The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I was alive, which was, statistically speaking, getting less and less likely every year.
The second thing I noticed was that I was handcuffed to a radiator on a space station that smelled like wet dog and broken promises, which at least explained why my arm felt like it had been installed by a first-year med student working from a description someone had given them over the phone.
The third thing I noticed was the goat.
I don't want to get ahead of myself with the goat. The goat comes later. The goat requires context. What I will say is that when a man wakes up handcuffed to a radiator on Junction Station — the armpit of the Kepler Belt, a place so comprehensively terrible that even the rats had filed for asylum elsewhere — and a goat is the third most alarming thing in the room, he should take a long, hard look at the trajectory of his life choices. I had taken that look before. Several times. The view never improved.
My name is Declan Oats. Yes, Oats. My mother had a sense of humor that could charitably be described as weaponized, and she deployed it on me approximately forty-eight hours after my birth when she was still, by her own later admission, "absolutely annihilated on whatever they had in that drip." I have spent thirty-seven years being the butt of a joke told by a woman who has been dead for twelve of them, which is either tragic or extremely on-brand, depending on your perspective.
I'm a courier. Freelance. The word freelance does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, carrying on its back concepts like uninsured, technically-wanted-in-three-systems, and surviving primarily on stimulant tabs and the residual goodwill of people who haven't yet realized I've let them down. I move things from one place to another place, ask no questions about the things, and expect the same courtesy in return. It's a relationship built on mutual incuriosity, and for about six years it had worked reasonably well.
Then I'd taken the Harlow job, and here we were. Radiator. Handcuffs. Goat.
I tested the cuffs with the sort of optimistic halfheartedness of a man who already knows the answer but feels the question deserves to be asked. They were good cuffs. Whoever had put them on me had done so with professional competence and, I suspected, a degree of personal satisfaction. The radiator itself was bolted to a wall covered in the kind of peeling synthetic-wood paneling that had been fashionable in station construction about twenty years ago, before everyone collectively realized it looked like a dentist's waiting room designed by someone who hated joy.
The room was small. There was a folding table with a half-eaten bowl of something on it — protein mash, probably, the beige of institutionalized despair — two mismatched chairs, a window that looked out onto the station's inner ring where a dirty orange light perpetually pretended to be noon, and the goat, who was standing in the corner looking at me with the flat, knowing eyes of an animal that had also made some questionable life choices and was no longer surprised by anything.
"Morning," I said to it.
The goat said nothing, in the way that goats communicate volumes.
My head felt like something had been living in it rent-free and had only just moved out, leaving the place a complete state. I did a quiet inventory of my injuries: the arm, definitely. A pulled something in my lower back that suggested I had been either in a fight or sleeping on a floor, and given the handcuffs, probably both. A split lip that had dried to a crust. Ribs that weren't broken but were doing their best impression of it, the ambitious little bastards. Nothing fatal, which meant whoever had brought me here wanted something from me first.
That was either reassuring or terrifying, and I hadn't had enough coffee to decide which.
My pockets had been turned out — jacket gone, boots gone, the small emergency tab of Clarion I kept tucked into my sock also gone, which was the loss I felt most keenly. Clarion was a fast-acting stimulant that did for the human brain roughly what a power surge does for old electronics: briefly spectacular, probably shortening its overall lifespan, but genuinely useful in emergencies. I had been taking it since I was nineteen, at first recreationally, then professionally, and now in the sort of complicated relationship where you're not sure if you love it or it's destroying you but you've co-signed a lease so you're seeing it through.
Without it, the hangover from whatever they'd dosed me with — and they'd definitely dosed me with something, because the last thing I remembered was standing in Bay Fourteen watching a cargo loader name Brix explain to me why the crate I needed to collect had, in his words, "sort of become a situation" — was sitting on my frontal lobe like a disapproving uncle.
I heard voices on the other side of the door. Two of them, getting louder, which meant getting closer.
I looked at the goat one more time. The goat looked at me.
"Whatever happens," I told it, "don't say anything."
The door opened.
