Planet Broker

  Chapter 1

  IDENTIFICATION: TOWER, COLBY

  SPECIES: HUMAN

  AFFILIATION: TERRA-NEBULA CORPORATION

  OCCUPATION: BROKER

  STATUS: TERMINATED

  I refreshed the display again.

  Nothing changed.

  I did it again and again and again. My hand didn’t feel like my own anymore. I watched it from outside my body, a stranger’s hand endlessly tapping at the brightly lit glass screen. I watched distantly as a tremor began finely at the wrist.

  TERMINATED. TERMINATED. TERMINATED. TERMINATED.

  No matter what I did, the blood-red letters didn’t change. They weren’t a glitch. They seemed to mock me as they grew brighter and brighter with each thudding pulse of my heart as it echoed cavernously in my ears. The edges of my vision had begun to tunnel black. All I could see were those pulsing letters, my eyes burning, my face searing, my lungs on fire …

  “CT!”

  Neka’s yowl snapped me out of it, and I took a great, gasping breath.

  Instantly, the tunnel walls receded. My heart no longer sounded like a sonic boom in my head. I blinked for the first time in what felt like years, and my eyelashes stuck together wetly. Before Neka could see, I scrubbed at them with the back of my hand. The searing red letters were still stamped across the inside of my eyelids.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I muttered as my fingers dug into my eye sockets and tried to claw the letters out. I took another few deep breaths, opened my eyes, and turned to my assistant.

  Neka looked so small there as she trembled beside the copilot’s chair six meters away. I hadn’t noticed her when I had entered the bridge a few moments ago. She probably hadn’t even had a chance to greet me before I had been distracted by the flashing yellow message light on one of the wall displays just inside the doorway. Before our lives as we knew them imploded.

  Her already alabaster skin was bone-white under the fluorescent lights of the ship’s bridge. Her pupils were dilated in fear, the yellow iris a band of thinnest gold along the outer edge. She wrung her hands, and I distantly noted the way her ears were flat against her orange hair and how her bushy tail kept flicking in and out of view behind her.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her gently, even though inside I felt like a roiling supernova. I pushed all that down below the surface. I had scared my assistant and needed to make it right. “I’m okay.” I opened my arms to her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she slunk into them. Her feet, as always, were silent as she nimbly crossed the few meters separating us. When she reached me, she buried her face in my chest and nuzzled there. I wrapped my arms around her and rested my chin on top of her head. I knew she was checking my heartbeat and my breathing rate. I let her.

  In the beginning, this type of affection had been weird. I was never a tactile person. My mother died giving birth to me, and my father had neither the time nor energy to spoil me with hugs. Tenderness was not something you found easily when you grew up on a backwater trading outpost like Proto Station g1-j6.

  So yeah, I hadn’t been one for cuddles, but Neka needed them, another part of her cat DNA made manifest. If I didn’t scratch behind her ears at least once a day, she drooped. I swear the first and only time I had refused her, I saw an actual cloud of gloom form above her head.

  And hell, she more than deserved a few kind touches. Tenderness might have been a rare sight on Proto, but it was completely nonexistent in the hellhole where I found Neka.

  Thinking about the injustices I rescued her from brought me back to the ones we faced now. I made sure not to tighten my embrace around the slight cat-girl in my arms, but my jaw ground together harshly.

  Fucking Terra-Nebula.

  I had heard rumors of this. The Corporations were always at war. They tried to outbid each other on planet acquisitions, tried to harness the best technology, the best resources and talent.

  But something had changed recently. Something had upped the ante.

  Now, Corporations were cutting costs left and right, and independent contractors like brokers were the first to get the axe, even if I was the best broker Terra-Nebula had to offer. Hell, I was better than the brokers most of the Mega Corporations employed. I had brokered over a thousand deals for those bastards, but that apparently, obviously, didn’t matter.

  After all, the “little guy” could only rise so far, the company, and the rich owners of the company, always came first. Five thousand years of evolution, but classism and greed had remained virtually unchanged.

