Free Chocolate

Book 1: The Chocoverse

by Amber Royer

Genres: Science Fiction Romance; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the far future, chocolate is Earth’s only unique commodity one that everyone else in the galaxy is willing to kill to get their hands, paws and tentacles on
 
Latina culinary arts student, Bo Benitez, becomes a fugitive when she’s caught stealing a cacao pod from one of the heavily-defended plantations that keep chocolate, Earth’s sole valuable export, safe from a hungry galaxy. 
 
Forces array against her including her alien boyfriend and a reptilian cop. But when she escapes onto an unmarked starship things go from bad to worse: it belongs to the race famed throughout the galaxy for eating stowaways! Surrounded by dangerous yet hunky aliens, Bo starts to uncover clues that the threat to Earth may be bigger than she first thought. 

File Under: Science Fiction [ Heiress Apparent | Sticky Fingers | Pod People | The Milky Way ]

Release date: June 5, 2018

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 448

Sample

Chapter One
 
Our waiter comes back, one tentacle wrapped around a barrel-style cheese grater. His black jacket looks almost comical, what with the dozen armholes, and the dark spots on his face that remind me of pimples. He hasn’t got much of a neck, more an inward curve between his jaw and his chest. I sorta know this guy, who’s a year behind me in culinary school. Last year, I interned at this same restaurant. He burbles something I can’t quite comprender, then gestures toward our salads.
“No, thank you,” I say in Lark. I wish he spoke one of the languages I understand, so he could crack a joke and relieve my nervousness. I’m on a double date with mi mamá, and we’re meeting each other’s respective boyfriends. Since she’s a celebrity, we rated a back wall table with a floor to ceiling view of the beach, and a skylight meant for watching this planet’s double sunset, which has just started.
There are still smudges on the window, where one of the Pops had rappelled down and peered in at us, taking holo until one of the restaurant’s staff had gone up on the roof and cut the cable. The guy had gone sliding down the glass. He’d been OK, though, despite a fourteen foot fall. He hadn’t been human, of course, but Mamá’s famous enough that that holo will sell on the MegaGalactica channels, as well as Earth feeds.
Mamá beams at me and elbows her date. “See, Frank. I told you my Bodacious is brilliant.” Of course she’s impressed that I can speak Lark. She rarely leaves Brazil, let alone Earth. “Her other major is galactic linguistics. That is important in an interspecies kitchen, no?”
“Call me Bo. Por favor.” I refrain from rolling my eyes at my own name as I spear a quizllen fruit onto my fork. I love these bite-size teal pear-shapes. Imagine a strawberry took a bath in honey then got all tied up in a rainbow. This salad is full of them, along with hand-carved zarroxes shaped to look like tiny peony blossoms. Gracias a Dios I don’t have to make those anymore.
“Bonito Benitez.” Frank rolls the words around in his mouth, affecting just the slightest hint of a Spanish accent. It should be bonita, and I’m still trying to decide whether to be enchanted or offended when he drops it and says earnestly, “Your father used to call you that. He told me bonito means beautiful, but he never mentioned what Benitez meant.”
“It means blessed,” Brill says, sliding my hand into his and giving it a squeeze. “And you’re right, Bo is both beautiful and blessed.”
Startled by Frank’s revelation, I barely register the compliment. “You knew my father?” I turn to Mamá. “Mire usted?”
“Yes, really.” Mamá puts a hand on the table and pats the cloth. “Frank and Big Mario worked together. Frank looked me up on the latest anniversary of your father’s death, just to make sure I was doing OK. Qué bonito detalle!” She smiles over at him, showing him she really thinks he is that thoughtful. She has a beautiful smile, with straight white teeth and almost no lines to mar her generous mouth. I look a lot like she did at my age, with the same high cheekbones and slightly hooked nose. If I age half as well, I’ll be contenta. “I made him stay and taste the flan I was testing for the Chocolate Festival marathon feed, and we started talking. What could be more bittersweet, pero romantic, no?”
No. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like Frank. Something about him feels off.
“Tell Bo about Minerva.” She turns towards me. “That is Frank’s granddaughter.”
“She’s a great kid–”
I tune Frank out. Our waiter, whose name I still can’t recall, is also handling the table next to ours, where a lady sits with three niños in high chairs. They look like triplets, all with the same protruding noseless faces and side-set eyes, their flat cheeks brilliant spots of red contrasting the bands of orange and blue crossing above and below their rubbery lips. He places solar system sundaes in front of each of the children. En serio. The most impressive desserts for sale anywhere on this planet are being wasted on toddlers whose palettes probably haven’t developed past frozen pizza, no? One of the niños pops the sphere in his bowl with the back of a spoon, activating the nanite-induced dance that breaks the ice cream into individual balls that change colors and float up to form a spinning replica of the Larksis system, complete with a swirl of chocolate syrup for the asteroid belt and gold candy sprinkles clustering together for the suns. It’s the most fabuloso chocolate sauce I ever tasted – and Chef won’t divulge his secret, not even to students. I was planning to surprise Mamá with one of those, but now… no importa. Never mind.
