by M. D. Cooper
The Heegs were advancing two abreast, and both of the soldiers in the lead were torn apart by the rail fire. The next pair took heavy damage, but hit the deck and returned fire, while the others backpedaled toward the hole leading to the storage room.
Jessica killed another before her rifle ran out of rail pellets and she switched it over to its electron beam mode.
Jessica queried Usef next.
Jessica kept up suppressive fire on the AST soldiers in the service corridor while looking up the positions of the two inbound AST cruisers. As luck would have it, they were approaching on the far side of the station, one twelve minutes out, the other fifteen.
But one of the enemy destroyers was boosting hard toward Chittering Hawk on the same side of the station as the Sexy. Though further away, destroyer’s beams could reach out and touch the pinnace should they acquire a good firing angle.
When Jessica turned she saw the corridor behind her empty.
Jessica fired a few more shots at the AST soldiers before running for the hole in the bulkhead and leaping across the small gap to the pinnace’s ramp.
Jessica glanced around to see the Sexy’s central passage filled with AI cases. A few meters away, Iris was removing her helmet to reveal a broad smile, while the two rescued crew who had helped watched in silence. Nearby Jinx stood still, though her eyes revealed a tempered excitement.
The pinnace’s grav shielding had held in most of the atmosphere during the rapid transfer process, and within a few seconds the red lights indicating unsafe air pressure turned off and the pair of rescuees removed their helmets.
“Hal, Alla,” Jinx exclaimed. “Stars, I’m glad you’re OK!”
“Sorry…who are you?” the man—who Jessica guessed was Hal—asked.
“Oh!” Jinx laughed. “I guess I can change my ident now. It’s me, Jinx.”
“Shit, Jinx,” Alla said with a laugh as she looked the AI’s frame up and down. “You got some serious upgrades!”
“Stands to reason, given who we’ve fallen in with,” Hal said with a smile.
Just then the cockpit’s door opened and a woman stepped into the passageway. “Stars, Jinx, I’m so glad you’re OK! I was worried that Trip—”
“You!” Jinx thundered, pushing past Jessica and Iris, striding toward the newcomer. “What the hell are you doing here, Kally?!”
“What?” Kally squeaked, her eyes turning pink and sparkling fiercely as she backpedaled away from AI frame bearing down on her. “I was captured! Colonel Usef rescued me.”
Jinx stopped centimeters from Kally, looming over her with Jessica and Iris both reaching her at the same time.
“What’s going on, Jinx?” Iris asked.
“Kally betrayed Trip and I…er, Roy. He had to change his name after she gave him up to the Heegs.”
“Really?” Jessica looked the woman over who cowered before Jinx.
“Jinx, Kally tells it the other way around,” Hal called out from behind the group.
Kally nodded. “Yeah! I’d set the hatch to seal once it was closed, but then the Heegs got there. They told us to freeze and the next thing I knew, Trip pushed me into them and pulled the hatch down over himself. He totally fucked me over.”
“What?” Jinx’s voice was filled with disbelief. “There’s no way…”
“Well, Roy…er Trip, whatever, is on Sabrina,” Jessica said, wondering if they’d let a spy onto the ship. “Once we get comms with them, we can make sure they sequester him till we get there.”
Jinx didn’t move, and Jessica tapped the AI on the shoulder.
“I need to get to the cockpit, Jinx.”
“Oh…uh…sorry.”
“And I need you to promise not to do anything to Kally till we get to the bottom of this. Can you make that promise?”
Jinx turned her head and regarded Jessica with the frame’s very human eyes—which were filled with pain and indecision—and then nodded. “I promise, Jessica. But I want to talk to Roy myself.”
“Deal,” Jessica said, and edged past the group in the narrow passageway to find Usef and one more of the rescuees in the cockpit.
“Good evening, General,” Usef said as he glanced at Jessica. “I see your armor didn’t survive the engagement.”
“It sacrificed itself for the greater good. If it hadn’t our egress would have been a lot more complicated.”
Usef gestured to the forward display. “We’re not in the clear yet. Those carriers are firing beams in a grid, trying to detect us.”
Jessica settled into a seat, glancing at the woman behind her. “Jessica, nice to meet you.”
“Trance,” the woman replied with a nervous smile. “Thanks for rescuing us.”
“Don’t mention it,” Jessica replied as she turned to look at the forward display, noting how the station was now firing beams to port while the cruisers were firing them to starboard.
“Mind if I take the helm?” Jessica asked.
Usef chuckled. “I don’t know, I kinda like flying a ship named the ‘Sexy’. I think it suits me.”
“Uhhh…OK.” Jessica glanced back at Iris who had just entered the cockpit.
