Chapter 10
Day One
(age twenty-four)
If Kelli had been supervising a crime drama about someone like Rowan, she would have wanted his ship to be parked outside, in the airless wilderness, with the dark and shining sky high overhead.
But in real life that didn’t make sense, because there were only a few ways to get into the main habitat from outside.
All of them were monitored as heavily as the hangars.
So she wasn’t surprised when Rowan guided her to the hangar at the edge of town.
He must have told ground control that he was here to visit family, or to do some innocuous errand.
Maybe he still lived on Callisto officially, and it was his trips elsewhere that needed the alibi.
Kelli actually didn’t know much about how Rowan was living, these days.
The ship, nestled in a parking spot in an enormous, ship-filled room, was stubby and streamlined like a bullet.
Kelli craned her neck to look at the hangar’s ceiling, disorientingly higher than any ceiling in the more human parts of the city, even the dome above the good neighborhood that had her apartment.
A crewed compartment perched on the top of the ship, marked by little portholes, looking about the size of a two-bedroom apartment.
Everything below that space was probably just engines and fuel.
The engines’ nozzles poked out at the bottom, suspended above the ground by a system of landing wheels and kickstands, each one wide enough to swallow a person whole.
Rowan led her up the ladder into the airlock, and Kelli focused as hard as she could on being like Orlando.
Following the very suspicious mermaid into her underwater den, Orlando wouldn’t act freaked out or accusing.
He’d be as charming to her as he was to everyone else.
He’d look around. He’d get her talking. He’d slowly and slyly put the pieces together until he knew just what was going on.
She wrinkled her nose as she climbed in, expecting a disaster area like the room Rowan had lived in as a teenager.
The lock cycled for form’s sake, even though the hangar had perfectly breathable air.
The space inside was a bit of a letdown: neither as beautiful and clean as Kelli preferred, nor as filthy and crammed with crime paraphernalia as she’d expected.
They’d come into an L-shaped corridor, eight feet high and eight feet wide, and only a little longer than that on the long sides; it looked even smaller on account of how it was outfitted for zero-grav, with fixtures, tools, and bags fastened to every inch of the floor, walls, and ceiling.
The interior was darker than she liked, but painted in tones that suggested someone had put thought into the colors.
Jewel tones, deep purples, forest greens, all harmonious except for the clutter of items strapped to them everywhere.
A spacesuit stood right next to the airlock; to one side, there were some simple appliances that looked like food preparation; in the crewed compartment’s center, a bunch of important looking computer screens and input panels hung around the walls, and a hatch and ladder led to an upper room.
There was enough clear space on what passed for the floor, marked out with a long black rubber mat, that Kelli could walk on without worrying if she’d kick anything.
Beside the mat, someone had installed a violet monstrosity that looked like a six-foot beanbag chair, only with more zippers and straps.
The whole thing disoriented her but it wasn’t bad, by the standards of spaceships.
She’d heard of spaceships so small that you had to crawl to get in.
She’d heard of the big short-range passenger transports, divided into cubbies too small to stand up in, where passengers were expected to eat, sleep, and entertain themselves for days on end.
Long-range carriers were better because they had to be, but those were murderously expensive, and most berths were still only a cube of a zero-grav cabin, eight by eight by eight.
Some people couldn’t do space travel, even if their life depended on it, because the claustrophobia got so bad.
But Kelli could handle this for a weekend.
“You own this thing?” she said, craning her neck to look around.
“Kinda. The lease is about half paid.”
She looked at him sidelong. “So you’re in debt for more than one reason.”
“Hey, a lease isn’t a debt. A lease is a standard business practice. C’mon over here.”
Orlando would look around at everything in the suspicious mermaid’s den, and so far, Rowan was making that part easy.
Kelli followed him toward a weird interior doorway—not a proper door, but just an open square, four feet by four feet in the center of the wall, so they both had to duck awkwardly through.
The room on the other side was just a cube, eight by eight by eight, painted in the same warm, dark colors as the hall.
