The glittering seas of Serendipity were, by wide regard, some of the most beautiful in the galaxy. It was a tall order, really, given some of the other places out there. More water than land, more beach than grass, and the water itself a sparkling blue so clear that you could see right to the bottom. Due to what Scratch was sure was some very impressive, very technical scientific reason that she did not understand, the ocean was less than fifty metres deep at its deepest point, and thus had a whole heap of really great places to go snorkelling. Orbiting around a trinary star system, Serendipity saw full sunset only once every sixteen days, and no matter where you were on the planet, it was a sight to behold.
Unless, of course, that somewhere was deep in the hold of a billionaire’s superyacht, shelling peas for dinner. It would have been far easier to synthesise them already shelled, but the billionaire in question didn’t like the texture of synth-food, and had ordered almost everything to be shipped from the nearby Praxis Station. It was exorbitantly expensive at the best of times. Even on Praxis Station, though, they were being grown using hydroponics, because the nearest garden world was light years away. There weren't a lot of garden utopias around; lots of gas giants and inhospitable rocky hellscapes with terraformed domes of civilisation, but not too many places you could grow in dirt. If Serendipity had had a little more in the way of arable land, it would have been perfect for it, but billionaires in want of a luxury escape planet had put a scupper on that idea.
Scratch tried not to be too resentful. After all, she was getting paid a not quite as exorbitant amount to shell those peas, and to wash the mint, and to artfully arrange the cheese on a wooden platter to be eaten by the billionaire and his other rich friends as they watch the first of the suns dip below the horizon. That, and the fact that she would be on Serendipity for at least another three months at least, meant that there would be plenty more sunsets in the sea. There were enough other perks of the job that she didn't mind having to run back inside while there were a pod of alien whales leaping through the air, just to check on the glazed caramel tart.
For one thing, this person with more money than sense was paying her almost a hundred thousand stilbits for this three month gig. Not as lucrative as some of the less than legal jobs she'd worked previously, but certainly a lot more pleasant, and less reliant on a security guard falling asleep at his desk during a long shift. Being a legal job technically meant paying taxes, but Scratch had already planned out a very elaborate fake death for her alias, so she wasn't worried that much.
A hundred thousand stilbits was a pretty good payday, but also not quite enough that you couldn't lose it all at Judar Casino in a night of fun, gambling and debauchery. Scratch had had quite a lot of those in the past, enough that there were still several casinos in this part of the galaxy that she was banned from.
The problem was, it was becoming increasingly evident that Scratch had underestimated the difficulty of this whole harebrained scheme. She had thought it was going to be easy. Spend a few months cooking for a rich guy, make a nice payout. It wasn't even like she'd broken any laws. Impersonating a chef wasn't exactly a crime. For the first time in a very long time, Scratch was making her money honestly. Relatively speaking.
It was turning out a little more complicated than she had expected. For one thing, her client, one Mister James Reginald Vandersnoot III, while generally pleasant (though Scratch had been around the block long enough to know that any billionaire that owned multiple mansions and yachts and also had “the third” as part of their name was not to be trusted), he also tended to get hungry at all hours of the night. Scratch had possibly missed that part of the contract when she'd signed it. She was not exactly averse to making a full fucking lasagne at two o'clock in the morning, but there were limits.
All of that Scratch would have taken in a heartbeat over the second problem, which was that the very attractive young woman that Scratch had met in the hotel baths and subsequently sullied said hotel baths with was Mr. Vandersnoot's only daughter.
Scratch was also not exactly averse to the idea of a one-night-stand turning into a three month fling, but usually she was just about smart enough for that person not to be her boss's daughter.
It would have been easy enough to do the responsible thing and apologise, keeping the vibe platonic and professional. If that were the case, though, she wouldn't have been able to sleep in the comfortable king-sized bed, which was frankly just unacceptable. So maybe they were using each other a little.
Charlotte Vandersnoot was about Scratch's age, very pretty, and very interested in doing the sorts of things that would make her father blush in embarrassment, all of which were key components for, in Scratch's mind, a Pretty Good Time. She was nicer than Scratch had expected (even if they hadn't been sleeping together) but still very slightly selfish in the way that only rich people's twenty-something year old children tended to be. On the flip side, she was also just that little bit filthy and depraved, also in the way that rich people's twenty-something children tended to be, and that suited Scratch just fine.
