by M. D. Cooper
Sinclair’s eyes widened, but she didn’t respond audibly. For several long minutes, the pair stared at one another, until she sagged and nodded. “Very well, but we’re still finishing our inspection.”
“Of course,” Fledge said. “I’d be shocked if it were just those three cores. They come in cases of five, you know.”
Kallie began clenching her hands into fists, and I gave her an understanding look. What Fledge was proposing was far more dangerous than ending up in a DSA prison.
They were going to make us set Korinth up.
12
THE DEAL
If it weren’t for the fact that we were going to have to lie to one of the most dangerous men in the L, I would have been rather amused by how pissed off Sinclair was over the situation.
The commander had been so pleased to have me dead to rights with some seriously illegal cargo on board, only to have DSA Intel swoop in and steal her thunder.
Even better? If we made sure Korinth got nailed to the wall, we were off free and clear.
Even more better? Sinclair’s inspection team had only found seven of the fifteen cores. Less than half. That meant we could still sell the rest.
“I think we have a deal, then.” I rose from the table in our small galley and walked to the chiller, where I pulled out a beer. “But I’m going to need official documentation, or we don’t do shit.”
“You’re pretty damn cocky for a man caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Sinclair hissed from her seat at the head of the table. “We could still choose to haul you over to the Victorious Strike and introduce you to our brig.”
“Commander,” Fledge held up his hand. “Your pride is not worth putting a win like this at risk. Everyone is going to relax, and we’re going to make the exchange happen. It’ll all be logged and processed. We’ll see who he sells to, and then bring the whole operation down.”
“Except me,” I clarified. “Nothing happens until I have a guarantee with the DSA IS’s tokens on it.”
Sinclair’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, a lot of things could still happen without a guarantee in your hands.”
Fledge shot her a look before turning back to me. “Yes, I’m working on that as we speak. We’re on a bit of a time crunch, and a few light hours from a final authority. We’ll have to get underway before you get one with a complete set of tokens, but I’ll provide you something provisional in a few minutes.”
I pursed my lips, not liking the sound of that. “OK, that will do for now. What are we going to do about the cores? I assume you’re not going to let us take the real deal to Korinth.”
A grin split Fledge’s lips. “Actually, we are.”
“What!” Sinclair thundered. “No. I forbid it.”
“Relax, Commander.” The spook seemed entirely nonplussed. “They’ll be useless. I’ll make sure of it.”
The moment those words left Fledge’s mouth, I realized why he was far less worried about things going wrong than Sinclair. She realized it too.
“You plan to go with him,” she whispered, gesturing at me. “With this fool.”
I placed a hand on my chest. “Ouch.”
“And you are missing the big picture,” the IS man shook his head. “You’re out here swatting at flies, counting yourself a mighty victor when you take one out. But those flies are here because of a great stinking boar in our midst. I want to kill the boar. Then the flies have nothing to feast on, and they die off.”
“Wow…that feels worse than being called a fool. Granted, you both are so entitled, you don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about, so I’ll let it slide.”
“Oh?” the commander rolled her eyes. “Pray tell, Captain Bremen, what is it that we don’t understand?”
“Korinth isn’t the thing the flies are swarming around. It’s the entire L. So long as the three systems aren’t unified, there’s opportunity, and a buck to be made.”
Fledge barked a laugh. “This isn’t going to go anywhere. Commander Sinclair, you are dismissed. You may take your inspectors and return to your ship. I’ll take full responsibility for the cubes.”
“It’s going to take something more than a lieutenant’s word for me to do that,” she replied.
I had suspected that Fledge was undercover. What I hadn’t expected was that the commander was not fully read into his situation.
Oh, that must burn her cookies so much.
To my great dismay, they didn’t conduct their conversation aloud, though it lasted several minutes.
I finished off my beer, and after watching them in silence for another minute, shook my head and returned to the chiller. “Either of you want one? You’ll have to stay hydrated if you want to keep this up.”
“No.” Commander Sinclair shook her head. “I’m leaving.”
She stalked to the door and then stopped on the threshold. Her shoulders heaved, and she spoke without turning.
“Eventually I’ll catch you, Bremen. One day, you won’t have another deuce up your sleeve.”
“Then I’ll pull one out of yours,” I replied.
She didn’t say another word, and I sagged against the counter, silently thanking the stars that they’d given me the out they had.
“You still offering a beer?”
I looked up to see Fledge standing before me with a weary grin on his lips. “I could really use one right now.”
The crew gathered around the white plas table in the galley, each member looking dour and unhappy in their own way as they regarded the man standing next to me.
“I’d like to introduce you all to our newest crewmember, Fledge. He’s going to be joining us for the handoff with Korinth. We make sure everything goes smooth as silk, and we all get off with a full pardon.”
