The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  “Think I’ve got it, Cap,” Jones reported.

  Without taking the time to acknowledge her, he tapped his watch. “Treacle, come in.” Silence greeted him. He tried two more times, but there was no answer.

  “We haven’t moved enough to hurt anyone,” Okilo said somewhat defensively.

  “Think someone got loose?” Jones asked.

  Vey tapped a different button on his watch. “Dennis, report.”

  A moment later, Dennis Shipiro’s voice came through. “What’s up, Cap?”

  “Finally,” Vey muttered. “Are you still guarding the crew?”

  “Right where you put me, Cap.”

  “Well, go find Tyler. He was supposed to be searching the ship, and now he’s not answering.”

  “Copy that, boss,” Dennis replied.

  Vey drew his pistol. “This is bad,” he stated.

  “You think?” Jones asked sarcastically. “They’re banging the hell out of our ship, we can’t do anything to stop them, and now Tyler’s missing. I think our mission’s pretty well screwed, Cap. Time to jump ship?”

  Vey chewed his lower lip as he considered his options. “Maybe.”

  “We could take the Stella back over to the Doris Day and just turn tail,” Jones offered. “I don’t love it, but we’d have our ship and our crew.”

  “Assuming Staples doesn’t take her ship back and come after us,” Okilo added.

  “She’s not the sort,” Jones said dismissively. She did little to hide her lack of respect for the pilot.

  Okilo pressed on anyway, his voice plaintive. “We don’t even know what kind of shape the ‘Day is in. We might not even be able to turn around.”

  “Well, we’re not leaving three of our crewmembers behind, are we Cap?” Jones looked to her captain for backup, but Vey continued to chew his lower lip in thought.

  Dennis Shipiro took the elevator down to deck four to begin his search for his missing crewmate. Treacle wasn’t any great prodigy, but he was more than capable of handling himself. The two of them had kept an eye on Gringolet’s berthing tube in Tranquility for several hours while waiting for the opportune moment. Their enigmatic employer had furnished them with a dossier on every person on Staples’ ship. It was detailed stuff, right down to dental surgeries and middle school transcripts. Dennis didn’t know how the person who hired them had gotten the information, and he didn’t want to know. The less he knew about the secrets of clandestine organizations, criminal syndicates, and secretive governmental agencies, the better he felt.

  Once the majority of Gringolet’s crew had left, Dennis and Tyler had agreed that they probably wouldn’t get a better chance. By their math, only four people remained on Gringolet; none of them had any combat experience to speak of, and one of them was a kid. With the codebreaker Vey had been supplied, it had been all too easy to gain access to the ship and take each of the remaining crew captive. It was a good thing, too. Less than half an hour after they had cleared Tranquility, the reports of the automaton attacks had begun to flood in through the coms. Dennis didn’t know if the timing was a coincidence, but he counted his lucky stars nonetheless.

  The elevator doors opened and he stepped out into a corridor, then he looped around a corner and began descending the ladder rungs set into the flooring. As a precaution, he undid the strap on his pistol holster.

  After poking his head into a few rooms and finding nothing, he climbed back up and took the elevator over to deck five. He was just rounding the corner when he walked smack into a group of four people, all of them armed with rifles. They were perhaps three meters away and seemed less surprised to see him than he was them. He panicked, drew his pistol, and fired two shots wildly as he ducked back around the corner.

  Dennis had no idea where the people had come from, but as he searched his memory, he recognized most of them from their dossiers. There were two men and two women. He didn’t know the white woman with the dark hair and the thin lips, but the others were members of Gringolet’s crew. He swore. The other woman, the one with the shaved head, was the one that he had been warned to absolutely avoid tangling with. He didn’t think he’d hit any of them with his two shots. Instead, he’d just ensured that they’d fire first if he so much as stuck his little toe out.

  He considered his options. They weren’t good. He was pressed up against a wall, his gun drawn, and four hostiles were undoubtedly in firing position at the end of the hallway. If he tried to take the elevator back up or down a deck, they’d hear it and close the distance. The elevator door was wire mesh; it wouldn’t protect him. He could make a fight of it, but he didn’t like his odds at all. There was really nothing to do but surrender, but he could at least make their lives harder before he did so.

  “Cap,” he said, tapping his watch. “We’ve got intruders. Four at least, members of Gringolet’s crew. They’re on-”

  Suddenly there was a shot behind him and Dennis found himself unable to stand. He collapsed to the ground, and a second later, his leg began to hurt a great deal.

  “Shut up,” a voice said. Dennis struggled to turn around, and there was the woman with the shaved head standing behind him and pointing a gun at him. Of course. It was their ship; they knew it better than he did, and there was more than one way to the elevator passage on this deck. He didn’t wait to be asked. He safetied his pistol and tossed it at her feet.

  Vey’s voice, steady but insistent, issued from his watch. “Dennis? Get back up here. Dennis?”

  Dennis didn’t answer. He looked into the steely gaze of the woman standing over him. Her eyes were dark and hard, and though he could see that bruises covered her forearms and that she had a black eye, the pistol in her hand was steady as a girder. He didn’t move to answer his captain. He just kept his hands where she could see them.

