The Last Call smelled like every bar on every colony world Harper Flint had ever walked into: recycled air, spilled liquor, and the musky aroma of people who worked hard and washed when they remembered. Which wasn’t often.

She stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust.

The place held a sizable crowd. Miners mostly, still in their dust-caked overalls, blowing shift pay on watered-down whiskey and rigged poker machines. A few hauler crews clustered near the back, loud and loose after weeks in the void. The bartender, a thick woman with forearms like docking clamps, moved behind the counter with the confidence of someone who’d broken up her share of fights and expected to break up more before the night was over.

Flint found what she was looking for in the far corner.

Prince Marduk Hassan—well, former prince, actually—sat at a round table with a drink in one hand and a fan of cards in the other, playing five-card draw with four men who looked like they regretted sitting down. He was a bulky man, soft in the middle, with heavy-lidded eyes and a charming smile.

Marduk was an ex-Ethnarch Kingdom prince kicked out and disowned by family and empire for his “sinfulness.” He kept the wardrobe, though. His clothes were too fine for the frontier. Silk collar, tailored jacket, rings on three fingers. He dressed as if he wanted you to know he had money, which, on a station like this, was brave or stupid. Probably both. They played five-card draw at his table. Some things outlived empires. Poker was one of them.

And, of course, there was Star with all her sequins and cleavage, a former showgirl Flint had experience with in dive bars across the rim.

Solara Starlith draped herself across Marduk’s lap, pouring herself there, one arm around his neck, the other holding a drink that caught the amber light from the neon sign above the bar. She laughed at something he’d said, laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and Marduk soaked it up. He tilted his cards a little when he leaned in to whisper something in her ear. Star’s eyes, alert and quick, and always working, flicked down to his hand and back up before he’d finished the sentence.

Flint crossed the room to the bar. She bought a Rim whiskey on the rocks, hoped for the best, and drifted toward the table where a hand played out. One miner pushed a stack of Geld coins into the center, thought about it, and folded. Marduk raked the pot toward him with a satisfied grunt and said something about fortune favoring the bold. Star kissed his cheek and clapped. She sneered at Flint.

“Room for one more?” Flint said, returning Star’s dirty look.

Marduk looked up. His eyes moved over her the way she expected. A quick assessment, fast dismissal. A woman in a worn leather jacket, nothing special, nobody important. Exactly what she wanted him to see.

“Sit,” he said. He gestured to an empty chair with the hand holding his drink, sloshing some of it onto the table. He didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.

Star looked Flint up and down with the lazy hostility of a woman marking her territory. “Who’s this?”

“Just a traveler,” Flint said. She sat down and pulled Geld coins from her jacket. Enough to buy in. Not enough to look like a threat.

“Wonderful,” Marduk said. “Fresh money.”

The first three hands Flint lost. Not much. Enough to feel the sting or look as if she felt it. She played hesitantly, the way a person plays when they’re not sure they belong at the table. Marduk barely acknowledged her. He remained focused on the miners, who were the easier marks, and on Star, who kept his glass full and his ego fed.

Flint watched the way he held his cards. Loose when he had a good hand, tight when he was bluffing. She watched how he drank, which was steady. He didn’t pace himself because he’d never had to. And she watched how he treated the miners. Magnanimous when he won, dismissive when he lost. The prince who couldn’t be a prince anymore but couldn’t stop performing the role.

By the fifth hand, two of the miners had dropped out. The stakes were climbing. Star had shifted on Marduk’s lap, angling herself so she could see his cards without him noticing. She hadn’t looked at Flint once since the opening exchange, which was just right. Two women who acknowledged each other too much would raise questions. Two women who ignored each other were just two women in a bar.

The sixth hand was when Star started.

Marduk dealt. Flint picked up her cards. A pair of sevens, a king, and garbage. She looked at her cards the way a person looks at a departure schedule—mild interest, nothing urgent. Across the table, Marduk arranged his hand and settled back in his chair. A relaxed posture that told Flint he liked what he saw.

Star glanced down. Her eyes moved over his cards the way a scanner reads a barcode. Fast, complete, and gone.

Then she wrinkled her nose and looked at Flint.

“God, what is that smell?” Star said, loud enough for the whole table. “Sweetie, did you fly here in a garbage scow?”

The remaining miner snorted. Marduk grinned. Flint felt the heat rise in her cheeks. All of it manufactured, practiced, but looking legit. She studied her cards, saying nothing, and bet small.

Garbage scow, huh?

Low cards. He’s got nothing worth chasing.

Flint raised.

