by J. F. Holmes
“Looking for something that never existed,” Mohammed said. “CS won’t stop tearing themselves apart to find the mystery tech or the traitors, especially since the tech is supposed to be able help solve Earth’s food problem. Good. I agree, it’s complete except for the exfil.”
“Right,” she said, “as long as we can sell it. One hole in the story and it comes apart. Time to move, boss.”
Mohammed got up and walked toward the door. “I know,” he said, hand in his pocket. Invisibly, he thumbed the first button, disabling the white noise. He opened the door, looked down the hall, then shouted, “Come on! Get back in here! They’re coming!”
The blonde guard was confused, looking left and right for targets. Mohammed slammed the door shut and locked it, then turned and ran into her, crashing his shoulder into her sternum and knocking her to the floor, the dropped shotgun skittering along the floor.
“No, Sharon, don’t!” he yelled.
He thumbed the second button on the box in his pocket. Her head burst like an implacable belt yanked too tight across a ripe melon as the micro-explosives detonate around her crown, barely making more than a pop. The smell of nitrates and burnt fat followed behind the light slap of the blast wave. Her black knit hat held leaking, sloshing red mush.
He knelt next to her and checked the wound, making sure she was dead. All the pieces were in place and moving. One last thing. He held the box in front of him, then pressed the final button down, holding it.
The door burst in. Black-clad figures flowed in, weapon barrels gazing at him. One was clearly in charge, barking orders and pointing at the remaining insurgent. Mohammed recognized Donovan’s movements and voice from hours of video study. He let go of the button. Everything went white, then black.
***
“Sir, they’re both dead. Her DNA is unknown, his is confirmed as Codename Mohammed, Free Farm Movement.” A uniformed Community Services sergeant was kneeling over the two bodies, holding a DNA scanner.
“Roger. Search them. Team, continue sweep,” Donovan said.
“Hey, sir, no prisoners! They’re making it easier.”
Donovan froze, then slowly turned toward the kneeling figure. The rest of the team also froze, but for a very different reason. The major raised his left hand and slashed it down at the sergeant, the knife-hand aimed centimeters from the sergeant’s masked face.
“We. Needed. That. Man.” Six men and three women clenched up. Donovan’s voice was ice cold and level. No cursing. No yelling. The colder Donovan got, the scarier he was, especially to them.
“Pull. Your. Head. Out. Of. Your. Ass.”
Donovan looked at the rest of the team. Somehow, even through his ballistic face shield, it felt like his gae was boring into each of them. They knew nothing would stop their team leader once he locked onto a target; he’d shot members his own team for failing to follow orders.
The officer took a visible breath, regaining his calm. He knew he needed to show control to become a citizen. He pulled up his face shield. His team followed suit.
“Listen up. We failed. We all failed. The target, Mohammed, was one of their top operations planners. He wouldn’t have come to Earth if he didn’t need to. Whatever it is, it’s big. Get the techs to check any environmental sensors in this dump. This has to be tied to the traitor Karsten we bagged nearby. Whatever it is, it’s just getting started. We need to stop it.”
He kicked Mohammed’s leg.
“And someone throw something over his face. It looks like he’s laughing at us.
_____________________
Bart Kemper is a former journalist and photographer, former NCO in the 82nd Airborne Division, and currently a consulting engineer as well as an Army engineer in the Reserves. He has earned patents, published many professional articles, served on multiple combat tours, and is now working as a fiction writer. He is a long-time science fiction fan and regularly attends conventions.
The Jump
by J.K. Robinson
_______________________
Present Day
Chapter 1
“Captain’s log, Stardate 2163.3. We are T minus six hours since launch from Navaho Nation Colony, approaching Stellar Asteroid Group 476980W at .2 subluminal.”
“Do you have to do that?” Kelvin asked, pressing his face against the cold metal of the ship’s inner frame. A hard night of drinking wasn’t recommended before a haul, but when you got paid in untraceable ingots of platinum, your health took a backseat to whatever the whims of the paymasters were.
