Ends, Means, Laws and an Angry Ship

by Lyn Gala

  John grabbed the edge of the nearest platform, and the young soldier clung to the door as the ship rocked again.

  “Report!” John said, his voice loud but steady.

  “Engineering has no idea why the engines are firing,” the kid said. Now he was on the sharp edge of panic.

  John pushed away from the platform and stumbled toward Tyce. Tyce dry heaved again, and the kid at the doorway began retching. Vomit splashed back onto the kid as gravity shifted.

  “Great,” John said dryly.

  The world tilted on its axis. Either the ship was turning or the center of gravity had changed, and John wildly wind-milled his arms and stumbled backward. With his hands chained, Tyce didn’t have that option. He slid through the goop and toward the seam where the floor and far wall met. As he did, he left a long trail of greenish slime behind, like a snail.

  An older guard appeared at the door, gripping the edge to keep from falling into the room. “Sir, they need you in the control room.”

  John used one leg to brace himself on the edge of a platform. “Tell them I’m on my way. Then help me get the prisoner out of this room.”

  The soldier gave Tyce a dirty look, as if it was his fault for being covered in goop and vomit. However, the man followed orders, stumbling down the steep slope of the floor. With a shudder that made the ship tremble, gravity shifted again, and Tyce now slid toward the opposite wall, the one with the door and the unhappy soldier. The man’s face grew comically alarmed two seconds before Tyce hit him and they both landed in a tangle of limbs near the door. Luckily they’d missed the side where the young soldier had vomited on himself and the wall.

  “Get off.” The soldier punctuated his unhappiness with an elbow to Tyce’s chest. Tyce grunted, but he didn’t have the leverage to move.

  John came over and hauled Tyce to his feet. “Enough,” he said. “Unshackle his ankles.”

  The soldier shot to his feet. “Sir?” He didn’t approve, but then Tyce didn’t understand the order either. If the ship was responding to the presence of another ship, John needed to focus on his crew and the potential for an imminent attack. He didn’t need to worry about Tyce.

  “I don’t want the doctor seeing him,” John said. “Unshackle his ankles and take him back to the holding cell near the central meeting room.”

  The young soldier asked, “Should we clean him up?”

  “No,” John said. A wave of rage caught Tyce under his ribs. He was covered in fucking slime and vomit, and John was playing a fucking power game in front of his crew. Then Tyce felt a hand at his waist. John slid something down into Tyce’s asscrack.

  After an initial moment of shock when Tyce thought John was engaging in the world’s oddest case of sexual harassment, he realized John had passed him something long and hard and very definitely not a dick. Tyce tightened his muscles to hold it in place. It felt big, but it fit between his butt cheeks.

  John gave his soldiers brisk orders. “Throw him in the cell. Maybe the smell will convince him to be more cooperative.” With that, John strode out. The ship’s gravity wobbled, and John caught himself on the edge of the door as he walked out.

  “Oh God, he smells,” the younger guard said.

  “Get his ankles and stop bitching.”

  Tyce held his tongue as the kid fumbled with the ankle locks, although he did manage to “accidentally” wipe alien goo on the soldier’s arm. However, for the most part, Tyce focused on holding whatever John had given him. He refused to climb the stairs, forcing the two soldiers to lift him from one stair to the next, a process that wore them out and resulted in Tyce having several more bruises, but he couldn’t climb and clench at the same time.

  “I hope you don’t have to use the bathroom soon,” the older guard said as he pushed Tyce into his old cell. Luckily he was so busy being an asshole that he didn’t notice an object sliding to the floor. Tyce moved his foot to cover it. When Tyce didn’t answer, the soldier triggered the door and it slid shut with a slurp that was definitely new. The ship was getting wetter. And since water didn’t form in space, either some water store was leaking or the damn ship was rotting.

  Tyce prayed it wasn’t the second because they were too far into deep space for the Dragon’s shuttles to reach any populated territory.

