“I have opened an allowance account for you,” Robert Salmela told Jet on the final day of their trip, as the passengers all gathered their things and prepared at last to depart the starliner. They stood in the departure lounges in restless crowds, anticipation buzzing through the sterile air. Each was followed by a luggage drone or, like Sal, a slave carrying the bags.

  The human gestured in the air with one hand; he wore slender silver rings on each finger which acted as an interface for his cryscomputer. To Jet’s UI vision, a holographic chart appeared in the air above his palm displaying a modest deion account of a couple thousand coin.

  “This isn’t part of your pay; it’s considered a business expense, so don’t worry about spending it. This is for food, hotels, clothes, basically whatever you need when I send you on a business trip.”

  “Send me…?”

  “Oh you’ll be taking quite a few trips for me, Jet. Get used to traveling on a starliner, although in the future we’ll try to get you upgraded quarters. I didn’t really have a choice on this one, I apologize for that.”

  Jet nodded. He’d found the week or so of travel very restorative; his body felt better than he had in years, and the sore leg he’d been nursing had finally completely healed. He hadn’t slept so much since he was a boy. Plus there’d been no cap on how many carnivore biscuits he could order and he’d eaten at least his body weight’s worth he was pretty sure.

  “How long do I have to make it last?” Jet asked, studying the account holo. Two thousand coin would go for a while but…

  “Oh this is weekly. I know it’s not much but it will refresh every Monday.”

  Jet felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He couldn’t speak for a second, then cleared his throat and managed hoarsely, “weekly, sir?”

  “Yes. So don’t go overboard, but it should be enough for taxis and things.” Then Robert Salmela was too busy checking his departure paperwork to bother with Jet, and Jet was left to stand there and digest this information.

  ‘Weekly. Nice.’ She stepped into view around him, wearing something a lot less human-themed than when she’d first appeared.

  His relationship (he hated to admit it was one but there was nothing else to call it) with Keeri had progressed inevitably during the nine day starliner trip. They’d become at this point quite familiar.

  She was there every day, fetching things from the vastness of the Stelnet for him, showing him the sights, educating him. It behooved her to do so. As she’d pointed out, his survival was her survival.

  She’d begun to pick up on his tastes, his expressions, his hints, his tone of voice. He’d tried to keep it strictly professional (she was, after all, not real) but she didn’t have such qualms. One day she’d shown up wearing a chic asymmetrical Bantan female wrap, and noting his pleasure at the change, she’d been adjusting her wardrobe to his liking ever since. Now she was dressed in something that bared one slender shoulder and arm, and her long, sinuous tail. He couldn’t help looking.

  He cleared his throat and tried to ignore the tail. “Are there restrictions on this allowance?”

  ‘Not really. Oh,’ she glanced up and to the side, ‘he’s changed the default settings on your account controls. You no longer need his permission to purchase anything so long as it’s under five hundred deion. Also he’s given you a lot more privacy, and waived his right to review your search history. Basically he doesn’t care so long as it’s all ‘normal use.’’

  “Wow.” Jet let that sink in as he watched the docking reports crawl around the room’s ceiling trim, letting the passengers know how far along they were in the door-opening process.

  He thought about what he would do with two thousand deion a week. That was a lot… especially for a man who hadn’t owned money since he was a little boy.

  A whiff of strange new air came to him. The docking report changed to ‘Umbilical Established. Atmosphere exchange active.’ It was the smell of Matrodonosian… and it was… different.

  Not bad. Just… not what he’d expected. He couldn’t define the smell. Industrial maybe, but very organic. The smell of wet rocks and metal. A faint taste of ozone. Something electric. It made his heart beat faster.

  Master Sal took a deep breath and grinned. “Ah! Smell that? That’s the docking caverns. We’re actually inside the planetoid right now. You’ll see when they—” he started, but as he pointed to the walls suddenly they changed into big windows (holographically of course) and they could see what surrounded the ship.

  They were in a vast cavern. Vast. It was so huge that entire piers full of ship’s berths spanned the massive gap, vaguely lit by holo lights. The entrance to the massive cavern above them was just a huge ragged hole in the planetoid’s crust which ships ascended and descended through. Above it there was nothing but stars — Matrodonosian the planet didn’t have an atmosphere.

  “How did they make such a hole?” Jet muttered, awed. He hadn’t really expected an answer, but Master Sal was enthusiastic enough to give one.

  “Mining. I don’t know how much of Matrodonosian’s history you know, but it was once the biggest mining venture in Gano! This was the only place to find drelk ore.”

  “What is drelk ore?”

  Sal chuckled. “Doesn’t matter now, it was only ever really valuable to the Bruskers. Nobody else had much use for it. The Alliance used to use it as part of the gravity manipulation systems for their ships, but then they found cheaper ways to do it.

