by Jay Allan
Then, a blast of fire slammed right into the support in front of her, and she stumbled back. It was too late, she realized suddenly. The first vehicle was within point blank range, and the other one was coming up right behind. Even the men on foot were in firing range, and fire ricocheted all around. A chunk of metal landed about five meters behind her, another piece of Pegasus torn off, an unidentified one this time.
Andi didn’t give up. It wasn’t in her. But she knew it was over. There wasn’t enough time, not before those heavy guns managed to damage something vital. It wouldn’t have to be a critical hit. Anything that prevented the ship from lifting off immediately was as good as a death sentence, to her certainly, and probably to all her people as well.
She was about to swing around, use up the last of her ammo—and use it well. If she was going to die, she was going to take as many of her enemies with her as she could. Her body tensed, and she started to lunge around the edge of the support…when a voice blared through the outside speakers. “Andi, get down!”
She reacted instinctively, ducking low behind the strut, just as a searing wave of heat hit her.
It was almost unbearable, and she could feel her skin burning. There was brightness, too, so intense that even after she closed her eyes, the lids glowed orange. For an instant, she had no idea what had happened. But then she opened her eyes again, and she saw the two vehicles, or what was left of them. One was a burning hulk, and the other even less, more a scattered field of twisted wreckage. And the men on foot were just gone.
The lasers.
Of course…Barret fired one of the lasers.
Those weapons were light ones by the standards of space combat, but they were made for just that purpose, for fighting over the vast distances in the depths of space. On a target less than thirty meters away, they were destruction incarnate.
They were also illegal to fire in port. More than illegal. Absolutely, utterly forbidden. Andi didn’t even know what the penalty would be, but it certainly eliminated any chance at all of getting clearance to lift off.
Or to come back…ever.
Pegasus was going to have to make a break for it, and run the gauntlet toward the transit point. Her ship shouldn’t have had a chance to escape from the patrols, but then, of course, Pegasus had a few…unauthorized…modifications.
They did have a chance. Probably.
But they had to go immediately, before the authorities showed up, and she had to decide if she’d open up on Port Royal cops and spaceport security teams.
Andi turned and raced up the ramp, her hand reaching out and slapping on the controls to close the door as she passed by.
Yes, they had a chance…but she didn’t dare to try to put any numbers to it.
* * *
“Free Trader Pegasus, you are ordered to cut all engine thrust immediately and prepare for boarding.” The message was the third one, repeated almost verbatim in the same officious tone.
Andi ignored it, just as she had the other two. She was committed. Pegasus was making a run for it, and she was reasonably confident she could outrun the pursuing patrol ships.
Assuming she could evade any shots if they opened fire.
Any doubts about that ‘if’ were quickly washed away as the energy readings on the scanner shot up, two enormous spikes that could only mean one thing.
The pursuing vessels had fired. And missed.
“Two lasers, Andi…some pretty bad shooting, too.” Barret had been a naval gunner before he’d…retired…and become a Badlands adventurer. Andi knew he was right, but she also knew the navy looked down on the system patrol crews, considering them amateurs. Barret’s disdain was no guarantee there wasn’t someone on one of those ships who could actually shoot.
For that matter, neither was a pair of misses. Pegasus had some devilish evasion routines, courtesy of Andi’s prior collaboration with Sylene Merrick, and a difficulty to score an initial hit didn’t mean the gunners were incompetent. Andi fancied Pegasus’s routines could evade naval gunners as well, at least for a while. That wasn’t a guess she wanted to risk testing, though.
It was a long way to the transit point, and even with Pegasus redlining its reactor, it would be at least ten minutes before her ship pulled away and out of firing range.
She knew the tactically correct thing to do. Barret was a crack shot, and she doubted the patrol crews were prepared for the armament Pegasus actually mounted. Her guns were nothing like the ones listed on her manifests—or transmitted by her beacon, more of Durango’s handiwork.
