Hanging in the Black, attached to a hard dock, was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.
“It’s a cruiser,” I said.
“It’s a frigate,” Odo countered.
“Is corvette,” the guard said. “Large enough to haul little cargo; good idea when you need cover story. Small enough to be nimble ship. Duck and dive plasma shots, yeah?” He moved his meaty hands through the air to imitate a ship in evasive manoeuvres. “Is fine ship. Best in system. Malcolm likes you.”
I let out a breath of air and stared at the corvette.
A fluxing corvette.
I’d been in one before, of course. Maybe Malcolm knew that. He knew a hell of a lot of things he shouldn’t have. But this corvette was something special, indeed.
“What’s it called,” I asked.
“Change name for you,” the guard said. “Not sure is improvement.”
I turned and looked at him, and he shrugged; big shoulders rolling.
“Is named Harpy II now, yeah?”
The Harpy II which would undoubtedly be shortened to the Harpy at some stage. I staggered back. Odo’s mouth fell open.
“Twenty-four hours, Captain,” the guard said. “You no have time to change name again, I think.”
Fluxing Mutts.
“Yeah,” I said, scrubbing a hand over my face. “No time.”
And once a ship was named. And once you’d flown in it under that name. It was that name for good.
Flux me.
“Come on, Big Guy,” I said, slapping a stunned Odo on the back. “Let’s go introduce you to the H2’s engines.”
“H2, Cap’n?”
“Why not?”
“Can’t think of one reason why not, Cap.”
“H2 it is, then.”
I turned and nodded to the head Mutt guard, who smirked back at me and said nothing. And then I opened the docking hatch and stepped through it.
Onto our new ship.
The Harpy had been home for over five long years.
It was no more now.
Just like Cass and Doc.
This wasn’t a new start. This was temporary. I’d have to hand this ship over to the Zarnissa twins or risk owing them more than I could ever hope to pay them in a single lifetime.
The name meant nothing.
For now, this was the means to rescue Zyla. The last member of our family. If it could help us achieve that, then it could be called anything.
I had to get to Zyla.
It had become a mantra inside my head; I couldn’t stop repeating.
I had to get to Zyla.
I had to get to Zyla.
I had to get to Zyla.
Then maybe, just maybe, this would all mean something.
Chapter Eight
The corvette was stunning. No two ways about it. It was swift and nimble, and if the sounds coming from engineering were anything to go by, beguiling beyond Odo’s wildest dreams.
“I think I’m in love,” the big guy said as he entered the bridge.
We’d left the Chi system three hours ago and were en route for Zenthia Actual. The main jump point exit was within spitting distance of the planet itself and would be crawling with Zenthian battleships. So I’d programmed an exit farther away, but one I was pretty sure we could use without too much trouble.
It would mean burning for Zenthia at full throttle and doing so in an unfamiliar ship was asking for problems. Odo was pretty confident we’d manage. At least, he was looking forward to the challenge.
I’d not been so sure, but entering the Zenthian system at the main jump point was suicidal.
I wasn’t quite at suicidal yet.
“Any bugs?” I asked my engineer.
Other than staring adoringly at the FTL engines, Odo had been performing a sweep of the ship; from top to bottom and side to side. We’d save an external sweep for when this was all over.
“Nothing,” he said. "If he’s bugged us, it’ll be a tracking device on the outside. Can’t check that out until we’re out of the jump tunnel.”
I leaned back in my chair and stared around the bridge. Everything was in pristine order. The ship wasn’t new; it’d seen a few battles I was sure. But it had been lovingly restored afterwards.
“It’s one of ours,” I said nodding to the nearest bulkhead.
“Yeah, with some impressive modifications.”
“How’d he get his hands on it and does the original owner want it back?”
Odo shrugged. “Does it matter?”
No. I guess it didn’t.
“What’s the plan once we get there, Cap’n?”
I brought up the map Malcolm had provided, showing the location of the complex Zyla and the Mutt were being held in.
“I don’t like where it’s at,” I said.
“Seems pretty good to me. In the mountains. Away from the major centres. Less traffic.”
“Exactly. Why keep an interrogation facility hidden like that?”
“Because the population would baulk at seeing it on their street?”
“Zenthia is an old planet,” I mused. “They’ve had interstellar flight for thousands of years. They’re used to defending themselves against aliens. A facility like this is to be expected.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“It’s clearly a secret, and I don’t like secrets.”
“Show me a Zenith who doesn’t have secrets.”
Odo knew Zyla had hers. Her emergency beacon for one. He hadn’t known about that until the Zeniths on Ceres A scanned her for it. In the council chamber they even went so far as to try to extract it, but extracting it might have killed Zyla before they were ready to do it themselves. Plus, it undoubtedly would have sent a signal out, and they were paranoid of another drone strike.
I was pretty sure Odo was feeling a little sour about being the last to know about that beacon.
“The Zeniths,” I said, carrying the conversation forward before it entered dangerous waters completely, “have been fighting amongst themselves for centuries. Maybe this is the splinter faction’s facility.”
“Then why hold Zyla there? Ceres A wouldn’t have been controlled by the malcontents, would it?”
