by Tanya Huff
“Why weren’t they in orbit?” The Clean-up Crew, C&C, didn’t hit dirt until the shooting ended, but they usually matched orbits with the Promise to cut the wait time.
“Supply drop to a mining platform. Company called in a favor. Justice agreed since we were in-system anyway.”
“Roger that.” Torin pressed her palm against the case of guns and shook her head, although she wasn’t sure what she was denying. “Come on.” Ressk fell into step beside her. “We need to get those two in the infirmary down,” she called to Werst as they reentered the common room, “before they come up with a way to use damaged, abandoned medical supplies as a defense.”
Werst snorted, nostril ridges flapping. “Not likely. They’re Navy.”
“Fuk you,” Shiraz muttered, chin on her chest.
“Oh—and, Torin, Analyzes Minutiae to Discover Truth wants me to remind you that contact destroys evidence.”
“The evidence is nine cases of stolen weapons, three of ammunition, and a firefight.”
“I’ll tell him you said so, then.”
“You didn’t identify yourselves as Wardens,” Ferin snarled, responding to Torin’s side of the conversation.
“You opened fire before we had the chance.”
“We thought you were the Berins!”
“You’re not allowed to shoot them either.”
“They’d have shot us!” She clenched her feet. “Chief got word they were coming in early. We wouldn’t have engaged if we knew you were Wardens. And you never read us our rights!”
“I don’t have to read you your rights. I have to not shoot you in the head.”
“But if you’re arresting us . . .”
“Subduing you.”
Ferin’s nostril ridges flared open. “So we’re not under arrest? We can . . .”
“Shut up!” It seemed Harr had pulled himself together while Torin and Ressk were in the storeroom. “You don’t tell them shit!”
“That’s right,” Alamber said cheerfully. “You don’t. You tell it to Asks a Million Questions Until You Find Yourself Spilling Your Guts.”
Harr frowned. “That’s not a real name.”
“No,” Alamber admitted, “but I’ve been trying to convince her to change it.”
“Dornagain?”
“Duh.”
“Coming here?”
“We take you down, they write you up.” He grinned and his eyes lightened. “I’m thinking of having buttons made.”
When Ferin continued to look confused, Torin leaned in. “After you’re written up, you’ll be under arrest.”
Every clean-up team included at least two Dornagain Wardens to deal with the extended bureaucracy involved in sending Confederation citizens into rehabilitation.
“Dornagain,” Harr repeated. He swept an angry gaze over Torin’s team. “We’d rather deal with you fukkers.”
Torin smiled down at him. “You’d be surprised how often we hear that.”
• • •
Last of her team out of the anchor, Torin let the deep rumble of Finds Truth Through Inquiry’s instructions to the captives carry her up the stairs and onto the roof.
“No, as a felon injured while in a position of temporary authority due to the chain of command being disrupted by the Strike Team, you were intended to fill out form FFA334. It appears you filled out FFA333. You’ll have to begin again. We need three copies.”
She’d bet her pension Harr was thinking, Shoot me now.
Both hands resting on top of her weapon, Binti Mashona waited by the ramp into the VTA. “I don’t want to be the sniper anymore, Gunny. I never get to have any fun.”
“You shot out the mortar.”
“Okay, hardly any fun.”
“Good shot, by the way.”
“Only kind I make.” She grinned and followed Torin inside, one of five people Torin gave no second thought to having armed at her back.
“At least no one was shooting at you. If they’d had TI, we’d have been holed.” Unarguably, her people were better shots, but thermal imaging made it a lot easier to find enemies in the dark. Fortunately for them, the ex-military, violent offenders the Strike Teams dealt with had a strange distaste for wearing helmets.
“Hey, no one was shooting at me, but I took damage. There are bugs on this planet. Bugs that bite.” She thrust out an arm, uniform sleeve tugged up.
Dark skin and the pale dawn light combined to hide any evidence. “There are bugs that bite on every planet. Suck it up.”
“Harsh.”
Torin secured both their weapons while Binti dogged down the hatch. “We have a seal,” she called when the lights turned orange—a Taykan-built VTA used orange and blue rather than green and red. Humans adapted. It was one of the things they did best. “Run decontamination.”
“Running decon.” Alamber twisted around and peered over the top of the second command seat. “How long, Boss?”
“All the way back to the Promise.” The ship was in a low orbit, only fifteen hundred kilometers up. Hopefully, the trip would last long enough for decon to do its job. “There are bugs on this planet that bite,” she added as his hair flattened and he made an unhappy noise. “And I don’t like the thought of planetary microbes mutating in space, joining together, gaining sentience, and starting another war.”
His hair flipped. “Yeah, like that’ll happen again.”
“Long odds occasionally pay off. ’S why chumps play the lottery.” Craig tipped his head back. Torin bent forward and kissed him. “Strap in,” he said against her mouth. “Let’s rattle our dags and get out of here before cleanup needs another form filled out. Plastic?”
“Some.” She dropped back into her seat and dragged the crash harness down over her shoulders. “All inert.”
