by David Liss
“I think that’s wise,” Captain Hyi said. “Director?”
“I can ask for no more than that. When we arrive at Confederation Central, I can provide more logistical information, and I hope I can convince you that what I am asking is within your abilities and reasonably safe. And on behalf of the Confederation of United Planets, I thank you all for listening and engaging with this matter with open minds and good hearts.”
At that we all stood.
“I am returning to my quarters to work,” the director said. “I wish you all a good day.”
“May I walk with you?” the captain asked. “There is a matter of some importance we must discuss.”
“Of course.” The two of them headed out of the room. Colonel Rage said he was going to get something to eat, and Mi Sun and Charles joined him. I was heading back to guest quarters with Nayana when I ran into Urch.
“Zeke, I must speak to you.”
Nayana waved me away to say it was fine with her, and Urch and I headed off in the direction of the battle sim room.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Maybe nothing,” he said, “but my instincts tell me that the crew is plotting something. They are behaving more suspiciously than usual.”
I suddenly felt that unique disorientation in which everything seemed real and unreal, up and down, and I knew that we were no longer tunneling through interdimensional space—or however it was that we traveled faster than light.
I looked at Urch and he stared back. Nothing needed to be said. We were still a long way off from Confederation Central, so dropping into normal space meant something was very wrong.
Urch looked at his bracelet. “There’s no order to emerge from tunnel,” he said, “and the executive officer hasn’t posted an alert. This is deliberate.”
Urch was about to speak, but a pair of crewmen turned the corner and were heading our way. They were still distant enough that they would not be able to hear us if we spoke quietly, but Urch was taking no chances.
Be advised, Smelly said suddenly, that those beings are armed, and their biosigns suggest malevolent intent.
I looked over at them, and my glance must have been all they needed. Both of them reached for their weapons.
I opened my mouth to warn Urch, but he was way ahead of me. With one hand he was shoving me down to the floor, and with the other he was raising his PPB pistol, which he’d already pulled out from somewhere. He fired off two shots before the other two could get their weapons raised.
“I don’t usually walk around armed,” Urch said, “but this was what I had a bad feeling about.” He keyed his data bracelet. “Captain Hyi. Please answer.”
The audio suddenly kicked in, and I heard the unmistakable sound of PPB fire at the other end. There was a brief pause, in which I feared the worst, and then I heard the captain’s voice.
“If you’re planning on warning me about a mutiny, I’ve already found out.”
“Are you hurt?” Urch asked.
“Negative. The director and I are safe, but I don’t know for how long. I think this entire crew is compromised.”
“Agreed,” Urch said. “Orders?”
“Secure this channel.”
Urch hit a few keys. “Encrypted,” he said.
“I think both the humans and the director are targets. We need to get them off this ship. We’ve got a long-range shuttle in bay two.”
“Understood,” Urch said. “I’ll alert the other humans, sir. You look after yourself and the director.”
“We’ll see you at the rendezvous point.”
Urch keyed off and gestured down the hall with his gun. Without waiting to be told, I opened an encrypted channel to the other humans, announced the plan, and told everyone to acknowledge.
“Zeke, this is Charles. I’m with the colonel and Mi Sun. We’re on our way.”
“I can’t get into the weapons lockers,” Colonel Rage said, “but I’m armed. Some squirrelly-looking thing—and I mean literally squirrelly—tried to take me down, so I relieved him of his firearm.”
“He broke the wall with the guy’s face,” Mi Sun said.
“Dented it,” grunted the colonel.
I realized there was still one of us I hadn’t heard from. “Nayana?” I signaled her directly.
“Yes? Hello?” she said calmly, like she was answering her phone while drinking iced tea on the veranda. “I am with the captain and the director. They are bringing me in.”
“Okay. Be careful.” I signed off and concentrated on getting to the shuttle bay without being killed.
