Junkyard — Part 1 (a free science fiction novella)

Hi, folks!

I’m working on Agents of the Crown, Book 4 (Elven Fury!), but I took a break to write a new novella and a novel in my Fallen Empire science-fiction universe. Except the stories take place before the fall of the empire. And they feature some new characters.

If you’ve read my short stories “Here Be Dragons” in the Bridge Across the Stars anthology or “Bearadise Lodge” (free for those who are signed up for my sci-fi newsletter), you’ve already met my skip tracer, McCall, her trusty dog Junkyard, and her android business partner Scipio. This novella is a bit of a mystery adventure and shows how she first met up with Junkyard (and where his name came from) and how Scipio officially became her business partner.

I’m sending it off to my editor to work on in October, so this is on the rough side, but if you don’t mind, please jump in. I’ll be sharing it in 4 or 5 parts over the next couple of weeks to go along with the release of the novel, Fractured Stars.

Oh, and that’s Scipio in the artwork down there. He’s a snazzy dressing android, as you’ll see!

Junkyard: Part I

Frost edged the mossy cracks in the pavement in front of Maple Moon warehouse and sugarhouse. McCall Richter wrinkled her nose, imagining the frozen crystals coating her cilia, and tucked her hands under her armpits as she walked. Her new employee, Scipio, said nothing of the cold, but frost wouldn’t bother an android capable of repairing spaceships from the outside. While in flight.

Plumes of smoke wafted from the chimneys of the sugarhouse, infusing the crisp early spring air with the scent of maple syrup. Imagining cherry-red furnaces inside, McCall wished her instructions said to meet the owner in there. But she was supposed to meet Mr. David Dunham in the warehouse after landing, its corrugated steel walls just as frosty as the pavement.

She looked wistfully back at her ship. The Star Surfer, its sleek purple hull gleaming under the early morning suns, its environmentally-controlled interior always at a comfortable temperature, rested a mere fifty meters behind her. The interior also happened to be comfortably free of unfamiliar people with expectations she didn’t know if she could meet.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to back out…

A trio of men walked out of the warehouse, and she held back a grimace. They wore trousers and parkas, not combat armor, but that didn’t make her any less wary. They were strangers, and she always felt the need to put on a mask for strangers. Force a smile, make eye contact, pretend talking about planetary weather wasn’t inane. There was a reason she usually only accepted jobs via text.

“For future reference, you’re not allowed to set up meetings,” she muttered to Scipio.

The android gave her Inquiring Head Tilt Number Two—in the three months he had been aboard her ship, McCall had mentally catalogued the various facial gestured he was programmed with and given them labels. She often had a hard time reading human faces, but his features arranged themselves in precisely the same manner to simulate well-defined emotions, which made them easier to grasp.

“You gave me the position of personal assistant and said I should interact with people on behalf of your business. Is setting up meetings not a typical duty?”

“Not with people I don’t know and for a job I’m not qualified to do.”

“I read the last ten years of your assignment records so I could thoroughly familiarize myself with your business. I understand that you usually seek out missing people rather than missing goods, but I am certain you are qualified to do this.”

“What I’m qualified to do and what I want to do aren’t the same thing.”

McCall knew she sounded peevish—the unassailable logic of an android could bring that out in anyone—but there wasn’t time to explain that she’d spent the last fifteen years carefully crafting a cocoon in which she could thrive. Leaving it usually turned into anxiety, stress, and sensory overload that could put her into an exhausted funk for days. Thank the suns she’d reached the point in her career where she could call the shots and make a comfortable living from within the private protected walls of her ship.

“Good morning, Captain Richter,” one of the three men said as the trio stopped in front of her.

He had a blunt face, a broad build, and a beard long enough to scrub out his bellybutton when he showered. Because of the beard, she recognized him as the man who wanted to hire her. David Dunham.

“It is Captain, isn’t it?” he added. “Or do you prefer detective? Officer?”

He looked her up and down, as if her ponytail, fur-lined jacket, hiking shoes, and loose trousers might give some clue to a rank. Or maybe the charm bracelet she was twisting around her wrist without realizing it. When she noticed him glancing at it, she jerked her hands down to her side.

“I work with the imperial space fleet and law enforcement sometimes, but I’m a civilian. You can call me captain if you like—the ship is mine.” She waved behind her. “But McCall or Richter are fine too.”

The two silent men behind the speaker gazed blandly at the ship. They wore blazer rifles slung across their backs on straps and had the hulking miens of bouncers. Security guards, she presumed.

