by Logan Jacobs
Besides, every time I really got to a good pace, I had to slow down again because I was worried the noise would attract someone’s attention below. My position was a good one because it was hidden, but it also made me a sitting duck if anyone came around a corner below before Honey Bee registered their approach.
“We don’t appreciate your lack of faith,” Honey Bee chimed.
I was about to respond when she warned me that the heat she had sensed from this branch of the fork was just up ahead. I crawled forward even more slowly until she signaled that it was directly below us, and then I peered down through the grate in the air ducts.
It looked like there was one man underneath me, and as far as I could tell through the close metal bars of the vent, he wore Dominion blue. He had to be a lookout of some kind. Unluckily for him, he wasn’t a lookup, or he might have seen me coming.
I aimed my laser through the openings in the vent. It was a close fit, but if I exhaled my shot at just the right time, I could take him out before he could raise the alarm. I inhaled, held my finger steady on the trigger, and gave a low whistle.
The man looked up, just as I breathed out and slowly squeezed the trigger. The laser fired perfectly through the vent and nailed the Dominion soldier square between the eyes, and as the blood slowly oozed and then poured out of his skull, his body swayed and crumpled to the ground.
After I checked with Honey Bee to make sure no one else was around, I yanked off the vent cover and set it aside. I swung myself down through the opening, legs first, and then dangled by one hand as I reached back up to pull the vent cover back in place behind me.
I had to do a little extra twist to get my broad shoulders through the opening, but in the end, I landed on my feet like a cat in the hallway below. The vent cover was more or less back in place, and there was no one else in the hallway.
I ripped off the soldier’s navy jacket, buttoned it over my vest, slipped his helmet on over my sunglasses, and pulled his navy pants over top of my own. I was glad to see that he’d been a paunchy little fellow, so his pants fit over my own. I didn’t really need them to look authentic, after all. They were just to avoid the suspicion of any casual glances.
I stuffed the jacket pockets full of all the ammunition from the pack that I hadn’t been able to fit in my vest, and I held the grenade in one hand. Since the jacket didn’t fit too well either, its long sleeves let me hide my grip on the grenade. As soon as I’d taken everything useful from the pack, I looked around for a place to hide the body in case anyone came looking for it.
Like most space stations, the Alexandria wasn’t exactly full of unnecessary space. She might be bigger and prettier than most stations that I’d visited, but she was still primarily functional, and that meant there was only one place the body could go.
“Sorry about this, old pal,” I told the man’s body. “It’s nothing personal. You just work for the enemy, that’s all.”
I pulled the air vent down and then fired a few quick laser rounds at the chunk of metal beside the air vent. When it fell, I caught it and rested it silently against the wall beside the vent grate itself. I threw the empty pack up into the ducts first, followed by the man’s body. I had to do a bit of shoving to get him into a position where he wouldn’t just immediately fall back down, but I managed it and then put the grate back in place.
The metal hunk I’d burned down was a little harder to adjust. It fit back into place about as well as the man’s pants fit me. If anyone looked up as they passed under it, they’d see how unstable it all looked and know something was wrong. Of course, if anyone passed under it and just breathed too loud, they’d likely bring the whole thing down on their heads, and then they’d definitely know something was wrong. If the falling metal didn’t clue them in, the falling body would.
“That sounds like someone else’s problem, not ours,” Honey Bee chimed helpfully.
“My thoughts exactly,” I growled.
I walked softly down the hallway so that I wouldn’t be the unlucky fuck to have a body fall on my head. I kept going the way that I had been in the air ducts, but I covered more ground much faster now that I could walk instead of crawl. I paused at a warning chime from Honey Bee.
Up ahead, the hallway curved to the right, and I heard voices from around the corner. I didn’t think my disguise would pass if I had to have a whole conversation with anyone, but I also hadn’t found a hiding place in the hallway yet. Besides, I wasn’t over-eager to hop back up into the air ducts again.
I straightened my shoulders and stepped into a soldier’s march. When the troops came around the corner, I was relieved to see there were only five of them. They marched forward in pairs, and the fifth straggler brought up the rear. I gave a little salute when they stopped.
“No sign of the fucker yet,” I announced. “Anything from that direction?”
“Negative,” the Dominion soldier in front answered. “Fall in, you’re with us now.”
I saluted again and stepped into formation beside the fifth soldier. So far, so good. I was glad that the man’s helmet kept them from identifying me on first sight based on my sunglasses. We marched forward, back the way I had just come from, and I was glad that I was in the back of the little group. No one could study my uniform from back here, unless the fifth soldier had superhuman peripheral vision.
I debated with myself about what to do next. I could make a break for it, run back in the opposition direction, and hope the hallway led me somewhere useful. Or I could just march along with these assholes and see if they were headed to a better destination. I shrugged. Better to flow with the water than swim upstream.
The air ducts did not crash on us when we passed under the busted seams, and I breathed a little sigh of relief until we rounded another corner and I saw half a dozen more Dominion soldiers headed our direction.
