The Midnight Sun (The Omega War Book 2)

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Aye,” he said. “I’m sick of the sight of you lot.” He rubbed at his hairless chin. “Reckon you feel the same way about us. It’s a deal.”

  They shook hands and separated, walking warily back to their respective ships.

  * * *

  “I don’t like it,” mumbled Sinclair to himself when he was safely back on the Nova with the main hatch locked behind him. “Neither of those crazy sisters is the sort to give up with their tail between their legs.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Vogel. “Reckon they’ve learned not to mess with us.”

  Sinclair slapped the back of Vogel’s head.

  “An’ you can shut up and all, Sergeant Cludgie. XO, double guards at all exterior hatches. All personnel are confined to ship until those Midnight Scunners are out of our hair. And you, Sergeant Vogel, along with the rest of you eejits who let yourself be captured by a wee squirrel with a bad attitude…you’re reassigned to a new unit I’m forming just for you. I call it Cludgie Command. You’re going to search toilets, plumbing, vents, recycling, and ventilation systems, every hidden and dirty area of the Arashi Nova, and make damned sure there are no more miniature aliens hiding on my ship. If anything larger than a microbe is on board without my permission, kill it.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 32

  Saisho Branco didn’t exist.

  Years spent undercover as a corporate spy had cost him his identity. Whoever he’d once been was not only unimportant but – according to the Binnig mind techs who could have peeled away the layers of false memories to reveal the truth – was too dangerous to remember.

  All he had left was a single memory that had escaped from a deep sense of buried tragedy – enough to persuade him to move on without looking back.

  But lately he’d been coming here to the restricted areas of Midnight Sun’s Deck 11 to be alone and think. And that sole memory of who he’d once been was like a thorn trapped in his head, forever pricking his mind.

  He’d been a boy, hand gripped tightly by a grown-up hurrying along Amager Boulevard in Copenhagen. He was wrapped up warm against the winter chill in a quilted coat and red woolen hat, but the woman was dressed only in a cream blouse and dark skirt, walking the cold sidewalk in bare feet because she’d kicked off the shoes that had slowed her.

  She looked down at him as they hurried along and tried to give a reassuring smile. But there was no joy behind that smile, and precious little hope. Of love for him, though, there was plenty, and he latched onto the reassurance he was cared for unconditionally, even though he was not safe. This woman…he was sure she wasn’t his mother, but who was she? And who was the boy?

  He didn’t want to remember.

  Saisho Branco, his history, VOWs scores, and merc registration, his school friends and hobbies – all had been the creation of a corporate intelligence planning team, the cover identity that had become real during the years of his final mission for Binnig.

  Branco was creating himself as he moved forward in his new life as a merc. He had no need for a history.

  Yet some aspects of his past wouldn’t let go. He’d been born a spy – literally. It had been the sole purpose of his existence. He couldn’t stop.

  Decks 9 through 14 were off limits, but telling Branco an area was restricted was like offering whiskey to an alcoholic. He’d traced the real identities of the two sisters who ran the visible part of the Midnight Sun Free Company and had made a start on the far greater challenge of uncovering the hidden depths.

  The Mercenary Guild seemed to be doing everything in its power to bury the real story behind the Midnighters, in collusion with the hidden alien mercs who must secretly run the company. Guild rules stated that a majority of mercs registered to a company must come from the same race, but Branco still hadn’t discovered the identity of that race, something that should be a matter of public record. Whoever it was, he had the sense that the Guild hated them, but they were too powerful to eradicate.

  It was a reminder that, for all humanity’s adventures since the Alpha Contracts, Branco had learned that most aliens regarded humans as naive – so easily distracted by their natural competence for fighting that they failed to grasp their deep ignorance of how the Union really worked.

