Phantom Planet – Snippet #1

Keltie Investigates a Ship Power Outage

One by one, the lights in the hallway flickered on as the luxury cruiser’s generators hummed to life. Keltie Sheffield paused and relaxed a little, hooking her handcoil onto her skirt. Microgravity returned, and she dropped from weightlessness, touching down onto the metal floors with a grace that surprised her, since she was wearing wedges.

Footsteps clanged on the deck above, where she was heading. She didn’t know whether the people on Deck Two were going to celebrate or kill her. Power outages on spaceships were rare and deadly, especially when you were in deep space, light-years from the nearest colony station.

Alistair, her loan officer, bumped into her. She felt his hot breath on her neck. He patted her apologetically. “What do you think happened?” he asked.

“I have no idea.” Keltie’s eyes wandered upward to the ceiling. The vents kicked on, funneling a rush of oxygen through the hallway. She smelled traces of lime and coriander in the air, designed to make the guests feel more comfortable. It must have worked, because the scent calmed her heart, which had been racing for the two minutes during the outage.

She stopped at a glass panel in the wall and pressed a red button. “Emina, are we up and running at a hundred percent?”

“Everything’s online,” a voice said after a longer than usual pause. “It’ll just take a few minutes to get the ship back to normal. I don’t think we’ll see any residual effects from the outage.”

“You’re in the bridge,” Keltie said, “What did you see?”

“Nothing. Space is clear. But you’d better get upstairs to Deck Two. Mr. Charsworth looks pretty upset.”

Keltie sighed and let go of the button. Across the hallway, a row of portholes that glimpsed into starry space glowed, and the celestial view transformed into a beach shore with emerald waves and palm trees swaying in a light breeze—a simulation to distract the guests from the ship’s spinning, centrifugal force.

“Want me to do the talking?” Alistair asked. Keltie was glad he decided to follow along. Maybe it would have been advantageous for him to do the talking—Charsworth tended to be the chauvinistic type—but no, this, unfortunately, was up to her.

“I can handle it,” she said. “Maybe.”

“You sure?” Alistair asked as they made their way up an L-shaped staircase. “You know what they say. People always expect bad news from the financial guy. I was going to slap a seventeen percent interest rate on their loan. I don’t know what’s worse news—that, or this.”

They passed a row of handcoils hanging from the wall. Keltie unloaded hers, spilling several silver, needle-like bullets onto her hand. She pulled open a small compartment in the wall and dropped the bullets inside, then hung the coil on the wall.

“I’m not going to need this after all,” she said. “I thought for sure it was pirates.”

“I don’t know if I’d put your coil away just yet,” Alistair said. “Angry clients are sometimes worse than pirates.”

“I’m a real estate agent,” Keltie said. “If I can’t defuse an angry client, then he might as well kill me.”

***

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