I am Connie Lam, a loser with a track record to prove it. I never win. Not even a free oil change for Lucky 48 Extra-Terrestrial Chandlery’s rust bucket minibulk hauler that I fly out for deliveries. And I certainly don’t win at life. I’m a single mother to a cute kid I call Sticky, a small claims handler, sundry gig worker, and micro-casino owner. And my best friend, Chance, together with my inconveniently dead former partner Hong, are about to turn my delicately balanced chaos of a life upside down.

Club Contango is an illegal micro-casino. Illegal for the reason that here on Freeport, close enough to kiss the 22nd century, the greatest crime in the eyes of Lady Justice, struggling in the payload of a billionaire’s personal shuttle, is tax evasion by the little guy. That’s the 99pct who can least afford the clawback by Territory and Company.

Stepping off the tram from Pioneer Ring where Sticky and I rent a cubicle, I begin my day with a teh halia (ginger tea) at the Hazy Halia across from Lucky 48 Extra-Terrestrial Chandlery under the calm and only slightly disapproving presence of coffeeshop owner Zaqy Ibrahim, who’s wiping down a spotless counter to the sounds of old Earth rock.

The basement of the Chandlery is a big room by asteroid station standards, with rows of collapsible shelves which are never empty for longer than a leave cycle. Chance always some new retro synth meets ragtime on the speakers, echoing every period of music history, and none, and, achieving that, feels entirely our own.

When I started Club Contango, Chance quietly watching over my shoulder, and then jumping in after the first bets won the house enough coin for me to pay the rent on the capsule and upgrade to a bigger studio with a partition board, I was tired of just coping. When you’re in the basement of Lucky 48 Chandlery on a work night, with a dozen other Contractors who’re trying to forget the people they thought they would become, that failure is your asset. Bet against it, or bet with it, but harness your failure, turn it on its head, and tell it to go fuck itself. And pay you for the pleasure.

Club Contango
Genre: Technothriller
Release: December 2024
Format: Digital (Print and Audio to follow)
Purchase Link

When failure is your only certainty, you play to lose, Those were the rules. Until I won and lost myself.

Single mum Connie Lam runs an illegal micro-casino on the first international space city with her best friend, until the murder of a former business partner crosses with the fine print on an old AI job, and locks her in a race to reclaim her life, from versions of herself.

Meet the author
Eliane Boey is a technothriller and fantasy writer. Her first book, Other Minds, a diptych of two cyberpunk novellas, was published in 2024. Club Contango, a space-set murder mystery, is her latest novel, out this December. She has short fiction published in Clarkesworld, the Penn Review, and Galaxy. She lives in Singapore, and can be found on Instagram as @author.eliane.