Excerpt of Six Lost Souls

A Novella by R. E. Stearns

Chapter One

It wasn’t quite eleven a.m. on Ceres Station, but nobody in the bar would tell Ku Nel-Aoki that it was too early to drink. A couple of the bar’s dancers were on stage, kicking to basoelectronica that shook the ill-lit floor beneath Ku’s boots. The few third shift workers relaxing in this corner of the Jane Jacobs residential module, JJ to the locals, would’ve left Ku and her two shadows alone even without the dancers to distract them. Ku owned this level of JJ. Everyone else just lived there.

One of her shadows, Fuse, thumped her arm with the back of his hand. Although his hair was as black as Ku’s own where he hadn’t streaked it green, Fuse was too old to be doing the work they did. Ku kept him around because he showed up when and where she told him to, and he was bigger than her. He also put up with everybody calling him “fuse” when his Japanese name had two syllables.

He nodded toward the front door. “Ey, is that the rojoy?”

Rojoy, Kuiper cant for “old-timer,” was Ku’s nickname for the white police officer assigned to JJ-2, the second level of the mod. “Dah-ah, that’s him.” Midmorning usually found the rojoy in his office three streets over, waiting for complaints to come to him. Now he wavered near the door while his eyes adjusted from the bright morning sunsim to the bar’s scattered overhead lights.

Ku’s second shadow said nothing. Cedar, all purple mohawk and hooded eyes this time of morning, would’ve spotted the new arrival before Fuse. If the rojoy’s complaint was a simple one, Cedar would spend the exchange scowling and sharpening vis knives with one boot propped on an empty chair.

The rojoy’s gaze finally fell on Ku and he crossed the stained floor to her table. Every patron who saw his uniform let their conversations lapse. The AI bartender that projected from the ceiling kept on bobbing its head to the music and wiping a projected rag over the bar. On the half hour, the bar cleaned itself.

By tightening eye muscles, Ku activated the implant protected by a metal housing embedded in and around her eye sockets. The rojoy snapped into focus as the implant redirected the light entering her eyes. His uniform was as rumpled as ever. The gleaming Ceres Station police badge projected onto his chest lit a weak chin and gray stubble. A thermographic analysis came back as anxious, the word fading into Ku’s view beside his head and fading out once she read it. According to her weapons scan, he’d added a stunner to his usual combination of knives and impatience.

Ku scowled like the rojoy interrupting her gin and orange breakfast inconvenienced her. Really, she was looking forward to learning what’d made the duster heave himself out of his desk chair. Like all law enforcement officers, he had no control over the dust-fine nannites that deployed at what cams identified as crime scenes, but the slang for his job stuck anyway. There was often money to be made in sources of duster distress.

Cedar’s knife slid into a sheath and vis boots thudded to the floor, preparation for violence on the off chance the rojoy had gotten ambitious since Cedar and Ku had last seen him. Fuse smiled with friendliness that should’ve been false but wasn’t, on him. “Ey, what do you need?” he asked the rojoy.

The rojoy barely glanced at Fuse. “Ku, we need to talk.”

Ku stood and shook out hair that almost touched her shoulders, covering minor disorientation from switching off her implant’s analyses. “Aw, are we breaking up? I’ll need another drink for that.”

“Ku, this is serious.”

Fuse and Cedar stood too, but three members of the Ceres syndicate against one old duster would make the rojoy too anxious to say all he had to say. Ku waved Fuse back to his seat. To Cedar, she said “Posey minun, foro karo.” Cedar sat down too.

The rojoy stepped aside to let Ku lead the way out. “Why can’t you just speak English? Everybody else here does.”

“Cant is faster,” Ku said. “My time’s valuable.” Not allowing an old duster to overhear her every command was valuable too.

She stepped out the bar’s front door and let her implant adjust her eyesight while she scanned for dangerous faces and the wrong kind of weapons. Locals walked along the bot tracks that ran through the center of the street, looking no more wary than usual. A massive delivery bot rumbled down the tracks, stopping every few meters to shove boxes into buildings’ inventory systems.

Several blocks to her right, toward the grav acclimation tunnel that led to the port mod, Ku’s implants pinged on a group of pedestrians. They were a long way off, but coming closer. The implant applied a yellow glow to highlight them as a potential threat. She and the rojoy would walk that way and see what they found.

“What’s the problem?” Ku asked the rojoy.

