by M. D. Cooper
At the same time, I was curious if he could be brought to work for the PMF. He seemed to have no love for the DSA, and was clearly being used as a pawn by both them and Korinth. Turning him into an asset could be highly beneficial.
As I rounded the crates one more time, the microdrones I’d deployed caught sight of a figure entering the bay. It was Kallie, the ship’s engineer.
“Gonna wear out my deck plates,” the woman said as she approached. “You know we have a gym with a treadmill, right? Decent VR as well, you could feel like you’re running anywhere.”
“I like the feeling of open space around me,” I replied, coming to a halt a few paces from her. “I always feel like I can tell with a sim. This is the biggest open space on the ship, so here I am.”
“Makes sense.” The other woman planted her hands on her hips. “I’m curious, though, why is it that you’ve touched every single crate exactly two times?”
I felt my blood pressure spike. I had done that, so focused on meticulously collecting my data, I hadn’t added any randomness to my actions.
“A game,” I replied. “Something to distract myself while killing time. I didn’t realize it was so obvious.”
“Well, it is,” Kallie’s tone was not entirely unfriendly, and I wondered what she was getting at. “Are you curious what’s inside of them?” she walked toward one of the crates at the corner of the stack and patted the side.
“I mean, who wouldn’t be?” I had to remember that my cover wasn’t an honest woman. She had no need to pretend at any virtuous morality. “The DSA rushes some cargo onto my bird, and then sends us off on a convoy to Chal, the lone system on the far side of the occlusion? Things are afoot, Kallie.”
“ ‘Afoot’?” The engineer laughed. “I like you, Sherry. I mean, not a lot, don’t get excited, but definitely more than Penny. You seem like a real person.”
“Penny’s not real?” I lifted my brow at the idea.
“She’s an endless stack of masks. I’ve never seen the real Penny, and I doubt you have, either.”
I couldn’t find fault in Kallie’s assessment. Korinth’s liaison, his ‘left hand’, as I’d heard Penny called, was clearly a woman who calculated every move she made. Even in forming an intimate relationship with me, it was clear that there had been no small amount of calculation.
Penny wanted to keep me close and under her thumb. Yet at the same time, she barely knew me, which meant there was no way I was her backup plan.
Is there someone else aboard already in her pocket? Is it Jax? Certainly not Kallie, those two women are not fans of one another. Granted, that would be a great cover.
One thing I’d learned thus far, I enjoyed the analysis of situations like this a lot more than being in one.
Kallie was staring at me in silence, and I realized that I needed to respond with more than a noncommittal grunt. “Uh, yeah, she’s not exactly transparent. I’ll give her that.”
“You aren’t too far behind, though.” The engineer’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know how much I trust that this is just a game. If I do a full scan of this cargo, what am I going to find? Signs of tampering? A hint at who you really are?”
“Me?” I placed a hand on my chest. “I’m nobody. Just a buyer looking to turn a profit on some quality hardware. I’m the sort of person who isn’t important at all.”
Kallie walked toward me, circled around, eyes looking me up and down. “I don’t know, Sherry. People like you are usually the most important. The movers behind the scenes. I mean, take this ship, me, Jax. We don’t look like much, no one would say that we’ve shaped shit. Yet you have no idea the stuff that we’ve smuggled between Chal and Delphi, between Delphi and…Paragon.”
She came back around to face me as she spoke the last, her face only a decimeter from my own.
“Personal space, Kallie.” I took a step back. “And great, you’re super-awesome smugglers. Are you looking for work? Think I might have jobs for you to take after this?”
“I don’t take jobs,” the engineer folded her arms across her chest. “That’s the captain’s territory.”
I nodded, though I didn’t believe for a second that Kallie didn’t have some say in everything the Kerrigan did. The engineer wanted something; whether it was a confession or a promise, I wasn’t sure, but there was no benefit in further conversation.
“Well, I’ll leave you to whatever you’re up to, then.” I walked to the crates and grabbed my water bottle from off the deck. A couple of my microdrones were still in the stack, but the likelihood of Kallie finding them was smaller than the drones.
Kallie didn’t move. “OK, see you for chow in a few hours.”
“You bet.” I began to walk away, when she reached out and put a hand on my arm.
“And, Sherry?”
“Yeah?”
“Touch the crates again, and I’ll cut this off. Get it?”
