by M. D. Cooper
I felt a wave of desperation hit me. A shootout with Skip was only going to end with a bunch of corpses…and mine might be amongst them. Even if we did win, future business on Barras would be complicated as a result.
Still, I couldn’t let a preening dandy like Skip walk all over me. That would damage my career almost as much as being dead.
“Look, Skip.” I lowered my voice, adding a deadly serious element—or so I hoped. “We’re making this deal. I’m giving you your shit back, and you’re going to hand over Korinth’s goods.”
“Nope, we’re taking this cargo off your sled, then we’re leaving. Good luck with…whatever.”
I sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s going to be a problem.”
Skip cocked his head, giving me an incredulous look. “Are you serious? Look at the hardware. We’re going to waste you, then take the chits Korinth sent and have a round at the Willston Saloon.”
“Over my dead body.”
The other man laughed. “That’s sort of the point.”
I fixed Skip with a cold stare that he returned without hesitation. During the exchange, we’d both advanced slowly and now stood a few meters apart on either side of the sled. Oln was still beside it, across from the guard who had examined the goods. I saw Skip’s eyes dart to the crates, a look of concern flashing across his face before he looked up at me.
My hand had found its way to my pistol, and I saw that Finn had done the same. The eleven guards had drawn as well, each one tightening their grips on the weapons they held—though not yet aiming at us.
I still wanted to know for sure.
“Skip,” I drew the word out. “Is this, by any chance, actually the right cargo, and you just found a buyer who is willing to offer more money?”
The scumbag shrugged, a mocking smile taking shape on his lips. “OK, you got me. The PMF is willing to pay big bucks for this shit. More than enough to risk pissing off Korinth—though I plan to dump the blame all on you.”
“How’s that going to work if I’m dead,” I demanded, annoyed by Skip’s shoddy planning.
“Not sure.” His hand drifted down toward his weapon. “I’ll play it by ear.”
As he spoke, his eyes darted to the left, and I followed their gaze, seeing the heavy truck rise over the ridge. Once at the top, it stopped, and the bed cover began to retract.
I was about to deliver a reprimand when the telltale whine of capacitance discharge met my ears. It was followed by the deafening SHOOM of a ship-mounted railgun firing in atmosphere.
By the time my mind had properly registered the chain of events, the truck—and part of the hillside—was gone.
I didn’t even look at the damage, trusting that Kallie would fire again if needed. My pistol was in hand, and I swung it toward Skip. Two rounds burst from the weapon’s barrel, but he’d already dropped, and the projectiles streaked through the space where he’d stood a second earlier.
I hit the dirt as well, crawling toward the sled, where Oln crouched.
“I shoulda brought my rifle,” the man muttered as he wildly fired his pistol over the crates. “Now I’m stuck out here with this pea shooter.”
Finn snorted as projectiles and low-v rail pellets struck the ground around us. “Well, at least we’ll die together.”
I didn’t hear any metallic impacts mixed in with the cacophony. “They’re not shooting at the sled. Means they’re gonna fl—”
The sound of Oln unloading half his mag cut me off. He’d emptied it into a guard who had eased into view on the left side of the sled.
“Flank us?” the man suggested with a wink.
“Yeah, that.” I glanced up at the ship.
Her words were followed by the sound of Oln’s coilgun discharging from the mouth of the cargo bay. I watched from the overhead drones and saw three of Skip’s people fall before the rest moved to cover.
There was a brief lull in the battle, and I took the opportunity to call out to Skip, “We can still do our deal, and you can leave with the money. You don’t have to die here.”
“OK, I’ll admit that we didn’t expect your ship’s rail to be online. But it can’t hit us this close to the hull, so it’s still twelve against four!”
He didn’t sound as scared as I would have, but then I did the math and realized there must be reinforcements still in the van. So, more than twelve against four.
A guttural roar came from the enemy, and I watched in horror through the drone feeds as Skip’s guards all charged at once.
Tammy fell back to cover, and though we emptied our mags, the goons flanked the sled, and a few seconds later, we were surrounded.
Skip ambled into view, laughing as he stopped in front of me.
“A valiant attempt, there, Jax. I really have to give you credit. It was a good fight. Now, you’re going to tell me where the chits are, and then I’ll make it quick.”
“No way I can get out of this alive?” I asked Skip, adding a bit of soft pleading to my voice in the hopes that it would trigger a modicum of compassion.
