REBOOTS

by Mercedes Lackey

  I should have realized it was too good. But, when you’re on top, after having been in the gutter for so long…

  So here we were, at our usual game. We had a comfortable table and lounges pulled out of the ship, set up under what passed for trees—more like giant ferns, but they kept the sun off. Since there wasn’t a breeze at the moment, a couple of the Reboots were working one of those overhead pulley-fans they used to have in India in the bungalows the English overlords lived in. Fred had a storage-closet-brewed beer next to him. Trust humans, once you get past basic food and shelter the next thing we think about is booze. About a hundred yards away, little waves lapped on the black sand—this was a volcanic beach. Behind us was the ship, nestled up against a cliff. I had to laugh when I thought about our landing.

  “Y’know…I’m not sure that that was much of a landing.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you did shear off a quarter ton of rock off of that cliff…”

  “Y’know what they say? Any landing you can walk away from, is a good landing. So, stuff it, Wrinkles.”

  We could still lift the ship if we had to. Like, oh, if one of the really big hurricanes decided to bear down on us. The fish and the veggies could survive one—better we got the hell out of Dodge if one of those things put a target on our island. So…screw it. Fred had been right. It had been a good enough landing.

  I grinned, staring at him. I could grin, now. The last time Fred lost to me, he made me—well, I guess you’d call them tooth veneers—to give me something that looked human-ish again, and the oil had given me nice, flexible lips, even if they were a bit thin. “You’re stalling. Even Pete has folded already.”

  “No, it’s not that.” A perplexed look crossed Fred’s face. “It feels like there’s something I should have remembered. Something important. I just can’t place my finger on it.” I could tell that whatever it was that Fred was thinking about, it was bugging him immensely. I decided to take his mind off of it.

  “No use, compadre. I’m not letting you out of this hand. I’ve got plans for my winnings, and you can’t get off that easy.” I gave him my best “gotcha” look. He was an aggressive player, normally. That should have gotten him back in the game, but it didn’t.

  I put my cards face-down on the table. “OK, if it bothers you that much. Did you leave your lunch on the stove?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not that. It feels…important.”

  “Is there an experiment you started and forgot to check on?”

  Fred scoffed. “I haven’t done an important experiment after the time I tried to stick three Reboots together for that—”

  “I know, I remember!” If I slept, it would have given me nightmares. “Was there a news alert? Have you checked for one lately?”

  He shook his head again, looking down at his cards. “No, I’ve scanned for our names, the ship’s name, the Fangs’ names, everything. Got it on automatic for the ship’s computer, set up in a way so we don’t get traced. Nothing on any of us, so far as I can tell. It’s not that.”

  “Forget to check the weather?” That had happened once. It hadn’t been drastic, but three of the Reboots had gotten washed out to sea, never to be seen again. No clue what happened to them. We hadn’t exactly been vigilant about checking for aquatic monsters. We’d pretty much figured that if something couldn’t crawl up on land to get us, we were good.

  Suddenly, we all heard the whine of a extra-planetary booster engine powering up, quickly building to a frantic roar. All of us turned to look at the ship; even the Reboots craned their leathery necks in that direction.

  “The hell?” I said. A single streak of fiery exhaust burst away from the top of the ship, with the bright point of light at the end of it blinking out of sight quickly, leaving only the thick plume of smoke pointing like a finger, upwards.

  A big, fat, middle finger to our entwined destinies.

  “Oh,” said Fred, guilt plastered over his face. “Shit.”

  “What?” I asked, sharply. Then even more sharply, “What?”

  “That’s what I forgot.” He laid his cards on the table, face up; nothing at all but stray cards. “Ship’s emergency beacon. Launches automatically if the ship’s captain doesn’t check in after a predetermined amount of time. It’s so the Home Service can recover the ship and any assets that are left. Tony was the only one supposed to know about it.” Fred looked up to meet my gaze. “I discovered it while I was bored and poking around some of the auxiliary systems one night. I kept meaning to deactivate it, but I never got around to it.” He looked down at his hand. “So…y’all got your bags packed?”

