Lindsay Buroker's Blog: Lindsay Buroker, page 7

Science Fiction by Women: Some Freebies to Check out

If you’ve been dying to give more independent science-fiction-writing female authors a try, I’ve got a few buddies with free offerings right now. And my own Junkyard novella is finally free everywhere and will be for the foreseeable future. The Fallen Empire Collection (first three books) is temporarily free. Most of these are temporary freebies, so grab them while you can!

(Books2Read links will take you to a page that directs you to your preferred store, i.e. Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble.)

Junkyard

McCall Richter works as a skip tracer, tracking down criminals, con men, and people who stop making payments on their fancy new spaceships. 

Her job description says nothing about locating vast quantities of stolen maple syrup, but thanks to her helpful new android employee, she finds herself tramping through a “sugar house” on a frosty moon full of suspicious characters. The only witness to the crime? The junkyard dog next door.

https://books2read.com/JunkyardNovella

The Fallen Empire Collection (Books 1-3 + prequel novella)

After the Alliance’s victorious last battle, Alisa is stranded on a planet far from home. Desperate to return to her daughter, her only hope is a broken old freighter. But a hostile cyborg has his own ideas for the ship…

https://books2read.com/FEBox

The Legacy Human (Singularity Book 1)

What would you give to live forever?

Seventeen-year-old Elijah Brighton wants to become an ascender—a post-Singularity human/machine hybrid—after all, they’re smarter, more enlightened, more compassionate, and above all, achingly beautiful. But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the rainforest he paints. When a fugue state possesses him and creates great art, Eli miraculously lands a sponsor for the creative Olympics. If he could just master the fugue, he could take the gold and win the right to ascend, bringing everything he’s yearned for within reach… including his beautiful ascender patron.

But once Eli arrives at the Games, he finds the ascenders are playing games of their own. Everything he knows about the ascenders and the legacies they keep starts to unravel… until he’s running for his life and wondering who he truly is.

http://susankayequinn.com/book/the-legacy-human

Last Ship off Polaris-G

A bureaucrat and an interstellar trader must overcome treachery and their broken past to save the last inhabitants of a dying planet.

Frontier planet Polaris-Gamma is dying, afflicted by a suspiciously-timed blight that destroys all crops. Worse, the whole system is now under military quarantine by the Central Galactic Concordance to prevent the catastrophic blight from spreading. The settlers must escape—or perish.

Caught behind the blockade, independent trader Gavril Danilovich finds his interstellar trading ship commandeered in the desperate plan to escape. He tells himself that’s the only reason he stays, and not because he’s worried about the woman he walked out on two years ago—who still lives on Pol-G.

Supply depot manager Anitra Helden races to gather the last of Pol-G’s assets. Her plan to launch a mothballed freighter off Pol-G may be crazy—but it can work, if she can talk Gavril into helping. Their precious cargo? Four thousand stranded colonists.

Can Anitra and Gavril, and their ragtag crew get past the deadly military blockade?

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/icwi6me3s0

The Sky Used to Be Blue

This is a novella based on Hugh Howey’s WOOL books.

Karma lives in a Silo deep beneath the earth. She isn’t sure of much else… only that the wallscreen shows an outside view that is barren and swirling with toxic clouds. Most of the other residents seem content. Except for the ones who jump to their deaths from the hundred-level spiral staircase. And the ones who are pushed.

After the doctor prescribes a special medicine and tells her to avoid tap water, Karma begins to remember a very different world. Despite the fog in her mind, she is convinced that something came before. Such memories are dangerous to talk about, or even to think about.

She must figure out who can be trusted. The doctor… her husband… or no one at all.

https://books2read.com/u/mvv7X2

Ambassador 1: Seeing Red

Would you betray Earth to save it?

24 October 2114: the day that shocked the world.

Young diplomat Cory Wilson narrowly escapes death in the assassination of President Sirkonen. No one claims responsibility but there is no doubt that the attack is extraterrestrial.

Cory was meant to start work as a representative to gamra, the alien organisation that governs the FTL transport network, but now his new job may well be scrapped in anger.

Worse, as Earth uses military force to stop any extraterrestrials coming or leaving, as 200,000 extraterrestrial humans are trapped on Earth, as the largest army in the galaxy prepares to free them by force, only Cory has the experience, language skills and contacts to solve the crime.

But he’s broke, out of a job and a long way from Earth.

https://books2read.com/u/bW9R57

Archangel Down: Archangel Project. Book One

In the year 2432, humans think they are alone in the universe. They’re wrong.

Commander Noa Sato plans a peaceful leave on her home planet Luddeccea … but winds up interrogated and imprisoned for her involvement in the Archangel Project. A project she knows nothing about.

Professor James Sinclair wakes in the snow, not remembering the past twenty four hours, or knowing why he is being pursued. The only thing he knows is that he has to find Commander Sato, a woman he’s never met.

A military officer from the colonies and a civilian from Old Earth, they couldn’t have less in common. But they have to work together to save the lives of millions—and their own.

Every step of the way they are haunted by the final words of a secret transmission:

The archangel is down.

https://books2read.com/u/mVQN0Z

The Star Crossed boxed set — 7 novels by 7 authors

7 full-length novels that explore the future without forgetting that the most dangerous battles will always be within the human heart. Aliens, AI, cyborgs, galactic empires, space battles, and romance…you’ll find them all here, along with heroines and heroes you’ll cheer for.

This has my Star Nomad (Fallen Empire, Book 1) in it, which is also in the Fallen Empire bundle I linked above, but there are six other novels by other authors that you can check out:

books2read.com/u/3kG0l6

That’s it for now. Grab these while you can!

What’s Coming from Me in 2019!

Hey, all!

As I’ve been reminded, not everybody follows me on Facebook or Twitter or through my newsletter (sign up for my sci-fi one here and my fantasy one here), so I should make an effort to update the website with news more often. So, here’s what you can look forward to from me this year.

SFWA Fantasy Bundle

First off, I’m part of a big kickass-fantasy-heroines boxed set over at StoryBundle (available until Feb 14th) with a lot of other fun authors. If you’ve enjoyed my stories, I think you’ll like the offerings in this bundle.

https://storybundle.com/fantasy

For $5, you get the basic bundle of five ebooks in any format, and for $15, you unlock all the bonus books, including my Dragon Blood boxed set (I’ll let you decide whether Sardelle or Jaxi is the kickass heroine in that series… Jaxi is positive it’s her.)

New Fantasy Coming Soon!

As you may know, I finished off my Agents of the Crown series last fall. If you missed it, Book 1 is Eye of Truth (exclusive to Amazon until summer 2019, and then it will be available everywhere).

I’ve been itching to start a new science fiction universe, but I have some dangling series I need to finish up, so I’m going to work on those in between launching new things. I’ve been hard at work on my Chains of Honor series this winter. I’ve finished Book 3 (Assassin’s Bond), and you can pre-order it in all the major stores. It comes out February 20th.

If you’re one of my Patreon subscribers, you’ll get it this weekend: https://patreon.com/lindsayburoker/

If you haven’t tried these books yet (it’s a spinoff series set in my Emperor’s Edge world, and Akstyr, Rias, Sicarius, and Amaranthe all have cameos), you can grab Book 1, Warrior Mage, everywhere.

As long as I was back with Yanko, Dak, and the crew, I decided to finish off the series and write Book 4 too. I just completed the first draft and am editing that now. I should have it ready to publish in March or April.

A New Space Adventure Series

Once Chains of Honor is wrapped up, I’m going to jump into the sci-fi series I’ve been wanting to start since last summer. It will be something all new, series title: Star Kingdom. I’m not sure how many books there will be yet, but it’s going to be my main project of 2019.

There will be pirates, robotics scientists, bacteriologists, genetically engineered badasses, archaeologists, and a ship’s snarky AI. In short, all the usual things you find in space opera. (Okay, okay, you don’t usually find many space adventure stories with bacteriologists for heroes, but I promise the usual humor, action, and adventure.) I hope to launch the first couple of novels by May.

And then…?

I’m not sure yet. If there’s something you’re dying to see, let me know in the comments. I may do a new installment in Rust & Relics or Sky Full of Stars, or I may write a sequel to Fractured Stars. That story is close to my heart, and I believe we need to find out where the dog Junkyard (who now has his own novella) really came from. I also haven’t forgotten that Basilard, in Diplomats & Fugitives, needs a follow-up.

Knowing me, I’ll be itching to start an all-new series by this fall (I was joking with my beta readers about “dragon cozy mysteries” not long ago), but I do want to get some of the older stuff wrapped up too.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Thoughts After Eight Years of Self-Publishing and About What’s Ahead

In the beginning… 

I published my first novel, The Emperor’s Edge, in December of 2010. I’d taken a short stab at querying agents, but at the same time that I was doing that, I got my first kindle, and I realized from a few blog posts (there weren’t that many at the time), that authors were not only publishing straight to Amazon but that they were making money doing it. More money, in some cases, than their traditionally published counterparts, who earned a smaller percentage of the pie and had to sell a lot more books in order to make a living wage.

I abandoned all attempts at querying and jumped in with the two novels I had been workshopping and considered complete. Encrypted was the second and remains one of my favorites, though it was The Emperor’s Edge that I turned into a series, eventually nine novels. (Encrypted did get a sequel, Decrypted.)

There weren’t any podcasts teaching book marketing or self-publishing techniques at the time, and the only sites where you could advertise were Kindle Nation Daily and G00dreads (pay-per-click ads). I didn’t have a lot of money for advertising or high quality covers, not that there was an industry of cover designers for indie authors back then. I commissioned some of my earliest art by contacting artists on Deviant Art.

For authors publishing in those days, there was a lot of stumbling around in the dark and figuring out what worked.

Fortunately, I found readers who enjoyed my work, and by the end of 2011, I was making about $3,000 a month with four books out (Encrypted and the first three Emperor’s Edge books). The income went up and down (making Book 1 free was what gave me my first big boost) when looking at it on a monthly basis, but as I published more books, the trend headed upward over time.

By 2013, I was making more than I ever had at my day job, and I’d long since transitioned to writing full-time. By 2015, I was making a lot more.

It was amazing to get to that point, especially since it had been drilled into my head as a kid that nobody makes a living writing fiction and that I should get a degree in business or computer science. It wasn’t until the kindle and other e-book readers came along, and we could upload books directly to the stores, that it became more viable.

Over the last eight or nine years, a lot of “mid-list” self-published authors have been making a full-time income and then some. Even though things have gotten more competitive, with countless titles now available in the ebook stores, there are still a lot of independent authors making six figures (and some seven).

From two novels to 50+ (becoming more prolific)

These days, I have more than fifty science fiction and fantasy novels out under my name and another dozen-odd under my pen name (Ruby Lionsdrake). “Ruby” publishes science fiction romance novels with more detailed sexy bits on the page.

(In case you’re curious, I started the pen name in part to see if I could anonymously start from scratch in late 2014 and still do well — you could and I did — and in part because a few readers complained when I published Balanced on the Blade’s Edge, which was a fantasy romance adventure with a more graphic sex scene than I’d done in my other series. After that, I decided to make LB a little more chaste and switch to RL if I was in the mood to write sex scenes. That waxes and wanes, I’ll admit, and Ruby’s fortunes along with it. The challenge of starting a pen name is that you need to keep publishing regularly to stay in people’s minds and keep selling books.

My first novel took seven years to finish. As you can see, I’ve learned to write more quickly, and I’ve published ten or more novels during each of the last three years.

Increasing my writing speed started out mostly as a challenge to myself (other full-time authors were writing 6,000 to 10,000 words a day, so why couldn’t I?). Balanced on the Blade’s Edge was the first book I wrote quickly (from rough draft to a manuscript ready for my editor in less than a month). And I loved it.

I loved finishing a novel that quickly (the rough draft in about two weeks), because I really got into the zone or the flow state or whatever the latest term is, and I was able to remember everything that happened early in the novel when I was writing later stuff. (When it had taken me months or even years to finish something, I ended up wasting a lot of time going back to re-read and dither around with early stuff.)

I also enjoyed the characters and the story–you can tell since what was supposed to be a one-off stand-alone fantasy romance, but it eventually turned into an eight-book series (later dubbed Dragon Blood) with a side novel (Shattered Past) and a five-book spinoff series (Heritage of Power).

Even though I’ve published numerous series by now, and my oldest, The Emperor’s Edge, remains a fan favorite, the Dragon Blood series has earned me more over the years than any of my other series. About $900,000 from the ebooks in the original eight-book Dragon Blood series (and the side novel, Shattered Past) since the first book was published in March of 2014. (For those who are curious, this series has never been in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited and exclusive with Amazon. I’ve spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000-$10,000 lifetime for advertising on it, usually pointing pointed toward the Books 1-3 bundle, which I often drop to 99 cents or free for sales.)

I share this as a nah-uh to those who say you can’t write quickly and produce good stories. I’ve written books that weren’t very good that took a long time to pen, and I’ve written books quickly that are favorites of mine (and of fans). This isn’t to say that everything I write quickly is wonderful (after 60-odd novels, I definitely have some favorites, and I have some duds), just that it doesn’t matter a whole lot if a book took a year or a week to write, at least for me.

To stay self-published or to try for a traditional publishing deal? 

This is a question I ask myself from time to time.

When I look back at my path, I’m so relieved I didn’t get a nibble from agents with that original handful of query letters, because traditional publishing is — let’s face it — a slow slog. Even if I’d been lucky enough to get a deal, I never would have replaced my day job income after two years (odds are, I wouldn’t have even seen my books published by then).

But many authors now hybrid publish, meaning they have some books traditionally published (you still get a lot more visibility overall that way), and they self-publish other works on the side, where they take home that 70% of the sales price. It’s a pretty good gig, if you can get it.

Despite modest successes over the years, I’ve never hit it really big and had a book or series stick at the top of the Amazon sales charts for months and months (though Dragon Blood and Fallen Empire had good runs!), but I’ve had a few series do well enough to be noticed, at least insofar as literary agents go.

I’ve talked to someone who had read my books and seemed like a genuine fan, and I’ve been contacted by someone who saw my books were selling well, read a couple of chapters, thought they seemed okay, and wanted to represent me. You can guess how fast I said no thanks on that one. I can’t say that a Big 5 publisher or Hollywood producer has ever come knocking, so I haven’t had to wrestle much with temptation.

Yes, there’s still some temptation. I know I’d never make as much with a traditional deal (and I know I’d bristle at how slow the process was, how much they’d want me to edit, and that my fans would have to pay $9.99 or $14.99 for an ebook instead of $5 or less), but I still have my imposter syndrome moments and admit it would be nice to have one trilogy out there available on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Especially now that I’ve made enough money to buy my house outright and sock away some extra.

I’m pretty nonchalant about it, though, and have filed this in the “someday” category. It’s possible that something appealing will come my way, and I’ll say yes, but I’m not so enamored with the idea that I’m pursuing it.

I do have a publisher for a lot of my audiobooks. Since those cost a lot more to produce, I’m generally happy to foist the work off on someone else and just get a quarterly bank deposit. I’ve done some of my series on my own (hiring a narrator and producer through ACX), and it’s time-consuming and so far hasn’t paid off in a big way for me.

Concerns about the future?

I’ve always had a bit of a glass half-full outlook and expected things to get harder for self-publishers, basically since the day I started. Believe it or not, when I published at the end of 2010, I thought I’d missed the boat. Amanda Hocking and a lot of huge success stories had already come and gone, and the secret was out. Self-publishing had become viable, and hungry authors were flocking to upload their trunk novels.

But I believed then, as I believe now, that it’s possible to gain enough fans that you can make a living as a creator. So long as you’re willing to work on your craft and also be a bit of an entrepreneur. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing to market (though it’s certainly OK if you enjoy what the market is craving), just learning a little about marketing and writing books with enough commercial appeal to find an audience.

I’m not a write-to-market person, mostly because I’ve never enjoyed what’s popular. One of the reasons I started writing was because I struggled to find the kinds of stories that I enjoy. What I do try to do is mesh what I want to write with what has a chance at selling.

It’s possible to make a living selling to fans of a niche, but if that niche gets too small… well, you’re only making a few dollars per sale. So, doing the math suggests your fans need to be in the thousands, not the hundreds or dozens, at least if you want to make a living.

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen more and more ebooks coming into the market (traditional publishing has gotten more backlist stuff out there, self-publishers have gotten very efficient and are publishing more and more novels, and then you’ve also got people hiring ghost writers to publish books by the dozens), and we’ve seen a rise in the cost to advertise and “gain visibility.”

On Facebook and Amazon, we’re bidding against each other and being encouraged to spend a dollar or more for a click (which may or may not turn into a sale). Some folks are speculating that we’ve entered a pay-to-play market where it’s not going to be possible to get seen and find a readership if you don’t have money to invest.

I agree that there is more competition. The books available have increased exponentially, but most of the English-reading markets are considered mature, meaning there probably won’t be more ebook buyers this year than last.

But do you have to come into this with piles to spend on advertising? Enh, I think there are still ways to be seen and find readers without dropping thousands a month on Amazon ads. Ads give you a brute force option to get your book seen. Which can be great. I’ve certainly started spending more on launches in the hope of gaining new readers with new series.

But when I started, there was barely anyplace to advertise. If you were writing in a smaller genre and didn’t know what you were doing with cover art (this was me), you probably struggled just as much to be seen back then as you do now.

I believe that you can still make a Book 1 in a series free and use social media, group promos, and small inexpensive ads to get readers to find and download your book. After that, it’s really up to you and the job you did with the story as to whether those readers will want to continue on (and are willing to pay to do so).

I do think it’s getting tougher for new authors to jump in with a full price book and find readers (if they don’t have much money for advertising). For the last few years, KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited (and Amazon exclusivity) has been a place where new authors can launch a full-price book and gain some traction (since people could borrow unlimited books with their monthly fee), but we’ll see if that continues indefinitely.

As a new author today, I would expect to have to write a series and make the first book free or 99 cents in order to (one hopes) suck people in. And then I’d expect to write another series. And another. If lightning strikes, and you get some massive hit, that’s awesome, but expect to work (write) year in and year out to make a living at this, and you won’t be disappointed if that’s what the future has in store.

The good thing is that you don’t have to sell piles of your first book or rank in the Top 20 for your category on Amazon to be a successful author.

I usually have a more recently published series that’s selling well enough to be on a chart somewhere, but I make good money every month from books that aren’t charting anywhere. Readers find my free Book 1s (I usually have at least three free series starters at any given time, which I pay to run promos on now and then, or put into inexpensive boxed sets with other authors, so we can take advantage of everybody’s reach), and enough of them go on to buy subsequent books in this series for me to continue to make up stories for a living.

Which is amazing.

The pessimistic part of me doesn’t think self-publishers will always be able to make as much as they can now, but I do believe that creators will always be able to find a way to reach their fans and earn an income from doing it. I’ve seen a lot of marketing tactics come and go over the last eight years, but the free sample continues to work. The free sample just has to be exactly what at least some readers are looking for.

Editor Taking New Clients

This post is for my author friends out there. I am occasionally asked for recommendations for editors, but my usual editor, Shelley Holloway, has gotten pretty popular and tends to be reserved many months out. Not entirely because of all the work I send her.

Science Fiction Romance Meets Fun Alien Critters in the Pets in Space 3 Anthology

I don’t usually post about my pen name projects on this blog, but “Ruby” has a new sci-fi romance novella out in the Embrace the Passion: Pets in Space 3 anthology. And it’s fun.

Junkyard — Part 4 and Epilogue (a free science fiction novella)

Here’s a Friday-night post to finish up the Junkyard novella!

If you want a free copy of the final ebook when it’s been edited and I have cover art for it, please sign up for my Fallen Empire newsletter: http://lindsayburoker.com/book-news/fallenempire/

There are a bunch of other bonus goodies when you sign up too (including the “Bearadise Lodge” short story with McCall, Junkyard, and Scipio).