  Tyce slid to the floor next to the package. Holding it was awkward with his wrists shackled to his waist, but he shook the object free of the silver fabric. It was a knife—a weapon formed for a human hand, but carved in some sort of dense plastic or bone. Tyce ran his hand over the blade where someone had carved faint figures. That sort of decorative detail didn’t match the Command crew.

  Pushing that mystery aside for the moment, Tyce grabbed the knife. He wasn’t sure it was up to cutting through heavy carbon-fiber, but he tentatively pulled the sharpened edge across the belt. It didn’t cut far, but the knife left a white line in the dark fabric.

  With new hope, Tyce carefully worked at the belt right under where the wrist restraint attached. He hoped to make a clean cut so he could sit in such a way as a guard wouldn’t notice the damage until he was close enough for Tyce to get a knife under his ribs. The problems with the crew had to be serious for John to arm him. But at the same time, he’d given Tyce an improvised weapon, and if Tyce got caught, he suspected John would deny being the one to provide it.

  Not that Tyce planned to throw him under the bus. John might be a pain in the ass, but he had a good heart. He wouldn’t have allowed men under him to rape. Of course, he had an ability to charm people into doing what he wanted. He would have talked them out of wanting to. Yet he never let anyone close. The first five or six months they’d lived together, John hadn’t shared a single personal detail, but he somehow got endless personal details out of Tyce. That was John.

  Tyce still remembered the sergeant in charge of weapons training. He’d hated everyone, but John had asked him about the Anla war and had listened with such intensity that it was like the sergeant’s hatred had been leached out enough to make him tolerable.

  John would have charmed or guilted the men under his command. He wouldn’t have resorted to shooting them.

  The belt came free. He had already searched the room for exits and found nothing, so he moved to the curved wall closest to the door to plan his ambush. The restraints wouldn’t fool anyone for long, so he had to be prepared to attack when a guard appeared. And once he’d chosen his spot, he could only sit and wait. They would have to bring food or water. Then Tyce could act.

  Since he had nothing else to do, he studied the knife. The figures were tiny people. Two arms, two legs, one head. He couldn’t tell scale, so they might be tiny or huge, but they were proportioned like a standard human. Rownt had arms and legs that were proportionally shorter than a human’s, and the Anla were weird. They were squat and their heads were too small. These figures were definitely humanish.

  The artist had used simple lines, but the figures were involved in some sort of battle with knives. Either that or they were out of ammunition and trying to beat each other to death with guns. The figures weren’t defined enough to tell. It made Tyce wonder what sort of secrets the government might’ve been keeping. In the academy, they’d learned basic facts about Anla and Rownt, but nothing about a species with living tech.

  A wall on the far side made a weird burping noise. Tyce glanced at the door, but it was still closed. Tucking his knife into his belt, Tyce approached. The wall looked the same—leathery with spirals and figures embossed on the surface. He touched the wall, and a section folded back like the skin over a whale’s blow hole, leaving an oval door into a dark space.

  Tyce peered into the darkness where a spiraling staircase lined the round wall, but he couldn’t see any other doors. So his options were to stay here and take his chances with a guard—which would probably require killing—or risk getting lost in the bowels of the ship. Tyce frowned. He hoped this wasn’t part of a literal bowel.

  But he was tired of killing, especially whe
n some of John’s people were little more than children. They made Tyce feel old and jaded. Decision made, he unbuckled the wrist restraints and dropped the belt to the ground before he eased into the darkness.

  A few streaks on the wall glowed dimly with some sort of phosphorescence. It wasn’t enough to illuminate the space, but Tyce could see the curved ramp leading down. Whatever aliens had built the ship must have been surefooted because there was no railing and the center of the spiral vanished into utter blackness.

  Tyce stepped back into the cell to grab the restraints before he tossed them into the center. A few links clinked together, but he didn’t hear them hit bottom. Tyce took a deep breath, and staying close to the outer wall, began inching his way down. “If I die here, I’m coming back to haunt John,” he muttered. The door into his cell snapped closed, taking most of the light with it.

