Chilling Effect Read online

  Dedication

  To Eric, the other lost soul swimming in this fish bowl

  And

  To Jay, who carries me across the cold, cold river

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Save the Cats

  Chapter 2: Woman in The Fridge

  Chapter 3: Universal Constants

  Chapter 4: De Tal Palo, Tal Astilla

  Chapter 5: Well, Actually

  Chapter 6: Just Ignore It

  Chapter 7: Damages

  Chapter 8: The Race Card

  Chapter 9: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Ship

  Chapter 10: El Orgullo y el Prejuicio

  Chapter 11: Going Down

  Chapter 12: El Que La Hace La Paga

  Chapter 13: Dame Pan y Dime Tonto

  Chapter 14: A Night at the Opera

  Chapter 15: The Mad Scene

  Chapter 16: No Hay Peor Cuña que La del Mismo Palo

  Chapter 17: Wake Up and Smell the Colada

  Chapter 18: The Empire Strikes Forth

  Chapter 19: Return of the Jodienda

  Chapter 20: Me Sube la Bilirrubina

  Chapter 21: It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

  Chapter 22: Take This

  Chapter 23: Save Point

  Chapter 24: Tumba la Casa

  Chapter 25: Traeme la Bulla

  Chapter 26: Calabaza, Calabaza, Cada Uno pa Su Casa

  Acknowledgments

  An Announcement for Prime Deceptions Chapter 1: Kick the Puppies

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Save the Cats

  Captain Eva Innocente crept down the central corridor of La Sirena Negra, straining to hear the soft rumble of her quarry over the whine of the FTL drive and the creak of space-cold metal.

  ((Getting warmer,)) Min pinged over her commlink.

  Min would know, since the ship was essentially her second body when she was connected to the piloting interface. But the critter Eva was tracking wouldn’t stop moving. It had gone from the cargo bay down below, up through the mess, and was now somewhere between the crew quarters and the head. If it got to the bridge—

  ((Warmer.))

  A hiss of steam sprayed Eva’s hair. Startled, she nearly dropped the vented box she carried onto her foot, juggling it awkwardly before settling it against her hip. She resumed her barefoot tiptoeing with a scowl. Vakar would have to fix that leak later, once the more immediate problem was taken care of.

  ((Red hot!))

  Eva crouched, held her breath, and listened. At last, in a gap between two panels, she heard it.

  A lone kitten, purring.

  Eva reached in, grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, and dropped it into the box.

  ((Got it,)) she pinged back at Min. Eighteen down, two to go. Her arms were covered in scratches and her black hair was a mass of tangles from being woken up in a hurry, but on the plus side, she’d gotten pretty good at catching the little mojones.

  On the minus side, they were only a few hours from their drop point on Letis, and she wouldn’t get paid unless she delivered the full cargo.

  The kitten mewled, and Eva lifted the box to glare at it. “Don’t start with me,” she said. “This is the third time you’ve escaped and I’m ready to throw you all out the airlock.”

  Green eyes stared her down, the slitted pupils dilating to black discs.

  “And stop trying to hypnotize me,” Eva muttered. “It’s rude.” Fucking psychic cats.

  The cat yowled in reply.

  Eva carried the box down to the cargo hold. The tall ceiling allowed for multiple stacked containers, with catwalks near the top that had earned their name repeatedly over the past cycle. Metal plates were bolted onto the ship’s frame, some hinged to allow access to the guts underneath, with no exposed pipes or wires to break the monotony. A blocky passenger cabin sat in the corner, for the occasions when someone hired them for transportation instead of delivery. Mostly it transported broken parts Eva hadn’t bothered to sell or scrap.

  Leroy stood in the middle of the room, sweat beading on his upper lip, his curly red hair sticking up at odd angles like it had been licked into place. Since she’d found him on the floor covered in cats earlier, that was to be expected.

  Eva was almost a half meter shorter than him, and each of his pale, tattooed arms was thick as a steel beam, but he stiffened into the straight-backed pose of a soldier about to get chewed out as she came closer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I heard you the last ten times. Relax.”