Now, let’s finish this novella…

Junkyard Part IV

McCall found the dog sitting and waiting by the cargo hatch when she came in. She had left it open so he could leave whenever he wished. Apparently, he hadn’t wished.

“Good to see you up,” she told him.

She didn’t have any ration bars on her, but he didn’t make any moves to eat her. He even thumped his tail on the deck. Promising.

“Is your name really Junkyard?”

He cocked his head and looked curiously at her.

“Yeah. I didn’t think so. I’m not very good at naming things though. I don’t think anyone in my family was. Our dog when I was growing up was named Buddy.”

He ran out onto the cargo ramp but paused after only a couple of steps. He looked back at her and wobbled his tail a little uncertainly. It had stopped raining, so that couldn’t be the problem. Besides, if he’d been living in a junkyard, he ought to be used to the elements.

“You want me to follow you?”

He ran to the bottom of the ramp, spun a circle, and looked back at her again.

“Why not?” she muttered, heading after him. “I don’t have any better leads.”

The dog raced past the warehouse and straight to the front of the junkyard. The rusty padlock still held the rolling chain-link gates shut. When they’d taken him out for his veterinary services, Scipio had stunned him, picked him up, and jumped over the fence. She imagined footage of a similar event could be used in a brochure toting the strength and versatility of androids.

The dog whined and nosed at the gap between the gates. He was as big as she was, so there wasn’t any chance of him squirming through. McCall was surprised he wanted to go back inside, especially if he had been trapped in there for the last month.

She tapped her earstar. “Scipio? I need you out front.”

“I’ll be there shortly, Captain.”

Almost instantly, the door to the warehouse opened. Scipio saw her and sprinted over.

“Are you in danger?” He looked at the dog, then all around the area.

The dog barked.

“No, but I need you to lift him up so he can go back inside.” McCall was tempted to simply ask him to break the padlock. It wasn’t as if the missing owner of the junkyard would notice any time soon. She’d looked him up, just in case he should be a suspect, but since he’d been off-moon so long, it seemed unlikely.

“I thought you wished to let him convalesce inside the ship.” Scipio eyed the big dog.

“Apparently, he’s done.”

The dog whined and nosed the lock.

“Maybe he’s going to lead us to the syrup. I’ve read books where animals were integral in solving crimes.” McCall didn’t point out that they had been children’s books and the animals had sometimes spoken in them. So far, Junkyard’s vocal range had been limited to whines and barks.

“I am skeptical, Captain.”

“Just help him in, please. He’s too big to go through that gap between the fence and the warehouse.”

Junkyard spun in a circle again, then pawed at the chain links.

“Very well, Captain. But I’ll have you know that the Laundro-Matic 3000 built into the ship is insufficient for removing fur from clothing. I learned this last night.”

Scipio stepped toward the dog, but Junkyard skittered back.

“It may be difficult to pick him up when he’s conscious,” Scipio said. “He could attempt to damage me.”

“Just do it quickly. As quickly as you ran out here. He’ll be too startled to bite you.” It sounded like a reasonable argument to her.

“Stunning him would be safer.”

“If you stun him, he won’t be able to lead us to the stolen syrup.”

Scipio faced her. “Do you believe it’s stored somewhere in the junkyard?”

“I think it’s a possibility. Nobody’s seen it at the spaceport, and the traffic cameras didn’t show anyone picking up huge vats of syrup in a truck.”

“The camera footage may have been altered.”

“Thus far, the thieves haven’t demonstrated that they have any sophisticated programming skills.” She waved in the direction of the hidden hole in the side of the warehouse.

Junkyard whined again. Whatever he wanted, he was insistent about it.

“Just jump over with him, Scipio.” She realized she was snapping orders like some military commander and added, “Please.”

“Yes, Captain.”

He blurred into motion, and a startled yelp sounded as he lifted Junkyard from his feet and sprang over the fence. The barks didn’t start up until they landed. Then they were thunderous.

The front door of the warehouse opened, and one of the security guards looked out—Mahajan. He peered straight at McCall. She felt like a criminal caught in the act, but she drew her netdisc and paced, pretending she was researching something and that her perambulations had merely happened to bring her in this direction.

Judging by the sounds of the barking, Junkyard was on the move. She had been joking—mostly—about him showing them to the stash, but wouldn’t be nice if that happened?

McCall wanted to climb over and see what was going on, but Mahajan kept staring at her. Or was he simply wondering what the dog was barking about? Louis poked his head out too. Wonderful. Soon the whole staff would be checking on her.

She made herself smile and wave, then went back to pacing, willing them to go back inside. If she had to, she would go back to the ship and watch the dog with her aerial cameras, but—

The two men leaned back inside, and the door shut. Good. She scrambled over the fence and jumped down.

At first, she didn’t see Scipio or Junkyard. Then, as plaintive a call as she’d ever heard from an android came from atop a stack of tires.

“Over here, Captain. I am trapped.” Scipio crouched on the stack, peering ten feet down at the dog barking up at him.

“It’s possible he didn’t appreciate your method of delivering him to his destination.” McCall headed toward Junkyard, poking in her pockets and hoping to find a suitable treat for him. She would have to start carrying meat bars around.

“It was your method,” Scipio pointed out.

Fortunately, Junkyard grew tired of the game before McCall reached him and had to attempt to haul a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound dog away from its target. He trotted past her and to the pile of clothing he’d peed on the day before. He lifted his leg and gave it the same treatment. For a long time.

What he’d been so antsy about slowly dawned on McCall. He set his leg down, took a few steps, and plopped down on his side.

She dropped her face into her palm, aware, by the soft thump, of Scipio jumping down beside her.

“I don’t think he’s going to show us to the stolen syrup,” she said.

“No.”

“All right. We’ll look anyway. You take that side, and I’ll take that side.” She pointed, determined to feel optimistic and not daunted by the acreage the big junkyard spanned. “Assume the syrup isn’t in anything resembling its original drums but that it is transportable.”

Scipio plucked a brown strand of fur off the front of his suit. “Yes, Captain.”

 

* * *

 

Darkness fell and the air grew damp and misty as McCall walked through the twisting aisles of the junkyard, the stacks in danger of toppling at the first stiff breeze. In some places, they already had, forcing her to climb over wreckage to continue on. She paused to open containers, everything from jugs of drain cleaner to dented beer kegs. Few were full, and those that were did not smell of syrup.

She tossed a jug of window cleaner aside, telling herself to think bigger. A thousand tons of maple syrup were missing. If all that liquid was stored here, it would have to be in something large. A water tank? She shone the flashlight from her netdisc around, and it glinted off a rusty metal cistern comprising the top half of a nearby junk stack. It looked like something that would store a few thousand gallons of water. She picked a route up the mountainous stack toward it, though she had a feeling it would have crushed the junk underneath it if it were full.

Her earstar chimed softly.

“Yes?”

“I am reporting in for an hourly check, Captain,” Scipio said. “I have searched approximately twenty-three percent of the junkyard and discovered nothing useful yet.”

“Same here.” She had no idea what percentage she’d explored, but it had to be close to half of the half she’d claimed for herself.

“My loafers have been sampled three times by the dog.”

“Er, sampled?” McCall peered into the darkness below. She hadn’t seen Junkyard for a while but had assumed he’d grown bored of following her and wandered off to whatever nook he had claimed for his den.

“Licked.”

“Ah. That shouldn’t damage anything.”

“Leather is not waterproof, Captain,” Scipio said primly. “If it doesn’t dry quickly enough, it can start to rot.”

McCall bit back a sarcastic comment. She already felt guilty that she’d been ordering Scipio around earlier, especially since it had been to do something that could have resulted in damage to him. And after they’d made it over the fence, Scipio could have used his strength and agility to knock the dog away, instead of allowing Junkyard to chase him up a pile of tires, but he hadn’t.

“I don’t think his tongue is likely to be that wet, but I’ll buy you a new pair if he damages them. I appreciate you helping me with him.”

She reached the water tank and rapped her knuckles against it. It clanged hollowly. Another dead end.

“You are my employer,” Scipio said. “It is my duty to do as you ask.”

McCall grimaced, thinking of the way Dunham had ordered Louis around—while berating him. She had never liked being an employee, and she hadn’t become Scipio’s employer because she wanted to order someone around. She had only taken him on because he’d asked for a job. She was far more comfortable treating everybody as equals.

“Look, it’s not the imperial fleet.” From her elevated perch, McCall shone her flashlight around on the junk below. “You don’t have to follow orders. If you think something is stupid, feel free to argue.”

“This assignment was my idea, and you do not want to be here. I do not wish to further inconvenience you.”

She didn’t agree with the idea that he might inconvenience her, but she said, “You’re a good man, Scipio.”

“I am an android, not a man.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but her light shone dully on a drab gray tarp spread on an open patch of ground. An oddly open patch. Aside from the main road through the compound, there hadn’t been many aisles or gaps large enough for ground vehicles to drive into. It would have taken a crane with a long arm to reach any of the piles and remove something. Or an aircraft or spaceship hefting junk from above.

McCall looked skyward, but nothing but clouds filled the night sky. Few ships came out this way, and she couldn’t remember hearing any aircraft engines either.

“I’m going to look at something,” she told Scipio, not that it was necessary. They had both been looking at things for hours.

As she scrambled down from the stack and headed toward the tarp, she noted oversized tires and rusted engines placed around it to hold down the edges. Even though it lay flat on the ground, and there wasn’t room for much to lay under it, she couldn’t help but think she might have found something.

She tugged at a tractor tire and grimaced at the weight. “I may need your help, Scipio. Can you track me by my earstar?”

“Certainly.”

As she walked across the tarp, intending to see if one of the engine parts would be easier to move, her foot landed on uneven ground. Pain shot up her leg when she turned her ankle. Gasping, she stumbled back from the tarp and glared at it as the pain faded. She stepped more carefully as she moved back onto it and found a ditch or something like it underneath. She set her netdisc down and used both hands, grunting and straining to haul the engine part off the tarp. A protrusion got stuck in the ditch, and she swore as she strained to tug it out.

“I am here, Captain,” came Scipio’s voice from the side. “Do you wish me to lift that for you?”

“No, I’m enjoying getting a workout.”

“Very well.”

“That was sarcasm, Scipio.” She let go and waved him to the engine and the tire. “Please move these things off the tarp.”

“Certainly. Please guard my loafers as I do so.”

She noticed Junkyard standing behind him in the dark. He wagged his tail when she looked at him.

“Dogs appear to find them irresistible,” Scipio added, hoisting the engine overhead as if it weighed a pound.

“A feature the manufacturer probably didn’t think to add to the sales brochure.” McCall watched Junkyard, whose focus did seem to be on Scipio’s feet. The loafer’s tassels flopped interestingly as he walked.

“Were such a feature mentioned, I believed it would deter prospective buyers.” Scipio hefted the engine toward a pile.

It landed with a loud crunch.

McCall winced at the noise and glanced toward the warehouse. She didn’t know if any of the security guards had remained tonight or if Louis was working—gaming—late. She couldn’t see the building from their spot on the far side of the junkyard and hoped the sound wouldn’t travel. Whoever had arranged this tarp—and whatever lay beneath it—likely worked in that building. And wouldn’t want them investigating it, she had no doubt.

As Scipio pushed or threw off the last of the junk pinning down the tarp, McCall tugged up a corner, shifting around so she could pull it back. The “ditch” she’d stepped into was the edge of a hole almost entirely filled by a tank. A huge tank.

Anticipation fluttered in her belly like moths dancing with a lamp. Could they have found it?

“A water tank,” Scipio observed.

“How much do you want to bet there’s something else inside. Does that have enough volume capacity for all the missing maple syrup?”

“Judging by what I can see of the tank’s width and with a guess to its height, I judge it could hold six thousand gallons of water.”

“How many tons is that?”

“Approximately 23.304 tons of water. I do not have the liquid weight of maple syrup in my database to give you a more accurate conversion.”

“Hm, so there would need to be eight more tanks like this stashed around the junkyard if this is where the syrup is being stored.” McCall thought that might be a possibility. They had yet to search the whole place, and others could be more cleverly concealed. “Do you see an opening in the top anywhere so we can check inside?”

McCall ran her flashlight over the surface. A heavy metal ring was affixed to the top. She assumed someone had used a crane to lower the tank after cutting out the hole with some other digging machine. There weren’t any piles of dirt nearby, so it must have been moved.

It would have taken specialized equipment to do all this over the course of a few nights. She would have to find the local machinery rental agencies and see if she could wrangle access to their records.

“There.” Scipio hopped onto the dusty blue tank, stepped over the large ring, and walked toward a screw cap.

A distant rumble grew audible, and McCall frowned in the direction it seemed to come from. The woods beyond the back fence. Just a few minutes ago, she had been thinking about how she hadn’t heard any airplanes or spacecraft flying overhead while they had been here.

She bounced from foot to foot as Scipio unscrewed the cap and she envisioned them being paid handsomely—their ten percent of the syrup—for something buried in the ground only a couple hundred yards from the warehouse.

He bent over the opening. “My olfactory sensors detect a sweet odor identical to that in the drum that Mr. Dunham showed us yesterday.”

“Yes.” McCall clenched a fist and ran across the top of the tank to join him. She wanted to use her own olfactory sensors.

Scipio lifted his head and looked toward the woods. “I also detect an aircraft heading in this direction.”

“It’s probably flying over on its way somewhere else.” McCall didn’t have to bring her nose too close to the opening to smell the distinctive maple-syrup scent.

“I do not believe this is an established flight route. I have not observed other aircraft traversing over this location.”

“Screw that back on, please.” She pointed to the lid he held and couldn’t help but glance skyward as she stepped back. Nothing was visible against the clouds yet. “I’ll comm Dunham. Wait, maybe I better comm the manager. Tate. We still don’t know who took the syrup in the first place, and if it was Dunham, and he finds out we’ve discovered his hiding spot, he might arrange an accident for us.”

She hopped off the tank and pulled up the roster Dunham had provided her so she could get the manager’s comm code. The sound of engines grew louder, and she spotted lights in the night sky.

“That is either a helicopter or an air hammer,” Scipio reported. “We are hearing the sound of its rotary blades. Shall I cover up the tank?”

McCall wanted to say there was no need because the helicopter couldn’t possibly be there for it, but the aircraft was flying straight toward the junkyard. And it was getting close.

“Yes, please.”

She helped Scipio tug the tarp back over the tank, but before they had fully hidden it, the helicopter lowered and flew closer, coming over the junkyard fence.

“Hide,” she whispered, reminded that they were trespassing, whether the dog wanted them there or not.

She ran into an aisle and pressed herself against a stack of scrap robot parts. Scipio sprang into a nook near the tarp. She thought the shadows would hide them sufficiently, but the helicopter turned on bright search beams that flooded the junkyard with light. She could clearly see Scipio across the way.

The helicopter flew closer, and the wind from the blades tried to tear her hair from its ponytail.

“Can you hear me, Captain?” Scipio asked over the comm link. His voice was barely audible over the whipping blades.

“Yes.” She forced herself to speak normally instead of whispering. Whoever was in the helicopter wouldn’t hear them over the craft’s noise.

“I believe we were noticed investigating the junkyard, and someone was ordered to come and remove any tanks here tonight so we would not find them.”

Since the helicopter hovered directly over the tarp, its lights blinding McCall, she couldn’t argue.

A soft clank sounded, something hitting a junk pile near her, and she jumped. It was a huge metal hook on a chain, and as it swung about, she realized that removing this tank was exactly what the pilot had in mind.

“Damn it, we just found it,” she blurted. “Scipio, do you think you’re strong enough to—”

A figure leaped out of the helicopter from thirty feet in the air, and she gasped. What the hells?

A man whirled toward her. No, an android. Its pale skin wasn’t quite real, and when his eyes locked onto her, they were silver. She might be in the shadows, but he knew she was there. The helicopter must have checked for life signs. Scipio wouldn’t have registered, but she—

The android ran straight at her.

“Shit,” she blurted and grabbed for something to use to defend herself.

Scipio had a stun gun, but it would be useless on an android. As she snatched a giant metal wrench from a pile, she feared it would also be useless. She didn’t have the strength or speed to harm an android, but she jerked it up in front of her, determined to try.

Scipio raced over and leaped onto the android’s back when it was less than three feet from her. She scrambled deeper into the aisle as he wrenched her attacker from its path. Thunderous barking sounded over the roar of the blades. Junkyard sprang into the fray, jaws snapping.

McCall’s heart banged rapid-fire against her ribcage as she hefted the wrench, hoping to find a way to help. And hoping Junkyard wouldn’t tear into the two androids indiscriminately. Did he recognize Scipio as a friend yet? Could he even tell the difference between the two models?

For a moment, the enemy android’s back was to her, and she sprang. She hammered the heavy wrench against his head. It seemed a cowardly move, but this wasn’t a human being, she reminded herself, and if it was a combat-specialist model, it would be able to beat Scipio in a fair fight.

The android didn’t react to her blow, its head as hard as a slab of steel. It gripped Scipio’s arm and hurled him atop a stack of junk, then spun back toward McCall. By all three suns, why was the thing so focused on her?

Junkyard lay on the ground, whining and shaking his head. Anger blasted her like magma erupting from a volcano. She ran at the android, swinging the wrench.

Her foe grabbed it out of the air as if it were catching a ball. The android tore it from her grip—and almost tore her arms out their sockets at the same time.

Junkyard sprang to his feet, snarled, and leaped for the back of the android’s neck. Since their enemy was focused on her, it didn’t notice the dog. Powerful fangs sank in, and Junkyard shook that neck as the weight of his body struck the android’s back.

“Run, Captain,” Scipio called from the top of stack. He’d found his footing again, and he crouched to spring. “He’s after you.”

“I noticed,” McCall yelled, looking around for something deadlier than a wrench.

Scipio jumped down and landed on the android. Junkyard still had a grip on their foe’s neck, and he growled like a rabid ghorettin from some children’s fable.

A clank came from the tank, and lights moved, the helicopter shifting position. McCall couldn’t see much of it through the fight, but she realized what the pilot was doing.

Cursing, she maneuvered around the battling androids and ran toward the tank. The helicopter operator had used the hook to move the tarp fully aside, and now he was lowering it toward that ring.

McCall grabbed a can and threw it at the helicopter, then promptly felt foolish. Her makeshift projectile clanged uselessly off one of the landing skids.

“I need some grenades,” she muttered.

Bangs and thumps came from the fight, and a whine of pain sounded. Junkyard.

Feeling helpless, McCall tapped her earstar and ordered it to comm Tate. Too bad she hadn’t spoken to the man before.

The helicopter lowered, the hook nearing the ring. McCall snatched up the next closest object that had some heft. A rusty coil from who knew what. This time, she hurled her projectile at the hook as it neared the ring. Even though her aim was generally superior to her athletic skills, she barely clipped it. But it was just enough to disrupt the pilot’s attempt to hook the ring.

“Hello?” a groggy voice asked. “Who is this?”

“Your skip tracer, McCall Richter.” She yelled to ensure he would hear her over the noise. “I found your maple syrup, but someone’s stealing it again right now. It’s in the junkyard about to be hauled off.” She snatched up another piece of junk to throw as the hook angled toward the ring again. “Hurry and get law enforcement out here.”

Belatedly, it occurred to her that she could comm the local law enforcement herself. Hopefully, they would overlook that she was trespassing in the junkyard since it was for a good reason….

She chucked the piece of junk, but it sailed past the hook without clipping it.

“Shit,” she swore again, missing Tate’s response.

The hook slid through the ring, and the helicopter rose immediately. Dirt crumbled and fell from the rim of the hole as the tank rose, far larger than she had realized.

“Get law-enforcement out here now,” she ordered Tate. “They need a ship. There’s a helicopter taking the syrup, and I have no idea where—”

Scipio ran out of the aisle and sprang into the air.

