The Hunt for the Halifax Fox

Chapter 1
Welcome to Castle Clusterfuck

Rox had just punched the Prime Minister of Mars. She’d socked him square in the face. He stooped before her, hands cupping his nose, while blood soaked into his spongy corporate beard. She was dreaming, she knew, but the details were vivid. His shirt was torn, his eye blackened.

He straightened. With one hand over his heart and the other raised as if to encompass the heavens, he opened his mouth to recite another poem. She punched him again.

The dream faded. Weight began to return, dragging her to her body, on her bed, in her room. She had to go back. She didn’t remember who she’d just been thrashing, but she didn’t care. Every muscle in her was straining to knock him into the next galaxy. She tried to relax, but it was no use. She groaned in frustration.

Someone whispered in her ear.

Rox clawed her way out from under a tangle of blankets into the dark of her cabin, throwing wild punches into empty air. “Light,” she said, but her voice got stuck in her throat, and the room remained pitch black. There was no sound in her quarters but her own panting.

The voice had been the lingering fragment of a dream. All she remembered was that the person had whispered a poem, the haiku kind, and that it had been a bad one. Not that she knew bad poetry from good poetry. Roksani Price did not like any kind of poetry.

She crossed her arms over her desk and leaned her head onto them. Wait—hadn’t she just been in her bed? How was she suddenly sitting at her desk? Her arms were wrapped around it. Its rounded surface was cold under her cheek.

This time when Rox woke up, she was truly awake. Her right hand throbbed with pain. She wasn’t leaning on her desk… she was draped over somebody’s toilet. In the dark, the stranger spoke again. “Captain Price wakes up, raging yelling murder death, vomits and forgets.”

Rox scrambled away, her non-injured hand grasping for something to use as a weapon. She banged against a hard vertical surface, then pushed away from it and collided with another. The room was the size of a coffin. “Who the fuck is that?” She tried for a tone of threat and command but sounded like a rusty hinge. 

Another, familiar voice spoke. “Deputy Captain, should I call for help?” Rox closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall of her own washroom, adjoining her cabin on the Halifax. Home. The voice was that of her AI assistant.

“I’m fine.” Her throat felt like she’d screamed. Not just a scream—a shriek, a horror-movie sound that scrapes vocal cords raw. Roksani Price did not shriek. “Pete, why the hell are you reciting poetry? And changing your voice?”

“I'm not permitted to tell you, Deputy Captain.”                                                               

She cursed. "Jos hacked into you, didn’t he.”

“I’m not permitted to tell you, Deputy Captain.”

It was a good thing her hacker ex wasn’t here right now. “Halifax, light to forty.” Her washroom closet materialized around her with a rosy glow. She pushed to her feet, rinsed her mouth in the sink, and flushed the toilet on the vomit she could only assume had come from her. She trudged into her cabin to put on pants, which she didn’t remember taking off. Her punching hand felt like it was being rhythmically stabbed. So, she hadn’t dreamed the broken bones.

The infirmary was empty when she arrived. Running her injured hand under the iatric scanner, she let the Halifax AI tell her the news. “Fractures of the fourth and fifth metacarpals of the dominant hand. This is a common injury from blunt closed-fist impact with a hard surface, often referred to as ‘brawler’s fracture.’ Would you like me to prepare—”

“I’ve got it.” This wasn’t the first time she’d woken up with a punch-sized dent in her cabin wall. She opened her shirt, prepped the traveler’s port in her chest, and injected herself with a painkiller. She sterilized another needle but paused. She’d better sit for this one. Holding her breath, she slid the needle into the back of her hand, then breathed out a stream of whispered profanity. Osseous nanos. Those fuckers burned like molten lava going in. Addressing her AI assistant, she said, “Pete, was I talking in my sleep again?” 

“No, Deputy Captain.” 

“Well, at least there’s that.”

“You were screaming in your sleep.”

“Son of a—” Rox ran her good hand over her face. She was pretty sure she knew the answer to her next question. “What was I screaming about?”

“Most of your words were unintelligible, but you did say, ‘Oh no, the Drift!’”