  Oh hell. But…no point in making a deal about it. If there is one thing I am at this point, it’s pragmatic. So Fred screwed up. Right now screaming about it wasn’t going to change anything; the Fangs had tried that often enough, and look where they were now. “Any more of those things on board?”

  “Just the one that I remember finding.”

  “Should we change islands, or whole planets?”

  “With the Home Service involved? If we could scoot out of this galaxy, it’d be just barely far enough.”

  Bugger. Oh well. We could dump some Reboots to leave room for food for Fred, harvest what we had, and be off here in a reasonable amount of time. The Dark Gods in charge of our fate only knew how far we would have to go to get out of reach. Or if we even could.

  Right. “Let’s check the news. See how close they are to here.” That would let us know how long we had to get a good head start. Twenty years would be nice. I could scream at Fred all I liked once we were on the run.

  Then again, given the guilt on Fred’s face, maybe I should just let him stew on his own. Without him, we’d have probably been drifting forever, and our plan never would have worked. Still, it was a colossal, colossal fuckup. Deal with what you can, while you can.

  We ran for the ship, and started the computer scanning through the news. I checked the “colonized planets” list, Pete for the “messages from near-space” and Fred for stuff that needed a little more hands-on than what we were doing.

  Fred made a strange noise. I looked over at him. Under his tan, he was pale. “Uh…looks like things have changed while we’ve been going with drive on full for the past century and change. We’ve got new neighbors. And they didn’t get there by the long haul like us.”

  Oh, I did not like the way that sounded. My brain might not have been the best in the world, but.… “Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

  “We’ve got not a whole lot of room to run, and we’re a lot slower than the competition.” He grimaced. “That’s the long and short of it, as it were.”

  Oh…hell. The Dark Gods Above and Below were laughing at us. That rocket’s contrail had been a middle finger after all. “No. FTL? Portal tech?” I begged him to say no with my beady little eyes. Fred merely shrugged. A lot changes in one hundred and some odd years. And we hadn’t been looking for it until now. And that was my fuckup. Fred was the techy, I was the one that had told the computer what to watch for in the feeds. But…dammit, when we left, everyone said FTL was impossible, and the most anyone could manage would be near-light!

  So everyone was wrong. OK, fine. Now we could both wallow in guilt. Wallow later, move now. Definitely abandon some of the Reboots. Run a couple of wires into the lagoon, stun the fish, flash-freeze. We’d been taking care of the hydroponics garden in the ship instead of letting it go to pot, so Fred was set.

  “Dude. I’ll get the Reboots harvesting brain-balls,” Pete said, and headed out of the ship. I looked at Fred.

  “Ship’s mine,” he said. “If you guys can handle everything else.”

  It was hard to think this fast. I hadn’t needed to in a long time. “Can we decide where we’re going once we’re up?” I asked. That would take one thing off the list.

  “Yes,” he said instantly. “If you guys can get everything loaded back in, and whatever consumables—”

&n
bsp; It had just occurred to me that there was something else we could leave behind…all the crap we’d needed for the Fangs. Best thing to do would be to sink it, so no one knew we’d lost them. The more we could confuse the issue, the better.

  The blood-store room could hold a lot of brain-balls…

  “Have I got determination on what to dump?” I asked. Fred just nodded. He was already busy with what I assumed was pre-flight, pre-readiness stuff.

  “As long as it isn’t me,” he added, jumping to another set of controls.

  Right. Stun the fish and harvest. Harvest what we could from the garden and the rest of the island. Strip out the Fang crap. Sink it in the ocean. Would it be possible to simulate a wreck? Probably not, dammit.

  I realized I was wasting time. I could think and plan while I did the first stages.

  That, and curse all the Dark Gods.

