Mayhem and Mutiny Read online

  Mayhem and Mutiny

  By Charissa Dufour

  © 2017 by Charissa Dufour

  All rights reserved.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Follow Charissa Dufour at

  https://www.facebook.com/Charissadufourauthor

  https://twitter.com/CharissaDufour

  https://www.instagram.com/charissadufourauthor/

  http://charissadufourauthor.com/

  Chapter One

  Bit stepped out of the elevator with the rest of those descending from the port, her boot kicking up dust. A few of those who followed her out of the elevator coughed as they inhaled, but Bit was used to the smog of Johannesburg. After all, up until a few months ago, it had been her home since she was five years old.

  Whether she wanted to our not, she was returning home, and she was doing it as an outlaw.

  To pay for her ticket to Earth, she stole from Jack, the captain of the Lenore and owner of her debt. Even after the two weeks journeying back to the blue planet, she hadn’t gotten over her shame. In the seventeen years, she had spent as an Indentured Servant, she had never stolen from her owner. Not once. Not even a bread crumb. Now, she had taken her owner’s pay card, removed money from his account, and run halfway across the inhabited galaxy.

  But it’s worth it, she told herself, drawing to her mind an image of what she thought her niece or nephew might look like. Other than the few minutes after birth, while the child lay in her dying sister’s arms, Bit had never seen it. She couldn’t remember the gender, though she had been present for the delivery.

  Bit let the crowd from the large elevator flow forward until she could walk without bodies bumping into her. Her transport had landed on the pad hovering over Vanderbijlpark. Unlike Mars, most of Earth’s transport vessels weren’t built to enter and exit the dense atmosphere. Instead, people traveled up an enormous elevator to a pad that hovered in the outer layer of the atmosphere. From there, one could take a transport to the orbiting port, the moon’s station, the shipyard orbiting the moon, or Sagan space station.

  Vanderbijlpark was one of the higher-rent neighborhoods in Johannesburg. It had once been its own city, but like everything around the Golden Giant—better known as Johannesburg—it got swallowed up over the years. Bit didn’t have to travel far to escape the glamor of the wealthy suburb. It wasn’t that the buildings shrunk so much but more that the additions and repairs no longer matched the structures’ original building material.

  The farther she walked, the worse it got. In Vanderbijlpark, the dust was a thin layer over old pavement. As she moved north into Vereeniging, the dust became a thick layer over the pavement and the rare sidewalk. When she dismounted the public train in Soweto, one could no longer find the pavement. The roads had once been paved, but it had been decades, maybe even longer, since the government bothered with suburbs like Soweto or Hillbrow.

  Bit knew she wouldn’t find Douglas Zandri—her owner at the time her sister got pregnant and the father of the child—in Soweto. If he had found a plush position with Morgan Reactors, or any of their sister companies, then he had worked his way out of the slums. All the same, she had more contacts in the slums than she did in any of the gilded suburbs. All she had to find Zandri with was a frequency number. With the right equipment, she hoped to track it down.

  Sighing, she thought back to how she got the code. Like stealing Jack’s money, she hated digging into the memory of the Lenore. It felt like another theft from her owner—more specifically from the man who had lifted her out of the mire and made her life bearable. But she couldn’t enjoy her new life knowing her only family was still working for some scum-peddling lunatic. Or, at least, that’s how Bit imagined the owner.

  She thought back to the beginning of her adventure. Bit had snuck out of her room in the dead of night just after they left the Nye space station. She crept up to bridge in the hopes that Oden or Calen would have fallen asleep or ran down to the galley for a bite. Bit had been prepared to repeat the effort as often as needed until she found the bridge unsupervised. To her astonishment, Calen lay sprawled across the pilot’s chair, his feet up on the controls, and snoring peacefully.

  Evidently, I’m not the only one to fall asleep on duty, Bit thought to herself, thinking of the horror she felt when she had fallen asleep at the helm.

  Tip-toeing into the bridge, Bit slid into the seat at the computer and communication station behind the pilot’s seat. As gently as she could, she hit the button, keying into the station’s memory banks—just as Randal had taught in one of her many lessons. She shifted through a list of frequencies. One number repeated itself over and over again—at least three times as often as the other numbers. Though she hadn’t memorized the thousands of frequency numbers used throughout the known universe, she did recognize Earth’s prefix.

  Earth. Douglas Zandri, her sister’s murderer, and the child’s father was on Earth.

  Chapter Two

  “You might know she went to Earth, but how can you know she traveled to Johannesburg?” demanded Dirk.

  Yet again, Oden glared at the Head Engineer. Dirk had been stretching everyone’s patience since they first discovered Bit’s absence in Ward Port orbiting Mars. It wasn’t the first time Bit had become lost in Ward Port and, at first, no one had thought much of it. Most of the crew opted to search for her for a few minutes before meeting at the terminal where a flight would take them down to the surface.

  It wasn’t until everyone returned, each one unable to find her, that they began to get concerned. Two hours later, their flight had left and their concern had turned into panic. By the time the sun set on the surface, the crew knew she was nowhere to be found on the port.

