The Mystery Box
“The sisters hardly ever talked about the infuriating reality that sometimes the most significant moments remain unanswerable and unexplained.”
It started with a shriek so loud Denver could scarcely believe it could have come out of her sister. Even on the flight deck with the door shut, the scream woke Denver from a dead sleep, and it was followed by a second scream and the sound of a skirmish, bodies jarring back and forth against the narrow hallway walls in the back of the ship.
Denver leapt out of the captain’s chair and rushed toward the commotion. When she got round the circular corridor of their small cargo carrier, her sister, Kilty, was halfway hunched down in a tangled ball along the wall, engaged in a wrestling match with a blur that seemed simultaneously to be pushing Kilty downward while trying to pull away, back toward the rear-facing ramp.
“Andrew!” Kilty was shouting. “Andrew!”
The android came rushing up the back ramp of the ship just as Denver jumped into the fray. She had no idea what this blur was, but she wasn’t about to allow it to assault her sister without having her say in the matter.
“Let go,” came a voice from the blur. The audio sounded like the external speaker from a space helmet.
Andrew stood at the inner edge of the ramp observing the scene. He put up the ship’s ramp behind him.
“What are you waiting for!” Kilty shouted to him.
Denver had already jumped onto the blur at the source of the voice, and her hands confirmed her suspicions. She felt the round hard polymer of a space helmet, though it was entirely transparent—not totally invisible, more that she could see all the way through the suit but not the wearer inside. It was like perfect camouflage, but as the suit moved, it became blurry, making it slightly visible.
“Don’t make me shock you,” the voice came again as Denver struggled to find the catch point on the collar.
It was a fight, which, Denver thought, meant he either wasn’t very strong, or he wasn’t a he. It was difficult to tell in that frenetic, struggling mass of three bodies, one of which was almost invisible, but he didn’t seem much bigger than she or Kilty, and he was struggling to fight off the two sisters, the younger of whom was now lying on her side on the floor, clutching onto one of the two nearly invisible legs.
“I got him!” Kilty said.
She’d found an ankle, and she was working one of her legs around his lower leg. Denver couldn’t exactly tell what Kilty was up to, but she seemed to be working her way toward an ankle lock. The intruder was struggling to knock Denver loose from the grip she had on his helmet, but he couldn’t get his arm around, limited as he was by the suit’s range of motion. But Denver couldn’t find the catch point for the helmet in the tussle either. It seemed like a stalemate.
“Let go please, Ms. Denver,” Andrew said calmly, latching onto a flailing transparent wrist. “I have him.”
Denver let go. Just in time. The intruder charged his suit, sending a shockwave along the exterior of his body.
Kilty leapt back screaming, and the blurry body almost disappeared. Andrew stood stock still, seeming to hold that lone wrist in his hand like a mime wrestling the head of an imaginary snake. Andrew reached his other hand forward while pulling back the intruder’s wrist, and as soon as he’d made contact with the intruder’s chest, he slammed the culprit to the wall with a short, sharp, concussive push that was so violent it sounded to the two sisters like multiple bones had to have broken.
“Do not resist,” Andrew stated. “We do not wish to harm you, but we will.”
For a moment, it was difficult for the sisters to tell what was happening. Andrew was standing perfectly still, and the blur had all but vanished.
“Ms. Denver, would you remove the helmet, please.”
At those words, the blur began to struggle again, pulling away from Andrew.
“I’ll break your wrist before you wrench yourself free, young man,” Andrew said.
As Denver again tried to get hold of the helmet, the wearer put another charge through the suit. Fortunately Denver only had her fingertips on the helmet and was able to pull her hand back quickly enough to avoid the full charge that Kilty had gotten.
She was on the floor still, recovering her senses, but the moment she saw Denver pull her hand back, shaking it in pain, a switch went off. She was done with this.
She started to push herself to her feet. “Oh, no you don’t. Come on our ship? Steal from our clients? Shock my sister!”
The blur’s outline was clear enough, and Kilty squared up and kicked the intruder dead in the crotch full force, leaving absolutely no doubt that he was a he.
He let out a howl that was loud enough to hear through the helmet.
“Don’t shock us again!” Kilty ordered.
The blur had collapsed forward on two knees, his free hand planted on the deck in a tripod while Andrew retained a firm hold of the intruder’s other wrist. He was hunched over in a position that allowed Denver to feel for the catch point on the back of the helmet, which she gingerly unlocked and twisted. She removed the helmet, which seemed to materialize in her hands out of thin air, revealing the back of a young man’s head. He was completely doubled over, coughing. Kilty leaned over to get a look at him, but he was in such agony that he wasn’t even able to raise his head to look back her way.
Denver grabbed the intruder by the back of the suit’s collar to bring him up to his knees.
“Please,” he said. “Please. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
Denver couldn’t see his face from where she was standing behind him, but she could see the look of shock on Kilty’s.
“You’re a young pup for a cartel thief,” Kilty said. “You picked the wrong ship, boy-o.”
