Free Dragonfly by Erica Hayes

happened. A harsh assessment, maybe. But I worked for Axis, not for someone who gave a shit about me. My own safety wasn’t important.
    I slipped my finger into my shorts’ seam for my sub-ether transmitter—a shiny clear oblong the size of a fingernail—and swiftly quartered the saloon, snapping pictures from four angles. I walked my fingers through the gadgetry on his worktable: tools, silicon-flecked components, ragged stealthplate filings, a couple of synapses still in wet plastic wrapping, the remains of a mocha in a black plastic flask. Stuffed down the back of the black sunken lounge I found a handful of Esperanza casino chips and an old digital proton decay meter. I imagined him crouched here late into the night, enthralled, his deft fingers twining wire and arcing plasma contacts. It looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory, but if he’d built something that had left these scraps behind I couldn’t figure what. Maybe he was just tinkering.
    Above, the shower stopped running. His footsteps crossed the corridor, and after a moment all was quiet. In bed, then. Warm, fragrant, relaxed after his shower, sleepy …
    Nope. Not going there.
    Beneath the sick green glow, the console operated in power-down mode, everything shut off but the basics. He was clever enough to hide that much from me. The slipspace field showed voltage, and the navset diodes glimmered red and yellow. We were moving, on some course. Big deal. I photographed the console anyway. Better too much information than missing that all-important detail.
    His grey suit jacket hung over the command chair. I checked the pockets and seams. Nothing. He’d strolled into the neurospace with nothing but a loaded hyperchip, a shielded virtual display and a plasma pistol. Gutsy.
    My fingers tingled in the soft fabric. I put the jacket back, trying not to notice that it smelled of him, subtle but human. Dragonfly had always been just a name to despise for me, never a person. I wouldn’t let him become one now.
    I crept up the flimsy spiral stairs, white plastic creaking under my boots. The upper deck was long and narrow, split down the middle by a passageway barely wide enough to walk front on. On the left, past the shower, hid a galley, similar to RapidFire ’s with a shallow stainless sink, a tiny electromag cooker and plastic storage bins. Spotless, meaning he was fastidious, or more likely didn’t eat here much.
    On the right, a tiny room was taken up almost entirely by his bed, and there he slept, wet dark hair spilling onto his pillow, the white sheet crumpled over his hip, his hand curled next to his cheek. A broad, shallow atomflash scar striped his lean shoulder. Interesting. Scars were easy to fix these days, if you had the cash. Which made him either poor—um, that’s a no—or sentimental—hardly—or stubbornly making a point.
    His chest shifted slowly as he breathed, and for a moment I imagined slipping into bed beside him, his body warm on mine.
    I fidgeted, my guts twisting. As far as my mission went, sleeping with him wasn’t out of the question as a way of mining information. Never mind that I hated him, that he was an Imperial enemy. I should consider this rationally. Weigh up the pros and cons, disregard my personal inclinations.
    Yeah. Because it wasn’t like I wanted him or anything.
    I watched him, compelled and disgusted at the same time. He looked weary, troubled, isolated. I wanted to stroke that soft hair away from his forehead, feel his skin again under my fingers, soothe his trouble into peace.
    I turned away, injustice burning in my soul. Why should he sleep when Mishka and my murdered friends no longer breathed? I wouldn’t even need to make a mess with the shatterjay. I could press my finger into that lethal place in his throat and he’d be gone without a sound, back to the soulless realm of names and myth.
    And I’d be stuck in slipspace in a ship full of gut-rotting biochem, flitting from navpoint to arbitrary navpoint