by M. D. Cooper
“I don’t think the general wants to just push them back—he wants to destroy them.”
“Even better,” Chase nodded. “People like you are a big part of that. You inspire those around you; you’re a natural leader.”
“Well, ‘til we do this op,” Rika sulked ruefully. “Then, like you said, our names will be mud.”
“Did I say that?” Chase asked. “I thought that was Barne.”
“It was you,” Rika replied. “Mud. M-U-D.”
“I have no recollection of that. I think you’re working too hard, Rika.” Chase winked. “Either way, taking out Stavros and The Politica will help rectify that.”
Rika nodded. The Politica wasn’t her concern, but she realized that maybe it should be. If they took out Stavros, someone else would move to the top of his fascist regime. She supposed that was where the Marauders and the Septhians would come in. If they could defeat the Politica fleets while their upper echelon was in disarray, it would be a victory for the cluster.
It occurred to her that this was not so different from the mission in Thebes—or what the plan had been, at least. Except this time, it really was for a better cause; this time, she wouldn’t have a problem pulling the trigger when the time for assassination came.
Stavros was a dead man walking. He just didn’t know it yet.
DUCKING OUT
STELLAR DATE: 03.13.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Interstellar pinnace, near Chyso
REGION: Scarborough System, Theban Alliance, Praesepe Cluster
“Pinnaces Romany-Gamma and Romany-Epsilon, return to hangar G3 immediately!” the voice on the other end of the comm channel yelled in strident tones.
“I think that Chief Ren had better ease up,” Chase said with a soft laugh. “He’s gonna blow that vein in his forehead if he goes on much longer.”
“Think they’ll take shots at us?” Rika asked.
“Nah,” Patty replied from her seat at the controls of the linked pinnaces. “We left the note for Ayer; she just has to manage the scene. You’re a horrible murderer, Rika. Kidnapped me, too! I never knew you had such a dark side.”
Rika shrugged. “What can I say? I like to get my way, even if it means murdering my teammates.”
Leslie gave a short laugh. “You say that entirely too easily. I’m starting to wonder about you, Rika.”
Rika scowled at her playfully. “If you weren’t banging Chase and Barne on the side, none of this would ever have happened. You have no one to blame but yourself.”
“I was just trying to work you up to a foursome,” Chase said defensively. “I didn’t expect to pay the ultimate price, just for a little tail.”
Rika twisted around and looked at Leslie’s ass. “She may have some sort of cat fetish going on, but I don’t see a tail.”
Leslie winked. “I won’t lie, I’ve thought about getting one; it would be a pain in the armor, though. I’d have to coil it up on my back or something.”
“I bet you could get a sheath for it,” Patty said. “We have flexible casings for exposed conduit on some of the ships; the stuff is stronger than hull plating because of how it can move and transfer heat from energy beams.”
Leslie raised a hand to her chin and stared pensively into the distance. “If we don’t get fired…or court martialed…or have our skin torn off by the Old Man, I think that I may look into that. It could really help with balance when I’m racing across rooftops and stuff.”
“In my little foursome fetish dream, you had ears too,” Chase jibed with a mischievous grin. “Can’t have a tail without ears.”
“You know, Chase,” Leslie turned to him with her brows raised and her hands on her hips. “You’re entirely too vanilla for this crew; if we all make it back, you have to get some mods. You’re into them—on Rika at least—it’s time for you to put your skin where your eyes are.”
Patty made a choking sound. “That was the worst adaptation of a metaphor I’ve ever heard, Leslie. Seriously. That sounds like he needs to have his skin put on Rika.”
Leslie laughed. “Yeah, that needs some work,” she admitted.
“Barne’s not modded,” Chase pointed out. “Why do I have to get changed up?”
“Barne? Seriously?” Leslie asked. “He has an artificial arm.”
“Yeah, but it’s just cause his organic one got shot off; it looks like a regular arm.”
Chase coughed into his fist. “Uhh…not sure I want to know, now.”
“Oh, wow!” Patty exclaimed emphatically.
“No, seriously, I don’t want to know,” Chase repeated.
“I’m not talking about Barne’s wanker,” Patty rushed on. “Either Ayer didn’t get the message, or they’re making it look good; they’ve sent two fighters to intercept.”
“Well, pour it on,” Leslie suggested.
Patty looked back, incredulous. “Leslie, seriously. I’m flying two pinnaces that are locked onto one another; do you really think I can outmaneuver a pair of HA-U8 fighters?”
Rika looked out of the cockpit’s window at the looming shape of Chyso, the gas giant planet they were passing. “Lose ‘em in the cloud tops?”
“Those fighters are more than capable of tracking us through the clouds…” Patty retorted, though her voice faded at the end.