The woman who walked in first was the kind of person who fills a room not because she's physically large — she wasn't particularly — but because she carries herself like she's already decided how every conversation in the room is going to end, and she's only present as a courtesy while everyone else catches up. She was maybe forty-five, dark-skinned, wearing the grey-green utility coat that the Kepler Belt Trading Authority liked to put on its senior enforcement officers, and she had the expression of someone who had specifically requested not to be here this morning and had been overruled by the universe.
Behind her came a man who could most accurately be described as a lot of man — wide enough that he had to angle himself slightly sideways through the doorframe, which was a standard ninety-centimeter opening and not, as far as I knew, unusually narrow. He had the look of someone who had been in enough fights that his face had sort of given up on maintaining a consistent shape and was now just doing its best. Friendly eyes, though. That worried me more than if they'd been unfriendly.
"Mr. Oats," the woman said, sitting down at the table without looking at me, pulling out a tablet, and beginning to scroll through it with the air of someone reviewing disappointing quarterly figures. "You look terrible."
"I always look like this," I said. "It's part of my charm."
"Does it work?"
"Occasionally. Less so when I'm handcuffed to things."
She made a small sound that might have been the precursor to a laugh, decided against it, and killed it before it could fully form. "My name is Director Imani Okafor. This is my associate, Corporal Hendrik Moss." She nodded at the large man, who raised one finger in a small, unexpectedly pleasant wave. "We have some questions for you about the events of last night, and depending on how cooperative you are, this could go several different ways."
"How many of those ways involve me being un-handcuffed from this radiator?"
"Most of them."
"Then I'm feeling very cooperative," I said. "Famously cooperative. Cooperation is basically my whole thing."
Director Okafor looked up from her tablet for the first time and regarded me with the steady, measuring look of someone calculating not whether you're lying, but how much you're lying and whether the remainder is worth anything. I had been regarded this way by various law enforcement officers, creditors, and one extremely perceptive cat over the course of my adult life, and I had never fully gotten comfortable with it.
"The crate, Mr. Oats," she said. "Let's start with the crate."
I glanced at the goat.
The goat offered no assistance whatsoever.
"Right," I said. "The crate."
Here's the thing about the crate — and I want to be very clear that everything I'm about to tell you is the truth, or at minimum a version of the truth that has been tidied up only in the places where the actual truth would make me sound worse than I need to sound at this particular moment — the crate was not supposed to be my problem.
It had started, as my problems have a statistical tendency to do, with a woman.
Her name was Petra Halloran, and I had met her three weeks earlier at a bar called The Elliptical on Sable Station, which was the kind of establishment that described itself as a "lounge" the way a man describes himself as "between opportunities" — technically accurate, deeply optimistic about the implications. She'd been sitting at the bar in a white jacket that probably cost more than my ship's last service, drinking something green that smelled like it had been assembled by a chemist who was also an artist, and she had the look of someone who was very good at looking like someone who wasn't looking for anything.
I sat down two stools away because those were the only ones available, which I mention because I want to be clear that this was not the beginning of me making a terrible decision. I was simply sitting down. The terrible decision came about forty minutes later, after two drinks I didn't pay for and a conversation that I would describe, with the benefit of hindsight, as criminally well-constructed.
She needed something moved, she said. Small job. Sable to Junction, Junction to the Harlow waypoint, where someone would collect the cargo, pay the second half of the fee, and everyone would go home happy and solvent. The cargo was listed on the manifest as agricultural equipment, miscellaneous, which is the space-freight equivalent of describing a bag of cocaine as "white powder, granular."
"What's actually in it?" I asked, because I am not, despite extensive evidence to the contrary, completely stupid.
"Agricultural equipment," she said, and smiled in a way that communicated clearly that the question had been noted, considered, and filed under not your concern.
I should have said no.
I should have said no the way a person says no to a second bottle of whiskey at eleven in the morning, or to a "quick shortcut" through an unfamiliar neighborhood, or to any sentence that begins with I know this sounds crazy, but — with the full knowledge that yes, it does sound crazy, and yes, you're going to do it anyway, and yes, you will be explaining this to someone later in uncomfortable circumstances.
The fee was forty thousand credits, which is the exact amount of money that makes a freelance courier who is three payments behind on his docking fees and has recently described his financial situation to his bank as "evolving" forget every lesson he's ever learned.
I said yes.
Forty thousand credits. For agricultural equipment.
God, I'm an idiot.