Fledge nodded. “Jax is right. I have provisional approval, and we’ll have it all locked down before we reach Myka Station.”
“And what if you don’t get final approvals?” Oln asked. “Do I get to crush you?”
Fledge chuckled. “You can try. But it’ll just mean that the op is off and you all go to prison. It’s in your best interests to go along with this—oh, and if any of you let anything slip to anyone about the DSA knowing about these seven cores, the deal’s off for the whole crew.”
“Hey, whoa,” I turned to the IS man. “That’s not the agreement we had.”
“Our agreement was a smooth handoff. If the word gets out that I was here, then things won’t be smooth.”
I could tell by the look in his eyes that there was no wiggle room to be had. Chances were that after the handoff, we’d be sent on a long trip to somewhere unimportant; best for us and the IS if the Kerrigan wasn’t around when Korinth went down.
“We’ll be good,” Kallie spoke up before I did. “None of us want to mess things up. Don’t worry.”
“Good.” Fledge swept his gaze over the crew, then gestured for me to sit. “Now, we don’t exactly know how things are going to go down when we get to Myka. Korinth runs these sorts of things a lot of different ways. Sometimes the clients come to the product, sometimes the product goes to the clients. Hell, he could hold an auction right in the Kerrigan’s main hold. We’ll need to be flexible.”
“You won’t be visible, will you?” Finn asked. “Magically appearing crew won’t give people the warm fuzzies.”
“I won’t,” Fledge confirmed. “This isn’t my first op. We’ve got people on Myka, though. Thing’ll be well in hand. The main thing is that we stay flexible, and no one gets worried or antsy. In a week, you’ll all be free and clear, enjoying a vacation while things wrap up.”
The crew exchanged worried looks, and I knew I’d have to speak with each one individually to ensure that nothing funny went on over the next few days.
The following morning, my daily inspection took me to the forward engineering bay were Kallie was still putting things back together.
“Come to lend a hand?” she asked.
“Ummm…No?”
She fixed me with a le
vel stare and I raised my hands in surrender.
“OK, what do you need me to do?”
“I’m done with the plasma line, can you put all the deck plates back down?”
“On it.” I walked over to where the plates were stacked against the bulkhead and grabbed the first one, setting it into an open slot. “So what do you think of Fledge?”
“I hate him,” Kallie said without preamble. “Guy’s a grade-A douche. I’m also worried about him screwing with the seven cores. What if he frigs them up? How will we pass that off to Korinth?”
I knew what she was getting at. We had to assume that Fledge had the entire ship bugged and that our network was tapped as well. Speaking in code was one of our few methods of communication.
Granted, we didn’t have much of a code, so vague hints would have to do the trick.
Kallie was worried about the same thing I was. That Korinth would be expecting fifteen cores and Fledge only knew of seven. If the DSA learned that there were eight other cores that they’d not rendered safe to sell, our days would be numbered.
“We’ll have to keep Korinth in the dark as much as possible,” I said. “Hope that the DSA takes him down before he realizes we double-crossed him.”
“That doesn’t sound easy. Maybe we should just come clean? Read him in. Could be that Korinth would be OK working for the DSA on this one. He still gets paid either way.”
I knew she wasn’t actually suggesting what it sounded like. She meant tell Korinth that seven of the cores were useless and traceable by the DSA, while eight weren’t. It was an option, and one I wasn’t against keeping in my back pocket.
“Sure,” I nodded as I set another plate into place. “It can work the other way too. Insurance policies all around.”
Kallie grunted as she set a console’s cover back into place. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Smuggler’s insurance. Get you out of a jam when the hammer comes down.”
“Almost rhymed,” I said with a laugh.
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Not a poet, don’t I know it.”
“I wonder where we’ll go after this,” I mused. “Our rep is going to be in tatters.”
“Well, we still have Korinth’s pay.” Kallie’s lips twitched as she referred to the money that was supposed to have been paid to Skip for the cores. “We can use that to hide out till things settle down.”
“So long as they do. We’re gonna want to make sure the big K is dead and buried before we move around in public again. We’ll need to go somewhere not in the three systems.”
The engineer snorted. “No way am I going out to a cloud-mining op. Those places are gross….”
“There are other options.”
“Not in the L, there aren’t. And no one’s left for a thousand years, not since the plasma storms intensified after Latara collapsed. We’re stuck in here, and have to make the best of it no matter what. Your pipe dreams notwithstanding.”
“I guess,” I chuckled while grabbing another plate. “Probably a shit-show outside the nebula, too.”
Kallie joined in with her own musical laughter. “Yeah, probably. Galaxy’s a total mess, I bet.”
