“Sure,” I lied. “Keep it simple. Get away clean.”
His frown said he knew I was bullshitting. I shrugged. It wasn’t like he hadn’t lied to me.
“You don’t get to leave me,” he said, tucking a hand into his pants pockets and glancing about the hall. He looked smaller, his shoulders slouching. “You’re all I’ve got.”
Well fuck me, he was having brotherly feelings. “I’m a hard bastard to kill.”
I strode on before Bren could get any ideas about hugging or shaking hands.
“Tell me you got some luck left, Lieutenant Shepperd,” he called.
I raised a middle-finger salute over my shoulder and continued to hangar three, where my ride off the Island waited.
* * *
While Fran and me had been pissing off the pirates on KP92, the Nine had been hard at work sprucing up Fran’s raptor. From my temporary flight position, piloting the Candes’ harrier, I got an eyeful of Fran’s bird rising out of the Island’s hangars. The nine-tailed fox insignia was gone, replaced by fleet’s stars and crescent moon. The lashing rain steamed off Raptor Nine-Nine-One, giving her a rippling heat aura. Lightning flashed, licking across her black panels. It was enough to start me drooling. She looked every inch the majestic bird of prey, but hidden in those deceptively streamlined curves was enough ordinance to deter pirates and blow anything equal her tonnage out of the black. Not much could top a raptor, and I’d always wanted one. Among the few good memories of home were those summers spent lying on my back in the sunbaked cornfields, watching fleet warbirds pull maneuvers over Vancouver airspace.
I piloted the Cande harrier into Mimir’s outer atmosphere, cut the engines, and sent out the towlines.
Fran’s sharp voice came over the comms. “Locked up.”
She pushed the override codes over. The harrier jolted, and the raptor reeled the harrier in. The raptor’s sleek ass and blinking external lights filled the obs window.
Time to go be a lieutenant. I left the bridge, checking the holstered twin pistols I’d brought along. My boots thumping along the catwalks were too fucking loud and only served to remind me that this ship was doomed. I wasn’t into all that superstitious shit like some who made their living in the black, but I did believe in human fuckups. I’d poked through a few typical smuggling hidey-holes and found the well-packed explosives wrapped in gray and molded into place. After that, I didn’t much feel like hanging around.
Only when I was safely inside the raptor’s airlock—the chimes counting down—did I shake off the unease. Sure, the bomb disguised as a harrier was technically only a few meters away, but it was out of sight. The rest I could put out of mind. When the airlock pressure seal gasped, I got a lung full of dry, chemical-tinged warbird air and made my way through the curved, ultra-white passages toward the bridge. There would be plenty of time to familiarize myself with Fran’s pride and joy, once we were properly black bound. Before that, I had to report to my senior officer.
Much of the jutting bridge consisted of the horizontal crescent obs window and the bank of flickering controls beneath it. A row back, the weapons consoles stood empty. We didn’t have the crew necessary to start a war. Just two—enough to get our towed harrier and us back to the original system under the guise of captured spoils. Keep it simple. Get away clean.
I sat in the second’s flight chair and watched Mimir shrink to moon size beneath us, deliberately not looking at Fran. Seeing her in those whites would fuck with my head. I had enough issues with her without the glaring irony slapping me in the face.
“Has your raptor got a name, Captain, besides Nine-Nine-One?” I finally asked as she turned her bird toward the star-dusted black.
“No.” Curt.
I slumped back in the chair and stole a quick sideways glance at her. She stared hard at the flightdash, her jaw set and her stance rigid. She’d pinned her hair back tight against her skull, accentuating the scar on her cheek and sharpening her Spanish features.
“She’s gotta have a name,” I said.
“Why? She’s carrying a crew bent on killing over two hundred thousand people. What should her name be?” Finally Fran looked at me. Her glare could have cut glass. “Lieutenant?”
Shit, this is off-the-scale fucked-up. “I won’t let that happen.”
“Because they’re not paying you enough?”
