“Good, then you’re leading away team beta.”
Horus saluted. “I consider it a great honor.”
Bayne clapped him on the shoulder. “Go get some sleep. I’ll see that you’re awake before liftoff.”
Horus nodded then staggered back to the Blue.
Bayne felt Delphyne’s eyes on him. He could hear the unspoken criticism. “He’ll be fine.”
“I didn’t say anything.” The pause was filled with daggers. “If I was to say something, it would be along the lines of not wanting a drunk to lead my away team and get me killed while I’m engaging in galactic piracy. If I were to say anything, that is. Which I didn’t.”
“I never actually said you were coming.”
Delphyne straightened like her spine had suddenly turned to steel. She stood a breath away from Bayne. “Do you really want to tell me that I just organized all the gear for away teams of which I am not a part?” Her breath was hot like fire. “Like I’m packing clothes for your sleepover?”
Bayne relented, raising his hands in surrender. “You’re coming. Bad joke.”
She tightened her jaw and pursed her lips, not seeming ready to let it go. Then her faced relaxed and she walked away. “I’m going to pour some coffee into that oaf. I’m not dying because he passes out on the job.”
The cargo bay of the Rabid Dog still smelled like death even after the crew cleaned it. Some smells never went away once they settled in.
The assembled crew, thirteen in all including Bayne, stood crammed in the tight space. The bay had been emptied of everything except what each member of the away team would need to complete the mission. They needed as much space as possible in expectation of the haul.
The bridge crew stood apart from the away teams. Three sailors only for such a small ship. Graeme, who would serve as communications officer, stared at his hands, watching his fingers crawl over each other like worms in a pile. Tenzo served aboard the Blue, though he was relatively inexperienced. He would be gunner. Wyrmwood was Parallax’s man, and the most experienced of the bunch. He served on the bridge crew of the Black Hole, which elicited a sense of awe from the others. He was the pilot.
Bayne felt nothing but resentment toward him. He was there to watch Bayne and report back, even though, according to Parallax, Wyrmwood was there only to see to the success of the mission.
The rest stood like a group of kids waiting to be picked for the team.
Graeme activated the monitor on the wall at the front of the cargo bay and displayed the prep report.
“A caravan of Byers haulers will be passing through here.” Bayne pointed to the map. “The Orlan Strait. A stretch of black between two dense asteroid fields. It’s a little-used course on account of the frequency of death that comes to those that try to sail it.”
“Sounds lovely.” The crowd parted to show Horus leaning against the back wall. His eyes were bloodshot and half-closed. His voice was little more than a mumble.
Bayne’s cheeks grew hot under Delphyne’s ‘I told you so’ glare.
“The caravan will be heavily guarded,” Bayne said. “Intel says two destroyers. But that just proves the load they’re protecting is worth taking. Three haulers, each one filled with ore coming out of the four mining outposts in the sector, en route to the Byers processing plant. We need to disable the defending ships, unload the haulers, and hightail it back here. Once we cross the planetary defense line, we’re clear.”
Horus belched and offered a thumbs up.
Delphyne sneered at him. “A Byers destroyer has enough firepower to atomize this rusty pile of scrap. How are we supposed to disable that and two schooners?”
Bayne gestured to Wyrmwood. “He assures me that there is an uncharted, and very narrow, path cut through the asteroid field. Using that, we’ll catch the caravan off guard. Our goal is to disable the defending ships. We don’t need to destroy them.”
Delphyne raised her hand to interject again. “And what about—”
Bayne cut her off. “I know we can’t fit three haulers’ worth of ore in this cargo bay. We’ll load what fits, then hitch the rest and tow it back.” Skepticism darkened his eyes as he looked at Wyrmwood. “Assuming you can pilot this thing like you say.”
Wyrmwood nodded.
Bayne appreciated the brevity. “Then everyone to your stations. We lift off in ten.”
