The Hunt for the Halifax Fox, page 1
THE HUNT FOR THE
HALIFAX FOX
The Hunt for the Halifax Fox
The Drift, Volume 1
Genia Bonyun
Published by Genia Bonyun Creative Arts, 2025.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Title Page
The Hunt for the Halifax Fox (The Drift, #1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
15
acknowledgements
about the author
A Note About Inclusivity
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THE HUNT FOR THE
HALIFAX FOX
BOOK ONE OF THE DRIFT
GENIA BONYUN
Any references to events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people or events is coincidental.
The Hunt for the Halifax Fox, Book One of The Drift, Copyright © 2025 Genia Bonyun. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author with the subject line, “Permissions,” at the address below.
ISBN: 9798990972704 (Paperback)
ISBN: 9798990972711 (EPUB)
Book design and front cover image by Genia Bonyun Creative Arts.
First printing edition 2025.
Genia Bonyun Creative Arts
geniabonyunauthor.com/contact
For my kids
who deserve representation in the stories they read
and for Mags
the first person to call me a writer
* * *
in slumber you hide
no hopes, no dreams, and no pants
you have hit the wall
* * *
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
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.