Rox cringed. Well, the nightmares were back. She took the gauze from the back of her hand and watched as the injection puncture finished healing over. She imagined the nanos within as submarines from the nature documentaries she’d loved as a child, but microscopic, propelling themselves through her
bloodstream toward the injured bits of bone, going to work. 

Thank you, little submarines, she thought. 

Damage control. How had this become her life? 

* * *

Rox hadn’t gone ten steps from the infirmary when she was ordered to report to the command deck. She whirled around and stalked in the opposite direction from her quarters, down the corridor toward the command deck lift. She was supposed to be off duty. She was supposed to be watching porn, eating a snack, and waiting for sleeping pills to kick in. But the senior captain had smacked her down at the first peep of protest. “Shut it, or I’ll put you out an airlock. I need a break.”

As she walked, Rox held her injured hand at a careful distance from her body, wondering if she should have followed the Halifax infirmary’s advice that she apply a brace. When she reached the lift, she paused. She visualized balling up the mysterious illness, then hurled the imagined mass back down the corridor, stepped into the lift, and closed the door. It was a theater trick she’d heard about somewhere along the way. Actors were just professional bullshitters, and sometimes the trick actually worked.

The Halifax was in the Offlands, one of the Lir System’s outlying asteroid clusters. Evidently, they’d been flagged by a Lir Coalition security outpost. For the past hour the space traffic controller on the comm had been needling the senior captain, threatening some vague action unless she provide biometric ID for every crew member on the ship. To the Coalition military, a ship in the Offlands could be crewed by babies and nuns and they’d still think it was a cesspit of filthy criminals. A typical day in the outer orbit.

Arriving at the command deck, Rox found the senior captain rising from the captain’s station, anticipating the arrival of her deputy. “Your command,” said Ahmadi, passing by without even a nod of thanks. “We’re already behind schedule and these people are holding us up. Try to pull some diplomacy out of your ass.”

“Diplomacy doesn’t exist in any part of me,” said Rox. “Including my ass.”

“Grow up. I just need a few hours.” As Ahmadi entered the lift, she said over her shoulder, “Use your words, Price.” The door closed. Rox adjusted the captain’s chair as high as it could go, sat, and flicked open the comm.

Lord, did she use words. Really, she was amazed that she lasted five minutes listening to the guy’s shrill demands. Remember to keep a low profile, said the voice in her head, while at the same time, her mouth hurled profanity at him in three languages.

He closed out the comm. At least she shut him up. Straightening, she examined the central holo on its dais, making a mental chart of the planets in their current orbital positions. The dwarf star Lir shone at the system’s center as a dot of orange in a vast, dark tableau of smaller dots. Their route through the Offlands appeared as a white line, shifting every now and then as the pilot made navigation adjustments. It ended at the outskirts of the asteroid cluster, at an abandoned station called Clearwater.

She had no idea why they were back here, and she wanted to strangle her captain. She ordered the ship’s AI to adjust the environment: cool air, dim light. Nothing was out of place. The wall's inset lamps spread their glow across the underfoot decking in a wash of dusky jewel tones and duskier shadows. The pilot’s music grated at her nerves, but she ignored it. Keep the crew happy, right? Abusing space traffic controllers was not an unusual occurrence. This was just another day. 

Another day that started with sleep punching and mystery vomit.

Motion caught her eye. Across the command deck sat Jos, ex-boyfriend, hacker of AIs, player of juvenile pranks. He waved again, a wiggle of the fingers that he knew annoyed her. He was planted at the wrong station as usual, stout legs stretched out beneath the work dash, crossed at the ankles.  Her link pinged a message from him. With a flick of her fingers, the text appeared in her visual field display:

You called the space traffic controller a choad. What’s a choad?

She slapped the link on her forearm and mouthed, “Fix my AI.” He swiped more text across his link screen.

That was some colorful cursing. ‘Go copulate with your sister,’ right? And something about testicles? Cangali is such a nuanced and beautiful language.

She returned,

Get back to work. You choad.

She blocked him, then watched with satisfaction as he keyed in more text, realized he was blocked, and looked hurt.

Before long, her link did ping another message. This one was from the senior captain.

