Excerpt

Chapter One

The ship's food processor beeped twice and spewed out hot, chunky sludge.

Lori Kimura swore, pushed up from her knees and crammed her right hand past the hot glop and into the opening. For a breathless, disgusting moment her fingers searched the scalding slop while it poured past her hands and slid down her arm like some kind of yokai in search of a bathhouse. Finally, her fingers found the valve and pinched it closed, slowing the yokai's parade, but far from ending it.

She needed to get at the emergency shut-off to the left of the machine. The loop wrench on the back of her belt would do just the trick, but as soon as she moved her right arm to grab the wrench, a tingling pain shot up and down both arms and a strange numbness lingered in her fingertips. Gritting her teeth, Lori willed her right hand to keep tight on the valve while she endured the prodding pain.

Stress.

It was probably stress causing all the weird sensations in her arms. That was what she decided on, anyway. It hadn't been this stressful smuggling weapons—that had been ridiculously easy. And, as unpleasant as her five-year stint in Aphelion Penitentiary had been, trying to run a legitimate passenger courier business was much, much worse.

Sensation reawakened in Lori's fingers and she got the loop wrench off her belt and to the shut-off valve. Standing, she eased her arm out of the food dispenser. The filth had traveled down the armhole of her tank top, past her utility belt, and to her legs. Her skin stung with the heat of it, and as the stuff started to cool, the stench of it took a full swing at Lori's senses—like prison loaf and raw sewage were having a conjugal visit.

The rest of the passenger lounge matched the food dispenser better than Lori wanted to admit. A shiny gloss over the deep scars on the grey, faux-marble floor. Long patches of new material covering the holes on the couches. A sanitation room at the far end of the lounge had newer fixtures, but a smell that Lori couldn't eradicate with even the most aggressive chemicals. And this food dispenser. When she bought the ship, the seller had claimed he'd upgraded it to dispense beverages, not the paste food of a few decades before.

She'd known that scrawny, twitchy-eyed hustler was lying. But she couldn't shove the nose of her favorite 1218 Spitzer into his gut and get the truth. Not with her parents watching from a vid, while they used their savings to pay for the ship and fund her new life.

Plus, it would have violated the bulk of her parole conditions in about thirty seconds.

And she didn't have a 1218 Spitzer, or any other gun, anyway.

At least Lori had encountered the greasy doom instead of her first passenger. She'd heard of passengers suing couriers for less. What a dismal way to end up back in front of a judge.

Three steps and she was outside of the passenger lounge and in a cramped hallway that was just as rusted, decrepit, and curmudgeonly as the inside of the broken food processor. She let both arms drop to her side and flexed her still-tingling fingers.

Stress. Just stress.

Lori trudged toward the Courier-class ship's cockpit, where her quarters were closet-sized with an even smaller shower. As soon as she walked into her room, an automated voice greeted her, "Welcome, Captain Kimura. Would you like to resume the last recording?"

"Sure," Lori replied.

"I'm sorry, I didn't understand. Would you like to resume the last recording?"

Lori leaned against the doorframe. "Yes."

"My apologies, Captain Kimura. Could you please speak louder? I'm having a hard time hearing you."

"I'd like to hear that recording of my dad!"

"Understood," the automated voice replied. "Accessing."

Lori tugged off her boots and unclipped her utility belt.

"My Kiyo-chan…"

Just the sound of his voice stilled Lori's body, making her as quiet and attentive as she'd been as a child.

"I sat in our favorite spot last night. The place where we can see Therasia and the Hoshiko moons. Someday your Ma and I will get an outside flat and I'll make the guest bed closest to this viewport and you can watch these stars all night and all day. You used to beg to do that, you know. Just cry and plead to sit at the viewport and watch. Your ma says all that watching made you restless. Made you—well, deviant is her word, but it's not mine."

His voice paused. A crackle of static and then he continued, "Do you see stars now, my Kiyo-chan? Do you get to watch them from where you are?"

Another pause.

"I miss you, my Kiyo-chan. I love you brighter than all the stars."

The recording ended with a click. Lori glanced up to the viewport above her bunk, no bigger than two of her hands together. But it was there. And she could see the stars. She could feel her father's love—and the aching guilt at all the heartbreak she'd brought him.

That was before. The old Lori. The weapons smuggler. This Lori—smelly, sticky, and living the dull life as a courier pilot would bring her dad the peace he deserved. Even if the peace was only his.

Lori slipped into the crevice of a shower, fully clothed. It was the easiest way to clean both her clothes and her skin. The laundry on the ship was only slightly more reliable than the food dispenser.

The shower's water came out in dribbles instead of a solid spray. She cupped the water and scrubbed anyway. She kept scrubbing until the ring of her dad's voice inside her lessened. Until some of the shame joined the sludge at the drain by her feet.

Even then, she avoided her own face in the mirror. Too much of her dad in her own brown eyes. Too much of herself there, too, mocking his goodness.