“Received, Chitec Transport Designation Zero-Fifty, please stand by.”
The smallest indication of movement blurred to my left. Jones slammed into the back of Bachar’s chair, sending the captain sprawling across the controls. I shoved him aside and reached for Jones. Her good hand shot out and punched an innocuous-looking yellow key. I caught her hand, twisted her arm behind her back, and pinned her against the controls.
“What did you activate?”
The yellow key pulsed a steady rhythm.
Jones’s sneer slashed across her hard face. “Reinforcements, bitch.”
Through the obs window, the fleet warbirds had shifted. Both birds were turning. In seconds, they’d lock on. The warning would come next. They’d demand to search the ship. I ran a quick scenario assessment: we weren’t getting through that gate—at least, not legally.
I cracked a fist across Jones’s jaw, dropped her semiconscious weight on the floor, yanked the captain from the flight chair, and buckled up in his place. “Strap in!”
“What are you doing?!”
Ignoring Doctor Lloyd’s shriek, I wrapped my fingers around the two control columns—one for thrust, one for trajectory—and pulled the lumbering pelican out of the orderly line. Her nose lifted. Stars and black filled the obs window.
Count the stars. I knew how to fly because Haley had. This would be … thrilling.
Doctor Lloyd strapped himself into the chair beside mine.
Run, One Thousand And One. Run. The memory of Hung’s voice drifted through my processes, seeking out the places where I kept fear hidden.
“You can’t outrun warbirds,” Bachar said from somewhere behind me. If he had any sense, he’d be strapping himself in, because this would be close. “You might as well give up now, before they fire.”
They won’t fire on civilians without good cause. Dropping the nose, I lined up my sights on the gate and doubled down on engine power. The pelican growled low in her belly and surged forward.
“You’re heading for the gate?” Bachar huffed a flat, nervous laugh. “You can’t go for the gate. You don’t have clearance.”
“I think we’re beyond needing clearance,” Doctor Lloyd muttered.
Bachar realized I wasn’t slowing his ship down.
“You can’t!” Fear underlined his shout.
“Why can’t we?” Doctor Lloyd asked.
Three ships have arrived while we’ve been waiting for clearance. Gate Control must open the return passage soon to alleviate traffic.
We approached the pinch point between the warbirds. They hung, motionless, weapon arrays exposed. But they wouldn’t fire, not this close to the gate. They, like Bachar, knew exactly what was about to happen. Why waste ordinance when the ship in question was likely to do the job for them?
“We don’t know which way the gate is operating,” Bachar said, his voice smaller than before as reality sank in. “If we enter into oncoming traffic, we’re dead.”
“What?” Doctor Lloyd squeaked. “One! Stop!”
I stared dead ahead and watched the gate lights ripple, calling us closer. “Everything will be fine, Doctor Lloyd.”
“Do you know that?—She knows that.” He made an odd little noise, something like a laugh, but tighter. “She’ll have run the numbers and deduced this is the most efficient course of action. It’s how she thinks. She knows the gate is open. We’ll be fine. That’s what you did, isn’t it, One?”
I smiled. A synthetic couldn’t choose to do this, to go against the odds and leave their manufactured lives in the hands of luck. Everything pointed to disaster. This was the wrong thing to do. The odds, the numbers, they were against me. I stared into the gate, into what could be the end, and never felt more alive.
“One?”
“Would you like me to lie, James?”
“Lie? What? Wh—”
“Chitec Transport Designation Zero-Fifty, power down your engines immediately. The gate is closed to departing traffic. I repeat, the gate is closed—”
“One, dammit!”
“Stop her! She’s going to kill us.”
The shouts boiled around me, swirling into a storm of noise, but inside, all was quiet. Someone came forward, Bachar perhaps, or Jones. I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t care. The gate loomed large. The lights spilled into the pelican’s bridge and washed over us as the ship broke the surface and punched through.
I closed my eyes, alive in the face of death.
Forty percent chance. Luck.
Stars are wishes and wishes are dreams. I’d captured mine.
