“This is ridiculous!” exploded from her before she could stop herself. Deidra was left with heaving shoulders and a continuous leak of fury from the vault she kept sealed tight, deep inside.
“Deidra. Do you want to live like this for the next hundred-sixty years?” said Devin.
“What?”
“We’re good workers. We’re young. We’re an investment, DD… The Gold Standard’s never going to let us go. They’ll give us the best healthcare money can buy to keep us alive, to keep us working, until we can’t. We’ll be stuck here for the rest of our lives if we don’t do something about it. We might taste a handful of years of freedom at the end of our sentences, if we’re lucky. Who knows if we’ll even want it, by then?” Devin’s every word deepened the reality of the situation and Deidra’s fury about it. They didn’t talk about this, so it wasn’t real. All she and Devin had to do was put their heads down and work, and everything would be fine, at the end of the day. She was fine, with table scrap dinners and blankets they weren’t supposed to have, in the back of the Forge. They’d never had anything else, after all. Why did he have to make it real?
“We have no training! No experience! Half the Olympia challenges need a starship! We don’t have a ship, you dipshit!” Deidra roared. Devin’s continued calm in the face of her long-caged fire only served to fan it.
“We have plenty of training. To work when others are tired. To carry on through silence, and darkness, and pain like others will never know. We can do this,” he said.
“And what about the ship? Where are we going to get one of those?”
“That handful of years we might have, at the end of our sentence? That’s worth something, isn’t it? No one of us could afford another loan that size on our own, but if our crew splits it six ways, we can pay for a Gold Standard ship with our last drops of freedom,” Devin did his best to explain, without lighting another fuse.
“You want… to trade a guaranteed out at the end of the road, for a very unlikely shortcut?” Deidra rephrased. Devin had expected resistance, but this was too much. He slammed the
kitchen counter. The soup pot teetered on its heating disk behind him.
“Come on, DD! You of all people know how unfair this is! I mean, hell, the rest of us actually made mistakes to land us in this mess! Yeah, petty theft or a few late payments is hardly grounds for a life sentence, but at least we did something! You… this wasn’t your fault,” Devin laid out line after line he regretted as he said it. But he knew he was trying to move a mountain. He needed the proper tools.
“Don’t you dare,” Deidra warned.
“You’re suffering the fallout of someone else’s choice. You did nothing to deserve this. Do something about it, Deidra,” Devin challenged her. She stomped within an inch of Devin’s face. She balled up his collar in two bruised fists. “You’re angry,” he said.
“You’re damn right!”
“You want to hit me? Are you angry at me, Deidra? Are you?”
“No!” Deidra roared.
“Who are you angry at?” Devin screamed, “Who do you want to fight?” Deidra’s fists unclenched. She let Devin go, only to slam a dent in the counter.
“Damn you,” Deidra muttered, while his shoes flattened on the floor.
“Damn me? Or the people who don’t let us take these off?” Devin tapped the collar around his neck. Deidra walked away from him. She had to. She had to stomp it out, to try and refocus her anger on anything less dangerous. Devin. The other servants. Even that guy that’d picked a fight with them in the streets would have been better. None of these vessels, however, were nearly big enough to house Deidra’s fury. She marched back to Devin a full hour later, more frustrated than ever that he was right. The only ones she really wanted to hurt were the ones that hurt her, every day.
“Does the ship… have a name?” Deidra asked.
Chapter Five: The Roster
“Toss me another one of those!” bellowed a man named Roran. Galia leaned back in her seat, arms crossed. She raised a brow to the burly man. It seemed to her, after knowing him for an hour, that his immense mass served only as a way to hide how small he was inside. Every word out of his mouth was another explosion set to dwarf the last. He had to be the loudest, the most outrageous. But even Galia had to draw the line somewhere.
“Trust me, pal, you’re done,” she smirked at him through two pinched fingers. Between her index finger and thumb was a glossy purple capsule. It was a drug she knew better than anyone in that bar. Better than anyone in the galaxy, most likely. “You keep going higher, you won’t enjoy the fall when it’s all done.”
“No one says when Roran’s done but him!” laughed one of his many enablers, the rest of his crew. Galia could only hope she wouldn’t see the name of their ship, Scorch, on the massive screen behind the bar in another minute.
“Pass me another!” Roran guffawed.
“You’re digging into my private stash. I’ll say when you’re done,” Galia declared. The literal accompaniment to her foot going down shook the floor under their table. Half-empty glasses of various colored liquor rattled between them. The grin vanished from both Galia and Roran’s faces at once. Both their crews rambled down to an intense simmer.
“Give. Me. Another.” Roran’s teeth gritted through each word, a primal show of force. Galia leaned forward to glare at him with two orbs of crystalized amber. He really is as impulsive as he seems, she noted.
“No.”
“Hey, it’s coming on!” Rey’s voice shattered the stagnant tension between them again. All heads darted to one direction. The television behind the bar. Even the bartender about-faced. He cranked up the volume over the intent silence that befell his tavern. Petty squabbles were pushed aside. There were only two voices that mattered now. That of Koslav Gold in his opening message, then the galaxy-renowned Cybil Cerano himself, his chief announcer. It was enough to quiet even Roran.
The man that appeared on the screen was clad in the finest silver tuxedo credits could pay for. The threads that held it together were so fine and glossy, he shone like he was made of steel. His tie was woven from actual strands of gold. He pushed glasses, rimmed by that same precious metal, up his long nose. His red lips grinned through a beard that somehow still had pepper mixed in with the salt, even at a hundred-fifty years old.