There was a lot of sneaking around on Scratch’s part, because the crew of the superyacht were crammed into three or four rooms with six bunks each, and a couple of very small shared bathrooms. Charlotte, on the other hand, was in her own prestige suite, decorated with antiquities from the Starlight Empire that her father had bought at auction for a million stilbits a pop, and didn't care for them enough to have them adorning his own suite. His own suite had framed vintage posters of superhero movies; sometimes, Scratch did wonder what Mrs. Vandersnoot thought about that. It was all just sitting there out in the open for anyone to take. No biometric scanner, no time cube, not even a security guard.
If Scratch really wanted to, she could have easily snagged one or two of them without anyone being any the wiser. It seemed like a stupid thing to do when she was only three weeks into her contract, and without a reliable fence though. The last fence she had used wasn't particularly good. Well, okay, he was good, but he hadn't been particularly interested in cutting Scratch a fair deal. She'd let go of the last thing she had stolen for far less than it was worth, and it was worth a lot.
No, she was better off waiting until the end of the contract, and then swiping some things for posterity. She was sure that Charlotte wouldn't care. In fact, Charlotte would probably encourage it, and her father certainly wouldn't miss any of them. One of them was a sword that looked hundreds of years old, emblazoned with the emblem of what Charlotte said was the Usan Dynasty. Scratch was not exactly a history buff, but she was pretty sure that the Usan Dynasty was entirely made up, and someone, somewhere along the way, had been completely and utterly ripped off.
Who was she to tell them otherwise? She was far more interested in enjoying that king-sized bed, and the triple pump-jet showers, and yes, even the exquisite food, most of which she'd had to cook herself. Their sleep-cycle dalliances had only been interrupted twice, once by the pirate alarm, and once when Charlotte’s father had had a nighttime hankering for a club sandwich, and the pager went off. Both times had necessitated Scratch running back to her own cabin in her underpants, swearing.
Charlotte, of course, knew her as Kitty Sparklestone, the persona under which Scratch had applied for the job, and was currently living. Kitty was an adventurous sort, had always wanted to see the galaxy, and was willing to do anything to make that happen. She also happened to have the same voice, body language and countenance as Scratch, who had always been very bad at the grifting aspect of thievery.
There were reasons for the subterfuge, not least of which was that Kitty Sparklestone had an impeccable resume, and considerably less of a criminal record. There weren't planets that she didn't go to on account of the fact that she would get arrested on them, and there definitely, definitely weren't people that would have killed her as soon as they got eyes on her for perceived slights or transgressions.
So, yeah, it would have been easy enough to do a sweep of the place, and steal the millions and millions of stilbits worth of ancient treasures, but really, where was the fun in that? She would just have to go back to her boring normal life of living aboard a shitty ship, pulling shitty jobs, and waiting for her luck to turn around in a far more tangible way.
In any case, Scratch finished shelling the peas. She sliced the radishes, and minced the onion, and crumbled the cheese. It was a nice, fresh sort of salad, perfect for the first night on the water in two standard weeks or so. The pork that was going with it had been shipped all the way from Terasus, and Scratch was almost certain that the cost of shipping would have been almost as much as just starting a pig farm on Serendipity.
She was just putting the finishing touches on the plating when Aziz came in. Of everyone, he was the only person Scratch let into the kitchen while she was cooking, because he was smart enough to stay the hell out of the way. Tall, with dark hair, and a very neatly trimmed beard, Aziz was the Head of Service. On this baby yacht, Scratch was literally the only other member of Service, making Aziz her direct supervisor. He was fine as far as supervisors went (Scratch had had some pretty fucking awful ones) and didn't give her nearly as much grief as the bosun did.
Tonight, on account of the fact that they had a skeleton crew, Aziz was on waiter duty. He had even dressed for the part, wearing a very nice waistcoat with silver buttons. It looked like it had been tailored, and Scratch desperately wanted to ask him where he'd gotten it made. All in all very suave, very debonaire, and absolutely not her type at all.