“Shit, Jax. I always thought you had more spine than this. Pleading? Face your death like a man.”
“A dead man has no pride,” I intoned, repeating something my father had often said. “There’s nothing I can offer you?”
A rather nasty chuckle leaked through Skip’s clenched teeth. “No. I could buy your ship ten times over with what this cargo’s worth. The PMF really wants it.”
“That’s gonna bring heat,” I replied, meeting the pompous dandy’s gaze. “If they want it, then it has to be something Delphi isn’t keen to say goodbye to.”
Skip placed a hand on his chest. “Oh, you bleeding heart. Are you really concerned about little ol’ me?”
“Not really.”
I flattened as twin thunderclaps shook the ground, the sound of electron point defense beams cutting through the air. The bolts of blue-white lightning fired for a full second, casting the area in an azure glow.
I didn’t wait for the enemy’s shock to wear off, quickly slamming a fresh mag in my pistol and firing into the groins of two guards before unloading a dozen rounds into Skip’s abdomen.
By the time I twisted to look around, it was over. Finn was reloading his pistol, while Oln sat astride one of the guards, driving his fists into the man’s face. I glanced up to see Tammy walking down the ramp, Oln’s coilgun sweeping the area.
“Looks clear, boss,” she called out.
The drones didn’t show any signs of more guards, but there was no substitute for the Mark I Eyeball.
“Make sure.” I gestured for her and Finn to check the far side of the sled and the car. “Oln.” I nodded to the big man. “Get the sled back in the ship. We’re leaving.”
Kallie called down.
BURN FREE
Aboard the Kerrigan…
Kallie, as per usual, had padded her estimates, so fifteen minutes later, we were getting ready for lift-off. I was annoyed at her inaccuracy, but held off bringing it up.
It’s really hard to plan when I can never tell if the numbers she’s giving me are way off!
All of Skip’s people were either dead or too injured to cause any trouble—Skip being a part of the first group. I’d been tempted to waste them all, but decided I didn’t need cold-blooded murder on my conscience.
Finn had set up a beacon with a delay that would alert the authorities to pay a visit once we were well on our way. No reason to hold things up with an annoying conversation with the cops before we took off. Granted, it was possible that said authorities might want to have a chat with me the next time the Kerrigan set down on Barras, but I was willing to make that gamble.
Not a lot of heavy freighters made runs between Chal—where Barras was located—and the other stars of the L. So long as I gave the locals time to settle down, no one would give me a hard time when I came back with goods they wanted to buy.
Relax. Skip was an ass. No one is going to miss him.
That small damn voice in the back of my head suggested otherwise, but I ignored it. There was no going back now. I’d blasted so much lead into Skip, we could have used his dick for a pencil—not that there was lead in the rounds, but I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to have a laugh at the idea.
Tammy looked back at me from the pilot’s seat, which sat in a clear sphere at the center of the bridge. “You gonna strap in so we can take off, boss?”
“Is something wrong with the dampeners?” I countered, cocking an eyebrow at the woman.
“Well, Kallie just put things back together in a rush, so who knows. Want to find out if she made a mistake when I throw ten gs at you?”
“Good point.” I sat and pulled the harness across my chest. “Let’s do this.”
“Know it?” I laughed. “I think we were counting on it. Everything secure?”
“Can we take off now?” Tammy asked, her voice laced with frustration.
“Have at it,” I ordered, waving my hand in her direction. “I too am looking forward to bare asses being behind me.”
I glanced at the nearest optic and shrugged.
I couldn’t help a laugh.
“As lovely as all this talk is, I’m taking off now,” Tammy announced. “I’ll just assume you were all paying attention and are ready.”
I realized that Finn hadn’t reported in, and checked the internal locators, surprised to find that he was on the bridge.
Turning, I looked at the consoles behind me and saw him at his customary station…asleep, his torso draped across the holodisplay.
“Finn!” I barked. “Wake up, get your shit together. No sleeping on the job.”
“I’m not sleeping, you’re sleeping,” he muttered without moving. “Not that anyone could so much as drift off, with all the yammering going on here.”
I felt an overwhelming urge to give the breacher a piece of my mind, but managed to reduce my mental tirade. “Aren’t you supposed to be monitoring comms?”
