Crownchasers
Page 6
I find a handhold on the side wall, just a simple bar used probably for leverage or who-the-hell-knows. I back into it, grab it with my right hand, wrap my left fingers around the opposite wrist . . .
. . . and I pull.
I lean forward, steady, forceful. Ligaments screaming at me like a Ravakian rattler. I’m grinding my teeth so hard my jaw already aches.
The toughest part is pushing past that point where your brain is like, This fucking hurts! Stop! Why the hell would you do this to us? I couldn’t do it myself the first time. Hell Monkey had to help me. But it gets easier the more often I have to do it.
That probably isn’t a good sign. I should probably see a medic about that.
But right now it means I have to pull for only about twenty seconds before I give one big yank and my arm comes loose from the socket with a gross, thick popping sound. There is just a wholesale stream of obscenities coming out of my mouth—like I could make the worst station merc blush right now—but I’ve got the space to twist my arms around until they’re in front of me instead of behind my back.
More cuss words. Sweat beads on my upper lip and along my temples. Stars and gods, this is painful. And my right arm is worth about nothing. Just hangs there like dead weight. Throbbing, burning dead weight. But at least it’s not pinned behind me.
I check the storage compartment door, but it’s locked and there’s no visible control panel on this side. Guess no one wants sentient cargo getting out and tearing up the place. It sounds absurd, but lemme tell you . . . it happens.
That’s okay. I kinda figured that wouldn’t be my way out. If I’m gonna get free of this room, the better bet is to squeeze myself into a wall cavity. A complex port like this has a lot of built-in space between all the interior walls to run wiring and vents and cables. Even better, just about every room except the brig has an access panel to get inside these cavities. Just in case someone needs to make a repair. Or, in my case, make an escape.
I find the access panel at the back of the room, down in the bottom corner. It’s a little extra tight from age and lack of use, but nothing that my boot and some desperation can’t handle. The cover pops open after the third or fourth kick, leaving a big, dark square in the wall. Just big enough for me to wiggle my way through. My dislocated arm burns the whole way, like, What the hell are you doing, Farshot?
Good question, arm.
The space on the other side is a tighter squeeze than I expect. Dark, and barely wide enough to sidestep along because there’s a ton of dimly glowing wires roped together and around each other, just oozing heat. Probably not healthy to bask in radiation energy too long. Time to get a move on. I work my way along the wall—grunt, cuss, squeeze, wires in my face, wires around my ankles—until I get to a ladder and climb up into a horizontal crawl space. Not that I can do much crawling with my right arm all messed up, but I get on my back and shove my way along with my legs until I find another access panel, one that I’m guessing is over the hallway.
I slam a boot down on it until it falls open, and then I drop down after it.
I hit hard, legs crumpling beneath me. But I avoid catching myself on my face, which is a feat with no hands.
And I was right. I’m in the hallway.
“Holy shit, that actually worked.” I can’t wait to tell Coy about this. She’s gonna be so pissed she missed it.
Okay, okay, still gotta find Hell Monkey. One step at a time.
I book it down the hallway, pausing to listen, to pick up any sounds. I should’ve counted doors when Faye dropped me off. I’d been too focused on the blaster at my back.
“Come on, H.M.! Sing out so I know you can hear me!”
There’s a thud and a curse and then the muffled sound of Hell Monkey’s voice on the other side of a door a few meters away. “Alyssa? Alyssa, in here!”
He pounds at the door so I know which one he’s behind, but I’m already at the control panel. A few seconds and then the door slides open and it’s such a relief to see him that I want to hug him. I can’t—and he can’t either. His hands are still cuffed. But judging by the mess on the floor right next to his feet, he’d managed to pry open a section of wall near the door and was trying to rewire the lock from the inside. With his arms literally tied behind his back.
Okay, man. That’s sexy.
He steps closer, almost closing all the distance between us, and his eyes drift down to my useless arm. “How’s it feeling?”
