It has been a quiet two weeks since their ill-fated mission to stop a human trafficker, and the crew of Huli Jing has spent the time recovering: Zan has relaxed back into their normal routine of meditation, exercise, and intellectual debates at a high-level vin lounge; Soo-jin’s arm is halfway healed, and she’s getting ready for her first date with her favorite commander; and Bob has been flexing his growing power with new and exciting interdimensional antics.
Then, they receive a head in the mail—and one of them recognizes it.
What follows unwraps a conspiracy that threatens to overthrow the system, and they are right in its cross-hairs.
Chapter 1
**Warning: Contains Immediate Spoilers for Tall Order!**
“Let me get this straight. You formed a symbiotic relationship with an interdimensional being to share your brain.” Zan lifted an eyebrow. “And you’re still bribing him with chocolate to deliver you coffee?”
Captain Soo-jin Dokgo hid a smile, pretending to examine the makeup bottle in her hand. Her first officer—well, XO now—leaned casually against her doorframe, their tall, dark form creating a comfortable presence in her mirror. Their crossed arms, raised eyebrows, and grimacing mouth suggested disapproval, but the façade was both friendly and familiar, as was the dry quality to their teasing.
It almost felt like having a close sibling watch her prep for a Saturday night out.
That was a change. They’d been friendly before—friends, definitely, and close—but it felt like the last few weeks had knocked down several metaphorical walls. Probably due to the insane mission they’d gone on.
The crew who fucks human traffickers over together, stays together.
“What can I say?” She shrugged, pushing away thoughts of their last undertaking as they threatened to emerge—some things she’d rather not be reminded of, especially when preparing for a date. She went back to applying her makeup. “I like coffee, Bob likes chocolate—it works.”
Zan pivoted and made a show of gauging the short distance between Soo-jin’s quarters and the Mess. “It’s like twelve steps to the coffeemaker. Ten, maybe.”
“That’s nine steps too many. I don’t like double digits. Besides—” She waved her arm in a vaguely pathetic way, the chrome of the regen cast gleaming under the light and the hand at its end flopping around uselessly. “I’m injured. Pity me.”
“That’s your arm, Soo-jin. You don’t use it to walk.”
“Yeah, well—have you seen these heels?” She made another floppy gesture, downward this time. “I’m not walking anywhere I don’t have to in these things.”
Zan rolled their eyes. “Good grief.”
“I know, I know.” Soo-jin put down the foundation and picked up a mascara tab, managing a pitiful, high-class sniff. “I’m just a delicate flower, I suppose.”
Zan made a strangled noise. Part squeak and part choke—as if they’d swallowed a violin string. Their whole torso gave a brief shake.
Then they roared with laughter.
Roared.
“Clio’s tits,” Soo-jin said, dropping the Delicate Flower act. The hand holding the mascara tab lowered to her side as she turned an incredulous expression onto her shipmate. “It wasn’t that funny!”
Zan had doubled over, struggling to breathe through spasms of laughter.
“You forget,” they said, leaning against the wall for support. “I’ve seen you drunk-punch a dude—in the dick—and then puke on him.” They lost six whole seconds to the laughter, chest quaking, breaths coming in strung-along wheezes. “Wasn’t it just two weeks ago you pegged a guy, then tried to chuck him out an airlock?”
Soo-jin closed her mouth.
Well, when you put it that way…
Laughter threatened her now. Her abdomen clenched, but she schooled her expression, tilting her head thoughtfully to the side. “Roughly two weeks, yes.”
“Clio.” Zan lost another battle to breathless laughter.
As her shipmate recovered, Soo-jin turned a smile to the mirror, lifted her good hand, and blinked to sweep the mascara through her lashes. It was supposed to be a charcoal shimmer, but by the way it was going on, she wasn’t sure she believed the packaging.
“How do I look?” she asked when the breathing had settled into a more regular rhythm behind her. “Classy enough?”
