by Rick Partlow
“I would like to hear,” he said when he turned back to Vala-Kel, “the tale of how you came to be here.”
“Are you certain? It is a long and sad story, and not one to brighten your mood.” At Kan-Ten’s insistent look, the other male assented with a set of his shoulders. “Then let us walk.”
Belenus was hanging midway down the western sky, and it cast a forest of shadows in the streets of the Tahni neighborhood, a curious image that made Kan-Ten feel as if the place was more illusion than reality. At least out here, in their own neighborhood, he saw male Tahni outside their houses and shops, running errands and pushing hand-carts loaded down with their wares through the street to other shops and houses for trade, rather than huddling inside, terrified to step into the light.
“When we parted at the repatriation center,” Vala-Kel began once they were safely away from the house, “you were determined to get as far away from our home and the war and the human government as you could. How did that work for you? How did you live?”
“I lived by the gun, as that was the only trade for which I was trained.” Kan-Ten felt no guilt at the declaration; it wasn’t as if he’d been killing his own people. “I moved from one place to another out in what the humans call the Pirate Worlds. That was where I met my human friend. We came here on the word that there might be work for our sort here, that there was violence to be done.” He paused, motioning to his friend. “And now you know how I came to be on this world. I await your own account.”
They walked together in silence for a moment, the only sound the scrape of their sandals on the crumbling pavement.
“I went home, as I said I would,” Vala-Kel finally spoke. He kept his eyes straight ahead down the street, his stance stiff and unbending. “I imagined that I would continue the fight against the humans, that I would lead our people in throwing off their rule. But our people were weary of fighting, and their spirit had fled along with their faith. The Emperor was dead, killed by a human Marine, some nameless leader of a squad, and our society died with him.”
He paused again before he went on, as if the next part was almost too painful to remember. “You know my father held a high position in the civil government of the capital city. He was recruited by the humans to be one of the leaders of their puppet government, and he arranged for me to work for him. At first, I agreed, hoping to somehow use my position to sabotage the efforts of the humans to rule us. But we had already turned into a planet of informers, each male ready to betray the next in order to keep what power he had. I made the mistake of trusting the wrong ‘friend,’ and I was given the choice of being sent to an ‘education center,’ for further ‘assimilation’ or going off-world to a planet with a Tahni population. I chose the latter and wound up on the world the humans call Anansi.”
“I have heard of it,” Kan-Ten acknowledged. “There is a large Tahni presence on that colony.”
“And they get along very well with the human population.” There was bitterness in his voice. “Very well…and to that end, they are prepared to turn in anyone who causes trouble. I fled that world just ahead of the human police, working my way on a private freighter to Jahn-Skyyiah, hoping that there, on a Tahni colony, I would find a warmer reception.”
“And did you?”
“At first.” The words were grudging, as if he didn’t want to admit it but was forced by innate honesty. “The Commonwealth military ruled that world with a clenched fist, and there was much discontent. It was a fertile field to sow revolution, and I had many allies. And I had a son.”
“What?” Kan-Ten couldn’t keep the disbelief from the set of his shoulders. “Your pardon, brother, but you were a refugee, with no prospects other than fighting a desperate war against our conquerors. What female would make a contract under those circumstances?”
“Surra-Kei was a believer.” A posture of grief came over his friend’s stance and Kan-Ten knew that this was the story Vala-Kel had not wished to share. “She thought me an instrument of the spirit-Emperor, and she didn’t wish my bloodline to die with me. When the humans finally came to arrest me, I was with my son in the visitation center outside the commune of the females. Surra-Kei was coming back to claim him.” A long pause, as if the words required a solid push to bring them to the surface.
“There was a battle and I was wounded and taken prisoner. They were both killed.”
“I grieve with you, my brother,” Kan-Ten said, and meant it. Nothing was more devastating to a warrior than the death of a son before he had the chance to prove his own worth in battle.
“I was languishing there in a cell,” Vala-Kel went on, not acknowledging Kan-Ten’s words, “my spirit broken, when a brother named Taarak-Sul told me of an opportunity, a way to take the battle to the humans and carve out a place for Tahni on a world where we still had a chance. He told me of a human named Jordi Abdullah, and how he could make this possible for us.”
“I have been in the Pirate Worlds,” Kan-Ten reminded him. “I know much of the man named Jordi Abdullah, and of the La Sombra cartel. Do you really think this man would be willing to help you take this world for the Tahni?”
“It suits his purpose. Of course, he has a selfish motive; I would not trust him if he didn’t. But his plans run leg-by-leg with ours: he wants to be rid of the Commonwealth government on this planet. Once that is done, we may have our own land with our own laws, left to our own devices by Jordi Abdullah and his band of criminals. I think it is a fair trade.”
Vala-Kel stopped in his tracks and Kan-Ten nearly passed by him, dragging his feet to halt in time to face him.
“What say you, my brother?” Vala-Kel demanded. “Will you pledge your arms to our cause? Will you fight with us to make our own place on this world, free of the humans? Is this a worthy use of your talents, or do you fight only for treasure?”
