The Fractured Void

by Tim Pratt

  “Your employers. The Federation of Sol?”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t say. Confidentiality, you know. Let’s just say, interested parties. Tell me about the attack. I might know who your enemies are.”

  The woman grudgingly gave an account of what she knew. It was a decently slick operation, Amina thought, heavy on the pirate shit, but it wouldn’t have worked if she’d been running security. “Play me a recording of the guy’s voice?” she asked. “Let me confirm a hunch.”

  The speakers crackled, and a male voice said, “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.”

  Azad nodded. “That’s captain Felix Duval, of the Mentak Coalition, though I’m sure they’d claim he’s on vacation or he’s been discharged or whatever. He’s got a pet Yssaril, she’s probably the one who snuck around and planted the bombs. Don’t feel too bad – she even got the drop on me. Natural advantages, sure, but the Coalition must have trained her to be sneaky too, and I bet her suit has countermeasures to make her even harder to detect.”

  “Never mind the Yssaril,” she said. “Duval.” The word was a curse in her mouth. “He will pay for what he’s done.”

  “I’ve got a bill to present to him, too.” Azad considered. The Letnev was smart, but she was also desperate, the right lie, deployed at the right moment, could work wonders. “Anyway, I have a tracking device on Thales–”

  That got the Letnev’s attention. “You can track them?”

  The hook was set. “Not with any precision from this distance, but if I can get even a weak ping, that will give us a direction, and once we’re in the same system as their ship, I can narrow things down.”

  The woman frowned, though her default expression was already a frown, so really it just deepened. “We had trackers on Shelma, too, in her containment suit, but they were deactivated.”

  “The tracker I put on Thales is hidden rather deeper. What I’m saying is, we put it in his body. Implanted while he was sedated, so he doesn’t know he’s on a leash.” That had been the plan, anyway. “The device should be undetectable to their bug sweepers, too – it’s the latest tech.”

  The woman looked at Azad for a long moment. “You will give me the device you use to track him.” She extended her hand.

  “Please. I am the tracking device.” Azad tapped her temple. “It’s integrated technology, connected to all my other tactical systems, left over from my days doing special jobs in the navy. If you try to break open my head to get the tracking system out, all the tech will fuse itself into slag. No good for my brain, but no good for you, either. It’s a standard countermeasure, prevents enemies from extracting Federation technology.”

  “Sol technology?” She turned up her nose. “Your species just crawled out of the gravity well yesterday. You’re still basically drawing on cave walls and poking each other with pointy sticks.”

  Ha, she was livelier than she looked. Azad smiled. “I seem to recall we kicked your pale Barony asses a few times.”

  The Letnev sniffed. “You had superior numbers, not superior technology. No one denies your people can field a large force. I blame your prolific and unrestrained breeding.”

  “It’s a big galaxy, lady. Somebody’s gotta fill it up. Might as well be us. What do you have against unrestrained breeding, anyway? You have to pass the time somehow.”

  “You sicken me,” the woman said. “You humans careen around the galaxy, disrupting the balance of power, causing chaos, and demonstrating a reckless disregard for the traditions and values of the elder species of the galactic community.”

  “When you put it that way,” Azad said, “you make us sound pretty badass.”

  The woman pressed her fingertips to her temples as if massaging away a headache, and for a moment she looked younger, less severe, and almost vulnerable. Then she looked up, and that glimpse of the woman underneath the uniform was gone – her eyes were once again ice floes adrift in a frozen sea. “I am not opposed to a temporary strategic alliance in order to further our mutual interests.”

  Azad cackled. “You mean, we can use each other, as long as we both get something out of it?”

  “That is literally what I said. My name is Severyne Joelle Dampierre. I am the head of security for this facility.”

  “Were you head of security yesterday, too, or are you replacing the person who oversaw this monumental fuck-up?”

  Severyne bared her teeth. “Officially, there hasn’t been a fuck-up. Not yet. If I can get Shelma back soon, no one ever has to know what happened here.”

  Azad nodded. “I can do that dance too. I won’t be welcome back home if I arrive empty-handed, but if I can recover Thales, all will be forgiven, hearts and flowers, big parade, backslaps all around. Except none of that actually, because officially I don’t exist, but there are other rewards, not least of all my continuing status as an alive person. I have a tracking device, and I’ve studied Thales like you studied for the boot-polishing final, so I can make some educated guesses about where he’s headed next. What do you have to offer this partnership?”

  “The key to this cell, for one thing,” Severyne said.

  Azad shrugged. “I escaped from a Mentak Coalition pirate flagship. I can usually get out of cells on my own. You haven’t impressed me with your ability to stop jailbreaks so far.”

  “We’d be more careful with you than we were with Shelma. She was more of a highstatus guest, with various privileges. You will be denied those privileges.”

  “Yes, fine, you showed me the stick, and it’s a big scary stick, I’m very impressed. Let’s move on to the carrot.”

  Severyne wrinkled her nose. “I can offer more tangible benefits. Access to a fast gunship, and weapons, and the assistance of my own personal security force.”