Thank you for the fifteen minutes I got to rest. 

She was coming back. Rox’s heart sped up. She was going to get reamed for how she’d handled this, acting like a mad baby with a full diaper.

She told her thumping heart to calm the hell down. How could Ahmadi expect her to be cool and professional? They were back traipsing around their old territory like they’d never left, like the gunfight on Belenus never happened, like Rox hadn’t spent the last ten years on the run from the Lir Coalition. Ahmadi should’ve known better than to come back to the Lir System and put the Butcher of Baringer Heights in the command seat.

At least this situation was just regular old fuckery from her past, not modern-day unexplained blackout punching. Tapping her link, she checked her vitals. Everything was fine. Did she hate being back in the Lir System? Yes. Was something wrong with her head? Probably also yes. But she was Roksani Price, and Roksani Price was not afraid of people in authority. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling, jaw muscles flexing. 

Behind her, the lift door opened with a soft schick, and a gruff voice said, "Light to seventy-five." The ceiling lights flared brilliant white, and Rox, still looking up, got them full in the eyes. She clapped her hands over her face. Shading her streaming eyes, she watched Ahmadi stride from the lift, her heavy gaze sweeping over the command deck like a raptor over a field of small prey. Jos pulled in his legs and leaned intently toward the display floating before him. 

“Turn off the music,” Ahmadi barked. She didn’t spare Rox a glance as she claimed the captain's station. 

Rox wiped her eyes on her sleeve, pulled her lightshades from her pocket, and slid them on. “Am I wrong that we agreed to cap the lights at sixty?"

"No." 

She waited for more of a response but Ahmadi ignored her, adjusting the seat to her shorter legs. "So you don't care that it now hurts me to look at things?"

"Make your own damned accommodations," the senior captain growled.

Rox did not get the reaming she expected. Her AI assistant did spout another haiku, but smooth as an owl sighting a rat, Ahmadi turned her head toward Jos and gave him the verbal thrashing that Rox had braced for. With his romance novel face and grating charm, Jos could disarm the scariest of bombs, even Ahmadi. And so he did.

Rox claimed another workstation, raising the seat and work dash, taking comfort in her routine cursing of ergonomics that favored short people. Why had Ahmadi let her off the hook? For months, she'd been handling Rox as if she might crack at the slightest pressure. No one had ever treated her this way before, and certainly not her senior captain.

She waved up the station schematic for the landing party. But it sure was hard to plan when you didn’t know the plan. Instead, she plotted a course with the pilot who, despite spending most of her life in the Lir System, had never been in the Offlands, and had no knowledge of its more dangerous regions. No, Rox told her, not the Brish; that was the thickest mafia territory. Nor the sector with the largest and most desperate of the flotilla slums. Did the pilot want to get into a shootout? And certainly not the central Offlands. That trajectory led too close to home. She didn’t share that thought.

For two hours, she was fine.

The command deck went monotone gray. She shook her head and stared at her display. It was her mind, and she could control it. She could. She forced her shoulders to relax. “Show me the central docks,” she ordered the ship’s AI. The holo blurred into a puddle of colors and shapes.

***

She was in a gray place. Something was moving. It was her chest, heaving as it tried to pull in air. There was none. The Drift.

She couldn’t breathe. She was falling.

Falling. Falling.

***

Her eyes were open. Air moved through her lungs, in, out, rhythmic and smooth. When she squinted, the lines of a ceiling came into focus. She was lying face up on the floor of her cabin.

Images began to surface. Ahmadi, watching her with a look of concern. Her own hands wrapping around her captain’s neck. The crush as her throat gave way; shaking until she heard vertebrae snap.

Rox shot to sitting, ignoring the sudden reel of vertigo and nausea, and ordered the Halifax AI to report Ahmadi’s vitals. Normal. The senior captain was still on the command deck. Rox had hallucinated. Then, somehow, she’d made it back to her cabin.

This was Jehan Ahmadi, the captain she’d followed for half her life. The captain may be a mean, terrible person, but Rox would never hurt her.

Or would she? When would she come back from one of these blackouts with someone bleeding at her feet?

