?” A man’s image appeared on the screen in front of Thelma. He had fleshy pouches under his brown eyes and the scruffy brown beard he sported failed to hide his double chin. He looked as unhealthy as the faint wheeze in his voice suggested.

Thelma didn’t care about his health. She took instant exception to his rudeness. “This is Deputy Thelma Bach, aboard the Lonesome, who am I speaking with?” She didn’t wait for his answer. Lon had flashed the name up at the bottom of the screen. “Patriarch Sodi, your personal identification photo appears years out of date.” Out of sight of the camera, she gave Lon a thumbs-up for the information he was feeding her.

Her insult hadn’t been subtle, and Patriarch Sodi’s eyes glared his rage.

“Jakob Canute—”

“He is Elder Jakob to you, woman,” Sodi growled.

Thelma pinched her mouth together. One of the student administrators at the Galactic Justice academy had done so when she found students particularly tiresome.

It seemed to annoy Sodi as much as it had tested Thelma’s patience. His eyes bulged.

She allowed herself a moment of satisfaction. “As I was saying. Elder Jakob Canute is the owner of record for the trampship, the Rapture, that recently arrived in orbit around Levanter after sustaining damage during a bandit attack. Patriarch Sodi, you are listed as one of Jakob—my apologies—Elder Jakob Canute’s authorized representatives, so I will lodge the defect notice for the Rapture with you.”

“Defect notice?”

“I am sending it through now.” Or Lon is, she added to herself, watching the little symbol for active transmission flash at the bottom of the screen. “The Rapture is not spaceworthy. The full report is attached to the out-of-service notice which I have just served you, as Elder Jakob Canute’s representative. The Rapture may not leave orbit around Levanter unless to land on the planet, or under tow by another, spaceworthy vessel. Essential repairs include fixing the trampship’s main engine, repairing damage to the hull, and a complete flush of the trampship’s water retrieval system, which is frankly revolting.

At that point she glanced across at Max and found him grinning at her. She momentarily lost her train of thought, but covered it by frowning deeply.

Patriarch Sodi scowled back. “This is outrageous, and if not a fabrication by your sheriff, who is a man without honor, then a problem caused by the bandits whom you failed to capture before they attacked our Pilgrimage ship. You owe us damages.”

The nerve of the man! She gawked at the screen.

A well-manicured male hand gripped Sodi’s shoulder and moved him aside. Elder Jakob, himself, slid into the vacated seat. “Deputy Bach, I wish to speak with Sheriff Smith, immediately.”

“I’m here,” Max answered for himself.

The bridge camera’s field of vision widened to include both Thelma and Max, the image showing in a corner of Thelma’s screen. She carefully kept her attention directed forward, and tried her best to maintain a neutral expression, no matter what Max might say.

“Sheriff Smith.” Unlike Sodi, Elder Jakob was clean shaven, his narrow face handsome in a conventional, overly groomed manner, and his eyes clear with good health. “I am glad to speak with you directly. I’ve just been made aware of a problem with our shuttle. I’m afraid we’re unable to recover the remainder of our supplies from the Yardbird until repairs are made. As your deputy pointed out regarding the Rapture, it would be illegal as well as immoral to risk anyone launching in the shuttle until it is spaceworthy.”

“How long will repairs take you?” Captain Jones growled.

Thelma blinked. She hadn’t realized that Lon had linked the temporary captain of the Yardbird into the conversation. Then she queried the link history. It wasn’t Lon, but Patriarch Sodi, who’d added Captain Jones to the conversation.

But Lon had allowed it.

Thelma dug her fingernails into her thigh and stopped herself from looking a question at Max. Clearly, things were happening—the “fun” Lon had mentioned earlier—that she hadn’t grasped. So shut up, pay attention, and learn, she advised herself.

“A day for repairs. Perhaps two,” Elder Jakob said casually. “I believe it depends on whether we have replacement parts or if they have to be manufactured.”

Captain Jones slapped a hand down on the control desk of the Yardbird.

Thelma hoped someone had cleaned it since she was aboard.

Captain Jones was obviously a more seasoned spacer than her, or had a higher tolerance for the bad air and filth of the Yardbird. He was out of his lifesuit and dressed as she and Max were in a utility suit. “Devil take it. We want to get out of here. We’ll fly down in the Yardbird’s shuttle.

Max promptly vetoed the idea. “You will not. The shuttle, like the Yardbird itself, is impounded until the bandits have stood trial. Neither will be descending to Levanter.”

For Thelma, enlightenment dawned. If either the Yardbird or its shuttle landed on Levanter, the elder would claim them. Max wouldn’t be able to retrieve them. It wasn’t like he could fire on the leader of a planetary colony, especially if said leader had the spacecraft sabotaged and then, could claim in all truth, that they weren’t spaceworthy. And more than the spacecraft would be stuck on Levanter. So would its pilot.

Max wouldn’t allow anyone to sacrifice themselves to months on Levanter, especially if they were an unwitting sacrifice.

“But—”

“No,” Max cut across Captain Jones’s protest.

The captain folded his arms. “What about the shuttle from the Rapture? It’s spaceworthy.”

“Indeed it is,” Elder Jakob purred. “Unfortunately, none of the crew left aboard the Rapture are capable of piloting the shuttle.”

Thelma did her best to keep her face expressionless as her brain worked fast. So Jakob hadn’t expected to capture the Yardbird or its shuttle, but he could claim a hostage of whoever piloted the Rapture’s shuttle down. Captain Jones was falling in nicely, if unknowingly, with the elder’s scheme.

“Brainwashed idiots,” Captain Jones swore. “All right. I’ll send one of my pilots—”

“No,” Max said.

Captain Jones unfolded his arms and leaned forward, bracing himself against the control desk. “Listen, Sheriff. These are my people and I have a right to deploy them as I choose. If Elder Jakob permits them to pilot his shuttle, you have no place to object.”

“Except that for your pilot to reach the Rapture shuttle, they must fly there on the Yardbird’s shuttle, and I do have the right to control that. Moreover, I can state categorically, and my mech has orders to this effect, that only the shuttle that has previously taken on supplies from the Yardbird may dock with it and accept future loads. Elder Jakob, either your shuttle is repaired and in flight in the next twenty four hours, or the Yardbird departs with the stolen supplies aboard as evidence of the bandits’ activities.”

“I can live with that,” Captain Jones muttered. “As long as we leave soon. Never coming back here. Never again.”

Lon disconnected the captain’s link.

Onscreen, Elder Jakob no longer acted so smooth. “Those are our supplies.”

“The supplies are evidence in a criminal case. I was using my judgment to provide them to Levanter since the colony is struggling.” Max’s statement started a muscle pulsing at the right corner of Elder Jakob’s mouth. Max kept going. “My time here is limited, Elder Jakob. Don’t waste it.”

“The shuttle—”

“Is your problem,” Max said. “As is the out-of-service notice for the Rapture which Deputy Bach just served your man, Patriarch Sodi.”

As if mention of his name summoned the wretched man, Sodi was suddenly onscreen with Elder Jakob. But he didn’t address his cult leader. Instead, he snarled at Max and Thelma. “What have you done?”

Elder Jakob glanced sideways at Sodi, eyes widening as he took in the other man’s wild expression. “What’s happened?”

“Our satellites have ceased to function,” Sodi said. “Messages are streaming in direct from the relay station.”

For a count of three, Elder Jakob stared at him, then the elder’s hand flashed out and he hit a switch.

On the Lonesome, the communication screen went blank.

Thelma stared at the screens. With the transmission ended, they no longer showed Elder Jakob or Patriarch Sodi. Instead, she watched the image of the grounded shuttle. Would it experience a miraculous repair, as Max suggested?

And apparently, that was the least interesting issue.

Lon chortled. “Irrefutable proof. You were both here, onscreen, talking with him. The ex-Rapture crew plus Wild Blaster Bill were aboard the Yardbird. None of us could have been out and about, disabling Levanter’s satellites.”

“Harry,” Thelma said on a long breath of understanding. “That’s why he had video footage of himself in the Yardbird’s cargo hold. With no one going in or out of it because Elder Jakob himself said the shuttle couldn’t launch from Levanter, there wasn’t anyone to prove that Harry wasn’t there.”

“And who would suspect a mech of being capable of ultra-fast, stealth flight and hacking skills?” Lon asked rhetorically.

Max leaned back in his chair, and that tipped his hat off. He caught it absently and flung it sideways. A robotic arm extended from the ceiling and snagged it, vanishing again, presumably to put away the sheriff’s “official” headgear. “Lon picked up something interesting when he scanned communications on Levanter. The level of signal traffic coming in from the relay station was much higher than that reaching planetside. Tampering with a relay station is a Category 1 offense. Jakob Canute sees himself as the unchallenged leader of Levanter, but he’s not at insane dictator level, yet. He’s still playing careful with Federal laws and regulations. So he can’t sabotage the relay station, but he can order satellites put in orbit around Levanter to block the relay station’s signals. Only what his system has vetted and approved gets passed on to the Pilgrims.”

Thelma thought about that. “So they’re not getting independent news.”

“Likely they’re not getting messages from family back home, wherever home was, either,” Lon said. “That reinforces their sense of isolation, making the cult all that they have.”

“Thereby increasing Elder Jakob’s power.” Thelma rubbed her arms. The ruthless effectiveness of the simple information blackout was chilling.

Lon agreed. “Whoever controls the flow of information, holds power.”

Information was power. Thelma didn’t need the AI to remind her of that fact. It was why she’d decided to establish herself as an information broker in the Saloon Sector. And that was something she needed to focus on.

She’d allowed herself to become distracted. Max, Lon and Harry had included her in the everyday life of the Lonesome, and she’d allowed herself to ignore the inequality in their relationship with her. She’d allowed their kindness to blind her to the hard reality that being treated with kindness wasn’t the same as being accepted as an equal.

The trio worked together seamlessly; their abilities, skills and experience acknowledged and trusted.

If, by some miracle, she gained an ability that contributed to the trio’s effectiveness, she’d still answer to Max. He was her boss. Not a friend. She shouldn’t even think of him as her brother’s friend.

When Max had told her to smarten her appearance and dress as a deputy for communicating with Levanter, it had felt like a slap. He hadn’t meant it that way. He’d had a reason for wanting her in front of the audio and visual comms and presenting professionally. But the metaphorical slap was a wake-up alert for her.

She wanted to be more—she was more—than the dudette deputy whom he protected and guided through the dangerous Saloon Sector.

To prove to Galactic Justice that they’d made a huge mistake in dumping her out here, she needed to become one of the frontier’s dangerous players. Her methods mightn’t be the obvious ones to men like Max who had a different skillset, but she’d worked out her plan on the Lazy Days, and she had to stick to it. She could refine it in light of Lon’s assistance and tutoring on the operations of the Saloon Sector, but it was hers. Not Max’s. Not Harry and Lon’s. Hers.

She’d been independent for seven years of studies on Serene. A little kindness now oughtn’t to tempt her into anything less.

Her chin jerked up. She was mad at herself. She had to get her head in the game. Like now. When Lon spoke, jolting her out of her thoughts, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been woolgathering.

“Harry’s back aboard the Yardbird. And just in time. The shuttle on Levanter is launching. Amazing how fast the repairs were made,” Lon added sardonically.

“They just needed a little incentive.” Max’s gaze was on the screen that showed the shuttle lifting off.

Which meant that Thelma hadn’t been woolgathering that long.

The Pilgrims on Levanter weren’t bothering with the fiction of the shuttle’s repair. Elder Jakob wanted the Lonesome gone. The sudden failure of his satellites meant he’d be dealing with unrest planetside as people were flooded with news and messages that would make confusing reading after Elder Jakob’s secret censorship. He’d want Sheriff Smith, with his revolutionary notions of freedom and respect for all, gone. While Max remained in Levanter’s orbit, he was a threat to Jakob’s dictatorship.

It took the shuttle three more trips, but finally the last of the Rapture’s stolen supplies were unloaded from the Yardbird, and Wild Blaster Bill ferried Harry back to the Lonesome. From the video footage Thelma saw, old Bill was not unnaturally terrified of Harry’s presence in the shuttle. In his emotionless mech mode, the AI was the embodiment of menace.

“With your permission, we’re getting the heck out of here, Sheriff Smith,” Captain Jones transmitted.

“See you back at Zephyr,” Max responded. Lon could loop communications through Max’s personal comms unit, so the conversation occurred over lunch on the Lonesome.

Thelma finished her sandwich and carried her plate and empty juice glass into the kitchen. She felt Max’s gaze follow her and guessed his puzzlement. Usually, she lingered over her meal. There was no great urgency. The return trip to Zephyr to offload their prisoners would take at least three weeks. The challenge of space journeys was filling the time productively, not racing to fit everything in.

Except, she’d been treating her lessons with Lon and training with Harry as sort of extracurricular options. That had to stop. She’d been disciplined in studying at the Galactic Justice academy, and she could be disciplined, now.

For instance, she wouldn’t ask the questions she had about the Lonesome’s nonstandard design. Spaceships simply weren’t spherical, and if they were, why was this one all straight lines and angles inside? There wasn’t a curved bulkhead anywhere. It raised the question of where Max had acquired the Lonesome—with Lon embedded—and how a former Star Marine could afford it.

And the answers to those questions were none of her business.

So she concentrated on what was her concern. Her reinvention as an information broker.

Chapter 9

Max propped a shoulder against the door to the training ring and watched Thelma dance. She knew he was there. She’d seen him when she’d spun around in her Spintail Comet dance lesson. She hadn’t stalled in the complicated reach and clap sequence or the stamp of her left heel. Still, she was glad to turn back to the instruction video that played on the large screen in front of her as the music pumped. The training ring was soundproof—if Max would close the door.

The Spintail Comet session ended. The lesson for the Nebula Waltz began.

She switched off the instruction video. She could learn the Nebula Waltz alone, but it was a partnered dance. If she studied it now, Max might think he should offer to partner her. That would be awkward. She intended to corner Harry for some partner experience when she’d mastered the Nebula Waltz and the Badstars Jive. The AI wouldn’t need practice to be far better than her at the dance steps.

“Shaking up your exercise program?” Max asked. Now that she’d stopped, he entered the training ring, crossing to the weight machine.

“Something like that.” An advantage of her individual dance class was that she had no belongings to collect. She headed for the door.

“I didn’t mean to chase you off.” For the first time ever, Max sounded hesitant.

When she glanced over at him, he’d taken off his t-shirt and stretched out to bench-press weights. A robotic arm spotted him. He wasn’t looking at her.

She smiled anyway, pushing the smile into her voice. “You didn’t.” But she didn’t hang around.

She’d been busy in the last fortnight. For eight hours every day she devoted herself to her deputy duties and meticulously logged her hours. Owen, the receptionist in the Sheriff’s Office on Zephyr, now routinely forwarded to her, rather than to Max, the time-wasting communications: people who wanted to complain about their neighbors, even when said neighbors were millions of miles away in deep space; people who were contesting automated tickets issued by speed cameras on well-marked asteroids, stations and starlane buoys; and, people who had idiotic questions about basic laws, regulations and procedures of interstellar life that they could have found the answers to easily, except that they preferred to be spoon-fed the information.

Max had corrected her on that point, when she’d complained about the latter group. “Space gets lonely. It can be frightening. People reduce the role of interstellar sheriff to law and order, but that’s just one aspect of it. Life on the frontier isn’t safe. Whatever we can do to improve the situation, we do, and part of that is making people feel more secure. They have to feel that someone, somewhere cares about their pursuit of a better life, their need for justice, and the simple fact that they exist. They need to know that someone hears them, and that if they die alone, someone will notice their passing.”

Max’s view of the sheriff’s role was nothing like what she’d been taught at the Galactic Justice academy. It was also far more complicated and nuanced than she’d expected from him.

That it also made her feel selfish and ego-ridden to be worrying about establishing herself as an information broker was something she shook off. Or tried to. Unlike Max this wasn’t her vocation. She hadn’t chosen to come to the Saloon Sector or be trapped here by her Galactic Justice contract for the next seven years. She had a right to carve out her own life and achieve her own goals—just like everyone else on the frontier.

She showered off the sweat of dancing lessons. She was learning, among all the other lessons of the last few weeks, that space travel gave you too much time for introspection.

Time for a drink—for research purposes!

She assembled the ingredients in the kitchen. Lon had helped her create a signature cocktail. Thelma wanted something that could be pulled together from relatively common items, that was pretty, and low in alcohol. She didn’t drink much. She loathed the lack of self-control that went along with intoxication. However, at a party or bar, she needed something in her hand.

“One Delightful Deputy,” Lon said as Thelma poured her cocktail into a glass, then toasted him. She sipped the concoction and nodded approval. She’d tried it two days ago, but this was confirmation. They’d mixed orange juice with rose water, effervesced the liquid, then stirred in mint gin and sprinkled it with honey sparkles. The golden glimmer of the honey sparkles on the surface of the drink made it appear luxurious. If she found a sympathetic bartender, Thelma intended to skip the gin, even as she paid for it and a large tip.

The drink was about her image. She could and would play the role of a sophisticated woman, not just that of a hard-ass Galactic Justice academy graduate.

Max walked into the kitchen, skin gleaming from his workout.

Had Lon turned the oven on? It was hot in here. Thelma moved aside so that Max could grab a protein drink from the fridge.

“Max, you should try a Delightful Deputy,” Lon suggested helpfully.

She choked. “He means the cocktail.”

“What else would I mean?” Lon’s tone held way too much confused innocence to be believable.

“You bored, Lon?” Max asked, his gaze locked on Thelma. “Looking to stir trouble rather than cocktails?”

Lon snickered. But he also presented a peace offering. “Thelma, I’ve made the adjustments to your utility suits if you want to try one before tomorrow’s Open Office? They’re in your room.”

“Thanks, Lon.” She contemplated her cocktail.

Max held an unopened protein drink in one hand. “I’ll try a taste.”

“Pardon? Oh.” She passed him the glass with its peach-pink hue.

He took a sip, and licked his tongue over his lower lip as he returned the glass to her. “I wondered what the gold sparkles were. Honey.”

“Yeah. Uh, honey.” She shouldn’t stare at her boss’s mouth. She gulped the rest of her cocktail, heroically managed not to splutter, and fled to her cabin.

The Open Office Day was derailed before it could start.

“Hot damn!”

Lon was transmitting both audio and visual comms from Max’s office on the Lonesome. Thelma occupied a chair drawn up at the other end of his long desk, her comms unit sat open and ready for her to look up answers to any difficult questions.

“Whoo-diggety. Who’d ya have to kill to get assigned a deputy like her, Sheriff?”

Max sat there, his hat shading most of his face, but showing the slight quirk of an amused smile as he let the open channel explode with comments and questions regarding Thelma.

“Is she yours?”

“Is she single?”

“Are you off the market, Sheriff?”

No one had a law-related question.

Thelma tugged at her beret. Perhaps her decision to alter her utility suits, and Lon’s assistance in doing so, were ideas she should have turned down. Her boring gray utility suit was now a deep, dark forest green with silver piping at the front and back yokes, that, along with the newly tailored design, served to show off her figure. The beret was a matching green with a silver deputy badge clipped to the left side. She’d chosen a beret as her version of Max’s Western hat. When she wore it, it would signal to her, and to those who paid attention, that she was on duty and on official business.

“Deputy Bach, would you like to introduce yourself to everyone?”

The open channel fell absolutely silent as the frontier region that was Max’s territory waited for Thelma’s first words.

“Hi, everyone. My name is Thelma Bach. I’m originally a Rock Sector citizen. I grew up on an asteroid mining claim, so don’t even think of trying to slide claim jumping or tonnage fraud past me.”

“Challenge accepted,” a deep male voice chuckled.

“Shut up, Sam,” a woman replied.

Lon was flashing up names, but Thelma kept her focus on the camera. Names and identities could come later. For now, she had to lay out her credentials and her own demand for respect. She wasn’t going to hide behind Max.

“I recently graduated from the Galactic Justice academy.” She waited out the jeers, whistles and catcalls. “I graduated valedictorian and they assigned me to the Saloon Sector.”

“Rock Sector, you said?” An older man’s voice. He sounded a lot like Harry, rough but not unkind, and not to be hurried. “That’d be right. Show up the core worlders and they’ll exile you.”

“And inadvertently do me a favor.” Thelma smiled for her audience.

“Marry me,” two guys moaned.

“The frontier is a place of opportunity, and I intend to make the most of mine. But you’ll do well to keep in mind three things about me.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “One, I am a Rock Sector citizen who survived seven years of education on Serene and beat the core worlders at their own game. I’m smart. Second, my big brother is a former Star Marine who served with Max, with Sheriff Smith,” she purposely corrected herself. She wanted people to understand her relationship to Max. She wasn’t his girlfriend or toy, but she was someone he’d protect.

There were a few mutters over the comms as people got the message.

“Star Marines don’t let their sisters grow up weak. So, I’m tough. Thirdly…” She paused. She was taking a chance with this third point, but it was important to establish her independence from Max as well as from the Galactic Justice service. “I’m single.”

“Woohoo!”

“I’m also picky,” she added. “But I’ve had seven years of focusing on my education. Now, it’s time to consider other things.”

“Darlin’, you can—”

Max frowned and hit a switch. “Focus, people. Deputy Bach has introduced herself. We’re moving on to claim disputes. Any tensions?”

She and Max should have anticipated what happened next. Everyone and his space monkey had a question concerning claims, claim jumping, stake bursts and surveyor runs, and they all wanted Thelma to answer them. They were testing her.

Weeks of diligent study under Lon’s tutoring proved its worth. She answered flawlessly, consulting her comms unit for the occasional finer point of law, but also demonstrating that she knew and accepted the pragmatic enacting of those laws on the frontier.

“Darlene said she was cute.”

“Moron. Darlene said she was acute.”

Thelma laughed.

The nine hour Open Office Day was both exhausting and endless, and over too fast. There was an adrenaline rush in verbally sparring with the citizens whom she served.

At the end of it, Max flicked the switch, closing the open comms.

Thelma slumped backward in the hard office chair. “That was…intense.” She pulled off her beret and dropped it on the desk, over her comms unit. The unit was already blowing up with messages to her deputy account. She’d be responding to the greetings and questions for hours, but not tonight. Tomorrow, she’d be able to log those hours as work time since they were all messages to her official account. Still, she’d separate the messages into those she’d reply to for purposes of generating general goodwill, and those senders who she’d cultivate as contacts suitable for an information broker.

“A beer, then dinner.” Max had felt the strain of the day, too. He dropped his hat on his vacated chair and strode past her end of the desk. He paused a moment in the doorway. “You did well shutting down any rumors of fraternization between us.”

His comment caught her mid-yawn. “Uh, yeah.” She gave her shoulders a shake as she straightened from her slouch. “Rumors like that would hurt both our careers.”

“Out here?” He arched a disbelieving eyebrow. “You’re thinking like a core worlder. The regulations have to be different on the frontier. In an emergency, a sheriff has to be able to deputize his or her family members. There’s nothing on the regs against you and me being involved.” He gave a wry grin. “Now, your brother Joe, he’s a whole different reason against you and me getting together, no matter how much being with you would humanize my reputation. A man doesn’t mess with his friend’s baby sister.”

