It seemed like the smart move, not to discuss impending felony plans inside of the place that you were going to commit said felonies. They were both nothing if not geniuses after all. Lucero had somehow figured out who she was, even while she was using her foolproof alias complete with an identity package put together by a master hacker. That alone meant that Lucero was clearly a lot better at putting together puzzle pieces than Scratch would ever be.

They didn’t have to go far. Lucero had a very nice hotel room that overlooked the entire city, that Scratch was willing to put money on the fact had been paid for by someone else.

For one thing it was the penthouse suite. It had a private elevator, and a private pool, and a private sauna. It even had a grand piano. The second thing that gave it away was when Lucero said, ‘There are perks to charming billionaires, sometimes they’ll buy you a diamond ring, sometimes they’ll rent you a penthouse suite.’ Scratch was a pretty good detective that way.

If she’d been any good at charming people herself, Scratch might’ve done the same thing, but in the face of such a task, she turned into a gibbering moron. It was far easier to just dress the part, and pretend like she’d been one of them all along. She was a little better at that than she used to be, but she still couldn’t quite afford anything other than slightly nicer than normal off-the-rack, taken in to fit, so most of the time she stuck out like a sore thumb.

The moment Lucero had shut the door, Scratch went straight for the kitchen. For her, that was always the benchmark of how much she was going to enjoy a hotel room, and this one was a fucking stunner.

The marble countertop ran twice the length of Scratch’s height, though that said less about the countertop than it did for Scratch’s height. Scratch knew for a fact that to get a countertop this size, you either had to have invisible seams where two or more slabs were joined together, or you paid out the ass for something big enough for what you needed. This was one solid piece, and probably cost more than what Scratch’s entire ship was worth.

This also wasn’t saying much.

It would have been a beautiful kitchen to cook in. Like the range in Mrs. Vandersnoot’s room, it used gas, and this one even had a teppanyaki plate. Scratch had spent six months working in a teppanyaki place as a teenager, before they’d fired her for reasons that definitely didn’t involve accidentally setting fire to a customer.

Sadly, she was not here to cook, and the exorbitantly expensive marble benchtop was currently being used as a surface on which Lucero could pour shots. In spite of the fact that someone else (Scratch had not entirely worked out who) was paying for the room, they had grabbed the cheapest, nastiest bottle of tequila from the bar, and even that was worth more than Scratch was willing to pay if she was the one buying.

Sometimes you had to drink the nasty stuff, even if you could afford the good stuff, Lucero explained. Scratch was not sure that she agreed, but it wasn’t a hill she was particularly interested in dying on. She took the first shot, and had a disgusted look on her face the whole time.

Five years ago, half a dozen tequila shots would have been the pre-game to a pretty good night out, but these days, Scratch had to pace herself. It took one or two low alcohol cocktails to give her a headache in the morning, and anything more than that was a trip to what could generously be called a hangover. She’d heard the stories of teens in Karsis getting the microchips put into their head that theoretically, regulated the alcohol intake and reduced hangovers. Of course, being a microchip put into your head in Karsis City, the implantation had caused severe kidney problems, which led to an uptick in back-alley kidney transplants that was, in fact, pretty characteristic of Karsis City.

That was one of the first things that Scratch remembered learning as a kid. Don’t fall asleep in public, because you might wake up in a bathtub full of ice. Scratch had never quite gotten any organs stolen, but she had almost been snatched up by military recruitment traffickers once or twice. Half the cannon fodder of the Ceres Empire came from street kids that had no other options in life, or the ones that hadn’t been smart enough to get away. The fact that they’d turned her down when she’d tried to join was frankly very rude.

No child on Lightport would ever fall victim to that kind of fate. At most, they might run the risk of being too sheltered, or their parents foisting off their care onto nannies or robots, but parents not caring about their children was a fate that was not restricted to the upper echelons of society. That was something universal.

‘Are you drinking, or are you just gonna sit there and stare into space?’ Lucero asked. They were on their fourth shot, and might as well have been drinking water for all the effect that it seemed to be having on them.

‘I thought we were planning a heist.’

‘Oh, fine. If you’re gonna be that impatient about it.’ Lucero turned their attention to the only outlier to the theme of the room. A large whiteboard covered with a sheet. The sole purpose of the sheet seemed to be so that Lucero could whip it off dramatically, which they did with extreme gusto.

Scratch wasn’t sure the last time she had even seen a physical whiteboard, with real ink pens. Maybe in a museum, and even then, the Museum of Stationery on Devalti was the most boring fucking museum she had ever been to in her life. And yet somehow, here, on a remote city on a remote planet, Lucero had managed to find one, and on it they had scrawled the beginnings of what looked like a plan.

In the middle right side of the board, written in blue pen, was the word “Scratch??” Well sure, okay.

It wasn’t the first time that Scratch had been called out for Galaster, but it was unusual that they knew the face. Mostly it was just the name. It would have been more practical to unpack that later, but given the circumstances, if her cover was blown, she needed to know about it.

