Tall Order

Chapter One

“That’s not a Fint.” Captain Soo-jin Dokgo leaned forward in her seat, a mix of revulsion and disbelief rising in her chest as she squinted at the image of the small, unimpressive ship Huli Jing’s cameras were feeding into the bridge’s main holoscreen. No matter how she pulled it, the ship didn’t magically morph into the expensive brand she’d been promised. She scoffed and flung a disgusted gesture at the screen. “That’s not even remotely close to a Fint.”

Sol’s burned child, if Lamar’s screwed me over again…

Lamar Jones. One-time sexual regret, many-time actual regret. He’d inherited a shipping business from his sister that had left him with a small fortune, which he often spent at the bars she frequented, a small fleet of franchised ships he had almost nothing to do with that paid him royalties, and a not-small set of crazy ideas he occasionally contacted her about.

This time, it had been grapes. Fresh, flash-frozen grapes from—if she believed him, which she didn’t—Clemens, the Sirius System’s farthest quasi-habitable planet. They were apparently for ice wine, which had caught her interest. The rarity and exoticism of the Clemens-grown grapes also raised their credit value by several orders of magnitude, which had caught her interest even more.

Now, she was less than impressed.

She growled and turned to her first mate. “Are you sure we got the right place?”

“Assuming he accounted for the last century of stellar drift, yes.” Zan’s voice dripped with sarcasm, even drier than usual. A muscled, bigender blend with dark eyes, deep brown skin, and thick waves of long, luscious black hair, they made a beautiful addition to the co-pilot’s seat—and they were staring at the image on screen as if they’d found a pile of dog crap in the middle of space and it was, somehow, starting to stink. “It’s the right color,” they pointed out. “And the ID matches. It’s most likely him.”

Hells.

Soo-jin drew in a slow, steady breath, and relaxed back in the seat, rubbing her thumb against her temple. The morning’s hangover had been fading for the past few hours, but she had a feeling she would need many more painkillers for the headache the ship on screen was promising.

Barely a minute into first sight, and he’s already brought the wrong ship. This job is going to go well.

She’d wanted to see a Fint today. Fints were elegant. Top of the line. A single look at one could fulfill all her hopes and dreams; a touch could make all the dark little desires in her engineering heart come true—or, at least, make her feel like all of that was happening. Exquisite design exuded from their every surface, as if Fint’s elite engineering teams had somehow distilled the definition of ‘high class’ and injected it into every line of their ships. Beautiful, but in a rich, understated way that only they seemed to have pulled off in ship design and engineering.

This ship, tagged ‘Coca’ in Huli Jing’s comms window, was a red piece of angular metal that looked like it had rolled off some mid-tier assembly line on Tala with speed fins taped to its ass.

She pinned the ship on screen with a venom-laced glare. “That’s definitely not a Fint. That’s a Durango or some shit. I wanted to see a Fint.”

Zan served her a commiserating smile. “I’m sorry, Soo-jin.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“I understand.” They brought up a new screen, this one detailing the greater surrounding area. Most of it was black and empty. They frowned, giving it a considering hum. “Nothing around for over a full light minute. Not a bad place to drop a body. A simple airlocking should suffice.”

She laughed. “Pretty sure someone would notice him missing.”

“In that case, we might get paid for our murder.” Their dark eyes flashed with humor. “Come to think of it, given the victim, this could qualify for charity work.”

She laughed harder. “Fucking hells, Zan.”

Black humor. It was what made Huli Jing tick.

Zan dismissed the map with a chuckle, then bared their teeth and replicated Soo-jin’s previous squint at the main screen. “He was probably trying to stuff his jockstrap.” They tilted their head, wrinkles appearing on the bridge of their nose as they stared harder. “The outline does somewhat resemble the Clanbrook model.”

She snorted. “If he thought he could fool two ship engineers and a scan drive, he’s even dumber than I realized.”

Zan laughed. “You’d have to be pretty drunk to profess Lamar Jones smart.”

