Chapter 14 Dax
Dax
“What was your sister working on?”
She froze mid-step. It was the tiniest moment of stillness. I only noticed because I’d been watching her so closely. Lacy Dupree was a woman of secrets, and whatever her sister was doing was another one.
“I don’t know for sure.” She was turned away from me when she spoke, but her body had already given her away.
“Liar.”
Lacy spun around, her wavy hair echoing the move like a shampoo commercial. Her expression was the perfect picture of shock and outrage. I’d be impressed if I weren’t so tired of the lies and half-truths.
I leaned forward, resting my forearms on my knees.
“Let’s cut the bullshit, Lacy. You didn’t borrow my ship, you stole it.
You cost me a valuable cargo, practically stranded me out here in the ass end of space, and now you’re telling me your sister’s in trouble, but you don’t actually know what she does.
She’s probably a thief like you and she got caught, just like you. ”
Apparently I was really tired of her shit, because the words just kept coming. “I’m pretty sure I’d be well within my rights to space you here and now for the piracy, but I’ll be nice and settle for leaving you on the next inhabited planet unless you give me a damn good reason not to.”
Whew. The rush of letting that all out was amazing.
Her jaw dropped, but as soon as she saw me noticing, she snapped her mouth shut and glared at me.
“Fine. Next planet it is.” I swung back to the console and pulled up the star map.
Zone 4 was the ass end of space when it came to Elegium Station, but it was only a few days from several other stations and a few planets.
I’d just go to the one closest to where I was supposed to pick up one of the other squad members and drop her off without even a wave good-bye.
Or I could space her. Sure, I might feel bad, but she had only herself to blame.
She retook her seat, but I didn’t even look at her. We sat in silence for several long minutes as I pondered which would be the best course.
Finally, in a voice so quiet I barely heard her, she said, “She’s looking for the Queen of Stars.”
Eyes focused on the star chart, I dismissed her claim. “That’s a fairy tale. A myth.”
“But is it?” Lacy asked softly. “Which side was your family on? Baronite?”
My shoulders tightened. “Good guess.”
Her laugh was soft, but sad. “Not much of a guess if you don’t believe the story of the Queen of Stars.”
I swiveled around in my chair to face her. “The story? More like the lie. A lie the Polarians told when they didn’t pay for the supplies the Baronites provided.” My voice was harsh.
Everyone who grew up in space knew the story.
During the hardship of early settlement outside the core planets in each system, ships had landed on what they had assumed were habitable planets similar to Earth, but most of them had faced unanticipated problems. Untillable soil, unbreathable atmospheres, unfriendly native species.
Some of the early settlers had gotten lucky, with either abundant mineral wealth or strong growing seasons, but none of the planets had both.
In exchange for food, the miners—the Polarians—on Swansea Prime traded ore, but when they got further and further behind on payments, their trading partners—the Baronites—had slowed the trade.
The ore carried on Queen of Stars had been intended for payment—what the settlers had owed and more.
But the ship never arrived and no trace had ever been found.
The Baronites had stopped trading after that.
The missing ship had exacerbated tensions between the two systems and had been the catalyst for each side building and expanding their military capabilities in space.
Now, generations later, the boundaries between the two sides had blurred and the Queen of Stars had been relegated to history books and fairy tales.
“Let me guess, you’re a Polarian,” I snapped.
She smirked. “Not even close. My dad preferred to be, uh, unaffiliated.”
I studied her. That was an interesting word choice. Most of the people who claimed to be unaffiliated operated outside the law. Did that mean her family was—
Lacy scattered my thoughts when she stood and stared out at the vastness of space. I turned my chair at an angle so I could watch her.
“When we were little,” she said, “I was seven and Layla was six, our ship was on a job at the edges of what had been Polarian space. Layla discovered that fact years later. All I remember was a lot of time in space and a lot of stars.”
“Layla couldn’t sleep, so she slipped out of our room. We had the run of the ship.” Her mouth curved into a gentle smile. “The only places we weren’t allowed to go by ourselves were the engine room and the cargo hold.”
Having been in both cargo holds and engine rooms, I thought the prohibition made sense.
Still, I couldn’t imagine raising a child on a ship.
I’d grown up planetside. I’d had a very generic upbringing—my mom was a teacher and my father was a mailman.
