Page 41 of How to Steal a Galaxy

I head to the door, and Rian trudges behind me. I can hear him muttering under his breath, “The damn strawberries.” I couldn’t risk eating anything when I had the gloss on my lips. Our kiss was sloppy enough to make me reckless, but I was able to avoid ingesting any or getting much direct-skin contact from the sticky stuff.

Glorydoesn’t have a huge mess hall; it’s mostly just a room with a reheater, a tank of recycler worms, and crates of ready-eats. And, of course, hot sauce on the table. “Yellow or red?” I ask, grabbing two of the boxes of ready-eats.

Rian makes a face that is, frankly, rude, because at least I’ve offered him some variety. I peel back the foil top of a red box and slurp some down. It’s not exactly charity-gala fare, but it’s better than the product of recycler worms, and the hot sauce perks me up a little.

“All right, what was so important that you had to kidnap me?” he asks.

“You’re not a child.”

“What?”

“Kidnapping. Napping kids. You’re not a kid,” I point out. Rian heaves a sigh from the very depths of his soul, so I figure I should let this one go. “Okay, fine. This all circles back to theRoundabout, which is ironic if you consider the name of that ship—”

“Ada.”

“So, you mentioned before that while I stole the plans and the nanobot prototype from the salvage, I only delayed the government’s process of creating them.”

Rian nods.

I gulp down a little more of the red stuff. It has a label identifying it as beef replacement, and the picture on the crumpled-up foil shows a steak dinner, but this is nothing like that. I would have stocked up on better food, but even with the advance in funds on this job, I’m skint. “Did it not occur to you that I wasn’t trying to stop the nanobot production?”

Rian’s face crinkles as he processes that.

“Well, I mean,Iwasn’t trying to do anything but the job I was paid for,” I continue. “Buttheyknew better than to assume one theft would stop the whole machine of the government. The bill, as you pointed out, was passed. The Goliath was lumbering into motion.”

“Then why—”

“For fuck’s sake, Rian, just because you’re good doesn’t mean the government is. The government is a for-profit business that has to make the ledgers go from red to black. The more altruistic you think this nanobot production is, the more I question your intelligence.”

That was a low blow, and I regret it the minute I say it. I could call Rian almost anything and he wouldn’t care, butstupidcrosses a line that actually insults him.

Still, though.

I wad up the empty ready-eat package. “Look, while you intended for the nanobots you’re releasing on Earth to be beneficial to the climate, you had to hire out Fetor Tech to make them. And Strom Fetor’s not exactly known for his giving nature.”

“I know, but—”

“But you wrapped up this project in lots of legalese, I know; I read the bill.”

“You read—”

“Yeah. The whole thing. I can read,” I say, mildly insulted.

“I know you can. I would never call you dumb.” He pauses, weighing his words. “In either sense of the word.”

Fair. Also, a pointed blow against my insult. “Anyway, I know you think you safeguarded the whole thing. But you may know how to write a proposal or, I don’t know, a memo, whatever you do all day, but you know jack shit about code.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but he remembers the one bad mark on my public profile—I got pinned for hacking the European ad system to deliver anti-government messaging. And, more recently, I read the code from the Jarra hacking in to the hover stage they’d set for a crash landing.

“Strom Fetor isn’t a trillionaire because he gives things away, even for the government label.”

“Of course not,” Rian says, exasperated. “He was paid.”

I snort. “Anyway, I looked at the code. I mean, my client did, too, but I wasn’t going to just hand it over without looking at it myself. Planned obsolescence.”

Rian’s brow wrinkles in confusion, and even though I know he knows what those words mean, they’re so far removed from the context of the illusion he’s created around this program he can’t figure it out.

“Planned obsolescence,” I say again. “The nanobots are coded to malfunction after a certain threshold.”

---