  He told himself it was the need to break out of his ignorance that had led him to this storage area on Deck 11. Twenty-foot-high panels grew out of the gently concave deck to reach two-thirds of the way up the bulkheads. Green-tinged liquid flowed through chunky transparent pipes that ran in and out of the overhead. Up and down were tricky concepts in space, of course, and what would be the overhead to this compartment if Midnight Sun were in space, spinning about its center, was currently to Branco’s right. He was sitting on one bulkhead, the deck rising to his left.

  The panels sprouting from the deck were arranged in right angles with large gaps between them and holes cut through them. He’d seen freighters use baffles like these to prevent liquid and dry cargo from sloshing around. But this was a battlecruiser, not a fuel tanker. The compartment did carry cargo, but the crates securely lashed inside storage frames were the regular universal ruggedized design with attachment points for parachutes or inflatable jackets. He’d broken into a few and found laser rifles, charge packs, and fluted swords with elaborate barbs that looked like bone but were too hard for Branco to scratch. The light combat armor he’d discovered was in a configuration he didn’t recognize but suggested they were designed for a multi-limbed race.

  Lately the hidden areas of the ship had stopped yielding fresh secrets, and he came here to be alone and to think.

  To over-think.

  Although he often thought of that woman in his deep past, there was another who filled his thoughts now.

  Small but honed, hard and deadly, Sun was the human equivalent of a CL32 Peacemaker: such perfection that it was impossible to imagine a better design. Unlike the handgun, Sun was a one-off, and could never be bought or owned.

  “It’s not as if I love her,” he pleaded to the pipes. “That would be ridiculous. I’m not a moody teenager.”

  The pipes gurgled as a blast of bubbles seemed to answer him, but he wondered whether he’d answered himself.

  The body he inhabited must have been a teenager once, but Saisho Branco had never been one – had never been in love. Binnig had specifically suppressed his capacity for romance to keep him focused.

  So he’d never built defenses against eyes that sparkled like black lasers when she smiled at him.

  That moment waiting in line to leave the Scorpion ship, he’d wanted to wrap his arms around Sun and keep her warm and safe, to protect her from a hurtful galaxy.

  The memory made him feel sick to his core. It was the most inappropriate way possible to think of your commanding officer. Not to mention dangerous for him, for her, and everyone around them.

  He punched the nearest crate until his knuckles bled.

  How had he been so stupid?

  And if he ever admitted to her how he’d felt so protective, she’d fire him. Probably push him out the airlock, too, if she had any sense.

  He looked up at the transparent pipes crossing the overhead. Clouds of bubbles were being swept along in the current. It looked organic, green blood flowing through the arteries of a living starship, blood vessels so large he could swim through them.

  “Okay,” he shouted at the pipes. “I do love her, but why…why in the whole entropy-cursed galaxy did it have to be her?”

  The pipes carried their liquid cargo, oblivious to the mortal concerns of the half-formed human with the missing past.

  Branco sighed, too hollowed out to even curse at the stupid pipes. He was reaching for his pouch to clean away any trace of his blood when he saw movement.

  In the pipe. A flexible limb. Gone, disappeared through the overhead. Then another, this one with colored bands cutting into its flesh. Another limb, or a different individual?

  Then nothing.

  Branco scrambled along the bulkhead
until he was ten feet from the spot where he’d seen the activity. He grabbed the stealth sheet from his hip pouch and, with a well-practiced action, shook it over himself as he lay prone to reduce the folds in the material. The sheet wouldn’t hide him from a high-tech targeting system, but if you didn’t look closely, you could pass within inches and not notice him or the transparent camera he trained on the pipe.

  He waited.

  In two hours, he’d have to report for duty, and that gave him an hour before he needed to leave the restricted decks with enough time to cover his tracks.

  After an hour and forty minutes, in which Branco had barely twitched a muscle, his reward came. Six of the aliens jetted through the fat pipes, pushing a boxy piece of equipment he couldn’t identify. He used his wrist slate to clean the image from his camera but couldn’t identify the species.

