by George Ellis
“Sorry to interrupt the fun, but we have a fed problem. The Burnett is docked at the station and Batista has already had a run-in with them.”
“No you’re not,” Edgar said.
“What?”
“You’re not sorry. Interrupting the fun is what you do.”
“That’s not — look, this isn’t the time to debate that, okay? Get dressed and meet us in quad five by the bridge.”
“No, by the loading docks,” Jiang corrected me. I gave him a confused look, but he nodded.
“Scratch that, the loading docks,” I relayed to Edgar. He sighed and clipped the transmission.
“Not much of a talker,” Jiang commented. “I guess she prefers other methods of communication as well.”
Jiang motioned across the marketplace, where Batista was using her fists to talk with a pair of fed soldiers. So much for sneaking out of the station undetected.
There were four blue suits around her. Two men. Two women. One of them tried to pin Batista’s arms behind her, but he got a broken nose courtesy of a brutal head snap, the back of her skull cracking the ridge of his nose. Even from 50 feet away, I saw the blood spurt out of the poor guy’s nose as he dropped to the deck in pain.
I hustled over to join the fight. Not because she needed my help. I just wanted to get the scuffle over with more quickly, so we could vacate the area. The eye in the sky – a drone camera – was hovering over the action. That meant not only were the EMG going to be arriving shortly, so were more feds, as they had informants inside the EMG who would immediately alert them to Batista’s presence.
I pulled my hat down further, as if it mattered. We were already blown. If Batista was on the station, they would know I was, too.
My boot connected with the back of one of the blue suiters. The force sent her flying into a nearby recycling bin with a loud clang. Batista grunted as she whirled around to her next opponent, the largest of the bunch. He was a tall, wide soldier, not unlike Edgar. But he wasn’t built for this kind of scrap. Before he could produce his gun, Batista had landed a crushing knee into his groin and followed that up with a forearm to the side of the head. The guy tried to keep his balance, his shaky hand still reaching for his weapon, and for that effort he was rewarded with a kick in the chest that sent him backward into the female soldier by the recycling bin who was stumbling to her feet.
They both went down in a heap.
Batista looked at me, Jiang and the teens. “I had it handled.”
“And now they have you on camera,” I noted, pointing to the drone above our heads.
Batista shrugged. One of the teens fired some kind of glowing pellet at the drone. It stuck to the drone and immediately brought it down with a thud.
“That’ll stop it from transmitting and scramble any old footage that hasn’t been viewed,” Jiang said. “Probably too late, though. We need to get to the docks.”
Batista gave one last kick to the big soldier as she passed, scooping up his weapon along the way. We all followed Jiang away from the gathered crowd. Once we turned the corner, we slowed to a nonchalant walk just in time for a pair of EMG guys to pass us by, heading toward the commotion.
“Were you even trying to stay under the radar?” I asked Batista.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You like to fight.”
“You’re saying I got spotted on purpose?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything else. I’d made my point. She smoldered as we followed Jiang into a maze of large ship carcasses and parts. We were in the junkyard exchange, where you could barter for various parts you needed to fix your vessel.
“I notice you didn’t get the food, either,” I said, unable to stop myself. I had every right to be upset, but for some reason I really wanted to push it. Jiang sensed the growing problem and stopped short.
“Look, you both need to shut up,” he said, in the sternest voice he could muster. He looked around. “If we’re lucky, I can get you to a friend who has access to every quad, meaning he could ferry us back to your ship on his transport skip. But if you’d rather argue and draw more attention to yourselves, I’ll leave you both right here. Your call.”
It took me a second to register that this was my normally mild-mannered friend talking to us like that. Batista and I glared at each other, deciding to leave the argument for later.
“Good,” Jiang said, noting the unspoken truce. “Now where’s the big guy.”
A loud crash caused us all to flinch. It was followed by the sound of rapid gunfire.
“I want to say that’s not him…” I said. “But something tells me I’d be wrong.”