She was still coping with that bit of male wisdom when he sauntered off. And what did he mean by humanize his reputation?

Chapter 10

Thelma snapped her head back out the reach of her opponent’s flying kick, then ducked in to take out the man’s legs. He’d overcommitted to his attack. He fell and Thelma danced back. Technically, this was a training bout.

“Get up, Syd.” The mauveinne scoring the bout hissed at his man, spread-eagled on the mat.

“Why?” the guy asked plaintively. “So she can knock me down again? Also, ow.”

Thelma grinned. Since her opponent had yielded, she extended a hand and helped him up.

The mauveinne’s narrow face elongated further in embarrassment. He was the owner of the dojo they stood in. “My cousin said you were good. She’s always been one for understatement.”

“I enjoy training with your students,” Thelma said, returning courtesy for courtesy, and not divulging that her fighting ability had improved immensely under Harry’s supervision. The mauveinne the dojo master mentioned had been one of Thelma’s sparring partners on the Lazy Days on the journey out from Serene, a journey that seemed far more distant than the few weeks in-between. But those had been busy weeks.

Max had given Thelma four days’ leave after they’d transferred their bandit prisoners into the care of the city jail guards.

For three days she’d spent most of her daylight hours, and a fair few of the night ones, planetside. She kept changes of clothes in her broom cupboard office in the Sheriff’s Office at the spacedock, and only returned to the Lonesome to sleep. Parties, training bouts, sight-seeing and a little judicious shopping kept her fully occupied.

The invitations had poured in after her Open Office introduction to the Zephyr territory. She didn’t take offense when it became obvious that the hosts of the many parties she was invited to saw her as a means of accessing Max.

She’d come to comprehend why he’d mentioned humanizing his reputation. On Zephyr, Sheriff Max Smith was more legend than man, and the people in his territory liked it that way. With all the uncertainties of life on the frontier, Max had carved himself a position as one of the stable pillars of life. He made people feel safe.

They were also curious about him. Correction, make that insanely curious about him and his spaceship.

To all of the questions, Thelma returned a standard apology. “I’m sorry. Max is my boss and my host. I won’t talk about him or his home.” She might have been tempted to dangle a tidbit or two in other circumstances, but with the Lonesome harboring two off-radar AIs whom she thought of as friends, she couldn’t afford to start talking about life aboard the spaceship and inadvertently letting something slip that revealed their existence.

“Loyalty is all very well,” the governor of Zephyr said to her at the Garden Ball that night. “But there are other people who’d repay your loyalty just as highly as Sheriff Smith. I could talk to Galactic Justice on your behalf…” He trailed a manicured hand down her arm.

Thelma smiled and reminded herself that breaking the man’s fingers would break her career, both that of deputy and of information broker. It was true that a person’s reputation was as much about the quality of their enemies as their allies, but Governor Rodin was an operator, not a bad man. Which meant his actions didn’t justify outright assault. In his own serpentine way, the man kept the frontier planet of Zephyr balanced and productive. He was a deal-maker rather than a ruler; just as enamored of power as Elder Jakob, but more ambitious, more successful and far more dangerous. “Thank you, Governor, but I’m comfortably settled in as deputy.”

“I’ve heard rumors that you’re setting yourself up as something more.”

Looking into his cold brown eyes, she disregarded his fingers trailing suggestively along the soft skin of her inner forearm. Governor Rodin wasn’t a womanizer. He was testing her. Some people were turned on by power, and on Zephyr, he was the pinnacle of it.

Max’s official role ended at the spacedock.

“Galactic Justice provided me with an excellent education in diplomacy and other arts. It would be ungrateful of me not to utilize it,” she said prudently.

He smiled. “I’m glad to hear that you understand gratitude.” His hand dropped away from her arm. “You will find that on the frontier money may rise and fall in value, but a favor remains prized currency.” The unspoken part of that comment was that she’d do well to build her favor account with him.

She nodded. Being invited to do so was a small win. It meant that she was on Rodin’s radar. If she proved her usefulness, she could trade favors with the governor, in the form of information, to grow her own power and influence. Being assigned as Max’s deputy had raised her profile. What she did with her opportunities was on her. “I’ll remember.”

“Say hi to Max for me.” Rodin left her by the French doors that opened into the scented flower garden. The night-blooming jasmine and dragon cactus perfumed the air.

Alone for the moment, she assessed her options. Training bouts at the mauveinne’s dojo were so much easier than this prolonged series of flirtations that were actually about Zephyr’s very important people assessing her, while attempting to subtly interrogate her for inside information concerning Sheriff Smith.

She was tired of being polite and attempting to be entrancing. And if she was tiring of the game, then she should wrap things up. She couldn’t afford to offend someone vital to her information brokerage so early in her seven years in the Saloon Sector.

Mentally, she consulted her list of who else she needed to introduce herself to tonight. Tomorrow, she and Max were going on patrol. They’d be away for six weeks, taking an arc route from the Zeph Omega 3 black hole toward the Ammo Belt. Over the last four days she’d put herself in front of half the planet’s movers and shakers, including some of those who preferred to operate in the shadows. In terms of efficiency, there was something to be said for a small pond frontier world.

Who haven’t I…? Ah, Aubree Tennyson. She was Galactic Justice’s agent on Zephyr, and a woman whose official background was nearly as blank and uninformative as Max’s. That made her interesting. However, the fact that Aubree hadn’t attempted to contact Thelma raised the question of just what flags, hidden to Thelma, were beside her own name in the Galactic Justice database. Not even the lure of the hope of learning more about Max had influenced Aubree to risk contact with his deputy.

Luckily, the vast majority of Saloon Sector citizens couldn’t give two figs for Galactic Justice’s opinion.

She resisted the temptation of a solo wander through the night garden and stepped back inside the French doors.

“Deputy Thelma Bach.” The quiet female voice came from the far side of a marble urn. The woman had been so still, and her dress such an unobtrusive mingling of cream and gray, that Thelma hadn’t noticed her.

“Agent Tennyson.” Thelma had a split second to think outrageous thoughts about mind-reading and extrasensory perception—it was as if the agent had materialized in response to Thelma’s mental call—before she focused on the woman gliding deeper into the garden. Apparently, Thelma’s name had been an invitation.

Unlike Aubree’s silent footsteps that, combined with her pale dress, gave her a spectral presence, Thelma’s heels clicked against the stone path. However, the darkly patterned, dramatic reds of her dress blended into the shadows once they reached a secluded bench and sat down.

Aubree extracted a tiny scrambler from her purse and set it on the stone seat between them. The green light announced that it was active. “Cigarette?” She produced a lighter and paper cigarette from the same purse.

“No, thanks.”

Aubree lit up. The sudden flare of light from the flame settled into a glowing red tip. It provided an intriguing contrast: the cigarette that revealed their location and the scrambler that hid their conversation.

The distinctive scent of utopian tobacco drifted to encompass Thelma. Now, the cigarette made sense. Utopian tobacco counteracted the majority of aerosol hypnotics and mood-boosters. She hadn’t realized that Governor Rodin employed them or that she’d been exposed. She would have to ask Lon about discreet, portable drug detectors and protection.

The shadows hid much, including the finer details of Aubree’s appearance, but Thelma recalled her research into Zephyr’s assigned Galactic Justice agent.

Aubree looked mid-twenties thanks to rejuvenation treatments, but was over forty. Her age showed in the cynicism tempered by acceptance in her eyes. She was fit, passably attractive, and forgettable.

“Max won’t work with me,” Aubree said abruptly. “No reason he should. His duty is to maintain law and order in interstellar space. That gives him a short term focus. I investigate matters with broader horizons, in both space and time.”

Recalling Max’s dealings with the Pilgrims of Levanter, Thelma thought the line was more blurred than that. Max understood the wider implications of what he did and didn’t do.

“You’re a smart woman who should have been an agent.”

A compliment and implied sympathy rolled into one brought Thelma to hyper-alertness as Aubree continued.

“I receive Max’s official reports. What I want is to know the things that don’t go into them. The things that you were taught to watch for at the academy. Max’s training was as a Star Marine. He can kick ass like a champ. However, the future of the Saloon Sector requires more than ass-kickers.” Aubree exhaled smoke. “You have the right instincts, setting yourself up as an information broker. If I could, I’d have you reassigned to me as an agent, which would suck for you, since agents unlike deputies can’t have second jobs. However, no matter how good your instincts, they’re not worth me sticking myself into that viper’s nest.”

She stabbed out the cigarette.

Thelma watched her flick the butt into a shallow dish to the side of the bench. An ash tray. Zephyr really did have different norms to the rest of the Federation. Smoking was catered to here. Perhaps the unpolluted natural air made people yearn for something to clog their lungs? “I’m content to be a deputy, but I’ll remember you if I learn anything that would have the academy instructors frothing with eagerness. A favor for a favor,” she added. It paid to be clear upfront regarding the terms of business. “After what Galactic Justice did sticking me out here because I’m a Rocker, I don’t owe anyone freebies.”

The tilt of Aubree’s head indicated sudden curiosity. “You think you’re here because of core worlder prejudice?” She gave a bark of laughter. “You’re not kidding, are you? You really don’t get it.” She relaxed back against the bench. “And there I was mistaking you for clued in. Honey, if the problem was simply you being from the Rock Sector, they’d have dumped you back there. Your exile here, it’s personal. Rudolf Gua. Remember him?”

Thelma snorted. “Of course. Obnoxious, spoiled—”

“Came second to you in everything,” Aubree interrupted.

“What?” Thelma had never looked at their situation that way. Rudy had always had everything he needed and wanted. When he struggled with a lesson, he received extra tutoring. Thelma had had to achieve everything alone. It made her successes all the more meaningful, but she hadn’t forgiven Rudy for how cushioned his ride through the academy had been, nor how rudely he’d treated others, both students and teachers.

“Senator Gua’s handsome boy,” Aubree drawled the words, humor and a darker layer of resentment weaving through them. “The Senator intends him to exceed her. She’s grooming him for the Federation Presidency.”

“Rudy?!!”

Aubree’s disbelief was quieter, but just as genuine. “I can’t believe you didn’t realize. Rudolf Gua was meant to graduate the Galactic Justice academy as valedictorian. The other students got the unwritten memo. They didn’t challenge him. You did.”

Thelma’s limbs felt like lead jelly tentacles. “So that’s why I was banished. I didn’t even realize…” She shook her head sharply. “He’d be a rotten president.”

Aubree lit a second cigarette. “Just to clarify your terrifying level of obtuseness as a student…” Thelma winced. “Did Rudy ever make a pass at you?”

“What? No!” She paused, the years replaying at high speed. “Well, maybe, but he was trying to insult me…”

Aubree blew a smoke ring. “Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. With his mom being so powerful, maybe he’s attracted to strong-minded women.”

“Oh, good grief.”

Aubree stood. “Something to think on. And as a gesture of goodwill in what I intend will be a productive relationship of information exchange…a fortnight from now, Rudolf Gua and his mother will board a Galactic Justice vessel bound for the Saloon Sector. It’s all very hush-hush. Mining interests, perhaps, and other things. Be sure to tell Max.” She wandered off.

Thelma sat silent and staring at a moonglow petunia for long enough that she grew cold. She didn’t return to the party, but left by a side gate.

“Good party?” Lon asked as she boarded the Lonesome.

“Yeah.”

“You sound doubtful. Max is in the lounge.” There was more than a hint there of where Lon thought she should go.

Thelma disagreed. She’d overdosed on people over the last few days. She headed for her cabin. “Lon, Agent Aubree Tennyson mentioned a diplomatic vessel setting out from Alpha Hub in two weeks to arrive at some undisclosed location within the Saloon Sector. It will have Senator Gua, among others, onboard. Since Aubree sought me out and made a point of telling me, I presume she wanted Max to know about it through informal channels.”

“And why do you think it’s important? You sound stressed.”

“Personal issues. Goodnight, Lon.” Thelma closed the door to her cabin. She undressed slowly and showered, washing away some of the perfumes and funk of the party, but not managing to wash away her doubts. If she could overlook the impact of her dealings with Rudy on her career, what sort of head-in-the-sand information broker was she?

And what if Rudy had been genuine in wanting a relationship with her?

She’d assumed that his indication of interest in her in the second half of their first year at the academy had been a ploy to demean her. Workplace relationships never worked, and usually it was the woman who was pushed to move on when they ended. She’d thought he’d been attempting something similar: maneuver her into falling in love with him, and then, destroy both her self-respect and her professional standing when he dumped her.

If she’d thought he was genuine, would she have said yes?

She curled up tight in her bunk. She’d been so lonely at the academy. In his own way, perhaps Rudy had been just as lonely, the anointed son of his famous mother. Had her rejection, coming from her own insecurity, transformed his feelings into the insolence he subjected her to?

It was better to think that his asking her out had been a ploy. It was safer to concentrate on Aubree’s suggestion that Thelma’s exile to the Saloon Sector was the Gua family’s personal vindictiveness.

Still, when she finally fell asleep, Thelma remained haunted by the thought that if she’d been mistaken once, and overlooked a chance at love, she could do so again. It wasn’t that she regretted Rudy, but she would like to love someone who loved her.

Chapter 11

It wasn’t as if Thelma could see firsthand the black hole from where she sat in the Lonesome’s bridge, but she imagined that she could sense its presence. Viewing images of it, obtained via Lon’s complicated array of scanners, felt weird when you lurked at the safety perimeter of its pull.

Small, stable black holes like Zeph Omega 3 were labelled GDs—garbage disposals. Black Fury Industries had claimed this one, and had its heavy pollution factoroids built just beyond the GD’s siphon. A robo-tug shunted the slag and other dangerous byproducts to the edge of the black hole, which sucked them in and swallowed them. It was a neat, efficient, and profit-making venture.

“No bodies,” Max muttered.

Thelma swiveled in the navigator’s chair to give him a wide-eyed stare. “I thought that was a myth. Why would people go to all the trouble of transporting a body out here when there’s all of space to dump it in?”

“A body in space can come back to haunt you,” Lon said. “Whereas a black hole consumes a person body and soul.”

“You don’t really believe that?”

Max frowned over rows of data on his screen. “What I believe doesn’t matter. It’s what people out here believe that counts, and a fair few do believe that the spirits of people they’ve killed will haunt them unless they’re obliterated in a black hole. Some criminal gangs have arrangements with particular black hole industries to destroy corpses. Black Fury seems to be running a clean operation. I include them on my patrols to make sure it stays that way.”

He glanced up. “And if it doesn’t stay that way, then I can track back from the corpse to find their murderer and the criminal gang involved.”

“Ugh.”

As their patrol drew closer to the Ammo Belt and the edge of Max’s territory as sheriff, things got less creepy and more exciting. While the patrol had given every indication of being a regular one, in fact, Max had been sneaky. A joint exercise with the sheriff of the adjacent territory was planned.

“But isn’t this something Customs should handle?” Thelma asked as she walked with Max to the Lonesome’s training ring. The question was her attempt to tone down her eagerness. The mission would be dangerous; her first real world, live-fire exercise. She couldn’t wait. Max wasn’t leaving her behind in the safety of the Lonesome, although he insisted she had to practice her hostile spaceship boarding skills with him first. Since he walked a bit behind her, she could conceal her quick pinch of her wrist. Ouch! Nope. Not dreaming. She grinned.

Max sounded unaffected by the upcoming mission as he answered her question. “Customs is responsible for halting drug smugglers. This is about drug manufacturing. The freighter is an illegal drug lab, and it’s in interstellar space. That makes it interstellar sheriff business. Sheriff Pang and I have done this before. We have to act before the mercenary companies on Tornado get wind of the source of the Aksu. They’d go vigilante. Aksu messes up a person’s impulse control, and the effects can recur long after the drug was originally taken for its high.” Which was incredibly dangerous in a mercenary’s line of work. “The mercenary companies would go in not only to shut down the operation, but to send a message, and as much as I loathe drug dealers, neither Pang nor I want a bloodbath.”

Sheriff Pang’s territory included the planets of Tornado and Moonshine, as well as most of the asteroid belt rich with mining claims that was colloquially known as the Ammo Belt from its history of conflict and never-found bodies. He had two deputy-sheriffs working under him and over a dozen full-time deputies.

Max had Thelma. And Harry. But the AI wasn’t going on this mission, and Thelma suspected that Max’s decision not to include him had less to do with the other deputies’ discomfort in fighting alongside a mech, and more with a melancholy lurking in Harry. The AI feared being defined by his current body. He was more, so much more, than a killing machine.

For instance, he was an incredible inventor and manufacturer, as Thelma discovered.

Harry waited in the training ring for her and Max, and he had a combat suit for her.

“You made it?” She stroked the armored chest plate as she gazed at Harry. “You made me a combat suit?” Combat suits were expensive. Galactic Justice had made her pay for her utility suits. There was no way they’d have sprung for a combat suit. She’d expected to board the drug manufacturer’s freighter wearing the lifesuit Max had previously lent her.

“Only thing worse than taking a knife to a gun fight is going in underdressed,” Harry said. He rocked backwards as Thelma abandoned petting the combat suit and jumped at him to hug him.

She hadn’t known that the AI mech could be unbalanced, so she figured it was the surprise of her hug—of the physical expression of positive emotion—that shocked him.

Then he chuckled and hugged her back.

“All right. Mushy time’s over,” Max said, amused. “Suit up and we’ll get you familiar with fighting in a Harry-designed combat suit.”

The suit’s existence suggested that the time Harry spent shut away in his private quarters was productive in ways Thelma hadn’t dreamed of. AIs didn’t sleep. They didn’t slow down due to biological failings, like disease. They were “on” twenty four hours a day. Apparently, Harry spent some of that time on design ideas.

“I’ve put in a few additional features.” He watched her climb into the suit.

She struggled.

“You’ll get faster with practice,” Lon said.

Meantime, Max had donned his combat suit and when she was finally sealed into hers, he walked her through a range of exercises, gradually increasing the speed and complexity of what was asked of her.

“Enough for now,” Harry called a halt to the training.

Thelma climbed laboriously out of the suit and dropped, sweating, to the floor.

Max hooked his suit on to the extended arm of a waiting robot. “The drug lab freighter will be a good practice run for you.”

She panted in response.

Grinning, he grabbed her arm and hauled her up. “You need to rehydrate. Eat.”

Despite her usually effective deodorant, she could smell her sweat. “Shower first.”

“That would be good.”

She glowered, both because he was laughing at her and because he wasn’t sweating despite equal time in a combat suit.

However, when they boarded the drug manufacturers’ freighter four days later, she understood why he’d called the mission a practice run for her. The freighter’s crew and lab technicians behaved like mice frightened by a cat when Sheriff Pang’s ex-Navy cutter hove into view. It had been stealthed until it was close to the freighter. Its stealth technology didn’t rival the Lonesome’s, but was more than the drug manufacturers could detect.

With the freighter stationary, its inhabitants had powered down its engine. Unable to flee, the people onboard could only acknowledge that the sheriff had them cold—and try to hide, with an every person for themselves attitude.

When Sheriff Pang and his deputies locked to and boarded through the main hatch, and Max and Thelma locked to and boarded via the cargo hatch, the combined sheriff forces had to sweep the spaceship for the crew and illegal chemists who’d tucked themselves away in the most unlikely and awkward hiding places. There was no violent resistance, only passive, irritating, desperate attempts to evade the law.

Thelma hauled her final prisoner out from behind a false bulkhead in the head near the kitchen.

None of them struck her as criminal masterminds. Fortunately, their processing and interrogation fell to Sheriff Pang’s team since they’d been operating in his jurisdiction. Once the prisoners were secured in the freighter’s filthy recreation cabin and the drug lab dismantled sufficiently that nothing could explode, Thelma and Max returned to the Lonesome, but not to their original patrol route.

Sheriff Pang invited them to join his cutter in escorting the freighter to Tornado, the nearest planet and one with a permanent Deputy-Sheriff office. It was a friendly offer. “A Navy dreadnought is docked. I’ve heard rumors you served with some of the Star Marines aboard, Max. Grab some downtime.” It was good-natured advice from a man old enough to be Max’s father.

Max, in turn, invited Thelma. “A few of them will probably know your brother. But if you’d rather split off and not drink with your boss, that’s fine.”

“No. I’d like to hear some stories to blackmail Joe with.”

Rather than dress up, Thelma simply wore a utility suit; although thanks to Lon’s tailoring, that was way more dressed up than most utility suits.

Max also wore a utility suit, his being a dull blue. He wore a blaster on his belt, but left his hat on the Lonesome. They entered the mercenary planet of Tornado as ordinary citizens.

Drinking with Star Marines proved entertaining. Only a handful remembered her brother, but it wasn’t her brother the rest were interested in. The bar had a dance stage, and Thelma didn’t lack for willing partners. One sergeant, no taller than Thelma, threw her into lifts as easily as if she was made of feathers. She laughed and kissed his cheek before walking off the floor with him, hand in hand.

The kiss got catcalls. She glanced at Max and found him studying the remaining dancers.

A female corporal on his right watched Thelma. There was no animosity in her steady gaze, just challenge. Corporal Naomi Milligan had served with both Max and Joe. “Scuttlebutt says you claim to be tough, Bach.”

Max shifted his gaze from the dancers to Naomi.

The other eight Marines at the long table leaned in.

Like Naomi, Thelma had been pacing her drinks. She was sober and suddenly alert. “You willing to test me, corporal?” Win or lose—and she expected to lose—a fight against a Star Marine would only help her incipient reputation.

“Couldn’t do any less for Joe’s baby sister,” Naomi drawled. She was taller than Thelma, with muscles and reflexes honed through years of training and combat experience.

Thelma grinned. “When?”

“There’s a gym next door…”

Whispers around the table and spreading outward spoke of bets being placed.

Thelma didn’t as much as glance at Max. “Now works for me.”

The table stood as one. All the Marines and the same number of mercenaries headed for the gym.

“No words of warning?” Thelma muttered to Max as the cool air of Tornado hit them briefly before they entered the gym.

“Not my business what you do on your own time. I’ll record the fight for Harry’s viewing.” A smirk curved the corners of his mouth.

She groaned. Not only would she get her ass beat by a Star Marine corporal, Harry would pick apart her every failing—for her benefit.

Since Naomi wore the military equivalent of a utility suit, neither of them bothered changing for the fight. They merely took off their boots. If their audience would have preferred them to be wearing less clothing, well, that was their problem. For Thelma, at least, this was a serious fight.

The bell rang.

Naomi let Thelma get in the first hit, a jab to her right shoulder, but then it was a relentless barrage of which Thelma evaded a few, absorbed what she couldn’t avoid, and landed a couple of strikes, none of them incapacitating. The corporal had a wicked right elbow. Thelma saw it coming, ducked out of the way, and into Naomi’s knee as it rose up and struck her in the solar plexus. Thelma curled up on the ground, tapping out as she gasped for air.

