It was past midnight by the time Scratch made it to her hotel. She had not yet checked in, hoping that by some stroke of luck, a much nicer room might have fallen in her lap, whether by the Lightport Grand Casino comping her one, or by piggybacking onto the expensive room of someone else, she wasn't entirely fussed. Instead, the Lightport Grand Casino had all but banned her, and any attempts at seduction had fallen entirely flat. Not her best efforts, frankly.

After Mrs. Vandersnoot and her friends had had their fill of drinks and lemon curd tarts, Scratch had left, accompanied by Lucero, and a cool ten k deposit burning a hole in her pocket. The restaurant was still open - ten thousand stilbits was not nearly enough to bribe her way onto the reservation list, but at the very least she might get a chance to stand at the window and salivate over Chef Armstrong's famous twice-cooked space octopus. It was two thousand stil a plate, and Scratch had heard a rumour that almost that entire cost went towards catching the octopuses.

She was in the wrong industry.

‘I genuinely don't get it,’ said Lucero, after Scratch had told them the price. ‘Do you know how many bottles of mid-range wine I can get for that much?’

Scratch shrugged. She wasn't sure that she could explain the appeal to someone who didn't get it intuitively. ‘Haven't you ever had a meal that made you happy?’

‘Sure, but I didn't spend my life savings on it.’ Lucero adjusted their waistcoat slightly, and Scratch had a feeling that the waistcoat had cost at least a thousand. So they were probably going to agree to disagree. In any case, Lucero disappeared into the night (into the very bright, two sun night) when Scratch stopped to make an offering at the Lord of Luck shrine.

Most of the shrines in this part of the city were to the Lord of Luck. Scratch was pretty sure they outnumbered all the other shrines. There were a couple to the Lord of Diligence, one that was better known in Karsis City as the Lord of the Grind. The thing about the Lord of Luck, though, was that most of the tokens at the bottom of the fountain were casino chips. Scratch flipped a five stil coin in there, just in case. If she was liquid again, then she needed both the Lord and the Lady Luck on her side.

Whether by luck or meteorology, it immediately started to rain. Scratch pulled off her lace shirt and shoved it into her bag, it had been so expensive, she absolutely could not get it wet. JD probably would have said that she was overreacting, and Naomi definitely would have thought that she was overreacting, but neither of them were here, so Scratch was perfectly happy to continue to overreact.

She was soaking wet by the time she made it to her hotel. It was true that Lightport had some very fancy infrastructure to prevent flooding, and to protect people from the weather, but very little of that seemed to be in place on the parts of street level where designer shoes would never touch.

The hotel reception was unstaffed, but the automatic check-in kiosks seemed to be working. Scratch didn't even have to tell the machine anything, it got her image from the security cameras at the hotel's entrance, and cross-referenced it against bookings. If she hadn't had a booking, it then would have very helpfully contacted law enforcement to come and take her away. Places like Lightport didn't do walk-ins, not even for the serving class.

It was, of course, authoritarian as fuck, but that was life in the Ceres Empire, and that was why Scratch preferred to go by aliases. She didn't need anyone knowing jack shit about her.

Her room was on the eighteenth floor, and it did not have a window. For once, this was actually a good thing, because it would have been almost impossible to sleep with the sun streaming in there at all hours of the day. Or maybe that was just her trying to rationalise the frankly unacceptable situation of being in a room that was little more than a bed and a bathroom. There was a shelf at one end of the bed where she could put her bag, and a viewing screen that projected onto the ceiling, but that was about it. If she wanted breakfast, or a coffee, or even just to get a glass of water, then she would have to go all the way down to the hotel restaurant. Not even a fancy hotel restaurant, it would have been all synth food, and not even the good synth food, the kind that was made up of protein scraps and skimped on flavour compounds. Scratch wasn’t going to eat there at all, if she could help it. She would sleep until noon, and have eggs benedict topped with caviar like god intended.

That was the plan, anyway. It was a plan that was very rudely interrupted when Scratch’s beeper went off at five minutes to nine the following morning. She had slept like a log, and was maybe only a little bit hungover. It didn’t take much these days, compared to ten years ago. Enough that if Mr. Vandersnoot was on the other end of the beeper, wanting pancakes, Scratch might very well lose her shit entirely.

It wasn’t Mr. Vandersnoot, it was Damaris. That got Scratch’s attention. Damaris very rarely sent for her. In fact, Scratch was certain that Damaris would sooner send for anyone else on the ship rather than Scratch; she hadn’t been so blunt as to directly tell Scratch that, but you only had to see the eyes roll a half dozen or so times before you knew where you stood.