“Yes.” Zan nodded their approval. “You are a ten-thousand-credit ring away from headlining a red carpet event. Security would let you doorcrash on presence alone.”
“Really?” She considered her reflection, eyebrows arching upward.
She was hot, but she didn’t think she was ‘red carpet’ hot.
Then again, she had bought a very nice dress for the occasion—a monochromatic artsy piece with sharp folds and angles. It gave her an edgy elegance and made the bold color in her many tattoos pop.
Combine it all with the cherry-red lipstick, heavy, stylized eyeliner, and the smoky shadow with the underlying shimmer of blood-red…
Yeah. Okay. She looked like she crushed men’s balls for sport.
Fortunately, her date liked powerful women.
Me, she reminded herself. He likes me.
Her heart fluttered, more like a grav-trip than a butterfly.
After all these years thinking otherwise, it was hard to believe.
“The commander will be all over you,” Zan confirmed with a nod. “All over you.”
“Gods, I hope so.” She plunged the mascara tab back into its slot and closed it with a click. “I need to get laid.”
“You really do,” Zan agreed. “And Baik is definitely the person for the job.”
Soo-jin chuckled. Commander Ji-hun Baik was a long-time friend, one of the few colleagues from her time in the Shadow War who still kept regular contact, and she’d had a crush on him since well before said war had ended.
Turns out, he’d felt the same about her, and they’d both been hiding their feelings and shooting themselves in the foot for an entire decade.
A decade.
Suns. She could have been having much better sex, and much less heartbreak, all this time.
Although…who knew how long this would last? If there was anything she’d learned in the past ten years, it’s that she was absolutely shit at relationships.
She met her own gaze in the mirror, and her expression closed, back teeth grinding as her jaws clenched.
I don’t get to be happy. Not for long. Eventually, the curtain will drop, and everything will blow up in my fucking face.
It had happened before—it would happen again. She, or somebody else, was going to fuck it up.
She sighed at herself.
Downward spiral. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-sabotage—Call it what you will. Pretty sure one of her many therapists had warned her about these kinds of thoughts and where they led. No place she wanted to visit, for sure, but the damn fuckers trained their tractor beams on her regularly and dragged her down to their level every single fucking time.
A system notification from Huli Jing chimed on the dashboard by the back wall, echoed a second later by forwarded notifications on both on her own netlink and Zan’s. Thank Sol for distractions. Zan pulled theirs out of their pocket, frowned at the message, and glanced up.
“Delivery. Did you order anything?”
“Not that I recall.” Soo-jin shook her head, then paused when her mind caught on something, eyes narrowing. “Maybe Drunk Soo-jin has blessed us with another surprise?”
Drunk Soo-jin was a happy, ambitious person who sometimes mixed auction listings with whiskey. Last time, Huli Jing had received a gravball-sized plushie of a cartoon pig with dizzy swirls for eyes. The time before, it had been the dismantled components of a Border Wars-era gravmine, delivered in three separate packages.
She’d learned then how certain mines could be disguised as ship parts—mostly because they’d been originally made from ship parts—but she’d been on pins and needles for weeks wondering if a fourth package would show up with the fire dart missiles the mines were infamous for.
Thankfully, the mysterious seller she’d bought it from had opted not to salvage them.
Either that, or Drunk Soo-jin had decided against the add-on.
Or…the fourth package was still in the mail. Somewhere.
A spike of alarm made her glance down to the notification on her screen, but Zan was already pivoting back through the door.
“You finish getting ready. I’ll check it out.”
She almost called them back, visions of fire darts flinging through the cargo hold of her mind—but no. It had been a very long time since the Border Wars Mine incident, and they already knew about the missing fire darts.
“Thanks,” she told them. “You’re the best.”
“It’s true,” they said as they walked away, humor underlining their confident tone. “I am.”
That brought a smile to her face.
She adored Zan. There was just something about their sterling manner and dry confidence that fit right in with her dark little heart.