I looked down at her hand on my arm like it was a repulsive insect. “Sure, whatever.”
She let go, and I walked away, the space between my shoulder blades itching till I was out of sight.
25
DEEPER SUSPICION
This one was tricky. Directly across from us was a steep staircase leading up to the next level. The right side led to an enlisted mess, while the left was our route to the storage bay we needed to reach.
We reached the end of the corridor, and I poked a stick cam around, looking down my side before turning it to look down his.
I shook my head.
Finn glanced over his shoulder and saw us both standing next to the bulkhead, not watching the approaches.
He retraced his steps and looked down at the engineer’s hand, where a holoimage of a microdrone floated.
I muttered.
Kallie was giving me a level stare.
I gave her a stern look, and she had the good graces to look contrite.
I heard a sound down the cross-corridor and poked my camera around the corner again. A trio of enemy soldiers had just walked out of the mess hall. None of them were armored, but two had pulse pistols strapped to their thighs.
Rather than engage them, I motioned Kallie and Finn to retreat down the passage to a maintenance closet. Once inside, I took up watch, observing the passage via the camera, which I’d lef
t outside on the deck.
Two of the soldiers turned and climbed the stairs to the next deck, while the third turned down the passage we were hiding in.
Neither spoke for a minute, and I was tempted to ask them for a view into what they were examining, but decided it was better if one of us stayed alert.
Anyone watching the game from outside would see activity indicating it was underway, but if we paused to have a private conversation, that would be readily apparent.
When we first started having private chats in the sim, I was worried that Penny or Sherry would be able to tap in and hear us, but Finn explained that it would be very difficult for them to pull that off. The sim had a team-versus-team mode, and the only people more paranoid than the military when it came to the enemy learning their plans were gamers.
Outside the closet we were all crammed into, another pair of DSA personnel walked past. This time not soldiers, but ship’s crew, both chiefs, and I worried that one of them would spot the stick cam laying on the deck. No one was better at spotting something out of place than a chief with a few minutes on their hands.
Not bothering to alert the others, I kicked open the closet’s door, slamming the hard plas into the first chief’s head and flipping him over backward. A focused blast rippled out from my pulse rifle and caught the other man in the face. As he fell, I turned back to the man the door had hit, and gave her a point-blank blast to the forehead. The second enemy was rolling over, groaning loudly, and I finished him off as well.
26
JUMP NIGHT
We’d finished the game, gotten to the cargo bay and tagged the contents with trackers, disabling some of the more sensitive equipment.
Kallie had been spotted in the sim and we’d had to shoot our way off the cruiser—not a great resolution, but not terrible, either.
As I lay in my bed, staring up at the overhead, a host of concerns whirled through my mind. The fear of actually having to shoot our way off the Daedalus being one of them.
In that scenario, we’d take one of the shuttles and get to a rendezvous point, where the Kerrigan would pick us up. It wouldn’t be quite as easy as that, but at least we had a plan.
Sherry was a different matter. It was likely she was a member of the PMF Intelligence Section. And Paragonian IS—something that more than one ‘piss’ joke had been made about—was known to be even less pleasant to deal with than DSA Intel.
In truth, I hadn’t had many conversations with Sherry. She’d joined us for a few of the crew meals, and skipped a couple of others. She’d chatted a bit with Tammy and Finn, but seemed to be avoiding the rest of us.
Even so, she didn’t seem like an evil, sadistic operative who would just as soon kill us as pass the salt.
Honestly, she seems kinda nice…minus the whole hacking our ship and trying to look in our cargo part.
A knock sounded on my door, and I pulled a feed from the corridor. It was Penny, in a simple, black sheath dress. It was probably the most basic thing I’d seen her wear in…ever.
I signaled the door to open, and she gave me a coy smile before stepping in. “I rather wondered if you’d leave me out there.”
“Thought crossed my mind.”
It hadn’t.
“So, here we are,” she said as the door closed. “Tucked into the convoy, and a day from the jump point. Korinth will be pleased.”
“Did you send him an update?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, he has enough eyes that he’ll get all the details he needs. We just have to do our jobs.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows. “I always do my job. Never lost so much as a crate when running for Korinth.”
“Well, except for the four cores we’re going to fetch.”
“They’re not lost,” I countered. “They’re perfectly safe, and I know exactly where they are.”