I’d flown with her long enough to know when to back the fuck off. She was looking for a fight, for someone or something to take her fears out on. Once, I would have played the game. We’d have fought, with words, maybe even gotten physical, probably sexual too. But I wasn’t taking her bait today.
“There’ll be another way. There’s always another way.”
She punched at a flightdash button that saw the stars turn to brittle slashes against the black. “There’s a package for you in your cabin.”
Blatantly dismissed, I curbed my tongue and left her wrestling with her morals. She thought she had issues? I was the one relying on a woman who’d tried to kill me to fly me into the heart of fleet territory, right into Chen Hung’s back yard.
My cabin was marginally larger than a closet, with another closet at one end to wash up in. The walls were white, the floor was white, the bunk was fucking white. On my first deployment, patrolling a backwater pirate route, me and the rookie fleet crew had hung up holosheets and downloaded from the cloud anything and everything, just as long as it wasn’t white. Fleet’s obsession with all things white was enough to drive a man to drink.
I shrugged off Bren’s coat and my pistols and set them aside, then frowned at the small box sitting on the bunk. No distinguishing marks, just a blue plastic container. I gently picked it up, popped the lid, and hoped this was all some cosmic joke. Maybe there would be a note from Bren inside telling me to laugh it up. There wasn’t. A cylindrical remote trigger sat nestled in specialist foam to keep it from getting knocked and prematurely blowing Fran and me apart. Icy fear skittered across my skin. There wasn’t any fucking foam wrap around the harrier attached to our hull. If we nudged anything—a Janus dock for example—that bitch could blow.
I closed the lid, wrapped the box and pistols in Bren’s coat, and buried it at the bottom of a narrow closet. That was where the trigger would stay.
Straightening, I caught sight of the fleet asshole in the mirror. If I didn’t know better, I’d have reckoned he was afraid.
“I need a drink.”
I tugged off the white jacket and tossed it aside. My gray compression top might as well have been spray-painted over my chest and arms, but it beat the whites. I ruffled my hair, hissed in a breath, and left my cabin for a tour of the ship.
On the surface, there wasn’t much to see. The engines would be worth a look if we hit landfall before Janus. Otherwise, she was fleet-clean, too white and ultra efficient, and as quiet as a Chitec lab.
One. My thoughts strayed as I surveyed the catwalks.
One just had to be the hero. I could have stopped her. If she’d waited for me on the Island, I could have taken her on that excursion. Nobody would have ever found us. Fran would have called it running away. I’d have called it surviving. Dad had taught me that life lesson. But maybe I wanted more than to survive. Maybe it was time to start living? The sound of my dry laugh echoed down the white, curved walkways. Great time to decide you wanna live, asshole.
With a dry mouth and uncomfortable thoughts, I hit the mess, which was little more than a single-person walkway with a fuckload of hidey-holes and a breakfast bar. A quick search revealed packets of desiccated food and powdered nutrients.
I tossed the food packets onto the counter and braced my arms against the countertop. “I miss Starscream.”
“Looking for this?”
Fran leaned against the door seal, holding a bottle of whiskey and a wry smile. Bren was right: she did look good in whites. She looked better than good. She looked right. The jacket and pants molded to her, somehow making her taller, straighter, more untouchable. I shouldn
’t be surprised—it wasn’t like I hadn’t jerked off to imagined scenes just like this one—but the reality left me hollow. Seeing her wrapped head to toe in whites cemented that part of me that had never really gotten on board with the fact she was fleet. She couldn’t be, not Fran. Yet there she was, Commander Olga, all wrapped up in white with the stripes to prove it.
The whiskey in her hand was mighty tempting.
“What’s the catch?” I asked, rooting around the nooks for two cups.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Don’t look at me like you don’t know me,” she murmured.
I don’t. I stayed quiet, tired of lies. Mine. Hers.
She huffed and entered the galley. “Look at me.”
“Is that an order?” I dumped the cups aside and leaned against the counter, keeping my gaze fixed ahead, well away from her.