  They vaguely resembled squids, though at a roughly human size. The analogy broke down because, rather than their bodies being air-filled sacs, their skin wrapped around a protective bony structure like studded armor. A head crest poked through the skin like the plume of a Roman helmet, and daggers from the same bony material poked out from what, with human limbs, would be wrist joints. Elaborately curved barbs curled from these natural weapons.

  Well, that’s a start, he thought. He’d seen those barbs before. On the swords in the equipment crates.

  He was going to be late reporting for duty. Every minute he delayed would make his explanation less convincing, would invite more questions about where he’d disappeared to.

  Nonetheless, long-ingrained habits that had saved his life more than once kicked in, and he spent the time to set up a full set of recognition checks before he started crawling away, the stealth sheet still covering him.

  The recognition check was basic spycraft. He was trained to observe far more than regular folk, but that didn’t give him recognition superpowers. Instead, he covertly captured images wherever he went and stole images of where he couldn’t go. He still did.

  His slate could spot patterns humans couldn’t. That random woman in a crowded sidewalk became more interesting if the slate revealed she always closed to within five paces of that random teenager when he emerged from the morning shuttle, then swiftly disappeared into the crowd. Maybe she was his bodyguard or police handler? Or maybe the boy was paying her to do his college assignments? If the slate had data and images to work on, it could sift out noise and turn coincidences into patterns.

  If his slate found a match, it was far more likely to be with translated alien reference sources than images he’d taken. Though with all the secrecy around the Midnight Sun Free Company, it was more likely still that any information he could use had been withheld from his species. Despite the similarity to the bone swords, he couldn’t even be sure the squids were the missing mercs. It was the most obvious answer, but he’d learned not to assume anything with aliens.

  They could be tourists, paying top credits to get a close-up view of this blood-crazed new race called humans. He thought of the equipment they’d been moving. Maybe they were part of the ship’s maintenance crew?

  A ping from his slate alerted him to a recognition match!

  Trembling with excitement, he brought the slate close and read the report.

  It wasn’t what he expected.

  The slate showed an image he’d taken at the Midnighter home base at Kubar Park. Those bas-relief tentacled monsters carved into the stone archway at the base of the ornamental hillside.

  They were here. In the ship.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 33

  Over a week had passed since he’d briefly held Sun in his arms in the lineup on the Arashi Nova. Despite all the time he’d had to steel himself, when Sun entered the quarters Branco shared with three other Shock Squad troopers, he knew he wasn’t prepared for what was coming.

  But he had to do it anyway.

  “At ease,” she said as Branco and Gjalp jumped out of their racks to come to attention.

  The mercenary world was not like an army from the olden days. “At ease” was a tricky concept you had to learn to interpret in context.

  Soren Gjalp read the situation instantly. “If you’ll excuse me, Major,” he said, “I’ve got to go do that…thing.”

  He withdrew in haste, leaving Sun and Branco to regard each other through hollow eyes, neither willing to speak.

  From the unfussy black hair that framed her finely chiseled features, to the dark pools of her eyes and that stubby nose, she looked perfect to him. Even the scars and burns that decorated her face were perfect. Sun wasn’t a Tri-V doll. She was a woman who knew how to blast her way through life, gun in hand, and the dings she’d picked up along the way spoke of a life hard lived. But no matter how much he wished for it, she’d never sail through her adventures with him at her side. It was a dream that was becoming a nightmare. He had to wake up.

  “Branco,” she said, “we need to have a little talk.”

  Branco discovered his legs were shaking like rubber. Just as well the spin they were borrowing from the Exuberance only gave a fifth of a gee. Collapsing onto the deck wouldn’t be a good look.

  “Oh, hell,” Sun said, her face glowing with a sudden and beautiful smile.

  She launched herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck, her legs around his hips, her momentum pushing him down onto his rack.

  Her lips were thin, with a delicate but perfect cupid’s bow. But when she pressed them against his, they felt broad and lush. She kissed him hungrily, her hand lifting his shirt.

