by George Ellis
“Get us the hell outta here!” I yelled as we shut the airlock.
Gary complied, as I could immediately see the Rox getting smaller through the window. I turned my attention to Avery, who was on the floor of the cargo bay. Batista kneeled over him, much like I knelt over her when I’d first carried her aboard the Stang.
His head and upper body were moving, but his legs were completely still. I considered where his wound was and felt a pang in my chest. My fears were confirmed when he told Batista he couldn’t feel his legs. There were a lot of things Gary knew how to fix and with any luck he could guide Batista to keeping my brother alive, but fixing a spinal injury likely wasn’t among those procedures.
“I have to go,” I said, trying to motivate my own legs to move, but also to tell them I couldn’t deal with the injury right now, even if I wanted to.
Avery gave me a sad smile. “If you don’t fly us out of here, none of us will ever walk again, not just me.”
I laughed half-heartedly and hurried back to the cabin, knowing that might be the last I’d see my brother alive. Again. Some of the anger welled back up, but there was no time for that.
“Glad you could join me,” Edgar said. He was already at his station and trying to plan our way out of this, though we were severely outgunned. I shot him a look that indicated I wasn’t in the mood for his attitude. To my surprise, he nodded apologetically. “I never had a problem with him.”
Which I guess was his way of saying he liked my brother.
“He’s not going to die, damnit, so you can go on not having a problem with him as soon as we haul ass out of here, BB.”
Edgar bit his tongue about my turning his nickname into an even shorter version. “He’s getting ready to fire.”
I looked on the monitor just in time to see the rail guns glow hot. I slammed my hands down on the console and ordered an evasive solution I’d specifically programmed for rail gun volleys.
The Stang banked so sharply, Edgar was thrown off his feet and his head dented the wall. I knew the maneuver was coming and had buckled into my chair just in time. The solution worked and the rail guns missed. That time.
“Nice one, but that won’t work again,” Edgar warned.
“I’m aware.”
I hit the intercom and checked to make sure everybody had survived the hard bank. Some of them were shaken up, but no worse for the wear. “Strap in or strap down,” I advised them and then turned my attention back to the Rox. The long ship was jockeying for another good position to fire.
Edgar bought me 10 or 15 seconds by sending a pair of missiles and a rail volley at the Rox, but the ship launched countermeasures for the missiles and just ate the rail fire like it was candy. I might have put a hole in a compartment or two if I was lucky.
We were starting to move at a good clip and the Rox was still disabled, but it was going to take a miracle for the Stang to get out of the sniper-ship’s firing range before they landed a direct hit. I didn’t need a miracle, though. I just needed Slay to play her part.
“Where is she?!” I screamed. The scanner still showed no sign of the Burnett.
“If you’re asking me, I haven’t seen her,” Gary said. “Judging by the look on your face and the way you howled at the console, I’m guessing the question was rhetorical. But I did alert Admiral Slay the moment we had the device. She didn’t even say thank you. I actually wanted to talk to you about that…”
“Not now,” I snapped.
The Rox’s rail guns were glowing hot again. Then they were just…gone. They had been sheared off the ship by a precision strike by the Burnett, which had arrived and fired at the exact same time.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, realizing I had just cheered for the federation for the first time in my life. “Floor it, Gary.”
“It is already being floored,” he said. “But I really think we should talk about the Burnett. Something isn’t right about it.”
I looked at the monitor and saw the Burnett decimating the Rox with rail and missile volleys. It was quite a show. Even Edgar was slack-jawed as he looked on. The baton for the most dangerous ship in the verse was being handed off from the Rox to the Burnett as the latter destroyed the former. The Rox began ejecting personal escape pods.
Gary’s words suddenly struck me.
“I know, Gary. Something definitely isn’t right about being saved by a fed ship. But I’ll take what I can get at the moment.”
“That’s the thing, Denver. I don’t think it’s a fed ship.”
I turned toward the nearest camera. “Say what?”
Edgar looked too.
“First, Slay says she can’t lift the warrant on us until after we complete the job,” explained Gary. “A job so secret that nobody else in the federation knows about it. Fine. Whatever. But then the bounty on us goes up the next day? Considering she has the most advanced ship in the fed fleet, you would think she’d have enough juice with the top brass to at least freeze the warrant price, if not rescind it altogether. I mean, if some other fed ship gets lucky and takes us out, Slay’s entire plan is ruined.”
“Sure, but there could be an explanation,” I protested.
“I’m just saying it got me curious,” Gary continued. “So while I was supposed to be sleeping because you were having a hissy fit, I did some digging and there’s no admiral named Slay in any official fed archives or bulletins. In the last five years, this so-called admiral has never issued a warrant or engaged in any official fed activity.”
I was starting to get a bad feeling. Gary had nothing but conjecture, but I’d told myself a dozen times since I first met Slay that she was too smart to be a fed and her ship too advanced to be military.
On the monitor, the Burnett was navigating away from the Rox wreckage and heading on the same course as us to our designated rendezvous point.
