Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  To Mairwen’s disapproval, Haberville responded immediately without asking Luka.

  “This is transport Beehive. Yes, we need assistance. We expect reinforcements from the merc company that attacked us both. We’d like to be out of this tin can before that happens.” Because the shipcomm was still keyed, her answer was broadcast throughout the Beehive.

  “Do you have external transports?”

  “No, we’ll have to join airlocks, and we’ll need your ramp. We have some cargo, too.” Haberville manipulated the nav interface, then sent size and shape specifications data. “Our system drive is operational. We can meet you above the asteroid elliptic.”

  “Acknowledged. Sending target coordinates.”

  Haberville checked the incoming data stream. “Got it. Our ETA is about eight minutes.”

  She plotted a safe course out of the asteroid belt and engaged the system drive.

  “Acknowledged. Will you need medical assistance?”

  Haberville eyed Mairwen’s bandaged head and lower calf, where the wound pack was visible through her torn pant leg. “Yeah, we’re a little banged up. Nothing critical.”

  She was about to turn off the shipcomm when Luka’s voice came over it. “Eve, ask them where they’ll be taking us.”

  Haberville complied, and was told simply “home.” She relayed the answer, then told Luka and Jerzi they’d need to be near the airlock when it came time to join with the spacer. She also unnecessarily reminded them it was standard procedure to seal exosuits and tie in. Everyone who’d ever traveled interstellar knew airlock joins were riskier than external transports when it came to transferring cargo or people.

  The spacer’s response had been an inadequate answer to Luka’s question, but perhaps Haberville thought it impolitic to question their rescuers. Haberville’s actions had committed them to close interaction with the unknown spacer crew. Doubtless she wouldn’t care that Mairwen didn’t like it.

  Via her earwire, she heard Luka tell Jerzi to put the weapons on top when they packed their equipment. She assumed he’d subvocalized it for her benefit, so she’d know he didn’t like the situation, either. He was becoming more untrusting since she’d known him. Perhaps she was a bad influence on him, too.

  As much as she wanted to be where Luka was, she decided she needed to stay in nav as long as possible, where she could be more useful if trouble arose. Even though the spacer had been hired by La Plata, her tracker instincts demanded more caution than Haberville was displaying.

  From the visuals, the exploration ship was easily three times the size of the Beehive. Like most, it had enough defensive and offensive capability to fend off an alien invasion, even though humans had never encountered other intelligent life in a thousand years of galactic exploration. The spacer could slag the Beehive without breaking a sweat. On the other hand, they hadn’t so far, despite multiple opportunities.

  To soothe her prickly sense of unease, Mairwen set up and hid a small instruction set in the shipcomp that silently added herself, Haberville, and Luka to the commander’s access group. It would reinitialize even if someone else specifically tried to remove them.

  The airlock join between the ships was connected and sealed quickly and expertly. Haberville told Luka and Jerzi they could unseal their exosuits and open the Beehive’s airlock door whenever they were ready.

  Haberville turned to Mairwen. “Why don’t you go meet the spacer crew? I’ll negotiate telemetry with their pilot.” She waved toward the door. “I’m sure Jerzi will want every last sample from that cold unit transferred to the spacer’s cargo hold for evidence.”

  Mairwen nodded, then folded the interface closed. She wished she could be both at the airlock and in the nav pod, but her series of hidden alerts would have to do. Haberville hadn’t remembered Mairwen’s earwire, and she had no intention of mentioning it. Nor of mentioning the spare in her pocket.

  Instead of going straight down to the cargo area, she stopped off in the kitchen to chug a protein drink and slap together a sandwich and wolf it down. It would tide her over for a short while.

  In the lift, she determinedly settled under the mental and physical camouflage of a simple night guard with dull senses. After days of freedom, it was harder to achieve than she would have imagined. She couldn’t remember if it had been as hard right after she’d escaped the CPS and was trying to blend in. She’d been in considerable pain at the time, and it colored all her memories. She wondered if she needed to explain to Luka what she was doing, but it was too late because the doors opened, and she was immediately among strangers.

