by M. D. Cooper
“Freeze motherfucker!”
Jessica realized that the AST sergeant had faked her out. His troops already had the tagging grenades. He knew he was dealing with a stealthed enemy and gave some commands verbally to lead her astray.
Jessica sighed as two of the squads surrounded her and the surly sergeant approached.
“OK, you maniac, disable your stealth, and drop your weapons,” he ordered.
Jessica saw that the squad out front was moving back into the concourse, while one of the others was moving to assist the injured from the first platoon and secure their positions. That meant she needed to disable nineteen soldiers in the next few seconds.
Jessica wasn’t worried about that. The taggers the grenades had sprayed her with had bored into the armor and ruined its stealth ability. It could repair, but that would take some time.
“I said disable your stealth!” the sergeant yelled.
Jessica complied, her armor shifting to a matte grey sheen. She then carefully lowered her rifle—which she hadn’t even used yet—to the ground, bending her knees as she set it on the deck, ready to jump.
“Now your helmet,” the Heeg ordered.
With the increased capacity that Finaeus and Earnest had engineered into her when they revitalized her alien symbiotes, that discharge was equivalent to over three million joules, delivered as raw electricity.
It blasted out the ports on her hands arching down to the soldiers who surrounded her, jumping between them as the flow of electrons sought the most efficacious route to the deck and what equalization it could find in the station.
Jessica cut the discharge before she hit the deck, but free electrons washed across her armor, flowing to ground and frying several of her armor’s powered joints.
Jessica’s breastplate hadn’t separated from the armor’s back and she grabbed it with her smoking hands and wrenched it aside while glancing around at the AST soldiers.
It was as though she was surrounded by a wall of smoking statues. A few were moving feebly, but some were entirely frozen—and probably dead as well.
Then the breastplate came free and clattered to the deck, and Jessica scooped up her rifle before running toward the squad at the entrance—who had fallen back once more under Iris’s beam-fire barrage.
Some were firing out into the corridor, while a few had turned toward Jessica. She fired on them with both her rifle and the electron beam in her arm before sweeping past, taking a few projectile rounds on her back and right thigh before a pulse blast hit her and sent her flying out into the middle of the concourse.
The AI was crouched behind a dockcar, and shook her head at Jessica as she approached.
Jessica glanced down at herself and laughed.
After a few of the Heegs tried to exit the storage facility—and met with beamfire from Iris—both women re-activated their stealth systems and retraced their steps to the ladder shaft at the top of which Usef and Jinx waited.
The AI laughed softly.
The group reached the top of the ladder shaft without further incident and formed up at the end of a service corridor three levels down from the station’s command deck, and one above the detention facility.
Jessica glanced at Usef.
Jessica sent an acknowledgement to the team on Sabrina before glancing at the group with her.
IMPOUND
STELLAR DATE: 05.03.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, near Chittering Hawk Station
REGION: Virginis System, AST Space
Cheeky glanced at the main holodisplay, looking over the projected paths of ships in nearspace.
Fourteen tugs, seven light haulers, seventy-nine cargo drones, eleven private freighters, six private recreational ships, nineteen station patrol skiffs, one AST corvette, two light assault craft.
The observation took a second and as the counts formed in her mind, the paths of the ships and their engine wash cones mapped out a web of no-fly zones for Sabrina to slip through.
Most of the civilian vessels were boosting away from Chittering Hawk. A few were being rather indelicate with their engine wash, splashing ionized plasma against the shields of other ships and spreading it far and wide.
Half the comm chatter around the station at present consisted of hurled insults, orders from the station’s STC for ships to get back into proper departure lanes and threats from the patrol craft that everyone knew they weren’t going to carry through with right now.
Cheeky was surprised to see a few of the civilian ships easi
ng up to external berths, apparently unconcerned that a battle was looming—either that, or they were low on fuel and had no choice but to snuggle up to the station for protection.
She flipped the main display to show their destination, the impound string. The facility stretched for over five hundred kilometers, a long shaft anchored to one of Chureen’s smaller moons.
Twenty years ago, when Cheeky had last flown past, the impound string had only a few dozen ships hanging from its grapples, but now there were hundreds. Ships were attached to every anchor point, and some smaller ships appeared to be anchored to larger ones. Even the moonlet had ships on its surface—larger freighters from the looks of it.