“Maybe it was. I don’t know. But to hide this facility up in the mountains means something and until I figure it out, I won’t be happy.”
“Not gonna stop us going in, though, is it?”
I turned and smiled broadly at my engineer. “What sort of kit have we got on this beast?”
He grinned back at me. “The sort of kit that could get us into serious trouble, Cap’n. Or get us out of it.”
“I like the sound of that. Let’s go take an inventory and gear up. Jump point exit is in a little less than a Standard hour.”
“Hoorah!”
“Activate artificial intelligence,” I said, standing up.
“Hello, Captain Jameson.”
It was a Basic. I hadn’t expected anything less.
“Self-diagnostic and activate auto-pilot.”
“Diagnostic running and auto-pilot activated.”
“Set at highest sensitivity and alert me to any anomalies.”
“Sensitivity is set at the highest setting. Standby for alerts.”
“It says that like it expects to find some anomalies,” Odo drawled.
“Maybe it knows something we don’t,” I muttered and led the way off the bridge.
The corridors were narrow but functional. The gel walls malleable, so if we took a rocket up the arse, we’d bounce off padded walls without incurring blunt force trauma injuries. There was a small med bay which reminded me of Doc. Four crew cabins which had undoubtedly been redesigned to accommodate one or two in a modicum of luxury compared to the half dozen bunks they would have initially been created for. A head large enough to handle the entire crew all at once; a kinky thought that didn’t bear acknowledging. A mess hall. A meeting/private communications room. Engineering, of course. And an armoury.
I’d
never had an armoury on a privately owned ship before. The Harpy kept her weapons in one of the cargo bays near engineering. Easy for Odo to reload and distribute from. This ship had a dedicated, biometrically locked room with racks of portable weapons and body armour enough for half a dozen people.
It concerned me greatly that the body armour was in various sizes rather than the ubiquitous one-size-fits-all that most ships carried. And when I pulled a couple out and found one that matched my body shape precisely, that concern ratcheted up a notch or ten.
“Hey, this one is made to measure for me,” Odo said.
“Yeah,” I murmured, fingering the body armour that would fit Zyla’s tall, thin frame nicely. “It’s as if he’s got a master plan and we’re just along for the ride.”
“Who, boss?”
I shook my head. I didn’t trust Malcolm one little bit. But beggars can’t be choosers and all that, and we needed to get to Zyla before she was executed.
I had a thought and rechecked the rack of armour, this time finding a suit that would fit a Mutt. My guess, it was made to measure for the Mutt we were rescuing.
Son of a bitch. Malcolm had more in store for us.
I didn’t like being manipulated, and it put me in a foul mood. But playing with mini-railguns and plasma rifles and flash-bang grenades did improve it.
Then the Basic alerted me to an anomaly in the self-diagnostic.
I left Odo to prepping the weapons we’d need to take planetside and returned to the bridge.
“Display anomaly," I ordered, as I slid into the command chair.
The main vid-screen lit up with a line of code that meant nothing.
“Explain it to me in layman’s terms.”
“A subroutine, Captain, that records all communications made onboard the vessel and compiles a data stack for delivery upon exiting a jump point,” the Basic AI advised.
Sometimes you could hide outgoing comms during a jump point exit.
“Destination?”
“Chi system, Captain.”
Yeah, he was watching us.
“Any other anomalies?”
“Negative, Captain. Self-diagnostic is complete.”
He wanted me to find the communications bug so I wouldn’t look deeper for what else he’d done to the vessel.
God, I missed Cassi.
In all reality, it didn’t much matter. I’d be handing this ship over to the Zarnissa twins, and then it would be their problem. But the longer we were on board the H2, the harder it was to like that idea.
It wasn’t a cargo hauler, but it was something sweet. And I couldn’t help thinking that transporting cargo in the outer rim was about to become tricky. We could use an armed vessel like this easily.
Something was happening on Zenthia, and if it kept going the way I thought it was going, then the galaxy was in for a rocky period.
Everyone fully acknowledged the Zenthian’s superior space technology. They led the way when it came to space-faring — and battling — tech. The Rhodies were close behind; their synths were unparalleled. No one had successfully integrated an AI into a humanoid body except for the Rhodians.
Even our third-gen AIs had to be stored in something bigger than an android. Ships, for instance. Large military facilities. Space stations. That sort of thing.
None of the Originators had managed to condense an artificial intelligence in its entirety to a point where they could become mobile soldiers like the Rhodian synths. I was sure they were working on it. But for now, the third-gens, our most advanced AIs, were all restricted to bigger things.
So, as far as space tech went, Zenthia was at the top of that food pile, closely followed by Rhodia. We did OK by mainly staying out of conflicts and keeping our third-gens a secret. The Mutts were considered the best soldiers out there in terms of pure might. And the Claxians were just the cockroaches of the galaxy, capable of surviving anything, even nuclear blasts from deep-space.
“ETA to jump point exit?” I asked the Basic.
“T-minus thirty minutes, Captain.”
Just enough time for a shower and a shave. For some reason, rescuing Zyla without either of those things happening felt unacceptable. I didn’t question the feeling too much. My beard had started to itch, and I just wanted the damn thing off.
