Alien: Perfect Organisms E-Book

Shaun Hamill

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Some years after the events of Aliens and Alien 3— an artist obsessed with the disturbing visceral potential of the xenomorphs is pursued to an abandoned colony. Written by the much-celebrated Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters and The Dissonance. Desperate, depressed and nearly destitute, Cynthia Goodwin goes against her better judgement to keep her ship the Chariot and its crew in work: she agrees to meet with the reclusive billionaire Roman Fade. Fade's request is unorthodox: go to the abandoned colony of New Providence and bring back his former lover, the renowned artist Corinth Bloch. The job is rife with uncertainty. No one knows what happened on New Providence or why it is under quarantine. And Bloch may be brilliant, but he is also deranged. As Cynthia follows his path to the colony, she learns of a mind obsessed with images of dark and horrifying creatures… Of an almost religious fervour for the ultimate subject for his art… Of the drive to capture the sublime terror of the perfect organism…

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1Fratto

2Chariot

3Knapik Station

4The Bowers

5An Offer

6Debate

7Departure

8Arrival

9Stranded

10DSJ-1020

11The First Day

12The Little Stranger

13Complications

14New Providence

15Corinth Bloch

16Awakening

17The Nest

18Gnosis

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PERFECTORGANISMS

THE COMPLETE ALIEN™ LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Official Movie Novelizations

by Alan Dean Foster

Alien, Aliens™, Alien 3, Alien: Covenant,Alien: Covenant Origins

Alien: Resurrectionby A.C. Crispin

Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplayby William Gibson & Pat Cadigan

Alien

Out of the Shadowsby Tim Lebbon

Sea of Sorrowsby James A. Moore

River of Painby Christopher Golden

The Cold Forgeby Alex White

Isolationby Keith R.A. DeCandido

Prototypeby Tim Waggoner

Into Charybdisby Alex White

Colony Warby David Barnett

Inferno’s Fallby Philippa Ballantine

Enemy of My Enemyby Mary SanGiovanni

Uncivil Warby Brendan Deneen

Seventh Circleby Philippa Ballantine and Clara Carija

Perfect Organismsby Shaun Hamill

Cultby Gavin G. Smith

The Complete Alien Collection

The Shadow Archive

Symphony of Death

The Rage War

by Tim Lebbon

Predator™: Incursion, Alien: Invasion

Alien vs. Predator™: Armageddon

Aliens

Bug Huntedited by Jonathan Maberry

Phalanxby Scott Sigler

Infiltratorby Weston Ochse

Vasquezby V. Castro

Bishopby T. R. Napper

The Complete Aliens Collection

Living Nightmares

The Complete Aliens Omnibus

Volumes 1–7

Predator

If It Bleedsedited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

The Predatorby Christopher Golden & Mark Morris

The Predator: Hunters and Huntedby James A. Moore

Stalking Shadowsby James A. Moore & Mark Morris

Eyes of the Demonedited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

The Complete Predator Omnibusby Nathan Archer & Sandy Scofield

Non-Fiction

AVP: Alien vs. Predatorby Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.

Aliens vs. Predator Requiem: Inside The Monster Shopby Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.

Alien: The Illustrated Storyby Archie Goodwin & Walter Simonson

The Art of Alien: Isolationby Andy McVittie

Alien: The Archive Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Reportby S.D. Perry

Aliens: The Set Photographyby Simon Ward

Alien: The Coloring Book The Art and Making of Alien: Covenantby Simon Ward

Alien Covenant: David’s Drawingsby Dane Hallett & Matt Hatton

The Predator: The Art and Making of the Filmby James Nolan

The Making of Alienby J.W. Rinzler

Alien: The Blueprintsby Graham Langridge

Alien: 40 Years 40 Artists Alien: The Official Cookbookby Chris-Rachael Oseland

Aliens: Artbookby Printed In Blood

Aliens vs. Predators

Ultimate Preyedited by Jonathan Maberry & Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Rift Warby Weston Ochse & Yvonne Navarro

The Complete Aliens vs. Predator Omnibusby Steve Perry & S.D. Perry

PERFECTORGANISMS

A NOVEL BY SHAUN HAMILL

TITAN BOOKS

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ALIEN™: PERFECT ORGANISMS

Print edition ISBN: 9781803360973

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803361895

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2025

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

TM & © 2025 20th Century Studios

Shaun Hamill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

Dedicated, with love,to The Jeckylloafs Fun Club: Chris, Brian, Rodie,Darrel, Jessica, Andy, Cleveland, Sam, and Kurt

Our regular barkeeps at Dr. Jeckyll’s Beer Lab:Nathan, Natalie, and John

You all make Wednesday the best night of the week.

“No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.”