  Reluctantly, most of them returned to the Lenore. Jack offered to let everyone begin their leave on the surface, and though Dirk showed signs of wanting to leave, he stuck with his crew. As they reentered the ship, Jack pulled his wallet out, preparing to put his unused ticket into its folds. His breath caught in his chest, drawing Oden’s attention.

  “Captain?”

  Jack shuffled through the various bits of plastic in his wallet. “One of my pay cards is missing. My personal pay card.”

  “You should shut that down. Whoever stole it can take away loads. My friend…”

  Jack waved him silent. “How would someone steal that… wouldn’t they steal the whole wallet?”

  The airlock hissed open and they stepped into the ship, leaving the airlock for the next batch of crewmembers. Oden frowned. Jack was making sense, and a sudden inkling teased Oden’s mind.

  “Captain, can you check your usage for the missing card?”

  “What are you thinking?” asked Jack, not answering his question.

  Oden shook his head. “Just check the card. If I’m right, I’ll tell you.”

  They walked up to the bridge and Jack sat at the communication station where one of the ship’s few computers could access the net. Within a few moments, Jack confirmed Oden's suspicions.

  “Someone’s taken a huge amount from it!”

  “Enough to book a flight?” asked Oden.

  “A flight to where? Oden, do you know about this? Who did this?”

  Oden nodded. “And so do you. It was Bit.”

  “What?”

  “Bit took your card. Bit removed the money. See if you can find out where the money was removed from your account. What currency station?”

  Jack turned back to the computer and clicked a few more buttons. “Ward Port, terminal sixteen.”
>
  “We passed right by that terminal before we realized she was gone.”

  “What are you guys doing up here?” Randal asked as he and Blaine entered the bridge.

  “Bit stole my pay card,” Jack announced, sounding unusually indignant.

  Randal’s look of worry darkened into a frown. “Why in the world would she do that?”

  “Oh dear,” Blaine sighed, his eyes closing.

  “What?” the three other men demanded.

  “Check the net,” Blaine ordered. “See if a flight left for Earth shortly after the money was stolen.”

  “What are you thinking?” asked Jack.

  “Just do the search. I’ll explain if I’m right.”

  Jack growled. “Okay, everyone stop doing that. Just explain.”

  To Oden’s astonishment, Blaine blushed. “Oden told me about that guy being her old owner, the one who was your contact… and how she kept screaming about a child.”

  “Yes. She wouldn’t explain what she meant,” prompted Oden.

  Blaine nodded. “When she first came aboard and she cut herself. I gave her pain meds before stitching her up. She got really loopy and let some stuff spill.”

  “Like what?” asked Jack.

  “That her sister got seduced by an owner, got pregnant, and died in childbirth. She said she didn’t know where the child was, but one day she would find it.”

  “And then she saw Zandri,” sighed Jack.

  “And she has a wealth of new skills,” added Randal.

  “Considering what she did to that guy on the space station, I’d be afraid to get on Bit’s bad side now,” said Oden, thinking of the tortured man Zandri had carted away.

  The three other men nodded.

  Jack let out an exhausted sigh. “So she stole my money and went back to Earth to find that son of a bitch.”

  Blaine nodded.

  “I’m torn between being mad as hell and a little proud of her,” Jack sighed.

  Oden smiled at the memory. It hadn’t taken them long to drag Dirk back up to the ship, get a clearance to leave, and refuel. A few hours after their conversation in the bridge, Oden was guiding the Lenore away from Ward Port.

  It was amazing how fast they could do the trip when not hounded by pirates. They made it in less than two weeks.

  “I don’t know if she traveled back to Earth,” Jack growled, sounding just as annoyed with Dirk as Oden felt. “But it’s the most logical guess based on the information we have.”

  “And this is where you won her?” Randal asked, turning to Calen.

  “There’s a cantina a few blocks away.”

  Calen led the way back to the cantina where it had all begun. Oden shuttered his eyes against the dust. He had only been to the enormous city the one time, but it had been dusty and windy then, too. Is it always like this? he wondered as he spotted a woman with a scarf wrapped around her head and face, her eyes barely visible.

  They reached the cantina to find it just opening.

  “You there,” called Jack to a man who appeared to be in charge. “Have you seen a small woman with blonde dreadlocks in here?”

  The man frowned for a moment. “You don’t mean Asselstine’s indentured girl?”

  “She doesn’t belong to him anymore, but yes, we mean Bit.”

  The man shrugged, indifferent to who owned who. “I ain’t seen her for a while now. She used to come in with Asselstine all the time, but it’s been months since he brought her in here.”

  Oden watched as Jack’s shoulders slumped. They had all been hoping for a short search, but it wasn’t to be.

  “If you see her, can you contact me on this frequency?” Jack asked, handing him his card.

  “Calls ain’t cheap, you know.”

  “Call collect,” offered Jack.

  “Well okay then.”

  “Well that was a waste of time,” Dirk grumbled as they emerged onto the crowded street.

  Chapter Three

  Bit looked up from the dust and squinted at the haze hovering over the enormous city. Unlike Tifton, or anywhere else on Mars for that matter, Earth failed to enforce the emissions laws, not just on vehicles—which were plentiful enough—but on the various forms of heating used within residences. Some had even grown desperate enough to burn coal again.

