The Complete Razia Series, page 25
"You are," Razia said, stepping into the light with a smirk on her face. She turned her eyes on the third man in the room. "He isn't."
***
Razia kicked open the door and dusty light flooded the back hall. Her bounty was strapped to her trusty floating canvas, an angry scowl on his sallow face. With a proud smile, she drug him out into the open bar, already filled with pirates and other patrons with their attentions on their mini-computers. They didn't bother to look up at her, even as she paraded her hard-earned bounty by three of them.
They had ignored her when she walked into the bar as well, ignored her when she tried to wheedle information from the bartender about the back-room poker game.
"Thanks a lot," she said to him, as if he had been an integral part of her bounty capture. He grumbled something and busied himself. Razia glared at him before sulking into the dusty air of the desert planet D-882, headed towards the bounty office.
Razia, otherwise known as Lyssa Peate, was twenty-two years old, and a member of one of the four pirate crime syndicates, known as webs. While some pirates hijacked transporters and lifted antiques from rich houses, Razia's primary focus was capturing pirates in rival webs as a bounty hunter. Piracy was a game; thanks to hefty payments to the Universal Police and other political forces, a captured pirate would spend just one night in jail, returning to the streets with a zeroed out bounty. As a bounty hunter, Razia's bounty was primarily funded by other pirates who wished to see her off the streets—a sign of respect.
But eight months after gaining her full-fledged membership in Dissident's web, she was still considered something of a joke and her bounty hadn't moved a single credit. To be honest, the more people knew her name, the worse it had become.
But at the end of the day, she was still bounty hunting the universe's most wanted pirates, so she couldn't complain too much.
She picked her conquests strategically, only hunting the trickiest and most elusive pirates, ones that took more time and effort than other bounty hunters were willing to put in. She felt it made her stand out from the rest of the bounty hunters and pirates, and hoped it would draw more attention to her talents instead of her gender.
Her recent capture was no different. Guido Tedesco stole some very expensive material and suddenly found himself the fifteenth most wanted person in the universe. Once he realized his mistake, he went into hiding and hadn't been seen for a few weeks, waiting for his bounty to drop down to a reasonable number.
Well, now he wasn't even on the most wanted list, she mused as she walked out of the bounty office about an hour later. Tedesco had netted a cool thirteen million credits to her Razia bank account, now at a healthy size. It was a far cry from when she was struggling to make ends meet, dashing across the universe to excavate planets as a Deep Space Exploration scientist and then hunt the universe's least wanted pirates on D-882. Now, things were finally settling between the two halves of her life.
Her mini-computer buzzed at her hip, and she eagerly pulled it out. It was just a marketing message. Out of habit, she checked her missed calls and other messages, just to see if she'd missed anything in the few minutes since she last looked at it.
She hoped the buzzing was a message from her little brother Vel, her former intern who had returned to school full time over a universal month ago since his new semester started. He was excited to go, as he had spent seven months following her around on bounty captures and the occasional planet excavation. He said he missed his friends, and his normal life as a student.
She wondered if he missed her, too.
To distract herself from that very annoying thought, she turned to the pirate news:
12) Fried, Max
Wanted in connection with theft of antiques from estate on R-3633. Estimated cost of stolen property: 1,000,000C
4) Bodhi, Gunnar
Wanted in connection with transporter hijacking. Estimated cost of stolen materials: 16,000,000C
15) Teon, Sage
Wanted in connection with transporter hijacking. Estimated cost of stolen materials: 1,950,000C
She rolled her eyes. Sage had changed the photo on his wanted poster. For the fifteenth time this month, it seemed. Now he was just showing off.
Like clockwork, her mini-computer lit up with Teon’s face. He was a year or so older than she, with shaggy blond hair and lively green eyes. With an annoyed sigh, she answered the call.
"You got him, right?" he asked.
"Yep," she nodded. "Just turned him in."
