Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  She flopped on the bed, grabbed the tablet, and thought about it.

  She had access to a lot of things on this little device. Maybe some of them would help her slow those bad guys down.

  THE HEAD WAS proving to be a problem. The thing stuck to Napier like some kind of weird glue. He couldn’t shut it out of the bridge, because every time he closed the door on the head, it floated back inside.

  And every time he tried to use some piece of the captain to provide identification, the head stated, quite calmly, “You are not Captain Ekhart. You lack his height, weight, and appearance. I have instructed the system to remain unfooled.”

  Unfooled. What kind of word was that, anyway?

  It was as annoying as the head was.

  To make matters worse, Napier’s internal clock was warning him that he was almost out of time for this job.

  He needed that Egg, but he couldn’t access anything.

  His personal comm vibrated. He pressed it, and Johnston, the only member of his team still on the ship, said, “We just got a ping from the security system. We’ve been scanned by something with an official government signature.”

  Napier didn’t even have to ask what that meant. It meant that either a security vehicle or a rescue ship was on the way. Or something larger and more important—some kind of government transport—was coming to or traveling along this route.

  Which meant he was done, if he didn’t find that manifest right now, if he couldn’t get the Egg right now.

  He reached for the head, and his hand went right through it. Had that head belonged to a human, it would’ve been slammed against the wall until it shattered.

  “You are unauthorized,” the head said obliviously. Clearly, it had no idea that he would have killed it if he could. “You do not have access. You are not Captain Ekhart. You must leave.”

  Napier glared at it. The thing looked like it made eye contact with him, but he could see through it, so it probably didn’t.

  But had it sent the information to the authorities?

  He had broken into a number of ships similar to the Blue Moon, but never one of this vintage. Sometimes older ships had technologies he hadn’t seen or even imagined. Things attempted and then discarded.

  Like annoying heads that floated after people and yelled at them. This couldn’t have been a popular feature.

  “Can you figure out who scanned us?” Napier asked Johnston.

  “Been trying. I have no idea.” Johnston was good with all of the equipment. Not great, but better than some of the idiots Napier had brought with him. Those idiots were good for scaring civilians, and that was what he’d been using them for. And for figuring out how to put an entire room full of people into a deep sleep, so they wouldn’t fight back.

  “I can’t find them with our scanners,” Johnston was saying, “but here’s what I’m worried about. They’re coming from Mars, and they scanned us far enough out that we can’t read them. So they have powerful equipment and they’re coming fast. There might be a whole bunch of them, for all I know.”

  If Napier didn’t get out of here now, he might actually get caught. He slammed his fist on the captain’s chair that he had forgotten to retract. It bounced and jiggled toward him, almost as if he offended it, which was a lot more satisfying than trying to grab that stupid head.

  “Hey, you,” he said to the head, “who did you notify that we had arrived?”

  “I sent a message to those in charge, as per my programming,” the head said primly.

  “And who might those in charge be?” Napier asked, hoping that maybe he could buy some more time if the head identified them.

  “I went through proper channels. You have accessed the bridge without authorization. You have attempted to impersonate Captain Ekhart. You will be dealt with firmly.”

  He wasn’t getting any information from the head, and he wasn’t going to be able to find that Egg.

  He had to think this through. He was good at cutting his losses when he needed to, but usually he had a bit more to show for a job this complicated.

  Still, running was a lot better than getting captured.

  He also needed to get rid of all of the evidence that pointed to him. A ship full of people who could identify him. Those head-things. Who knew what they had taken from him and his team? DNA? Imagery? Everything?

  Now he was going to have to change his plan. He couldn’t remote detonate the Blue Moon because he didn’t have access to the controls. He would have to use regular explosives, the kind with their own timers.

  They were a little less reliable than a remote detonation, but they would have to do.

  Then his fist clenched.

  The kid.

  He thought of her for a moment, sprawled on that floor, looking helpless and lost as Mommy and Daddy got carted away.

  He didn’t dare jettison her from the Blue Moon, not now, not with the authorities (or whomever) closing in.

  This job was really screwed up. He was going to have to do things he didn’t want to do for no real payoff at all.

  He punched the retractable captain’s chair one last time, then shoved his way past the head as he stalked off the bridge. Or, rather, tried to shove. Because the head moved with him.

  How come he inherited the head from Griz? Because the head figured Napier was the greater threat?

  Didn’t matter. He had to tell his team to dump the explosives near the passengers and surviving crew. There was no time for finesse.

  He and his team needed to be on board his ship within fifteen minutes, so they could be as far away from the Blue Moon as possible when it exploded.

  As far from the Egg as possible.

  Because he had no idea what kind of damage it would do.

  COLETTE TRIED TO work faster, to see what else she could find, what she could use.

  She had almost given up when she found something weird.

  Apparently, passenger liners from the old days had a lot of theft, and theft was bad for business.