I’d almost forgotten about it for a second there. “Like hell. But this one’s all good.” I wiggle my left fingers at him. “Can you talk me through how to disable these cuffs?”
He grins. “My pleasure, Captain.”
A lot of people look at tall, broad, muscley Hell Monkey and think: knuckledragger. But I’m careful about who I hire—I’m the only idiot allowed on board my ship. So it doesn’t take H.M. long to figure out how to use what we have on hand—and by that I mean the wiring he’d half yanked out of the wall—to short-circuit the cuffs on his wrists. It takes even less time for him to get mine off.
Hands free. Arms free. It feels better right now than a Lenosi massage. Even with one arm still dislocated and aching.
“We should pop that back in,” Hell Monkey says.
“You can medic as we walk.” I spin around and head toward the lift farther down. “We’ve gotta get upstairs and take the control room back.”
“Are you serious, Farshot? With no weapons and one good arm?”
I give him a wink over my shoulder. “Yup. Sounds about right for me.”
Ten
THERE SHOULD BE MUSIC ON THIS LIFT. AREN’T lifts supposed to have music? Something to fill all this stupid silence? All I can hear right now is Hell Monkey breathing disapproval next to me. I don’t think it’s because we’re rolling ass-first into danger—that’s kinda our thing. I think it’s more because I’m hurt and he wanted to fix it, but I wouldn’t let him. You’ve gotta be relaxed to easily pop a shoulder back into a socket, and I’ve got way too much adrenaline pumping now. We’d have to go hunt down some kind of muscle relaxant to help the process along, and we don’t have time for that.
But it’s fine. My arm barely even hurts.
Sort of.
The lift doors whoosh open on the control room, and halfway across the space, Faye Orso and Honor Winger look up from what they’re doing.
Faye locks eyes with me. I lock eyes with Faye.
I grin. “Miss me?”
They pull blasters from their holsters, and I haul Hell Monkey down by the front of his shirt as laserfire erupts all around us. We manage to tumble out of the lift and underneath a long, heavy table. There’s probably better cover in here, but it’s closer than anything else, and Orso and Winger would have to move from their station to get a better angle on us. I’ve got bets that they don’t want to do that. They still need the ghostport to finish decrypting the data package, and they won’t spread out and risk getting cut off from one another.
Blaster shots pepper the walls and floor and tabletop. Hell Monkey is curled up with his knees basically knocking into his chin in the small space. He raises an eyebrow at me.
“Is this going about how you expected?”
“Better, actually. The table is a nice bonus.”
Sudden silence. No gunfire. Hell Monkey and I exchange a look, and then we carefully unpeel ourselves and peek out over the table.
Faye is bent over the conn, fingers moving with a fury. Honor still has guns trained in our direction, but her head is angled toward Faye, muttering something.
“They’re gonna wipe the whole system,” Hell Monkey whispers to me. “It’ll take us hours to reboot it and run our own decryption on that message.”
“Then we’ve gotta move.” My eyes catch on my blaster, lying on the half wall dividing the command stations from the strategy and communications area. “Can you—”
I don’t have to finish the sentence. Hell Monkey roars out from under the table, angling toward the si
de of the room, and Honor’s head snaps around and she opens fire. I move at the same time, scuttle across the floor, and pin myself against that half wall in a crouch.
Hell Monkey has tucked himself into an alcove along the wall, and Honor is just pelting the area around him, pinning him down.
“Don’t kill him!” Faye yells over the blaster fire.
I reach up. My fingers curl around warm, familiar alloy, and I pull my blaster down to my chest.
Hell yeah.
I pop my head over the wall, just enough to see. “My turn!”
I send two shots screaming past Faye’s ears, making her hit the ground. I wail on the ground around Honor’s feet until she jumps back. She returns fire, but I stay up. I just keep at it, lacing the air with bolt after bolt from my gun, until Faye beats a retreat from the command center. She doesn’t turn a blaster on me, but Honor does. She and I have a good ol’ exchange of how-close-can-I-get-without-inflicting-serious-injuries, and then she makes it to a lift on the other side and—whoosh.