Kan-Ten looked deep into the eyes of his oldest friend, wondering how much of what he was about to say was part of his cover, and how much was the truth of his spirit.
“I will fight with you until the end.”
Chapter Five
Reality warped and stretched and tore like an old bedsheet, then did the same thing less than a second later, and Sandi pressed her lips together and swallowed hard to keep the gorge in her throat from escaping.
“Shit, that’s getting old,” Ash murmured, yanking the interface jacks out of the sockets implanted at his temples.
Sandi focused on the main display projection, where the mineral barge seemed to have lurched tens of thousands of kilometers back towards them, growing from a barely discernable dot against the stars to a massive, looming mountain riding a flare of star-fire. Their own fusion drive remained silent; there was no point in burning reactor fuel on the physical drive when they could continue the micro-Transitions every few hours to catch up to the cargo hauler.
Except that it would be so much more comfortable, she complained silently.
She didn’t bother to say it because they’d both said it too much over the last two days. They both had years of experience with star travel, and a single Transition didn’t bother either of them much; jumping in and out in quick succession however, did nasty things to human perceptions. It wasn’t as bad when you were jacked into the interface, which was why they were taking turns in the left seat, but it was still beginning to leave them both with perpetual nagging headaches that were probably more psychological than physical.
“How many more days of this?” Ash wondered, rubbing both hands over his face. “This damned thing practically crawls.”
“Another ten days until she does her deceleration flip.” Sandi reminded him. “After that, there won’t be much anyone can do to her short of ramming an asteroid into her.”
“Another ten days of this and I’m going to go stark raving mad,” Ash said into his palms, his voice muffled. If there’d been any gravity, she knew, he would be sagging in the chair.
“Well, we got another three hours before the next one,” she sighed. “Why d
on’t we get some sleep?”
“I’m not tired,” Ash told her, shaking his head, his hair flopping side to side.
“Your hair’s getting shaggy again,” she told him, leaning over to run a hand through it. He usually kept it tightly-cropped, but there hadn’t been time before they’d left for Brigantia and he hadn’t asked her to cut it on the trip out. “You gonna’ let it grow out this time?”
He caught her hand, turned it over and kissed her fingers.
“You gonna’ let yours go back to brown?” he countered, nodding toward the red tresses that were hanging below her shoulders now.
“What?” Sandi demanded with a grin. “You don’t like me as a redhead?”
“I like you however you want to be,” he assured her.
“Good answer. You’re not as dumb as you look, Carpenter…”
She yanked at the quick-release for her seat harness and pushed over to him, leaning in to kiss him softly.
“You know, there are advantages to having the ship to ourselves,” Sandi pointed out, snuggling into his shoulder.
They were both in normal shipwear, T-shirts and shorts and soft boots, and it was easily shed. It orbited above them, floating on the air currents in the cockpit. Skin against warm skin, slick with a thin sheen of sweat and growing hotter with the friction, and then the alarms went off and the lights flashed red and they were tumbling apart in a whirlwind of arms grabbing at clothes and a torrent of fervent curses.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Sandi bit off, yanking her shorts back on and grabbing at her shirt as she pulled herself into the pilot’s seat ahead of Ash.
“Hey!” he protested, grabbing at the back of the acceleration couch. “It’s my turn!”
“I agree, babe,” she shot him a bawdy grin just as the interface began to close around her consciousness, “but you’re going to have to wait until after the battle.”
“Shit,” he mumbled, and she had a vague sense of him strapping into the copilot’s seat before she became one with the Acheron.
Diving the interface was the greatest drug humans had ever devised, and as addictive as any of them. Sandi was a silver eagle soaring through a sky full of stars, and some of those stars were man-made candle flames of burning hydrogen. The barge was close, so close it felt as if she could reach out and touch it, but the bogies were closer still, just a few thousand kilometers away. She sprinted to meet them, nine gravities of acceleration squeezing at her chest and reminding her for just a moment that she had a physical body somewhere inside that silver delta. The interface drew her back into its embrace once again, and the punishing boost took a step further away from her consciousness, like a marathon runner pushing the pain and exertion into a compartment so she could keep her pace and finish the course.
There was just one bogie, familiar to her from the mission brief, a converted missile cutter like so many that had been parted out and sold as surplus after the war, like the Acheron. She had an eye for such things by now, and she judged that the ship wasn’t a junker assembled from spare parts, but a complete body. Was it bought stripped, refitted by its new owners with civilian parts? Or had it been sold on the black market by some corrupt Fleet supply officer on the take?
It might matter, if it still had the military-grade deflectors and Electronic Counter-Measure packets intact. Without shields, one shot from the Acheron’s proton cannon would blast the cutter to vapors; with the electromagnetic deflectors, they could shrug off a hit, maybe two, especially at extreme range. Best to try to get close. Sandi cut the acceleration and an elephant shifted its weight off of her chest; she thought she heard Ash gasp in relief beside her, but she wasn’t sure.