I checked my handheld and at the same moment, I got a transmission from Edgar. He was driving a rover with one hand and tossing a fed soldier out onto the deck with the other. He was probably driving 40 miles per hour at the time. Wonderful.
“You guys at the docks yet?” he asked. He was so calm I thought he might yawn. The bullets whizzing by him didn’t seem to faze him much. He touched his shoulder and frowned.
“Are you hit?” I asked.
“Very perceptive, captain,” he replied.
The teens shared a look. They liked this guy.
“We’re close to the docks, but it would be better if you didn’t draw the entire EMG to us!” I barked.
Edgar rolled his eyes and turned the rover. “I’ll meet you there in five. Hasta la vista.”
The transmission ended. Jiang was confused. “Hasta la vista?”
“He’s going through a Terminator phase,” I explained. Jiang had no clue what I was talking about.
“I love that movie!” one of the teens blurted. Then he looked at Jiang and quieted himself again.
The sound of the gunfire seemed to be dissipating, meaning Edgar was drawing them away from us. How he was going to get back to the docks without a bunch of pissed off people on his ass, I had no idea. But that was his problem. Ours was getting to the transport skip.
We zig-zagged through the huge engines, missile tubes and various other parts strewn about the junkyard, doing our best to either avoid other people or appear as inconspicuous as possible when we crossed paths with someone. Half a dozen drones buzzed back and forth overhead, but we had the benefit of being just five people among hundreds in the quad.
When we reached the edge of the junkyard, the docks were a hundred yards away. Jiang turned to the teens. “Wait as long as you can,” he said. They understood. I didn’t. But they did. Guess that was enough. They disappeared among the parts.
Jiang led us toward a weathered, gray transport skip. It was maybe 20 feet long. A guy in his late 50s, balding with white tufts of hair sticking out of his temples, leaned against the side panel, eating a sandwich.
Chapter 15
They say being shot feels like being punched.
Well guess what? They’re idiots. Being shot feels like being shot.
About ten feet from the transport skip, my right shoulder exploded in pain. I don’t even think I felt the impact of the bullet, just the searing ball of fire that shook my entire right shoulder and arm, dropping me to my knees in agony. The sharp tendrils of white-hot pain reached all the way into my gut, making me woozy and a little nauseous.
As I tried to catch my breath, my left hand instinctively grabbed my shoulder. It was slick with blood. All around me, I heard little “pfft” noises as bullets flew by my ears. Someone scooped me up and dragged me the final few feet to the small transport shuttle. I stumbled inside it and collapsed to the floor.
I don’t think I blacked out. I just kinda went numb for a few moments. Shock can do that to you. Then the pain returned and I saw Jiang leaning over me, holding a rag to my shoulder to stem the bleeding.
“It feels worse than it is,” he said.
“How do you know how it feels?” I asked.
Jiang smiled a bit and looked at Batista and Edgar, who were safely in the shuttle with us. “He hasn’t lost his sense of humor,” Jiang said.
Edgar made a face. “Didn’t know he had one.”
“What happened?” I managed as I tried to sit up. Jiang gently pushed me back down, urging me to lay flat. He said they needed to dress the wound a bit more before I started moving.
Batista explained that we’d almost made it to the transport craft when a pair of feds came out of nowhere and started lighting us up. Luckily, I was the only one who got hit (lucky for who, I wondered). When I asked what happened to the feds, Edgar simply waved his hand.
“Dead?” I asked.
Batista nodded. Well, that certainly complicated matters.
“Don’t worry,” Edgar said. “I already put a couple others out of their misery before those two. We were on Slay’s bad side anyway. Shooting her men in the knees wouldn’t have made her feel any better about us.”
