Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  But if this had been an act of war, hadn’t Space Waste charged into battle willingly? And there was the big question: would they have made that kind of attack if they hadn’t been led into it by deception? Their intention hadn’t been so warlike, they just wanted to steal stuff.

  Of course, the stuff they thought they were going to steal was a weapons cache.

  Runstom sighed and glanced at the WrappiMate around his forearm. “So when do you think we’ll get the OrbitBurner back?”

  Jax fidgeted. How the hell could he know? Dava probably flew it out to the site of the battle; it was the only place of interest in the whole system, aside from EE-3 and a ModPol outpost in some secret location. What she might be doing out there, he couldn’t guess, but then again, he never could work out what motivated that assassin.

  “Soon,” he answered quietly.

  Chapter 2

  Tim Cazos was fucking sick of Space Waste.

  Everywhere he looked, that goddamn logo with the twisting arrows. What did that even mean? Three arrows, curving along a circular path as if to go one into the next, only to bend awkwardly outward at their heads. It was on every wall, on every ceiling, even on every floor.

  Not that there were that many walls, ceilings, and floors on the dropship. It was basically a big box – a bay – with a smaller box – a cockpit – mounted to the front of it. On the outside it looked less like a box, given the massive Xarp drive thrusters at the rear and the high-burn crash-landing gear underneath. But where he was inside the loading bay, it was just a box. And all six sides had that goddamn logo splashed across them.

  Cazos was strapped into one of the hanging personnel cages. Not for any reason but the lack of gravity; he was sick of floating around the awkward space of the bay. A few dozen cages, a handful of deflated spacesuits – also decorated with the bent-arrow logo – and weapon racks, mostly empty save the occasional particle blaster or projectile firearm. Healthy paranoia had caused Cazos to stuff himself into a suit and seal it up, despite the bay being completely capable of maintaining pressure and oxygen as normal. At least he hoped it was capable. How many missions had this heap of junk seen? Before and after it fell into the hands of Space Waste?

  He itched to wake the handypad strapped to his arm, but it wasn’t time yet. He gave himself a count to wait. Long enough to know the Space Waste command ship, the Longhorn, had fled the system, and long enough to wait out any ModPol sweepers. He knew the Longhorn had already Xarped away, because Rando Jansen was a fucking tool. But any blip of a signal now, and he’d get himself roasted by trigger-happy ModPol fighters.

  Just a few more hours, then he could check the contact monitor. In the meantime, he was just a derelict dropship, drifting at the outer edge of the remains of a nasty battlefield.

  So he spent his idle time cursing Jansen. Underboss Jansen. Cazos had never met the fucker until he got the Space Waste assignment. By that point, some plan had already been running full thrust ahead. Cazos – the “hacker” – was just decoration. Make them think you wrote this program. Make them think you can make the detection equipment work. That you can find the target when it comes out of Xarp.

  And so he’d done what he was told, though he didn’t believe anyone was stupid enough to buy it. Apparently he’d overestimated the collective intelligence of Space Waste. He’d whipped up a phony user interface with lots of graphs and maps and numbers swirling around, and everyone took him at his word. And why not? He was the unassuming Basil Roy, software architect.

  And besides, it had appeared to work; because Jansen knew right where that ModPol transport was going to pop out of Xarp. He didn’t need a real detector.

  Cazos was sick of thinking about it. Whatever Jansen’s plans were, he didn’t want to know. He was obviously toying with Space Waste, but to what end? The ambush had taken the old boss out of the picture, and that put Jansen at the top of the food chain. Why take command of a band of gangbangers? Why not just arrest them all?

  It made no difference. Cazos knew a clusterfuck forming when he saw one, and this was one he needed to stay away from. As far as he was concerned, his debt was paid.

  A distant beeping wormed into his ear, slow and persistent. He blinked away heaviness in his eyelids. He looked at the heads-up-display in his suit’s helmet. He must have drifted off, because the hours had rolled by.