Marduk called, looking amused. The draw came and went. Flint took two cards and improved to three sevens. Marduk took one, which meant he was sitting on two pair or fishing for a straight.

Flint bet with more confidence. Marduk studied her, studied his cards, and folded. A small pot, but it was the first hand Flint had won all night. Marduk’s smile thinned for half a second before he remembered to put it back. Not a concern. Irritation. A woman had just taken a pot from him, and somewhere deep in the architecture of his Ethnarch Kingdom upbringing, a small alarm sounded.

The game continued. The last miner went broke on the eighth hand and left the table muttering about rigged decks and frontier thieves. That left Flint and Marduk heads-up, which was where Flint needed to be.

Star got louder.

“You know, sweetie,” she said, adjusting herself on Marduk’s lap and toying with the collar of his jacket, “I don’t think your new friend here has showered in a week. I can smell her from here.” She waved a hand in front of her nose theatrically. “It’s like engine goo and distress had a baby and named it ‘Stanky.’”

“Would you shut up?” Flint said, flashing sharp anger.

“I’m just saying,” Star continued, “maybe worry less about the cards and more about basic hygiene.”

Marduk laughed. A big, generous, drunk laugh. He patted Star’s thigh as if she were a pet who’d done a trick. “Leave her alone, sweetness. She can’t help how she smells. Let her play.”

Flint’s jaw tightened at the condescension, but she focused on her cards.

Engine goo, huh?

Mid-range hand. He’s holding something, but it’s not a lock.

They played two more hands. Star kept the insults coming, and the pots grew. Flint won one, lost one, won another. Each win made Marduk drink a little faster and bet a little harder. He wasn’t losing badly, not yet, but he was losing to a woman, and every hand Flint took was a splinter under his fingernail.

Every time Marduk’s jaw set after a loss, Star leaned in, whispered something in his ear, making him smile. She kept his glass full and flattered him enough to remain confident and stay in the game.

On the twelfth hand, Star turned it up a notch. She swung her legs around on Marduk’s lap to face the table, planted her elbows on the felt, and gyrated.

Marduk laughed and dealt. “Yeah, baby, yeah!”

Flint rolled her eyes and picked up her cards. Star unlatched from her opponent and settled onto his lap sideways. Marduk still chuckled while he pondered his hand, but his posture shifted. He sat up straight. His grin faded, and his fingers stopped moving. Flint had watched him for over an hour, and she read this tell like a headline: he had a proper hand this time.

Star glanced at his cards, then at Flint with undisguised contempt.

“Seriously, what died on you? I’ve been downwind of mining rigs that smelled better than this.” She turned to Marduk and cupped her hand around his ear in a stage whisper loud enough for the entire bar. “Baby, I think she’s nervous. Nervous people sweat, and this one sweats like a dockworker in a heat wave.”

Flint looked down at herself, quickly, reflexively, as if she couldn’t help it. She ducked her head and sniffed her own armpit.

The table grew quiet. Marduk burst out laughing. Star buried her face in his neck, shaking with giggles. Even the bartender glanced over with the shadow of a smirk.

Flint straightened up, red-faced. She stared at her cards, trying to pretend the last three seconds hadn’t happened.

Marduk wiped his eyes. “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good.” He grinned now, wide and loose, the grin of a player who held a great hand, a beautiful woman on his lap, and a rattled opponent across the table who’d just checked her own armpits in public. This was the best night he’d had since the Ethnarch Kingdom changed the locks on him.

He pushed his coins forward. All of it. Close to twenty-five thousand in hard Geld, stacked in heavy columns on the felt.

“All in,” he said. He leaned back and spread his arms like a king on a throne. “Let’s see what you’ve got, sweetheart.”

Flint stared at the pile, at her cards, and last, at Marduk. A long, visible hesitation that screamed uncertainty to everyone watching.

Then she pushed her own stack forward.

“Call.”

The draw. Marduk discarded one, confident, barely looking. Flint took two, like someone fishing for a miracle. The cards came. Marduk glanced at his new one and set his hand down as if he already knew the outcome.

“Ladies first,” he said.

“Age before beauty,” Flint said. Emotionless. Quiet.

Marduk’s smile twitched. He laid his cards on the table with a flourish. Full house. Kings over tens. A beautiful hand. He looked at Star for her reaction, expecting the celebration, expecting the kiss.

Flint set her cards down one at a time. Ace. Ace. Ace. Seven. Seven.

Full house. Aces over sevens.

The air went out of the bar along with all sound.

Not the gradual quiet of a conversation winding down. The sudden, vacuum-sealed silence of twenty people realizing something had just happened. The bartender stopped pouring. A miner at the far end of the room set his glass down without drinking. Someone near the door took a step back, not leaving, but getting clear of the blast radius.