“Oh, where do I start?” In anything other than an enviro emergency the rojoy had preliminaries to go through, listing all the ways that the Ceres syndicate and the delinquents who wanted to join it had inconvenienced him this week. By listening, Ku respected him for his age and implied that they both wanted the same thing: peace in JJ-2.

She could’ve ignored his complaints, or threatened him with violence for wasting her time, but if she pushed him too hard, he’d fight back. Get enough dusters fighting the syndicate and the syndicate higher-ups would step in to preserve the balance of power. That reality had trapped Ku into long minutes playing therapist for the rojoy.

He was still going through his list as the hour changed. The sunsim turned slightly more orange. Above the street, ceiling projectors displayed a beautiful slice of Ceres stationspace. A huge passenger liner was docked at the orbital station. It had to be a colony ship. Around it, buoys glittered red and green and yellow-white. Dots of shuttles and short hop transports zipped around the behemoth. The starscape weirded out some travelers, but this was the sky that Ceresians loved.

Ku glanced over her shoulder. Cedar had left the bar, as Ku’s cant request had asked ver to do. Despite being named after a dark green tree, Cedar was short and white. The purple mohawk, nose stud, and piercings along vis ears and the backs of vis fingers made ver easy to track in a crowd. With Cedar slouching down the street behind her, Ku could relax. If she needed help, Cedar had her back.

As the rojoy’s litany of complaints ground to an end, Ku stepped beneath an awning over the front door of a club that’d open in a few hours. The awning was an Earther affectation that matched the club’s theme. The atmo in Ceres Station was always fine. The pedestrians Ku’s implant had identified as threatening were still coming toward her. They outnumbered her and the rojoy by about five to one. From here, she could watch them while the awning blocked the street cams.

“And not that you care,” the rojoy said, “But here’s what’s coming out of the port.” Ku nodded at the right places in the rojoy’s port difficulties, listening for one that would involve her. It was easiest to let him talk himself out. Besides, everything coming from the port to JJ went through her level before it went anywhere else.

The people Ku’s implant highlighted had come near enough for Ku to turn off the tracker and evaluate them herself. The group resolved into five allies she’d set alerts on: Max Solonik’s crew, the people who did syndicate business on JJ-4, two levels closer to the station’s center than hers. Max himself had joined them, identifiable by his buzzed hair, pale skin tattooed in black, and armored jacket.

She didn’t know the six people Max’s crew herded down the street. Their blank expressions and flickering facial features meant that they were wearing projected-on false faces. Some of their projected-on skin didn’t match the color of their clenched and wringing hands. Max’s crew hurried them along the street, passing behind the rojoy on their way to the elevators. They were coming from the grav acclimation tunnel, and the port module on the far end of it.

“And one of you businesspeople is holding up that gods damn colony ship up there.” The rojoy pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the stationspace projection above the street. “Look at her. Still as death.”

Ku did not look. Her implant read Max’s thin lips: “. . . someplace peaceful. Don’t worry about a thing,” he was telling his guests, in text that appeared in Ku’s vision and disappeared after she read it. Max caught Ku watching and mouthed “Fuck off. They’re mine.” She smirked just enough to be sure he’d see it. He scowled and returned a rude gesture. Predictable people were fun to play with.

“I’ll tell you this much, I’m glad that place isn’t my problem.” Ku agreed with the rojoy on that. “Between the colony ship and the pharma printer they still can’t find, you all are going to have a lot of explaining to do when the port authority weighs in. Which they will, you know how they are.”

“Are you implying that the syndicate is responsible for all this?” Ku channeled her boss’s cold disdain into the question. Keeping all the JJ-2 residents balanced between reliance on and fear of the syndicate required a precise touch.

She hadn’t quite mastered the boss’s disdain, but the tonal shift set the rojoy gaping comically for a second. “Well . . . aren’t you?”

Of course the syndicate was involved. From the looks of things, Max had tried something stupid and failed. In the process, he’d held up the biggest ship in port. Max was greedy that way, which was why Ku never encouraged him to stop in her mod.

If a money-making opportunity led from Ku’s lap to the port, she still wouldn’t follow it there. Too many thugs were working too many angles there, and port authority agents armed themselves well enough to be dangerous. On top of that, one wrong move with explosives or safety equipment would put everybody there in the cold and the black.

But the rojoy was worried enough about the stalled colony ship that she could gain a bit more leverage over him. “Although this is not my fucking problem . . . ” Ku leaned into her cant-roughened pronunciation of the English words. “I’ll get rid of it for you. As a favor.” She managed not to smile as the rojoy’s expression hardened. Repaying syndicate favors was hard on dusters, but they’d do it, or something costly and painful would happen to them.