But she wasn’t ready to open fire on Confederation ships.
She knew she’d taken the step into full blown outlawry, but that didn’t mean she was going to gun down Confederation spacers.
“Andi, I can take out those…”
“No, Barret. We’re not firing on them.”
A pause. “I might be able to disable them without causing critical damage.”
“Can you guarantee no casualties?” Andi already knew the answer. The question was as much a repeated answer to her gunner, as a request for an answer.
“No, of course not, but…” Barret’s voice dropped off. Andi knew his request had been an instinctive thing, and not something he’d really considered. She couldn’t imagine her ex-navy gunner blowing up legitimate system patrol craft. Odds were, at least one of those ships had a navy veteran or two onboard.
I might be an outlaw, but I’m no traitor…
“Let’s push the engine output.” She had to do something. Even those clowns at the controls behind her would hit if she gave them ten minutes with no return fire.
“We’re already at one-ten.”
“Then go to one-twenty…and get down to engineering. With our new engineer still sleeping it off, you’re what we’ve got. Keep that reactor from Scragging, whatever it takes. We’re looking at maybe fifty minutes to transit, and that’s a long time this deep in the red zone.”
“Andi, there’s no way I…” He stopped suddenly. “Okay, Andi…I’ll manage. Somehow.” The gunner, now wearing his hat as a makeshift engineer, leapt up and raced off the bridge, even as Andi felt the added acceleration kicking in. Pegasus’s engine output was well beyond the levels her dampeners could handle, and Andi guessed everyone onboard was feeling an effective 2g, maybe 2.5g.
Barret wobbled a little on his feet as the force hit him, but his years of naval training served him well. He righted himself and slipped through the door and down the ladder to the lower level.
“They’re falling behind, Andi.” Anna Fasarus struggled to her feet, moving from the third station to the newly vacated second as she reported.
“They’re still in range, though.” Andi’s hands were gripped around the controls, jerking around almost randomly, throwing some extra push into Pegasus’s evasive maneuvers. She didn’t like running, she was a fighter by nature, but there was no other choice, not just then.
Not unless she wanted to start gunning down Confederation spacers…and if she did that, she would not only despise herself, she would probably provoke the patrol into following Pegasus into the Badlands.
Maybe the navy, too. The military didn’t particularly respect the patrol crews, but she doubted they’d react well to someone who killed them.
So, running is all you can do…
Her eyes moved toward the main scanner. There were three naval ships in position around the base orbiting Dannith’s largest moon. She’d been worried since she’d broken out of orbit, afraid she’d see the energy blooms indicating those ships were preparing to pursue. The vessels were small by naval standards, but they were vastly larger and more powerful than Pegasus…and their weapons outranged those of the patrol vessels by at least twenty thousand kilometers. She’d never outrun the navy ships, nor would she escape from their fire.
But they were still just sitting there. Clearly, an outlaw making a break for it was less than a top priority. She was surprised at first, but then she decided she shouldn’t be. The navy
patrolled the Badlands frontier, and while they weren’t above occasionally boarding prospector ships and arresting their crews, they didn’t particularly care to take orders from Dannith’s civil authorities…and that fact gave Andi a chance at the margin she needed.
It was a touch of arrogance that just might save her life. All her people’s lives.
She looked back at the display. Forty-one minutes to the point. And maybe eight until Pegasus pushed past the patrol ships’ range.
She leaned back, her hands still hard on the controls.
It was time to see just how long eight minutes could be.
Chapter Eight
Free Trader Pegasus
Approaching Transit Point Frontier-1
Ventica System
Year 302 AC
Andi’s eyes were burning, the long trail of an escaped tear making its way slowly down her face. She wasn’t crying—it would take more than a few system patrol boats to bring her to that particular pass—but the smoke in the air was acidic, and with her hands tight on the controls, she couldn’t wipe it away.