  “Great,” Tyce said. The sound rolled through the empty space. The die was cast now, and he walked down, hoping he hadn’t made another stupid decision.

  Chapter Eleven

  A SLIVER OF LIGHT APPEARED below him, and Tyce sent up a prayer that he had found another exit. The slope of the spiral ramp was steep enough and the wall slick enough that he worried about his own balance. Then there was his sheer terror at the idea that the ship could buck again. If gravity shifted for even one second, he was going to slide into the abyss in the center of the spiral and he didn’t want to find out how deep that hole was. If he was lucky, the hole was so deep that it would reach through to the other side of the gravity well, leaving a zero gravity zone. However, he didn’t feel particularly lucky. And he didn’t want to end up floating helplessly in the dark.

  That might be one of his nightmares.

  He ran a finger over the sliver of light. With a slurp, the sphincter opened onto an empty corridor. Tyce pulled his knife and eased into the new space. He should’ve been low enough to be outside the Command perimeter, but he couldn’t be sure. The lights were low and the ship silent, outside a low rumbling that reminded Tyce of the Dragon.

  “Another fine mess,” he muttered to himself as he stripped off his shirt. His pants were equally vile, but he didn’t want to run around enemy territory with his dick hanging out. So he would do it with a Ribelian soul tattoo guaranteed to drive every Command soldier into a homicidal rage.

  The first door he came to was closed, but Tyce ran his finger down the side the way he’d seen his guards do. When he touched a small indent at about waist level, the door slid open and vanished into the wall. Tyce quickly shifted his knife to his right hand and braced, but the new corridor was equally silent, although this one had more light.

  “I’ve seen horror films that started this way.”

  Only silence answered. Tyce wandered three more corridors and found another balloon elevator that took him lower into the belly of the ship before he found his first sign of humans—a ration wrapper. Command had been through here. But this was far below the level John claimed as his. Tyce added that to the list of mysteries clanging around in his head.

  Two more levels and a staircase later, and Tyce wondered if he would starve to death wandering a ship that had to be the size of a small city. But then he heard a distant whisper, like a crowd talking at some great distance. He followed it until a shot nearly took his head off.

  “Hey!” he yelled as he leaped back.

  “Who the fuck are you?” a woman demanded.

  “Tyce Robinson. Now maybe you can stop shooting at me.”

  “Tyce?”

  Tyce peeked around the corner and spotted Jela cautiously edging out from cover. Tyce moved into the center of the corridor. “How many times have I told you to protect your own position?” He finger scolded her, but he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

  “Considering that you’re the idiot who keeps throwing himself at the enemy while unarmed, I’ve decided to stop listening to you,” she teased back. She turned to whoever was behind her. “Go get Amali .” Footsteps pounded down the corridor. Then she opened her arms. “Come here, you idiot.”

  “I’m not a hugger,” he protested, but he knew it was a lost cause. The Dragon crew were hopelessly affectionate, and she caught him in a huge hug, but at least she ended it before it got too uncomfortable.

  “How did you get away? We’ve been trying to blast our way through to the upper levels, but everything is locked down.”

  “Not everything. This place has hidden passages,” Tyce said. “So hidden that I’m not sure I could find one again if I tried.”

  She grimaced.

  “Yeah, exactly,” he said, since she understood the danger. Hidden passages meant that their people might not be safe behind the lines. And Command soldiers had already proved that they would use civilians and children as hostages to get their way. Tyce had to hope that John wouldn’t let his guys get that out of hand.

  He heard footsteps and a few seconds later, Ama came around the corner. Wisps of gray hair had escaped her ponytail and had tangled near her hairline, as if she’d been shoving her hair back thoughtlessly. He moved toward her, his arms open. She ran at him, punched him in the side and then hugged him so hard he couldn’t breathe.

  “Mixed messages there,” he muttered in her ear.