Frank shakes his head. “Enough about me. I have questions for this young man.” He points his fork at Brill. Near the front of the restaurant, a plate crashes to the floor, adding a jolt to his words.
Brill tilts his head, signaling he’s listening, and at the same time showing off his chiseled jaw. Mi strawberry-blond hermoso from the planet Krom usually goes for tight T-shirts and black leather, but tonight he’s wearing a starched white shirt and a tie with yellow birds all over it. The thick silver proximity band that ties him to his starship is visible at the cuff on his left wrist, but I don’t think that could come off unless he cut it. I feel muy tingly inside. He’s trying so hard to make a good first impression on mi mamá and her whatever-you-call Frank.
Frank’s brow wrinkles, and his brown eyes sharpen hawk-like when he asks Brill, “Can a Krom lie?”
I half choke on that quizllen. “Mamá! Por favor!” Angling a stern look her way, I grab tighter onto Brill’s hand. I was right not to like Frank. I drop my voice and switch to Krom, which I’ve learned pretty well. After all, I’ve been inspired. “Hanstral,” I’m sorry, “about my mother’s life choices.”
Mamá’s voice cajoles me inside my head, via the connection we’ve left open on the sublingual. Ya basta, mija. Frank is just a little more blunt than the rest of us, no? She’s lived in Brazil since I was seventeen, but she still favors Spanish over Portuguese. So do I, to be honest. But whatever the language, I still don’t appreciate her telling me to calm down.
Frank puts his fork on the table. “Now Bo, I’m not implying anything about your date. It’s an honest question. I worked with a Krom when I did an exchange program. The iris changes occurred specifically according to her emotion at a given moment. I was curious, but I never got the nerve to ask. So how about it, Brill? Can you fake those feelings, or are people always going to know what you are thinking?”
Those patterns are as important to Krom non-verbal communication as body language – and just as telling. Brill’s eyes right now are bright blue, tinged toward violet, showing he’s happy and a little amused as he says, “That’s a good question, Mr Sawyer. Not many humans are that observant.” He leans forward and drops his voice, as though he’s sharing a particularly juicy secret. “We can lie, but it takes practice. The part of our brain that shunts chemicals to the iris is buried deep in the subconscious. You concentrate on an old memory until you believe that the memory – the lie – is more important than the present. Much the same way humans lie, I believe.”
I flex my larynx, adding nuance to my words as they flow from my neural patch to Mamá’s. Why’s this guy so obsessed with lying? Dios mío, for all we know, Frank could just be another gold-digger after your dinero. Papá never would have called me bonito instead of bonita.
She disconnects the sublingual, dismissing me with a mere thought. Mamá leans in closer, suddenly interested in hearing about Krom life, even though I’ve spent the past ten months trying unsuccessfully to tell her about the guy I’m dating. “So what happens if the subconscious is not working, mijo?”
“Like if I got knocked out or had a lobotomy?” Brill gives Mamá a wicked grin. “Then my irises would go clear and you’d see the burnt orange blood veins behind them.”
I had always assumed those eyes proved Brill meant it when he said, oh, for instance, Te amo, meaning I love you.
I mean, I’ve seen Brill be less than truthful before, like when he had claimed not to remember seeing those niños who had put the dinkball through the Governor’s window. Pero even then, his irises had turned purple, and then an embarrassed pink hue had crept in, though of course, the Governor’s aide hadn’t recognized it for what it was: Brill’s neon-bright tell. Or so I thought.
What he’s talking about now sounds muy diferente.
I finally manage to squeak, “So can you lie?”
“Not very well, Babe,” he says without hesitation. Those blue irises dance through forest tones on their way towards the golden hue of our first kiss.
I smile and crinkle my nose at him as giddy sun-kissed love-bubbles dance in my heart.
Our waiter reaches over us and re-foams all our near-empty glasses at once. The foam dissolves into sparkling fruit-infused water.
Frank takes a sip. “The other thing that’s always puzzled me about Krom culture is how you claim honor by taking commodities from other people’s planets. I mean, with us, it was Earth’s first First Contact. Didn’t that seem a little cowardly?”
My jaw clenches, and I have to relax my hands to keep them from doing the same thing. I don’t look at Brill. Even from the Krom point of view, our first contact was botched. We weren’t even supposed to know about it, let alone let it destroy us. Pero, it’s not like it’s mi vida’s fault. He wasn’t even born then.
Brill had told me a version of the story one night, when we were sitting on the hood of his rentacar, hand in hand, looking up at the stars towards his home world, the same night I had opened my eyes from kissing him and seen the first hints of gold in his gaze. The setting had been perfect for romance, with just a nip of fall in the air and the rushing waves of the Azlutian Ocean beating in the background like Larksis’s heartbeat.
