by R L Dean
"Kep, I will not be long," he said, somewhere between assurance and pleading, and looking at Mat.
Mat nodded, but Haydon answered, "Good."
Yuri ignored him and plugged in the navigation sequence for the braking maneuver. Another ten minutes passed and they were gliding into their assigned slot.
The proximity alert suddenly blared, making Yuri jump and Haydon curse.
"What was that!" Mat yelled.
Yuri pulled up a camera and rotated it in the direction his sensor software flashed on the screen. The ship in the next slot was executing a roll and dropping away, pulling away from the docking arm.
Idiots. "I think we got hit by an antenna," he told Mat. "Scraped the paint, nothing more."
"I'll go check," Misaki said and unbuckled from her seat. She was so quiet and so rarely on the Flight deck that he sometimes forgot that she was even there. A part of him found that disturbing.
Yuri tapped the control column and eased the Sadie to a halt. As his lights turned green and the ship stabilized he unbuckled and pulled himself up. The gravity was light, but enough to keep his feet on the deck without activating his magboots.
"I will be back," he said, feeling sweat beading on his head and nervousness in his stomach.
"Yuri, wait," Mat suddenly said. "Haydon, go with him."
"I knew you were going to say that," Haydon said. "Boss, this place is already making me jittery."
Mat grunted. "Yeah, me too. That's why you're going with him."
Inside, Yuri sighed. Haydon would complain the whole time. "Kep, I don't need a babysitter ..."
"You wanted to come here," Mat told him. "So we're here. Now Haydon is going with you."
Haydon frowned but unbuckled from his seat.
They made it down the access tube and were climbing into the starboard airlock corridor before Haydon said anything else.
"Is the airlock going to hold?"
Yuri blinked back his frustration and palmed the control pad. No warnings or hisses from the seal as the exterior hatch opened.
The docking arm's access tube was a junkier version of any drop-off station he had ever been to. One long streak of scuff marks ran down the middle of the deck in both directions, and rust was showing in sections. The slot hatches lined it on two sides, and at the end was the expected security checkpoint, but instead of security personnel a kiosk sitting in front of the desk flashed ads. If this had been Butte he would have smiled, but not here. He had been right in his assessment of the place.
"I wonder where security is ..." Haydon mumbled. Yuri decided not to comment.
The access tube was empty, except for three men leaning against a slot hatchway, talking. They were in coveralls, but there were no company patches that Yuri could see. As he and Haydon passed they stopped talking and all three looked at them. That was going to make Haydon nervous, and a nervous Haydon wasn't good for anybody.
One of the men, his arms folded over a protruding stomach, smiled through an unkempt beard. Haydon was staring at them and Yuri suddenly saw his brows rise.
"Ignore them," Yuri said, and nudging his arm. "Just keep walking."
"Yuri, I don't like this place."
Haydon's head rotated to the side, to keep an eye on the men.
"Stop looking at them, you will make them mad."
"I don't care."
Yuri ground his teeth. This was why he didn't want Haydon to come with him.
They made the checkpoint without incident, but Haydon kept rubbing the back of his neck and looking over his shoulder. I need a drink, I've been sober for too long, Yuri told himself. Sobriety, and the possibility of meeting his son again was making him nervous, and Haydon was just adding to it.
Yuri stopped at the kiosk and it changed to a directory. His contact, a shipmate on a hauler when he first went into space, said that there was a particular bar that Ivan frequented ... the Dullahan.
He found it, a level down. It was as back alley as you could get. He would just have to memorize the location, there was no way he was letting the local network have access to his handcomm.
"Yuri, let's go," Haydon said.
"We are, stop rushing me!"
Yuri turned to the terminal's access hatch on the other side of the security desk.
The depot's original designation was D9, but he didn't know what the new owners called it now. Whatever its name, it was built as a fueling stop and nothing else. The terminal was a third the size of Butte's and lined with more automated kiosks and vending machines than real shops or eateries.