There was a big display screen on one wall, plenty of storage bags on the walls and ceiling, and another weird beanbag thing on the floor—this one black.
“What is that?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at it.
“Zero-grav convertible sleeping bag. You never seen one?”
“Do you sleep here?”
“Not here, but planetside it doubles as a comfy seat. My bag’s right by the cockpit in case any alarms go off.
But the Wildfire is big enough to house up to four.
The old-fashioned method is to install all the bags in one spot, kind of a bunk room, but I hate that.
No privacy. So here every passenger gets their own room.
There’s one bag here, one out there in the hall, and one in the storage closet. ”
Kelli stumbled to a stop, horrified. “You named your ship the Wildfire?”
“Don’t read too much into it. Everybody calls their ships macho things like that. But what I wanted to show you was on the computer here. You said you’d break Inspiration’s rules if you could, write things you weren’t allowed to write. I want to show you what I do for a living.”
Kelli took a long breath, in for four, hold for four, out for four.
She tried not to think about what it might mean that Rowan had chosen that name in particular.
She imagined the mermaid, holding up some magical gem for Orlando’s approval.
A healing crystal, maybe—not just beautiful, but valuable in a rarer way.
Rowan picked the display screen out of its berth—a slim model, wrapped in a shockproof case, not fixed to the wall but tethered to it by extendable straps.
He fished something else out of one of the storage bags—a data chip—and plopped down at one end of the sleeping bag, motioning for Kelli to sit beside him.
She thought a small handful of things.
First: whatever Rowan did for a living, it was obviously illegal.
Second: Rowan wasn’t some wide-eyed baby. He must know he couldn’t show Kelli illegal things.
Therefore: whatever he was about to show her, it wouldn’t be the full story. It would be some cleaned-up sliver that he thought she’d like, or a lie.
She imagined Orlando, staring at that healing crystal, knowing it was a lie.
An ordinary gem without any magic, and not even especially valuable, just shiny.
Would he challenge the mermaid immediately?
No. He already knew she might lie to him, and there was no sense in tipping his hand.
He’d listen nicely and charmingly, then do some more digging on his own.
Kelli sat down beside Rowan. The sleeping bag made a comfortable seat—not the beanbag texture that she’d assumed, but something more uniform, like heavy foam padding.
Rowan plugged the data chip into the display screen and booted it up.
A file listing appeared on the screen. All books, as far as she could see, but this was just one folder and the listing seemed to go on and on.
The titles looked very worrying and exciting, but she couldn’t discern any linking theme.
Sunward Peril: A Bayani Santos Story.
The Triton Conspiracy: What Neptune’s Independent Colony Wants You to Know (But Inspiration Doesn’t).
Take Charge of Your Health.
Red Flags.
The Waterfall.
Seduced by the Spear-Wielding Amazons.
“I don’t understand,” said Kelli, although she had a creeping suspicion.
“I smuggle media,” said Rowan. “That’s my, uh, profession. I help people jailbreak their workstations so Inspiration won’t snoop on what you’re reading, and then I give people things to read. Or watch, or listen—we’ve got a whole bunch of file formats here.”
Kelli stared at him. She’d assumed Rowan wasn’t stupid enough to just sit down here and show her an illegal thing, right off the bat. Was she wrong?
“What,” she stammered, unable to come up with a cleverer response. “Like . . . illegal fiction?”
“Sure. Illegal for various reasons, mind you. There’s original works that people wrote without Inspiration’s approval, which means they violate Inspiration’s stupid version of trademark law.
There’s unauthorized AdventureVerse fanfiction.
There’s bootlegs of old stuff from before Inspiration bought everything, stories they technically own but haven’t reissued because they didn’t fit the mission statement or weren’t profitable.
And there’s stuff from other planets where Inspiration isn’t the only law.
Occult texts from Venus; dramas from Saturn; political thrillers from Mars.
Trust me, on Mars they have the weirdest politics you have ever seen.
This chip is for written fiction, and there’s plenty where it came from.
Did you know there are people on the outer colonies who still make movies the old-fashioned way, by setting up some human actors and pointing a camera at them? ”