Just when they thought they were out … TwiceFar station is at the edge of the Known Universe, and that’s just how Niko Larsen, a former admiral in the grand army of the Holy Hive Mind, likes it.Retired and finally free of the continual war of conquest, Niko and the remnants of her former unit are content to spend the rest of their days working at the restaurant they built together, the Last Chance. But some wars can’t ever be escaped, and unlike the Holy Hive Mind, some enemies aren’t content to let old soldiers go. Niko and her crew are forced onto a sentient ship that is convinced it is being stolen, and must survive the machinations of a sadistic pirate king if they even hope to keep the dream of the Last Chance alive.
Release date:
September 7, 2021
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
320
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The entrance buzzer chimed. Someone outside in the public hallway of the space station was paging admittance.
Niko Larsen, a.k.a. Captain Nicolette Larsen, formerly one of the finest military geniuses the Holy Hive Mind had ever threatened to absorb, now retired, looked around.
Huh, she thought. What now?
She checked the view screen. A delivery bot stood outside, flanked by a large crate, about two meters long, a half meter wide, and a meter tall. Its metal carapace was brown and yellow, regular station delivery colors. It stood patiently, ignoring the impatient stares of passersby trying to get around the large crate in the five-meter-wide hallway.
She didn’t remember any deliveries due today, but pushed the button nonetheless. With a velvety whoosh, the door slid open.
“You should take that into the kitchen through the back access hall,” she said. “There’s too much furniture in here—don’t bring it in this way.”
Despite her words, the bot was already trundling forward past her and the entrance lectern, trailed by the crate. It said, with a burst of speaker static resembling an officious chirp, “The access hallway leads to the kitchens of the Last Chance Restaurant. This delivery tag specifies Last Chance, and the default is main entrance.”
“Then don’t go with the default, use the back entrance!”
“My delivery has been executed.” The bot detached itself from the crate, leaving it two meters inside the vestibule. “I do not accept outside commissions. If this service has been of use to you, please consider rewarding my employers with a plus.”
Machines were impervious to Niko’s stare, but she tried one anyway. “This service has not been of use to me,” she said.
“My employers are sorry you feel that way,” the bot said, and exited.
Niko looked the crate over. Made of white-enameled plasmetal, it floated a few inches above the ground. A sturdy handle on each of the narrower ends provided the means with which to move it. The label simply bore Niko’s full name, along with the address of the restaurant. The orange ticket that would have disclosed its point of origin seemed to have been torn away.
Niko scowled at it and left it where it was.
She found her second-in-command waiting in her office. He silently handed her a sheet of plastic. Looking it over, she raised an eyebrow.
“Eggplant?” she said incredulously. “Where am I going to get eggplant, short of you finding some cut-rate sorcerer? None of the big farm ships grow it, except for the Mannan, and their prices are twice anyone else’s.”
She frowned at Dabry in the office’s dim light. Niko was of indeterminate human mix, with pale brown skin and graying dreadlocks swept back and contained on the back of her head with an ivory beaded net. Muscular shoulders rounded out her white chef’s jacket, its front unpinned and fallen awry, bearing coffee stains along one sleeve.
Although Niko was tall, the being also wearing a chef’s jacket (although significantly less crumpled and stained), hulking across from where she sat at the tiny desk, dwarfed her. He was an Ettilite, an eight-foot-tall humanoid with four arms and skin the color of the eggplant they had been discussing.
Dabry, a.k.a. Sergeant Dabry, also retired from the ranks of the Holy Hive Mind, folded both pairs of arms and stared at her impassively. “The critic,” he rumbled, “is said to have a weakness for old Earth food from its Mediterranean region. I need to analyze the components if I’m going to replicate it.”
“You are all way too concerned about this critic,” Niko said. “Ever since Skidoo found out who booked the reservation, you have been ridiculous! Cleaning—which I do approve of. Redecorating—which I approve of up to a certain budgetary point. But now—rearranging the menu just for them?”
“They have the power to give our restaurant a Nikkelin Orb,” Dabry said with a tone that implied that once a restaurant had achieved such a thing, everyone in it might go ahead and die happily, their life goals attained. They had been operating the Last Chance for a little over a solar year now, and Dabry tracked its few reviews and mentions with a gleeful zeal.
“This restaurant,” Niko said, not for the first time, “was not my idea.”
“This restaurant,” Dabry said, also not for the first time, “got us all out of the Holy Hive Mind’s service and let us keep what we could of the company together while we try to build our finances.”
Niko sighed and pushed away the piece of plastic. They were in her tiny office, which had once been a walk-in closet and still smelled of artificial cedar and orange from the scent unit near the fan. (She kept saying she meant to disable it because of its rattle.)
While she groused about the unit, though, she didn’t mind it, really. It overrode other smells from the kitchen only a few steps farther down the tin tube of a hallway, and their associated memories. Cinnamon, when Milly was baking, reminded her of Free Trade life and came on a wash of loss and nostalgia. Stale dishwater reminded her of the IAPH, wafting on fear and regret.
And vinegar’s tang, once such a clean smell to her, crept under the doorway every so often, and seeping with it came the despair and terror of life in the Holy Hive Mind’s barracks.
The office was still lined on two sides with shelves, now holding a mix of data pads, books, clothes, and miscellaneous ordnance and knives, and a hanging rack half full of white chefs’ jackets, the other half full of disused civvies. A folding cot was jammed up against the wall behind her, next to two crates filled with glossy black rocks left over from the redecorating effort. Past menus were stickied to the wall, the plastic slips fluttering whenever the door opened or closed.
