by M. D. Cooper
Directly in the center of the view was the crate. It was spinning slowly, and I activated the bay’s a-grav controls, extending the ship’s field to draw the crate closer, manipulating the controls to arrest its languid tumble. A minute later, it lay on our deck, and I closed the doors.
Air flooded back into the bay, and heaters kicked on, casting the space in a ruddy IR light. Once atmosphere was fully restored, I pulled off my helmet, and unsealed the bay from the rest of the ship.
Jacy was in the room seconds later, striding toward the crate.
“I can’t wait to be done with this. Tail end of a mission is always so stressful.”
“Really?” I was surprised to hear it. “I thought this would be old hat for you by now.”
The colonel shrugged. “It is, but that part never changes—the fear that we screwed up and all of this was for nothing….”
Her words reinforced my own worry, and I quickly punched in the access code Jax had passed me, relieved when the crate’s lid released.
“OK, well, it’s the right crate, at least.”
The colonel and I slid the lid off and looked inside.
“Motherfucker!” Jacy swore and slammed a fist into the lid. “What is this shit? Wait…is that actual shit?”
I couldn’t even find the words as I looked down at a pile of miscellaneous parts that looked to be the remains of a used ship-board toilet.
Jacy’s eyes met mine. “Why would he lie?”
“I don’t know,” I shook my head vigorously. “Unless he was just playing me and planned to give the cores back to the DSA…or to Penny. Fuck, I don’t know.”
“I hate dealing with criminals.” Jacy clenched her teeth, and I could hear them grinding. Then she stopped, ran a hand through her hair. “OK, new plan. We go stealth, wait for the Daedalus to move away, and then storm the Kerrigan. Either they have the cores, or they know where they are. We’ll find out one way or another.”
From the fire in Jacy’s eyes, I knew there was no arguing with her.
“OK. I’m in.”
“You sure?” the colonel asked. “You’re going to have to look people in the eyes, people you’ve befriended, and hurt them. Maybe kill them. You can stay back and let Cyn and I handle it.”
I shook my head, back straightening. “No. I screwed this up. I want to be a part of fixing it.”
Jacy gave me a nod of approval. “Good. I knew I didn’t make a mistake when I brought you on.”
The words helped, gave me a sense of purpose and belonging—though that was still overshadowed by my failure.
You’re going to pay for this, Jax Bremen.
33
JUGGLING
Aboard the Kerrigan…
I watched the DSA shuttle’s door cycle open, wondering how we got here. One thing was for certain: it sure as fuck wasn’t my fault.
I just work here.
It was my instinct to blame Jax. Most of the crap we got into happened because he leapt before he looked—granted, most of our successes were for the same reason. Still, things being his fault was typically a safe bet.
This time, though…this time I couldn’t lay our issues at Jax’s feet. The captain was threading a dozen needles with a harpoon gun fired at fifty meters.
That first job from Korinth to pick up the cores had sent up red flags, but the pay was good, and it was from the big man. If you wanted to stay in the black, you didn’t say no when Korinth offered work.
The double-cross from Skip wasn’t on Jax, either. Nor was fighting off Reeve, being picked up by Sinclair, or finding ourselves at the mercy of Fledge. The fact that we’d disbursed the cores to the couriers without disaster striking was a miracle.
Even having Penny and Sherry aboard was tolerable. It was this business of being Commander Mars’s pet breach team that was the real problem. Without that, this whole mess would be over with.
And I wouldn’t be staring at four DSA techs looking about as happy to be here as I am to have them.
The airlock cycled faster than I’d’ve wished, and a minute later, I was staring at a chief warrant officer who looked like he’d just sucked on a whole basket of lemons.
“You are…?” he prompted without any greeting.
“First Mate Kallie,” I replied as evenly as possible. “And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
“I’m CWO Aarons. These are warrant officers Olley, Higgs, and Alice. I understand that you need help getting your port-side fuel lines fixed? You also took damage to the bell in Chal, right?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Our calibrations to even out our burn are what caused us to lose control after the failure. Getting that bell fixed would be great, but I don’t know that we have the time to do it out here.”
“Agreed. We don’t,” came the man’s brusque reply. “We’ll get your line fixed and see what we can do about your thrust control systems. Probably ancient and barely functional.”