“You didn’t follow orders when you were in fleet. I don’t expect you to follow them now.” She set the whiskey beside the cups. A good year. She’d have paid handsomely for it, especially on Mimir. “We’ve got about fifteen hours to kill before we hit the first gate. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to share a few drinks with an old friend.”
Friends? Is that what we were? “If fleet searches us at the gate and finds the booze, they’ll pull us in.”
She leaned her hip against the counter and crossed her arms. “I learned a thing or two while smuggling. I’m sure there are places on the warbird we can stash contraband.”
We were smugglers. Now I wasn’t sure what we were. Drinking wouldn’t help with that. After a few glasses and with that look in her eyes, I knew exactly where this would end up. She’d be growling all the Spanish curses while I fucked her senseless against the counter. A stirring started way down low. Fucking hell, when will this shit end?
“I can’t do this, Fran.”
“Bit late for that.” She popped the stopper off the whiskey and poured two fingers into each glass. “You think the Fenrir Nine will let us walk away if we say no? We’ll be the ones face down in the Mimir sea—”
“That’s not what I meant.” I picked up the glass and poured the contents down the sink. “You. Me. Whatever fucked up thing we’ve got going on, I ain’t doing it no more.”
I looked her in those Spanish eyes and saw her expression tighten as she guarded against the words to come.
“Starscream’s gone. That ship was about the only thing keeping us together. We do this mission and then we go our separate ways.” If we survive.
I waited for her to say something, maybe come back with something Spanish that I’d have to look up later, but she swallowed and reached for her drink. “Fine.”
Fine? After everything we’d been through, all I was getting was a fine? There had to be more to it. She didn’t strike me as the type to let go without a fight. I had her pegged as the sort to aim her knee at my twitching junk.
I shrugged. “Good.”
She picked up her drink and wet her lips with golden whiskey, her green, seductive eyes on me the whole time. I let a smile slip through, for old times’ sake. It wasn’t so long ago I’d have craved the taste of whiskey on her lips. She knew it too and believed I couldn’t walk away.
“I’m done.” I nudged passed her and left the galley, heading straight for the bridge.
Whatever we were, or whatever we’d had, it had crashed and burned beneath all the twisted shit long ago. She had it in her to make a decent living doing whatever the hell she wanted. Maybe she wanted to go legit, or maybe she’d go on to be a pirate. Off the phencyl, she didn’t need me, and I didn’t need her. I’d been alone before Francisca. I’d be alone after her too. It was the right thing to do, but it still fucking hurt, because somehow, somewhere down the line, I’d started caring. Old habits wanted me to turn around, down half that bottle, and fuck until I lost my mind. I could pretend it meant nothing, but after the hangover, I’d hate myself the way I hated that fleet asshole in the mirror.
Francisca Olga could get her kicks elsewhere. I was done being fucked every which way.
On the bridge, I set about familiarizing myself with the raptor’s controls, steering my thoughts a long way from Fran.
Count the stars. On second thought, maybe while approaching fleet’s checks wasn’t the best time to piss off my fake superior officer who had a track record of screwing me over. Well shit. What was done was done.
I pulled the maintenance and flight manual from the cloud, spread the documents open on the holodisplays, and focused everything I had on a crash course in raptor controls. I soon forgot the siren call of Fran and whiskey. Not long after, Fran joined me on the bridge, silently running through multiple checks. She noticed the flight manuals and pitched in with a few little tricks she’d picked up, then helped me get a feel for the warbird’s twitchy controls.
Either she took rejection a lot better than I did, or she had revenge up her sleeve, the type of revenge I wouldn’t see coming.
I sure knew how to pick ‘em.
Chapter Twelve: One
My acquisitioned Chitec transport pelican drifted into the gate lane behind four other commercial ships. The jumpgate—a vast ring that routinely swallowed ships and spat arrivals back out on the other side—glittered ahead. Fleet’s gull-wing-shaped warbirds flanked either side of the commercial and civilian lines. Their presence alone was enough to deter most people with unsavory motives.
