Absolution

by Rick Partlow

  “Two minutes,” Dog told me, as cool as ever, as if the possibility of being blown up didn’t greatly disturb him. “But there are energy fluctuations in the drive matrix. I think we took some damage from that hit. Can’t promise she’ll hold together for the jump.”

  “You’d rather stick around here?”

  “I’m just letting you know. You’re theoretically in charge.”

  There, there it was again, flashing across my display moving across our course from starboard to port. I twisted the joystick and tried to catch up with him, firing reflexively before I even had a target lock. Glowing red traces of energy chased after him, raw power from our reactor funneled through Bartoli crystals and focused into bursts of plasma, but he was moving too fast. They had to be accelerating at five or six gravities, trying to outpace us, trying to get in front of our course and face us nose-on.

  The ability to keep control of the ship under a high-gee boost meant the pilot probably had military experience. That meant mercenaries, not just ordinary, everyday gun thugs. I already knew they were ruthless and well-equipped. All of it together smelled like money, and lots of it. Whoever was trying to kill Beckett, if she was indeed the target, was connected. Organized crime at the least. At the most…well, there were always men like Tomas Caty.

  The targeting reticle seemed to be dancing all over the screen with every evasive maneuver Dog made, and I blasted more plasma energy off into the black to disperse harmlessly, keeping it to short bursts. Energy wasn’t the issue, overheating was. Maybe a Navy cruiser could spray blaster fire for ten or twenty seconds at a time and count on redundant Bartoli crystals to hold up, but if I poured too much power through the turret in too short a time, my crystals were going to overheat and crack and that would be all she wrote.

  “Port!” Dog warned me and I slewed the turret around.

  They hit first. The jolt was stronger this time, more hull armor sublimated to the vacuum, enough that Dog had to hit the maneuvering jets to correct the oversteer. Red lights were flashing warnings about hull breaches and structural integrity and every one of them just seemed like more and more money flying right out of my bank account. I caught a glimpse of a target in the gun reticle and punched the trigger like it was to blame for all my troubles. I nearly missed, would have if the other pilot hadn’t jinked the wrong direction, trying to outguess me, and rolled right into a burst of star-hot plasma. I couldn’t have made that shot if I’d tried, but fortune, as they say, favors the bold, and God smiles on children and the simple-minded. Crimson energy exploded away from the other ship’s portside wing and he finally broke off, backing down his acceleration and falling behind us.

  “Everyone hold onto something,” Dog warned. “We’re jumping.”

  I folded the weapons control panel into the console and frowned at Dog. “Why would we need to hold onto some…?” I started to ask.

  Then the stars ahead of us twisted into a rainbow ring in the front viewscreens and reality crumpled me into a wad and threw me screaming into the trash can.

  Chapter Seven

  “What the….” I bit down on the curse and fixed Dog with a glare once my vision had cleared. “What happened?”

  The main screen had gone dead, but it always did in hyperspace. There was nothing in that dimension either a human or a human-designed Artificial Intelligence could comprehend. I’d jumped dozens of times, both in my law enforcement career and since, and it was usually mildly disconcerting but nothing like what I’d just experienced. I wiped at my nose and my fingers came away with a small trickle of blood. Beckett wasn’t bleeding, but she was groaning softly, holding her head in her one free hand. Dog, of course, looked as fresh as a daisy.

  “I told you there was an energy fluctuation in the drive,” he said with an aggrieved tone, as if it were somehow my fault. “We made it though, didn’t we? Just a couple hours to the Panicle.”

  I regarded Delia Beckett, sitting secured to the navigator’s station, recovered from the shock of the rough hyperspace jump now but still seeming miserable and resigned to her fate, as well as nursing a nasty bruise on the side of her head. I unstrapped and clambered out of the cockpit back to the utility bay, pulling open the first aid cabinet. It stuck, battered and abused like everything else on the ship. I’d slowly been fixing up the interior since I’d bought her, but I hadn’t had to use the medical gear much, for which I was grateful, and hadn’t gotten around to working on the warped, metal hatch.