He landed on the top of the tank as it cleared the hole. Without pausing, he leaped again, catching the chain and shimmying up it toward the helicopter. Something fell as he climbed—one of his shoes.

McCall gaped, barely aware of Tate finishing with “…on my way,” and cutting the link.

“Scipio!” she yelled as he reached the landing skid. Did the pilot know he was on there? How many people—or androids—were in the cabin of the helicopter? Was Scipio going to get himself blown away if he tried to get in?

The helicopter rose high enough for the massive tank, now hanging from its hook like a giant pendulum, to clear the junk piles. It rotated and flew toward the fence.

The water tank bumped against one of the taller junk piles, and heavy pieces of debris tumbled down in its wake. Some smashed against the fence, knocking down several boards. The helicopter sailed onward, the tank swinging underneath it.

Switching to her comm, McCall called, “Scipio!” again. “Jump down. This isn’t worth getting yourself killed.”

She had no idea if he heard her. He was crouching on the landing skid and reaching for the belly of the craft. Trying to unhook the chain? At this point, it had to have too much weight on it for even him to disturb.

The helicopter was on the verge of flying out of her sight. She scrambled up one of the junk piles in time to see the door in the side of the cabin open. A dark figure leaned out. Was that a BlazTech rifle in its hand?

“Get down, Scipio,” she tried again.

The helicopter turned, the angle and the dark night sky stealing him from her view. As the craft continued out over the trees, she lost sight of it completely.

The junkyard grew very still and quiet. She was about to comm law-enforcement when she remembered Junkyard. Was he still alive? What about the other android?

She ran back, yanking out her netdisc and activating the flashlight. A whimper greeted her as she entered the aisle.

Junkyard was on the ground next to the remains of the android. Its head and one arm had been torn off. She had no idea if the dog had done that or Scipio had been responsible, but Junkyard chomped savagely on the dismembered arm. With all his shaggy dark fur, she couldn’t tell if he was bleeding or badly injured, but she found it encouraging that he was chewing instead of lying there unconscious.

“Junkyard, boy? Are you all right?” McCall bent and patted him. “I appreciated your help there.”

He thumped his tail a couple of times and chomped harder on the arm.

“I can’t imagine that tastes that good,” she said and knelt beside the unmoving android.

Even though it was a machine and not flesh and blood, seeing the decapitated head lying to one side was unnerving. She made herself pat down the android’s pockets, hoping for something that would hint at its owner and where that owner was located. Would the helicopter fly the tank to that location? Or head straight for the spaceport? No, the pilot must have some interim destination in mind. Another spot to hide the syrup until it could more easily be transported off-world.

McCall tugged down the android’s collar in the back—that was where their serial numbers usually were. A plaque was affixed to its skin that gave its identification number and marked it as property of Veridian Rental Androids and Robots.

Sirens sounded in the distance. Maybe she didn’t need to comm law enforcement after all.

Her earstar chimed.

“Scipio?” she answered.

“No, this is Dunham.”

Her belly sank.

“Tate said you found the syrup.”

“A helicopter just took a big tank of it,” she said, not volunteering more information since he was still a suspect.

“Any idea where? Or who’s responsible?”

“Comm up Veridian Rental Androids and see if any of your employees checked one out. I—” Realization slammed into her like a wrecking ball.

Androids are way too expensive for me to buy. Have you seen what they cost just to rent?

Louis had said that. Why did he know what androids cost to rent? Unless he’d recently done that and it had been on his mind.

If he was the one responsible for everything, the mastermind behind the theft…

McCall grimaced and sank to her knees. She didn’t want him to be the culprit.

She fiddled with her bracelet and shook her head slowly, fearing she had just condemned him by accident. If she hadn’t, maybe she wouldn’t have said anything. She wasn’t a law enforcer. She wasn’t obligated to turn in criminals. Maybe she could have turned her back or simply found the syrup and pretended she couldn’t figure out who’d stolen it in the first place.

“Will do,” Dunham said. “We’re heading for the crash, and then we’ll come talk to you.”

“Crash?”

But Dunham didn’t answer. He cut the comm.

“Why is everyone hanging up on me today?” McCall grumbled and stood up.

Junkyard stood up too.

“Let’s see if we can find whatever crash they’re talking about.” She hoped the helicopter had gone down and that Scipio was standing triumphantly on the metal carcass of another rental android.

Remembering the portion of fence that had been knocked down, she jogged toward it. Junkyard followed, limping.

“You can stay here.” She lifted a hand. “I’ll come back for you.”

He walked toward the hole where the tank had been, and she thought he might have understood somehow and intended to obey. But he only stopped to pick up something brown. Scipio’s loafer.

“I’m afraid you won’t have much luck tracking him through the air.”

Nonetheless, Junkyard carried it in his mouth and followed her, his gait lopsided but determined.

As soon as they reached the broken fence, she saw what Dunham had meant. Flames leapt somewhere in the forest of bare-branched maple trees, and the orange glow lit the night.

“Come on, buddy,” she whispered and ran toward it.

 

* * *

 

The first thing McCall saw among the burning wreckage was the tank laying amid several trees that had been knocked down. The helicopter was among them too, its hull bashed in and its blades bent or broken off. A tree trunk stuck through the open door of the cab—the door that man or android had opened when he leaned out.

She scanned the ground, not seeing Scipio. She didn’t see anyone else either, not yet.

“Can you find him, boy?” she asked. “Find Scipio?”

Junkyard still carried the loafer in his mouth. Probably because he considered it his prize rather than because he intended to track down Scipio. Still, he walked off to one side of the tank, heading into the trees.

McCall started after him, but voices made her pause. Two men ran into sight, Dunham and someone wearing a black law-enforcer uniform. Dunham headed straight for the tank, but the law enforcer veered toward something lying on the ground between two trees. A body?

He picked up a decapitated head, and McCall puffed a relieved breath when she saw that it was identical to the one in the junkyard. Another rental android must have been piloting the helicopter.

“This didn’t happen in the crash,” the law enforcer said in a dry tone.

“I think my friend—my android friend—did it,” McCall said.

The man twitched in surprise when she spoke.

She lifted her hands to show they were empty, but Junkyard barked, and she forgot about the law enforcer. She ran through the trees, shining her flashlight around until she spotted him.

“Captain,” came a plaintive call. “Your dog is sitting on me.”

McCall rushed up, checking to see if Scipio was all in one piece. That was difficult to ascertain with a large dog sitting on his chest.

The side of Scipio’s face was blackened, and his shirt was torn in numerous places—one sleeve was completely missing. He must have been thrown out when the helicopter crashed.

“He’s not really my dog,” McCall pointed out.

“I may have only known you a short time, Captain, but I am positive you will not leave him behind in that junkyard.”

McCall started to object, but she wasn’t sure she could. “Maybe we can find a good home for him somewhere… large.”

Junkyard dropped Scipio’s loafer next to his shoulder, looked back, and cocked his head.

McCall, eyeing the shaven fur on his side and his healing injury, had the protective urge to keep him so she could ensure he was treated well. A spaceship might not be the ideal environment for a dog, but there was room to run around in the cargo hold, and she did stop to visit planets and moons now and then. She could make sure he got to run among trees periodically. And surely, she could arrange some sort of dog latrine for his use. She’d met freighter operators who carried their families, complete with family pets, through the shipping lanes from destination to destination.

Scipio gently pushed Junkyard to the side and groaned melodramatically as he rose to his feet. “I am in need of lubrication.”

“If a human said that, I’d assume he meant vodka or wine.”

“Alcohol? That would be poor lubrication. I use a mixture of aliphatic hydrocarbons and mineral oil.”

“Equally refreshing, I’m sure.”

Scipio gave her Inquiring Head Tilt Number One.

“Never mind.” She patted his soot-covered and sleeveless arm. “Thank you for your help. Am I right in deducing that you attacked the pilot and forced him to crash?”

“I did attempt to pull him from the pilot’s seat. When I saw he was another android, I felt few qualms about tossing him out the door. The crash, however, was unintended. I simply wished to land the helicopter back in the junkyard after taking over the controls. However, the android pilot objected to being thrown out.”

“Odd.”

“We battled, neither able to throw the other out. The helicopter flew wild with nobody manning the controls. We clipped a tree, bounced off a second, and went down soon after.” Scipio shook his head. “It did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.”

“I think that can be said of this whole mission.” McCall gazed at Junkyard, who had settled down next to Scipio’s loafer, his head on his paws. Unlike Scipio, the dog’s injuries from fighting the android would cause him pain, and she regretted that he’d suffered again.

“It is my hope that the tank was not destroyed in the crash and that Mr. Dunham will recover his syrup. Also, I hope the other tanks are buried in the junkyard and will be more easily found now that we know they are there.” Scipio lifted his arm, as if testing its mobility. “I believe I now understand why you prefer missions that allow you to work from a distance and have no interaction with clients or those they seek.”

McCall thought of Louis, who might even now be facing a squad of law enforcers at his door, and doubted Scipio quite understood. But she wouldn’t naysay him. If it kept him from volunteering her for more missions like this, that was fine with her.

After all he’d done, all the self-sacrifice that she highly doubted was part of his programming as a personal assistant android, she couldn’t berate him for choosing this one. Further, she felt like a heel for her earlier regrets about hiring him. What human assistant would have flung himself into the paths of not one but two enemy androids to save her and complete the mission?

“Do you want a promotion, Scipio?” she asked.

“Pardon?” He lowered his arm and issued one of his puzzled expressions.

“If you agree to let me go over all the potential cases before saying yes to anything, I would like to offer you a permanent position in my little business. As my partner.”

“A business partner?”

“Yes. A fifty-fifty split.”

“A business partnership involves two or more individuals sharing management and profits while cooperating to advance their mutual interests.”

“Thanks for the definition.”

“Captain, I am an android. I have no need of your profits, nor do I have any interests to advance.”

“Don’t you want to make money? To buy cufflinks? And—” McCall looked down, noticing Junkyard had shifted his head to draw something into his mouth. He was licking Scipio’s loafer and nibbling on the tassels. “And to purchase repairs to damaged portions of your wardrobe?”

Scipio looked down, gasped with even more theatric flair than he’d given the earlier groan, and snatched his loafer away from the dog.

“Think about it,” McCall said.

 

Epilogue

 

McCall had to endure two hours’ worth of questions from two law-enforcement officers before being allowed to go back to her ship. She walked across the pavement with Scipio, and Junkyard trailed behind them. Scipio had retrieved his saliva-drenched loafer and put it on. There’d been no retrieving the missing sleeve.

Tired of dealing with people, McCall wanted to retreat to her cabin and take a long nap. But Dunham stood at the base of her cargo ramp with Mahajan. She forced herself to smile, though seeing them made her feel inept. They were two people who she had considered suspects a few short hours earlier. Two people who’d likely had nothing to do with the theft.

Junkyard barked at them, but when Scipio hurried up the ramp, no doubt wanting to change into clothing less perforated, the dog followed. He seemed to have already decided the ship was his new home.

“As agreed,” Dunham told McCall, “we’ve loaded full drums of maple syrup equivalent to the ten percent that we’re in the process of recovering into your cargo bay.”

McCall blinked and peered through the hatch. “Oh?”

“The maple syrup survived the crash, and we’ve already found one of the other tanks hidden in the junkyard. I have faith that we’ll find the rest.” Dunham pointed into the cargo bay. “I suggest you sell your share straight to Imperial Distribution Headquarters on Arkadius, accept their set rate, and report the income, since I’ll be reporting that I traded the drums to you for your services when I fill out my taxes. The imperials, as you know, keep meticulous records. But it’s up to you.” He shrugged. “Black market prices are higher.”

“I understand. I’ll keep it official. Thank you.” McCall nodded, pleased the man wanted everything to be handled legally. And also that he’d already delivered the syrup to her cargo hold. After seeing Dunham berate Louis, she had wondered if he would truly come through and give her the share they had agreed upon. He might have said that the unorthodox transportation and the crash had rendered the syrup unsalable, and she wouldn’t have known if that was true.

“I must admit, I don’t feel the smartest for hiring someone from three planets away to come locate syrup that was three hundred yards from my facility.”

“It was well-hidden. And my ship was in orbit when you contacted us.”

Dunham snorted. “I’ll pretend that makes me feel better.”

The door to the warehouse opened, and two armed law enforcers walked out. Louis Desmarais came behind them with intellicuffs binding his wrists, and his head down. Two more law enforcers strode behind him.

That many men seemed so unnecessary. Defeat slumped Louis’s shoulders, and he didn’t look at anything except the pavement in front of him. McCall was glad he didn’t look at her, for she was certain there would have been an accusation in his eyes. She acknowledged the sentiment was selfish, but that didn’t make it go away.

“He rented the androids?” McCall asked Dunham.

“Yes. Weeks ago. He had the bad luck—my good luck—of timing his theft right before the bombing of the spaceport. He’s been waiting for weeks for the security there to lessen so he could arrange to have the stolen syrup transported off-moon. Apparently, he saw you and your android sniffing around in the junkyard this evening, and he realized he couldn’t simply wait out security. He had to move the syrup somewhere else tonight. I don’t know why he didn’t just give up and leave it there to be found. I never would have guessed he was the one who’d stolen it. Or did you already know?”

“Not yet, but I believe I would have figured it out before long.”

She wouldn’t lie, but she didn’t want to admit that Louis hadn’t been on her suspect list at all. Looking back, she wasn’t sure why he hadn’t been. She’d witnessed him being yelled at by Dunham and ignored by his colleagues. Why couldn’t she have guessed that he might long for an early retirement? An escape from a job he’d clearly disliked? Because he was, like Scipio had said, one of her kind? And she couldn’t imagine someone similar to her committing a crime?

Though maybe she could. If she felt trapped in some job—some life—she hated, and the opportunity to vastly improve her situation presented itself, and if she believed nobody would be hurt, maybe she could have contemplated such a thing. She was relieved she wasn’t in that situation and didn’t have to worry about temptation. Thankfully, she’d found a way to make her own path, one where she didn’t have to answer to anyone except clients, and even with them, she’d reached a point financially where she could refuse to work with those who were difficult. She decided she was fortunate and regretted that not everybody else was.

“I’ll let you go, Captain.” Dunham nodded to her and waved for his man to accompany him back into the warehouse. “Good evening.”

As they walked away, McCall rubbed her face, weary from more than the night without sleep.

She turned, intending to find the comfort of her cabin, but the law-enforcement officers walked over, apparently at Louis’s request. He was still sandwiched between them, but one stepped aside and waved at her.

“Make it quick.”

McCall held back a grimace, fearing Louis had come to make some accusation.

“Captain, will you take care of Junkyard, please?” he asked. “I don’t think anyone else will.”

“Oh.” That wasn’t what she had expected him to say.

“I saw him go in your ship with your android. Will you keep him? Nobody else feeds him, and he’s lonely.”

“Are you the one who ordered him dropped into the junkyard to guard it?” She would take care of the dog, but her feelings toward Louis would definitely change if he’d been responsible for that botched dog drop.

But Louis frowned, his forehead creasing. “Dropped? No, he just showed up. But, uhm, I thought he might have gotten in through the hole…” He glanced toward the narrow alley with the gap in the warehouse wall and the matching gap in the fence. “And then been stuck and not able to get out. I felt bad and started feeding him. I mean, I would have anyway, but…” He shrugged helplessly.

McCall thought he was telling the truth, but she also hadn’t sensed that he’d been lying when he’d told her he knew nothing of the theft. If he was being truthful about this, then who had dropped Junkyard into that prison? Would she ever find out?

“You’ll take care of him?” Louis asked, his eyes full of concern.

“I will.”

“Good. Thank you.”

The guards nudged him, and the group walked toward waiting ground vehicles.

When McCall stepped into her ship’s cargo hold, she found Scipio in a new suit, hat, and shoes, his face and hands already scrubbed free of soot. He must have used his preternatural android speed to change so quickly.

Junkyard was snoring on the deck next to the syrup drums they would need to secure before liftoff. She vowed to buy him a dog bed so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the hard textured metal.

“I have decided to accept your offer, Captain,” Scipio announced. “To become your business partner. Would you like me to research the proper documentation? Androids being given stakes in companies is unorthodox and may even be without precedent, so you may have to hire a contract lawyer. We may have to.”

“Having a good contract seems wise under any circumstances. What made you decide to accept? Did you realize you have interests you wish to advance, after all?”

“Indeed. I saw a silver pocket watch and chain that would look fabulous with the cufflinks I intend to purchase. There’s a matching cane too. I have also been contemplating that display case built into my cabin and considering starting a collection that will represent our travels to the various planets and moons in the system. I am deciding between mechanical banks, stuffed animals, and decorative ceramic eggs.”

“So… the interest you’re choosing to advance is shopping?”

“Yes.”

Looking pleased with himself, Scipio headed over to secure the drums.

McCall decided not to point out that Junkyard would likely see a cane as a chew toy.

 

THE END

 

If you enjoyed this story and haven’t checked out Fractured Stars yet, I hope you’ll pick up a copy. The novel jumps ahead a couple of years to McCall’s next big adventure (Junkyard and Scipio included). Thanks for reading!

Junkyard — Part 3 (a free science fiction novella)

Hey, folks! Many thanks to those of you who have grabbed a copy of Fractured Stars. It picks up the adventure of McCall, Scipio, Junkyard (and a new hero) a couple of years in the future.

But for now, let’s continue on with the story of how McCall met Junkyard! (If you’re coming in new, make sure to start with Part I).

**Just a reminder that this hasn’t been edited yet. I should have the final (edited) ebook version in November. Thanks for taking this early peek!

Junkyard Part III

McCall sipped espresso from a cup as she sat in her office and watched the traffic camera footage at ten times normal speed. She had tried coding a search algorithm, but as she’d feared, it had been too difficult to instruct the ship’s computer in regard to what looked suspicious. Numerous delivery vans visited the warehouse every day, dropping off supplies for the sugarhouse, and others came to pick up drums of syrup. In addition, large farm and logging vehicles rolled down the street many times a day on their way to their rural destinations.

“What’s this?” she murmured, leaning forward in her chair and swiping her finger through the display to pause the playback.

A black ship had appeared on the nearest traffic camera. It had flown over the maple trees, the back fence, and hovered over a towering debris pile in the middle of the junkyard.

“Zoom in on the ship,” she ordered the computer.

It complied to the best of its ability. The camera had been focused on the street, and the ship had stopped at least a hundred yards inside of the junkyard. It was only luck that it showed up at all.

“Identify the model of the ship,” she said, hoping the computer could tell from the blurry outline. She didn’t see any identification, so it was unlikely she could look up the owner, but this could be the starting point she’d sought. The time display on the footage informed her that this had happened at two hours past midnight local time. The dark ship wouldn’t have been visible to the human eye if not for the lights along the perimeter of the junkyard.

“Unknown model,” the computer informed her.

“Unknown?”

“Affirmative.”

That was strange. It wasn’t as if there were that many manufacturers of spaceships in the system. The sys-net had information on anything large enough to have been produced in even a limited run.

“It is a spaceship, right?” McCall asked. “Not simply an aircraft local to this moon?”

The computer answered by displaying “ninety-five percent certainty” that it was a spaceship, along with a list and table of reasons for the assessment.

McCall tapped the holo controls, ordering the footage to play at normal speed. The ship didn’t hover for long before a hatch opened. Something fuzzy rolled out of it and fell onto the debris pile. No, not fuzzy. Furry.

She cringed as the junkyard dog struck down—he must have fallen twenty feet—and then tumbled down the side of the pile and out of sight. The hatch closed and the ship flew away.

This must have been when the dog was impaled. She glanced at the date stamp. Thirty days ago. Damn, the dog had been running around with that shard in his side for four weeks? He must have kept bumping it and causing it to bleed anew. The poor thing.

