Delirium: Atom and Evil, Book I

Living on the fringe of deep space, Iris is nothing like the woman she was Before.

She’s broken. A shadow. Running from a shady past filled with trauma and unspeakable pain, she’s lost and trying not to be found. Numbing her anguish with boredom and opium.

Because she knows he’s coming.

A vicious criminal.

The enemy she used to love.Her biggest mistake.

Fifteen years wasn’t nearly long enough to dull the ache of what they lost. Scars branded too deep, wounds that never healed.

They say pain is temporary, that it leads to personal growth. But Iris is a creature remade in blistering agony. Forged by a drive to wreak havoc. He should have known better than to abduct and blackmail her.

She will claim vengeance, or die trying.

There are no heroes here. Only a pipe full of the good stuff and villains fighting over scraps.

It was said there was nothing so dangerous as deep space hauls. No risk so great as guiding a fat, pregnant cargo freighter through ghostly shipping lanes littered with the dregs of human society who did their best not to fit in. Those errant rejects who’d prefer to suckle at the teats of honest, hardworking people.

Pirates. 

Raiders.

Vultures.

Bloody parasites, each and every one.

Her people, once.

Iris took a drag from her opium pipe, propping slick, scuffed boots on the dash of her trusty lane jumper-turned-freighter. The Seeker. Her baby was the only thing left over from Before. Named with a coy little nod to a life best left to die in the past, The Seeker’s hull was stuffed to capacity with the mundane crap that fed the furthest colonies under the fleshy, protective bosom of the United Earth Alliance. Water filtration systems. Undyed bolts of cotton and other precious, utilitarian fabrics. Seed and bags of fertilizer gel that would keep the entire colony fed once said seed had been planted in it.

Nothing exciting. Nothing to draw the attention of the raiders and their scanners that could penetrate The Seeker’s hull as if it were made of little more than tissue paper. 

Mundane cargo, right down to the bags of freeze-dried worms and grubs that system 88-AqZr2 would need to terraform its rocky dead soil. Nothing a raider could possibly have any use for. Satan’s flaming nuts—she hadn’t even installed the scan-proof smuggling bins that would fit snug under The Seeker’s belly and flanks. Hauling dangerous cargo wasn’t the risk—not out here, where the scum glutted themselves on anything dangerous or illicit.

It was being caught in the lie.

Being a good little girl was the only way to survive passing through these largely unpatrolled shipping lanes where modern pirates roamed.

Iris sent another lungful of green smoke toward the cockpit ceiling. Good girls didn’t smoke opium though, did they? They didn’t make friends with pirates, either. But so what? Who cared if she’d befriended the nastiest of the bunch with a few jokes and her foul mouth? That wasn’t evil. That was industrious. She hadn’t let the lane boss fuck a wad of cum down her throat, even though that was the first thing that dangerous, lazy prick had offered to take as payment for safe passage.

No. She’d given him a thirty percent tariff above what he’d demanded, left him with a few of her foulest riddles, and a promise to give him the answers upon their next meeting.

That had been fifteen years ago this past cycle.

Fifteen years she’d been doing this thankless, shitty job.

Fifteen years she’d spent thinking up insane, raunchy riddles for the lane boss, and fifteen years she’d been known as Iris, and not… and not… who she’d been Before. There was good reason she was able to navigate her sluggish cargo ship through unchartered space filled with dangerous men and vicious women.

The way only someone born into the grimy muck could.

As for the opium? Well. She needed something to keep the crazy at bay on these long hauls filled with nothing but dead space. Needed something to keep the whispers quiet, didn’t she?

A warning bell on the dash screamed awake, flashing beneath the heel of her left boot.

Iris jerked, choking on half-smoked opium, yet coming awake before her boots had even touched the floor panels. Scrambling to find a clear head through a haze of numbing tar, she discarded her pipe and found the noise maker.

A proximity alarm.

How in the actual fuck had someone managed to sneak into her blind spot and crawl up her ass? Out here, with nothing to hide behind. With no moons or asteroids or bloody planets they could use to sling-shot around The Seeker’s girth.

Cycling through all seventy-seven cameras embedded in her ship’s hull, Iris scrambled for answers. Searching for the culprit making her baby scream and whine.

Nothing.

Not a fuckin’ thing came up on her screens.

Which could only mean one thing.

She’d picked up a parasite.

And it was time for an introduction.