They both knew she hadn’t touched every piece of plastic in the anchor and in the ruined APCs around it. They both allowed the comfort of close enough. They had to, given that the marker left in their brains when they’d passed through a section of sentient, polynumerous molecular polyhydroxide alcoholydes arranged into the shape of a spaceship didn’t always evoke a reaction. Torin wanted a reaction. She wanted a reaction, and then she wanted enough of them in one place to hold down and . . . And what? And demand an apology from the remnants of the plastic aliens lingering in known space who’d thrown two galactic civilizations into war as a social experiment? Demand restitution? Demand that they restore the lives lost on both sides while they accumulated data? No. Not only was there no way for them to make amends for the centuries of death and destruction they’d caused, for the continuing violence from a population trained to war, but previous interactions proved they felt they had nothing to make amends for.
Torin kept that hold down and . . . open ended, certain she’d resolve it in time. Sooner or later, they’d have an ass she could kick.
Meanwhile, she touched—and Craig touched—as much plastic as they could. Just in case.
Not one of the xenoneurologists who’d tested them, singly and collectively, had been able to determine how the protein marker worked or why it only worked part-time. They didn’t know why the alien in General Morris’ office had reacted to Craig or why the aliens in the prison hadn’t reacted to Torin until she’d forced the issue. The general consensus, based on sweet fuk all as far as Torin could see, was that the aliens were running smaller experiments within the larger. She believed that as well as being patronizing, probably telepathic, voyeuristic hive minds, they were also contrary, psychopathic shitheads.
The Confederation had collectively decided to get rid of as much plastic as possible.
Impossible to get rid of it all, all at once.
Research into plastic substitutes tossed out something new every couple of tendays.
Natural materials had made a huge comeback. So had environmental protections.
“I almost forgot,” she added as the VTA shuddered and lifted off, heading back to the Promise, “there’s a chance Humans First is involved in the gunrunning.”
“Fukking Humans First,” Craig sighed. “They make the rest of us look bad.”
“Or good in comparison,” Binti offered. “And at least they got rid of the apostrophe.”
• • •
Thirteen hours later, Torin pushed wet hair back off her face—she’d been in the shower when the alert sounded—and frowned at the information about the incoming ships scrolling across Promise’s main board. “Their public files are too perfect; they’re shouting nothing to see here.”
“You have a suspicious mind, luv.” Craig dragged a shirt down over damp skin.
“It makes me good at my job.”
“Should we tag them?”
They had no way of knowing if the pair of ships heading in-system held the Berin gang, but even if the bullshit in their public files turned out to be true, their trajectory, riding the momentum from their Susumi wave, meant they hadn’t used the buoy and that meant an unregistered jump. As this was a MidSector system and both gas giants had mining platforms, the ships were, at the very least, guilty of a traffic violation.
She was starting to think like a Warden.
Torin wasn’t one hundred percent sure how she felt about that. The Confederation Marine Corps had been the core of her identity for a long time.
“They just snagged our PFs.” The Strike Teams had slightly less than perfect public files, designed to be seen and forgotten.
“So they’re scanning.” Wardens scanned automatically, filing information on every ship in range. Most ships didn’t. Civilian salvage operators might, or might not, have developed a program Justice Department scans slid past. The CSOs were prickly about government interference, and Torin had heard about the possibility through unofficial channels, so she was ignoring it for the moment.
“We could engage.” Craig dropped into the pilot’s seat. Metal joints creaked a protest, the sound a background noise rather than a warning as the chair had held them both during some athletic maneuvering.
Rather than sit in the second chair, Torin rested her arms on the duct-taped upper curve behind Craig’s head and, in turn, rested her chin on her arms. “And end up in a high-speed chase across the galaxy?”
“Why not? We’ll use Presit’s equations to follow them through Susumi.”
“We’ll jump out, smack into a solid object, and die young.” Pilots who missed a decimal point in a Susumi equation were given memorial services.
“Then I herd them in too close to a gravitational field to make their jump.”
“You’ll match speeds, hook them with a grappling cable, and reel them in?”
“Don’t be daft, I’d have to bugger their engines first.”
“With?” The Wardens’ ships weren’t armed.
“Force of personality.”
She rose up and leaned down to kiss the top of his head. “Well, we don’t deal with traffic violations and until they start shooting at us, they’re not our problem so . . .”
His hands stilled on the board. “If they are the Berins, they’ll want those weapons.”
C&C had minimal defenses, a single member of the Younger Races there to protect the nonviolent species that had, until a year ago, been the only Wardens. They were still working the kinks out of the new system, but not even an ex-Marine could stand between two shiploads of criminals and a dozen cases of arms and ammunition.
“Ablin gon savit!”
“I get all aroused when you swear in Taykan, Boss.”
“You get all aroused when you read training manuals,” Torin said absently, staring down at what their scanner continued to pull up about the pair of distant ships.
“Depends on who’s being trained in what.” Alamber dropped into the second chair and yawned, eyes paling as light receptors closed. “Who’d we scan?”
“Possibly the Berin gang.”
“We taking off in hot pursuit?”