“Do you have to not shower?”
“It’s part of my manly charm.”
“Is that what they call body odor where you’re from?” Dean snickered, realizing this whole conversation was still being recorded. He turned it off. “For real though, there’s a shower on this tub, ya know.”
“I will after we make the jump. If it’s gonna make me vomit, I’d rather do it in the shower.” Kelvin burped. It was worse than being in a locked room with someone with halitosis.
“Gross. That smells like you ate some degenerate’s ass-hamster and forgot to digest it before it putrefied.”
“What, you piss in the shower. Why not vomit too?”
“Do you also shit in the shower? Then just waffle-stomp them bad boys down the drain? God, I hate you.” Dean started spooling the jump coils sooner rather than later.
“D’aw. I love you too, Buddy.” Kelvin put his head back up against the support beam.
“So what did you do last night?” Dean continued the small talk, mostly to torture his longtime friend and cohort. “Bathe in the pisser at a rodeo?”
“Close enough. I mean, I don’t remember anything before my phone paged me for this job. Why you asking, did you get some too?” Kelvin opened one eye, surveying Dean’s typically clean appearance.
“Yes, Kel. I’m married. We have sex whenever we want.”
“So do I!” Kelvin seemed to think he had the upper hand.
“And I don’t have to pay for it.” Dean locked down the trump card.
Considering the argument for a moment, Kelvin took a flask out of his flight jacket’s inner pocket and finished the last few drops. “Do you pay for the rent, or does she?”
“I do. Her job doesn’t pay much.”
“Do you buy the groceries, or does she?”
“I do. I make as much as you do, why would I make her pay for it?”
Kelvin spread his hands, motioning that Dean should get it by now. “So what you’re saying is you pay for it, you just don’t like a wide variety to your women.”
Dean glared. “Back to me hating you...”
“You’re so easy.” Kelvin stood, making a point of stretching so his pelvis leaned into Dean’s personal space. “I’ll go take a shower,” he said, ripping ass as he left the control room, then shut the hatch and waited. It didn’t take long to hear Dean shouting and cursing as the smell hit him. Good times.
A Zephyr-class transport was basically an upscaled version of the front half of an old-style airliner, except the aft end was cut off and replaced with various sized engines in a star shaped cluster. Perhaps two thirds larger than the long-serving Boeing 747 of the last century before star drive, the graceful, swept wings had been clipped and replaced with interchangeable cargo pods, which might have been mistaken for large fuel tanks, recessed about a third of the way into the primary hull. Capable of carrying up to two hundred passengers, it did feel a little empty with just the two of them on board. It might actually be nice to have fares for once, but this rusty old jalopy hadn’t had more than a dozen settlers in the passenger areas in as many years. The plumbing didn’t work in at least two cabins, and there was a cat-piss smell that wouldn’t come out of one of the bed frames that had been there long before them. Sure, they’d turned a profit and the ship had paid for itself twice over, but it would take a much larger sum to get her back into good enough shape to attract more than dirt-poor refugees as fare. Besides, if they had to stop somewhe
re off-schedule, nobody ever wanted to take in a ship full of tired, destitute masses, the “great unwashed”. So in that respect, passengers would just continue to be a detriment to their operation.
Turning the calcium-encrusted nozzles on the sorely out of date shower, Kelvin let the hot water start while he popped pills for his headache. “Computer,” he said aloud. On a ship this old, the computer indicated it was listening to you through a change in color on the light below the nearest hub, which was much less intrusive than newer models. One would think it a great idea in sci-fi stories when the computer speaks in response to prompts, but in reality it’s like having someone breathing down your neck, just out of sight. “Mars Colony Symphony, Fourth Edition.” The computer flashed its small diode, and through dozens of speakers built into virtually every corner, the dark melody of the Fourth Edition’s opening piece relaxed his mind more than the steaming water or cornucopia of stimulants.