McCall dashed aside tears and, struggling for scientific detachment, backed up the video to when the hatch had been open. Who had pushed the dog out?

Though she zoomed in as much as possible, it was too blurry to see anything with certainty. She glimpsed what might have been a person’s gloved hands, but it might have been a robot or android too. She never saw a face, nor did the back side of the ship reveal any identification as it turned and flew away.

At no point did the black vessel approach the warehouse or stop again to pick up any cargo, not within sight of the traffic camera. There was another street-side camera farther up the road from the warehouse that would have caught it if the ship had landed on the other side. Her own ship was currently displayed on it.

As McCall rolled the rest of the footage, she checked the spaceport’s logs for that night. Only two ships had landed or taken off, and neither were black vessels, model unknown.

Did that ship and the poor dumped dog have anything to do with the maple-syrup mystery? Or was the dog a second unrelated mystery? Why would someone have dumped him in a rural junkyard? If he’d been a guard dog and become too much of a nuisance to keep around, why not kill him? She would never do such a thing, but she had no trouble imagining imperial security shooting a dog.

Not that the ship she’d been had possessed imperial markings. It hadn’t had any markings at all.

McCall growled and watched the rest of the traffic-camera footage. It caught up to real time, with nothing else of note happening.

“Either I blinked at an inopportune moment or the theft happened longer ago than Dunham believes.”

It wasn’t a question, so the computer didn’t answer. And, since she was alone in her office, nobody else did either. That was typical, but the silence made her think of the dog. Funny that she could imagine him lounging on the deck and snoring while she worked. But a spaceship wasn’t any better a place for a dog than a junkyard. Where would he run? Would he do laps around the cargo hold? Would she have to get a doggie treadmill to set up alongside hers in the tiny exercise cabin? And where would he… do his business?

A knock sounded at the door, and she rose to stretch her back. It was well past midnight according to local time.

“Come in, Scipio.”

He opened the hatch and stepped inside. “I can confirm that your random assignment of sex was correct.”

“For the dog? It wasn’t random. I knew he was male as soon as he flung himself against the fence. What female would do such a thing?” She smiled, but it was a weak joke. Her mind was still on the image of the dog being pushed out that hatch.

Scipio cocked his head. “There are many species in which the females are more aggressive than the males. Had the dog been protecting a litter of pups—”

McCall lifted a hand. “Never mind. How is he doing? Were you able to remove that piece of metal?”

She felt guilty for foisting the surgery on Scipio, but she didn’t have the ability to download software to instantly teach herself how to perform a new skill. Nor did she like the sight of blood or the insides of bodies, human, canine, or otherwise.

“Yes,” Scipio said, “but you may wish to come look at his X-rays and examine him before he wakes up.”

“Examine him?”

She envisioned holding a med-lyzer to his furry chest or probing orifices with instruments. The latter sounded particularly unappealing. Then she realized Scipio might have found something that would explain why the dog had been dumped.

She followed him to the ship’s small sickbay, cabinets, counters, and a single examining table the extent of its furnishings. Seeing a huge unconscious dog lying on his side on it was a strange sight. As was the shaved fur around the wound. At least the metal protrusion had been removed and the wound sealed and smeared with QuickSkin.

“The shard was a relatively recent wound, but he’s suffered numerous other injuries in the past.” Scipio pointed to X-rays hovering in a holodisplay behind the exam table. “He’s had numerous cracked ribs, a fractured skull, and the tip of his tail was cut off, perhaps caught in some machinery. It is possible an accident caused the other wounds, but it is also possible the injuries were not accidental.”

McCall’s eyes welled with sympathetic tears as she looked from the dog to the X-rays and back again. She stepped forward and stroked his thick, furred neck.

“I only sanitized the area directly around the wound before operating on him.” Scipio looked pointedly at her hand.

“What?”

“He may harbor all manner of bacteria. You should wear a glove when touching him so you don’t contract a disease.”

She snorted but admitted, “His fur is a bit crunchy.”

“Have you found any further leads in regard to the maple syrup heist?”

McCall went back to stroking the dog’s neck, crunchy fur, regardless. “Unfortunately, no.”

She couldn’t help but wonder if that ship was related, but since she hadn’t seen it take off with tons of maple syrup, she couldn’t assume it was.

“I stand by my earlier belief that this is an inside job, but nobody listed on the payroll has a criminal past. I have a short list of suspects simply based on suspicious activity, and I intend to poke into their personal records to see if any are in untenable debt or may be possibilities for blackmail, but this whole setup is making me wish I was more comfortable with—and a lot better at—questioning people directly.”

She shuddered at the mere idea of being confrontational. Sometimes, when her nerves were frayed and she was tense, she snapped at people, but she preferred to avoid arguments and hurt feelings whenever possible. She preferred avoiding people whenever possible. Talking to Louis might be all right, since he would most likely burble about his passion for maple trees instead of asking questions or getting defensive over her questions. Maybe she could chat with him in the morning.

“I can question the suspects on your list and assess the likelihood that they are telling me the truth,” Scipio said. “By analyzing human body language, I can determine whether someone is lying with sixty-eight-percent accuracy.”

“That’s not bad.”

“I am less adept at determining human motivations for committing crime.”

“Tell me about it.”

She had a list of typical motivations hanging on the wall by her desk, and she sometimes had to glance over and remind herself. So little of what motivated other people even interested her. All she wanted from life was the freedom to go where she wished and do work that challenged her and that she enjoyed. Now and then, she thought about what it would be like to have a life companion, but she was so horrible at dating that she didn’t even try. When she had added Scipio to her ship, it’d had the unintended result of giving her someone to talk to when she was lonely. She wondered what her mother would have said of her making friends with an android. The poor woman had never quite understood McCall or her sister McKenzie. They were too much like their father, aloof and hard to live with. Hard to love, she supposed, though Mom had done her best.

“Do you wish to rest before the workday starts inside the warehouse and sugarhouse?” Scipio asked. “I have observed that you function optimally when you get at least seven-point-five hours of sleep a night, and it is already late.”

“So I do.” She was somewhat amused that her new android friend thought it was his job to take care of her. “I may poke deeper into those people’s backgrounds though. I especially want to comb through Dunham’s credit records, as it seemed to bother him that the maple syrup is worth so much and he apparently earns little after expenses and taxes. I could envision him stealing his own syrup, selling it on the black market, and stashing the earnings somewhere he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on them. I have to admit it bemuses me that there’s a black market for syrup. A few days ago, I never would have guessed.”

“Would Dunham have hired you if he had stolen it himself? Would he not have preferred to let the slow-acting and possibly indifferent local authorities deal with the crime?”

“Those are good questions. Unless he’s confident that he’s hidden his tracks so well that we would never discover proof. Perhaps, in hiring us, he wants to show that he made every attempt to find the syrup.”

“Perhaps,” Scipio said neutrally.

“I’m going to do more research before sleeping.” McCall patted the dog’s neck and headed for the hatch. “I better find some blankets and prepare an area for our guest too.”

“Our guest?” Scipio’s neutralness disappeared and something akin to alarm—an android’s version of alarm—entered his voice. “I planned to return him to the junkyard before dawn so nobody would miss him.”

“We can’t kick him out right after operating on him.”

“It was a minor operation, and there would be no kicking involved.”

“I’ll make up a spot for him in my cabin,” McCall said firmly.

Scipio opened his mouth.

“I’ll keep the hatch shut so he can’t wander into your cabin and find your tassels.”

Scipio flattened his lips together and looked down at the loafers he wore once again. “My tassels are on the loafers on my feet.”

“All the more reason that you wouldn’t want him finding them.”

So that was what a long-suffering sigh sounded like coming from an android.

 

* * *

 

It was raining the next morning, a warm rain that melted dents and divots in the gray mounds of snow that plows had pushed to the edges of the road and parking area. McCall followed Scipio around the warehouse and the sugarhouse as he questioned the employees who had made her short list. She hadn’t dug up evidence of any significant debt in Dunham’s record—just a line of credit and a mortgage, both of which he paid regularly each month. She’d also looked up his family members and the business itself. Maple Moon Factory didn’t have a huge profit margin but was in the black with no accounts payable outstanding that she had been able to dig up.

When Louis came in—an hour later than most of the employees—she veered away from Scipio and braced herself to ask questions.

But Dunham reached him first, scowling as he stomped out of his office. He planted himself in Louis’s path and didn’t seem to notice McCall.

“You’re late again?” Dunham demanded.

“Sorry, sir.” Louis’s cheeks reddened as he looked at Dunham’s shoes instead of his face. “I stayed late yesterday, so I thought—”

“You don’t get to make your own hours, Desmarais. You’re here when the sap’s flowing so you can oversee its collection. That’s your job, not staying in your office after hours playing some stupid game.”

Louis’s shoulders slumped, and he didn’t argue.

“If you’re late again,” Dunham continued, “you’re fired. And when you make your weekly sap report to Tate, do it in person. Quit delivering written reports and slinking off before he can ask you questions.”

“Yes, sir,” Louis whispered.

Dunham stalked away, bumping Louis hard in the shoulder as he passed.

McCall, realizing her fingers had curled into a fist, forced herself to uncurl them. This wasn’t her business, so she couldn’t butt in. Besides, if Louis felt he was being treated poorly, he could look for another job.

Except that it wasn’t always that easy. McCall thought of all the jobs her very smart and very talented sister had held over the years, unable to, despite her intelligence, “work well with others.” That was what so many of her termination reports had said in some variation or another. McCall was lucky that entrepreneurship was one of her passions, and she hadn’t minded learning how to market her services. She was also lucky the sys-net made it so she rarely had to do so in person.

“Are you all right?” McCall stuck her hands in her pockets as she walked closer to Louis, trying to appear non-intimidating, like someone he could trust, not some hired detective. Someone he could trust and talk to. If he had any dirt on Dunham, this might be the perfect time to ask.

Louis jumped, glanced at her, and jerked his gaze away. His cheeks were even redder now. Was he embarrassed because she’d witnessed him being berated?

“Fine,” he mumbled.

“He seems like an ass.” McCall waved in the direction Dunham had gone.

Louis shrugged. “I’m late more often than I should be. It’s my own fault. I have a hard time getting up. I wish I could work nights.”

“You stay late often?”

“Sometimes. The warehouse has a hard-wired sys-net line, so it’s really fast for, uhm, computer stuff.”

“Games?”

He shrugged again. “I guess. There are a couple I like that need a fast connection. I consulted on one of them. On the botany stuff. Jungle Conqueror. Do you know it? You have to build your colony before nature encroaches and wraps vines around your structures and spaceships. The vines are more aggressive than in real life, but only slightly. They used Arkadian kroyka vines for their jungle, and those can grow up to twenty feet a day. They have leaves more than six-feet long, and if you stand still long enough, they’ll wrap around you. They’ll wrap around anything. And then the leaves turn into pods that capture what’s inside. The kroyka is super long-lived. Botanists have found the bones of extinct animals that were caught up in the pods.”

“That’s interesting.” McCall groped for a way to bring this topic that he was clearly interested in around to his work. “Did you get paid for the consulting?”

“My name is listed in the game credits.”

“Sounds like a no.”

He snorted. “Yeah.”

“Is the pay here all right?” she asked quietly, aware of someone driving a forklift past, bringing fresh drums of syrup in from the sugarhouse. How many of the forklift operators were aware of that hole? She couldn’t see evidence of it from here, but someone had placed those drums there at some point. They looked to be stacked at least ten deep along that entire wall.

“It’s fine. It’s just… This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life, you know?”

Despite his passion for games, he didn’t appear that young. There was as much gray in his short hair as brown, so he was probably older than she was.

“Do you think a lot of people here feel that way?” she asked.

“Maybe. They don’t talk to me much. They don’t care about…” He trailed off with another shrug.

Kroyka vines and other botanical interests, McCall guessed. Or sys-net games.

“I imagine that’s lonely,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever considered getting an android?” She smiled, meaning it as a joke, though she was starting to think of Scipio as a friend.

His forehead wrinkled. “Androids are way too expensive for me to buy. Have you seen what they cost just to rent?”

She hadn’t paid for Scipio, so she didn’t know the exact price of an android. He’d asked to work for her of his own accord, and she considered him a free individual who could stay or go as he wished. If only the empire saw him that way.

“Maybe you could get a dog,” she offered as an alternative, thinking of her furry guest, whom she’d left lounging on a pile of blankets on the ship.

“My apartment building doesn’t allow it.”

“Ah.” She hadn’t managed to bring Louis around to what she needed to know, so she decided to be more blunt. “When you’ve been here late at night, have you ever seen anything suspicious?”

“Like when the syrup was stolen? I didn’t see that, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t think anybody did.”

“Except whoever did it.”

“True. Unless it was androids. Or robots.”

“Someone would have had to order them to do it,” she pointed out.

“Unless they went rogue and decided to take the syrup and buy their freedom from this backward moon.” His eyes lit, as if he could easily envision the fantasy.

“I think it’s more likely an insider planned the heist.”

Louis’s forehead furrowed again. “Like one of the guards? Or office workers?”

“Someone with intimate knowledge of the facility.” And the placement of the security cameras and their limitations of coverage, she added silently. “Does Dunham ever stay late?”

“I don’t think so. Tate, the manager, is more likely to stay if we’re behind or a buyer is coming in late.”

McCall had looked up Tate. He was a single man who’d paid off his condominium two years earlier and had been funding a retirement account religiously all of his working life. He was in a good financial position, so she hadn’t put him on her list of suspects.

She drummed her fingers, wishing she could use search queries on Louis’s brain to see if he knew anything more than she was sharing. She glanced toward the hidden hole in the wall, thinking she might get a reaction from him if he was aware of it, but he didn’t even notice. He was studying a crack on the floor.

“Do you know anything about the dog in the junkyard?” she asked.

If he went over there every night to feed the dog scraps, maybe he’d seen activity there and not realized what it was. It certainly appeared that the stolen syrup had been toted out that way.

“Junkyard? Not much.”

“That’s his name?”

“Some of the security guys call him that. He just showed up one day, and he’s been barking ever since.”

Actually, he had showed up one night. But given the hour that ship had come by, she doubted anyone in the warehouse had been around to see it.

McCall was tempted to ask Louis how long he’d been feeding the dog, but that would require admitting she’d been spying on him—on the entire complex—the night before.

“One day? Like what—a month ago? A year ago?”

“Last month, I think.”

McCall nodded. That synced with the date the ship had come by.

She was still mulling whether it was possible the dog’s appearance had something to do with the syrup theft. What if he’d been brought in specifically to keep anyone from peering into the junkyard? Such as while drums and drums of syrup were siphoned off and stored over there temporarily? Until a ship or a truck came to transport them to the spaceport.

She twisted her bracelet around her wrist. Was it possible the syrup was still there? She had assumed it had been removed already, but if the thieves had taken it and then realized security was heightened at the spaceport… Or maybe that Alliance bomb had gone off right as the perpetrators had been finishing up their theft, and they’d been forced to alter their plans.

But if the thieves had put the dog there to act as a guard, why had they dropped him from that height? He could have been killed.

“Kind of odd that he just appeared inside a locked junkyard, don’t you think?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Louis frowned at her, probably wondering about her seemingly random questions.

“Have you ever—”

“Desmarais,” Dunham barked, striding out of his office. “What are you still doing inside? That sap isn’t going to hop into the sugarhouse on its own, and we’re way behind on fulfilling this year’s orders now that we’ve lost all that syrup.” Dunham made a shooing motion as he stalked over.

“Yes, sir.” Louis hustled away, his head down and his shoulders hunched, and disappeared out the back door.

“He doesn’t know anything,” Dunham explained to McCall, then lowered his voice. “Look, has your android learned anything from interviewing all the security guards? Some of those men are pretty new. I was thinking someone might have applied for the job and had this in mind from the beginning. We just got Mahajan and Peck at the end of autumn. It’s no secret on this moon what maple syrup sells for and what it’s worth.”

“We’ll confer at the end of the day,” McCall said.

Dunham frowned. Did he expect her to be doing something more brilliant than wandering around and talking to people?

She decided to retreat to the safety of her ship and dig deeper on him. It was likely only in her imagination that his eyes were boring into her back like BlazTech rifles.

~

Part IV coming soon!

Junkyard — Part 2 (a free science fiction novella)

Here’s the next installment of Junkyard!

That’s a picture of a wolfhound down there, so not quite the mixed-breed mutt that Junkyard is, but that’s how I imagine his face. And his height!

If you need something to read after this, Fractured Stars, the novel that’s set a couple of years later, is officially out.

Junkyard Part II

McCall felt much more comfortable back on her ship, sitting in her office with the search algorithms she’d refined over the years spitting out data on the displays floating over her desk. Thank the suns. Her nerves were frayed after the tour of the noisy, cramped, employee-filled sugarhouse, and her nostrils were still protesting the cloying scent of maple syrup that had clogged the air like pollution in Perun Central.

Irish Wolfhound dog, sitting, , isolated on white

Analyzing data in her quiet odor-free office soothed her.

The names and faces of Dunham’s employees hovered in a row in one display. The names and addresses of black marketeers known to handle agricultural products floated in another. None of them had offices on Dasos Moon, so Dunham’s assumption that a thief would have to take the stolen syrup to the spaceport to ship off-world was reasonable.

The traffic logs from the spaceport, information that wasn’t public but that she knew how to get, currently hovered behind the other displays. She was in the middle of trying to convince the local traffic cameras that she had the right to see the vids from the last two months of comings and goings on this rural street. Skimming through such logs would be stultifying, but she doubted whoever had doctored the warehouse’s security cameras would have been able to diddle the county’s recordings, and if a vehicle large enough to tote away two hundred tons of syrup had arrived, it would be noticeable. She might even get lucky and be able to magnify the image to identify the people, androids, or robots that had loaded the cargo.

A knock sounded on the closed hatch.

“Come in, Scipio.”

He stepped inside and got straight to business, something McCall appreciated about him.

“I have performed short interviews of all the employees that were at the warehouse and sugarhouse today,” he said. “I have also visited two who reported in sick this morning and were staying in a boarding house up the street. A third sick employee was not in his domicile, nor did he answer his earstar.”

“That’s a lot of people sick for a staff of twenty.” McCall assumed the three employees had caught wind of an investigation and had reasons to feel guilty. Given Scipio’s stolen status, she found she could empathize with those people a lot more than she once might have. But if they’d taken syrup to get rich, she wouldn’t empathize. She’d taken Scipio because his previous owners had treated him so poorly it had broken her heart. An android might not have feelings, but Scipio managed to have a kind of dignity, and it shone through now that he was his own person. Or at least his own mechanical being. “Can you give me their names?” she added.

“I’ve already transferred the information.” As he said the words, three names and faces enlarged on one of her displays.

“Good. I’ll prioritize looking up their backgrounds. Thank you.”

“There is one more matter I must discuss before leaving you to work.” Scipio lifted his hand in Apologetic Gesture Number Three. He had already learned that when she focused on work, she tended to do so for hours and hours and loathed interruptions. “The local law-enforcement agency commed the ship while we were out.”

“Oh?” McCall hadn’t gone to NavCom to check messages. “Do they object to our presence in the investigation they haven’t bothered to send anyone out to start yet?”

“No. They informed us that parking a spaceship outside of the port is grounds for a fine. If the Star Surfer remains here, we will be subject to a thirty-morat-per-night fine.”

“They can keep track of illegally parked spaceships, but they’re too busy to help Dunham recover millions of morats in syrup?”

“Traffic control is the responsibility of a different department than theft.”

“A more efficient one, apparently.”

“Shall I prepare to move the ship?” Among Scipio’s other talents, he was a pilot. A better one than she, not surprisingly. She didn’t have the best spatial awareness, and she’d had to take her pilot’s exam more than once before passing. It had been worth it to have the freedom to fly herself, to not have to rely on public transport clogged with people who insisted on sitting entirely too close to each other and touching.

