by TS Hottle
"I'll go through Hanar's embassy. I think First Citizen's crush is an official position now. Congratulations, JT. You've flirted your way into diplomatic immunity."
"What about me?" said Boolay.
Suicide turned to the constable. "Well?"
The big Orag grumbled. "Get me a writ on this one…" He pointed to JT. "And you can relieve me of the other one. But…" He leaned in, clearly trying to intimidate her. "They don't come back to this district. Ever."
She pushed him back gently. "First, clean your teeth. I'm surprised the recyclers didn't set off a warning with that breath. Second, understand they taught me hand-to-hand combat by Compact Navy Special Forces. You may be what passes for law in this hole in the ground, but I will defend myself. With prejudice."
The constable grumbled. "You can use my comm."
"You're not green." As the newly rechristened Goldeneye emerged from its wormhole, Suicide noticed JT Austin showed no sign of his usual wormhole sickness. "What happened?"
He held up a bottle of pills. "The trip to Menh wasn't a complete waste." He jerked a thumb at Boolay. "Before that one picked a fight, I bought a bottle of the Orag wormhole remedy. Believe it or not, it works."
So, it did. The Goldeneye had emerged over Ramcat, the world that acted as the entry point to the Laputan Guardianship. Above the blue-and-red planet floated a set of concentric cylinders, each one longer than the one inside it and gapped on two sides to allow access to a spherical core.
"Armaneya City," said Suicide. "If you want to disappear, go there. You can walk in under one name and leave under another. No legal alias needed."
"Why are we here?" asked JT.
"Neutral territory." Suicide steered the ship away from the station and the planet. They were in free fall, so she had more freedom of movement than she would maintain orbit. In the distance, a jeweled ring appeared in the night sky. She fired the EM drive, and the ring grew in the window.
"I thought Gohem was neutral," said JT.
"It's also open. Anyone in the Compact would know we went there and came back. I want to enter the Compact hypergate system with no trace of where we were before. If you want to cover your tracks, project into the Guardianship, then leave through Ramcat. But first, I want us to be seen coming back through the hypergate." She keyed their transponder to send a narrow beam signal to traffic control. "We have a slot."
"Really?" said Boolay. "Every time I've gone through this gate, it's backed up for hours."
"Where we're going, there's not a lot of traffic. Although this ship will be expected to carry an update from the Compact's entire internet."
"Why?"
"The hypergates always piggyback updates on ships going through. And Marilyn gets even less traffic than Amargosa." She angled the ship. A large, bulbous tanker with strange writing on the side, lumbered backwards in the window. She recognized the writing as Qorori, from Earth's closest alien neighbor. The script made no sense to her, but the dimmer-than-normal lights did. Qorori preferred night, so their ships always ran a bit dark. "Yes," she said before either of her companions could ask, "we are line jumping."
"You have connections or something?" asked JT.
"We have a destination no one else is going to today. They want us out of the queue as quickly as possible." She keyed her console. "You have control, Austin. You've flown solo through a hypergate before, haven't you?" She knew the answer. All his wormhole flights as a pilot had been through a hypergate or in the bay of a larger vessel. She wasn't about to ask him to project them into a system. Not yet, anyway.
She unstrapped and folded her legs into the lotus position, closed her eyes, and held her arms out in front of her. "Let me know when we're through."
"What is that she's doing?" asked Boolay, his voice rising.
JT shushed him. "She gets cranky when she doesn't get to meditate."
Marilyn spread below them, the tan-brown of desert mottled with green. Suicide shook her head, knowing what the green was.
"Creeper vine," said JT. "So JunoCorp got their hooks into this place, too."
"Looks like it," said Suicide, "but you don't hear them complaining."
"Why did you guys name a planet after somebody's aunt?" asked Boolay.
Suicide did not want to go into the whole explanation of the Marilynist Temple, how they adopted a World War Era actress as their goddess, or how what started as a joke had become an institution on Jefivah. One reason Jayne Best had gone to Amargosa with her husband was to get away from all that. Now, if her information had been correct, she had run right back into the arms of the "Blessed Mother."