The Orlan Strait was a nightmare for a clunker like the Rabid Dog. It should have been, at least. It lacked in maneuverability and grace. But Wyrmwood proved an effective pilot. Bayne hid how truly impressed he was. Heaping praise on Parallax’s men would devastate the already tenuous morale of his own crew.
He couldn’t help but think on how this entire mission was one big test. Every aspect of it seemed designed to pull him in different directions. The presence of Wyrmwood. The crumbling ship. The difficulty. The high probability of failure.
Bayne questioned how much more difficult Parallax made this mission than it needed to be. He could have provided a more suitable ship. He had a fleet of them. Parallax would be sitting in his penthouse, watching to see if Bayne could succeed and return without his crew having turned their backs on him.
The secret passage through the asteroid field was genius. They must have spent months creating it, meticulously charting the path and clearing only as many rocks as needed so the passage remained unnoticed.
The prep team returned to the ship, entering the airlock and waiting for decompression. Delphyne led them into the cargo to brief Bayne. Over her shoulder, Bayne noticed the smallest of the crew, Hepzah, pacing circles.
Hep removed his helmet. The youth of his face was a jarring contrast to the wear of his suit and the situation he was in—the things he’d just done. Though, if Bayne looked at him for more than a few seconds, he realized he’d done things much more concerning at that age. There was something about Hep that made him seem younger, more naïve than he was. The boy was as calculating as any experienced sailor, though. More so, maybe.
“Everything’s set,” Delphyne said.
“Good,” Bayne said. “Get with your away teams and be ready to move.”
Hep kept his eyes to the floor as he walked past Bayne.
The tension between the two was not so much based on anger but a general uneasiness. They were unsure how to be around each other. Hep had betrayed him. He’d rectified the mistake, and Bayne forgave him, but Bayne questioned whether Hep still believed it was a mistake.
Hep pivoted his body to avoid bumping shoulders with Wilco as the latter entered the cargo bay. They didn’t look at each other.
“Graeme’s got a ping on the caravan,” Wilco said, excitement in his voice. “Twenty klicks out.”
Bayne nodded. He cleared his head of clutter. “Ready stations,” he said over the ship’s general comm.
The Byers Clan caravan moved slowly and carefully through the open corridor sandwiched between two asteroid fields. It was a smart move, if you subtracted the reputation the Strait had garnered over the past few months. This would be the third caravan Parallax hit on this route. One would assume that would be enough for the clan to close the route in favor or another, but the success rate for their shipments on this route was still among its highest.
Cost-benefit analysis was king.
The potential loss of a few ships, two dozen sailors, and a haul of ore was nothing compared to the losses that could come from abandoning the route for a more open, yet still vulnerable one. It was predictable on the Byers’ part, and there was nothing more dangerous than predictability.
“First ship is entering the kill zone,” Graeme said through the personal comm channel.
“Hold for my mark,” Bayne ordered. His voice sounded dull in his helmet, lifeless. He climbed around the front of the rock he clung to for a full view of the caravan coming toward him.
The Byers logo was plastered on the bow of the lead ship. A grossly conspicuous detail for such a hidden path. The power brokers of the Byers Clan were strategic o
n a grand scale, but ignorant when it came to the minutia.
“The last ship has entered the kill zone,” Graeme said.
Bayne gripped rock. He looked to the members of his away team. They returned a thumbs-up or nodded. “Move.”
The thruster packs attached to the rock roared to life, pushing it forward into the path of the oncoming caravan. Hep was light on the trigger, sure not to give the thrusters too much juice for fear of pushing them past their target. He activated the thrusters on the opposite side of the rock, slowing it to a stop in the middle of the path.
“Locked down,” Bayne said.
Horus answered back, “Locked down.”
“Engage,” Bayne said.
The blast from the Rabid Dog’s bow guns preceded the appearance of the ship. Tenzo broadsided the lead ship, a destroyer, a shot meant to distract it from the approaching away team.
At the flash of light from the Rabid Dog, Bayne and his team activated their boot thrusters and shot like rockets toward the ship. Bayne and his team ducked down below the bow of the lead ship, hoping to avoid the pilot’s line of sight. Once under the ship, the team split in two and came up on either side of it.
