Smuggler’s Beauty

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Hinky.

That was the best word to describe the current job Aiden was on.

It wasn’t just that the client had been stingy with information regarding her motives. As far as Aiden was concerned, her business was her business. He had all the data he needed to breach the ship without setting off any security systems thanks to Vinnie’s data packet.

It was more the way she’d conveyed the information. One crumb at a time.

“Gig of the century,” she’d said. “Heist of a lifetime.”

And then she’d reeled his whole crew in with a ridiculous retainer. Credits upon credits tumbling into their escrow account like loose slot machines turning over on a lucky push of a button.

The crew of the Rising Dawn couldn’t afford to say no to a payday like that. They all had their debts, their nests to feather, their indulgences that required a ready flow of cash.

But now, as Aiden looked at the ship he was about to board, he knew what it all added up to.

Hinky.

The ship they were tasked with breaking into was supposed to be an abandoned research vessel.

Vinnie had claimed it was chock full of discarded medical tech she could sell at a premium to any of the planets refusing to bend the knee to the Galactic Planetary Collective.

Those planets maintained their independence, but at the expense of access to the GPC’s vast resources.

Such supplies could turn a fat profit, fast.

And a fast payday was very appealing to Aiden right now. The more swiftly Tariel was out from under his absurd divorce settlement, the better. Then Aiden could finally tell his moms that he needed to get off the Dawn without letting down his family.

“Can you zoom in on the hull?” Aiden asked Cairn.

His pilot nodded and pushed a few buttons on the control panel. The image cleared. Cairn took the opportunity to unwrap a pineapple hard candy and offered another to Aiden.

“Am I crazy or is that one hell of a paint job?” Cairn asked. He squinted his blue eyes at the screen, straining to make out the finer details of the medivessel’s hull.

Aiden shook his head, his overlong brown hair flopping over his green eyes as he focused on the ship.

Its hull looked worn at first glance, but the stippling effect was apparent when you took a second — or third — glance.

The ship had been expertly camouflaged to look as if it had been floating around in space for the last half century.

There were faux scrapes along the sides of the hull; sponged on rust-colored paint imitated corrosion around the entry port.

There was even a substantial three-dimensional dent on the port side.

“I’m vaguely concerned about the quantity of artificial pineapple in your bloodstream, but otherwise you’re pretty stable.” Still staring at the ship, Aiden took a pineapple candy and popped it in his mouth.

The moment he placed the wrapper on his thigh, it started to levitate, bouncing gently up and down as Aiden absentmindedly used his telekinesis.

It was something he did when he was thinking, manipulating small objects the way some people clicked pens or tapped their feet.

Unintentional fidgeting that helped clear the mind by keeping the body busy.

“Why would anyone take the time to disguise a ship like this and then leave it unprotected in open space?” Cairn asked.

“Hiding in plain sight is usually the right move if you want to go undetected. Your wife is always telling us to be more subtle. Could be the camouflage keeps scavengers at bay.”

Cairn grinned and crunched down on the candy and waggled his bushy red eyebrows at Aiden.

“True. And her advice has saved our collective asses more times than I can count. Veronique knows subtlety.”

“That she does. It makes it doubly strange that she married you,” Aiden said with a grin, “but she knows subtle.” Looking from the ship to Cairn, Aiden sighed and dragged his hand roughly down his neatly trimmed beard. “This feels wrong, Cairn. Vinnie didn’t give us nearly enough intel.”

The ship was where it had been promised to be, it just wasn’t as it had been promised. How bad was the rest of the intel? Would the codes even work? His candy wrapper dropped to the ground. Cairn swiped it off the floor and placed it with his pile of candy detritus.

“Aye. But she also gave us a shit ton of money up front.”

“That she did.” Aiden nodded. He paced the few steps the cockpit of the small jump ship allowed, tugging on his beard as he mulled the details their benefactor had given them. “Why the hell would she do that?”

