The worst spies in the s.., p.1
The Worst Spies in the Sector, page 1
The Worst Spies in the Sector
Book Two of Dumb Luck and Dead Heroes
Skyler Ramirez
Copyright © 2023 Skyler S. Ramirez
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
To my bookworm daughter, who keeps saying she'll get to my books when she's done with the latest Rick Riordan series.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Books By This Author
About The Author
Foreword
I love my readers. The outpouring of support I’ve gotten for the first book in this series, The Worst Ship in the Fleet, is just what any author dreams of. I’ve enjoyed reading all your comments and reviews, even the not-so-flattering ones. I love it when you reach out to me on social media and tell me how much you enjoy my books, and I try to respond to as many of you as I can. You’re the reason I write.
If you haven’t read the first book of this series yet, I highly recommend you do so before you read on, as there will be major spoilers ahead. And while each book in this series will have its own unique story and messy situation for our ‘dead heroes’ to overcome, they do all fit into the larger narrative of Brad Mendoza and Jessica Lin. If you want a quick way to get through Book One, I’m pleased to share that The Worst Ship in the Fleet audiobook will be released on Audible and iTunes any day now (late October 2023).
A lot of you have mentioned really wanting to see how our two heroes reacted to their ‘deaths’ in Book One. We delve into some of that in the chapters to come, though we’re still experiencing it all from Brad’s standpoint. So, we get his reactions, filtered through his own self-awareness (or supreme lack thereof at times). And we only get Jessica’s thoughts and reactions insofar as Brad understands them. And let’s be honest, Brad is kind of an idiot, especially when it comes to women.
Still, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn a lot more about these two wonderful characters in this second book. And book three, which is coming in January 2024, will go even deeper into their pasts and reveal more of the secrets teased in Book One. After all, I can’t reveal it all at once! How boring would that be?
As with all my books, there are no graphic scenes in this one, and there is no swearing. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy another chaotic ride with Brad and Jessica. And let me know what you think! (www.facebook.com/skylerramirezauthor and www.instagram.com/skyler.ramirez.author/)
Thanks,
Skyler Ramirez
Prologue
“Brad, you’re an idiot.”
How come people always feel the need to tell me that? It’s not as if I don’t already know! As I’ve said many times before, my stupidity is an incontrovertible fact!
Yet nearly everyone in my life seems intent on reminding me of it at every opportunity. My ex-father-in-law, the illustrious windbag Admiral Terrence Oliphant, was always especially fond of explaining to me in very colorful ways how little he admired my intelligence. My ex-wife, Carla, toward the end, said it not with words but with her eyes. I know that sounds dramatic, like something out of a cheap romance novel. But Carla had a way of conveying entire epic poems with just her eyes. I used to love that about her until those poems turned into indictments against me.
Even my own mother, the day after my divorce was finalized, told me straight to my face just how dumb I was for driving my wife into the arms of another man. Gee, Mom, I’m pretty sure Carla had something to say about that choice. But listen to Paula Mendoza tell it, and I may as well have physically pushed Carla into bed with that dandy Horace Clarington, and somehow, in the process of falling, she lost her clothes along the way!
Yes, many people have called me dumb, stupid, idiot, and a host of more colorful synonyms in the last six months, but none of them hurt me as much as these four simple words do now.
Perhaps it’s because the person who just called me an idiot is quite literally the only person in the galaxy I can now count on as a friend, partner, or even acquaintance! After all, everyone else, even my mother, thinks I died in the Gerson system three days ago.
So, I look up from where I’m sitting on my bunk on board our new ship, the Wanderer, at the lithe but somehow looming figure of Jessica Lin, who just finished giving that simple yet scathing opinion of me. I’ve known her now for a very long and eventful week, yet every time I see her, it still takes my breath away. She’s shorter than me, about 175 centimeters, with straight black hair and other Asian facial features. And everything about her, from her face to the curve of her waist into her hips, is absolutely perfect. But she’s mad at me right now, so she’s…crying? Wait, why is she crying?
I was expecting Jessica to be glaring angrily at me and the nearly empty bottle of scotch I just finished downing in a vain attempt to escape the reality of my death. But I’m surprised to find no anger in her expression. Instead, her stunning face is wet with tears that run in rivulets down her cheeks.
Now, any heterosexual man will tell you, at least if he’s being honest, that few things can evoke emotion in a man more than the sight and sound of a woman crying. I know it sounds sexist, but it awakens some kind of primal instinct in us from way back in the day when we lived on only one planet, and men were expected to defend the honor of their women by throwing rocks at each other or slapping each other with little white gloves. Or something like that; I never listened in history class. If it didn’t have anything to do with flying through the stars and shooting stuff with really big lasers, I was never all that interested.