Damaris also probably had an understanding of the terms of Scratch’s contract, where she was supposed to get triple time if she got called in on her day off. Couldn’t say no to that.

Eggs Benedict would have to be postponed, then. The all-day breakfast place was on the other side of Lightport to the docks, and Scratch suspected that she would get a few more emergency beeps from Damaris before she even got her socks on.

It seemed urgent enough that Scratch took one of the automated trams that looped the outskirts of the city. Most of the other passengers were dressed in uniforms; whether for moving crates on the docks, or standing very bored at a convenience store checkout while someone used the automated kiosks, or sitting at a desk filling out the paperwork for the next entertainment complex to be built on the ever-expanding hexagons of the downtown sandbar. Anyone like the Vandersnoots or their equally rich friends would not stoop so low as to share a public vehicle; the private cars that shuttled people from building to building rarely ever got close to ground level, unless that was the final destination.

When she arrived at the docks, Damaris was on the phone, surrounded by crates. Mr. Vandersnoot was also there, also on the phone. They both looked very frustrated, and Scratch sincerely hoped that it wasn’t her they were frustrated with. She was enjoying most of the perks of this job, and the pay was pretty good, too.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

There were two things about the whole situation that caught Scratch’s attention. The first was that every single superyacht docked along this strip appeared to have maintenance people working on them. One at the very end still had “Respect the Sea” spray-painted onto its hull. Eric and his Friends had clearly been busy. The second thing that Scratch noticed was that there were far too many crates stacked next to the Determinator. More than they could ever hope to carry and still have passengers.

A very quick conversation with Damaris after she had gotten off the phone told Scratch that twelve of those crates held nothing but pineapples, and there had been considerable back and forth between Damaris and the supplier, Mr. Vandersnoot and the supplier, and Damaris and Mr. Vandersnoot, the result of which was that Scratch learned Mr. Vandersnoot had had a hankering for rum-glazed pineapple, and thought that he was ordering twelve pineapples to be added onto the normal provisions order, and as a consequence there were now thirty-six thousand stilbits worth of pineapples sitting on the loading dock with nowhere to go.

‘Well, I’m sure you two have it sorted,’ Mr. Vandersnoot said. He clapped Scratch on the shoulder, and went to do the same to Damaris but immediately thought better of it. Scratch waited until he was just out of earshot before saying anything.

‘Does he really think that pineapples cost three-thousand a pop? Are you fucking kidding me?’

Damaris very kindly did not dignify the question with a response. It wasn’t her job to answer questions like “is our employer a total moron?” and if she thought it, she kept it very close to the chest. As it turned out, you couldn’t return twelve crates of pineapples that had been shipped halfway across the galaxy at great expense just because someone hadn’t reviewed the procurement order.

Damaris bit back a beleaguered sigh. Okay, so yes, it was Scratch’s job to review the procurement orders, but she tended not to second-guess the decisions of the man that was responsible for paying her, and she hadn’t checked what he had added to the order at the last minute over a week ago. She leaned up against one of the crates while the delivery guy was on the comms to his boss, trying to figure out if there was anything that could be done.

It was too much pineapple. Even a ship of a thousand people would take months to go through that much pineapple, and there were not going to be three-hundred people on this voyage.The two chances they had were Buckley's and none, so Scratch was not holding her breath.

They were never going to be able to fit twelve crates of pineapple in the cargo hold. The types of guests that they were going to have were not the type to skimp on luggage, and every kilogram and square metre of space had been preallocated to far more luxurious indulgences. Why get twelve tonnes of pineapples when you could get a hundred grams of edible gold leaf that had absolutely zero nutritional value, and was more expensive to boot.

‘Can we just toss them over the dock?’ Scratch asked, and she was only half-joking. There were a couple of other thoughts that she had, like scrawling the word “free” on a scrap of cardboard and just leaving them there for people to take, or listing them on QuasarMarket for a hundred stilbits, or even shooting them up into space and letting them get burned up by the atmosphere.

‘No,’ Damaris said, and for the briefest moments, Scratch got the impression that Damaris had actually considered this option. ‘Lightport has very straight waste disposal laws. The fines aren’t a problem, but we’ve already been delayed enough, and the paperwork would take too much time.’ Right. That made sense. Scratch resisted the temptation to ask how much the fines were. On a planet like Serendipity, they had to be pretty steep. Almost certainly more than the pineapples had cost in the first place.

