Her Last Run

by Michael Penmore

  Isabel twitched. “I don’t have a criminal record.”

  “Please don’t treat me like a village fool. Three separate worlds issued outstanding warrants for your immediate arrest. Every Interpol officer has alerts for you on his dashboard.”

  “Petty things. Misunderstandings.”

  “You nearly killed the Overseer of Steel City.”

  A cloud fell on Isabel’s face. Pace really knew her past. She considered the event as the defining moment of her life. She had broken the shackles that held her to a broken life. She spread her wings and flew away. Pace wanted to use that. He’d had her in his sights for longer than he let on. The details he was aware of weren’t public record, so he must have researched her long before their meeting in the underground bunker on Rockwall. “You should know I consider it my worst under achievement that I only nearly killed that old prick. My feelings now are exactly the same as then. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.”

  “I could give you that chance, perhaps.”

  She froze. This was a trap, for sure. The Overseer was powerful and protected. She would not be allowed to land on the same planet as him. But, for the first time, Pace said something that was tempting. Pity she could not swallow working for an ass like him. “I think I’m going to give your generous offer a pass.”

  Pace remained standing with his back to her. Only his head moved slightly, observing the trajectory of a comet dashing on a vivid course through long space. “A pity. Then Ypsilon may need to kill you.”

  She knew it. They were going to try to kill her because she knew too much. For a spy from a secret organisation, Pace had an awfully flappy mouth. “What if I kill you first?” She looked about her person. Dangnabbit! She was still wearing the EEF sergeant’s threads. Greta was in her room and she had dropped the plasma rifle on the floor in the cargo bay. She’d have to go into this fight bare-knuckled.

  The harrumph she heard from the Arbiter was probably his own form of laughing. “You may try but you will not succeed.”

  Isabel rose from the captain’s chair as quietly as she could. The leather was prone to creaking, so she had to do it very slowly. “You are awfully sure of yourself. A long list of people underestimated me. Guess where they landed?”

  “I don’t have to. I know your abilities and history. I took every single permutation into account and deduced a solution for all of them.” Jacob Pace turned on his heel, catching her just before she was fully poised to strike him from behind. “If you kill me, however unlikely that is, Nadine Chu will die. If you try to expose Ypsilon, Nadine Chu will die. If you do anything I don’t approve, Nadine Chu will die.”

  Hot anger rolled through Isabel’s eyes. They started glowing with ten thousand colours. This had just become personal. Threaten her, Isabel could let it go past her. But threaten her friends, and she was a demon of vengeance.

  Grinding her jaw, she threw up her fist, aiming for his nose, hoping to disable him fast. Pace swept the blow to the side with a counter that whirled before her eyes faster than she could say ‘goodbye banana’. She tried again with her other hand reaching for another pressure point - the solar plexus. She felt the skin on her fingers connect with the fabrics of the clothes on his chest. She was already planning her next moves…

  His hand came up out of nowhere and stopped her on the brink of making the strike a reality. He caught her by the wrist and pressed her thumb so hard it nearly dislocated. The needling pain was insurmountable and Isabel went down on her knees. She had bright flashes before her eyes. Pace grabbed her whole arm and twisted. Fire ants crawled up to her elbow and shoulder. Her face contorted in an ugly snarl and she gave out a small yelp. He was faster and stronger than she had expected. She had underestimated him, not the other way around.

  Pace stood above her with serenity in his face. He said, “You are as naughty as a three-year-old. How disappointing. You’re like the fringe separatists, the bounty hunters, the pirates and the smugglers. You have the cunning of the villainous scum. You’d do best to acknowledge I tower over you in every respect. I need to help you make the right decision. Would a little physical deformation convince you to make the right choice? You don’t need two functioning arms to do what I need you to do.”

  Don’t pee yourself. Don’t pee yourself. That was the only coherent thing Isabel could think of. Pain was increasing into agony. Pace had command over her body and her mind was also giving up. He could finish her with one move. The Arbiter let her go. She fell back. Her back scraped over the edge of her own chair but she barely registered the fact. The pain in her arm receded, and the flush of relief intoxicated her.