Two days ago, she wouldn’t have guessed a maple syrup factory would need security. That had been before she looked up the business and how much the stuff sold for. Premium maple syrup, derived from sap tapped from trees that could trace their lineage to the seeds originally brought on the colony ships from Old Earth, went for a hundred imperial morats a gallon.

“It’s a very purple spaceship,” one of the guards said.

He wore a glove on his right hand but not his left. The skin on the exposed hand appeared slightly waxy, reminding McCall of Scipio’s not entirely realistic synthetic flesh.

“Yes,” she said when he looked at her, seeming to expect a response. “Criminals don’t see it as a threat until it’s too late.”

That was the reason she always gave for the unique paint job even though the real reason was “because it’s different, and I like that.” Maybe someday, she would be comfortable enough in her own skin to simply say that. But she’d spent too much of her life trying to pass for normal for anything else to come easily now.

“This is my assistant, Scipio,” McCall added. “He’s the one you spoke with on the vid.”

Scipio adjusted the navy blue suit he wore, the front open to reveal a white shirt fastened with horizontal bamboo clasps that were apparently “on trend” now.

“Greetings,” Scipio said.

The men nodded at him, but they were dismissive nods. The talking-to-the-woman’s-android-can’t-be-important nods she’d seen before.

“Captain Richter,” Dunham said. “I appreciate you coming out. My father owns this installation and the sugarbush plantation out back, but he’s retired, so I run things. The business has been in our family since this moon was first terraformed and settled. We make do, but we’re independent operators without wealthy backers, and the government…” He spread a hand, and McCall didn’t need to be good at reading faces to guess that he was refraining from complaining about the rules, regulations, and price-setting by the empire. One never knew who would report back to government officials, resulting in a “therapist” showing up and deciding a loyal subject needed a mental adjustment.

“You said someone stole some of your syrup?” McCall wanted to move things along—imperial politics wasn’t a passion for her and thanks to the less-than-legal way she’d liberated Scipio from his previous owner, she was the last person who would report someone to the government.

“Some?” one of the guards balked.

“We’re missing over two hundred tons of syrup,” Dunham said. “It’s valued at over four million morats.”

“Your farm sounds lucrative, sir,” Scipio observed.

Dunham grimaced. “That represents more than this year’s harvest. The sap flow for the last few years was good, and because the government dictates how much we can sell each year, we have—had—extra in storage. I have twenty employees in addition to family members working here, and we have production and distribution costs, and the empire takes almost fifty percent in taxes. We’re not wealthy, if that’s what you’re implying.”

Scipio tilted his head. “I was merely making an observation, Mr. Dunham.”

“Scipio is chatty,” McCall said. “Want to show me around and tell me everything? Wait, before we start, I want to make sure you know my expertise lies in finding people, right? I’m a skip tracer, not a detective. I specialize in locating people who’ve stopped making payments on their spaceships or ground vehicles and then skipped town—or the planet. I do occasionally find hardened criminals, too, but I’ve never been hired to look for sweets.”

“Whoever stole my syrup is a criminal.” Dunham scraped his fingers through his beard in an agitated gesture. “They’re going to sell it on the black market and leave me with imperials sniffing around, wondering if I arranged everything to avoid paying taxes. It’s only been three days since we discovered the theft. I’m hoping that last month’s Alliance spaceport bombing has made security too tough for the criminal to arrange transportation off the moon for such a large and illegal cargo. If so, it has to be somewhere on the moon, and we might yet recover it.”

McCall nodded, taking in the information without commenting, though she wondered why someone would have stolen something during a month when transporting it to the black market would have been next to impossible.

“This way, please, Captain.” Dunham and his guards headed toward an open roll-up door in the front of the warehouse.

McCall was relieved he wanted to get straight to work. Often, she had to deal with people who were shocked that she was a woman and asked all sorts of silly questions about what it was like working in a man’s business. Admittedly, her name—inspired by her mother’s obsession with Old Earth historical romance novels—didn’t suggest to potential clients that she would be a woman, but it wasn’t as if she was a bounty hunter and went down to planets to forcibly collect the criminals herself. She simply pointed them out for those who hired her and let them handle the rest.

“Captain,” Scipio said as they walked, “I am no more chatty than other androids of my line. As a personal assistant model, I have been programmed to gather information about people and anticipate their needs so that I may better serve. Do you find me overly garrulous for your tastes?”

“No. If you talk and ask questions, I won’t have to. It’s perfect.”