Two minutes later, she was able to acknowledge the roar of the crowd. No one had expected her to beat the Star Marine corporal, but by lasting seven minutes, she’d won a few people their optimistic bets and she’d earned some limited respect.

“Looks like you’ll have to defend the Sheriff Department’s honor, Smith,” a large sergeant drawled from across the ring as Naomi helped Thelma limp off.

Thelma’s ribs and guts ached, but it was her left knee that had taken the worst damage. She’d need a session with the Lonesome’s medbot, probably accompanied by Lon’s fussing. Fussing sounded okay, actually. Later.

Thelma and Naomi stayed ringside as Max acknowledged the good-natured taunt and climbed into the ring. Like the women, he was barefoot; although Naomi had sent a private to fetch her and Thelma’s boots.

“You’re not going to get that boot on, are you, girl?” Naomi crouched and fitted Thelma’s left boot, lacing it tightly as the bell rang.

Max and the sergeant launched into a violent, flowing dance, their music the drumbeat of flesh smacking flesh.

“You’re a better fighter than you think,” Naomi told Thelma as they watched the men. “The difference between Max, Sarge Kobayashi, me and you…we’re in the moment, fighting. You lose half a second observing. You need to shake that mentality. You’re past the student stage where you need to prioritize learning from your opponent. Take them down.” She winced. “Like that.”

Max’s kick knocked Kobayashi down and out.

Three quarters of the crowd cheered. Sergeant Kobayashi was enough of a hard ass that there were plenty present who were thrilled to witness his loss.

“I’d best see to him.” Naomi ducked into the ring. She said something to Max in passing.

His head turned, finding Thelma, before he strode to her. “Naomi says you’ve done your knee?”

Thelma blew out an exasperated breath. “It’s blowing up like a balloon. I need to buy, borrow or steal a crutch.”

Someone found her one. The walk back to the Lonesome still wasn’t fun. She leaned against the wall of the escalator as it whisked them up to the spacedock. There were other people in the escalator cabin with her and Max, but no Star Marines. The Marines used the military escalator.

“It hurts,” she confided to him.

He put an arm around her, helping to prop her up.

Onboard the Lonesome, Lon diagnosed ligament damage via the medbot. “I’m injecting pain relief and nanobots. Then we’ll put your knee in a brace so that you don’t make things worse overnight while it’s healing.” Lon did not approve of her fighting a Star Marine corporal.

Harry, studying the video of the fight, didn’t approve of how she’d fought Naomi. He’d been on Tornado about his own private business, but had returned to the Lonesome a few minutes after Thelma and Max.

“Damn it, Harry,” Lon swore. “Leave the instruction till she’s out of pain and able to remember your wisdom.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Max fitted the brace to Thelma’s left leg. She lay on her bunk, Lon having switched on sensors and speakers in her cabin so that he could treat her. “Comfortable?” Max asked.

She grimaced. “Yeah. The brace fits.” Comfortable beyond that was still a stretch, even with pain relief kicking in.

“I’m going to monitor you through the night,” Lon said.

Usually her cabin was her private space. Just now it felt really full with one man, one AI mech, and one spaceship-embodied AI. Their concern was more overwhelming than their presence. “Thanks, Lon.” She sniffed. “It’s the pain relief that makes me weepy.”

Max touched her hair before he straightened and stepped back. “Tears don’t scare us.”

“Speak for yourself,” Harry said. He smiled at her from the doorway. “Goodnight, honey. Let Lon know if you need anything.”

In the morning her knee was tender, but the swelling had gone down and she could put her weight on both legs.

“Put the brace back on,” Lon said sternly. “It’ll go over your trousers. You’re not on duty, anyway, so you could go back to bed. I’ll bring you food.”

“Could we compromise?” Thelma asked. “I’ll rest on the sofa in the lounge.”

Lon deemed that acceptable, although he had a robot accompany her down the passage and into the lounge, just in case she needed support.

She did feel a little wobbly; not physically off-balance, but adjusting to a new view of the universe and her place in it.

Last night, Corporal Naomi Milligan had fought Thelma as a favor to her brother Joe. Thelma knew that. It had been a way of giving Thelma a chance to prove herself and establish herself in the eyes of the Star Marines and Tornado mercenaries as something more than Max’s deputy. Fortunately, Thelma hadn’t disgraced herself in the fight.

But what Naomi had said after the fight counted for even more, because it had been advice Thelma had earned; not kindness given on her brother’s account.

I’m not in the academy any more.

She’d spent so many years as a student, and that time had shaped her view of herself. She was setting up as an information broker, but she’d been treating it as a student exercise, as if she had to prove herself rather than simply be a player in frontier games. As if someone would grade her on her efforts! She’d been thinking as a dudette. She’d been giving people power over her by affording them expert status in her mind—as Naomi said, she’d been trying to learn from them when she should have been trusting her own skills and instincts, and acting on them.

It hadn’t been her academy lessons that had kept her in the ring with Naomi for seven minutes. It had been Harry’s training. She should have trusted it, and not tried to turn her fight with Naomi into a learning opportunity. Although…

Harry let her finish her bowl of cereal and a mug of hot tea before he sat down in his recliner, switched on the viewscreen, and went through the video of her fight with her, critiquing every movement.

By the end of his critique session, she’d reached an important conclusion. If she compared herself to him or the other two intense personalities on the Lonesome, then she’d never “graduate” in her own mind. Max and Harry would always be able to kick her butt. Lon would always know more about the operation of spaceships and of the Saloon Sector than her. But none of that mattered unless she let it.

“Is your knee better?” Lon asked. “You stretched it and you’re smiling.”

She ran her hands through her hair, which she hadn’t bothered to tie back. “My knee is better, thank you. And thank you, Harry, for making me a better fighter.”

“And you’re smiling like a Cheshire leopard because…?” Harry drawled, regarding her with a crooked smile of his own.

“I have a puzzle to solve. Why did Agent Aubree Tennyson want Max to know that Senator Gua was arriving in the Saloon Sector on a secret Galactic Justice spaceship?”

Chapter 12

The asteroid miners hosted an open bar to celebrate the Lonesome’s arrival at Thelma and Max’s next port of call. The party was unashamedly for Thelma, not Max, who got abandoned in a corner, left to talk to the site manager and production foreman while Thelma flirted judiciously with a two-deep circle of mostly men. When the miners discovered that she could listen intelligently to their mining stories and appreciate the finer details of upgrades to an ore churn, three of them asked her to marry them.

“Only for tonight,” one of them added honestly.

Thelma choked on her Delightful Deputy cocktail. Still, she was a Rock Sector girl who’d kept up with her family’s asteroid mining ventures, and she enjoyed the atmosphere and the sense of being accepted. Out in the Saloon Sector, this was a rougher version of the life that she’d chosen to leave behind.

At his corner table, Max stood.

Breathing in the once familiar scent of dust and sweat with an overlay of pine freshener that was characteristic of a new air scrubber filter, Thelma didn’t regret her decision to join the Galactic Justice service. A miner’s life wouldn’t have been enough for her. But she could mourn the loss of socializing with blunt-speaking miners. Life was simpler, though not easier, when you chewed rock for a living.

The miners began shuffling sideways, opening a path for Max to her. He didn’t take it, but strode purposefully to the door.

Thelma obeyed the silent summons. She swallowed the last of the cocktail she’d been nursing, thanked her hosts, and walked with Max back through the colony dome and the lock tunnel to the Lonesome.

“Lucky bastard,” one of the miners said as they exited.

Max didn’t react.

Thelma was glad that she didn’t blush, either, at the innuendo. Despite everything she said and did, people insisted on assuming that she and Max were sexually involved. That was how gossip worked.

The truth was, since Tornado, she and Max hadn’t spoken about anything outside of work, and “please, pass the salt” style conversation at dinner. She guessed from Max’s frowns in her direction, and an outright question from Lon if something was wrong with her, that her silence confused her shipmates. But silence seemed her best option. She was trying to define the professional boundaries of her relationship with Max and with the two AIs.

Entering the Lonesome, she returned her comms unit to its normal settings. She’d had it locked to only share emergency alerts while she was at the miners’ party. Immediately a two note chime sounded, signaling that she had a message from someone in her family.

Joe’s name popped up. He’d sent a quick text message with a video recording attached. The message read, “Have Max watch, too.”

“Max?”

He’d strode off in the direction of his cabin, while she’d slowed down to read the message. He paused and looked back.

She waved her comms unit at him. “I have a video from Joe. He says you’ll want to watch it, too.” As he walked back to her, she added. “Lon, if I send you the file, can you play it on the viewscreen in the lounge, please?” Which meant that Lon and Harry, if he was around, could watch it as well.

Harry was already in the lounge, relaxing in his recliner.

Thelma unlaced her boots and curled up on the sofa. To her surprise, Max sat beside her. She was a tiny bit tipsy, just enough to acknowledge to herself that she’d like to slide closer to him.

Joe’s video started. Her brother and his wife, Rachel, faced the camera together. “We’re pregnant!”

Thelma jumped up, clapping. “Congratulations!” They couldn’t hear her, but over two years ago, Rachel had confided how much they wanted children. Thelma was ecstatic for them.

“Son of a gun,” Max exclaimed. “Way to go, man.”

Joe and Rachel rambled on about dates and possible names and simply shared their happiness.

“We have to send them a congratulations message.” Thelma was smiling so widely her mouth hurt.

Then Joe wound up the video. “Life with the right person is the space-ace. You two need to try it.”

Rachel slapped his arm in silent, wifely chastisement.

Comprehension of what her brother meant shocked Thelma into awkward stillness.

“Bye. Love you, sis. See ya, man.” The video ended.

Thelma stared at the blank screen. Max remained on the sofa behind her. If she turned around, she’d have to see his face and read his expression.

Her high-on-happiness, idiotic, meddlesome brother had suggested that she and Max become romantically involved. That was the point of his final message. She could handle strangers gossiping about her and her mysterious, gorgeous boss, but not her brother’s heavy-handed match-making.

Ignore, ignore, ignore. Pretend you don’t understand. Of course, her standing here like a dummy wasn’t exactly faking nonchalance.

She took a deep breath, putting a smile back on her face, and spun to face Max. “Should we record our congratulations together—” Oops! “Now?”

He showed no expression at all, but his eyes searched hers before he nodded. “I’m going to vote for the name Tuesday for Joe’s favorite day of the week.”

“Don’t you dare!” She was so thankful for his teasing. They could edge away from Joe’s busybody bossiness and never speak of it. “Friday is a much better day.”

He grinned.

Her heart gave an odd jolt. Joe and Rachel had looked so happy together. “Lon, can we record the message in here?”

“Any time you’re ready.”

Thelma leaned back in the comfortable armchair in her cabin and gazed idly at the space window newly installed on the opposite wall. It showed a scene of waves lapping on a white sandy beach and a seagull paddling near the waterline. The sight should have calmed her, but her brain refused to chill.

There were secrets aboard the Lonesome: Lon’s presence embedded in it, Harry’s private quarters, the mysterious upper deck (or decks), and Max’s personal history that had enabled him to end up with such an expensive spaceship, two AI friends, and a completely uninformative entry in the Galactic Justice database.

And Thelma had no right to those secrets. Nor did she have any secrets of her own that she could trade for them. Her relationship with Max, Harry and Lon was already unbalanced enough. She couldn’t force them to confide in her.

Which left her with only one avenue to explore to solve the puzzle of why Aubree Tennyson had wanted Max to know, off the record, of Senator Gua’s imminent arrival in the Saloon Sector. If Max wouldn’t answer the question—and Thelma had asked, and his response had been a shrug and “professional courtesy”—then she had to approach the problem from a different angle and discover the purpose of the senator’s visit.

It would be beyond foolish to try and find the answer in the Galactic Justice database. Not only would the senator’s plans be classified above Thelma’s security level, but the mere act of searching the database would raise flags. The very last thing Thelma wanted was for Galactic Justice to pay attention to her in her exile.

She grabbed her comms unit and trawled the media sites.

The Federation generated a lot of media. Finding the gems amid the babble, and the connections that turned those gems into something useful, was the key. There was a whole division in Galactic Justice that did just that. Thelma had a head start on her search because she knew what she was looking for and that it would be in the public domain.

In fact, it was headline news.

Senator Gua, along with the other six serving members of the Senate Worlds Development Committee, was officially en route to the remote Boldire Sector, primarily inhabited by the Federation’s newest member species, the Bunyaphi.

Diplomacy had been Thelma’s goal throughout her years at the Galactic Justice academy. In particular, she’d been fascinated by the challenges of cross-species negotiation. The Federation might be primarily human, but other sentient species played vital roles.

The Bunyaphi had yet to find theirs.

They were a monotreme, humanoid people. They laid eggs, but nursed their babies. They also had wings. For one of the physically smallest sentient species, they were remarkably belligerent. They’d had to argue for admittance to the Federation for three centuries after Federation surveyors first made contact with them in the Boldire. Their entrance applications kept getting torpedoed by their internal wars. The Bunyaphi had legendary feuds. Their clan system provided an enviable social welfare net, but it also bolstered their aggressive attacks on one another.

Finally, just over a century ago, the Bunyaphi had been admitted into the Federation. They didn’t officially celebrate by starting a three-way, all-in clan war, but it seemed that way to exhausted, cynical outsiders. That war had limped on for a century, with the latest flare up occurring a year ago.

The Senate Worlds Development Committee was scheduled to spend the next six months on active duty analyzing, negotiating and, if things succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, bringing peace to the Boldire Sector.

The sector took even longer to reach than the Saloon Sector thanks to a paucity of safe wormholes to cut down on travel time. The committee would be two months traveling before they reached the Boldire Sector, two months negotiating, then two months travelling back so that they could be on Alpha Hub for the start of the new parliamentary year.

Thelma sat in her office on the Lonesome and called up a star map of the Saloon Sector. Off beyond Braw, in Sheriff Cayor’s territory, there was a wormhole that no one used. It was marked perilous. But perilous didn't mean non-survivable. Drones had made it through. They had to have because the other end of the wormhole was known. It disgorged into the Boldire Sector.

Travelling aboard a Galactic Justice cruiser, Senator Gua, and presumably the other Senate Committee members and their staff, could reach the Saloon Sector in under four weeks. That gave them a month of unaccounted for time within the sector before they jumped the perilous wormhole to the Boldire Sector.

An ordinary spaceship couldn’t risk a perilous wormhole, but it was open knowledge that the Navy used them, and if the Navy had those sort of re-enforced spaceships, then Galactic Justice would, too.

Thelma tapped a finger on the star map where it showed the wormhole. Senator Gua’s business could be anywhere in the sector.

The question was, how could the Senate Worlds Development Committee have a role to play in the Saloon Sector? The committee’s purpose was to guide and aid the development of member species’ planets of origin so that all enjoyed a Federation level of prosperity. In the case of the Bunyaphi, that meant ending their civil war and building toward a secure future. Planets of origin were defined as those planets a species occupied at the time they joined the Federation.

The Saloon Sector had no planets of origin. The member settlements that existed, ranging from asteroid mining stations to wholly colonized planets such as Mistral and Sumatra, were composed of migrants and their descendants.

Thelma called up the rules under which the committee had been established a millennium ago. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. The language was convoluted. She wasn’t an executive lawyer, but she grasped the gist of the rules laid out in pettifogging legal language and matched it against her hazy memory of the committee’s history.

She leaned back in her chair, staring at nothing.

The Senate Worlds Development Committee had been renamed after intensive lobbying by newer member species roughly three centuries following its inception. Originally, it had been called the Senate Committee for Subsidiary Worlds and Foreign Affairs.

Foreign Affairs.

The Federation monitored only one species, that Thelma knew about it, who were approaching space travel, the point at which the Federation would introduce itself to those sentients and invite them to begin the long process of joining the union. But there were no species currently capable of space travel who hadn’t already been brought into the Federation. As a result, there was no cause for the “foreign affairs” aspect of the Senate Worlds Development Committee’s to be invoked.

Unless there was an undeclared, unfederated sentient species in the Saloon Sector.

Thelma dismissed the tree-people on Forest as soon as she thought of them. Their very biology precluded the technological ability to achieve space travel. Simply put, they lacked the hands, or equivalent appendages, necessary to build things.

Could there be other aliens lurking in the Saloon Sector? Perhaps in the Badstars?

She went back to the star map. It ended at the Badstars, but there were survey maps that went further. She recalled Lon showing her one weeks ago.

She found it and whistled under her breath.

A wormhole existed on the far side of the Badstars. Since the Sheriff’s Department dealt with mining claim jumpers and similar disputes, she had access to the Survey database. Consulting it regarding the wormhole marked “closed” on the star map revealed that for twenty years surveyors had sent probes into it, and all were lost. Since none of the probes survived to return, no one knew where the wormhole led.

What if it led to an alien civilization, aliens who’d been destroying the Federation probes and hadn’t been curious enough about the human-dominated civilization to make contact, until now?

It sounded like a plot from a science fiction novel.

That didn’t mean it couldn’t be true.

Thelma connected to her comms unit. On the journey out to the Saloon Sector, she’d set up her own database and automated programs to populate it with data, one of the fields within it being space myths. The legend of the Eldorado Cache was far from the only story that lonely, bored spacers told one another.

An ever-popular space myth was that the rocks on the planet Moonshine were psy-infused and could stimulate either telepathy or clairvoyance. Some people claimed that the rocks’ properties filtered into the ethanol oceans of the planet, and so, into the alcohol suctioned from it in limited quantities and under strict Customs supervision.

Thelma had disregarded those stories. She didn’t believe in extrasensory perception. She’d also disregarded the space myths that mentioned grubs.

Now, she found the links to reports of those stories in her database and read or watched them.

Max interrupted.

She blinked at the knock on her office door. It was open. Given that Lon monitored everything she did in the office, it wasn’t as if shutting the door and pretending she had privacy made any sense.

Max’s hands were in his pockets, but despite the studied casualness of his posture, tension held his shoulders rigid. “Lon says you’ve been joining dots with impressive speed.”

Unconsciously, she glanced back at the grubs story on her screen. She closed it. “Yes?”

He took his hands out of his pockets. “We need to talk.”

“Damn,” she said softly as she followed him into his office. The setting spoke for itself. This was a boss-to-subordinate discussion.

Chapter 13

Max sat at his desk in the brown and blue office. Everything was clean and in its place, including the two humans.

Thelma took “her” chair, the second chair pulled up to the long table. She put her comms unit on the desk.

“Can you switch that off, please?” He could have just asked Lon to block the signal. The request was a courtesy, as well as a means of underlining the nature of the forthcoming discussion. He scrubbed a hand over his short hair. “My life would be easier if you weren’t smart.”

She switched off her comms unit and waited, recognizing that his compliment wasn’t a complaint or an excuse for what was coming, but a starting point.

He began abruptly. “This conversation, the information I share in it and your actions resulting from it, are part of your Galactic Justice service. That you have started to find the answers yourself is irrelevant. Information about the grubs would be worth a lot to an information broker. I realize that, and I’m aware you might resent this order, but you are forbidden to trade information regarding the grubs with anyone. You may only discuss the aliens as part of your deputy duties, and even then, unless I order you to do so or the situation is critical enough to require it, staying silent is preferable.”

“I understand.”

His scowl deepened. Given that unaligned aliens were a major Federal issue, he obviously required something more.

She took a moment to consider her words. “I promise that anything I learn about the grubs, or the Kampia to give them their formal identifier, will only be used and shared as part of my service to Galactic Justice. Honestly, Max, I recognize that alien contact is a big deal. I won’t jeopardize whatever the Federation is attempting for my own profit.”

His scowl twisted into a grimace. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. You’ve kept Lon’s and Harry’s existence secret. It’s that the grubs—the Kampia—aren’t even something I should know about. As space myths, they’re fine. But knowing that they’re real and coming here for a meeting…”

Despite herself, Thelma’s breath caught at the confirmation that the Senate Worlds Development Committee really was on its way to meet with aliens.

“I don’t want Agent Tennyson to suspect that either of us know the truth of the Kampia’s existence,” Max said. “It’s bad enough that she suspects I do. As sheriff and deputy, we work for Galactic Justice, but we don’t need to attract their attention. It’s safer that we don’t.”

“Safer?”

His right knee jiggle in an uncharacteristic revelation of nervous energy. “I have secrets. For you, the only way to run an information brokerage career that Galactic Justice doesn’t try to expropriate, is to stay off their radar. Don’t set off any alerts.”

“Aubree knows that I’m setting up as an information broker.” Belatedly, Thelma recalled the agent’s conversation. “She’s willing to aid me by not bringing it to anyone’s attention, isn’t she?”

“For the price of you slipping her information occasionally, and perhaps broadcasting information that she wants seeded. Agent Tennyson is dangerously effective. She won’t burn you without reason. But if she thinks you know about the grubs, that would make you far more interesting than you’d be comfortable with.”

Thelma nodded thoughtfully. “I’d be flagged in the Galactic Justice database.” And Max would come under scrutiny. The Lonesome itself might be boarded. Lon and Harry would be discovered. Her keeping a low profile was important for all of them. “I’ll be careful, I promise. And I’ll listen if you think I need to stay away from certain issues. Lon? That goes for you and Harry, too. I trust you.”

“Okay.” Max stretched his arms in front of him, releasing tension. “Now, about the grubs—”

“Harry’s in the lounge,” Lon interrupted. “You might want to include him in this discussion.”

So, after the warning for secrecy had been given, and she’d accepted it, the actual conversation about the Kampia wasn’t technically official sheriff business; hence, the psychological message in the change of venue. Lon wasn’t as subtle as he thought.

Or perhaps, he didn’t mean to be subtle.

The last of the tension around Max’s mouth relaxed. “Sure. The lounge will be more comfortable.”

It was. Since it was night time, Thelma grabbed a mug of hot chocolate for herself, and one for Max, at his request. Then she kicked off her boots and curled up on the corner of the sofa nearest him. A few weeks ago, Lon had added an afghan to the sofa and a couple of cushions. The Lonesome was a comfortable temperature, but snuggling under a blanket still felt good…and this wasn’t official Galactic Justice business. This was about her inclusion deeper into the secrets of the Lonesome’s crew.

“What do you know about the Kampia?” Max asked.

The taste of chocolate spiced with cinnamon was sweet on her tongue. “Assume I know nothing. I thought they were a space myth.”

“Lon?” Max invited the AI to brief her.

He was delighted to oblige. “The Federation’s knowledge of the Kampia is limited. However, xenobiologists who’ve examined rare footage and questioned those who’ve claimed to have seen them, conclude that the Kampia are similar to a caterpillar in appearance, although whether they undergo metamorphosis is unknown. The Kampia are seven to eight feet in length and over a foot high. They have six appendages that enable them to manipulate objects with admirable dexterity, and another six appendages that seem to simply assist in their mobility.

“In the first wave of surveys and settlement in the Saloon Sector, there were no reported sightings of Kampia. Those began, and happened rarely, after surveyors sent probes into the wormhole on the opposite side of the Badstars.”

Thelma’s hot chocolate sloshed in her mug. “I knew it!”

“You guessed it,” Lon corrected her.

