by Mina Carter
“Hell, girl, you sure like to make a guy work for it,” he grumbled as he wandered down the balcony. It started to narrow down as the ship curved around. Typical, her stuff would be right in the corner, wouldn’t it?
He moved from the pool of light cast by the last bulb and waited for the next light to snap on. It didn’t, leaving him walking into semidarkness.
“Ack.” The bulb was out. Johnny shook his head, flicked his ocular implant over to night vision and waited for it to adapt. In the second between triggering the change and being able to see, it happened.
There were few things in the universe that bothered Johnny. Assholes picking on those smaller or weaker than themselves… Politicians that spewed nothing but lies… That idiot actor on Love Colony, with the nasal whine and the slick chat up lines that women seemed to love.
And spiders.
The big Aries-class cyborg, who’d killed more men than he’d had hot dinners and who could rig a base to blow with half an ounce of plastic explosive, a roll of duct tape and a paper clip, was scared of spiders. No, make that terrified of spiders. So much so that the first brush of the soft, clinging cotton-candy-like feeling of a web against the bare skin of his arm and shoulder turned him into a ninja-master.
“UgghHHH-UH! Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!”
Curses spewed from his lips as he flailed his arms wildly, ducking and backing up across the balcony as all his muscles went into contortions to escape the feeling of the web against his skin. Finally he stopped, ass against the railing and the sheer drop of the hold looming behind him, brushing at his shoulder and arm as he looked up into the darkness with hatred. His night sight easily picked out the small bodies within the webs. Space spiders. Little bastards that infected ships and fed on fuck knew what.
A shudder hit him again as he got his heart rate under control, routing an order through his cybernetic implants to control the wild beating to something more manageable.
“Fuck! Ugh. Fucking spiders! Stay where you are, you little bastards,” he muttered as he moved forward again, able to move between the webs now that he could see them, his skin crawling every step of the way. He needed to tell Milly about the spiders…then realized he couldn’t. A bot wouldn’t even register their presence, simply walking through the webs and letting them drape all over it. Bots weren’t scared of spiders.
Only badass scary cyborgs called Johnny were.
6
“Ughhhhh.”
Milly stretched leisurely, arms and legs spread-eagled on the bed in an inelegant display and her vocal contribution the height of eloquence. With the Aries off to fetch various feminine fripperies from her locker down in the hold, she dropped her guard, no longer concerned about what he thought of her as she yawned, stretching her jaw wide and cricking her neck. All the things Jason had hated and made fun of. Repeatedly. Wanker. She was well rid of him and his pathetic attempts at lovemaking.
Body buzzing pleasantly, with some sore spots in some specific x-rated places, she rolled to her feet and padded to the shower alcove. Memories swirled through her head as she stepped into the small cubicle. Of the Aries’ big body crowded in here with her, taking her hard and fast against the wall and the seriously steamy session on her bed afterward. One thing was to be said for a bot as a lover…the stamina was incredible.
Pity she couldn’t keep him. She could reprogram him to her exact likes and dislikes, explore all those fantasies Jason had thought too kinky. Which amounted to pretty much everything apart from her sucking him off, then him sticking his dick in her and thrusting a couple of times before he came with a groan. Wrinkling her nose, she let the hot water cascade over her. His ineptitude and sheer lack of care about her needs was the reason she had such an extensive collection of sex toys in her bedside cabinet, not to mention the one she’d sent down to the hold to collect some of her stuff from her locker.
She showered quickly, washing and rinsing suds out of her hair with practiced economy. Even though they were docked at a station, water was a precious commodity, and the last year she’d spent in space had taught her to conserve it as much as possible. Bet Jason never had to worry about saving water, she glowered to herself. Last she heard, fleet ships didn’t ration their officers, even asshole sons of admirals who wouldn’t know proper service if it bit them in the ass.
Amusement filled her as she stepped from the shower. Pity she couldn’t send her bot in to give him the fright of his life. The Aries made a real convincing cyborg…so much so, she’d have been convinced herself if she didn’t know what he was. She dried herself on a large towel that still bore his scent as she padded across the room and opened the closet to grab some new clothes. Like that, he had a scent…sweat glands, the whole nine hundred microns.
Her heart hit the deck again. Just the cost of his synth-skin alone must be astronomical. She’d probably couldn’t have afforded to hire him without Cyn offering him on a testing basis, let alone buy him.
Bloody stupid woman, already half in love with a bot. How pathetic was that? She hauled her clothes on roughly, annoyed with herself. The soft ping-ping-ping of the ships internal alarm brought her head up and a frown creased her brow.
“Computer, report status?” She queried as she snapped her pants shut and walked into her onesie ship boots. She hated socks with a passion, almost as much as she hated her ex-husband.
“Breach on level four,” the soft voice of the computer replied as she barreled from the room, easily tracking her progress out of her room and through the corridors toward the bridge. “Internal sensor net down in sections five through nine, unable to gather data on the breach.”
“Fuck!”
She hit the lift at light speed, punching in the code that would take her up to the bridge. A breach could mean only one thing. Hijack. They were after her cargo. Out on the space lanes, all ships were prepared for the possibility, especially in the current tough economic climate, but to hijack while the ship was still in dock? That was ballsy.