"Someone loved their aunt very much," was all she said.
It took an hour to get down to Marilyn's capital, Mortenson. Like New Lansdorp, the central part of the city consisted of rapidly cultured nano-buildings, all rounded windows and boring boxy shapes. Further out, however, the buildings took on more interesting shapes, slanted roofs and squared windows. Every few blocks, ceramic statues of a blonde woman in a white dress blown up by some undetectable breeze stood on the corner, sometimes in front of a specific building, other times surrounded by well-tended green space.
Beyond the city lay desert broken by patches of something green that looked like corn or wheat growing out of drying kelp. JT rolled his eyes. "Creeper vine. It's an impressive GMO, but I feel sorry for whoever grows that crap."
"Explains why the Gelt settlers were willing to move out of the Townships," said Suicide. "They don't seem upset about the creeper vine here."
"Of course not," said Boolay. "It's the only thing besides mountains to look at on this dust ball. Do I have to go outside?"
"Maybe." Suicide angled the craft toward Mortenson's spaceport. The wide patch of land with dozens of round landing pads sat at the edge of town. Desert with no growth surrounded it. Near the city side of the spaceport, a large building with bulbous spires squatted, shimmering brightly in the midday sun. A huge statue with the white dress and blonde hair towered over it. If it were not for the statue, Suicide might have thought it was a mosque.
JT rattled off instructions called in by traffic control. Suicide maneuvered the Goldeneye to a landing pad with a large enough hangar to handle it. Boolay quietly shut down systems as they approached the ground: orbital thrusters, the EM drive (or whatever his people called the engine used between planets), and the projection drive, not to mention life support.
The Goldeneye moved into the hangar. Suicide rotated the ship for quick exit when they took off. The desert beyond the port came into view. "If Jayne Best came here, she must be desperate."
"I still don't understand," said JT. "If she's the Archbishop or High Priestess of Earth…"
"The title is High Normaj," Suicide corrected. "She used to be the High Normaj of Earth."
"Right. So why come to this dump?"
Suicide spread her arms wide. "Welcome to the new homeworld of the Temple of the Blessed Mother Marilyn. And you can thank Governor Best for this. He got sweet-talked into giving the Temple this place when he was Agricultural Minister for Jefivah."
JT unstrapped, stood, and stretched. "So, what do you need from me?" he said through a yawn.
"First off, send a hyperdrone to Hanar to update your girlfriend…"
"We're just friends."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Send the message. Update her people. Then I need you to watch for an info packet from my friend on Gohem. Don't open it. It'll be encrypted, anyway." She stood and started for the cockpit door. Stopping to point at Boolay, she added, "And keep this one out of trouble."
Boolay flipped out of his harness, landing on his feet. "What did I do?"
"Where are you going?" said JT, apparently not interested in the Zaran's complaint.
Suicide smiled. "I'm going to get drunk. You have the keys?"
Retroact: 413 IE
Aboard CV Raven's Claw, Invictus Belt, near Etrusca
Yun wished she hadn't taken the contract. Akrad had warned her. Her father had warned
her. Belts outside of Sol or Helios swarmed with pirates. It sounded to her like a bad pulp story. Pirates? Those were either an Age of Sail myth or an annoyance to even minor powers during Earth's World War Era. Pirates didn't roam space. There was too much space to roam.
Learn something new every day, she told herself as the rattletrap ship, really a habitat module strapped to an outdated and oversized EM drive, put a kinetic rod across her bow. The whole Jefivah-rigged vessel had been mounted on a barge with two railguns and a couple of ancient point defense cannons welded to it. For an improvised ship, it was pretty clever.
As a threat to her existence, it did no favors to her bladder. Akrad had taught her a couple of tricks to make sure they did not jam her comms. For starters, she could transmit on a frequency off-limits to civilians. Illegal use of military frequencies attracted Navy attention beautifully.
"Mayday," she said, "mayday, this is the Raven's Claw, four days out of Tian and en route to Gaius Station. My ship is under attack by an improvised ship." She recorded the message as she transmitted, putting it on a loop.
