The Fractured Void

by Tim Pratt

  One of the guards she’d dispatched reached out over comms to say there was a malfunction in the elevator. A tingle of foreboding started up at the back of Severyne’s mind. She was a creature of order who loved routine, and disruptions gave her an almost visceral twinge of disgust. The panic button was one disruption, albeit a common one. The elevator breaking down was a second. And there was a third – the merchant ship, the Swift Emergence, was still idling in their cargo bay. There’d been some fuss about the manifests, the ship carrying the wrong cargo, that she’d picked up on the assistant director-level comms channel – Melisante Couray, the AD in charge of procurement, had been complaining about the mix-up. Was it a mix-up?

  Officially, this was just a research facility studying weather patterns, but Severyne knew anyone who looked at them closely would realize there was something more serious going on. Their delivery schedule, for example, would reveal they seemed to be feeding and supplying more staff than such a station would normally require. Had someone gotten curious, and sent spies to see what they were doing here? Or, had someone already figured out what they were doing here, and come to stop them, or steal their research – and their star researcher? They were only in this station at all because the Federation of Sol had discovered Shelma’s previous lab and sent her a message trying to tempt her back to their service. Had they tracked her down again, and decided to take a more direct approach?

  The deck beneath Severyne’s feet vibrated. That didn’t set off another tingle of foreboding. That set off an earthquake. The screens hovering before her eyes, projected from her contact lenses, blared red: there was hull damage in one of the hydroponic gardens, though apparently no injuries. She called the assistant director of resource management and barked “Report!”

  “There was an explosion – that’s all I know so far. It could have been caused by a build-up of static electricity, discharging and igniting a hydrogen tank–”

  Another boom rocked the room, this one much closer, and another section of the station diagram hovering before Severyne’s eyes turned red and started flashing. This time, an explosion had torn apart the lab at the top of the station’s central hub, where the weathermonitoring equipment was located. There were no injuries there, either, because no one actually worked in that section; the lab and all the equipment were purely for show, to make their cover story plausible.

  “My new theory is enemy action,” the voice on Severyne’s comms said. She cut the contact without a word and called the leaders of all her guard divisions, on-duty and otherwise: “Scan the ship for more explosives, and report anything unusual immediately.” An array of affirmatives cascaded into her ears. “Second squad, go check on Shelma. I know the elevator is out – go through the maintenance tunnels!”

  She gritted her teeth as she watched the blinking dots of her guards spread out through the ship diagram. Could this be internal sabotage? The Barony was full of competing political currents, and some factions thought this station – dedicated to the work of a Hylar who was somewhere between a defector and a prisoner – was a misallocation of resources, either because they had a natural distrust of other species, and/or because they thought the idea of generating wormholes on demand was a ridiculous fantasy. Usually attacks from within the Barony were rather more subtle than this. You didn’t bomb a station to shut it down; you snarled the station in red tape and did your best to encourage small, deniable problems that added up into cumulative disasters. When the heating or plumbing broke, you made sure the work orders got lost, or that the repair crew showed up with incompatible parts, and contrived to make it look like incompetence on the part of the station head. Or you introduced errors into the supply chain, to deny the crew their necessities and their comforts –

  That thought reminded her of the cargo ship – the one that had shown up a day early, and with the wrong supplies. Severyne had ascribed that error to either a genuine mistake, or petty political maneuvering… but what if the ship was more than that? What if the enemy had come from outside?

  She pulled up her security override panel and began to lock down portions of the station, simultaneously calling her guards in the cargo bay. “Don’t let that ship go anywhere–” she began, and then the hangar bay where her fighters and support ships were docked exploded.

  •••

  Felix crouched beside Shelma’s exo-suit as boots pounded in the corridor around the corner. The guards were headed to the Hylar’s lab, and if they’d been a little faster, they would have run head-on into Felix. Fortunately, he was beyond their entry point, but adding some distance was a good idea.