“Unable to comply, please restate command.”
“Contact station security, tell them we have a problem.” She jiggled, jumping from foot to foot as she waited for the lift to ascend. Crap, she should have installed the latest model speed lifts in this thing months ago. The minute it took to reach the command deck was feeling like a lifetime.
“Unable to comply. No link to station.”
“Fuck it!”
Milly bit her lip as she shoved a hand through her hair in frustration. They were jamming the damn signal.
“Unable to comply. Please restat—”
Several things happened at once. The computer cut off mid-sentence as the lift ground to a halt, leaving her looking at a blank wall rather than the unopened doors of the bridge she was expecting. A distinctive rumble shuddered up through the deck plates, the low sound shivering through her body and settling into a warm knot at the base of her skull as the Starflame’s subspace engines were started up.
“No, you bastards!”
Frustration and anger exploded through her as she flew to the wall, hammering on it with her fists. Her only reward was a dull metallic clang and sharp pain shooting up her arms. She ignored it as the sound swelled and grew. Even without being on the bridge, she knew what was happening, could feel it as the docking clamps disengaged. A little drop, the shunt sideways as the ship scooted past the restraining utilities arm as it retracted back to the station, felt the swell in power as whoever was at the helm opened her up to take her out into deep space.
“Shitshitshitshit!”
What did she do now? Milly looked about her in the close confines of the lift and had to bite back a chuckle of bitter amusement. Of all the places to get caught during a hijack, she had to get caught in the damn lift. It was worse than getting caught in the head, although both scenarios had her metaphorical pants around her ankles. At least in the head she had options. She could have escaped through the ventilation shafts or fashioned a weapon from the toilet seat and the paper-dispenser,
made napalm from the soap dispenser or something. Anything.
In the lift she was shit out of luck. The smooth walls were oval in shape, the only gap where the doors should be, the blank metal there mocking her. And because it was an antigravity lift, there wasn’t even a roof or cable to the thing she could crawl on and climb up. She was literally stuck, hanging around until whoever had control on the bridge decided what to do with her.
“If I get out of this, I’m installing bloody stairs,” she muttered, plastering herself against the side of the lift and trying to see how far up the door to the bridge was. The half-assed notion that she could somehow use the small lip of the lift wall to balance on, and open a pressurized door by hand died a swift death. She could just see the bottom edge of the door in the darkness beyond the floating light above her but she’d need to be ten foot rather than five foot nothing to reach it.
“Bollocks.”
“What the fuck?”
The first notion Johnny had that there was something wrong was when the lights flickered in the cargo hold and the ship started to move. Swearing, he dropped the pretty little soaps and the pink loofah—who the hell kept a pink loofah in their locker?—Milly had sent him down to fetch in favor of grabbing hold of the guardrail around the balcony.
Eyes widening he looked around and up, more feeling through his feet and the hand in contact with the ship than seeing. The dull grind and inertial movement said they were moving, but why? From the conversations he’d overheard between Milly and her crew, the ship wasn’t due out until Tuesday and he couldn’t see the station asking her to move a leviathan like this to another berth. The fuel cost alone would negate any saving they might make having this berth earlier. Nor could he see her as the kind of person to cut and run with what she thought was an expensive, experimental android.
Instantly the only other option came to mind. Hijackers. Cargo ships like the Starflame were always at risk because of the high value and the sheer amount of cargo they could carry, but it was a bold team that jacked a ship while it was in station.
“Just my fucking luck,” he grumbled as he beat feet across the balcony and headed back into the corridors. The first time he’d gotten some action in months, finally getting his elusive mystery lady into bed and freaking hijackers turn up to ruin all his damn fun. Well, he’d see about that. All he needed was to find a computer console…there had to be one somewhere along here.
There. His gaze fell on one of the nameplates on the doors along the corridor. Cargo Masters office. Perfect. The ship’s CM would need mainframe access to load and unload, controlling the host of mechanical loaders remotely. The lock on the door was a simple one that would take him mere minutes to crack, but he didn’t have minutes. Instinct and the feeling in his gut told him that something bad was going down, and if he’d learnt one thing during his long and brutal career as a combat cyborg, it was to trust the feeling in his gut. It had saved him too many times for him to do anything else.
Two hard blows hammered into the lock in quick succession, the pain as his skin was damaged relegated to irrelevant as the smashed box dangled by its wires from the wall and the door slid open. He was through it like a shot, shaking the cut hand absently as he rounded on the quartermaster’s desk. It was the work of a second to boot the console up, the blue glare washing over his features in the darkness of the room and casting his own reflection at him from the glass over the ship schematic on the wall opposite.
Ignoring the user interface currently displaying on the screen, Johnny grabbed the keyboard and hauled it toward him. His fingers were lightning fast as he typed in combination after combination from his long-term memory storage.
“Come on, come on. You can’t be that difficult to crack…you’re only a civvie transport,” he muttered as he searched for the combination that would allow him access to the ships internal sensors, at least then he’d be able to see what was going on. But the system stubbornly refused to allow him access, blinking error codes at him on the screen in a smug way.