Disgusted with the lack of space, he threw himself back into the co-pilot’s seat.

“We’ll never know until you get into that boat and see what’s what. Could be she’s in some weird prank war with an eccentric weirdo. Could be there really is an abandoned cache in that ship that will help her line her pockets. So call it, kid. You going in or are we cutting our losses?”

Aiden glared at Cairn. He snatched a candy from the bag Cairn had propped on the bridge, unwrapped it and sent the clear packaging into the air.

Several more wrappers from the pile in front of Cairn joined his, creating a clear, floating, pineapple-scented Ferris wheel.

He felt a little petty satisfaction as Cairn failed to contain a shudder at his casual use of telekinesis.

Humanity on Earth had only started exhibiting extrasensory phenomena about a generation ago, and Cairn was still uneasy around it.

It made visiting planets where psychic phenomena were commonplace a challenge for the maintenance of the pilot’s poker face.

Still, he never complained when the credits landed in their accounts.

“Firstly, you’re like, ten months older than I am,” Aiden said, popping the candy into his mouth. Artificial pineapple shards flooded his taste buds, the sharp sugar digging into his tongue as he thought.

The sensible thing to do in this situation would be to tell Cairn to turn the ship around and head back to the Dawn.

This gig was turning into yet one more example of why Aiden was sick of his job.

It wasn’t the plotting or the scheming. He was quite good at logistics.

He liked the stealing, being places he shouldn’t, getting away with a score.

But he had had it with the goddamn clients.

The fact that this goddamn client was offering him enough money to split with a clear conscience was absolutely slaying his reasoning skills.

“It just feels . . . hinky.” He sighed and focused on Cairn. “We have everything we need in here to wire me up? I want your eyes on this, too. Shit goes sideways, you take off and get the rest of the crew on it.”

“Relax. How bad could it be?”

“Well, that was a dumbass thing to say.”

Aiden adjusted the mask of his spacesuit and knocked on the inner door of the airlock, then enabled the security jammer in the inner pocket of his suit while he waited for Cairn to release the outer lock.

Crinkling his nose twice, he enabled the streaming function in the old fashioned horn-rimmed glasses he wore under his helmet.

With a hiss, the door slid open and Aiden floated out into the vast cold expanse of space.

He had a brief moment of panic every time he left a ship in only the thin material that made up his spacesuit.

Surely this would be the time that a pinprick in a seam would cause his imminent death by suffocation.

It hadn’t happened yet, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t.

They could tout the sophistication of these thermo-polymer fabrics with their self-sealing technology until the cows came home, Aiden wasn’t any more convinced he was zipping himself into anything more secure than a sandwich baggie.

Paranoid? Maybe, but his fastidious attention to detail was what made him good at his job.

He used the barest touch of his telekinetic ability to push himself toward the airlock of the medivessel. Triggering the mechanism that opened the outer door, he lurched through the opening, and the entrance swiftly shut behind him.

The hissing and beeping of the airlock re-pressurizing echoed around the stainless steel chamber.

A number pad was situated next to the interior door, and a pinprick camera was positioned in the far corner.

Vinnie had promised that the station had a minimal security set up, and it seemed that she was right on that count. So far.

“Cairn? You got the code that Vinnie gave us?”

Cairn’s voice crackled in his earpiece as he recited the numbers. Aiden punched them in, and the inner airlock door slid open. He stepped through the passage and ripped the helmet off his head, running his fingers through his hair as he looked around the ship.

The entryway was sparsely decorated. The walls and floor were a blinding shade of white, the ceiling more of that same stainless steel.

Harsh white lighting shone down on him from naked bulbs mounted flush into the ceiling at precise intervals.

Aiden winced at the thunderous rustle of his suit in the station’s deafening silence.

There was a neat, well-appointed niche beside the door stocked with spacewalk suits, and directly across from the airlock was a sleek white desk.

A deactivated reception droid sat behind it, its blank eyes staring at nothing.