The pirate ship did not seem to notice her broadcast. Instead, it approached the Raven's Claw with an inflatable universal dock opening like the maw of some venomous reptile. They would not mount the Raven's Claw's airlock. They would simply latch onto the ship and burn into the hull.
Her father had given her one other trick.
"These are brand new," he told her as he handed her a rifle with an elaborate electronics cradle mounted on it. "I'm probably breaking a dozen regs to give this to you, but the Navy is going to issue these soon. The Marines are already training with them."
She held the rifle that day her father gave it to her. "What is it?"
"They call it the KR-27. Smart bullets, a site that doubles as a surveillance pod. You can literally shoot around corners if you do it right."
"Isn't this a war machine?"
The Compact had a patchwork of weapons laws, with Earth having its own patchwork. Tian was one of those worlds that considered military grade personal weapons to be war machines.
"It's illegal on Tian." He smiled. "You're going to Etrusca, where I believe they issue sidearms as soon as the birth certificate is registered."
Now, with the flying abortion that was the pirate ship attaching to her hull like some space borne parasite, she killed her grav plates and floated over to the locker behind the pilot's seat. Out came the KR-27, four magazines floating with it. She snatched three of them up and put them in her pocket. The fourth slid into the weapon with a satisfying snick. A push of a button loaded a bullet into the chamber. The electronic cradle powered up, its screen reading "Smart Mode Initiated."
She locked the hatch to the cockpit. No reason to make it easy on them. The smart bullets required the KR-27 paint the target before firing on it, so smart mode was out. She backed up against the pilot's seat and aimed at the door. The first person to come through would go down. Looking at the underside of their ship, she doubted they had Marine power armor or even nano-fabric uniforms.
Her console flashed an alert. She did not need to see it to know. They breached the hull. They would cut the ship open, take the cargo, try to take her, and leave the airless hulk to float like so much debris among Invictus's crowded asteroid belt. The sound of metallic boots hitting the deck on the other side of the hatch told her they were aboard.
Something hit the window outside.
She whirled and saw a suited figure outside. It was likely a man, but whoever it was wore face paint, so it looked like a skull leering out from the helmet's visor. Skull made obscene gestures at her.
Yun's heart leapt into her throat, and she struggled to slow her breathing.
"Calm, Yun," she told herself. "Calm. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."
The Special Forces and Marine motto had become something of a personal mantra for her. That calm detached part of her brain noticed that she had said "Slow is smooth…" in a rapid, staccato voice. She wanted to laugh.
Unfortunately, Skull held a vacuum torch he brought down to the transparent bulkhead of the window. Something cold settled over her. Skull meant to crack the cockpit, vent the air and possibly her, and enter the ship through the window. That cold settling over her allowed her to think.
The cockpit's decompression response would take thirty seconds to kick in. They designed the windows to prevent objects from coming in, not going out. Who left their ship through the window unless they crashed? The windows depended on internal pressure for strength.
She raised the KR-27 and exhaled. Skull laughed, his grin exaggerated by the face paint and the jerking of his body. As he brought up the blade again, Yun made sure she emptied her lungs. Full lungs, Akrad had warned, could rupture in a vacuum. She fired.
For a moment, she saw Skull's eyes go wide. The window exploded out. Air rushed through the sudden opening. Yun clung to the pilot's seat, slamming the KR-27 onto the deck and jamming it under the seat. The roar faded quickly, and she felt herself suffocate.
She also felt like she would explode. Her eyes burned. Gas escaped her from behind. It took all she had to keep from gasping for air.
So, the detached part of her mind, this is what it's like to drown.
Two metal panels slammed down over the hole and the remaining window. Air began flowing from the recycler. She gasped, no longer able to resist. With each attempt to breathe, more air entered her lungs. The sound returned with her console speaking.
