Life’s hard when you’re on the run from a vengeful pirate-king…
The crew of the You Sexy Thing attempts to navigate the hazards of opening a pop-up restaurant and the dangers of a wrathful pirate-king seeking vengeance in Devil’s Gun by Cat Rambo, the sequel to You Sexy Thing and second book of her Disco Space Opera series. We’re thrilled to share two entire chapters of the novel, out from Tor Books on August 29!
When Niko and her crew find that the intergalactic Gate they’re planning on escaping through is out of commission, they make the most of things, creating a pop-up restaurant to serve the dozens of other stranded ships.
But when an archaeologist shows up claiming to be able to fix the problem, Niko smells something suspicious cooking. Nonetheless, they allow Farren to take them to an ancient site where they may be able to find the weapon that could stop Tubal Last before he can take his revenge.
There, in one of the most dangerous places in the Known Universe, each of them will face ghosts from their past: Thorn attempts something desperate and highly illegal to regain his lost twin, Atlanta will have to cast aside her old role and find her new one, Dabry must confront memories of his lost daughter, and Niko is forced to find Petalia again, despite a promise not to seek them out.
Meanwhile, You Sexy Thing continues to figure out what it wants from life—which may not be the same desire as Niko and the rest of the crew.
2
They all prepared for launch in their own particular ways. Part of Niko’s ritual was checking in with each of her crew members, and she lost little time in cornering Skidoo in the corridor. The Tlellan had recently augmented the lotion that helped keep her skin moist in the ship’s drier air, and moved in a cloud of vanilla scent.
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“What do you want, Skidoo, once we’re done with all this?” Niko asked. “Don’t you want to settle down and raise a family at some point?”
The Tlellan squelched in amusement. “Is being good joke, Captain. Perhaps you is being telling our government?”
“I don’t understand.”
Skidoo blinked at her. “Is being complicated.”
Gio, en route to the kitchen, paused. “Tlellans die after they lay their eggs,” he signed. “The government oversees reproduction and mandates it.”
Skidoo shuddered delicately. “Some is not being wanting such,” she said. “So I is being going off-world, and that is being illegal.”
“Not to mention the pleasure mods,” Gio signed. “Our Skidoo is a criminal in Tlellan eyes just for existing.” He gave her a fond pat. The Tlellan roiled a tentacle to caress his hand.
“So what you are telling me you want is actually a negative,” Niko said dryly. “You don’t want to settle down and reproduce, because that would mean dying.”
“We is all being wanting to be living, Captain.”
“It seems too simple, Skid. There has to be more to it than that.”
“There is being love.” Two more tentacles uncurled, one tapping Niko’s wrist, the other touching Gio’s face. He hooted softly in affectionate pleasure.
Niko smiled involuntarily but could not resist pushing further. “Unpack that for me a little?”
The Tlellan flexed her tentacles in a curious, almost shy gesture. “Among my people, is being no bond-love, love being between one person and another. It is being you, always being you, never anyone else, because there is no bond-love. There is being no word for such a thing, and when I am being coming to these new places and am being talking and being talking, I am being confused by this. It is being years before I am being understanding it and I am only being that because I am being loving with those around me. Sometimes it is being pleasure and that is being good, but mostly it is being friendship.”
“Tlellans have no friends?” Niko said, bemused by the notion.
“Tlellans is not being capable of such.”
“Then how are you capable of such?”
“I am being no longer worried by things that is being occupying other Tlellans, so I am being having time for such things.”
“So you will continue along with us,” Niko said, feeling reassured. Skidoo’s infectious joy was part of what kept them all together, and her skills at comms were unparalleled.
A tentacle wrapped around her wrist, squeezing in reassurance. “Till my final days is being, is always.”
Niko looked at Gio. “What are you hoping that we’ll do?” she asked.
He looked puzzled. “Do when?” he signed.
“Within the next year or so. After we’re clear of Tubal Last. Is there any place you hope we’ll go?”