 Whatever this sickness was, for a while it left her alone. The hours passed, and the Halifax slipped silently through the Offlands. Their high-priority mystery mission to this cadaver of a station looked like a hundred jobs they’d been on. But the closer they got to their destination, the more disquieted Rox became. An unfamiliar sense of foreboding increased with each hour that drew them closer to Clearwater Station. Her Offlands kin might call it a premonition, a warning from Beyond, but she didn’t subscribe to her mother’s mystical garbage. What, then?

When the Halifax began its slow approach to Clearwater’s central docks, Rox was still in her cabin. She pulled on her boots and checked the cartridge on her gun. Above the desk hung an old-fashioned wall mirror, and there stood her reflection, looking back at her. Her black brows were drawn together. It made her look like her mother. Oh, hell no. She forced her face to relax. 

“Why do I feel like something bad is going to happen?” she said. Reflection Rox, scowling, asked her the same question.

There’s a wind change coming.

It was something her father would say. Eyes squeezed shut, she gripped her head in her hands and considered pulling out her hair. “There’s no goddamn wind in space,” she snarled. She shut up then. Roksani Price did not talk to herself.  

* * *

Her day did not get better. 

Alone, Rox floated along one of Clearwater Station’s cylindrical dockways, coasting from one handhold to the next. Through the transparent wall of the tube, she saw the station’s innermost ring far ahead, spreading wide and arcing around to encircle the spike-shaped hub that housed the station’s central docks. The concavity of the ring was elegant silver and studded with lights, an encircling collar of glittering gems. 

In contrast, every other direction was starry space, wrapping itself around the station in a dark and deadly hug. Clarenium was strong, but still, it wasn’t the smartest architectural choice to have a single barrier between humans and the space things that could kill them. But Clearwater had been built by Homelanders, and people from Earth did love a view. 

When she had arrived at the docking hatch, suited up and ready to roll, Ahmadi had been there before her. The senior captain had told her she wasn’t going. Rox had looked at her, uncomprehending, then reminded her that she was Deputy Captain, and Deputy Captain Price led the landing parties, so what the hell? Ahmadi was silent. A slight forward lean of her head, the stare that could curdle raw vinegar. Rox was a grown-ass captain. She knew she commanded respect. She knew she could intimidate. But nobody could intimidate like Jehan Ahmadi.

This act of defiance was going to earn her a very serious reaming indeed. As she drew closer to the lift that would take her into the station’s rings, she engaged her mag boots to walk the remaining distance. Like any ring station, the central docking and assembly section shot through the center of its spokes like a spear through the heart of a colossal spider web. Rox revised her initial take on the station’s architectural aesthetic. Maybe it wasn’t so elegant. The chunky clacking of her mag boots brought to mind an insect in a web. A fruit fly, drawing the attention of a giant, eight-eyed spider. She was the fruit fly.

She disengaged her boots, grabbed a rung and propelled her floating body forward. With her link hand, she double-tapped thumb to middle finger, requesting a voice comm with Jos.

She hummed a few notes until he answered her ping. "What's up, Boss?"

"You know those terrible fruits the Martians invented?”

“Orples?” 

“Yes. I was trying to think of the name. Orples. That’s what this mission is like.” The hybrid fruit looked like a regular apple, but when you bit in, your teeth passed through the crispy white mantle to sink unexpectedly into a viscous interior, releasing pockets of purple juice like a candy-flavored infection. She shuddered in revulsion.

“So,” Jos prompted, “this mission is deliciously weird?" 

"No. There is nothing delicious about orples, and the mission isn't weird, it feels dangerously wrong. What possible reason could Ahmadi have for leaving me behind?" 

"I don’t know, but I can only hide your tracker for so long.” 

"It just doesn’t make sense.” She sailed past a handhold and reached for the next. “Unless she left me behind by mistake. She has been looking tired lately.” He didn’t respond.

She’d ignored Ahmadi’s order for the sake of the crew. The deputy captain always led the landing party. Nobody knew what this mission was about, and the crew was already nervous, more so now after the break from routine.

"You’re nervous," said Jos. 

She scoffed. "What? I am not."

"You're humming," he noted.

