Tempted by Celestial Bodies

Chapter 1

chapter one

gen

“Come on, baby,” I coaxed. “You know I always treat you good. You’ve got one more in you, I just know it. Do it for me, okay?”

Unfortunately, I didn’t think Nebula had one more in her—for me, or anyone else.

With a sigh, I sat back on my heels, cleaned lubricant from my hands with a rag, and studied the engine’s core. “Just one more job before you need drydock maintenance,” I told my ship. “That’s all I’m asking. I need one more job after this to afford downtime and then we can both take a break. I’ll find an outpost where you can get some parts replaced and I can get laid. Then we’ll both be happy. Well, as happy as either of us are likely to get.”

My ship groaned and creaked. I couldn’t tell if that was an agreement with my plan or a derisive sniff at my ambition to find someone at an outpost worth sharing a bunk with. Or just the strain of another deep-space run at hyperspeed with a fully loaded cargo bay. Nebula was a moody bitch when she wanted to be. I supposed I could relate.

I shut the access panel to the core and rose.

“You require sleep, Captain Drae.” My maintenance robot rolled to my side from the open access panel where it had been repairing wires. The tall, many-appendaged ’bot had a male voice today with a distinctly Raxian accent. It knew I disliked Raxians, but it kept that voice in its rotation—I suspected just to annoy me, like the reminders about needing rest.

“You know there’s no rest for the wicked, Mechabot.” I headed for the cockpit. “Work on this conduit instead, okay? Contact me immediately if you see anything else leaking or sparking.”

“Affirmative, Captain.” The ’bot turned its attention to the open access panel and the leaky tube that had given us trouble lately.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only leak on my ship, and even more unfortunately, that conduit was part of Nebula ’s life support system.

I suspected I was more concerned about the leak than Mechabot. The robot could function perfectly fine if life support failed. After I asphyxiated, it would even roll past my corpse to pilot my ship to Ymar II. It was the coldest of comforts, I reflected wryly, to know my untimely death wouldn’t stop the food, weapons, and other supplies in my cargo hold from making it to one of the most dreaded prison colonies in the galaxy.

A paycheck is a paycheck , I reminded myself. The prison colony paid top rates for speedy delivery from reliable freight captains. I was lucky to be on their roster. Whatever I thought of the colony itself, these gigs paid for my fuel, ship maintenance, and my infrequent planetary or outpost stopovers.

Not that I got as much enjoyment from shore leave as someone who didn’t have my past. I never stayed long in one place, and I never really relaxed, no matter how luxurious the accommodations. My instincts urged me to keep moving. Too many people wanted me dead. A target who stayed in motion was much more difficult to take out.

Right now, all I wanted was to deliver my cargo to Ymar II, get paid, and set course for Outpost 600. If I was lucky, my favorite freighter mechanic would still be living and working there, and both Nebula and I could get well-serviced during our stay.

Nebula was a mid-sized single pilot freighter with a cockpit, a captain’s quarters, and two small cabins I used for storage since I had no crew but Mechabot. The ship also included an engine control room, a minimal medical bay, and its enormous cargo hold. I would be the first to admit she was fully utilitarian and would never win any beauty contests, but she was reliable, tough, and perfect for a former mercenary soldier who preferred the solitude of lengthy deep-space freight runs.

I’d only made it halfway to the cockpit from the engine room when an alarm sounded and warning lights flashed red all around me. “Stasis pod systems failure detected in the cargo hold,” the ship’s computer announced.

“What the hells?” I stopped in the middle of the corridor. “Computer, what stasis pod?”

“Unidentified stasis pod detected in the cargo hold.” The computer’s utterly unemotional voice contrasted sharply with my anger and confusion. “Life-threatening conditions observed. Do you wish to cancel this alert?”

“No, I do not wish to cancel the alert,” I snapped. “But silence the alarm so I can think .”

The noise shut off abruptly. The emergency lights along the corridor remained on. Not really necessary, since I was seeing red anyway.

What the hells stasis pod? I fumed.

The cargo manifest for this job had not included a stasis pod. If it had, I wouldn’t have taken the gig. Every booking agent I worked with knew I did not transport people aboard my freighter for any price—not as passengers, not as crew, and most definitely not as cargo. So someone had snuck this pod aboard my ship, hidden among the supplies intended for the Ymar II colony.

I opened my weapons storage, stuck my pulse gun and a couple of my favorite blades into my thigh holsters, and ran for the closest entrance to the cargo bay.

At the entry, I pressed my palm to the scanner and unlocked the hold. The doors rattled and whined as they opened. I sighed. I really needed to get Mechabot to fix these doors once it repaired life support.

Nebula ’s cargo bay made up three quarters of the ship’s total volume—typical of mid-sized deep space freighters. The supplies ordered by the Ymar II colony filled the bay completely. I’d supervised the load-in and not spotted the stasis pod, so it was hidden somewhere among the mountains of stacked containers.

“Computer, location of the malfunctioning stasis pod?” I called.

The computer chirped to signal that it was scanning. “Quadrant Delta,” it replied. “Container listed on manifest as XKDP6335, food waste processing unit and related materials.”

Luckily, Quadrant Delta was against the hull on the starboard side of the hold and easily accessible. Once I got close, urgent beeping led me straight to one container in particular. XKDP6335 turned out to be a large unit about four meters wide by five meters tall and twelve meters long. Two more identical units were stacked on top of it.

The shipping agent had locked the container. According to my contract, I had to leave that lock intact or risk a deduction from my payout for its compromised contents. Given the work I needed done on my ship, money had a strong claim to the top of my list of concerns. However, slightly above that was wanting to know who the hells was stashed in this container. Plus I still had six Earth-standard days of travel to get to Ymar II and I didn’t want to spend them with a corpse in the cargo hold.

I had to consider that this could be a ploy to get me to open the container, where an assassin might lie in wait. Despite how carefully I had built my new identity since leaving the mercenary guild, a past enemy could have tracked me down or hired someone to find me. That was an argument for leaving the container locked, dropping it on Ymar II, and letting its contents be their problem.

On the other hand, if a potential assassin didn’t have a way to open it from the inside, they would hardly have locked themselves in and gambled I’d voluntarily open it. So either I had to open it now or risk the person inside opening it later.

Meanwhile, the beeping had turned into a full-fledged alarm that indicated the stasis pod had reached critical failure. If there really was someone in the pod, I was about to have a corpse on my hands who wouldn’t be able to answer any questions without the help of a medium.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I typed my override code into the container door’s keypad, got ready to shoot anything that moved, and yanked the door open.