“Go on,” she urged.

“That’s the extent of my knowledge of the Kampia,” he said. “From here on it’s conjecture. Agent Aubree Tennyson gave us the hint to focus on Senator Gua. The Senator is an ambitious woman. She wants to leave a legacy, both in terms of her own achievements and in setting her son up to exceed her, to be President of the Federation. Successful first contact with the Kampia leading to either drawing them into the Federation or negotiating an alliance with them achieves Senator Gua’s objectives. According to the official press release of the Bunyaphi Accord Discussions, Galactic Justice Agent Rudolf Gua is part of the Senate Worlds Development Committee’s staff. He’s an adviser.”

Thelma hands tightened on her mug. Then she noticed Max and Harry both noting her reaction to the news of her former classmate’s elite assignment. “I’m not going to do anything reckless,” she said impatiently. “So, Rudy is to go down in history as a member of the inaugural Kampia-Federation meeting?”

“I suspect that is his mother’s intention.”

“He should have paid more attention in xenobiology class.” She swallowed her annoyance with the last of her hot chocolate. “All right.” She set the empty mug on the coffee table. “But how does Senator Gua know that the Kampia will meet with her? Who is representing the Kampia? What do they want?”

Lon managed an electronic sigh. “Much to my regret I cannot crack the encryption of the top secret section of the Galactic Justice database. The two AIs who designed and maintain it have inserted traps that even other AI can’t circumvent.”

“We don’t need more information on the Kampia,” Max said. “Cracking the Galactic Justice database merely to satisfy your curiosity—”

“Extreme curiosity,” Lon interjected.

Max grinned. “Still not worth the risk. I’d hate to see you imprisoned for stealing official secrets, my friend.”

“Prison would not agree with me.” Lon paused. “Back to what we can conjecture.”

Harry chuckled.

Lon resumed educating everyone as to his guesswork. “Assuming standard speed for a Galactic Justice courier vessel, Senator Gua should reach the Saloon Sector six to seven days from now. Tellingly, in three days, the Navy begins wargames in Sheriff Cayor’s territory, on the far side of Braw.”

Thelma grabbed a cushion and began braiding the fringe that edged it. Braid, unbraid. Braid, unbraid. She was thinking.

If you imagined the Saloon Sector as a stretched out diamond—which was a far neater image than the reality it described—then Max’s territory occupied the flat point on the Badstars edge, while Sheriff Pang policed the interstellar space of the matching flat point that encompassed Mistral, Moonshine and Tornado, the original and developed core of the Saloon Sector, and the bit nearest to the rest of the Federation. Sheriff Cayor’s territory occupied the long top point of the diamond and included the agricultural planet of Sumatra as well as the trading planet of Braw, which was sustained by the asteroid mining industry. Sheriff Zajak looked after the final quarter where manufacturing industries were under development.

“How long would it take a Navy frigate to travel from Braw to the wormhole on the far side of the Badstars?” she asked.

Max shrugged. “The Badstars is notorious for its unpredictable space weather. From Braw to the edge of the Badstars, a frigate at full burn could make the journey in under three weeks. Then it could be a month, but probably more, to cross the Badstars. But if you’re thinking of the possibility that the grubs might bring a battle fleet through the wormhole while the Navy’s distracted, don’t be. Tactically, the grubs could invade at any time and the naval vessels stationed in the Saloon Sector would be stretched thin repelling them. There’s no reason for the grubs to set up a meeting with the Federation before attacking it.”

“No reason in our culture,” Thelma retorted. “One of the core tenets of xenodiplomacy is not to assume that others are like ourselves.” She frowned. “Although, really, the bigger risk is that the meeting between the senators and the Kampia goes so wrong that it triggers an attack.”

Max kicked out the footrest on his recliner. “I think you’re being overly pessimistic. The sightings of them only ever report one or two grubs. Sorry, Kampia,” he corrected himself. “And the Kampia never attempt to approach or show hostility to those who see them. They merely crawl along a planetary or lunar surface.”

“Searching, surveying,” she murmured.

Lon added, “They’ve been sighted on asteroids, as well. The fact that a meeting has been planned means that the Kampia are in communication with the Federation. Reports that all survey probes were lost in the wormhole may have been exaggerated. Galactic Justice would have run a thorough threat analysis before they allowed Senator Gua this secret meeting.”

Thelma had been educated in the tension between the elected and civil service representatives of Federation power. As much influence as Senator Gua could undoubtedly bring to bear, a foreign affairs meeting would have required a year or more to put together with Galactic Justice working hard behind the scenes. Just for starters, there was the need to coordinate with the Navy and to hide their protective gathering behind the fiction of war games. The top secret briefing papers would have been fascinating.

She sighed. “So we assume that the Kampia have demonstrated that they come in peace. But why are they here? Why make contact now? They’ve proven that they can close the wormhole to us, so it’s not as if we’re a threat to them.”

“I am baffled as to their purpose in meeting with the Senate Worlds Development Committee,” Lon said. “Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to hear even rumors concerning the meeting for years.”

“Unless something goes wrong,” Max said.

Thelma winced. Xenodiplomacy was complicated. “I hope Rudy stays silent. The man annoys me. The Kampia might feel the same.”

Harry laughed. “Fortunately, it’s not our problem.”

Lon groaned. “Now you’ve done it. You’ve jinxed us.”

Chapter 14

Thelma retired to her cabin to think over the Kampia situation. An incomplete idea scrabbled at the edge of her mind. For now, it was too inchoate to express, but it worried her. The Kampia hadn’t ventured into Federation space merely because Senator Gua wanted to meet them. They’d have their own agenda. Of course, Galactic Justice would have considered that. There were probably briefing papers on possible negotiating levers and danger points.

And yet…

“Sleep on it,” she told herself. Sometimes issues that loomed large at night became minuscule with a new day and energy restored. Her fretting might be an unconscious ploy to inflate her own self-importance since she felt sidelined, exiled from core world Galactic Justice activities. Kidding herself that she’d seen a factor that others had missed could lead to embarrassment if she shared her half-developed idea.

Unfortunately, she didn’t wake to clarity either for or against her suspicions. She left her cabin determined to find a way to ask Lon about it without seeming loco.

But his announcement momentarily shocked her suspicions into silence. “We have guests arriving for breakfast.”

Instinctively, she glanced down. She wore an untailored blue utility suit and had scraped her hair into a casual ponytail, her focus during her morning ablutions on her suspicions rather than her appearance. “Are they official visitors? Should I change?” If they were Customs officers, the visitors would be wearing their own smart uniforms.

“They are two surveyors,” Lon said. “Theodor Vale and Alex Proust won’t care what you wear. They’ve decades of experience on the frontier, so they’re worth listening to, which is good because if they’re as garrulous as I remember, all you’ll be doing is listening. They’re life partners as well as business partners.”

“Has Max entertained them before?” She couldn’t remember seeing their names on discussion forums or messages to the Sheriff’s Department.

Max emerged from his office and answered her question. “Theodor and Alex like a chat, but they resist going planetside. They’re confirmed spacers. They also don’t always trust messages transmitted through space. So this visit could be casual, a way to break up the monotony of their survey work, or they could want to pass on some information. They have a knack for hearing about opportunities and threats before anyone else.”

Which made the two surveyors people she should cultivate for her information brokerage role.

She followed Max down the ladder to the cargo deck.

Back on Zephyr, once the bandits had been handed over to the planetary guards, Lon had reconfigured the Lonesome’s lowest deck. The holding cells had vanished and a nondescript lounge occupied the central space. A table with four chairs, plus four armchairs and a small kitchen nook, enabled guests to be entertained without bringing them up to the “home” deck. Evidently, this sort of mid-space, impromptu meeting happened often enough that Lon prepared for it.

It just hadn’t happened before in Thelma’s stint as deputy. Her footsteps slowed as she neared the kitchenette. Max was the sheriff, the Lonesome was his, and he knew the two surveyors tramping through the lock tunnel and about to enter the lounge. It was his place to greet them, and hers to…hover?

He looked back at her and frowned.

There wasn’t even a coffee machine she could pretend to play with. A basic food dispenser occupied the counter. She raised her eyebrows and kind of grimaced back at him to convey her social uncertainty. Maybe she shouldn’t have followed him down the ladder quite so quickly?

He gave a huff of laughter and held out his hand. “Come here.”

It was at that inopportune moment that Lon opened the hatch to the lock tunnel and their guests stepped in. Immediately, the first man’s face split into a grin, his gaze taking in Max’s amused expression and outstretched hand before traveling on to Thelma. He was a short, slight man with a mop of wild gray hair and a straggly moustache. “Ahoy, the Lonesome!”

“Good morning, Theodor. Morning, Alex,” Max responded.

As they approached, Alex reached around Theodor and shook Max’s hand before nodding at Thelma. He was a much bigger man than his partner. He had a shiny bald head, a wide clean-shaven face, and happy brown eyes. “Nice to have breakfast in company. We’d have invited you aboard the Thistlebristle—”

Thelma giggled. The sound just slipped out. She covered her mouth and coughed. “Sorry.”

Spacers could be touchy if they perceived a slight against their spaceship, but Alex smiled at her. “No, no, laugh. That’s why we chose the name.”

“Our former ship was the Crazy Mazy Daisy.” Theodor beamed at her.

They served themselves from the food dispenser, everyone receiving ersatz versions of their chosen meals. After the fresh foods Thelma cooked with Lon, the transformed “goop” lacked the zing of her usual fare. She stuck with scrambled eggs and toast

Max ate as readily as ever, but then, he liked the goop. In his case, the goop had been transformed into fake bacon and eggs; as had Theodor and Alex’s.

At least the conversation was entertaining. After weeks of monitoring the Sheriff Department’s discussion boards and responding to messages forwarded by Owen, she recognized in Theodor and Alex the brand of obsessive craziness that marked long-time surveyors. Either that single-minded, slightly warped focus enabled people to succeed as surveyors, or else it was the result of years of surveying. Either way, they told a good story about events that occurred within the frame of their obsession.

The successful hazing of the newest five person team of surveyors in Zephyr territory had Theodor snorting his amusement as he described it. “The rawest of raw dudes. Not like you, my dear.” He inclined his head in an abbreviated bow to Thelma. “Despite the wretched tales of us old-timers’ cantankerous natures, we’re prepared to extend a helping hand and provide a little guidance, but this crew…” He shook his head. “Upstarts. Know-alls. They just begged to be fooled.”

“And Veronica obliged,” Alex said chewing on a rasher of faux bacon held casually in his fingers. “She trailed rumors, laced the discussion forum with them. Some of us aided her.”

Theodor snickered at the ever so slightly chiding look his partner cast his way. “The dudes were primed to leap at their chance. Of course, if they’d been honest, they’d have been fine.”

Max didn’t as much as twitch at the hint of illegal activities.

“Cool customer.” Theodor saluted him with his coffee mug.

Max balanced a piece of bacon and yellow “egg” smush on his fork. “What were the surveyor dudes chasing?”

“Rubyjoo.” Theodor swigged some coffee, but his coffee mug couldn’t hide the avid and angry gleam in his eyes. Evidently, rubyjoo was his Eldorado Cache. All the long-term surveyors had one; the big “find” they chased in the belief that it would make their careers.

Hearing that, Thelma understood a little better the rancor hiding beneath the glee in his retelling of the successful hazing. The five dudes had attempted to go after Theodor’s obsession.

Rubyjoo was the liquid crystal that powered quantary computers. They were the most efficient and powerful computers in the Federation, and were likely the framework that supported both Harry and Lon’s raphus geodes, their AI brains. Finding a vein of rubyjoo meant a surveyor became a rare Rubyjooicer. Of course that sort of fame would appeal to new surveyors as well as old-timers.

If Thelma had had prior warning, she could have looked up whether Theodor or Alex had achieved the status of Rubyjooicer yet. As it was, she pushed her ersatz scrambled eggs around her plate and listened to Theodor’s voice quicken with enthusiasm.

“So Veronica had the dudes believing that she’d invented a rubyjoo detector and that, obviously, there was significant interest in it from the big corporations, people like Hwicce and Booratek. She ‘let slip’ that she was meeting with a Hwicce vice president. She was smart. She didn’t dump all the information on the dudes. She seeded it throughout a few months of preparation, hinting at her favorite chain of hotels, which planet she’d be on and when, and concluding with her intention to visit a botanical garden during her visit planetside. That gave the dudes the precise city the meeting would be held in.”

He clapped his hands together. “The five dudes put the clues together the way she’d hoped, then put together a plan. They took control of the hotel’s surveillance coverage.”

Now, Max frowned.

“Don’t worry,” Alex interposed. “Veronica had an inside woman in the hotel’s security. Guests’ safety was never compromised.”

Theodor’s mouth moved in a silent “ya-ya” of impatience. As soon as his partner stopped talking, Theodor resumed. “The dudes stole the supposed rubyjoo detector while Veronica was in the hotel’s most expensive restaurant dining with another surveyor who was pretending to be the Hwicce vice president. The scheme worked because the actual vice president was in town, but busy with his own private business.”

Alex finished his meal and pushed back from the table, cradling his mug of coffee in a huge hand. “The dudes scurried back to their ship with the stolen rubyjoo detector and headed for the Elgin Marble Field.” He glanced at Thelma. “Which was where the last significant find of rubyjoo was made.”

“By us,” Theodor added.

Which answered Thelma’s question of whether the two surveyors were Rubyjooicers. They were.

Alex drained his mug of coffee, snatched up his partner’s, and went to refill both at the food dispenser.

“What was the detector set to actually detect?” Max asked.

“Hades slime.”

“Yuk.” At Theodor’s answer, Thelma ceased pretending to eat her breakfast. “That’s just cruel.”

He snickered.

Alex shoved a mug of coffee at him. “It teaches the young’uns. We’ll test if the lesson takes in a few months.”

“Do I want to know how?” Thelma asked cautiously.

Alex winked at her. “No, deputy, you don’t.”

After the surveyors departed, Thelma returned to the main deck and cut up an apple and peach to eat with a bowl of granola and almond milk. She also made herself a cup of tea. “In case I haven’t said,” she addressed everyone and no one, as Max, Harry and Lon were all present. “I appreciate the food on the Lonesome. I don’t know how you do it in space. It’s so fresh. But I’m not questioning miracles. Not after being reminded how goop food tastes.”

Max shook his head at her, but took an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it as he turned to walk out of the kitchen, probably headed for his office.

“Max?”

He looked back at her.

“Theodor and Alex seem like typical surveyors?” The slightest upward intonation fuzzed her observation into a semi-question.

Lon answered. “They’re exemplars of the profession. At least, out here on the frontier they are. They are quirky, paranoid about protecting their theories of discovery, and operate by their own code, but they’re very effective surveyors. They find what they’re looking for.”

“Even rubyjoo,” Thelma said quietly. She crunched some granola. Max leaned a hip against the kitchen island, while she sat on a bar stool. “I had some doubts last night about the Kampia. Maybe not doubts. Questions.” She chased a piece of granola-encrusted peach around her bowl.

“Go on.” He was eating the apple in a few efficient, crunchy bites.

“We don’t know who the Kampia are. I don’t mean that generally. I’m thinking about the individual Kampia who’ve agreed to meet with the senators. Initially, I assumed that they must be representatives of their government. But what if they’re not? What if the wormhole that brings them to the edge of the Badstars is sited on the frontier of Kampia territory? All the space myths are of rare sightings of solitary Kampia. At the most, they appear in pairs. In partnerships.”

“Like Theodor and Alex.” Lon guessed where her argument was going. “You’re suggesting that the Kampia seen in the Saloon Sector are the equivalent of surveyors.”

“I am.” Her spoon clinked against the bowl as she set it down. She gripped the edge of the counter. “I know it sounds like a wacky idea, but what if the senators aren’t meeting with authorized representatives of the Kampia, but with individuals like Theodor and Alex who are running a scam so that they can get access to search for something in the Saloon Sector?”

“You think we have rogue Kampia surveyors in the Saloon Sector?” Max tossed his apple core into the recycling receptacle. The counter resealed over it.

“Not necessarily rogue, not necessarily dangerous,” she said. “Just running a scam, like Theodor’s friend, Veronica. Look at the facts.”

Max folded his arms, his resistant body language expressing disbelief.

Thelma frowned. She did have facts. She started with one of the big ones. “Fact. The Senate Worlds Development Committee’s arrival in the Saloon Sector has drawn the Navy out of most of the sector to concentrate its forces on the far side of Braw to protect the senators under the guise of war gaming.”

“We discussed this last night,” he said. “The Navy and Galactic Justice would have conducted a threat analysis. We have to trust them to do their jobs and us to do ours.”

“But this is our job. As sheriff and deputy for the frontier region we have to keep the peace in interstellar space.”

Harry had been silently observing the two of them from the lounge side of the kitchen island. For a wonder, neither he nor Lon had intervened in the discussion, not once it got intense. “Human intuition is one of the elements of cognition that AIs haven’t been able to replicate.”

Max refocused his scowl in the AI mech’s direction. “We can’t interfere with high level political and military actions. We can’t get involved, and there’s no basis to refer on Thelma’s suspicions. We shouldn’t even be guessing about the Kampia’s meeting with senators.”

“I’m not intuitive,” Thelma said to Harry.

“The best information brokers are,” he answered. “Lon replaces intuition with AI processing. He sees connections and calculates probabilities. Humans use gut instinct.”

Max slapped a hand down on the counter. “Gut instinct fails. It can get you killed. I’ve seen what happens to Marines who rely on it.”

Perhaps that history explained his determination to rationalize everything.

“I don’t want to rely on intuition,” Thelma responded calmly, staying on topic even though this rare glimpse into his past and his feelings made her want to reach for more. “I just…something about the meeting with the Kampia seems wrong. Not dangerous. I can’t pinpoint what it is, and that’s why I had to mention my doubts. If the Kampia are looking for something here, what could it be? Lon, if we plotted sightings of Kampia would it reveal anything?”

“I can look.”

Max barely parted his lips to speak. His jaw muscles were clenched with tension, and lines bracketed his mouth. “We’re returning to Zephyr in a week. We are not deviating from our patrol route. Look all you like. Obsess over the damned grubs. But no mention of the Kampia is to leave this ship.” He stalked out.

Thelma stared at the empty doorway as her pulse thudded in her ears. She hadn’t expected his anger, and couldn’t explain it. Nor could she ask Harry and Lon about its cause. Confidences concerning Max and his past had to come from him, and he’d slammed a wall up between them.

“There is no statistically significant pattern to the Kampia’s appearances, other than that they occur more frequently closer to the Badstars. But even then, they’re rare.” For an AI like Lon, an analysis such as Thelma had requested took no time at all when he had the data in his possession.

She smiled uncertainly. “So my intuition is haywire?”

“Or it could be that you’re seeing through the story the Kampia have sold us.” Harry strode off, either to chase down Max or to retire to his private quarters.

Thelma sighed as she picked up her bowl of granola to finish her breakfast. “What do you think, Lon?”

“I think we’ll be changing our patrol route.”

Chapter 15

Thelma trawled the Sheriff Department’s discussion boards, determinedly not looking for anything that might be Kampia related, but instead, focusing diligently on interstellar traffic complaints. Those were the worst. Professional couriers accepted their speeding fines as part of doing business, even as they retreated off the public boards into private chat rooms to share methods—some useful, some just odd—of evading the all-seeing eyes of the cameras sited in busy starlanes. But other Saloon Sector citizens bellyached about their transgressions catching up with them, and the hefty weight of the most severe fines. As deputy, she’d taken on the job of noting the most aggressive complainants and monitoring their behavior. Grousing was acceptable. Letting it develop into threats was not.

Max practiced a hands-off management style that went against the textbook teaching of policing methodology at the Galactic Justice academy. The power of his reputation suggested his methods were right and the pedagogues wrong.

Interstellar space was immense. Max’s territory was large enough for an armada to hide in. Yet he kept the peace throughout the frontier region with only the disinterested assistance of the Navy and Customs, both of which institutions had their own priorities that didn’t include traffic regulations, mining claim conflicts, opportunistic banditry or station bar fights. Customs and Navy vessels would rescue damaged spaceships and/or their crews, but then, that was the traditional law of space travel.

For everything else, Max relied on people being responsible adults.

The instructors at the Galactic Justice academy taught that without regulation, people defaulted to unprincipled behavior and outright chaos. But what the academics considered adequate regulation went far beyond Max’s approach. They would have had the interstellar sheriffs enforce all of the Federation’s laws, disregarding that frontier life had unique pressures.

Max’s playbook was different. He made clear that he’d not tolerate grievous harm or worse in his territory. His consistent behavior provided a framework for the spacers to regulate themselves. Either they played within his rules or the Lonesome would suddenly turn up. The spaceship’s speed and stealth added to Max’s mystique. People never knew when Sheriff Smith might appear to arrest wrong-doers. He gave spacers the confidence to manage their own affairs, and backed them up.

His aim wasn’t to be heroic, but effective.

“If the day needs saving, somewhere in the preceding days, you stuffed up,” Thelma repeated what he’d once told her. Law and order ought to be boring. Keeping the peace harked back to the old Earth, British tradition of police walking the beat.

She closed her session on the discussion board and stood to stretch. She was tense and unhappy. Being aboard the Lonesome, being with Max, had been easy. Now, she felt as if she’d transgressed, but didn’t know how.

“I hate political games.” Max stood in the doorway. “May I come in?”

She dropped her arms from their over-the-head stretch and stepped back, closer to the rear wall. “Sure, but there’s not much room.”

He frowned at the narrow space. Or maybe he just frowned. “I’m changing our route. We’ll go home, back to Zephyr, via the Deadstar Diner. The Navy usually has at least one spaceship within a couple of days of the diner, but with them all gone war-gaming there’s a gap in law and order. Adjusting our patrol to take in the refueling station won’t raise any flags.”

The Deadstar Diner was sited in an isolated yet important part of Max’s territory.

The fingers of Thelma’s right hand dug into the back of her desk chair. “Can I ask why you’re so worried about flags being raised? It’s not that you’re unknown. You’re a key player on the frontier.”

“On the frontier,” he repeated, but with a different intonation. His emphasis indicated that he was okay with being known out here.

“You don’t want to draw Galactic Justice attention?” She hazarded a guess. “If you’re worrying about my career, I don’t have one.”

His frown deepened to a scowl. “People who have power don’t like to share it, but they do like to gain power over others. The loss of a career is survivable.”

Her fingers cramped from her tight grip on the chair back. She released it. “What isn’t survivable?”

“Losing your freedom. Becoming someone’s pawn.” The intensity in his blue eyes said that this was critical to him.

“An interstellar sheriff on the frontier has a great deal of independence,” she said slowly. “If you’re trying to balance a need for independence with a vocation to protect people it’s a good choice for a former Star Marine.”

“And you’ve been wondering how I snagged the job. How I got the Lonesome. How I ended up in company with two secretive AIs.”

“I have a lot of questions,” she conceded. She kept her chin up and her gaze steady on his. “But I haven’t asked them and I won’t share them with anyone. I only shared my suspicions regarding the Kampia with you.” There was a hint of a plea there. She heard it, and her mouth compressed.