Bayne and Hep took starboard. Crane, Crowe, and Shamway took port. The three moved as a unit wherever they went. As Navy sailors, they had come up through the academy together, were assigned to the same ship, and served in the same department aboard the Royal Blue. Theirs was an informal unit. As members of Bayne’s renegade crew, they made it known that their team was to be formalized. They moved together or not at all.
Crane and Crowe could have been brother and sister. For a long time, Bayne thought they were. Both had pale skin and dark hair. Even the same chocolate eyes. But they assured him, and everyone, that they were of no relation. Shamway had deep brown skin. His head was shaved bald to reveal an elaborate gold tattoo on his scalp. All three were lithe and nimble.
Which suited Bayne fine. They were among the most effective sailors under his command, and among the few who had become more useful since defecting from the Navy.
Hep placed a breach charge on the hull then he and Bayne climbed topside. Once the charge detonated, they entered the ship. Crane, Crow, and Shamway did the same on the port side at the same time, catching the three Byers Clan sailors in a pincer attack. Hep and Shamway slapped force patches over the breaches to keep the ship from depressurizing while the others held the Byers Clan sailors at gunpoint.
“No need to die,” Bayne said to them. “Allow my colleagues here to tie you up and toss you in a locker, and you’ll come out of this just fine.”
With little resistance, the sailors dropped their blasters. Crane and Crowe secured their hands with zip ties then escorted them to the head, where they would be spending the remainder of their flight.
Hep and Bayne secured the pilot, who also offered little resistance. Hep deactivated the ship’s thrusters.
“Lead ship secure,” Bayne said. The silence that followed felt infinite, though it was no longer than a few seconds. “Away Team B, do you copy?”
“Copy,” Delphyne said. Her voice sounded shaky.
“Is the rear ship secure?”
Another silence followed by another shaky word. “Yes.”
Bayne’s heart resumed beating. “Commence with next phase.”
Shamway stayed aboard the lead ship to guard the Byers sailors. The rest made their way to the first hauler. These caravans were at once exercises in efficiency and stupidity. Bookending the caravan with destroyers made sense strategically because they were bulky and powerful. They provided cover to the haulers and shielded them from any rock that floated into the strait. But they were economical because they only required a small crew, which meant fewer hands to pay.
The haulers had a slightly larger crew, but only the pilot was specialized. The rest were labor to load and unload the ship. No one on the haulers was armed, so, once the destroyers were subdued, the haulers were easy picking.
Bayne, Hep, Crane, and Crowe took the first hauler with no fuss. The crew was already on their knees in surrender when they breached. Crane stayed to guard the ship while the others moved back to the trailer.
Horus’s team moved up from the rear, doing the same thing, until the teams met at the second hauler, in the middle of the caravan.
Bayne knew something was wrong as soon as he saw them. Horus, Delphyne, and Wilco were covered in red spatter. The other two members of their team, Cesar and Tink, were guarding the Byers crew on the other ships. But Bayne didn’t address it. He couldn’t without disrupting the mission.
“Start consolidating the trailers into this middle one,” Bayne said. “Load what you can into the Dog’s cargo bay. What doesn’t fit, we leave behind.” He locked eyes with Delphyne. They were wide, windows into her adrenaline-flooded body. “Get it done.”
They moved like parts of a machine. They each knew their parts and did them without speaking. Within minutes, the middle trailer and the Dog’s cargo bay were packed. Maneuvering the ships was like a puzzle, pushing one forward, inserting the Rabid Dog, attaching the trailer, pulling it out, shifting the remaining ships so Wyrmwood could turn around. In the end, the trailer was hooked to the back of the Dog and they were positioned to exit the area on the same narrow path they had taken in.
Bayne would never acknowledge it aloud, but Wyrmwood was one of the best pilots he had ever seen.
“Load up,” Bayne said, calling the crew back to the Dog. “We’ve got what we came for. Time to bug out.”
Horus’s voice came through comms, the edge of a hangover in it. “What about the caravan?”
