Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 62128 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62128 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
The bulk of our crew is ranged around the verge of the fountain, sitting on the edge and eating ice cream. I’m looking at nearly twenty of the most wanted women in the system right now, each and every one of them apparently unconcerned by the fact we’re exposing ourselves for dessert.
“We should get out of here.”
“The crew needs some downtime,” she says. “They need somewhere to spend their spoils, and where better than this?”
“Where better than a massive public place with extensive surveillance? Practically anywhere,” I say.
“You should get some ice cream, Raine. Relax. Have a good time.”
I am not having ice cream, or a good time. I am on edge, scanning the crowds for any signs of trouble. We are on the lowest floor, but there are a good half dozen stories above us, all with balconies corresponding to the fountain. When I look up, there’s nothing but railing after railing packed with sentient creatures, any one of whom could be reporting us to the authorities or be affiliated with the authorities themselves.
“We should leave,” I repeat.
“We can’t. We’re scouting.”
“For what? This is a fucking mall, Sullivan.”
“Right,” she says. “And a mall is a place where people spend money. A lot of money.”
“We are pirates. We are not going to rip off a mall like a pack of out-of-control teens. This is ridiculous.”
“This is one of the biggest malls in the galaxy. Billions of dollars of trade every year.”
“There are kids here. A lot of them. Have you thought about crossfire?”
She gives me that smirking look she likes to give when she’s correcting some minor detail that doesn't make an insane plan the slightest bit less insane. “We won’t do it now, obviously. We’ll come back in the evening. After the place closes.”
“After they’ve already moved all the cash offsite, you mean?”
“We’re not here for the cash. It’s all credits these days anyway, digital transactions. Can’t steal them. You know what you can steal, though?”
“What?”
She holds up a hanger with bright, silken, padded underwear on it and gives me a manic grin.
“Booty.”
I roll my eyes, assuming she’s joking. Sullivan loves to make inappropriate jokes. She also loves to make insane plans too, though, so I have to be careful.
Later that night, we prepare to rob a mall.
“Three minutes,” I say. “No more than that. Everybody has their transporter discs on hand, right?”
Sullivan is the captain, but on briefings like this she defers to me. That’s a good thing, because if they were left to her there wouldn’t be any plan or safety checks. The crew would do as they pleased, when they pleased. We wouldn’t effectively have a crew at all. We’d have two dozen loose cannons.
Personally, I cannot fucking believe how stupid we are being right now. There is nothing here worth getting caught for, but Sullivan has hyped the crew up to thinking that this is the best idea ever simply because it is funny.
We have big black sacks to transport the various items in, like reverse Santa Clauses, all rushing between stores snatching up goods that do not belong to us. Obviously, I do not have an inherent problem with robbery, but I prefer to hit authority freighters and big merchant ships. What we are doing is going to mostly affect small traders.
“GO!” Sullivan shouts. “Go! Go! Go!”
The mall’s security is lax. We were able to slip in through some of the air conditioning ducts, and our little briefing was conducted in front of the same fountain where Sullivan cooked up the whole insane plan to begin with. I stand in place, refusing to join on in this crime for crime’s sake. I am trying to keep the crew safe. I am trying to make this free-for-all orderly. Of course, it devolves into total chaos almost immediately.
“It’s for old times’ sake!” Felicity runs past with an armful of cosmetics. “I used to rob stores with my older sister all the time when we were young! It was the best!”
Felicity is young. She just turned eighteen, but I think she has potential. She agreed to serve on the Mare as an alternative to whoring herself out on the station she somehow managed to hitchhike her way to. I suspect she’s a runaway, but she refuses to talk about where she came from, or what happened to make her run. I’ve never pushed her for her secrets. There’s a lot of secrecy on board the Mare, and we respect what we don’t know. She has auburn hair cut in a cute bob, and a plethora of freckles dashed over her nose under laughing green eyes. She’s cute, and she has her entire life ahead of her. I’ve been teaching her the ropes since she came aboard, and she’s really starting to get the hang of things.
Seeing her behave like this does not please me in the slightest. I thought she had more sense than this — though I suppose I knew she was reckless at heart. Nobody aboard the Mare is the type to worry overly about consequences. Sullivan is cultivating an air of almost untouchable recklessness. We get away with what we do because nobody could believe we would ever do it.