Okay, he really was losing it if he thought a comp was being smug. An ordinary comp, not an up-its-own-ass AI either. AIs were a bastard to deal with and he hated them with a passion, but a normal comp shouldn’t be beyond his capabilities as long as he targeted specific systems. If he were a Virgo class like Cyn or even a Cancer class with their massive onboard capabilities, he could have wrestled the flame’s computer into submission easily, but he wasn’t, he was an Aries, which meant he was way better at blowing shit up than coercing a reluctant mainframe to cooperate. But without Cyn here or any way to contact her since the ship had no access to the station comms network, he was going to have to do it himself.
“You fucking awkward piece of shit,” he hissed after his last attempt failed. Sweat rolled down the hollow of his spine as his onboard ticked away the seconds. His sense of dread increased. “Believe me, if anything happens to Milly, I’m gonna find your core and introduce you to some ZX-fourteen. Let’s see how you cooperate with all your memory crystals fried, shall we, hmmm?”
As if it could hear his threats, the last combination worked and the screen cleared to allow him access to the sensor system. The code scrolling over the screen would have been incomprehensible to any human looking at the screen, but the part of Johnny’s brain that wasn’t human easily deciphered the gobbledygook.
Quickly he maneuvered around the system, triggering several displays of various corridors until he found movement on one of the sensors. An image of the bridge displayed before him, two men he’d never seen before moving across the camera’s field of vision. A frown creased his brow as he noted their appearance. Dock loader’s uniforms, not particularly good ones either. Even he could see that the color was slightly off compared to the station ones, the blue a shade too dark.
His breath caught as one of them disappeared out of frame for a second, then returned, dragging a smaller figure with him by the scruff of the neck. As he approached the other one, he shoved his captive forward so she sprawled over the deck. She rolled and came back to her feet with her fists up, but Johnny could already see the darkening bruise over one side of her face where she’d been hit.
His heart lurched, all but stopped for a second before it kicked up a notch, adrenaline and murderous rage flooding his body. The screech of metal drew his attention away from the screen and he looked down at his hands. Blood welled across the ruined desk, his fingers wrapped around the sheet metal, crumpling it as though it were paper. His gaze flicked back up to the screen in time to see one of the men backhand Milly again.
He stood. They were going to pay.
In blood.
She was going to die.
The instant the lift started to move again, adrenaline poured through Milly’s system. Someone had control of the lift from the bridge, the same someone who was piloting her ship out of dock and into space. Whichever way she cut a situation like this, one thing was for sure, it wasn’t going to end up well for her. She didn’t know many hijackers who looked after the crews of the ships they took or put them off at the nearest planet, moon or asteroid with thanks and a nice little survival basket. No, most hijackers just herded them into an airlock and vented it to space. No crew, no bodies to stink the place up, no problem.
“Shitshitshitshit.”
The muttered refrain rolled around the small enclosure as she looked around in the vain hope she might have missed something she could use as a weapon the fifty other times she’d scanned it. The blank walls and empty floor mocked her. She was screwed, six ways to Sunday and back again.
The lift pulled level with the doors. Her heart pounded, fit to burst from her chest as she eyed them with something near panic. Her only hope was to burst through them as soon as they opened and take whoever was on the other side by surprise, a course of action that would have one of three possible outcomes. She would manage to escape, slipping past whoever was there to the bridge proper and beyond into the corridors of the command level…she could wrest some k
ind of weapon from them—although, knowing her luck, they’d be carrying nothing more dangerous than a breakfast pastry and the morning news-flexi…more likely was that she’d be caught, marched down to the airlock and introduced to cold, hard space.
She gathered herself, crouched low with her legs bunched under her. Her body ached, buzzing with the energy pouring through her as she watched the doors like a Quolaxian hawk.
They opened. With a wordless bellow, she launched herself through them.
“Frigging ‘ell!”
She collided with the person on the other side. Armed and male, he was taller than she was by at least a foot. Face grim with determination, she wrapped her hands around the pulse shotgun he carried and tried to twist it from his hands.
“What the f— Oh no, you don’t, you little bitch,” he muttered, fighting her for possession of the weapon. The struggle was short lived, her strength no match for his. With a grunt, he jerked the gun from her grasp and lashed out.
The butt of the gun crashed into her cheek. Pain flared across her face as her head was slammed back and stars to rival the most beautiful space scene exploded across her vision. The coppery, metallic tang of blood filled her mouth as hard hands grabbed her. Even though she couldn’t see properly, her attackers face hidden behind starburst nebulas in green and purple, she fought like a wildcat. Kicking and screaming she lashed out with her nails and fists and tried everything she had to get loose.
“Oh, you’re a wild little thing, aren’t you? Fucking well hold still.”
“For god’s sake, Welch. Would you keep it down over there? Some of us are trying to friggin’ work here.”
A new voice broke through the sounds of the scuffle. Milly managed to twist a little in her attacker’s hold. Another guy, dressed like this one in a loader’s coverall, sat in the pilot’s chair, his pale gaze unwavering on the screen in front of him as he piloted the Starflame out of station dock.