"That's good, because I was just calling to tell you that I—"
"Yeah, yeah, I saw it," Razia said with a smirk. "Still even."
They’d been playing this game for weeks. Not even an hour after she'd dropped Vel off at the Academy, Sage had called and goaded her into this silly competition: could he hijack a ship faster than she could catch a pirate named Costa Enoch. Of course, Razia found her bounty first, but the next week, Sage bet her that he could hijack another ship before she found another bounty, and thus ensued almost six straight universal weeks of friendly competition. She wasn't really sure why she still engaged with him, but it was nice to have someone to talk to—even if it was Sage.
"Have you registered to vote yet?" Sage asked, leaning back. "Fulfill your civic duty?"
"I believe my mother usually votes for me," Razia said. "Not as if there’s much to vote for in this election."
"Great Creator in Leveman’s Vortex, you’re such a pessimist," he laughed.
"What?" she said, lazily strolling down the street talking to him on her mini-computer. "Nobody cares about politics."
"Hey now, some of us do," he interrupted. "I happen to be a registered member of the Conservative party."
"Conservative party?" She snorted. "What kind of...you...conservative?"
"I happen to agree with most of what they stand for," he scoffed. "I only suppose you’re a liberal."
She rolled her eyes. "You don’t know the first thing about politics."
"I don’t understand how you can possibly want to re-elect President Llendo," he muttered.
"Yeah, he’s a moron who still has his assistants tie his shoes," she retorted, "but have you heard of some of the things that General State wants to do with the Universal Council?"
"General State wants to give the president’s office more power to get more things done, and he wants to crack down on those who perpetrate violent crimes."
"Yeah, and Jukin works for him, so you know he's going to give him the go-ahead to round up all the pirates."
"State presided over Jukin's disciplinary hearing," Sage reminded her. Not as if she needed reminding of that terrible episode. "He knows piracy isn't that big of a deal. There are more important things to throw people in jail for."
"We don't need any more idiots like Jukin running around," Razia mumbled, glancing up at the ivory tower of the Universal Police headquarters on D-882. It was glinting rather pretentiously in the early morning sun, as if daring the desert planet to sully the pristine surface.
"So how's your other brother doing?"
"I dunno," Razia said, her eyes still on the large tower.
"Aww," Sage cooed annoyingly. "Do you miss your little buddy?"
"Shut up," Razia snapped, reminded, yet again, that her "little buddy" hadn't called nor messaged in over a week. Maybe he didn't miss her the way she was definitely not missing him.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"It's no use lying to me," Sage pressed. "I can tell when something is—"
She abruptly ended the call, pleased with the silence instead of Sage's incessant condescension. She paused, looking around the empty streets covered in the familiar orange tint from the dusty, desert planet. She supposed she could start hunting another bounty, since she was here, and maybe grab another couple thousand credits. But the idea seemed unappealing to her at the moment.
Her eyes swept up to the U-POL tower again, and her thoughts drifted to her eldest brother. She wondered if he was up there in his ivory tower, already hard at work in a futile attempt to arrest every last pirate in the city below him.
It probably drove him insane.
She stuffed her hands in her pockets and began walking to the nearest shuttle station, her mind shifting to a faraway planet that she thought she might excavate. She had to sell a minimum of three a quarter anyway, so she felt it was probably time to don her lab coat and glasses.
And it had nothing to do with wanting to see Vel again.
***
A few days later, Dr. Lyssa Peate walked through the sterile hallways of the Planetary and System Science Academy. Her hair was pulled back into her signature bun, and her black, thick-rimmed glasses were perched on her nose. Her lab coat billowed behind her, seemingly out of place in the hallway filled with students ranging from tiny pre-teens slouching under the weight of their books to burly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, many of whom eyed the young kids with mischievous smiles.
