Chapter 1
“We’ve been what?”
Kat shrieked the last word so loudly that the two blob-like aliens sitting at the next table in the dimly lit tavern stopped talking and glanced over, their transparent round eyes wide with curiosity.
“Keep your voice down,” her brother Lirid hissed with a warning in his voice, gesturing with his eyebrows at the other table. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, do we?”
Kat flicked her gaze to the blobs and stared back at them for a few seconds. Quickly, she decided it was best to just ignore the nosy buggers. In a tavern filled with creepy menacing aliens, they seemed rather harmless. Like a plate of jelly. Of course, looks could be deceiving, but Kat reckoned that—in the very unlikely event they became agressive—she’d be able to scare them off with nothing more than a spoon. Furthermore, she had far more pressing matters to attend to.
Turning her attention back to her brother, she closed her eyes for a brief moment and took in a deep breath in an attempt to calm her nerves. It didn’t help much, though. Biting the inside of her lip, she straightened her back and leaned her upper body over the small square table to huddle closer to the two men opposite her, Lirid to her left and their cousin Mitha to her right.
“What do you mean we’ve been robbed?” Kat murmured through clenched teeth.
Lirid shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know how it happened, but my space cruiser is no longer in the section of the docking bay we left it in. And before you ask, yes, I checked the entire docking bay. It’s gone. Stolen, most likely.”
“Didn’t you lock it?” Kat asked in a high-pitched voice, frowning in disbelief and horror. How could someone just steal a space cruiser? In public?
Lirid grimaced and gave her the most irritating stare, as if Kat had said the dumbest thing ever. She hated it when her brother did that. She loved him with all her heart, but sometimes—well, most of the time—he was such a doofus. Especially when he acted as if he knew better just because he was a few years her senior, and she was nothing more than his ignorant and incredibly stupid baby sister. This behavior had been annoying when they were children, and it was even more so now that they were grown up. Unfortunately, Lirid’s brain didn’t seem to have matured along with his body.
“It isn’t an Earth transport vehicle, Kat.” He snorted scornfully. “Do you think I left the keys in the ignition or something and someone took it for a vehicle pleasuring ride? It doesn’t work that way.”
“It’s called a joyride,” she corrected him with a look of disgust. “You make it sound like someone’s having sex with his car.”
Kat deemed it wise not to mention that car sex was most likely a real thing. Some things she’d learned while she was on Earth, she’d rather forget, like how excited some men would become when they talked about their cars. Oh no, buffing your car three times a day has absolutely no sexual dimension to it at all, Bob. Yeah, right. Furthermore, she didn’t want to give her brother more ammunition to say awkward things. He was able to forget the entry code to his residence every second day, but he would remember useless stuff like this, only to blurt it out in public when you least expected it and when it was most inappropriate. No, it was best not to go into it any further.
“Whatever,” Lirid dragged out, rolling his eyes.
Kat wished she had never taught him that one. She wanted to smack her brother in the back of his head—he would deserve it for being such an immature idiot—but she refrained from doing so. The slapping sound might give the blob aliens another reason to stare at them again. She didn’t want that.
“Someone must have hacked the ship’s computer,” Mitha intervened. “That’s the only way the thief could have entered the cruiser and taken off. It must have been a very skilled thief, though. Hacking a ship’s computer from the outside is extremely difficult. One wrong move and you trigger all kinds of alarms before you know it. The thief knew how to bypass every single safeguard. That’s very impressive,” he murmured, almost awestruck.
“See?” Lirid huffed, cocking up both eyebrows and shaking his head from left to right with every word. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Kat rubbed her fingers against her temples. She needed to focus, and her brother’s childish behavior wasn’t helping at all.
“Okay, we lost our ship. That means we must find an alternative means of transport. Do you have enough credits to pay for our journey back to Cassidiri? Mitha and I are broke.”
Lirid shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“Lirid?” Kat asked with a compelling tone in her voice, demanding an answer.
He cleared his throat before talking.
“Um…no. Besides the credits in my pocket, I left everything on the cruiser. I thought that would be safer considering we were coming to this place. This station is filled with criminals. I didn’t want to have my credits stolen by a pickpocket or be forced to hand everything over at knifepoint by some low-life thief.”
Kat gasped and wiped her hands over her face, then pointed a finger to her brother.
“So, you’re telling me we don’t have a ship or credits, and that we’re basically stranded on this more-than-dubious space station?”
Her hands turned into fists. The urge to slap his head had changed into an urge to punch his perfectly sculpted nose.
Why had she ever agreed to join her brother and cousin on this trip? She must have been mad. Or suicidal. As soon as the trail had led them to this space station, they should have made a U-turn and returned to Cassidiri immediately for some backup. Coming here, just the three of them, had been a disastrous decision.
Blackway space station was the place where pirates, criminals and other lowlifes came to trade—mostly illegal merchandise—and to relax. Apparently, even criminals needed some R&R now and then. Which according to Mitha meant gambling all your credits away, getting drunk on cheap spirits, having sex with even cheaper prostitutes and getting into bar fights. None of which were on Kat’s bucket list.
Whether or not they kept a low profile, it was obvious that the three of them didn’t belong in this lawless place. They stuck out like sore thumbs. From the very first moment they had arrived here, Kat had been afraid they would end up being molested, mutilated, murdered and eaten, not necessarily in that order.
“I’m sure we’ll find a way back home,” Lirid uttered with a confidence that wasn’t showing in his eyes.
Kat lowered her shoulders with the intention of banging her head on the table but stopped when she remembered where they were. Hygiene clearly wasn’t a priority in this tavern. The tabletop was sticky with who knew what, so unless you wanted to end up with a questionable skin disease or worse, it was best not to touch anything if possible, she gathered. Instead, she lowered her head into her hands and rested her elbows on her knees.
“We are so screwed,” she whimpered. “Big-time.”
“At least we got the information we came here for.” Mitha squeezed Kat’s shoulder. “We know what happened to Lucas now.”
Yes, indeed they did.
A few weeks ago, her best friend Lucas had disappeared without a trace. Lucas was human, but he lived on Cassidiri. Kat had met Lucas when she had lived on Earth for a few years as a teenager. Kat was born on Cassidiri. Her mother was Cassidi—as the people of Cassidiri were called—but her father was human, making Kat half-human, half-Cassidi. Kat had wanted to learn more about Earth and her human relatives, and when she was sixteen, she had gotten her parents’ permission to live on Earth for a while with her grandparents from her father’s side.