Things were spiraling out of control. It was bad enough Batista and I had maimed a bunch of feds escaping the Graymore, but now we were leaving bodies. Never mind the morality of it, that’s just something the federation would never forget – or forgive. I felt even sicker to my stomach than I did a few minutes earlier. Jiang could see the concern on my face and raised his eyebrows in agreement. He knew I was used to bending the rules, even breaking some of them, but killing people? It didn’t matter if they were feds who were trying to kill me, it just wasn’t something I’d ever done before.
The older guy piloting the shuttle yelled over his shoulder that we were almost back to the quad six bay where the Stang was docked. He checked his scans and confirmed we hadn’t been detected. I felt a sense of relief.
“Benefits of not leaving any witnesses,” Edgar said.
The relief was quickly replaced by anger again.
“We’ll talk about that later,” I told him, sitting up, despite Jiang’s protest. Edgar was nonplussed. What was there to talk about, really? It was done. Just over a week ago, I was a wrecker with a few dings on my record and about the same number of blemishes on my conscience. Now I was associating with Tracers and killers, which made me as bad as them, in my book. I wanted to turn back the clock and simply ignore that distress call from the Graymore. Instead, I was hurtling toward a fight I didn’t want, leaving all kinds of carnage in my wake.
“Better hurry,” Jiang said when the shuttle landed next to the Stang. He opened the door and checked the area first. It was quiet. The only person there was the woman he’d tasked with refueling my ship. They exchanged a few words in Chinese and then Jiang nodded, satisfied.
The transfer to the Stang was surprisingly uneventful. Jiang informed me the ship was refueled and he’d even put some of his own food reserves in the kitchen to tide us over until Jasper Station. That was assuming we made it that far, of course.
“What about the other request?” I asked.
Jiang nodded. Good. I would need all the help I could get.
Edgar and Batista were already aboard the Stang and I was halfway up the gangway, with Jiang helping me every step, when he stopped for a moment and turned toward me.
“You’re a good man,” he said.
It was meant to make me feel better, but it hit a different way. It just made me question myself even more. Jiang didn’t know half of what I’d done.
“Am I, though?” I asked.
“You are,” Jiang said, with even more conviction. “You’re a good man in a bad situation. Don’t lose sight of that. Safe travels, friend.”
* * *
Pirate was sitting in my lap as we navigated out of the bay. Jiang’s words were still echoing in my head. I wanted to believe them. It reminded me of something my mom used to say: speak with your actions, and when your actions say the wrong thing, make sure you don’t repeat the lie ever again. I don’t know if it applied to situations like this, though.
I looked over at Edgar, who was standing at the weapon station, not a care in the world. I wondered whether his conscience had been altered or his lack of compassion was simply the foundation the people who enhanced him built upon. As we prepped the ship to take off, he had calmly informed me that he never felt remorse over a life he’d taken. “They were all just,” he had said. Apparently, if someone was trying to do him harm, he felt they had crossed a line that could result in his death, so he had no reservations about killing them. If everything was black and white, sure, that is one way to look at things. But it’s a very dark, very messed up way to live. It definitely didn’t make me feel any better about having him on my ship. He could decide any number of my decisions were bad for him, and then suddenly I was the dispensable one.
Then there was Batista. She was in the co-pilot chair, oddly silent at the moment. She had finished Jiang’s work of stitching and bandaging me up, though we hadn’t exchanged a single word during the entire ad-hoc procedure. She simply took Gary’s directions and with cold eyes and mechanical hands, repaired my shoulder. It still hurt like hell, but the pain killers had kicked in and Gary was reasonably sure they’d missed any vital parts. I just wouldn’t be able to use my right arm anytime in the next week or so without a whole lot of white-hot pain.
“It’s a shame,” Gary said.
“Which part?”
“That was a great parking spot. We’ll never get one like that on Jasper Station.”
“Just keep your eyes on the scans,” I told him. It was a good sitcom reference, but I’d long since learned not to feed the beast.
“Will do, boss. I’m actually surprised it was such a clean getaway. Almost too easy if you ask me,” Gary said.