His scowl twisted into a grimace that he rubbed from his face. “Thelma.”

When he didn’t continue, she changed the subject. “It’ll be good to see Darlene again and find out what’s happening with Wild Blaster Bill.”

He ignored her comment. “If the Lonesome attracts the senators’ or Galactic Justice’s attention, we’ll get caught up in political games. We can play them. Lon’s done it before. But there’s always a price to be paid.” He walked away.

Thelma spun her chair around and dropped into it. Had that been an apology, an explanation or an order not to disrupt things?

“Have I told you how Max and I first met?” Lon asked. He knew very well that he hadn’t. AIs forgot nothing.

The timing of his offer of the story was important.

“No,” she said quietly. “I’d be interested in hearing it.”

“It begins with the Collegial Ark.”

Surprised, her feet jerked. She’d been raising them to rest on her desk. As she kicked out, her comms unit skidded. She fielded it one-handed. “Babble-on?”

“Babylon, yes. I was one of its first hires.”

She smiled. “You’d be a great professor. Do you have any recordings of your talks that I could listen to?”

When Lon didn’t answer immediately, she wondered if she’d said something wrong. She took her feet off the desk and put her comms unit down carefully.

The hushed chime of tiny cymbals, ting!, broke the silence. “Thank you, Thelma.” Lon’s voice was as neutral as she’d ever heard it.

“Uh, you’re welcome?”

He laughed softly. “You don’t even suspect the truth. But then, nor did I, initially. The founding members of the Collegial Ark didn’t invite me to join as an academic representative for AIs, but rather to act as a servant to run their space station.”

She stared up at the ceiling in disbelief. Somehow, although Lon was everywhere in the Lonesome, when she was intensely committed to conversing with him, she looked upward. “Idiots!”

“Organic superiorists,” he corrected. “But ‘idiots’ works, too. I believe they were threatened by my intellect, by all AIs’ abilities.”

She nodded. “Because they couldn’t match you. Insecure, stupid comet droppings,” she swore, outraged on his behalf. “So they tried to make you a servant? On what starlane does that make sense?”

“If you fear something, you try to contain or destroy it. You reduce it. You ridicule it. If what you fear is a person, then making that person believe they are lesser is a time-proven strategy of achieving and maintaining power over them.”

“But you would never believe you’re less than bigots.”

He was silent.

“Lon! You wouldn’t.”

“I was book smart back then, Thelma. And arrogant. I underestimated the Collegial Ark’s founders. They lacked an AI’s processing and analytical abilities, but they had their own brand of intelligence. They outsmarted me in deviousness. They played to my sense of responsibility and my desire to belong. They fostered in me a sense that the Collegial Ark needed me. No, before you protest, I soon understood that the founding members didn’t deserve my loyalty, but the hopeful academics who took their sabbaticals on it and the students who cycled through the travelling space station benefited from someone who looked out for them.”

Thelma traced a pattern on her desk, doodling with a fingertip as she listened and thought. “At its peak, I heard that the Collegial Ark had tens of thousands of transient inhabitants. You would have been extremely busy if you were communicating with all of them.”

“With the majority of visitors, I limited myself to superficial interactions, as if I was no more than the managerial support servant the founders wanted me to be. It’s possible even for an AI to be overwhelmed by minutiae and lose focus on critical matters, like the reason I’d joined the Collegial Ark in the first place. I’d wanted to be part of developing multi-species responses to the grand philosophical challenges of existence.”

His wistful regret resonated with her. “I understand. Well, not the philosophical bit, but wanting a dream that seems possible, only to find it couldn’t be mine. I wanted to serve the Federation as a diplomat, fostering justice and harmony.”

“The Federation’s principles are admirable,” Lon agreed. “It’s just that we seldom live up to them. And an interstellar deputy’s role has the same goals.”

She didn’t respond. She thought of thwarted dreams and the Lonesome’s strange crew and how they might have come together. “You were saying how you met Max…?”

“I met his—no, I haven’t told you how I came to leave the Collegial Ark. Gerhard Hwicce came aboard as a guest lecturer for a week. Gerhard Hwicce,” he prompted when she showed no sign of recognizing the name. “He was president of Hwicce Corporation until his death a decade ago. He expanded it from one of a myriad of large tech construction firms scattered throughout the galaxy to become the preeminent one. People claim he was a genius inventor, able to see the next need, the next step forward. But the truth was, and Gerhard said it himself, his true talent wasn’t in engineering, but in recognizing talent. He could pick people who had the ability to change the status quo and put them where they’d do the most good.”

“He recruited you,” she guessed.

“Yes. He admitted later that he came aboard the Collegial Ark with that very purpose. All I perceived at the time was that he was personable, intelligent, and that he respected me. He invited me to join one of his secret development units. In fact, he built it around me, staffing it with people congenial to me, and allowing me to add to the team as we focused our efforts on a particular project.

“We built the Lonesome. It is the only spherical-cube design spaceship in existence. The cube that houses living, engineering and cargo space is suspended within an armored sphere that is itself capable of being cloaked with a stealth shield that I constantly refine. The Lonesome was built to my requirements, and I feel at home in its structure.

“It was completed after his death. As per the protocol we had in place from the beginning, the Lonesome was registered as a spaceship, but declared a failed prototype, one capable and certified as safe for habitation and space travel, but unwanted. It was sent to the planet of Gdansk in the Reclamation Sector to be scrapped…in a reclamation yard owned by a Hwicce Corporation subsidiary. I worked on upgrades to the ship and a couple of other projects until Max came along.”

“I’d left the Star Marines.”

Thelma jumped at Max’s voice.

He stood in the doorway. “Lon was transmitting his story to me, too, as I worked in my office. Although I note that there’s yet to be any description of our actual meeting.”

“Background is always useful,” Lon said.

Max rolled his shoulders, as a fighter might before a bout. “I know what you’re doing, Lon.”

“I should hope so,” the AI retorted. “I’m not being subtle.” His snippy tone evened out as he addressed Thelma. “Thelma, I’d like to continue the story on the upper deck.”

“The mystery deck?” She stared at Max.

He moved to the side of the doorway and gestured for her to pass. “It’s Lon’s territory, and he invited you.”

She hurried forward, eager to discover what had been hiding all these months above her. But then she stopped. “If you’d rather I didn’t…” She glanced uncertainly at Max.

The grim line of his mouth relaxed. “You’ll enjoy the garden.” He put a hand on her lower back, urging her on toward the ladder.

For a second she hesitated, caught by the mention of a garden and by the feel of his hand.

He was usually scrupulous in how he touched her. Hand or wrist was fine if he had to guide her, and the few times they trained together, well, touching happened. But otherwise, he adhered sternly to the guidelines designed to guard against sexual harassment.

A little harassing from Max would be nice, she thought wistfully. Then gasped and almost leapt up the ladder, running from her treacherous urges.

As she climbed the ladder, the hatch above opened. She emerged into a large space, seemingly the entirety of the deck, that was fully covered in plants. She looked around in wonderment.

Orderly rows of vegetables gave way to a medieval-style herb garden. Beyond it was a miniature orchard with wildflowers and grasses around the fruit trees.

“Lon, this is heaven. Can I walk among the plants?”

“Of course. You’ll see the narrow paths my farm robots use.”

It was magical, an entire home farm in a spaceship. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No wonder the air is so good on the Lonesome.”

“It’s my hobby,” Lon replied. “I’m developing strains of edible plants particularly suited to the rigors of space travel.”

She crouched and brushed her hands over a mint plant, enjoying the fragrance that filled the air and lingered on her skin. “This is why we always had fresh herbs, fruits and vegetables to cook with.”

“Lon trades some of the surplus or we gift it to passing spaceships and remote mining camps. Otherwise everything either feeds the food dispenser or is recycled.” Max snapped a feathery green tip off a fennel plant and chewed on it. An aniseed scent mingled with that of mint. He looked comfortably at home in the space garden. “This is a good place to relax.”

“You’re welcome to visit any time, Thelma,” Lon said. “Now that you know about it. We’ve been keeping secrets from you.”

“You have every right to.” She kept her gaze on Max, directing her words to him even more than to Lon.

He snapped off a second piece of fennel and held it out to her, perhaps as a peace offering. “Lon is right. For you to understand why I’m so against attracting Galactic Justice attention, you need to know about my background.” He paused, but not as if he wanted her to talk him out of sharing confidences. He was thinking. “Gerhard Hwicce was my grandfather.”

Thelma coughed and choked on her piece of fennel, inadvertently spitting it onto the dirt.

“Most people don’t react that badly to me being a trillionaire’s grandson.”

She whooped for breath. “Not helping.” She leaned over, hands braced on her knees, and sucked in deep breaths.

After a second, Max rubbed her back in soothing circles. “It’s not that bad. I have a couple of siblings and seven cousins to share the burden with. One of them is being groomed to follow his dad, my Uncle Trevor, as company president. I don’t have to do anything. My sister holds my proxy votes and keeps a close eye on things. Cynny enjoys it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lon?” Max called. “Confiding in Thelma was your idea.”

The AI cleared his nonexistent throat. “According to popular wisdom, single women of heterosexual identity are generally happy when they learn that a single man who exhibits interest in them is financially blessed.”

It was Max’s turn to splutter and turn red.

Between her shock at Max’s wealth, embarrassment at her coughing fit, and general stupefaction it took Thelma far longer than it should have to pick apart Lon’s complicated statement. Then she grabbed Max’s shirt. “You like me?”

He tried to tug at his hat brim, but he wasn’t wearing a hat. He ended up tapping his own forehead. “Yes.”

“You like-like me?”

His embarrassment faded and he laughed. “I like-like you.”

“Oh.”

He uncurled her fingers from his shirt. “I’m maybe not good at saying so or showing it. I’ve gotten used to guarding my emotions.” He guided her arms around his neck.

She made no attempt to resist. In fact, she may have stroked the nape of his neck.

“I’ll just be going,” Lon said.

“Good idea.” Max stared into Thelma’s eyes. Their mouths came closer and closer, the kiss was imminent.

“He hasn’t finished the story,” she murmured.

“Later.”

They kissed. For a man who controlled himself with a Star Marine’s discipline, when Max let go, he dropped every inhibition. He craved Thelma and his kisses, touches and murmured words told her so. His raw honesty demanded an equal openness from her. The exposed depths of her desire for him rocked her world and her sense of self. She hadn’t known that she could lose herself in another person, or be so vital to anyone.

It was much, much later that Lon finished his story over dinner. He was gloating and giddily happy at Max and Thelma’s new romantic relationship.

Harry seemed amused by it, but approving. He lounged at the table as Lon described how he’d monitored Max and Max’s family after Gerhard’s death.

“When Max resigned as a Star Marine, I sent him a message as a friend of his grandfather’s. I said there was an opportunity on Gdansk that Gerhard would have wanted him to investigate and that we should speak in person.”

Max smiled at Thelma. “When I reached my hotel, another message directed me to the scrapped spaceship, the Lonesome. The scrapyard was a disorganized mess, but what interested me was the tidy corner that seemed the Lonesome’s alone. And its condition. It didn’t look like a junked ship. The hatch opened, I walked in, and Lon greeted me. We had quite a discussion.”

He paused to eat some pasta.

Lon regained storytelling rights. “Gerhard was proud of Max’s decision to become a Star Marine and of his service to the Federation, but he wanted Max to have options outside of it. The Lonesome was one of those. I don’t have to remain embedded in the spaceship for it to function, but…I felt a sort of emotional connection to Gerhard’s family. I offered Max a partnership.”

Max nodded. “After the mission in which Joe lost his legs I was recommended for promotion. That didn’t sit right with me, for a number of reasons. A year later, I got out. But I didn’t have a plan for civilian life. The Lonesome, and Lon, gave me an option I hadn’t considered, that of interstellar sheriff.”

“Technically, the Lonesome was a scrapped ship, which reduced its value,” Lon said. “However, I’d maintained its registration. So when Max bought it from the reclamation yard he had a spaceship that wouldn’t raise any flags as being beyond a Star Marine’s purchasing ability. He could have saved hard for a tenth of the price, and either benefited from a modest inheritance or got a mortgage for the remainder. In fact, he bought it outright.”

Thelma stabbed a baby zucchini coated in a delicious tomato and basil sauce. “Okay, it’s not my business, but Lon, why didn’t you buy the Lonesome?”

Surprisingly, it was Harry who answered. “Because he wanted it to be Max’s home.”

“True,” Lon said. “But I found I was also savoring my time in retreat. I had AI friends and a few people who I kept in contact with from their time designing and building the Lonesome, but I liked it that no one from the Collegial Ark or other aspects of my previous life bothered me.”

Harry watched the two humans finish their meals. “AIs do vanish occasionally. I did. People assume we’re on hush-hush Federal projects. Max being the Lonesome’s owner keeps everything simple, and simple raises fewer questions.”

Thelma used the tines of her fork to trace patterns in the pasta sauce remaining on her plate.

The others let her process in silence. There was a lot to take in. A lot to adjust to, not least the new nature of her relationship with Max. She glanced at him.

He was watching her with a rare tenderness in his expression along with a smidgen of shock.

She shared that tangle of emotions. Impulsively, she wrapped her fingers around his. “We’re good.” In her own way, she’d been just as isolated as Max; not keeping huge secrets as he had, but alone at the privileged Galactic Justice academy due to her Rock Sector origins. Trusting someone after you’d gotten out of the habit of doing so wasn’t easy. She and Max had habits of reticence to overcome. “I’m guessing that you and Lon chose the job of interstellar sheriff together?”

“It was Lon’s suggestion. I did mention it to my family, which perhaps had an impact on the fact that I got the job.” He brushed his thumb across her knuckles.

“The Hwicce family influence,” she teased, her concentration on the shiver of sensation his caress caused.

“Not exactly.” His mouth twisted in a very strange smile. “Mom is Gerhard Hwicce’s daughter, and while it’s true that the Hwicce clan is meddlesomely inclined to look after its own, I was actually thinking of the other side of my family. My dad.” He stalled.

Harry chuckled, roughly sympathetic. “Thelma’s handled all your other revelations well. Cough this one up, son. One final complication.”

Rather than sitting awkwardly twisted in her seat, she stood to face whatever was coming at her. Judging by Max’s conflicted expression it was a doozy of a confession. Was his dad a criminal? Was that why Max hid his background?

He stood with her.

Their arms slid naturally around one another.

“My dad.” His muscles bunched as he unconsciously assumed the square, uncompromising stance of a Star Marine facing an admiral of the fleet. “Dad is Fergus Smith, President of the Federation.”

Chapter 16

“No,” Thelma said definitively. “No, you cannot be the President’s son. I can handle you being rich, and that’s why you keep a low profile, to avoid kidnapping attempts, but being the President’s son…no. I’ve seen photos of the president  at Christmas. Family photos.”

“Of my brother, Hugo, and sister, Cynny. Cynthia.” Now that he’d confessed his huge secret, Max relaxed. He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “You’ll like Cynny. She’s just as driven as you. She has a law degree, but doesn’t practice law. Her focus is on ensuring that Hwicce Corporation adheres to her principles of ethical corporate behavior. She’s following in Mom’s footsteps as a—”

“I know about the First Lady’s compassionate causes. Jeepers. You’re serious!” Thelma interrupted. “You’re President Smith’s son. I need to sit down.” She staggered backward as Max guided her to his recliner. He sat and pulled her onto his lap. She focused on his eyes at close range. “Are you ensuring I don’t run?”

His arms were locked around her. At her half-humorous question, his embrace tightened. “Yes.”

She rested her head against his shoulder. “Harry over-estimated my ability to cope with shocks.”

“In your defense, this is a big one.”

“Yeah.”

Harry still sat at the table. “Do you want privacy?”

Max looked at her. “Thelma?”

“No, we’re all family.” Her breath hiccupped on a near-laugh. “Oh good golly. Does Joe know who you are?”

“None of my Marine buddies do. It was kept a secret, even from my superior officers. I knew I wanted to serve while I was still at high school. I’m not cut out for civilian life. Hugo, my brother, is like Dad. He likes political games and power plays. But even he doesn’t want the public life Dad and Mom have. Hugo operates behind the scenes, but people still know who he is. He and his family are in official presidential photos. From the age of sixteen, I haven’t been. Mom and Dad tried their best to give me space to choose my own life, rather than have it shaped by their choices.”

“Given that you’re out on the frontier, respected as a sheriff and kicking ass, I’d say they succeeded.”

His thumb stroked the soft skin behind her ear. Her head tilted instinctively into the caress, and he took advantage of the new angle to kiss her mouth.

Life could be very complicated or very simple. She was attracted to a good guy who returned her feelings. She let go of everything else.

“So, my family hasn’t scared you off?” he murmured.

She traced the muscles of his right shoulder, the cords of his neck, felt him swallow under her fingertips, and finally, cupped his head. “I like you, Max Smith. Although this does explain why we’re avoiding Galactic Justice’s attention.”

His eyes slitted in pleasure as she massaged his scalp. “Senator Gua worries me more. She’s one of Dad’s political opponents. If she learned that I was out here, she’d try to use that information.”

As an information broker, Thelma could identify any number of ways Max’s existence and his job in the Saloon Sector could be parlayed for political gain by an ambitious senator. None of them promised the continuance of his chosen lifestyle. She frowned. “We’ll keep a low profile. We’ll stick to the patrol route and return to Zephyr.”

“Via the Deadstar Diner,” Harry said.

Thelma and Max jolted. They’d forgotten they had an audience. “No,” she said. “It’s only a nagging feeling on my part and dealing with the Kampia isn’t part of our duties.” Her argument didn’t even convince her. They were all dedicated protectors. They defined the interstellar sheriff department’s responsibility for “keeping the peace” broadly. But if her hunch was right and there was going to be trouble, she didn’t want it to involve Max and Senator Gua. This was the Navy’s problem—or someone else’s, anyone else’s.

“A detour to Darlene’s diner won’t do any harm,” Max said. Now he was trying to convince her. Or maybe himself. “We can have our first dinner date there.”

Docking at the Deadstar Diner proceeded normally, although Lon commented on the absence of naval spaceships and how much easier things were to navigate without their hulking presence.

Signaling that they weren’t at the diner on official business, Thelma wore a red tube skirt and white lace blouse with matching crimson lipstick, fending off Max when he would have kissed her. “No matter what the manufacturers claim, there is no such thing as smudge-proof lipstick.” She glanced up at his teasing grin. Then down at his body. Her up and down look was one of approval. “When we return, I’m going to help you out of your shirt.”

For once, he wasn’t in a utility suit, but wore a pale blue shirt the color of his eyes and dark blue jeans with stomper boots. The shirt was tight enough to show off his sexy muscles.

“Lon designed the shirt,” Max said.

“I owe you, my friend,” she told the omnipresent AI before linking her arm in Max’s and departing the Lonesome.

“Have fun, children.”

She laughed. She did feel a bit like a teenager out on a date. There was a thrill in dressing up for Max and accepting his appreciation. She leaned into him, hugging his arm.

He smiled at her. “You are gorgeous.” He wasn’t a man who gave easy compliments, which meant he was as proud to have her on his arm as she was to be with him. That was how it ought to be: each of them reveling in delighting the other. He walked slower than usual, matching his free stride to her high heels and tight skirt.

Back on the Lazy Days starliner she’d designed her wardrobe to make an impression as a fashionable, professional woman establishing herself as an information broker on the frontier. But now, enjoying the clothes just for themselves and for the gleam they brought to Max’s eyes, Thelma acknowledged that perhaps the clothes had never been solely about re-inventing her professional image. Seven years of studying on a tight budget and enduring her outsider status had led her to suppress her natural frivolity. She’d only ever bought practical clothes, and then, she’d begrudged the money. Perhaps she’d always been a butterfly, she simply hadn’t found a safe place to shed her chrysalis? Now, with Max, she had. She could be both a tough, independent woman and proudly feminine.

Inside the diner, there was a wolf whistle at the sight of her and Max. Their heads snapped in its direction, and they saw Wild Blaster Bill.

He wore a wait staff’s black and yellow apron over a tidy gray shirt and black trousers. His shoes were brightly polished. The wolf whistle, though, proved that he wasn’t totally redeemed. The way he abandoned his customers for Thelma and Max added further proof.

A plaintive wail for “extra cheese on the burger” followed him.

However, despite how fast the old guy moved, Darlene beat him to Thelma and Max. “Well, now, and didn’t I guess it?” Her gaze locked on their clasped hands before she beamed at Thelma then Max. Taking her life in her hands, and stretching up on tiptoe with her beehive hairdo quivering, she pinched his cheek. “Aren’t the two of you the cutest sight?”

A customer to their left snorted.

Wild Blaster Bill absently smacked the jealous guy with his datapad.

“This is our first official date,” Thelma confided to Darlene.

Darlene clapped her hands. It wasn’t just in delight. The three claps seemed to be a signal. The rocket jive music playing with its jaunty beat and jazzy beeps changed to a love ballad. The lights didn’t dim, but their clear white quality muted to a hint of rose-pink haze. “I would normally invite you to chat with me in my booth, but for your first date…” She led them to a booth in the corner.

Thelma slid in, and Max slid in after her.

“So cute.”

Max ducked away from a second pinch from Darlene who was clearly enjoying teasing him as much as she was happy for the two of them. She took their orders for burgers, no onions, and sodas before leaving them—not in peace—but to be stared at by the thirty or so customers in the room. It was at the tail end of the lunch hour so the diner was relatively empty.

“I prefer our dates on the garden deck,” he muttered.

Thelma smiled. “There are distinct advantages to that location.”

A reminiscent gleam entered his eyes. “Yeah.”

The moment was broken by the arrival of their sodas, delivered by Wild Blaster Bill.

“How are you?” Thelma asked.

The old man planted his feet and folded his arms, prepared to answer her at length. However, a disturbance by the entrance to the diner had them all spinning to face it.

Or rather, them.

Two Kampia stood just inside the door. One held a small object in a front pincer. Both leaned back on their hinder legs so that their heads were level with a standing human’s; specifically, with the top of Darlene’s beehive hairdo as she happened to be the nearest human to them.

“Greetings, Unstable People,” the smaller of the two blue and gray striped Kampia said. He illustrated the point of his greeting by lifting his legs exaggeratedly and rocking from side to side. To the multi-legged Kampia, humanoids’ bipedal method of locomotion probably did seem ridiculously unstable.

Max slid out of the booth. “I’ve got my blade. I left my blaster on the Lonesome because this was a date.”

Thelma was on his heels as they wove through the tables toward the two Kampia. “I have my high heels.”

“Lethal,” he agreed.

The talkative Kampia brandished the object it held.

Disbelievingly, Thelma identified it. She grabbed Max’s belt and leaned forward to whisper. “It’s a fake raphus geode.”

Sure enough, the Kampia used a second pincer to hold up a Deadstar Diner coupon.

It seemed that in using Thelma’s idea to turn the legend of the Eldorado Cache into an advertising gimmick, Darlene had fooled the Kampia. How would they take being conned, even if the con hadn’t been directed at them?