“I get pretty drunk regularly. It’s never helped his intelligence.” She curled her lip in a sneer. “Fuck me, I wanted to see a Fint. He promised me a Fint.”

“Men promise a lot of things.”

“Yeah, well, he better have my fucking fruit.” She tapped a sequence into the comms panel and sent the hailing call, a not-small part of her debating whether she actually wanted Lamar to answer.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t given her much of a choice. As Zan had pointed out, this sector was emptier than Clio’s coffers, and Huli Jing didn’t run well on fumes. With no potential scrounge to save them, and the time and fuel already spent hiking it out to this patch of darkness, a discarded trip would set them back two weeks of lost work.

After the sanctuary run they’d just made, and the ensuing repairs they’d needed, a lost trip like this would hurt.

Besides, Lamar had promised profit. Shitstain though he could be, most of his jobs did see money come in—even if the complications were frequent.

I will do many things for money, even if those things involve Lamar Jones.

She kept the thought on her mind as the call connected, baring her teeth in a fake smile.

“Lamar,” she said with a conversational purr. They weren’t quite within standard proximity alert range, and they were early, so she hoped to catch him by surprise. “I notice that’s not a Fint.”

Dead silence met her statement, the connection popping slightly. Audio only, nothing on video, so for several long seconds, she wondered if she’d just hailed some random fucking person and Lamar Jones and his fictional Fint were jacking off somewhere else.

Then, the silence took a hesitant breath that she recognized, and Lamar’s flimsy, apologetic tone trickled through the speakers.

“I may have mistook my Durango for something it isn’t.”

Sol’s fucking child, I’m going to kill him. I’m going to tape him to his Not-a-Fint engine room and murder him dead. I’m going to wrap a fucking rope around—

The silent tangent continued for some time. Lamar’s mother probably deserved better than what her mental tirade went on to suggest, but Lamar’s mother hadn’t dragged herself to the ass-end of the system to deal with him.

How this dumbass still had a functioning business was beyond her.

She sighed, giving up on the Fint. In Lamar’s possession, it would have just depressed her, anyway. “As long as you didn’t mistake those grapes and their profit margin for a sack of shit, I don’t care.”

The next pause was damning.

“Look,” he began. “Soo-jin. This is a great opportunity—”

Are you kidding me?

He didn’t have her grapes, and he was trying to sell her a sack of shit.

Rage snapped, hot and violent. She shoved to her feet with a growl. “Gods fuck it all, Lamar. I’m going to come over there and hang you by your dick.”

“Soo, Soo—hear me out,” he pleaded. “The grapes got jacked. Pirates. I sent you a message, but I guess it didn’t hit the relay in time. I’m sorry. But I do have a job for you. Twenty-thou to get my engines back online. Please?"

This time, the pause came from their end. Soo-jin stood very still, staring at the screen with the same smelling-dog-crap expression Zan had had less than a minute ago, her mind whirling at the new information. Hovering above the comms controls, her hand vibrated with the need to reach through the call and smack Lamar’s stupid face.

With her strength augments, she’d leave a decent mark.

Unfortunately, Lamar had unwittingly presented them with a whole new problem.

Sol damn it.

She made a frustrated hiss, cut the mics, and tilted a skeptical eye to Zan.

“Pirates?” she said. “And they just left him here?”

Ten years ago, the Shadow War had decimated the system’s security, and blatant piracy had grown as a career option—especially in places like this, where patrols were few and far between. Usually, the system’s pirates fell into one of two categories: Nice Pirates and Not-So-Nice Pirates. Nice Pirates(TM) threatened you at gunpoint to let them board, stole all your shit, but left you alive and functional. The space equivalent of mugging. It ran the risk of you reporting them to the authorities at the next port, but the authorities had many better things to do these days than track down purported thieves in the Black, and career pirates had a few tricks for covering their tracks.

Plus, simple armed theft felt better on the conscience than serial murder.

Not-So-Nice Pirates tended to break their way in, tock up your ship, take all your stuff, then take you, as well—for slavery, ransom, or…other auctions.