It was nice to have a friend she could trust, and a first officer whose tastes ran so similar to hers.
She mentally flicked herself.
Executive officer, not first.
Zan had made her change the title two weeks ago, a consequence for one of her more questionable life choices that had caused a massive headache for them.
She sighed, rolled her shoulders, and returned her stare to herself in the mirror.
Zan was right. She did look good. Dark, tattooed intrigue wrapped in a pop gala dress and sealed with smoke, danger, and cherry-red lipstick. Even the cast on her arm matched the look, its chromed veneer polished to a mirror-like shine.
She glanced down at it, hiding a grimace at the reminder of her injury. She’d been shot twice, the blaster rounds burning a sizable hole right through the arm, clipping a bone, and doing their damnedest to make a horror show of her soft tissues.
Ten years ago, she would have been in a tank for a month.
Now, they brought the tank to her.
Regen casts were a recent development. Under the metal shell, a mix of localized nanotech, biogel compounds, and regen fluid were hard at work, rebuilding the muscle, bone, tissue, nerve, and lymph damage she’d received. It weighed about the same as a mid-sized wrench and was awkward to work around, and parts of her arm occasionally itched underneath—but she wouldn’t trade it for a tank for all the money in the world.
Her PTSD had a problem with being trapped like that. Encased.
Plus, she was already feeling parts of her left hand again. This morning, her fingers had twitched. Voluntarily.
Mostly, though, it remained numb.
She poked at it, flopped the hand back and forth a couple times, then tried to lift her fingers. When the middle one twitched, she cracked a smile.
Only a matter of time before she could tell the world how she really felt. Possibly within the next day or so, even, if she were lucky.
“Coffee for the Delicate Flower,” Bob announced, his hybrid thought-voice cutting into her mind.
By the moniker, he must have caught at least some of the last conversation—hard not to, with the coffee maker only twelve steps away.
The light shifted to her left. She turned, expecting to find him in the doorway.
Instead, the doorway was gone. Hells, the entire side of her room was gone.
In its place was a wall of dark, depthless void.
Her skin crawled. An unnatural silence fell, the atmosphere tensing with a restless energy, as if the environment itself had awakened. A tingling sensation entered her nerves. As she stared into the impossible darkness swallowing the side of her room, it felt like it was pulling her closer, a long-lost relative calling her home.
It touched at her mind, soft as a feather.
Then a piece of the void took on a humanoid silhouette, stepped out of itself, and offered her a small ceramic mug.
She took it. Inside, the steaming coffee was as black as the infinite darkness behind him and smelled bitter enough to wilt iron.
Just how this Delicate Flower liked it.
She took a sip and smiled up at her favorite humanoid patch of darkness. “Thank you, Symbiotic Interdimensional Brain-Share Partner.”
“I prefer ‘Bob’,” he informed her.
So did she. Less of a mouthful. She set the mug on her desk with a clunk, then plucked a wrapped chocolate from a box on her shelf and dropped it into the entity’s selectively corporeal hand.
By the time she picked the mug back up, both chocolate and wrapper had vanished.
Bob was the newest member of her ship. Unlike Zan, he hadn’t called in for a job interview. Instead, he’d just shown up one night and…hadn’t left.
Given he was still on board, months later, he had to be one of the system’s most successful stowaways.
And now, he was a stowaway inside her head.
Yeah, she was still getting used to the whole concept of it.
“Not a stowaway,” Bob said, reading the thought off her mind. “You invited me in. That makes me a guest.”
A guest who could read her mind. She was still getting used to that, too. Shadows, in general, had some natural psychic ability, but Bob seemed to have dialed it up to twenty.
She nodded up at the void-field that had replaced her normal door and wall. “You getting some creative exercise in?”
His psychic abilities weren’t the only things to have changed. Bob was much stronger than he’d been before. As far as she knew, normal Shadows didn’t create entire walls of void.
She’d never heard of them doing it, anyway.