“Please, I’m sorry,” the boy said. “Please, let me go.”
“Like hell,” Denver said. “Let’s get this suit off him. We can lock him in Cargo 3 until we figure out what to do with him.”
Kilty was up on the flight deck with Andrew watching their guest in the locked cargo closet. The boy wasn’t inside and alone for much longer than a few seconds before the waterworks started. It wasn’t the reaction of a cartel thief, not by a long shot. And this teenager, stripped from the spacesuit, had the look and accent of a schoolboy from one of the residential worlds of the inner Letters, one of the Betas perhaps. And the way he cried was real—one of those whole-body cries, where before long he was looking for a tissue and finding nothing but his base layer. He was hunched over on his side, all balled up, his face buried in his shirt.
Denver appeared behind Kilty, looking over her shoulder at the small floatscreen hovering over the FO’s chair where Kilty was seated.
“Doesn’t that just wrench the heart?” Denver said, a cutting sarcasm discernible in her tone.
“Actually, kinda, yeah,” Kilty said. “I don’t know about this boy.”
“Such a sweet, soft heart you have, baby sister,” Denver replied. “That box you said he was after? We’d have been working off the contract on it for half a year.”
“It’s not insured?”
“That’s why the COP on it was so high. It’s on us if it doesn’t make it to delivery.”
“Makes me wonder a little.”
“Yeah, don’t get any ideas. As soon as we figure out what to do with weeping Willie here, we’re going straight to Beta-Coronado with that item to offload it.”
“The thing I can’t figure out is this kid,” Kilty said, staring up at the screen, where the boy was still crying, softly now. “He doesn’t fit. Not with the Rexes. Not with this place.”
“Not with that spacesuit either, that’s for sure,” Denver added.
“The suit, right.”
“Come have a look at it,” Denver said. “Wildest tech I’ve seen in a while.”
Kilty turned and followed her older sister and their Andrew to the lunch table midships, where Denver had the suit laid out like a piece of drying laundry with the helmet sitting on the suit’s torso, keeping it from sliding off the table under the suit’s considerable weight.
“Any idea where he might have gotten gear like that?” Kilty asked.
Denver shook her head, handing a loose glove to her younger sister for inspection.
“This is Trasp technology,” Andrew stated.
“You’re certain of that?” Denver asked.
“One hundred percent,” Andrew answered. “The helmet contour matches the geometric outlines of standard issue deep-space combat suits of their Lunar Rangers. I’ve never heard of that kind of gear having the stealth properties this suit has, but either the Trasp have that tech and are using it or this suit has been adapted.”
“I’d bet good credit on two things,” Kilty said. “That boy’s no Trasp Moon Ranger, and he sure as hell didn’t adapt this suit to disappear.”
“So where’d he get it, you reckon?” Denver asked. “The Rexes? If they really wanted our mystery box back there, why would they send a kid like weeping Willie? Wouldn’t they put that suit on a proper dude?”
“We could ask the boy?” Kilty suggested.
“I kinda just want him and that box off the ship, K.”
“It couldn’t hurt to ask him.”
“Oh, it’s not the asking, I’m worried about. It’s just, I have this feeling the deeper this goes, the more we’re going to regret asking, and I know I won’t regret turfing that boy out into the loading bay in his underwear and letting the Rexes deal with him, or whomever.”
“Really?” Kilty asked. “You want to put that boy in the hands of the Rexes? Out here?”
Denver shook her head, extending her hand to take back the glove.
“That suit, wherever he got it, could easily cover the contract price of the item he came to steal,” their Andrew stated. “So regardless of what you decide to do with him, you’ve taken no losses yet.”
“Yet,” Denver said. “That’s the operative word. The longer we sit in this bay waiting for someone to make another attempt, the more likely we are to start taking losses. I say we pitch him out the back and be done with it.”
“Something must pass for law here,” Kilty suggested. “Even out here in the Gammas.”
Denver shook her head. “I just know that if you go in there and listen to whatever sob story that boy pitches at you, we’re going to end up in a mess.”
“It can’t hurt to ask, Denver.”
“Just remember who came onto whose ship to rip us off, baby sister, and how that fight might have gone if Andrew and I hadn’t been here to jump in.”
Kilty shrugged. “I know how it did go. How it goes now is entirely up to us.”
“No. Me,” Denver insisted. “It’s up to me. When Mom and Dad retire and give you a ship of your own, you can do whatever you want with the local delinquents.”
“Yeah, of course,” Kilty said. “That’s what I meant, Denver, obviously.”
Kilty had Andrew do a little research on the outpost before going in to talk with their young intruder. The legal system on Gamma-Merced was a hodge-podge of independent regional sectors, most of which fell under an elected sheriff. In the port where they were docked, the Sheriff was a woman named Kayna Stoll, in her mid-fifties, a stout, ill-humored person from the look of her official picture, and given the nature of the territory, more than likely nearly as corrupt as the Rexes themselves. After digging a bit further, Andrew confirmed that Gamma-Merced outsourced their colony corrections to Dinzer-C, one of the two major prison management corporations in the Letters, who stayed in business providing cheap human labor under cost.