He told it like this. Once upon a time, before humans ever dreamed of traveling to the stars, when they crossed the world in sailing ships and felt like their globe was as immense as any galaxy, the people in the Arabian Peninsula had coffee. And while they were willing to part with bags of coffee for significant amounts of dinero, they always boiled the beans first, so they wouldn’t grow. Men from Europe didn’t want to pay such high prices, so in 1616, Dutchmen stole a few beans, making off with them well before they had been boiled. The Dutch shared their spoil with the French, but the climate in both countries was wrong, and the plants didn’t do well.
Enter Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, a Frenchman bound for Martinique, which had the right climate. When his government refused to give him clippings to found a plantation, he stole a pequeño coffee tree. Aboard ship, someone tried to steal the plant from him, and the precious green thing was torn apart. Pero, it survived. The ship was threatened by pirates, then bashed about in a storm, then stuck in becalmed seas. The journey took so long their fresh agua started running out. De Clieu kept the plant alive by giving it half his scanty water ration.
He was rewarded with a bountiful coffee plantation, pero coffee was too important for him to be able to keep it to himself. The Brazilians sent Francisco de Melo Palheta to French Guiana to settle a border dispute, where he managed to attract the governor’s wife. At his going-away party, she presented him with a magnífico bouquet of flowers – and as a bonus, a few coffee seedlings hidden in the greenery. And so it continued, until coffee was being grown the world over, with ninety percent of the plants being direct descendants of De Clieu’s stolen one. He is remembered not as a thief, pero as the man who gave coffee to the world.
By the time the Krom arrived on Earth, you could buy coffee seedlings on the Internet. After visiting a little café on the University of Iowa campus and falling in love with the stuff, that’s exactly what one of them did. They catalogued it, cloned it and propagated it. And then somebody else bought it from them. So, now, the best Kona coffee in the galaxy is grown on one of the moons of Mardgar, almost ten thousand light years from Earth.
The Krom also took samples of sugar and tea and vanilla, and everything else they could catalog. But they messed up when it came to chocolate. Cocoa beans come from the cacao tree. Pero, working with limited knowledge of English, and in a hurry because of the riots that poofbanged as soon as they were discovered, the Krom First Contact party accidentally got their hands on a coca plant instead. That plant died in transit. Otherwise, they’d have imported a major drug problem.
Needless to say, Earth media didn’t report it quite that way. Later, when they finally understood what had happened, our FeedCasters painted the entire Krom race as cowards and galactathieves. Pero, that’s an unfair generalization. I’ve seen Brill be brave, seen him help people.
Whereas Frank, if he really was in the same company of firefighters as Papá, must have fled the weakening structure of the Yucatan HGB high rise the night the furnace blew, when there were still life signs inside. Talk about a coward. I call Mamá to say as much.
Qué? She sounds exasperated. I recognize the dangerous look in her eyes.
Uh oh. Nada, Mamá.
She hangs up on me. I try to call her back, but she’s shut down her system.
Brill smiles at Mamá, pero it lacks his usual warmth. “Have you been watching the news? The colony called Farder was destroyed a few days ago, and the colonists massacred. Rumor is they’d discovered a plant people had started calling the fountain of youth. If it existed, it’s gone now. They destroyed it, rather than share.”
That may seem muy random, and nada to smile about, pero he’s drawing a parallel between Farder and Earth, with our refusal to let anyone else have unfermented cacao beans. We’ll let toda la galaxia – the entire galaxy – have chocolate, even cocoa nibs, as long as we keep control over how and where those products are produced. We keep the source for ourselves.
The criticism’s not lost on Frank, who starts into a blustery defense of Earth’s economy. Get him this passionate in front of a reporter, and an unexpected question could make him totally crashbang. That would be fun to set up. I realize I’m smiling. Mamá seems to know exactly what I’m thinking.
“Pardon, mi amor,” she interrupts Frank, “but I need to powder my nose. I have a feeling Bo does too.”
She grabs my arm. Her hands are strong from years of kneading bread dough, and her fake nails bite into my skin. I’m regretting the sleeveless burgundy dress I’m wearing as she drags me to the bathroom. My favorite chunky white earrings swing against my neck from the momentum.
As we walk past the other tables, I hear a guy say, “Is that Lavonda Benitez?”
Not Lavonda and Bo. No y no. Not anymore. I’ve been here, shadowpopped out on a backwater planet, long enough that the Pops have more or less forgotten me. And with them, the public.
“Mamá Lavonda!” a girl at that table calls, and she and the guy both wave.
Mamá gives them a smile and blows them a kiss. Without letting me go. Or stopping walking. I’m sure she’ll sign autographs for them later – when she’s not angry at me anymore.
