by M. D. Cooper
She smiled and shook her head.
I soaked up the radiance flowing off her. She hadn’t smiled a lot lately, so it was nice to finally see it again. It made me feel like everything would be alright.
“OK, everyone,” Oln proclaimed as he set down a bowl of thick, brown gravy. “Dig in!”
“Gotta say,” Penny winked at me. “For a shitty little tub, the Kerrigan sure puts out a good spread.”
“I’ve had a lot worse,” Sherry nodded in agreement as she skewered a steak and set it on her plate. “Granted, your ship’s appearance is clearly a ruse.”
“A ruse?” I hoped she wasn’t about to make things difficult. “We’re just honest traders.”
The Paragonian spy barked a laugh. “Oh, c’mon, Captain. We all know you’ve done some lucrative hauls.”
There was a moment of silence, broken by Oln’s oblivious laugh. “Sure have! I mean, that VR rig would have taken years for me to save for before some of our recent jobs.”
He looked up to see everyone at the table staring at him.
“What? Would someone pass the potatoes? This boy’s gotta keep the starches high.”
“Sure,” Tammy said with a giggle. “We wouldn’t want our boy to waste away.”
“Perish the thought.” Sherry joined in the laughter.
Kallie steered conversation away from our prior exploits by shifting to stories of other ships in the convoy.
I watched everyone as the conversation circled the table, noting how Tammy always took delight in a story, carefree and amused, while Finn often frowned, clearly working out details and judging validity. Oln usually nodded the whole time.
I was often too hard on the big guy. He wasn’t dumb, he just didn’t think things through too much before doing them. The epitome of living in the now.
Right now, for him, that was a good meal among friends. Nevermind that two of them would just as soon see the rest of us dead—a feeling that was largely mutual.
Sherry was a little less reserved than usual, joining in the banter and laughing periodically as Kallie got into her stories about the foibles of the merchant captains who made up the convoy.
“Wait, wait, wait!” she held up her hands. “Are you telling me that Captain Jorge actually let them use his ass as a dartboard? Like…willingly?”
Kallie nodded vigorously. “I kid you not, that’s just a regular day for him. I don’t know how he manages to command a ship, because every time I see him drunk, he’s begging people to abuse him.”
“I wish I’d known that,” Penny muttered. “I mean, I’d heard rumors, but I figured if he commands a ship, he can’t be that big of a dumbass.”
“Something yesterday’s collision confirmed,” Tammy said with a nod. “I guess any dolt can captain a starship.”
All eyes at the table turned to me, and I snorted. “Jorge doesn’t pilot his ship. That bad jump probably wasn’t his fault.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Kallie wagged a finger. “You know that.”
“Oh, I do.” I nodded vigorously. “On a ship, all shit flows toward the captain.”
“Must be why you’re the bilge rat so often in Snark,” Kallie prodded.
The meal went on with stories and good-natured barbs for over an hour before Sherry and Penny finally begged off. We helped Oln with the cleanup, and then Tammy retreated to the bridge while the other four of us trekked down to the VR setup and jacked in.
“Do we have to do the cruiser assault again?” Oln asked. “It’s getting really dull. We could do this one in our sleep.”
“Let’s do a new twist today,” I suggested. “Let’s get in and out without killing a single enemy.”
“What?” Oln almost growled the word. “Killing Delphies is half the fun.”
“Just for kicks,” I replied. “Last time.”
“Fine. Then let’s play the mission where we assault Earth.”
“Deal.”
29
THE RUSE
Aboard the Kerrigan…
At exactly 09:17 ship time, an explosion shook the Kerrigan, and the port engine cut out. Instead of killing thrust, the starboard burner’s programming decoupled from the central control, and shifted to max power.
I watched Tammy frantically fight with the ship, using every trick in the book to keep us flying as straight as possible. She dove us under another nearby freighter, then let the ship careen hard to port to avoid one of the DSA cruisers.
When we were clear of the convoy, she rotated the ship to adjust course, corkscrewing the vessel through the black to keep us on the right heading.
The ship’s a-grav systems were good, but even they couldn’t quite keep up with the centripetal force from the maneuver. Everyone on the bridge was swaying side to side, fighting feelings of nausea, when Penny burst through the door.
“The fuck! What blew—?” She looked around at our grim, unworried expressions. “Ohh…this is all theater. Well done. I didn’t expect you to blow part of your ship to pull this off.”