Bayne’s heart pounded out one painful beat, a surge of anger at the insinuation. “They go on their way.”
“We just let them sail out of here?” Horus’s edge grew sharper.
“Yes.”
“So they can just—”
“Get on the damn ship!” Bayne blunted Horus’s edge with the heft of a blacksmith’s hammer.
No other objections followed.
The crew piled into the overcrowded cargo bay from the airlock, congratulating each other, buzzing with the energy of a successful mission. The first action any of them had seen since touching down in Ore Town.
As the crew removed their spacewalk suits and aimed to move the celebration to a less crowded space, Bayne told Wilco, Horus, and Delphyne to stay behind.
“I want a report,” he said to Horus. “Why are you covered in blood?”
4
The sight of Horus made her stomach tighten in all the wrong ways. He was a brute, unclean and unkempt, uncaring about niceties or norms or not being an obnoxious ogre. Delphyne was only glad that she could not smell him in the vacuum of space, adequately buffered by oblivion and spacewalk suits.
The away team consisted of her, Horus, Wilco, Lysander, and Greely. They all clutched to their chunk of space rock as she piloted the thrusters, turning the rock into a tiny ship. They snuck up behind the rear ship in the caravan, a destroyer, and blocked its retreat.
When the signal came from Bayne, they disembarked from their rock ship and used their boot thrusters to board the destroyer. But it was Horus who led the team, not Bayne. Though she couldn’t exactly say she trusted Bayne’s judgement as she once had, she could say wholeheartedly that she did not trust Horus’s at all.
Elvin Horus was a captain once, one of some renown, but he’d sunken into a barrel of rum since those days. His mind sloshed about like an olive in a cocktail, pickled and disgusting.
The team clung to the destroyer’s hull like fleas, waiting for the order to move. And they waited. Bayne’s team had breached already. They’d taken their destroyer. The crew of this destroyer would realize quickly that the caravan had stopped moving. They’d try to contact the lead ship. They’d fall into the established protocol when there was no response.
Delphyne was a second from giving the order herself when Horus belched out the order to breach. Delphyne led Lysander and Greely thro
ugh the starboard side while Horus and Wilco took the port. The crew offered little resistance, as she’d assumed they would. Paid sailors, oftentimes underpaid sailors, would not put their lives on the line the way enlisted sailors would to protect their mission. They secured the destroyer with swiftness and ease.
Delphyne noticed an unease in Horus’s movements that she didn’t attribute to his hangover. It wasn’t sloppy or careless. It was undisciplined, but intentionally so. Like he knew what he was meant to do and deliberately, spitefully almost, did the opposite.
He marched through the destroyer like a golem, a lumbering, stone man without the ability for finesse. He didn’t slow as he approached Lysander, a narrow woman who would have been trampled under his foot. She stepped out of the way just in time to avoid being bowled over.
One of the Byers crew dared cast Horus an offending glance—at least in Horus’s mind—so the golem drove the butt of his blaster into the man’s face, cracking the glass of his facemask.
Delphyne’s throat tightened. She wanted to scream at the bloated goon, but she still clung to a sense of protocol. He was the team leader. He was in charge, giving the orders, setting the expectations of the mission and people serving under him. So she was quiet.
The words burned like acid as she swallowed them.
“You.” Horus pointed to Lysander. He probably didn’t know her name. “Hold this ship.” He said nothing to the others as he crawled out the breach they’d made like a bear waking from hibernation, finding his way out of the cave for the first time in months.
What concerned her more than Horus’s brutish behavior was Wilco’s adoration of it. His fox-like smile spread wide over his face at the cracks snaking across the Byers sailor’s mask. A wild look sparked in his eyes. Something inside that boy unsettled Delphyne.
They took the hauler as easily as they did the destroyer. It was clear to her then that not only did the sailors not care to endanger themselves for the sake of the Byers, but the Byers didn’t care to put themselves out to ensure the safety of their sailors. It was a mutually dismissive relationship.
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 29