If Lamar’s ship was dead in the Black, he’d been done by the latter type. And if they’d left him on a dead ship in the middle of nowhere, he’d either really pissed in somebody’s cereal or they were waiting to see who might come to his aid.

In other words, waiting for ships like Huli Jing.

Beside her, Zan came to the same conclusion. “Bait boat.”

Hells.

Yep. Her headache was back. She pressed her thumb against her temple to ward off the first twinges of its re-emergence. Her next speech came as a throaty growl.

“Clio’s fucking sun. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to murder him dead.”

“Let’s get him on board first.” Zan opened Huli Jing’s sensors to a greater range and set an optical and thermal scan through its secondary systems. If pirates were hiding in the Black, they wouldn’t be dumb enough to show up on regular scans. The only way to find them was to analyze secondary data, and even that would be useless if the theoretical pirates had powered down to wait.

Hopefully, they’d get something on the optics.

Extra hopefully, the pirates weren’t around anymore.

Sol’s fucking child. I really am going to kill him for this.

“Uh, guys? Huli Jing?” Lamar’s voice sounded tentative. “Are you there?"

Soo-jin flicked on the mics with a snarl. “We’re here. We’re just astounded at the situation you’ve dragged us into.”

Zan muted them again. “If he’s been hit by pirates, they wouldn’t have left him the twenty-thou he’s offering to pay us.”

“He could have hidden it. I have plenty of separate credit stores.”

“He doesn’t sell bullshit as well as you do.”

“True. I deal in higher grade markets.” She made a disgusted sound and re-activated the mic. “Tell me about these pirates. Who were they, and how did they work?”

“Uhhh,” came the answer.

“Uhhh?” She bared her teeth. “With your dick on the line, I think you can do better than ‘uhhh.’ Are you high?”

Sol take him. Couldn’t he answer a simple question?

“No, no, I’m not high. Just a little—nevermind. Look, I think they were called ‘The Black Crows.’”

As opposed to the purple crows. Or the green crows. She rolled her eyes. Pirates sure loved their black. “How did they get you? You’re not normally starved for defense.”

She booted up Huli Jing’s weapons system in another window. A few seconds later, the pot shooter of a laser cannon they had came online. She winced as a clunk echoed through the ship, under no delusions that the gun would actually help them against a proper pirate attack.

It hadn’t last time.

“They jacked the defense grid.”

Her attention snapped back to Lamar.

Cripes, really? That took a lot more technical skill than a simple stick-em-up hijacking. She narrowed her eyes. “And how did they do that? Send you a phishing chat promising a large penis?”

“No,” he said, a little too quickly. “Nothing like that. It was—we were supposed to do a deal. They stabbed me in the back.”

Soo-jin snorted. “Did you tell them you had a Fint, too? ’Cause I could understand that reaction.”

“Sol’s fucking child—I’m sorry for lying to you. Can you please help me? I’m dead in the Black here.”

Oh, a confession and an apology.

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes again. The muscles were apt to get strained at some point.

“Tell me more about how they left you stranded. What the hells did you do? Shit on their dicks?”

“For fuck’s sakes, Soo. Will you please help me? It’s just a boost.”

She laughed. “If you think I’m coming anywhere near your damned ship, you should have a different think. How do I know they haven’t rigged the airlock to explode the second I disembark? Even damaged, Huli Jing is worth more than your Not-a-Fint Durango.”

“Soo—”

“What I will do is rescue your ass, no charge, and drop you off at Marduk. You can arrange your ship’s recovery with a bomb squad from there.”

“But if I leave it here, someone could steal it,” he said.

Gods, he was stupid. The mental gymnastics required to get down to his level made her new headache spike. She pressed her hand to her temple and leaned in closer to the screen, snarling at the mic.

“If you got hit by pirates, someone should have already stolen it. The very fact that you are somehow still alive is a saints-tocked miracle. If I were a pirate, I would have shot you within five minutes, or at least gagged you. You are one annoying dude, Lamar.”

“Soo…that was uncalled for.”