She was concentrating on the jump computations. Sandi had taken class after class on navigating Transition Lines, learned the formulae for calculating the power output for each T-space entry and the time needed for each distance interval. It had been a waste; the ship’s computer did all that work for her, requiring only a destination and a pair of fully-charged capacitor banks. The Acheron slipped through the space between spaces, ripping shortcuts through reality with bursts of gravimetic energy and coming out only a few hundred kilometers from the barge, between it and the enemy cutter, just beneath the plane of the raider ship’s approach. The railgun could only be fired in a straight line from the ship’s vector, so he’d have to maneuver to get a shot at them and they’d get the first swing. Unfortunately, the Acheron’s capacitor banks had both been drained by the double-jump, which meant no proton cannon until they recharged, so…
“Gatling laser, Ash,” she murmured.
The remote laser turret was controlled manually by the right-seat copilot or crew chief; even with the interface, there was only so much the pilot could handle.
And it makes them think they’re good for something besides spare parts.
The laser pulses were invisible in the vacuum, but the computer simulated them for her, painting a checkered line of red between the wing of the Acheron and the nose of the enemy cutter for over a second. A flare of vaporized metal bloomed from the pirate cutter and Sandi had barely registered it before she was kicking herself in the pants with a six-gravity boost. Simultaneously, she began pulling the nose up with the maneuvering jets at the Acheron’s bow, staying in the enemy’s blind spot but still keeping the proton cannon muzzle aimed their way until the capacitors recharged.
Just another few seconds…
Then the cutter disappeared in an explosion of polychromatic light, and Sandi whispered a curse. He’d jumped, and she doubted he’d be going far.
With a thought, she killed the boost and opened herself up to the sensor input, searching for a warp corona that wouldn’t be more than a few light-seconds away. There, back toward the asteroid belt, still on the ecliptic for this system, and only a hundred thousand kilometers from her position.
“Hold on,” she growled to Ash, then slipped them back into Transition space for a heartbeat.
“Shit!” he grunted as reality folded and spindled and spat them out again.
But he was ready with the Gatling turret and hosed down the other ship with a long burst, chewing a set of charred pockmarks down the underside of its port wing before her pilot turned her stern toward them and ignited her plasma drives. The view in the main screens and the view inside Sandi’s head both whited out as a star erupted only ten kilometers away, but she ignored the loss of optical feed and followed their thermal signature, still visible like a torch in the darkness.
Three gravities, then six and she was wishing they were back in the Fleet wearing military flight suits to lessen the impact of the constant acceleration but she kept on the enemy ship’s tail, knowing if she gave her the chance to turn on them for even a moment they could use that rail gun and core the Acheron like an apple at this range. She just needed one clear shot with the proton cannon, and while they stuck to the enemy’s six, the capacitors were recharging.
Unless he Transitions again, she reflected absently. How long does he want to play that game? What’s the fucking point?
She felt the tickle of the sensor data on the corner of her limits of perception, a warp corona opening up hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, back on the course of the ore barge, and it could only be one thing.
“Fucker!” she blurted, yanking at Transition Space with a force of will. “Goddamn motherfucker!”
She’d been suckered; she felt it like a kick in the gut that was a worse jolt than the quick double-Transition and she flogged the ship at the highest boost she could take short of blacking out. Ash would be unconscious, she was sure of it, but she had to get into position. The cutter was the fraternal twin of the rabbit she’d been chasing, battered and scraped in different spots but definitely from the same gene pool, unmarked and unregistered and modified for its task with weapons illegal in any commercial system.
The Acheron’s capacitor banks were charging again even as the acceleration mashed her deeper and deeper into her liquid-cushioned couch, making
it harder to concentrate on the interface, harder to think or plan or do anything but act on instinct. Fortunately, she had some good instincts. The two ships were less than a hundred kilometers apart when they fired simultaneously.
Time slowed and her brain manipulated the ship and the sensor input faster than any human body ever could, and with more precise judgement than the best artificial intelligences that computer science had been able to produce in two centuries of trying. The proton blast was moving closer to the speed of light than the coffin-sized tungsten dart from the rail gun, and when it struck the enemy cutter, the ship was engulfed in a crackling, coruscating ball of light that could only be the result of the particle beam interacting with an electromagnetic deflector shield.
Damn, they do have military-grade defenses.
She had one more charged capacitor and she was getting ready to unload on the cutter when it disappeared in a Teller-Fox warp corona and into Transition Space, unwilling to chance being taken out now that it had fired. Its rail gun projectile remained, though, a silent dagger in the dark, about to turn hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of hardware and probably millions of dollars’ worth of ore into a worthless and short-lived comet heading into the system’s primary.
There was no way to stop it; it was too heavy and going far too fast for the Acheron’s deflectors to affect its course, and a proton burst wouldn’t do anything even if she could get into a position to hit it. Sublimated tungsten still travelling at a substantial percentage of lightspeed would do as much damage as the solid kind. Well, no, that wasn’t quite true…there was one thing she could do.
The ship’s belly jets fired, using a good percentage of their limited stores of maneuvering fuel, and the bottom of her seat pressed into her, squeezing her vertebrae together like a child’s building blocks, and she felt herself getting centimeters shorter. Vectors and trajectories played out before her like a ballet, streaming green and red lines that curved with gravity and spacetime and she could feel the massive tungsten slug like a whisper from death itself breathing on her neck.