Junkyard (a Fractured Stars adventure)

By Lindsay Buroker

McCall Richter works as a skip tracer, tracking down criminals, con men, and people who stop making payments on their fancy new spaceships.

Her job description says nothing about locating vast quantities of stolen maple syrup, but thanks to her helpful new android employee, she finds herself tramping through a “sugar house” on a frosty moon full of suspicious characters. The only witness to the crime? The junkyard dog next door.

Junkyard is a stand-alone novella set two years before Fractured Stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lindsay Buroker
• Release date: Jan 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463457252

Lindsay Buroker

Lindsay Buroker war Rettungsschwimmerin, Soldatin bei der U.S. Army und hat als IT-Administratorin gearbeitet. Sie hat eine Menge Geschichten zu erzählen. Seit 2011 tut sie das hauptberuflich und veröffentlicht ihre Steampunk-Fantasy-Romane im Self-Publishing. Die erfolgreiche Indie-Autorin und begeisterte Bloggerin lebt in Arizona und hat inzwischen zahlreiche Romanserien und Kurzgeschichten geschrieben. Der erste Band der Emperor’s-Edge-Serie „Die Klinge des Kaisers“ ist jetzt ins Deutsche übersetzt.

Book preview

Part I

Frost edged the mossy cracks in the pavement in front of the Maple Moon warehouse and sugarhouse. McCall Richter wrinkled her nose, imagining the frozen crystals coating her cilia, and tucked her hands under her armpits as she walked. Her new employee, Scipio, said nothing of the cold, but frost wouldn’t bother an android capable of repairing spaceships from the outside. While in flight.

Plumes of smoke wafted from the chimneys of the sugarhouse, infusing the crisp early spring air with the scent of maple syrup. Imagining cherry-red furnaces inside, McCall wished her instructions had said to meet the owner in there. But she was supposed to meet Mr. David Dunham in the warehouse after landing, its corrugated steel walls just as frosty as the pavement.

She looked wistfully back at her ship. The Star Surfer, its sleek purple hull gleaming under the early-morning suns, its environmentally-controlled interior always at a comfortable temperature, rested a mere fifty meters behind her. The interior also happened to be comfortably free of unfamiliar people with expectations she didn’t know if she could meet.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to back out…

A trio of men walked out of the warehouse, and she held back a grimace. They wore trousers and parkas, not combat armor, but that didn’t make her any less wary. They were strangers, and she always felt the need to put on a mask for strangers. Force a smile, make eye contact, pretend talking about planetary weather wasn’t inane. There was a reason she usually only accepted jobs via text.

For future reference, you’re not allowed to set up meetings, she muttered to Scipio.

The android gave her Inquiring Head Tilt Number Two—in the three months he had been aboard her ship, McCall had mentally cataloged the various facial expressions he was programmed with and given them labels. She often had a hard time reading human faces, but his features arranged themselves in precisely the same manner to simulate well-defined emotions, which made them easier to grasp.

You gave me the position of personal assistant and said I should interact with people on behalf of your business. Is setting up meetings not a typical duty?

Not with people I don’t know and for a job I’m not qualified to do.

I read the last ten years of your assignment records so I could thoroughly familiarize myself with your business. I understand that you usually seek out missing people rather than missing goods, but I am certain you are qualified to do this.

"What I’m qualified to do and what I want to do aren’t the same thing."

McCall knew she sounded peevish—the unassailable logic of an android could bring that out in anyone—but there wasn’t time to explain that she’d spent the last fifteen years carefully crafting a cocoon in which she could thrive. Leaving it usually turned into anxiety, stress, and sensory overload that could put her into an exhausted funk for days. Thank the suns she’d reached the point in her career where she could call the shots and make a comfortable living from within the private protected walls of her ship.

Good morning, Captain Richter, one of the three men said as the trio stopped in front of her.

He had a blunt face, a broad build, and a beard long enough to scrub out his bellybutton when he showered. Because of the beard, she recognized him as the man who wanted to hire her. David Dunham.

It is Captain, isn’t it? he added. Or do you prefer Detective? Officer?

He looked her up and down, as if her ponytail, fur-lined jacket, hiking shoes, and loose trousers might give some clue to a rank. Or maybe the charm bracelet she was twisting around her wrist without realizing it. When she noticed him glancing at it, she jerked her hands down to her side.

I work with the imperial space fleet and law enforcement sometimes, but I’m a civilian. You can call me Captain if you like—the ship is mine. She waved behind her. But McCall or Richter are fine too.

The two silent men behind the speaker gazed blandly at the ship. They wore blazer rifles slung across their backs on straps and had the hulking miens of bouncers. Security guards, she presumed.

Two days ago, she wouldn’t have guessed a maple syrup factory would need security. That had been before she looked up the business and how much the stuff sold for. Premium maple syrup, derived from sap tapped from trees that could trace their lineage to the seeds originally brought on the colony ships from Old Earth, went for a hundred imperial morats a gallon.

It’s a very purple spaceship, one of the guards said.

He wore a glove on his right hand but not his left. The skin on the exposed hand appeared slightly waxy, reminding McCall of Scipio’s not entirely realistic synthetic flesh.

Yes, she said when he looked at her as though expecting a response. Criminals don’t see it as a threat until it’s too late.

That was the reason she always gave for the unique paint job even though the real reason was Because it’s different, and I like that. Maybe someday, she would be comfortable enough in her own skin to simply say that. But she’d spent too much of her life trying to pass for normal for anything else to come easily now.

This is my assistant, Scipio, McCall added. He’s the one you spoke with on the vid.

Scipio adjusted the navy blue suit he wore, the front open to reveal a white shirt fastened with horizontal bamboo clasps that were apparently on trend now.

Greetings, Scipio said.

The men nodded at him, but they were dismissive nods. The talking-to-the-woman’s-android-can’t-be-important nods she’d seen before.

Captain Richter, Dunham said. I appreciate you coming out. My father owns this installation and the sugarbush plantation out back, but he’s retired, so I run things. The business has been in our family since this moon was first terraformed and settled. We make do, but we’re independent operators without wealthy backers, and the government… He spread a hand, and McCall didn’t need to be good at reading faces to guess that he was refraining from complaining about the rules, regulations, and price-setting by the empire. One never knew who would report back to government officials, resulting in a therapist showing up and deciding a loyal subject needed a mental adjustment.

You said someone stole some of your syrup? McCall wanted to move things along—imperial politics wasn’t a passion of hers, and thanks to the less-than-legal way she’d liberated Scipio from his previous owner, she was the last

Reviews for Junkyard (a Fractured Stars adventure)

[ALAN W MORRISON · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Too short, but excellent. Loved the parallel between the McCall and droid. Will read more.