  Branco reached under her shoulders and lifted her off him, extending his arms to hold her as he were flying a playful child through the air.

  Sun’s beautiful face twisted with pain and confusion, her hunger and need unsatisfied. She couldn’t understand what was happening.

  “I scratch your itch between missions,” he said, “but that’s not enough for me anymore. I want our souls to kiss.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t be that person.”

  “I know,” he said softly and set her down onto the deck.

  “I want to,” she whispered, “but…”

  He just wanted her to go away, but he waited as she fought for the words to explain. Words he didn’t want to hear.

  “I’m too broken. Ever since my sister—”

  “No you’re not.” Branco stood and pressed his finger to her lips. “I know your sister’s story. She was a thrill junkie, taking street nanites that amplified the adrenaline kick from taking extreme risks. But one night, she took a bad dose that permanently rewired her brain. She’s addicted to danger. She lives for the thrill of gambling hard and winning anyway. Ever since, you’ve watched over her night and day, talking her out of bad ideas when the thrill addiction takes over. With you by her side, she’s never failed to bring in a contract because, despite her weakness, your sister is still brilliant. But until you find a cure, you can never drop your guard. You can’t risk being alive. Have I misunderstood any of this?”

  She shook her head.

  “You are not broken, Sun Sue. You’re just…constrained by your responsibilities.”

  “Yeah,” she replied bitterly. “Imprisoned by duty. How fucking noble. You’re doing the right thing, Branco. You were a convenient habit – a prop I used too often – and I’m sorry for that. Don’t do anything stupid like going AWOL, because you’re a good trooper. It would be a shame to lose you.”

  He watched her leave, then stared at the door she clanged shut behind her.

  Branco would have stared for hours but, after a few seconds, his heart leaped when the door opened.

  It was only Gjalp, his face red with fury.

  “What the hell did you say to her?” he accused. “The major looks as if…”

  His anger drained away.

  “What?” Branco queried. “She looks as if what?”

  “Look, pal, I’m no mind-doctor, but I’d say her soul’s been sucked out and cast into hellfire before her
eyes. But never mind her, Branco. You look ten times worse.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  Gjalp rubbed at his chin thoughtfully for a moment. “I don’t need to be a shrink to know what you need. Look…I’m not supposed to tell you this, but some of the guys have struck a friendship with Chief Engineer Rough.”

  “You mean Lieutenant Rough? The limping Scorpion? You gotta be kidding.”

  “Yeah, well, Archie Rough’s all right. For a haggis sniffer. Better than all right – turns out he’s a genius at zero-g brewing. That’s where the others are – at Rough’s Brewery Tap in the engineering space on Deck 14 of the Arashi Nova. You see, those Scorpions are confined to their ship, and it seemed neighborly to give them some decent company.”

  “And why am I only hearing about this now?”

  At least Gjalp had the grace to look guilty. “Well, we’ve not exactly been ordered to stay off the Scorpions’ ship, but the sergeant thought maybe it was better if the major didn’t officially know, and you and she were…” He shrugged. “Put it like this, you won’t be bumping into Major Sun over on the Arashi Nova.”

  Branco grabbed his jacket and gave Gjalp a hearty slap on the shoulder. “What are you doing wasting drinking time, Gjalpy? Let’s go!”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 34

  Cludgie Command…

  Two whole days spent squeezing into the hidden recesses of the Arashi Bloody Nova. Cleaning, checking, sterilizing…The bots did most of the work, but some poor soul had to put them in place and monitor every patch of grease and mouse droppings they encountered in case they turned out to be concealed cyber weapons or a bio weapon concealed up a rat’s rectum. Every minor blockage in the plumbing had to be examined and explained. To hide from the scorn of their so-called pals, Vogel had installed Cludgie Command in a tiny store cupboard. It bought them a little respite from the humiliation, but the minimal ventilation meant the compartment was now absolutely reeking.