For a moment, she calculated the adjustments that must have been made to the moon’s orbit to handle the significant change in mass. Then she wondered what would happen if they cut the string free. Would they have enough momentum to fly off into space?
She quickly determined that the answer was yes. The string was effectively hanging from the moon. Cut it and it would fly.
The moon was coming around the far side of Chureen. In thirty minutes, it would be on a perfect trajectory to send the entire collection of ships toward the planet Sarneeve for the VDF to collect.
“What do you think, Sabs?” Cheeky asked aloud. “Do you think we could hit the string where it anchors to the moon, and break it free?”
“Cheeks, I smashed into a planet and fractured its crust enough that all life on the world died. Do I actually have to answer that question? Besides. I hate impound yards.”
The response came audibly, and Cheeky glanced over her shoulder to see one of Sabrina’s mobile frames—the red and gold one—standing nearby.
“Well, no, it was more a way for me to introduce my plan.”
“It does seem like a good way to give the inner system a little gift. I imagine that half those ships belong to people who fled to the inner system, or to people in AST prisons,” Sabrina replied as she settled down at the weapons console.
“Uhh…what are you doing?” Cheeky asked.
“Just getting more practice at being in a frame like this. Don’t worry, when the shit hits the fan—note how I said when—I’ll do things the old-fashioned way.”
“Can you really do that?” Edgar asked from his station. “I hate the assholes who run that place. Would make my day to see it cut free.”
“I’m all for it, too,” Amavia added from the other side of the bridge. “But let’s wait till I get control of the Garrulous Brooke. I’d rather not risk an EV maneuver while that whole damn string of ships is hurtling through space.”
“Technically it’s already hurtling—” Cheeky began to say, a wide grin splitting her lips.
But Amavia cut her off. “I know, I know. I just want consistent and predictable hurtling, OK?”
“Yeah, I get it,” Cheeky replied. “We don’t reeeally need to cut it free, either, it would just be fun.”
“I like it,” Sabrina said. “I still have strong memories of being stuck in an impound yard, slowly seeing my body being pillaged. Even if there aren’t AIs on any of those other ships, as a starship myself, I feel like it would be a good deed to liberate those hulls from the Hegemony.”
Cheeky giggled at Sabrina’s anthropomorphization of other starships. Then she wondered if that was the right term. Would it be aithropomorphization? Or maybe shipropomorphization.
During the conversation, she’d deftly slipped past Chittering Hawk’s local traffic, drifting toward the string of ships in impound.
“Any luck, Mav?” she asked Amavia.
“I’m working my way into their network, but from what scan shows, the ships are all powered down. Reactors cold. I don’t know if they slaved the ships to a central control, or if they just shut them down manually.”
“I think they keep them segregated and shut them down manually,” Edgar supplied.
“Which means you’d have to go down for sure to get the ship running again—” Cheeky began before being interrupted.
“Huh…looks different,” an all-too-familiar voice said from the entrance to the bridge.
Cheeky was out of her chair in an instant, a part of her mind still on piloting the ship, but most of it on the hulking blond man standing on the room’s threshold.
She stalked toward him, eyed him up and down—noting that his expression was slightly bemused. “Well hello there, Thompson.”
Her tone was carefully neutral, almost friendly.
“Uh, hi, Cheeky,” Thompson replied, looking a little surprised that she hadn’t laid into him.
“Hey, no hard feelings,” Cheeky smiled, and reached up to embrace the man.
“Uhhh…sure, yeah, of course not.” Thompson leaned down toward Cheeky and she slid her hands up his arms and onto his shoulders.
Then she gripped hard and pulled down with all her considerably enhanced might while driving a knee into the man’s groin.
Thompson let out a surprised squeal and then collapsed to the deck, gasping for breath.
“Is that really a mature response?” Amavia asked as she turned in her seat to watch Thompson struggle for breath.
“No,” Cheeky replied as she turned and walked back to her chair. “But, given the nature of his transgression, I think it was a fitting response.”
She returned to her seat and adjusted the ship’s vector, trying to still her breathing and focus on the task at hand.