I nodded and gave her a wink as I grabbed another plate, happy to be working on something mindless, something that didn’t require me to figure my way out of the maze we were in.
Because there was no way I was blindly trusting that Fledge would get us off free and clear.
No way in the L.
13
KORINTH
Aboard the Firelight…
“It amazes me, Sherry,” Colonel Jacy said to me as we watched Myka Station grow larger in the forward holodisplay, “how the Delphians manage to function at all. They’re so disorderly.”
“That’s what a person would see when they look at an anthill,” Cynthia replied before I could respond. “To an outsider, it appears to be chaos. But they have their own order. Their own methods.”
The colonel snorted. “Don’t give me that. You assume two things not in evidence, Cynthia. The first being that I don’t understand how the Delphians do things. I’ve spent nearly as much time in their system as ours over the past decade.”
“Then you should better appreciate how they function and are able to advance apace of us,” Cynthia countered.
“And the second?” I prompted.
“The second,” Jacy turned to fix me with a bemused look. “Is to assume that ants are efficient, or a functional model worth emulating. We would not be so happy with an ant morality. The Delphians less so.”
The master chief barked a laugh. “OK, so now that you’ve taken a casual remark far too seriously, what’s our next move? System traffic reports show the Kerrigan spending some quality time with a DSA cruiser.”
“Do you think the inspectors will find the cargo?” I asked.
Jacy shrugged. “Hard to say. The Kerrigan has a good reputation for getting things from point A to point B with minimal losses. Then again, the Victorious Strike has its own rather impressive reputation. Hard to say which will come out on top.”
Cynthia pursed her lips. “We have to continue under the assumption that the Kerrigan will come here to Myka for their designated meet.”
“Of course,” Jacy nodded. “But depending on when they finish with their unwelcome visitors, we’re looking at four or five days before they get here.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “Is the plan still to run an intercept?”
Jacy shook her head. “No, not while they’re in the black. Even if the DSA doesn’t find shit, they’ll still be watching the Kerrigan like the bloodthirsty hawks they are. No, we’re going to have to wait till they get to Myka.”
“The meet won’t be right away,” Cynthia said. “Korinth will wait a day or two to make sure there’s no heat on the Kerrigan. That’ll give us time to breach and get the cores.”
“And we’ll set up a backup plan.” Jacy gave me a smirk that sent a chill down my spine. “Did you do your homework on Korinth?”
I sat at the club’s bar, nursing a fruity cocktail whose name currently escaped me. It was good, but I knew I wouldn’t be ordering another. I had to remain sharp for when Korinth entered and I began the operation.
Jacy’s winning smile appeared in my mind.
I nodded, taking another sip of my drink rather than replying.
Jacy didn’t respond, and I took a moment to enjoy the silence in my mind. The bar was another matter. People were lined up three-deep to get drinks, the scent and sound of all their bodies enough to drive my augmented senses into overdrive.
It reminded me of the watering holes I’d been to in my younger years…if they had been a lot cleaner. For all Jacy’s disdain of Delphi, I had to admit that the people here reminded me of those on the stations in the dark where my family had stopped for refit and refuel—so very much unlike the inner worlds of Paragon, where law and o
rder ruled the day.
I wasn’t sure which I liked more, but I was loyal to my people. The general populace of Delphi may be decent enough, but their government and military were not headed by live-and-let-live sorts. If Paragon showed weakness, the Delphians would not hesitate to press that advantage.
And though Admiral Terezia said her job was to be prepared for war, I felt that striving to not have a war in the first place was a better mindset.
A woman pushed between me and the next seat, bellowing for her drink and nearly shoving her arm into my face.
Who am I kidding?
In that moment, the throbbing beat pounding out of the club’s sound system felt as though it was boring into my brain. The holos swirling overhead coupled with the cacophony began to overwhelm my senses.
How am I going to make a difference? How can some girl from the rigs have any part in stopping a war?
I couldn’t breathe, air entered my mouth, but didn’t feel like it was getting to my lungs. Were the station’s scrubbers failing? Were we all going to die from CO2 poisoning?
Sliding off my stool, I pushed away from the bar and shouldered my way through the crowd clamoring for their drinks—which was stupid, since they could use the Link.
It was all stupid.
But I was the stupidest of all.
The tables along the side of the room were more sparsely occupied, and an empty high-top beckoned to me. I threaded the crowd, wishing the towering heels Jacy had made me wear had a-grav stabilizers. The drink had affected me more than I’d anticipated.
I was at least glad I’d opted for the luminescent azure leggings and not the tiny skirt the colonel had suggested. Fighting to keep my ass covered while trying to walk was more than I could manage at the moment.