  So the holographic concierges were designed, not for the passengers’ comfort, but to spy on them. If concierges deemed someone suspicious, they harassed that someone on the ship. If that someone left the ship, the concierges shrank themselves down to a pinprick and became some kind of tiny spy that sent a signal so that the suspicious personages could be traced.

  It was weird, and it was brilliant, and it was strangely appropriate.

  Colette couldn’t prevent them from taking hostages. She couldn’t prevent them from getting the Egg. But she could help the authorities find the bad guys.

  If they let her live.

  A shiver ran through her.

  It didn’t really matter if they could track her or not. Because she had to get out of this room and stop them.

  Somehow.

  She just didn’t know how yet.

  THE HEAD THING vanished as Napier climbed into the only airlock that wasn’t stacked with dead crew members. His team had already gotten onto his ship and were waiting for him.

  God, he was irritated. Hours, risk, a few deaths, and what did he have to show for it?

  He was actually fleeing, something he thought he had become too sophisticated to do.

  Well, he had learned his lesson. No more boarding a passenger ship of this vintage, not without a lot more planning.

  He watched the exterior door open into the enclosed ramp his ship had set up, and it took every bit of effort he had not to dive through it.

  He would have a little dignity here.

  He would have to consider this a scouting mission rather than a failed attempt. He had learned something, and, if he had time to set it up, he would learn a bit more.

  He would learn what happened when a ship carrying a Glyster Egg exploded.

  He would have to set up something specific to monitor space around the starliner, but he could do that, and he could do it from a distance.

  Then he would gather information, and with it, he could tell any possible clien
t one of the many things the Egg did—more as a cautionary tale, with the explosion and all, but still. Information was information.

  That was the kind of thing that clients liked.

  He would have to remember that when the kid appeared in his dreams.

  He slid into the airlock on his ship, shifting from foot to foot, hoping he would get through this quickly.

  They needed to get out of here—and they needed to do so fast.

  THE ENGINES WERE powering up on that second ship. Rodriguez sent the coordinates to the ships Mars Rescue had sent, hoping they would either veer off and catch the pirate ship.

  She didn’t have time to think about capturing a pirate ship. She was kinda relieved that it was leaving. She commanded a rescue vessel, not a security vessel. The handful of times she’d gone after perpetrators hadn’t ended well for her. In all but one instance, the perpetrators had gotten away.

  She hoped that the pirate ship wasn’t taking the Blue Moon with it. That would create other problems.

  Right now, her scans showed that the Blue Moon was more or less immobile, moving forward ever so slightly, but not enough to measure as anything. Maybe on autopilot.

  She wasn’t close enough yet to find that out.

  But she would be in just a few minutes—and her team now knew this wasn’t a drill.

  It was going to be life and death.

  COLETTE STARED AT the tablet in surprise. It told her that bad guys had left the Blue Moon.

  Maybe they had found what they were looking for.

  Not that it mattered to her.

  She had to get to her parents.

  She snuck out of her suite, and ran along the corridor, bent almost in half, just because, even though she knew the monitors caught her every movement anyway.

  The buffet that her parents and the rest of the passengers were in was on this level. She just had to get to it.

  She hurried through the maze of corridors, going half on her memory and half on the map that showed up on the tablet, when she almost tripped on a small square block.

  It wasn’t alone. There were half a dozen small square blocks just in this corridor.

  She turned the tablet toward them, and asked it to identify the blocks.

  The tablet did not respond. Maybe it didn’t have the programming.

  So she needed to figure this out on her own. After all, she had seen a lot of things in all the various schools she’d gone to. (She had done most of those things as well.)

  She crouched near the closest block, and peered at it. It smelled faintly of rust—the telltale sign of a kind of acid that would eventually eat through a casing, hit a trigger, and—

  Oh, god. This was a bomb, one of the kinds she’d thought too damn dangerous to make.

  The bad guys were off the ship, and they were going to blow it up. But they hadn’t taken the Egg and they hadn’t taken her and they hadn’t taken any of the passengers, so they must have been after something else, but what she had no idea, and now there was no time to figure it out.

  She needed to get rid of these things. Somehow.

  She reached for the box in front of her, then remembered: acid. She would have lost all the skin on her hand.

  Focus, focus, focus.

  There had to be a command that allowed the concierges, real or not, to isolate something dangerous in a corridor. Kids made smoke bombs, after all. And people sometimes tried to burn the materials in a ship.

  Everyone on the crew had to be able to access that kind of security protocol.

  She just had to find it before something happened.

  RODRIGUEZ HAD BEEN right: the Sally arrived after the pirate ship left. The readings she got off theBlue Moon were some of the strangest she’d seen. The ship was completely intact. Some of the crew remained alive, and all of the passengers seemed to be breathing as well, but none of them were moving.

  Except one of the Treacher women.

  Was she in on the attack somehow?

  Rodriguez brought two of her teammates with her, but let them move toward the room filled with passengers. Her entire team wore their environmental suits, and were armed with everything she could think to bring.