Scipio gave her Puzzled Expression Number One. “Humans are social animals. Do you not find interacting with them necessary for mental health?”

“No.”

“Is it because of your autism diagnosis?”

McCall flushed and almost snapped another, “No,” but Dunham looked back, and she gave Scipio a stop-talking gesture. She didn’t even share her breakfast preferences with strangers, much less what was in her medical records. Maybe she should have been more selective in the background information she’d given her new employee to pursue. She’d simply wanted him familiar with her work.

Thankfully, Dunham didn’t comment on the conversation. He came to a stop inside the chilly warehouse and turned to face her again.

“Let us negotiate before we start.”

“Fine with me,” McCall said.

“Your fees for finding people are quite high.”

“I’ve been in the field for fifteen years. I’m experienced and good at what I do.”

McCall squinted into the gloom, willing her eyes to adjust to the shadowy interior of the warehouse. Stacks of drums filled more than half of it, with doors in the back and on one side leading to offices. Considering the warehouse had suffered a substantial theft, she would have expected far fewer drums.

“Would you consider charging less to find syrup than you do people?” Dunham asked.

“As you pointed out, a person had to have stolen it. If we find the person, we’ll find your missing goods.”

“Unless this all happened months ago, and they’re already off-moon,” one of the men muttered.

“Is that likely?” McCall envisioned chasing maple-syrup thieves all over the Tri-Sun System and grimaced.

“No.” Dunham shook his head, but behind him, the guard nodded.

How could they have only found out three days ago if the theft could have happened months ago? Or even last month? Lights were on in the office, and the warehouse appeared to be staffed on a daily basis.

“It couldn’t have happened over the winter.” Dunham frowned at guard. “Everything was locked down solid, and nobody was on the premises. The undisturbed locks confirm that. It’s only been five weeks since we opened up for the year.”

The man opened his mouth to reply, but Dunham made a chopping gesture not unlike the one she’d given Scipio earlier. He turned back to McCall and took a deep breath.

“I’m a little short on liquid funds right now,” he told her.

McCall couldn’t help but give Scipio a very dry look. This was one of the reasons she usually took jobs from established corporations and the government rather than individuals.

He gazed back blandly.

“Would you consider partial payment in maple syrup?” Dunham asked. “Assuming you’re able to find the missing syrup and return it, we can pay you from those reserves.”

“That’s a lot of assumptions.”

“I can pay part of your fee in morats,” Dunham said, “if you agree to the case. And one percent of the syrup recovered.”

“One percent?” McCall had done pro bono work before, and was at the point in her career where she could afford to take time off for charitable activities, but she was skeptical that someone with millions of morats of syrup in his warehouse was a candidate for charity. “Make it twenty percent, and you can forgo the rest of the fee.”

“Twenty.” Dunham rocked back on his heels.

One of the guards reached out, perhaps intending to catch him by the beard if he tipped too far back.

But Dunham recovered and shook his head vigorously. “That’s two hundred tons of syrup. Your cargo hold wouldn’t even carry that much.”

“My ship has no trouble carrying that much cargo. You should see how many suits Scipio has in his closet.”

Dunham gave her what seemed to be the human equivalent of Puzzled Expression Number Two.

“My entire clothing collection weighs approximately thirty-four point seven three pounds, Captain.” Scipio also gave her the puzzled expression.

McCall waved away what had been an attempt at a joke. “Never mind. Give me a counter offer, Mr. Dunham.”

“Five percent.”

“Fifteen.” McCall hated negotiating and avoided all flea markets where bartering was commonplace, but she also didn’t like being taken advantage of. She deemed it very possible that she could spend months on this and not find the syrup in the end. People could be slathering it all over their pancakes right now. If it was unrecoverable, she would end up with nothing, and like Dunham, she had operating costs—a spaceship wasn’t an insignificant thing to keep running. “Fifteen percent and no fee. I’m taking all the risk here.”

Dunham took a deep breath. “Ten percent.” He stuck out his hand.

“Ten percent.” McCall nodded firmly, hoping that would do since she didn’t like touching strangers—or friends.

Dunham nodded back but kept his hand out. His brow creased, and he peered into her eyes. McCall held back a grimace and made herself clasp his hand and meet his eyes, lest he think her up to something duplicitous.

“Give me a tour and introduce me to your employees, please,” McCall said, pulling her netdisc out of her pocket.