  “Come on,” he muttered, adjusting the straps of the duffel over his shoulder. The bag contained various data-sticks, which didn’t weigh much, and Shelma’s torpedo-shaped device, which weighed so much he assumed it was made of lead-wrapped osmium. He hurried along the narrow tunnel, past bundled cables and humming pipes, with Shelma clattering along ahead of him.

  They reached a corridor that led to the cargo bay doors – the ones with guards on the other side – and he paused to call his ship on their private comm channel. “Calred, I’m on my way back with our guest.”

  “Are we being noisy or quiet?” Calred said.

  “I’m hoping for the latter, but let’s be prepared for the former.” He glanced at Shelma, who waited with poor grace, her many-jointed legs delicately bent. Her skin was bright red; she looked like a walking danger indicator. “Don’t say anything during this next part.” She glared at him, which he supposed counted as agreement.

  The doors to the cargo bay slid open as they approached. He could see his ship, barely fifty meters away, but you could die a lot of times in a lot of ways in the course of fifty meters. The guards on the door turned to face him, guns held up.

  Plan A was just to brazen things out. “The bomber took out our hangar!” he said, voice modulated with menace. “AD Dampierre sent me to commandeer that civilian vessel and get the Hylar to safety.” Felix thought it was a plausible cover story – he was pretty proud of it – so he was disappointed when they kept pointing their guns at him. He promptly stepped behind the Hylar, hoping they wouldn’t risk shooting through her to get to him.

  “Drop your weapon!” the first guard said.

  “You drop yours!” Felix said.

  “Right now!” the second guard shouted.

  “Guess we’re going loud, then,” Felix said.

  The guards dropped, with barely a second between the falls. Felix looked past them to Calred, who stood on the ramp of the Temerarious, holding his favorite precision plasma rifle. He’d placed second in the all-Coalition long-range target shooting competition the year before, and wore the silver pin he’d earned on the collar of his uniform with pride. Taking out two men from fifty meters was nothing to him; Felix was surprised he hadn’t worn a blindfold or something to make it more interesting.

  Seeing Calred poised with his weapon reminded Felix of the sniper, up there on overwatch. Calred was shielded from fire by the roof of his own ship, and Felix and Shelma were partially protected because they were still in the corridor, and hadn’t yet passed into the cargo bay. A sufficiently eager sniper could hit the legs of her exo-suit. If her suit was disabled, that was it – Felix couldn’t manhandle hundreds of kilograms of metal and liquid and Hylar five meters, let alone fifty.

  Felix crouched down, imagining the long barrel pointed right at him, attempting to calculate the angles, creeping forward to get a glimpse of the sniper, knowing if he could see, he could be seen –

  The sniper was poised, pointing his gun right at Felix, and he flung himself back, trying to hide behind Shelma again. No shot rang out, no plasma seared the deck plates or sheared off Shelma’s legs – nothing happened at all.

  Felix edged forward again in time to see the sniper’s rifle fall from the catwalk, bounce off the top of the Temerarious, and fall onto the deck with a clatter. The sniper appe
ared to be choking himself, hands clasped to his throat as he stumbled jerkily to and fro, bouncing off the railings of the catwalk. The sniper’s mask came loose and went flying and falling to the deck, flung by an unseen hand.

  “Let’s get on the ship, shall we?” Felix prodded the back of Shelma’s tank, making the liquid inside slosh.

  “Is that guard having some sort of seizure?” Shelma scuttled toward the ship’s ramp. “Did you disperse a nerve agent in here? Their masks can filter most of the common ones.” Her voice held nothing but professional interest. Scientists were so strange.

  “Oh, no, he’s just being strangled by an invisible woman. It’s a disconcerting sensation, as I know from experience.” The sniper finally stopped struggling and slumped to the catwalk floor, as if gently lowered.

  Felix had instructed Tib to set bombs with the aim of crippling pursuit capabilities with minimal casualties, and he’d hoped to get off the station without killing anyone, but that was hopes for you. Sometimes he thought they existed just to be dashed.

