Hamster Care and Feeding
Carlos returned to the cargo bay to find the girl lying atop the same crate she’d been leaning against earlier. She lay on her back—hands laced under her head—breathing slow. One eye was shut. The other glowed violet. He crept closer to see the implant—careful not to wake her. The device fit well with no visible scarring. Inside the clear sac, blue-purple flashes danced around a soft lens—ringed by that violent violet glow.
He drifted a hand over her face. She flinched—then yelped—and slapped him away, tumbling over the opposite edge to the floor.
He winced and leaned over the crate. “¿Estás bien, jovencita?”
She popped up, eyes wide. “Why did you do that? I didn’t hear you come in. How were you so quiet?”
Carlos fumbled. Spanish? She spoke Spanish? So, he replied in Spanish. “Oh... I thought you were sleeping, and I wear soft soles. The echoes drive me crazy. What were you doing laying there like that?”
She yammered again in Spanish, but faster. “Reviewing schematics in augmented reality—works better if I close one eye. You can’t do that to someone with high contrast infrared activated. Your hand looked like a big orange...” She traced a ball with her hands. “Gran estallido.”
Carlos laughed. “¡Más despacio, por favor! My Spanish isn’t that good!”
Tucking her chin, she knitted her brow.
Carlos wrinkled his own brow. “What? Don’t stereotype me—I like to practice. It’s a bit of a con really—people see an old brown guy, hispanic name, drifting in and out of Español, and they think they have me pegged. But you of all people should know better than that. Names travel farther than culture, nena, and Spanish is only my third language, comprendes?”
Simonee smirked and nodded. “Okay, English then.”
“Bueno. Now, speaking of names, we haven’t been properly introduced. I popped onto the station feed, so I know your name, but I also know you were born with a number. So, how about we skip the cover story, nena, and cut right to the part where you became Simonee Saran.”
Simonee looked horrified again for a moment, glancing toward the hatch.
When she looked back at Carlos, he nodded slowly. She sighed.
“It was… a misunderstanding. I was programmed in Russian, for a brothel in Novaya Moskva. We used to go by the end part of our serial numbers, ‘Sem’ nol’ tri sem’ odin’. That was the only name I knew.”
Simonee paused and leaned on the crate, crossed her arms. Carlos put his hands behind him.
She continued. “When I left the Eleos, the credits Mariem gave me didn’t go very far. I needed identification to setup accounts, and get a bunk in the nomad shelters. The terminal I pieced together at the time was junk—literally. I said my number, but it spit out Simonee Saran instead. That document cost me the everything I had left, so I said fuck it. And now that’s me—Simonee Saran. I don’t think it actually means anything, except maybe freedom—to me.”
Carlos chuckled, and gave Simonee a wide grin and a half bow. “Encantado, Ms. Saran. Well, I was programmed in English, and got my name from my daddy, Carlos Rogelio Santiago, but no junior; my Polish Catholic mother wanted a proper confirmation, but she never got it. I joined the Zentari-Neys navy and got my third one.”
Simonee smiled. “You were the admiral… on the Eleos.”
“Sí, and here you are again stowing away on my ship,” Carlos grumbled.
“Mariem didn’t like hiding me from you. She never said it out loud, but I could tell. That’s why I left.”
Carlos nodded. “Hmm. The admiral I was back then would have dragged you out of her quarters. For honor and duty, he would have shoved you into the slurry-maker himself.” He looked at the ground and chewed at his lip. “But the captain I am now wants to know why he should risk his ship and crew rather than simply turn you in.”
Simonee’s eye widened and she stepped back. Clasping her hands in front of her, she looked at Carlos’s toes. “I’m really sorry, captain—but Dalia Ledas is in danger, I’m sure of it. I don’t know politics, but I’ve worked ice freighters; what’s happening here risks the entire ice trade. If you turn me in, nobody will listen. If you turn me in... they’ll take me to the slurry-maker.”
