“I know how to fucking play fucking bluejack, pal,” Dava said. She waved her arm in an arc. “You got four tables in this tiny, little shit-hole. At most eight players to a table, and looks like you ain’t exactly packin’ a full house.” She looked around the filthy hovel. “Let’s face it. Most of your customers are pale-skinned domers. If a guy came in here with bright-red skin, you’d notice him.”

“Hey, I don’t judge,” the owner said with a used-hovercar-salesman smile. “Alleys are Alleys. Money is Money. I’d even let you play, if you wanted to.”

Dava’s eyes narrowed. “Even a brown-skin like me, huh? I’m touched. You’re a fucking saint.” She put a firm hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “Benson had money to play with. And knowing his luck, he probably started losing. Then he thought he had to play some more to make back his losses. That’s how gamblers think.”

“Read the sign lady. This ain’t gambling. The bluejack tables are for entertainment purposes only.” The man was sticking to his routine, but Dava could hear the faint touch of fear seeping into his voice. She could almost smell the perspiration emerging from his skin.

“So he was probably in here more than once,” she continued, ignoring his fine-print line and tightening her grip. “This stout, tattoo-covered, red-skinned man with a fat wad of Alliance Credits.” She leaned in close and got quieter. “You know, I understand what you’re doing. He was a good customer, I’m sure. Lost lots of money on your tables. But you should know: that wasn’t his money to lose.”

The man swallowed and blinked slowly. Dava could see beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He turned away from her and wiggled out from under her hand. “I told you,” he said weakly. “It’s our policy.”

Dava frowned. “That’s unfortunate.” She walked over to one of the bluejack tables.

“Orange, what’s your bet?” the dealer-bot droned as she approached.

“Uh,” said one of the three skinny, white-faced players at the table. “Twelve?” He watched Dava nervously. “I mean, I’m um. I’m out.” He turned his cards over.

“Green, wha-zzzzZZZTTT—”

She drove a small blade into the top of the dealer-bot’s head and pushed a trigger, generating a series of shinking sounds. She removed the blade and a thin lick of smoke followed it out of the now lifeless hunk of metal.

“Aww, awww,” the owner of the Grand Star Resort whined. “Come on, you know how much those dealer-bots cost? Aww, right in the central processor. Come on!”

She walked over to another table and waggled the knife in her hand as she moved. “Maybe you wanna call the cops?”

“Oh come on, lady!” The man ran up and grabbed one of Dava’s arms. “Please!” She looked at him for a moment, saying nothing. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I saw the man you’re looking for.”

“And he’s a regular?”

“Yeah,” the owner said, defeated. “Comes in every night, right about seven. Before the third shift comes on, so’s he can get a good spot at a table.”

Dava nodded, inspecting the man’s face. He seemed just frightened enough to be sincere. “Thanks for your time.” She looked around. “Sorry about the dealer.”

As she walked out the door, she heard the owner say, “Goddammit, Suzu, go get an out-of-order sign for that table! And while you’re at it, get the bot-tech on the phone and see when he can get over here.”

Dava found a dark corner to disappear into, just off the large corridor where the Grand Star Resort and a few other squat gambling shacks clustered like mushrooms. Dark corners were easy to find in the massive maze of underground maintenance tunnels beneath Blue Haven. Skinny white B-foureans flitted about like bits of paper, disappearing into the mobile storage units that had been converted into bars and card-houses. The domed cities above looked so pristine and perfect, but every beautiful rock in the sky has a dark side.

She turned her arm over and looked at the small screen that was embedded into the bracer she wore. It was a RadMess; Rad meaning radio wave, and therefore relatively short-ranged. Mess meaning message; the device had a voice module, but she and her mates mostly used the small keyboard to send text-based messages back and forth silently.

Space Waste was a gang that oozed brash confidence and chaos on the outside, but internally the organization strove to be efficient and careful. When you flaunt the fact that you’re persistently circumventing the planetary laws, you have plenty of reason to be paranoid at every opportunity. Quite often, the gang found itself in possession of military-grade equipment, including communication devices with near-unbreakable encryption.

Dava started punching a message into her RadMess bracer. The reason they didn’t bother with that military-grade comm stuff was pretty simple. Any dome like Blue Haven was going to have scanners all over the place monitoring radio waves on any frequency. The local authorities wouldn’t be able to decrypt any military comm chatter, but its presence would set off a bunch of red flags and attract immediate attention. So when in domes, they used the cheap-as-shit, consumer-grade RadMess.

Of course, being Space Waste, they were still adequately paranoid about it. Rather than trying to layer on more encryption – the RadMess had a base level of encryption that wouldn’t stop any authorities, but kept civilians from eavesdropping on each other – they used a manual code. It was a pretty dead-simple substitution cypher. Every letter of the alphabet was represented by a number. It took a little practice, but most Space Wasters could easily memorize the code. It was just a matter of training your brain to see an “A” whenever it saw a “22”, and so on. When they typed their messages, they randomly sprinkled in other numbers that were outside the set just to keep chaos on their side.

Any radio scanners in a dome might be checking for frequencies and contexts of certain keywords. A lot of time and money went into developing artificial intelligence smart enough to interpret the meanings behind the words of humans. A string of raw numbers was just static on the wire to them. Geologists taking readings, students answering quiz questions, box scores from a bombball game – nothing worth bothering with.

She sent a message to Captain 2-Bit and Johnny Eyeball, letting them know she’d found a card-house that Three-Hairs Benson frequented. Less than a minute later, she got a response, mentally spelling out the numbers into letters, into words.

Dava broke the silence of her dark corner, groaning at the news that Captain 2-Bit had lost Eyeball. She started to write a message back to tell him to look for Johnny in the bars, but 2-Bit didn’t need to be told that. With all the bars in Blue Haven proper, he would be looking all night anyway. She’d just have to go ahead by herself and meet up with them later. She didn’t need their help to handle Benson. Eyeball was supposed to be the muscle – he was big, fast, and as deadly with a blade as he was with a pistol, rifle, or ship-mounted laser turret. He was one of the best; but lately he’d been hitting the bottle a lot. It might have been a mistake for 2-Bit to bring him on this job. Something about the domes – the too-perfect air, the too-perfect architecture, the too-perfect people – triggered self-destructive instincts in an atmo-born like Johnny Eyeball.

Of course, Dava wasn’t born in a dome either. Her brown skin was a constant reminder that she was actually born on Earth. For some reason, if two brown people left Earth and had a baby on another planet, in a dome, the baby would turn white-skinned within the first year. Or pink, if they lived in one of the upper-class domes. Dava’s skin color marked her as Earthen, even though she left there at four years old and her memories of her home planet were fuzzy at best.

Abducted is what she would tell people. Rescued was what the abductors called it. Rescued from the Earth, that dying planet. People still lived there, but those that remained were a special combination of rich and stubborn. Rich enough that they could afford to live in an arcology, those massive, all-in-one structures that were the precursors to domes. Stubborn enough to not want to leave their dying Mother and give one of the other nearby planets a try.