“Meow!” the kitcoon whined, food bits dangling off his whiskers as he begged for more.
She pushed him back in her pocket and ditched the emptied scraps bag atop an overfilled garbage can. “Not now.”
Grand Hotel lit up in bright neon lights above her head, a beacon in the cacophony. She glanced again down the block, then headed inside, keeping her head bowed as she wove through people crowded into the front of the lobby.
“When are we leaving?” a woman with a miniature pigdog shrieked and stamped her foot at an exhausted-looking pilot. “I can’t miss the presidential inauguration.”
“Ma’am, it’s the military—”
“And this place,” she spat, flapping her hands at the dilapidated front desk with a last-century droid manning the counter. “Is all you could get?”
The droid’s digitally projected face didn’t sync with its vocalizations as it spoke to a customer through a broken bullet-proof window.
“We’re not the only canceled flight, ma’am,” the pilot sighed. “The Dominion’s grounded hundreds of starships. They must be looking for someone.”
Or something, Rex thought, placing her hand over the kitcoon in her pocket.
She dismissed the thought. How could one little kitcoon be enough trouble that the Dominion would arrest and ground so many flights? It was an actionable offense, enough to trigger a countermeasure by their rivals, The United Starways Coalition. Maybe enough to start a war.
The sirens outside grew louder. In seconds, the place would be raided, faces scanned, passports scrutinized—
I’m not going back in a collar, she thought, rubbing her neck, remembering the excruciating pain of the last shock collar. The thought of prison, of even being detained, stirred the dark space inside her. I can’t get caught.
Rex pretended to check the advertisement station posted near the restrooms and stairwell but ignored the holograms for local hotspots. What she really needed was the map on the wall.
Grand suites upstairs, she thought, scanning the floorplan. And by the way the basement was segmented and laid out in grids between power sources, coffins—the cheap sim/stim tubes that resembled the long and narrow boxes for the dead—would be downstairs, in the dark and out of sight.
“You can’t escape this life,” Chezzie’s voice recirculated in her head as Rex ran down the stairs to the basement. A keycard reader guarded the door, but utilizing her lockpicks disguised as dangling earrings, she bypassed the cheap lock in seconds, letting herself into the darkened chamber. Thanks, Chezzie.
Rex tiptoed down the lighted pathway through the coffins, listening and looking with more than her eyes and ears. Sentients of all types slumbered in the tight confines of the tubes, drifting through simulations/stimulation routines as a rainbow of chems, dripping from machines mounted on the walls, pumped through their veins. A cheap way to pass the time between long layovers and escape the drudgery of reality. And an opportunity for a data hustler like her—
Ex-data hustler, she tried to tell herself.
—to steal valuable information and to sell to the highest bidder, or use it for personal gain, like stealing a starship—
This is the last time.
Decent coffins were encrypted to ensure the privacy of the users’ experiences. But even if they weren’t, and most of the knockoff coffins she worked with didn’t have any semblance of a security system, data-hustlers still had their work cut out for them. Even the most sophisticated tech couldn’t decode every detail of a dream, or, in a hustler’s case, extract specific, salable information.
But someone like her—who could look deeper, through the fragile walls every Sentient erected to protect themselves—could find anything she wanted. And here, all by herself without Chezzie watching for security—
Watching me—
—while she went in for an extraction, she didn’t have to pretend to need all the tech she demanded from him to keep her cover.
As Rex passed by a row of coffins, a psionic storm boomed like thunder from one of the tubes. Most sim-stims induced positive feelings, pleasure. This felt disorganized, chaotic, painful like—
Trauma.
Rex zeroed in on the source and checked the tube. Inside the glowing blue cylinder, a muscular human male with lots of scars, grafting, and biomech parts twitched in his coffin, his face contorted with pain.
Hell no. She didn’t want any part of his messed-up mind. But she couldn’t look away. There was something about him, even though he reeked of military with his sweat-soaked white tank top, his dirty fatigue pants, multitool hanging off his belt, and the battered dog tags hanging around his neck.
With a starship key, she realized, spying the blue chip between the dog tags. But it wouldn’t work without a code. Which is in your chakked-up head.
The kitcoon stirred, wiggling around, but she placed her hand inside her pocket and stroked his back until he calmed.
“Chak,” she muttered, glancing up at the ceiling. Muffled thumps echoed down. A stampede—
Or crowd-control gunfire.
The soldier grunted, arcing his back. She grimaced and braced her temples as his pain blasted across the psionic plane.
So much pain…
“An easy mark,” she could hear Chezzie saying.
No, not easy. Maybe for a legit data hustler with gear, but not for a telepath that took on their client’s pain. Prodgies “Fall” when the person they try to heal is too toxic, and the damage crosses over to their own bodies, driving them insane. That’s why her people never healed another being alone.
I’m not healing, she reassured herself. Just…looking.
“Right,” she muttered and checked the neural feed streaming on the readout near his head. He was outputting massive brain wave variability even though he had fifteen minutes left in the sim/stim and should be coming down off the high.
Bad cocktail, she thought, flicking one of the clogged IV lines hooked to the infuser strapped to his right forearm. Bad coffin.
Which meant he probably wouldn’t notice her intrusion.
But his pain could kill me.
The thumping increased in intensity, growing louder. Dust and debris rattled loose from the ceiling, raining down on the coffins.
“Chak,” she muttered, kneeling beside his tube. She overrode the safeties and lifted the coffin lid just enough for her to slide her arm inside and grab the blue chip and the multitool off his belt. After stuffing them in her pants pocket, she grasped the soldier’s cold, calloused hand. Closing her eyes, she whispered: “Give me a break, soldier.”
Gathering into an iridescent swirl of psionic energy, Rex slid down her arm, through her fingers, and crossed the corporeal bridge that separated her from the man. Like fizzing carbonation, she bubbled to the surface, and opened her eyes inside his being. Red blood, white bone, yellow fat.
Rising blood pressure pinged her ears. Ignoring the inflammatory cells clumped around his lungs and liver, she traversed upward, through his spine and into his neural network where the sim/stim chemicals lit up his brain like fireworks. There, she watched as his memories exploded across his mind: Gunfire, soldiers in red and black uniforms.