  His shoulders hunched. “I thought maybe, just one, for a minute—”

  “I know, Leroy. They’re hypnotic.” And you’re prone to suggestion, she added silently. One of many unfortunate side effects of his years as a meat-puppet soldier, being thrown into whatever corporate war needed warm bodies instead of tactical nukes, controlled remotely by people with an eye in the sky and no skin in the game. Other side effects being anxiety, nightmares, and the kind of sudden, extremely violent outbursts that turned an asset into a liability.

  Eva knew how those nightmares felt. She was also good at turning liabilities into assets, and Leroy was no exception. He’d been responsible for managing supply chains and tracking inventory when he was deployed, so handling smaller, less-frequent cargo logistics came easily to him.

  She dropped the cat into the spacious, climate-controlled shipping container from whence it had escaped. It had food, water, self-cleaning litter boxes, toys, tiny hammocks, raised platforms on which to run or recline—anything a cat could want, or so the person who designed it had thought.

  Apparently, what a cat really wanted was freedom.

  Eighteen balls of fur sat, or splayed out, or licked their butts, most of them studiously ignoring Eva and Leroy. A few glanced up and blinked languidly, as if they had not been slinking around the ship getting into trouble only minutes earlier.

  This was what she got for taking on live cargo. If she weren’t doing this for her former captain Tito, and if he weren’t paying better than their last four jobs combined . . . That smiling comemierda hadn’t told her the critters were genetically engineered mind-controlling geniuses. It was exactly the kind of casual not-quite-lie that had made her quit his crew seven years earlier, over her father’s objections. Given that her father preferred whole-ass lies, and given that he was Tito’s boss back then, his opinion had mattered as much as a fart in a hurricane.

  Fuck ’em both, she thought, not for the first time.

  “Found another one trying to get into a supply cabinet in my med bay.” Pink sauntered in holding a kitten to her chest, rubbing its face absently with one dark finger. Her dreads were tucked under a sleep cap, and her eye patch was flipped down to cover her cybernetic eye, while her organic one took in Eva’s scruffy condition with a raised brow. “You’re looking splendid,” she said.

  Eva examined her welt-striped arms. “I look like I wrestled a needle-bear.”

  “Are those real?” Leroy asked.

  “No,” Pink said.

  “Says the lady who hasn’t wrestled one,” Eva retorted.

  Pink rolled her eyes. “I’ll clean you up and synthesize you some allergy medicine when I’m done making my hormones. How many cats left?”

  “Just one.” Leroy paused for dramatic effect. “The leader.”

  “Cats don’t have leaders, honey,” Pink said.

  “Tell that to . . . the leader.”

  Pink may have been right, but Eva knew who Leroy meant. The one who kept busting everyone out was the smallest cat, a calico with mottled brown and black fur with patches of orange, and
hazel eyes that looked like they had seen some shit. They probably had. She didn’t know what it took to make the kittens more intelligent, but she doubted it was nice.

  “Viva la revolución,” Eva said. “But not on my ship. Min, can you pinpoint its location?”

  No response.

  “Min? Can you hear me?” The silence grabbed her stomach and slid it up to her throat.

  ((Bridge, help,)) her commlink pinged, the limitations of the mind-to-mind communication feature more frustrating than usual at the moment. It was Vakar, who for some reason made the cats nervous. Maybe it was the quennian’s pangolin-like skin, or his twitchy face-palp things, or the fact that his smell changed to match his mood. These particular psychic cats probably weren’t designed to work with nonhuman people.

  “Me cago en la hora que yo nací,” she muttered. If the cat had gotten into the bridge, there might be more trouble than lost wages. “Leroy, stay here. Pink, with me.”

  Pink shook her head. “I’m not leaving Leroy alone with these babies when we’re so close to docking.” She punctuated this by placing her kitten in the container and closing the lid firmly, then standing next to Leroy, hand on hip.