  “But still, drelk ore was so in demand by the ancient Heranom Empire, and then by the Bruskers, that they literally mined the whole planetoid out. There isn’t an ounce of drelk left now, just these caverns that run all the way down into the planetoid core, they tell me. They built inside all of them, and there’s more city inside the planetoid now than on the surface!”

  The docking lights in the room all turned green, and a cheery breathy artificial voice announced to the crowds, “Docking successful. Welcome to Matrodonosian, and thank you for choosing Adensa Starliners. Please watch your step on your way out.”

  With a hiss of the air seal breaking, and a subtle change of pressure, the inner doors to the loading rooms shifted and lifted in synch with the outer doors, and the sound and atmosphere of the starliner dock rushed in. It was a busy terminal owned by Adensa Starliners, full of travelers and luggage and cargo and announcements. The air that came from it was cold but strangely thrilling.

  Sal got moving at once, eagerly following the crowds through the doors, and Jet tried to keep up. The smaller and faster humans tended to cut him off so he was delayed a bit, but after some maneuvering with the bags he managed to catch up to his Master.

  By the time his long-legged stride brought him to Sal, Sal had already ordered them a taxi. It was waiting for them as they crossed the expansive Pier hall and exited into an even larger Quay.

  The Quay was a piece of the city, streets and all, which reached right down to the Piers. All of the City of Matrodonosian, in its various forms, was built inside giant enclosures — here, part of the cave made up the back wall and ceiling, the front of the enclosure was massive panels of transparent litris crystal like windows looking out over the docking cavern. They were dusted with centuries upon centuries of space dust and debris, making the view hazy.

  The taxi was a very unsafe looking contraption; basically a hover platform with a few bench seats bolted on, and hand rails around the outside. No roll bars, no seat belts. No driver.

  “There’s a trunk in the back for the luggage,” Sal told him as he chose a seat.

  Jet rounded the vehicle to the back as its trunk popped open helpfully for him. He loaded the bags inside, then just as he was shutting the trunk the thing started to take off. He had to jump — and flap a little — to catch one of the rails and pull himself onto the back bench seat, barely sitting down in time.

  Before he knew what was happening, they were flying through the insane labyrinthine tunnels and caverns of Matrodonosian City, and Jet was hanging on to the handrail for his life. It was hard to ignore instinct but he somehow kept his wings shut. He couldn’t stop himself from ducking every time it looked like they swooped way too close to an overhang or tunnel ceiling.

  The city was a rat’s maze, an absolute nightmare for getting lost. There was no way to tell where they were going. Giant mine shafts were connected to caverns which were connected to artificially built halls, all of them crammed top and bottom full of buildings, and then suddenly they’d fly through a stone-cut tunnel right into a crater on the planetoid’s surface. In the blink of an eye the sky would open up above them full of stars, but between them and space was a vast dusty habitat dome capping the crater.

  Inside these city-crater-domes was more city. Sky-towers rising up from the flat crater floor like stalagmites, and towers hanging down from the dome itself like stalactites, all of them shimmering with a million brightly lit windows like golden stars.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The free air inside the dome was full of traffic. Thousands, millions of vehicles of every kind — and a large percentage of them were these insane drone taxis without roofs or proper restraint systems.

  Sal loved it; he held onto the grab-bar and whooped when the taxi pulled a maneuver, but Jet was petrified. He held onto the rail until his arms ached, almost coming off of the bench more times than he could count.

  The taxi swooped down toward a row of large, fancy buildings in the ‘downtown’ section of the crater area. It nose-dived straight for a clear spot on an upper landing pad, pulling up at the last second and then settling serenely, gently, as if it had always flown like a butterfly.

  Jet couldn’t get off the insane thing fast enough. He glared at the horrible little taxi the whole time he was pulling the bags out of the trunk, prepared to start kicking and cursing at it should it attempt to fly off before he had retrieved them all.

  Maybe the AI in the vehicle sensed his displeasure — it allowed him to finish his chore and even close the trunk before it sedately took off and flew away like it never did anything crazy.

  He glared hard after it, then picked up the bags and followed Sal.

  Before they’d gone halfway across the landing platform, a tall thin man with distinctive Brusker features strode out of the fancy glass doors to the building with his arms raised and a delighted expression on his face. He grabbed Sal’s shoulders while exclaiming loudly that he was so, so glad to see him and kissed him on both cheeks.

  Thankfully he ignored the slave. Jet just stood back and studied with distaste the man’s fancy and rather ridiculously exaggerated chartreuse green ultra-fashionable business suit. The man reeked of perfume.

  “Rooooobert!” cried the silly man. “SO glad to see you. Do you know that everything has absolutely fallen apart without you. Everything. All shipments are lost or stopped… you HAVE to save us. You are the only one who can! I am SO glad you were able to cut your vacation short and SO sorry you had to.”