“Yes.” Bob turned his head to follow her line of sight. “It’s not very useful, though.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, her gaze drifting over the gaping blackness eclipsing her wall. “It definitely sets a mood.”
“Are you ready for your date?” he asked.
Before she could answer, the comms interrupted them.
“Your future husband is here,” Zan said.
“Guess I am now.” She smiled at Bob before reaching over and bumping the comms button with the edge of her cast. “I’ll be right down. What was the delivery?”
“Don’t know yet. We’re investigating.” They paused. “It was addressed to me.”
She laughed. “Oh, boy. Do we have a Drunk Zan Delivery on our hands?”
“If we do, I am disappointed in myself. This box is rather small.”
“It isn’t always about the size, Zan.”
“It is if I’m custom ordering.”
She laughed, then stood. “I’ll be right down.”
She tapped the comms off with the edge of the cast again, then gulped the rest of her coffee, grimacing against the burn. Next, she swiped the small purse off the back of her chair, checked herself in the mirror one last time, and headed for the wall of darkness to her left.
“So, do I just walk through this, or—gargh!” The darkness enveloped her in a hissing, staticky rush, briefly making her regret her decision to go for bare shoulders—not that it mattered, since the hissing static was hitting her all over, regardless of clothing—then it dissipated two steps in, and she walked through the doorway into the main corridor. “Thanks.”
“Anytime, Captain,” Bob said, close behind her.
“Are you following me?” she asked.
“Yes.” He paused. “I, too, am interested in the delivery. And I wanted to see you off. That is the polite human thing to do, yes?”
“Yes. It’s very polite.”
Bob didn’t have a face to smile with, but she felt it nonetheless.
“I am learning.”
Downstairs, Baik and Zan hunched over a box they’d placed on a table next to the main row of cargo containers. Despite Zan’s previous admonishment, the box was not small. Small in comparison to the rest of the room’s conventional shipping-sized inventory, perhaps, but definitely edging toward a medium-sized postage box.
Big enough for a grav ball, but not a grav bat.
Then again, she didn’t get a very good look at it. The second she entered the room, all her attention went straight to Baik.
Holy hells. He’d dressed up.
Gone was the usual SysOps agent who liked to haunt her door. In his place stood an echo of the High Command officer she’d met a decade ago—and more than a glimpse of his royal heritage. His hair was freshly cut, the customary overgrown crew transformed into layers of refinement and a tapered fade reflecting both elegance and style. A luxurious wool coat, storm gray, trailed over a slate turtleneck. The fine gold chain hanging loose from his neck made a striking contrast. His pants, darker still than the shirt and coat, had a permanent crease and a subtle, expensive sheen. The soft polish of his dress shoes looked out of place on Cargo’s battered floor.
Her breath caught. Baik was a professional, and he was practical. He could have gotten away with a lot less—she’d expected a lot less. He wasn’t the type of person who gloried in fashion, nor was he the type who drew attention to himself, and yet here he was, making the effort to achieve both.
He’d done this for her.
The grav wheel in her heart lurched to a halt as the realization and all its implications hit.
Sol’s tits. She was dating a prince. And he liked her.
She still had trouble believing it all. Especially the last part.
It was one thing for him to tell her this, and quite another to have it expressed so clearly.
While she’d been gawking, he’d glanced up. Heat flushed her cheeks when she realized he was watching her—and that he seemed to be having the same trouble with comprehension as she was.
Suns.
After a moment, he excused himself from the box and pulled around her Executive Officer to make an approach.
“She’s dressed to kill tonight, Commander,” Zan warned in a playful tone.
“I’ve never faced a happier death,” he replied, finishing the quote from an episode of Moon Sailor.
A shot of electricity jolted straight through her flushing skin.
Holy hells.
She swallowed a bundle of nerves. By the time he’d stopped in front of her, she was looking up at him with an uncertain smile.
Even in her heels, he was so much taller than her.
“You look good,” she told him softly.