  “Goddamn zero-G,” he muttered. He could never get used to it. He would do anything for a planet under his feet again.

  He shifted his limbs around, trying to drive the numbness from them. Another part of his HUD was blinking in time with the beep. The oxygen had burned down to twenty-five percent and was giving him a subtle warning that the tank needed changing.

  It was time. The itch to check his datapad could finally be scratched. He switched the piece on and it winked to life. Diagnostics scrolled by for a moment, then he was flicking through the interface, seeking out the contact app.

  Desolation. The battle had gone poorly for Space Waste, that was for sure. Pieces of ships – most of them Waster fighter craft – drifted about the three-dimensional space. No signals of any kind, other than the auto-emergency beacons here and there. And the little camera drones that the Wasters liked to use to record their battles. “BatCaps,” he said aloud when he remembered what they called them. There were a few dozen of those still.

  “Shit.” One more signal. A scanner. Well, if he was caught he was caught. He got ready to turn off the datapad and play dead, but stopped himself. “Just one second.” He zeroed in on the scan signal and ran it through the database, just for the hell of it. A lot of scanner equipment contained a signal inside it, like a serial number. This one came up right away. It was civilian.

  This information gave him pause. He could continue to hide, but it seemed foolish to hide from a civilian ship. Unless they panicked and somehow reported his presence back to ModPol. He could get on the open comm and threaten to blow them to pieces if they attempted any transmissions. Really though, what difference did it make? Once the Xarp drive was warmed up, he’d be gone.

  It was his plan all along. Well, there hadn’t been much of a plan, not really. The primary goal was to get a ship with Xarp capabilities. He’d altered the fleet manifest back before they left the Space Waste base, including the dropship on the carrier. Once the conflict started, only the raiders and fighters were deployed, leaving the lone mistaken and useless dropship in a bay, just waiting for him. Then all he had to do was to escape just before the Longhorn Xarped away. No one would miss him in the heat of the moment. After that, he would play dead. What to do next, well, there the plan got a little fuzzier. He had a handful of caches, two in the Barnard system and one in the Sirius system. A few thousand Alliance credits in hard currency. The stuff was traceable, but only if someone took the time to do it. Something he never worried about, because he had the equipment to scramble the hidden etchings inside the money, inside those slim, rectangular cards printed with algorithmic ink. It made it harder to spend – especially anywhere that wanted to keep a reputation – but not impossible.

  “Scrambling Alleys is what got you in this mess, asshole.”

  His brain told his mouth to shut up so he could think. The analyzer in his handypad wasn’t much information to go on. He needed to scan that civvy and find out what it was, maybe where it came from.

  The O2 level on his HUD dropped another percentage point. At the very least he needed to get out of the cage and turn on the air. So he did, drifting from the wall over to the panel that hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. He was going to light up on the other ship’s contact map any moment now, since he had to power on the reactor to generate oxygen and nitrogen. He tried to move quickly, but a part of him wanted to linger just to see what the civilian would do. Just to tempt fate.

  He must have been in a good mood. Maybe it was the dawning realization that he’d actually escaped those bloodthirsty bastards.

  A sing-song tone trilled throughout the bay, signa
ling that pressure was nominal. He removed his helmet and climbed out of the suit. Getting undressed in null gravity would have been hard enough for him, but wrestling with the bulky suit added a few more minutes to the process. Finally he got free of the thing and pulled himself over to the cabin door. Pressure inside the small cockpit was already good, so it slid open as he touched the panel.

  Floating around without a suit was somehow more nauseating. Probably because most of his body thought everything was normal, allowing the confusion in his inner ear to dominate. He closed his eyes and took a few breaths, his chest swelling, causing him to become all too aware of his increased heart rate. He opened his eyes and shook his head in a failed attempt to shed panic.

  He strapped into the chair in front of the main console. Having the screen to anchor his focus on seemed to help. He fired up a few subsystems, letting the proximity scanners and other sensors come to life. This activity would most definitely make his presence known; so be it. He charged the auto-turret but set it to remain in its locked position. This way it remained non-threatening, and anyway, if he opened it up, he’d have to lock it again before he could kick into Xarp. Having done all that, he set the Xarp drive to pre-charge.