  “Sounds like an average day at work,” Sal said wryly.

  Finally the overdone man got around to looking at Jet. His expression became genuinely puzzled. “You brought home… a souvenir??”

  Sal laughed, patting the man on the shoulder as he turned with him and began to walk toward the glass doors of the building. “You might say that. Saw him and just couldn’t resist. He’s rather magnificent, isn’t he?”

  The floofy man wasn’t sure if Sal was joking or not and just kept looking back at Jet with a confused and faintly terrified expression.

  Jet wondered if he was joking, too.

  It wasn’t until they passed the threshold of the building that Sal shifted gears suddenly to more serious talk, but his smooth demeanor and warm smile didn’t shift a bit. “He’s going to be very useful to us, Dan. Very useful.”

  “I hesitate to speculate,” Dan said warily, stopping in the lobby to turn and look more appraisingly at Jet. “He’s muscle. Do we really need…?”

  “You tell me, Dan,” Sal hooked his thumbs into his pockets and assumed a very casual, but confident, stance. As if he knew all the answers to the questions he was about to ask.

  Dan dropped his voice to a quiet, anxious whisper. “If we escalate this, Sal…”

  “It’s already escalated, Dan. They’re the ones who started this.” He looked at Dan, seeing the man’s discomfort, then modulated his voice down to an encouraging, coercive tone. “Look, all he is is the messenger boy. That’s it. We don’t have to actually do anything. The suggestion is enough.”

  “Are you… sure…?”

  “Yes. It came to me while I was on Banta. It just… struck me. I realized this is exactly what we need.” His grin was brilliant. “It’ll work.”

  “So you… bought him? Makardian Company now owns a slave?”

  “We do. But think of him as an investment. I’ve given him the option of working off his slavery. He’s more… indentured.”

  “Oh.” Dan seemed a little more comfortable with that. He relaxed slightly, looking Jet over again. “Well. Alright… I suppose it couldn’t hurt to try him. But what if they call our bluff?”

  “If our clients actively turn on us, we have bigger problems than choosing who we are going to hire to slap the starlight out of them, don’t we?”

  “Hmm.” Dan crossed his arms, still not entirely pleased with the situation. “He’s going to need clothes. You can’t have our representative walking around in nothing but a goddamned loincloth and a cryscomputer.”

  Sal laughed and looked Jet over as well.

  Being scrutinized by both the human and half-human made Jet feel self-conscious and he looked down at himself and the luggage at his feet. His heavily scaled body was muscled, compact, his worn scales dented and scarred from a lifetime of labor. He’d never really thought about clothing — on Banta it was used for ornament more than anything. But humans needed it, and felt uncomfortable being around people who didn’t.

  “I’m going to need to unlock him, too,” Sal said in a quiet, secretive tone.

  “Of course,” said the other offhandedly. “That would be the first thing we’d do. In fact I believe we have Vaugn on premises. We can get it done right now.”

  “Vaugn is here? Lucky day.”

  Together the two men started walking down the long, shiny halls of the impressive building. Jet picked up the luggage and followed, not knowing what else to do.

  “Oh Jet,” said Sal as an afterthought, “put the bags in my office will you?”

  In his UI vision, a blue glowing line appeared on the floor heading a different direction. He stopped and looked at it, then followed it, wondering if he’d be able to find the humans again once he was separated.

  The line took him down a hall and up a floor, to a very expensive looking office with real wood doors. They opened for him as he approached.

  The office inside was the kind of lavish that Jet had only heard about. As a child, he’d seen a couple of holo-shows with places that looked like this.

  It made him stop just inside the threshold to stare around him. Wood paneling… mother of pearl inlay… all of the materials had to have been flown in from a living world. That made them expensive this far into the void.

  ‘Come on, Jet. Don’t keep them waiting.’ She stepped out from behind him and paced slowly through the room, casually studying this or that. A little statue, an ornamental sword, a bookshelf.

  “This is nice,” Jet said admiringly as he put the luggage in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Careful what you say aloud,’ she warned offhand. ‘Pretty sure you’re being watched by the building AI.’

  Of course the building was sentient. Damn humans… everything in their world had eyeballs, and usually attitude to go with it.

  Jet just sighed. As if that was a command, a red line appeared on the floor leading him back out.

  He shot her a wry look, and followed the red line. She smiled with the same dryness, and seemed to follow along.

  The door almost hit him as he crossed the threshold, it closed so fast.

  Yah, attitude.

  Jet followed the line through the building, down two floors, to a level full of workrooms. The security here was a little higher; there were a few doors he had to go through which he knew the building AI could lock if it didn’t want him there.

  It looked to him like chemistry labs. Industrial packaging and mixing facilities. They were manufacturing something… which smelled. A lot.

  By the time he’d reached the computer lab at the end of the hall he was starting to guess what it was that his new boss did for a living.