“Unless…” She thought for another second. “Taking us in.”
“Romany is joining the pursuit,” Chase reported.
“Good,” Patty replied.
Rika glanced at Leslie as they both settled into auxiliary seats in the cockpit and quickly pulled down the harnesses.
Leslie called up a holoprojection of the ship and space surrounding them, and Rika looked it over, wondering what Patty had in mind.
Chyso was a busy place, its orbital plane filled with moonlets, asteroids, and gas—nearly all of it being mined and harvested. The planet itself was rich in deuterium, and no fewer than seven orbital facilities worked to pull out the gas and sell it to starships.
The planet was also located 55 AU from the Scarborough System’s star; currently passing a busy jump point.
This made for a mess to navigate through, but it also meant that the Romany’s fighters couldn’t take long-range shots at the linked pinnaces without risk of hitting other ships or stations.
Rika could see that Patty was using that to her advantage and keeping as many civilians between them and the pursuing HA-U8 fighters as she could. Even so, the fighters were boosting hard, slowly closing the gap between the ships. They were not, however, breaking local speed and burn vector ordinances. If they continued to follow the rules, the pinnaces should reach the cloud tops first.
“They’re totally letting us get away,” Patty called out as she banked around a small moonlet, careful to keep her engine wash off the orbital plane.
“You sure about that?” Chase asked as one of the fighters flew right through a loose grouping of cargo haulers.
“Well, mostly. I know half those guys; they won’t take a shot at us.”
“Not even with Rika the Murderer aboard?” Leslie pressed.
Patty nodded, then qualified, “Well, unless they sent Ron. He’s kinda pissed at me after the pot I won in a recent Snark game. I don’t think he’d make a kill shot, but he might get a little excited.”
“Oh, shoot. Ally’s kinda pissed at me too. I borrowed one of her dresses and spilled red wine on it.”
“Patty, seriously, do you make a point of pissing off all the other pilots?” Leslie demanded.
“I cleaned the dress; it’s not like nano can’t fix a wine stain. But Ally says ‘it’s the principle of the thing’.�
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“Shit, Ayer’s on the horn,” Chase cursed, turning to look back at Rika. “She doesn’t sound happy at all.”
Rika took the call and entered a virtual space in her mind where Ayer stood with her arms crossed, and a very real rage evident on her face.
“Rika, you are charged with murder and treason against the Marauders, as well as a dozen other violations of the military code of conduct we adhere to. You will cease burn and alter vector for escort back to the Romany immediately. Do I make myself clear?”
The scene Barne had created in Rika’s quarters seemed to have been very convincing. When Rika had seen it for herself, she’d gagged at what had appeared to be several, fully dismembered bodies.
A brief fear flitted through Rika’s mind that Ayer really did think she was guilty of the crime.
Barne had said that close examination—which the Romany’s forensics teams would be able to manage without trouble—would reveal that the bodies were fakes, comprised of cloned replacement limbs and banked blood to provide DNA evidence.
By now, Ayer had to know this. Her charges of murder meant she was going along with it—though the anger in her voice did not seem contrived.
“Do you think I’m going to come back to face your justice?” Rika retorted. “Chase called me ‘meat’, so I made him into meat. Barne and Leslie, too.”
“You can’t murder Marauders in cold blood and get away with it,” Ayer spat. “We’ll come after you, we’ll find you, and when we do, you’d best hope the capture team kills you, because what the tribunal will order will be far worse.”
“You gonna chip me again? That’s what they were trying to do.”
Ayer nodded once, her eyes cold. “If we have to.”
“Enough,” Rika said with finality. “I’m done with the Marauders. I’ll find an outfit that really understands what I can do—one that appreciates me.”
“Rika.” Ayer’s voice was dripping with acid. “You’ve become a monster. Only fools and other monsters will take you in now. This is your last chance; with a compliance chip, we can rehabilitate you.”
There was a look in Ayer’s eyes that Rika couldn’t place. Is that sorrow? Or just raw anger at my disobedience?
“Never going to happen. I’ll die before I get chipped again,” Rika swore, the vehemence in her voice authentic even as she wondered at Ayer’s meaning.
“We’ll see,” the captain replied. “Know this: I’ll find you, and when I do, there will be hell to pay.”
Rika cut the communication and considered what had just taken place.
There was more than one message hidden in those words. Ayer will come with the Marauders once Stavros is dead; she believes that Stavros will try to chip me if I act too boldly—he might do it anyway. Lastly, if Stavros catches on to me, I may want to consider death over capture.
The virtual space disappeared from around her, and Rika looked around at the cockpit once more. She had made the conversation available to the team, and they too were contemplating Ayer’s words.