All she truly wanted were the names of all the employees so she could look them up on the sys-net. If she had to rely on her ability to question people and ferret out whether they were lying by their body language, she wouldn’t be able to locate soap in a lavatory, much less a slick syrup criminal.

“This way.” Dunham waved to the guards, and they took up positions beside the exterior doors in the warehouse.

“Is someone on guard around the clock?” Scipio asked as they followed Dunham toward the offices.

“Now, they are. Before, I had a security system, but whoever stole the syrup got past it somehow. I’m not positive, but I think they created a loop of a time when nothing was going on and inserted that for the night of the theft. Or nights. A lot of syrup was moved. It would have taken time.”

“Do any of your employees have the expertise to do that?” McCall asked.

“Not that I know of. Other than the basic machinery in the sugarhouse, we’re a low-tech operation. You drill holes in the trees, string up the hoses, put the sap in buckets, boil it until it becomes syrup, then store it and ship it out.” Dunham stopped in front of two barrels that had been placed on the cement floor near the offices. “You keep asking about employees. Do you believe it was an inside job?”

“Don’t you?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t know who would be responsible. Desmarais is weird and likes computers, but he’s no mastermind criminal.”

“Weird?” McCall raised her eyebrows.

“I’ll introduce you to him. And to Tate, my operations manager, and also my chief finance officer, Takahashi. He’s smart enough he might be able to diddle with the security cameras, but he has access to the company bank account, so if he were going to steal…” Dunham shrugged.

“Understood.” McCall asked for first names to go with the surnames she’d been given, then called up the holodisplay on her netdisc and tapped them in to research later.

A raucous barking sounded somewhere outside.

“Guard dog?” McCall asked. “Or have you got someone with hounds searching for tracks in the trees?”

“We’re not quite that medieval here. It’s the junkyard dog next door. He barks whenever our forklift operator moves drums. Or if someone walks past his fence. Or breathes too heavily.” Dunham’s lips pressed together. “I know the owner and have a key to the lock so we can deposit our refuse there at a reduced rate, but lately, it hasn’t been worth the hassle.”

Dunham patted a drum, then pulled off a lid that had been loosened. A pungent sweet odor wafted from the viscous dark liquid inside.

“This is maple syrup.” He tried to remove the lid on the drum next to it, but that one hadn’t been loosened. “Mahajan.” He waved to the guard with the single gloved hand. “I’m in need of a can opener.”

“Funny, boss.”

“I aim to entertain.”

“I’m not that amused since this is the fiftieth time you’ve said that.”

“I still find it amusing,” the second guard called from his station.

Mahajan used his gloved hand to offer a screw-you gesture before gripping the lid with the bare one and tugging it off without apparent effort.

“Thanks.” Dunham shooed the guard back, then pointed again at the first drum. “Syrup,” he repeated to McCall. Presumably for dramatic flair and not because he thought she was slow. He waved his hand over a far clearer liquid inside the second drum. “This is water.” He spat on the floor and pointed toward several stacks of drums. “All of those were once filled with maple syrup and are now filled with water.”

“Every drum in the warehouse?” Scipio asked.

“Not every one, but more than half.”

McCall stared bleakly at the water, realizing this was why they didn’t know when exactly the theft had occurred. The drums had still been present in the warehouse. And full of liquid.

“Have you reported the theft to law enforcement?” Scipio asked.

A back door opened, and two men walked inside and turned into a room at the rear of the warehouse.

“Yes, but they haven’t sent anyone out yet. They’re all busy sniffing around the spaceport and trying to find Alliance sympathizers. It could be weeks before they bother coming out here.”

Dunham frowned and tapped an earstar affixed to his helix. “Dunham here… Yes? Just a minute.” He held up a finger toward McCall and walked into one of the offices.

“Let’s snoop,” McCall whispered to Scipio.

“Snoop? We have been invited here to perform an investigation. Does the word snoop not have furtive and perhaps illegal connotations?”

“Fine, let’s investigate.”

McCall headed toward the room the newcomers had gone into, wanting to see what else was in the warehouse. She glanced at the guards to see if they would object, but they must have believed she was allowed to snoop.

The back door opened, and another man came in, removing gloves and turning into a different room. McCall glimpsed bare trees outside with trails through dirty gray snow before the door shut.

One of the rooms was simply a lavatory—she decided not to snoop in there. Another was a break area with the smell of coffee hanging in the air. Three men and a woman sat around one table, warming their hands on steaming mugs. At another table, a slender man with salt-and-pepper hair sat by himself, watching something on a netdisc holodisplay. He glanced at the doorway when McCall peeked in, but looked back at his display without making eye contact. The people at the other table hadn’t noticed her.