‘Perfect timing,’ Scratch said, as she set the last place onto the servery bench. 'Need a hand?'
‘She's not on deck,’ Aziz said, perhaps a little bit too astutely. Scratch hadn't realised she'd been so sloppy. ‘She's in her cabin.’ There was a very long pause. Aziz raised an eyebrow. It was an eyebrow that told a story, and the story was “please do not leave the kitchen to go and have recreational time, you haven't even started on dessert.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Okay, that was fair. Dessert, a stunning crème brûlée topped with edible flowers, was not something that could be thrown together in ten minutes after spending forty-five minutes getting railed against a bulkhead. Sadly enough. She was good, but she wasn't that good. At least some of that time would be spent looking up how to actually make crème brûlée, but it was probably fine. It was basically just baked custard with a fancy name. Way easier than soufflé.
Recreation time would have to wait. Maybe once dessert was done. Tonight was the last night they had on the runabout before rendezvous with the full-sized superyacht in Lightport, and Scratch wanted to make the most of it. On a small ship, you could just about get away with late night liaisons, but on the parent ship, the Determinator, there would be at least a dozen extra crew, and another hundred or so passengers, meaning that free time would be in far shorter supply.
But, the Determinator had a steam room, and a casino room, and an onboard swimming pool so it all evened out in the end. Scratch didn't even want to imagine how many hundreds of millions of stilbits it would have cost to build. The kitchen alone was worth at least a couple of hundred thousand, and in her mind, it was absolutely worth it. You couldn't get anything even close to that level of sear on her shitty single burner thing on the Theseus. The Determinator on the hand, had a fifty thousand stilbit induction range that heated up in ten seconds flat. Like the runabout it also had nice, big stainless steel prep benches, and a large servery bench where the meals were plated and served from. Aziz somehow managed to carry all twelve plates in just two trips. The Determinator at least had a dumb waiter.
The fact that Aziz was suspicious of Scratch's daliances was concerning, but perhaps a blessing in disguise. It meant that he probably hadn't turned her in. From what Scratch had heard, it wasn't exactly uncommon for things to get a little soap operay, and was far from the worst thing that a crew member had ever done. Ariadne, the ship's engineer, had told her the story of how one crew she'd worked on, the captain had gone on a bender, hijacked the ship, and was seconds away from turning it over to a salvage crew. The bar was pretty goddamned high for fuck-ups. Fucking up because of something she had said or done was one thing, but fucking up dessert was quite another. That was a matter of her professional integrity.
That said, she wasn't worried about future employment. Literally all of her credentials were forged anyway, the careful work of a friend that first encountered in a buy, swap, sell group looking for used pallets. Fania was an excellent hacker, a pretty good poker player, and a goddamned mystery. She refused to ever meet Scratch in person, and had ridiculous requests when it came to payment for services rendered. This particular identity package had cost about a thousand stilbits worth of Andimonian oysters, which, actually, was only about a dozen. They were a rare delicacy, and Scratch had almost gotten herself shot by a fishmonger security guard while trying to procure them.
It had gotten her a Galactic Passport, a Pilot's Licence, a Planeteer's Check, and, because Fania had a sense of humour, a Blockbuster membership. There were a whole slew of other cards and checks that seemed like a pain in the ass to get, and Fania assured Scratch that she had them. It would have been just her luck to not be able to collect her free coffee for getting ten stamps at the Delta Four Cafe drive-thru. But at least she could watch trashy romance movies in the depth of space.
None of that would be particularly helpful if she failed at this the way that she had failed at so many other things in life. So. Dessert. Bring cream, honey, vanilla to a simmer. Salt to taste. Beat eggs and sugar. Combine and bake.
Back on her own ship, Scratch had a reasonably nice hydroponics set-up that had been done by a guy named Reggie. It was one of those difficult things to do properly in space, growing food. Light, and gravity, and beyond light speed were all factors that you had to take into consideration when deciding what you wanted your garden to look like. Soil was frowned upon, because fine particles and delicate machinery were never a good mix if you wanted to not die. The hydroponics had been expensive, but having fresh thyme on hand for culinary purposes made it entirely worthwhile. Most people she knew (and most people that Reggie worked for) needed hydroponics for other things. Scratch didn't have the time or the money.