DAVID, ALIEN: COVENANT

1

FRATTO

Another night meant another graveyard shift aboard the USS Fratto, watching the sensors on the mostly empty bridge, and that was fine with Corporal Jared Briscoe. Ever since boyhood, he’d preferred the late hours, and the quiet that came with them. During the day, you had officers and enlisted personnel filling the corridors with their chatter and nervous energy. At night, though, you could hear the ship’s systems humming along. You could hear yourself think.

Unless you got a hard ass on the con, which Briscoe’s CO, Lieutenant Diaz, definitely was not. At night nobody cared if you slouched at your station or stared into the middle distance for a while. Nobody noticed if you chewed your nails while you pondered the infinite.

Of course, ‘night’ and ‘day’ were relative terms in the vacuum of space. For Briscoe, this was part of the appeal, why he’d enlisted with the Colonial Marines. Sure, the military kept time, put on a façade of circadian rhythms—breakfast at this hour, dinner at this hour, day shift, night shift—but unless you were planetside, it was all pretend. All you had to do was look out any of the Fratto’s viewports and you’d find yourself face-to-face with endless night as far as you could see.

Fresh from the commissary with the night’s second cup of coffee, Briscoe now re-settled into his station on the bridge, steaming mug in hand. He raised it to his lips and blew on its contents, sending tendrils of steam wafting through the air before him. He gave his monitors a cursory glance, saw nothing of note, then looked up, out the main viewport, at the spill of stars ahead, and, to his left, the planet hogging most of the view.

The planet appeared mostly gray from space. According to the data packets Briscoe had reviewed before deployment, there were large bodies of water down there, and mountains, and even verdant forests, but the view was usually obscured by frequent thunderstorms that raged across the surface.

This world was the Fratto’s assignment. Its alphanumeric designation was DSJ-1020, but most of the enlisted personnel (and a few officers, when they thought their superiors weren’t listening) colloquially referred to it by the name of its one colony: ‘New Providence.’

Briscoe pondered the mottled gray planet. He (and the Fratto) had been stationed here for six months, but he still wasn’t sure why. The orders from above had been vague: Fratto was to orbit DSJ-1020 and prevent any other vessels from landing on or departing from the world. That was it. No explanations or reasoning had been offered, other than that the world was “under quarantine.” Quarantine for what? Nobody seemed to know.

In the time since the Fratto’s arrival, not a single ship had appeared on the sensors, and there’d been no transmissions from below. Briscoe wasn’t stupid. He knew something must have happened down there. Something that caused the colony to go radio silent. But when, in his off-time, he’d searched newsfeeds for keywords “DSJ-1020” and “New Providence,” he’d found nothing. Nothing about a crisis, or an SOS, or an evacuation. Not even puff pieces about the founding of the colony.

That in itself didn’t necessarily mean anything. After all, Briscoe had used the ship’s systems to access the feeds; it would’ve been a simple matter for command to have blocked certain articles, or sites. For all he knew, there was a wealth of info out there on New Providence. He doubted it, though. After all, if New Providence were a mystery that the news orgs had presented for public consumption, there would’ve been visitors. Reporters looking to make their name, or looky-loos with nothing better to do. The Fratto would’ve been turning them away around the clock. No, whatever had happened down on New Providence, it had been kept quiet.

Command discouraged the crew from discussing the assignment, and reiterated this wish at least once every four weeks. At the last bridge crew meeting, Lieutenant Diaz had said, Remember, you already know everything you need to know to do your job. If more information becomes necessary, I’ll tell you. Until then, keep your head down and stay out of trouble.

This hadn’t stopped the enlisted grunts from running their mouths, of course. Even working the graveyard shift, Briscoe had heard a few rumors. The prevalent theories seemed to be a reactor meltdown, or some form of plague. Briscoe could understand and almost believe the former; a reactor failure would have wiped out all life on the colony in milliseconds. But then why send Fratto to guard the planet? That didn’t make sense. The United Americas could just post a ‘do not travel’ warning for the planet and leave it at that. Was Weyland-Yutani that paranoid about people finding out the reactor had failed? Were they worried about bad public relations?

Still, the reactor made more sense to Briscoe than a plague. A contagious virus would have caused a panic on New Providence. There would be radio signals from the surface, begging for help. People would have tried to leave, to save themselves. The Fratto would’ve been tasked with shooting escaping ships out of the sky to prevent sickness from spreading across the galaxy. But the last six months, DSJ-1020 had been quiet as a tomb.

Maybe someone did that part before you got here, reasoned a little voice in the back of Briscoe’s head.

Before he was able to pursue this particular line of thought, a chirping noise sounded from his station. He was so startled that he nearly dropped his coffee. It was a sound he hadn’t heard once in the last six months: the Fratto’s sensors had just picked up another ship in the area.