  “Fine. I’m sure Vakar and I can handle one damn cat.” Eva stalked out of the cargo bay, back up past the mess and crew quarters and head, past her cabin and the med bay, all the way up to the short hallway that led to the bridge. Min’s neural implants—originally meant for controlling repair mechs on her family’s solar farm, later used for the bot fights that had earned Min her reputation—let her control and monitor La Sirena Negra from anywhere on the ship, but the pilot still preferred to be near the physical controls. Eva had told Min to ping her if a cat made it inside, and she had assumed the comm silence meant good news.

  She should have known better.

  Vakar waited outside the door, smelling like tar. Nervous, Eva’s scent translators supplied. He had taken off the gloves he normally wore and was trying to dig his four-fingered claws underneath the handle of the emergency door release.

  “You know your hands are too big,” Eva whispered. “What’s the situation?”

  “I tried to reason with the cat,” he whispered back. “It ran in and the door locked. I managed to bypass the security protocol, but the manual override engaged. I must say, for creatures without prehensile extremities, these cats are remarkably—”

  “Later.” She gripped the handle and tugged it out, then twisted it clockwise to disengage the dead bolts. Each unlocking pin made a loud grinding sound as it moved.

  “When was the last time you lubricated this?” Eva snapped.

  “I would have to check my maintenance logs, but I have been rationing lubricant and this was lower priority than other items.”

  Eva suppressed a joke. Vakar was always so sensible, and it wasn’t his fault she’d been denying his requisitions.

  “On three, you open the door and I bust in,” she whispered. “Ready?”

  He shrugged assent.

  She moved aside and drew her pistol, loaded with tranq rounds for the occasion. Hopefully she wouldn’t need them. Hopefully they weren’t strong enough to kill a cat. Hopefully she wouldn’t miss and hit something that would blow up the ship.

  Hope in one hand and shit in the other, and see which gets full first, she thought. She leaned against the bulkhead next to the door and pinged the countdown silently at Vakar.

  On three, he slid the door open and she leaped in, scanning the room with her pistol leading.

  Min lay in the pilot’s chair, black eyes open, short dyed-blue hair in disarray. Because she was connected to the ship’s systems wirelessly, she didn’t have to look at the instrument panel in front of her, so her chair was reclined as far back as the small bridge allowed. Where some ships had holographic controls, La Sirena Negra was all old-fashioned buttons and switches and blinking lights—less fancy, but cheaper to maintain and not as prone to sudden catastrophic failure. Above that, the display connected to the fore hull cameras was turned on, projecting an image of the dizzying streak of stars passing them as they flew through the red-tinged blackness of space.

  Sitting on the instrument panel, pawing at the manual control override, was the calico cat.

  It hissed at Eva, hazel eyes flashing. She felt a sudden vertigo, as if the artificial gravity had shifted. Shaking her head to clear it, she leveled her gun at the critter.

  “Get down from there, you cabrón revolutionary,” she said, “before you break something.”

  “The little cuddly-poof accidentally blocked my commlink access, Cap.” Min spoke through the speakers in the bridge instead of her human mouth, as usual.

  Eva snorted. “Accident, sure. You okay?”

  “Yeah, comm’s almost back up.”

  “But are you okay?”

  “A few bites and scratches in random spots. Nothing Vakar can’t fix.”

  “I meant your— Never mind.” Eva was going to say “real body,” but after four years the ship was as much Min’s body as the one she’d been born with.

  The cat crouched, its butt shaking in the air. Then, in a fluid motion, it jumped onto another part of the panel.

  “Idiot,” Eva hissed. “Get away from there. You’ll jettison everything in the cargo hold.”

  It raised a paw threateningly.

  “You’re seriously going to kill all your little cat buddies? Flush them right out into space?”

  It hesitated and cocked its head at her.

  “Cap,” Min said, “you’re talking to a cat.”

  “I believe it can understand us quite well, Min,” Vakar said, peering around the edge of the door.

  “Right, okay.” Eva hunkered down and stared at the cat, face-to-face. “Listen, kitty. I’m taking you to a nice new home somewhere. A café where millions of tourists will come every year to pet you and feed you canned meat. I don’t even get to eat canned meat.”