  Sarkis remained on board the Sally and three more team members were heading to the brig to find the crew stranded there. The remaining three team members were spreading out between engineering and the bridge, hoping to get this ship moving again.

  Rodriguez was going to handle the Treacher woman herself, not just because that person was still moving, but because Rodriguez didn’t quite believe the information the passenger manifest had sent her.

  It said that this distant Treacher relative was only eleven. Which wasn’t possible, since no children were allowed on board ships like the Blue Moon.

  Someone might have spoofed the file, which concerned Rodriguez more than she wanted to admit. Especially since the first thing she found when she came on board was the carnage in the first airlock she tried. She was lucky she hadn’t opened it, or bodies would have tumbled into space.

  Bodies.

  The pirates had clearly gotten something. You don’t kill that many people for the hell of it.

  She rounded a corner and saw a corridor strewn with black boxes.

  “Don’t move!” a panicked nasal voice said.

  Rodriguez stopped and looked. She had seen the boxes, but she had missed the very small person crouched near the box farthest away.

  A very small person who did indeed look like an eleven-year-old child, holding onto an old-fashioned rectangular tablet.

  “Colette Treacher?” Rodriguez asked, trying to remember all of the girl’s elaborate name.

  “Close enough,” the girl said. “You weren’t tagged by one of the concierges. Are they gone?”

  “What?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Who are you?” The girl’s tone was annoyed, as if Rodriguez was the dumbest person she had ever encountered.

  And, to be fair, the girl couldn’t see Rodriguez’s identification. She was wearing a high-end environmental suit, not the ones issued by Mars Rescue. And the girl didn’t seem to be networked into any kind of Mars system.

  Rodriguez introduced herself without using her name. Names weren’t important in situations like this. Jobs were.

  “I’m with Mars Rescue,” she said.

  “It’s about time.” The girl’s annoyance grew. “It’s been hours.”

  Hours was miraculous, given where the Blue Moon ended up, and Rodriguez nearly said that, then realized the girl’s tone had made her feel defensive.

  “What are you doing?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Trying to diffuse a bomb,” the girl said. “What are you doing?”

  That adrenaline spike hit again.

  “All of these are bombs?” Rodriguez asked.

  “I haven’t checked them all, but I would guess so,” the girl said. “They’re pretty mad.”

  Rodriguez had a hunch the girl wasn’t talking about the bombs now, but the pirates. “Who?”

  “The guys who attacked us. They wanted something, and I hope they didn’t get it. They left pretty fast. And now...” The girl ran her hands near the boxes. “This.”

  Her voice broke on that last word, the bravado gone.

  “I can’t find any way to diffuse them,” she said.

  And that, the edge of panic in the girl’s voice, brought Rodriguez back to herself.

  She contacted her team.

  “Found half a dozen box bombs, type unknown,” Rodriguez said. “They’re not too far from the passengers. Check for other bombs. We need a scan of this ship, and we need to put every single corridor on lockdown.”

  “Do you have some kind of shield program?” The girl shook the tablet at Rodriguez. “Because I can’t find one.”

  Rodriguez wasn’t carrying any kind of device like the girl had, but Rodriguez had access to every single ship built in official shipyards in the past one hundred years. The failsafes built into each system, override codes
along with physical identification, specific to each rescue service.

  She hoped that would be on board the Blue Moon as well, even though the ship was pretty old.

  She slid to the nearest door, pulled back a wall panel, and found the interior controls. Then she opened the secondary panel underneath, hit the override commands, and found what she was looking for.

  There were no tiny shields on a ship like this. Only one big shield that would coat the corridor.

  “Join me,” she said to the girl.

  The girl stood slowly, giving the boxes a glance.

  “Right now,” Rodriguez said.

  The girl crept past the boxes, moving slower than Rodriguez would have liked. After what seemed like an eternity, the girl reached Rodriguez’s side, and Rodriguez released the shields.

  They encased the entire floor, avoiding her and the girl, but trapping them in one place. It would take some maneuvering, but Rodriguez could get that shield and the boxes it contained out of the ship—if she could find an airlock without bodies in it.

  Her comm chirruped.

  “We found more boxes, and yeah, they’re bombs. We’re getting them out now,” said Lytel, who was handling the rest of the team.

  “I got these explosives contained as well,” Rodriguez said. “Any word on the passengers?”

  “They’re unconscious. The remaining crew too. Doing medical evaluations right now, but it looks like they’re just out. Guess the bombs were going to do the dirty work of actual murder,” Lytel said.

  Rodriguez looked down at the girl. Her eyes were red, but there were no tear-streaks on her face.

  “Do you have any idea what happened here?” Rodriguez asked.

  The girl shook her head.

  “How come you’re out and no one else is?” Rodriguez said.

  “Some guy,” the girl said, “he was surprised there was a kid on board. He locked me in my suite.”

  She shook the tablet at Rodriguez.

  “That was his first mistake.” And then the girl grinned. The grin was a little cold, it was a little off, and then it trembled on the girl’s face and fell away, showing that it was more bravado than anything else.