Briscoe was so taken aback by this unexpected arrival that it took him a moment to remember the protocol. He hadn’t been called upon to do more than drink coffee and stare into space for half a year. He set down his coffee now, glanced at the monitors, and frowned. The sensors were picking up the presence of another ship, but no additional data. That meant the new arrival was traveling with its transponder switched off, which could mean trouble.

Briscoe put on his headset and opened a comm channel.

“Unidentified craft,” he said, “this is the USS Fratto. You have entered restricted space. Please identify yourself at once.”

He sat and listened to the crackle of the open channel, waiting for the other ship to respond. The sensors reported the craft growing closer, but no one answered the hail.

Briscoe swallowed hard and sat forward in his seat. “Unidentified craft, this is the USS Fratto. Failure to identify yourself will result in an assumption of hostile intentions. We are authorized to use lethal force. Do you understand?”

Another long moment of crackling silence passed on the channel. Briscoe swallowed hard, worried. But he had been trained for this. He turned to his left, to the monitor hooked up to the ship’s automatic targeting system. During the day shift, the weapons would have had their own operator, but during graveyard shift, Briscoe was basically a one-man crew. He started to type in a command to arm the targeting system when a chirp sounded to his right. He glanced back at the main monitor. The other craft had apparently activated its transponder.

Briscoe skimmed the info as it was received, and almost snorted with relief. It was a small ship, called Gnosis. It had no onboard weapons systems, no FTL drive, and was only capable of 13 parsecs of travel with a full fuel tank. Shit, this thing was probably older than his grandfather. Not exactly a threat, but still—what the hell was it doing out here?

A voice broke the static of the comm channel. Despite the radio distortion, it was calm and clear, and sounded to Briscoe like a man. “I’d like to speak to Lieutenant Diaz.”

Diaz wasn’t on the bridge at the moment. She was still on meal break. But how did this stranger have her name? With each passing moment, this encounter grew more confusing.

“Gnosis, you can either change course now or we will open fire. This is your last warning.”

“Lieutenant Diaz. Please.” The voice sounded perfectly calm, and at its ease.

Briscoe turned back to the weapons system. He started to type, but his fingers were shaking. He stopped and took a breath. He wasn’t like some of the people he served with. People who’d joined up because they wanted a chance to hurt, to kill, and get paid for it. Briscoe didn’t relish the thought of killing anyone. But that little voice in the back of his head—the one he tried to listen to, when it spoke—was shouting at him that something was definitely wrong here. He needed to act, or something bad would happen.

He put his fingers back on the keys, calmer now, ready to activate the targeting system. A hand landed on his shoulder, startling him for the second time in as many minutes. He jumped in his chair, stifled a shout, and turned to see Lieutenant Diaz.

The lieutenant was usually pretty cool and collected, but looked almost comical now, her cheeks distended with a mouthful of food she was still chewing, her shoulders rising and falling as she took deep breaths. She looked like she’d run here.

She put a hand in front of her mouth as she spoke. “I’ve got this, Corporal.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Briscoe said, confused. “But—”

She snapped her fingers and jerked a thumb over one shoulder in the universal get up out of that chair gesture. Briscoe took off his headset and stood. The short woman sat down at his station and pulled on the headset.

“Gnosis,” she said. “This is Lieutenant Diaz, of the USS Fratto. You are cleared to proceed.”

She sat at Briscoe’s station for another few seconds, then took off the headset and stood up again.

“Ma’am?” Briscoe said, completely confused.

She seemed to consider her next words for a moment before she spoke. Or maybe she was just finishing chewing the rest of her mouthful of food.

“You want to forget everything you saw and heard in the last few minutes, Corporal,” she said at last.

“I don’t understand,” Briscoe said.

“Keep it that way,” Diaz said. She shook his shoulder lightly. “It’s above your pay grade. There are a few things I do need you to understand, though: if you try to tell anyone about what just happened, I’ll deny it. If you try to tell anyone about this conversation, I’ll deny that, too. By the time the next shift comes on, there will no longer be any record in the ship’s logs of what’s just transpired. Do you understand?”

Briscoe didn’t—not entirely. But he understood what she was ordering him to do, at least, so he nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Diaz studied him a moment, leaving her hand on his shoulder, as though trying to assess whether or not he was telling her the truth. Eventually, she must have decided that he was, because she nodded and let him go.

“Carry on, Corporal,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Briscoe said.

Diaz turned and left the bridge again, likely to return to her aborted meal in the commissary. Briscoe watched her until she was out of sight, then took his seat at his station again. He lifted his headset to put it back on, but paused when he realized his hands were still shaking.

He set the headset down and looked out the viewport again, in time to see the Gnosis pass by, a tiny arrowhead shape against the gray of the planet below.