“You two need to cut back on your Star Wardens.” The vids had gotten very popular since the addition of the Younger Races to the Justice Department, although given that the dialogue tended toward “He’s the law, I’m the enforcement.” Torin wasn’t sure why. Still, they couldn’t leave the clean-up team undefended. “Trajectory?”
“Theirs?” Craig pulled a line of streaming data up to the front of the screen. “Close enough to Three Points for government work.”
“ETA?” Riding their Susumi wave, the potential Berins were moving a lot faster than the Promise.
“Five, give or take.”
“Can we intercept?”
“If I micro jump us from here to here . . .” He pulled up a hard light projection. “. . . we can cut them off.”
A wise man back on Terra had once declared space was big. The corollary to big was empty, at least outside the Core. Even in the MidSectors the distance between ships—unless those ships were very unlucky—made anything but fictional pursuit impractical. Although micro jumps into Susumi space could cover millions of kilometers in a few moments, they fell somewhere between suicidal and are you fukking kidding on the dangerous ideas scale and while all six of the Strike Team pilots had done simulations, an actual micro jump remained theory. So far, circumstances had never fallen on the jump side of is this worth dying for.
Still hadn’t, Torin noted silently. “What are the odds that C&C will be dirtside when they arrive?”
“There were nine bad guys down there, Boss. Odds are Finds Truth will still have them filling out their WGB78s.”
Craig was ship’s captain; his was the final word within Promise’s bulkheads, but she commanded the team, so this was her call. She straightened, squaring her shoulders. “Drop our public files. Let them see who we are.”
“You think the Berins will run?”
“From Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr and Strike Team Alpha?” Alamber replied before Torin could. “If they’re smart enough to dress themselves, they’re smart enough to run. You good with me trying to ride our scan into their OS, Boss?”
“Knock yourself out.” He hadn’t managed it yet, but if . . . when he did, they’d be able to take control of any ship close enough to scan and enjoy a brief window where their quarry couldn’t escape into the vast emptiness of space. And then a coder on the other side would develop a block. Torin didn’t subscribe to the belief that criminal meant stupid; Alamber was proof of that. He’d been part of Big Bill’s pirate support organization, pulling his own weight from the moment his vantu had died, leaving him alone, young, and unethically brilliant. He’d helped Torin’s team escape, engineering his own escape at the same time. Technically, Torin should have handed him over to the Wardens and rehabilitation, but she’d promised him a place for as long as he wanted it and she’d done everything she could to keep that promise.
If the Justice Department suspected Alamber’s background—and Torin wasn’t arrogant enough to assume they didn’t—they either refused to act without proof or they considered his inclusion in Strike Team Alpha to be a part of his rehabilitation. She was good with either possibility.
“They’re bringing their engines on. Canceling momentum.” Craig leaned back, right hand splayed across the bottom of the screen, fingers bracketing the data from the long-range scanners. “And they’re running.”
“Back to their entry point?”
“It’s the easiest math. Ninety-eight percent probability they jump out where they jumped in.”
“You made that number up.”
“I did. Still true.”
“Tag them.”
Craig had been a civilian salvage operator before Torin, before the Primacy, before the gray plastic aliens and the end of the war. He’d worked alone, tagging and collecting battle debris and then sell
ing it back to the military. He claimed he could hit a moving piece of live tech the size of his fist from ten kilometers out, and Torin had no reason to doubt him. Unless the Berins had a CSO in their crew, they had no idea of what he could do.
“Tags away.”
The tags were small and fast, small enough that when their vector intercepted the vector of the ships in—Torin leaned over the back of the chair and scanned the screen to find the relevant data—in three and a half hours, they’d read like space dust impacting against the outer hull. In spite of that, they were large enough to send out a tight beacon only the Navy and the Wardens could read. Alamber called them HI PAMS—essentially short for Hello, I’m a Bad Person, Arrest Me. The name had been slow to catch on. Werst insisted it was because he’d left out the B. “Bad person; that’s the relevant part right there. Makes no fukking sense without the B, kid.”
“And that’s another section of space preserved for truth, justice, and good government.” Craig stretched, spine cracking. “Go us.”
TWO
"SO, MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT when we could logically expect even gunrunners to be tucked into bed dreaming of mayhem, they were all up, waiting for you. Lovely.” Lanh Ng looked down at his desk where Strike Team Alpha’s reports took up most of the surface, and frowned. As the first Human Warden, he’d been tapped to command the six newly formed Strike Teams although, with the teams having been structured for independent operations, his job seemed heavily weighted toward translating the actions of the Younger Races under his nominal leadership to the Elder Races who made up the bulk of the Justice Department. Torin wondered if they’d given him a choice. “You’re certain you didn’t trip a sensor?”
“They left no security in orbit, the ship was inert, and Alamber swears it was clear dirtside.”
“So either they were more alert than you believe, or someone warned them you were coming. I don’t like that word, someone. A few gunrunners trying to turn a profit on death and destruction; means and motive are clear. Throw in too many someones and the conspiracy theorists come out of the duct work.”