  Speaking of money …

  I didn’t hold my breath as I unwound one arm from around Neka and swiped across the screen in front of me. The taunting red letters of my employee status faded away, replaced by a login screen. Curious, Neka turned in my grasp to watch what I was doing.

  “Pfffthhbah,” I spat as her tail came around and swished me in the face. Her fur was incredibly soft, but that didn’t mean I wanted it in my mouth. “Neka, I can’t see.”

  “Oops!” she mrowled. Her tail flicked down, and I finished punching in the password.

  The big, fat bunch of zeros that waited for me wasn’t surprising. Of course all my corporate accounts would be drained. So far as Terra-Nebula was concerned, that was their money.

  “That’s … not good, right?” Neka meowed softly. Her ears twitched again on top of her head, and they tickled the underside of my chin.

  “No,” I admitted.

  I may have been a broker, a so-called “independent” party, but I had signed a very lengthy and detailed contract with Terra-Nebula when I was first recruited nearly ten years ago. I was young and stupid and hungry, so I definitely didn’t read it as carefully as I should have. What it amounted to was that I had basically been Terra-Nebula’s bitch. A well paid one, yes, but it didn’t change the fact that I was at their beck and call. I went where they told me to go, brokered the best deals for whatever planet they wanted, even if it was dangerous, especially if it was dangerous, because those planets usually fetched a better deal.

  But I had been happy for the most part. They paid me well for each planet I brokered, and I got to travel the galaxy, visiting worlds I couldn’t have imagined as a dirty kid roaming the walkways and alleys of Proto.

  It hadn’t been such a bad deal.

  Until it soured. Until Neka and I were tossed aside again like we were expendable, meaningless, nothing more than space debris that took up resources.

  Yeah, screw that.

  And screw Terra-Nebula.

  I smacked a kiss on the top of Neka’s head, and the cat-girl chirped in surprise, but I had already closed out the screen on the console. The accounts were empty, dead. Nothing left for me there.

  And if there was anything I was truly good at, it was moving on.

  “Omni,” I called out to the seemingly otherwise empty bridge. “Hey, buddy! Wake up!”

  Now, our modest little home among the stars was technically meant to be piloted by a crew of at least three, and technically they were meant to all have some experience with running a ship the size of our cruiser or larger. Terra-Nebula had given me some flight training, in case of emergencies, so I passed muster. And while I had taught Neka to interface with most of the ship’s displays and systems, the cat-girl was by no means a pilot or engineer.

  However, she was my right hand, my crewmate, the only person I had been able to stand traveling with.

  I had needed her.

  But we’d still needed a pilot.

  And, well, let’s say I’ve been known to come up with creative solutions.

  The dimmed lights of the “night-cycle” brightened and faded again in a rolling wave. It was the electronic version of an eye roll.

  “For the very last time, you know I don’t sleep, Colby,�
�� Omni responded. Even after all these years, the A.I. refused to call me ‘CT’. I had tried to reprogram him, but he had since learned to rewrite his own code. I knew he did it just to get on my nerves. “You don’t have to yell.”

  The A.I. continued to lecture me, but I had perfected the art of tuning him out.

  Terra-Nebula was a multi-trillion dollar Corporation. As such, their technology was cutting edge, state-of-the art. A few years back, they made A.I.s standard for every Corporate vessel. Granted, their default A.I.s were generally simplistic. They were built to follow orders and could learn up to a point, but the Corporate scientists built-in safety checks so the machines wouldn’t develop past their use.

  As a young, stupid kid, I had thought to myself, “What would happen if someone deleted some of those fail-safes and reprogrammed the A.I. to not only fly ships on its own but also hold intelligent, stimulating conversation?”

  “Colby? Colby Tower? Did you finally have an aneurysm or are you ignoring me?”

  I had created a monster, and it was no one’s fault but my own.

  I ignored him. “So, Terra-Nebula’s terminated our contract,” I declared as I strode across the floor to the pilot’s chair.