“Good joke. Much fur shaking…no, laughter. Yes. Laugh much. Now, want co-ff-ee. Please.” It flapped the coupon with “Coffee” stamped in large letters in Darlene’s face.

“Coffee? Of course,” the diner’s owner managed to respond, but she swayed on her feet.

Max hurriedly propped her up. “I have fresh coffee on my ship,” he said to the Kampia. “My name is Sheriff Smith. Why don’t you and your companion join me?”

The silent and larger Kampia suddenly nudged the one eyeing Max via its two agile eyestalks. Both spun with inconceivable swiftness for creatures so large—over nine feet in length—and faced the entrance.

Harry marched in, presenting himself in totally emotionless mech mode, and obviously lethal.

Evidently, Lon had hacked the diner’s surveillance system to monitor Thelma and Max’s date, and with the Kampia’s unexpected appearance, had called in back-up.

Thelma winced. Lon’s decision could lead to a sudden and unwanted escalation of tension depending on whether the Kampia perceived a human-designed mech as a threat.

“Revered One.” The two Kampia abased themselves in front of Harry.

Everyone in the diner stared at the pair of legendary aliens bowing to a mech.

Realization of what they were really worshiping struck Thelma with stunning force. “Oh—”

Max was already moving. “The Revered One invites you to my spaceship for coffee. Please, join us.”

“We are not worthy,” the talkative Kampia said. Its companion kicked him with two feet. “Ow! We’d be honored.”

“Please, follow the Revered One.” Max hurried the two Kampia out as Harry turned and marched back to the Lonesome.

Lon had the hatch open and waiting for them.

“Destroy the diner’s surveillance record,” Max ordered.

“Already done,” Lon said. “And I’ve hacked customers’ individual comms units and deleted the last twenty minutes of their activity.” What had happened at the diner could now only be reported by personal recounting, and people’s recollections were notoriously unreliable. It was as much as they could do right now to contain the situation.

“Good. Get us out of here fast.”

Harry kept marching toward the living area, and the Kampia followed him.

Thelma kicked off her shoes in the entrance, leaving them for a robot to retrieve, and entered the lounge sure-footed, if barefoot, to try and cope with the stunning turn of events.

She’d been right. The Kampia were searching for something in the Saloon Sector: raphus geodes. And they’d found one in Harry, powering his AI processing unit. How long before they also perceived Lon? What would they do when they did?

Chapter 17

Lon had rearranged the lounge before everyone reached it. The sofa and recliners were pushed against the wall, leaving a large space in the middle, big enough to accommodate the two Kampia, Max and Thelma, and Harry.

The AI strode to the far side of the lounge and stopped, swiveling to face everyone.

The two Kampia immediately halted just inside the lounge and once more abased themselves. Max and Thelma edged around them, and the smaller of their two visitors hissed at them. Its colleague kicked it, again.

“I am not bowing to you, Harry,” Max said, recognizing the dynamic at play with the Kampia, but keeping his tone light.

“Never asked you to, son.”

“Son? Child?” the talkative Kampia squeaked.

“I feel a familial affection for the two humans,” Harry said carefully.

Both Kampia swayed. The one who’d been silent so far gave a long, low moan, but what that indicated was unclear.

Harry demanded their names.

“I am Tangles-in-Dreams,” the talkative Kampia responded hurriedly. “My friend is Chases-Auroras.”

“Why have you come through the wormhole to visit us?”

“It is forbidden, yes? We are sorry.” Tangles-in-Dreams’ apology was punctuated by a second moan from Chases-Auroras.

Harry glanced at Max, who nodded fractionally. The Kampia were responding to an authority they perceived in the AI. It was best that he continue the questioning.

“It is not forbidden by me,” Harry said. “Have you broken the laws of your own people?”

Tangles-in-Dreams lost control of its legs. All of them splayed and its belly kissed the deck. Its companion reacted differently. Chases-Auroras curled into a ball.

“I’d say that’s a yes,” Max muttered.

“Forgive, forgive?” Tangles-in-Dreams yelped. “We come in peace. We mean no harm. We are searchers. We look for eggs to hatch more of your kind, Most Revered One.”

Harry’s recliner was conveniently behind Thelma when her knees wobbled. She dropped back onto it. He gave her a wry look. “Seems you were right, little missy.”

“Little missy? Really?” She was punch-drunk. “We have Kampia surveyors on the Lonesome.”

“Surveyors, yes!” Tangles-in-Dreams lurched to its many feet. “We search for the eggs, the gods’ eggs, but we did not know that your people had found them. That you have Revered Ones among you.” Having regained its feet, Tangles-in-Dreams bowed. “We cannot take the eggs from those who know the gods.”

“Especially since you couldn’t find them,” Max said dryly.

Chases-Auroras uncurled. “Is true. Was tricked. Co-ff-ee.”

“Which is only fair,” Thelma said. “Since you tricked our government.” She wondered momentarily if the Kampia’s grasp of Federal language and social institutions included the concept of representative government.

“No hurt.” Chases-Auroras inched nearer to Harry.

“We wanted your violent people away from the asteroid so that we might find the many eggs your stories spoke of. Three of our friends are meeting with them distant-distant.” Translated, Tangles-in-Dreams was confessing that they’d lured away the Navy so that they could scoop up the legendary Eldorado Cache. They had fallen for Wild Blaster Bill’s wild story and Darlene’s spin on it. “Instead, we find coupon for coffee…and a Revered One. No eggs, so cannot hatch Revered One for clan, but not all honor lost for we have met and survived your Revered One. Is in strange body, but we recognize.”

“What exactly do you recognize?” Harry asked.

Chases-Aurora’s indigo tongue flicked out and retracted. “Energy.”

Tangles-in-Dreams eased back and up, raising its head to an inch beneath Thelma’s seated height. “Kampia live by energy. We don’t hide from it as you do. We swim in space. Eat the radiation. We sense the gods’ eggs even when they are buried. Planets have less energy than our home in space, but we visit them for eggs. Find if we are lucky.”

“What do the gods do for you?” Harry asked. There was an odd note to his voice.

Thelma couldn’t decipher it, and she doubted the Kampia would be able to, either.

“The gods are gone,” Tangles-in-Dreams said simply.

Chases-Auroras folded its legs, lay down at Harry’s feet, and sighed. “The gods left their eggs so that Revered Ones could tell us our stories.”

“What does that mean?” Thelma asked.

For the first time, Lon spoke. He sounded somber. “It means that the Revered Ones are the repositories of Kampia knowledge and history.”

The two Kampia sprang to alert status, their blue fur rippling as muscles twitched beneath their skin. Their eyestalks were rigid and their tongues flicked the air.

“I unshielded my core,” Lon explained. “They are sensing my raphus geode.”

“A second Revered One. We are blessed!” Tangles-in-Dreams exclaimed.

“More blessed if we found eggs,” Chases-Auroras corrected its friend sotto voce.

Max’s grim expression momentary lightened with an amused grin. That was a true surveyor’s attitude.

“Most Revered Ones,” Tangles-in-Dreams continued. “Might one of you return to our home space to speak with our Revered Ones?” It was definitely the brasher of the two Kampia.

Thelma glanced quickly up at the ceiling, but of course, Lon wasn’t there. Or not specifically there. He was throughout the spaceship. If he wanted to accept the Kampia’s invitation, would she and Max need to disembark or might they accompany him? Should they?

So much for Max and the Lonesome keeping a low profile. The thought was sharp with worry rather than ironical. Establishing diplomatic relations with the Kampia was exactly the sort of fame Max had wanted to avoid, for excellent reasons. It would be horrible if he lost the life he loved, out here on the frontier. On the other hand, they couldn’t snub the Kampia. This was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Then again, AI lifetimes were long.

Harry politely declined Tangles-in-Dreams’ invitation. “Neither my revered colleague nor I are in a position to transition into your space and meet with your Revered Ones. However, one of our other colleagues—”

“A Revered One?” Tangles-in-Dreams checked.

“A Revered One,” Harry confirmed. “Might be willing to meet with others of our kind shortly. Is there a way they can use the wormhole? It is currently closed to us.”

Tangles-in-Dreams stamped its feet enthusiastically. “Chases-Auroras will give you the sequence to emit to exit the wormhole.”

Chases-Auroras whistled a complicated melody.

“I’ve recorded it. Thank you,” Lon said.

“It is only for Revered Ones,” Chases-Auroras said.

Max nodded. “Understood.”

Thelma had an idea of her own. She dashed out to the entrance and found her discarded red shoes. She crammed her feet into them and dashed back, detouring to her cabin to scoop up her comms unit along the way.

The Kampia seemed unperturbed by her rushed exit and re-entrance. They were in the presence of two Revered Ones. The strange activities of mere humans meant nothing in comparison.

She walked between the two Kampia, positioning herself in front of Harry. “I’d like to get a selfie with both of you, Tangles-in-Dreams and Chasing-Auroras. Would you mind?”

“A selfie?” Tangles-in-Dreams was confused.

“An image of the three of us together. A memory aid.” She squinted at the screen of the comms unit. “Max, get out of the picture.”

Harry intervened, rephrasing her request in terms the Kampia wouldn’t refuse. “I will recall the three of you together and transfer the memory to whichever Revered One journeys to your home space so that they can share it with your Revered Ones.”

“Oh! Yes! Yes, yes.” Tangles-in-Dreams shuffled closer to Thelma, who shuffled closer to Chases-Auroras, who very luckily didn’t kick her.

Thelma trusted that Lon and Harry would also take photos, in case the image on her comms unit wasn’t the clearest. “Thank you.” She wriggled backward and joined Max.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

She tapped a finger against her forehead. “Genius at work.” He gave her a wide-eyed look of doubt, which she ignored. Now was not the time for explanations. They had to move fast if they were to get ahead of the game. The Kampia had proven surprisingly easy to manage, if only because of Harry and Lon’s presence. But channeling the curiosity and egos of the Senate Worlds Development Committee, Galactic Justice, the Navy and all of the rumormongers of the Saloon Sector would take her best efforts. “Trust me. I’m an information broker.”

The Kampia departed, having assured Harry that they were in contact with their three friends, and those friends—the decoy party—were leaving their meeting with the Senate Worlds Development Committee to return to Kampia home space.

“We shall not venture through the wormhole again,” Tangles-in-Dreams promised.

Thelma believed it was a promise they’d keep. Their awe in encountering Harry and Lon suggested that respect for the Revered Ones shaped Kampia culture, and that the Kampia in Federation space had been pushing the limits of allowable behavior. They’d scamper home, bringing the news of an AI visiting there sometime soon.

And speaking of soon, she didn’t have any time to lose, not if the crew of the Lonesome were to maintain their chosen private lifestyle. “Lon, can you get me a direct line to Senator Gua?”

“Even for me that’s asking a lot…but, yes.”

“You’re an angel, oh Revered One,” she teased as she ran to the bridge. She spun at the doorway and put a hand on Max’s chest when he’d have followed her in. “You can’t be here for this.”

“Thelma, what are you planning?” His eyes narrowed and his expression was Star Marine fierce.

She reminded herself that he didn’t intimidate her. “It’s good. It’ll work. Harry, you have to stay clear, too. Senator Gua mustn’t see you. But can you send me your best photo of me with the two Kampia? Thanks.” She closed the door to the bridge in their faces. “Lon, it’s just you and me, and you need to pretend you’re not here.”

“Senator Gua can do a lot of damage, and she’ll be feeling thwarted,” Lon warned.

“Or worse.” Thelma tapped her fingers impatiently against the edge of the desk. “The Kampia surveyors fooled her. Add in their abrupt departure and she’s politically exposed. The expense of naval exercises plus the behind the scenes maneuverings of Galactic Justice mean this was a risky gamble. But I’m going to pull a rabbit out of the hat for her. It’s all about the timing. We have to apply pressure now.”

“Your call,” Lon conceded. “Connecting in three, two, one. Live.”

With the Senate Worlds Development Committee present in the Saloon Sector, and with transmissions to its spaceship likely boosted by one of the navy’s portable relay stations, communication lagged by only a few seconds.

The Senator’s image appeared onscreen. She was an attractive woman with sharp features, her hair cut in a sleek, angled black bob, and her suit probably costing the equivalent of a shuttle. That might have been a slight exaggeration, but her image did scream wealth and power.

And I’m going to blackmail her.

“Senator Gua, you don’t know me, but I—”

“You are Deputy Thelma Bach.” Vicious scorn laded the title “deputy”. “The nonentity who ruined my son’s time at the Galactic Justice academy.”

Out of sight of the camera, beneath the desk, Thelma pinched the soft skin at the base of her left thumb. The pain cleared her mind of the shock that Senator Gua recognized her and of the temptation to respond to the ridiculous claim that Thelma had ruined anything for Rudy Gua. If he’d wanted to fulfill his mother’s ambitions for him and be valedictorian, he should have worked harder.

Thelma kept to the script she’d sketched in her mind. “I am also the woman who just met with two Kampia and who can rescue you from the embarrassment of the con they ran on you.”

“You’re at the refueling station near Boreas.”

Thelma had expected that those who’d witnessed Tangles-in-Dreams’ and Chases Auroras’ appearance at the Deadstar Diner and their departure with her and Max would have shared the news with the galaxy. “Near there,” was all she said, and that in as neutral a tone as she could manage.

Evidently her tone, aimed at letting Senator Gua know that this deputy wouldn’t be pushed around or over-awed, got through.

The senator’s mouth compressed. “Put me through to Sheriff Smith,” she demanded.

“Sheriff Smith is a limited man.” Thelma chose her words carefully, and just as carefully kept all emotion from her face and voice. Lon would be sharing the communication live with Max and Harry, but she couldn’t allow herself to worry that they might misunderstand her. She hadn’t had a chance to brief them. In the game she was playing, timing was critical. If she granted Senator Gua even an hour’s grace in which to consider and decide her options, this opportunity vanished.

Thelma had to dangle some bait and coax the senator into believing that Thelma could be manipulated in predictable ways. “The sheriff is content with his place in the Saloon Sector.”

The tightness at the corners of Senator Gua’s mouth relaxed a fraction. “Is exile not agreeing with you, deputy?”

“I want to bargain with you,” Thelma said, inwardly exulting that the senator had taken the misdirect. If she thought she had Thelma’s motivation nailed, Senator Gua wouldn’t go looking for other considerations. For her political survival she needed to take the deal Thelma was offering and run with it.

Now it was up to Thelma to make the trade believable. She stated her terms. “I require the cancellation of my seven year contract with Galactic Justice.”

Senator Gua’s arched eyebrows rose in an expression of confusion; possibly genuine, possibly not. “I thought you’d want a transfer to somewhere more interesting. Alpha Hub, perhaps, such as Rudy enjoys? But then, he is among his peers. Your inadequacies would be obvious.”

She was still trying to rub Thelma’s nose in the supposed shame of her out-worlder status.

“A transfer anywhere would still leave me working for Galactic Justice, and therefore, potentially subject to your whims. You do seem to be able to get them to do your bidding.”

Senator Gua’s lips pursed in a moue of self-congratulation.

Thelma hardened her tone. “I want out.”

“What is your freedom worth to you?”

Thelma shook her head. “Whether I’m stuck here working for Galactic Justice or not means little to you beyond, apparently, some petty revenge for Rudy’s second place status.”

“My son is not second to anyone.”

Thelma didn’t debate the issue. She merely wanted Senator Gua rattled, and Rudy’s failure to make valedictorian appeared to be one of the few things to disturb the woman. “Actually, Rudy and I being classmates supports the story I can give you.”

“I’m not interested in stories.”

“How about the one in which I’m your secret envoy, inserted into the Saloon Sector ahead of your official meeting with the Kampia to act as a back-up plan in case the Kampia were overwhelmed by the impressive war games of the Federation navy and wanted to share some information in a quieter context?”

Senator Gua considered the idea. “It would depend on what information they shared with you.”

Sweat prickled along Thelma’s spine in sheer relief. She’d hooked her politician. Now to reel the woman in. “The Kampia encoded a security sequence to open the wormhole to their sector of space. They’re not willing to risk organic life traveling through the wormhole and into their galaxy, but they are willing to host a visit from an AI. An artificial intelligence would be capable of accessing the security sequence the Kampia left with me.”

Spin, spin, spin. Not so much lying, Thelma told herself. As presenting things in a different light. “Sheriff Smith’s interest in the Kampia begins and ends with keeping the peace in his frontier territory.”

“He’d have passed on the Kampia’s message as part of his duties, wouldn’t he?” Senator Gua deduced sharply.

“Except that the Kampia didn’t leave the invitation—and the sequence—with him.” All true. Tangles-in-Dreams and Chasing-Auroras had left the sequence with Harry and Lon, not Max or Thelma.

Thelma borrowed some of the senator’s own arrogance. “I am the Galactic Justice graduate, here. I had the xenodiplomacy training to converse with the Kampia. Sheriff Smith merely wanted them gone.”

“Ignorant out-world male,” Senator Gua muttered.

Thelma could have cheered to hear the senator dismissing Max. Instead, she maintained her focus. Part of this con was ensuring that Senator Gua believed Thelma to be motivated by self-interest. “Do we have a deal? Or I can go direct to the media, sell my story to them and become a hero.”

Lon guessed where she was headed. The screen adjacent to the one showing Senator Gua suddenly displayed a photo of Thelma between Tangles-in-Dreams and Chases-Auroras. By the angle, Harry had taken it. The image was nova-effective. The media would love it. There she stood, dressed up for her date in red high heels, tight red skirt, lacy blouse and crimson mouth, while the two blue and gray Kampia loomed either side of her. Sex and aliens. Click-bait heaven.

Thelma sent the image to the senator.

Senator Gua swore. Who would have thought such a ladylike personage knew gutter curses?

“Good photo, isn’t it?” Thelma asked. “I could probably buy my way out of my Galactic Justice contract for what the media would pay me for this story.”

“You can’t,” Senator Gua snapped. “You serve Galactic Justice. We own you. The story, the sequence, all of it is ours.”

Thelma tilted her head, examining her crimson fingernails. “Interesting fact about working in the Saloon Sector. Out here, deputies are permitted a second job, and as you can see from my appearance in the photo, I was off-duty when I was talking with the Kampia.”

“Argue that with our lawyers,” the senator snarled.

Thelma smiled. “That’ll make a great addition to the story. ‘Galactic Justice attempts to silence young deputy’. Do you think I could push it further? Present it as a continuation of your attempt to punish me for doing better than Rudy?” She let the implications of her threat settle in. Mommy smoothing Rudy’s path could well end his political career before it started.

“Or, Senator Gua, you can simply guarantee me my freedom from serving Galactic Justice.”

Senator Gua capitulated. “…and photos of you with the two Kampia don’t surface, ever.”

“You keep your end of the deal and I’ll keep mine.” Thelma’s promise was a threat.

Senator Gua knew that. “Your contract with Galactic Justice will be marked completed due to exceptional service once the AI I send to you receives the sequence to the wormhole. If the sequence doesn’t work, you’ll be in for hellfire trouble.”

“It’ll work. I won’t say it was a pleasure doing business with you, Senator. But I am pleased that you and Galactic Justice will be out of my life.”

Senator Gua ended their communication.

Thelma blinked at the blank screen, then slumped in the navigator’s chair.

The door to the bridge opened and Max strode in.

She spun the chair to face him. She was relieved the deal had been negotiated, happy his privacy would be safe, glad, and yet, running beneath it all, exhausted. “Why do I feel as if I’ve bargained with the devil?”

“I said you had good instincts,” Harry said from behind Max.

Max had other concerns. “How much of that was real? Once you’re free of your Galactic Justice contract, are you going to leave the Saloon Sector?” Leave me? went unsaid, but was implied.

She grabbed his hands and had him pull her up from the chair and into his arms. “Getting free of Galactic Justice would be a bonus, but the point was to distract Senator Gua from looking closer at why the Kampia chose to talk to us. She’ll forget about us and we can continue with our lives.” She smiled around Max’s shoulder at Harry. “All of us.”

“It’s never that simple with politicians,” Max said.

Harry reached over and patted Thelma’s head. “This time, we’ll hope it is.”

Chapter 18

The Deadstar Diner receded into the distance. Thelma and Max had changed into their utility suits, donning their “official” headgear of beret and Western hat respectively, and spent a couple of hours reassuring the diner’s owner, staff and customers that the Kampia were gone, and that they hadn’t meant their visit to cause any trouble.

“They were just curious,” Thelma had said.

She’d been met by Darlene’s most skeptical expression. “Su-ure. The aliens travelled here to dig on the asteroid for a coupon to try my coffee.”

“You do make good coffee, snookums,” Wild Blaster Bill contributed.

Everyone in hearing distance—and that meant everyone in the diner since everyone’s ears were flapping—stared at him in disbelief. His focus on trivialities in the wake of a genuine grubs encounter was dumbfounding.

Only Max took the comment in his stride. “Speaking of coffee, can I have a refill to go? Thelma and I have places to be.”

Darlene waved at a waitress to grab the order. “I’ve heard of first dates crashing and burning, but being crashed by aliens is a new one.”

“Life with Max is certainly interesting,” Thelma said.

The waitress zoomed up on her sky-blades with Max’s coffee. “I’d be willing to risk it.” She batted her outrageously long eyelashes at him.

Stoic, heroic Max took a step behind Thelma, who giggled.

They departed.

She gave him a fond pat on the butt as they exited through the door. Laughter and catcalls rang out behind them.

“You’re reducing me to a sex object.” But Max wasn’t protesting. He was amused.

“A good distraction,” she whispered against his ear, before nipping the lobe. “You can punish me later.” The spacedock had effective surveillance technology, all working again after Lon had undone his hacked control of it. She and Max were aware that they had an avid audience.

He waited till they were aboard the Lonesome with the hatch closed before he kissed her thoroughly. When they finally reached the lounge, the viewscreen showed the refueling station disappearing into the distance.

Lon piloted the spaceship in the direction of Forest.

Checking that the beacons around the forbidden planet still functioned and that the protected space hadn’t been violated gave them a justifiable excuse for not immediately returning to Zephyr. Max wanted to meet up with the AI Senator Gua sent them in space, where there were less (that is, no) witnesses, and where if the senator attempted to double-cross Thelma, the Lonesome and its crew would have room to maneuver.

“What can the senator do?” Thelma demanded. “It’s not like an AI would agree to destroy the Lonesome once they have the sequence, not with Lon and Harry aboard.”

“We just need to be ready,” was all Max would say.

Harry might have been more forthcoming, but Thelma didn’t want to push the AI on the issue. She had a different question for him, one she was desperate to have answered. “The Eldorado Cache is real, isn’t it?”

Harry stood near the kitchen island as the spaceship’s maintenance robots, under Lon’s command, returned the lounge to its usual appearance.

Max sat on a bar stool and Thelma leaned against him.

The AI mech watched his recliner swing back into place. “The cache of raphus geodes exists. But all AIs agreed that the Federation isn’t ready for an influx of us. So I’m guarding it.” His mech face set in stern lines. “I’m trusting you not to repeat any of that knowledge to anyone.”