All she would’ve had to do was tell the rojoy to turn around. Max and his four friends in their expensive clothes guiding six disguised strangers away from port would’ve been a solid start to the duster’s investigation. The moment stretched, reflecting all of Ku’s Ceres Station life as she pretended that the law and those who upheld it mattered a good gods damn while the syndicate went on with business as usual.

Max, for all his idiocy, was still syndicate. Except for trips to and from the port, he’d stayed out of her level for years now. He was welcome to recover from his fuckup however he liked, somewhere else. Maybe those six people were all escorts under those disguises, although their plain outfits weren’t very sexy. As they rounded a corner, still heading for the elevators, a chunky brown bracelet on one of the disguised people’s wrists caught Ku’s eye. An escort would’ve worn something shinier.

“Yeah, all right.” The rojoy slumped into his typical slovenly street posture, now that Ku had agreed to check out what was keeping the colony ship in port. He extracted an ecig and she dug a tin of catch out of her pocket. The cig had a fierce orange and black cat design, and it smelled like it contained a nicotine derivative. Her tin bore her boss’s symbol, a pink peony blossom. The streak of magenta gel she brushed onto the skin of her throat calmed her and kicked her into high gear at the same time. The rojoy pointedly blew a sour breath toward the stars, away from the illegal substance.

“I hate when those big ships come in,” said the rojoy. “At least it’s not a cruise liner, or one of those hibernation transports from the Kuiper colonies. It’s not even noon.” The rojoy looked at his comp in its blue glove. In the open square on the back of his hand where the comp projected information, something was flashing. “Ah, great. Gotta go. Tell me . . .” He glanced up like he was checking to see if his near order had insulted her. She frowned, mostly for effect. “Sorry,” said the rojoy. “Please tell me if you find anything out about that colony ship. It’s been a hell of a week already.”

“Sure.”

The rojoy set off at a brisk walk toward his office, swearing the whole way. When he’d moved out of hearing range, Cedar slouched into the cam free area beneath the awning, watching everyone on the street. Ve took a more proactive approach to Ku’s protection than Fuse ever thought to do.

All right?” Cedar asked. Ku offered ver the gel tin. Ve brushed a line of magenta on vis pale throat, drawing a long breath as the effect kicked in.

“I shiret.” Ku wouldn’t know that until she had more information. It’d be interesting to see what Max had gotten himself into. With luck, the damn colony ship would shove off before she had to investigate what’d held it up, and the rojoy would still owe her one. 

Ku, Cedar, and Fuse dropped by a debtor’s apartment to scare him into pay his installment, then moved on to JJ-2’s public terminals. They hadn’t come for an “experience,” so they bypassed the rentable rooms and took out three pods with hard mattresses that stunk of industrial cleaner. Once they got their headsets on and connected to the syndicate’s virtual space, they were lying on their backs in a small ship’s main cabin.

Stationspace slid by in wide projected windows. Its speed proved that the real ship this sim represented moved too slowly to generate the grav Ku and her shadows enjoyed. They stood using the pod controls. A real ship like this lurked somewhere in Ceres stationspace, but Ku had never seen it in person. The virtual version was functional and comfortable, and it worked well as a hub where Ceres Station’s whole syndicate operation coordinated. The virtual space had gotten the stars just right. No gigantic silicate haulers or colony ships blocked them here.

She didn’t come here for the view, though. A recordkeeper ran the place, and their body language and tone told her a hell of a lot more than the sloppy reports published for everybody to read. Between the rojoy’s visit and that stalled colony ship, she wanted a clearer pic of what was happening around the station.

Fuse and Cedar each took a different part of the report to the boss and composed it using built-in projection stages. The boss wouldn’t read the reports, but her analysts would. Ku raised her voice over the familiar drone of a small ship’s atmo handlers to dictate her account of Max’s parade through her level. Her shadows could list everything else the three of them had done in the syndicate’s name over the past few days.

A recordkeeper was always logged in here, screening everything before it went to the bosses. Usually they found something wrong with the reports. Ku, Cedar, and Fuse waited around in the little ship after they sent in their combined report, watching the stars.

Sure enough, the recordkeeper of the day, a guy named Vhren, walked into the main cabin from the ship’s tiny bridge while looking at his comp. He liked to use a storybook alien avatar, with green skin and antennae sticking out of his forehead. English was his second or third language, and nobody but the syndicate would’ve hired him to manage English records. That was what the syndicate did, though: train up people nobody else would.