“What’s he likely to serve for armed robbery and assault?” Kilty asked Andrew. “For a juvenile?”
“Assuming they’d treat him as a juvenile? Precedent would dictate about four years. Ten if they treated him as an adult.”
“What are the odds they’d treat him as an adult, Andrew?”
“Fifty-fifty, I’d wager.”
“Thank you, Andrew.”
Kilty sighed and started back toward Cargo 3.
When she opened the door, the boy sat up fast, wiping his eyes, seemingly embarrassed to be caught crying and completely unaware that they’d had him on their monitors the whole time he’d been in there.
“I have a lot of questions for you,” Kilty stated. “And don’t even think of trying anything. Andrew is right outside, and I have a shock box. Not sure if you’ve been on the receiving end in your life, but if it’s anything like the jolt your suit gave me, I can tell you it’s not so fun.”
“I’m sorry about that,” the boy said.
Kilty could see from his eyes he genuinely meant it.
“Hey,” he continued, “I know I’m not in any position to ask you for anything, but if I’m going to be here much longer before the Sheriff’s people get here, could you find it in your heart to maybe get me an icepack if you have one.”
“An icepack?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, grimacing and holding his groin, “I think you might have cracked something, you know, down there.”
Kilty tried but couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“It’s not that funny,” the boy said. “If you were worried about me running away, don’t be. I could barely manage to walk off this ship if you let me. Where’d you learn to kick like that? Martial arts?”
“Well, yes,” Kilty said. “Our parents made sure both of us learned to defend ourselves. It’s a necessary skill in our business, but I really learned to kick playing football as a kid.”
“That explains it.”
“And, yes,” Kilty said. “I think we can manage some ice. I’d like some answers to my questions, though.”
“They’re probably going to kill me either way,” the boy said, genuinely resigned to a grave fate from the sound of his tone.
Kilty let that comment hang there for the moment without inquiring further.
“Andrew,” she said, “Can you bring us some ice, please.”
“Yes, Ms. Kilty,” Andrew’s voice came over the ship’s PA. “I’ll be right down shortly.”
“That’s a pretty name,” the boy said.
Kilty got the sense that he meant that too. He didn’t seem like he was trying to butter her up. He seemed resigned.
“Speaking of names,” Kilty said. “That was one of my questions.”
“Rohan,” he replied. “Rohan Naylor.”
She looked at him probingly.
“Well, that’s it,” he said. “Rohan.”
“Where are you from, Rohan?”
He shrugged. “It’s been a long time since I could answer that question with a simple answer. I grew up in the inner Alpha-Ben cylinder group. I don’t know if you’d have heard or remember what happened there?”
“I remember. Were you there when it got hit?”
“No. I was on a class trip with my school—to Hellenia. And they moved everyone out, evacuated to ten different colonies throughout the Alphas. The Trasp only gave hardly three days’ warning, so it was total chaos, and nobody knew who went where. My school, we got sent to this city called Mingo.”
“Oh, my God,” Kilty said.
“You’ve heard about it?”
“Mingo, Slipstream, Varro, all the major cities on Koss. That’s some terrible luck, Rohan.”
He shook his head. “Luck? I don’t think so. The Trasp knew what they were doing. They knew the planets would be the only place that could take in that many refugees if they hit the cylinders. They wanted to clear those systems out.”
“Sorry that happened to you,” Kilty said. “Does that have anything to do with why you’re on our ship stealing from us?”
Rohan frowned. There was a knock at the outer door, and when Kilty signaled for Andrew to enter, the android opened the door, looked down at Rohan, and handed him an icepack and a towel. The boy grimaced, positioned the towel over his lap for modesty’s sake, and resituated himself.
“Thank you,” he said to Andrew.
To Kilty he seemed to say it as genuinely as though Andrew were a person. She’d always thought that was a decent proxy for whether someone was truly polite—how they treated artificial beings. This Rohan was continuing to defy the profile of a cartel thief. Andrew nodded and stepped out.
“How old are you, Rohan?”
“Fourteen,” he said, still trying to position himself in a reasonably tolerable way. He was still grimacing slightly.
“So all this happened when you were what? About twelve?”
“Yeah. We had a birthday cake with a few of my classmates and our host family just outside Mingo. Four days later, the Trasp came. Lucky number thirteen.”
“What have you been doing since?”
“For a while, after Koss, after the Trasp took it over, the Letters sent a lot of us younger refugees away from the lines. I ended up at a camp on this world in the Kappas, and I stayed there for a couple weeks, waiting to get word if anyone had news about my family, but it was the same for me and everyone else in that camp. I’d gotten scattered from my school getting off Koss. And I realized nobody was ever going to find my family for me, so I snuck onto a cargo freighter, and I’ve been wandering around looking for word of my parents and brothers ever since.”