As close as they and anyone else in our family had come to space, until the moment I’d joined the space corps, had been the delivery of an occasional package from a distant planet.
“That sounds like an interesting childhood,” I said.
Unspoken was the part where I didn’t understand what that had to do with anything.
“Layla loved the stars. Loved learning their names, loved identifying them. So, she wandered out to one of the big windows to watch the stars. She saw something that night. Something no one else did. Ever since then, she’s been convinced that she saw the Queen of Stars.”
I waited for her to laugh, to let me in on the joke. “You’re kidding.”
She faced me fully, her expression perfectly serious. “No. She’s held onto that belief for more than twenty years. It’s her, I don’t know, passion project. Her obsession.”
Her ticket to the psych ward, but I didn’t say that. “Do you believe her?”
She shoved her hands into her pockets and sighed. “I don’t not believe her. Space is vast. It would be easy to overlook a ship that got lost.”
“It didn’t exist,” I countered. “It was a government coverup.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re a conspiracy theorist?”
I scoffed. “No. I’m a realist. There was no ship. There was never a ship.”
Turning back to the stars, Lacy said, “That night she drew a picture of a ship. It looked like a typical five-year-old’s work. Unsteady lines, wonky perspective. When my parents asked her about the ship, she said it was the Queen of Stars.”
“Let me guess, your parents had told that as a bedtime story.”
Lacy shook her head. “No. Layla and I had never heard of the ship.” She looked toward me and sent me a gentle smile. “Telling little kids about ships that disappear into space, never to be seen again, isn’t really conducive to getting them to sleep through the night.”
I blanched. Even as an adult, as a member of the space corps, I didn’t like to think about ships getting lost in space.
“My mom called up all the information she could find on the missing ship. One of the stories included an image.” She paused, letting the tension build. “My sister’s drawing was a damn good representation of the ship for her age.”
“So your parents believed her?”
“They did. Until there were no records of the ship on our sensors. According to all our systems, we had been all alone out there. My dad decided to focus on the payday from delivering our cargo and that was that.”
“But your sister still believes?”
Lacy nodded. “Yep. Nothing anyone said, or did, convinced her otherwise. She’s determined to be the one to find it.”
“And the chip is what?” I had a good idea, but needed to hear her say it out loud.
She swallowed hard. “As far as I can tell, the chip is the record of all her research. Everything she’s collected until a few days ago when she didn’t make the check-in for her fail-safe.”
I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around what Lacy had just told me. Such determined belief in a ghost ship—in an imaginary ship—really was an obsession. “So she’s out here looking for the Queen of Stars?”
“Apparently.” Lacy sounded annoyed, but I didn’t think it was directed at me. “Usually she stays on my dad’s ship and visits libraries and museums for her research while he’s in port. I didn’t expect her to be out here. Especially not alone.”
“Why not?” So far Lacy had proven herself adept—more than adept—at surviving on her own. If her sister was anything like her . . .
“I think I’ve mentioned that Layla is more likely to be found in a book than in an engine room.”
“So?” If my time in the space corps had taught me anything, it was that people were capable of far more than we gave them credit for, good or bad.
“I just didn’t expect it. My father taught us both to fly, but she never seemed to care, one way or another.”
Interesting.
I turned my attention back to the star chart and considered what Lacy had told me.
I’d told her the truth: I didn’t believe in the Queen of Stars tale.
If it had really existed, if it had really been sent, someone would have discovered it by now.
The early search teams would have at least found a debris field.
Later explorers would have found a trace as they’d pressed farther and farther out into the unexplored edges of the galaxy.
Someone would have found it. And yet . . .
“You think she found something.”
Lacy gasped. “What? No, I . . .” She trailed off, which was just as well, because I wasn’t sure there was an argument she could make that would change my mind.
I dismissed the star chart with a flick of my wrist. This wasn’t more important than picking up my team, but it felt . . . momentous. Like it deserved my full attention. “You think she found something,” I repeated.
Lacy started pacing again, her fists opening and closing at her sides. “I don’t know. She could have taken off for any number of reasons. A library, a pickup for our dad, a . . . a date!” She threw her hands up in the air. “I. Don’t. Know.”
“What does the chip say?”
She shrugged, reached the far side of the bridge, and whirled back to face me. “I haven’t watched until the end. It could just be her research.” Her worried tone said she didn’t believe that.
“Then let’s find out,” I said.