The Fractured Void

by Tim Pratt

  “Only two per cent,” Felix said. “I’ll split it with my crew, of course.” No one expected an officer of the Mentak Coalition to be scrupulously honest – it would have been suspicious if they had been – but you didn’t want a reputation for being too greedy, either, or you’d lose out on crucial opportunities to profit in the future.

  “Fair enough. Not many opportunities for plunder out in the territories, are there?”

  “There’s plenty to steal, as long as you want to steal dirt or sheep,” Felix said. “Unfortunately, it all belongs to people I’m supposed to protect instead of profit from. I call first pick on any personal weapons we recover on the enemy ship. Carrying a regulation sidearm is so basic.”

  “Spoils of war, eh?” Meehves switched off.

  Chapter 3

  The kidnappers had the good sense to stop running when a destroyer and its attendant fighters appeared before them (and beside, above, and below them). The Temerarious, which had lagged behind at a distance where they could counteract any attacks lobbed at them, rapidly closed the gap to cut off the last avenue of retreat.

  “They’re trying to send out some kind of encrypted communication,” Calred said over Felix’s helmet radio. “It’s adorable, really.”

  Felix grinned. Meehves had jammed outgoing signals, of course. He clambered into the Temerarious’s shuttle and let the computer chart the course. The little hemispherical boarding pods were already spinning off from Meehves’s ship, The Bad Cat, and would soon attach to the hull of the enemy vessel like leeches on a swimmer. They weren’t quite sure what they’d find inside – the enemy ship was shielded against deep sensor scans, like most vessels with military specs, so they had to guess at the interior layout and the crew complement. The boarding pods were full of electronic countermeasures and security circumvention tools meant to convince ships to pop open their airlocks, and, if those failed, they also had lasers, cutting blades, and acid nozzles to make their own openings through the hull.

  Usually, the pods weren’t necessary. The unofficial raider fleet of the Coalition wasn’t in the murder business, nor did they wish to discourage interstellar trade; they were basically just a toll you had to pay if you strayed too close to Coalition space without making proper prior arrangements. The merchant vessels knew to bring along a little extra so they could satisfy the raider captains and still make an appropriate profit, and worked that expense into their projections of the cost of doing business. Every once in a while, you encountered a ship with a crew that didn’t understand the rules and needed them explained, in person, at the end of a gun. Even then, there was usually no reason to kill anyone. After all, if you murder someone, you only get to steal from them once.

  This ship wasn’t like the others, though, and would not be extended such courtesies. Once you fire on a Coalition vessel, especially an official one like the Temerarious, negotiations are pretty much over. By the time Felix’s shuttle was close enough to dock, the boarding pods had taken control of the aft airlock, and Meehves’s first officer, an Xxcha named Qqmel, was on board waiting for Felix. Being confronted by hulking reptilian bipeds was inherently disconcerting for humans who hadn’t grown up around Xxcha, so who better to lead the party?

  Qqmel was patient and thoughtful, but those qualities tended to come across to strangers as emotionless menace, an impression compounded by the elaborate shouldermounted cannon he wore. The cannon moved independently, with audible whirs and clicks, to remain pointed steadfastly at the face (or equivalent) of anyone he target-locked. “How would you like to handle this?” Qqmel said.

  “Oh, right. I’m the ranking officer here.” Felix straightened his shoulders.

  Qqmel made the weird little cough that Xxcha used for laughing. “I’m in charge of the boarding party, reporting to Commander Meehves. You’re tagging along. But Meehves said I should ask you how you’d go about it, to see if you learned anything in tactic class.”

  Felix slumped, but he thought about it. “They’ll have Thales in some remote part of the ship, where he’s safe, with a guard or two, while the bulk of their forces try to keep us from reaching him. Except they must know we have overwhelming force, so they’ll also have some plan to escape this ship, maybe an escape pod they’ll try to slip away in unnoticed with Thales, to reach some predetermined rendezvous point. So, why don’t you and your large violent comrades do the big noisy seizing-the-bridge thing, and I’ll creep along the service corridors and see if I can find the actual prisoner? They’ll either be hiding in the tunnels, or using them to reach their means of escape, I bet.”