‘How did you know I was here?’ Scratch asked, but that was probably the wrong question. The right question was “how did you know who I am?”

Lucero tapped their nose conspiratorially, and then relented almost immediately. ‘You’re using the same phone. Super easy to trace. I swear, kids these days - why doesn’t anyone use burners?’ Scratch objected to the word “kid.” If Lucero was older than her, it wasn’t by much, not that you could tell by looking at any aspect of Scratch’s face, height, or flawless skin. The phone thing, though, that was embarrassing. Scratch usually did try to swap out phones on occasion, but it was just so much work to move all her stuff over to the new one. ‘You also didn’t use an alias or a middle-man when you fenced the Galastar loot.’ Scratch frowned. Now they were just rubbing salt in the wound. ‘Rodrigo’s chatty.’

‘Yes, well, okay, I guess there were a few things that I could have done a little better. In my defence, I was in a hurry.’ Scratch sincerely hoped that Lucero was the only one that had put the pieces together, but knowing her luck, they weren’t. She decided to change the subject. ‘So,’ she said, eying the whiteboard with what she hoped was a casual air. ‘Which Bonasecci are you thinking? Interstellar Dreamer? The Rings of Atticus?’ Scratch wasn’t trying to flaunt her knowledge of hyper-modern art. Those happened to be two of the more well-known pieces, and were sure to be under extreme security measures. Scratch had tried more than once to replicate the art style, but there was something in the paint that she couldn’t quite get. She suspected that it was ground up bits of meteorite, but hadn’t taken a trip to the Gover Belt to test that claim, and probably wouldn’t. The visa for the Gover Belt was stupidly expensive, and Scratch could not afford to buy a date with a supermodel at auction.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

‘Are you kidding? We’d need a full crew for those two.’ Lucero waved a hand dismissively. ‘You’re thinking too big. Everyone’s focused on the ones they all know about, meanwhile, there’s hundreds of pieces that nobody’s heard of in overflow storage.’

Who cares about those? Scratch almost found herself ready to ask, but stopped just in time. Any art collector worth their salt would care about even the less famous Bonasecci pieces. All they needed was a fence that was willing to buy them and onsell them to some rich idiot looking to decorate the walls of his fourth lake house. They could make millions.

‘Interesting,’ Scratch said. ‘What’s your plan? Scratch that-’ (She winced, slightly), ‘-what’s your specialty? I know you make cocktails, but like…what do you do?’

‘Oh, I dabble in a bit of everything,’ Lucero said, airily. ‘Seduction, demolitions…well, okay, mostly just those two things.’ Scratch could not help but raise an eyebrow. There was a world of difference between those two specialties. ‘I know you’re mostly an art thief.’

Scratch grimaced slightly. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Sure, okay, we can go with that.’ She had only ever stolen one painting, and even that had not exactly been planned. If she had to pick the best word to describe herself it would have been “opportunist.”

The plan was…okay, there was the beginnings of a plan. Lucero had a much better set of blueprints than Scratch had, and they accurately showed the sprawling spiderweb that was the entire network of casinos. The Bonasecci collection was, of course, in the Bird of Paradise, but the security office that controlled the cameras, and sensors, and all of that stuff was about half a kilometre away under Ganymede’s Pride.

That already represented a significant issue. The amount of time it would take to get from the security office to the Bonasecci collection, even the storage overflow, was too big of a window. Anything could go wrong.

Lucero had already spotted the problem, which, apparently, was why they needed a second.

‘You can’t just…cause a distraction, or a fire hazard or something in the overflow vault, and then grab it when they relocate?’

‘Well, that was the idea,’ Lucero said, with a shrug, ‘Only I can’t be in two places at once.’ There was a very long pause where Scratch tried to figure out why it mattered. After a frankly embarrassingly long time, she got there.

‘Right. You’d need to take it in transit, because that’s when security will be the lightest.’ Lucero seemed to relax very slightly (but not nearly enough). ‘Once it’s in the secondary location, it might as well be off-world.’

Okay, so that led them to the next part of the question. How to steal the painting while it was being transported. Really, they still needed one or two more people to make this work properly. That was the problem with heist crews. Either you could do things alone, or you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t, well…sucked to be you.

‘What’re these vents?’ Scratch asked, gesturing to the electrical plans. ‘Can we use those?’

Lucero did not bother to even look exasperated. ‘Most buildings in Lightport have two main sets of vents. One is the air-conditioning ductwork, and the other is the actual ventilation system. Both are way too small to crawl through, and even then, only useful if you want to go to the basement or something.’ There was very much a “you should know all of this” tone to the explanation. ‘Any security consultant worth their salt would recommend an isolated HVAC system for any vaults that require ventilation. Hell, even your buddy Mr. V has one on the Determinator with its own separate oxygen supply.’

Scratch raised an eyebrow. This was news to her. Lucero had clearly done a lot more research than she had, but that was not saying much.

