“Leaving so soon?” Agent Weathers called after them, and the crew halted. He reminded Nilah of a terrier—always steadfast whether anyone took them seriously or not. “I’ll need to see you in my office.”
Nilah sighed. She’d hoped to get off this depressing prison hulk of a planet and score a little vacation. If Cedric was flagging them down, he probably intended to send them somewhere unpleasant. He excelled in finding the worst places to conduct covert operations.
Cordell gave up on his smoke break, lumbered back to his crew, and cocked an eyebrow. “Surely it can wait a cycle? We only just arrived, and everyone busted their humps to get here.”
“Fresh intel. I’ve got something interesting for you.” At this, he gave the rest of those gathered a little wave.
“Well, well…” The captain fetched a dispenser from his pocket and pulled out a toothpick with his teeth. Nilah knew he’d have much preferred a cigarette and was secretly dying inside from the interruption. “‘Fresh intel.’ What do y’all say?”
“I’d say we haven’t caught a break in months,” said Boots, straightening her bright yellow Rook Velocity jacket. “We just put Grimsby down. Time to get the next chump in the hopper.”
“And what do the rest of you think?” asked Cordell.
“I was promised shore leave,” said Nilah. “So how good is this one?”
“Very,” said Cedric.
“We can sleep when they’re dead,” said Orna, throwing an arm around Nilah. “Lead on, Agent.”
The crew shuffled into Special Agent Weathers’s temporary prison office—a three-walled cubicle at the end of the last row of the admin ward, beside the custodial bot cleaning station. It was clear whoever was in charge of office assignments liked Cedric Weathers as much as everyone else. On the way in, Cedric made a quick pass through the rest of the cube farm, making sure there were no other staffers present. Since it was the middle of the night cycle, the only other folks in the prison were the guards, distributed through the various wings.
“Going to a lot of trouble to make sure we’re alone, mate,” said Nilah, cramming into his cubicle with the others.
“That’s because we’re going to run a private operation.” Cedric waved out a projection and tacked it to the wall. “Compass eyes only. Not even Special Branch gets this one.”
Cordell perked up, the epaulets sparkling on his captain’s jacket. Nilah noticed that he always took special steps to make sure his old Arca Defense Force clothes shined in front of Cedric. He maneuvered his toothpick from one side of his wide grin to another.
“Just us?” he asked. “What kind of budget?”
The Compass man chortled. “Do whatever is required. Send receipts.”
“Oh, I like those jobs,” said Aisha Jan. She, like her husband, Malik Jan, had been napping before the execution. Nilah envied their ability to sleep anywhere they wanted. “Nice hotels, good food…”
“If it’s a civilized world,” Malik added.
“I feel like I never get off the ship,” said Aisha. “It’d better have some good food. That’s my favorite part.”
“My favorite part is the deserving target at the end,” said Alister Ferrier, crossing his pale, freckled arms. His red hair stood up at an odd angle from where he’d been trying to nap, as well. Jeannie, his twin sister, came up behind him and smoothed it down.
“You’re doing this off-books because of the mole in the Special Branch?” asked Boots.
“Because you’re the right crew for the job,” said Cedric.
Boots cleared her throat and nudged Nilah. “Mole.”
Cordell smirked at Boots’s comment, then said, “Enough beating around the bush. We’re all tired, remember? Let’s have it.”
“I’m sure you all remember catching Grimsby at Mizuhara,” said Cedric.
The woman’s dead eyes were still too fresh in Nilah’s mind to recall much of their brief day in the Thousand Waterfalls resort. She’d been responsible for bringing Rebecca to the Intergalactic Criminal Court on Compass orders. At the time, they’d been excited to remove Harriet Fulsom’s daughter from the game board, but now it felt hollow. It was just an arrest—they hadn’t actually stopped anything that they knew of.
“Grimsby was there to buy something,” said Cedric. “A data cube from the estate of Sekhet Mostafa.”
Boots’s face lit up. “Ha! They’re going after that old crap?”
Cedric leaned back in his squeaky old office chair. “Of course you’ve heard of her.”
“Sure,” laughed Boots. “Used to be part of this group on the Link called the Graverobbers, where we’d swap stories about various historical figures. The place was a gold mine for me. Easy to sell a salvage map if you can stick some famous dead weirdo to the story and—” She paused to look at Cedric.
A smile crooked the corner of his mouth. “I’m not going after you for old frauds committed, if that’s why you stopped talking.”
“Just checking, bud. Anyway, one of the guys was obsessed with Sekhet Mostafa. Had like eight thousand murder theories.” Boots paused to grab one of Cedric’s clean mugs off the charger on his desk and drop a cube of government-issued coffee into it. The black shape melted into an oily splash, and hot steam filled the air.
Nilah couldn’t stand the stuff, but she watched as Cordell and Alister ducked in after Boots to fill mugs of their own. “Was she the murderer or the victim?”
“Maybe neither,” said Boots. “She was this kid from one of the smaller banking clans—rebel child, liked to adventure, obsessed with finding Origin. She’s basically forgotten now, but she used to be quite the scandal on Taitu.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
Boots took a hearty sip and went to set her mug on the desk, but Cedric preempted her with a coaster before it could touch. “You wouldn’t have heard of her, Nilah. Had to be more than a hundred years since this went down. Mostafa was kind of like a professional cultist, too. She bounced around between about a dozen of them, and when her family threatened to disown her, she disappeared.”
Orna snorted. “What, Mummy and Daddy didn’t like all the liars and crooks dipping into their fortune?”
“She took it with her,” said Boots. “Cleaned them out, down to the very last coin.”
“I bet they disowned her after that,” said Cordell.
“There was nothing left, save for their land holdings, but with the family in arrears and cash-poor, they folded. Everything they owned was sold off—but there was a real market for Sekhet’s possessions. Lots of folks had a morbid fascination with her fate.”
Cordell’s toothpick swirled on his lip as he chewed it. “So why did you call it ‘that old crap’?”
“It’s like this,” said Boots. “She was in so many cults, and so many locations, with so many freaks… you can link her to almost any conspiracy theory. It’s all too far afield.”
Alister scowled at his coffee, obviously tasting government issue for the first time. Nilah had learned to avoid any food in classified areas.