“Get their names and what they do here, will you, Scipio?” She felt guilty foisting gruntwork off on him, but he was a personal assistant android and, as far as she could determine, had no aversion to speaking with strangers.

“Certainly, Captain.”

“You can call me McCall, you know. It’s just the two of us. You don’t have to be so formal.”

“Certainly, Captain McCall.”

“Thank you,” she said dryly.

He stepped into the break room, and she opened the back door. The forest of maple trees started up at the edge of the pavement ten meters away and stretched back as far as the eye could see. Tubes ran around and between some of the trees. Others simply had buckets hanging from tiny spouts that had been inserted into the trunks.

“Not a high-tech industry indeed,” she murmured, amused by the juxtaposition of the buckets dangling from trees and her spaceship parked out front. A lot on the other side of the sugarhouse held ground vehicles, but they didn’t appear any more high-tech than the tube setup.

The dog barked, his ringing voice louder with the door open. McCall could see part of the fence of what had to be the junkyard Dunham had mentioned. It was so close to the warehouse, almost touching it on one side, that she wondered if the property had once been owned by the same family.

“Hate this slagging job,” a man muttered, walking out of the trees, lugging a wobbly hoverboard, its back end dragging in the snow. A huge pile of equipment was stacked atop it, and thanks to its ill-functioning hover engine, the man was responsible for toting all the weight himself.

He didn’t glance at her or seem to notice her as he headed for a door large enough for the sled to fit inside. He was young with dark skin and hair. Hopefully, Scipio would get his name, and she could look him up.

“Oh, uhm, excuse me,” someone said behind her.

McCall stepped aside, holding the door open for a man in hat and parka to step outside. It was the person who’d been sitting by himself in the break room. Had he slipped out before Scipio could question him? Or after?

She was inclined to let him go without saying anything, but he stopped and looked at her curiously before shifting his gaze past her and to the trees.

“We need to wait for the temperature to rise two more degrees before the sap will flow,” he said. “There’s little point in sending men out to check the lines this morning.”

“Just what I was thinking,” McCall said.

“Are you here to look at the Tercoraosa?”

He wasn’t looking at her, which made McCall glance around to see if someone else had walked up. No, the grumpy fellow with the hoverboard had disappeared inside.

“The what?” she asked, feeling stupid. It wasn’t a feeling she liked, so she vowed to look up the word when she got back to the ship.

“The Tercoraosa fungus. The original colonists were careful not to bring Anthracnose, Verticillium wilt, or Phyllosticta mimima with them from Old Earth, but there were indigenous fungi on this moon that can be problematic for non-native species as well as native vegetation.”

“I’m here to investigate the theft of the maple syrup.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed, like he had hoped she was some fungus-studying scientist with a passion for trees.

“Sorry.”

He shrugged and fell silent.

And this was why she preferred to let Scipio interact with strangers.

“What’s your name?” she forced herself to ask.

“Louis Desmarais.”

Ah. The “weird” employee Dunham had mentioned.

“I’m a botanist,” he added, glancing in her direction, but not at her face. “Did you know there were approximately one hundred and twenty eight species of maple tree on Old Earth? The colonists only brought three with them, and one was irrevocably lost. This species is most prolific in terms of sap production, which we turn into syrup in the sugarhouse.”

“Desmarais,” Dunham snapped from the hallway. “Break’s over. Stop pestering our guest.”

“Yes, sir.” Desmarais—Louis—dipped his head and shuffled into the woods.

A bark came from the fence, and a huge furry head appeared in a spot with a missing board. The dog had to be the size of one of those syrup drums. McCall couldn’t tell if it was wagging—the gap wasn’t large enough—but it wasn’t baring its teeth and snarling the way she’d imagined when Dunham had described it. Louis waved at it as he passed the fence, and the dog disappeared from sight.

“You won’t get anything useful from Desmarais,” Dunham said. “Unless you want to hear about trees. Or flowers. In the spring he regales us with his knowledge of flowers.”

“We all have our passions,” McCall murmured, feeling an urge to stand up for Louis, even if she’d just met him.

“Come on. I’ll give you a tour of the sugarhouse.”

McCall trailed him back toward the other building, reminding herself to get the name of the surly man, though she suspected someone in the middle of becoming extremely wealthy wouldn’t be grumpy. No, she needed to find the person wandering around elated. Elated but very nervous.

~

Part II is available now!