It took about forty minutes for the emergency workers to arrive and get them out of the elevator. By that time the rest of the hotel had been evacuated. The explosion was in 302, Slack Dog's room. It was loud, but not very damaging—both the bathroom door and the door to the room were shut, so the damage was contained to just one casualty. They said the bomb had been placed at the victim's feet when he was on the toilet. All of Slack Dog's stuff except his missing suitcases had been thrown into the bathroom with him, as had all of the room's computer equipment.

While Hargrove dealt with the police, Buttercup slipped up the stairs to her room and sat at her desk in front of her viewscreen. It woke at her presence and projected a keyboard onto the desk. Buttercup ticked her passcode into the keyboard with a familiar flurry and opened the Hotel Employee Portal program. It presented her with a username and password, and she typed in Hargrove's administrator credentials—Buttercup learned long ago that he never bothered changing anything.

She clicked through some files and folders until she found the security footage from the camera outside room 302. She sped past her confrontation with Lee and watched herself walk into the elevator. When the doors closed Lee used some kind of device on the lock to open the door to 302. A few minutes went by and he emerged from the room with Slack Dog's luggage, took the stairs down to the ground floor, and made his exit.

Buttercup thought again of Lee's bounty, and cursed herself for not recognizing him. He was wanted for piracy, kidnapping, murder, and a plethora of smaller charges in the outer rim. And now this. Slack Dog must have had something valuable in those cases for Lee to have come all that way, but what? More of those black coins? And why the bomb?

She'd heard from various patrons recently that the pirates were growing stronger and bolder every year, but Hargrove usually dismissed such talk and said it's bad for business. This was different. Brazen. They'd never come to Surface before.

It was always quick strikes on the shipping lanes, one or two vessels captured or looted, and then they would vanish before anyone could respond. Or they'd blockade some outlying moon base and ransack it. Why a bomb? He could have just shot, stabbed, or strangled Slack Dog—the old fool was in no state to defend himself. It didn't make sense for Lee to broadcast his presence when he still had to get off-planet.

But then, Lee hadn't been expecting anyone to see him. And certainly not anyone who would recognize him. A bounty hunter wouldn't be looking for him where they weren't expecting him—most of them stuck to the outer rim, where the biggest bounties were. Maybe the bomb was supposed to be a distraction, to allow him to escape.

If that was his intention, it backfired. There was no way he had time to get back up to the station where his ship was docked. They'd probably flag it and alert the station's guards that Lee was headed their way.Most likely, if he hadn't been caught already trying to get offworld, Jensen Lee was stuck in the city somewhere—her city, she thought fiercely—with his stolen suitcases.

And he'd just kicked the hornet's nest. Half the police force would be after him. With its domed roof and airlocks, the city was practically a prison already. The police would post guards at all the exits and comb the city for him. It would only be a matter of time until Lee was caught. Buttercup opened a browser window and searched for news on the incident.

The local media was having a field day—this was the biggest story in years, even bigger than the Fated Lovers. Buttercup swiped through news video after news video, talking head after talking head, and learned nothing more than she already knew. Then she landed on a live feed where the reporter was standing with his back to one of the sealed-off airlocks. Two Capitol City officers leaned against the airlock in the background, protected from the gathering crowd by police barriers.

Jensen Lee's face was displayed prominently in a graphic next to the reporter, the same picture she'd seen on his bounty page. The one she failed to recognize. Above his face: WANTED. Below it: 20,000 REWARD. Buttercup's eyebrows rose in thin arches. They'd quadrupled it after the attack.

"—also a two thousand credit reward for information leading to the capture of Jensen Robert Lee. Viewers, please don't hesitate to call. He has been on the run from interplanetary authorities for more than five weeks and Capitol City's Commissioner Norton has warned us that the fugitive will not hesitate to kill again. Until further notice, the city's walls are closed to pedestrian traffic, meaning the cancellation of tonight's Fated Lovers festivities."