“Onto a freighter? How did you survive the …” Kilty realized the answer before finishing the question. “Right. The suit, I’m guessing?”
“My host family was far enough outside Mingo that it wasn’t hopeless, but it was a chaotic few hours getting out of there with all of the civilians trying to escape and the Trasp coming in. There were blasts going off everywhere, ships going down. I got separated from my group, my host family. They didn’t wait for me. I just started following people across this plain toward an airfield out in the suburbs. When I found the suit, I couldn’t see the Moon Ranger wearing it at all. I was just running and tripped over something. I had to get down on all fours to find her and feel for what it was, because I couldn’t see her with the suit’s camouflage active. Near as I could tell, her drone suit had given out high up in the atmosphere and she fell. I figured I’d have a better chance getting away if the Trasp couldn’t see me either. So I took her suit and figured out how to trigger it to disappear. It keeps me warm and breathing in cargo crates too. I just have to make sure I have enough oxygen for the transit before freighthopping.”
“And you use it to rip off people like us when the opportunity crops up?”
Rohan, who’d been slowly sitting up straighter and looking Kilty in the eyes, dropped his head again.
“I try not to, Ms. Kilty. I really do. It’s just tough out here. I didn’t really mean to come all this way out into the Gammas. I just got stuck.”
“So, Rohan, you mind telling me what’s in that mystery box you were trying to steal from us?”
Rohan looked back at her, puzzled. “You mean you don’t know what you’re carrying?”
“That’s kind of our business, you know. Private curriers. Any system in the Letters and Inner Battery. We have a vague set of screening questions for our safety—nothing radioactive, nothing illegal, things like that. But we don’t ask what people are shipping unless they want to tell us. Most people don’t.”
“Oh,” Rohan said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. If I did, I think at this point I would tell you. I don’t have anything more to lose.”
“Why do you say that, Rohan?”
He shrugged. “You’re waiting for the Sheriff’s people, right? To hand me over?”
Kilty nodded.
“Either the Rexes will get me before I go in, or they’ll get me out on one of the workships or the prison colonies. But they’ll get me.”
“Why, Rohan?”
“I took a debt to get out here, and I took this job to get out of it. Whatever’s in that box, they want it bad. Between the debt and coming up short on this? Let’s just say I’ll need more than an icepack when they’re done with me.”
“Why would you take a debt to the Rexes? You know what they are, right?”
“There’s not a lot of cargo carriers come out to the Gammas, Ms. Kilty. I heard rumors from a couple of my last stops in the inner Alphas that some of the refugees from Koss got taken out this way. Turned out that was wrong, best I could find out. But I had to look.”
“How many systems have you been to?”
Rohan shook his head. “Some systems have a bunch of outposts. I have it all in the navigation card on the suit. I wrote most of the names down in my notepad. Maybe twenty-five systems. At least forty outposts counting this one, whatever this one is? Gamma-M-something. Merchant?”
“Gamma-Merced,” Kilty said.
“That’s it,” Rohan said. “Well, anyway. That’s all I know. I wish I could tell you what’s in that box. I just know they want it, and I wouldn’t hang around here long after the Sheriffs take me. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Rexes came after that package themselves as soon as they find out I got caught. And, for what it’s worth, you should be careful on the other end. If they can’t get it here, they might try there too.”
“Okay, Rohan. Thank you for letting us know about it. You hang tight here.”
She got up to leave, offering a muted smile.
“Ms. Kilty,” Rohan said. “I know it probably doesn’t mean all that much to you, and it definitely doesn’t make up for what I did, but I am sorry. I was told the ship would be empty, and I never wanted to hurt you or your sister. I just needed to get out of debt so I could get back to the Kappas and keep searching for my family.”
Kilty found Denver on the flight deck, checking up on the mystery box’s destination, Beta-Coronado, both the system charts and the port of Arkeon, where the package was scheduled to be delivered. Clearly, she’d been listening in on Kilty’s interrogation and was concerned about the Rexes on that end of the delivery.
“What did I tell you, little sister? That was some sob story. Poor little fella.”
“You don’t buy it, Denver?”
She shrugged. “Not enough to change the situation. Only question is whether we ping Sheriff Stoll or turf him out in his underwear and let the Rexes deal with him. Unless you have a better suggestion?”
Kilty sighed. “I don’t know. Regardless, I do think he’s telling the truth about the Rexes. We shouldn’t sit around here much longer.”
“Agreed,” Denver said. “My inclination is to put him out on the deck of the docking bay and be done with it.”
Kilty shook her head but didn’t respond. Denver, looking back over her shoulder, knew her sister’s body language well enough to see how she felt about that solution.
“You want to wait around for the Sheriff? He said himself it’s the same outcome. The Rexes will get him in jail. At least in the city he’s got a fighting chance to hide.”
“Can we just attempt to corroborate his story before putting the boy out to fend for himself?”
“How do you suggest doing that?”
“He said the suit has a data card in it, positioning records, and the metadata. We could ask him for a list from his memory and check it against the suit? Have Andrew cross-check what he says?”
