Chapter Seven Part One

The restaurant’s interior was as humble and unassuming as its exterior. The only thing declaring it as a place where people could get food were the tables scattered randomly throughout the space. Most of which looked like they’d been sourced from the local scrap heap. Sheets of metal served as table tops. Some of the edges had been left raw and looked sharp enough to cut. Exhaust pipes had been welded together to create table bases.

The chairs were whatever random item they could source. Metal buckets or cargo containers they’d picked up from around the station.

It had ambiance. Just not the type of ambiance you’d expect from an eatery. Welcoming it was not.

Functional, on the other hand. Gus supposed it was that.

She scanned the place, trying to pinpoint the source of the uneasy feeling sitting like a rock in her chest.

It was the smell, Gus realized.

There was none. The place smelled like everywhere else in the station. Air that was slightly stale. Maybe a little less rank from unwashed bodies but with the metallic, chemical scent pronouncing it as recycled. There was nothing to indicate that cooking was happening anywhere nearby.

Once Gus latched onto one discrepancy, it was impossible not to notice more. Like the fact that there were no customers.

Or servers for that matter.

A portly woman with a friendly face shuffled through the door Gus suspected led into the kitchen. Her soft brown hair was gathered into a messy knot at the back of her head, a few tendrils escaping to frame her features.

Seeing Gus and the other two, she dawned a surprised and delighted look, beckoning them forward. “Hello. Welcome. Come in, come in.”

Gus sneered internally as she moved forward. Someone was quite the actress.

No way was this woman taken by surprise. Not with number of security cameras Gus spotted on the way in.

She wouldn’t have thought a restaurant owner would be able to afford Nosco 5000’s. A top of the line brand favored by conglomerates. Supposedly, they were virtually unhackable.

It was a bit of overkill for a place like Titan, making Gus wonder what the owner was hiding in those back rooms to justify such an expenditure.

“Are you closed?” Caius asked, looking around.

The woman flapped a hand. “No, no. Don’t be silly. Of course not. We’re just between rushes. It’ll pick up soon enough.”

That was lie number two.

Since Titan had no sun to help inhabitants distinguish between night and day, the station followed a twenty four hour day cycle that was a holdover from humanity’s time on old Earth. This close to the evening shift change the place should have been crawling with customers, looking to pad their stomach with food before the next twelve hour shift.

It wasn’t.

That made Gus think the residents of this level already knew Natalie’s secret. That the restaurant wasn’t an actual restaurant with real food. Rather it was a front for something much different. Something illegal and likely quite dangerous.

For a second, Gus questioned the impulse that had led her to Natalie’s. She’d known there was something hinky about Kyle’s background, but since she never intended for their paths to cross in real life, she’d left it alone.

Now, she wished she hadn’t. Or at the very least that she hadn’t dragged Caius and Anandra along with her into a den of what was looking increasingly like thieves and murderers.

Anandra’s stomach chose that moment to grumble.

The woman gave him a sympathetic look. “Poor dear. He sounds hungry. Were you looking for a table?”

“Yes,” Gus answered, ignoring Caius’s stare or the way it was demanding she answer no.

Caius could huff and puff as much as he wanted, Gus had her reasons for staying. Besides, they were here now. Might as well see it through to the end.

It wasn’t like this woman would let them walk away unscathed anyway.

“Before that though, I’d like to see the wizard,” Gus announced, well aware of the irony in a wizard—as humans called the Tuann—asking to see another wizard.

It was a joke of Kyle’s. He’d taken the name from an old story. Or so he said. Gus had a feeling it had more to do with his in-game character in one of the virtual reality worlds he preferred to real life.

The woman dropped her false geniality like a bad habit.

Gus stayed calm as the woman eyed Gus and Caius with a predatory gaze.

“Would you now?” she asked.

Gus nodded, pretending not to notice the woman reaching for the weapon hidden in her bulky top. “The gardener sent me.”

The woman’s shoulder’s relaxed, her expression warming as she removed her hand from whatever weapon she had concealed. “You should have said so from the beginning. You almost got yourselves killed.”

She beckoned them to follow as she headed toward the back room she’d come out of earlier.

“We’re not the ones who almost died,” Caius grumbled under his breath.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.” Gus nodded at the wall to their left. “See that—those are boomers.”

They looked like speakers, but Gus recognized them. Part of her training was familiarizing herself with all kinds of weaponry. Tuann. Human. And otherwise.

It was habit she’d kept up with in the years since.

“Not to mention the sparklies in the floor.”

Boomers were primarily favored by law enforcement. They were usually deployed against large groups for crowd suppression. The sonic wave they emitted caused extreme vertigo.

Sparklies were a more technologically advanced form of the flash bang grenade. Except the flash of light they triggered could sear a person’s retina, blinding them for several days up to weeks.

Both weapons worked just fine against Tuann anatomy.

Once Gus and Caius were incapacitated, Kyle’s mom—because that’s who Gus was coming to realize they’d been talking to this entire time—would then use the weapon concealed on her person. Or maybe she’d call some of the lookouts in the hall outside to drag them to the nearest airlock.

Either way, Gus and Caius would be dead.

Kyle’s mom looked back at them with a questioning glance. Gus smiled at her to indicate they would be just one second.

“Underestimating humans is how you wound up in this situation in the first place,” Gus told Caius.

Humans might not be as strong or innately powerful as the Tuann, but they were creative. And persistent when they wanted to be. Those two traits coupled with their ability to procreate at a rate that far outstripped the Tuann’s made them a dangerous foe.

Not that the Tuann recognized that. To them, humanity were mere nuisances to be kept in line.

Gus and the forty three knew the depths to which humanity could sink when there was something they wanted. Evil was too light a word.

Then again, that was something the Tuann had in common with them.

Gus met Caius’s gaze with a hard look. “I suggest you fix that habit of yours before you wind up dead.”

And took Gus with him.

Caius caught Gus’s arm when she would have swept past him. “With all that you just shared, do you think it’s wise to swan into the lair of a woman with such stringent security measures? She may not let you walk back out again.”

“It may not be wise.” It definitely wasn’t. “But it is necessary.”

Sometimes you had to choose between the two. Gus was a pragmatic soul. As much as she would have preferred solving this issue alone, she knew she couldn’t. They needed the person they called Titan’s brain. He was the only one who could do what she needed to be done.

She didn’t expect Caius to understand that. As someone from a great House, he probably didn’t know what it was to struggle. To scrape and crawl and beg. To be so desperate that sometimes you had to choose between two evils. None of which were the lesser. Just two sides of the same coin. With the one you could live with a little better as your only option.

Even among the Tuann, Caius would be considered privileged. A treasured son of Roake. One of the most influential and powerful members of his House. One word from him was enough to decide the fate of thousands.
There was no comparison between him and Gus.

Except there was a look on his face that said Gus might be wrong about him. That he knew all too well the distinction in those two things and pitied her for it.

Gus jerked her arm out of his hold before stalking after Kyle’s mom.