The camera zoomed out to show the outer wall's base behind them, with the clear dome stretching up from it and a crowd of maybe twenty gathered at the airlock. The two officers were waving people back and seemed to be trying to get the crowd to disperse.

"As you can see," the reporter said, "it seems for the moment that many people are trapped inside Capitol City with the deranged outlaw bomber. Police are still not sure what the motive of the bombing was. We can only speculate what will happen from here—perhaps this is only the prelude to a larger, more devastating attack."

Buttercup closed the window and leaned back in her chair, bathed in the cool glow of the viewscreen. She realized she'd been sitting in the dark, and as she got up to turn on the lights Slack Dog's phone vibrated in her pocket. She'd completely forgotten about it. Startled, she grabbed for the phone and the screen lit up as she brought it out of her pocket.

Buttercup looked at the screen and saw with horror that she'd accidentally answered a video call. An older man of maybe forty with a red floral-print bandanna on his head squinted at her from the tiny screen, trying to make out her face. She quickly covered the camera with her thumb, thankful for the darkness. It looked like he was in a kitchen. She hovered her other thumb over the "end" button, but didn't hang up.

"Well, you're not Slack Dog," he said. The video quality was poor and kept going all pixelated, his voice stuttering unnaturally. "You're far too pretty."

The phone squawked a cacophony of garbled laughter.

So he had gotten a look at her. Buttercup considered ending the call. She was still wearing her uniform—the gaudy dark magenta outfit was unmistakably that of a hotel employee, and it even had her name on it. She had no idea who the guy was, or what connection he had to Slack Dog, but she decided at that moment she didn't want him to know anything more about her than he did already.

"Who are you?" Buttercup asked.

"An old friend of his," he said.

"Right. Well—look, sorry, but he was killed today. I found his phone. I didn't steal it or anything. I was going to return it."

Silver shrugged. "I never asked. I called as soon as I heard about the bombing. Damn shame. He was a decent man."

"What was he doing here?"

"Why are you so interested?"

She didn't know how much the man already knew, but she didn't want to reveal that she worked at the hotel. Between her face and her job he'd be able to find out who she was for sure. She considered hanging up. Whoever the guy was, it wasn't her business. She could feel the silence after his question growing, and a flutter of panic brought the first thing that came to mind tumbling out of her mouth.

"I'm a bounty hunter," she blurted.

Buttercup had to cover the speaker as the man howled with laughter. Embarrassed, she felt her cheeks flush. Her mouth had a way of working on its own when she was flustered. The man wiped tears from the crows' feet at the corners of his eyes as he shook with mirth.

"Goodbye," she said, and went to end the call.

"Wait, wait," the man said. "Please, I'm sorry. I'm a very rude man. Name's Bill Silver."

"I'm not telling you mine," she said. "Now tell me what's going on. Why was Slack Dog killed?"

Silver hesitated for a moment. He looked deep into the camera, and even though she knew he couldn't see her, she understood she was being assessed somehow. Calculated. Again she felt the urge to extract herself from the situation, but she didn't hang up.

"He had something very valuable," Silver said.

"What was it?"

"A map."

"A map of what?"

"Buried treasure," he said with an adventurous growl.

Buttercup snorted. "Really."

"I'm sure you've heard of Dreadstar."

"Dreadstar," Buttercup said. The name brought a bad taste into her mouth. Why did she—

Dreadstar. The name repeated itself in her head like an echo that grew louder at every return.The body of the ruthless space pirate Dreadstar was on display at a museum in Capitol City. She only saw it once, accidentally. Mother didn't know what they were walking into.

The image flashed demonically in her mind. He was bare except for a pair of black briefs and every visible inch of his lean, pale body but his face was covered with tiny numbers—his infamous tattoos, the still-unbroken code that hid the location of his treasure hoard. They'd preserved his precious tattooed skin and contorted his body into a snarling battle pose like some kind of action figure. He held a pistol in one hand and a saber in the other. His bionic eye was still installed, blazing with a red light from inside—his namesake.