“Andrew,” Denver said, “are you listening?”
He was in the rear of the ship, near the door to Cargo 3.
“I am, Ms. Denver. I can check the suit’s data and the boy’s notes. I also suggest that I interrogate him further. Inconsistencies with the data in the suit or with the story he told Ms. Kilty would indicate his level of forthrightness.”
“How long, Andrew?” Denver asked. “I don’t want to spend all day sitting in this docking bay if he’s telling the truth about the Rexes.”
“An hour, ma’am. Maybe two.”
“No, sorry,” Denver said. “The suit notwithstanding, this kid’s costing us money and putting us in further danger every minute we sit here.”
“Denver,” Kilty said. “he’s a kid.”
“So what, K? What does that change? We’ve got two options. Let him go here or call the Sheriff. Anything else and we become responsible.”
“We could let him off on Beta-Coronado. We’re going there anyway.”
“That’s a great idea, Kilty. So he can steal the package from our client the minute we deliver it? Or better yet, what if he’s just some local kid who’s full of it? You want to take responsibility for abducting a fourteen-year-old and dumping him all the way in the Betas?”
“Somewhere else along the way, maybe? Somewhere safe. If his story checks out, Denver.”
Denver shook her head and got up from the Captain’s chair.
“He comes to rob us, and you want to give him a ride, Kilty? Unbelievable.”
Denver walked back through the ship to Cargo 3, where Andrew was standing outside the door. She opened the door in a huff, motioning for Andrew to follow her in. The room was too small for Kilty to cram into as well, so she looked on from the corridor.
“I want video of this conversation as well please, Andrew,” Denver said, turning toward Rohan. “Here’s the deal, kid. We have you on video admitting to my sister that you came to our ship with the intention of robbing us this morning. Is that correct?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s correct. I’m very sorry abou—”
“Save it. You also admit that you assaulted both of us in the process.”
Rohan nodded. “That’s true, but I didn’t mean to—”
“Whatever. I’d be well within my rights to turn you over to the Sheriff right now and wash our hands of you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rohan said, looking down at the floor of the cargo closet.
“The one thing I believe in the story you told Kilty is that the Rexes are a threat to our ship. Is that correct?”
“I think so.”
“Sitting in port here? Right now?”
Rohan shrugged and nodded. “It’s tough to say exactly, but I think there’s a good chance.”
“I don’t want to sit here waiting for them to come after us. I also don’t want to abduct a lying kid. My sister wants to corroborate your story. In order to do that, I need you to tell me that we have your permission to take you out of the port with us so we can see any threats coming our way. Andrew’s going to ask you some questions. If you get any of those questions wrong, we’re coming right back here and handing you to the Sheriff. If you’re not okay with that I’m calling her right now. Do you understand?”
“That’s fine,” Rohan said. “I’d be okay with that. I don’t want to go to jail.”
“Good enough,” Denver said. “Andrew, I want him strapped in one of the jump seats by the time we take off in five minutes. Then you have two hours to interrogate him.”
“Yes, Ms. Denver.”
They shut the boy in the room so Andrew and Kilty could secure the ship for takeoff. As Denver headed back to the flight deck, she turned to Kilty angrily. “If he’s full of it and we end up dumping him back on the Sheriff anyway, which we inevitably will, the docking fees are on you, K.”
A few minutes later, Denver took the ship out and drifted at a distance from the outpost, far enough out that any ship approaching them would signal bad intentions with an intercepting course. Denver wasn’t taking any chances with the Rexes, not while that mystery box was still on their ship.
Andrew, meanwhile, spent nearly the full two hours interrogating their young guest. After going through both the boy’s notes in the data card and the suit’s metadata, he asked Rohan to take him through his travels by memory, line by line, originating on the date he came across the suit on Alpha-Koss, outpost by outpost, and the boy was able to recount his journey with surprising accuracy. He missed some of the names, but Andrew was able to corroborate most of Rohan’s story. More importantly, he didn’t contradict any of the details he’d given Kilty in her interrogation earlier in the day.
Kilty and Denver were strapped in on the flight deck when Andrew pinged them on the PA. “I calculate with a confidence of over ninety-eight percent, the boy is who he claims to be.”
“Okay, thank you, Andrew,” Denver said, closing the channel and looking over at her younger sister. “Now what, genius? I presume you still don’t want to turf him out?”
“We can’t put that boy in jail, Denver, not after everything he’s been through.”
“Fine. Let’s go talk to him then,” Denver said. “And you let me do the talking.”
Kilty nodded and gestured for Denver to lead the way back to the cargo room again. When she opened the door, Rohan was free-floating, and by his reaction, must have dozed off, for his eyes popped open, startled by the sound of the door handle.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“I’d like to ask you a couple more questions,” Denver said. “We’re not going to hand you over to the Sheriff, Rohan. I believe that you might end up dead if we put you in jail. I want to know a couple things, though, honestly.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If you had succeeded and got hold of that package as planned and given it to the Rexes, what would they have given you for it?”