I laughed and shook my head. “We didn’t. Well, not too much. Just a secondary fuel line, and a big light show in the exhaust bell from a bad mixture. Won’t take more than a few minutes to bring the engine back online.”
“Good,” Penny settled into Kallie’s seat. “I don’t fancy being dead in the water in the middle of the maelstrom.”
“Me either.”
Sherry arrived a moment later. “Damn, you guys put on a good show.”
She sounded genuinely surprised, despite us having warned her about the event. I still didn’t know if she’d shared details with Penny or not. We’d find out soon enough.
“All about the presentation,” Tammy said, her tone light, though her face was still a mask of concentration. “Three minutes till engine cut.”
“And here’s our hail from Sinclair,” I said. “Took her a bit longer than I thought it would. Maybe she was napping.”
She sounded angrier than expected, but also resigned, as though she’d anticipated some sort of calamity to strike the Kerrigan sooner or later.
The connection died, and I took that as her answer.
“How we looking?” I asked Tammy.
“Right in the pipe, boss. Aw shit, now some of the sea urchins are coming to see if we need help.”
Sure enough, two of the ships following behind the convoy were boosting on vectors to intercept us. One was the Firelight, and another the freighter Mars had been using as cover, the Hard Case.
“What are those dumbasses doing?” Penny muttered. “Think they’ll get a reward or something?”
“They’ve reached out, explaining that they’re responding to the mayday and ready to offer assistance,” Finn replied. “So far, none of the DSA craft are moving to intercept.”
“They will,” I muttered.
“You almost sound like you want them to.” Penny looked at me and then at Finn. “Why would that be?”
“ ‘Want’ isn’t exactly the right word. They will because we’re hauling their cargo, and they don’t want us rendezvousing
with random ships in the occlusion while it’s aboard. We have a plan to handle that, it just works best if they do it when I expect them to.”
“You’ll forgive me if this doesn’t make me feel good,” Penny bit off the words. “I can’t believe I ever thought it would be wise to put my life in your hands.”
Me either. You’ll come to regret that soon enough.
“We’ve got all the bases covered,” I said. “Things are well in hand.”
“Sure they are. You gonna tell those ships coming over that you don’t need them?”
Before I had a chance to respond, Oln meandered onto the bridge, stretching and yawning. “Shit. How am I supposed to sleep when it feels like I’m on some sort of thrill ride?”
“You’re not supposed to,” I grunted. “It’s two hours into first shift.”
“Sure.” He nodded. “Yeah, totally awake for the job.”
As he talked, he walked to the far side of Tammy’s sphere and placed a hand on it to steady himself.
“You on the sauce, Tam?”
“No, just had a blowout. Remember our plan to get away from the convoy to get the cores?”
Oln nodded sagely. “Yeah, I do. Finally getting that done, then, eh?”
“Sure are,” I replied. “Say, remember that thing I said I might need you to do today? I need you to do it.”
He turned to look at me, eyes wide. “Really?”
I could see Penny’s eyes narrow as she turned her attention from our resident mountain to me. I locked my gaze onto hers.
“Yes.”
With more speed and fluidity than one would expect a musclebound giant to possess, Oln pulled his right hand off Tammy’s sphere, balled it into a fist, and swung it around toward Penny.
I was impressed. At the last moment, she brought her arms up and crossed them in front of her face, blocking the fist that was as large as her head.
It wasn’t enough, though. He might not be the most perceptive person in the world, but Oln was a born brawler.
His left fist was already in motion, and slammed into the side of Penny’s head. The blow lifted her out of her chair, and she flailed her arms, trying to regain her balance, only to catch another fist in the solar plexus.
She fell to the ground, gasping for breath. Oln gave her a curious look, then brought a fist down to the base of her skull, slamming the woman’s face into the deck.
“Fuck!” Sherry exclaimed. “I thought you said you weren’t going to kill her?”
Oln nudged Penny with his boot. “She’s alive. She has a reinforced spine, I could tell by how her torso went rigid when I first hit her. She’ll be fine.”
Finn was already out of his seat, pushing past Sherry to kneel next to the prone woman. He pulled a pair of binders from inside his jacket, and cuffed Penny’s hands behind her back.
“OK.” I nodded to Oln. “Get her to Hold 7 and lock it down. Secure her to the deck as well. I don’t want her to be able to so much as lift her head.”
“We’ll make sure she’s not going anywhere,” Finn said.
“Killing burn in three, two, one,” Tammy announced.