Though she’d joked about hitting Thompson in the junk, she hadn’t actually planned on doing it until he showed up on the bridge. If the first words from his lips had been an apology for how he’d left, she might have reacted differently. But to just stroll onto the bridge and act like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t crushed Nance’s spirit and betrayed the team’s bond with one another….
Easy now, Cheeks, deep breaths. Slow breaths.
There was some shuffling from behind, and Cheeky didn’t turn, instead tapping the bridge’s feeds to see Thompson rise to his feet, a look of sorrowful shame on his face.
“OK…I know I deserved that. I would have said something else, but…well, there are strangers here, and—”
“I’m no stranger,” Sabrina said via her mobile frame as she turned in her seat to regard Thompson.
“Sabrina?” he asked, brow lowering. “Are you not the ship’s AI anymore?”
“Thompson, you’ve always been a bit dense, but don’t be stupid. The only way I’m ever not going to be this ship’s AI is if I ascend and give it to Cheeky.”
“If you what?”
“And that’s Amanda and Ylonda,” Sabrina gestured at Amavia. “Er…it was. Now they’re Amavia. You met both of them back on the Intrepid.
“Oh, yeah, I guess I did.”
“Stars, Thompson,” Cheeky muttered while keeping her eyes on her console. “Were you always this slow and dimwitted?”
To her surprise Thompson smiled and shook his head. “No, I’m pretty sure I used to be worse. I know you’re pissed at me, Cheeks. Is Nance aboard? I can’t find any sign of her, just this weird cook in the galley. I need to—well, you know.”
“I believe the word you’re looking for is apologize,” Sabrina supplied. “And no. She opted to sit this jaunt out. She’s back at New Canaan.”
“Oh.” Thompson let the single word fall from his lips like lead. “Well…even though you’re not happy to see me, I’m glad to see the lot of you…even though Miss Plum herself is the captain now. I guess Cargo is back at New Canaan, too?”
“Running a cattle ranch, if you can believe it,” Cheeky said, still keeping her eyes fixed on her console.
A snort escaped Thompson’s lips. “No…to be honest, I really can’t believe it.”
No one spoke for a second, and then Thompson shrugged. “Well, I guess I should go. I just wanted to say I’m sorry, thanks, and all that shit.”
“I’m…I’m sorry I kneed you in the nards,” Cheeky replied. “Not a lot sorry…like a little bit. A teensy bit sorry.”
Through the feeds she saw Thompson shift, half turning to leave, but then his eyes fixed on the main holo.
“Whoa…why are we headed for the impound string?”
“We’re going to make sure that they didn’t leave the ship’s AI, Malachi, on the Garrulous Brooke.”
Thompson whistled. “That should be fun. You realize they have seeker limpets tucked in all over that string.”
“They what?” Cheeky asked, twisting around to look Thompson in the eyes. “Are you shitting me?”
“That’s new,” Edgar added. “I knew I hated those guys for good reason—just not enough.”
“There were some looters recently. They had them delivered a week back,” Thompson said. “Will your stealth hide you from them?”
“Maaaybe?” Cheeky asked, glancing at Sabrina and then Amavia.
“Depends how close we get. Certain types of magnetism can see ships in stealth if they’re real close,” Amavia said. “If the limpets use magnets to attach, it might be possible for them to detect us. Normally Inner Stars tech is pretty much garbage, but the AST seems to have better toys than most.”
“We’ll be reeeaal careful, then,” Cheeky said.
“Well, if anyone can do it, it’ll be you, Cheeky,” Thompson said as he turned away. “I’m going to go check on my people.”
“Uhh…thanks?”
Thompson didn’t reply, and a few seconds later, the sound of him descending the ladder came from the corridor.
“OK…maybe I feel a bit more than a teensy bit bad that I nailed him in the nards.”
* * * * *
Amavia rose from her station on Sabrina’s bridge and blew out a long breath.
“It’s no good. From what I can tell, a lot of people have tried to steal ships from this place in the past, making them seriously paranoid. They’ve totally segregated their networks. None of the external, or wireless systems are connected in any way to the systems that manage the ships. I think they even have different power generation.”
Cheeky whistled. “Now that’s some serious paranoia—though, considering how we’re planning to steal all their ships, I guess it’s warranted.”