  All this would be generating a lot of noise, signal-wise. So it was time to deal with the civilian ship. He did a full scan on it, and whistled. An OrbitBurner 4200 LX. A wasteful but sporty propulsion system for showing off, plus a Warp drive for making it to an event only fashionably late. No weapons, and a hybrid hull good for stopping rocks and radiation, but not much else. Chock full of the best AI-assisted systems, which meant it might be a crew of one, or it might include a small party of guests.

  Those caches Cazos had, how secure were they? There was no telling if they would even be there. Maybe they’d be there but they’d be bugged. His ticket to freedom could be his ticket right back to prison.

  But here was a luxury machine, just out for a cruise in the Epsilon Eridani system. A largely uninhabited system, except for a ModPol outpost and a brand-new colony, still being constructed, on EE-3. A colony with a very specific customer in mind: the richest of the richest domers.

  It was a brilliant idea, to build an out-of-the-way colony and sell residency at a premium; thus ensuring only occupants that have too much money to spend. A population of pure consumers, locked into a controlled economy. Sold on exclusivity, their stockpiles of cash could be slowly bled away from them. It was like counterfeiting, but without all the legal trouble.

  This OrbitBurner, it had to be one of those richies who’d come out to Epsilon Eridani for an early look at the new domes. And now he was out flying around the system, showing off his shiny rocket to whomever. Maybe a whole party of richies. Right there in front of him.

  They wouldn’t have much hard currency on board, no of course not. But they would have valuables. Cazos wished he could take the OrbitBurner itself, but without Xarp, he’d be stuck in this mostly-empty system. He could strip it though. There was a fair amount of room in his dropship’s bay. He knew how to pick apart the processing systems – all that AI would be worth a good trade somewhere. And there were bound to be other luxuries onboard. Food, clothes, personal electronics. Alcohol. Well-aged, expensive shit.

  He just needed to find out how many people were on it. He would have to board. And there were a few guns in the back, so he’d be well armed. The question would just be a matter of whether he could restrain them. He didn’t want to have to kill anyone, but the sheer amount of death he’d witnessed a few days prior out-scaled anything he could have ever imagined. When he stepped back and thought about it, what was the death of a few rich assholes out flaunting their luxury spaceship?

  “No,” he said. He wouldn’t let his encounter with Space Waste corrupt him. Well, he was already pretty goddamn corrupt. But it wouldn’t make him a killer. He’d just go aboard, flash his guns, and make them tie each other up. If they gave him a problem, he could always retreat to the dropship and threaten them with the auto-turret.

  Cazos pointed the comm laser at the OrbitBurner and hailed her with an SOS. Just text, no voice or video.

  *

  Ten minutes later, he floated around the bay, trying to decide on a gun. He was torn between practicality – the smaller weapons, like the shock-pistol – and menace – the larger weapons, like the pulse machinegun. He also debated briefly on whether or not he should don the spacesuit, but decided it wasn’t necessary. The message he’d received back from the civvy was a friendly invite, and they’d set up a ship-to-ship dock plan that would mean no need to spacewalk.

  Cazos went for the big gun, the pulse machinegun. If he had to fire it in zero-G, he’d probably lose control. But he didn’t want to fire it, he just wanted to do a little terrifying. He strapped it over his shoulder and extended it in front of him, holding it with one hand so he could hop from handhold to handhold with the other. The zero-G was a good thing, he realized: he’d never be able to lift this gun one-handed if there were any gravity. He grabbed a shiny space blanket out of a cabinet and wrapped it around the barrel.

  He slapped the controls at the door and slid open the inner airlock. He made a move forward, then caught himself, pulling back to the controls. As a final precaution, he decided to force the inner door to stay open. If something went down, he needed to know he could get back to his boat.