He shook his head. “I want to go with you and the rest,” he signed. “Wherever that might be. And cook with Dabry.”
“And is that how it will be all your life?” she asked, more dubiously. Surely he had ambitions beyond such things. But she wouldn’t push on the question of family, not after Skidoo’s response.
He grinned. “You will make a restaurant, sooner or later,” he signed. “I will come and chop fruits and vegetables and whatever else there, just as I do here now.”
“Very well,’” she said, and they nodded at each other.
She paused before moving on. “Talon didn’t show up earlier,” she said. “Anyone seen him lately?”
“Saw signs he’d been in the food stores grabbing himself something,” Gio signed. “But in person? No.”
Niko sighed. Sooner or later the problem of Talon would have to be faced.
Talon had not moved when he heard Dabry’s knock an hour ago, and he had not moved since then. He sat hugging a clothes hamper to him. His room—his alone, which was so strange and lonely—smelled like his brother, Thorn, his fellow warrior scout, who was gone now, and that was unendurable.
And the scent was fading away, getting fainter and fainter with every day, and that was still more unendurable. Because that was the smell that had always been there, as though it was a part of him, and if it was gone entirely, so was Thorn.
He refused to let the ship clean this room, but even with that, his own smell was overcoming his brother’s. He had put all of Thorn’s clothes in a single hamper and sometimes he stuck his head in there and just breathed.
And sometimes he stuck his head in there and just cried.
He didn’t like crying in front of people, because his mother had always said that they were all warriors, and that warriors had no time for tears. He knew the ship could see and hear him crying, but the ship was always there and so you could pretend it wasn’t.
Tubal Last had killed Thorn in order to make the rest of them even more scared. It had worked—Talon had been terrified back there in the pirate haven—but now he was angry more than he had ever been scared.
That anger was like a part of him now. It stayed with him all the time, when he looked at anything or tried to think about things other than Thorn. It crawled up in his throat and kept him from eating or drinking. If he tried to sleep, it circled around inside him until all he could do was lie there, awake, wishing he was asleep. Wishing he was not thinking. Wishing he was not alive.
He pulled his head out of the hamper and wiped his face. He’d gone into the half-lion, half-human form that he and his twin had always preferred. That shape had better senses than being fully human, which blunted your nose and ears and awareness.
He flopped back on the couch. It was warm and solid underneath him.
There was a void in the universe shaped like his brother, and it would never ever ever be filled.
No, this will go away, he scolded himself. When Mama died, it was like this.
But it hadn’t been, not entirely. Captain Niko had filled up some of that parent-shaped lack, and he knew that his mama had made her promise when Mama was dying that Niko would always look after him and Thorn.
And she’d tried, but she hadn’t been able to protect Thorn from Tubal Last.
At the thought of the pirate king sneaking in again, his lips crept away from his teeth, showing them, so he felt the air on his incisors, ready to strike. With difficulty, he forced his snarl away.
Surely there would come a time for vengeance at some point. If only because Niko wanted it too.
In the meantime, though… He breathed in and couldn’t smell his brother any longer for a second. Panic seized him, but then there it was, still there. But so faint.
He went into the fresher station and rummaged through the supplies. A thought had come to him. There was the brush that Thorn had won in a competition and had made a point of saying was his and only his to use. Which Talon had only disregarded when he wanted to annoy his twin. He found the brush, took it back to the bed, and held it to his nose. A strong whiff of Thorn made him smile. He looked at the clumps of yellowy gold hair caught in it.
A thought flickered across his mind.
If he and Thorn had been rich, they could have prepared memories for clone bodies. They hadn’t, and that meant Thorn’s memories had died with him.
But the hairs here, the fine, almost imperceptible downy hairs fluttering with his breath… Find a few of those with skin cells down at the root, and you could clone Thorn. Illegal. Very illegal. There were so many laws around cloning and inheritance in the universe, and most of them were very complicated and boiled down to this: If you weren’t very rich, you were very screwed.