“Then the other day Romy said the Burnett had the warp prototype installed,” Gary said. “Well how did they get it? It took me a while to dig it up, but I found scattered reports of the prototype being stolen by a ship matching the Burnett’s description, only it was under a different call sign: the Mariner 2.”
“The Mariner?” I asked. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“Because the Mariner 1 is a private ship owned by a citizen you happen to know. Jack Largent.”
The Burnett was actually a Silver Star ship. Largent had played me.
A light flashed on the console. Slay was hailing us.
“Speak of the devil,” Gary said.
“Good work, Gary,” I told him with as much sincerity as I’d ever afforded him. “I’m glad you weren’t sleeping that whole time. I’ll handle Slay. You make sure Batista gets Avery patched up.”
“Will do!” Gary replied, proud of himself.
The hail was waiting for me to accept it. I looked at Edgar. He had no idea how to respond. The news had blindsided him, too.
I pressed the button and Slay’s smiling face filled the screen.
“Good work, Denver,” she said by way of a greeting.
I smiled back. “Actually, Slay, it looks like we have a slight problem.”
Chapter 23
As I considered how to proceed with Slay, I thought of my brother. He was in the cargo bay getting patched up. I pushed the idea that he might never walk again out of my mind and remembered the days on my father’s ship when he taught me how to play cards. The lessons started with me at a severe disadvantage. The first few weeks, I didn’t beat him a single time. And to ensure I understood the consequences of losing, he forced me to place actual bets each game. Or maybe he just wanted all my credits.
He also made me play against other members of the crew, who had even less regard for my credits, gobbling them up hand after hand. They laughed as they did it, offering me yet more wisdom I’d never forget: greedy people prey on the weak.
Eventually, however, I picked up some tricks. I learned strategy. According to my brother, I became an even better bluffer than him. I realized that t
he worst thing you could do was give away too much. It was fine to overplay or underplay your hand, but you never wanted to fall into a pattern. It (literally) paid to keep your opponents guessing.
So I didn’t just tell Slay I knew she was working for Jack Largent. I had to tease it out a bit.
“What problem is that?” she asked, concerned where the conversation was going.
“Good news is we got Marcum and the device,” I said. “Bad news is the device, which I should probably admit that I now know is a warp drive, was damaged during the getaway.”
“How extensive is the damage?”
“It’s hard to say. It’s not brand new anymore, I can tell you that. Romy and Marcum are currently looking at it.”
“That’s fine. We’ll assess the device when we pick it up at the rendezvous point. As I’m sure you saw, the Rox has been destroyed and we should have no trouble transferring the drive to the Burnett.”
“I did see that. Good work dealing with the Rox. In fact, the Burnett is probably the only ship in the fed fleet that could’ve done it.”
Slay accepted the compliment with a wary nod.
“Oh, there is one more thing,” I said. “The matter of the federation warrant on me and my crew. Gonna need you to kill that before we hand over the drive. I assume that’s not a problem.”
“Once we have the device, I will have the warrant rescinded,” Slay countered.
I pretended to understand. “Right, because you wouldn’t want me taking off with the goods once the bounty is removed. I get it. Maybe a fair compromise would be that you get the warrant reduced, even by just one credit, so I know you have sway over those guys at the top of the food chain over there. I’m not exactly on the best terms with them.”
Slay didn’t respond verbally. Instead, she let her ship do it for her. One second our scan was clean, the next thing I knew there was the Burnett, bouncing into frame thanks to semi-warp capabilities. The ship’s weapons weren’t hot, though that wasn’t surprising; they couldn’t risk firing at us with the warp drive on board.
“Oh, hi there,” I said, noting the Burnett’s appearance. “So what do you say about the compromise?”
“Our deal was simple. The bounty is lifted once we have the device,” she said.
I sighed and put my hands wide, palms up. “Hey, I had to try. Alright, how do you want to do this?”
Slay said she’d be sending a boarding party over to retrieve the drive, along with Marcum and Romy. I told her I’d have to check with Marcum, as we hadn’t discussed him being transferred to the Burnett, and I didn’t want to assume he was willing to go without asking him first. Slay agreed.
* * *
“She knew. Of course she knew!” Edgar shouted. He was pointing at Romy, who cowered at the other end of the kitchen.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Even if she did know, would you trust us if you were her?”
Edgar had no good response for that. Batista continued looking at Avery, who was now sedated and on a gurney she’d wheeled in for the crew meeting. “It doesn’t matter now. All that matters is what we do in the next 15 minutes before the boarding team gets here.”
“Easy,” Edgar said. “We kill the first batch. Then they send over another batch and we kill them. Eventually, Desmond shows up and takes care of the rest. Now that we know they’re not federation, the captain here doesn’t have to worry about his delicate conscience being injured. He hates Silver Star more than any of us.”
“Speaking of that, where is Desmond? I thought he had this all taken care of,” Batista sniped at Edgar.
“I said that’s enough, damnit!” I yelled. “I’d rather not waste the entire time the transport shuttle is flying here arguing with each other. Like it or not, we’re all a crew now…even if it’s just for the next few minutes. So let’s at least act like it.”
Batista folded her arms. “Fine, Captain Boyd, what do you propose we do?”