As I was piloting a clearly designated Chitec vessel, I was hoping we’d get clearance without delay. There was no reason for fleet to suspect the vessel had been hijacked.
In the flight chair beside me, James was scanning the maps and images I’d pulled from the cloud using the ship’s direct link. Our next stop blinked on the charts: a decommissioned mining waypoint locked in artificial orbit around Ceres. I only needed the crew to get through the gate. Once on the other side, I’d leave them at the waypoint before moving on to Janus.
“I need direct access to the cloud,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s wise,” James replied, focused entirely on the holoscreen.
Various replies presented themselves, not all of them pleasant. I could easily force him to reinstate my cloud access. A few broken fingers would suffice.
He looked at me and smiled when he found me watching. A little under two seconds later, his smile faded.
“One, I disconnected you from the cloud for your own protection. To keep …” He paused, aware of the crew huddled at the back of the bridge. “To keep you safe from certain individuals.”
“I do not need your protection, Doctor Lloyd.”
He stared back at me with wide, questioning eyes. “Why don’t you call me James any more?” When I didn’t reply, he pressed his lips together, blanching them of color, and swallowed hard. “Right. I er … Look, there’s no way around saying this, but the last time you were connected, you killed people.”
“You breached my protocols and left me open to the remote override. That was your error, not mine.”
“Why do you need access?” he asked, the pitch of his voice more insistent. He waved a hand at the flightdash. “You have the cloud right here.”
“I can navigate the datacloud more efficiently than these rudimentary controls. With access, I can garner information on our target and his resources within seconds. Information that is vital if our mission is to succeed.”
“I don’t know …” He rubbed at the back of his neck.
“You are mistaken. There is no choice here. You will restore my access, either of your own free will or under duress.”
“Torture?” He laughed, but his laughter abruptly cut off at the sight of my expression. “To reinstate your access, I will need my datapad. You’ll have to allow me direct access to your processes. It will take time.”
“How much time?”
“An hour. Less, if your digital pathways are all intact.” He looked away but not before I caught the downturn of his lips. Guilt. Good.
<
br /> He couldn’t hurt me. I’d allowed him administrative access to all of my systems. I’d trusted him. That would never happen again.
“Chitec Transport Designation Zero-Fifty,” a curt male voice announced via external comms. “Gate travel is on high alert. Authentication is required before you proceed.”
“After we’re through the gate,” I told Lloyd then turned my attention to the crew. They’d tucked themselves into a tight, protective group, all but Jones. She sat off to the left and looked at me with steel in her gaze.
I retrieved the captain and sat him in the flight chair. His wide, fear-filled eyes pleaded with me. I didn’t know him and couldn’t pull his dataprint from the cloud to learn what his pressure points were. That left few options should he prove to be difficult.
“What is your name?”
“Bachar. Adrian Bachar.”
“Captain Bachar, you will key in the correct code.” I gently settled a hand on his shoulder. His trembles filtered through my touch and plucked on that part of me that hoarded data, even data born of fear and intimidation. “If you do as I say, there is no reason for me to harm any of you. I have every intention of keeping you and your crew alive.”
“I’ll lose my job.” His nervous gaze skipped to my hand on his shoulder.
“You will lose your life should you alert the authorities.”
“I’m ready.” His voice wavered.
I snapped the wrap restraining his wrists, settled my hand once again on his shoulder, and stood back. “I will be monitoring your inputs.”
“Chitec Transport Designation Zero-Fifty, this is Gate Control. Authentication is required before you proceed. Please respond.”
The captain reached a quivering hand forward and opened the comms. “Gate Control, this is Captain Bachar of the Chitec Transport Designation Zero-Fifty, authentication code echo-kilo-five-five-zero, requesting gate clearance.”
The captain’s voice quivered as much as his hands did. Whether Gate Control had noticed remained to be seen.
Girl From Above #4: Trust Page 8