“So you say.” She took a few steps forward and stopped at the foot of my bed. “I don’t know what this’ll do for our relationship, though. Korinth isn’t really excited about you playing games with him—neither am I. Spending a few weeks aboard your flying tin can isn’t what I’d call a good time.”
I groaned. “Just what I love to hear. Can you insult my ship some more? It’s like a soothing bedtime lullaby. In case you didn’t pick it up, that’s sarcasm.”
Her look softened. “OK, I’m sorry. I’m not really pissed at you, I’ve been on a lot worse than the Kerrigan. I’m just annoyed with Korinth. He’s been…sloppy lately. I worry about how things are going to go.”
“Well, if things go tits up, then maybe you should consider yourself lucky that you’re here, and not back on Myka.”
She lifted an eyebrow and shook her head. “Let’s not get carried away. I had a lot of friends on Myka, the DSA would have a hard time pinning me down there. I mean, look at us. We’re surrounded by a DSA task force that could crush the Kerrigan without a second thought.”
“Yeah, but why would they? We have some of their oh-so-precious cargo, and no one knows you’re here.”
“You sure about that?” Penny asked, her voice sounding weary. “I didn’t advertise where I was going, and we futzed the sensors on Myka when I boarded, but someone might have seen me. I can’t discount the possibility.”
“What about Sherry?” I asked. “What if she spilled the beans?”
“Possible,” Penny allowed. “She could have told her employer—whoever that is—or maybe sold the information to the DSA. But I doubt she told the authorities, what with her being aboard and all.”
“True.” I nodded. “The DSA isn’t exactly known for their measured responses.”
Penny lowered herself to the bed while nodding, settling near my feet. She reached out and placed a hand on my calf. “Yeah, I know how it can be better than most. Best I can hope for is that the DSA never gets wind that I’m aboard, and that the scoop operation goes off without a hitch.”
I looked down at her hand, then up at her face. “Are we this familiar, Penny?”
Her fingers traced a path up to my thigh. “I don’t know, are we? Would you like to be? You’re a smart man, Jax Bremen, a clever man. Clever people can go far working directly for someone like Korinth.”
I snorted. “No thanks. Direct employment for people like Korinth redefines ‘go far’ to ‘get dead’. I like being the master of my own destiny. I choose where the Kerrigan’s bow points, not some mob boss who never leaves the lap of luxury of some planet or station.”
Penny’s eyes hardened. “You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand.”
“I know you’re terrible at seduction,” I scoffed. “Or did you have some other goal here? Did you think that if you whisper some sweet nothings in my ear, I’ll just tell you where the cores are?”
“Do you think so little of me, Jax?” she asked sweetly. “What if I really do just want the pleasure of your company?”
“My company you can have, and often, but nothing more. You’re far too dangerous to get close to. I know what the female of your species does.”
“Humans?” she asked.
“No. Spiders.”
Penny snatched her hand back, a withering look in her eyes. “You might regret calling me that, Jax
Bremen.”
“Great. I’ll add it to my list. So long as you pay, I’ll have all the regret it takes. Will that be all?”
Penny rose and strode to the door. She stopped, facing it for a moment, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like to take her, to grip her ass while I plunged—
No. The woman was poison. An addictive drug that I didn’t need in my life.
I’d just divested myself of the fantasy when she turned her head and said in a husky voice, “For now.”
She opened the door and stepped through right as Kallie was walking past. My engineer took one look at Penny, then at me laying on my bed, and gave me a disgusted glare.
The door closed, and I flopped back onto my pillow.
“Fuck.”
V
Convoy
27
INTO THE MAELSTROM
On the bridge of the Victorious Strike…
Mine was the first ship out of the dark layer.
I watched in satisfaction as helm brought the ship into its assigned location, and then I rose from my command seat and walked down to the holotank in the center of the bridge.
One by one, the ships of the convoy appeared in the display, most within a thousand kilometers of their target exit point. Two of the civilian ships were on the edge of their safe zone, and one of the MFPs was completely outside the group, but otherwise, it had been a decent jump for a mixed flotilla.
Not that I’m going to let any of them know that.
I sent out a flurry of orders, passing some through Naomi, and sending others directly to the ships that I was particularly annoyed with. A pair of corvettes had boosted away from the convoy to escort the platform back in, when an EM flare lit up on the tank, and one of the ships flashed a distress beacon.