  “The security force likewise hasn’t impressed me, but I do like gunships. I came here on a freighter, and it only has enough firepower to nudge the odd asteroid out of the way. So let’s say we set out together, and chase down our fugitives, and I get Thales, and you get Shelma, and then we dissolve our partnership?”

  “Those terms are acceptable to me,” Severyne said.

  Azad shook her chains. “Take these off?”

  “I have a sidearm,” the Letnev said.

  “How nice for you. Guns are a great comfort when you’re in a room with me, I’m told.”

  Severyne looked off into space, interacting with some heads-up display Azad couldn’t see, and a moment later her shackles unlocked themselves and slithered back into recesses in the table. “There. Partner, not prisoner.”

  Azad spat into her palm and reached across the table. “Shake on it to seal the deal?”

  Severyne stared at her hand with undisguised horror. “Is this some horrible human custom? I will never touch your hand, let alone your hand when it is covered in – in saliva.”

  Azad shrugged, wiping her hand off on the table. “Oh well. I can settle for a verbal agreement.” She could tell that needling Severyne was going to be fun. The Letnev was cute when she got horrified. You had to find entertainment where you could.

  •••

  Severyne cleared her plan with the director, which wasn’t very difficult, as the director snapped, “Don’t tell me what you’re doing, just do it, and you’d better succeed or I’ll see you rot forever in your own filth.” Severyne tuned her out after that, turning her mind toward logistics. She was good at logistics.

  Severyne’s own authorizations were sufficient to requisition a gunship, though it took a bit of creative paperwork to account for why she needed to bring a ship from the planet instead of using one from the station hangar, since said hangar was officially still intact. The station director would eventually fake some equipment malfunction, ideally blamed on a mistake by an outside contractor, to account for the damaged and destroyed parts o
f the station, but, for now, Severyne had to work within the constraints of their cover. You didn’t rise this high in the Letnev service without learning how to convince the system to do what needed doing, though, so she got her ship.

  Officially, Severyne’s mission was to investigate reports of pirate activity in the system, and to neutralize any threat they discovered. Under that aegis, she could stay out for several days, or even a week, without triggering an oversight check from the accountability office. Such flexibility was rare in the Barony, but their station was a high-security covert facility, and their rules were consequently relaxed, at least by Letnev standards.

  Her ship arrived: the Grim Countenance, a heavily armed cruiser previously assigned to protect the thoroughly unremarkable and unthreatened planet below, and the best ship available in the system. The displaced captain had taken over the next-best ship, and that displaced captain the next after that, and so on; somewhere at the bottom would be a captain left with no ship at all, but that was life in a hierarchy. If you didn’t like it at the bottom, you should have worked harder to get to the top.

  The Grim Countenance had a small crew, now under Severyne’s command, consisting of engineering and pilot and navigation personnel, but the rest of the complement that tromped aboard when the ship docked was composed of her personal, hand-picked guards, the best security people on the station, or at least the best ones that weren’t dead after Duval’s cowardly sneak attack. Casualties has been surprisingly low – that would help with the cover-up – but she had lost her best sniper.

  “I’m good with a rifle,” Azad said beside her, and Severyne realized, to her horror, that she’d muttered some portion of her thoughts aloud. That was a shocking break in her customary discipline.

  She covered it with hauteur. “Good by human standards, or Letnev ones?”

  “The Barony was banned from the last round of pan-galactic games on account of being fascists, so it’s not like I have a lot of data about your peak marksmanship, but the human who won the bronze in target shooting? I broke her record at the last interservice rifle competition, so it’s kinda like I took the silver, at least.”

  Severyne grunted and refused to be impressed. They walked along the ship’s corridors, toward the bridge. “If you’re so good with a rifle, why didn’t you compete in the games yourself?”

  “You’ve heard of the L1Z1X? Sometimes they take a break from fighting with the Nekro to cause trouble for actual people, so I was busy shooting cyborgs on a colony world way out in the eastern spiral arm. Sadly, there were no impartial judges on hand to score my shooting, and they weren’t ideal competition conditions, since some of the targets were shooting back. There were twelve hostiles, though, and I took out eleven with headshots. I think that gives you points for style.”

  “Eleven of twelve?” Severyne said. “Imperfect. My sniper would have hit the whole dozen.” The doors to the bridge slid open before them, and they passed through side-by-side.

  “Oh, I hit the last one,” Azad said. “I just shot him in the stomach. He killed one of my squad-mates, so he didn’t deserve a clean and easy death. I wasn’t even sure if those cybernetic types could feel pain, but then he started hollering and wailing and carrying on when I perforated his guts, so I guess they do.”

  How distasteful. One’s enemies should be crushed, of course, and it was sometimes useful to cause gruesome injuries as an example to others, but as the last killed, that victim had provided no such instructional value. “Do you enjoy inflicting pain?”