Carlos nodded slowly, pacing away to the wall. He stood there a moment, then grabbed a rolling stool and dragged it back in front of the crate. Settling into it, he crossed his arms and lifted her eyes with a glare. “If I turn you in, Mariem will murder me.”
Simonee’s mouth dropped. Carlos chuckled. “Está bien, chica. Now that I know this is more than a lover’s quarrel, I need details. Fortunately, politics was my second language, so, tell me everything. But go slow, I’m old.”
Mariem put on a clean shirt and a clean face before returning to the cargo bay. When she got there, Simonee was telling Carlos all about her tussle with the security guard.
Carlos looked up as she walked in. “I can’t believe you did that.”
She shrugged. “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want him looking at my face. The idea was to distract him and punch his lights out but the guy just.. tripped. Besides, you’ve got no room to talk since you pulled your dick out on that guard at MarsCon.”
“That was different!” Carlos barked. “I was pulling a bribe out of that Mando armor and the belt broke. I didn’t know the guy had a fetish.”
“Still doesn’t explain the lack of underwear,” Mariem said.
“I never wear chonies in costume!”
Simonee winced. “Can we maybe, get back on topic?”
Carlos grunted. “Let’s start with how we get off this station without them searching the Fénix from stem to stern.”
“We—”
Carlos stopped Mariem with a finger. “Ah! Don’t tell me we’ll just hide her in the orlop, you know that’s the first place they’ll look.”
Mariem crossed her arms. “And what ideas have you come up with so far?”
Carlos half rose but Simonee blurted, “My apartment!”
Mariem groaned.
“Que?” Carlos glanced between them. “Well!”
Mariem huffed. “Simonee wants to clear things up with Dalia.”
Carlos raised his eyebrows at Simonee.
Simonee winced. “I have an air-gap recording system with footage from my meeting with Mason. If I can access it, I can show Dalia the recording and warn her about her aunt.”
Carlos sagged.
“Maybe she’ll call off security!” Simonee bleated.
“Doesn’t your…” Carlos gestured circles over his right eye, “eye record stuff too?”
Simonee shrugged. “I mean, sure, to my brain.”
“Point taken,” Carlos growled. “So, this Mason character, he got into your apartment without opening the door, which means there’s another way in. You swear there are no other entrances to your apartment. Floor? Ceiling? Behind a bookcase?”
Simonee shook her head. “In my line of work, paranoia is the job description.” She tapped her temple by the implant. “I’ve checked. Other than a few five centimeter pipes for either wires or water, it’s a sealed capsule for breach containment. Other than a magic spell, I have no idea how he got in. Which is why I need him to show me now.”
Carlos growled. “So how do we find him then? And quickly—it’s been a few hours since security lost you; they’ll start banging on bulkheads soon, demanding inspections.”
Simonee shook her head and Mariem put a gentle hand on her knee. “Can you find him?”
Simonee put her arm to her side and blinked twice. Mariem stepped back as Simonee stared through them, her implant flickering behind dark curtains of hair.
Carlos shifted in front of Simonee. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m thinking,” Simonee droned.
“Is that how I look when I think?” Carlos whispered at Mariem.
“I don’t know, you should try it sometime.” Mariem whispered back.
“That’s hurtful!” Carlos hissed.
Simonee sighed and looked at Mariem. “Yes. I need your terminal though, I can’t use my smartcomm, and there’s only so much my eye can do.”
They left Carlos on his stool, and Mariem led Simonee to the terminal at the desk in the back. She pulled out the chair.
“Here you go, hon,” she said. “Watch the control key; it’s sticky.”
Simonee pulled herself in. Casually tapping around the GUI, she probed the layout until she found and opened the terminal app. A black window appeared with a cursor blinking lazily in the corner, and she pulled the keyboard closer, scanned it once, and pecked a few keys, entering a short series of commands. She slapped Enter and handed Mariem the keyboard.