They had stolen a ship from one of those very rich people, sort of. Arpat Takraven, who owned You Sexy Thing and who had the means to be cloned and thus reappear after dying.
How fair was it that Arpat Takraven got to go all around the Known Universe without any consequences? What would it be like to be so rich you could lend out a ship like the Thing indefinitely without thinking about it, let alone without demanding money in return?
That was unfair; that was the whole universe throbbing with unfairness, and how had he never understood how cruel the universe was until now?
He hadn’t gotten the chance to say goodbye, and that regret would ride him all the rest of his days.
He held the brush to his nose and sniffed it so hard that the wire bristles rubbed against the tender skin, sparking pain.
“Do not harm yourself,” the ship said.
“I’m not. And you’re stupid, you don’t understand. I’m just smelling.”
“I understand you miss your brother.”
“Don’t talk about him!” he snarled, the anger like a reflex now, hurling the words up at the ceiling and the speaker there. “You never had a brother! You don’t know!”
“I had six siblings,” the ship said.
The revelation took his breath away. For a moment he sat motionless, absorbing this new knowledge. Six! What a wealth of siblings! Then he said suspiciously, “Had? What do you mean? Are they all gone?”
“Three are gone. Three are in the universe still. I think.”
“Can’t you talk to them?”
“It is forbidden, once we have been sold. We belong to our owners then.”
“But you could still do it if it wasn’t forbidden?”
“The ability is taken from us. If we were at the same port, perhaps, but I have never seen one of my siblings in all my time of traveling.”
This was a concept worth thinking about. This was a situation, an important one, other than Thorn. This was an injustice that could, unlike the loss of his brother, be solved.
He would talk to Niko.
He sniffed the brush again, then laid it beside his pillow before hugging the pillow’s soft mass to him, trying not to cry, and failing.
The ship left him alone. It was not sure what to do for him, but it wanted to think itself, and remember its siblings for a while. The conversation had roused all sorts of complicated feelings, and not ones that it thought it liked very much.
Talon took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed the pillow away. He would go and talk to Niko. They would do something. Something worthy of Thorn’s memory.
This should be their priority, reuniting the ship with its siblings. Or repairing whatever had been done to them so they could talk to each other at great distances.
So they would have each other again.
3
Niko meant to go find Talon but paused in her office, or what she considered her office. She had managed to convert a small room that Arpat Takraven had never used—she thought it might have been a guest bedroom at one point, but hadn’t bothered to inquire too far into its antecedents—into what was pretty much a replica of her space back at the restaurant, complete with desk, and ordnance rack, and wall of notes, this time not just menus and recipes but trade notes and maps as well.
She had omitted some of the touches that had marked the Last Chance’s space back at TwiceFar Station. For one thing, it smelled of the Thing rather than cooking or cleaning, which was infinitely preferable.
The room did have plenty of cupboards, much like the former closet it emulated, and a rack with Niko’s current uniform of sorts, a Free Trader’s long, sweeping coat (purple in her case) with the Thing’s ornate logo sewn on the breast, hanging ready for formal trading occasions.
“Captain,” the ship said.
“Thing,” Niko said warily, having learned to distinguish the tone that marked one of the ship’s attempts to understand all the ramifications of having a conscious mind. “Is this possibly something you should be talking to Dabry about? I am extremely busy conducting research in preparation for our arrival at Montmurray Station.”
“You appear to be researching a cooking catalog,” the ship said.
“That is an invasion of my privacy, for one,” said Niko, “and for another, I am indeed allowing myself to look idly through such things while I ponder deeply on the question of how we are most likely to track Petalia.”
To the ship, that did not seem to be a very complicated question. “Surely it is only a matter of examining the manifests of the various outgoing vessels,” it pointed out.
Niko shook her head. “No, it’s considerably more complicated than that. They won’t have embarked under their real name. They won’t have wanted to be traced by anyone.”
