Free Rebels and Lovers by Linnea Sinclair

twelve, his aunt Pelagia—Dr. Pelagia Lang Javeiro, head of his family’s multisentient Harmony-One Project—had the ability to disconcert him too.
    He’d thought he’d outgrown that. But as he approached Dock Five’s version of an escalator, a female Taka in dockworker’s coveralls leered down at him,her thin smile revealing a row of sharp, pointed, and very stained teeth.
    Devin tightened his grip on his duffel. Maybe not. “Lead the way,” he said, with far more enthusiasm than he felt.
    What little enthusiasm he had left died when he saw the entrance to the hotel, which could easily be mistaken for a cargo bay, in Devin’s estimation. In fact, as he stood before it, inspecting the wide double doors and the triple-thick plating over which
The Celestian
was stenciled in three Imperial languages, it looked—and smelled in an oily, musty way—as if it had at one time been a cargo bay.
    Wonderful.
    An antigrav pallet loaded with small duro-hards blocked their way. The pallet was malfunctioning, a painful whirring noise coming from underneath as two human workers—dockworkers or hotel employees, Devin didn’t know—pushed and pulled on the pallet’s arched handles.
    “Goddamned slag-headed piece of shit!” the taller worker rasped loudly.
    “The primary differential regulator’s jammed,” Devin said, stepping closer, recognizing the pitch of an AG unit in distress. “It—”
    “You here to fix it?” The frizzy-haired woman on the other side of the pallet barked out the question.
    “No, but I—”
    “Then get the hell out of the way.” She lifted her chin toward the man. “Sergey, push!”
    “Mr. Devin.” Barthol touched his shoulder. “It’s probably best if you don’t—”
    The high whine of laser fire interrupted Barthol’s words. Devin jerked around as a scream sounded somewhere behind him, back in the direction of theescalator. A few people reversed course, heading for the commotion, but most kept walking away, intent on their own business and not interested in anyone else’s.
    “Don’t,” Barthol repeated, his grip tightening on Devin’s shoulder.
    Devin shrugged him off. Any commotion could potentially center on Trippy—or draw his nephew’s interest, just as it drew his own. “I’ll be right back.” He strode forward, breaking into a trot as a knot of stationers near the top of the escalator came into view. There were voices, hard shouts, and someone speaking rapidly in a clipped, odd-sounding language. A Stolorth male and two Takan women stood heads above the rest of the crowd, the Stolorth hanging back, the Takans—in dockworker brown coveralls—pressing forward.
    Devin craned his neck, scanning the crowd, hoping to see his nephew’s dark head but also discerning the crowd’s focus. He didn’t see Trip, and almost everyone was glancing down. Except for a staggering, wrinkle-faced man who, as Devin watched, tried to slip his long fingers into the back pocket of a shorter man’s sagging coveralls.
    The short guy spun. “Hey!” He grabbed the old man’s arm. A creased green wallet fell to the decking, and now there was a new commotion—new shouting, new shoving and pushing.
    Devin sidled his way through the raucous crowd until he leaned against the metal railing overlooking the open area around the escalator. Two stripers stood on either side of the body of a red-haired woman who was sprawled facedown, her left arm bent at an angle human arms didn’t bend. A third striper was locking cuffs on another woman, whose short black hair helda wide streak of white on the left. Both women were in what appeared to be black leathers—typical spacer attire. A battered cylindrical security servobot circled the scene’s perimeter about four feet off the decking, orange warning lights flashing around its middle.
    “Looks like Nula finally caught up with Gudrin,” the man standing next to Devin told the woman on his left.
    “Drugs or weapons?” the woman asked.
    The man