  “Acceptable,” Qqmel said. “If you lose Thales, though, you’ll be the one who gets the blame, not me or the commander.”

  “Yes, I realize that. Good tactics on your part.”

  “Want to take a marine with you?”

  Felix shook his head. He had a secret weapon, and didn’t need a big obvious one too. “I’ll be faster and quieter on my own. I’d better go silent, too, so don’t contact me; I’ll contact you. I’d welcome any schematics we have for the ship, though.”

  After briefly scanning the layout in his heads-up display (the diagrams were for the generic model of this ship, so any modifications would be an unwelcome surprise, but it was the best they could do), he moved left down a passageway to a service access hatch.

  Felix had grown up on a shipyard space station near the center of Coalition space, and was comfortable clambering through the innards of vessels, though he’d moved a lot more easily as a ten year-old than he did nearly twenty years later. He moved quietly, ducking under bundles of cable, turning sideways to slip past pipes, occasionally consulting his display to make sure he hadn’t become lost. The only light came from thin strips along the floor, turning the tunnels into a shadowland, but Felix had no trouble negotiating such environments. He had all that practice hunting Tib, and being hunted. This was the same thing, except at the end of this exercise, his prey might really try to kill him.

  He heard occasional booms, shouts, and thumps that told him battle had been joined elsewhere on board. The raider fleet was expert at boarding hostile craft, and came armed for that specific purpose with anti-personnel weapons, lethal and non-, so he didn’t worry much about whether his people were winning. He was beginning to feel silly, though, because he’d gone through a whole lot of tunnels without seeing anyone. Maybe he was giving his opponents too much credit, and they weren’t that clever after all – what if Qqmel was waiting impatiently with Thales already in custody up on the bridge? Felix considered risking the use of his comms to ask –

  Ah ha, what’s this? He reached a narrow, downward-slanting passageway that wasn’t marked on his schematics, which meant it was an after-market alteration to the ship’s design, which meant it was potentially interesting. He started to make his way down, toward the belly of the ship – home to the shuttle, and cargo, and maybe other things too. A secret hidey-hole, maybe, for a small escape pod.

  He slithered down a vertical shaft barely large enough to accommodate him. That gave him more doubts: it would be hard to manhandle a prisoner through a space that cramped, though he supposed if someone pointed a gun at him and told him to start crawling, he would. No way to tell where he was going until he got there, so on he went. If I end up in a trash compactor or something, Tib will never let me live it down…

  Felix crawled through a duct on his hands and knees, toward a vent, the grille that should have been covering the opening dangling askew. So, either this ship was maintained in a slovenly fashion, or someone had come this way before him. He eased forward on his belly and peered through the opening.

  The vent led to a small cylindrical room, about the size of an airlock, with no visible points of entry. An escape pod shaped like the closed bud of a flower filled most of the space, leaving a thin strip to walk on all the way around. A woman in black mercenary armor – but no helmet; that was lucky – crouched by the po
d’s entry hatch, tapping away on a handheld terminal. There was no sign of Thales, but he might be inside the pod already.

  Felix unclipped a noisemaker, set it for a five-second delay, then slung it toward the woman. The small object bounced off her head, making her curse and lift her eyes to him. She was the one he’d talked to earlier, the one who couldn’t hide her emotions and who’d tried to bribe him. How nice to see her again.