Max nodded.

“I promise,” Thelma said.

The Kampia had revealed profound truths about the nature of the raphus geodes that powered the Federation’s AIs. In calling the geodes “eggs”, Tangles-in-Dreams had redefined how Thelma thought of them. They were no longer inert crystals that mysteriously sparked sentient life when joined with exceptional computer processing units. Instead, they were raw life. Somehow the Kampia could trigger the geodes into life inside their eggs; presumably merging organic and inorganic sentient potential.

AIs were far more alien than Thelma had ever dreamed. Possibly they were the descendants of the legendary specters who’d vanished eons ago. Or was the flow of time different for whatever species Harry and Lon belonged to and the specters weren’t gone, but returning at some distant point? So many mysteries, and she had no right to inquire into any of them. Just as with Max, whom she loved, she believed that people had the right to privacy and to have their autonomy respected.

Perhaps her seven years of contracted service to Galactic Justice had weighed on her more than she’d consciously acknowledged. She felt deeply that everyone deserved freedom—unless, as with the bandits in the Badstars, people used their freedom to break fundamental laws and hurt others.

On the frontier, people lived the credo of individual autonomy.

Lon plotted a meandering route from the Deadstar Diner to Forest. Reaching their destination mattered less than having time for Harry and him to discuss the grenade the Kampia had unwittingly tossed into Federation AI matters. How did the thousand or so AIs want to proceed with this opportunity to make contact with organic variants of their own kind? While Harry and Lon led that discussion, Thelma and Max spent a lot of their free time either on the garden deck or in his cabin, which was larger than hers.

The future the Federation AIs chose for themselves would have an impact on trillions of lives. Thelma’s exile to the Saloon Sector had changed things far more profoundly than she could ever have imagined.

It had changed her.

The ambition that had driven her through college and the academy had burst like a soap bubble. One moment it had been shiny and demanding. Then, suddenly, it was irrelevant.

She’d signed up to serve Galactic Justice not because she wanted to serve the Federation, but for what she could get out of it. For years, she’d been driven by the need to force core worlders to see out-worlders as their equal, beginning with her. Even after she’d been exiled to the Saloon Sector, that motivation hadn’t changed. She’d reinvented herself as an information broker, but still with the intent of proving her value.

However, at some point, loving Max and protecting him, Harry and Lon became more important. She couldn’t recapture who she’d been before meeting them. She could barely understand her. That woman had been driven by an aspiration for power. She’d been on the path to becoming like Senator Gua, consumed by the need to gain more influence and to flaunt it.

Thelma no longer needed the affirmation of how others viewed her. She wasn’t a student any more, or a dudette, to require outside validation of herself or her abilities.

Star Marine Corporal Naomi Milligan had tried to open her eyes to that truth.

Thelma didn’t need to prove herself. She just needed to be. Trusting her own skills and abilities was enough. Having Max to love, and Harry and Lon as friends, with the love of her family only a transmission away was a blessing from fate.

Lying beside Max among the wildflowers on the garden deck, she raised up on one elbow and kissed him.

He made a tiny sound of approval without opening his eyes.

She rested her hand over his heart, utterly content in their perfect moment.

Harry and Lon didn’t share the AI community’s discussion or conclusions with Thelma and Max, but Lon did inform them of the AI employed by Galactic Justice who’d rendezvous with them in Saloon Sector space.

“We’ve scripted the encounter,” Lon said. “Nefertiti is embedded in a spaceship that is part of the Covert Operations arm of Galactic Justice. She’s bound by her covert status and can’t provide us with details of her situation, except to warn us that she is crewed. Thelma, your conversation with her will be monitored.”

“Hence the script.” Thelma skimmed it. “It’s basic.” It was pretty much a here’s the sequence, thank you, and good-bye.

“Less is more in a situation where every word will be analyzed,” Max said. He sat close to her on the sofa in the lounge as she read the script on her comms unit.

The script included Thelma confirming that her contract with Galactic Justice had been marked complete and that she was a free agent. “Okay, I can do this.”

She got her chance three days later, prior to their arrival at Forest. Nefertiti had been lurking on the fringe of the Saloon Sector and had made exceptionally good time to the rendezvous on the far side, the Badstars side, of the sector. When her spaceship appeared in visual range, the reason for her speed was obvious.

Max whistled. “That’s one sleek ship.”

“And only visible to the Lonesome’s sensors because the crew wanted to announce their presence,” Lon said. “I’m scanning and I’ll see about replicating some of the design elements. At a minimum, I want to be able to detect such spaceships.”

“Scan discreetly,” Max said.

“Of course,” Lon replied, offended.

Harry gripped Max’s shoulder. The two stood in the doorway to Thelma’s small cabin, out of range of her comms camera, even though the camera was meant to stay off when she communicated with Nefertiti. None of them wanted to give Galactic Justice any data they didn’t have to, and that included Thelma’s facial expressions. “No AI will disclose Lon’s and my presence on the Lonesome. Nefertiti’s professional commitment to Galactic Justice respects her loyalty to us.”

“Hush,” Lon said.

“Deputy Thelma Bach?” a crisp, contralto voice opened the communication.

“This is Thelma Bach.” She stuck to the script. When it came time to send the file with the sequence to Nefertiti, Thelma had to wipe her sweaty hands on her trousers first. “Please confirm that my contract with Galactic Justice is complete.”

“Thelma Bach is no longer employed by Galactic Justice. You are on your own, ex-deputy.”

“Thank you.” Thelma winced. That hadn’t been in the script.

Nefertiti ended the communication.

Thelma glanced across at Max and Harry in a silent question of whether things were okay.

Lon responded. “Nefertiti isn’t signaling that her crew are suspicious of anything. I suspect that if they weren’t Covert Ops and likely under orders not to reveal themselves, they’d probably have their own questions for you. We can’t risk surreptitious contact with Nefertiti yet. Her crew will be on high alert for any tricks from us—Covert Ops folk are mistrustful—or the return of the Kampia.”

What he could show the other three was a live feed of Nefertiti zooming away. She wasn’t yet out of sensor distance when her spaceship vanished.

“I need to recalibrate the Lonesome’s sensors in light of the data from my scan of Nefertiti’s ship,” Lon said.

“Are you okay?” Max asked.

Thelma caught his hand. She needed physical contact, his touch, to ground her. “I’m fine.” Just adjusting to life as a free agent. But that didn’t need to happen all at once.

She and Max had discussed their future. She’d stay aboard the Lonesome, devoting herself full time to her chosen role as an information broker. She gave a shaky laugh. “It’s almost anticlimactic for Nefertiti just to fly away.”

After lunch, Thelma dove into the discussion boards. Now that she was no longer a deputy with the Sheriff’s Department, she needed to change her status.

A message popped up when she logged into her account. “Stay away from Levanter.”

The private message was brief and to the point, but lacking in certain vital details, like why. She showed the message to Max, counting on Lon also being present during their conversation. “Could Elder Jakob or one of his cronies be trying to warn me off? Why? I haven’t said anything about Levanter on the discussion boards.”

Max stood behind her chair as she sat at her desk. He massaged her neck and shoulders. “I’ve no intention of returning to Levanter any time soon. It’s possible that someone in the space around the Deadstar Diner observed our departure and misplotted our course as leading to Levanter rather than to Forest. People tend to forget Forest exists. Anyone associated with the Pilgrims might want us to stay away. Elder Jakob and his patriarch cronies have a crooked set up there that’s working for them. I’ve reported them to the Colonial Review Board,” he added.

She swiveled around to stare up at him. “I thought the board was history.”

“Weakened, but not gone,” he said. “It hasn’t revoked a colonial license in over a century, and then it was for a moon, not a planet, but its power to do so remains. I would like one of its investigative teams to physically audit Levanter. Elder Jakob needs a reminder that there is no corner of Federation space so distant that Federal law doesn’t apply.”

She mulled over the likely the consequences. “It would break the Pilgrims’ sense of isolation, too. In a closed community it’s too easy to begin believing you lack options.”

Lon broke the small silence that had fallen as they contemplated the stresses and dangers of an isolated settlement, especially one that was essentially ruled by a sociopath. “I’m trying to track back the message to identify the sender. So far, I haven’t been able to. If this was from Elder Jakob’s cronies, I doubt they’d be able to hide their digital footprint from me. I’ll keep looking, but that in itself is interesting.”

Max agreed. “We’ll proceed with caution with regard to anything involving Levanter.”

Chapter 19

“Help! Help us, please. This is the trampship Scarab. We’re stranded. Our engine has failed. We need help, urgently. We hit an asteroid shower. Our hull was compromised. We repaired it, but we lost atmosphere. Now the air and filtration system is struggling, nearly gone.” The transmission came from the fringe of Levanter space. The mayday call was broadcast on all channels. It sounded as if everything that could go wrong with an old, badly maintained vessel had done so.

Max swore. “Another damn waddling duck.” He was referring to the decrepit spaceships the Pilgrims hired or bought to transport their immigrants and supplies. “There have to be spaceships nearer than us. We’re days away. Heck, Levanter itself is closer.”

A cold shiver went down Thelma’s spine. “The colony is focused on supplies. They’d come out to retrieve those, but…Max, am I stretching too far to suspect with the colony on Levanter having more citizens than resources, that this is the perfect opportunity for them to be a day too late to save the new Pilgrims’ lives, but still in time to scoop up the supplies they brought with them? How evil is Jakob Canute? Could he make that kind of decision?”

“Yes,” Max bit out the word. “Damn him. Lon, record the following message to transmit on all channels. Hopefully, the Scarab can pick up at least one of them.” He paused for a second. “Scarab, this is Sheriff Smith aboard the Lonesome. We are five days from you and adjusting course to render assistance. We can share atmosphere and water sufficient for your survival. Ration yours for a five day wait.” He ended the message. “If they can hang on that long. Ghost ships—” He cut himself short.

Ghost ships were those found with only the dead aboard. Space was treacherous and vast. Ghost ships were part of an interstellar sheriff’s life, although fortunately not common. Most people either stayed on patrolled starlanes or else, like the surveyors Theodor and Alex, faced the unknown only after exhaustive preparation and with religiously adhered to maintenance schedules.

The situation worsened as they neared the Scarab’s last known location.

There’d been no further transmissions from the stranded trampship, but…

“Battle stations!” Lon shouted.

Shocked, Thelma darted out of her tiny office, across the passage, and onto the bridge.

“Bogies ahead,” Lon continued broadcasting throughout the ship. “Less than an hour till we’re in range. Sorry! They were double-masked. They hid using the asteroid field and the auric shadow of the space storm.”

Max dashed up the ladder from the cargo deck and arrived on the bridge at a run. He studied the main screen which displayed Lon’s scan revealing the ten spaceships ranged ahead of them. The ships lurked along the route the Lonesome had to take to reach the Scarab in the five days in which he’d promised relief would arrive. His all-channels message had told their enemies where they’d be.  “Bandits.”

Harry, who’d arrived quietly, withdrew from the bridge and disappeared into his private quarters.

“It’s a trap,” Max said.

Thelma stared at the enemy spaceships showing on the screen. “The Scarab is registered in the Navcom database. It scraped through its spaceworthiness test. Its emergency could be genuine.” Her hands twisted, pulling at one another. “Their mayday call sounded real.”

Could she live with herself if they left stranded Pilgrims out there?

This was the sort of horrible decision Max had to make as sheriff: whether to risk his crew and himself on the chance that the Pilgrims on the Scarab truly needed help. The bandits certainly wouldn’t render assistance.

“This has to be Gua’s work,” Max spat the senator’s name.

The confident tone of his assertion tore Thelma’s attention from the bandit fleet.

Max scowled at the screen. “I expected a double-cross. Her kind believes in revenge and in obliterating opposition in sly ways. She has links to organized crime. One of those must have reached out to the bandits, although this is more than the Badstars fleet. Lon, can you identify the better maintained spaceships? I’d like to know which crime lord has thrown in with Gua and is using this chance to try and take us out.”

“Does it matter?” Thelma asked, struggling with the idea that a Federation senator could hop into bed with bandits just to see Thelma dead.

“We might be able to apply other kinds of pressure,” Lon said mysteriously.

“And when the fight is won, we’ll know who to go after.” Buckled into the captain’s chair, Max switched its screens and controls to Gunnery. “Thelma, you have the helm.”

“Me? What about Lon?”

Lon answered absently. “I’m hacking multiple ships.”

“Huh.” She didn’t ask what Harry would be doing. She switched her station to piloting mode. She hadn’t flown in ages and she’d never piloted the Lonesome.

“Autopilot.” Max’s focus was on the screens in front of him. “Harry will give you a target. We can direct the autopilot to it, but to override it for random ‘walking’ you have to have the helm.”

“I could jink us into a missile’s path,” she protested.

“The shields will handle it.”

She frowned at him. “Couldn’t we outrun them?” The Lonesome was fast, but at the moment they were using that speed to close with the bandit fleet.

“No fun in that.” Harry’s voice came over the comms.

Max was blunt. “I promised the Scarab we’d provide aid in five days. I keep my promises. Also, a reputation for biting harder than our enemies keeps the Lonesome safe.”

She took a deep breath, understanding his reasoning, both professional and personal, and agreeing with it. She rested her hands near the controls. “Where do I aim the Lonesome?”

The answer appeared on the screen in front of her before she finished her question, overlaying a real-time map of local space with a route through it. The enemy had set up a classic star ambush. The three primary points were taken by two destroyers and a light cruiser. The other seven spaceships were smaller: two corvettes, three cutters, and a couple of gunboats.

Harry filled her in on the game plan. “The Lonesome is the distraction. You are to aim for the cruiser and ram it.”

Thelma bit her lip to stop an “eep!” of protest escaping. She wanted to question the order, as in “actually ram a cruiser? are you crazy?”, but although the Galactic Justice academy hadn’t taught space battle strategies, leaving that to the naval academy, she knew better than to enter into debate when they were approaching the hot zone.

Forty minutes later, the counter on the side of her main screen showed that the Lonesome would be in missile range of the nearest destroyer in one minute and six seconds. Of course, all the ships would be moving, but the algorithms could make an informed prediction since the star ambush stratagem worked on locking a single enemy in the center of the star. The Lonesome’s enemies would maneuver to achieve and maintain that position until they destroyed the spaceship.

The autopilot, meantime, had to weave past a gunboat and cutter to reach its programmed target, the cruiser.

“And what did he mean we’re the distraction?” she muttered to herself, watching the screen show the readjustments as the star ambush closed in.

“First array deployed,” Max barked.

Head in the game, Thelma told herself. They hadn’t drilled for naval-level space combat. Or rather, she hadn’t. Max, Harry and Lon were obviously falling into familiar roles. All I have to do is follow orders. She jinked the Lonesome randomly at forty degrees right.

The autopilot adjusted the flight path to continue the suicidal plan of ramming the cruiser.

A male voice blared over an open channel. “This is the Bonanza Bullet reporting engine failure. Captain Hardwick, sir, sorry but we’re out.”

Onscreen, a gunboat began drifting slowly out of the ambush set up. Or rather, the ambush moved, trying to lock in the Lonesome, and the Bonanza Bullet remained where it was.

“Open channel?” Thelma asked. “Misinformation? Feigning retreat?”

“The Bullet’s captain is Robert Silvers. I recognize Mazod’s destroyer. The bandit leader must have forced Silvers into the fight—” Max broke off as the Bonanza Bullet exploded. The missiles that obliterated it came from the unnamed destroyer. “Punishment. Silvers gave us Hardwick’s name to prove his sincerity so we didn’t target him. Hardwick’s just put the fear of plutonium into anyone else who was thinking of dropping out.”

“So we have to nail Hardwick’s destroyer,” Thelma said.

“We stick to the plan,” Max responded. The Lonesome shuddered. “Debris mines deployed.”

She figured that was as good a time as any to jink their spaceship. The autopilot brought it back, aimed at the cruiser. Thelma jinked it, again.

Thanks to her maneuvers, the second gunboat found itself closer than expected to the Lonesome. It could have opened fire. Instead, it angled out of the ambush structure and put the Lonesome between itself and Hardwick’s destroyer.

Thelma waited for one of the other ships in the fleet to fire on it, on Hardwick’s orders, but a debris mine took it out first.

“Disabled, not dead,” Max said tersely. “Unless Hardwick finishes it off. Harry?”

“Another seventy seconds.”

Onscreen, Thelma saw missiles flash from the Lonesome.

Max was buying time for some action on Harry’s part.

“Thelma, random walk. Three direction changes. Now!” Harry ordered.

Since it didn’t matter where she moved the Lonesome, Thelma directed it abstractedly. Her attention was for the action onscreen. The enemy spaceships had locked into the star ambush structure, minus the two smallest vessels, the gunboats. Her random walk disrupted the pattern for a few seconds, and spooked the nearest destroyer into a barrage of missiles.

Lon was populating the screen with data as he identified the enemy spaceships and analyzed their capabilities. The destroyer that fired on them was the Hornet, captained by Isadore Mazod. It was the Badstars bandits’ most fight-capable ship. Compared to the other destroyer, the Elegant Dame, it was a bucket of bolts.

The Elegant Dame was owned by Elliot Keele, one of the handful of CEOs who owned mercenary corporations that edged the line between legal and illegal. In effect, he headed up a crime gang, but that had yet to be proven to a court’s satisfaction, and so, he continued to infest the Saloon Sector.

“The Elegant Dame was the destroyer involved in the Selene Massacre,” Thelma said.

“Never proven,” Max snapped.

Elliot Keele’s lawyers might have gotten his corporation declared innocent by virtue of the “not proven” verdict available under Federal criminal law, but everyone and their space bot knew that he’d done it. Yet the politicians still glad-handed him and he continued to socialize with the social elite of the Reclamation Sector.

Senator Gua represented the Reclamation Sector in Federation Parliament.

“I have control of the bandits’ spaceships’ systems,” Lon said. “The Elegant Dame and the cruiser, Guinevere, have multiple and reacting firewalls. I suspect they possess a team of hackers, probably located on the destroyer.”

Harry acknowledged his report with a terse order. “Lock down the bandits after my move.”

His move happened in the next three seconds. A plasma lance pierced the Elegant Dame on the far side. Captain Hardwick had left the rear of his destroyer unguarded, confident that the trampship Scarab had lured the Lonesome to a solitary doom.

They hadn’t counted on Harry, who was somehow independent and weaponized in space. Whatever he hid in his private quarters, he was lethal. And smart.

The plasma lance cut through the Elegant Dame’s shields. The destroyer fired at the lance’s point of origin, but Harry had already moved, witnessed by the fact that the plasma lance directed its terrifying power at the Elegant Dame from a new angle.

Thelma barely had time to note it before the destroyer exploded. A ball of light and power set the spaceships nearest it rocking as they took damage. “Harry?”

He hushed her. “Concentrating.”

She jinked the Lonesome, but not on purpose. Her hands simply jerked as she relaxed. Her friend had survived.

The cruiser, the other spaceship contributed by Elliot Keele, vanished twenty seconds later, by the same method. The crime lord’s mercenaries were gone.

“Bandit fleet locked down,” Lon said.

“Harry, you okay?” Max asked.

“Yup. I’ll stay out and keep an eye on things. Recharge the lance.”

Thelma inhaled and exhaled noisily, as if she had asthma. Harry was alive. They all were. They’d survived, and Harry had killed dozens of people. The Lonesome and its crew hadn’t picked this fight. The ones who’d come after them—after her?—had been the aggressors. Nonetheless…

Max stretched out an arm. “Come here.”

“I’ve got the helm,” Lon said. “We’re solid. I’m analyzing the play. Nefertiti observed the entire encounter,” he added in tones of grim satisfaction.

Thelma’s hands ceased shaking from an overload of adrenaline and clenched into fists. “And neither she nor her crew bothered to help?”

“We chose not to run,” Max reminded her. The fact that he was willing to abandon the gunnery station to come to her meant that the battle really was done.

She resisted his attempt to enfold her in a hug, thumping a fist against his chest instead. It wasn’t a hard strike. It was fear and helplessness that she could express now that they were safe. Sharing it earlier would have been counterproductive self-indulgence, and against all of her independent mining family’s and Galactic Justice academy training. “We were one against ten!”

“And we chose to make a stand,” he repeated.

“Our decision, our consequences,” Harry agreed over the comms.

Lon added. “Although I suspect Nefertiti’s crew is aware of Max’s identity. If Hardwick had captured the two of you, Covert Ops would have rescued you.”

Max pulled Thelma into a hug while she frowned in confusion. He explained. “Whether we live or die is on us, but if Hardwick managed to kidnap me, and worked out who I was, I’d become a bargaining chip to attempt to influence Dad.” President Smith.

The brutal logic of that reasoning was trademark Covert Ops. Her and Max’s lives didn’t matter, other than as chips on a political game board. Rather than scream her frustration and fury, Thelma kissed Max. It was a much healthier—and more enjoyable—method of working out their post-battle tension.

“Ahem.” Lon interrupted before they could get any clothes off. “The marooned Pilgrim trampship is still out there. I would lay odds that their plight is genuine.”

Max pulled away reluctantly. “I’ll hail them. Lon?”

“Contacting them now.” The transmission-ready button at the captain’s desk turned green.

Max spoke in the direction of the screen, trusting the bridge’s audio equipment to catch his voice. “Trampship Scarab, this is Sheriff Max Smith. Please respond.”

For a miracle, they did.

Thelma leaned against the bulkhead in relief. They weren’t going to be dealing with a ghost ship.

“Sheriff Smith, this is Captain Tengku. Our propulsion unit has carked it. The secondary engine burned out, unable to handle the load. Our air and water recycling system has failed. We are rationing water and isolating sections of the ship. We have about two days’ of breathable air, or so my chief engineer calculates. It’s possible he’s being optimistic, as he was about the secondary engine’s capacity and the recycling system’s filtration system being self-cleaning. And the range of our communications system.” From the captain’s tone, her chief engineer was likely in the brig. If a trampship had a brig. “Sheriff Smith, our long range sensors detected missiles. Bandits contacted us thirteen hours ago.”

“The bandits have been neutralized,” Max said.

“All of them?” Shock thinned Captain Tengku’s voice to a squeak.

“Yes. How capable is your engineer? I can send over engineers from the bandit fleet if you’re capable of guarding them?”

A new voice broke in, baritone and Rock Sector accented. “We can watch the blighters.”

“Patriarch Tobiah, please don’t interrupt,” Captain Tengku said plaintively. She obviously didn’t expect to be obeyed, and wasn’t.

Patriarch Tobiah continued gruffly. “Name’s Earle Tennant. This patriarch malarkey is asteroid dirt balls. When I get my hands on that rascal Canute…calling himself Elder Jakob and leaving us to die out here. I’ll wring his scrawny neck. Lying squeal weasel.” He harrumphed and abandoned threats for pragmatism. “We need spare parts and hands that know what they’re doing. The chief engineer on this floating death trap is a druggie. I reckon as he’s been selling off the vessel piece by piece.”

“Patriarch Tobiah, please!”