  Seamus Murtaugh Ian ap Llowynn, who answered to “Ian Lonagan” so far as the Home Service were concerned, sauntered back to his office in an exceedingly contented frame of mind. A delightful three-hour lunch in the presence of the equally delightful Sharice from Planetary Resources Accounting, coupled with the high probability that he would be completely idle this afternoon, made this Púca one happy puppy. Oh sure, technically he wasn’t supposed to be fraternizing with other employees except under very specific and Home Service-sponsored circumstances, but she was Planetary Resources and he was Extra-Planetary Exploration Incidents (aka, “oh fuck, we got a beacon”) and it wasn’t really fraternizing when they weren’t even working in the same mega-block, much less building, much less department, now, was it?

  Ian was on his three thousandth game of Spider Solitaire for the day when the e-mail came. This job was virtually perfect for him; lost in the bureaucracy of Home Service, there was very little work he was actually expected to do.

  Besides, he worked hard enough chasing after tasty tidbits like Sharice.

  Home Service just didn’t appreciate that sort of thing; heaven knew he’d petitioned to open a new position that would let him get paid directly for just that. How else was she supposed to stay content in her dead-end, soul-sucking Accounting job, unless someone like him made her life exciting? Parahumans were always a hundred times more attractive than Norms, a thousand times better at evading actual commitments—Home Service would be annoyed if Sharice actually got married and had a real life and real responsibilities, as opposed to the illusory life and very real thrills Ian was giving her. Home Service would have been even more annoyed if someone like a Fang had moved in on her, and possibly even Turned her. Whereas, with a Púca, she was safe from Turning into anything, and Ian had several hundred years’ worth of experience at ditching someone if she somehow did begin to want more out of him than she was ever going to get.

  Annoyed at the distraction from his diversion, Ian closed the game and opened his e-mail. “Well, this is depressingly different.”

  It was an automatic notification from a broadcast repeater satellite on the edge of the Solar System’s frontier. It was dated as having been sent three months ago, which was strange until he read further into the e-mail; usually any beacons that came in were within minutes of “Special Circumstances.” Those circumstances usually being that another crew had gone batshit insane and torn itself to pieces, or that a ship had pancaked into a rogue asteroid or some other such cosmic mishap. Lowest bidder, after all, and it was difficult to find competent Fangs or Fur engineers. Paras still made up most of the crews, even with third-generation FTL. They were still the toughest things around, and with what was Out There, you wanted a crew that was hard to kill.

  “That explains it.” The e-mail listed that the beacon was one hundred and forty eight years old, launched four months prior. The older generation ships were very bare-bones affairs, and the tech capabilities were almost literally light years behind what was available now. He hadn’t seen a beacon from one of these babies in…well, more than a year. He checked the ship list; this one hadn’t been heard from in three years. Plenty of reasons for that, really, so no one had checked on it.

  What was interesting was the partial log recovered from the beacon. The ship had landed. And had stayed that way, while still receiving Galaxy Net feeder streams.

  “Keeping an ear to the ground for the cavalry, huh?”

  No moon. Lots of sun. Looked as if the onboard Fur had done the impossible, overcome the Fang crew, and hijacked the ship.

  I seriously don’t have the time or patience for a wolf hunt. Who’ll wine and dine Sharice in the meantime? He’d have to check out a scouter from Home Service—oh, the paperwork!—put in an appropriations request for ship, cash, and supplies, head out to that backwater, look for the ship…

  And unless the Fur in question was a terrible pilot and the ship had been so damaged in landing it couldn’t take off again, it was unlikely that the ship would still be there. Which meant another round of paperwork, getting authorization to search the galactic neighborhood…

  “A fracking snipe-hunt,” he said aloud with disgust. It could be months. Years! And at the end of it he’d have to try to wrangle a pissed off Werewolf. A pissed off old Werewolf, which compounded the problem. The older a Fur got, the tougher he got. And meaner. And this one had dispatched a full Fang crew, which argued that he was very tough and very mean indeed.

  It was the same for many Parahumans, granted. Still, far more aggravation than Ian wanted to deal with. And no prospects for romancing tasty females, human or Para. What to do? How to avoid this? He’d been hired to deal with dead ships, not rogue ones. This was not his skillset!

