Lourdes could not believe what he had gotten his hands on. Luzia Colvyr's thick manila file folder rested on the three-tiered spaceship control panel, practically drilling a hole into his brain. The girl was a genius, and he was- well, Lourdes was a thief. That was what he was good at.
Granted, he wasn't notably called on for stealing documents, but his co-conspirator Marwa Itiope was particularly excited about this endeavor, and Lourdes was terrified of Captain Tanya Zoubek, the pilot who hired him for the gig.
Zoubek was a head and shoulders shorter than him but he'd seen her do some serious damage with her tampered automail gloves. Plus her dead fish eyes would scare the crap out of anyone with a reasonable scrap of sanity floating around in their brains.
"Lourdes Pierre," a voice growled from behind Lourdes. "Those papers shouldn't just be lying on my panels. They should be in my hands. That was the deal."
Lourdes swallowed hard and turned his eyes (very slowly) to Captain Zoubek.
"Heyy Zouzou," he drawled. "Sorry, I got distracted by all the buttons on this control panel... blazing Im'nama above, why are there so many buttons?"
"To control the ship. And don't call me Zouzou."
"Yes ma'am."
Lourdes turned over the documents sheepishly. Little did he know what Zoubek planned to do with them. Or that years down the line, when he was on trial for treason against the government, that Luzia Colvyr herself would thumb through the manuscripts, humming to herself, and cite his first mistake in a series of many.
He should not have been a thief.