She curled a lip at the thought of riding a ground transport out here each morning during the investigation, complete with a long walk at the end, since nothing would go directly to this rural dead end.

“Send them the fine, enough for three nights.”

Scipio tilted his head. “Is there a reason you wish to remain on the premises against the wishes of law enforcement? Do you believe the thieves may make a nocturnal appearance? Shall I send out hover-cams to monitor the facility?”

All she’d been thinking about was loathsome shoulder-touching with strangers, but the suggestion sounded like a good one, and she wished she’d thought of it.

“Yes,” she said. “Program them to ping us if there’s any activity in the middle of the night.”

McCall didn’t expect anyone to return to the scene of the crime, especially with her ship parked out front, but it was always possible.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Scipio?” she said as he turned for the hatch.

“Yes, Captain?”

“McCall.”

“Captain McCall.”

“I mean, you can call me by my first name instead of adding a rank.” Especially since it was a de facto rank she only held because she’d had the morats to buy her ship.

“I was programmed to maintain a servant-master relationship with my human owners, and it is against my protocol to be, as you would say, on a first-name basis with people.”

“That’s disgusting. Can’t you download a patch or something?”

He stared at her, then, after a long hesitation, issued his rarely used Laugh Number One. It was, in fact, the only version of a laugh she’d heard from him, and it usually came when he was attempting to give the expected response to a joke. She’d been serious, but she smiled in complete understanding. She’d faked a lot of laughs to give the expected response—or cover up that she didn’t understand the joke.

“But I don’t own you, right?” McCall attempted to clarify. “I just assisted you in leaving your previous owner. So I’m not your master.”

“I do grasp the concept, Captain, but it is difficult for me to override my inherent protocols. As I admitted to you, I am able to perform numerous types of combat and bodyguard duties because I downloaded new routines, but my need to perform my basic functions will always trump them.”

“All right, I understand.” She wagered that having him address her as a superior—or dear suns, a master—bothered her more than it did him. “What I wanted to say is thank you for your help. I had some… doubts about whether I’d made the right choice after I assisted you in escaping that facility, especially since your treatment there seemed to bother me a lot more than it bothered you, but I’m glad I did so. And that you refused to leave afterward and wanted a job.”

She smiled at the memory of her attempt to free Scipio, who had been, at the time, Model DuraSky 3636, serial number 73837-D4. It had been something akin to opening the door of a birdcage and receiving a puzzled chirp from the parakeet inside.

“I am pleased that my service has satisfied you.” He issued Nod Number Seven. “I do find this work more fulfilling than retrieving beverages and performing sexual acts.”

“Right. Good.” McCall waved, not wanting to discuss all the demeaning uses that his previous owner had had for him.

Scipio left, and she perused the files of the “sick” people who hadn’t been at work.

 

* * *

 

McCall was still at her desk when a soft chime floated through the ship. She frowned at the interruption. What was that? Not the comm or the exterior hatch buzzer.

“Scipio’s alarms,” she blurted with realization.

She glanced at the two clock displays to the side of the desk, one ship’s time and one local time. Going by local time, it wouldn’t be fully dark out yet, but the warehouse’s work shift had ended two hours earlier. She jogged up to NavCom to see if Scipio was up there monitoring the cameras.

He was. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back as he observed the Star Surfer’s surroundings, both on NavCom’s wrap-around display of the exterior and on a holodisplay showing the hover-cams he’d set up outside. Birds’ eye viewpoints showed the warehouse, the sugarhouse, some of the trees out back, and the front and side parking areas. She could also make out some of piles of metal scrap, appliances, and rusted vehicles in the near side of the junkyard.

Two men in dark clothing stood out front of the now-closed rollup door to the warehouse. They pointed at each other, at the warehouse, and also at her ship.

“This is the first activity since the work day ended and the employees left the warehouse,” Scipio said. “No security guards were left on duty tonight. I have been observing.”

“We set up the alarms so you wouldn’t have to observe.”

“I have completed choosing cufflinks to match my new suit, so I am able to devote my ocular receptors to this task.”

“Cufflinks? Is that what you’re buying with your share of the money if we recover the stolen maple syrup?” McCall slid into the pilot’s seat and swiped her fingers in the air to zoom in on the two men.

“We will recover the syrup. My current salary is sufficient for the purchase of silver cufflinks. You did not mention shares.”

“Well, there’ll be a share if we make that much. But I’m glad to hear your tastes aren’t overly extravagant. Given that you were in that drab butler’s uniform when we met, I admit to being surprised by your flair for dress.”

“I have decided to individualize myself from the other androids in my line by wearing atypical garb, thus to make it less likely that I’ll be recognized and scanned by imperial law enforcers.”

“And cufflinks will accomplish this?”

“Most assuredly.”

“That’s the security guard with the bionic hand, right? Mahajan?” McCall pointed at the larger of the two men. She might not be good with faces, but she remembered his lack of a glove, and he still didn’t have his left hand covered. Did he special order single gloves or donate all of his lefts to the junkyard dog to chew on?

“I did not ask him about the status of his limbs,” Scipio said, “but that is his name. I am not familiar with the second man. It is possible he is the third sick individual, the one who was not in his domicile.”

“He doesn’t look that sick.”

“He may also be someone from outside the organization. Let me adjust the camera to better see his face.”

“Don’t get too close,” McCall warned. “My hover-cams are a lot smaller and quieter than imperial spy boxes, but they’re not invisible.”

“Yes, Captain.”

McCall leaned forward as the camera slowly shifted its position to give them a view of the newcomer’s face. Since it was positioned so far above the men, and twilight was creeping in, she had a hard time telling if it was one of the employees from the roster. She’d looked at the faces, bios, and background information on them all already and had been queuing up the footage she’d acquired from the traffic cameras when the alarm chimed.

“That is Erik Pottinger,” Scipio said. “The missing sick man.”

“I’m glad you’re better at faces than I am.” She decided she had been right to hire Scipio, even if he hadn’t yet figured out that she didn’t want to take on bizarre assignments that took her out of her comfort zone. “I wish we had audio.”

Unfortunately, the cameras weren’t that sophisticated. She would have needed to purchase larger, more noticeable units if she wanted extra features, and she’d thought stealth might be more important than sound.

“We could go out and question them,” Scipio said. “With my speed, I could catch them before they could escape.”

McCall grimaced. Running down people and questioning them was even less in her comfort zone than searching for syrup.

“We don’t have the authority to do that, and somehow, I doubt you’ve been programmed to effectively interrogate people.”

“This is true. My programming would suggest I make them coffee after capturing them.”

“Unless you make it so hot it scalds their throats on the way down, I don’t see that as an effective interrogation method.” She understood why Scipio had chosen a name for himself instead of going by his serial number, but it amused her that he’d named himself after an Old Earth general. Maybe he aspired to overcome his programming and become a master military tactician someday.

“Perhaps we should simply observe them,” he said.

“I think so.”

The two men walked to a door, unlocked it, and went into the warehouse.

“It’s possible they don’t want to be observed,” McCall said.

“Their body language did not suggest they were aware of our surveillance. It is possible they represent the night-shift security guards. I thought it unusual that Dunham did not leave employees at the warehouse since, earlier in the day, he said he was doing so now.”

“Maybe they’re the ones responsible for the heist, and they’ve come to cover some tracks.”

“I did not observe any tracks on the floor when we were inside.”

McCall looked at him, wondering if that was one of his attempts at humor, or if he was being literal. He wasn’t wearing one of his expressions that she’d identified to give her any clues.

She leaned back in the seat and twisted her bracelet on her wrist, barely aware of the bronze charms tinkling. “From what’s in their files, Pottinger is a security guard, like Mahajan. They were both infantry in the fleet and served for one enlistment term before getting out and seeking civilian work. Infantry specialize in ground warfare and also getting into enemy ships, rushing through the corridors, and subduing the foolish souls opposing the empire. They had a lot of training on how to kill people with their pinkies. None of the courses listed on their resumes suggest they had computer or electronics training, so I’m skeptical that either of them could alter the security cameras. It’s always possible one of them has a hobby though, if not any formal training.”

“Killing people with their pinkies? Even an android would find a single diminutive digit insufficient for such a purpose.”

“Never mind. It’s just a saying. Do you think we could maneuver the camera and try to get it into the warehouse? We should have done it when they had the door open. Damn. Wait.” McCall leaned forward in her seat again and made a hooking motion with her finger to draw the display from the other camera to the forefront. “Who’s this?”

A man wearing a fur cap hurried out the rear of the warehouse, glancing over his shoulder as the door closed behind him. There weren’t any exterior lights back there, so she doubted even Scipio would be able to make out his face.

Instead of heading toward the lot near the sugarhouse where a couple of ground vehicles were parked, he followed the back of the building toward the junkyard. A few lightposts along its perimeter shed illumination near the fence.

“I am attempting to angle the camera so that we will be able to see his face if he walks into the light,” Scipio said.

“Good.” McCall tapped her foot and twiddled the unicorn charm on her bracelet. “Do you think the dog is barking at all this activity?”

They couldn’t hear sound through the thick, insulated hull of the ship.

“I have not yet detected its movement,” Scipio said. “It may be asleep.”

McCall hoped it had a cozy den somewhere in the junkyard and that someone fed it regularly. Even so, she imagined the existence to be lonely. No wonder it got cranky at the denizens next door.

A dark blur ran through the shadows inside the fence as the man approached from the outside. He stepped into the light, and Scipio worked the camera down closer. The man pulled something out from inside his jacket and unwrapped it. The blur—the dog—arrived on the other side of the fence, a mass of gray, black, and brown fur. Thanks to the perimeter lighting, his wagging tail was visible.

“Not quite the monster Dunham made him out to be.” McCall didn’t like calling anything it, so she assigned the dog a sex based on its—his—size. She had no idea if it was accurate.

As the man slid pieces of a sandwich through the gap between the fence boards, the camera drew close enough for his face to be visible.

“Louis Desmarais,” Scipio said, identifying him. “He effectively evaded my questioning earlier, so I have not spoken with him. Also, I believed he had left earlier when he went into the woods, so I did not consider him when I was counting employees as they left the building. He must have returned before I set up the cameras.”

“I spoke with him briefly earlier.”

“Did you find it appealing to speak to one of your kind?”

McCall blinked. “My kind?”

“When I interviewed one of his colleagues, the man mentioned he was autistic. He grew up on a border planet and was not taken to a hospital as a child for the empire’s normalization surgery.”

McCall blew out a slow breath and pointedly unclasped the charm she’d been twirling. “It’s not really a kind. It’s not like we share a cultural background or both go to the same church and sing Sun Trinity hymns together.”

“Do you not have the common upbringing of having been born on a border world?”

“No, I was born on Perun. My mother had access to imperial hospitals. She just didn’t trust them. She never went herself, which resulted in her dying far younger than she should have, and she never took us—my sister and I.”

Louis finished feeding the dog, patted him through the fence, then tugged his collar up against the breeze and headed toward the vehicle lot.

“Scipio, why don’t we take a tour of that junkyard?” McCall suggested.

“The gate is locked, and the junkyard is not owned by the Dunham family.”

“No, it’s owned by Jacob Hyssop who has been off-moon for the last year. I checked the tax records for the neighboring properties.”

“Wise. Do you believe it possible the missing maple syrup may be stored over there until such time that security lessens at the spaceport?”

“That would certainly be convenient for us, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.” She worried the maple syrup was long gone, that it had been stolen, despite the supposedly undisturbed door locks, during the quiet of winter and that filling the containers with water had kept Dunham for discovering the theft in a timely manner.

“I will get a stun gun in case we need to handle the dog.”

“I’ll get a steak.”

Scipio gave her Curious Head Tilt Number Two.

“For the same reason,” she explained and headed to the ship’s kitchen.

 

* * *

 

Technically, it wasn’t a steak. It was a cranberry-turkey ration bar purchased because the ingredients did not upset McCall’s stomach. She did not tolerate grains or dairy from either cows or jakloffs and assumed dogs wouldn’t object to the lack of such things. Just in case, she had heated it so it would smell more enticing.

Scipio, his stun gun in hand, did not look like he believed the meat bribe would gain them entrance to the junkyard.

They walked quickly across the cracked pavement, the frosty air encouraging briskness. It was easily ten degrees chillier than it had been that morning when they landed. McCall knew nothing about maple sap but was surprised it could flow when the temperatures were barely above freezing during the day.

Maybe this was a cold snap, or the end of one. Or maybe Dunham was trying to get production going early in the year because he feared the imperials would descend upon him if he couldn’t come up with the tax money due on the stolen syrup. A legitimate fear, unfortunately.

The government tended to be draconian in their tax collections, as she knew since she had been late a couple of times. Not because she didn’t have the money but because she’d been focused on her work and had forgotten—or maybe forgotten to muster the enthusiasm—to open the warning messages sitting in her inbox. Now, she had a bookkeeper to help out and ensure she stayed in the empire’s good graces.

A deep baying echoed from within the junkyard. The sound of claws on pavement followed and heavy pants emanated from behind the fence. A thud came, and the closest boards rattled.

McCall jumped, clenching her ration bar tightly while worrying that her bribery plan might not be sufficient. Just because Louis had befriended the savage beast over who knew how many months didn’t mean she could do the same thing.

“If the owner, Jacob Hyssop, is not located on the moon, who is caring for the dog?” Scipio asked, not noticeably fazed by the shaking boards.

Was the dog jumping against them to try to get out and devour them whole? Or maybe he was so eager to play that he was bumping his huge body against them.

More barks sounded. He wasn’t growling, at least.

“I don’t know. Maybe just Louis. If the poor dog has been in there as long as Hyssop has been gone, I’m going to use your stun gun on him if I ever see him.” McCall forced herself to keep walking until they reached the wide front entrance, which consisted of two chain-link gates that could be rolled to the sides so vehicles could drive in. The rest of the fence was made from wood. There wasn’t any barbed wire along the top and certainly nothing as high-tech as a forcefield. A stiff wind could have thwarted the rusty padlock holding the gates shut.

The dog appeared, leaping in from the side and startling McCall anew with his size. He barked ferociously at them, and this time a few frustrated growls escaped.

Scipio raised his stun gun.

“Wait.” McCall lifted a hand to stop him, then tore off a chunk of the ration bar. She had two more in their wrappers in her pocket should a more substantial bribe be required.

She tossed the piece over the gate to land between the dog’s paws. He snapped at the air and scurried back, leaving the treat untouched on the ground.

McCall lifted the rest of the bar to her mouth and simulated eating it, complete with nom-nom sounds of enjoyment.

Scipio looked at her, and she felt silly.

“It worked on my college roommate’s dog,” she said.

“Are you sure the stun gun would not be preferable? If it continues to bark, the noise could alert the two men in the warehouse.”

“I get the feeling he barks a lot and the employees ignore it.” McCall backed up a few paces in case that would help the dog relax.

Scipio did the same.

The barks stopped, and the dog came forward and sniffed the treat. A tongue almost as big as McCall’s forearm came out and lapped it up. She was fairly certain he consumed it too quickly to taste, but he tilted his head, big furry ears flopping, in a gesture that reminded her of one of Scipio’s curious expressions.

McCall ripped off another piece of the bar and tossed it inside. The dog ate it promptly, and his tail wagged slightly.

“Shall I break the lock while it is distracted?” Scipio asked.

“He.”

“Pardon?”

“While he’s distracted. And I was thinking we could just climb over the fence. We don’t need to drive a vehicle inside.”

“How can you ascertain its—his?—sex? The dog’s genitalia are covered by fur.”

“Just a hunch.” McCall didn’t want to explain why she thought it dehumanizing—dedogizing—to call him an it. “Will you let me climb in there with you, boy?” She tossed another piece of meat and went to the gate and put her hands on the chain links.

She was tempted to try to go over the fence farther away from the dog, so he wouldn’t see her as a threat, but the planks didn’t offer sufficient handholds.

Scipio stepped closer to the gate, pointing the muzzle of his stun gun through one of the gaps. The dog stopped wagging his tail, and he backed up, sniffing the air.

“I’m still hoping that won’t be necessary.” McCall climbed slowly to the top. She paused, sitting aside the cross bar, and tossed the last piece. As she pulled out another bar, she asked, “Do you have a name, buddy?”

She kept talking in a soothing voice as she descended down the inside of the gate. The dog didn’t have a collar or any visible identification, so she had no way to guess his name.

His tail wagged uncertainly, and his eyes focused on her second bar. As she unwrapped it, she walked inside, looking at the scenery as she continued to talk soothingly. She’d grown up with a fluffy mutt and had always liked animals, so it wasn’t difficult to “talk dog” so to speak. If a spaceship were a good environment for pets, she would likely have a cargo hold full of them. She decided not to point out to Scipio that she was more likely to consider animals her “kind” than another human being, autistic or not.

Scipio leaped the fence with an inhuman bound, barely bending his synthetic knees as he landed.

“Show off,” McCall said.

The dog growled, his tail going straight out like a rigid flag.

“It’s all right, boy,” McCall said. “He’s with me. We just want a quick tour, eh?” She tossed him a piece of bar. “Care to lead the way?”

The dog trotted over to a stack of moldy clothing and lifted his leg.

“He appears uncooperative,” Scipio observed.

“It’s possible he doesn’t speak System Standard,” McCall said dryly, heading deeper into the junkyard.

Only one aisle down the center was wide enough to accommodate vehicles. Elsewhere, narrow paths were framed by massive stacks of robot parts, broken appliances, tires and wheels, and cardboard boxes half-disintegrated from the weather.

A mouse scurried out as she approached one, and the dog sprang into motion, catching it before it could scurry back under cover. He devoured it in a gulp.

“I’m guessing you don’t get enough food, boy.” McCall walked toward a dented, rusty drum that looked like the drums inside the warehouse. She withdrew her netdisc from her pocket and pulled up the flashlight application. The Maple Moon logo, a tree with a spherical silhouette behind it, was stamped on one side, as faded from the elements as the cardboard boxes. “This has been here a while.”

When Scipio did not comment, she looked over at him. He stood, his stun gun put away, and his hands clasped behind his back.

“It looks far too old to have been stolen this year, right?” McCall knew things could be weathered prematurely, but it was hard to imagine someone bothering. Besides, the drums weren’t what had been stolen. Their contents were missing.

“Forgive me,” Scipio said. “I did not realize you had stopped communicating with the dog and were speaking to me. Yes, I estimate that has been outside for ten years.”

The dog headed to Scipio and sniffed his leg.

“If he urinates on my handmade jakloff-leather Taglio loafers, I believe it will be within my rights as a consumer and appreciator of fine footwear to stun him.”

“I disagree. Anyone who wears shoes with pretentious tassels deserves to have his foot peed on.”

“My tassels serve an aesthetic function. They are not pretentious.”

McCall waved another piece of the ration bar. “Come on, boy. Show me where the stolen maple syrup is.”

As the dog bounded toward her, Scipio headed down another aisle. “I will search for condemning evidence on this side,” he called back.

“That’s his way of protecting his tassels,” McCall murmured.

The dog took the treat from her hand with a surprisingly gentle mouth, and wagged his tail as he jumped away again. He was younger than she had first guessed. Maybe only a couple of years old and still playful. He bounded in again, and by the light of her netdisc, she noticed the fur on his right side was matted and had something stuck to it.

“What’s wrong there, boy? Got tar or something stuck to you?” She held out a treat but kept it in her fist as he approached.

He grew still as he sniffed at her fist, and she got a better look at his side. Her jaw sagged open in horror.

“Not tar,” she whispered. A shard of metal thrust out of his side like an arrowhead but much larger. His fur was matted with dried blood. She leaned in, trying to see better, but he scurried back. “No wonder you have tendencies toward crabbiness,” she murmured. “Who did this to you?”

