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Chapter One
FAYE
Outdoor market
Capital city of Kajal, Planet Xaxos
"This is Detective Faye Madison reporting to Wanderstar Fleet. I arrived at sector 8-2, over."
I spoke into my com link while I navigated the sleek hovercar to the designated parking spaces at the west entrance of the market. The speakers inside the hovercar produced static before my boss, Agent Nash, head of the intel and investigative divisions of the Wanderstar Fleet, came online.
"You’re late, Detective."
"Sorry. Traffic’s a pain today."
"I thought you were from a large metropolis on your planet."
"I had less issues during rush hour in Chicago when the cars didn’t fly." I found a parking space.
"Detective, remember to be on alert. The targets could be in the area. Keep your guard up and your com link on."
"Guard up and com link on. Got it." I shoved my driving glasses into my pocket and surveyed the bustling alien marketplace that was in Kajal, planet Xaxos’s capital city and home to the largest space hub in the Arcturus Galaxy. I stepped out of the sleek hovercar. Bright, blinking neon colors, exotic, mingling sweet and savory scents, and a storm of different languages filled the space around me.
It was beautiful, foreign, and full sensory overload at the same time.Just focus.I scraped my palm lightly with my fingernail, one of the little tricks I learned to do over the course of my thirty-year lifetime to calm my nerves and bring myself back to the task at hand.
My job now was to solve this case. If my leads were correct, the thieves I was tracking were hiding somewhere in this crowded market. They had a priceless artifact stolen from the Xaxos Museum of History. I had to get it back before the thieves had a chance to leave the city.
I adjusted my simple grey tunic dress, a common clothing item worn by many of the female and femme presenting Javorian people on the planet. The color wasn’t the greatest shade against my dark skin, but I wasn’t here to make a fashion statement. As a woman from Earth, I needed to blend in as much as possible to navigate the marketplace.
Shoppers brushed past me, bumping against my shoulders. In reflex, I pulled them in. I hated strangers touching me.Focus, focus. I turned sideways to squeeze between two vendor stalls. They were packed so close together my knee bumped the side of one stall and my ankle the other.
So much for being discreet. I lowered my head in apology to both stall vendors before going on my way. The less attention I drew to myself as a human, the better. Too bad I could be a bit of a klutz sometimes.
My com link vibrated on my wrist. Instead of raising my hand to speak into it, I touched the tiny device behind my ear instead that was paired with it. "Detective Madison here."
"Your daily news and email feed have arrived." An artificial voice responded in my ear.
I tapped on the little device twice to get it to stop. I thought I turned my personal alerts off before I headed out on this case today.
"Report One." The AI ignored my efforts to get it to stop reading the news. "Last night’s rain made this morning’s downtown traffic a complete washout."
"Stop." My command to the com link was a bit loud. A Javorian next to me turned her head and took a step back.
"Not you." I slipped past her, then muttered under my breath. "I’m talking to my chat bot who won’t listen."
"Report Two." The bot skipped to the next news headline as if I just didn’t instruct it to put a sock in it. "Engineers say energy fields in the eastern sector of the planet may be malfunctioning."
"No. Stop. End." I rattled off a bunch of prompts that one would think any intelligence, natural or artificial, would understand. The Wanderstar Fleet programmed the device to respond to my voice. Did I need to speak Javorian to get it to listen to me?
"News reports paused."
"Thank you." I breathed a sigh. Finally, the darn thing decided to listen to me. Just another workday annoyance.
"You’re welcome." Silly thing always had to have the last word.
I lowered my hand from my ear and surveyed my surroundings again. A helmeted rider on a souped-up alien moped with wing guards zipped in front of me, kicking back mud from last night’s rain onto the stalls. I ducked before it could splash onto me.
Some things were exactly like living in Chi-town.