  Noisemakers were little blue spheres, sized to fit comfortably in the hand, and when you set them off they released sonic waves of such intensity that they obliterated thought and left their victims dazed, blinking, and bleeding from the ears and nose. Felix, of course, had his noise-cancelling earpieces in, so the onslaught was just an unpleasant whine for him, and a rumble that made his skeleton tingle. He scrambled out of the vent, dropped to the floor, and dashed to the woman. She was on her back, staring up blankly – but, wait, her ears weren’t bleeding, and neither was her nose, so –

  Felix flung himself to one side just as she raised her sidearm and fired. The energy blast melted a section of the wall behind him. Damn. She must have protective gear on too. He scrambled toward her, getting too close for her to shoot easily, and tried to pin her gun arm down. Even using both hands, he could barely manage – her armor was powered, making her easily twice as strong as he was. His own suit was made for infiltration rather than brute force, which had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  She started punching him in the side with her free hand, and if he didn’t make her stop soon he was going to end up with broken ribs, as his armor was not as comprehensive as hers. She snarled and yelled things, calling him a traitor to humanity and so on, but he ignored that, flicking his eyes across his helmet display, selecting the countermeasure he really should have queued up earlier, and blinking to activate it.

  His suit used most of its remaining battery life to discharge an electromagnetic pulse, and her eyes bulged as her armor locked in place. Felix’s suit systems went down too, of course – EMPs didn’t discriminate – but he had a secondary, shielded, temporary power source that kicked on immediately to compensate. He took her gun away and threw it aside, then peeked into the escape pod.

  It was empty.

  He sighed and looked down at her. She still had one arm raised, armor locked in position, fingers twisted into a claw. “Where’s Thales?”

  “Gone.” She grinned savagely. “Long gone. You’re too late. My team leader escaped with him.”

  “You mean you aren’t the team leader? Wait, never mind – of course not. They left you on the ship, after all, while the competent people went down to do the actual job. Oh well. At least tell me why you wanted him. What’s so special about Thales, anyway?”

  “I’ll never tell you anything, pirate scum.”

  “That’s hurtful.” He leaned against the rounded side of the escape pod, crossed his arms, and gazed down at her. “I don’t have much experience with Coalition interrogation methods – that was never my area of training – but I gather they’re quite effective. We’ll find out what you know eventually, so you might as well spare yourself some trouble and tell me now.”

  “Never.” She clenched her jaw, grinding her teeth, then spasmed, foamed spit through her lips, and went limp.

  “Great Edwin’s ghost,” Felix murmured. He hadn’t expected that. Had she bitten down on a suicide pill or something? He hadn’t realized people actually did that, outside spy adventure serials. He prodded her with his foot, in case she was faking, then checked for a pulse in her neck. Apparently, people did.

  Felix considered himself a patriot, but really, there were limits. Did this mean Thales was so important it was better to die than to risk the Coalition even finding out why?

  He activated his comms. “Qqmel, I found one crew member trying to escape, but no sign of Thales. She killed herself before I could ask too many questions. Tell me you had better luck?”

  “We took some very nice guns off some corpses. The armor is mostly ruined though. No survivors among the enemy up here – they fought to the last. We offered nicely to take them prisoner, but they preferred certain death. Where’s the percentage in that? Your cousins are strange, Felix.”

  “Tell me you just forgot to mention recovering their hostage.”

  “Sorry, Felix. No sign of the mysterious Thales. We’re still searching, so don’t give up hope yet. We found a bunch of documents and equipment, the former encrypted, the latter mysterious. My techs are digging through the ship’s computers, but there’s nothing yet to indicate who hired these people or the purpose of their mission. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a classic black ops setup, verbal orders only, highly compartmentalized, all need-to-know. Clearly no one thinks we need to know.”

  “Did you lose anyone?” Felix asked.

  “No, we came in heavy, since your reports indicated they were pretty geared up. We sacrificed mobility for armor. Lieutenant Roarge will be out of commission for a while – they got lucky and shot his arm off at the elbow, so the medics will need to grow him a new one – but otherwise it’s just bruises and dents.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll come up and help with the search.” He looked around, but there really weren’t any doors, so it was back through the ventilation hatch again. That was an unnecessary addition of insult to injury.