  Normally this meant he wouldn’t be able to open the outer door, but since they had established a seal between the two ships, it wouldn’t be a problem. The OrbitBurner had a universal airlock that could change shape as necessary to fit any other docking module. The readout on the panel at Cazos’s outer door showed a perfect seal, with optimal pressurization on the other side.

  He flipped to the camera, wondering if he’d see a grinning welcoming committee on the other side. No, of course not. They’d opened their outer door, but not their inner. The small bay between the doors was empty.

  The outer door of the dropship was less compromising than the OrbitBurner’s universal. In fact, it was more or less invasive. When he opened it, it pushed six triangles outward, wedging itself into the other ship’s airlock. The consistent pressure would allow his new friends to open their inner door, but they couldn’t close their outer door on him.

  He waved his free hand at the camera next to the door, then lifted the blanket-shrouded weapon. “Hey there!” he said, forcing what he hoped was a friendly smile. “I got that busted drive coil I told you about. I sure appreciate you folks giving me a hand.”

  “Of course,” came a woman’s voice from the tinny speaker. “Stand by, I’m opening the door now.”

  Cazos felt his cheery grin turning darker as the door began to slide away and the painted and posh interior of the OrbitBurner appeared before him. He slid away the blanket and pulled himself through, barrel first.

  “I hope you have something to drink on this beautiful boat,” he said. “Because—”

  Then he closed his mouth as something cold, hard, and flat materialized against his throat.

  *

  “Welcome to the party, Basil.” Dava pulled lightly on Basil Roy’s shoulder, rotating him to face her. Her blade turned too, so that the point of it poked into his throat. “I was really hoping to find an ally on the other side of that door. But this is even better.”

  She could feel the others come into the foyer without seeing them. It was the change in the air, the energy. Thompson-Gun, one of her best soldiers, and Lucky Jerk, the pilot with ninety-nine lives. She could feel the tension they brought. Dava had been running on fury since the ModPol ambush that got a bunch of her Space Waste family killed, and most of the rest captured. Including Boss Moses Down, the single person in the universe she truly gave a shit about.

  So she really only had two things on her mind at any given moment: get Moses back was the first. The second was to find those responsible for the setup and murder them.

  And in her pocket, there burned a handwritten note from Psycho Jack, also known as Jack Fugere, a
lso known as Jax. Fugere, the Fixer. Jax, the hacker.

  A note that read: Basil Roy faked the detector.

  She didn’t know what it meant, not exactly anyway. They had stolen fancy new detection equipment from a research station on a moon named Vulca, orbiting a planet called Sirius-5. That equipment was supposed to allow them to detect a ship incoming from a Xarp jump anywhere inside a single star system, from one end to the other. Only it needed the right software to make it work.

  And along came Basil Roy. Another hacker, or as he preferred, solutions architect or some shit. He had made the equipment work.

  They had a target: a supposedly lightly outfitted ModPol transport ship that would Xarp from Barnard to Epsilon Eridani. The ship itself was barely armed, but its cargo was to include a number of experimental weapons to be delivered to a ModPol base where they could be tested in a largely empty system.

  The detection equipment had seemed to work, finding the ModPol transport coming out of Xarp. Space Waste moved in, swarming the ship with fighters and boarding it with raiders. And then they found themselves waist deep in a shitstorm of an ambush. ModPol ships came out of hiding and flanked the fighters, while hordes of ModPol Defenders poured out of cargo holds and splintered the boarding parties.

  So although she still didn’t quite understand how it all went wrong, she knew that the job was a setup. And she knew that the detection equipment’s software had to be part of it.

  And she knew that the fish wriggling at the end of her spear was the one who forged the software.

  “Lemme take that for you,” Thompson-Gun said. Dava watched the other woman as she drifted around Roy and gently tugged the pulse rifle from his hands.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, his hands reflexively going palms out. “I’m on your side. It’s me, Basil Roy. The uh, the hacker.”

  “I thought you preferred solutions architect,” Dava said.