"Warning: Decompression event! Remain in place. Warning: Decompression event…"
She crawled to the pilot's seat and brought up one of the external cameras. Skull's body, a gaping hole in his chest, had slammed into the makeshift pirate craft. Apparently Skull had knocked the ship away from the Raven's Claw. Her own ship had completely decompressed, leaving the cockpit the only part of the ship with air.
She reached up and turned on her distress beacon, then collapsed in the pilot's seat. Tears ran down her face as she started to cry. Her lungs burned. A mirror would most certainly reveal her eyes to be bloodshot.
And yet, that detached part of her mind felt exhilarated. She had killed.
But she felt alive.
7
For a colony founded on a rather hedonistic religion, Marilyn had damned few bars. The Compact claimed its share of worlds founded by religious groups. Two, Deseret and The Caliphate, traced their origins to notoriously dry cultures, Mormonism and Islam respectively. On Deseret, however, one found coffee under more scrutiny than alcohol (though Suicide had to admit the beer there was weak) while Caliphites often dashed off to the wine bar after evening prayers.
Deseret and The Caliphate had also been around for two or more centuries, time enough to relax the cultural taboos. Marilyn had been a weapons depot in the middle of nowhere until only five years before.
And despite the creeper vine taking over the rural landscape, sand got into everything. Including Suicide's boots. It could be worse, she told herself. She wasn't in a swamp on Aphrodite wondering what just crawled up her pant leg.
At least her contact had given her a meeting place. Marilyn might have had damned few bars, but the city of Mortenson had them. Her contact sent her to a dive near the spaceport's freight-handling section simply called Al's.
She swore not to have any more tequila. It might have been mid-morning in Mortenson, but she left Arcanum mid-afternoon and spent several hours on Menh. Sooner or later, her body would either go back to Amargosan time or demand she pick a local clock and stick to it. She parked herself on a barstool and flagged the bartender, whom she assumed was Al. "What kind of beer or ale you got?"
"Cold," he said. "You have a specific brew in mind?"
"Arean, if you have it."
The bartender nodded with approval. "Either you've been around, or you're ex-Navy." He looked her over. "Pilot?"
She merely nodded.
"Call sign?"
"I flew aboard the Hancock."
"Al," a big man in a
stained apron, frowned as his expression showed him searching for a name. "Where you from?"
"Everywhere. Tian originally. Did some time on Aphrodite. Hanar." Nobody local, except her contact, needed to know she had lived on Amargosa for the past five years.
"Aphrodite." A grin split Al's face. "I've been there. Were you one of Dasarius's contractors?"
"I was. Too bad that project turned to shit."
Al grumbled something under his breath. "I worked in one of the Penqu districts." He shoved a hand toward her, revealing the tattoo on his arm. "Al Molino, ex-Marine."
"Priya Izumi," she said, combining the names of the two people whose ashes hung around her neck. "Did the Hancock during the Polygamy Wars."
Al's grin became wider. "You don't say?" He rolled up his sleeve and showed her a tattoo. "101st Orbital. Jumped out of more perfectly good spacecraft than is healthy for a human."
"Ever been in a vacuum without a suit?"
"Outside of training?" He turned and pulled on one of the taps. "On the house. Arean brew, a lager. Unless you're one of those Temple types who want Jefivan pale ales or some shit like that."
"Lager's fine," said Suicide. "My father's a retired pilot. He raised me right." She took a sip of the stuff. It was like drinking coffee, the semi-illegal stuff they served on Deseret, no less. Smooth, a little heavy, with the hint of flour in the aftertaste. The light reddish color betrayed its origins from Ares. Either Al imported it, or someone locally brewed it from that weird Arean grain. "We used to drink it like this back on Tian."
"Ares is one planet out from Tian," he said. "And I bet you managed to go home a lot when you contracted on Aphrodite."
"No," she said. "I pretty much stayed there." She smiled, though she knew it would look sad to Al. "I had someone there." She used another sip of the beer to reset her poker face. "Anyway, I'm meeting an old buddy from my Aphrodite days."
"Would that be my Priya I hear?"
They both turned to see a dark-skinned man, rejuved but showing his age anyway, shamble out of the restroom.