Once we’re inside the restroom, Mamá snaps, “Do not try to scare Frank off by putting him in front of the media, just because you do not like him. You say nada about him to the feeds, negativo or not. Comprendes?”
Heat rushes into my chest. “Mamá, I only tell the celebarazzi things like how unfair it is that the chocolatiers have to work an extra hour and a half without pay to cover the cost of the new planetary security system.”
“I told you to stop those FeedCasts too, mija. Be careful what you say about the corporation that puts food in our mouths. They are not this evil conspiracy thing you keep making them out to be.”
I arch an eyebrow. “Are you so sure about that?”
Mamá’s FeedCasts – her entire career – have been sponsored by HGB, the monster corporation that sprouted in the wake of the First Contact War. While everyone else was trying to take over the chocolate belt by force, a group of choc-centric companies – primarily Hershey, Godiva and Bissinger, with a few marketing and management firms and a handful of botanists and independent chocolatiers thrown in – banded together. They quietly made proprietary trade agreements with other planets, at the same time selling stock to both chocolate producing and chocolate processing nations. Now, HGB is something more than a corporation, something less than a government, pero with an equal three seats on the Global Earth Court, which was set up to mirror the Galactic Court.
En breve, HGB is the face Earth presents to the galaxy, which makes it the most powerful organization on the planet, with private security forces that rival any army. At the same time, though, it needs people like Mamá because without global popular opinion, those that weren’t invited to invest would jump at the chance to overthrow their control of chocolate.
Mamá rolls her eyes, though I have said none of this out loud. “This boy that you are with, he is filling your cabeza with his people’s nonsense.”
My face flushes unattractively in the mirror. “Do you not like Brill just because he’s an alien?”
“I am trying to like this one. At least you have got your own man this time.”
My breath catches. She’s really bringing that up again, after all this time. “How many times do I have to tell you I didn’t kiss your fiancé, OK? Hugo attacked me in the garden that night.”
“And how many times do I have to tell you that I believe you?” She sighs. “The only boy you have ever been loyal to was that soccer player. I think he broke something inside you when he broke your heart. You will never be happy until you learn to stop running away when a relationship gets hard, no?”
For a second I can’t speak. Or hear over the rushing sound in my ears. That soccer player, as she calls him, left me a long time ago, yet I can still recall every curve of his face. It’s not fair of her to poke at so painful a memory. Finally I manage, “Unlike you? You’ve been engaged three times in the last five years.”
She looks away. My barb landed just like I meant it to, pero I immediately want to stuff the words back into my mouth. She’s been through a lot, too. Her voice softens. “Big Mario always was your hero, and losing him so young had to–”
“He was everyone’s hero, Mamá. They saved twenty-nine people.” The bureau determined later that HGB’s negligence caused that fire. They’d installed a replacement furnace that couldn’t handle the building’s capacity, against the express wishes of the repairman involved. I sigh. “An HGB starwrangler approached me today after class. They want to make me the new spokesperson for a line of princess-themed chocolate bars. Something about Papá being able to trace his ancestry all the way back to Montezuma, and me being perfect for the role of the rightful Princesa de Cacao.”
Mamá claps her hands in that little fluttering way she does when she’s excited, the pain I’d just caused forgotten. “Fantástica, mija!”
“No, Mamá. It’s insulting.” I don’t mention that the offer was more of a threat – stop the protest holos, or I get recalled to Earth. They could do it, too. Their influence over the Global Court – more weight than their three seats really should merit – means they could get my student visa cancelled without me even being able to file a protest. Resist, and they also threatened Mamá’s feeds could get cut. They wouldn’t really do that to her, though. She’s too popular.
Still, I hate how she is always trying to get me back into show business. I travel halfway across the galaxy to live life away from the sleazarazzi, and she still doesn’t get it. “Papá was no more gene-tied to Montezuma than Brill is to–”
“I cannot understand why you throw away every opportunity life hands you.” She crumples the paper towel.
I adjust the straps on my dress and tilt my arm to the mirror. Mamá’s nails have left bright red marks. “Then just be happy for me and Brill. That’s an opportunity too, no?”
She breaks out a spare tube of lipstick, gesturing between me and the mirror. I could use a fresh coat, and I left my purse at the table. At least the unattractive flush in my cheeks is starting to fade. While I’m applying the deep pink shade, Mamá studies me. One of her eyebrows arches upwards. “Will you go out there and act interested in Frank’s family?”
“No lo sé.” I don’t know. “Will you be nice to Brill?”
She puts a hand over mine and squeezes. “Just promise me you will be careful, mija.”