I paused my hands in mid-air, trying not to move a muscle and create a disturbance in the force. I glanced at Batista and Edgar and they too were motionless.
In general, I wasn’t particularly superstitious. I didn’t get the impression Batista or Mr. Kills-A-Lot were either.
But Gary had broken the cardinal rule when making a getaway: saying it was too easy. Because in all likelihood, it was too easy, and giving voice to that reality was only a step removed from hoping something went wrong.
Gary noticed we all stopped moving at the same time, and snickered. “What did I say?”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
My eyes locked onto the scanner and suddenly, as if it appeared out of nowhere, there was a ship about 50 miles from our position. Weapons armed and locked. We were dead in the atmo if they wanted us.
“You had to open your big mouth,” Edgar said to the ceiling.
“It’s the Burnett,” I said, not surprised. “She’s hailing us.”
I didn’t answer. My mind raced for some way out of this. Some hidden advantage we had, or a trick I could pull. I drew a complete blank. I looked at Batista and she just shrugged. No ideas there. Edgar wasn’t even bothering to plug in a counter-attack into the system.
Not that it mattered much, but I couldn’t figure out how the Burnett was doing it. It had to be some new stealth technology. That didn’t make sense, though. The federation was the leakiest ship of all when it came to secrets, so if they’d been developing some super-high-tech stealth technology that could mask an entire warbird, the whole verse would know about it. And that’s assuming it was a fed creation. They weren’t exactly known for their technical prowess. Innovations like stealth almost always came from the private sector, and since the feds were cheap as hell, they never got the tech first.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with what I said,” Gary mused, in a meek voice.
“Well, I guess I should answer and get this over with,” I said, before telling Gary to accept the beam. I tried my best to put on a neutral expression. Slay popped up onto the monitor, her steely eyes boring into my soul. She let the silence do the talking for the first few moments.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I smiled.
“Well this is awkward,” I said. “You’re the very last person I was hoping to see today.”
“Mr. Boyd. For someone I’d never heard of two weeks ago, you do cause a lot of trouble. And now we’re adding the murder of 12 federation soldiers
to your resume.”
A dozen! I turned my head toward Edgar in disbelief. He produced a smirk that said it made no difference to him.
“Unlike our last encounter, there will be no escape this time. We’re going to board your ship, remove you and your crew and then deliver justice,” Slay said.
“And if I refuse?”
“Justice will be even more swift.”
“I admit you have us in a corner. But the fact I’m still breathing means you want something from me or my crew. So I’m going to use that piece of information to make one request.”
Slay narrowed her eyes. I could tell she wanted to blast us to smithereens with every fiber of her being, but something was stopping her. It wasn’t enough to let us go, obviously, but it might be enough leverage to eke out a meager assurance before we turned ourselves in. There was also something deeper going on. I just wasn’t quite sure what it was. Her mention of the dead soldiers seemed somewhat perfunctory to me. Like she thought it was a crime, but she wasn’t too upset about it. She was definitely unlike any fed admiral I’d encountered before. A new breed of officer, perhaps.
She gestured for me to proceed.
“Nobody hurts the cat,” I said. “He comes with me until we sort out this justice.”
Slay seemed to pause, unsure if it was a joke or not. Edgar exhaled loudly in disbelief. Even Batista, who had come to form a bond with Pirate over the course of our mission, frowned.
When Pirate sauntered into the room, passing by me in the background, Slay realized I wasn’t joking. She nodded. “Done. The cat will not be harmed. Prepare to be boarded.”
Zeep. The monitor went black.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Edgar said. “The cat?!”
“We’re done. You heard her. There’s no escaping this. Most likely, we’ll be dead before the day is through, so yeah, I went to bat for my original and most valuable crewmember.”
Gary cleared his throat. “What am I, chopped liver?”
“I want you to erase all top-level data and wipe the hard drive,” I commanded. “They get nothing but your winning personality. Unless you want to reboot. I will leave that call to you.”