Page 1 of How to Steal a Galaxy

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IdockGloryin bay ninety-four at the outer Oort station and ping my contact. I know it won’t take him long to get to me, but also I’ve had nothing but recycler worms for the entire journey away from theRoundaboutwreckage, so I hop out. Stations always have a variety of food and people selling them, and this one is pretty big, with lots of cruiser transfers. I grab some skewers of something brown and crunchy as an appetizer—surprisingly sweet—and then get closer to the center, where the good stuff is.

My contact finds me bent over a cart, picking a flavor of a protein drink. “There you are,” he says, his voice low and gruff. “Why did you leave the bay?”

“I’ll take a purple one, with some of those cold cubes,” I tell the vendor, pointing. “And he’s paying.”

The vendor bends into her cart, scooping out the squishy cubes into the reusable cup I hand her.

“No, I’m not,” my contact says. I don’t know his name. He told me once before, but eh. I ping him with the code word, and he shows up; that’s all this ever needs to be.

“You are paying,” I say, my voice betraying a bit of an edge. “Because I have your stuff. Want anything?” I grin at the vendor as I take the cup back.

Grudgingly, my contact taps his cuff against the vendor’s scanner. “Come on,” he growls, leading me back toGlory.When we’re far enough away from others, he says in a low voice, “You got all three items we need?”

I slurp the purple drink. “Yup.”

He frowns and looks like he wants to say more, but a group of people walks close by. I motion for him to follow me into the docking bay and on board the ship.

He looks around at my littleGloryas if she wasn’t the best ship in the entire galaxy, which says a lot about how bad his taste is. Even with a hole in her side that I have to seal off behind the bulkhead doors,Glory’slovely.

“You have comms down, right?” he asks.

“Obviously,” I snap. Everyone knows that all communication runs through the portal network, and the portal network is run by the government using the same system base. The law-abiding types tend to point out that comms are on private relays, but it doesn’t take much figuring to guess that “private relays” are only private as long as no one wants to listen.

And there are a lot of people who want to listen to what my contact has to say.

“Speaking of security, you do know that the code wordJane Irwinis, er, how shall I put this? Too well fucking known.” I head toward the bridge, the contact on my heels.

“We know,” he says.

I shoot him an exasperated look over my shoulder as I lean down to the bridge box and get out the data recorder that has all the information from the cryptex drive on it.

“It’s a base code at best, and a way to recognize who may be working undercover. We let the law think they know the right code so they don’t dig deeper, and we weed out some low-levels by using it.” He looks down at the box as I hand it to him. “This is useless without the key and the prototype.”

“Sure is. Just like you’re useless until I see the payment in my account.” I pointedly look at the data band on my wrist, already glowing with my financial info.

The contact heaves a sigh. “Some people would help us because it’s the right thing to do,” he says. “I am not getting paid. Knowing that I could save billions of people is payment enough, and—”

I clear my throat and tap my band.

His jaw works while he pulls out a data pad, punches a code on the screen, waits, taps a few more times. In moments, the sum we agreed upon flashes in my account.

“Wonderful!” I say brightly. I reach into my pocket for the small box that contains the cryptex key and the nanobot prototype and toss it to him.

He fumbles, dropping his data pad to catch the box. “Hey, this is sensitive material!”

“It’sfine,” I say. “If that little nanobot is supposed to figure out a way to clean up the pollution on Earth, then it’s going to have to take a bigger beating than just being tossed a few meters.”

He stares down at the box as if it holds the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

Maybe it does.

No, who am I kidding. It just holds a key and bot.

“Any trouble?” he asks.

“Some,” I say. I was already in place whenRoundaboutcame into view. I watched as the crew inside evacuated and got picked up by another ship in my contact’s network. I suppose there’s some sort of cover for the crew. They were all Earthers; I know that much. Anyway, after the crew left, they set a crash course forRoundaboutonto the terran protoplanet.

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