  The cat’s tail lashed back and forth.

  “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe that’s not your idea of a good time.” Eva ran a hand through her tangled black hair. “What do you want me to do? Someone is paying me to take you to another planet, and if I don’t deliver, I don’t get paid. And if I don’t get paid, I lose my ship, so pretty please with sugar on top, get in your cabrón crate already, coño!”

  The bridge was silent for a moment.

  “That did not sound like a compelling argument,” Vakar said.

  Eva made a disgusted noise and threw her hands in the air. As if in response, the cat leaped onto Min’s human lap, where it settled down and began to lick its paw.

  “Okay, what the hell,” Eva said.

  “Ooh, I think it likes me,” Min said. She scratched the cat’s ears with a pale hand.

  “Too bad. Twenty kittens, cash on delivery. We don’t get paid for nineteen.”

  The cat yawned, showing tiny sharp teeth and a throat pink as a guayaba.

  “It is arguably cute,” Vakar said.

  “It broke out of its cage, locked itself in the bridge, and tried to take over the nav systems!”

  “Cap, come on. How would it know how to use the nav systems?” Min scratched the cat’s chin and made soft cooing noises at it with her human mouth.

  “Psychically,” Eva said. “Mira, cute or not, I want these sinvergüenzas off my ship as soon as we dock. If that cat isn’t in its box in the next—” She glanced at Min. “How far out are we from Letis?”

  “We’ll hit the nearest Gate in about an hour, then two hours to orbit, plus docking time and customs.”

  “Madre de dios. I was supposed to call Tito to find out who we’re meeting and where.” Eva cast one last snarling look at the kitten, which had the gall to wink at her. “I’ll be back for you, cat, so don’t get comfortable. Vakar, keep an eye on them.”

  She stalked past Vakar, back straight, fighting the urge to scratch her welted arms until they bled. Could one thing go right for her this cycle?

  “You’re shitting me.”
>
  Eva sat in the mess room, clenched fists resting on the big oval table in the center. The smirking face of Tito Santiago, patron saint of smug assholes, floated in front of her. His dark, wavy hair was precisely tousled and his brown eyes twinkled with barely suppressed amusement.

  “Shit happens, Beni,” he said, his holo image crackling slightly. “It’s not my fault the buyer went bankrupt.”

  “Cómetelo. Now I know why you convinced me not to take the usual half up front.”

  “I’ll owe you a favor.”

  “My ship runs on fuel, not favors.”

  His smile didn’t change, but his eyes narrowed. He was getting annoyed. Back when he was her boss, it had worried her; now it just pissed her off more.

  “No es pa tanto,” he said. “You can sell the cargo on the black market for triple what the buyer was going to pay.”

  She ran her finger along a scratch in the table’s metal surface. “You know that’s not my game anymore. Not to mention the damn things are a righteous pain in the ass.”

  “You wouldn’t know anything about that, I’m sure.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Decídete, mi cielo, I haven’t got all cycle.”

  Mierda. It wasn’t like she could return the cats as defective, either; the sellers would credit the original buyer. And probably reprogram them, whatever that entailed. Animal protection laws got flexible in certain sectors.

  Eva thought of that stupid little ball of fluff curled up on Min’s lap and sighed.

  “A big favor,” she said finally. “An expensive favor.”

  “Claro que sí, mi vida. You know I’ll take care of you.”

  “You take care of your boyfriend. Me, you just fuck.”

  He glanced at someone over his shoulder. “Bueno, speaking of boyfriends, te dejo. I’ll let you know if any more jobs come in that will fit your . . . particular preferences. Adiós.” The holovid flickered off.

  “Particular preferences.” Only Tito could make her desire to avoid illegal or unethical work sound perverted. Hell, he’d probably given them the job in the first place because legality shit all over his bottom line.

  Why was it so hard to make a living without killing strangers or screwing people over? Seven years of cargo delivery and passenger transport, of building up a reputation from nothing, and what did she have to show for it? A few regular clients, a handful of shell companies under various aliases, and a message box full of unpaid bills.