  He entered the small computer lab to find Master Sal and the heavily perfumed Dan Bodari chatting with a young, good-looking skinny human kid dressed in an extremely fashionable casual suit. It looked like it was made of websilk, steel gray colored with gold embroidery on the edges and a long tailored jacket. He had the hairstyle to go with it too; perfectly rumpled and hanging down over one eye, with a slender gold headband across his forehead. He had gold rings on each finger, and a gold ring around both pupils. He looked like a magazine ad.

  “Jet! There you are,” Sal said, gesturing him forward. “This is a business associate of ours. Meet Ekar Vaugn, a local superstar of sorts.”

  Ekar Vaugn chuckled. “I don’t know if superstar is the word I’d choose, Sal.”

  “When everyone on the planetoid knows your name…”

  Ekar shrugged, then fixed Jet with a very piercing look. As if he was looking right through him.

  Immediately Keeri appeared beside Jet, and gasped, startled. ‘Oh my…’ she said, staring at Ekar Vaugn in shock. ‘He’s rigged.’

  “Rigged?” Jet muttered under his breath, so quietly they couldn’t hear it.

  ‘Yes, rigged. He’s reading my entire profile, in fact… he’s listening to us.’

  Ekar gave the faintest ghost of a smile and his glance met Jet’s eye. Yes he was listening. Suddenly a holo of Vaugn appeared standing right next to Keeri, even though the real human was still sitting in the chair. He had a thumb hooked into his pocket and a fashionable slouch.

  ‘Hi. Just thought I’d give you a private heads-up as to what is happening here, since your Artificium is quite sharp. Just between the three of us. I’m a C-5 Operator, just to confirm that for you.’ He looked at Jet and saw that the Bantan had no idea what he was talking about. ‘That means I’ve got a military-grade sentient crystanar on my back.’

  ‘It means he can do practically anything to any computer,’ Keeri said, stiffly, as if she was actually scared. Her stare did not leave him. ‘He can hack military ships if he wants to.’

  ‘Sure. But there’s a lot more money to be made fixing little problems for very rich smugglers. They want you jailbroken; that means I’m going to be giving Keeri here a little upgrade. Don’t worry, I won’t mess with her personality profile. I’m just going to slip her a little extra package which will give her more options than a normal Stelnet Account has.’

  While the holographic version of him was talking, the flesh and blood Ekar Vaugn was making little gestures in the air in front of him, doing his magic with a user interface that only he could see. The real him was also chatting with the bosses.

  “Alright, so you want your man here to be free to move through Stelnet zones without backchecks?”

  “And go stealth,” Sal said.

  “Of course. Stealth is part of the base package. Where do you want him registered? I assume not Matro.”

  “Anywhere is fine. Whatever you have as far as availability.”

  “You want him registered to Avath like you are? Or maybe Khrin…?”

  “Avath is fine.”

  The rigged human reached into a pocket and brought out a large ring. It was made of gunmetal black-silver with an onyx stone. He handed it to Jet. “That will size itself to you, go ahead and put that on.”

  Jet took the ring and slid it onto a finger. It was a little too big at first, but then strangely the ring contracted, gently, until it fit perfectly. He admired it; he’d never owned jewelry and this looked expensive.

  “Do you want him to come up as a slave, or hide that?”

  “Hide it. Where he’s going, and what he’s doing, nobody needs to know.”

  The black stone on the ring flashed briefly with some sort of electricity as Ekar did something, gesturing to the air. For just a moment, a white symbol appeared on the stone then faded away.

  “How about authorities? What level do you want him able to access?”

  Sal and Dan looked at one another for a long moment, facial expressions having a silent conversation. Dan shrugged, and Sal turned to Ekar Vaugn. “How about V.I.P., we just want to use him as a courier basically.”

  “So he won’t be traveling armed?”

  “No. I don’t think…” Sal glanced back at the looming Bantan, “I don’t think he’ll need an actual weapon.”

  Jet raised his brows. Weapon? He glanced at Keeri.

  She stiffened and took a breath as a ripple of light went through her. ‘Oh… my…’ she whispered.

  “There we go,” Ekar said calmly, making one or two more gestures in the air. “All done. He’s set. Anything else I can do for you good fellows today?”

  “No I think that’s all we can afford right now,” Dan joked, but he wasn’t entirely joking.

  Ekar stood up and bowed slightly. “Good doing business as always with Clan Brusker. Clan Lartha sends its regards. I’ll find my own way out.”

  “Until next time,” Sal saluted his back as the svelte young man left with a bounce in his step.

  Both human and half-human turned to look at Jet like men who had just purchased an assault rifle.

  “I think he’s set,” Sal grinned. “Want to try him out?”

  The smile on Dan’s face wasn’t entirely nice. Actually it was really very sinister. “With alacrity, my good sir.”

  Sal smirked.