She supposed it could have been an accident, given the amount of sharp debris in the junkyard, but it looked more like someone had thrown something at the dog. To scare him away? She clenched her teeth, tears threatening to film her eyes, and tossed him the treat he’d been sniffing.

He plucked it out of the air, then sat down ten feet away, as if to say he wasn’t going to let her get any closer if she was interested in his injury.

“You may have to get stunned anyway,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve got a canine tranquilizer on the ship. Unless I can convince you to come voluntarily? How would you like to see my sickbay?”

Her earstar chimed softly, and Scipio spoke over the comm.

“Captain? I have located a suspicious hole in the fence near the warehouse. I’m coming to get you, so I can lead you to it.”

“I’m still in the same spot.” She lowered her voice. “Just give us a few minutes, boy, and I’ll take you to see if we can fix you up.”

Scipio appeared, carrying his shoes in his hands, his black socks covered in dust. Chewing gum stuck to one of them, but he appeared disinclined to have the shoes within canine reach.

The dog’s eyes brightened when he saw the tassels flapping, and McCall didn’t know if Scipio had improved the situation.

“Follow me, Captain.” Scipio glanced at the dog but did not extend the invitation to him.

“You can come,” she told him.

The dog trailed them as Scipio led her toward the fence adjacent to the side of the warehouse. Less than a foot separated it from the building, and she found that she had a view of the wall and also a gap in it. A large square had been cut in the boards, rather than someone removing a section of the fence entirely, and she wagered the perpetrator had hoped it wouldn’t be noticed that way. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d peered into the gap between fence and building earlier. And she certainly hadn’t noticed the round hole sawn in the warehouse wall, but that wasn’t surprising since stacks of drums on the inside completely blocked it. She didn’t know how deep they went, but she couldn’t see any light through them.

“Got an age estimate on this?” she whispered to Scipio, more conscious of her voice now that she knew there was the equivalent of an open window here.

“Recent.” He pointed out freshly frayed splinters in the wood where the boards had been cut.

McCall nodded in agreement. “Why make a hole here instead of simply taking things out one of the doors? Do you think this is an area not covered by internal or exterior cameras?”

“That is likely. Perhaps the footage was not doctored, after all. Perhaps the perpetrators simply knew the blind spots in the warehouse and worked within them.”

McCall shone her light on the ground, looking for signs that heavy drums—or had the thieves syphoned the syrup from the drums into smaller jugs?—had been dragged out recently. The packed dirt didn’t show much. Maybe a real tracker could have distinguished more, but the ground was too hard for tracks to show, and it was also possible snow had covered it when the theft had occurred.

“And where did the thieves take the syrup from here? Through the front gate of the junkyard to a vehicle waiting there?” McCall scratched her jaw as she thought of the rusty padlock. It hadn’t looked like it had been disturbed in some time, but someone could have cut it and replaced it with an equally rusty one. “I haven’t finished skimming through the footage I snagged from the traffic cameras yet.”

She grimaced at the idea that she might have to. Even playing them on fast-forward, it was a mind-numbing task. She was tempted to write a search algorithm that she could apply, then simply have the ship’s computer scan the footage and pick out significant events, but it would be a challenge to teach it to distinguish regular vehicles from nefarious maple-syrup-stealing vehicles.

“Away,” Scipio said. “Away, junkyard beast.”

McCall looked over her shoulder in time to see Scipio waving a hand and raising his loafers overhead. The dog jumped up, trying to get them, as if this were a fun game. As McCall had suspected, the shoes were even more appealing now that they were off Scipio’s feet and had gone from being a part of him to being a toy, at least in the dog’s mind.

“…be the ones to get in trouble,” a distant voice said, someone speaking from within the warehouse.

McCall held a finger to her lips and scooted closer to the hole in the wall. That sounded like one of the security guards.

“We didn’t do anything,” a second speaker growled.

“But we didn’t catch who did.”

“There wasn’t a nightshift then. How can we be blamed for that?” McCall thought that sounded like the guard with the bionic hand, Mahajan.

“I don’t know, but somebody’s going to get blamed, and the boss doesn’t like me. I appreciate you letting me in to get my stuff, and if you’re smart, you won’t come back to work tomorrow either. He doesn’t like you any more than he likes me. Can Opener.”

“That’s because he’s an asshole. Isn’t there a rule against mocking your employees?”

The voices grew more distant, as if the men were moving.

“I don’t know, but I’m quitting, and you should too.”

“That’s going to look suspicious, you idiot,” Mahajan said. “That android was already asking about people who commed in sick today. You’re on his radar.”

“Shit.”

A door clanged, and McCall heard it both through the hole and from around the corner of the building. The men were leaving out the front.

She bit her lip, half-tempted to send Scipio up there to stun them to drag them onto the ship for questioning. If she’d been a law enforcer officially on the case, she might have, but she was simply an imperial subject privately hired to look for missing syrup. If she started stunning and questioning people, she could end up in trouble with the law herself.

Thunderous barking came from right behind her, and McCall thunked her head on the edge of the hole.

The dog took off, running along the fence line, or as close as he could manage around the piles of junk. He reached the corner and barked at the men who were likely walking to the vehicle park.

McCall rubbed her head.

“He is a noisy junkyard dog,” Scipio observed quietly.

“Yeah.”

“It sounds like those two men are not responsible for the crime.”

McCall almost nodded in agreement, but… “Are we sure they didn’t know we were listening? We weren’t keeping our voices down before we saw the hole. They may have heard us first and staged their conversation there, pretending they hadn’t.”

“It is possible. Do you wish to snoop inside next?”

“No. We would have to break a lock for that since Dunham didn’t give us a key. We can snoop around some more tomorrow.” McCall was tempted to suggest they snoop further in the junkyard, but the dog returned to them and flopped down on the ground, not on the side with the jagged piece of metal sticking out. “We need to help our new friend, first. Have you, by chance, ever downloaded a veterinary routine?”

Scipio lowered his loafers and issued her Displeased Expression Number One.

~

Part III coming soon!

Junkyard — Part 1 (a free science fiction novella)

Hi, folks!

I’m working on Agents of the Crown, Book 4 (Elven Fury!), but I took a break to write a new novella and a novel in my Fallen Empire science-fiction universe. Except the stories take place before the fall of the empire. And they feature some new characters.

If you’ve read my short stories “Here Be Dragons” in the Bridge Across the Stars anthology or “Bearadise Lodge” (free for those who are signed up for my sci-fi newsletter), you’ve already met my skip tracer, McCall, her trusty dog Junkyard, and her android business partner Scipio. This novella is a bit of a mystery adventure and shows how she first met up with Junkyard (and where his name came from) and how Scipio officially became her business partner.

I’m sending it off to my editor to work on in October, so this is on the rough side, but if you don’t mind, please jump in. I’ll be sharing it in 4 or 5 parts over the next couple of weeks to go along with the release of the novel, Fractured Stars.

Oh, and that’s Scipio in the artwork down there. He’s a snazzy dressing android, as you’ll see!

Junkyard: Part I

Frost edged the mossy cracks in the pavement in front of Maple Moon warehouse and sugarhouse. McCall Richter wrinkled her nose, imagining the frozen crystals coating her cilia, and tucked her hands under her armpits as she walked. Her new employee, Scipio, said nothing of the cold, but frost wouldn’t bother an android capable of repairing spaceships from the outside. While in flight.

Plumes of smoke wafted from the chimneys of the sugarhouse, infusing the crisp early spring air with the scent of maple syrup. Imagining cherry-red furnaces inside, McCall wished her instructions said to meet the owner in there. But she was supposed to meet Mr. David Dunham in the warehouse after landing, its corrugated steel walls just as frosty as the pavement.

She looked wistfully back at her ship. The Star Surfer, its sleek purple hull gleaming under the early morning suns, its environmentally-controlled interior always at a comfortable temperature, rested a mere fifty meters behind her. The interior also happened to be comfortably free of unfamiliar people with expectations she didn’t know if she could meet.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to back out…

A trio of men walked out of the warehouse, and she held back a grimace. They wore trousers and parkas, not combat armor, but that didn’t make her any less wary. They were strangers, and she always felt the need to put on a mask for strangers. Force a smile, make eye contact, pretend talking about planetary weather wasn’t inane. There was a reason she usually only accepted jobs via text.

“For future reference, you’re not allowed to set up meetings,” she muttered to Scipio.

The android gave her Inquiring Head Tilt Number Two—in the three months he had been aboard her ship, McCall had mentally catalogued the various facial gestured he was programmed with and given them labels. She often had a hard time reading human faces, but his features arranged themselves in precisely the same manner to simulate well-defined emotions, which made them easier to grasp.

“You gave me the position of personal assistant and said I should interact with people on behalf of your business. Is setting up meetings not a typical duty?”

“Not with people I don’t know and for a job I’m not qualified to do.”

“I read the last ten years of your assignment records so I could thoroughly familiarize myself with your business. I understand that you usually seek out missing people rather than missing goods, but I am certain you are qualified to do this.”

“What I’m qualified to do and what I want to do aren’t the same thing.”

McCall knew she sounded peevish—the unassailable logic of an android could bring that out in anyone—but there wasn’t time to explain that she’d spent the last fifteen years carefully crafting a cocoon in which she could thrive. Leaving it usually turned into anxiety, stress, and sensory overload that could put her into an exhausted funk for days. Thank the suns she’d reached the point in her career where she could call the shots and make a comfortable living from within the private protected walls of her ship.

“Good morning, Captain Richter,” one of the three men said as the trio stopped in front of her.

He had a blunt face, a broad build, and a beard long enough to scrub out his bellybutton when he showered. Because of the beard, she recognized him as the man who wanted to hire her. David Dunham.

“It is Captain, isn’t it?” he added. “Or do you prefer detective? Officer?”

He looked her up and down, as if her ponytail, fur-lined jacket, hiking shoes, and loose trousers might give some clue to a rank. Or maybe the charm bracelet she was twisting around her wrist without realizing it. When she noticed him glancing at it, she jerked her hands down to her side.

“I work with the imperial space fleet and law enforcement sometimes, but I’m a civilian. You can call me captain if you like—the ship is mine.” She waved behind her. “But McCall or Richter are fine too.”

The two silent men behind the speaker gazed blandly at the ship. They wore blazer rifles slung across their backs on straps and had the hulking miens of bouncers. Security guards, she presumed.

Two days ago, she wouldn’t have guessed a maple syrup factory would need security. That had been before she looked up the business and how much the stuff sold for. Premium maple syrup, derived from sap tapped from trees that could trace their lineage to the seeds originally brought on the colony ships from Old Earth, went for a hundred imperial morats a gallon.

“It’s a very purple spaceship,” one of the guards said.

He wore a glove on his right hand but not his left. The skin on the exposed hand appeared slightly waxy, reminding McCall of Scipio’s not entirely realistic synthetic flesh.

“Yes,” she said when he looked at her, seeming to expect a response. “Criminals don’t see it as a threat until it’s too late.”

That was the reason she always gave for the unique paint job even though the real reason was “because it’s different, and I like that.” Maybe someday, she would be comfortable enough in her own skin to simply say that. But she’d spent too much of her life trying to pass for normal for anything else to come easily now.

“This is my assistant, Scipio,” McCall added. “He’s the one you spoke with on the vid.”

Scipio adjusted the navy blue suit he wore, the front open to reveal a white shirt fastened with horizontal bamboo clasps that were apparently “on trend” now.

“Greetings,” Scipio said.

The men nodded at him, but they were dismissive nods. The talking-to-the-woman’s-android-can’t-be-important nods she’d seen before.

“Captain Richter,” Dunham said. “I appreciate you coming out. My father owns this installation and the sugarbush plantation out back, but he’s retired, so I run things. The business has been in our family since this moon was first terraformed and settled. We make do, but we’re independent operators without wealthy backers, and the government…” He spread a hand, and McCall didn’t need to be good at reading faces to guess that he was refraining from complaining about the rules, regulations, and price-setting by the empire. One never knew who would report back to government officials, resulting in a “therapist” showing up and deciding a loyal subject needed a mental adjustment.

“You said someone stole some of your syrup?” McCall wanted to move things along—imperial politics wasn’t a passion for her and thanks to the less-than-legal way she’d liberated Scipio from his previous owner, she was the last person who would report someone to the government.

“Some?” one of the guards balked.

“We’re missing over two hundred tons of syrup,” Dunham said. “It’s valued at over four million morats.”

“Your farm sounds lucrative, sir,” Scipio observed.

Dunham grimaced. “That represents more than this year’s harvest. The sap flow for the last few years was good, and because the government dictates how much we can sell each year, we have—had—extra in storage. I have twenty employees in addition to family members working here, and we have production and distribution costs, and the empire takes almost fifty percent in taxes. We’re not wealthy, if that’s what you’re implying.”

Scipio tilted his head. “I was merely making an observation, Mr. Dunham.”

“Scipio is chatty,” McCall said. “Want to show me around and tell me everything? Wait, before we start, I want to make sure you know my expertise lies in finding people, right? I’m a skip tracer, not a detective. I specialize in locating people who’ve stopped making payments on their spaceships or ground vehicles and then skipped town—or the planet. I do occasionally find hardened criminals, too, but I’ve never been hired to look for sweets.”

“Whoever stole my syrup is a criminal.” Dunham scraped his fingers through his beard in an agitated gesture. “They’re going to sell it on the black market and leave me with imperials sniffing around, wondering if I arranged everything to avoid paying taxes. It’s only been three days since we discovered the theft. I’m hoping that last month’s Alliance spaceport bombing has made security too tough for the criminal to arrange transportation off the moon for such a large and illegal cargo. If so, it has to be somewhere on the moon, and we might yet recover it.”

McCall nodded, taking in the information without commenting, though she wondered why someone would have stolen something during a month when transporting it to the black market would have been next to impossible.

“This way, please, Captain.” Dunham and his guards headed toward an open roll-up door in the front of the warehouse.

McCall was relieved he wanted to get straight to work. Often, she had to deal with people who were shocked that she was a woman and asked all sorts of silly questions about what it was like working in a man’s business. Admittedly, her name—inspired by her mother’s obsession with Old Earth historical romance novels—didn’t suggest to potential clients that she would be a woman, but it wasn’t as if she was a bounty hunter and went down to planets to forcibly collect the criminals herself. She simply pointed them out for those who hired her and let them handle the rest.

“Captain,” Scipio said as they walked, “I am no more chatty than other androids of my line. As a personal assistant model, I have been programmed to gather information about people and anticipate their needs so that I may better serve. Do you find me overly garrulous for your tastes?”

“No. If you talk and ask questions, I won’t have to. It’s perfect.”

Scipio gave her Puzzled Expression Number One. “Humans are social animals. Do you not find interacting with them necessary for mental health?”

“No.”

“Is it because of your autism diagnosis?”

McCall flushed and almost snapped another, “No,” but Dunham looked back, and she gave Scipio a stop-talking gesture. She didn’t even share her breakfast preferences with strangers, much less what was in her medical records. Maybe she should have been more selective in the background information she’d given her new employee to pursue. She’d simply wanted him familiar with her work.

Thankfully, Dunham didn’t comment on the conversation. He came to a stop inside the chilly warehouse and turned to face her again.

“Let us negotiate before we start.”

“Fine with me,” McCall said.

“Your fees for finding people are quite high.”

“I’ve been in the field for fifteen years. I’m experienced and good at what I do.”

McCall squinted into the gloom, willing her eyes to adjust to the shadowy interior of the warehouse. Stacks of drums filled more than half of it, with doors in the back and on one side leading to offices. Considering the warehouse had suffered a substantial theft, she would have expected far fewer drums.

“Would you consider charging less to find syrup than you do people?” Dunham asked.

“As you pointed out, a person had to have stolen it. If we find the person, we’ll find your missing goods.”

“Unless this all happened months ago, and they’re already off-moon,” one of the men muttered.

“Is that likely?” McCall envisioned chasing maple-syrup thieves all over the Tri-Sun System and grimaced.

“No.” Dunham shook his head, but behind him, the guard nodded.

How could they have only found out three days ago if the theft could have happened months ago? Or even last month? Lights were on in the office, and the warehouse appeared to be staffed on a daily basis.

“It couldn’t have happened over the winter.” Dunham frowned at guard. “Everything was locked down solid, and nobody was on the premises. The undisturbed locks confirm that. It’s only been five weeks since we opened up for the year.”

The man opened his mouth to reply, but Dunham made a chopping gesture not unlike the one she’d given Scipio earlier. He turned back to McCall and took a deep breath.

“I’m a little short on liquid funds right now,” he told her.

McCall couldn’t help but give Scipio a very dry look. This was one of the reasons she usually took jobs from established corporations and the government rather than individuals.

He gazed back blandly.

“Would you consider partial payment in maple syrup?” Dunham asked. “Assuming you’re able to find the missing syrup and return it, we can pay you from those reserves.”

“That’s a lot of assumptions.”

“I can pay part of your fee in morats,” Dunham said, “if you agree to the case. And one percent of the syrup recovered.”

“One percent?” McCall had done pro bono work before, and was at the point in her career where she could afford to take time off for charitable activities, but she was skeptical that someone with millions of morats of syrup in his warehouse was a candidate for charity. “Make it twenty percent, and you can forgo the rest of the fee.”

“Twenty.” Dunham rocked back on his heels.

One of the guards reached out, perhaps intending to catch him by the beard if he tipped too far back.

But Dunham recovered and shook his head vigorously. “That’s two hundred tons of syrup. Your cargo hold wouldn’t even carry that much.”

“My ship has no trouble carrying that much cargo. You should see how many suits Scipio has in his closet.”

Dunham gave her what seemed to be the human equivalent of Puzzled Expression Number Two.

“My entire clothing collection weighs approximately thirty-four point seven three pounds, Captain.” Scipio also gave her the puzzled expression.

McCall waved away what had been an attempt at a joke. “Never mind. Give me a counter offer, Mr. Dunham.”

“Five percent.”

“Fifteen.” McCall hated negotiating and avoided all flea markets where bartering was commonplace, but she also didn’t like being taken advantage of. She deemed it very possible that she could spend months on this and not find the syrup in the end. People could be slathering it all over their pancakes right now. If it was unrecoverable, she would end up with nothing, and like Dunham, she had operating costs—a spaceship wasn’t an insignificant thing to keep running. “Fifteen percent and no fee. I’m taking all the risk here.”

Dunham took a deep breath. “Ten percent.” He stuck out his hand.

“Ten percent.” McCall nodded firmly, hoping that would do since she didn’t like touching strangers—or friends.

Dunham nodded back but kept his hand out. His brow creased, and he peered into her eyes. McCall held back a grimace and made herself clasp his hand and meet his eyes, lest he think her up to something duplicitous.

“Give me a tour and introduce me to your employees, please,” McCall said, pulling her netdisc out of her pocket.

All she truly wanted were the names of all the employees so she could look them up on the sys-net. If she had to rely on her ability to question people and ferret out whether they were lying by their body language, she wouldn’t be able to locate soap in a lavatory, much less a slick syrup criminal.

“This way.” Dunham waved to the guards, and they took up positions beside the exterior doors in the warehouse.

“Is someone on guard around the clock?” Scipio asked as they followed Dunham toward the offices.

“Now, they are. Before, I had a security system, but whoever stole the syrup got past it somehow. I’m not positive, but I think they created a loop of a time when nothing was going on and inserted that for the night of the theft. Or nights. A lot of syrup was moved. It would have taken time.”

“Do any of your employees have the expertise to do that?” McCall asked.

“Not that I know of. Other than the basic machinery in the sugarhouse, we’re a low-tech operation. You drill holes in the trees, string up the hoses, put the sap in buckets, boil it until it becomes syrup, then store it and ship it out.” Dunham stopped in front of two barrels that had been placed on the cement floor near the offices. “You keep asking about employees. Do you believe it was an inside job?”

“Don’t you?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t know who would be responsible. Desmarais is weird and likes computers, but he’s no mastermind criminal.”