It had seemed almost like a joke, a nasty prank the universe had decided to play on her. Pegasus had almost been out of range. She’d dared to hope her ship was out of range. Then, a shot, the last one, taken at the very edge of long range, scored a hit. For a terrible instant, she thought her people had been caught, that Pegasus had been crippled, and that they’d end up in a Dannith prison for the next twenty years. But Barret had quickly stripped those fears away. The shot had taken out a cooling unit, and released a burst of caustic, but not especially dangerous, coolant into the ventilation system. But that was all.
The backups had come online immediately, and Pegasus hadn’t lost any noticeable power or acceleration. In fact, just about the only real effects were red and swollen eyes across the ship.
“Everybody, stay strapped in. The life support system is fully operational, and it should have the air cleared in a minute or two. We should be out of reach of those patrol ships, and it doesn’t look like we’re notorious enough for the naval units to respond.” Thank you for that. “We’re heading right into the transit point, and we’re going to keep blasting the engines at full the whole way. So, sit tight, and in a few minutes, we’ll be back out there. Back in the Badlands.”
Andi sighed softly. She’d addressed the immediate situation, but she hadn’t even touched upon the unspoken shadow hanging over them all. A blood feud with a local gangster had been bad enough, a dangerous situation certainly, if the kind of thing they’d dealt with before. She suspected all her people figured she’d eventually find a way to get to Carmichael and kill the fool…which was exactly what she’d planned to do.
But shooting up the landing bay and making a break for it from the system patrol boats was something else entirely. She’d bribed her way out of minor problems with the law before, but this time it looked very much like she’d pulled herself, and all her people with her, into a hole too deep to dig out of. They were full blown outlaws, now, wanted criminals. She’d never thought of herself quite that way before, not really. But if Pegasus returned to Dannith, the best she could hope for was immediate arrest and trial…and conviction meant jail, not to mention the authorities seizing her ship.
And she couldn’t come up with any scenario that didn’t end in conviction. After all, her people had opened up with the ship’s lasers in the middle of the spaceport.
She just might slip back to Samis undetected to collect the reward if her people completed the mission. Assuming Durango doesn’t just turn us over to the authorities and avoid the need to pay for whatever swag we’re bringing back.
I’ll think about that later. We’ve got to make it back before that’s a problem, and if I don’t stay focused on this mission, we’ll solve our legal problems by getting captured now…or wasted in some imperial ruin.
She stared at the display, at the strange image of the transit point, sort of a deep black void, but something else as well, something no one had ever been able to adequately describe. Pegasus was close just then, close enough for visual contact. And then, in an instant, the ship was inside.
The experience of a transit was something else no one had ever managed to express to anyone else, especially to someone who’d never experienced it. A jump did take time, that had been more or less proven through experimentation, and the duration of a transit varied with the distance traversed, from less than a second, to the highest recorded duration of 11.23 seconds. But the apparent time to a traveler varied enormously, even in multiple trips through the same point. Andi had jumped out of Dannith and into the Badlands more than a dozen times, and no two had seemed the same, at least not in the faded and sporadic memories one retained of such trips.
The transit felt like a long one to Andi, and she wondered if her own stress and tension affected her interpretation. She tried to think about it, to look back at other transits to create some kind of correlation. But in-depth thought was all but impossible during a jump, and her mind simply wandered uncontrollably. Images of the Gut, of the Marine, of her mother…of friends and comrades, both with her and lost, swirled around in a seemingly random witch’s brew of memories.
And then, suddenly, she was back to normal. More or less…it took a few seconds to truly adapt to the return to normal space.
Pegasus had crossed the border. They were back out in the Badlands.
* * *
“Shut the hell up, and listen to me. You have no idea how much trouble we went to—how much we still have to deal with—just to get you, and to pull your ass out of the mess you were in. I don’t care who broke your heart, or how life disillusioned you, or what else drove you to the bottle and to the wretched waste of skill and talent you’ve obviously become, but I can tell you one thing. That’s over now.”