  Shelma went up the ramp, delicate legs spidering her along, and paused in front of Calred.

  “Greetings,” Calred said. “Welcome to my humble merchant vessel.”

  “Get this bomb off me, captain,” Shelma demanded.

  “Hey, I’m the captain,” Felix said, turning to look back at the cargo bay doors. Trouble could come bursting through them at any moment.

  “He seems much more commanding than you do,” Shelma said.

  “You are keen and perceptive,” Calred said. “Once we’re underway, we’ll get that bomb off you.” He handed Felix the precision rifle, a device of exquisite craftsmanship that was largely wasted on the captain. Felix had placed in the bottom hundred in the long gun competition – he was more adept with sidearms, at least – but even he could hit a personsized target at this distance. Calred escorted Shelma deeper into the ship, while Felix watched the doors and waited for Tib to shimmer into visibility. Once she got on board, they could close the ramp and get out of here –

  “You aren’t where you’re supposed to be,” said a voice in his ear. Felix flinched – he’d muted the station’s internal comm channels, since all the yelling and blaring of alarms was too distracting – but, of course, certain people would have override codes. “Which means you aren’t who you’re supposed to be – you’re an outside agitator in a stolen helmet. Did the Federation send you?”

  “Assistant Director Dampierre,” Felix said. “I’m sorry for all the fuss we caused.” He paused. “The guard I took this helmet from is fine, if you were wondering.”

  “He won’t be once I get my hands on him,” she snapped. “Neither will you.”

  “I’m afraid our meeting will have to wait for another time. We’re about to be on our way, and we won’t bother you again.”

  “You won’t bother anyone ever again.”

  Felix had a sudden stab of insight, dropped the rifle, and undid the clasps on his helmet. He flung the mask away just as it sparked with electricity and thumped, smoking, on the deck. He picked up the rifle with trembling arms, heart pounding in his chest. Of course the Letnev would have corrective and coercive measures built into their standard-issue equipment. He wondered if that electrical discharge would have killed him, or merely incapacitated him. He kicked the helmet as hard as he could, sending it spinning off the ship and into the cargo bay. For all he knew, it was packed with explosives too.

  Tib materialized, dancing out of the way before the helmet could hit her. “Good idea. They could track you with that thing.”

  Among other things. “My thought exactly.” The ramp receded as she raced up it. The ship’s cargo door started to lower just as a crowd of guards poured through the hangar doors, taking up an attack formation with drilled precision, the ones in front kneeling to clear the field of fire for the back rank. Tib and Felix flung themselves behind piles of crates as blobs of superheated metal and streaks of energy struck around them. When the cargo bay was sealed, Felix shouted, “Calred, get us out of here!”

  “I’d be happy to,” he drawled. “Once someone opens the door.”

  “Oh, right,” Tib said, and pressed a button on the chunky bracelet on her right wrist.

  Tib’s bombs blew open the station’s closed bay doors with a dull whump, and she and Felix were pressed against the stack of crates as the ship accelerated out through the hole she’d made. They rose, shakily, and Felix went around to the other side of their makeshift barricade. The fire from the guards had shattered the crates and their contents, and bits of jellied eel oozed out onto the floor. “It’s going to smell like fish in here forever,” he lamented.

  “Better than smelling like our dead corpses,” Tib said.

  “Oh, the day is young,” Felix said. “What kind of pursuit are we looking at?”

  “I blew up their cruisers and shuttles and fighters, but I couldn’t shut down their comms,” Tib said. “They won’t be chasing us from the station, but they’ll call people who can chase us, soon enough.”

  “Do we have enough of a head start to lose them?” Felix said.

  “I’m good at disappearing,” Tib said. “I think we’ll be OK, but we probably shouldn’t come back this way anytime soon.”

  Felix grinned. “What a shame. It was such a nice place to visit. You did excellent work back there, Tib.”