“Weird?” McCall raised her eyebrows.

“I’ll introduce you to him. And to Tate, my operations manager, and also my chief finance officer, Takahashi. He’s smart enough he might be able to diddle with the security cameras, but he has access to the company bank account, so if he were going to steal…” Dunham shrugged.

“Understood.” McCall asked for first names to go with the surnames she’d been given, then called up the holodisplay on her netdisc and tapped them in to research later.

A raucous barking sounded somewhere outside.

“Guard dog?” McCall asked. “Or have you got someone with hounds searching for tracks in the trees?”

“We’re not quite that medieval here. It’s the junkyard dog next door. He barks whenever our forklift operator moves drums. Or if someone walks past his fence. Or breathes too heavily.” Dunham’s lips pressed together. “I know the owner and have a key to the lock so we can deposit our refuse there at a reduced rate, but lately, it hasn’t been worth the hassle.”

Dunham patted a drum, then pulled off a lid that had been loosened. A pungent sweet odor wafted from the viscous dark liquid inside.

“This is maple syrup.” He tried to remove the lid on the drum next to it, but that one hadn’t been loosened. “Mahajan.” He waved to the guard with the single gloved hand. “I’m in need of a can opener.”

“Funny, boss.”

“I aim to entertain.”

“I’m not that amused since this is the fiftieth time you’ve said that.”

“I still find it amusing,” the second guard called from his station.

Mahajan used his gloved hand to offer a screw-you gesture before gripping the lid with the bare one and tugging it off without apparent effort.

“Thanks.” Dunham shooed the guard back, then pointed again at the first drum. “Syrup,” he repeated to McCall. Presumably for dramatic flair and not because he thought she was slow. He waved his hand over a far clearer liquid inside the second drum. “This is water.” He spat on the floor and pointed toward several stacks of drums. “All of those were once filled with maple syrup and are now filled with water.”

“Every drum in the warehouse?” Scipio asked.

“Not every one, but more than half.”

McCall stared bleakly at the water, realizing this was why they didn’t know when exactly the theft had occurred. The drums had still been present in the warehouse. And full of liquid.

“Have you reported the theft to law enforcement?” Scipio asked.

A back door opened, and two men walked inside and turned into a room at the rear of the warehouse.

“Yes, but they haven’t sent anyone out yet. They’re all busy sniffing around the spaceport and trying to find Alliance sympathizers. It could be weeks before they bother coming out here.”

Dunham frowned and tapped an earstar affixed to his helix. “Dunham here… Yes? Just a minute.” He held up a finger toward McCall and walked into one of the offices.

“Let’s snoop,” McCall whispered to Scipio.

“Snoop? We have been invited here to perform an investigation. Does the word snoop not have furtive and perhaps illegal connotations?”

“Fine, let’s investigate.”

McCall headed toward the room the newcomers had gone into, wanting to see what else was in the warehouse. She glanced at the guards to see if they would object, but they must have believed she was allowed to snoop.

The back door opened, and another man came in, removing gloves and turning into a different room. McCall glimpsed bare trees outside with trails through dirty gray snow before the door shut.

One of the rooms was simply a lavatory—she decided not to snoop in there. Another was a break area with the smell of coffee hanging in the air. Three men and a woman sat around one table, warming their hands on steaming mugs. At another table, a slender man with salt-and-pepper hair sat by himself, watching something on a netdisc holodisplay. He glanced at the doorway when McCall peeked in, but looked back at his display without making eye contact. The people at the other table hadn’t noticed her.

“Get their names and what they do here, will you, Scipio?” She felt guilty foisting gruntwork off on him, but he was a personal assistant android and, as far as she could determine, had no aversion to speaking with strangers.

“Certainly, Captain.”

“You can call me McCall, you know. It’s just the two of us. You don’t have to be so formal.”

“Certainly, Captain McCall.”

“Thank you,” she said dryly.

He stepped into the break room, and she opened the back door. The forest of maple trees started up at the edge of the pavement ten meters away and stretched back as far as the eye could see. Tubes ran around and between some of the trees. Others simply had buckets hanging from tiny spouts that had been inserted into the trunks.

“Not a high-tech industry indeed,” she murmured, amused by the juxtaposition of the buckets dangling from trees and her spaceship parked out front. A lot on the other side of the sugarhouse held ground vehicles, but they didn’t appear any more high-tech than the tube setup.

The dog barked, his ringing voice louder with the door open. McCall could see part of the fence of what had to be the junkyard Dunham had mentioned. It was so close to the warehouse, almost touching it on one side, that she wondered if the property had once been owned by the same family.

“Hate this slagging job,” a man muttered, walking out of the trees, lugging a wobbly hoverboard, its back end dragging in the snow. A huge pile of equipment was stacked atop it, and thanks to its ill-functioning hover engine, the man was responsible for toting all the weight himself.

He didn’t glance at her or seem to notice her as he headed for a door large enough for the sled to fit inside. He was young with dark skin and hair. Hopefully, Scipio would get his name, and she could look him up.

“Oh, uhm, excuse me,” someone said behind her.

McCall stepped aside, holding the door open for a man in hat and parka to step outside. It was the person who’d been sitting by himself in the break room. Had he slipped out before Scipio could question him? Or after?

She was inclined to let him go without saying anything, but he stopped and looked at her curiously before shifting his gaze past her and to the trees.

“We need to wait for the temperature to rise two more degrees before the sap will flow,” he said. “There’s little point in sending men out to check the lines this morning.”

“Just what I was thinking,” McCall said.

“Are you here to look at the Tercoraosa?”

He wasn’t looking at her, which made McCall glance around to see if someone else had walked up. No, the grumpy fellow with the hoverboard had disappeared inside.

“The what?” she asked, feeling stupid. It wasn’t a feeling she liked, so she vowed to look up the word when she got back to the ship.

“The Tercoraosa fungus. The original colonists were careful not to bring Anthracnose, Verticillium wilt, or Phyllosticta mimima with them from Old Earth, but there were indigenous fungi on this moon that can be problematic for non-native species as well as native vegetation.”

“I’m here to investigate the theft of the maple syrup.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed, like he had hoped she was some fungus-studying scientist with a passion for trees.

“Sorry.”

He shrugged and fell silent.

And this was why she preferred to let Scipio interact with strangers.

“What’s your name?” she forced herself to ask.

“Louis Desmarais.”

Ah. The “weird” employee Dunham had mentioned.

“I’m a botanist,” he added, glancing in her direction, but not at her face. “Did you know there were approximately one hundred and twenty eight species of maple tree on Old Earth? The colonists only brought three with them, and one was irrevocably lost. This species is most prolific in terms of sap production, which we turn into syrup in the sugarhouse.”

“Desmarais,” Dunham snapped from the hallway. “Break’s over. Stop pestering our guest.”

“Yes, sir.” Desmarais—Louis—dipped his head and shuffled into the woods.

A bark came from the fence, and a huge furry head appeared in a spot with a missing board. The dog had to be the size of one of those syrup drums. McCall couldn’t tell if it was wagging—the gap wasn’t large enough—but it wasn’t baring its teeth and snarling the way she’d imagined when Dunham had described it. Louis waved at it as he passed the fence, and the dog disappeared from sight.

“You won’t get anything useful from Desmarais,” Dunham said. “Unless you want to hear about trees. Or flowers. In the spring he regales us with his knowledge of flowers.”

“We all have our passions,” McCall murmured, feeling an urge to stand up for Louis, even if she’d just met him.

“Come on. I’ll give you a tour of the sugarhouse.”

McCall trailed him back toward the other building, reminding herself to get the name of the surly man, though she suspected someone in the middle of becoming extremely wealthy wouldn’t be grumpy. No, she needed to find the person wandering around elated. Elated but very nervous.

~

Part II coming soon!

The Agents of the Crown Fantasy Series Kicks off with Eye of Truth (preview chapters)

Many thanks to those of you who read all of Eye of Truth (Agents of the Crown, Book 1) on my blog this summer. The ebook is now releasing on Amazon where it’ll be exclusive for the rest of 2018, so I need to take it down from my site. I am allowed to leave up a couple of preview chapters, so those are below for anyone who missed the earlier postings.

If you’re not an Amazon-shopper, look for Agents of the Crown in 2019 at Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play. Also look for my recent series Heritage of Power and Sky Full of Stars to come out of Amazon exclusivity and into those stores this fall.

If you hate waiting, you can always sign up for my Patreon campaign. For $5 a pop, you can get my novels (in both e-reader formats and also as a PDF) before they are published.

If you like Amazon just fine, here are the links to Book 1 (available today) and Book 2 (coming on August 31st).

Eye of Truth

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon CA
Amazon AUS

Book 2: Blood Ties

Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon CA
Amazon AUS

And here you’ll find the blurb and first two chapters of Eye of Truth:

Description

After ten years at war, Jev Dharrow looks forward to hanging up his sword, relaxing with a cool mug of ale, and forgetting that the love of his life married another man while he was gone. But when his ship sails into port, a beautiful woman wearing the garb of an inquisitor from one of the religious orders waits to arrest him. 

His crime? 

He’s accused of stealing an ancient artifact with the power to start another war. Jev would gladly hand over the artifact to stop more suffering, but he has no idea where it is or even what it looks like. The inquisitor woman definitely has the wrong person. 

Inquisitor Zenia Cham grew up with nothing, but she has distinguished herself as one of the most capable law enforcers in the city, and she’s next in line to become archmage of her temple. All she has to do is find the Eye of Truth, and her superiors are certain that Jev has it. 

He tries to charm her with his twinkling eyes and easy smile, but she’s not letting any man get between her and her dreams. Especially not a thief. 

If Jev can’t convince Zenia they’re on the same side, find the artifact, and clear his name, his homecoming will turn into a jail sentence. Or worse. 

 

Chapter 1

Inquisitor Zenia Cham crouched atop a parked wagon, observing the brick square in front of the Temple of the Water Order. Observing and waiting.

Pedestrians ambled through the area, buying from vendors, ignoring beggars, and tossing pebbles into the dragon fountain for luck. Two boys waded through the water, scrambled up the statue, and giggled as they stuck their fingers into the dragon’s nostrils in an attempt to plug the streams shooting out of them.

Zenia almost yelled for them to get off the fountain—that statue represented the Blue Dragon founder of the Water Order and deserved respect—but she had a greater criminal to catch.

“He’s not going to come back here,” her colleague whispered from behind her.

“You’re doubting my ability to read a criminal’s intentions in his actions?” Zenia arched her brows and smiled over her shoulder.

Rhi Lin leaned casually against the wagon’s dormant smoke stack, but she also scrutinized the square from their elevated perch, her dark brown eyes missing little. “I’m doubting anyone would be stupid enough to return to the scene of his crime. Twenty minutes after committing it.”

“Judging by the nervous way he kept glancing over his shoulder, he knew we were following him. And his hand strayed often to his purse full of stolen coins. Those were hesitant touches. I believe he knows he won’t escape and that he’s decided to return the offering to the temple charity plate in the hope that we’ll let him go.”

“Your rock tell you that?” Rhi glanced at the front of Zenia’s robe.

Zenia’s dragon-tear gem wasn’t visible, but her colleague knew well that she kept it on a chain around her neck.

“I didn’t need magic to deduce our criminal’s motives.”

“So, you’re guessing.” Despite the skeptical curve of Rhi’s lips, she leaned forward onto the balls of her feet, her fingers curled around her bo staff. She was ready to spring into action.

“We’ll see.” Zenia smiled and turned her attention back to the square.

It was a guess, but after more than ten years as an inquisitor, and five years apprenticed to an inquisitor before that, she believed in her guesses. Her deductions. They typically proved correct.

One of the twin bronze-and-wood doors to the temple opened, their massive size and height making the blue-robed figure that stepped out appear diminutive. But the white-haired Archmage Sazshen was anything but diminutive, and when she yelled at the boys to get off the dragon, they leaped down and sprinted away so quickly they tripped over their own feet. Repeatedly.

Sazshen gazed calmly after them, then around the square. Her square.

Uncharacteristic nerves trotted through Zenia’s belly as she realized the temple leader, who was also her employer and mentor, might witness her failing. What if she had guessed wrong? Sazshen would think it odd to find her protégé sunning herself atop a wagon for no reason.

Rhi touched Zenia’s shoulder. “There he is.”

Before Zenia spotted their target, Rhi sprang from the top of the wagon. She landed lightly on the brick pavers, her soft shoes not making a sound as she sprinted through the pedestrians with her bo in hand. People hurried out of the way, though she wouldn’t have knocked anyone aside. Rhi was five and a half feet tall and as stocky as a dwarf, but she had the uncanny agility of an elf.

She weaved through the crowds like a dancer, the six-foot olive-wood staff a natural extension of her body rather than a clunky weapon, and if people hadn’t made exclamations of surprise as she ran past, her target never would have heard her.

But the gaunt man in tattered clothing glanced back and jumped, spotting her sprinting toward him. Rhi had been circling as she ran, perhaps hoping to herd him up the steps and into the temple’s great hall. But he took off down the street instead, heading toward the wagon where Zenia perched.

She hopped down, not with as much agility as her colleague, but she was ready when the man approached, bystanders scattering to get out of the way. Zenia lifted her arms and stepped toward him. She had no great magical attacks she could throw at him, since her gem only lent her powers that were useful in sussing out clues and tracking down criminals, but she prepared to shout a mental command into his mind, a compulsion to stop and surrender.

Before she sent it, he saw her and halted so quickly he tumbled to his knees in front of the dragon fountain. Sheer terror flashed in his eyes, making Zenia feel like some tyrannical troll that ate those who trespassed in its territory.

The man was so gaunt and clad in such tattered clothing that a part of her wished she could let him go, that she could look the other way and let him take the Order’s donation money to buy some fish and flatbread. Times had been difficult for many these last years of the war, and Zenia hadn’t forgotten what it was like to go hungry and to have hunger turn into desperation.

But she had sworn an oath long ago to do the Water Order’s bidding, to protect the interests of the temple and all it employed. If the laws were ignored for one, they might as well be ignored for a thousand. Besides, she could never let a criminal go with Archmage Sazshen looking on.

As Zenia stepped forward, believing the man would give up, he threw another terror-filled look at her and leaped to his feet. He whirled to sprint in the other direction.

By now, Rhi had caught up with him. She launched a fist at his face. His nose crunched loudly enough that Zenia heard it from several paces away, even over the rumble of a nearby steam carriage and the gurgle of the fountain. The blow dropped the man to his back.

As Zenia approached, Rhi knelt to pat down the thief. Groaning and dazed, the man brought shaky hands to his nose but did not object to the search.

Rhi produced a jangling pouch and handed it up to Zenia. A witness in the temple had seen the man slip the donation coins into the pouch, so there was no question that they belonged to the Order.

“All those hours I spend sparring with Jagarr and throwing sandbags around in the gym,” Rhi said, shaking her head, “and criminals are more terrified of you than they are of me.”

She truly sounded disgusted.

“It’s the pin that terrifies them.” Zenia accepted the pouch and pointed to the dragon claw pin attached to the front of her robe, the pin that marked her as an inquisitor. “Those with sins staining their souls get nervous when an inquisitor of any of the Orders comes around.”

“I’m not arguing that, but you’ve got a special reputation in the city. And don’t tell me you don’t know it.”

Zenia grimaced as Rhi hefted the thief to his feet, tears streaming from the man’s eyes. She was aware of her reputation and the fact that she was known as the Frost Mage—and occasionally the Frost Bitch, depending on who was listening.

She never knew how to feel about it. In the early years, she had been proud, because it had come about due to all the crimes she’d solved, all the underworld felons she’d located and brought in. She’d risen to her current level of fame—or perhaps infamy, at least in the eyes of guilty parties—three years ago after finding and defeating the elusive Dark Stalker, a man who’d raped and murdered his way up and down the kingdom coast.

She remained proud that she was good at her job, but her reputation did lead to a degree of isolation that she hadn’t anticipated. Even within the temple, she had few friends, and she wasn’t sure why that was. It had been years since a man had asked her out to dinner or for a walk on the beach. Even though she was focused on her career and told herself companionship wasn’t important, she sometimes wondered if she would die without ever marrying and having children, without finding someone she loved and who loved her.

Her gaze drifted up the long marble steps to where Archmage Sazshen still stood, now gazing down at them. Sazshen was everything Zenia longed to be, with a career and power that nobody could take from her, but she’d also never married and she had no children. By choice? Or because she, too, had been feared by men rather than loved by them?

Realizing that Rhi was almost to the top of the stairs with the prisoner, Zenia trotted up after them. She hoped the gaunt man wouldn’t be punished unduly for his crimes, especially since the money had been recovered before it could be spent.

Archmage Sazshen regarded him with cold eyes.

“Dungeon, Archmage?” Rhi asked.

“Dungeon.” Sazshen nodded firmly. “Brakkor will drop a few lashes on his back to ensure he thinks twice about stealing again.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Rhi escorted her charge into the cool temple interior.

Zenia was glad the man would receive a whipping rather than the traditional punishment for theft, having his hand cut off. Thankfully, all the Orders had grown more lenient in dispensing justice these last few years. It was anything but a time of prosperity for the kingdom, and half the city would be without hands if punishments remained as harsh as they had been historically. Even so, Zenia was glad she was usually assigned tough cases, men and women who had done far more evil than swiping a few coins from the Order’s coffers.

“How did you convince the thief to return to the temple?” Sazshen asked. “I’m sure your monk appreciates having such a short walk to the dungeon with her recalcitrant prisoner.”

Your monk. As if Archmage Sazshen didn’t know Rhi’s name. A few dozen monks lived in or worked for the temple, but that wasn’t so many that one couldn’t learn their names. And Rhi, as one of only two female monks here, was memorable.

“He convinced himself, Archmage.”

“Handy.”

“I thought so.” Zenia thought about mentioning that Rhi had wanted to head to the public market, believing the thief would rush to spend his ill-gotten coin there, and that it had been she who’d deduced the criminal’s route. She shouldn’t feel the need to brag, and it irritated her that she still had the urge to do so, to point out that she’d done something clever. She’d passed her thirty-second birthday, and she was established in her profession. Why did she still feel the need for praise?

“I sensed your approach and came out to meet you.” Sazshen touched the tear-shaped gem that she wore openly on the outside of her robe, an intricate representation of the fountain in front of the temple carved into its surface. Most people who owned the valuable gems hid them, lest they tempt the desperate and the hungry.

“Do you need something more than thieves from me?” Zenia asked.

“I wish to take you to lunch.”

“Ah.” Zenia had hoped for more interesting news, but she was always willing to spend time with her mentor. “I would be happy to dine with you.”

“I thought we would discuss my retirement.”

“Again?” Zenia smiled.

Archmage Sazshen had been threatening to retire for years. More than once, she’d hinted that she might suggest Zenia to her colleagues at the other temples as a possible replacement, but Zenia hadn’t been holding her breath. Even though she liked to think her work and dedication to the Order would make her ideal for the position, there were other mages and inquisitors who were more eligible. Older and more experienced. And from the nobility. Even though the temples supposedly promoted people equally these days, and ignored kingdom titles, the bias was there. And Zenia was… well, her father had never acknowledged her existence, so it didn’t matter that she was technically half zyndar.

“Many have watched your work and your career with interest,” Sazshen said. “Archmages are usually at least in their fifties before they’re considered wise and mature enough for the position—if Archmage Xan’s tendency to place noise-maker cushions on the chairs of his colleagues at meetings can be considered mature—but I’ve mentioned your name numerous times, and I believe they’re considering you. If you were to complete one more high-profile task for the Order, I suspect they could be swayed.”

Zenia clasped her hands behind her back. “I would certainly be honored to be chosen for the position, Archmage.”

Was it possible a high-profile task was already on the horizon? Perhaps some new crafty criminal was at work right now, harming the Order or the subjects of the kingdom.