“Jessica…” the colonel said in a low voice as he tucked the ship in low over the station.
“Uh…yeah?”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh, good.”
* * * * *
Amavia had finally reached an airlock and set one of her frames to breaching it while she and the other one watched for any patrol craft that might spot them.
They’d had a near miss coming off the cargo drone; a pair of inspection bots had come out of a service hatch to check the thing over and Amavia had barely managed to get her three selves into cover before being detected.
Controlling the extra bodies had caused her to realize that the complexity inherent in dealing with multiple visuals, scan feeds, and movement was something she’d missed.
Both Amanda and Ylonda had been so much more than just individual people. Living in one body, doing the things a singular person—one without a starship and crew to manage—had just been unimaginably boring.
I think I’m going to make a fleet of these frames, Amavia decided. I wonder what I should call them…’Mavies’?
The airlock opened and she moved all her bodies inside.
One thing’s for sure. If I don’t name them, Cheeky will…or Jessica, and then it’ll be inappropriate for certain. Maybe ‘Vias’. Yeah, I think that suits them nicely.
The inner lock doors cycled open, and Amavia sent her two Vias down the short corridor to the door at the end. Based on the size of the strand holding the ships, she guessed the door would lead into the central shaft. Alpha Via threaded nano through the door, and Amavia confirmed it was in fact the central shaft.
A trio of maglev tracks ran through the center, with catwalks on either side and, at regular intervals, corridors led off to the ships anchored to the strand.
Some of those corridors were above and below,
while catwalks and maglev spurs ran off at peculiar angles to match up with them.
At times, Amavia was still amazed by the implications of artificial gravity. Something like this docking strand would have been entirely zero-g back in Sol. It probably would have been easier to manage as well, but humans were so used to having normal gravity at all times, they often utilized it when it made things more difficult.
While her breach of the impound strand’s network didn’t give her access to the ships, it did tell her which ship was at which berth, and she determined that the Garrulous Brooke was still thirty kilometers distant.
Amavia and her two Vias took off at an easy lope, adding more and more speed in the strand’s 0.7g until she was up to one hundred-fifty kilometers per hour.
Though the trio was still invisible in optical ranges, they were creating noticeable wind currents and their footfalls were far from silent. Nevertheless, Amavia considered speed to be preferable to slow stealth at that point.
She just hoped that if there were any internal defenses in the strand, it wouldn’t be too hard to defeat them.
As she ran, she saw that several of the passages leading to impounded ships had piles of gear stripped from the vessels stacked along their bulkheads. Flat-bed maglev cars sat at intervals, loaded with everything from engine components to galley tables.
Damn…less of an impound yard and more of a chop shop, Amavia thought, hoping that the Garrulous Brooke would still be in good enough shape to fly away in.
Then again, I can always just dive out an airlock and get Sabrina to catch me if needs be—once I find Malachi’s core.
Only at one point did she encounter anyone on the way. A pair of workers were moving a large holotank down the catwalk on an a-grav pallet. Amavia and her Vias slowed down as they passed, resisting the temptation to reach out and shove the tank off the pallet.
Granted, these guys are going to get their comeuppance when Sabrina cuts the strand free.
Twelve minutes after her run had begun, Amavia finally reached the passage leading to the Garrulous Brooke, glad to see that it wasn’t filled with pilfered gear.
She walked the twenty meters to the ship’s airlock, only to find both doors open. She hoped it was just standard procedure on the impound strand—though she knew those hopes were in vain.
Amavia paused at a control panel for the docking clamps and placed a hackIt on the data port before moving into the ship. Up ahead, a series of service lights attached to the bulkhead lead aft toward engineering.
She dropped a comm relay before turning toward the bow and the forward comm node—where Jinx had said Malachi’s core would be housed.
Even in the backward systems of the Inner Stars, ship’s AIs were usually still housed in gold-titanium cylinders, the alloy—when reinforced with carbon nanotubes—being dozens of times harder than steel alone.
AIs had the ability to seal the housing cylinder from the inside, and often it was more work than it was worth to remove it from the ship—at least not without damaging key systems.
And it was with that hope that Amavia reached the door to the forward comm node and used her Vias’ combined strength to prise them open.
Once inside, to her great relief, she saw an intact AI housing with the access panel closed—albeit with some carbon scoring around the edges.
“Stars, glad you’re here,” she said to the core. “This would have been a pointless venture otherwise.”
“You’ll not get me out,” a voice came from the cylinder. “They tried, as you can see from the scuff marks.”
“Those rate a bit more than scuffs,” Amavia said as she approached the core. “But I’m not here to get you out, Malachi. I’m here to get the whole ship. Then we’ll make a bee-line for Cerka.”