Foot traffic was almost nonexistent, but Haydon's face had rested on a frown since they exited the Sadie's airlock, now his eyes began to narrow. "Where's security? Yuri, does this place have security?"
"I don't know. Stop complaining."
The mechanic shut his mouth, but as they passed a maintenance crew wearing tan jumpsuits and sitting at plastic tables in front of a food kiosk he didn't stop watching them until Yuri led him down a corridor marked LIFT.
The lift looked like it was made for cargo, and it was gated. A kiosk beside it offered passes to the depot's levels for a fee. Haydon stared at it. It wouldn't be something he had seen before. Yuri selected a pass and used his handcomm to transfer the fee to the account listed.
Level Two was the obvious maintenance level. It was circular, the ceiling arching overhead like a dome. It was busier than the terminal, but not like the crowds on Butte and the larger drop-off stations.
They stepped off the lift, passing the Shenhau's Coordinator's office— a sign hanging on the hatch said, NO HAULERS.
Haydon bumped into him as Yuri paused for a moment to look around. "Why are you crowding me!"
"I don't want to touch anything."
Yuri took a deep breath and rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck. I need a drink, I need a drink, I need a drink. He scanned the far side of the level and found corridor B5, according to the directory the Dullahan was at the end of it.
"Come on," he told Haydon.
He would have walked directly across the level but there were tables and chairs and, dusty, fake potted plants in the way. So he took the concourse around. When they reached the corridor Yuri heard Haydon's handcomm beep.
"Yeah, boss?" Haydon answered.
"Haydon," he heard Mat begin. "It's getting uncomfortable up here, I think you and Yuri should come back."
Yuri rounded on Haydon. "What? What is it?" He was so close to finding Ivan. They were inside the entrance to the corridor and had to push against the walls to let two men pass by.
"The ship in the slot over has cameras and guns on us. This is not looking good. Get back to the ship."
"No!" Yuri yelled, his heart speeding up. "It is normal for places like this. Just point the turrets at them and everything will be okay."
Haydon was staring at him, tilting the handcomm his way. When Yuri turned and headed down the corridor, he followed.
"Ahh, boss," he heard the mechanic say behind him. "This is his kid. We won't be long."
Yuri heard Mat say something then the handcomm beeped again and Haydon said, "He's going to be pissed, I hope your son is wherever we're going." He didn't answer but hoped the same thing.
The Dullahan was the last hatch in the corridor, just like the directory at the checkpoint said.
"Yuri, a dead end? One way out?" Haydon asked, as they approached the open hatch. "Maybe we should ..."
"No. You go back," Yuri told him.
Haydon didn't say anything, but followed him inside.
It was a bar like any other he had been in, back on Earth or in space. Someone had started painting the back wall but stopped and now there was a faded patch of green on top of faded gray. The floor was metal and most of the tables were bolted to it. There were three men, miners, sitting at one of the tables, drinking and talking. Their faces were hollow, and gritty with days of not shaving, and they looked at Yuri and Haydon as they walked inside. None of them were Ivan. Yuri turned to the b
ar, where a beefy man with bulging eyes and wearing a wife-beater was leaning against the counter from the other side and watching them.
"This place is horrible," Haydon muttered.
Yuri ignored him and walked to the bar. Friendly was better, so he smiled and pulled out his handcomm.
"Have you seen this man?"
The bartender looked at Ivan's picture on the handcomm, then narrowed his eyes at Yuri and tilted his head. "Who's asking?"
The man knew him, Yuri silently thanked his friend. "Ivan is my son."
"Yuri," Haydon suddenly said, grabbing him on the shoulder. When Yuri turned to look at him Haydon's expression was serious, and he was holding his handcomm. "What?" He snapped, jerking his shoulder out of Haydon's grip.
"Boss says we have to go now."
"You go!"
Yuri turned back to the bartender, who was now shifting his eyes between him and Haydon.
"So, you have seen him?"