The sight filled him with discomfort. It wasn’t just that he’d watched a superior officer break protocol. It wasn’t just that said officer had also involved him in her misconduct, and threatened him. No. He wasn’t thrilled about those things, but they weren’t what was really bothering him.

It was that little voice in the back of his head. He could hear it again, but this time, it wasn’t saying anything specific. Right now, it was screaming.

2

CHARIOT

Cynthia Goodwin woke with a sharp intake of breath, only vaguely aware of the lurch in her stomach. She squinted against the bright lights. There was a figure standing over her. Somehow, something had followed her out of her bad dreams and into the real world.

Still more asleep than awake, she scrambled backward, kicking with weak legs and pulling with enervated arms—and bumped the top of her head against something hard. Her arms went to her sides, and they also bumped against hard barriers. She was in a narrow space. A coffin with an open lid.

“Easy,” the figure above her said. His voice was soft and soothing. “Easy, Captain.”

Something about the impact to her head and the tone of the voice brought her most of the way awake, and reality reasserted itself. She wasn’t in a coffin. She was in her cryo pod aboard her ship, the Chariot. The figure standing over her was the ship’s artificial person, Compton.

He was unusual looking, for an android. Whereas most were designed to look young and clean-cut, Compton had been designed to appear as if he was in his early forties. He was bald, with a thick blonde beard, and looked more like a Viking than a caretaker. His unusual appearance had been a bold experiment by Weyland-Yutani, and not a particularly successful one. He’d been one of the less-popular models on the market, and Goodwin had been able to purchase him at a steep discount. It was the only reason she’d been able to afford him.

The Chariot’s crew—particularly Goodwin’s pilot, Sam Kurzel—hadn’t been thrilled when Goodwin had first brought Compton aboard, but his gentle manner and easy smile had quickly won them over, and now it was difficult for Goodwin to imagine life without him.

Compton offered her a hand now, which she accepted. He pulled her up to a sitting position and offered her a glass of water.

“Another nightmare?” he said.

She nodded before chugging the water. It helped settle her stomach.

“What was it this time?” Compton asked.

Goodwin turned to see her pilot, Sam Kurzel, sitting up in the pod to her left. Now, here was someone good-looking enough to be a typical android. He was clean-shaven, with a strong jaw and bright blue eyes beneath an unruly mop of brown hair. He blinked a few times, and rubbed his eyes with balled fists, like a little kid. Goodwin’s heart broke a little at the mix of rugged definition and boyishness. It was almost more than she could take.

“I don’t remember,” she said to him. “I never do.”

*   *   *

Compton gave Goodwin a robe, which she wore to the showers, along with the rest of the crew. Under the spray of hot water, she came the rest of the way awake, and as usual, she felt a little guilty for lying to Compton.

In her thirty years, Goodwin had met plenty of people who claimed not to remember their dreams. Part of her envied these people. Another part flatly disbelieved them.

Goodwin always remembered her dreams. They made indelible marks on her, as vivid and lasting as anything that had ever happened to her in her waking life. The problem wasn’t remembering them; the problem was describing them. There was never a story. No characters. Goodwin couldn’t describe herself as being ‘there’ in these dreams, except maybe as a disembodied consciousness, a helpless observer. But what she observed was hard to put into words, less a series of events than a collection of images and sensations: roiling, slimy textures, interspersed with vast, dark voids; inexplicable flesh-like substances stretched and distorted; sharp, stabbing pains; hard, black carapaces that reflected harsh lights; all coupled with a sense of complete hopelessness and dread.

None of it made any sense. The few times Goodwin had tried to explain it to doctors and therapists, she’d felt confounded and stupid. She’d been at a loss to make them understand why the dreams felt so terrible. The doctors always offered the same response: serious head nods, murmurs of sympathy, and prescriptions for sleeping pills.

Goodwin had tried the medication. She’d tried several varieties of pill, at several varying doses. None of it had helped. The dreams persisted, and the medication left her feeling hungover during her waking hours. And anyway, what good was a sleeping pill when you were in technologically-enforced hyper-sleep? So she’d ditched them, and tried to make peace with her nightmares.

She basked in the shower spray now. She could’ve contentedly stayed in that warm, steamy stall for an hour, but the hot water only lasted a few minutes, since the whole crew was showering at once. Like almost everything on the Chariot, the hot water heater was old. It was something Goodwin meant to replace someday, if she ever managed to whittle down the list of more important fixes the ship needed. So she hurried through the ritual of scrubbing her body and hair clean, then shuffled up to the bridge, to check the nav systems and make sure that they were on course.

If the Chariot had had an onboard AI, a MUTH/UR or Apollo, she would’ve had the info as soon as she’d woken up. As it was, this verification was technically Sam’s responsibility, but Goodwin wouldn’t be able to fully relax until she’d verified the ship’s location for herself. Too many things could go wrong out here in space. Better to know before breakfast if you were fucked or not.