“You look better.” He leaned forward, seeming to sway for a moment. Then his gaze dropped. “How’s your arm?”
She looked down. The cast gleamed up at her, the chrome finish reflecting herself, Baik, and the room in an oblong mirror.
“Getting better. It’s starting to reconnect my motor nerves.” She flashed him a grin. “I’ll be back to bitchslapping in no time.”
“It takes longer than that. You need to strengthen the muscles.”
She groaned. “Ugh. I hate it already. Remind me never to get shot again.”
“I will. I would also like that to not happen again.” The moment of seriousness dropped ice into her veins, but his lips twitched, and the warmth re-entering his expression spread to her. “You do look very good.”
“So do you.”
“Please don’t bitchslap me.”
She giggled. “I’ll try not to.”
She leaned up to deliver a quick kiss to his cheek. In the background, a cutting sound came as Zan began opening the mystery box.
“I’m trying to decide if you look more like a commander or a prince,” she told him.
“You look like a goddess,” he said immediately. “Dark and arresting. Chaotic. An enigma designed to toy with the attentions and ambitions of men.”
Another Moon Sailor quote. The man was on a roll tonight.
“Now, now,” she teased. “I don’t discriminate. I toy with the attentions of everyone, regardless of—”
In the background, Zan made a small, surprised sound. Part moan, part keen—as if they’d been hurt.
“—genders.” She frowned and drew back, looking around Baik’s shoulder. “Zan, you all right?”
Zan stood stiffly, shoulders hunched, one hand gripping the side of the table so hard, their muscles visibly bulged. Another sound came from them. Breath, straining hard through a throat choked by emotion.
Alarm snapped through her. “Zan?”
They choked—a sob, quickly cut—then shoved off the table and strode away. Their veer into the open space of Cargo looked more like a stagger than anything controlled. Rudderless. Empty. Desperate. One arm stretched out as if to fend something off. They disappeared around the corner.
What the hells?
Her gaze drifted back. The box stood open and alone on the table, parts of shipping wrap scattered around it. The lid sat askew and upturned, the ribbed underfitting of cold insulation gleaming wetly in the lights. Her attention snagged on this, and the skin between her shoulder blades tingled with unease.
Fuck.
She stepped around Baik and strode over, heels making sharp, determined taps on the floor. Baik followed right behind her. Bob swooped in a second later, his Shadow speed already taking him to the box.
“Don’t touch it, Bob,” she said. “Let us see it first.”
“No!” Zan said, coming back around. Emotion throttled their throat, the sound strained and loud, as if they were drunk. “Don’t open that!”
Fuck this. She was already there. Before anyone could stop her, she shoved the lid all the way off and peered inside—and frowned as it revealed a thick splay of black hair.
A wig? Zan was all in arms about a wig?
What in the actual—
Her brain caught up with the rest of what her eyes were seeing. She froze in place, jaw slackening as it registered with her. A chemical smell rose, threading nausea through her skin as her attention dropped lower.
There’s a fucking head in this box.
The thought registered as if from a great distance. Black hair spread before her, partly mussed by transit, partly frozen with streaks of gel. Below, the face was tipped, leaning against the side of the box as if it were sleeping. Eyes closed, mouth open and slack.
Except it wasn’t sleeping. It wasn’t alive. And the neck—
Sol’s fucking child.
The smell strengthened. Chemicals, wet rust. Another smell, like someone had been sick. Goosebumps traveled across her skin in a wave, and her stomach flipped in warning. It felt like something in her brain detached. Belatedly, her mind identified the chemical smell as preservatives mixed with blood.
She stared at the head in the box, her thoughts numbing. Then, movement made her look up. Zan re-emerged from around the corner, raw anguish held in every tense line of their face.
“That’s—”
Their breath seemed to vanish from beneath the words, like the bottom had dropped completely out from them. They struggled with themself, throat rasping as they pulled in a new one.
“That’s my sister.”