"Yeah, Ivan practically lives here, when he's here."
Yuri felt his heart fall. "He is not here?"
The bartender shrugged. "Hadn't seen him in a few weeks. He comes and goes."
"Yuri, please, let's go," Haydon was saying, Yuri ignored him.
"What ship is he on?" He asked the bartender.
"He hops around a lot," the man said, shrugging again.
Haydon grabbed him again and he shoved back, then looked the mechanic in his eyes. "I am not going! Tell Mat to cash out my shares. I am staying here to wait for my son."
They stared at each other for a moment, then Yuri turned back to the bartender.
18 - Misaki
In a news clip playing on the screen in Engineering a reporter was hurrying up to an older man in a UNSEC officer's uniform. The man, and a black woman with a brace over one leg of her uniform, were at the glass doors of a building. Misaki was familiar with Lieutenant Colonel Compton. Eric had a problem with authority, and Compton represented the man on Martian soil. She spent many nights in his dorm room listening to him talk about a better Mars and how UNSEC was the only thing stopping them from making that happen.
Eric was troubled. She hadn't seen it during those fevered nights so long ago. Realization hadn't come until she was in neck deep.
Misaki turned from the screen and checked the seals on her vac-suit. Being back aboard the Sadie— back in Mat's presence— had done what she knew it would— given her some measure of clarity. She didn't need the memory of Eric Prator thrown in the mix of contorted dreams that still tried to invade her mind late at night. Clamping her helmet down she palmed the airlock's control pad and stepped inside. By the time it cycled Eric was just a sneering face in the back corner of her mind.
Opening the maintenance hatch she stared out across the emptiness between the Sadie's docking slot to the ships docked at the arm some three hundred meters away. She looked up, then down, letting her brain absorb the infinite for a moment, then she pulled the safety line from the leader beside the hatch and clamped it on her belt and stepped out onto the hull.
"Mat," she said across the commlink.
"Yeah? Everything okay?" Came the immediate question. He still thought of her as porcelain, she could hear it in his voice.
"Yes. Send me the sensor data from Yuri's terminal."
"Oh, sure. On its way now."
Her HUD flashed with the incoming data and she used the keypad on her wrist to call up the location of the hull strike. An outline of the hull shifted on the HUD and settled on a blinking plate on the Engineering Deck, about ten meters behind the hatch. A short walk.
What would Mat think if he knew that Haydon wasn't teaching her self-defense, but something more lethal ... like a soldier would learn? After the first two lessons of learning to block and twist away from someone that outweighed her, she realized that it wasn't enough. Haydon had resisted her request for real combat training, but by the fifth time they met in the cargo hold he agreed— thinking that he understood her reasons why. He thought of her as emotional porcelain too. From then on the training turned brutal, Peterson's coveralls hiding most of the bruises and her own will hiding the soreness.
Your secrets are piling up, her conscience giggled. She was not a person that Mat could love.
Focusing on the blinking HUD she turned and headed forward. The Sadie's hull stretched out to the depot's docking arm. The access tube's exterior was scuffed, ice formed around plate seams, and at least one two meter plate was missing, exposing frost covered pipes. During her time aboard the Pendleton she had seen her share of remote depots, but Captain Pendleton never brought his family to a place like this. Though, if it had been in search of his wife or son he would have stopped at them all.
Mat could not have refused Yuri's request even if it had brought the Sadie to the gates of Hell itself, and Misaki, perhaps most of all, understood Yuri's need to find his son. After all, they were still counting the number of people she had killed to get her mother's surgery. She didn't know what had happened between the Russian pilot and his estranged son, but she understood very well why they were here.
One day her sins were going to come back to haunt her. Maybe she was there, back aboard the Sadie, to confess everything to Mat. The look of pain and disgust on his face would be like a physical blow. How could he have ever had feelings for someone like her ... he would ask himself that.