  I pulled out a cold pack and took it back to the cockpit, twisting it to activate the refrigerants inside and handing it to Delia Beckett. She looked from the pack to me for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure what it was for, but then took it and pressed it against the side of her face.

  “Thanks,” she said, her voice still subdued and defensive.

  “We need to talk,” I told her. “Who wants you dead that bad?”

  “I still think they could have been after you,” Dog insisted, hopping out of the pilot’s seat and padding over beside me. “That asshole Caty could be gunning for you still.”

  I shook my head. “He already had his revenge. I think he made it pretty clear he’d rather let me live than put me out of my misery.”

  There was a lot more bitterness in the statement than I’d intended, and I wasn’t sure if it had been creeping there beneath the surface after all this time, or if Dog’s words had dredged it up from the briny deep. I shook it away and pressed on.

  “Those were professionals,” I said to Beckett, “mercenaries. Probably ex-military, either from the Union or maybe even from the Confederation Wars. Why would they be after you? Who did you tick off that badly?”

  “It’s better if you don’t know.” She leaned into the cold-pack, eyes closing. “It’s safer for you.”

  “Well, obviously fucking not!” Dog pointed out. I disagreed with his language, but not his sentiment.

  “Ma’am,” I said, trying to keep my tone cool and even despite the onset of the post-fight adrenalin shakes sending a chill right through my core, “they know who I am. They know what this ship is. I am involved, whether or not it was a good idea. I know you don’t owe me anything and I’m the guy who just slapped you in handcuffs and hauled you away, but if people are trying to kill us, I would really like to know who they are.”

  “Can I have some water?” she asked, not meeting my eyes.

  I very deliberately did not sigh in exasperation, though the temptation was there. Instead, I pulled open a small cooler built into the bulkhead beside the pilot’s seat and retrieved a bottle, twisting the lid off before handing it to her. She took her time drinking it and I started getting thirsty just watching her, and then started thinking I needed to pee before chalking both up to incipient shock and settling for a moment’s meditation to calm my thoughts.

  “When I left Absolution,” Beckett said, her eyes still downcast, her voice so soft I could barely hear her, “I went to work for a defense contractor called Hadur Technologies out in the Panicle.” My brows knit as I tried to recall the name and she must have noticed. “If you haven’t heard of them, don’t feel bad. They were one of a couple dozen that sprang up during the Confederation Wars, all of them trying to jump on the gravy train of selling weapons to Danu and Dagda before the Union brokered a peace there. Once the Navy cracked down on arms sales, Hadur began circling the drain like all the rest of them.”

  She finished the last of the water in a long swallow and her jaw set with what might have been anger, or maybe pain. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.

  “I thought that was it, that I would have to try to find a job with one of the big firms selling to the Union Navy, which would have sucked because the demand is fixed and the jobs are low-paying, but it was either that or start again at the bottom of the ladder. And then Hadur got bought out.”

  “By who?” I asked, wondering why anyone would bother.

  “Whom,” Dog corrected.

  “Pedant,” I murmured. Dog lifted an ear and s
tared at me.

  “You don’t know who from whom but you know how to use the word ‘pedant?’ You get some traumatic brain injury you didn’t report to the Marshals back in the day?”

  “Who bought out Hadur Technologies?” I asked, side-stepping the grammatical land-mine.

  “A corporation calling itself Nautilus Acquisitions Group.” She chuckled, as if in bitter admiration. “Cheeky bastards, aren’t they?”

  I shook my head, not sure why they were cheeky, nor yet sure exactly what “cheeky” meant, and doubly confused as to how their parentage figured into it.

  “Nautilus,” she repeated, gesturing as if it was obvious.

  “They’re a shell corporation, you big doofus,” Dog said, as if that was enough explanation.

  “Okay,” I prompted, still not getting it but unwilling to further explore my ignorance of the joke. “And how did you figure out they were a shell corporation?”