For someone who looked like a biker advertising cigarettes, Deter Kelvin was actually a reasonably complex man, probably the reason someone who aspired to high society like Dean would keep him around. Expecting some sort of stereotypical rock music to be on his radio, several women over the years had run from his apartment in terror, expecting him to murder them, when the orchestra’s first piece began. It wasn’t until just recently he’d learned of a low-budget horror movie that was popular, mostly on Orion Colony, in which a serial killer played classical music after luring women back to his similarly rundown apartment. A lot of botched dates had made more sense to him after seeing the movie for himself.
The lights dimmed and the water pressure dropped, which meant power was being diverted for the jump. Grabbing a handrail, he counted down in his head from the first power surge to the next. Four surges and…
JUMP
…sheer and utter violence. Before he could register his imminent danger, Kelvin nearly died. A piece of plumbing, dislodged by the unbelievable vibration in the ship, flew through the shower compartment like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Just then gravity failed, but the jarring actions seemed only to worsen, until a ripple like one might see in a wave pool passed through the steel bulkheads and snapped Kelvin away from the handrail like the tip of a whip. Thrown to the far side of the room, he hit an adjacent shower nozzle so hard, the only reason he lived was it didn’t hit his liver. Reeling in agony as he flailed about in zero-G, Kelvin had the presence of mind to hope whatever had gone through the ship would soon suck him out into space and the pain would stop.
Instead, gravity stuttered back online and he fell onto a shard of metal in a pool of water mixed with hydraulic fluid and probably whatever sewage hadn’t made it to the reclamator yet. The lights went to red, and the cracked computer terminal tried to display a warning to get to the airtight shelter at the center of the ship. Unable to move, Kelvin started to slip in and out of consciousness as more blood ended up outside of him than in.
The next thing he saw was a bright light and Dean’s blanched face. He had medical foam in his hand and was already spraying it into the gaping wound that had once been the fleshy part just above his hip. Bracing himself, Kelvin cried aloud when the pressure on his wounds increased a thousand-fold before the anesthetic set in.
“What happened?” he said through clenched teeth. Grabbing a nearby roll of gauze with his left hand, Kelvin shoved it in his mouth so he wouldn’t break a tooth.
“I don’t know yet. The computer core is damaged.”
“Is there a hull breach?” he asked, his voice muffled.
“In the cargo bay. I released the sealant packs, but we lost most of the air in the ship. We can pressurize the crew deck, but the cargo itself was flash-frozen.”
That was insult to injury right there. The pod loaded with what few fertile crops they could steal from the UNES supply depots was exposed to space. Earth’s crippling embargo on terrestrial-based seeds needed to end, and this trip was supposed to be a big part of that. Their part of the transport had been worth more than they normally made in six months, which begged the next question, what were their paymasters going to do when they found out it was all gone? It wouldn’t be good, unless you were the type that could pull off cement shoes.
“All of it?”
“The seeds survived, I think. They’re in a separate container inside the greenhouse pod.”
“Maybe they won’t kill us then,” Kelvin sighed. The morphine drip had started.
“Bob and Rob are not our biggest problem.” Dean sat back against the bulkhead in the ship’s primitive med-bay. “The jump cycle completed, but we’re not where we’re supposed to be. We’re listing, and the thrusters aren’t responding. If the secondary computers are to be trusted, we’ve burned out several capacitors and the heat-sink coils, along with most of the internal and external sensors. I can’t tell if our inertia carried through the jump, or if we’re dead in the water. Hell, I can’t tell anything, except that we’re deaf, dumb, and blind!”
Kelvin leaned his head against the musty, plastic-wrapped pillow. “How bad am I?”
“On a scale of one to ten: really bad. I think your kidney might be damaged, because you pissed blood while I was carrying you here. We have to get to a doctor, or I don’t know what to do.” Dean actually had to concentrate on not bursting into tears.
