by Rick Partlow
“I understand it’s a social faux pas shipboard to eavesdrop, but I feel I have experience that may be instructive in your situations.”
“What?” Sanders cracked, leaning back into his seat and eyeing the cyborg dubiously. “You think we should both get rid of our human parts and we’ll feel much better about life?”
“It’s not a decision for everyone,” he admitted. “And if there were no Norms around, then who would we be different from?” The corner of his mouth turned up slightly and I chuckled despite my irritation. Either he was used to the frequent criticism or he was the most self-aware Skinganger I’d ever met.
He shrugged, regarding Sanders. “Though, as you say, Mr. Sanders, you may live a very long life. Who knows what decisions you’ll make in another century or two?” Sanders made a face at that, but didn’t bother arguing with the Russian.
“So, what’s your sage advice, Anatoly?” I prompted, hoping to get this over quickly.
“I have been in several situations in my admittedly short life,” he told me, “where my options seemed limited, where I apparently had no way out. When I felt trapped in my brother’s shadow, frustrated by his unwillingness to fight for what he’d built; when my body was crushed between cargo containers in the hold of an independent freighter I’d signed on with as a spacer to work my way out of the Pirate Worlds; when I found myself an outsider on Aphrodite, looked down upon by others who saw my cybernetics as a weakness; when my new family, the Skingangers of Kennedy City, were threatened by the rising power of the Predecessor Cult; and now here, when everything I had built was destroyed in a day.”
He paused, taking a breath, and for a moment, I thought I saw a very human pain in the set of his eyes. But then the part of him that didn’t want to be human anymore regained control. “But each of these opened up a new opportunity for me,” he went on, seemingly back in control and serene once again. “They transformed me into something stronger, better, harder…something more equipped to fight back against every obstacle the universe puts in our way. This time will be no different. And this is what I say to you two gentlemen: be transformed.” He grinned. “Perhaps not into a more perfect body, but into whoever you need to become to deal with the problems you face.”
“I have a little experience in becoming a new person,” I said, perhaps a bit dryly, though he couldn’t know the why of it. “But doing that means leaving behind everyone who loved the old one, and I don’t know that I’m ready to do that.”
“You will do it, though,” he assured me. “Or it will be done to you. There’s a poem I read a long time ago, in another life, which said ‘if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.’ Allowing things to happen to you changes you as surely as if you’d changed to keep them from happening. I’ve seen that, as well.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t try. I hid behind taking a drink from the bulb, the orange juice not as sour as the truth of Anatoly’s words.
“So, what would you do, Mr. Transformer?” Sanders asked him irreverently, missing the change in my mood. “If you were the one who had to make the call? Would you tell your bosses about the Predecessor tech and fuck everyone else in the Commonwealth, or would you risk them coming after you for holding out on them?”
“If it were me,” Anatoly answered readily, “there would be no issue. I have no loyalty to your society or your government. I would take the technology for myself and kill anyone who might give away my secret, then I would use it first to take back Peboan, then to forge a power base for the Evolutionist movement among the Norms.”
I laughed quietly at the brutal honesty of his answer. I had to admit, it had its appeal: seize the Predecessor cache for myself, then use it to set up my own little fiefdom on one of the Pirate Worlds. I’d told Sanders it would suck being the pawn in someone else’s power struggle, but if I were the one taking power… I could bring Sophia and Cesar out there, where the Corporate Council couldn’t touch me, finally be free from Mother and Uncle Andre. That had been my great grandfather’s dream.
“There’s only one problem with that idea, Anatoly,” I said to him, carrying my tray to the recycler.
“And what is that, Mr. Munroe?”
“When you take that kind of power,” I said, leaning back against the storage bins and regarding him coolly, “you attract the attention of the wrong kind of people. People who see everyone and everything as either a threat or an asset to be used. And those people send guys like me to take care of threats.”
“And when ‘guys like you’ are the threat?” He wondered.
“No matter how big you are,” I quoted to him, “there’s always someone bigger. No matter how much of a badass you think you are, there’s always someone badder. These people have the money and the resources to find someone bigger and badder.”
“Then you’ve lost already?” It was a taunt, though it was couched as an interested question.
I smiled and quoted at him again, this time from a book by Ferdinand Foch that Gramps had made me read. “A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”
“If you know your enemy and know yourself,” he rattled off Sun Tzu in reply, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “So how will you win this battle?”
“You like quotes, Anatoly,” I said, shrugging. “I heard one, once, from an ancient warrior named Bruce Lee. ‘You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.’”
Sanders laughed at that, throwing his head back.
“What that means,” he translated for Anatoly, “is that he’s making it up as he goes along.”
Chapter Seventeen
One of the tricky things about travelling through Transition Space was that time didn’t work exactly the way the way it did in realspace. I wasn’t even a pilot, much less a hyperdimensional physicist, so I couldn’t tell you the why of it or if there was a formula that explained how it worked. But I did know that, unless you were travelling in the same drive bubble as another ship, time wouldn’t pass for you at exactly the same rate as it did for them. It wasn’t a huge difference, which was why convoys and mass attacks were still possible, but the greater the difference in the time and place from which you entered Transition Space, the more slippage there was.