The doors close and they’re gone.
I crane my head toward the alcove. “H.M.? You okay?”
He pops his head out. “All good. You?”
My pulse pounds through me. I can feel every vein in my body. And I’m not even lying when I say I don’t feel my dislocated shoulder right now. “I’m fan-fucking-tastic.”
Hell Monkey makes a dash for the conn, bending over Faye’s handiwork. “I was right—she was inputting a system wipe.”
I clamber over the half wall to join him. “Can you—”
“On it. Give me a minute.”
I wait. It’s not my strong suit. I jiggle up and down beside him, too full of everything to hold still. Even when he scowls at me.
“It’s been a lot longer than a minute.”
“With all due respect, Captain: shut up.”
I pace the area and try not to think about how the adrenaline is wearing off and my arm is starting to throb again.
Hell Monkey finally straightens. And grins at me.
“You stopped the system wipe?”
“Oh, sure, yeah, that—” He waves my question away with one hand like it’s no big deal and then his other hand holds up the flat, shiny octagon shape of a data card. “But even better: they left before they could clear off the de-encrypted data. And I nabbed it.”
I grab him by the face, pull him down, and plant a kiss on his cheek. “Best. Engineer. You’re seriously never allowed to quit.”
His whole head flushes bright red, and I hear him mutter something, but I’m already heading for the lifts, yelling over my shoulder, “We’ve gotta get back to the Vagabond. Come on!”
I half expect my ship to be blown to pieces by the time we get back, but she’s all there, so either Faye was feeling generous or she was bluffing about her cruiser being nearby and snuck in under our scanners using a liftship. Doesn’t matter either way. What’s important is that my Vagabond is here and her AI flickers right to life as we hit the bridge. The front half of this space, closest to the prow, is the navcomm area, with all the basic make-ship-go-now stuff. The back half is strategic operations, which has tons of handy data analysis toys, including a full, three-dimensional display table.
The mediabot materializes almost as soon as we’re back on board, but it’s a second too slow in following us onto the bridge. I shut the door and swipe my hand over the lockpad, leaving the bot to try to film through the glass. Then I turn and pluck the data card from Hell Monkey’s hand and load it into the strategic-ops table. “New project for you, Rose. Analyze this and show me what we got. Full display.”
Her smooth voice rings out. “Processing . . . please wait . . .” Half a second later, a 3D projection fills the space above the table. And whatever I was expecting, I gotta tell ya, it wasn’t . . . a big mess of lines.
Hell Monkey cocks his head left, then right. “What the hell is it?”
I don’t have a good answer. It just looks like a total disarray of jagged lines and squares inside of squares and strange intersecting diagonals. I have Rose switch the projection to manual control and then I start to play with it. With just my uninjured arm, I rotate it, resize it, stretch its dimensions, and then finally spread it all out like it was before, pushing it lower until it’s level with my ankles.
Okay, wait . . .
“H.M.—”
He shakes his head at me. “I can tell by your face that you’re getting something, but it just looks like a mess to me.”
“No! No, it’s just—” I clamber into my captain’s chair and stand on it for a better vantage point. The jump seat swings and tilts awkwardly at the weird weight distribution. Almost tips me right off, but I get my balance. “Rose, flatten the image.” The whole display goes razor thin. “Now reorganize using topographical mapping characteristics. Shade relevant reliefs and elevations.”
It takes a minute. Well, it probably takes less than an actual minute because AIs are fast as hell, but time is relative. Or so I’ve heard. But by the time I’ve gotten my butt off my chair—without even falling, thank you very much—the image is starting to come together and Hell Monkey’s eyebrows are halfway up his forehead.
“A map. Nice. What is it a map of, though?”