  The bridge of the Lacuna Noctis wasn’t very large, maybe twenty-five to thirty meters from wall to wall. The viewport was directly across from the doors, so the vast reaches of space were the first thing that greeted me every time the automatic doors whooshed open. Three chairs took up the center of the room: the pilot’s chair slightly ahead, closest to the viewport, with the co-pilot’s and first mate’s chairs flanking on either side. Each chair had its own glass and holographic display screens. The walls of the bridge were a maze of circuitry and electronics, flashing lights and monitors. One of those monitors was where I had stood and taken Terra-Nebula’s middle finger right in the face.

  I could do most of the same things from any station with a display, but right now, I wanted to be in the pilot’s chair because a plan was already forming in my brain. It jumped from synapse to synapse like a wildfire. It consumed every other thought in its path.

  “You mean your contract,” Omni pointed out. As I reached out to sit in the chair, the A.I. turned it away from me and away again when I tried to grab the other side. “Neka and I are innocent bystanders. We haven’t pissed off Terra-Nebula.”

  I glared up at the ceiling out of habit. Intellectually, I knew the A.I. was technically interfaced into the whole ship. That’s why I had named him Omni in the first place after all. In retrospect, naming him was my first mistake. I’d walked onto the bridge of the Lacuna Noctis for the first time and heard a voice address me from nowhere and everywhere at once. It was omnipresent, omniscient. Okay, so I hadn’t been very creative when we first met. I was a backwater kid, sue me.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I insisted. “They’re downsizing, and we just had some crap luck.” We continued to fight over the chair.

  “I refuse to believe you didn’t do something to incur this response,” the A.I. said pointedly. I don’t know how I managed to program him to sound so haughty and disapproving, but it was honestly one of the greatest mistakes of my life.

  Behind me, Neka gasped, and I turned to see her holding her hands in front of her mouth. A film of tears shone over her big yellow eyes. “Did I ...?”

  “No,” I cut her off, turning to point at her over my shoulder. I was still trying to wrest the pilot’s chair out of Omni’s grasp so I could sit. “Don’t start that again, Neka. It isn’t you.”

  Neka was perpetually worried that her status and presence aboard the ship, and on my crew, would get me in trouble. The poor cat-girl didn’t have a very high opinion of herself, mostly because polite society didn’t either. Gen-mods were typically only used for one thing.

  However, as far as Terra-Nebula was concerned, as long as I kept bringing in the money and didn’t tarnish the Company reputation by making galactic headlines, I could do whatever I wanted. I could have whoever I wanted on my ship. Neka wasn’t even on their radar.

  I turned my finger from my assistant to point accusingly at the ceiling. “And stop getting her riled up.”

  I got the distinct impression Omni wished he had a tongue to stick out at me.

  “Colby is right, of course,” the A.I. intoned, and I had a moment to blink in surprise before he continued. “You are completely blameless, Neka. In fact, this likely falls squarely on a Terra-Nebula bean counter’s head.”

  “My thoughts exactly, O,” I muttered as he finally let me sit in the pilot’s chair.

  Neka smiled slightly and walked over to join me, but her tail still twitched in agitation, flashes of orange and white in my peripheral vision. I was already typing away at the navigation, but I reached out and rubbed one of her ears between my fingers. She purred happily.

  “So, what’s the plan?” she asked, so simple and direct.

  I glanced over to find her staring at me. Her eyes were calmer now, no longer terrified, and they were filled to the brim with trust. A wave of warmth washed over me as I took in the details of my cat-girl’s heart-shaped face. I noted the way her sunset hair fell in a wave down her back, how it spilled across her shoulders, how her bangs shaded her lovely yellow eyes and framed the delicate curve of her chin. She’d been with me over five years now. Besides Omni, who was little more than an over talkative parking assistant, she was my only family.

  She trusted that I always knew what to do next. She trusted that I would take care of her.

  Someone else might have frozen in a situation like this. Someone else might have fallen on their ass and moaned, “Woe is me,” and whined about how unfair this was.