The nav systems showed that the ship was on course, about an hour out from Knapik Station.

Satisfied, she doubled back to the ship’s mess, as Sam and the rest of the crew came trickling in. Sam took a seat to Goodwin’s right, while the cargo handlers, Danielle Cardona and Loewen White, sat to her right. Harris, the ship’s tech, entered last and sat opposite Goodwin. Everyone was quiet at first, looking as beat-up as Goodwin felt, but as Compton served them a breakfast of stale-tasting coffee and dry cereal with milk, they revived enough to start the customary complaints.

“Doesn’t matter how I feel when we go into the freezers,” Harris grumbled into his coffee. “Whether I’m tired or wide awake when I lay down. Doesn’t matter how long we’re frozen. Could be a week, could be a month. I always wake up feeling like I went on a bender the night before.”

Cardona nodded her sympathy, but Sam just smiled into his mug. It seemed too soon after defrosting for smiles, but that was Sam. Nothing ever kept him down for long.

“Sounds like you need a different career, Harris,” Sam said. “Something that doesn’t require so much cryo.”

Harris grunted, a sound that might charitably have been interpreted as a laugh. “If I were good at anything other than keeping this rust bucket in the sky, I might consider it. But seriously—you’d think that, after all these years of FTL travel, they’d have found a way to make cryo more palatable.”

“Believe me,” White said. “They have. You think corporate execs at Seegson and Weyland-Yutani are waking up feeling like this when they travel? I guarantee you they’ve figured out first-class cryo. The tech just hasn’t filtered down to us poor people yet.”

“Maybe if we gave the pods a tune-up?” Cardona suggested. The youngest member of the crew, only nineteen years old, she always spoke quietly, as though afraid to jar anyone’s nerves. She was good at her job, but timid to a fault.

“I’m a starship technician, not a miracle worker,” Harris said. “We’d need a new set of pods altogether.” The remark was met with small chuckles and wan smiles, but no one would meet Goodwin’s eye to see if she shared their amusement. This was the common complaint: the Chariot was old. She’d been old when Goodwin’s mother had bought her twenty years ago, and the old girl was showing her age. Two years ago, Harris had started keeping a list of upgrades and repairs the ship needed, but no matter how much money Goodwin poured into the project, the list never seemed to get shorter. Every time they fixed one thing, something else broke.

Sam picked that moment to flee the tension, getting up to check the nav systems on the bridge. He returned a moment later to confirm what Goodwin already knew: they were on course, approaching Knapik Station. The Chariot had been contracted to deliver a shipment of food—six months of rations for the crew and civilians onboard. Once the Chariot had unloaded its cargo, the crew was supposed to get three days of leave before they departed for their next job.

“Three days off,” Harris said now. “I hardly know what to do with myself.”

“Is there anything to do on-station?” Cardona asked.

“There’s a bar,” White said. “Or there was, last time I was out this way.”

“It’ll still be there,” Harris said. “I’ve yet to see a bar go out of business on the frontier.”

“Is that it?” Cardona said. “No other entertainment? No arcades or theaters?”

“No brothels?” Harris said.

Cardona winced. She was a bit prudish, in addition to being timid.

“Let’s keep the conversation breakfast-table appropriate,” Goodwin said. She always felt a need to protect Cardona. She’d been with the crew for about six months now, and Goodwin couldn’t help thinking of her as a little sister.

Harris set down his mug and help up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “No offense intended,” he said to Cardona.

Cardona nodded at the table, acknowledging the semi-apology without making eye contact.

Goodwin considered pushing the matter further, but let it lie. She was tired. Harris was tired. Everyone was tired—and worse, they were tired of one another. A few days’ rest—seeing some new faces on-station—would do them all some good.

*   *   *

After breakfast, the crew finished getting dressed and presentable, then split. Harris retreated to the engine room, grumbling about a shaky rear stabilizer, while Goodwin and Sam headed for the bridge, joined by White and Cardona, who had nothing to do until landing.

As Goodwin and the others entered the bridge and she took her seat, Knapik Station had already come into view out the main viewport.

Knapik Station hadn’t originally been designed as a space station. It had started life as a Cygnus ore refinery—four individual towers in a square formation, rising above a main platform structure—before being repurposed fifteen years previous, to serve as the administrative hub for the Knapik Belt, a series of frontier mining planets. It floated in orbit around the world closest to the solar system’s sun, CS-1225, but provided food and other supplies to all five worlds in the belt, as well as arranging transport for the worlds’ harvested ore.

The food in Goodwin’s cargo hold wasn’t fancy. There was no steak, or wine, or even purified water. No, it was all bug juice and W Y rations. Nothing you’d rush to the dinner table to consume, but stuff that would keep you alive from one day to the next. It was low-margin cargo, which meant a meager payday for Goodwin and her crew.