Lyssa had spent some part of ages eleven through eighteen here, when Tauron, her pirate mentor, forced her to attend lessons. For as much as she hated it here at the time, she felt a twinge of nostalgia at the hall of classrooms. She paused by one room, spying a rather obnoxious professor who taught a class in ethics. He'd never let her skip, no matter how much she protested that "certain famous scientists" needed her, which was her regular excuse to get out of attending boring classes. He didn't seem to recognize her, but it wasn't as if she wanted to talk to him anyway. She recalled a rather lengthy discussion on the ethics of using Leveman's Vortex as a dumping ground for unwanted space junk and was in no mood to continue it some six years later.
She continued walking down the hallway, turned a corner and spied a large screen on the wall displaying announcements for clubs, reselling text books, and advertising study groups. Her mind wandered to the last time she'd been in a hall like this, when the announcements abruptly stopped, displaying a newscaster.
"Pirate Tauron Ball was captured today by Captain Jukin Peate's Special Forces in a surprise move. We are hearing that the execution is imminent. Now going to the live feed on D-882…"
A line of men stood on a platform, a corresponding noose behind them. She recognized the form of every man: Wade Baarda, who showed her how to throw a punch and took pleasure in showing her how terrible she was at it. Oskari Attenburg, who taught her to code applications and helped her rebuild her father's instruments. Stephanus Boveri, who complained about her laundry and cooking skills, but beat the crap out of a barfly who dared make a sexist comment about her. Elias Bohmer, Fredric Tivoli, Sigsteinn Aita—new hires on the crew, who had taken to picking on her like she was their annoying little sister.
And Tauron Ball—the man who took her in when no one else wanted her, who gave her a home when she had no where else to go. The man who had promised her that when she finished her last class, he would call Dissident and get her into the pirate web, so she could be the kind of bounty hunter that he'd always made her feel she could be. The only person who believed in her. The only person who ever made her feel she was worth something.
"And now they've placed the hood on the first pirate now."
"Oy, move it!"
Someone roughly bumped into her, snapping her from her memory. The short blonde hair would have been enough to recognize his lineage, but the sneering scowl definitively placed him as one of her twenty-four Peate siblings.
"Hey whatever-your-name-is," she said, feeling no shame that she had no idea what his name was. "Where's Vel?"
"I don't know," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Now gerrof!"
"What's the magic word?" Lyssa smiled, and, unable to resist digging the knife in a little deeper, added, "I know your nanny taught you some manners."
"Yeah, it's just a shame that you never learned how to be a lady," her brother snarled back, ripping his arm out of her hand. Lyssa let him walk away, as a lady was never something she aspired to be in the first place.
She headed down to the dormitories, found in the very lowest levels of the Academy space station. They always reminded Lyssa of a prison, long rows of barren doors leading to boxed rooms of the same size and shape, holding two DSE candidates. Luckily for Lyssa, students were housed together based on year, and each door held a placard with the names of the occupants. It took her some time to find the right level, but finally she stood in front of the door labeled V. Peate.
She knocked on the door and waited, amused at her own excitement to see him again. He'd really grown on her, it would seem (not that she'd ever admit that to him).
When he didn't answer, she knocked harder and waited, wondering if he was asleep. When he didn't answer a second time, she decided he wasn't in. Never one to be deterred by locked doors, she pulled a universal key out of her pocket and jammed it into the door. As a bounty hunter, she rarely needed to break into anything, but having some pirate skills was useful. The key molded itself into the lock, and she twisted and turned it until it softly clicked open.
The room was empty, as she expected. One side of the room was covered in posters of rock groups and naked women, and the other was devoid of personality. A bunk bed was pushed against the far wall, both beds a mess, but the upper bunk had the familiar Peate-provided bedding that she had been sent to the Academy with; one of the only things she'd been sent with.
She sauntered over to the bunk beds, climbed the metal ladder, and lay down on Vel's hard mattress. He'd tried to make it more palatable with blankets and padding, but it was still hard as a rock. Lyssa had heard once that the Academy provided the most uncomfortable beds to DSE candidates to prepare them for a life of sleeping on the ground on uninhabited planets. After deciding that the ground was softer, she dismissed that notion.