  “The tint of your glasses,” Pace pointed to her cheeks where the glow was spreading. “It is aesthetically pleasing.”

  Isabel climbed back into the captain’s chair, trying her darnedest not to let out a tired giggle, and to ignore the changing aspects of unpleasantness still visiting her whole arm. As she gathered her wits, the usual sense of purpose melted away. Fear bordering on panic nested in its place. It made thinking hard. What did Pace just say? Something strange. She caught a wheezing breath and figured out what he had meant. The lights bursting from her eyes, covered by the glasses. She closed her eyelids, summoned focus, and the involuntary illumination passed.

  “And now it is gone,” Pace sounded pensive. “Did you reconsider your position?”

  Isabel looked down at the tips of her boots. She rubbed her bad hand with her good one. Pain subsided gradually. As normal thinking kicked back in, she knew she had to play for time. “Do I sign on the dotted line with my blood?” She managed a small quip. Even she considered it a lame one.

  Jacob Pace adjusted his stance and went back from a fighter at the ready to the eloquent judge. “There’ll be time to finalise the formalities. Rest up. Tomorrow will be a big day. You will get to see a world of fable for what it is.”

  Isabel kept her eyes closed and nursed her arm. A wave of exhaustion went through her, threatening to throw her out of the chair in the land of sleep. “I’ll do whatever you want,” she slurred quiet, half-lucid words. “Just leave Nadie out of this.”

  “That is up to you. Work for me and Ypsilon will keep your friend safe from dangers which haven’t even materialised yet. But enough about the Corporal. You have some reading to do before you lie down. Check out what Antares 259 knows about its previous trips to Origo. That can be helpful.” Pace sauntered to the exit like a man strolling out of a playhouse to catch a post-theatre snack. His parting words to her were: “Good night, Isabel Rocarion. And welcome to Ypsilon.”

  The cockpit air was heavy with ashes of dreams gone to charcoal. The night of long space rolled outside the window like gooey blackberry paste with bright bits thrown in to kill the monotony. Isabel pressed her forehead against the cold metal slab of the instruments dashboard. In the darkness of half-dreams, she watched her retirement on Procyon chuffing away. She chuckled weakly. She had the money to go there, but she got it by selling something more important: her freedom.

  Her head jolted upward. Eyes blinked to readjust to the light. How long had she been out? She had the time on her glasses display, but she looked to one of the ship’s computer screens instead. That’s when she realised what Pace had said to her. Check out the previous trips of Antares 259.

  She sat up straight and rolled close to the keyboard. For the second time that day, her hands danced fast across the characters as she put in the query. Antares 259 was the production serial number of the Anvil. Pace using it was strange because as far as she knew, only herself and the previous owner knew that, and for a good reason to boot.

  Antares 259 was a near-legendary handle. No self-respecting space historian would be without the knowledge of its significance. It was the ship of Adam Beck, also known as Starman, an explorer of places no man or woman had set foot in. Starman accumulated a massive archive of star charts from places stretched over 100 light years away in every direction from the Sun and Earth. His maps were more a
ccurate than anything else, including the charts in the hands of the Science Consortium and the Earth Council. And they were stored on the Anvil’s temperamental Mastrad 414 computer system. A treasure worth keeping secret.

  Isabel forgot all her worries for the duration of the search. The Origo Nebula, she had typed in. After an eternity of throbbing and jarring, Mastrad spat out a result on the screen. It was a single entry, a navigational log from the past, long before Isabel had even heard the name Anvil, let alone sat inside the freighter.

  November 13, 2062. Captain: Adam Beck. Course: Origo Cloud. A star chart sat under the digital signature strip. A white line in the middle of the display signified the path Anvil had travelled. It ran straight to the edge of the nebula and disappeared without a trace.

  “That can’t be right. Show me the rest of it,” Isabel mumbled to the old machine. She worked to extricate the missing detail. No such luck. There wasn’t any data. She shook her head in disbelief. According to the log, on November 13, 2062 at 1743 hours Earth Standard Time, the Anvil penetrated the limit of the Origo Cloud and ceased to exist, as far as the logs were concerned. Nothing suggested it had gone anywhere. There was no movement ahead, nor an escape vector.