“Really?” He cracked an eyelid, his pupil rotating toward me. “This is Barras. I could monitor comms with one neuron. Most of what’s on the bands is fart jokes at the best of times. So long as Tammy doesn’t run us into anything, we’ll be fine.”
“Funny,” the pilot muttered. “I have the nav feeds up, and a vector charted and filed. Just let me know if NearSpace Traffic Control issues any alerts.”
“You got it,” Finn muttered, then closed his eye and began to mock snore.
“Wow, I sure am glad I picked the best of the best,” I muttered, then tapped the NSTC’s feeds myself, not trusting that Finn wasn’t going to actually drift off.
I watched as Tammy activated the launch systems, the grav drives sending waves of negative gravitons toward the planet’s mass below, easing the ship off the landing gear and into the air.
When the forward display read an altitude of fifty meters, the struts retracted, and the ship continued its rise into the air.
“Buh-bye, Skip,” I waved down at the deck. “Nice knowing you.”
“Classy,” Finn murmured from behind me. “Granted, he’ll make better fertilizer than he did a human.”
The ship bucked and shuddered at the hundred-meter mark, and I saw the atmospheric readings showing a stiff crosswind.
I reached out to Kallie.
I decided not to pursue the discussion as the ship continued to rise, reaching an altitude of five kilometers less than a minute later. The rate of acceleration evened out, and the next several minutes passed in silence, until the Kerrigan crossed the atmosphere-space boundary at ninety kilometers.
“Killing lateral thrust,” Tammy announced.
The readings on the forward holo showed the rate of acceleration tick down to zero, and the three kilometer-per-second delta-v with Barras began to taper off as well.
“Fusion drive is green.” Tammy spoke while adjusting her displays, moving the atmospheric information to the side, the passive scan from the ship’s systems dominating the center display, while feeds from the NSTC scrolled by on her left.
Kallie chimed in a moment later.
“Hit it,” I intoned.
Tammy nodded from her seat. “Initiating plotted burn.”
Other than the comforting low-level vibration from the fusion drives, I didn’t feel a thing as the rate of acceleration crept up to forty gs.
“You did that slower than normal,” I commented.
“Well, on the off chance that Kallie’s ‘calibrations’ weren’t quite right, I figured I’d keep Finn from getting a broken back.”
“What else is new?” Finn whispered.
Tammy cocked her head to the side, as though waiting for Kallie to make a comment about being able to hear Finn, but none came.
“False alarm,” she chuckled. “OK, burn’s good, we’re in the pipe, boss.”
“NSTC looks to be happy with our vector as well.” I pulled off my harness and stretched my arms above my head. “Love how
they just let you pick your lane here and only bitch if you screw up.”
“I mean, it’s efficient,” Tammy replied. “None of all that pompous ‘I’ve got your vector, Victor’ nonsense they require in Delphi and Paragon. I wish we spent more time in the Chal System. Feels so free here.”
“Sure,” Kallie said as she strode onto the bridge. “We just killed at least fifteen people, and no one’s said a thing. If that happened in Delphi, the anal probe would go on for months.”
“Kal!” Finn hissed. “What in the stars are you doing? Don’t say things like that. You know Chal’s getting more civilized these days, they just might decide to make an example of us.”
The tall blonde woman turned and fixed the man—who was still draped across his console—with a penetrating stare. “What? You worried the locals are going to start doing something other than issue stern warnings?”
“No, that’s not—well, fuck. There goes.”
“What?” I sat up straight and turned to see Finn erect, eyes alert as he scanned the holodisplay he’d been slumped over moments before. “There’s nothing from the NSTC.”
He shook his head. “No shit. Are any of you monitoring the feeds from Iydra Station?”
I shook my head. Iydra lay at the L1 position between Barras and its largest moon. We were headed in almost the opposite direction on an outsystem vector. “Why would we be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because the Restaff was docked there.”
I wracked my mind, trying to remember why that name rang a bell. “Oh, wait,” I pulled up the ship’s registration. “Isn’t that one of the courier ships that sometimes does business with Skip?”
“Uh huh.” Finn’s voice carried a note of legitimate concern. “Also happens to be skippered by a certain recently deceased man’s brother.”
“Better than Skip skippering,” Tammy said with a laugh. “They’re two light seconds behind us, and we’re already at five kilometers per second. That ‘vette’s probably fast, but unless—”
“Tammy!” Finn shouted. “Have you learned nothing? Fate’s Eye is on us. Don’t give it more ammunition.”