Every eye was on Marduk.

His smile still clung to his face, but the rest of him had gone somewhere else. His eyes moved from his cards to Flint’s cards to the pile of Geld between them. One of his hands drifted toward the edge of the table as if reaching for a weapon. His jaw locked.

A disgraced Ethnarch Kingdom prince. Beaten by a woman. In front of a room full of people. The Geld was beside the point. What he’d lost was something no amount of money could buy back in a place where stories traveled faster than freight haulers.

The silence stretched. Flint didn’t move. Didn’t reach for the Geld. Didn’t speak. She sat still, hands flat on the table, and watched Marduk the way a pilot watches a proximity alarm.

Five seconds. Ten.

Star saved it.

She laughed. Not nervous, not forced. Warm, bright, and easy. The laugh of a woman who’d seen a hundred games end a hundred ways and didn’t take any of them seriously.

“Oh, well, sweetie!” She patted Marduk’s chest and kissed his jaw. “Easy come, easy go on the frontier. Let me buy you a drink!”

She waved at the bartender before the words had finished landing. The spell cracked. Marduk blinked. His face rearranged itself into something that almost passed for grace. He exhaled through his nose, looked at the ceiling, and shook his head.

“The frontier,” he muttered, as if the word explained everything.

The room exhaled with him. Conversations restarted, and the bartender poured. The person at the door stayed and found a place at the bar. The tension broke. Star pressed a fresh glass into Marduk’s hand, directing him away from the wreckage, filling his attention with warmth and comfort. “Tomorrow will be better. But tonight will be spectacular, baby,” she said, winking at him.

Flint collected the Geld. She didn’t count it at the table. That would be an insult Marduk probably couldn’t swallow. She swept it into a leather satchel, finished her drink in one pull, and stood.

“Good game,” she said. Nothing more.

Flint walked out of the Last Call without looking back. She needed to pay landing fees at the spaceport’s admin building.

Inside the fluorescent-lit and half-empty building, the night shift ran on synth-coffee and indifference. Flint stood at the counter and paid the fees with a few of the coins she’d won. A clerk with tired, bloodshot eyes processed the transaction as if it were the four hundredth one that day. It probably was. Flint knew the feeling.

“Berth twelve, settled through oh-six-hundred,” the clerk said. “After that, it’s double rate.”

“I’ll be gone in a few,” Flint said.

She walked through the spaceport’s lower concourse, past shuttered vendor stalls and sleeping freighter crews slumped against their cargo containers. The satchel sat heavy against her hip. Twenty-five thousand in hard Geld. Enough to matter. Enough to put Aurorax VII’s colony relief fund back together and keep people alive in the Pheronix Cluster for another season.

She climbed the ramp to her ship, keyed the hatch, and stepped inside.

Star was in the common area, halfway into a gray jumpsuit, tugging it up over one shoulder. Her flashy clothes were in a heap on the bench. The sequined top, tight pants, the heels that made her three inches taller and ten years younger. Her hair fell loose, and her makeup had smudged. She had a fresh whiskey on the console beside her.

She looked up and grinned.

“How’d your exit go?” Flint said.

Star zipped the jumpsuit the rest of the way and picked up her glass. “I slipped away to use the bathroom. By the time the prince figured things out, I was gone, baby, gone.”

Flint set the satchel on the table between them. She unzipped it and the Geld caught the overhead light. Heavy coins, real weight, money the people on Aurorax VII hadn’t seen in months.

“Good work, sister,” Flint said.

Star took a long sip and settled into the co-pilot’s chair with deep, satisfied ease. She’d played this game before and planned to do it again. “You betcha, sweetie,” she said, smiling. Not the showgirl smile. The real one. “This is always a good time.”

Flint collected the coins and dropped into the pilot’s seat. She started the pre-flight sequence. Back in the Last Call, Prince Marduk Hassan drank and wondered how his night had gone so wrong. He’d figure it out in time. Or he wouldn’t. Either way, he wasn’t Flint’s problem anymore. The swindler shouldn’t have scammed Aurorax VII out of its relief fund.

Flint punched in the coordinates for the Pheronix Cluster. Twenty thousand Geld going home. Five thousand for the trouble.

The ship purred to life, and the docking clamps released. Engine thrusters replaced the purring with rumbling, and the spaceport fell away beneath them. The frontier opened ahead, dark and vast, and full of people who needed someone to even the odds.

Flint flew. Star drank. And on the edge of nothing, the next signal for help was already waiting.

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