“I had a debt of almost two hundred L-Cr that they were going to clear, and they said they’d pay me an additional four for the box.”
“Six hundred?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Damn,” Kilty said, clutching the doorway as she floated beside her sister.
“And what would you have done after you cleared that money? What was your plan after? Obviously, you didn’t expect things to go down this way.”
“No, I certainly didn’t,” Rohan said. “As I said earlier, I already figured out none of my people made it out this far into the Gammas. That money would have been enough to keep me straight for maybe a couple months, plus legitimate transport out. I didn’t have a definite destination, but I was thinking of heading back to the Kappas.”
“Do you know where we’re heading?”
“No, ma’am.”
“We’re going to get that damn box the Rexes want off our ship.”
“That’s a good idea, I think,” Rohan said. “The sooner it’s out of your hands, the safer you’ll be. Hot potato, so they say, whatever that means.”
“I’d rather not leave you off in the same port as the item, for a number of reasons, but I’d be willing to drop you somewhere nearby in the Betas if you’d like.”
“Oh, ma’am,” Rohan said. “Ms. Denver, I can’t …”
Rohan began to tear up again, this time it was a mixture of joy, relief, and gratitude all rolled into one emotion he couldn’t contain.
“I can’t even tell you how …” again, he couldn’t even get the words out.
“Okay,” Denver said. “I’ll take that as a yes?”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he blurted out. “Thank you so much.”
“Quit your blubbering and strap in. We’ll jump straightaway.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I had some things down on the—” Then he stopped, reconsidering. “But they’re definitely, not worth going back for.”
“That’s good,” Denver said, shaking her head. “Because the ship’s departing presently.”
It was nearly a four-day transit back to the Betas from Gamma-Merced. The boy got hungry, and, as he explained to Kilty, he’d hardly eaten in the two days prior to boarding their ship to begin with.
“I ain’t feeding you for free either,” Denver told him.
“Can I do something?” Rohan suggested. “Some job none of you wants?”
“That’s what Andrew’s for, kid,” Denver said. “I’ve got something else in mind.”
She explained to him that she never had any intention of letting him get off their ship with that Trasp suit so he could go around ripping off other unsuspecting captains all over the Lettered Systems.
“But I’ll give you a fair price for it,” Denver told him.
At first, he was crestfallen, having his most important mode of travel suddenly taken off the table, and as he protested, both Denver and Kilty told him a fourteen-year-old shouldn’t be wandering around the galaxy on his own anyway. He needed to be settled, minding his lessons, living with a family in a stable environment, and that when the time came for him to do it safely, there’d be plenty of jobs that would allow him to travel all over the Letters looking for his family.
“You said you’d give me a fair price,” Rohan said. “I don’t have any idea what that’d be.”
“Fifteen hundred,” Denver said. “That’s generous under the circumstances, I’d say, but I’m not going to chisel a kid out of his last worldly possession.”
Rohan’s eyes got wide, and Denver stopped him before he started tearing up again.
“For someone who’s been out own his own taking hard knocks for two years you sure cry easy,” she teased him. “Just imagine what the Trasp Ranger you pulled out of that suit would have thought of you.”
Rohan hadn’t imagined he’d ever see that kind of credit in his lifetime.
“Eat your fill,” Denver said. “It may be a week or two before we find a proper place to drop you, and you don’t need to be getting any skinnier.”
The closer they got to Beta-Coronado, the more nervous Rohan got. “I don’t want anything to happen to you two,” he told Kilty when she asked him why he’d gone so quiet around the ship. “I don’t know what they think happened to me, but I know the Rexes won’t think twice about whether I’m okay or not, just vengeance if I turn up safe. But they also won’t think twice about doing violence to get what they want. And they want what’s in that box.”
“You really don’t know what’s in it?” Kilty asked him.
“No, but it’s right back there if you really want to know.”
Kilty shook her head. “That’s the first rule of what we do. We only have to break it once to lose everything our family has worked for three generations now to build. It’s not just our ship but our parents’ ship, our brother’s, and our cousins who took over for two other aunts and uncles. We wouldn’t put all their livelihoods in jeopardy over our curiosity.”
“I understand,” Rohan said. “Still, I think we should have a plan on delivering that package.”
“We?” Kilty asked.
“You know,” Rohan said. “I’m not bad at sneaking around places and getting things done when nobody’s looking. That’s why the Rexes even trusted me with this job in the first place. It wasn’t the first time I’d worked for them.”
“It was the last, though, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rohan promised. “I’ll never cause anyone to get hurt again.”
“Denver and I will figure something out,” Kilty said.
Rohan didn’t much care for the plan the sisters did come up with, mostly because it involved him getting locked up in the storage closet again.
The suit, they discovered, had a flexible enough outer to fit Denver, Kilty, and most importantly for this plan, even their Andrew. And the mystery box itself was small enough that Andrew could zip it up inside the torso of the suit and walk down the streets of Beta-Coronado almost completely unseen.