“Cerka? So you’re not with these legalized pirates?”
“No. I’m from Sabrina. My name is Amavia.”
“And the other two?” Malachi asked.
Amavia glanced at her Vias. “Just extra sets of hands. I’m going to leave one here in case we need it and then head to engineering. I think there are some of these pillagers on board, so I’ll kick them off and then get us gone.”
“That easy?” Malachi asked. “Do they coat you with magic dust when you go on missions?”
An easy laugh slipped out of Amavia’s lips. “Pretty much, yeah. How long does this ship’s reactor core take to come online?”
“Stars…ages. Forty minutes if its cold. But the batts were charged when we got boarded, so the grav drives can get us rolling. I also don’t know if the H3 fuel line was repaired, since they pulled the ship over with a tug.”
“Can your engines run on deuterium only?” Amavia asked.
“In a pinch; they’re not terribly efficient.”
“OK,” Amavia replied. “We’ll give that a shot, but if I say we have to bail, open up and let Alpha here grab you. We’ve already rescued Jinx and the others—or will have very shortly. Once I get comms up I can find out what our current status is.”
“Damn,” Malachi whispered. “Just like that, eh?”
Amavia nodded. “Yup. Remember? Magic dust. OK, sit tight.”
Pleased with the knowledge that her mission hadn’t been a waste of time, Amavia and Beta Via worked their way toward engineering, the sounds of activity growing louder and louder the further aft they went.
Her drones reached the main engineering bay before Amavia and Beta, relaying the presence of six people. Two women were working on dismantling the burn regulation system while a man and a woman leant against one of the consoles chatting about ‘the dustup over on Chittering Hawk’. The final pair were laying atop a crate near the far bulkhead, wrapped in each other’s arms—though still mostly clothed.
Beta moved to the chatty pair, while Amavia walked to the two working on the burn regulators and leant in close before whispering, “I hope you haven’t gotten too far on that, because I’m going to need you to put it all back together.”
“Fuck!” one of the women jumped back and tripped on her tool chest, falling onto her ass while the other pressed herself against one of the fuel lines.
“What the hell?”
Everyone else in the bay stopped what they were doing and stared at the two women. The others hadn’t heard Amavia speak and regarded their friends with mixed expressions of curiosity and amusement.
“Who said that?” the woman who’d fallen to the deck demanded.
Amavia decided that she’d best get the show on the road and disabled her stealth systems to reveal herself along with her rifle—which was currently pointed at the woman leaning against the fuel line.
“I did. Now chop chop. Put that burn regulator back together. You two lovebirds, get down from there and make yourselves useful.
“Six against one. You sure those are good odds?” the man who’d been leaning against the control system console asked.
“The odds are closer to even than you’d think,” Amavia said as Beta grabbed the man’s shirt and lifted him to the air. “This is our ship now. If you’re not going to be useful, then you can take a walk out the airlock…the spaceward one.”
The group of men and women exchanged a few nervous glances then began to work at putting the burn regulation system back together. Amavia hoped they’d do it properly, and set Beta to watching their progress for any mistakes while she approached the control console and placed a hackIt on one of its data ports.
came Malachi’s response.
>
Malachi chuckled.
“How’s it going?” she asked the six people who were spending as much time glancing over their shoulders, looking for invisible enemies as putting the system back together.
“Uhhh…almost done,” said the woman who’d fallen on her ass. “We’d just gotten started taking it apart.”
“Oh, what about the H3 fuel line, is that still damaged?”
“The H3 line?” one of the women cast Amavia a confused look. “Oh, right! Yeah, that had been repaired back on the Hawk before the Heegs sent us the ship.”
“Excellent,” Amavia replied. “I think I’m going to keep you all as hostages, by the way. That way if you screw something up, you can pay the ultimate price along with me. Plus, I’m not sure you’d be able to get off the strand in time.”
“In time for what?” the man who’d been making out on the crate asked.
“The strand is going for a ride,” Amavia replied.
“A ride?” one of the women asked. “Where?”
“Depends on when we cut it free. Probably Sarneeve, maybe Cerka. We’ll see.”
“Are you nuts?” the first man demanded. “This thing’s mined…it’ll blow if you do that!”
“Think so?” Amavia asked. “That seems dumb to me. Sorta mutually assured destruction. I guess if the mines go up, then that’s that. You’ll be safe here in one of the holds, though.”
“No way—” the second man began to say, but Beta grabbed him around the neck and lifted him in the air.
“You were saying?” Amavia asked with a laugh as Beta put him back down. “Look, I’m not good at being a threatening hardass. If you make any more trouble, I’ll just kill you. OK?”