  “Jake. Jacob Wiley, one of my co-workers.” The corners of her eyes pinched, just the slightest wince of pain. “He was an engineer and I worked in shipping. We were…involved. I was just happy as hell we still had jobs, that someone was stupid enough to sink money into Hadur. He got suspicious as to why they would bother buying out a sinking defense contractor and he began looking into them. There was nothing there, no interviews, no news reports, no names we could trace to anyone with a record of any kind. They were shadows, specters, nothing you could pin down.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugged. “Jake was suspicious, but no one had done anything wrong and we were still getting paid, so we just kept coming to work. And the orders kept coming in. We had no idea where it was going, but it kept coming in. Not for weapons, but for raw materials, fusion reactor parts, radiation shielding. And Bartoli crystals. Lots and lots of military-grade Bartoli crystals. We had an official license to buy them, of course. We’d never given it up. But we were only allowed to sell them to Union-authorized buyers.”

  “You weren’t selling them, though,” I said, beginning to see what she was saying. “You were just shipping them to the company that had bought you out.”

  “That’s how I justified it in my head, at first.” She set the cold-pack down, rubbing her hands together to warm up the left one. “But like I said, I was in shipping, and I had to deal with it every month and, eventually, Jake convinced me I needed to find out where the crystals were being sent, that it was our responsibility. He said if someone used them to start a war, or carry out a terrorist attack, it would be our fault.”

  “And you did find out.” It wasn’t a question.

  “They were shipping them to Hanuman, one of the moons of Agni, right here in the Epsilon Indi system. But there were no records of them being shipped out from their facilities on Hanuman to anywhere else, or of sales to anyone. Which made no sense. No one is going to pay hundreds of millions of credits for that many military-grade Bartoli crystals just to stick them in a warehouse on some nowhere moon in a backwater system like Epsilon Indi. Something was going on.”

  “And this is where everything goes horribly wrong, I’m assuming,” Dog surmised.

  “Jake wanted to go to the Marshals straight off,” she said, sniffling and wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “Just give them everything we had, tell them our suspicions and let the chips fall where they may. But I didn’t want to lose my job. I knew I wouldn’t find another this good, and Jake and I would probably have to separate in order to find work. So, instead, I went to the head of my department, Deborah Modi. I’d known her for years…we were friends. I thought she’d be safe, thought she’d know the right thing to do.”

  Her whole body seemed to clench like a fist, as if she was trying to pin something inside that wouldn’t be contained, and finally the sobs broke through.

  “I came home that day and found Jake’s body in our apartment.” Her voice broke and her face quivered as she fought to keep going. “He’d been stabbed with a knife I inherited from my father, one he used to use when we would go camping together.” She squeezed her eyes shut, pushing the heels of her hands into them to scrub away the memories. “There was so much blood…”

  I gave her a moment. It cost nothing to be considerate, and if I was in a hurry to find out what was going on, well, waiting for her to compose herself and not rushing her wouldn’t cost me that much time.

  “I called the Marshals then. Too late. Modi must have told them, told this Nautilus Group, given them time to set things up. When the authorities arrived, it wasn’t the Marshals, it was the Military Police, and they arrested me for murder, which would have been a local jurisdictional matter, as well as treason and misappropriation of vital military assets, which were not. They made it look as if Jake and I had hatched the whole plan, authorized the purchase and smuggling out of the Bartoli crystals.”

  “How the hell did you escape the MPs?” I wanted to know. I wasn’t sure if I believed her version of the events—I’d dealt with criminals my whole life and every single one of them was innocent if you asked them—but I really was curious as to how they’d let her get away.

  She shrugged it off as if it were the least interesting part of the story. “The MPs had locked me up in the holding cell down in corporate security while they searched my workstation and collected more evidence from my apartment. It took them hours.”

  Her teeth clenched at the memory. I could sympathize, having been there. Hours of fear and dread and tedium and nothing to do but think about how badly you’d screwed up.