People said Dreadstar was a code breaker for the Interstellar Fleet who got stranded when the gates went down during the war. His vessel was forced into hiding in the asteroid belt Styx, where he went mad and murdered the entire crew before piloting the ship, alone, into pirate territory. No one knows how exactly he brought the pirate clans under his heel, but when they joined forces they claimed the whole system as their territory. It took more than a decade to bring him down and banish the pirate fleets back to the asteroid belt.

The body was in a display case just inside the museum's front doors. It was the first thing Buttercup saw after they walked in, and had been designed to get a reaction from people. He seemed to be charging forward, straight for the door, posed as though he were perpetually in the midst of staging an escape. Six-year-old Buttercup immediately vomited from sheer terror. It was a short museum trip.

That was the same day—

Buttercup dropped the phone onto her desk with a clatter and scrambled for the bathroom with a hand clapped over her mouth. Before she could quite make it to the toilet she puked, and some of it streamed through her fingers and down her chin. The rest splashed into the water, chunky soup that stuck to the bowl. Buttercup gagged and retched, but nothing came up except bad memories.

She flushed the bowl's foul contents down the drain, washed her hands and face, gargled some water, and dried herself with a hand towel. Luckily she hadn't gotten any on her uniform or in her hair. She heard Bill Silver's deep baritone on the phone in the other room, but couldn't make it out over the noise of the toilet.

Buttercup flicked on the lights. She picked up the phone again, but didn't bother covering the camera this time; he'd already seen her, what did it matter? She peered into the phone's small display. Silver had set his phone down on a metal countertop. He had his back turned to the camera, and seemed to be engaged in a conversation with himself as he chopped a bulbous green vegetable of some kind on a cutting board.

Buttercup took the opportunity to study the man and his surroundings. It looked like a ship's kitchen—from this angle she could see the star-pocked darkness of endless space just beyond a round window in the wall. No distinguishing planet or satellite of any kind.

Silver had a white apron tied around the great girth of his belly, and Buttercup noted with some curiosity that his left hand appeared to be bionic. She saw glints of metal shine off the hand in the artificial light of the kitchen. He used his good hand to cut.

The kitchen itself was clean and organized, with spices, herbs, and other ingredients arranged in neat rows behind glass cupboard doors. Silver lifted the cutting board and slid the edge of his knife across it, sending the diced vegetables tumbling into a large tub, and glanced over his shoulder at his phone's screen.

"Ah," he said. "The bold bounty huntress returns."

Buttercup's ears burned at the jab.

"So, Slack Dog got blown up for a treasure map," she said, and saw Silver flinch slightly. She regretted her sharp words.

"Yes, back to business. The long-lost treasure of the space pirate—well, I'd better not say it," he said with a grin and another glance at the camera. "Of course you must know the story, living in Capitol City. You can't live there without hearing about him."

So he did know where she was—of course. He probably knew which hotel Slack Dog would be staying at if they were supposed to meet. The thought that he knew her location made her uneasy. He'd revealed it on purpose, she was sure.

Silver wiped his hands on his apron and picked up the phone, pointing the camera to a window on the opposite wall. As the image refocused she saw that the luminescent blue globe out the window was definitely her planet. She picked out the green mass of her home continent. He was close, and he wanted her to know it.

"I grew up here, too," he said, and took on a reflective tone. "Spent most of my young days on Surface. Best times of my life."

"The map," she said. Her voice was quiet.