“Find out where we are. Bring the interface tablet from my bunk; it wasn’t plugged into the wall when we jumped, so maybe –” Kelvin winced. Sitting up was not an option. “Maybe it wasn’t damaged during the power surges.”
“You’re not just sending me away so you can die in peace, are you?” Dean genuinely asked. He’d seen too many movies, but Kelvin was hardly that altruistic.
“Nah, man. Then you couldn’t give me more of this bitchin’ morphine.” Kelvin smiled, though his teeth were still caked in blood like he’d been in a fight.
“Well, we don’t have any blood in stock, and I’ve already given you a pint of mine.” Dean laid the back of his hand on his buddy’s forehead. “You’re warmer than before. That’s good. Really thought I’d lost you.” Kelvin puckered for a kiss and Dean punched him in the upper arm. “Asshole.”
Chapter 2
Crawling through a small space behind the helm console, Dean plugged Kelvin’s tablet into the auxiliary port. Cobwebs covered everything, attesting to the age of the ship, which might be why this calamity had occurred. The only computer port on the bridge not burned out, and it had to be where the fiddle-backs lived. Steeling himself, Dean slipped the circular plug into the port and waited for the interface to boot up. Swiping through the backlog of warnings that popped up, it didn’t take long to figure out what went wrong. The computer hadn’t been refurbished, upgraded, or defragmented in a decade, and for the sake of skipping a bunch of technobabble, had logged the ship’s jump coordinates in just barely the wrong order. In a ten-thousand-digit code, one might not suspect the final twenty would make much difference, but those were the ones that determined your vector in known space. Trying to backtrack the error, Dean made two discoveries that sent him racing back to the med-bay to tell Kelvin.
“We’re in the Helanic Asteroid Belt, but well outside the authorized shipping lanes,” he said, out of breath from running down the steps. “We gotta get outta here. If the local Coast Guard catches us, we’ll never see the outside of a federal prison again.”
“Shit. They patrol the hell out of this sector,” Kelvin said with some alarm.
“Why else would I panic, dammit?” Dean gave the interface tablet to Kelvin. “The jump singularity’s displacement funnel spat us out literally in the middle of an asteroid, which is why we’re so beat to hell. For a fraction of a second, part of the hull coexisted in space-time with the rock. Luckily the displacement effect spat the rocks out the other end of the excretion disk.” Dean sank into the chair across from the bed. “Bottom line, the sublights are fragged. The power couplings between them and the reactor are burned out, too. Currently, I don’t have any idea how to g
et us moving. We may have to send a distress call.”
“No.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? The mission’s a bust, and so is the ship.”
Kelvin thought about it for a moment, a tear forming in his eye, so he quickly turned away from Dean. He gave the impression he didn’t care about much, but believe it or not, his friends were one of those few things. “Get in the escape pod. I’ll overload the reactor and stay to bypass the safeties.”
“No,” Dean said quickly. “I’d rather do twenty years than leave you to die.”
“If the Coasties find out about the plants, it’s all over. They’ll track our jump, connect the dots to Bob and Rob…no. I’d rather you go home to Wynona. Move off world, start over. I’ll give you access to my bank account. I saved more than I let on. It’s enough for a new ship.”
“No.” Dean shook his head. “You’re not that bad off, and neither are we.” He was trying to sound optimistic, just before the tablet’s bridge interface alerted them to the proximity of an approaching vessel. IFF signature matched a UNES patrol boat, basically a beefed-up intersystem corvette, so they couldn’t have outrun them if they’d tried. The patrol ship would have to get close if they wanted to use guns, but more likely they’d try to board the Roadrunner, since their ship’s own Identify Friend or Foe beacon would display little more than classification. Just another fine that would solidify the case against them, or at least against Dean, because there was a good chance Kelvin was just on borrowed time. “I have an idea.” Wrapping Kelvin up as tightly as he could, Dean pumped him full of more morphine than was good for him, and a touch of adrenaline just to make certain his heart didn’t stop.
“Where are we going?”