  The spacer’s crew had no uniforms, but there was a similarity to their clothing, body art, and jewelry that marked them as a unit. As Haberville predicted, Jerzi was supervising the offloading of the Insche 255C biological samples, tracking the crates against the inventory. She found Luka in the sealable hold with three of the spacer crew, loading their motley gear onto a long, narrow grav cart. Curiously, none of their weapons were on the cart.

  She took a couple of steps inside, then assumed an at-ease stance and gave Luka as impassive a look as she could manage.

  “Haberville said to report to you.” She added a tiny bit of boredom to her tone. The spacers gave her a glance, then dismissed her, as she’d hoped they would.

  An astute observer might have noticed that Luka’s eyes widened in momentary surprise, but he covered it smoothly. “Good. Get the med kit from the third level and anything else we left.”

  She nodded and went back to the third level where the showers were. She checked them briefly for any equipment they may have left behind, then went through the staterooms.

  She found the medical kit in the hall outside the stateroom closest to the clothes sanitizer. It felt heavier than she remembered. She checked and discovered it was now home to some of their stash of captured hand weapons, concealed under the top layer of medical supplies. She pocketed one of the small hand-beamers, just in case. She was definitely a bad influence on Luka. She smiled briefly as she rearranged the contents to hide the weapons again and closed the case.

  She was about to head back down when she remembered that Jerzi had stashed the xenobiological sampling kit in the engine pod. Since he’d been so diligent in collecting the samples it now carried, it would be a shame to leave the kit behind. She walked up the circular ramp to the engine pod door and stepped inside.

  The kit wasn’t in plain view, but the evidence of the jury-rigged overload flux connection they’d added to power the rigged laser was. She didn’t know what would happen to the Beehive after they abandoned it, but if military investigators went poking about, she’d rather not be questioned about the modifications they’d made, and she knew Haberville would give her up in a heartbeat. She put the med kit down and sat on the bench to open the engine console so she could adjust the flux controls before decoupling the connection.

  Mairwen shook her head. Haberville seemed constitutionally incapable of putting things away. She’d left the emergency communications relay module running, including the recorder. There were two messages queued, and Mairwen assumed one was a copy, until she noticed one was encrypted and considerably larger. The encryptor was still open with the last key used, so she was able to decrypt the longer message.

  Just as she was about to listen to it, she heard two sets of boots clomping on the circular ramp one level below, coming up toward her. She didn’t recognize the footsteps, so it must be more of the spacer crew. She clamped down on her senses, becoming the dumb guard again, and had the engine comp convert the message for display. While waiting, she opened the cabinet beneath the console to see if Jerzi had secured the xeno kit there.

  Far too late, she realized she’d made several mistakes. The words on the screen shocked her, and the sudden sound and floral scent of Haberville behind her caused her to jump, but not fast enough to avoid the slap patch applied to her vulnerable neck. She threw herself to the side to avoid any weapon Haberville might have, but the anesthetic patch
did its job, and submerged her into numb, despairing twilight with alarming speed, and then unfeeling blackness.

  23 * Interstellar: “Beehive” Ship Day 02 * GDAT 3237.045 *

  EVE HARBERVILLE WAS so royally pissed she was ready to shoot the next person who spoke. She’d been so fucking close to winning the high-risk, high-reward gamble that she could pull off this mission, and now everything was in jeopardy.

  It had gone as planned to begin with. It was child’s play to lure perverted Ta’foulou into using the emergency monitoring system where she’d hidden the mal virus. She’d promised he’d be hearing memorable sex between her and the lusciously hard-bodied, but now sadly departed, DeBayaud.

  Then everything had gone chaotic, starting with the sabotage and damage to the Berjalan, which wasn’t her doing. If she ever got her hands on whoever did, she’d give them a one-way trip off the wheel of life.

  She’d rolled with the punches, though. Even after surviving a crash landing and living through a firefight with a merc squad, she’d gotten the gods-cursed samples off that lung-rotting, stinking boghole of a planet and into the contract exploration spacer’s hold. She’d even, amazingly, gotten the drop on Morganthur, but now that hellspawn freak of nature had vanished.