Gods, it was so tempting to just leave him there. But she couldn’t. She wasn’t that kind of person. If she did that, it’d eat her up inside—and he wasn’t worth the extra alcoholism that would cause.

But he didn’t know that.

“If you call me ‘Soo’ one more time, I’m going to fucking leave you here,” she growled. “My name is Soo-jin.”

“I’ve heard other people call you ‘Soo.’”

“You are not those people, Lamar,” she gritted out.

“Soo…”

“Another minute, and it’ll be ‘Captain Dokgo.’” She let out a frustrated breath. “Now, do you have a jetsuit?”

“Uhh.” By the shift in acoustics, he’d moved away from his comms dashboard. Something clunked in the background, as if he’d opened a locker, and there came the recognizable rustle of EVA suit material—and an alarming sharp intake of breath.

The fabric rustled again, accompanied by muttered swears.

Her brows lifted. “What is it?”

“It’s…broken,” he said.

Seriously?

She gave the speaker an aghast look. “How is it broken? That’s standard operating equipment.”

“They broke it,” he said, panicky now. “I—Gods—all the suits are ripped to fucking shreds.”

By the tone of his voice, it sounded like he was broken.

Sol.

“Captain,” Zan said, cutting the mics. “He’s not alone on there. I’m picking up six separate life signatures, five of them large enough to qualify for human.”

What?

Her brain did some quick math. Lamar traveled alone, or with a plus one at the most. The Lifescan picked up signs of living life, by size.

Unless he had three or four people in cryostasis, which he definitely didn’t have the license for, they had a big damn problem.

“The pirates are still on there?” She bared her teeth in a grimace. “I doubt he knows. He seemed surprised about the suits.”

“Easy to hide on a Durango,” Zan observed. “Easy to patch into its comms, too.”

“Especially if they jacked his systems like he claims.” She sat back down with a wince, hissing a breath through her teeth at the situation.

Out in the Black, against pirates, with an idiot to save, no backup, and no Fint in sight. Why does this kind of shit always happen to me?

Maybe she was cursed. Her family seemed to think so, anyway. She sighed and turned to Zan. “You feel like reaching into your other skill set today?”

Before Zan had signed up on Huli Jing, they’d worked as a merc. Before then, they’d been the demolitions expert in a Novan Earth Special Forces unit.

Mostly, Soo-jin wanted them to shoot a few pirates for her.

They grunted. “Not for free.”

That’ll do.

She smiled, then turned the mics back on. “Okay, here’s the deal. We were supposed to get fifty-thou for those grapes, so it’ll cost you fifty-thou for this rescue.”

“What? Soo, that’s—that’s so much!”

Damn right it is, and you will pay me every fucking penny.

“Soo-jin,” she reminded him. “The jin is very fucking important, Lamar.”

“Soo-jin,” he corrected, somehow making it sound not-at-all like its natural Korean pronunciation. “I don’t have fifty-thou on me—”

“You literally just offered us twenty,” she said flatly.

“Yeah, I have twenty. But I don’t have fifty.”

Gods help me.

“Then you’ll owe me thirty at Marduk. Forty if you keep annoying me. Agreed?”

Fifty-thousand credits was about thirty-five thousand credits above the going rate for transport, especially from a stranded person the Alliance legally required her to rescue, but his sister’s business had left him far more than that, and he was about to find out how much extra expertise this rescue would require.

He was also stranded in the ass-end of space, and she had a legal reason to not attempt a rescue.

No matter how much the Alliance cared about helping people in distress, the four extra life signatures aboard Coca made the rescue quite unsafe for her and her crew.

“Fine,” he said. “But I’m not buying you any more drinks after this. You’re on your own for your bar tab.”

Unexpected delight crashed through her, and she couldn’t keep a grin from pulling her lips tight.

“Ooo, bonus! Now, hop to your aft airlock and get ready to receive my air bridge.”

She ended the call before he could answer, confirmed a course to slide her ship alongside Coca, then stood.

“Bring your prettiest gun,” she told Zan as she headed for the door. “I’ll bribe Bob out of hiding.”