Misaki stood over the spot marked on her HUD, where the antenna from the departing ship had lashed the Sadie's hull and scored the plate. She hunched down and rubbed the surface with her glove. Sorry girl, she thought, then felt a tight smile on her lips. Mat's euphemisms had crept into her mind. That smile, clipped though it was, had been an unconscious reaction ... she had a life, it had been sometime before Mars. She had smiled then.
Her face relaxed and she looked up from the hull to starboard, where a glint, just a flicker of something, caught her attention. The ship in the slot over was a bare twenty meters away. It was a small freighter, missing its cargo pods it wasn't much larger than the Sadie. Misaki counted three cameras aimed in their direction, then she saw what had drawn her attention. There was an aft ventral turret, almost shoved up against the main thrust assembly. A thin, red beam of light shot from it, disappearing up the curve of the Sadie's hull out of her line of sight. The turret barrels were lined up with the light. The Crew deck, she realized. By the angle of the turret it was aimed amidships ... the Crew deck.
Misaki straightened, turned, and calmly headed back to the maintenance hatch. She didn't know if it was her time aboard the pirate tug that kept her heart rate steady, or if it was the murderous actions she had committed later, but she didn't feel ... afraid ... and not one drop of sweat was on her forehead.
"Mat," she said.
"Yeah? I'm here."
"I'm sending you some footage from my helmet cam."
"Okay," he replied. "That bad, huh?"
"No. There's something I want you to see when I get inside."
She entered the hatch and cycled the airlock and took off her helmet. Not bothering to get out of her vac-suit she pulled herself up the access tube to the Flight deck. Mat was seated at his command station, staring that the screen running the footage she had sent.
"What am I missing?" He asked as she walked to the station and tapped the screen.
The footage zoomed forward under her finger, then she stopped it, showing the freighter in the starboard slot. She pointed to the cameras.
"They're watching us," she told him. Then she nudged the image until a thin red line became visible, stretching from the freighter's aft section toward the Sadie.
Mat leaned forward, squinting.
"It's a turret," she clarified for him. "Mounted against the thruster assembly."
Mat immediately went for the optical controls but she shook her head.
"We can't see it, our cameras are off angle."
He frowned and sat back, rubbing his mouth and chin with one hand before folding his arms across his chest.
&n
bsp; For a moment Misaki studied the lines of his face; his knitted brow, the shadow of a beard he constantly wore. It's because he forgets to shave, her own voice whispered. How did she know that ... when did she learn it? Was it on the long trip from Saturn ... before she blew up the Apex plant and Harmony dome?
"I think it's time to leave," he said. "Get us prepped, I'll call Haydon."
She took a seat at her usual terminal and called up the propulsion systems. As the diagnostic program went down its checklist she accessed the optical controls.
"Haydon, it's getting uncomfortable up here," she heard Mat say. "I think you and Yuri should come back."
Misaki wasn't interested in the turrets of the freighter, but the ship itself. Running an image of it through an engineering database produced what she expected, so she took pictures of as many ships as the camera angles would allow for and ran them through the database as well.
Yuri's voice came across the comm but she wasn't paying attention to the conversation.
"The ship in the slot over has cameras and guns on us. This is not looking good. Get back to the ship."
Her database scan was starting to produce results, all of which she expected. She busied herself with the startup sequence for the drive while Mat talked to Haydon. When he banged his fist on the console and cursed, she took that as a sign that the conversation was over.
"Mat?"
"Yes?" The ire in his voice wasn't aimed at her. It was rare that he used that tone when she was within hearing. He didn't want to hurt her by sounding angry. The animals aboard the pirate tug had yelled at her sometimes ... but they laughed, mostly. Mat could never be one of them.
"I mean, yeah?" He corrected himself, and looked over at her, his eyebrows raised.
She wanted to tell him not to worry about her feelings, but this wasn't the time for that repeat discussion.
"Look at this," she said, and sent the image scan results from her terminal to his. "All of the ships around us are of Martian design. Look at the freighter in slot fifteen."