  Eve knew the anesthetic slap patch had made full contact because she’d checked it before stripping off Morganthur’s earwire. She should have found a weapon and shot Morganthur then and there instead of taking the time to wipe the nav history and bottle up Foxe and Adams. It was partly her own fault for indulging her soft spot for Jerzi, wanting to protect him from whatever her generous but exacting employer might do to him.

  Eve had been planning to quit the piece-of-shit Beehive with good riddance when she remembered Adams’s precious xenobiological sample kit. Maybe her thoroughness in getting the samples would make up for the fact that one of the merc transports got away, possibly with another cold unit full of samples, although that hadn’t been her fault, either.

  Besides, it was too dangerous to leave Morganthur alive. Even if she wasn’t a jacker anymore, she likely had friends who were, and Eve didn’t want to be at the top of some jack crew’s payback hit parade. The impatient spacer crew had given her a beamer and five minutes to take care of loose ends.

  Now the mutant bitch was gone, and Eve had no idea how or where. She’d even taken the med and xeno kits with her. Christ only knew what the bitch was thinking, but Eve did know Morganthur’s weakness, which was why she was standing outside the cargo hold where Adams and Foxe were trapped. She keyed the hold’s door comm.

  “Jerzi? Luka? You in there?” she shouted, as if she’d only just discovered where they might be.

  Adams’s muffled baritone came back after a short moment. “Eve, are we glad to hear you! We’re locked in.”

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry.” She smiled at how sincerely apologetic she sounded. “The spacer crew said you were already aboard their ship, so I sealed the holds out of habit. I’ll get you out right now.”

  She entered the proper code sequence, and the door opened. She hugged Adams when he came out, taking care to make skin contact with him so he’d feel a little wave of pleasure. Her exciter talent was so low-level that it barely registered in CPS testing, but she’d learned to use it very effectively. She’d tried the same trick with Foxe, but unfortunately, there were always a few who were immune or averse. At least he felt normal. The few times she’d tried with Morganthur, it was like trying to excite a reptile.

  Eve angled away so her back was against the wall, then pointed her high-res beamer at them. “Park. I have a deal to make.”

  Adams’s mouth gaped in disbelief. Her tone and the look on her face must have told them not to fuck with her, because they froze in place, their full attention on the business end of her weapon.

  She subvocalized a command into her earwire, then spoke. Her voice boomed over the shipcomm.

  “Morganthur, I have something you want. You have something I want. Bring me the xeno kit and don’t fuck with me, and I’ll give you Foxe and Adams. Find a wall comm and respond, or I’ll start frying delicate parts of your loverboy.”

  Foxe’s face was admirably stoic, but Adams was looking sadly shocked. If she let him live, maybe it’d be a lesson to him.

  Long seconds went by. The ship was silent.

  Eve stamped her foot in frustration and swore. The spacer crew didn’t seem like the indulgent type. “On a schedule here, Morganthur. Two minutes and I cut my losses.”

  After a long moment, Morganthur’s voice sounded from the shipcomm and echoed in the cargo area. She sounded calm, as if discussing whether or not to have tea.

  “Leave alone now and live. Stay and die.”

  “I’m holding a high-res beamer on Foxe, you subhuman freak!” Eve bit out angrily, and it boomed throughout the ship. “I don’t know how you’re awake, but get your goddamn ass down here with that kit! Ninety seconds.”

  There was no response, and no sound from the lifts. Eve swore again, steeling herself to shoot Foxe’s torso. She didn’t like close-up wetwork, but she’d do it if she had to. At this distance, his exosuit and flexin armor wouldn’t hold and she couldn’t miss.

  24 * Interstellar: “Beehive” Ship Day 02 * GDAT 3237.045 *

  IT HAD TAKEN Luka an embarrassingly long time to figure out that he and Jerzi hadn’t been locked in the hold accidentally.

  After the door automatically sealed but didn’t respond to his commander’s access, and no one answered their calls on the shipcomm, he assumed it was because Eve was temporarily busy. When Mairwen didn’t respond right away via the earwire, he’d thought she was waiting until she could do so without being noticed.