Andi glowered at the wretched form in front of her, the disheveled—and stinking—man she’d saved from almost certain death. The one she’d gone back to Dannith, with exceedingly troublesome complications, to find. She tended to believe Durango—he’d never lied to her yet, not that she’d caught, at least. But she found it hard to believe the pile of human debris sitting in front of her was a man who could fill in for Yarra.
Righter looked up at her, his expression half anger and half destitution. “I didn’t ask you to come find me, and I damned sure didn’t ask to be loaded on this scow and dragged out…wherever the hell we are. So, why don’t you just take me back to Dannith right now…and in the meantime, somebody give me a damned drink!”
Andi grabbed him hard and pulled him from the chair, throwing him to the deck. She hauled off and gave him a hard kick to the ribs, and she stared down as he whimpered in pain. “It’s time for you to understand your new reality. You’re in the Badlands now, Righter. There’s no law here, no cops, no security…assuming any of those would give a shit about a piece of garbage like you in the first place. I am the law here. If I order my people to throw your stinking carcass out the airlock, they’ll do it.” Gregor was standing off to the side nodding, looking very much like that command was his greatest fantasy just then. “And no one will ever find your frozen corpse, much less pin it on us. So, take all that into consideration before you speak again.” Her expression practically dared him to argue with her.
Righter looked utterly miserable, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Welcome to Pegasus, Righter. You’re going to live in the cargo hold for now, where a reeking pile of slime like you belongs, sleeping on the metal deck until you dry the hell out. And, if you find something, some coolant or engine lubricant—or anything else you decide might be some kind of intoxicant—I’m going to beat the hell out of you for the trouble you cause. There may not be many things you think are worse than not having your alcohol right now, but you can count on this. I am one of those things.”
She paused and stared into his eyes with a look that said she’d just as soon kill him as make the kind of effort she’d just described. Then she said, “And wh
en—if—you begin to resemble a human, and to smell like one too, we’ll start treating you like one. Pegasus isn’t the worst ship to serve on, Lex. When you’ve got a better grip on yourself, ask some of the crew. When we get back from this voyage, we’ll let you off the ship and you can go back to your miserable excuse for an existence, freed for the moment from the debts that had you this close…” She held her fingers a centimeter apart. “…from ending up face down in a District alley somewhere. That one is on me, call it payment for services you will render. But if you decide you want to stay and try to live like a human again, well, we can discuss that, too.”
She turned toward Gregor. “Take him to the hold and lock him up…and make sure there’s nothing there he can drink.”
* * *
“I need you to deliver this message to Brewer…immediately.” Carmichael sat behind an enormous desk, staring coldly at the pair of his men standing there, nervously. He knew why they were edgy. Andromeda Lafarge. She was nothing but the captain of a prospector ship, and yet somehow, she and her people had managed to kill more than twenty of his men in two encounters, and they’d put as many more in the hospital. It was infuriating, and as pompous as the gangster was prone to be, he had to acknowledge, the crew of the Pegasus had badly damaged his organization. He could recruit more muscle, of course. He had already begun that effort. But he’d have to be careful for some time. His rivals, even his allies, were men and women unlikely to allow opportunity to slip past them…and his weakness was their opening. And it was only exacerbated by the humiliation of being bested by Andi Lafarge and her ragtag crew of pirates.
“Yes, Boss.” One of the men leaned forward and took the data chip. “We’ll see to it immediately.” The two thugs turned and raced out of the room, leaving Carmichael alone. He took a deep breath and considered his situation. He’d dealt with Brewer before, and the Sector Nine operative had always done what he’d promised. Carmichael needed help, and Brewer could provide that. Not all the gangsters in the District knew the agent’s true identity, of course. Very few did. But they all knew he was a powerful man, one with considerable force at his beck and call. Not many would want to cross him by moving against Carmichael, at least as long as Brewer extended his protection to his sometime ally.