All the faces in the room turned to me for the answer. I didn’t have it, of course, and was starting to regret drawing so much attention to myself in front of my crew. I mean, it was kind of a no-win scenario.
We couldn’t run.
The Burnett had more manpower than us. It was also backed by Silver Star.
And Desmond was nowhere to be found.
“Perhaps this admiral or whatever she is has other ideas,” Marcum said, breaking the silence. “Just because she isn’t federation doesn’t mean she wants to destroy us. She could be sincere in her desire to let us go.”
I sighed. Marcum was an academic. He had a brilliant mind for the abstract and the scientific, but when it came to simple logic he had the same problem many geniuses had: no common sense.
“How many people were killed when the warp drive was stolen from your lab?” I asked.
“Six,” Marcum answered, grimly.
“That woman is the one who stole it. And she works for an even worse human being. If she had no problem killing six engineers, I doubt she’ll lose any sleep over taking us out in deep space,” I explained.
“Ah, right you are,” he said, then sat back down, realizing he was out of his depth.
“What about Desmond?” I asked Edgar. “You think he’ll let us go if we somehow get the drive to him?”
Edgar nodded and said Desmond was a man of his word. “If he says you can walk, you can walk. Nothing I’ve seen over the past year makes me think otherwise. Besides, you cross him, you’ll be running the rest of your very short life.”
“So what’s in this for you?” I wondered.
“Credits,” he shrugged. “Plain and simple. If I had a better offer, I’d reconsider. But I don’t have a better offer. So the Tracers get the drive.”
Thinking about it, I’d much rather have Desmond flying around the world with warp capabilities than anyone under Largent’s control anyway. The problem was time. We couldn’t wait for Desmond to magically show up.
“Try him again,” I told Edgar.
He used the encrypted beam and got nothing but silence in return.
“Aren’t you guys forgetting something?” a weak voice managed. It was Avery. He slowly opened his eyes. He didn’t have the strength to sit up and his legs were completely immobilized. Then he calmly gave us the answer.
Chapter 24
The transport shuttle was only five minutes away from the Stang. I was back in my chair in the cabin, monitoring the scans for any sign of Desmond. Edgar was sitting in the co-pilot chair, as we had already decided engaging the Burnett in a firefight was a losing proposition, so there was no need for him to be at his typical station. He wanted a more comfortable view of the action through the main monitor.
“What would be a better offer?” I asked.
Edgar smirked and shook his head. “Aside from more credits?”
“Yes, aside from that.”
“I can’t really think of anything.”
“There has to be something, Edgar.”
“You could give me the Stang,” he said. “I’d be willing to make a deal in exchange for the ship.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response.
Gary chimed in, suddenly. “Uh…I’m seeing something on the radar. But I’m not sure I believe it.”
I adjusted the radar for maximum range and now saw a large mass moving toward our position. It looked like an approaching planet.
“Wow,” Edgar said. “That’s almost all of them.”
“Almost all of them what?”
“No, all of them who. Enhance that and I bet you find a few hundred ships.”
I did, and I did. “You’re telling me he sent all the Tracers as our backup?”
“At least the ones close enough to be part of it.”
“How long until they get here?” I asked Gary.
“Looks like about 20 minutes,” he reported back.
“If we’re seeing it, you can bet Slay is seeing it now too,” I said.
Right on cue, the Burnett hailed us. At the same
time, their weapons went hot. Edgar gave a look and jumped back to his weapons station, punching in some commands.
I hit the button to accept the hail.
“What the hell is going on?” Slay asked, her cool demeanor replaced by contained rage.
“I could ask you the same thing. Maybe those are just Silver Star ships coming to celebrate your victory.”
Slay took a moment to process what I had just said. Then she shrugged.
“Doesn’t change the fact that you give me the device or I turn your little ship into smithereens.”
“It’s not that little,” I said. “I think it’s the perfect size. And I doubt good ol’ Jack would want you to destroy the drive.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Denver. He specifically told me if he can’t have it, nobody can. Especially not a bunch of Tracers who will be late to the party anyway. Your choice. Let my men recover the drive and take your chances…or I can end it right now. Or have you forgotten the failsafe that’s right between your legs?”
That wasn’t exactly where they put it, of course. But it was only about five feet from my chair, so it may as well have been positioned right in my crotch. I assumed that’s where they pointed the blast to go, just as a final f you.
“Edgar, lock on the transport ship.”
Slay looked in my eyes to see if I was bluffing. She couldn’t tell. Just before she was about to speak, I cut the transmission. A second later, the Golden Bear wanted to chat. I accepted.
“You won’t make it,” I snapped.
Desmond put up a hand to calm me.
“Relax, the federation won’t take the chance of destroying the –”
I cut him off. “It’s Largent. That’s not a federation ship after all.”
Desmond, also one who normally had a cool demeanor, lost his edge as well. He inhaled angrily. “I have nearly five hundred ships with me. We can make it.”
“No, you can’t. And you don’t have to,” I said.
“Sorry to interrupt, but the transport shuttle has turned around. It’s going back to the Burnett,” Gary said. “Guess they decided we weren’t worth the trouble.”