As we headed into the stairwell, a volley of PPB bursts almost nailed us. The air smelled of smoke, and I saw scorch marks along the bulkheads as we dropped to the floor and Urch returned fire.
“Give us the human, Urch,” one of them said as he peeked around the corner. I recognized his deep voice at once. It was Knutjhob. “Your species is primitive too, but you are part of the Confederation, so we’re willing to let you prove yourself as have others from your savage world. You can do that by aiding our cause and handing over the corruptor.”
“What am I corrupting exactly?” I called out.
“A lively exchange of ideas can wait for another time,” Urch said, firing off a few blasts.
The mutineers returned fire, lighting up the corridor with sparks. The smell of burning plastic was heavy in the air. “This doesn’t have to concern you, Urch,” Knutjhob called.
“Weapons fire in my direction makes it concern me,” he said. “And I’m not about to turn anyone over to your Phandic masters.”
“You think we are traitors?” Knutjhob asked incredulously. “You couldn’t be more wrong. We’re working with those who think the Confederation has gone the wrong way. The Movement for Peace isn’t about cooperating with Phands.”
“Doesn’t seem to be about peace, either,” Urch observed.
“Not when it comes to our enemies. I’m sorry, but we can’t let those humans make it to Confederation Central. Hand them over. We’ll return them to their own planet safely, and this disgraceful business will be concluded.”
I didn’t believe that for a second, and apparently neither did Urch, because he fired off another couple of blasts and charged forward, practically throwing himself down the stairs. He let loose another barrage of PPB blasts and shouted for me to come join him.
“I got two of them,” he said, gesturing toward the unconscious bodies on the floor. “Knutjhob got away.”
Urch and I rushed the last couple hundred feet or so and then burst into the shuttle bay. The chamber space glowed blue from the plasma field that protected us from the vacuum of space. The colonel was standing with a PPB pistol drawn, aimed at the door. When he recognized us, his expression relaxed.
“The others?” Urch asked.
“Not here yet,” the colonel said.
Urch looked at me. “There are two priorities. You must prep that shuttle and be ready to move the second all are on board. You must also secure the entrance. I will have to go search for the director and the captain.”
He gestured toward one of the shuttles, and we got on board. Urch opened the weapons locker and handed everyone pistols.
I took mine and felt reassured for a second, but then a horrible thought occurred to me. “Oh, no,” I said. “Alice. She’s in the brig.”
“[Sweet-smelling flower]!” Urch swore. “That’s a problem.”
“It’s not far,” I said. “I’ll get her out.”
“I’ll go with him,” the colonel said, while he looked down the sight of a PPB pistol. You never forget your first ray gun.
Urch nodded and turned to Charles and Mi Sun. “You must protect the shuttle and keep the enemy out of the bay.”
Charles had a PPB pistol in each hand. “No problem.”
“You’ll need access codes for both the brig and the shuttle,” Urch said, keying his bracelet to send me the information. “I’m transmitting them now. Good luck.”
My bracelet chimed, indicating that it had received the information, and the colonel and I ran out and down the hall, which still smelled faintly of smoke from all the pistol discharge. The brig was on this deck, but almost on the opposite end of the ship, which meant we would have to be pretty lucky to get there and back without running into trouble.
We were not lucky, and we almost stumbled into a trio of mutineers, but the colonel took them down without breaking his stride, and we burst into the brig. A big alien who looked like a gigantic, muscle-bound poodle stood guard, and the colonel shot him as soon as he saw the Movement for Peace armband.
I ran over to the security console and punched in the code. The plasma field dropped and the door swung open.
Alice stepped out, looking sleepy and confused. “What’s going on?”
“Mutineers have taken the ship,” I explained. “They say they want to take us back to Earth, but I think they really want to put us out the airlock.”
Alice stared at me. Her eyes were huge, and the fear was unmistakable. I knew that in that moment she regretted stowing away. Then she stood straight, holding herself like she was ready for anything. I noticed that she had a data bracelet on her wrist, so I knew she wouldn’t be at too much of a disadvantage.