Her ship's engine still kind of crapped out on re-entry, and needed to be replaced, as did a number of other pretty key components, but that was neither here nor there. Once this job was done, she could get it up into flying shape, but then, knowing Scratch’s impulsivity, she’d probably do something highly inadvisable, and buy a sous vide machine, or a steaming closet. She preferred the crisp lines that an iron got her, but she had already made the mistake (several times) of trying to iron shirts while in the middle of an asteroid field, and had the burn scars to show for it.
The good news was, she could tell extravagant stories about how she’d gotten them trying to deep fry a turkey, and most people weren’t familiar enough with burn scars to be able to tell the difference. It gave her culinary credibility, in any case. Every chef, line cook and grillmaster that Scratch had ever met was covered in kitchen-accident related scars.
Aziz was nowhere to be found when dessert was ready to be served. Scratch wasn't exactly concerned; he was probably off dealing with some kind of flower emergency. It wouldn't have been the first time. So, Scratch used the flash clean to get rid of the food stains, buttoned up her crisp white jacket, and set about serving them herself. Twelve of them, in little ramekins, topped with lavender and edible gold, both of which had probably cost more than her entire salary to procure. She had gotten a little too trigger-happy with the blowtorch on a couple of them, so they had some extra decor.
Because she was not as agile as Aziz, and had no interest in making an idiot of herself, Scratch found a tray. She would still have to do it in two trips, but the chance of tripping and falling flat on her face was slightly lessened. It had happened several times before.
There was an order to how meals were supposed to be served. It had been drilled into her by Aziz, who had hired her, and even by Mr Vandersnoot himself. First, to the guests, then to Mr Vandersnoot, then to the rest of the family. Exactly why he was in the middle, Scratch did not know. If she was feeling a little bolder, she might have asked him if he would have pushed his family out of the way to get onto the lifeboats. He seemed like the sort of person that might take the question in good humour, but it wasn't worth the risk.
Because this was the runabout, the current guests were all friends of the Vandersnoots. A couple of other middle-aged men that he had gone to rich person school with (Business school?), someone that he played hypergolf with, and then a couple of his wife's closest confidantes.
Given a choice, Scratch might have been more interested in a secret situationship with one of these women. Both early fifties, and enough nipping and tucking done that they looked about ten years younger, but done well enough that you couldn't really tell unless you were looking for it. Even if one of them had seemed somewhat interested, it seemed a little bit riskier to engage with someone that would be spending much of the trip gossiping. Charlotte, at least, was discreet about the whole thing, and wasn't in the midst of a midlife crisis.
It was beautiful out on the main deck. Three brilliant points of light, each in various stages of setting, and the first glimmering of stars against fading blue. They were far enough from Lightport that there would be no real light pollution.
To Scratch's surprise, Charlotte was out there, watching the last rays of the second sun begin its dip below the horizon. Interesting. Aziz had lied. It was probably for the best. Scratch absolutely would have lingered out here after serving the dinner, and gotten a late start on dessert. The younger woman was sitting at the end of the table, pretending not to be bored out of her brains while her father talked about…lithium futures?
Not even bothering to see if anyone was watching, Charlotte put a sneaky hand on Scratch’s ass as she went past. Not that there was really anything of it to grab onto.
‘Busy later?’ Charlotte whispered, not quite soft enough that nobody would hear her. Unfortunately, it was soft enough that Scratch couldn’t hear her, but there was just enough light to lipread. They were literally metres from both of Charlotte’s parents, neither of whom seemed to have noticed this display.
Scratch almost laughed. They were out in the middle of the ocean on a ship the size of a school bus. She wasn't really sure if there was much to do besides work and the other obvious thing. The only job left to do for the evening was the dishes.
On The Determinator, there would be another half a dozen or so members of the service team, one of which Scratch could surely assign to dish duty. Here, she at least had a dishwasher that could take care of most of it.