The door began to jiggle and then swung open. Vel walked into the room, hair combed and neat, his Academy uniform immaculate. She hadn't seen him in a few weeks and couldn't believe how much older he looked. He had filled out from the wide-eyed innocent kid that Pymus had shoved on her last year. Now, she noticed how tired he seemed accentuated by the purple bags under his smart silver-framed glasses.
"You look like death," Lyssa announced.
Vel screamed and jumped three feet, his bag falling to the ground.
"God in Leveman's Vortex, Lyss!" he panted, placing his hand to his heart. "You scared me!"
"I’m sorry," she said unapologetically, swinging her legs off the side of the bed.
"What are you doing here?"
"What do you mean ‘what am I doing here?’ I haven't heard from you in ages!" Lyssa slid off the bed. "Why don't you come hang out with me this weekend?"
"Man, Lyss, I'd love to but I…I can't." He looked genuinely sorry.
She tried not to look as hurt as she was. "Why not?"
"I’ve been pulling all-nighters all week," Vel said. "Lots of homework, reading, lab reports. I wanted to catch up on sleep, too—"
"You mean you wanna sleep instead of bounty hunt?" she asked, as if the concept was anathema to her.
"I know you came all the way out here to get me, but…I really…I can't…" He trailed off hopelessly.
"No, it's fine," she said hollowly. "I mean…I had a planet I was selling anyways…just thought maybe…"
She trailed off and tried to look as pitiful as she could. It seemed to work; after a moment, Vel sighed loudly.
"Fine," he acquiesced. "I'm starving. I was going to the cafeteria anyways. Want to join me?"
"Is that all I'm going to get out of you?" Lyssa scowled. "Dinner?"
"Take it or leave it."
***
The cafeteria was as crowded as always, but Lyssa didn’t mind it as much as she used to. She was just happy to be back with Vel, laughing and ribbing him. She'd forgotten how much she enjoyed his company, the way they just bounced off each other's quips, how he kept pace with her train of thought. He, too, seemed to relax as he returned to the young kid she'd dropped off a few weeks ago. She could see how the strain of the term weighed on him, especially as he dug into his food even before they sat down.
"I didn't have time for lunch," he shrugged, inhaling one of two sandwiches in two bites.
"Is the new term that bad?" Lyssa asked. "They won't even let you eat lunch?"
"My term?" he said, confused for a second. "Oh yeah. Yeah it is." Without elaborating further, he took a huge bite out of his hard piece of bread.
"You know, I don’t remember being that busy." Lyssa eyed him curiously. "And I was out with Tauron most of the time."
"Well, that's it, isn't it?" Vel said, a hint of seriousness in his voice. "You didn't want to be here. I do."
"Why?"
"Because my friends are here, my life is here." Vel looked around the cafeteria. "I'm happy here."
"I thought we had a good time together," Lyssa said, her face falling.
"We did!" Vel reached over to take her hand. "But…I'm not going to be a pirate, Lyss. It's not something…I mean, I'm in school to become a Deep Space Explorer…"
She frowned. It wasn't about being a pirate over being a scientist. It was about spending time with her versus not. But before she could tell him that, a highly displeased voice interrupted their conversation.
"I see you're back, Lyssandra."
Her second eldest brother Dorst stood above them, glaring at her with the same look of horrid disappointment and disapproval so common to the Peate family when it came to the family pariah.
"You are such a perceptive supervisor," Lyssa drawled, tossing a smirk to Vel, who did not return it.
"Please don't make me write you up again for insubordination," Dorst breathed, as if asking the Great Creator for more patience. "That will be twice in the past month. You've only been my employee for three weeks."
"Then, stop writing me up," Lyssa smiled, finally looking up at him. "What do you want?"
"Have you received any of my messages?" She snorted and he sighed audibly. "Of course not, because if you had, you would have answered them."