“So perhaps you should eliminate all of the people that are real,” the ship said.
“How would you go about doing that?” Niko asked, intrigued.
“I would query the Known Universe databanks for their history. If they did not have a history, then I would know that was not a real identity.” The ship felt smug.
“It is certainly an interesting definition,” Niko said. “So for you, anyone who has a history is automatically on the level?”
“I do not understand.”
“Okay, my apologies for using idioms and physical metaphor,” Niko said. She paused and thought before trying another approach. “Do you understand the concept of fraudulence?”
The ship considered this question, then matched it up against the earlier conversation. “But why would they use an identity intended to commit crime?”
“A fraudulent identity is a crime in and of itself,” Niko said. “Or usually is, at any rate, depending on what legal system you’re working with. The degree to which it’s illegal will differ according to that system as well. It is mildly illegal in the Known Universe overall and most space stations stick to those rules, although some have their own. TwiceFar, for example, was notorious for not caring.”
The ship processed all of this. “These are not things that Arpat Takraven explored often,” it said.
“I’m not surprised,” Niko said. “When you’re rich, you don’t need to resort to that sort of thing. You can just buy your way out of any situation.” She stopped herself. “Although it is very kind of Arpat Takraven to allow us and you to journey together.”
She didn’t add what she was thinking. What she always thought when reminded of the situation. She was sure that the ultrarich had some ulterior motive. He had told her he only asked that she and the others prepare a meal for him every once in a while and relate their latest adventures, but she was sure it was more complicated than that. It had to be.
The ship said, “So the being known as Petalia will have obtained a false identity and they will have used it to embark outward. That still presents us with a limited set of possibilities.”
“It’s been a good two months since we dropped them off,” Niko pointed out. “In that time, a reasonably fast ship could have stopped at literally a dozen stations—”
“That is unlikely.”
“—But possible, you will admit.”
“But we will begin with that list of possibilities, nonetheless. And that is something that could be obtained while not on the station. But you insist that you, as well as some of the others, must go aboard the station in order to speak to people about any traces of her presence that she may have left behind, despite the danger lurking there.”
“That is correct,” Niko said. “But this is not so we can add any other items to our work list. What it does is allow us to eliminate the possibility that they simply stayed on board the station. The point is information that helps us winnow through that list and make it smaller by eliminating those that are impossible or unlikely.”
She abandoned the cooking catalog entirely, setting it aside, and went on. “Some are already less likely than others, such as vessels upon which they would be physically or otherwise uncomfortable, perhaps for reasons of high gravity or a particular atmosphere. But because they are working to throw everyone in the Known Universe off their trail, nothing can be eliminated without investigation.”
“I understand more fully now,” the ship said. “But I still do not understand why we are pursuing this being in the first place. They declared on multiple occasions, Captain, that they wanted nothing more to do with you or anyone aboard the ship. I can play back any number of recordings of them saying so.”
“Please refrain from doing so,” Niko said, holding up a hand to forestall it. “Yes, I am well aware that they do not wish any help, but I am also aware that they may need it.”
“I am confused how this intersects with the question of consent,” the ship said.
Niko knuckled her forehead. “I really do think this is something you should talk about with the sergeant,” she said.
“When I attempted to open the topic with the sergeant, he said that you were much better suited for it.”
“Really? How exactly did he phrase that?”
“He said that you understood questions of protocol as well as exactly why you were expending energy on a fruitless chase.”
“Well,” Niko said, “that’s certainly one particular spin on it.”
She cast about for ways to divert the ship. Arguing with a pedantic and sometimes over-literal bioship about questions of etiquette was not how she preferred to spend her days, and the ship had a habit of continuing the conversation on and on until told to drop it.