  Inspiration struck Ian like a ton of bricks. Why not just do what he always did when responsibility came a-knockin’?

  He opened up the Rolodex—an antique novelty gift from one of his exes—and started flipping through it. Someone reliable, but replaceable. No one from in-house. Inexpensive is a plus…there! Ian punched up the ident number into the vid-phone, which picked up on the first ring.

  “HB Investigations.” The face was male, and rather forgettable, the sort of face that could get lost in any crowd. It was also not the face of a receptionist, which meant the Boggart in question was not in a financial position to hire anyone. Good. Lean and hungry; he’d probably jump at the chance to get a case from Home Service.

  Ian licked his lips, smiling. “Mr. Boggart, I represent Home Service, Extraplanetary Incidents Division. It seems that I have a job for you.”

  ***

  =REBOOTS=

  BOOK TWO: JUST

  THE RIGHT BULLETS

  MERCEDES LACKEY

  The Boggart cut the connection, and wondered if he had been a little too hasty…but a completely unnecessary check of his credit balance and the sure and certain knowledge that there were several bills coming due soon made him shake his head a little. The fee was probably woefully small by the standards of that smartly-dressed Púca on the other end of the connection, but he had wrangled half up-front and a per diem and a finder’s fee if he actually discovered the ship in standard salvageable shape. The half up-front would cover all those bills and then some. Home Service could certainly afford it. And what neither the Púca nor Home Service knew, of course, was that he wasn’t exactly going to have what you would call “traveling expenses” even though he was charging the per diem for them. A little extra cash for greasing palms never hurt, though. He’d pad that in later as “itemized expenses,” but he’d need the cash up front. He drummed his fingers on his old desk; he’d had it a long, long time, and it was an antique at this point. Real wood. Not worth trying to sell, though, they’d made a crap-ton of these things back in the day, and they’d been made to last, so there were still a lot of them around, most in much better shape than his. It was scuffed and battered, and the top had more coffee rings than he had ever bothered to count. There were two chairs in here, an ancient sofa that he slept on when he actually slept, big built-in bookcases full of battered old-fashioned paper books, and two giant old wardrob
es that held clothing and other things necessary in his job. No one ever gave them a second glance since hardly anyone but an antiquarian knew what a wardrobe was anymore. Through the only other door was the reason he’d rented and held onto this particular office, although it was in a far-from-convenient part of town: the full bathroom, from back when this whole building had been owned by a single firm, and this had been one of the executives’ offices. He lived here. Not that the landlord was aware of that. There was no good reason to have an apartment, really, not with food stalls within walking distance, and a perfectly good couch.

  His mail pinged, and he pulled up the file from Home Service. UES Cenotaph. Ha ha. Had to have been an early ship, they’d run out of graveyard humor names for the exploration vessels pretty early on in the process and just started assigning the names of old hurricanes; start at one end of the alphabet with a name book, and work your way down. So, standard crew, hold full of Reboots, one Fur, four Fangs.

  Well, the obvious first-cause would be the Fang Council of Elders; the Nests had their fingers into every little dirty enterprise imaginable, just like the old Norm mobs, so chopping up a ship was small time for them. Before he even opened the file, that was his assumption. It was vanishingly unlikely the Fur had taken the thing over, but the proximity of the ship going missing to when FTL went commercial was just too much to be a coincidence. There had been no few ships that went down that way—more than the Home Service was ever going to admit. A little private subspace radio exchange, spacing your resident Fur twenty-four hours before rendezvous with an Elder Corsair, and Bob’s your uncle. It was easy enough for the Fangs to manufacture new IDs for the mutineering crew, and even easier for them to vanish into the Fang Nests once they’d gotten themselves the “dowry” of one fourth of a ship. Strip the ship for parts, or refit her and pull all the ID, and sell her to an Indie spacer or pirate fleet who wouldn’t ask any questions; standard MO for the Elder Nests.