"You're hearing things. Roksani Price doesn’t get nervous."

"The Drift makes you nervous. But to be fair, the Drift makes everybody nervous." 

Right now, the Drift was the least of her concerns. They were silent for a bit as Rox floated onward. “Rox?” said Jos.

“Hm?”

“I know you hate being back in the Lir System. I’m here if you need to flog someone.”

 “If my assistant recites one more haiku, you’ll get worse than a flogging. Price out.” She was using her injured hand to grab the rungs. She flipped over and switched hands. It would take a few days for the osseous nanos to finish healing the fractures.

This fist had taken a lot of beatings over the decades, or rather, had dealt out a lot of beatings. Childhood bullies, handsy bar drunks, sparring partners. Those Martian religious cult zealots who’d wanted to cut off her ears. Ah, now that had been a hell of a fight. Her punching fist deserved so much better than beating up walls.

The change had begun with subtle symptoms she could easily dismiss. When they became un-subtle, she still wrote them off, even the first broken bone. An Earth-orbit habitat had been threatening secession; a typical strongarm job for a government’s contract privateers. It ended with said privateers, Rox and her landing party, knocked out with gas, taken prisoner, and crammed together into a single sweaty jail cell for three days. She got back to the ship, she had a restless night’s sleep, she woke up to a busted hand. Exhaustion, she’d told herself, injecting the nanos. Stress.

Now, eight months, nine sprains uncounted blackouts, and half a dozen broken bones later, there was no ignoring it. Three weeks ago, she’d woken up with a concussion. That time, the dent in the wall had been head-sized. 

The AI’s psychiatrics never flagged anything but the usual robust ability to stuff down bad memories. When they got back to the Sol System, Rox would find a good doctor for a workup. She’d be fine.

At the end of the dockway, she proceeded into the lift that would carry her from the relative brightness of the central structure into the dim ghost light of an abandoned habitat. Engaging her boots, she stepped through the lift's ceiling hatch and walked from the wall to what would soon be the floor. The hatch closed above her. The lift’s lights were out; only a fractional amount of the hub’s light entered through the overhead grate. Most people would have to rely on a visual field display to see in darkness like this, but Rox wasn’t most people. Her Callic ancestors had gene-edited for the best night vision there was. They’d given up their day vision in the process, which was why Ahmadi had agreed to lower light on the command deck, not that it apparently mattered any more.

The lift was old and slow. Rox drummed her fingers against the forestock of the rifle in her arms. As she moved feet-first toward the greater spin gravity of the ring’s outer levels, her frame adjusted for the increasing weight. Bones shifted, joints condensed, muscles engaged. The animal body that remembered hunting across grassy plains woke from its floating slumber. She adjusted the grip on her now-heavier rifle. She didn’t like fighting in gravity, and she had the distinct feeling that a fight was coming.

She followed the landing party’s trackers to the fourth deck. According to her suit's sensors, a small concentration of odorized methane clung to the air, likely from a leak that the station had automatically sealed off. When the landing party passed through here, her crewmate Val had probably made a fart joke.

The air wasn’t poisonous, though, and she didn't need sensors to tell her so. Evidence of squatters littered the corners and scrawled in glowing graffiti on the walls. No station in the Offlands was really abandoned, even the ones that had been deemed off limits by the Lir Coalition. Out here, if there was centrifugal force to give you weight, and even semi-breathable air, there were people. Walking through here solo wasn’t ideal. If she was lucky, the station's inhabitants were hiders. As soon as she passed through, they’d slink back out into the open. If she was unlucky, they were attackers, and she’d have to fight her way out of being ambushed, robbed, and thrown out an airlock into space.

She read the inscriptions on the walls for clues as to which type of squatters she might encounter, hiders or attackers. The vertical script of Teng vied for space on the walls with loops of Hindi, Lirish Arabic, and a few blocky Latin languages, a kind of community message board. Here was a recipe for groundbean and cave cress stew, near an old set of instructions for manual operation of this section’s water filtration system. Over by the lift door, some stuff in English she couldn’t read. She ignored the translation text that scrolled down the left side of her visual field. There was the obligatory teenage love proclamation, in Teng: Suzell & Ghazi forever. And: Question everything, to which someone had responded, Why?