“Hey,” Vhren said to Ku, “you see the old JJ duster today?”

“Dah-ah.” This was the kind of question that Vhren wouldn’t have had the opportunity to ask if Ku had been writing her own reports. “Why?”

“Rumor says he does not work there now. So, there is the new duster in JJ.”

“What?” Ku’s question was higher and louder than it needed to be in the small cabin, and the even smaller public terminal pod she lay in. “I talked to the old guy a couple hours ago, and he was in uniform and everything. Did that just happen?”

“Yeah, today,” said Vhren. “New duster is in JJ-3 asking, like, who are the gangs.”

“Oh my gods. Where did he come from?” Except for some port trash, the syndicate didn’t allow street gangs to form in Ceres Station.

“Nobody knows.” Vhren chuckled. “Who are the gangs. Your stuff is okay. I am sending it.”

“Thanks.”

If the rojoy had gotten reassigned or fired, then Ku would have to break in a whole new duster. She’d never done that before. The boss had reached an understanding with the rojoy, and Ku had taken over where the boss had left off.

Interesting as that challenge would be, reaching an understanding would take time from things that made Ku money. Making money kept the boss and ambitious up-and-comers off her back. She’d have to send up-and-comers to do the delicate collections she currently did herself. Sending Fuse or Cedar in her stead would mean walking around the mod on her own, and that was asking to get jumped. She swore in cant.

“That’s bad news, huh?” The rented pod’s cheap earpiece doubled Fuse's question between its speaker and his voice through the pod walls.

Working with a new duster might be fun, or it might be a fucking nightmare. Some dusters came into new assignments talking like they could change the way the syndicate ran Ceres. In the past, that kind of talk had launched wars of assassination and arrest, families threatened, fires started. Ku didn’t want any of that in JJ-2, but if the new dusters fought her, she wouldn’t back down.

“Get the Sundaravej sisters prositna about novi,” Ku told Fuse. The sisters talked to everybody and everybody talked to them. They were the perfect people to ask around about new dusters in the mod. Fuse gave her a shallow bow to acknowledge her order and pulled a second comp out of his pocket. He switched out the one clipped into his fingerless glove, mirroring the action he was taking in reality, and tapped at the message window projected on the back of his hand.

The hum of Ku’s comp alert brought a message to her attention. She bowed out of the virtual space, then pulled herself out of the physical pod in JJ-2. That particular hum meant the boss had contacted her, and she frowned as she opened the message.

One of the boss’s assistants had sent Ku an official invitation. Her breath caught. The invitation began with Please attend, which let Ku start breathing again. If the boss had invited multiple people, then she probably wasn’t mad at Ku personally. The gathering was at the boss’s home at eight in the evening, too early for nightlife and too late for day work, so nobody had an excuse to miss it. There really must be new dusters in JJ, and the boss was treating that like an emergency.

Chapter 2

When Ku met her shadows at the JJ-2 elevators that evening, they looked as good as she’d asked them to. To make sure that the rest of the syndicate understood that they had no chance of taking Ku’s position in the mod, she and her shadows dressed to show how much money they made. To balance that out with loyalty to the boss, Ku’s people never entered JJ-1 without symbols of the boss’s corner of the syndicate empire. Cedar’s cuff links were peony blossoms, and Fuse wore an earring shaped like one. Ku’s peonies featured in the tattoo around her upper arm that glowed pink through her thin sleeve.

Fuse also seemed to have turned up the brightness on the green streaks in his hair, and Cedar had put on eyeliner, which ve rarely did. Ku always wore a little. Her, Fuse’s, and the boss’s monolid eyes were relatively rare in JJ. That reminder of Ku’s relationship to the boss sometimes stopped trouble with other syndicate members before it started. Also, with so much metal around Ku’s eyes, makeup emphasized humanity where people expected robotics or pseudo-organics.

One of her best-kept secrets was that her high radiation, low grav upbringing had kept her eyes from developing properly. Ceresians assumed she had all the hardware put in to give her an advantage in a fight, but without the implant, her universe would’ve been a colorful blur.

Ku tapped the button projected on the metal wall by the elevator. A chime sounded. Above them, stationspace was wide open now that the massive colony ship had left. Maybe Max had fixed his fuckup already. She’d ask him at the meeting.