“That’s the million-credit question.” Rose finishes the last touches, and even if you’ve seen a lot of topographic maps, this would be a weird one for you. Usually they’ve got a lot of curving lines and squiggly circles, but this is all sharp edges and ninety-degree angles. All the elevations are tall and rectangular, and the slopes form perfect step patterns downward. Through the middle, at the lowest elevation, are two lines zigzagging in perfect unison from one end of the image to the other.
Hell Monkey rocks back on his heels. He doesn’t have that furrow in between his eyebrows anymore. “There’s only one planet I know of that would have a map that looks like this.”
“Agreed. Let’s just hope the other crownchasers aren’t as familiar with the Peridot system as we are.” I check to make sure the mediabot is still out in the corridor where it can’t hear us and then start inputting coordinates into the computer. “Rose, gear us up to jump to hyperlight. We’re headed to planet AW42.”
Eleven
AW421979.
The homeworld of a race called blotinzoids. Also the only planet I’ve ever known in the thousand-plus around here that adopted their numerical designation as their official planetary name.
I’ve only been there once, but it leaves an impression. Maybe that means we can make up whatever ground we lost thanks to Faye’s stunt on my ghostport.
I really need to get better security on that place.
It’s gonna take a little while to get there, even riding hyperlight, so as soon as the initial jump is complete, I head for my quarters. Our resident mediabot follows me, its big round lenses glowing. No, actually, not glowing—recording. I can feel it on my back, and I shudder as it spits out questions at me.
“How do you feel things went on the abandoned spaceport, Captain Farshot?”
“Were you expecting to encounter another crownchaser so soon?”
“Do you feel it speaks poorly of your skills in this competition that you were caught off guard so easily?”
I spin around at the door to my quarters. “Why do all of you have the same accent?”
It halts, head twitching this way, then that. The thing must have a dozen audio input sources on its body so it doesn’t miss a word I say.
“Seriously, every damn mediabot I’ve ever met has the exact same Imperial accent like some research group somewhere decided this particular voice combination would make people more inclined to answer questions, but you know what? I don’t want to answer questions right now, buddy. I’m tired. I’m taking a break. Shove off.”
It can’t calculate a response before I turn my back on it and let the door slide shut in its face.
Nice work, Farshot. That’s gonna look great for Cheery Coyenne’s headlines. Crap.
I’m prepared to just send a recorded message, but Coy’s face fills the screen in an instant.
“Farshot, your ass better be alive and uninjured or I swear I will—”
“Save the threats, Coyenne.” I hold up my left hand and waggle my fingers at the screen. “See? All appendages accounted for.”
She sits back a little, one eyebrow raised, giving me a parental kind of look, which is a hoot coming from her. “Daily Worlds just had a breaking-news bulletin with camera drone footage of a firefight between you and Orso.”
“That was fast. Your mom must have staff working overtime to upload, process, and edit all this.”
Coy snorts. “She’s nothing if not voracious in her pursuit of entertainment.”
There’s a very specific cadence of knocks on my door—a code Hell Monkey and I have had for a year or two now. I open the door, and he squeezes in with a med kit in his hand. He doesn’t even glance at the screen. Just pulls out a hypo of muscle relaxant and injects it into the tissues around my jacked-up shoulder.
“Well.” Coy puts on a kind of bored expression. “I’m glad you’re all right. Would hate for our partnership to go up in smoke less than twenty-four hours into things. Terrible inconvenience, that.”
Hell Monkey makes an irritated noise, but I give him a little kick to signal him to shut it. You can’t take Coy at face value. That’s almost never the real Coy. But then again, that’s exactly why he doesn’t like her. Doesn’t like most anyone from all the big, messy webs of prime families, really. Present company excluded of course.
I suck in a breath through my teeth as Hell Monkey starts slowly moving my arm, angling to pop it back into place. “Lucky for you, we’re both convenient and competent.”
Coy jerks upright, almost falling out of her seat. “You cracked the encryption.” It’s not a question.