  She grinned back. “This is why I went to raider school. Breaching charges work just as well when planted on the inside of a vessel as they do from the outside. Of course, we used up all our heavy explosives back there, so you’ll have to come up with more subtle plans next time.”

  Felix picked up the duffel and gave it a pat. “I think we’re out of the black ops business. We got the expert, and we got her data and her prototype, so Thales should be good to go. Let’s organize the happy reunion.”

  Chapter 10

  Severyne was having a bad day. Her superiors were not pleased – the station director had shouted at her until she went hoarse, then paused to take a throat lozenge, then screamed some more. “I won’t let your disaster bring me down, Dampierre,” she concluded. “I can contain this situation, and blame the damage and casualties on accidents and executions for insubordination, but we have to get Shelma back before my superiors get suspicious.”

  “Of course, director.” Severyne stood stiffly at attention, as she had been doing for the past hour. Her calves ached, and her feet hurt, but she would never let her discomfort show.

  The director was in her chair, perfectly at ease, frowning at something parsecs away. “Do you think the Federation is behind this attack?”

  “Perhaps, director.” Severyne had reviewed the security footage from Shelma’s lab. The kidnapper was masked, of course, and he hadn’t confirmed he was from Sol, but he appeared human, and he’d claimed he was working with Thales. The Federation had attempted to co-opt Shelma before, and it made sense that if they were after her, they’d gone after her old partner, too. The Barony had been interested in Thales too, of course, but they hadn’t been able to track down his location. “We aren’t sure.”

  “What are we sure of?” The director’s voice was soft, and that seemed more dangerous, after all the shouting.

  “Their ship, the Swift Emergence, was ostensibly a Hacan merchant vessel, but the real Swift Emergence is a day away. The attackers spoofed their transponder. The captain of the real Swift Emergence insists he has no knowledge of an imposter, and that someone must have stolen their schedule and data, but we can’t rule out collaboration–”

  “I’ve already canceled their contracts,” the director snapped. “Don’t worry about any of that. Worry about finding Shelma and getting her back. What do you know that can help with that?”

  Precious little, but Severyne wasn’t about to admit it. “If they’re going to Federation space, they’re doubtless on their way to the Kellkillian wormhole.
We can send interceptors to–” An alert filled her vision – something serious, if it overrode director-level privacy settings; the boss didn’t like being interrupted when she was dressing someone down. Severyne scanned the message and suppressed a gasp. “Forgive me, director, there’s a visitor to the station. She claims… director, she says she has information about the people who took Shelma.”

  “Then go and talk to her,” the director said. “Find out what she knows, even if you have to squeeze it out of her with a vise. Get me my squid back, Severyne. If I go down for this, you’ll go down with me, but it will be so much worse for you. I have friends, influence, connections, and all you’ll have is me for an enemy. I still might end up assistant head of operations on some horrible tropical island somewhere in the sun, but I’ll use those same connections to make sure you rot in a Barony cell.”

  “I understand,” Severyne said.

  The director flicked her hand. “Dismissed. Don’t come back until you have good news.”

  Severyne turned and walked calmly out of the director’s office.

  Once the door shut behind her, she broke into a sprint.

  •••

  “Amina Azad.” The Barony head of security was a little younger than Azad, her hair pulled back in a severe bun, her uniform perfect even though portions of her station were still literally on fire. “An unemployed Federation navy veteran. What possible use can you be to me?”

  “I was part of a small team sent to capture Phillip Thales,” Azad said. “He was hiding out on some backwater in Mentak Coalition space. Unfortunately, we ran afoul of a raider fleet, and now the Coalition has Thales.” The Letnev’s expression didn’t change, and Azad felt a grudging respect for her self-control – the news of Coalition involvement had to be a surprise, but the woman didn’t show it. “It occurred to me that the Coalition might want to complete the set and get their hands on Shelma, too. We knew where she was being held – my employers looked at liberating her ourselves, actually, but we decided Thales was a better target.”