“Password.”
Mariem poked out a stream of characters against her knee, sealed the phrase with a thumb scan and hit the enter key.
“Here you go,” she said, handing back the keyboard.
Simonee splayed her fingers, curled them twice, and rested them over the keys. That’s when the storm hit.
Her fingers blurred as commands and code scrolled out onto the screen faster than Mariem could read.
“I’m tunneling into the underground network,” Simonee murmured. “Promise to delete the connection when I’m done.”
New windows appeared on the screen—section maps, camera footage, and a relay chat discussing hamster care and feeding. Messages were highlighted, copied, and pasted to another window that transliterated the characters like a cipher, shifting into sentences resembling a clumsy cross between Polish and Spanish.
“Is that Esperanto?” Mariem asked.
Simonee nodded. “It’s an underground pidgin because nobody else takes it seriously.”
Red blips appeared on the section maps with each new entry. They multiplied, clustered and grew. Simonee dragged each map into the center of the screen and then pulled them apart, fingers splayed; a wire-frame model of the station spun on the screen.
“These are the reported sightings of Mason over the last few days,” Simonee said.
Mariem whistled. “That boy gets around.”
Simonee nodded, blurred in more code, and slapped the enter key again; crossing her arms she leaned back. The dots blinked on and off until they disappeared completely, leaving a trio of pulsing red blobs on the map labelled with time and probability.
Simonee sat up and leaned in, squinting. “My model predicts these as Mason’s likely positions over the next twenty four hours.”
Mariem pointed at one of the blobs. “So, he’ll be here in five hours? GenHab?”
Simonee nodded.
“Will he be alone, you think?”
Simonee blew the hair out of her face, exposing her implant’s violet glow. After another blur over the keyboard, blue dots appeared around the station with a circle of four dots near the location of Mason in the habitat ring.
Simonee looked up. “There’s a sixty-four percent chance he’ll have company. Approximately four people.”
“Which means we’re one heavy coin flip from running into his thugs,” Mariem groaned.
“Shit! The condom broke.” Simonee spat and blurred at the keys again.
Mariem scowled at Simonee then looked at the screen again. “Say what?”
“You’re on a guest network. I double-encrypted my tunnel but Ms. Aggy broke it. Stupid, stupid, stupid—”
“Qué pasa?” Carlos sidled up behind them.
Mariem looked at him. “The condom broke.”
“Oh, that’s never good. What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Tunnel cut, I’m out.” Simonee sighed. “But now Ms. Aggy knows I double bagged my channel into her access point. She doesn’t know why, but she’s wary of your ship.”
“I’m so very confused.” Carlos said.
Mariem grumbled. “Let’s just say, when they start knocking on doors, the Fénix will be the first on their list.”
Carlos groaned. “Oh, no bueno. Now what?”
“We go quick, but we need help. We know where Mason is, but we know he’s not alone and surveillance has extra eyes on us, whatever we do.” Mariem sighed and nodded toward the hatch in the back. “We need to enlist officer friendly in there.” Mariem said.
Carlos gaped at her.
Mariem shrugged. “What? He’s just a stiff with a badge. He makes, what, a few thousand scrip-credits a week? We’ll offer him a share of the bounty.”
“Bounty?” Carlos asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, didn’t she tell you? Her accounts are full of patsy money. They’re frozen now, but if Dalia releases the hold—”
Carlos put his face in his hands. “Dios mío! So, you want to bribe our hostage? What keeps him from turning on us the second we’re out in the open?”
Mariem scowled and put her hands on her hips. “He won’t get paid if we don’t clear the accounts.”
Carlos puts his hands on his hips and shook them as he whined. “He gets a reward for turning us all in.”
Mariem crossed her arms. “Then we offer him something even better, prestige.”
“Qué?”
“We give officer friendly the most feared criminal on Enceladus.” Mariem raised her brow. “Let’s help him arrest the mother fucker.”