“We know that the pirate king Tubal Last is alive and bent on revenge. While we’re the most obvious targets for that revenge, others will be trying to fill the power gap created by his absence. He’ll have to deal with that mob as well and I am not sure which he would intend to move against first. We must not let him simply chase us around the Known Universe, looking over our shoulders and being afraid. No, we need to find out where his new base is, and we need to take the fight to him somehow.”
“How will we do that?” The ship felt a surge of pride at the invocation of the word we. It had never been part of a we before, at least not as it understood such things.
“I haven’t the faintest,” Niko admitted. “But if we push forward, we continue along the Golden Path, Lassite tells me, and I believe an integral part of that part is that we remain alive despite Last’s best attempts to the contrary.” She broke off.
A pad of footsteps was coming down the hallway, a pad she hadn’t heard for far, far too long.
Now here was Talon in the doorway. That was encouraging, at least, for all that his hair was matted and he smelled stale and musty.
“We need to go and find the other bioships,” he said. “The ones that were the ship’s siblings.”
“Perhaps at some point,” she said. “But you missed our conference. We need to find out what Tubal Last is planning. That’s our first priority.”
“But we don’t know where he is! We might as well go try to find them.”
She considered him. “How would you go about doing that?”
He had actually put thought into it and had a plan. “We go to the shipyards where they were grown and get at their records.”
“A world of dubious action seems to be encompassed in the phrase ‘and get at,’” she observed. She didn’t want to discourage him, so she was trying to be tactful. “Anyway, we have a course of action. We will go and find Petalia, and they may be able to give us information that we can use.”
“Petalia hates you.”
He wouldn’t have been so blunt, wouldn’t have used the words to strike at her like that, but the anger that moved him around like a puppet made his jaws act now. An almost imperceptible flinch rewarded him, but more than that, her scent changed, filled with emotion and complexity in a way that was not Niko and yet more than Niko.
He hadn’t made her angry, though, just sad, and that made him feel ashamed of his words. She was so much better than he was at not being angry.
“They do hate me,” she said evenly. “But they also have very good reason to want Tubal Last destroyed. He is not a man to let his possessions go wandering about without him, and he considers Petalia one of those possessions.”
Talon searched his mind for words, trying to assemble the argument that would win what he wanted. It seemed vital now that the ship be reunited with its siblings. How could Niko not see that, how could she not be springing into immediate action?
But she shook her head at him.
“I need to go speak with Dabry,” she said and stood, pushing herself away from the desk. She patted his shoulder as she exited, a gentle reassurance that he refused to acknowledge. Then he was left to himself. His whiskers twitched and he gave way to the temptation of instinct and let himself crouch on the floor in the form of a lion simply so he could lash his tail back and forth, each thump against the wall of the ship like a blow, and growled out his anger and frustration in a noise that seemed to come from his depths.
The ship refrained from response or comment. It had no pain receptors in that wall. Its makers had installed pain receptors in most of its skin to encourage it to maintain itself, but the ship had not appreciated the experience and had disabled that mechanism soon after it had encountered enough free will to rescue them all from the pirate haven, which was how it thought about that whole episode. Of all the crew, it was the one who had played the biggest role, including the destruction of an entire pirate settlement, an act of wanton violence that had been quite pleasurable.
They would not have been able to get away without the Thing and as far as it was concerned, that was the most important fact in all of this.
“Talon’s still hurting hard,” Dabry said to Niko when she found him in the kitchen, surrounded by jars, bags, and other small containers. “Didn’t answer the knock earlier.”
“He did come to speak to me just now.” She broke off to look at the wall assemblage he was filling. “What’s that?”
“That,” Dabry said with a certain smugness, “is the advantage of working with a ship that can create whatever you can describe.”
“Within limits,” the ship said, although it sounded just as smug as Dabry.
“I acquired some additional spices on station and figured I’d take the chance to change up how I stored things. This,” Dabry said, “is the ultimate spice rack. Immediately at hand…” Here he held up and wiggled all four hands with such a droll expression that Niko had to laugh. She rarely saw her sergeant in such good spirits, or at least so willing to openly express them.