Between one blink—one thread of code, one heartbeat—and the next, we reappeared on the opposite side of the gate. The original system glittered. Traffic queued around the gate’s transit lanes.
An odd tickle flitted up my insides and burst from my lips. Laughter. I blinked at James’s white, horror-filled face and laughed harder.
“She’s insane,” one of the crew muttered.
Insane?
No.
I am One.
And I’m alive.
Chapter Thirteen: Caleb
“That’s a fuckload of security.” I leaned over the flightdash to get a panoramic view of the gridlock.
Traffic was backed up on our side of the jumpgate to the point where we weren’t getting through this cycle, and not before Hung pulled his finger out of his synthetic ass and shut the gate system down for good.
I slumped back in the flight chair, pulled the fleet jacket collar away from my neck—this close to fleet, I had to wear the fucking thing—and checked Fran’s sour face. She stared out at the jam, a muscle working in her cheek as she ground her teeth. She had to be thinking the same as me.
Fleet had descended on the gate like pirates on a wreck. I tried to see through the snarl of ships for any sign of a Chitec-branded transport. Most of the traffic was commercial mining vessels, a few freighters, and fleet transports, peppered by the occasional passenger ship. No sign of Chitec. Had One gotten through?
“Raptor Designation Nine-Nine-One, this is Captain Holt of the Acer, come back.”
“Here we go …” Fran uttered before opening her external comms channel. “Acknowledged, Captain Holt. This is Commander Olga, Raptor Nine-Nine-One, you seem to be having some traffic control issues, Captain.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Fran had changed the pitch and tone of her voice, adding a note of “don’t fuck with me little man.” I’d heard it before, usually when she was giving me the side-eye with a heavy dose of “I’m always right.”
With an inward smile, I pulled down the holoscreen and searched the cloud for Captain Holt’s dataprint. We’d already scanned for any mention of Fran’s alter ego, Special Commander Francisca Olga. There wasn’t anything remarkable about Francisca Olga. Her dataprint confirmed she was a merchant’s daughter trying to get by in the black. The same dataprint I’d fallen for years ago. Had I dug a bit deeper, I might have realized her dataprint was too light on data. Back then, I’d been more focused on her ass than on her past. Hindsight’s a bitch.
Holt’s print was unremarkable. A squeaky-clean fleet career. A good guy, probably. In another life, we might have shared drinks in the academy mess halls.
“Commander, I don’t have you or your ship on any flight plans. In fact, I can’t find any—”
“You won’t, Captain. I’m designated Special Ops, sanctioned by Admiral Jarvis. You can waste time bouncing requests back and forth, maybe wake him up back on Old Earth, add another backlog of reports to what must be a growing pile, or you can wave us on through without adding to your headache.”
She said it all with the self-assured, bad-ass tone that, had I not sworn off Francisca Olga, might have had my mind wandering into the gutter.
She raised her middle finger at me without looking my way.
“That’s all very well, Commande
r, but after a recent security breach, I can’t afford to wave anyone through, not even you, Ma’am. You’ll need to wait your turn and pass through our inspections like everyone else. Though I will move you up and get you on your way as soon as possible.”
Fran hesitated long enough for me to lift my head and see her wet her lips. “Captain, you did hear me say Special Ops? My ship does not fall under the same security protocols as regular gate traffic. We have security-sensitive material on board.”
“Ma’am, you can get in line like everyone else, or you can wait while I go right ahead and request confirmation from Admiral Jarvis.”
Jarvis was a desk jockey, had been since I was in fleet, and still was according to Fran. He’d likely deny she existed and then send a patrol to pick her up on the quiet.
I muted the comms. “Let them search us. It’ll be a quick sweep. They don’t have time for anything else.”
Fran pinched her bottom lip between her teeth and winced.
“If they bother to search the harrier, the explosives are well hidden. They won’t find them. There ain’t no reason for them to go poking behind the harrier’s panels.”
“Commander?”
Fran reopened the comms. “Captain Holt, proceed with the inspection posthaste.”