  “It was gradually beginning to sink in what was happening, how they’d set all this up in so short a time, and I had to think they’d seen it coming, maybe when Jake and I first started looking into Nautilus. I was scared, panicking. They were about to take me to the Navy base and then, from there, I’d be held at the military prison back in the Solar System while I awaited trial. The MPs had left a couple of guards watching the cell, because I guess they didn’t trust corporate security.” Her brow knitted, still confused after all this time. “Something happened. I still don’t understand the why of it all, and there was no one I could ask, obviously. But there was a power failure in the cell block and they had to go check it out and try to see why backups hadn’t come on. And the door was suddenly unlocked. Someone wanted me to get away, and I did.”

  She motioned off-handedly, as if everything else was an after-thought. “I made it to El Mercado and got work on a grey-market freighter heading out to Morrigan. It was too easy, but I wasn’t in jail so I didn’t think about it too hard.”

  “So, you think whoever is behind Nautilus hired these mercenaries to come after you when they heard I was going to bring you in?” I tapped my fingers against the edge of the control panel, fitting the timeline together. “They could have had a worm in the Fugitive Retrieval database to notify them if someone picked up the bounty. Or that local yokel cop could have been on the take.”

  I leaned against the command console and tried to think with my head instead of my heart. Because my heart wanted to believe her. Her story sounded way too familiar and I couldn’t let myself make another huge mistake just because I wanted what she said to be true.

  “Whether you buy all this or not,” Dog said, as if he were reading my thoughts, “the way she escaped is all kinds of fishy. Something’s going on here, Grant.”

  “Is there any evidence?” I asked her. “Anything you could get your hands on to prove what you’re saying?” I sounded almost as desperate as her, and maybe I was.

  “There’s something,” she admitted, the words almost prying their way free of her. “But it’s not…I can’t use it. The penalty for using it would be as high as the one I’m already facing.”

  That tossed all my thoughts up in the air and scrambled them, but she wouldn’t say another word on the matter. I stared at her for a long minute, trying to decide what to do.

  “You know,” Dog suggested slowly, almost hesitantly, which I knew was an affectation sin
ce he never has to hesitate about anything, “that moon, Hanuman, is just a couple hours away through hyperspace. We could go check it out ourselves. Wouldn’t take too long at all.” His ears flicked in the equivalent of a shrug. “From there, it’s just a short hop back to the Panicle.”

  I nodded. I liked the idea. At the very least, whether she was innocent as a newborn babe or guilty as sin, we might have a better handle on the identity of the people who were gunning for us.

  “Hanuman is a closed facility,” I reminded him. “It’s a corporate business park, automated mining equipment and the people who service it, plus a few research labs and all of it’s restricted access. What excuse could we give for being there?”

  “We don’t have to make up an excuse,” Dog reminded me. “Damaged hyperdrive, remember? Honestly, a couple more jumps without fixing it and we might just wind up scattered all over two universes.”

  “Well, aren’t you just full of good news?” I muttered. I knew I could sit on that console till we reached the Panicle and still not have any better or more logical reason to go through with this other than my gut. “All right, Dog. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t like getting shot at, and I want to make somebody sorry they tried it. Set a course for Hanuman.”

  Chapter Eight

  Hanuman was a world of angry, seething red pustules against a sullen yellow, harsh to look at and even harsher to try to survive. The sensors told the story, even if I hadn’t already known. The atmosphere was mostly sulphur dioxide, sucked away gradually by the gravity of Agni and replenished by an incredible amount of geological activity. Agni was a truculent orange and red god staring down at his wayward child, keeping him too close for too long.

  The Charietto shuddered as she passed through the spot where the gravity from Hanuman began to outstrip the pull from Agni, and I was reminded how unhealthy the radiation from the gas giant was supposed to be if you were exposed to it for too long without shielding. Which is, I suppose, why the helium mines in its atmosphere were automated.