“You think they got a bulk deal on white paint?” Cairn’s voice was a touch too loud in Aiden’s ear now that he was through the airlock. He turned the volume down on his earpiece.

“You clearly missed your calling as an interior decorator.”

Cairn sniffed. “I’m just saying, a parlor palm is never amiss in reception.”

Aiden snorted. Cairn was something of a marvel as a horticulturalist. He’d never met a man with a greener thumb. “You’d bring a plant to an execution to brighten up the place.”

Cairn huffed, and Aiden heard the crackle of a candy wrapper. Aiden blinked twice, bringing up an overlay of the map Vinnie had drawn for them on the lens of his glasses. He tucked the helmet under his arm and headed down the indicated hallway.

It feels sterile in here.

The expanse of white walls was only broken by white sliding doors with long, skinny windows. Aiden stopped peeking in them after the third abandoned lab. “There is a bizarre amount of equipment in here, Cairn. Why would anyone leave all this behind?”

“Rampant virus? Fried the whole network?”

“Maybe. Still. You’d think they’d chop the components up and sell them for scrap.”

“Not everyone is as frugal as we are. This place screams government contract. It’s ugly and over the top at the same time.”

Aiden barked out a laugh and took the left indicated on his map. There was a staircase ahead of him, and a door marked STORAGE. He headed up the stairs, then down the corridor to the right of the landing.

“Third door on the left,” Cairn crackled in his ear.

“You know, I can read the map all on my own.”

“Yes, but I’m bored over here, and annoying you is fun.”

Aiden rolled his eyes, and then blinked twice to deactivate the map. “You wanna play conductor, that’s fine by me.”

Aiden approached the door. It was one of the few doors he’d seen in the station with an additional keypad lock. He entered the code Cairn relayed for him and the door slid open.

To Aiden’s surprise, the walls were painted a peaceful lilac shade.

The lighting was less harsh in here, due to the natural-toned old-fashioned bulbs in the lamps scattered around the room.

There was furniture in here, a dresser and a desk.

The room was the only one on the ship Aiden had encountered with any personality.

He frowned when he noticed the calendar hung on the wall was ninety-five years out of date.

Aiden’s stomach sank when his gaze landed on the stasis pod in the center of the room. Seemed his gut feeling was justified.

The pod hummed, the steady flow of power that kept its occupant alive buzzed with white noise on the air.

It had more tubes flowing out of the back of the chamber than was typical.

They emanated a golden glow as shimmering light pulsed away from the pod into a tank that reminded him of deep-sea diving equipment.

Aiden was sure this set up was not typical for medical equipment of this type.

Stasis pods had one job; they kept the inhabitants alive.

This was doing something else entirely. He was no meditech, but he knew that the damn things were not supposed to emanate light of any kind, let alone the shimmering golden glow that tickled his extrasensory senses.

A panel behind the pod chamber showed a constant stream of medical data in neon that Aiden didn’t understand.

But even he knew what a heartbeat looked like on a medical display.

“You were right. This is fucked.”

“Never ignore the gut, Cairn.”

Aiden approached the stasis pod. The top was a clear domed panel.

The mechanism to awaken the occupant was a simple toggle switch.

A wiser man than he would turn around and refund Vinnie’s advance.

That man would listen to his instincts screaming that whatever was in that pod was trouble, and hightail it off this vessel before the inevitable return of whoever was keeping something alive in the middle of barely charted space.

Aiden wasn’t that man.

He gave the switch the lightest prod with his mind, and the dome shot off the top of the stasis pod.

The unexpected lurch of machinery startled him and he staggered backwards in surprise.

Determined to maintain his footing, he lurched forward, overcorrected in his haste, and fell face-first onto the woman who’d been peacefully asleep inside.

He caught a glimpse of silky blonde waves, a pale face with a button nose, and a lush mouth with a pronounced cupid’s bow. When their lips touched, her eyes shot open.

“Mmm. Pineapple.”