She cut the link and navigated the warbird through streams of traffic to the priority channel.
If we were lucky—right—we’d get some low-level fleet grunts ticking boxes so we could be on our way in no time. If we were lucky.
“This is bullshit.” Fran pushed from her chair and flung her hands up, threading her fingers into her hair. She snagged her clip, grumbled in Spanish, then tore the clip free and tossed it across the controls. “While we’re standing around with our dicks hanging out, Hung is counting down the minutes.”
She pulled her hair back, holding it away from her face in an iron grip.
I turned my chair side-on and watched her long-legged pacing. Color flushed her cheeks. Fury burned in her eyes. Fran knew what she was doing, she knew exactly what we were walking into, and that wasn’t anger driving her steps.
“What the fuck am I going to tell them about you?” She flicked her hand at me like my breathing was fucking inconvenient. “By now, fleet probably uses a picture of Cap’n Caleb Shepperd to teach new recruits how to shoot right.”
“I’m just some lowly lieutenant, a grunt. They won’t even notice me, especially in whites. It’s you they’ll be interested in. A Special Ops Commander. The boarding crew will give you some stick.”
She stopped dead and glared through me. “I can handle their questions. I’ve been swallowing their shit for years.”
I pushed from my chair. “No, you haven’t. You’ve been my second, a pirate, and an escaped convict for years. What you ain’t been is a fleet commander. Get your shit together, Fran. Act like the fleet officer who earned her stripes, not the stroppy bitch who doesn’t like to be told no.”
Her eyes flashed. “Fuck you, Cale.”
“You’ve got it in you. They gave you those stripes for something, right?”
That cooled her jets. Her top lip lifted but the snarl didn’t get vocal. She swallowed and then crossed to her flight chair and gripped its back.
“I got the stripes on the Treno raid. When the lead ship went down, I stepped up.” She glared at the traffic filling our obs window like she could will them out of her way.
Treno. I’d heard the name for all the wrong reasons. Pirates had overrun Treno. Fleet turned a blind eye until the newsfeeds got hold of it. Unaccustomed to having their noses rubbed in shit, fleet launched a heavy-handed strike, and if you believed the newsfeeds, they cleared up that quaint little backwater planet like the heroes they were supposed to be. All hail fleet, the keepers of the peace. From the look on Fran’s face, I figured things had played out differently to the official datafiles.
“Pirates regularly station themselves among civilians. It keeps them safe from aerial assaults. From Treno orbit, there was no way of knowing if the fleeing ships were pirate or civilian. One of the ships pitched into our commanding vessel. They never saw what hit them.” She breathed in deeply, held it, and sighed. “It would have taken dozens of cycles to get strike intel from planetside. Command wanted it done.” Her fingers whitened on the seat’s back. “They gave me stripes and called me Commander because I was the sucker next in line to give the fire order.”
That was why the Nine wanted her on this mission. Not because she was ex-fleet. Press the button or say the word and thousands die. Mass murder—she’d done it before.
“I get it. They patted you on the back and called you a hero, so you got the fuck out of there, chose S-Ops to hide in. None of that matters here and now. Commander Francisca Olga is a cold, hard bitch. She’s the fucking hero of Treno. Saved a whole bunch of fleet assholes and returned peace to a planet that didn’t know it needed it. That’s who we need now, not my mouthy second-in-command who’s afraid of facing the past.” Fuck, I know all about that. “Suck it up, Fran.”
If she made one slip when fleet came calling, one wrong word, one mispronounced name or fumbled code, they’d know something was up. Any excuse to dig deeper and they’d take it. We needed this inspection to go smoothly. Keep it simple. Get away clean.
I stopped by her side and watched the ships choking the gate space. “You’re the best fucking liar I know. Don’t flake out on me now.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she replied, her words soft, like whispers, but with a jagged edge of irony. Her hand slipped inside her jacket. She pulled out a pistol.
I got a grand view down the barrel, felt my gut sink, and groaned. “Really?”
She pulled out a pair of wrap-cuffs and threw them at my chest. “Do the honors.”