But now, I get to feel a new and exciting emotion! One that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in quite some time:
Shame.
I get unsteadily to my feet and look again at the bottle in my hand. There are a few last milliliters of scotch left sloshing around in the bottom, and they call to me with their sweet promise of oblivion and forgetfulness. I yearn to take them up on their offer.
But then I look back up at the tear-streaked face of Jessica Lin, and I reach out to her with the hand holding the bottle. She understands, taking it from me and putting it behind her back, where its siren song doesn’t call out to me quite so strongly.
“OK,” I say, trying extremely hard not to slur my words. “Let’s go figure out what we’re going to do now that we’re dead.”
Chapter 1
Things Cost Money
Do you know how much it costs to run a starship? I didn’t.
When your entire adult life is spent in the Navy, trivialities like the cost of operating the ships you serve on don’t often come up. When you need fuel, a tanker is there to provide it. When you need more missiles, a tender comes alongside, and you’re good to go. When your uniform wears out, you get a new one from the quartermaster. When you need booze, you find whatever still the enlisted spacers have set up, and you ‘confiscate’ it and the product. And on and on and on.
Oh sure, I had my life outside of the Navy with Carla while we were still married. But she handled all the money, and we always seemed to have enough of it. I always suspected that good ole Terrible Terrence was giving her money on the side to augment my meager officer’s salary. The Oliphants are kind of a big deal in Promethean society, and they have a lot of money from mysterious sources. They didn’t always, but somehow Carla’s dad went from rags to riches, all while on a government salary. Sketchy, I know.
OK, honestly, I knew that my father-in-law was giving us money on the side. I just never wanted to admit it, even to myself. There’s an aspect of pride to being an adult where you really do want to provide for yourself and your spouse without accepting anyone else’s charity. But I also knew when I married her that Carla had expensive tastes. She had so many shoes in her closet and still bought new ones all the time. So, she obviously took her daddy’s money and didn’t tell me, and I never asked. And we both lived more-or-less happily with the fiction of it all.
Until we didn’t, but it wasn’t money that drove us apart. It had more to do with me becoming a mass murderer. But I digress.
Anyway, what I really mean to say is that I’m realizing now that I more or less have no clue how the real universe works. I don’t know how to pay bills or even what those entail for running a starship. And the thought of learning about that stuff gives me a headache…or maybe that’s still the hangover from yesterday or the day before. T
Either way, I’m not about to go build some spreadsheets or something boring like that to figure out just how broke Lin and I are. Because running a starship is expensive. I know enough to be daunted by that. There’s fuel, water, foodstuffs, thruster reaction mass, toothpaste, soap, and booze. We can’t forget the booze. Agent of the King’s Cross Heather Kilgore, when she let us steal Wanderer from Gerson Station—I suspect it was a ship set aside for her personal use while there—was kind enough to leave a few bottles of the good stuff in the galley. But what I haven’t already drunk, Lin has dumped down the sink.
But booze or not, we need money! Otherwise, our new lives as Ben Lopez and Jennifer Kim are going to be short and impoverished. By the way, I hate the new name Kilgore chose for me; my high school bully was named Ben.
It’s only been a day since Jessica took my last bit of scotch, but all this thinking about money reminds me why I hate being sober.
“All I’m saying, Captain,” Lin says to me now in the small ship’s galley, breaking me out of my thoughts, “is that the only way this is going to work is if you take charge and be the captain.”
I regard her across the table and the steaming plate of dehydrated potatoes that desperately make me miss Warrant Officer Hoag’s cooking from Persephone. I honestly never thought I’d miss anything from that ship.
“Well,” I respond, spearing another soggy potato with my fork and pointing it at her for emphasis, “the thing is, I’m not a captain anymore. And you’re not a lieutenant commander anymore, Jessica. We’re no longer in the Navy, so we don’t have to think in those terms now. We can be anything we want. Like clowns.”
She looks at me incredulously. Which, of course, means I need to explain myself. I feel like I have to do a lot of that with her.
“No, seriously. I went to the circus once with my mom when I was a kid. I saw like fifteen clowns get out of a tiny rocket, and I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be so cool to be a clown and travel the galaxy in a tiny little starship with fourteen of my closest friends? For something like two years, all I wanted to be was a clown until someone told me that the Navy would let me shoot things. Clowns don’t get to shoot stuff.”
She’s still frowning, trying to decide if I’m being serious—which I am—or mocking her—which I also am. So, I do what most guys do when they’ve put their foot in their mouth with a pretty girl: I double down.
“Come on, Jessica. Didn’t you ever want to be anything other than a naval officer? Or did you come home from the hospital saluting your parents and spouting naval regulations?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember back that far.”
