Local Star by Aimee Ogden

Author:Aimee Ogden [Ogden, Aimee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interstellar Flight Press

Triz, who’d never been one to turn up her nose at food, forced herself to choke down half a crispbread for breakfast. She poured the spicy sauces from the mealcase into the recycling port—she didn’t want to risk anything more than bland bread in her jumping stomach.

Justice didn’t open its doors to Hab residents for another hour and change. Counting down the minutes left Triz’s patience more brittle than a bad batch of plastisteel. More than once, she stepped up to the door of her pairhome and put her fob to the door to go down to the quad and loop them into this wild plan. Veling would be up for it, and she was a recycling engineer, smart, cool-headed, able to spot the bugs in Triz and Kalo’s kludged-up machinations. Casne’s damu Othine knew how to fly most of the rigs that came through eir quadhusband’s wrenchworks, which would build in some redundancy where Kalo was concerned—not that Triz meant to cut Kalo out of the loop entirely. Or did she? She shelved that question for later. Casne’s daddy Idha was quiet but loved his quaddaughter and quadwife enough that, Triz thought, he’d go with Veling on this.

The problem was Quelian. Triz couldn’t count on him not to be there, couldn’t count on him not catching wind of this somehow. Othine didn’t like secrets, e’d spoiled the surprise of Triz’s first-ever Remembrance gift before Casne ever gave it to her. Would this be different? Could it?

Each time she got up to go to the door, Triz sat back down. Her cuticles were a bloodied mess by the time her fob alert chirped to let her know Justice’s doors had opened.

Queues had already formed by the time Triz emerged from the lift at the top of the Hab. Belas’ was long, but she tucked herself into it anyway, behind a man talking loudly into his fob about the indignity of having to pay an import fee for Erreti dry-pearls when he held dual citizenship in one of the arcologies there.

When at last the line shuffled Triz to Belas’ counter, he greeted her with a sad smile. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to perform the same trick this time. Security is spacetight these days.” He lowered his voice. “It’ll be on the newschannels tonight, but the Fleet detected an encrypted tight-beam transmission to the Webward Pearls.”

“I don’t understand. Someone’s calling in pirates?” The Pearls had harbored raiders for years, small lightsail gunships that hopped between the system’s dozens of miniature moons faster than Fleet fighters could follow. “What does that have to do with Casne?”

“Not her in particular and not pirates at all. The Pearls are where the remnants of Ceebee forces are supposed to have ended up after Hedgehome.”

“But all the Ceebees are locked up in . . .” Triz rocked back on her heels. “Someone’s smuggling messages out of Justice.”

“The Fleet might have some questions for you,” Belas said, and shrugged apologetically. His stylus flicked up and down between his fingers, tapping out an anxious rhythm against the countertop.

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