Feeling much cleaner than I had in over a month, I entered the armoury to find Odo already gearing up.
“Have you checked out the mess?” he asked, securing the connectors on his armour. “Found a mac and cheese recipe that’s almost as good as my Mom’s.”
I’d forgotten to eat again, but I didn’t regret the time spent in the showers.
“Any desserts?” I asked, pulling my own armour off the rack. I stared at it for a moment, wondering what trackers Malcolm had put on it that the Basic would fail to tell me about if I asked it to do a diagnostic.
“Yeah. Heaps. Even got s’mores.”
I chuckled and stepped into the armour. We checked each other’s seals and then started to load up on ammunition and weapons. I took a couple of battery packs for the plasma rifle and a spare pistol that took miniature rocket-powered slugs. I grabbed several magazines for that feeling damn near perky about it. A couple of grenades and a wicked-looking knife strapped to my chest armour later, and I was done.
I turned to look at Odo and burst out laughing.
“You won’t fit out the airlock with half of that,” I told him.
He had a rocket launcher and a criss-cross of bandoliers loaded with grenades. Two railguns and a couple of thigh holsters with plasma pistols. The only thing he hadn’t bothered with was a plasma rifle. Probably because it’d get in the way of the rocket launcher strapped to his back.
“You’ll thank me later,” he said.
I shrugged. If he wanted to haul around that amount of weight in munitions, then I wasn’t going to argue. I knew in my heart we were in for a hard fight.
“The facility is well guarded,” I said, pulling out a vid-screen and activating it. “As soon as we announce our presence, they’ll lock it down, and there’s no getting in or out. It can’t be avoided once we’re on the inside, but I’d rather make it inside before they hit the alarm. So, we’re doing a stealth approach.”
“Armour’s got camo.”
“Of course, it does,” I muttered. A diagram of the facility and the surrounding area came up on the vid-screen. “Best approach is from this direction.”
“Is that a sheer cliff face?”
“Made of ice,” I said. “The wall of a glacier that’s slowly moving down between these two mountains. Guards are at their lowest in number this side of the facility.”
“Because of the wall of ice.”
“Yeah.”
“And no one being dumb enough to scale it.”
“Gravity will assist,” I told him. “And, hey look! We’ve got rappelling lines in the armour.”
“Ever wondered if you’ve got a death wish, Cap’n?”
“Every day I wake up.”
He laughed.
“Now, according to the intel provided, the guards radio-in every fifteen minutes,” I said. “Once we take them out here, we’ve got that long or less to make it inside.”
“Suggest we wait for them to do a radio call first, then.”
“Good idea. Tap the guards quietly. Use their biometrics to gain entry. And then,” I pulled up an internal schematic of the building itself, “we head directly here.”
“That’s the Mutt’s cell. Why not Zyla first?”
“Because Zyla will be injured and we’ll need the Mutt’s strength to fight our way out.”
“I don’t like it. What if the Mutt refuses to help?”
“Then we leave him behind.”
“But the alarm will have gone off by then and it’ll be harder to get to Zy.”
I sighed and lowered the vid-screen.
“Do you think I don’t want to go to her first? Do you think I like that we’ll free Malcolm’s precious little Mutt befor
e our own damn crew member and then have to watch our backs all the way to the exit? Do you think I haven’t thought about all the different ways that this could go south? Damn it, Odo! This is what I do. I plan things. I find the best possible solution to a problem, and I execute it.”
He stared at me for a long time and then said, “What were you before the Harpy, Captain?”
“Good at this.”
We shot eyeball daggers at each other and then he relented and looked off to the side, breaking eye contact.
“OK,” he mumbled.
“You don’t have to like it, Odo. Just do it.”
“Like a soldier.”
“Yeah.”
“You were in the Space Fleet, weren’t you?”
“Does it matter? We’re getting Zyla back. And we’re going to have some help doing it whether the Mutt wants to or not.”
He stared at me again.
“We’ve got the keys to the getaway ship, haven’t we?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Yeah, we have.”
I hadn’t told him about the anomaly. About how easy it was to spot it which meant there was undoubtedly more the Basic was keeping mum about. For all I knew, Malcolm had made the Mutt Executive Head Basher and Ship’s Supreme Overlord as soon as his biosignature registered in the system.
I’d keep a few magazines in reserve just in case.
We rechecked our gear and, in a more sombre mood, headed back to the bridge to prepare for jump point exit.
“Any idea of what will be waiting?” Odo asked.
“Hopefully not much, ‘cause that’d suck and ruin the surprise.”
“But probably something,” Odo guessed.
“Yep. Zeniths aren’t known for being stupid. They’ll have this backdoor monitored.”
“Then we’ll need guns.”
I smiled over my shoulder at him. “Activate the weapons array and send controls to the engineer’s station,” I ordered the AI. “Happy Launch Day, Odo,” I said cheerfully.
“You do the sweetest things for me, Cap.”
He rubbed his hands together and then familiarised himself with the weapons system. I checked my restraints and then checked the command console one last time. Fat lot of good it would do me; Malcolm could have been showing me false readings across the board.
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 9