And there, in big, freshly inked scrawl, someone had written, Trespassers beware! with the universal symbol of an airlocked figure dying in space. Rox smiled. Hiders, then. Squatters who threw interlopers out of airlocks didn’t advertise.

She twisted off her helmet and let it hang off the back of her suit, wrinkling her nose at the methane fart smell. She pulled up a navigation display, snapped her link into its casing on the forestock of her rifle, and started off toward the trackers. The ring’s long curve arced upward before her. Hovering over the forestock, the map’s gridlines glowed jaundiced yellow against the red ghost lights of the halls.

“Price.”

Rox’s heart jumped. Innocently, she asked, “Yes, Captain?”

“Go. Back. To. The ship,” said Ahmadi.

“What?” Tapping thumb to finger, she closed off the comm, then opened it. “Captain, I can’t—” She closed the comm; opened it. “Something’s interfering with my comms—” In the map, she saw Ahmadi’s dot separate from the dots representing the landing crew, then begin moving in Rox’s direction, fast.

Rox emerged into an atrium. Here, the ghost lights were joined by brighter lights set around the circumference of a domed ceiling. Before its makers left, the hollow gray bowl had likely boasted an impressive view, maybe of the Milky Way, or the familiar sky of the architects’ home planet. Rox imagined that the trees scattered about the space had once cast an artful play of dappled light across the benches set under them. Now, their bare branches cast thin, lifeless shadows against the littered decking. She passed a playground, rusted and silent, set back in the darkness.

Ahmadi met her at the other end of the atrium. For a moment, they faced off. “My orders,” said Ahmadi, “are not a suggestion.”

“Captain, tell me why we’re here. Tell me why you’re leading the landing party instead of me.”

“I do not owe you an explanation. Get back to the Halifax.” Ahmadi turned her back and strode out of the atrium.

Rox followed. “Jehan!” When she caught up, reaching for Ahmadi’s shoulder, the senior captain abruptly spun and shoved her. Caught by surprise, Rox stumbled back. Ahmadi surged forward to shove her again, backward into a room. Lightning fast, Ahmadi whipped up her rifle and shot. Rox’s knees buckled. “Code beta beta five seven. Halifax, lock down Price’s weapons and comms for the next forty minutes.”

Rox lay on her side, breathing hard, muscles contracting painfully from the shock blast. When she could open her eyes, she saw her captain in the doorway, a shadow backlit by the red lights. Her blood went cold.

This was no longer the person indentured to the United Provinces of the Americas. This wasn’t the old woman who captained an outdated, borrowed ship and had to travel under a pseudonym. Here was Jehan-Islon Ahmadi, Field General of the Offlands Syndicate. Here was the Ahmadi who had had a hundred under her command, had been a right hand in the domination of the outer Lir System, had punished the families of mafia deserters. If her deeper soul had lain dormant around a different sun, all she'd needed was the orange light of Lir to wake it from its long sleep. 

Her dark, hooded eyes took Rox in. “I’ve watched out for you, Price. Whatever happens today, remember that.” She began to turn; paused; kept her gaze angled away. “I’ll be back for you.” With a command and a flick of her hand, Ahmadi transferred a file to Rox’s link. She turned and left. The door slid shut behind her. 

For several long moments, Rox could only lie still. When she could move, she crawled to the door on leaden limbs, pulled herself to her feet, and tapped the door panel. She’d been locked in. The rage was an explosion. The universe tilted, upended, and went out like a light.

* * *

“Deputy Captain.”

She was on her hands and knees. She didn't remember falling, though her palms stung where they pressed the decking.

“Deputy Captain. Your vitals are still stabilizing. Please stay on the floor.”

She recognized the voice. Pressure pulsed against the inside of her skull like sonic shock—her own blood, keeping time with her beating heart. With a jolt of untethered fear, she realized she didn’t have a name. A whimper issued from her throat, and the vibration of sound in her chest brought her back, a fast-sliding evolution from wherever she'd just been, back to the present.