Still, it took another twenty minutes to clean up and load the dishwasher, and then there were a few things that she needed to prep for breakfast tomorrow morning. Okay, she didn’t need to, but the morning would go a lot more smoothly if everything was pre-measured, and she just knew that Mr. Vandersnoot would wake her up at two in the morning requesting a shrimp cocktail the way he had for the last three days in a row. So, better to be prepared.
Aziz caught Scratch on the way out of the kitchen. She still had soapy water down her front, and a couple of shreds of spinach leaves on her sleeve. So she'd been a little sloppy with the flash clean.
‘You need to be a little more careful,’ he said, and he really could have been referring to so many things. He could have been talking about the spinach leaves, or the fact that she was a wanted criminal, or the fact that she had burnt two of the crème brûlées and tried to cover it up.
Probably wasn't about any of that. Was probably about something else. Scratch shrugged, and tried to feign ignorance. Aziz didn't push the matter, for which Scratch was very grateful. If she had to start defending herself against these outrageous and definitely false accusations…Well, she hoped it wouldn't come to that.
‘I'll keep that in mind,’ Scratch said, and ran away before Aziz could ask any intrusive questions. She very much wanted to go straight to Charlotte's room, but if she didn't get her whites in the evening laundry run, then Damaris would straight up kill her. It would be absolutely scandalous if she wore the same jacket two days in a row.
The last thing in the world that Scratch needed was to be murdered by Damaris, because she was pretty sure Damaris was competent enough the no-one would ever find the body, and she really did not want to get the reputation of someone who had fled her post in the middle of the night, all while her body was decomposing at the bottom of the ocean floor.
After she had dumped her dirty clothes down the laundry chute, Scratch made her way to Charlotte's room in her pyjamas. At least that way if she was caught, she could feign sleepwalking. Definitely a normal and not unsafe condition to have while living on a yacht.
The door to Charlotte’s room was locked. Not unexpected, and not particularly unusual. Scratch made a soft “tap tap tap” sound near the handle, resisting the urge to make a couple more extra taps for fun.
The door clicked open, and Scratch looked up and down the hallway before stepping inside. She wasn’t too proud to admit that she was just as excited about the opportunity to lie on a bed that didn’t have a ceiling six inches above it as she was for anything else that might happen tonight.
Charlotte was sitting at the small desk built into the bulkhead, a priceless artifact hanging from the wall above her. She hadn’t gotten up to open the door, but instead opened it with a button beside the desk. ‘Sorry, I just got an email back from Professor Darkholme about my thesis that I need to reply to, he’s really riding my ass.’
Scratch bit her tongue. There were a number of things that she could have said, the low hanging fruit of which was, of course, “I wish you’d ride my ass,” and getting progressively filthier from there. She didn't even complain about the fact that Charlotte was facing the other way while talking, because partial deafness was also a normal and not at all detrimental thing to advise in a job interview, and people definitely wouldn't ignore your application because of it. Scratch didn't bother anymore, and usually just had to make sure to stand at an angle to people.
While Charlotte finished typing up her email, Scratch sat on the edge of the bed and twiddled her thumbs. Like any good billionaire’s daughter, Charlotte was studying something entirely impractical, in this case, philosophy. There was just something about having access to lots of money that meant you didn’t need to worry about future job prospects and could just spend your time writing about old white men that had been dead for four thousand years.
Scratch, on the other hand, had dropped out of high school, and things had been on something of a downward trajectory since then. Fortunately, Charlotte was not interested in learning a single thing about Scratch’s past, and it was better for both of them that way. Scratch would be gone in three months, and the less people knew the better.
When she was finally finished, Charlotte turned from the desk, and her face dropped, just slightly.
Scratch raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you expecting someone else?’ she asked. They had put both a time limit and a non-exclusivity clause on the relationship, but Scratch did not think there was anyone else on board stupid enough to get involved.
‘No, I just…’ Charlotte gave a devilish sort of smile. ‘I really like taking your jacket off,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ Scratch's mind had already started running through the possibilities. On the one hand, Damaris would kill her if she was behind on her laundry. On the other hand…
It wasn't even a question. If she woke up in the middle of the night with a knife-wielding figure standing over her, then that was Future Scratch's problem.