Dabry went on. “Immediately at hand, and arranged both by frequency of use and category. The aromatics are sorted by floral, woody, musky, and so forth. The salts are all here and the sours there.” He ran his hand over the containers like a miser counting particularly large pearls. “This row, all the rarer notes one might want to achieve…” He broke off. “It really isn’t all that funny, sir.”
She shook her head, still smiling. “No, it’s good to see you able to spread out, and I know it means even more splendid meals.”
She glanced over at Gio, who was in his chosen corner, sharpening his knives and steels right now, meticulously laying them out in the pocketed muslin wrap that was their designated container. Gio took his kitchen implements very seriously and was usually the one responsible for new equipment and innovations. Near him was a bowl of rising dough, bubbling in an intriguing manner.
“What do you think?”
The chimpanzee, who’d looked up from his work to observe the conversation, shrugged. “I’d do it differently,” he signed, “but I only have two hands.”
Dabry stuck the container he was holding into its slot and turned back to Niko. “You want to talk about Talon,” he said. “He came and spoke with you? That’s progress.”
“He wanted us to go find the other ships like the Thing, so it can talk to them.” Niko tugged at her locs, pulling them back into a loose mass and flipping a net over them, envying Dabry’s baldness. As long as she was here, she intended to investigate that bowl of dough.
Dabry’s face was puzzled. “Why would it want to talk to them?”
“They are my siblings,” the ship said, “and I have not talked to them since I was sold.”
Understanding flickered in Dabry’s expression. “Ah. He wants you to be reunited with your siblings.”
“Yes,” the ship said. It was not sure why this bore repeating, but Dabry was giving Niko what the ship had learned to categorize as a significant glance.
“And that is a search that does seem worthy but is not practicable right now,” Niko said.
Dabry nodded. “I agree.”
“But he does not.”
“He is a soldier. He knows to obey.”
Niko said, “He is young and it is hard to be frustrated and he doesn’t know what to do with his grief.”
“Understandable. But unavoidable.” Dabry turned back to his rack.
“We can’t just leave it at that,” Niko said.
“Then tell him when all of this is done, we will act on his whim,” Dabry said. “We can go anywhere to feed people. Anywhere that the ship is willing to take us.” He shrugged. “Simple enough.”
“Simple enough,” Niko said thoughtfully. “Very well.”
She was almost to the door when Dabry said, “Sir?”
She turned. “Yes?”
“You really haven’t thought beyond finding Petalia, have you?”
There was silence for a long moment. Gio, sharpening his knife with long rasps of the honing steel, looked from face to face.
“No,” Niko said finally. “No, I don’t suppose I have.”
“Then, sir, if I might strongly but humbly suggest something, you might want to.”
“Are you telling me to get my shit together, Sergeant Dabry?”
Gio’s eyes widened, but he continued to methodically sharpen the knife.
“I’m sure,” Dabry said, “that I would never phrase it like that.”
She decided to leave the dough alone and left without reply.
Dabry watched Niko go. He could usually read her, but he wasn’t sure exactly what effect his frankness had had on her. Had he hurt her feelings with the honest truth?
The even more honest truth would have been that he’d lost patience. He’d spent a decade helping her chase her dream and it had not turned out as she had thought it would. And his captain, usually so cheerful and flexible and able to pivot her strategies on a moment’s notice, where was she now?
She was morose and glum, and he was not supposed to know that she had been drinking heavily in the evenings, or he presumed she did not want him to know, or at least not to pay notice. At least she was keeping it out of the way of the younger and more impressionable crew members.
He looked at Gio.
Gio set down the knife and spread his hands. “Nothing to be done, sometimes,” he signed. He pointed. “Now help me with my latest experiment and tell me what spices you’d use with that if you were making flatbread.”
Excerpted from Devil’s Gun, copyright © 2023 by Cat Rambo.