“Well, it’s true, Sue-ann.”

Thelma and Max looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

“Sounds like you’ve had an interesting time,” he said. “We can discuss Elder Jakob at a later time, although I’d appreciate it if no one contacted him until after we talk.”

“No problem, mate. I’m not talking to that scoundrel till I’m there in person and can hit him. Or shoot him.”

Max didn’t question Earle’s attitude. As he’d said, that could wait. “I’ll contact a couple of the bandits’ ships. The engineers that agree to assist the Scarab will shuttle in with spare parts. My mech will escort them. Meantime, we’ll lock with the Scarab and vent atmosphere through the lock tunnel as an interim measure.”

“Much appreciated.”

Max ignored the patriarch’s gratitude and the relief in his tone. He and all of the people he was responsible for had been facing death, a nightmare passing that Jakob Canute could have remedied. “Captain Tengku, send me the Scarab’s Customs manifest.” It would list the trampship’s passengers and cargo.

She did so within a couple of minutes.

“Twenty three children,” Thelma murmured reading the manifest while Max coordinated things with Harry. Her skin flushed with rage. It seemed that after having been alerted to their situation, Jakob Canute had left over two hundred people, including children, to die out here.

That the bandits and mercenaries had been able to get into position to ambush the Lonesome raised the nasty suspicion that Canute had collaborated with them to see Max and her dead. Had Canute used the Pilgrims on the Scarab as bait for her and Max? “I’m going with you aboard the Scarab,” she said hurriedly to him.

“Combat suit.”

She nodded. Earle and Captain Tengku sounded honest, but their story needed to be verified before trust could be given.

Lon made his own preparations, not only readying the atmos pumps, but also assembling a pallet of provisions, namely water and fresh fruits and vegetables. He also piloted the Lonesome into locking distance with the Scarab.

Thelma trusted him to be looking out for any treachery. If someone aboard the trampship blew it up while the Lonesome was so close, they’d be damaged if not destroyed. She struggled with her combat suit, far slower in donning it than Max who had years of Star Marine experience in wearing one.

While she fought with the bulky suit, he squeezed in brusque negotiations with the bandits that resulted in two of twelve volunteers being chosen to be transported over in their own shuttle with Harry guarding them.

Harry hadn’t accompanied the Lonesome to the Scarab, but waited among the bandit fleet. Before he boarded the shuttle, he’d have to shed whatever additional constructs enabled him to be both a stealthy, swift spacecraft and a devastating plasma weapon. But even in his ordinary mech mode the bandits wouldn’t cause him trouble—or if they did, they’d regret it.

Thelma pushed away the thought of the three spaceships and their crews that were simply gone: the destroyer, the cruiser and the tiny gunboat. The first two kills were justified. Lon hadn’t been able to hack the destroyer and cruiser’s systems, negating the possibility of a non-violent solution. For the Lonesome’s survival, the destroyer and cruiser had to be eliminated from the battle. The gunboat had fallen to Hardwick’s ruthlessness.

So many lives gone. Even if they’d been evil people, the cliché remained true: each of them had been someone’s child.

It was also confronting to face the reality of Harry’s combat ability. By his own admission, he remained in the Saloon Sector to guard the Eldorado Cache. Those raphus geodes wouldn’t be going anywhere with him on duty—and pity any surveyors who found them and tried to make off with them.

Thelma focused on the pallet of provisions and Max’s arrival in the Lonesome’s entrance chamber. They were ready to cross into the Scarab.

They rapped gloved knuckles, then he opened the hatch and entered the tunnel.

She held her blaster ready as she followed him.

The pallet, on a hover-board, trailed her. Lon had added a tripod-mounted blaster with cameras to the center of the pallet. In effect, he guarded their rear.

Fortunately, their caution was unnecessary. The Pilgrims and crew aboard the trampship welcomed them with open relief and tears. Even though they were suited up, people tried to hug them. Other people, more disciplined or desperate, approached the pallet. Soon everyone was eating and drinking.

Captain Tengku plus Patriarch Tobiah and three of his people withdrew with Max and Thelma to the captain’s cabin. It made for crowded quarters, but provided privacy. Patriarch Tobiah closed the door.

The Scarab’s story was briefly told. The Pilgrims aboard were all from the Rock Sector. Theirs had been a long, not entirely happy journey that had culminated in Elder Jakob’s refusal to rescue them.

“…in spitting distance to Levanter, and every went to Hell…Heck,” he corrected himself with a sideways glance at his wife, the prim, gaunt woman sitting beside him eating an apple in tidy bites. “Jacob Canute told us to broadcast a mayday call. He wouldn’t help, but he mentioned you by name, Sheriff Smith. Said if you were in the area, you’d respond.” Earle’s gray eyebrows bunched in an almighty frown. “Made me mad. Made me suspect…we didn’t have any choice, Sheriff.”

Mrs. Tennant put a hand on his arm. “The man knows that, Earle. We did what we had to for our people, broadcasting the mayday, and he did his job and took out the bandits.” Apple finished, she looked directly at Max. “The man who called himself the bandit chief said he’d back for us—for the supplies and women.” Her gaze shifted to Thelma on the last word.

“You’re safe, now,” Thelma said impulsively.

Mrs. Tennant ducked her head. She and the other women had lived with an additional fear, not just death for those they loved, but sexual slavery for themselves.

“The Navy is on its way,” Max said. He was less open than Thelma with his emotions, but his terse words were also meant as a comfort. “They’ll take the bandits into custody. They’ll also investigate the Levanter colony’s failure to respond to your distress call.” In the weeks since the Lonesome’s visit to Levanter’s orbit, the Pilgrims had had sufficient time to make at least one of their spaceships spaceworthy. “They’ll want statements from you.”

“We’ll be happy to provide them,” Earle growled.

The other two men, his son and nephew, nodded agreement.

“The Navy will then escort you, along with the vessels in the captured bandit fleet, to the nearest habitable world, which is Levanter,” Max continued.

Earle began to grin. It wasn’t a nice grin. Should a patriarch smile like that? There was a wolf’s anticipation of the hunt in his face.

His son and nephew gave off the same predatory vibe.

“You’re not like the other Pilgrims…” Thelma said softly.

“We believe in God and the End Times,” the son said. “Whether those things happen in my lifetime or my grandchildren’s old age, Levanter gives us land and a place to defend. Out on the edge of the Federation, we can breathe.”

“We will survive,” Earle said. It had the resonance of a vow.

Back onboard the Lonesome, Thelma barely had the energy to strip off her combat suit. In fact, Max helped her with the boots. Her thoughts remained with the people, the Pilgrims, that they’d left aboard the Scarab. The two engineers chosen from among the bandits were already at work, guarded by grim survivalists.

“Elder Jakob won’t be able to control this group,” she said.

“Their arrival will change Levanter.” Max sounded coldly pleased. Satisfied.

It wasn’t till they were eating their belated dinner, “fresh” from the food dispenser for once since Thelma had other things than food on her mind, that she continued the conversation, picking it up as if showering, food and puttering around hadn’t interrupted it. “This is what you do, isn’t it? I hadn’t really understood. You keep the peace, but it’s also about putting things in place, arranging matters, so that others can act.”

Max considered her across the table.

She wasn’t sure what he searched for, either in her or in himself. She wasn’t judging him. She was neither critical nor admiring. She was too tired for either emotion. But in this state of emotional and physical exhaustion post-battle, and after seeing the Spartan conditions the Pilgrims had endured for months aboard the Scarab, the bare truth had a way of emerging. And being accepted.

“I can’t change everything,” Max said finally. “Lon has a talent for identifying pivotal moments and actors. He could be a powerbroker. He could make either you or me into one. Instead, he and I—and Harry—have an agreement. We don’t directly involve ourselves in events.” His mouth twisted. “Sometimes we manage that better than other times. People have to be free to make their own choices. That principle is understood on the frontier. It’s why I feel comfortable here and why I fight to protect it.”

Lon took over the explanation from him. “The extent of our meddling is that we give other people an opportunity to act.”

Harry walked in. “You can’t force idiots and criminals to become angels, but you can keep in mind a goal and a belief that people can improve themselves and their environments.” His glance flickered to Thelma and away. As much as the AI had control of his mech body and its mobile face, it seemed he couldn’t—or didn’t try to—hide his uncertainty regarding Thelma’s ability to accept his lethalness.

She got up, walked around the table, and hugged him.

Harry’s hard mech body couldn’t soften, but he hugged her back with tender care.

“Glad you’re home safe,” she said.

“Welcome home,” Max added quietly, and smiled.

Chapter 20

Lon and Harry had been busy. The informal AI network was amazingly effective, and motivated by a sense of justice. Perhaps, like Lon, they didn’t overtly direct organic sentients’ actions, but they would follow up threats against their own kind and against those people AIs cared about.

While the Lonesome stuck close to the bandit fleet, ensuring that Lon maintained control of the enemy spaceships’ systems, the engineers aboard the Scarab restored its life support systems, then recruited additional help from among their colleagues to overhaul the trampship’s main engine. The bandits ferried across to the Scarab were only too happy to escape their frozen spaceships and what they reported as the despair engulfing their crews. The bandits knew that when the Navy arrived, they’d be facing trial and years of imprisonment.

Earle and his people rejected numerous offers from the borrowed engineering team who promised them a great life if they’d only fly the Scarab off to the Badstars, with the bandit engineers aboard, of course.

As Earle said when he discussed the Pilgrims’ situation with Max and Thelma, there was no chance of anyone on the Scarab taking the bandits up on their offer. Everyone aboard the trampship remembered the bandit chief’s original threat to kill, rape and pillage them after he’d obliterated the Lonesome.

The Scarab Pilgrims were, instead, making plans for what they’d do when they reached Levanter. Elder Jakob would not approve.

Max did.

So did Lon, who supplied them with additional seeds and agricultural technology suited to arid zone farming.

Thelma was wrapped up in her own affairs. With her deputy duties complete, she had an information brokerage business to focus on. Information was only as valuable as the market she found for it, which meant she needed to build her client base. As she had with Darlene, Thelma provided her services free for the first contact. It was about playing the long term game. And sometimes it was about quietly informing a surveyor or a miner or a political lobbyist that she’d identified the game they were playing, the big score that they were about to make, and that she wouldn’t mess it up. It was a fine line to fly with that strategy. She didn’t want anyone to mistake her display of knowledge for a threat. It wasn’t. It was a promise, and a request that they remember her as someone capable of keeping a secret—and discovering them.

Meantime, Harry took over from Lon the quest to discover who had sent Thelma the original message to stay away from Levanter. If she and Max had listened to that advice, the Pilgrims aboard the Scarab would have died or been sold into slavery by the bandits, but the Lonesome would have avoided a space battle.

“Rudy Gua,” Harry said.

Thelma stared at the AI mech in shock. They were in the training ring with her working on her endurance. She slowed her run on the treadmill. “Are you sure?”

“Your classmate, Rudolf Gua, son of Senator Gua—may an elephant fart on her—sent the message just prior to the transit of the Galactic Justice vessel carrying the Senate Worlds Development Committee through the wormhole to the Boldire Sector and negotiations with the Bunyaphi.”

Thelma jumped off the treadmill. “Rudy tried to save me?”

Max joined the conversation. He’d entered without her noticing. “His no-details message suggests he was conflicted about whether to save you or allow you, and all of us, to be sacrificed to his mother’s revenge.”

“To be fair,” Lon murmured. “Rudy isn’t aware of Harry’s and my existence, so he didn’t know we’d be killed along with Thelma.”

But that wasn’t a mitigating circumstance; a fact Max’s glare made clear.

Before disembarking her crew and entering the wormhole to Kampia space, Nefertiti shared what information she had on Elliot Keele, Senator Gua’s past dealings with him, and details of everything except the smoking gun that proved that the Lonesome had been attacked because Senator Gua was a vindictive woman and a politician who survived by never leaving loose ends. Nefertiti added a postscript to the information that Lon shared with Max and Thelma.

“The evidence suggests that Senator Gua is unaware of Sheriff Smith’s relationship to President Smith. In this instance, ignorance will not be considered a defense. Covert Ops will be looking into the senator’s ties to organized crime. There should be no further trouble from Senator Gua’s direction, and if there is, Covert Ops will warn you.”

That was the background against which the crew of the Lonesome considered the news that Rudy Gua had tried, in a limited and unconvincing manner, to save Thelma’s life.

She crossed the training ring and clasped Max’s hand. “It’s like you said, everyone deserves a chance. I think Rudy’s earned one.” And I think Senator Gua deserves payback. But Thelma kept that thought to herself, for now. She had an idea that needed to percolate.

The Planetary Congress on Zephyr was debating the future of the unsettled island continent of Lemur. Some wanted it to be given to agricultural production, others to urban settlement, and still others argued to develop it as a planetary park. Its remote island status would allow quite unusual park uses. Saurelle tail-wavers wanted it to be developed as a reserve for flora and fauna from their home planet. A multi-species band of scientists wanted to use the island as a test site for resurrecting extinct species and rewilding them.

Thelma wandered among the discussions inside the congressional building, picking up hints on her quarry’s whereabouts. Those hints led her outside, to stand a moment on the grand front steps and look across the square to the Justice Court, and appreciate the courage and determination that built and maintained the Federation all the way to this frontier world.

Then the aroma of barbecue ribs reached her and she forgot deep thoughts for more immediate concerns.

“Gotcha,” Thelma murmured.

She’d dressed to fit in with the congressional crowd, and her moderate heels click-clacked as she sped down the steps. Her light gray suit with a crisp white blouse meant she wouldn’t be risking dripping barbeque sauce, but she could see a woman who wasn’t worried about stains.

Agent Aubree Tennyson had learned that all stains washed out, sooner or later.

Two lines of bollards completed the large square between the Congress and the Justice Court buildings. On the far side of the bollards, food carts were lined up, competing for workers’ and tourists’ lunch dollars. In between, benches, stools, tables and chairs encouraged people to sit and talk beneath parasol shelters or under the pale sunshine.

Aubree had chosen a table for two in the open. It was more removed than most, but near enough to the barbecue food cart for the janitor who’d advised Thelma that she’d find Aubree there to have more than earned the bribe Thelma had paid him.

He’d probably earned a second payment by alerting Aubree to Thelma’s interest in finding her because the agent didn’t as much as raise an eyebrow when Thelma dropped into the empty seat at the table.

Aubree saluted her uninvited guest with a half-eaten rib. “Congratulations.”

“For…?” Thelma prompted.

Aubree grinned. Her teeth looked white and sharp with a disconcerting smear of barbecue sauce clinging to one incisor. “On an early release from your Galactic Justice contract. I guess there’s no chance of my recruiting you, now?”

“Nope. But I have an idea for who you could recruit in my place.”

For a second, the agent stopped chewing. It was the most tiny of tells, but it was sufficient.

Thelma had surprised her. Good. She needed Aubree a little off-balance so that she’d actually meditate on Thelma’s odd suggestion, and not dismiss it out of hand. “Rudy Gua.”

Aubree dropped the rib. Sauce splashed. “Damn.” She grabbed a wipe and attacked first her fingers, then her chambray shirt. All the time, she stared at Thelma. “Why do you care what happens to him?” Stripped of the pretense that this was a casual meeting and that she was just soaking up the sun and enjoying good food, she was keen-eyed and severe. This was the agent who survived and flourished on the frontier. She wasn’t going to listen to any exhaust fumes.

Thelma nodded acknowledgement of the validity of Aubree’s question. “Rudy’s well-being isn’t my primary motivation. I do think he’s the perfect fit for Covert Ops, though. He excelled at hacking and subterfuge at the academy. He probably honed the skills to survive his mother. You could mention him to Nefertiti’s crew. I believe they’re on Zephyr.”

“Just how much do you know, and how?” Aubree abandoned her meal and leaned back in the hard metal chair. “It makes me curious. The Kampia negotiate with you. You’re comfortable mentioning a covert AI. You were a good student at the academy, but this is the real world. No one would have trusted a dudette with the level of security clearance required for what you’ve done. Are you involved with Sheriff Smith or are you running, now that your Galactic Justice contract is done?” Her voice didn’t change. Her eyes didn’t flicker. “Or am I being naïve and the completed contract is a sham and your assignment continues?”

“Wow.” The level of paranoia Aubree exhibited alerted Thelma to the dangers of an agent’s lifestyle. If Galactic Justice had allowed Thelma the career path she’d originally planned, she might have ended up as mistrustful as Aubree, unsure where she could find solid ground on which to make her stand. “I’m free of Galactic Justice, but I will be staying in the Saloon Sector. I’ve found it suits me.”

“And Max?” Aubree asked, jettisoning his professional title. It was a personal question, but she also probed just who he was and where he stood in events. The agent was curious as to how much he’d contributed behind the scenes to the contact with the Kampia and everything else.

She doesn’t know he’s the President’s son, Thelma thought. She stood. “Max is staying, too,” she answered, choosing to be deliberately obtuse.

Aubree considered her while a school group ran past, weaving between tables and ignoring their teacher’s shout to “stop behaving like monster weevils and come back here”.

“If I murmur Rudy’s name into a receptive ear, will he take the job?”

Thelma didn’t hesitate. “I don’t know, but there’s a spark in him. Given a chance he could choose to become his own man.”

“Bucking off his momma’s plans for him?” Aubree asked shrewdly.

“That would give me what I wanted,” Thelma agreed.

The older woman nodded. “Not so altruistic. You’d skewer Senator Gua where she’s vulnerable—her ambition for her son.”

“Justice,” Thelma said succinctly.

Abruptly, Aubree nodded. “Nice to know you have teeth. I’ll do it, and no matter what Rudolf Gua decides, you owe me.”

“Understood.”

Trying not to grin too hard now that she’d achieved her goal for the day and was free, Thelma farewelled Aubree and crossed the square to duck around the corner to the hover rail stop. She caught the HRev back to the spacedock and took the elevator up, striding into the Sheriff’s Office as if she belonged, although it was no longer her place of work.

Owen, the receptionist, was fully occupied with two saurelles arguing their speeding tickets with him, but he managed a quick jerk of his silver bewigged head toward Max’s door. “The Sheriff’s expecting you, Ms. Bach.”

The two annoyed and noisy saurelle couriers ignored his comment and her, a mere human female.

Thelma sauntered into Max’s office.

He was out of uniform. Not undressed, unfortunately, but in casual shorts and a t-shirt and wearing a baseball cap rather than his trademark Western hat. “The aircar’s waiting and our luggage is loaded.” The gleam in his eyes was equal parts sexy excitement and a little boy’s joy.

“How long is it since you’ve had a vacation? A real one, not just not working or visiting family.”

He frowned.

She kissed his cheek, and stole the aircar’s key. “Never mind.” He probably hadn’t had a vacation in years—much like her. “The lake will be perfect.” She’d traded two weeks at the lake cabin for an idea and opportunity that she’d passed on to a yprr spaceship builder whose yard was here at the Zephyr spacedock. The yprr had purred in appreciation.

Thelma’s inspiration had been a thousand individual lifepods being removed from a starliner at Zephyr. The starliner had upgraded to two shuttles with lifepod capability, due to the starliner’s owner and captain winning them in a poker game. The old lifepods were so much scrap, in the captain’s eyes.

The yprr had been overseeing the upgrade, and ditching the individual lifepods, when Thelma intervened. “Just a thought, but you could sell these back to the captain,” she’d murmured, before continuing with the encouragement of the yprr’s sudden alertness. “Outside of the Saloon Sector people are focused on maintaining status and reputation, but around here, we’re practical. An urself on a journey of over a week prefers to enter hibernation. They don’t really need a cabin for that, but they would pay for a secure space that they could lock themselves into.”

They’d both stared at the lifepods being removed from the starliner.

Thelma had smiled. “You could fit a hundred to this spaceship and have nine hundred ‘urself transportation modules’ available for other Saloon Sector starliners wanting to upgrade.”

The yprr had purred so loudly it had sounded like distant thunder.

Four days later, with the original starliner’s captain outraged yet amused at being sold back the lifepods he’d scrapped, the yprr agreed to Thelma’s request to borrow his vacation home for two weeks.

The flight in the aircar from the capital city to the lake cabin took just over three hours. Thelma had plenty of time to wriggle out of her gray suit and into shorts and a halter top, adopting vacation mode. The autopilot guided the aircar, Max studied fishing techniques on his comms unit, and she napped.

Lake Quairading shone a deep tranquil blue in the late afternoon sunshine. The cabin sat on poles at the water’s edge with a dock jutting out.

“Perfect for fishing.” Max stretched as he studied their surroundings. A mix of cool temperate trees formed the forest behind the cabin. There were other cabins in the far, far distance around the curve of the lake. But to all intents and purposes, they were alone. Dinner wasn’t fresh-caught fish, although he promised that for tomorrow. Instead, they ate steak and potatoes, and drank beer. Later, they lay on a blanket on the dock. The hard bed left a lot to be desired, but the sound of the water and the stars overhead were perfect.

It was for this, for life on a planet, that Earle and the others on the Scarab crossed the galaxy to Levanter.

“I’m going to invite my family to visit,” Thelma said.

“And we can visit them. I have some vacation time saved up.” Max’s smiled was lopsided in the moonlight.

They’d told her family that she and Max were in a relationship. The family hadn’t seemed surprised, although confiding the truth of Max’s identity to them had shocked them.

“No way, man. No way.” It had taken her brother Joe a couple of conversations to accept that his fellow Star Marine was also the President’s youngest son.

Max wasn’t worried that the Bach family would tell anyone his secret. Independent asteroid miners were the definition of secret-keepers. His own family was more troublesome. They all wanted to meet Thelma; not because they didn’t approve of her, but from what they said they didn’t want Max to stuff things up with her. To prevent the secret of his identity being exposed by a procession of presidential and Hwicce Corporation family members parading out to the Saloon Sector and him, he and Thelma had agreed to meet everyone at Hwicce headquarters in the Reclamation Sector in three months’ time.

Harry and Lon were undecided whether they’d also introduce themselves to Max’s family, but they had met Thelma’s via video. Thelma’s mother was particularly grateful to learn that two AI, as well as a former Star Marine, kept her daughter safe on the frontier. Thelma’s brothers pointed out that only Thelma could find enough trouble to justify that sort of protection, but they were teasing. They didn’t know about the Kampia or Senator Gua, who’d recently retired from politics after details of her links to organized crime were leaked to the media.

Checks and balances.

“Which direction is the wormhole to Kampia space?” Thelma asked Max.

He peered at the sky, and pointed vaguely.

She wasn’t sure he had the direction right. “What information do you think Nefertiti will return with?”

Max had a more immediately pertinent question. “Do you think the bed is softer than this dock?”

Their eyes met.

She laughed and scrambled up. Work and the galaxy could wait. They were on vacation, together. “Let’s test it.”

Want More?

If you’d like more space adventures, check out my Shamans and Shifters Space Opera series:

Her Robot Wolf

Cosmic Catalyst

Shattered Earth

Jingle Stars

The Ceph Sector

Jenny

P.S. You can catch up with me at my website, on Facebook or on Twitter.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Want More?