  “They’re on board,” Jones said unhelpfully.

  “How did they get on the ship?” Okilo asked, a tremor in his voice.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jones replied. She looked at Vey, who stood very still while he stared at his watch. He still held his pistol in his other hand. Alex watched him intently as well, concern for his twin brother written plainly on his face.

  “What are you thinking, Cap? Hold the bridge, hold the ship?” Jones asked.

  “Can we barricade ourselves in here?” Okilo asked.

  Jones gestured at the back of the cockpit. “No door, genius.”

  Okilo looked around the room as though he were seeing it for the first time. Mostly, he looked at the windows. “We can’t fight in here!” he said in a raised voice.

  Jones nodded. “They’d be stupid to try to take us here, Cap. They’d risk venting the whole ship.”

  “No,” Vey said, finally emerging from his reverie. “The ship’s not her priority.” He holstered his pistol and walked briskly to the ladder at the back of the cockpit.

  “Cap?” his first mate asked. “Where are you going?” She looked around at the two men that her captain appeared to be leaving her with. Though she was armed, neither of them was.

  “There’s only one bargaining chip worth having on this ship,” Vey said as he began to descend the ladder. “And I’m going to go get it.”

  Vey saw Jones nod in understanding before she was out of sight. He continued down hand under hand, passed through two bulkheads towards the aft section of the ship, and finally arrived at cabin four. He drew his pistol again and spent a minute catching his breath.

  This job had unquestionably gone south, but there was still a chance of salvaging it. Staples was more tenacious than he thought, and evidently more insane. If members of her crew were on Gringolet, they must have taken a shuttle over while he was busy watching his precious ship being beaten to a pulp by the Tyger. He briefly cursed himself for not seeing the play, but there was little sense in deriding himself now. The question was what to do moving forward. It didn’t matter if Staples was flying the Tyger or if she was on Gringolet. He knew one thing about her that was true above all others: she was
a fool for her crew. All Vey would have to do was put a pistol to the little girl’s head and Staples would give him anything he wanted.

  He paused to check the clip and to chamber a round. He didn’t think an eight-year-old girl would give him any trouble, but there was no sense taking chances at this point. If he couldn’t secure her, the game was up. He drew a breath and opened the door, his pistol held out before him.

  The girl wasn’t in the room. Instead, a man whom Logan Vey had never seen before stood pointing a pistol right back at him. The man was small with shaggy dark hair and a swarthy complexion. Vey was so surprised by the sight of the man, someone completely unexpected, that his trigger tightened on the trigger. The pistol jumped in his hand, and the bullet hit the stranger square in the chest. The other man fired back immediately, and then they were both unloading at each other. Vey felt terrible hammer blows against his chest. They seemed to take his breath with them as they passed through him, and there was nothing he wanted in the world so much as to let his body sink to the floor so that he could close his eyes.

  Chapter 12

  Once Logan Vey was dead, the rest was a matter of cleanup. Guided by Brutus, Dinah liberated the rest of the crew in short order. Realizing that there was no real way to hold the cockpit of Gringolet with one pistol, Wilhelmina Jones surrendered on behalf of her crew. She made no bones about being a survivor and seemed to be uninterested in upholding her captain’s reputation for always getting the job done. They had found Gwen cowering in a nearby cabin under a bed, right where Amit Sadana had told her to hide. When Overton found Amit alive and messaged Jabir to get to medical as fast as possible, no one had objected.

  Now, with their ship retaken, the five remaining members of the Doris Day’s crew locked in a cabin, and Vey’s body moved to the shuttle bay in preparation for return to his ship, Staples stood in medical and looked at Amit Sadana. Charis and Gwen, their tearful reunion behind them, stood nearby. Gwen held her mother’s flesh and blood hand, but she did not shy from the blood covering Amit’s shirt. He was dying.

  Jabir observed helplessly. Despite his prognosis, he had been ready to do everything in his power to try to save their captive. Amit had declined, and Staples though she understood why. There was little that could be done, and if she were given the choice to face death awake and cognizant or to die under anesthesia and a doctor’s scalpel, she would choose the former as well.

  Amit reached out his hand to Charis. Staples thought that her navigator would rebuff the gesture, but Charis placed her artificial hand in Amit’s, the slight whine of servos just audible. When they had found her, Gwen had explained that she had been very frightened when the man who had shot both of her parents had entered the room with a gun in hand. He had spoken softly to her, however, and gently guided her out of the room to hide elsewhere. He had evidently then waited in the room for a member of Vey’s crew to come looking for her.

  In doing so, Amit had probably allowed Staples and her crew to retake their ship and had quite possibly saved all their lives. If Vey had gotten hold of Gwen and put a gun to her head, the day would have played out very differently. The fact that Logan Vey had intended to do just that had deeply disturbed Staples. She knew the man was a criminal and an opportunist of the worst sort, but she had not believed him capable of villainy of that order.

  Amit squeezed Charis’ replacement hand. “I’m sorry,” he rasped.

  Charis nodded but did not answer. Gwen regarded him with a mix of feelings that Staples could only guess at. What does an eight-year-old girl say to a man who tried to kill both of her parents, costing one of them a limb, and then sacrificed himself to protect her?