“We’re escaping,” I told her, trying to act calm, like this was the sort of thing I did all the time. Maybe it was.
I keyed my bracelet so I could speak to my entire group. “I’ve got Alice. Does anyone need help?”
“Negative.” Urch’s voice came over the comm. “I’ve made contact with the captain and his group. All are accounted for, but we had to take a circuitous route. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Understood.”
The colonel led us back to the shuttle bay, and we encountered no more resistance. I directed Alice to the shuttle, and then stood outside with the colonel, watching the door.
As it opened, I was hoping Urch had made it back sooner than I’d expected, and we’d be able to get out of there, but I was disappointed. Six mutineers, Knutjhob among them, poured in, PPBs blazing.
We hit the deck and returned fire, but their shots had been way off. They weren’t aiming for us.
I think the colonel figured it out at the same time I did. “Get in the shuttle!” he yelled. “Now!”
I scrambled up and threw myself inside while I shouted for someone, anyone, to seal the doors. The second we crossed the threshold, Mi Sun mashed some buttons, and the shuttle doors hissed closed. And then my head cracked against one of the bulkheads. Not the bulkhead, I realized—the ceiling. Then the bulkhead. Then the floor. Then Mi Sun’s foot.
Through the bursts of pain and the nauseating tumbling, I managed to catch a glimpse of the viewscreen and saw the Kind Disposition. From the outside. Knutjhob and his fellow mutineers had shot out the plasma-field generator in the hopes of blowing us all into space. Instead they’d blown our shuttle out of the bay.
I clawed my way over to the shuttle’s control station. It took me a moment to remember what was what, but I began pressing in codes, and the shuttle stopped tumbling.
I immediately keyed my bracelet. “Urch!”
“We’re coming,” he said irritably.
“Don’t,” I said. “They blew out the plasma field. The bay’s been compromised, and the shuttle is no longer on board.”
“Understood” came Urch’s voice He was speaking in a clipped tone that he must have learned from his years of training, but I had no doubt that he knew he was in serious trouble. “We’re going to have to lie low until I can come up with a way for us to rendezvous. I’ve got some ideas, so stand by.”
“Good luck.” I was wracked with worry about them, but I was also worried about us. We were sitting ducks out here, and if they really wanted us dead, and they were willing to sacrifice a shuttle, killing us would be no problem. Alternatively, they could secure us with a lance and then take their sweet time deciding what they wanted to do with us. The only way we would be safe would be if we were to run away, but that would mean abandoning Urch and Nayana, not to mention the captain and the director.
Running away is the best option, Smelly said. Preserve yourself. You shall make other friends soon enough.
“Not going to happen,” I mumbled. “We need to figure out a way to hide ourselves from the ship until we can get them out of there.”
Charles nodded, looking like he was concentrating. “Is there some way we could hide the shuttle in the ship’s ion trail without the exhaust destroying us?”
“Brilliant!” I shouted. “Even if they guess we’re hiding back there, we’ll be blending into the exhaust emissions, and they won’t be able to get a fix on us. We can hide in plain sight.” I tapped my data bracelet and began calling up data.
Smelly made a disembodied sighing noise. I suppose if you are determined to stick near the other worthless members of your primitive social group, I may as well keep you alive. Numbers began to appear before my eyes, hovering in the air. I realized that Smelly was projecting a course. I didn’t hesitate. Smelly was about a zillion times smarter than I was, and it was too worried about its well-being to give me bad advice.
I had the new course laid in, and we were moving into position, when Charles gasped at the information on his readout. “They’re beginning the sequence to open their dark-matter-missile bays. They’re going to fire on us.”