I snapped one loop around my right wrist. “Tell me this is kinky and I’ll let it slide.”
With her focus on my left wrist, I lunged off my back foot, knocked her pistol high, and received a loose fist to the face for my trouble. The whip-fast impact snapped through my face and neck. I was all set up to retaliate when the cool, hard pistol muzzle pressed against my temple.
Rolling my jaw, I straightened and faced those deceptively pretty eyes. Fran had never been much of a brawler. Clearly, she’d learned a few moves in Asgard.
She shrugged a shoulder. “Don’t be a dick, Cale. Trust me.”
“Trust you?” I side-eyed the pistol. “I’m pretty sure this here ain’t how trust works.”
“I need you beaten up and pissed off.”
“Well, you’re halfway there.”
“You’d never let me cuff you and hand you over to fleet.” She snapped the left loop around my wrist. The wrap-cuffs tightened, yanked my arms together, and held firm.
“Fucking right,” I grumbled.
She tugged on my cuffs, checking their hold. “This is the easiest way.”
“Easy for you.”
“I need a distraction.”
“Is that what I am?”
“Something to keep fleet from looking too closely at the harrier.”
“You’re handing me over?”
“Wanted for endless smuggling offences, breaching Asgard—twice—five counts of murder, a string of cargo thefts, soliciting unlawful sexual services—”
“That wasn’t me—”
“And”—she stepped back and trawled her gaze from my head to my toes—“impersonating a fleet officer.” She raised a fine dark eyebrow in a deliberately suggestive manner. “You’d never pass a fleet shakedown. So, I’m your escort to Janus, where according to my report—which will of course be available for inspection—you’ll stand trial for your crimes.”
Gotta love a girl who always has a Plan B in her back pocket. “I’m your security-sensitive cargo.”
She smiled. “You wanted the fleet commander, here she is. Your ass is mine, Shepperd. At least until we get through the gate.” She maneuvered around me and gave me a nudge in the back with the pistol. “Your cabin. Go.”
<
br /> “That was what the whiskey was about. You were gonna get me so fucking drunk that I’d wake up cuffed to my own bunk.” I laughed and got nudged forward again. Fuck, she was good. So damn good.
“Actually, no. The whiskey offer was genuine.”
We’d come this far, waded through layers of shit and lies, and I wasn’t buying it. “You’re not gonna shoot me, Fran.”
“You’re not going to fight me, Captain. This is the right call. You know it.”
She marched me off the bridge and into the brilliant white passageway.
“You think I trust you’ll let me go?” I asked, getting another painful nudge in the back.
“You don’t have a choice.”
She was right about that.
“Relax. I got your back, Cale.”
“You’ve got a pistol in my back is what you’ve got.”
“Just like old times.”
Trust her? Well, shit.
Chapter Fourteen: One
I maneuvered the Chitec transport gently into the Janus dock and locked her down. Through the obs window, I could clearly see the customs queues. A flash of Doctor Lloyd’s credentials should get us inside the orbit station without any problems.
“It’s quiet,” Doctor Lloyd commented, standing over the flight controls and scanning the dockside.
He didn’t look at me. He hadn’t made any direct eye contact since he’d reinstated my cloud access. We’d abandoned the Chitec crew at the mining outpost, and on the remaining flight to Janus, I’d allowed him brief access to my code. But even with restrictions, the wireless touch of his programming had elicited a barbed, twisting knot of revulsion that had made me want to physically push him away. His touch in my mind, his code curling through mine—Poison. Invasion. Get it out … GET HIM OUT. But I’d silently endured, and he’d quickly reopened my link to the datacloud, withdrawing his technician’s touch from my mind without meeting my eyes.
I’d immediately scanned the original system’s real-time reports. Janus Security was on high alert, as was much of the original system. Main gate traffic in and out of the original system was subjected to thorough security checks, but I’d found no mention of a hijacked Chitec transport vessel, and nobody had stopped us on our arrival. That seemed highly irregular.
Girl From Above #4: Trust Page 9