I’ll show you barely functional.
That was what I wanted to say.
“I’ll take any help I can get. This way.”
I couldn’t help but notice that the two techs in the rear—who were carrying a crate of supplies between them—were looking around a lot more than the others. As we passed by the door into the main bay, they took special note of the location of the DSA cargo we were hauling.
One shook his head, and I could only guess at what they were thinking.
Hands off, buckaroo. You take one step into that bay, and I’ll space your ass so fast….
The breach kit finally finished its work, and the Daedalus’s airlock opened up, allowing Penny and I to enter. We shared a look and then pulled ourselves into the cruiser, letting the low-g in the airlock pull us down to the deck.
This was the point of no return. The moment when we would know if Mars was playing us or not. Granted, I couldn’t think of any reason she and her general would have sent us out here just to get caught on the Daedalus when they could have had us arrested back at Myka Station on a host of trumped-up charges.
At least, I hope there isn’t a reason.
Our armor warmed to the same temperature as the interior of the cruiser, optical and EM pass-through systems coming online. It wasn’t the best stealth gear I’d ever seen, though it might have been the best I’d worn.
According to the breach kit, the airlock wouldn’t register the cycle, but the moment the interior door opened, we moved into the corridor, not wanting to be trapped within if an alarm had been triggered. A few meters’ walk took us to a T-intersection. To the right was the docking bay, which would be occupied at present. It lay between us and our target, but I’d decided to take a more circuitous route. Since we were ostensibly working for the DSA, killing their personnel wasn’t ideal.
We moved down the left passage, keeping close to the bulkhead, leaving two meters of space for anyone we came upon.
My hope was that we wouldn’t see a soul on the route I’d picked out—a fool’s hope, but a hope nonetheless. Cruisers like the Daedalus were mostly engines, fuel, batteries and weapons systems. The ship was listed as only having five hundred crew aboard, all of which could fit in a tiny fraction of the ship.
Our initial destination was a ladder shaft, or what the military considered to be a ladder. It ran at a sixty-degree angle, only going down a few decks at a time before ending on a landing and switching direction.
We crept down the steps, our a-grav systems helping us to avoid making sound. We passed the first two decks without issue, but as we came to the third, voices below alerted us to the presence of crew nearby.
I dropped a probe and saw a pair of ratings standing next to the ladder, chatting about some shipboard gossip concerning a new type of flooring installed in the officer’s mess.
Glancing up, I nodded to Penny, indicating that we could make it past them, and continued down to
the third deck. The two men were chatting about how the new flooring didn’t require a wax polish, but the CWO3 in his great wisdom had been apoplectic that the floor hadn’t been properly waxed, and ordered it done by hand.
The ratings who had done the work used an abrasive polish and ruined the floor, bringing Commander Petrov’s wrath down on the whole lot.
One of the two men talking thought it was hilarious, while the other was just shaking his head.
Our destination was down a passage that the two men were standing in. There was just enough room for Penny to get by, so I gestured for her to go first. Once she had succeeded, I tapped a finger on the bulkhead near the ladder.
“What was that?” one of the men asked.
He turned just enough that there was room for me to get past, and I did so, following after Penny to the first hold on our list.
We reached it a minute later, and once inside, disabled the surveillance systems, which included EM detection.
Penny sighed.
We moved among the crates in the bay, searching for the high-value items that Mars had flagged for us to add the extra tracking modules to.
I located the first one and bent to open the control mechanism for the crate’s hoverpad. The pad would power the tracker. Penny opened the crate and inserted small microtrackers into various components, adding a layer of detection, should the contents get parted out.
I whistled in the confines of my helmet.
MABs were Mobile Assault Batteries, colloquially referred to as “tanks” for reasons no one could recall. If there were spare parts for MABs on the Daedalus, then somewhere in the convoy—maybe on the cruiser we were in—would be the MABs themselves.
I muttered as I rose.
She shrugged as we moved to the next crate.
I snorted.
We finished adding trackers to the rest of the crates in the first bay a few minutes later. The second bay was on the port side of the ship, and we had to pass out of the quiet cargo regions and across the ship’s central access shaft to get to the far side.