“Does that mean she thinks we can do it?” Chase wondered, “Or that we’re going to get our assess handed to us?”
“I don’t think she’s certain one way or the other,” Leslie guessed. “But the Marauders will have our backs, either way.”
Rika looked at their position and saw that they were just a few thousand kilometers from Chyso’s cloud tops now. She silently counted down from ten; when she hit two, they dropped into the upper strata of the gas giant.
Patty continued to dive deeper, passing bulbous cumulus clouds, until they hit the planet’s ‘deck’. There, the gas changed from atmosphere to something much closer to ocean.
The pinnaces began to shudder as the grav fields’ dampening motion struggled to compensate.
“Patty, is this necessary?” Chase asked, his voice carrying a nervous lilt.
“Yeah…it seems excessive,” Leslie added.
“You want it to look good, right?” Patty reasoned. “We’re within tolerances…barely.”
They stayed in the cloud soup for another three minutes—then Patty pulled out, and the shuddering ceased. Rika breathed a sigh of relief as they soared through the upper levels of the planet’s cloud cover. A minute later, they were back in space; their scan showing no sign of either the Romany, or the two fighters.
“Well done, Patty,” Chase appraised. “You timed it just right. They’re still on the far side.”
“We slowed down below the deck; they came all the way around and passed us overhead. I have a clear shot to the jump point, now. They won’t catch us unless they fire RMs up our asses.”
Rika leaned back.
We did it; we’re clear.
Which was, of course, the easy part.
A NEW TEAMMATE
STELLAR DATE: 03.14.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Isthmus, Sparta
REGION: Peloponnese System, Politica, Praesepe Cluster
“You’ve lost your mind, Barne,” Rika pronounced in disgust. “What in the stars were you thinking, bringing her along? She outed us to Captain Sarn!”
To say Rika was a little surprised when Barne revealed the ‘something extra’ he had brought along would be an understatement. She had no idea how he had smuggled the AI from the Persephone Jones along for the trip, let alone convinced her to help.
Help that seems all too suspicious.
“Explain this to me again from the start,” Rika ordered, ignoring Niki’s statement. “You were talking with this AI the entire time we were flying back to the Romany?”
The look on Barne’s face indicated that he had not expected this sort of reaction from Rika. He even looked a little scared.
“Well…it’s not often one has a couple of weeks to spend with an AI. She was going nuts without stimuli, and I was curious how a ship like the Jones ended up with an L3 AI.”
“So you guys just hit it off?” Rika asked testily. “Started having a little tête-à-tête?”
“Rika, seriously, there’s nothing in the regs that says I shouldn’t have done what I did,” Barne retorted.
“You need to do a bit of rereading,” Rika countered. “You can’t introduce new variables like that into an op that’s underway. I’m your CO; you have to run shit like this past me.”
“She’s sentient, Rika,” Barne argued. “Not an NSAI. You can’t leave a sentient being cooped up like that; there are laws.”
Rika shrugged. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re supposed to clear stuff like this with me.”
“Niki—” Barne began, but the AI shut him down.
Barne folded his arms and glared at the AI core that was sitting atop the pedestal on the galley table. “Fine.”
“Why?” Rika demanded.
“How’s that?” Rika asked, still unconvinced.
“I can beat a chip,” Rika replied dismissively.
“For a few minutes,” Barne allowed. “Maybe long enough to take out Stavros; then what happens after that? You know the pain doesn’t stop.”
&
nbsp; Rika nodded slowly, remembering her struggle against Cheri. She had killed the woman, but that had only made the Discipline from the compliance chip worse. If Stavros chipped her and she killed him, it would be suicide.
“What are you proposing?”
Barne nodded vigorously. “Niki can disable the Discipline, and Stavros’s techs won’t know to look for her. If you two are careful, she’ll go undetected, and you can act with impunity.”
Not suffering through Discipline to take out Stavros is an appealing idea; I’d also be operating on my own. Having an AI could be useful…
She tamped down her anger at Barne and considered it objectively.
“OK, say we do this. How does it go down?”
“Why?” Rika asked.
Barne nodded in encouragement. “I’ve spent weeks talking with her, Rika. Niki is good.”
Rika shook her head and closed her eyes. “This is nuts.” Then she took a deep breath and accepted the connection Niki was offering.
The room fell away, and Rika found herself in a shaded glade with tall trees, their boughs intertwining in a thick canopy above her and blocking out the sun and sky.
A babbling brook ran through the glade, and beside it rested a silver and blue sphinx. Her form was unexpected, but even with their limited interactions, Rika had to admit that it suited Niki.
She noticed wounds on Niki’s forelegs, an affectation showing she had not yet recovered from her recent shackling on the Persephone Jones.