A second later, the feeling that my head was constantly moving in circles stopped, and the bridge suddenly seemed to spin the other direction.
I kept one eye on Finn and Oln as they carried Penny off the bridge, and the other on Sherry.
“We’re two hundred thousand klicks from the cores,” I informed her.
“Dead ahead?” she asked.
“No.” I shook my head. “We’re not idiots. It’s close, though.”
A marker lit up on the main holo, giving a rough indication of where the cores were.
“Glad to see you didn’t point your ship right at them.” Sherry nodded in satisfaction. “Looks like my ride is ten minutes out. I assume you’ll give me the precise coordinates once they arrive?”
“I’ll give them to you once I get the money.”
She shook her head. “Always about the money with you.”
“I don’t have a government paycheck.” I folded my arms across my chest. “This is how I get paid. You want the goods, you pay.”
“And if I don’t?”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Then you don’t get the cores. I turn them over to the DSA instead. So you tell me, which government should get them?”
“Fine,” Sherry hissed. She reached into the loose jacket she wore and pulled out a datacube. “Certified credit transfer.”
Nodding, I took the cube and walked to my console, slotting it into a sandboxed reader slot. The system ran a check on the cube, and then verified its contents. There it was, sixty million certified credits.
“Auth the transfer.” I gestured to my console.
“The coordinates.”
I nodded and passed her a vector via the Link. “This is where you’ll find them, and this is the crate’s beacon pattern. We’ve already picked it up. Hard to hear in the maelstrom’s background noise, but it’s there.”
Sherry nodded, and I knew she was using our comm arrays to listen for the beacon and triangulate its location. A minute later, she nodded. “OK. I’m satisfied. If you screw us over, my employer will not be happy.”
“Yeah, yeah. Threats, threats, I know the drill.” I gestured to my console again, and she walked over to it and passed an auth token, verifying it with a nano signature.
“There. The credits are transferred.”
“Then our business is concluded. I’ll escort you to the airlock.”
I strode across the Victorious Strike’s bridge and dropped into my command seat with a grunt. Of all the people to cock things up, of course it would be Jax Bremen. I knew something like this would happen.
“I recommend the Daedalus again, ma’am,” Major Naomi suggested. “Petrov is a steady ship captain. He can handle the Kerrigan.”
“I hate the idea of saddling him with sheep-dog duty a second time,” I mused. “But you’re right, Major. He’s the best man for the job.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Should I pass the order?”
“No, I’ll handle it.” I brought the current position of the ships up on my console’s holodisplay to confirm he was a good option, and then reached out.
“Shit,” I muttered aloud.
I tapped a finger against my chin, considering the suggestion. I was loath to send a DSA engineering team over to a ship like the Kerrigan. Not that I greatly feared their crew, but I worried that dealing with Bremen may create more headaches than Petrov needed.
I stared at the holodisplay, which showed the ships of the convoy moving away from the Kerrigan, and the Daedalus peeling off to intercept.
The likelihood that this was some sort of trap was nearly inconceivable, but seeing those two ships moving forward from the rear while the Kerrigan drifted alone made me wonder if sending only one cruiser was wise.
“Major. Put two corvettes on a wide escort with the Daedalus. I just want to make sure nothing untoward happens.”
Naomi’s brow lowered for a moment, but then she nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll get right on that.”
Just you try something stupid, Jax. Just do it. The L would be a lot better off without you.
I stood in the passage watching Sherry quickly pack, one hand on my pulse pistol’s grip. She appeared to be almost ready, a neat person who didn’t unpack her bags much—l
ikely something she’d picked up in the military.
I didn’t respond, and instead checked the feeds to see the two men strapping Penny spread-eagle to the deck with cargo stays. She was motionless, her breathing suggesting she was still out cold. I didn’t trust that she was, but the two men had stripped her down to her underwear to check her for weapons.
Normally, I’d have considered that excessive, but the woman had a reputation for killing people with almost anything. I would have done the same.
Satisfied with their progress, I reached out to Kallie.
I did, and she was right, which was why she’d spent the last hour on the outside of the hull, wedged under the cannon, maglocked on for dear life.
A laugh came from Kallie.
Her words made my stomach drop, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s just what she’d do. It had occurred to me that the wealth we would end this trip with might cause some of the crew to go their own way. But I’d really hoped she wouldn’t.
“I’m ready,” Sherry said, turning toward me, two cases hovering behind her. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
I backed away from the door and let her out. “Starboard lock.”