  “All righty, Adam. What are you trying to hide?” Isabel couldn’t find the lost data. It must have been erased. That in itself was cause enough for investigation. She pulled up one position in the ship’s repositories and searched for the next nearest entry. “November 15, 2062. Gotcha!” The chart was a slightly different edge of the Origo. The white line came out of the nebula, leaving at a different point than it had entered.

  “What were you doing in that soup for two days, Adam? What’s your secret?” Isabel scratched her chin. Whatever it was, she was determined to find out.

  Epilogue

  * 1 *

  Earth Expeditionary Ship Higher Power, hovering over planet Rockwall, Wolf 359 System

  Hangar Bay

  Ramsey and Moon, the hapless duo of ground pounders, broke into the ship’s ‘garage’. Ramsey immediately stopped, bent in two, placed his hands on his knees and nearly coughed up his lungs. Moon, two heads taller and 10 inches broader in the chest, raced past him until he stopped some fifteen yards into the empty field.

  “They’re gone,” he said, neither happy nor upset.

  “Really? No shnitz. Thanks for forking up the obvious, Private Bounce,” Ramsey jeered between gasps. He wouldn’t pass muster, but his fitness for duty was the least of his worries now. “It’s all your freaking fault, gas brain!”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Ya should have run faster, ya slow mow! I dunno what I’m keeping ya for…”

  A well-meaning smile blossomed on Moon’s face in slow motion. “Because we are friends?”

  “Yah. Tell yarself that, lumpy head.” Ramsey put himself back to vertical and looked around the hangar. “Nobody home. We can’t even board our transport. We’re in shampoo.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to go fight, Ramsey?”

  “Will ya stop flapping about that in the open? Anyone can hear ya!” the shorter EEFer clamoured, then cast uneasy glances around the hangar, looking for prying ears. Finding none, he approached Moon and added in a quiet voice, “No, I don’t wanna go. No one wanna go. But that’s our job. We’re army grunts, Moon. Meat. Mince. Rags. Screws. Bone. Gristle. No one cares what happens to us, so we need to look after each other. Ya with me, pal?”

  Moon beamed. “Sure as Europa orbits Jupiter.”

  Ramsey looked at him funny. “What are you on about?”

  “Europa. It’s the smallest of the Galilean moons, named after Galileo Galilei, the famous seventeenth-century astronomer, physicist-“

  “OK, that’s enough.” Ramsey didn’t like Moon talking about stuff he had no business knowing, so he fist-pumped the big guy in the lower side. Someone smaller than Moon might call it a push, a punch even. Moon just brushed it off and kept smiling. “Here’s the deal, nature lover. We’re gonna get pat down for deredaction... deprecation...”

  “Dereliction of duty?”

  “Yeah, thanks. How did ya know I was gonna say that?”

  “Educated guess,” Moon winked at him.

  Ramsey nodded and smiled back. He realised late what he did and scowled, baring his teeth like a nasty rabid dog, minus the frothing at the mouth. In his head, the ‘partnership’ between him and Moon was clearly defined. He was the brains and Moon was the muscle. Any sign of Moon having a mind of his own derailed that neat arrangement, so he discouraged it, going as far as giving Moon flak at every turn, whether it was deserved or not.

  “Stop making bat eyes at me, ya plumb! Who cares what they freakin’ call it? We’re forked! Uppers gonna drop one big hammer o’ hairy on us for this! And it’s all on you!”

  “But I did nothing. You told me we should leave the ranks and pick up the prisoner. You said he was our bidding chip.”

  Ramsey pulled his jaw down and poked Moon on the muscle-hard abdomen. “Oh? What ya sayin’, Moon? It’s my fault now?”

  Moon scratched the back of his head awkwardly. Despite being twice Ramsey’s size, he still wasn’t good at confrontations. “Well, the way I see it… umm... yes?”

  “You’re dead meat!” Ramsey launched a vicious punch against Moon’s chest, but the fist simply bounced off the sturdy pectoral. Moon backed up out of sheer surprise. Ramsey took that as a good sign and followed him with a left-handed swing, but he miscalculated the distance, missed and fell flat on the deck.