Kilty had scanned the box and printed an identical decoy, which she would walk to a different destination on the other side of the city from the delivery address, drawing any potential attention from the Rexes her way while their Andrew delivered the real item. Denver would follow her sister at a distance and watch her back in case anything went wrong. They told Rohan they thought he could be trusted, just that they weren’t ready to bet their ship or their lives on it. So he was going into the closet until the drop went down.
“I think I could be more helpful,” he told them. “I’ll do whatever you say, but I’d like to help.”
“Best thing you can do for us is be safe and out of mind,” Denver told him. “We’ve been doing this a while, kid. We’ll be just fine without your help.”
Rohan watched as the sisters laid out their plan as they approached Beta-Coronado at sublight. Their parents had taught them the trade from an early age. They were accustomed to transporting hard currency and valuable items, so they were well trained in threat assessment, situational awareness, and self-defense. Invisible intruders notwithstanding, theirs was not an easy crew to surprise. And with Andrew aboard, they had plenty of practice operating as a three-person tactical unit.
They sat, strapped in at the lunch table while Rohan looked on, floating nearby as they reviewed their route, flagging pinch points, obstructions, exit strategies, and contingencies for all types of scenarios—Rohan couldn’t believe how much could go into a simple distraction and delivery operation.
He still didn’t feel good about it as they were landing, though.
“I really wish you’d let me come with you, Ms. Denver,” he said as they were shutting him in.
“Just sit tight,” she told him. “If we’re not back in two hours, I’ve set the ship’s AI to allow you access to call out. But we should be back in twenty minutes tops. The back ramp locks behind us, and no one’s getting in. Everything will be fine.”
She could see the look of trepidation on his face as she shut him in Cargo 3 again, she hoped for the last time.
Kilty walked out first with the decoy. She did her best to act as though her situation was genuine. She opted for an external mid-thigh holster for her bolt-gun, and she made a point to watch her surroundings carefully, almost performatively so.
Andrew came down the ramp after the younger sister. He’d been fully briefed by Rohan on ways to move in the suit to improve its effectiveness camouflaging the wearer—fluid as opposed to sharp movements, slower as opposed to faster movements. And, Andrew, once he had minimal practice at the correct movement patterns, could repeat them with perfect fidelity. As long as no one was looking directly at him with thermals, he was going to be nearly impossible to spot.
Last came Denver, following her sister from about fifty meters back, trailing in constant audio contact by headset. Close enough that she could always see Kilty in front of her. Far enough that it would take genuine coordination from a team to pinch both of them, and the Rexes, even though they were the biggest cartel in the Letters, seldom had such disciplined people.
Their two routes diverged almost immediately, with Andrew tailing off into the back avenues of the main city, while Kilty’s route had enough people on it to make the Rexes think twice about starting serious trouble.
Denver didn’t reckon there’d be any trouble. They’d come straight from the Gammas, and, she figured, if the box had really been so top-priority, the Rexes wouldn’t have sent a kid after it in the first place.
Over the course of the first ten minutes of Kilty’s walk, neither of the sisters had seen any signs anyone was tracking them at all. Andrew, meanwhile, was reporting in at intervals, also sending back a steady string of “all clears.”
Finally, the call came from Andrew that the package had been delivered to the recipient, signed for, with payment rendered.
Kilty began to look for a place to dispose of the decoy before turning back toward the ship—a doorstep, a drop box, even a garbage can would do with no visible tail on her. Neither of the sisters wanted to waste any time, but they also didn’t aim to be too obvious either.
Kilty was at an intersection where two streets met at right angles. There were only a few pedestrians between her and Denver, who had crept up to about thirty meters to stay within a block of her sister.
The assailants came at Kilty from three different directions—straight ahead and both sides—just as she passed the edge of the building on the corner of the block. They rushed her so fast and with such coordination that Kilty, whose instinct would almost always have been to draw, instead dropped right to her knees with her hands up, placing the decoy on the ground, and stating, “Shit, okay. Take it. Take it. Take it.”
“Hands! Hands! Hands!” Denver heard loud voices echoing off the building.
She heard them continuing to shout at Kilty as she started into a dead sprint toward her sister.
Kilty, meanwhile, as soon as one of the assailants had grabbed the package, got up and retreated toward Denver, her hands still raised. One of the men took the package, one vanished around the corner, and another followed behind Kilty at a brisk walk for a few meters, keeping his weapon trained on her as he followed.
As Denver approached, still at full sprint, Kilty’s pursuer holstered his weapon and ran off across the street.
“On me, on me, K,” Denver stated, still several steps away.
It was only then she noticed the look on Kilty’s face and realized that something had truly gone wrong. Denver saw Kilty, wide-eyed, draw down on someone or something behind her. In that split second, Denver realized she’d become so drawn forward by the threat to her sister that she’d completely lost track of her six. She began to draw herself, turning in the same motion, and behind her, no more than ten meters away was another cartel gunman coming up on her, masked, weapon drawn, and a half step behind him, bar-wrench in hand, was Rohan, too close for either of the two women to dare risk a shot.
