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Personally, I cannot fucking believe how stupid we are being right now. There is nothing here worth getting caught for, but Sullivan has hyped the crew up to thinking that this is the best idea ever simply because it is funny.
We have big black sacks to transport the various items in, like reverse Santa Clauses, all rushing between stores snatching up goods that do not belong to us. Obviously, I do not have an inherent problem with robbery, but I prefer to hit authority freighters and big merchant ships. What we are doing is going to mostly affect small traders.
“GO!” Sullivan shouts. “Go! Go! Go!”
The mall’s security is lax. We were able to slip in through some of the air conditioning ducts, and our little briefing was conducted in front of the same fountain where Sullivan cooked up the whole insane plan to begin with. I stand in place, refusing to join on in this crime for crime’s sake. I am trying to keep the crew safe. I am trying to make this free-for-all orderly. Of course, it devolves into total chaos almost immediately.
“It’s for old times’ sake!” Felicity runs past with an armful of cosmetics. “I used to rob stores with my older sister all the time when we were young! It was the best!”
Felicity is young. She just turned eighteen, but I think she has potential. She agreed to serve on the Mare as an alternative to whoring herself out on the station she somehow managed to hitchhike her way to. I suspect she’s a runaway, but she refuses to talk about where she came from, or what happened to make her run. I’ve never pushed her for her secrets. There’s a lot of secrecy on board the Mare, and we respect what we don’t know. She has auburn hair cut in a cute bob, and a plethora of freckles dashed over her nose under laughing green eyes. She’s cute, and she has her entire life ahead of her. I’ve been teaching her the ropes since she came aboard, and she’s really starting to get the hang of things.
Seeing her behave like this does not please me in the slightest. I thought she had more sense than this — though I suppose I knew she was reckless at heart. Nobody aboard the Mare is the type to worry overly about consequences. Sullivan is cultivating an air of almost untouchable recklessness. We get away with what we do because nobody could believe we would ever do it.
This is going to be added to a profile somewhere. Someone is going to find us more predictable as a result of this randomness. I know these things because I come from a world where data is everything. We’re not going to get away with this forever.
“We’re going to get away with this FOREVER!” Sullivan somehow snatches the thought out of my head and shouts its opposite to the rooftops.
“It’s been too long. We need to get back to the ship. Now. We agreed on three minutes. Three minutes and no more. Remember?”
“STOP, THIEVES!”
Mall security apparently goes home in the evenings. The human parts of it anyway. We figured that when we didn’t see any patrols. What we didn’t know is what is activated when there aren’t supposed to be any shoppers around.
A big, round robot with a sort of round turret body on comically outsized wheels comes trundling around the corner. It is whistling a little tune to itself, the same three notes over and over, like a bored security guard.
Felicity is the first to notice it. Unfortunately, she is also the first person it notices.
“Look at these things! They’re so cute! What do you think they do…”
A red dot appears on Felicity’s forehead as she finishes her question. There is a slight puff sound. So innocuous you could easily miss it. Felicity drops like a stone, mercifully unaware of what hit her. There’s still a dot in the middle of her forehead, but it’s darker now and it oozes red.
“Evacuate. NOW!” I give the order, scooping Felicity up in my arms. She’s gone, and as I pull her up, parts of her remain behind. There’s no time to get all of her up before I activate the transporter. I leave parts of Felicity in the mall. I leave the parts that felt joy and pain, the parts that trusted us — me, to keep her safe in this wild world.
I take her body to the sick bay. I don’t know why. She’s beyond sick. She’s beyond saving in any way. On a ship like this, there isn’t much we can do regardless. We don’t have a doctor. We don’t have access to highly trained staff of any kind, because Sullivan chooses crew based on her gut feeling, not what we need.
It is left to me to prepare Felicity for her final journey. I clean her up and put her in the clothes she liked the best. I perform the tasks with a certain numbness, doing what needs to be done. I don’t feel anything except a numb sense of tragedy, a sadness that will go deep and join the rest of my grief in the pit of my stomach.
Sullivan does not make an appearance. I am not surprised. She never confronts the consequences of her actions. She’ll turn up when it is time to farewell Felicity, once she has been wrapped up and sent toward the nearest sun, then Sullivan will have a toast to celebrate the young life of the woman who I am now attempting to puppet into fresh clothing while she is missing everything from the brain stem up.
This is Sullivan’s fault.
We did something stupid because she ordered it. There was no proper recon. There was no proper consideration at all. There was nothing more than an impulse and an opportunistic rush. And the worst thing about the entire debacle is that there was nothing in that mall that was worth this. Not a single piece of crap in that place was worth ending this young woman’s life for. She came to us because she wanted to live free and meaningfully, and she died for no goddamn good reason other than her irresponsible captain’s whims.
I hear a light scuffling behind me. Some of the crew have come to pay their respects. The younger crowd, Felicity’s friends. Her bunkmates.
“Raine?” Kyla says my name in a timorous voice laced with tears. “Is it true, did Felicity…”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
I keep my words clipped and short not out of a desire to be brusque, but because I do not trust myself not to cry if I say more. They come up around their friend with mournful, serious faces. We were lucky that nobody else was injured.
“You tried to warn us,” Kyla says. “We should have listened.”
I say nothing, because it’s too late for should haves. Yes, they should have listened. Yes, we should have been more careful. Yes, yes, yes to all the most obvious mistakes we have made not only once, but again and again and again.
Back from memory lane, I find myself with a very fucking sore ass and inside a cell. Avel is a saurian of his word, I’ll give him that. I really thought an orgasm would change his mind, but he is both a twisted and determined kind of asshole. Once he told me he was going to take me to the cells, of course that’s where he took me. It wouldn’t have mattered what I did after that point, I tell myself, thereby absolving myself of any responsibility for how things worked out.
“INCOMING!”