Normally, Goodwin wouldn’t have taken the assignment, but she had done so for a couple of reasons. First (and most painful to admit), the Chariot’s towing clamps had been damaged during the ship’s last major haul, and Goodwin couldn’t afford to get them fixed yet, so the types of jobs she could take on right now were limited.

The second reason was far more pleasant to contemplate: this job might lead to better work. Maybe even a contract hauling ore for the Knapik Belt. Most ore hauling jobs went to corporation ships, but Goodwin had reason to hope. She’d heard through the grapevine that admin on-station were unhappy with Weyland-Yutani’s hauling services of late, and might be open to trying out an independent contractor. Goodwin had a contact in station admin, a friend of a friend who’d agreed to meet her for drinks tonight. If Goodwin could sweet-talk her way into an ore-hauling contract, the signing bonus would be enough to handle the most pressing repairs on the Chariot (including the clamps) and keep Goodwin and her crew paid and flying for the foreseeable future.

She contemplated the view of Knapik Station now, its black metal architecture standing in sharp contrast to the gray planet below, almost a silhouette.

“Not much to look at, is it?” White said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Goodwin said. Not beautiful, maybe, but functional. In fact, its history as an ore refinery was a good omen, she decided. A promise of better days ahead.

3

KNAPIK STATION

As Sam brought the Chariot into one of Knapik Station’s landing bays, the ship began to shudder so hard that Goodwin worried she’d shake herself apart.

From somewhere aft, Harris swore loud enough to be heard even over the groan of the ship settling back into stillness. Sam and Goodwin exchanged a look. Sam grimaced sympathetically, then looked back at his instruments.

Goodwin unbuckled her crash harness and ran back to the engine room. She found Harris crouched over an open panel, swearing at it as though it had personally wronged him.

“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Aft starboard stabilizer’s fucked,” he said. “Blew out right as we landed.”

Goodwin tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach.

“How fucked are we talking?” she said. “Can you fix it?”

Harris gave her a look. “I can fix almost anything, with enough time, parts, and tools. But I don’t know about this, kiddo. I think we may just need a new one.”

“I see,” Goodwin said.

Harris sighed. He was the longest-serving crew member on the Chariot. He’d been with the ship since Goodwin’s mother still ran things. He was the closest thing Goodwin had ever had to a father. It was hard for her to keep anything from him.

“Can we afford a new one?” he asked. “After we get paid, I mean.”

Goodwin considered how to answer. Losing a stabilizer was bad, but not insurmountable. It was just another repair to add to the list. Once she’d secured the ore-hauling contract with administration, they’d be able to afford it.

“Probably,” she said at last.

Harris nodded and wiped his hands with a dirty rag. “I’ll take a look around the shops while we’re here. See what our options are.”

“Sounds good,” she said. “Just—do me a favor?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t mention this to the crew. I’ll tell them, when the time comes. But for now, I don’t want anything putting a damper on their leave.”

“Aye-aye, kiddo,” Harris said.

*   *   *

Goodwin returned to the bridge and flopped into her chair. Sam was running through his post-landing checklist, but paused to look at her.

“Cardona and White went down to cargo to get ready for unloading,” he said. “Harris had bad news, I take it?”

She nodded.

“Do I want to know?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Once I have some good news to couple it with.”

Sam went back to work. He didn’t push or prod. Didn’t try to weasel the information out of her. She liked this about him. He seemed to exist on a permanent even keel, which made him a perfect foil for her own constant anxiety. Another reason they made a good team.

Before she could tell him so, the comm crackled as a channel opened. “Captain?” Cardona said.

“I’m here,” Goodwin said.

“You might want to come down here,” Cardona said.

“What is it?”

“It’s better if you see for yourself,” White piped in.

Goodwin suppressed a groan of frustration as she stood up. “On my way.”

She crossed the ship and descended the ladder into the cargo bay. A sickly-sweet, almost nauseating smell hit her before she’d even finished climbing down, and she cursed, knowing what she was about to see: spilled bug juice.

She approached Cardona and White, who stood with their backs to her, peering at a mess of broken boxes and shattered bottles, all soaked dark red with spilled bug juice.

“What happened?” she said.

“A couple of security straps broke,” White said. They pointed up at the nearest wall, where formerly taut belts hung torn and limp. “It must’ve happened during the landing, because I did a visual inspection after we woke up and everything looked okay.”

“How bad is it?” Goodwin asked.

“Not as bad as it looks from here,” White said. “I checked the rest of the hold, and everything else seems to be secure.”

“This is bad enough,” Goodwin said. At a glance, she guessed that they’d lost about ten percent of the shipment. Ten percent that would come out of the Chariot’s paycheck.