Ugh. If she’s going to insist on having no sense of humor, this new life will end up being really long for both of us. Actually, never mind, because we’ll die first from starvation when we run out of food and have no money to buy more. But we’ll be bored the entire time we’re starving.
“Listen, Brad,” she says my name for the first time since she called me an idiot yesterday. It sounds foreign coming off her tongue as if she’s totally out of place calling anyone anything other than ‘sir, yes sir, right away sir!’.
“I don’t remember what I wanted to be as a kid,” she continues, “but I know what I am now. And even though I’ve been...ripped out of the Navy, I’m still a naval officer at heart. And so are you. And if we don’t stick with what we know, then…”
She trails off, and I can see her eyes starting to water up. And I don’t particularly want to feel like a horrible human being for making her cry a second day in a row. Even mass murderers have to draw the line somewhere. So, I decide that surrender is the better part of valor.
“Fine. I’m the captain again. Happy? But you can’t be the XO, not on a civilian ship. People will get suspicious. So, you’re my first mate. Got it?”
She nods, a look of relief on her face that tells me that she genuinely is grasping for a lifeline with this whole ‘act like we’re still in the Navy’ thing. Maybe being dead is easier for me; after all, my naval career all but ended six months ago. And with Carla, I at least had a life outside the Navy for a little while. But, as far as I can tell, Lin hasn’t known anything outside the Promethean Navy for her entire adult life. So perhaps I just need to give her this.
“Got it,” she finally responds.
“Good,” I say, and then I have a wicked thought. “And as my first order to my new first mate, I need you to go and figure out what it’s going to cost to run this ship and keep food in the galley. Report back to me at 0800 tomorrow with your findings. Scratch that; make it 1100. I want to sleep in.”
She frowns.
“Fine,” I say begrudgingly. “Oh nine-thirty, and not a moment sooner!”
I’ve never seen anyone so happy to be ordered to go and build a spreadsheet.
Chapter 2
Picking a New Career (Lin Ruins Everything)
“Three weeks? Really? That’s all we have?”
I try and fail to keep the frustration out of my voice. I haven’t had a drink in two full days now, and going that long without has me seriously on edge. Not to mention, I slept terribly last night, knowing that the first thing I got to do upon waking was review a depressing spreadsheet. And I wasn’t disappointed!
“That’s what the numbers say,” Jessica says hesitantly. “I can recheck them; maybe I made a mistake somewhere.”
“No, no, no,” I say, waving her down as she starts to get up from the small table in Wanderer’s galley. “I’m sure your math is fine. I’m just not used to having to worry about where my next meal is coming from. It kinda…”
“Sucks?” she finishes for me with a timid shrug. “At least we have three weeks if we keep our jumps to a minimum and don’t eat huge meals. I’m sorry.”
I don’t know why she’s apologizing, but it’s not a good sign. I badly need ‘Confident Lin’ right now, the woman who devised the plan to destroy a heavily armed Scimitar-class destroyer using the barely-spaceworthy Persephone. What I don’t need is for her to go back to doubting herself. Because at least one of us needs to be intelligent and decisive, and it sure isn’t going to be me.
“It’s not your fault, first mate,” I say in my best imitation of my old command voice. “It’s just the reality of the situation. So, what do we do about it?”
She sits up straighter. I’m quickly learning that Confident Lin usually emerges when she sets her brilliant mind to solving a problem. It’s why I asked her to take on the task of figuring out our finances; well, that and because it was a great way to pay her back for forcing me to keep pretending I’m a captain. But either way, Lin needs problems to solve as much as I need alcohol to drink.
“We have to stop thinking like we’re still in the Navy,” she says slowly, directly contradicting what she told me yesterday. I’m smart enough not to call her out on it.
She continues, “And that means we have to figure out what skills we have and how to monetize them, and quickly.”
“I can play chopsticks on the piano,” I say with a half-smile, trying to lighten the mood. She throws me an irritated frown like my mother did when she caught me trying to light the drapes on fire when I was eight. It turns out Confident Lin also comes out when she’s annoyed with me. Great, that should be easy to maintain.
“I can drive and fight a ship,” she says through her frown, “but I don’t know much about keeping it running.”
“Neither do I,” I admit. “At least, beyond the basic engineering courses from the Academy, but you and I both went the tactics and command track, so they didn’t exactly spend much time teaching us to maintain a reactor.”
She nods. “But we can drive the ship. And probably better than most merchant pilots out there.”
“Might make us good smugglers,” I say, only half joking.
Lin frowns again. “No, we need to try and stay on the right side of the law; avoid attention.” It’s a naïve statement, considering we’re in a stolen ship with fake identity papers, but I get where she’s coming from. Neither one of us has the makings of a criminal mastermind.