“As it happens, I have a challenging assignment for you right now.”

“Oh?” Zenia leaned forward on her toes, not bothering to hide her eagerness. It had been weeks, if not months, since she’d had a truly demanding assignment. The capital city of Korvann had been unusually restful since news of the king’s death and the end of the war had arrived, as if its one million residents believed a period of prosperity would return now that resources would no longer be funneled across the sea to the north.

“I find it encouraging that you appear more excited about an assignment than a promotion,” Sazshen said, smiling slightly.

“You know I enjoy the challenge of my job, Archmage.”

“Indeed I do. I suspect that would have to be one of the stipulations of the promotion, that you would continue to tackle difficult assignments as an inquisitor.”

“Is that a possibility?” Zenia had dreamed often of rising all the way to archmage, not only the highest position in the Water Order Temple, but, because this temple presided over the capital city, one of the highest positions in the entire kingdom. Only the Fire, Earth, and Air Order archmages would be her equals. For a girl of her dubious origins… it was amazing to think that she might rise so far.

“You would be the boss over the whole temple. You would make the rules.”

“That sounds encouraging.”

Sazshen patted her on the shoulder. “Let’s save that talk for the future and discuss this new assignment. You wouldn’t mind arresting a zyndar, would you?”

Zenia imagined her eyes flaring with inner fire. Usually the kingdom’s nobles were untouchable, above most of the laws of the land—and they knew it—but if a crime was grievous enough, they could be brought in for an inquisition and punishment. And she loved bringing in those arrogant entitled sots. Maybe it made her petty, but she couldn’t help it. So many of them did not deserve all that they had.

“I would not mind,” Zenia said calmly, hoping her feelings didn’t show.

“Good. Good. Because an artifact was stolen from the temple several years ago. Now that the war is over, and the soldiers are returning home, we may be able to get it back. You may be able to get it back.”

“I’m ready. Who has it?”

“Zyndar Jevlain Dharrow.”

 

Chapter 2

Zyndar Jevlain Dharrow gripped the railing as the ship turned, knifing through the gleaming waves of the Anchor Sea, and Korvann came into sight. The war hadn’t touched these shores, and the capital was as he remembered it, the whitewashed plaster walls, the red-clay tile roofs, and the four pillars to the four founding dragons rising up from the winter, spring, summer, and fall quarters of the city. The brown waters of the Jade River delta still marked Korvann’s eastern border, with few attempting to build inland along the waterway, not with the dense mangrove swamps rising along the muddy shores for miles.

Claps, cheers, and shouts came from behind Jev as the ship sailed closer. All he felt like doing was throwing up.

He rubbed his face. The feeling in his stomach wasn’t nerves, not exactly. He didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d longed for an end to the war for so long, it had become a habit, but he wasn’t sure what he was coming home to. His crusty old father? The woman who hadn’t waited?

Someone walked up from behind and thumped Jev on the shoulder. “Is the city as wondrous a sight to you as it is to me, Captain?” the cheerful voice asked.

Jev attempted to arrange his face into an expression of good cheer as Second Lieutenant Targyon joined him at the rail.

“Korvann remains beautiful,” Jev said, hoping the young officer wouldn’t notice that he didn’t quite answer the question.

Targyon, one of fallen King Abdor’s nephews, hadn’t earned a reputation as a great warrior or dauntless leader during his two years at the front, but his bookishness had lent itself toward craftiness. Despite the affable smile that made him seem simple rather than shrewd, the twenty-two-year-old man didn’t miss much.

“I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever again see a settlement that wasn’t full of death and booby traps. And I was only out there for two years. I can only imagine what this moment must be like to you after ten. That’s almost half my lifetime.” Targyon shook his head.

“Yes.” Jev lowered his voice when he added, more to himself than to his young officer, “Long enough to grow jaded to death and fear and pain and to almost forget one’s identity. But not quite long enough to forget… other things.”

Targyon’s brow furrowed.

Jev forced a smile onto his face. “I’m looking forward to getting smashing drunk and sleeping it off on the beach under one of those thatch umbrellas,” he offered, both because that was what so many of the men had expressed longing for and because it did sound appealing right now.

“That’s how you’ll celebrate? You won’t go home to see your father? Your mother has passed, hasn’t she? You never mentioned if there was anyone else.”

Jev locked that smile onto his face, though it wanted to drop off onto the deck of the ship.

Naysha, her name floated into his mind. He’d thought he had gotten over her, come to accept that she had moved on. It had been years now. But seeing the city he’d visited so often in his youth and knowing he would soon ride past the farms and vineyards of his family’s estate brought all the memories back. Too many memories.

“No,” Jev said. “There’s no one else.”

Oh, he had cousins, aunts, and uncles aplenty, but they weren’t the ones occupying his thoughts.

Since Targyon looked like he might pry, Jev hurried to add, “What will you do, Lieutenant?”

“Go back to school and finish my classes. Become a professor of the sciences, as I’d always planned. This…” Targyon extended a hand backward, encompassing the hundred-odd men out on the deck, the soldiers who had survived countless battles, fighting for a king who’d never been able to see that the war was unwinnable. “This was a startling dose of reality and something I’ll always remember, but I wasn’t a soldier two years ago when I joined you in Taziira, and in my heart, I know I’m still not. I do appreciate you letting me tag along, letting me get myself into trouble even.”

Targyon offered a lopsided grin, silently alluding to how few zyndar captains had wanted the king’s scholarly nephew in their company. But he’d fit in well with the intelligence-gathering Gryphon Company, and Jev had never minded having him along. He hadn’t been a burden.

“You’re a soldier,” Jev said. “Don’t let anyone tell you differently. You became a soldier the day you stopped hiding under the table in the mess hall and started helping me ferret out the activities of the Taziir.”

“Thought I saw the boy under the table last week,” came a deep male voice from behind them, the timbre reminiscent of rocks grinding together.

“Only because I dropped my fig,” Targyon said, turning toward Cutter, the only dwarf who’d fought with the kingdom army during the war.

Red-haired, red-bearded, and barefoot, Cutter wore a belt full of weapons and tools that would have brought most men to their knees with its weight. After almost five years, Jev still didn’t know his real name. Cutter assured him it was too difficult for humans to pronounce, even though Jev spoke six languages in addition to a smattering of Preskabroton Dwarf.

“That wasn’t a prize I was willing to let go easily,” Targyon added. “Considering nothing but berries grow on the elves’ benighted continent.”

“So long as there was a reason your dusty butt was top-up like a dirt flower sprouting from a rock.”

“A dirt flower? Is that an actual plant?” Targyon arched his eyebrows at Jev.

“Maybe,” Jev said, “but dwarves have about fifty words for dirt. It’s possible there wasn’t a more apt translation.”

“I hope you’re not mocking my language, human.” Cutter pointed the hook that replaced his missing right hand up at Jev’s face. “I’d hate to have to break your nose when you’ve somehow managed to survive all these years of battles without a blow to crook it.”

Cutter’s own nose looked like a sculptor’s drunken apprentice had battered at it for years with a hammer.

“You’d better treat my nose well,” Jev said, “if you want that introduction to the city’s master gem cutter.”

“Arkura Grindmor,” Cutter said, his tone managing to take on a wistful quality without losing any of its harshness. He faced the railing and the city. Their vessel had sailed close enough that the masts and smokestacks of docked ships blocked the view of the waterfront, but meandering streets climbed up the slope from the harbor with buildings visible as they stretched up and over the ridge. “Can we see the master today? Do you know where the workshop is located?”

“I do know where his shop is, assuming it hasn’t moved in the last ten years.” Jev looked to Targyon since he’d been in the city far more recently.

“I don’t think she’s moved in ten years,” he said dryly.

“There’s plenty of moving involved in bringing out the magic in a gem,” Cutter said. “I’m sure she’s as sound as a boulder.”

“That’s a compliment, right?” Targyon asked.

Jev nodded. “For a dwarf, yes. He’s practically swooning. One wonders if his interest in our city’s master gem cutter isn’t more personal than professional. I hadn’t realized Master Grindmor is a, er, woman.” Considering he’d seen the dwarf a few times and even gone to the shop once, it was somewhat alarming that he hadn’t known that.

“She does have that appealing beard.” Targyon scraped his fingers through his own beard. It was on the clumpy and scraggly side, but Jev’s wasn’t much better. None of them had bathed, shaved, or had haircuts in he couldn’t remember how long.

“Indeed,” Jev said. “It’s fuller and fluffier than the tail of a wolfhound.”

Cutter squinted up at Jev’s face, perhaps entertaining nose-breaking fantasies again. “I’ve never met her,” was all he said. “But I’ve waited a long time to beg her to take me on and teach me.”

Cutter touched one of the many leather pouches and kits attached to his belt, one that held his jewelry tools. He had often put those tools to use while assisting the army, repairing and improving the dragon-tear gems that some of the officers wielded. They were the only source of magical power in the world that humans could draw upon and use, and they’d been imperative in surviving against the magical Taziir. Jev didn’t know what more the dwarf hoped to learn about carving, but he owed it to Cutter to help him gain an apprenticeship if he wanted one.

“King Alderoth?” a man asked as he approached Targyon. It was Lieutenant Morfan, one of the signal officers.

“What?” Targyon’s brow furrowed at the incorrect address.

Jev wondered if they had both misheard it. The earnest Lieutenant Morfan wasn’t known for telling jokes. Or laughing at the ones others told.

“Sire.” Morfan dropped to one knee and bowed his head. “You may have noticed the flag message we received a short while ago.”

Jev and Targyon glanced toward the high stone walls that stretched into the Anchor Sea, creating a protected harbor for the docks and swimming beaches. A semaphore soldier had been atop it earlier, waving his colored flags toward the Fleet Stallion. Since Jev was colorblind, he’d never tried to add the semaphore code to his repertoire of languages, but he did remember thinking the flags had been waving about more quickly than usual. More urgently?

“Uhm, yes, but whatever you think you saw must have been a mistake if…” Targyon spread a helpless hand and glanced to Jev, as if he had some idea what was going on.

He did not. As his father’s eldest—and now only—son, Jev knew how the government and the succession worked, but he couldn’t think of anything that would account for this. King Abdor was dead, but according to the last reports Jev’s company had received, his three sons were alive with Crown Prince Dazron running the kingdom.

“It’s not a mistake, Sire. I checked three times to be certain. I, too, was… surprised.” The lieutenant lifted his head but only enough to glance up at Targyon. “The three princes died of a rare disease of the blood, all within weeks of each other and all quite suddenly. This left the kingdom without a named heir. The four archmages of the Orders came together and debated the merits of the children of the king’s sisters.”

Jev scratched his bearded jaw and watched Targyon’s face as the story unfolded. His mouth hung open. No, it was frozen open. The expression stamped there held both horror and disbelief.

Horror for the deaths of the princes, Jev guessed. He didn’t know how close Targyon was with his cousins, but unlike their warmongering father, they had been well-liked among the populace. And disbelief because—

“I’m the youngest,” Targyon managed to blurt. “Of six boys. My mother is the oldest of my uncle’s sisters, yes, but Himon, Dralyn, and—four hells, all of them would be before me.”

“I don’t claim to understand, Sire.” The lieutenant was careful to use the royal honorific. Whether this proved to be a mistake or not, he wouldn’t risk failing to respect the possibility. “I just know what I read in the flags. The ship’s captain would like you to join him. We’ll be docking shortly, and he’s arranging a suitable bodyguard for you. Representatives of the Orders, including Archmage Petor, should be waiting to explain everything to you.”

“Bodyguard,” Targyon mouthed, then looked to Jev again.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Jev said, figuring Targyon would appreciate a familiar title right now. “I don’t know what to tell you, but I do know the oldest-is-considered-first rule is only for the king’s direct descendants. In this situation, the precedent is for the archmages to decide among themselves which of the potential heirs that put themselves forward would be best for the kingdom.”

“Put themselves forward?” Targyon brightened at this potential loophole. “I didn’t do that. That makes this a mistake. Or maybe they assumed since I volunteered to serve in the army that I would—no, this must be a mistake. And I can get out of it, right?”

“You’ll have to discuss it with the archmages,” Jev said neutrally. He couldn’t imagine young Targyon saying no or even arguing with those intimidating figures. Few did. On paper, the Orders and the kingdom government had equal power over the land, but the archmages tended to get what they wanted, especially in those rare incidents when all four Orders worked together toward a common goal.

“I will.” Targyon nodded firmly and turned, almost tripping over the lieutenant who still knelt, his head bowed. “Where’s the ship’s captain, Morfan?”

“Permission to rise, Sire?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Morfan stood. “I’ll take you to him.”

Jev felt numb as he watched them go, having a hard time envisioning Targyon as king. Even if he only dove under tables these days for figs.

How had this happened? A disease of the blood? That struck down all three princes in the prime of their lives? By the founders, that was as unlikely as a dragon cave without treasure in it. Jev hoped the Orders’ inquisitors were crawling all over the castle looking for signs of foul play. He imagined every newspaper in the city speculating that the Taziir were behind it.

But why would they be? The elves had won the war. Their archers had found the cracks in Abdor’s armor and taken him down, leaving no one else who cared to continue the assault. The kingdom was no further threat to Taziira.

“That boy is going to be a king?” Cutter asked. He’d been silent during the exchange, but he scratched his head vigorously with his hook now. If the metal appendage bit into his scalp, he didn’t notice it. “He’s barely out of diapers.”

Jev didn’t voice an objection to the observation since he was more than ten years older than Targyon and also had a tendency to think of him as a boy. What had the Orders been thinking?

A green-clad figure with pointed ears and silver hair walked toward Jev and Cutter, his pack slung over one shoulder and his longbow visible over the other. His elegant facial features were impossible to read as he glanced past them and toward the ships. The Fleet Stallion was only seconds from sliding into one of several vacant slips along the main dock—other troop transport ships trailed behind, waiting their turns.

The sailors scurrying about preparing the Stallion glanced uneasily at the elf.

“You decide to take me up on my offer, Lornysh?” Jev asked.

Lornysh arched a slender silver eyebrow, first at Jev, then at Cutter. “To share a guest room with a snoring dwarf?”

“My family has a castle. There’s more than one guest room.”

“Are there trees?” Lornysh’s ice-blue eyes shifted, his gaze sweeping across the city.

Here and there, squat olive trees rose between buildings, and one could glimpse the dark mangroves stretching up the Jade River, but to an elf accustomed to the dense northern forests across the sea, Jev supposed the foliage seemed sparse.

“There are some trees. My father’s land is fifteen miles that way.” Jev pointed up the river and past the ridge. “Outside of the city. We have fields for the cows and sheep, but there are copses here and there near the water. We have a lovely bog where we grow lots of gort leaves.”

“Hm.” The single note held disapproval, for the paucity of trees rather than for the gort bog, Jev assumed. One didn’t typically disapprove of gort until one had tasted it. Multiple times. Which didn’t take long in Korvann where it was served with almost every meal. “Your people are such… assiduous loggers.”

The pause did nothing to hide Lornysh’s distaste of all things related to humans and their proclivities. That he’d worked so many years as a scout in Gryphon Company, and occasionally even an assassin, was a marvel. He’d never shared his reason for turning on his people, but a few omissions here and there led Jev to believe Lornysh had been cast out for some reason.

“We like to clear them so we can farm and eat, but I can find you some trees on our land,” Jev said. “I would be happy to string you up a hammock outside the castle.”

It would actually be easier for Jev to fulfill his promise of sanctuary to Lornysh if he opted to sleep outside. Perhaps his father need never know an elf was on his land. Not that Jev would lie if the subject came up. His honor wouldn’t permit that.

“You going to live here among the humans, Lorn?” Cutter asked.

“For a few weeks. I wish to see some of their culture and art. I haven’t decided yet what I’ll do after that.”

Jev hadn’t either, and this was his home. Was that odd?

He was sure his father would be quick to put him to work again on the estate, which had to have been neglected since the king had required that Jev recruit eighty of their men to form up a company to join the army with him. So many women had been without their husbands for so long. And some of their husbands would never return.

Jev felt he owed something to the estate for that, especially since he hadn’t been able to keep an eye on his men once he’d been transferred to Gryphon Company, but a job overseeing Dharrow farms, dairy, and craftsmen seemed far too tame to hold his interest after the action of war. All the other men spoke of plans, of all the delightful things they would enjoy now that they were free. And Jev had no idea beyond introducing a dwarf to a bearded woman and finding a hammock for Lornysh.

A blue robe on the docks caught his eye. A woman from the Water Order stood at the base of the recently extended gangplank, a space of several feet around her clear of people, even though soldiers, sailors, and vendors hawking their wares crowded the area. Only one person stood near the robed figure, another woman, this one in a blue monk’s gi. She was as stout as a dwarf, one of their temple’s enforcers, no doubt.

Jev saw the browns, reds, and whites of the other Orders farther up the dock and assumed the temple representatives were here to talk to Targyon. Poor kid. Jev wasn’t sure what was worse. Getting stuck with the job of king or having to deal with the Orders.

“I’ve heard you have to join some kind of criminal guild if you want to be an assassin in a human city,” Cutter said.

“I will join nothing,” Lornysh said.

“So, you’re going to be as social here as you were in the company.”

“There is nothing I wish to say to humans. Or dwarves.”

“Or elves either, apparently,” Cutter said, “seeing as how you’re fine with poking them with arrows these days. Is it hard making friends when you’ll stick pointy metal in anyone you meet?”

Lornysh looked at Jev, as if Jev were Cutter’s handler and could silence him with a jerk of a leash.

“How far is the hammock tree from his room?” Lornysh asked.

“Nearly a mile,” Jev said, waving toward the gangplank. Targyon and six soldiers pressed into bodyguard duty had already descended, and other men were crowding it, eager to escape into the city. “The grounds around the castle were cleared centuries ago, back when squabbles between the zyndar were as common within the kingdom’s borders as battles with surrounding nations.”

“A mile should suffice,” Lornysh said.

“You’re sure? Cutter snores loudly.”

“Are the walls of your castle so thin?”

“The snore of a dwarf is a battering ram even thick walls cannot withstand,” Jev said.

“True.”

Jev walked down the gangplank ahead of his companions, hoping people would notice him first and not make trouble for Lornysh. Not even a half elf would be welcome in the capital these days. A full-blooded one? Jev wanted to get him past the city walls as quickly as possible.

As he walked, he made sure the gold wolf-head clasp securing his gray cloak to his shoulders was visible. The Dharrow family emblem marked him as zyndar, a noble from one of the oldest and most recognizable lines. Commoners here in Korvann, so close to where his family held their land, had always nodded or greeted him with respect.

The blue-robed woman from the Water Order still waited at the bottom of the gangplank. That surprised Jev since Targyon and his escort were moving away from the docks, the colored robes of Order representatives all around him, including someone else in a blue robe.

This woman had dark brown hair pulled back in a braid and an olive-skinned face one might have called beautiful if it had appeared less haughty and aloof. She pinned Jev with a cool green-eyed gaze and stepped forward as he reached the end of the gangplank.

He gave her a nod, recognizing the large silver clasp at her shoulder, the emblem of an inquisitor. He should have guessed from the monk standing at her side. He wondered who on the ship she had been sent to question. A sailor? All the soldiers had been gone for years, so they couldn’t be associated with any recent trouble in the city.

A chain around the woman’s neck suggested a dragon tear hung beneath her robe. For her, the gem’s power would likely manifest as the ability to read minds and tell truths from lies.

After his polite nod, Jev started to move past her, hoping her gaze wouldn’t fix on Lornysh. It was very possible one of the Orders’ law enforcers would opt to pick him up instead of letting him roam free in the city.

As Jev rehearsed the defense he would utter if the woman stopped Lornysh, she reached out a hand to stop him.

“Zyndar Jevlain Dharrow?” she asked, her voice as cool as her eyes.

“Yes?”

“You’re under arrest.”

~

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