“Rohan, no!” Denver heard Kilty scream, just as the boy lunged and leveled a mighty swipe at the gunman’s arm.
In those few seconds, on that small stretch of street in Beta-Coronado, there was nowhere safe to stand. Denver was perhaps in the worst place, between Kilty and the cartel gunman, who’d begun to fire as he sensed Rohan coming over his shoulder.
After he struck the gunman’s forearm with the bar-wrench, the boy fell headfirst to the ground, lifeless, setting off a chain of bolt blasts at close range that happened so fast it was impossible for Denver to even aim or think. Twenty rounds, it had to have been. She unloaded her weapon in shock and disbelief that it could be happening. Then, before her, the gunman dropped to the footpath beside the boy, stone-dead.
Denver turned, wide-eyed, to see Kilty, a few steps behind her, still standing, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging open.
“Are you hit?” Denver shouted. “K, are you hit?”
Kilty was too shocked to even answer. Denver rushed over to the gunman and kicked away the weapon that had clacked away from his hand as he’d hit the footpath.
“Rohan,” she shouted, crawling over the gunman.
The boy was bleeding profusely from his forehead, and Denver frantically swept her hands up and down his’s body, looking for other wounds.
“We need to go,” Kilty said, her eyes staring down the street all the way to the horizon. “We need to get out of here.”
“Get over here, K!” Denver shouted, turning the boy over and pulling him into her arms.
“This can’t be happening,” Kilty said, a trance-like tone to her voice. “This isn’t real.”
“He’s breathing,” Denver said. “Kilty, help me. Help!”
It was almost as though, for those few minutes following the shooting, language no longer had meaning for her, as though her body was suddenly empty. Kilty finally moved closer and took up the boy under his shoulder, locking arms with her older sister and running, pulling the boy along, his feet dragging behind them as blood ran all over his forehead and down his lifeless face. They had only carried him for a block before Andrew arrived at a full android sprint, taking up the boy in his arms.
From that moment, neither sister had a memory of their run back to the ship nor of their flight from the system. The shock of the moment, the gravity and suddenness of it all, was too much to process. There was an endless loop of questions whose origin was the boy and whose constant two-word refrain rang in both sisters’ minds: what happened?
What happened?
In quieter times, in a system like Beta-Coronado, unanswered questions regarding a shooting in broad daylight involving seven people, over twenty rounds, a disappearing victim who appeared to be a juvenile, and a dead cartel member, would not have gone unanswered. That wouldn’t have been tolerable. The incident happened, though, only weeks after the Lambda-Shadra massacre. Violence—of the war itself or of the populace, in the shadow of darkness or of the light of day—it seemed to be erupting everywhere. And in the very days following the incident on Beta-Coronado, the Trasp hit several contested outposts along the border with the Alphas, drawing casualties in the tens of thousands, causing millions of already beleaguered civilians to be further displaced.
It was difficult for either sister to fathom that they could simply fly away from the port and never be called to answer some of the questions, like how, with all their training and preparation, they ever let a seemingly simple delivery come to the point it ended with a firefight in the streets of a peaceful city over a useless decoy. Those were questions that even after countless hours reviewing their footage they had no meaningful answers for.
They had questions of their own too, like how the boy ever got past the locked hatch, or what that gunman’s purpose was and whether he’d have ever fired on anyone if the boy had remained in the ship as he’d been instructed. Or what the hell that boy thought he could possibly accomplish by trying to guard their backs with a bar-wrench—if that’s what he was even trying to do.
Above all, in the months that followed, they wondered about Rohan, who never quite regained consciousness in their presence, before, by some miraculous touch of fate, they happened to hear the nearby call sign of a hospital frigate in service to the Semmistratum, returning to the front from the Lambdas.
The sisters hardly ever talked about the infuriating reality that sometimes the most significant moments remain unanswerable and unexplained. They endure. They haunt. They live in your soul. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. Still the universe refuses to explain itself.
The boy, Rohan Naylor, for his part, had few answers when he regained consciousness aboard the Semmistratum hospital ship Nexus. Just that he’d hit his head and couldn’t remember how it happened, or even how he’d gotten to the Semmistratum. His family. He’d been searching for his family ever since the Trasp had attacked his home in the Alpha-Ben cylinder group.
“Alpha-Ben?” his nurse said, shaking her head. “That was so long ago I can hardly remember. So much has happened. But if anybody can help you track down your family, Rohan, it’s us. We hold the largest refugee database in the Battery. If they’re still out there somewhere, we can help you find your family.”
Rohan Naylor remembered the sisters, Kilty and Denver, and their ship, out there somewhere, tracing through the galaxy delivering an unending stream of unknown items. He remembered them, yes, but he couldn’t remember saying goodbye, nor did he ever have the chance to thank them properly for delivering him to the people who would one day reunite him with his family.