  “You’re OK?” Moon leaned down to check how his only friend was doing. Ramsey rolled on his back and cut Moon's feet from under him with a two-legged swipe. The big man tumbled on deck with a mighty crash, and Ramsey leapt on top of him. The two soldiers rolled on the floor, Ramsey throwing clumsy punches, Moon blocking or taking them on the chin in the knowledge he could end the squabble in one heavy-handed strike.

  **

  Bridge

  The smuggler’s freighter moved fast out of reach, and with it the monkey and the scary man called Jacob Pace. The ship’s Captain stood on a dais, resting against a rail that protected him from a drop to the lower level. His chair waited there, sad in its emptiness. He didn’t feel any urge to take it now. His heart had a hole in it that was shaped like a failure of command.

  The things Jacob Pace had told him occupied his head and made his right hand tremble. He put the limb behind his back and clasped the left one over it. That stopped the visible shakes, but they were still going on underneath. He could feel every shudder, and it plunged him deeper into his gloom. He’d spoken to the Chief Medical Officer about the problem. Doc Halliday ran some quick scans and came back with a shattering: Parkinson’s, early to middle stages. Not lethal in itself, but a surefire ticket out of the service. The Captain was past the initial shock now, but still in denial. How could it be middle stages? He’d only started feeling symptoms two weeks ago. Doc Halliday was wrong.

  Still, there was a procedure to follow in these circumstances. The CMO had to report. The Captain managed to persuade the Doc to stall based on the invasion being in full motion. He claimed that his health wasn’t affecting his command yet, and agreed to report for daily checkups. Those visits proved to be a trap. Regular arguments ensued, Doc Halliday wanting to contact the Admiralty, the Captain straining to dissuade him. So far, the CO was winning, but the fact he’d let go a vessel suspected of criminal activity wouldn’t go unnoticed.

  “Sir?” he shuddered when the first officer called out to him from the weapons console. “Your orders, sir?”

  The Captain blinked and looked across the bridge from left to right. The atmosphere was as taut as a politician at 2 am on vote night. From the lowly petty officer on radiation levels to the comms specialist, to the energetic XO, everyone expected decisive action. The XO had set targeting systems to lock on the runaway ship; one finger swipe and the torpedoes would go off on a hunt. The Captain approved. To hell with the special monkey. His brain screame
d for Jacob Pace to be blasted into oblivion. But his emotions interfered. He had already issued a request for a private call home. It would take at least two days before the arrangements were made, two days of nail-biting worry.

  “Sir. You need to give the order now, or the civilian vessel will move out of range,” the XO reminded him. He was another problem. Young, ambitious Commander ready to take a shot as a Captain in his own right. Would he go as far as challenging his CO for the Higher Power’s chair? The ship’s Captain wasn’t sure.

  I got this, team, he sent good thoughts in his family’s way. And then he gave his order. “Stand down, number one.”

  The XO fidgeted. “Sir? With respect, I don’t understand.”

  “Negative on weapons discharge. We let them leave.”

  That didn’t go well with some of the bridge crew. Those who dissented looked among themselves. The Captain marked them on a mental checklist. Only the XO had what it takes to speak up:

  “But why, sir? With respect, it doesn’t make sense.” He mentioned the word ‘respect’ again, but his manner was all defiance: the spark in his eyes, furrowed brow, one hand hovering over the weapons console as though he were going to launch the missiles come what may. “They acted against the safety and security of the ship. We need to retaliate.”

  The dissenters nodded. There were four of them out of the total of eight persons present. The ship’s Captain’s nature came to the fore and assumed the worst. If a fight ensued, he could still come out on top. If mutineers overpowered the loyalists, he had a way out of the bridge just behind him. He’d duck out, rally the crew and contain the mutiny.

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a cow in the pasture, number one,” he scolded the man. If a challenge was coming, he’d meet it with head held up high.

  The younger man took his hand away from the weapons console. He looked more confused than hostile. “My apologies, sir. I’m just trying to understand the motivation behind your decision.”