"Of course," Silver said, and turned the camera back to himself. "It's an encoded list of coordinates. Dreadstar's crew spent months spreading their stolen goods across a vast, complicated network of asteroids in the outer belt. But before they could finish, some members of the crew felt they were being cheated out of their share and mutinied. No one knows which asteroids are filled with loot and which ones are just rock, ice, and ore. It's chaos out there.However, recent astronomical data recovered from the same time period indicates the orbits of many asteroids have been, ah, bumped, shall we say, which is very common, of course, due to illegal mining operations and the like—unavoidable, unpoliceable, that kind of thing, out there—"

Buttercup's heart began to pound as Bill Silver continued to elaborate on the significance of the map, but she couldn't concentrate. His voice droned out and her ears started ringing. Why was she still talking to him? He was right up there, probably parked at the orbital station. What if he already had more men on the way to get this treasure map and he was just stalling her?

"Hey, girl," Silver snapped. He was staring at her, and had apparently finished talking. "Don't you see?"

"See what?" she said.

"You're holding the map," Silver said.

Buttercup looked at the device in her hand.

"Well, a copy of it," he corrected himself.

"If it's so valuable why are you telling me all this?"

"You have it. I want you to bring it to me. No need to involve anyone else."

"Whoa, whoa, I am in no way involved here. Why don't you just come down here and get it?"

"That wasn't the plan. Slack Dog was supposed to bring it to me this afternoon. Things always work better when you stick to the plan," Silver said. "And besides, you can scurry it on up to me just as well as he could have."

Buttercup laughed. "Yeah, except that he was killed by a bomb because he was carrying this map of yours. Jensen Lee is still out there, you know, and if this is what he's after—"

"Jensen Lee already got what he wanted—another copy of the map. There were multiples. You think he would have left that room without one? Look, you've got Slack Dog's phone, and I know for a fact a copy was saved on there. Come on, it's easy money. You'll have plenty to spend during the Festival. Have you not got any steel inside you at all? You just scared?"

Buttercup straightened her spine and glared into the screen.

"No, I'm not scared. But for one thing, I don't trust you."

"So you're not empty-headed, that's a start."

"And for another, why should I risk my life for you when I could just take this to the police and be done with it?"

"The police?" he sputtered.

Now she had his attention.

"Well, it is evidence," she said. "Actually, it seems like it'd be illegal not to turn it in."

"You don't want to do that, girl," he said. There was a growl of anger in his voice. He used his robotic left hand to clean the knife, rubbing the rough fabric of his apron against the blade with dexterous metal fingers.

"I really do." Buttercup said evenly. "Why should I get involved?"

Silver put away the knife and wiped his hands with the apron—first the dark metallic one with its eerily natural movements, then his real hand. He seemed to reconsider his approach, and shrugged. "Fine. I can see your point. Go ahead, take it to the police. They'll be looking for it after I report it stolen."

"I told you," Buttercup said with a heated snarl, "I didn't steal it. Your slobbering drunk accomplice left it sitting on the bar before he went up to his room and passed out with the door open. I was trying to give it back to him, which is the only reason I'm talking to you. Asshole. I've got people who trust me here, okay, so don't think you can just go making accusations like that and expect them to hold up."

Silver waved away her indignant bluster. "Fine, fine. I can see you're just a daft girl who doesn't know a good offer when you see one. Absolutely no ambition, no drive at all. I can see it. In this world, you've got to reach out and take things. Enjoy your lot in life, girl, because you'll only ever amount to what you're given. No ambition at all."

She didn't like the derisive inflection he used when he said girl. Her eyes flashed with anger.

"What does that mean?" she said.

"With enough money you can fuel any ambition you've got. And I can pay you a whole lot of money for that map. But since you don't want it I'll have to find someone else."

"I notice you still haven't given me a price."

"Five thousand credits," he barked.

Buttercup's heart jumped. It would take years for her to save that much. It was enough to make it all the way to the outer rim—and on a decent ship, too. In the back of her mind she thought she heard the familiar whisper: Find him. She kept her expression flat, suspecting Silver may be lowballing her based on her age. If it was worth as much as he said it was he'd be willing to pay for it.

"Five thousand before I bring it to you," she said. "And another five when I get there."

 Silver balked and squinted unhappily at her, but she kept a thin-lipped silence and finally he rumbled his acquiescence: "Fine."

#

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