Donating them was a possibility, but it was a lot of legwork, and Scratch suspected that all of the hundreds of thousands of fine dining restaurants in Lightport had about as much pineapple as they already needed.

Scratch put a hand to her head. This wasn’t what she had wanted. She had wanted to be a normal person with a normal, “private chef for a multi-billionaire” sort of life. She had forgotten, of course, that even those sorts of people had problems like this. Why couldn’t they have just paid her lots of money to only do the things that she wanted to do?

There was another option, but Scratch didn’t like it. It wasn’t that it was bad for her. In fact, it was potentially very, very good for her. She was sure that a bunch of crates of pineapples was just the sort of weird thing that Fania would trade for a favour or two, and somehow, the hacker always had people nearby that were able to pick up cargo like this. All of that was fine. The problem was that “hey I know a definitely not shady person that will take this off our hands with no questions asked” opened her up to a lot of awkward questions, like “why do you know someone that will take things off your hands with no questions asked?” and “what does this person want with twelve crates of pineapples?”

At the very least, it was something that she should probably run by Damaris, at least for the optics of it. It wouldn’t really work for her to be all “don’t worry, I’ve got it, please don’t ask questions.” The last thing she needed was for people to be getting suspicious.

To Scratch’s surprise, Damaris turned to her, and asked, ‘You don’t happen to know anyone that needs twelve crates of pineapples, do you?’ and Scratch was a little bit thunderstruck, because really, why wouldn’t a chef know other chefs, one of whom might very legitimately need thousands of pineapples. Of all the single ingredient gimmick restaurants that existed, she had never seen one that specialised in pineapples, but Damaris didn’t know that.

‘Probably,’ she said. ‘As long as we foot the bill on the pineapple export levy.’ She had worked with Fania long enough to know what her terms would be, and had been on Lightport long enough to know that, like the fines, the export levies were also nothing to be sneezed at. The docking agents had tried to levy her for the stuff in the galley pantry.

Damaris put her head in her hands. ‘How much is the levy?’

Scratch wasn’t sure, so she looked it up. She’d been burned before on levies. ‘Oh…only a hundred stilbits per tonne, we’re fine.’ That was a great deal less than it had cost to buy the damn things in the first place. ‘Let me ask this person first, though, she might already have twelve crates of pineapples.’

Would you, by any chance, be willing to take a dozen crates of pineapples off my hands?

???

Long story. I just have a whole bunch of pineapples I need to get rid of, no questions asked.

There was a long wait before the next reply. Scratch watched as three dots popped up and then disappeared a few times. Finally:

Can’t do twelve, but can probably manage ten? As long as this mysterious pineapple benefactor pays the transport costs.

Well, yeah.

It was a surprisingly positive outcome. In fact, given that Fania would be probably willing to trade the pineapples for work, Scratch was actually coming out on top, something that rarely ever happened. The only downside was the fact that it was also giving her an undeserved reputation as a problem-solver; if she was really trying to get in good with the family, it would have been perfect.

It certainly helped that she hadn’t been the one that had ordered the pineapples, and that she could turn some of the two crates that remained into a delicious tropical medley, an occasion for which everyone had to wear their swimsuits and bright floral shirts. It certainly wasn’t just an excuse to get people wearing their swimsuits, it was a perfectly normal thing to do on an ocean voyage.

Damaris breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the news. Scratch was beginning to suspect that the other woman dealt with far more employer-started fires than was immediately evident, and this was just the latest of many that had to be swept under the rug. Scratch was sure that there had been some mysterious black garbage bags disposed of in the middle of the night that she was not privy to.

All in all, it was about an hour’s work, once she had arranged for the crates to be sent off. By which she meant that she had given Damaris the dropoff address (Praxis Station Dispatch Centre) and the details of who it should be addressed to (Lady Vane Industries Pty Ltd). Scratch wasn’t sure what anyone would find if they looked into Lady Vane Industries, but she assumed that Fania had done her homework.

‘Thank-you for your help, Kitty.’ Damaris gave her a crisp handshake. ‘Mr. Vandersnoot will be very pleased that this problem has been dealt with.’ Scratch couldn’t quite stop the grimace that crossed her face, and Damaris was once again kind enough to not call attention to it, and Scratch wondered if there was something close to friendship that was happening here.

God, she hoped not. There were far more important things to be dealing with.