Cardona put a comforting hand on Goodwin’s shoulder. “Insurance will cover what we lost, right?”

Goodwin doubted it. She carried insurance on her cargo—she wasn’t that broke yet—but in her experience, insurance companies didn’t part with a single dollar if they didn’t have to. She could just see an adjuster looking at those straps, or finding out about the stabilizer, or any number of other problems on the ship, and declaring Goodwin at-fault. Granting her a settlement of ‘Go fuck yourself.’

“Probably,” Goodwin said to Cardona. No sense letting the kid know they were a little more fucked now than they had been ten minutes ago.

*   *   *

Sam joined Goodwin, Cardona, and White in the hold, and they cleaned up the mess as best they could before they started the unloading process. This part went as well as could have been expected. The rep from station admin, a small man with receding hair and dark bags under his eyes, reviewed the surviving cargo, typed some numbers into a calculator, and determined that they’d lost approximately fifteen percent of the shipment (his exact figure was “fourteen-point-eight-five percent”). He said that, when he returned to the office, he’d authorize a credit for eighty-five-point-fifteen percent of the original agreed-upon price.

Goodwin shook the man’s hand and thanked him for his time. Once he was gone, she turned to her crew.

“Get out of here,” she said. “I don’t want to see any of you again for three days.”

Cardona, White, and Harris said their goodbyes and took off, but Sam lingered. When everyone else had left, he said, “Check-in’s at three. Want to head over together?”

Sam had booked them a room at the Bowers. Although Knapik Station had a few ‘hotels’, most were little more than stacks of sleeping tubes for transient workers. The Bowers, by contrast, had actual rooms with beds in them, and bathrooms with full-sized bathtubs. Sam had paid for the whole thing himself, and Goodwin was looking forward to a few days of privacy and decadence with her pilot. But not yet.

“I have a couple of things to do first,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

Once he was gone, she returned to the now-empty cargo hold and stared at the wine-red stain on the floor. Despite their best efforts, the crew had been unable to remove it, and it was still sticky to step on. She wondered how long the stickiness would last. It seemed likely that the stain itself would endure the rest of the ship’s days.

Assuming this ship has any days left, she thought.

She shook her head, trying to physically remove the thought from her body. She wasn’t licked. Not yet.

*   *   *

Goodwin had a little bit of time to kill before her meeting with the admin rep, and wasn’t quite ready to head to the Bowers—once she was checked in there, she didn’t want to leave the hotel room until it was time to depart the station. She wanted a chance to truly forget about the whole galaxy for a few days.

So instead she took a lift to the commercial district. She wandered the vendor stalls and shops for a while, stopping occasionally to examine an interesting item, or ask for a price. She didn’t see much worth buying—the wares in the Outer Veil were sparse. The books and movies on offer were years old, content that even Goodwin, with her limited disposable income, had consumed years ago.

But at least it helped kill the time until her meeting. Checking her watch, she headed for the bar. Despite Harris’s earlier statements to the contrary, this bar did have a name: Ore's Pours. Not very appetizing, but at least it rhymed with the theme of mining.

Despite the dim lighting and relatively upscale location in the commercial district, Ore’s Pours had a grubby look, as if everything was covered in dust. Every object in sight, from the décor to the seating, looked like it had been repurposed from mining equipment.

Like every bar on every station she’d ever visited, this one was popular, and Goodwin had to squeeze between groups of people to find an open, sticky table near the back wall, next to the restroom. It took a server several minutes to stop by and take her order, and several more minutes for Goodwin’s bottle of Aspen to arrive. It did so in tandem with Goodwin’s contact from station admin.

His name was Aldous Hemphill, and Goodwin would’ve recognized him even if she hadn’t seen his photo before now. He stuck out in this dingy little watering hole. Whereas most people here were in dun-colored jumpsuits, this man wore a tailored suit. He was clean-shaven, with a stylish haircut, and a briefcase in his right hand. He frowned as he entered the bar, a look of clear distaste on his handsome face. The expression sent a stab of dislike through Goodwin. He was the one who’d wanted to meet in public. They could’ve met at his office instead.

Still, she smiled, waved, and called his name. His eyebrows went up when he saw her, and he waved back. He made his way through the crowd, clearly uncomfortable, and she enjoyed watching his discomfort. She ran through what she knew about him—mostly gossip from a mutual friend named Bulloch. Hemphill had grown up in the Knapik Belt, came from a family of miners, but had somehow managed to wriggle out of manual labor and into administration. He was young—still in his mid-twenties—and looking to make a name for himself out here in the Outer Veil. Hoping to get noticed by a bigger company, and get out of the Knapik Belt for good.