Before he’d even finished speaking, I banked us sharply away from the nearest launch bay. I knew, from both sim training and real-life experience, how hard it was to get a dark-matter missile lock, and I planned to make their hitting us as difficult as possible. I could evade them all day, I told myself, or at least until they ran out of missiles. They could always move on to PPB weapons, I realized, and the shuttle wouldn’t have much defense against that. Which made me sort of wonder why they would squander a missile when they didn’t need to.
“Don’t bother with the evasion,” Charles said, his voice strangely flat. He was scrolling through text on his bracelet. Clearly, he’d been wondering the same thing I had, and he had entered a query into his bracelet’s database. “I think they’re using a missile because it can lock onto our shuttle’s unique comm signal. They don’t even have to aim. The missile will just find us.”
“Change the comm signal, then!” Colonel Rage ordered.
“There is not enough time,” Charles said. “According to this it can’t be done in less than three minutes, and once they fire the missile, we’ll have about thirty seconds.”
“Options!” barked the colonel. He stood with his hands on his hips, his expression one of impatience. He didn’t look like a man who’d been told he had thirty seconds to live. He looked like someone who expected his subordinates to snap to.
You must surrender, Smelly said. There is no technological solution in the time available.
“We have to surrender,” I said, hating how the words sounded. I’d faced enemies before, but I’d never given in, not willingly. Now the clock was running out, and it was either give up or blow up.
I looked back at Charles and Mi Sun, both of them battered and terrified. I didn’t hesitate. I told myself this wasn’t giving in. This was providing myself more time to figure out how to turn things around. I hit my data bracelet. “Kind Disposition, hold your fire! We surrender. Repeat. We surrender!”
“That’s nice” came Knutjhob’s voice. “But our orders are to kill you.”
There was a flash of light as the ship’s missile-bay doors opened and our enemies prepared to fire on us.
• • •
“We’re going to die,” Mi Sun said. Her voice was hollow as the realization came over her. There was no escape. No hope of evasion. They were locked on, and that missile was going to hit us and scatter our atoms into the void of space.
“Will it hurt?” Charles asked. His voice cracked, but he met my eye. He didn’t want to go out a coward.
“It’s going to hurt them,” I said, and hurled the ship forward at m
aximum acceleration. I may have had only a few seconds left, but I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for the end. If there was a way out of this, I’d find it or go out trying.
With the shuttle moving at its top velocity, I spun it around to the other side of the Kind Disposition, gaining us another few seconds. Everyone was thrown to the side, and the internal gravity systems tried to compensate for the speed and sharp turns.
“There’s no point,” Charles said. “We’re done.”
“Can they cancel the missile?” I asked, but the glazed look in Charles’s eyes said he wasn’t really listening. “Snap out of it! Can they disarm or negate the comm lock?”
His eyes widened slightly, as he began to understand what I had in mind. He immediately ran a query through his data bracelet. “Yes, if they choose,” he said.
“Then let’s make that their best option. I’ll keep us in one piece as long as I can.”
Charles grinned, suddenly reinvigorated. “A fine gambit!” he shouted. Then, while trying not to smash into the side of the sharply turning shuttle, he keyed his bracelet. “Kind Disposition, cancel your missile lock, or we’re going to take you with us.”
I was now circling the ship at top speed, and the missile was following us, about five hundred feet aft. I kept us perhaps twenty feet out from the ship’s hull, so if the missile hit us, the Kind Disposition would take the hit as well.
There was no answer.
Charles signaled them again. “Kind Disposition, I strongly urge you to abort that missile.”
This time we got an answer. “We’re trying” came a panicked voice. “We can’t figure out how!”
“Don’t you morons train your personnel?” Colonel Rage demanded.
“We didn’t complete training” came the panicky reply. “What do we do?”
Unfortunately, their incompetence came as no surprise. The crew had been forced on the captain by Junup. Clearly, they were assassins, meant to take out the humans and, unless I missed my guess, Director Ghli Wixxix at the same time. Junup’s loyal soldiers were supposed to relieve him of two pesky problems at once. They weren’t prepared to deal with complicated and high-stress technical operations.