  Bit stifled a cough and continued down the crowded street, the sweaty bodies of the slum's residents pressing up against her. She had grown accustomed to space within the Lenore, though it was comparatively small, it wasn’t packed to the brim with people.

  A large body bumped into her and she felt the tell-tale jostle of someone checking her pockets. Bit ignored the sensation, knowing they wouldn’t find anything but lint, but when she found an empty space between two vendors, she pulled her backpack off and slung it over her shoulders with the bulk draped over her stomach. She continued into the crowd, trying to cross the flow of traffic to reach the smaller streets on the north side of Bolani Road.

  The smaller streets were empty in comparison, and Bit breathed a sigh of relief. Amazed how nothing had changed since her absence from the suburb nearly twelve years ago, Bit watched the two streams of water and sewage flow down the sides of the street. Women still hung their laundry out their windows and on lines attached to the opposite building. Bit flinched when a large drop of water landed on her forehead. It seemed as though the exact same barefoot boys played in the streets, oblivious to mire they ran through.

  Finally, Bit stopped at a narrow building with a small restaurant showing through its front windows. The structure still rose a number of stories above her head—and yet more had been ramshackled together since the last time she had visited. Two larger buildings grew around it, leaving the narrowest of alleys. Bit slipped into one of them, walking a few paces into the darkness before she found the right door. The door opened with the jingle of a bell hung over the top of the door.

  Inside the first room lay the furniture of a living room. In fact, the only thing to suggest a business waited beneath the trappings was the bell. Bit waited by the door, knowing someone would be by to help her.

  A girl barely old enough to work legally emerged. Bit prayed to whatever gods might look down on the broken human race that this girl didn’t work their main business in the rooms above their heads. Even in the fake living room, Bit could hear the going-ons of the women and men upstairs.

  “Can I help you?” the girl asked.

  “Does Miss Bernice still work here?”

  The girl frowned at her for a moment before silently turning and exiting the room. Bit didn’t know whether she was supposed to follow or stay by the door. Bit was just about to follow when an old woman entered the little, dusty living room. Bit felt her jaw drop and quickly adjusted her expression.

  “Miss Bernice?”

  The old woman squinted at her through cracked glasses. “Do I know you, child?”

  “You did. ‘Bout eight years ago. I’m…”

  “Bit? Is that you?”

  Bit smiled; sharp as a rock, as always. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Well, well, I don’t suppose you’re finally ready to go to work? I’d buy your debt in a heartbeat. And you’d pay it off a lot faster with my work than anything else out there.”

  “No, Miss Bernice, I’m not here for work.”

  Bernice operated one of the slums’ many illegal brothels—though one of the most successful ones. Bit had never heard of Miss Bernice getting ruffled by the government. Selling sex was perfectly legal, but it required licenses, permits, bi-yearly exams, and enough paperwork to keep you busy between those two exams. There were plenty of legal brothels in the wealthy neighborhoods where businessmen cared what they put it in, but down in the slums, buyers only cared about the price tag.

  “Then what brings you back to my doorstep, Little Bit.”

  “When I lived in these parts, I worked for Douglas Zandri,” Bit began.

  “I remember.”

  “Any idea what happened to him?”
>
  Miss Bernice frowned as she adjusted her cane. “No. Don’t think I do.”

  “Know who I should ask?”

  “You remember Delci?”

  “The doctor.”

  They both shrugged and smiled at the misnomer.

  “Yeah, I remember Delci. She still working out of the same shop?” Bit asked.

  Miss Bernice nodded. “You better get going before a customer comes in.”

  Bit nodded and turned just as the door opened—almost as though Bernice has timed it. Bit knew it was likely the time of day the men came every day. Bernice was known for building an impressive list of regular clients, each with their own habits.

  Two men stepped in. Compared to the other residents of Soweto, there was a subtle wealth to them. It wasn’t enough to suggest they were from a different part of the city, but they definitely weren’t part of the masses. Bit stepped back, glancing at Miss Bernice. The old woman stood stiff and wary, telling Bit even more about the newcomers.

  The first man to enter had gone prematurely gray early in his life, and his hair and neatly trimmed beard had since turned to a stark white. His white face was weathered with deep lines that suggested he laughed and frowned in equal parts. Despite all this, the man held a vigor that suggested he had taken care of himself and continued to enjoy an active life. Bit guessed his age to be somewhere near sixty.

  The other man was as opposite as can be. While the first man was white—and likely downright pale where his shirt protected his skin—the second man’s skin was a beautiful milk chocolate, making Bit wonder what his ancestry might have been. Had she been a wealthy layabout, she would have used ancestry research as a hobby. She was fascinated by the slow transition from many skin tones to just a few as various races intermixed. She had found a book once with a picture of a woman with skin as black as night. It was amazing, and she longed for the days when diversity abounded.

  The dusky man’s features were fair and his dark hair trimmed short, nearly shaved off completely. His face was smooth-shaven. With the right additions, the attractive man could have passed for a woman.