  “How dare you almost get yourself killed.” She sounded genuinely angry, so Tyce didn’t mount a defense. However, he wouldn’t apologize, either. The Command crew had been hunting for him, so his surrender had been the only logical choice. It gave John an excuse to retreat back to his territory. Finally she backed out of his embrace. “I thought those bastards would kill you.”

  “A few of them tried,” Tyce admitted. The back of his head still ached from the damn alien probes, and he kept having a sensation of cold that skittered across his nerves.

  Her expression grew hard. Tyce had seen that look before. He rested a hand on her arm and said softly, “The sub-commander stopped them. They’re scared idiots, not the monsters from before.”

  Her anger didn’t soften in the least. “You are sometimes too charitable.”

  “Says the woman who took in a Command lieutenant and made him her captain.”

  She sighed. “I have a soft spot for idiots.” Jela laughed and gave Tyce a shoulder bump.

  “Great, now you’re ganging up on me,” Tyce said. Both women caught him in yet another hug, which Tyce considered a great act of sacrifice considering how he smelled.

  “Take patrol out the length of another door,” Ama ordered Jela, and she nodded and moved toward the door Tyce had come through. It had already slid closed again, but considering they were in space, Tyce had expected that. Secured hatches were the only defense against decompression in case of a hull breach.

  “Ama, this door was open earlier,” Jela said.

  Ama frowned. “How?”

  “I opened it,” Tyce said. “Command soldiers figured out the latch. It’s on the side.” Tyce went to open the door, touching the spot. The door slid open easily.

  Ama and Jela shared a concerned look.

  “What?”

  Ama cleared her throat. “Tuch found the latch mechanism, but none of them work from this side.”

  Tyce’s arm hair stood on end. “All the latches work on the upper level, and when I was coming down, every door opened easily.”

  “And we have to blast each one.” She blew out a breath. When Tyce had gone from being a prisoner to being a member of the Dragon crew, Ama had asked him to be first an advisor and later the captain because she respected his strategy and military training. He understood Command strategy in a way she couldn’t, and so she saw his as the more valuable mind. However, she was brilliant in her own right. No doubt she was already considering all the possible reasons why the owners of this ship would have guarded the upper decks from anyone coming up-ship.

  “We need to secure this passageway,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” Tyce agreed. “But we have bigger worries than Command. The ship is putting out a signal—”

&
nbsp; “Was that the engine tremors we felt?”

  “Maybe,” Tyce said. “I wish I had answers, but Command is as confused as we are. We need to get our shuttles ready to launch. If the owners of the ship show up, we need to get clear and ask forgiveness from a distance. And hopefully they’ll give us a ride to some inhabited part of space.”

  Ama glanced toward Jela. “I’m going to secure the next corridor,” Jela said before she walked through the door.

  Catching Tyce by the arm, Ama urged him to retreat deeper into Dragon territory. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Then we have a larger problem than you know.”

  Cold fear ran up Tyce’s spine. “Ama?”

  “The ship’s skin has infiltrated the shuttles and integrated into the hulls so we can’t launch, although we can still access them.”

  Tyce leaned against the wall and tried to ride out the wave of helpless fury that assaulted him. “Fuck.”

  “Given the intertwining of this ship with our shuttles, copulation would be one description,” she said dryly.

  Her humor threw fuel on his anger. “How can you joke about this?”

  “Because there is no other option,” she said easily, but then she sighed and put a hand on his arm. “I love your ability to scheme, but sometimes the universe has its own plans. And this ship does not wish to be left alone. She has been alone too long, so she holds onto us. I don’t see this as threatening and even if it is a hostile gesture, I have no control over it.”

  “Could we burn the biological material away?” Tyce asked, ignoring his own discomfort. No spacer liked damaging a ship, especially one he was standing in.

  “That would leave the shuttle hulls too compromised to fly. It gains us nothing and hurts her.” Ama patted the ship’s wall.

  Tyce tried calming his emotions and thinking about the problem logically. Unfortunately, hunger and the stench of his own body made that hard.