Rox pushed herself to her knees, examining the room she was in. Clearwater. Ahmadi had locked her in, and then… what? Evidently, she’d had another episode, one that had come with a flood of tears and snot. Wiping her face, she croaked, “Pete, private channel to Tavarres and Benjoska.” Speaking hurt her throat, as if she’d screamed. Roksani Price doesn’t scream. 

“I’m unable to open a comm with anyone,” answered the assistant.

She rose, pushing into the wall for support. “Why not?”

“Senior Captain Ahmadi placed a temporary block on your comms.” Rox leaned on the wall, eyes closed, and waited for the universe to slow its maddening orbit around her.   

She thought back to what Ahmadi had said before leaving. I’ve watched out for you. 

Jos and their gunner, Hachi, had talked about jumping ship so many times that mutiny had become a running joke between them. Rox had considered it once or twice, but never seriously.

Her captain had locked her in a room. Her captain had shot her.

She strode to the door and tapped its panel. "Clearwater, let me out." She was a trusting fool. "Let me OUT." She tapped the panel again, spoke to the station’s artificial intelligence, tried to cajole it into listening. “Pete, how do I convince the station to open this door?”

“The AI will not let you out until someone on the other side lets you out.”

“Is it possible to overload the locking mechanism with a shock bolt?”

“No.” 

Her gun was locked down anyway. Rox began to pace, inspecting every crevice and vent, feeling increasingly hot and trapped. “Damn it, tell me there’s a way to get out of this room.”

“There’s a way to get out of this room.”

Rox brightened. “Well? How do I get out?” 

“There’s no way to get out of this room.” Rox called her AI assistant a lot of horrible things then. Unperturbed, Pete said, “For your safety, it’s important to note that evidence of the Drift has appeared to the right of your current physical orientation.” 

Rox stopped short and went rigid. If her blood had gone cold before with the captain, now it froze to ice in her veins. She cleared her throat so her voice wouldn’t squeak. “It’s a visible rift?” 

“It won’t be visible to you. For your safety, please step to the back left of your current physical orientation. Would you like me to show you the distortion?”

"No.” Somewhere in a faraway universe, confronting Ahmadi, Rox had been filled with steel. Now, she shrank back to the wall behind her and tried to melt herself into it. It was not a large room. If it had been a lover in there with her, she would have described the setting as intimate. What would happen to her if it shifted closer? Would she fall into it? Would her dry bones emerge back into normal spacetime, light years away? That was a popular theory. In an embarrassingly small voice, she said, “Tell me if it comes any nearer. Or disappears.” 

Rox knew no one who’d had even one brush with the Drift, other than going through the gravity ports between the two accessible planetary systems, and this was her third such personal encounter. If Jos hadn’t fixed Pete, it could have informed her of the Drift visit in the form of a limerick. There once was a bitch from the Offlands… she knew nothing about meter, and she was off to a bad start anyway because nothing in any of her languages rhymed with Offlands. Her skin felt like it was trying to crawl off her body to get away. 

The sudden sound of her assistant’s voice sent her heart skittering anew. “The Drift is no longer detectable.” A string of curses came out of her in a rush of air.

Her audio crackled to life. “Captain Price.” More crackling. “Foxy, you hear me?” 

Hachi. Sweet Mother, she’d never been gladder to hear that deep, rumbling voice. “Call me that again and I’ll shoot your kneecaps. I’m trapped in a room. Get me out of here.”  

“I’m halfway to you. I left Ellison and Garzia with the captain.”

“Ahmadi agreed to this?”

“Nope.”

Loyal, dependable Hachi. “Stay sharp, Tavarres. My assistant says the Drift appeared three meters away from me.”

His voice rose in pitch. “Drift?” Hachi, alarmed. That was a first.

A new voice joined them. “Again? I’m going to start having Drifter fantasies about you.” This was Jos, of course, in command of the ship. “Ill-timed. Words retracted. Are you okay? Is it gone?”

“Inappropriate is the word, Benjoska. Yes, it’s gone and I’m fine. Who’s on this comm?”

“It’s just the three of us,” said Jos. “What’s going on? Your vitals went haywire.”

“The captain locked her up,” said Hachi.