‘That doesn’t mean we can’t use them, though. Or at least use some of the less obvious things to our advantage. Like the fire detection alarms and the sprinkler system…’ They trailed off, and Scratch was suddenly fearful that she was going to be expected to burn the hotel down to steal a painting worth a fraction of the cost of it. The art connoisseur and the gambler in her absolutely did not want that, but the promise of a big payday was pretty tempting.

It would have been very easy to make a very poor decision. Very easy, and very satisfying. But, there was something that stopped Scratch, and she wasn’t entirely sure what it was. Maybe it was the fact that she had already reached her quota of poor decisions on this trip, and she wasn’t sure if she had room to make another one.

Already, they would be committing a very light grand larceny. Not even a sexy grand larceny, because you couldn’t even brag about it properly. “Oh, you stole a Bonasecci, which one, the one where a dragon is wrestling a space kraken, or the one where there are goats on the moon? Oh, the one where the trees are made of rock? Never heard of it,” and so on. At least the Galastar robbery had been on the news for at least three weeks. At least she had gotten some notoriety out of it. No, this one would be just for fun. As though reading Scratch’s mind, Lucero, sucking on an ice-cube for what Scratch suspected was little more than dramatic effect, said, ‘So how’d you do it?’

Scratch decided to feign ignorance. ‘What, make a lemon tart? It’s a pretty simple recipe, definitely not worth ten thousand stilbits.’ Scratch lowered her voice a little, even though Lucero was the only one there. She didn’t think that they had been followed, but if there was someone standing at the door listening in, then they had bigger problems.

Lucero scoffed, still not bothering to take the ice cube out of their mouth. Scratch was sure she would have choked on it, if it were her. ‘No, Scratch, I’m not talking about the curd tart, I’m talking about Galastar. That gallery literally has some of the best security measures in the galaxy. The time cube? The retroactive lasers? Randomised rotating encryption based on the output of a supercollider? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure you’re a wonderful person…’ They trailed off, and didn’t exactly need to go into details. It still kinda hurt a little.

‘Wow, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad that the pinnacle of my career is so confusing for you. What makes you think I couldn’t get past a time cube?’

Lucero sort of just gestured generally, and really…Scratch was dressed in her nicest clothes with only the tiniest bit of sauce stain on her shirt, and she hadn’t even been arrested tonight. ‘Just the…everything about you,’ they said. ‘But more than that, it’s the fact that you are working for a billionaire, and it’s not even because you want to steal his stuff.’ There was a very long pause. ‘And, it takes six people to get through a time cube.’

Okay, well, yeah, that was probably a pretty good point. A real thief would care about that sort of stuff. A real thief would be meticulously planning a way to swipe it all without anyone being the wiser. A real thief would find a way to have all the blame land on someone else’s shoulders.

‘Well, stick around long enough, and I might tell you,’ Scratch said, which was not particularly satisfying for Lucero, but at least bought Scratch a little more time. After all, how could she explain how she’d pulled the Galastar job when she had no fucking idea. It had been a weird fucking night, and she had gone in there with the intention of theft, and somehow, she’d ended up with literally the most expensive artwork in the galaxy, and a price on her head.

The kicker was, she hadn’t even gotten that much for it, because the funny fucking thing about trying to fence one of the most famous paintings in existence was that it was really goddamned hard. For one thing, you had Denim Soldiers trying to hunt you down, and for another, even if there were plenty of rich assholes that would happily drop a hundred and fifty million stilbits to get something to keep in their private collection, at least half of them would just as easily turn around and kill the person that had sold it to them just to get their money back. That was the whole point of fences, and Scratch’s had well and truly fucked her over.

So, she’d lost on all counts. Gained a notoriety she didn’t want, put a price on her head, and in the end, barely even made enough to make it remotely worthwhile. But hey, at least she’d managed to get her ship fixed.

‘Scratch?’ Lucero said. They had said something, and Scratch had zoned out entirely, rather than listen. It was the sort of thing that happened when you were used to spending months at a time on your own, because you couldn’t get a Quantum Manipulator Engine.

‘Hmm?’

‘I said, do you think Mrs. Vandersnoot would be willing to host a private art viewing in the Bonasecci exhibit?’

The honest answer was, of course, a resounding “yes,” but that wasn’t the real question. The real question was, “hey, I think we should get Mrs. Vandersnoot to host a private art viewing in the Bonasecci exhibit, what do you think?” to which the answer was “absolutely not, I really like this job, and only part of that is because I get laid on a semi-frequent basis because of it.”

But that wasn’t a very fun answer.

The fun answer was, “one hundred percent, Mrs. Vandersnoot will throw a full fucking gala if we so much as put the inkling of the idea in her head,” which was sounding even more fun by the second. Fun enough that Scratch kinda sorta really wanted to do it. You got to dress up for galas. There were canapes, and nice music, and you got to network. She definitely couldn’t say no to that.

‘Damnit,’ she said, not really all that upset. ‘Alright, I’m in. But I am not pretending to be a caterer.’