She narrowed her eyes at Dabry. “I know,” she said, “and that was not the worst plan you’ve ever come up with, but you’re taking it so seriously. It’s a restaurant. A glorified location for the satisfaction of one of the most basic urges.”
Dabry pointed two lower fingers at her in emphasis. “And you cannot talk like that, or they will know you are not an artist.”
Niko shuddered. When it came to retiring from the Holy Hive Mind, there were few acceptable ways—most of its soldiers stayed in the army until they died, and a few of them long after that. She would have been one of those few, her brain extracted upon death and moved into a Holy Hive Mind container and reanimated to serve as part of its consciousness.
Not a fate she had anticipated with pleasure. When Dabry came to her with a crazy plan to claim that Niko was a thwarted artist—one of the sacred Occupations—and that her medium was cooking, it being her single talent, she’d been willing to play along.
A vast amount of bribery and wheedling had gone into the escape, but in the end she’d been able to use her considerable back wages—combined with those of her crew who wanted to come, and whom she declared part of her immediate family—to buy a small establishment aboard one of the largest space stations around, TwiceFar Station, relic of some long-forgotten race and now home to dozens of alien species.
Niko fixed her former sergeant with the stare that had straightened soldierly spines, cowed bureaucrats, and put the fear of the Holy Hive Mind into her enemies more than once.
Dabry, inoculated by long exposure, gave her a bland look back. “You know it as well as I do, Captain,” he said. “The Holy Hive Mind is still keeping tabs on us. If they suspected that you think of the restaurant as something other than an artistic enterprise, they would haul you back and scoop the brain out of your head.”
“I am an artist,” she said. “Just not in the way that it thinks of artists. Its definition is a cross between an addict and an artist possessed by their muse, unable to help creating. It’s hard to keep convincing it of that. An Orb would cement me as that kind of artist.” She frowned at her second-in-command.
Dabry had turned out to have an unexpected (to Niko, at least) flair for all of this. He was the one who had found the odd little space that they turned into the restaurant, a former bar built by Derloens, who had fled the place when a particular side effect of their inhabitation became too much for them. Derloens leave what some species might call “ghosts” behind them, and these spirits, while no longer sentient, still inhabited the space in the form of long, glowing blue worms swimming through the air, which their maître d’, Lassite, had incorporated into the decor.
Most of the restaurant’s interior was dark blues and blacks, giving it a restrained rather than subdued look. The luminescent, writhing forms, shimmying overhead in aimless pursuit of one another, shed their light over it, augmented only by thumb-sized glow candles on each table.
Over the past year, and particularly in recent months, the restaurant had proved surprisingly successful. Something about the shadowy decor hadn’t lured the criminals whom Niko had feared, but diners who sought privacy and exclusivity: lovers, those wishing to become lovers, diplomats, people with other people that they wanted to impress.
“Speaking of which, shouldn’t I be planning this meal?” Niko grumbled.
“You said I could take this one,” Dabry protested. It had pained him to have had to step back and let Niko take the wheel the last time they presented to the Holy Hive Mind, a yearly requirement of their situation.
“All right,” Niko said. She waved her hand. “Go forth. And if you truly desire an eggplant to dissect, then who am I to stand in your way? Place an order with the Mannan.”
Dabry hesitated.
Niko’s eyes narrowed farther. “What?”
“An order from the Mannan,” Dabry said, “would take over a sleep unit to get here. Too late.”
“Then where are you planning on getting it?”
“I have a favor due me,” Dabry said with dignity.
“Do I want to know anything about the nature of the favor or what you intend to do with it?”
“Probably not, other than that I will obtain an eggplant with it.”
“Then I’m not sure why you’re even telling me!” Niko threw up her hands in exasperation. Sometimes she thought Dabry enjoyed these encounters; the more expressionless he remained, the more convinced of that she became. She began to add a remark to that effect but a flurry of knocks on the door interrupted her.
Only one of her workers knocked like that. “Come in, Skidoo,” she called.
The entity who entered was unlike either of the beings already in the room. Skidoo was a Tlellan, which humans sometimes called Squids for their resemblance to one of the few Terran creatures left alive. Her ten limbs functioned as either arms or legs to propel her sacklike body along. Atop that squat bundle was a lump that served as a head, fixed with three bright blue eyes. Unlike Terran squids, she was colored as brightly as a festival, purples and reds variegating across blue and yellow dots and stripes.
“I am being securing an important reservation!” she announced.
“We’re not taking any more reservations for tonight,” Niko told her. “I said that already. We’ve got this stupid food critic arriving.”
Skidoo wilted. “But this is being a very large party,” she said.
“Even worse,” Dabry said. “How large?”
“Possibly they are being saying as many as twenty.”
“Twenty! We don’t have room for that. We’d have to rearrange one of the back chambers,” Niko protested.
“They are being saying they are knowing you, Captain, so I am being taking the reservation,” Skidoo said.
“Did they give you a name?”
Skidoo drew herself up as much as possible in order to deliver this information in a suitably grand manner: “Admiral Taklibia.”
“Taklibia? Here?” Niko was flabbergasted.
“The one you served under?” Dabry asked.
“I did, but I was only an aide. They wouldn’t remember me.”
“Apparently they do, and enough to seek out your restaurant.”
Niko shook her head. She was about to tell Skidoo to cancel the reservation when the door flew open with a crash. Milly, her new pastry chef, stuck her head in, just the beaked face at the end of a long white-feathered neck, giving the impression of a disembodied head. “The boys are fighting in the storage room again!” she gasped in her high, fluting voice, and clacked her beak urgently.
Swearing under her breath, Niko rose. She pointed at Skidoo and Dabry. “Take care of it!” she told Dabry, and went to tame her lions.
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