“Should we simply ask them what they’re all doing on the space station of a crime lord?” Honey Bee asked dryly.
I was more interested in what the crime lord was doing with a station full of Dominion troops, but that interrogation would have to wait for another day. It was obviously about money, but I wondered if there was anything else involved. It would be a dark day when a crime lord like Favian Grith had to work with the Dominion to turn a profit.
“Perhaps he was bored,” Honey Bee suggested.
“Ain’t we all,” I muttered.
I saw a hall up ahead that branched off to the side of the main passage. We’d pass it right before we encountered the oncoming troops, so I figured that might be the best time to make a run for it before any questions started flying about.
As we approached the other troops, I snuck my hand down to my waist and silently pulled out my sidearm, just barely enough so that no one would notice. With Honey Bee’s help, I aimed it at one of the floor lights behind me and squeezed the trigger. The light burst in a spray of sound and glass, and the soldiers in the hallway all spun away from me to see who had fired the shot.
“Who the fuck--” one of them swore as they all pulled out their guns.
“I don’t see anybody,” I added. “What kind of asshole would shoot at our backs?”
The soldiers all pulled out their guns and started back the way we had come from.
“I don’t know,” another soldier said, “but when I--”
I didn’t stick around to hear what he planned to do when he found this make-believe asshole. Instead, I took advantage of their confusion to duck into the side hall. I ran until I felt that I was a safe distance away, but when Honey Bee warned me more soldiers were coming, I glanced back up at the air ducts wistfully. I probably should have stayed in the ceiling a little longer, but the idea of being such a sitting target was about more than I could stand.
But then I saw something better than the air ducts. There was an extra seam where the wall met the ceiling, so even though I couldn’t see a door in the wall, I knew there had to be one.
“We do not have time for this,” Honey Bee
warned.
“We’re just gonna have to,” I answered.
As I started to hear the soldiers for myself, I pressed my hands against the wall to try to find a secret lever that would open the door. There was nothing unusual about this section of the wall, but I knew I wasn’t wrong about the seam. The soldiers were close enough now that I knew I only had seconds before I would have to pass muster or get the fuck out of there.
When I found the same odd double seam between the wall and the floor, I knew I had found the trick. I pressed the heel of my boot against the floor light and held it for three seconds. A panel in the wall slid open, I jumped through, and I let the hidden door slide shut just as the soldiers came around the corner.
I leaned my head against the hidden panel and exhaled. Slowly, then, as my shielding glasses hissed to vent off the extra heat, I turned around to see what room I had stumbled into on the Alexandria.
It was definitely not what I expected.
I’d thought that maybe I was headed into a secret study or library, some place where Grith went to have his private thoughts and plan his private plans, but then again, that would probably only be accessible through Grith’s retina or handprint. Not just through a trip lever in a floor light.
Instead of a secret study, I had walked into a hangar, only this one wasn’t the same as the one that I had flown in and out of before. This one was smaller, for one thing, but it was still an impressive size for a space station. And to go along with its smaller size, it also had far fewer dock workers. In fact, I only saw a few workers scattered here and there throughout the hangar, and most of them were busy refueling or restocking ships.
It also didn’t have a clear force field that stretched along the entire length of the hangar. It had one transparent force field at the very end, so any ships would have to travel down the middle of the hangar for its entire length before they could take off or dock. But none of that was what really caught my eye.
That honor belonged to the ships themselves. I had thought the ships in Grith’s other hangar were impressive, but the ones in front of me now seemed unreal. The metal of their hulls was so brightly polished that the hangar damn near didn’t need any lights, and I would have put money on the fact that their engines alone probably cost the same amount as the construction of the whole Alexandria.
I had never seen spacefaring ships quite like them. The closest I had come was the racing ships in the Abn Presa back on Deltulu, but even then, they weren’t meant to be flown out of atmosphere.
But there was one thing that I couldn’t quite figure out. All the ships had the distinctive navy blue emblem of the Dominion stamped on their wings, but I had never seen any of these models before. They all seemed brand new, so I figured that they must be prototypes or experimental models. And if that was true, the fact that they were here on Favian Grith’s space station meant he was deep in bed with the Dominion.
“Well,” I muttered, “I feel like we deserve something nice and new after being stuck with the Skyhawk.”
“Of course we do,” Honey Bee confirmed.
“Would you like to pick one, or should I?” I grinned.
She drew my attention to two crafts in the middle of the hangar, each with the usual twin engines but also with a third strange one just under the hull of the ship. I picked the one on the left, but only because I could only pick one, and she was the first ship that I saw.
“Do you think they left the keys in it?” I asked.
That would have been too much to ask. But these weren’t junkyard ships like the Skyhawk or even run-of-the-mill transport ships like the one I had lifted for Grith from the Deltulu shipyard. These were Dominion military grade fighter ships, and more than that, they were Dominion ships that I had never seen before. I somehow doubted that these prototype crafts would be as easy to hotwire or to break into their computers and override their locking systems.
