Chapter Four The Smuggler #2
If Dad knew I was out on Coruscant, on a level he didn’t approve of, alone, he’d combust. After Mom died and my brother Valor left, Dad focused on me.
I was all he had, so I understood it. Losing Mom was a tragedy, but when my brother left the Starfarer, it broke Dad’s heart in a way he hadn’t recovered from, and ever since it’d been exhausting to try to be both his son and his daughter.
Kotti told me once that it wasn’t my duty to fix everything Val left undone, but she didn’t understand.
This ship was my dad’s entire life—and now so was I.
Kotti twined her arm with mine. “What is your gorgeous best friend for, right? I can lie to my boss and haggle down prices for ion chambers to the sublight drive. Truly”—she gave a dramatic sigh—“what can’t I do?”
“Mmmh, keep a partner for longer than six months?”
“You wound me, Arie. My last partner was at least six and a half.”
Kotti was five years my senior and one of my favorite people in the whole galaxy.
Growing up, I had made friends with other kids during the tours, but it was hard to keep friendships when you kept moving around.
Kotti had been the only exception. The first time she came onto the Starfarer, she’d been thirteen and with her parents, lovestruck by the grandeur of the ship and its promise of adventure.
I had been eight and wanted nothing more than a friend.
Ten years later, Kotti was in charge of our guest relations and had become a staple in my life who knew me better than I knew myself most days.
“But seriously,” she added, “what happened? I called you and you stopped answering, and then you didn’t show up when you said you would. You seriously gave me a heart palpitation.”
“I just got lost,” I replied quickly, watching two spindly droids behind her tug the crate to the back of the ship and load it into the supply port.
“Liar.”
“There was traffic.”
“There’s always traffic. Are you in trouble?”
Not exactly, but it wasn’t something I could tell Kotti about—at least not here, out in the open. Besides, I needed to get to the galley before the droids started unpacking the supplies and found my stowaway.
And you’ll bring her into all of this if you tell her anything, I thought. You’ll put her in danger.
And that was the last thing I wanted.
“I thought we didn’t lie to each other,” she added quietly.
I flinched. “No, that’s not—”
From the mouth of the ship, a booming voice cried, “Daughter! There you are!”
We jumped, startled, and spun around on the gangway toward the voice.
Standing in the airlock, a middle-aged man crossed his arms over his broad chest and quirked a thick peppery-brown eyebrow.
His dark blue uniform was pressed to perfection, not a single golden tassel out of place, with the medals he’d earned from the war pinned to his collar.
He must’ve just gotten out of a meeting with someone important, because he looked quite captain-like at the moment, his deep brown beard braided with souvenir rings and ornaments from faraway planets, his hair pulled into a neat ponytail.
His beard had a streak of white, like a vein of silver in clay.
He always joked that it was a gift from his children.
I knew he couldn’t possibly mean me.
Captain Hansifred Quay cut an imposing figure to anyone who didn’t know he had a sweet tooth for obessa seeds and a secret love of the opera.
Kotti pushed back her disappointment and called up to the captain, “She finally came out of her room! Yay!”
He studied me, worried. “And everything’s sorted?”
“Um—yes.” What had Kotti told him? “I’m feeling better now.”
The worry quickly faded, overcome with excitement. “Grand! Because we need you in tip-top shape for this tour! I have a feeling it’s going to be special.”
“You say that about every tour,” I pointed out, and Kotti agreed.
“And I’m right about every tour,” he said with a wag of his finger, unable to hide a toothy smile exposing that he was missing his left canine.
The way he told it, he had gotten into a fistfight with an Imperial stormtrooper during the war, but I think he lost it in drunk celebration one night just after the fall of the Empire.
He tilted his head behind him and said to Kotti, “Speakin’ of things that always happen, Veebee needs one of you. She lost her finger again.”
Kotti sighed. “Fine. I’m done with my precheck, so I’ll do it. Where is she? In the galley?”
“Last I saw,” Dad said.
The galley? Oh, no. The supply crate. Sian.
I jumped. “I’ll do it!”
Kotti waved her hand in dismissal. “I really can. I don’t mind.”
“I know, but—I haven’t done anything yet, you know? I’ve just been in my room being…um…waylaid…and you know Veebee. She always complains.”
Kotti eyed me suspiciously. “If you’re sure…”
“Oh, yeah, take some time off. I got this,” I added with a wave of my own hand.
“Perfect,” Dad said. “You know, eventually that finger’s not fittin’ back on. Let me know when you’re done?”
Once we agreed, he passed us on the gangway and headed for the hangar bay tech.
The lander was acting up again—something about the comms—and Kotti had already tried everything to fix it, so might as well outsource it.
While it was technically out of her purview as head of guest relations, she had a knack for engineering in a way that Entoo, regrettably, did not.
So she ended up doing a lot of tinkering in her spare time.
I think she liked it—she could take out her guest relations frustrations on faulty hardware, and this ship had a lot of that.
While the Starfarer was renowned, it was also old as dirt, and with every tour came another thing that broke.
It was only a matter of time before the ship got too expensive to keep in the skies.
Kotti had pulled her arm from mine and climbed the gangway to the open airlock. Even though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was annoyed with me for lying. I caught up to her in the mouth of the ship and tugged her arm to get her to stop.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her.
The annoyance on her face softened. She sighed. “It’s fine. I was just worried about you.”
“I know.” I turned my eyes downward so she couldn’t see the Sian-sized guilt there.
She studied me for a moment, and I wondered if she knew what I was hiding, though she couldn’t possibly.
Then her communicator beeped in her pocket. The garbled voice of Daaric relayed that the ion chamber had been delivered, and she threw back a reply that she’d be right there. Then she said to me, “You’re your Dad’s heart, you know.”
“I know,” I replied guiltily, and left for the galley.