Housing the central lifts within the Daedalus, the shaft was the heart of transportation within the craft. Because it gave access to all decks, it was protected by automated sentries and human patrols.
We stood at the door, watching as a woman walked by, rifle slung low, hand on the grip.
I nodded, surprised that Penny invoked the stars as well. The expression was much less common within the L than without.
With that, we opened the door and stepped through. Despite the name, the shaft was really more of a twenty-meter-wide tunnel. The right led to the bow, while the engines were situated on our left.
A dozen maglev rails encircled the space, some on the ‘roof’ and others on the sides and deck. The lift cars were capable of rotating, so even if the ship’s internal a-grav was offline and the vessel was under thrust, the bottom of the lift cars would always be ‘down’.
The railed gantry we stood on dipped under two rails and came up the other side to where the door led toward yet another passage and our destination beyond.
Penny led the way, and I followed after, an eye on two nearby turrets that sat between the tracks. Both sported pulse cannons and beam weapons. Other turrets nearby swept large-bore projectile barrels back and forth.
It was enough to make a person’s skin crawl.
We ducked low while passing under the rail, and I did my best not to cringe as several lift cars raced by. The wind from them pulled at us, and halfway through our passage, my foot clipped a bracket that held the railing in place.
The sound was small, but it caught the attention of the guard who was a dozen paces away, near where we had entered the shaft.
Penny and I both froze as the turrets swung toward the origin of the sound. The entire area seemed to fall silent for several long seconds until another car whistled by. With its sound for cover, we moved again, reaching the far side as the turrets resumed their sweeps, and the human guard continued her rounds.
We waited until another car sped past before opening the door and slipping through, moving briskly through the passage to the next bay.
Once inside, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
I almost laughed aloud.
Her casual references made me wonder what sort of contact she’d had with DSA Intel. It occurred to me that people I thought were working against Korinth might be working for him in some roundabout way. Wheels within wheels.
Add to that the fact that I really couldn’t trust Penny, and I was starting to feel like I was trapped between a sea of rocks and hard places. The only consolation I had was that at the end of all this, I’d still hold the location of the four NSAI cores, and both Penny and Sherry would be dead.
Maybe Mars too, if I could figure out a way to play my cards right. Then the Kerrigan could disappear, and we could start new lives with our newfound bounty.
I was willing to bet there’d be really lucrative smuggling between Delphi and Chal, once things heated up in a few years.
While Penny handled the trackers, I moved to the furthest bulkhead from the door. In our study of the cruiser, we’d learned that a major comm trunkline ran behind the panel. Mars’s instructions were to tap the Daedalus’s external arrays in a different location, but per our SOP, we weren’t doing anything the way she wanted.
Finn would have already tapped the comm system further aft, and once I did so here, I’d be able to reach out to him, as well as see if things were going well aboard the Kerrigan.
It took a minute to get the panel open, and another to affix the breach tool to the correct line. I was a little less nervous using it now, certain that if Mars’s plan was to fuck
us over, she would have done it already.
Two options remained for the Intel commander. Either she was on the up and up, or she wanted the hardware we were lifting.
Just like our workaround aboard the Kerrigan, we were using one of the Daedalus’s training simulators to communicate, both logged on with names that matched off-duty crew. In the unlikely chance there was a way for anyone aboard the cruiser to listen in, they would just think we were talking about an objective in the game.
“No wonder this thing blew,” one of the DSA technicians muttered as he pulled a junction seal out of the fuel line.
I couldn’t recall which one he was, Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dumber.
“What a fucking mess.” The chief shook his head in disdain. “I’m surprised this ship hasn’t just detonated in space.”
I wanted to say, ‘No shit, sherlock. Anyone worth their salt would be able to tell I planted that bad seal, but nope, you just assume that people like me don’t know how to run a ship.’ Instead, I only nodded sheepishly, doing my best not to think about grabbing Oln’s heavy repeater and turning these asshats into mulch.
The vision kept me going as they continued to deride the condition of the Kerrigan. I’d begun to seriously weigh the risk when a message came in from the Daedalus.
It was short and in code, but the gist was that all was well. My interpretation was that thus far, Penny hadn’t betrayed us, and Oln hadn’t fucked anything up yet.
Just a matter of time on both those things.