Destiny's Song (The Fixers, book #1: A KarmaCorp Novel) by Audrey Faye Page B
Authors: Audrey Faye
Ads: Link
she said, coming around the north corner of her home. “View’s better from the other side, and I’ve got a couple bottles of cider chilling, if you like. Real stuff—I’ve got a friend who retired to Gaia V and sings to his apple orchards all day long. His first cider tasted like rocket fuel, but these last bottles are fairly tolerable.”
I smiled—I’d been to Gaia V. Elegant, miniscule farms piled one on top of the other. They provided luxury food items to half the quadrant. The cider would be seriously prime. “You’d be claustrophobic there.”
She looked out at her grasslands and laughed. “I would indeed.”
I followed her around a corner, still not sure how angles and glass felt so homey. It was a far cry from the underground oval pods of my home asteroid.
The far side of Tameka’s house had a small deck and two lounging chairs turned to face some hills in the distant north. The planet’s twin moons hung low on the horizon, picking up blue and green shadows from the sky auroras.
I slung my butt in a chair, not at all sure I wanted to be sitting yet. It felt good enough, so I stayed.
Tameka took a seat beside me and fished around in a bucket at the side of her chair. “So what kind of name is Lakisha Drinkwater?”
Apparently, the strange personal interrogation wasn’t over yet, but I was in a good enough mood to answer. “It’s the kind of name you get when your mom’s got Jamaican blood and your dad’s sixth-generation space Cheyenne.”
Her cider bottle stopped halfway to anywhere useful. “You haven’t exactly got the coloring for that mix of bloodlines.”
That was putting it politely. I was pale blonde Scandinavian, through and through. But whoever might have given birth to me, it was a couple of miners who had brought me to the only home my child self remembered. “My adoptive parents found me in an evac pod on the side of a crater.” With a woman dead in the junker ship wreckage beside me, one of the unregistereds that collected space scrap to sell for barely enough to fuel their vessels. Ship systems, barely functional even before the crash, had routed all remaining oxygen to the evac pod and the week-old baby inside it. The Federation had been duly informed, but there were no living relatives, no one to claim me. It was a common enough story in the farther reaches of the galaxy. So I’d gone from space-junker brat to mining-rock brat.
“I’m sorry,” said Tameka quietly. “It was well done of them to take you in.”
I shrugged. “They were miners, and another pair of hands was always useful.” I said it without rancor—they’d been decent enough parents, they just hadn’t had any idea what to do with their blonde wild child.
She inclined her head in the dark. “Destiny has tossed you around some.”
It had—and the two most pivotal events in my life had come when someone had crashed a tin can into a rock. I was damn glad my butt was no longer sitting in one. “I grow where I’m planted.” Or I’d learned to, anyhow. With a lot of very patient help.
“Good.” Tameka was back to drinking her cider. “We respect hard-won roots out here.”
The colony planets usually did. It hadn’t been any different back on the mining asteroid—we’d assumed that anyone who’d grown up on one of the pampered inner planets was soft. I’d met enough of those people since to have changed my impressions somewhat, but they definitely hardened up a little differently.
The show in the sky was getting more serene, but no less enthralling. “Does it do this often?”
“An hour or two most nights.”
Score one for the boondocks. A quick yellow light flashed to the far left of my view. “Meteorite?”
“Nope. Visitor.” My host squinted at the night sky. “Coming from the direction of the Lovatts’.”
She didn’t sound surprised. “Do they usually just hop on over for a visit?”
“Often enough.” She smiled. “The Inheritor appreciates a good cider.”
I
I smiled—I’d been to Gaia V. Elegant, miniscule farms piled one on top of the other. They provided luxury food items to half the quadrant. The cider would be seriously prime. “You’d be claustrophobic there.”
She looked out at her grasslands and laughed. “I would indeed.”
I followed her around a corner, still not sure how angles and glass felt so homey. It was a far cry from the underground oval pods of my home asteroid.
The far side of Tameka’s house had a small deck and two lounging chairs turned to face some hills in the distant north. The planet’s twin moons hung low on the horizon, picking up blue and green shadows from the sky auroras.
I slung my butt in a chair, not at all sure I wanted to be sitting yet. It felt good enough, so I stayed.
Tameka took a seat beside me and fished around in a bucket at the side of her chair. “So what kind of name is Lakisha Drinkwater?”
Apparently, the strange personal interrogation wasn’t over yet, but I was in a good enough mood to answer. “It’s the kind of name you get when your mom’s got Jamaican blood and your dad’s sixth-generation space Cheyenne.”
Her cider bottle stopped halfway to anywhere useful. “You haven’t exactly got the coloring for that mix of bloodlines.”
That was putting it politely. I was pale blonde Scandinavian, through and through. But whoever might have given birth to me, it was a couple of miners who had brought me to the only home my child self remembered. “My adoptive parents found me in an evac pod on the side of a crater.” With a woman dead in the junker ship wreckage beside me, one of the unregistereds that collected space scrap to sell for barely enough to fuel their vessels. Ship systems, barely functional even before the crash, had routed all remaining oxygen to the evac pod and the week-old baby inside it. The Federation had been duly informed, but there were no living relatives, no one to claim me. It was a common enough story in the farther reaches of the galaxy. So I’d gone from space-junker brat to mining-rock brat.
“I’m sorry,” said Tameka quietly. “It was well done of them to take you in.”
I shrugged. “They were miners, and another pair of hands was always useful.” I said it without rancor—they’d been decent enough parents, they just hadn’t had any idea what to do with their blonde wild child.
She inclined her head in the dark. “Destiny has tossed you around some.”
It had—and the two most pivotal events in my life had come when someone had crashed a tin can into a rock. I was damn glad my butt was no longer sitting in one. “I grow where I’m planted.” Or I’d learned to, anyhow. With a lot of very patient help.
“Good.” Tameka was back to drinking her cider. “We respect hard-won roots out here.”
The colony planets usually did. It hadn’t been any different back on the mining asteroid—we’d assumed that anyone who’d grown up on one of the pampered inner planets was soft. I’d met enough of those people since to have changed my impressions somewhat, but they definitely hardened up a little differently.
The show in the sky was getting more serene, but no less enthralling. “Does it do this often?”
“An hour or two most nights.”
Score one for the boondocks. A quick yellow light flashed to the far left of my view. “Meteorite?”
“Nope. Visitor.” My host squinted at the night sky. “Coming from the direction of the Lovatts’.”
She didn’t sound surprised. “Do they usually just hop on over for a visit?”
“Often enough.” She smiled. “The Inheritor appreciates a good cider.”
I
Similar Books