  “Huh.” Azad appeared to take the question seriously. She followed Severyne, standing beside the captain’s chair when Severyne seated herself and surveyed the bridge, glaring at the crew going about their preparations. “Nobody’s asked me that since my psych evaluation when I first joined the navy. I don’t enjoy hurting people on its own merits, no – not like some people do. The thrill of combat, for me, is about pushing yourself to new heights of excellence. Plus, you never feel more alive than you do when death is right there beside you. But, I will admit, I’m sort of a grudge-holder. I find spite and vengeance highly motivating, and yeah, I do like to hurt people who’ve hurt me. Does that make me a terrible person?”

  “I am sure you are a terrible person for many other reasons as well.”

  Azad grinned. She had a scar on her cheek that made her look quite rakish when she smiled, and it annoyed Severyne, because the mark could have easily been removed with a simple cosmetic surgery, which meant Azad wanted to look that way, that she knew it made her look dangerous and, and a bit alluring – She shook herself. Despite superficial physical similarities, the woman wasn’t even the same species as her.

  “What about you?” Azad said. “Do you have a sadistic streak? I’d like to know, since I’m likely to annoy you occasionally, just being who I am.”

  “Pain is a tool. If it is the proper tool, necessary to achieve the desired outcome, then I wield it as readily as any other.”

  “We’re going to get along really well, Severyne.”

  “We are not.”

  “See, you say that, but I sense this spark between us. Talking to you is thrilling the same way being in combat is. We’re going to push each other toward new heights of excellence. Is there a shooting range on this ship?”

  “That was an abrupt transition,” Severyne said. “There is a holographic training simulator, yes.”

  “Eh, a virtual range can’t compete with the feel of real rounds hitting real targets, but it’s good enough. I’ll teach you to shoot.”

  “I am fully qualified for my rank,” she said frostily.

  “Sure, but fundamentally, you’re a supervisor, yeah? An officer.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  Azad seesawed her hand in the air. “It’s a different thing. I don’t deny being an officer requires a certain set of skills. But this Duval is a pirate. Sometimes you have to shoot pirates, and being good enough to get a passing score in officer training might not be good enough for that. What do you say? I’m a resource, Severyne. Exploit me.”

  “We’ll see,” Severyne conceded. “If we have time. Speaking of time – I think it’s time you told me where we’re going, don’t you?” She gestured to the crew, all at their stations, awaiting orders.

  “How about I just give you a heading first. I’ll tell you the destination once we’ve got some distance between us and my cell. I don’t want you tempted to leave without me.”

  “I’m already tempted to do that.”

  “Maybe I can tempt you to do other things too, Sev.”

  Chapter 11

  Felix sat down in the corner of the cabin they’d assigned Shelma. The quarters had been full of pallets of sunscreen earlier; their ruse on the Letnev station had also conveniently cleared out some space for the Hylar to move in. “How are you settling in?”

  The front of her exo-suit was turned away from him, and she didn’t bother to move so she could look at him when she answered. “I no longer have an explosive connected to my tank, so circumstances are improving.”

  “I was never going to blow a hole your suit, Doctor Shelma. I just needed to motivate you. I’d like to apologize for the, ah, whole situation. Thales gave us the impression you were a prisoner, and that we were on a rescue mission.”

  “You must not have known Phillip for very long if you believed something he said.”

  “Our relationship has been brief, but eventful. If you don’t mind, I was hoping you could fill me in a little bit about him. We’re usually pretty good at digging up background on people, but we haven’t found much about him in our database, even with his genetic profile in hand.”

  “You’re probably looking in the wrong places,” Shelma said. “I can’t imagine why I’d want to help my kidnappers, though.”

  Felix nodded, not that she could see it. “The thing is, you’re here now. We can’
t call up the Barony and say, ‘Oops, sorry, we thought it was a jailbreak, not an abduction – you can have your scientist back’.”

  “I suppose not.” The exo-suit turned, and she floated in the tank, gazing at him. “The Letnev are not famously forgiving.”

  “That’s my understanding,” Felix said. “I want you to know, my employers are willing to provide you and Thales with whatever resources you need to complete your work.” That was close enough to the truth, anyway.

  “From the Federation to the Barony to your mysterious employers. I’m quite popular these days. You’re with the Mentak Coalition, aren’t you? I’m assuming, based on the unusual makeup of your crew.”

  “I should probably deny it, but I’m sure Thales will tell you soon enough. Yes, we’re Coalition. Can I ask how you ended up working for the Letnev?”

  “They were the least bad option available to me at the time.”

  “Who were your other options? The doomsday cult on Tendil Two? That swarm of homicidal machines out in Nekro space? Some kind of large, angry, carnivorous monster?”

  Her tank bubbled as she moved her tentacles in what Felix interpreted as a shrug. “The Letnev aren’t that bad. They’re a bit unimaginative, but they respect science and technology, and they take research and development seriously. The Coalition is prejudiced against the Letnev because the Barony is such a disciplined culture, while your lot enjoys playing the rogue.”

  “Who’s playing?”

  The Hylar burbled a laugh. “You really don’t know much about Thales at all, do you?”