“What?” She could almost see Jos go pale.

“The captain shot me,” said Rox. Jos cursed in English, Hachi in Cangali. “Just get here.” Silence again. “Benjoska. Tavarres.” A voice crackled through in splintered bits. “Pete, is that Ahmadi’s block? Please tell me that isn’t the Drift interfering with my comms.”

“That isn’t the Drift interfering with your comms.”

Rox squinted with suspicion. “Are you being literal again?”

“I’m repeating you as directed, but also, that isn’t the Drift interfering with your comms.” 

Rox rubbed her head. She brought up a crew tracker display. She saw the dots that were her crew, and she saw her own. One lonely glowing dot, stuck in a room by itself, experiencing lapses of memory and visited moments ago by the physics-bending anomaly that held the record for utterly baffling science.

Whatever bullshittery was happening on this station, Rox needed to collect her crew and get out. Why couldn't she learn this lesson? Jehan Ahmadi was a hardened ex-mafia criminal. Rox should have seen it coming.

As soon as the door opened, she was through it. She barreled straight into Hachi’s open arms, receiving a lung-crushing hug. “How you feel about mutiny now?” he asked. 

 “Let me go,” she wheezed.

He gave her a final squeeze before loosening his hold. “You okay?”

“I’m good.” She patted his thick arm. “Did Ahmadi say anything about why we’re here?”

“She said the United Provinces got word there’s a weapons lab here. Biotech, something being tested on people. They want to know what new threat Earth is dealing with. And we’re supposed to break out one of the test subjects.”

Rox gritted her teeth. “She’s hiding something.”

“Little slow on the uptake, kiddo.”

“That’s ‘Captain,’ dickhead.”

“Captain Dickhead it is.” He gave a two-finger salute.

She opened a comm. “Garzia, this is Price. What’s the status there?”

“Ahmadi’s got friends,” came the whispered reply. “Four. Three of them hired security, by the look of them, and one in medical scrubs. They said there’s an armed Offlander gang roaming the station.”

 “When you and Ellison can break away, get to our position,” said Rox. “You’re not safe with Ahmadi. Follow our trackers.”

Hachi and Rox moved quietly through the halls. They found themselves in a darkened warehouse populated with ancient, hulking equipment—a foundry. The station had been built for the extraction of minerals from asteroid ore. A voice came from the shadows. “Captain?”

“It’s us,” Rox replied. Their crewmates materialized from behind the machines, rifles lowered but ready at their sides. Like everyone on the crew of the Halifax, Finch Garzia and Val Ellison filled multiple roles. Garzia was the Halifax’s deputy engineer, Val a mechanic. They also doubled as ass-kicking fighters in close combat and were part of every potentially dangerous landing party, which was basically all of them.

“Welcome to Castle Clusterfuck,” said Rox. “We’re getting the hell out. Anybody who wants to stick with Ahmadi is free to stay here.”

“I’m with you,” said Garzia.

“Place smells like farts,” said Val, warming a little spot in Rox’s heart.

“You’re leaving her?” Hachi’s face was expressionless as ever.

Rox thought of a younger Ahmadi, a different crew. Times when collecting the mafia’s due had them unknowingly walking into organized resistance. The crewmates who’d gotten lost, fallen behind, been paralyzed by shock blasts. It was a cold practicality Ahmadi had taught her. Leave them to their fate. Save the rest; save yourself.

Except for the one time her captain had gone back. 

The planet Belenus, receding behind them. Ahmadi hovering above her, grey as a fading specter. Hang on, Price.

Rox rubbed her hand over her face. She looked at Hachi from between her fingers, then dropped her hand and looked away. “So there’s us, killer scientists, and gang dogs running around this station. And everybody is enemies.”

“Something like that,” Garzia replied.

She ground her jaw.  “Pete, give us the quickest route to the senior captain.”

They fanned out, weaving around metal tables and equipment to take positions on either side of a set of double doors. Garzia looked over the flashing security panel at the door’s edge. “Locked from the outside,” he murmured. “What’s that about?” He tapped the unlock.

“Burning shite!” Val jumped back as a human torso flopped through the doors onto the decking at their feet.

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