  He’d already explained to Jerzi that she preferred to let strangers think she was an inconsequential security guard with barely two brain cells to rub together. Jerzi was skeptical that anyone who spent more than ten minutes with her would believe that, but had been willing to play along if Luka wanted.

  Worse than being sealed in was not knowing what was going on outside the hold. When Eve had finally shown up at the hold’s door fifteen minutes later, he was just happy to be rescued, after torturing himself with visions of them having been left to die, and anguishing about what could have happened to Mairwen.

  Eve’s beamer pointed at him had been a shock, but less so than he would have imagined. Mairwen had been right after all. He wanted to tell Eve that the person not to fuck with was Mairwen, but of course she’d never believe that.

  Too late, his intuition began filling in the gaps and drawing conclusions. Eve had been on someone else’s payroll from the beginning, and her objective was to retrieve the biological samples from the hybrid planet. The exploration spacer’s presence was just too damned convenient, and the fact that they weren’t accompanied by Space Division should have set off alerts in his mind a lot sooner.

  He’d bet a month’s pay that Eve worked for Korisni Genetika, Loyduk Pharma’s rival, looking to take advantage of Loyduk’s emergency withdrawal from the hybrid planet. Other players were possible, though, such as a blackmarketer, or even the Citizen Protection Service, which had turned up in the investigation too many times for coincidence.

  He didn’t know if Eve had planned the attack on Ta’foulou, but he thought she definitely hadn’t expected the Berjalan to be sabotaged. Looking back, he conceded that Eve had done an excellent job of keeping everyone off balance the whole trip. He resolutely fired up his talent and focused on her, like he should have done a lot sooner. They needed any advantage they could get.

  “...your ass down here with that kit! Ninety seconds.” Eve was practically vibrating with rage. The look on her face reminded him of the berserking ramper in Etonver. The beamer’s barrel centered on his chest, and he knew she wouldn’t miss.

  His talent said Eve was corrupt, narcissistic, and amoral, but not an ice-cold killer. His intuition said to distract her.

  “Do you believe in any of those deities you swear by?” he asked conv
ersationally.

  It visibly derailed her train of thought and relaxed her trigger finger. “Not really.” She shrugged. “Hedging my bets.”

  Luka nodded, projecting calm. “Protagoran logic, then.” He felt a draft and suppressed a cold shiver, the price of using his talent.

  Eve looked startled, then annoyed. “What?”

  Through his earwire, he heard his beloved angel of death. “Luka, Jerzi, down.”

  Luka dropped like a stone, gratified when Jerzi did the same. Faster than he imagined, even though he’d seen her in action, Mairwen blurred into view and closed her hand over Eve’s. By the time Eve started to react, the beamer was already up under her chin and triggered. In his mind, Eve’s essence faded to nothing.

  Her face still wore its annoyed expression as her body slid down the wall and slumped forward. The back half of her head was missing.

  A whiff of burned hair stung his nose. Mairwen was already halfway to the airlock controls.

  Luka shook off his daze and spoke urgently to Jerzi. “Get our package. When we decouple the airlock, we need to give our spacer friends something else to think about.”

  Luka ran to the airlock and took the beamer from Mairwen to cover the airlock door, in case someone from the spacer came looking for Eve. The Beehive’s painfully slow airlock sequence was still engaging when Jerzi joined him, holding the cube they’d made to blow the hold’s door. Luka was glad neither the spacer’s crew nor Eve had noticed they’d been sealed in the hold with four flat cases of KemX explosives.

  “Set it for thirty seconds and throw it down the ramp as far as you can,” ordered Luka.

  Jerzi complied and achieved admirable distance. The package landed in the corner of the ramp, right outside the spacer’s hull.

  “Nav pod, now!” ordered Mairwen. She started toward the ramp.

  The Beehive’s airlock was still closing with agonizing slowness as he and Jerzi ran up the ship’s circular ramp as fast as they could. Mairwen outdistanced them like they were running in place.