  •••

  Hours later, Felix sat slumped in the captain’s chair on the enemy ship, where the woman he’d watched die had snarled at him not long ago. “Where did they go?” he said, not for the first time.

  “I don’t know, but I’m going back to my ship.” Qqmel’s shoulder-mounted cannon drooped like a wilted flower, pointing at the floor. “We’ve searched every inch of this vessel, found two more of those hidden escape pod bays – both with their pods still in place. Maybe they jumped out an airlock with a personal propulsion device, something too small to show up on our sensors, and met up with another stealth ship. Wherever they went, they’re gone.” Qqmel patted Felix on the shoulder. “This was some kind of well-funded clandestine operation, so take heart – you didn’t accidentally declare war against anyone, since the assets were obviously deniable. The raider fleet gained a nice new cruiser and a bunch of guns, and you’ll get a share of plunder deposited in your account, which you official military types don’t usually get to enjoy. The analysts back home will keep researching this Thales, and maybe we’ll figure out who wanted him, and what for.”

  “Maybe.” Felix wasn’t cheered up. He’d really believed this was it: his ticket out of backwater patrol and back to the fast track, where he belonged. He’d spent enough time gambling over the years to know this feeling well: seeing the big score vanish from sight with one bad turn of the cards or roll of the dice. “Guess I’ll head back to the Temerarious. Give Meehves my best.”

  “She said to tell you she’ll send you a bottle of something nice. Said you’d have sorrows that need drowning?”

  “She knows me better than she has any right to,” Felix grumbled.

  •••

  Felix returned to the airlock where his shuttle was docked. The lockers on either side of the corridor were hanging open, environment suits and supplies scattered on the floor in the aftermath of the search. At least cleaning up the mess was someone else’s job. He punched the button to open the inner doors, entered the airlock, waited for it to seal shut, then unlocked the doors leading to the shuttle. He ducked as he stepped into the long, low-ceilinged space. The shuttle was simple, a box of air attached to engines and a guidance system, the interior just a row of seats and walls made up entirely of storage compartments, without so much as a window.

  Once on board, he strapped into one of the front seats and ordered the computer to begin the detachment sequence and return to the Temerarious. The shuttle’s mechanical voice droned a countdown, and when it reached zero the shuttle kicked away from the captured vessel and began its journ
ey back home.

  Something off to the right went thump and crack, and Felix turned to look. A woman in black mercenary armor stepped out of the largest storage locker, the one where the spare environment suits should have been. She pointed her sidearm at him, and for a moment they regarded one another silently. He’d never seen her before, and he would have remembered: she had a face made of diamond-sharp edges, with dark and merry eyes, topped by a crown of spikily short dark hair. Her grin was as self-satisfied as any Felix had ever seen in the mirror.

  There was someone else in the locker, slumped over to one side, unmoving: a man with thinning gray hair, a string of drool hanging from his thin lips, eyes closed.

  Felix inclined his head toward the man, without taking his eyes from the gun. “Mister Thales, I presume?”

  “Doctor, actually,” she said.

  That was interesting. “What kind of doctor?”

  “Based on our brief interactions,” she said, “he’s a doctor of being a huge asshole.”

  Chapter 4

  “So, not the medical kind,” Felix said.

  “Nope,” she replied. “He won’t be any help at all after I shoot you in the knee.”

  “Ah. Could I persuade you not to shoot me in the knee?”

  “The knee is already my compromise. My first impulse was to shoot you in the face.”

  “But I’m too pretty?”

  “Not from where I’m looking, no,” she said. “You are a giant pain in the ass, captain Duval. You very nearly ruined everything, but fortunately I’m a professional, so it can still be salvaged. You took my ship, so I’m going to take yours. I won’t need it for long, and then you can have it back. You can captain with one knee, I’m sure.”

  “I’m grateful, understand, but why did you decide on maiming me rather than killing me?”