Destiny's Song (The Fixers, book #1: A KarmaCorp Novel) by Audrey Faye Read Free Book Online

croons to, with the hairy little plumes sticking out of their heads. Flotsam in a vast universe that doesn’t give a damn if you live or die, but enchants you with its beauty all the same.
    I wasn’t that kind of flotsam. I didn’t have the freedom to throw my life away on a solar flare gone amok.
    Sexy guy raised an eyebrow. “Ever met a Sun Dancer before?”
    “Yeah.” I pulled my brain back out of the ether. He probably assumed my glazed eyes were fantasizing about his naked chest, which, judging from what I could see through his skinsuit, wasn’t an entirely unreasonable assumption.
    He offered up a grin that was less arrogant than most of his kind. “You ever flown?”
    He wasn’t talking about a cubesat ride. “No.” I made to pull the privacy bubble around my head and then reconsidered. It was a pretty long flight, and he didn’t smell like totally bad company. “I’ve heard it’s pretty addictive, though.”
    “Better than sex.” He laughed, as much at himself as anyone else. “Most times, anyhow.”
    I raised an eyebrow, amused despite myself. “That’s not a great advertisement for your skills.”
    The guy strapped in behind us reached around and boffed my seatmate’s head. “Jay, you’re such a dingbat.” He made overt googly eyes at me. “Come sit back here—we know how to romance a woman properly.”
    Their odds on romancing a Singer were approximately nil, and I figured they knew that. My seatmate, now named but not at all chastened, pushed a button to call over the serverbot. “Want anything to eat?”
    Generally, I avoided making my stomach do any work in spaceflight, but the Canucks usually managed gentle landings, and my appetite was still ramped up from the heavy-grav world of my last assignment. “Sure, so long as they have something that isn’t soy.”
    The guy behind us hooted again. “Look out, Jay—this one’s high maintenance.”
    Somehow their juvenile antics continued to find my funny bone. I might as well enjoy them for what they were—a four-day distraction I’d never see again. “It’s worse than you think, hot stuff. I don’t do synth-caf, either.” The fake caffeine screwed with my vocal chords, but he didn’t need to know that. “I like my food real.” At least, I did when I could afford it, and these days, Journeywoman wages were almost up to the task of keeping my belly happy with stuff that had swum or mooed or clucked once upon a time. Tee and her family kept us well supplied with things that had grown in actual dirt.
    The mining brat had gotten totally spoiled.
    Jay pulled out my arm tray and set down a plasticup. “Not soy. Not real, either—sorry, the menu doesn’t run to the good stuff.”
    Neither should the budget of a stranger. “That wasn’t an actual hint.”
    “I know.” His smile reminded me of an overgrown teddy bear. “But it would have been fun to see your reaction.”
    I studied him a little more carefully. Some people slot into a round hole or a square box and you don’t have to think much to figure them out. This guy was a bit of a surprise, which was a characteristic I enjoyed in people I had to sit beside for days. I picked up the cup and settled deeper into my seat. Maybe it wouldn’t be an entirely horrible flight.
    He glanced my direction again, eyes pulled to the logo on my skinsuit. “Is it hard?”
    That was a long conversation I didn’t generally have with strangers. “Is what hard?”
    He thought for a minute, clearly reformulating his question. “Walking around the galaxy with so much power to change things.”
    That was a more nuanced question than most people asked. I gave him points for having a brain and using it, and contemplated how to answer. When I wore KarmaCorp’s logo on my chest, every word I said represented the company. And people, even thoughtful ones, often carried plenty of distrust for the entity I worked for.
    Three hundred years ago, a small group known as the Warriors of Karma had