The upshot was, even though we’d hit the gravito-inertial Transition line only hours behind the Cultist’s lighter, and were probably heading to the same spatial coordinates, and were only going to be in T-space for a couple days subjectively, there was every possibility that we could arrive days later, or simultaneously, or even days before they got there. I was hoping for the latter, but we had to be ready for the other two possibilities.
That was why we were doing our initial Transition into the system at the farthest entry point on its line, out near what the gravimetic sensors told us was an ice giant about thirty Astronomical Units from its primary. We’d hide our warp corona behind its mass, then orbit around the other side of it and sneak a look at our target before we made a shorter jump farther in-system.
Kane swore it would work, that he’d done it before during the war. I found the whole business akin to black magic and just about as comprehensible, so I had to trust his judgement. I still felt nervous strapped into the copilot’s couch in the cockpit, beside Kane. Divya and Bobbi were behind us, while everyone else was either strapped into a bunk in the cabin or one of the spare couches in the utility bay.
“What are the odds the bad guys know about this trick?” I asked Kane as the computer counted down the seconds to our entry to realspace. “And that they left a drone here to watch for it? Or a mine?”
“If this was a Fleet ship,” he allowed, more talkative than usual as he considered the problem, “even chance. These guys…” A derisive snort. “Wannabes.”
“Some of these ‘wannabes’ are former military, Mr. Kane” Divya informed him, her voice te
nser than usual. She was still pissed at me for not telling her everything. I hadn’t even mentioned where we were going until a few hours ago, and when she found out the safeguards I’d put in place to mask the location of the system, she’d thrown a shit-fit that had lasted nearly until we’d strapped in for the jump.
I’d even gone back to Kane and had him write a program to scramble the constellations in the main view screen just in case she tried to ID the system’s location by their position.
“Ten seconds,” the computer’s automated voice droned. “Nine, eight, seven…”
I tried to clench my stomach muscles, but it didn’t do any good; it never did. Transition wasn’t a purely physical event, for reasons that had sent philosophers and theologians and psychologists scrambling for decades now. No one had won their Nobel Prize off it, though, and I doubted anyone would. Some things were just meant to remain mysteries.
The ice giant was a dull, brooding grey ball that filled up half the forward screens, blocking out the inaccurate stars and the secrets of the inner system with its bulk. Kane made no announcement and asked for no permissions; he just engaged the Teller-Fox warp unit and sent us cruising out of the huge planet’s shadow, revealing the treasures it guarded.
The system’s primary was a red giant that had swallowed up most of its planets in the nova that had formed it, leaving only three: the ice giant farthest out, a crispy cinder about the size of Earth’s moon closest in, and right in the middle, the place we were heading. The innermost planet was on the other side of the star when we cleared the ice giant, but the middle one, the terrestrial leftover, was visible on our optical telescope and I brought the image up on the main viewscreen.
It was largely brown, but with an incongruous amount of blue and green mixed in.
“How the hell is there life on that rockball?” Bobbi wondered, sounding scandalized. “When the star went nova, it should have wiped everything out.”
“I guess the Predecessors and their terraformers arrived after things had settled down,” I speculated, chuckling in involuntary amusement at how readily we accepted things like that.
“Yes,” Divya said softly, nodding agreement. Her eyes were fixed on the world, filled with an almost sexual hunger that had apparently made her forget how pissed she was at me. “That kind of power…”
“Detecting a ship in orbit,” Kane announced, and a red avatar appeared over the image of the planet, high in a geosynchronous orbit over the world’s equator. “Right size for a cargo ship, or a lighter.”
“Damn it,” Bobbi hissed and I shared the sentiment. So much for hyperdimensional physics and time slippage helping us out.
“What about on the surface?” Divya demanded sharply, not looking away from the vision on the screen. “Have they landed a shuttle?”
“Too far away,” Kane said. “Atmosphere’s masking any heat signature if they have.”
“You can bet your ass they have,” Bobbi said. “The question is, how long have they been here?”
I hit the intercom control, synching it to my implanted ‘link audio.
“Everyone up to the cockpit,” I ordered.
Time to get down to business.
***
“The way I see it,” I announced, gesturing at the image of the planet still hanging in the blackness on the cockpit viewscreen, “we have two targets: the lighter, and whatever forces they have on the ground already.”
“You have a military-grade proton cannon in this boat, right?” Vilberg asked me. “Would that be enough to take out the lighter?”
He was crammed in beside Victor and Sanders just inside the cockpit hatch. We were in zero gravity, of course, but everyone was jammed in shoulder to shoulder, bulkhead to bulkhead, so no one was floating around with the air currents. Even with Kurt still in the auto-doc, it got damned crowded on a ship this small.
“Maybe,” Kane answered the question for me, still strapped into the pilot’s acceleration couch but spun around to face the hatchway. “Depends on their armor and shielding.”