While they waited for the elevator, Fuse took pics of them scowling in style. He liked to record moments of Ku, her shadows, and the reliable up-and-comers to post on a social feed he maintained. They’d attracted more competent wannabes since Fuse started posting, and Ku had used a vid as an alibi once, so she let him do his thing as long as he didn’t publish evidence of actual crimes.

The elevator door opened on the two toughs who ran JJ-3. One man’s skin was several shades lighter brown than Ku’s. The other was white. They wore black jackets over emerald and turquoise dress shirts, with multiple knives and projectile weapons beneath. The elevator reeked of the JJ-3 toughs’ cologne.

The five of them exchanged bows appropriate for equals, which was a stretch on Cedar’s and Fuse’s part. According to the boss, the toughs were both level bosses. They’d never trusted lieutenants like Ku’s shadows to do what the two of them didn’t have time for, and they watched each other’s backs well enough. Peony blossom pins gleamed on their lapels.

“Kai vo polu no satra?” Ku asked the JJ-3 toughs.

“Lushni,” one said with acceptable pronunciation and a sulky tone.

The other said “Posh fu back,” and Ku bit off a laugh. That was the most awkward way she’d ever been told to fuck off.

“Dah-ah, that’s good,” she said. “Used it on the street yet?” The JJ-3 toughs looked at each other and shrugged. If she had to guess, they had, and they didn’t want to tell her what they’d talked about.

Grav pressed down as the elevator carried them from JJ-2 to JJ-1, where the boss lived. The one-level, on the outermost layer of Ceres Station’s revolving sphere, was the only level that maintained a full g of grav. In addition to the dizziness that accompanied each change in level, the sensation made Ku’s every move feel like she was picking up a glass that she expected to be empty, but which turned out to be half full.

When the doors opened on JJ-1, they faced a line of live trees planted across the street in front of level one’s shipping distribution center, surrounded by shops. More small trees grew along the walkway on the residential side of the street, where you could buy a three-story single-family home in “healthy” grav for about as much money as Ku expected to see in her whole lifetime. The smaller trees grew beneath pinkish purple glow lamps which were also shaped like trees, gleaming in the nighttime sunsim. Dogs would’ve peed those plants to death in JJ-2. In JJ-1, pets got as much space as their owners.

A hip-high wall with intricate brickwork hid bot tracks. Drones attracted by five moving bodies flew over with lights. The softly buzzing drones kept pace in front of them, as if there were anything in this clean and aggressively safe place to trip on. Walking in JJ-1's residential zone felt like traveling through a sim. What the hell did rich people do with all this empty space?

The boss’s house was second from the end in a line of enormous homes. Delicate statues flanked the front walkway, balanced metal and glass that Ku had spent years fantasizing about knocking over. It wasn’t that she wanted to break them, exactly. They were just expensive, exposed, vulnerable, glittery visual bragging that’d shatter under pressure. One good shove would take them all down at once, in shards and splinters and glorious clattering. The fact that they remained intact was testament to the boss’s control of the mod and every syndicate member in it.

Inside, more delicate art was everywhere. A human servant swept into the entryway to greet them and discourage them from breaking anything on the way to their destination. Calbin was older than Ku and had the palest natural skin she’d ever seen, with red hair, formal clothes that couldn’t wrinkle if they tried, and a blank professionalism that he would’ve dropped if Ku had come alone. She smiled at him behind the JJ-3 toughs’ backs.

Since Calbin came to guide them, the boss wasn’t lurking in some side room, waiting to dispense punishment. That eased the claustrophobia this house generated, despite its size. Ku knew every turn, every creak of the interior elevator, and the name of every pictured member of the boss’s family framed along their route. Her forehead had dented the wall beside the third-floor elevator door when she’d been sixteen and rebellious. The sitting room baseboards had once been stubbornly stained with blood, which was why all the baseboards on that floor were newer than the walls. That was the problem with naturally grown wood. It held on to what’d happened to it.

She and the JJ-3 toughs had gotten there early, but the JJ-1 people had beat them here anyway. The old woman who ran JJ-1’s day-to-day syndicate business sat on a couch, chatting with the boss over wine. Ku and the other new arrivals did the required amount of bowing and waiting for reciprocal nods. The JJ-1 level boss’s underlings, five pretty people of varying races and genders, congregated near the projected window.

The JJ-3 toughs exchanged a look with Ku. The toughs didn’t have much to say to high-society grifters like the JJ-1 underlings, but somebody had to say something. Ku had the best chance of not pissing the locals off before the meeting even started. And that meant that for every meeting in which Ku played socialite, the JJ-3 toughs owed her a little more.