When he arrived at the table, he seemed to debate where to set his briefcase. Neither the table nor the floor seemed to meet with his satisfaction, so as he sat across from Goodwin, he cradled the briefcase in his lap. Goodwin was honestly a little surprised he deigned to sit. Surely the chair would dirty up the hindquarters of that expensive suit.

“You’re late,” Goodwin said. She said it lightly, to let him know it was no big deal.

“I had a meeting that ran over,” Hemphill said. It wasn’t an apology, but rather a statement of fact. He looked around the bar, caught a server’s eye, and summoned her over to order a whiskey neat. Then he sat with both hands on his briefcase, as though someone might try to snatch it.

This all felt wrong so far. Goodwin already disliked the man. However, she would set that aside. She would do whatever it took to walk out of here with a contract.

She tried a smile. “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” she said.

“I owed your friend Bulloch a favor from way back,” Hemphill said. “Thank him.”

Goodwin clamped down on her instinctive response—to throw her beer in this smarmy asshole’s face—and took a sip from her bottle instead. “I’ll do that.”

Hemphill’s drink arrived. He took one hand off his briefcase to pick it up and sip from it. He made a face, but not the usual face people made when drinking whiskey. This was an expression of distaste. Clearly the drink wasn’t up to his usual standards.

“Look, I know you’re a busy man,” Goodwin said. “I don’t want to waste your time. Bulloch tells me that Knapik administration is unhappy with Weyland-Yutani’s ore-hauling services.”

She paused there to give Hemphill a chance to respond. He just stared back at her, waiting for her to continue.

“Bulloch also indicated that administration might be into the idea of trying out some smaller, different ore-haulers. Maybe an independent contractor, like the Chariot. We’re a mid-size cargo hauler,” she said. “Been in service for a while now.” She deliberately left out the model number and age of her ship. No need to tell him exactly how long they’d been flying. “And we have a strong history of reliable service. I sent you some customer testimonials along with the rest of our information a few weeks back.”

Hemphill took another sip of his whiskey and made that irritating face again. “‘A strong history of reliable service,’” he said, echoing her.

“That’s right,” Goodwin said.

“Reliable,” he said again, as he set the glass down on the table. “Have you updated your records to include the mishap you had in our docking bay a few hours ago?”

Goodwin stopped herself from physically moving in reaction to what he’d said, but couldn’t entirely mask her surprise. He’d already heard about that?

“Just a stabilizer malfunction,” she said. “Already fixed.” A lie, but he didn’t need to know that.

“A malfunction that eliminated nearly fifteen percent of our planned rations for the next six months,” Hemphill said.

“We took a pay cut for that,” Goodwin said, keeping her voice even and reasonable.

“That pay cut for you means stricter rationing for half a year in the Knapik Belt,” Hemphill said.

“I didn’t realize you were so concerned with the plight of the common worker,” Goodwin said.

“I’m not, personally,” Hemphill said. “But it’s a hard life out here, especially for people at the bottom of the ladder. If things get harder, those people tend to become…” he waved a hand through the air, as though wafting a smell away from himself. “…unproductive,” he finished. “When they become unproductive, we start to miss quotas. Once we start missing quotas, my life gets harder. So you might say I have a vested interest in keeping people happy—or at least, maintaining a baseline level of misery. Your little accident today means that my life is about to get harder.”

“I’m sorry,” Goodwin said. The words were out before she had time to calculate their effect, and she was immediately unhappy with herself for saying them. But they were out, so she had to follow them where they led. “Truly, I am. But accidents do happen.”

“They seem to happen to the Chariot more than the average cargo hauler,” Hemphill said. “I did a little independent research on you before you arrived. Learned some information you conveniently left out of your own materials. Like your accident out on Gorham’s Folly.”

Again, Goodwin struggled to keep her expression neutral. It was getting harder.

“Honestly?” Hemphill said. “I’m surprised that your ship is even capable of hauling ore after the damage you must’ve sustained. That would’ve been an expensive repair, getting your cargo clamps replaced.”

“It was,” Goodwin lied. “But if you’ll just give us a chance—give us a probationary job, even—”

He cut her off with a sharp hand gesture. “Look. You heard correctly when Bulloch said we’re unhappy with Weyland-Yutani right now. They’re screwing us on costs, hurting our margins. We’re looking at alternatives. But we’re looking at other corporations, like Seegson. Large operations that can handle all over our business and provide consistent results.”

“Independent contractors are less expensive,” Goodwin said. She knew this. She’s known this for years. It was the major selling point for her ship. She had a number in mind, the absolute rock bottom she could accept and keep flying, and it was far lower than the rates a corporation would charge.

“True,” Hemphill said, “but hiring lots of independent contractors creates more busywork for admin—and typically provides inconsistent results.” He shrugged and drank the rest of his whiskey in a single gulp.

“So there was no point in us meeting at all,” Goodwin said. “You never meant to give me the contract.”