“It’s a lighter,” I pointed out, “a converted freighter like the one you Savage/Slaughter people have making supply runs to Peboan. It has as much armor as they could afford to have retrofitted to it without compromising hull integrity and your guess is as good as mine as to how much that is. I also have no idea how well armed it is, but I imagine they’ve crammed as much of that stolen Sung Brothers weaponry as they could onto it.”
“And they have at least two assault shuttles,” Sanders reminded me, “and those have proton cannons, too.” He seemed sanguine about the whole thing, as if listing off the enemy’s capabilities was somehow comforting.
“And we don’t know if both shuttles are on the ground or they kept one on the lighter in reserve,” Victor put in.
“We could fill a book with what we don’t know,” I interjected. “Let’s try to figure out how to use what we have. We can’t just blow the lighter out of orbit, even if their armor sucks. Marquette might still be on board. We need to insert a team and take control of the ship.” I sucked in a deep breath and grabbed at the edge of the console to keep from floating up into the overhead. “And we have to be flexible. If the shuttles have already landed, we need to get a team down there to make sure they don’t find anything to use against us.”
“We’re awfully thin on personnel to pull off something like that, Boss,” Victor said, shaking his head, “especially with Kurt still in the fridge.”
I nodded, wishing we had the other Simak brother back in action. The auto-doc was busy growing him a new spleen, which was taking a while.
“Can’t believe I’m saying it,” Victor muttered sourly, “but I’m kind of sorry we left Calderon on Peboan.” The mercenary officer had told us he had to check for any more survivors from his company and wait for the resupply ship to come back.
“I realize I’m not part of your unit, Mr. Munroe,” Anatoly spoke up from where the magnets in the bottoms of his bionic legs anchored him to the deck by the hatchway, “but I would like to volunteer to help in whatever capacity you need me on this operation.”
I thought about that for a moment. I’d been a bit nervous about the idea of leaving him on the ship with just Kane and Divya, but did I really trust him to be down on the planet? On the lighter, fighting Cultists, though…
“Okay,” I told him. “You’ll be in the boarding party. Actually,” I amended as the plan came to me in a flush of inspiration, “we’ll all board the lighter, first. That’ll be our initial target. We’ll jump in as close as we can, take out their communications and any point defense systems we can reach, then we’ll do an EVA into their docking bay and force our way in through one of the airlocks. We’ve got cracking modules that should be able to break into their security system, but we’ll bring breaching charges if it comes to that.”
I rubbed my chin, seeing the pieces come together as if they were projected in front of me.
“That’s when we’ll have to be like water,” I mused. Sanders snorted in amusement but the others just seemed confused. “If they haven’t landed yet, then no problem; we’ll take out the ones shipboard, and Kane will patrol outside the ship and make sure no one tries to sneak off in a shuttle.”
“And if they have?” Bobbi prompted with a tone that spoke of strained patience.
“Then you stay on the ship with Anatoly and Vilberg and secure it,” I went on, “while me and Sanders and Victor head down to the planet and take out whoever they have down there. Kane, you and Divya will stay on the Nomad and coordinate communications and provide air cover, and if there are any of their shuttles already launched, you’ll have to take them out.”
I looked around, making sure to meet everyone’s eyes. “Any questions, suggestions, objections? Now’s the time, don’t hold back.”
“How are we going to approach close enough without them seeing us steaming in?” Vilberg wondered.
“Ship’s in a geosynchronous orbit,” Kane answered for me. “Jump
in while it’s on the opposite side of the planet, insert into a lower energy orbit, then goose it. Simple.”
“It won’t work if they’ve dropped surveillance drones or have the shuttles patrolling,” I warned, “but that’s another bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it.”
“I got a question,” Sanders said and I nodded to him to go on. “How’re we getting down to the planet? I mean, the Nomad ain’t gonna fit in that lighter’s docking bay, and it’ll take a lot of time to EVA back out to the ship, even assuming she’s not busy duking it out with a shuttle.”
“If we can,” I said, “if one’s docked and available, we take one of their shuttles. If not, we improvise.” I shrugged, smiling. “Ship that size has to have emergency life-pods.”
“Ah,” he acknowledged, rolling his eyes slightly. “Sorry I asked.”
I waited a moment longer, but no one spoke.
“Okay, if that’s it, then go get prepped. We have another four hours until the Cult ship is out of visual contact, and that’s when we’re going to jump in. At that point, everyone needs to be armored up, gunned up, helmets sealed and strapped in. Bobbi,” I said, turning to my second-in-command, “get Anatoly fitted with armor and vacuum gear, then issue him a rifle and ammo.”
“Got it.” She nodded to the cyborg. “Come on, Tin Man,” she said, gesturing back down towards the utility bay, “let’s go see what size suit you wear.”
The others began to trickle away back down the passage until it was just Divya, Kane and me in the cockpit.
“Kane,” Divya said, her eyes fixed on me and the expression in them not at all pleasant, “give us the room.”
“On a ship,” he grunted, unstrapping and locking his magnetics to the deck plating, “it’s a ‘compartment.’”
Divya didn’t respond, just waited until he’d loudly and slowly clomped out through the hatch, then hit the control to close it.
“I thought you were smart, Munroe,” she said with a cold disdain, “but now I see you just think you’re smart.”