  “It’s okay,” Gwen said. She took Amit’s hand from her mother and grasped it in both of hers. Amit’s breath was labored and his pulse uneven, but he shifted his gaze to the girl with the dark hair and the pale skin. “Captain Clea told me about people like you,” she said.

  Staples had no idea what Gwen was talking about. She had never spoken to Gwen about Amit, though she knew that John and Charis had.

  “She did?” Amit asked, his voice a whisper.

  Gwen nodded. “You’re a dynamic character. They’re the ones that change. She said sometimes people need to start bad so that they can change into someone good. She said that we shouldn’t judge people on where they started, just on where they end up.”

  Amit smiled weakly in understanding. “The journey of faith. Thank you, Gwen. May I call you Gwen?” His eyes flicked to the girl’s mother.

  Rather than answer, Charis looked back down at her daughter. Gwen nodded again.

  “Thank you,” Amit said. “I think that-” and then, abruptly, he stopped speaking.

  Jabir stepped forward to check his pulse, then reached up and gently closed the man’s eyes. Charis steered Gwen away from the body, but as Staples watched her, she thought that the girl wasn’t afraid. She had grown up quite a lot in the past six months. Part of her mourned the loss of innocence that Gwen represented. In a way, she mirrored them all. None of them were the same people they had been when they had left Earth on a simple Jovian run. Not only had each of them changed, their concepts of what it meant to be people had shifted. She thought about the human-seeming intelligence that inhabited her ship, the woman with the prosthetic arm in front of her, and her engineer with her mechanical foot. The line, she thought, between man and machine was blurring more and more every day.

  “Ow,” Gwen said as her mother led her to the door of medical by the hand.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” Charis asked.

  “My arm; it hurts from where the big man injected me.” Gwen held out her left arm and Staples could just see the red spot left behind by a hypodermic needle. “He said it was medicine,” Gwen added by way of explanation.

  Charis looked up at Jabir in alarm, and he moved quickly to curtain off Amit Sadana’s body. That done, he lifted Gwen up onto another of the medical beds.

  “Let’s have a look, shall we?” he asked.

  “What do you think we should do with them?” Staples asked Overton. The two of them sat in Staples’ quarters. They were able to sit only because Gringolet was still under thrust, and that was because they needed to keep pace with the other two ships until they got things sorted out. And that had to wait for this conversation.

  “You mean do I think we should kill them?” Overton asked.

  “No, actually, that’s not what I’m asking.”

  “Good, because my pragmatism has limits,” Overton smiled half-heartedly.

  “We don’t kill people unless we have to. That’s who we are,” Staples said, speaking as though she were reading from a rulebook.

  “Is it?” Overton asked. “Or is that who you want us to be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we left a crewmate behind on Mars, not to mention the crew of the Tyger. A good argument could be made for their deaths being on our heads, even if it’s not currently plaguing your conscience.” Overton grimaced and scratched his spiky hair. His demeanor didn’t quite match the severity of his words.

  Staples gritted her teeth briefly. “There is that, but I’m not sure that we had any choice. I’ll take living-”

  “People over ones who might be alive, I know,” Overton finished. “I’m not arguing with you. I think you made the right call. The only call, really. I’m just asking if your vision of ‘us’ fits the reality.”

  “Maybe not,” Staples conceded. “But we try. We set up ideals and then try to achieve them. We fall short, but what we don’t do is adjust the ideals to fit the behavior. That’s moralizing, something I’ll admit that I do from time to time, but try to avoid.”

  Overton sat back in his chair with his arms crossed and peered at her down his nose. “You want me to call you on it when you do it?”

  “Yes, though privately, if you don’t mind.”

  “Cool.” He nodded once. “Anyway, back to your question. What do I think we should do? Drop them in the nearest
jail and let them rot. Even if you can’t prove that they planned to kill Gwen, Charis, John, and Bethany, they stole your ship. There’s got to be some evidence of that on Mars.”

  “I’m not even sure how much of Mars is left. Evelyn’s been catching some broadcasts from the core, and it looks like humanity beat back the robot tide, but everything’s a mess. They’re saying thousands and thousands of people are dead.”

  Overton grunted. “Yeah, I guess they’re not going to be setting up a grand tribunal for a little case of spaceship theft.”

  “Probably a good thing. If they did, we might find ourselves on trial too.”

  Overton frowned. “Good point. I mean, it’s not the same thing. They stole the ship because they were hired to, and we did it to survive, but it’s still a good point. If they do get the court systems working again and begin sifting through the avalanche of crimes that were probably committed in the past two days in the name of survival, we might find ourselves in a spot of trouble.”

  “This is why a lot of captains resort to space justice.”

  “Space Justice? That sounds like a terrible TV show,” Overton said, making a distasteful face, “but I know what you mean. There’s room for a lot of ‘he said, she said’ out here in the black.”

  “Yeah. It’s tempting. That’s why I need a good moral compass.”

  Overton pointed at her with both index fingers. “I told you that’s not my specialty.”

  Staples sighed. She missed Don.