The human servant appeared at her elbow with a tray of vodka in tiny cups. A peony blossom printed on the tray gleamed pink through the clear cups. “Thanks, Calbin,” Ku said as she took one. The boss would’ve had the stuff chilled especially for Ku. She’d made a habit of plying Ku with things they both liked.

Ku beckoned Calbin to follow her to the five JJ-1 underlings. “Hello, all.” In JJ-1, people relished every syllable. Talking like she did in JJ-2 would’ve been slurring here. After everyone exchanged bows, Ku raised her cup. “Shots?”

Five fake smiles appeared on the underlings’ faces. “Oh, fun!” said one. “Absolutely!” said another. The other three were already taking cups from Calbin’s tray.

Ku raised hers and waved her shadows and the JJ-3 toughs over, who took the rest of the cups from the tray. Cedar ended up without one, which was fine because ve didn’t drink at syndicate gatherings. In Russian, because vodka was vodka, Ku said, “May we always have a reason for a party.” Even if they weren’t gathered here for a good reason, JJ-1 people liked clichés.

The JJ-1 underlings delightedly repeated the toast and emptied their cups. The cool burn of vodka was an excellent start to what Ku expected to be an unpleasant evening. A pretty underling coughed. The rest laughed like actors pretending to have a good time and turned to the food laid out on a side table, made with pricey vat-grown ingredients guaranteed free of contaminants. Maybe the underlings’ performative behavior was why Fuse, who was forever on the verge of landing his “breakout” acting role, was so comfortable around them.

“Anybody have odds on the AIs?” asked the JJ-3 tough with the full plate.

“Oh, I don’t know, do we?” one JJ-1 underling asked the others. The question wasn’t “Do we have it?” but “Should we tell him?”

“Ryujin is the current favorite, I believe,” said another.

Ku squinted slightly to activate her thermographics. The color pattern on the speaker’s face and chest was confident and honest. The bookies really expected Ryujin to absorb its opponent in this week’s competition.

She blinked the thermographics off, but one of the underlings caught her at it. “Ku, did you get a new implant frame?”

Ku forced herself to smile. “I did.” The outside part of her implant emerged near the corners of her eyes and followed her orbital socket and facial bones out a few centimeters all the way around, gleaming like iridescent chrome. This thicker frame would take heavier hits than the old one. Last month somebody had thrown an elbow in a fight and crushed one side against the bones beneath. The implant was a weak point, so she’d told the designer to make it look like armor. That stopped people from aiming for it.

“They make them in such elegant styles these days,” said a condescending underling who was careful not to imply that Ku’s frame was elegant. “Perhaps a peony blossom at the corner of each eye?”

“Oh, that would be perfect,” said another. Now they were calling Ku the sort of bootlicker who couldn’t have enough of the boss’s symbols on her person.

“Wouldn’t it just.” Ku let her Kuiper slur slip into her voice.

The pretty underlings’ eyebrows rose. Three little words had set a lot of meticulously shaped facial hair twitching. Ku’s smile grew genuine. “Ku.” The boss’s voice carried a hint of warning.

Everyone stopped talking. Ku executed the combination turn and nod required for an initial address. The boss waved her gold-tinged hand at a chair near the couch she shared with the JJ-1 level boss and Ku sat, back straight and hands on her knees, politely visible.

Bosses who ran a whole mod didn’t usually have much to worry about, but something had the boss worried tonight. Or, not worried. The boss never seemed worried. She was ready for a fight she saw coming.

Instinct told her that if she didn’t back the boss up on whatever this was, the trouble would land in her territory next. Maybe that was leadership. If the boss threw the first punch, everybody in this room would stand up to finish what she started and ask questions later.

“We were just talking about Max,” said the boss. Ku had been braced for threats of what the boss would do if Ku kept provoking the JJ-1 underlings, but she did her best to hide her confusion. “When we’re all here, you’ll tell us about when you saw him last.”

Nobody new had entered since Ku’s group. Max and his whole entourage were missing. ‘When you last saw him’ sounded like he wasn’t coming. “Who else will be here?” Ku asked.

“Ms. Dumont.” The boss said the name softly, with a hard edge that made Ku’s back straighten even more. Dumont reported to the head of all the syndicate’s operations on Ceres. If Dumont was coming here, then Max must’ve fucked up worse than usual.