  But I had already learned some hard lessons. The universe was not fair. The universe was a cold, dark, and never-ending place. It took whatever you weren’t holding on to for dear life, and sometimes, even then, the universe would rip it from your grasp, anyway and leave you with nothing but bloody, broken fingernails.

  I lived by two mottos: nothing is certain and always have a plan B. So …

  “Say hello to Plan B,” I announced with a flourish as I keyed in the last set of coordinates.

  Neka leaned in and across my lap, her small chest molded against my shoulder. “Theron Prrrrrime,” she read aloud, and the last word elongated into a purr. I felt it reverberate through me, and I watched her eyes narrow in confusion, the pupils constricted to slits. “What’s that?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but as always, Omni beat me to it. He was such a showoff.

  “Theron Prime,” the A.I. repeated. “Trading outpost in the Palioxis System. Class Distinction E. The most traded export/import is Odrine, a material utilized in the production and construction of space vehicles. It is extracted primarily from a planet not too far from the station. While technically owned and operated by the Terra-Nebula Corporation, it is in such an out of the way system, it is basically self-sustaining.”

  “Know-it-all,” I grumbled under my breath and tapped at the screen to bring up a 3D hologram of the station. The translucent blue image filled the air in front of us. Before Omni could interject that why, yes, he did know it all, I zoomed in on the hologram and started to plot our course. Outside the viewport of the bridge, the vast darkness of space drifted idly by.

  “Our mechanical friend is correct, of course,” I told Neka. “But what he forgot to mention is that Theron Prime, with its influx of raw material and space vagabonds, is a hotbed of amoral activity, primarily gambling.”

  My assistant blinked her eyes owlishly at me. “So … we’re going there to gamble?” she asked tentatively. That trust in her eyes was now thinly laced through with skepticism. My sweet little cat-girl. She had spent too much time with our cynical neighborhood A.I.

  “Maybe, if we can figure out how to smuggle Omni into the casino to count cards and decrypt algorithms.” The surrounding machinery began to whirl with the beginnings of the A.I.’s protest. “Or,” I emphasized with a smirk, “we could simply wa
ltz into the station and withdraw the money I already have stashed there.”

  Neka’s mouth dropped open in shock, the tips of her little cat fangs resting gently on the swell of her bottom lip. Her pupils dilated again, and her ears sprang forward. “Wait, what?! But I thought …” Her eyes darted to the computer console and back, even though my empty accounts were no longer displayed there. “How … and when did you--”

  “It was before we met.” I shrugged. “And before I had the terrible idea to create you,” I flippantly directed at Omni.

  “You didn’t create me,” the A.I. corrected. “Merely bastardized me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I wasn’t--”

  “Okay, wait! Timeout!” Neka cried, making a T-shape with her hands. She was our unofficial referee. The cat-girl puffed out a breath in exasperation that caused her bangs to flutter. “So … we’re not broke?”

  “Oh no, we’re broke,” I deadpanned. Neka’s head dropped, followed by her ears. “At least by Corporate standards,” I continued. The cat-girl perked up at that, hopeful again. We’d both been at rock bottom before. We knew that corporate broke and real, honest to goodness broke were vastly different.

  If machines could sigh, Omni did the equivalent to that. “Could you speak in standardized numbers please? I cannot quantify human hyperbole.”

  “Hmmm…” I leaned back in the pilot’s chair and interlaced my fingers behind my head. It had been almost a decade since I had been on that station. It was right after I had signed up with Terra-Nebula. I was still technically a broker-in-training, still a stupid kid. I didn’t have my own ship. I barely had anything to my name when the broker who was “mentoring” me dragged us to that cesspool of a trading post to try to make a little money on the side from the casinos.

  He wasn’t very good at it, but I was. I knew the men at those poker and roulette tables. Well, maybe not those men specifically, but I knew their ilk. I knew what they thought, what they wanted, what they could never have. Proto was just like Theron. I knew the scent of desperation like the stench of my own sweat.