Not impossible, of course. Just not as easy. And from the sheer number of Dominion troops on board the Alexandria, I didn’t exactly figure I had all the time in the world before I needed to be the fuck out of here.
“Perhaps there is a key,” Honey Bee suggested.
I scanned the secret hangar from my hidden position. It was like valet parking, so I just had to find where all the keys were kept and then grab the one I needed. There was sure to be some sort of locking code as well, but my chip would take care of that, just so long as I could get the ship started in the first place.
For the number of ships in the hangar, there was surprisingly little activity around them. No one took them in or out, but I knew that might have something to do with the fact that all the troops were out looking for me. The dock workers might move them from one docking space to another, but there was no way they were actually authorized to fly them off of the space station.
And since no one was flying ships in and out of there, the little valet stand was completely unguarded.
It was located at the end of the hangar opposite the narrow exit off the space station, and I couldn’t tell from my position how difficult it would be to steal a key. There was only one way to find out.
I straightened my posture, adjusted the soldier’s uniform as best I could on top of my own clothes, and strode like a man with a plan right toward the key stand. Most of the dock workers didn’t give me a second look. One or two of them stood at attention as I passed by, but I figured the more I ignored them, the more like an actual Dominion asshole I would seem.
I had almost reached the key stand before anybody said anything to me. One of the dock workers, a mousy little thing, stepped in front of me and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, but I don’t see your security badge displayed,” the mousy man said. “I’m sure you just forgot to put it on, but I will need to see your clearance.”
The mousy man had balls, I’d give him that.
“I’m here for an inspection,” I told him, “and you know very well that means I don’t have to have the usual clearances.”
Another rule about lying: if you didn’t know something, you just had to say it so convincingly that the other person suddenly doubted everything that they thought they knew for a fact.
“I don’t have an inspection on the schedule,” the dock worker replied. “And even inspectors need clearance.”
“That’s because it’s a surprise inspection,” I said confidentially. “Different kind of inspection, different rules.”
“I don’t think--”
“You just couldn’t make this easy on yourself, could you?” I sighed.
I punched the mousy man squarely in the nose, and he stumbled back and then collapsed in a heap on the docks. So much for pretending to be an inspector. I ripped off the soldier’s helmet, grabbed the set of keys from the dock worker’s belt, and ran to the key stand.
Honey Bee scanned the lock and suggested which key I should try from the mousy man’s keyring. As soon as I used it, I ripped open the unlocked cabinet and scanned the interior of the cabinet for Lucky Number Seven.
All the keys were in neat little rows inside, all organized very clearly by dock number and ship class. You had to love government docks. I would have bet anything that the organization of the crime lord’s own hangar was more… complicated. With good reason, of course. Crime lords were always on the alert for guys like me. The government was too, or so they thought, but to think like a criminal, you really had to be one.
I grabbed the key to the ship parked at dock number seven and raced toward my target. The dock worker had stumbled to his feet, but I just backhanded him as I ran past, so he collapsed to the docks again.
Up close, the ship at dock number seven was even prettier than it had been across the hangar. She shone so brightly that my glasses hissed as if I had looked at the sun too long, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the third engine underneath her hull. The key itched against my palm. I didn’t just want to fly her out of here. I needed to, damn near as much as I needed oxygen.
I
scanned the area immediately around me, but there weren’t any other workers close by. I would have maybe half a minute before anyone spotted the body of the dock worker that I had punched and raised the alarm, and I trusted that would be long enough for Honey Bee to work her magic while I worked mine. I unlocked the docking brake for Lucky Number Seven and then hurried onto the boarding ramp.
As soon as I was on board, I ripped off the Dominion jacket as the boarding ramp closed behind me, and I stuffed all my ammunition back into my vest before I let the uniform jacket drop. I raced through the ship as quickly as I could, but it was hard not to be distracted by the gleaming interior. Compared to the Skyhawk, this ship was fucking spotless, and I wanted nothing more than to just explore everything she had to offer. She even smelled clean, not like the dusty, near-rusted interior of that asshole smuggler’s ship.
The ship was small, so the bridge wasn’t hard to find. I cranked her up with the key while Honey Bee worked on the code to override the additional locking system. She powered on in seconds, but I couldn’t move her until my chip broke the locking code. I slipped off the uniform pants and left them in a heap on the floor, so I was back in my own clothes alone.
I glanced through the cockpit window and saw that panic had set in on the docks below. None of the workers raced toward me, but I knew that was only because they were afraid that I would run them over. That, plus they had definitely already called for backup. These unlucky fucks weren’t soldiers, after all.
“I think someone must have found their unconscious pal,” I muttered, “so I reckon that’s our cue to blow this joint.”
“ZX4951B,” Honey Bee chimed cheerfully.
I input the code into the computer system, and all the lights in the interior of Number Seven went from dim to fully on. The engines roared beneath me to vibrate the pilot’s chair.
“Beautiful work, sweetness,” I told my chip.
“The feeling is mutual,” she answered.