by Alan Black
Jaden laughed. “That’s the truth. Then again, what makes you think we’re going to send you back to your upper class buddies?”
York nodded, “You fat bastard, sir, those slavers you’ve been helping may have just helped themselves to seven sons and daughters of some very high ranking New Hope citizens. I wonder how they’d feel about your involvement in kidnapping.”
Jaden said, “Eight people, Ensign. Not seven.”
York laughed with genuine humor. He’d counted the missing Gambion junior officers with the exception of Samdon. “Jaden, I’m sure seven is the right number. I doubt if Lieutenant Junior Grade Bartol Samdon will ever be found. Making this animal disappear is exactly what I would like to do, but …”
Jaden nodded, “But, Captain Altamont said we’re to hold him and take him down to Liberty for trial.”
York said, “I’ll let Commander Paul know what went on after Blaque is on the planet.” All he planned on doing was filing a report stating their need for a new second shift commander. Maybe Paul would care enough to do something and maybe not.
All three communicators buzzed for attention and Captain Altamont’s voice boomed, “The Gambion has exited the system. Three shuttles left orbit heading for the moon before the Gambion’s jump wake even dissipated. Two have unknown engine wave signatures. The third is obviously the missing one from Ron’s Rentals. We’ve patched across the station’s communications and have an active scanning fix on the slaver’s main ship behind the moon. Its stationary and its engines are cold. Lieutenant Altamont, depart the station on the planned course toward Liberty now.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Altamont continued. “Ensign York, ten minutes or I will leave without you. Please be late since Chrissie is your teammate and without you with her I would get to down check my daughter from this op, so believe me, I won’t wait. Master Chief Fugget can handle things on the other end of this trip without you.”
York made eye contact with Blaque and slid his finger across his own throat in a cutting expression. He smiled without humor saying, “Captain, task completed. I’m on my way.” He looked at Jaden. “I know you wanted to go with us, but you need to secure this thing and prepare him for transport.”
Jaden smiled back with even less humor. He shoved a gag in Blaque’s mouth to stop his response, “If you and the 44th don’t get back to Liberty safely, this ‘thing’ won’t live long either.” He looked at the spacer apprentice. “Do you have a problem with that, Bob?”
Bob shook his head, “No, Senior Chief. I’ve been hauling the trash out as long as I could toddle. This would be the first time I took out trash that could walk there by itself. Still, I say we hold him for ransom, seems like a waste of money to just throw him out into empty space.”
Jaden shook his head. “You’ll never get promoted if you think that way. His family’ll pay the ransom sure, but they ain’t above trying to take a little revenge on yours truly, not to mention your tender tush.”
York left the two men arguing about the best way to kill and dispose of Blaque’s body while Blaque’s pasty face grew paler. He raced down the emergency steps instead of waiting for the hotel’s slow elevator. The corridors were empty and the docking station where the old cattle hauler sat, her sputtering engines causing vibrations across the decks, was just a short run away. Fugget’s team closed hatches as York sprinted through, locking down the hanger deck and airlocks behind them, racing to catch up as Fugget pulled the last set of doors closed, the last man slid through with inches to spare.
Fugget shouted into the ship’s open comms. “All aboard, Captain. Kick her in the pants. Let’s see if the old girl can still get wet and juicy.”
Altamont’s laugh floated back through the comms. “Do you kiss Mimi with that mouth, Master Chief?” Without waiting for a response, they felt a small jerk as the ship backed away from the dock. “Damn it. Hold on people. The inertial dampeners need a bit of …” There was a loud banging and the vibrations smoothed out, the jerking stopped, and the ship felt motionless. “There we go, all fixed. Engines to full thrust in five … three … now!”
York didn’t feel any movement and hoped the faulty old inertial dampeners held out or they’d all become human jelly smeared across the closest bulkhead. He didn’t mind getting killed. In fact, he was looking forward to it someday, just to see what it felt like, today just wasn’t the day for it. Today he’d made plans to dispatch a few human traffickers, slavers, and hopefully, a few pedophiles. In truth, if his plan worked right, he’d be able to dispatch more than his fair share. It’d be distressing to die before his plan bloomed into a full blood-red flower.
Captain Altamont reported, “Ship on designated course. Running silent and dark.” The old cattle hauler didn’t have any functioning camouflage system. It would’ve been odd if it had. Why would anyone ever bother to try hiding a beat up old freighter? They hadn’t been able to find a camo system on the station they could use to retrofit the ship. Ernie had one installed on his shuttle and they’d left it where Ernie had put it. Kenna would need it.
Fugget shouted over the growing noise in the huge bay. “We’ve practiced this operation time and again, so let’s not get our panties in a twist. Keep it relaxed and comfortable. We have about an hour before we make our move. Remember, Ensign York is in charge once we leave the ship and if anything changes in mid-operation, the word comes from him. Tac Team, check your weapons. The rest of you take a seat. We’ll be about it soon enough.”
York sat on the deck next to Chrissie Altamont. He sniffed at the odors surrounding him. No matter how many times the lower enlisted ranks scrubbed the deck plates, they still smelled like cow urine and manure. He checked the gun Fugget had given him. The pistol was ready to shoot, only the safety held its violence in check. His fingers flickered over the handle of his knife. It almost hummed against his fingertips. Did it remember the excitement of slicing through Samdon and yearn for more?
He didn’t pull the knife from its sheath. He was so emotionally charged he was afraid his calm external demeanor would crack. Instead, he rubbed a thumb across his face, working to relax that irritating facial tic the Yard’s commandant had told him about so long ago. He knew the only way to bleed off a little excitement would be to bleed a little blood from the humanity huddled around him in small groups. Studying each face, he was unable to find anyone who’d given him sufficient cause to dispatch, or even cut just a little. Booger was a bit of a lazy a-hole, however killing him now would throw a kink in his plans. His plans would allow him to do a lot more than bleed one cretin who didn’t pull his own weight. He quickly dismissed a random thought about loosing a little of his own blood. He’d read about people who cut themselves and it didn’t make any sense to him. He hadn’t done anything to warrant such punishment. Neither had Booger, Chrissie or Fugget.
Senior Petty Officer Rodriguez met his eyes from across the room. Smiling and sticking her tongue out as far as it could go, sliding the edge of her combat knife across it, she offered him a broad wink. He knew she was a tough little woman, hardened from living on Liberty a third class colony world, struggling against deprivations and poverty, and keeping fit for military and police duties. Her dark hair fluttered around her head and York realized he’d better be quick or this little woman would dispatch a few pedophiles he hoped to save for himself. She obviously recognized a kindred spirit in him.
York shook his head. He hadn’t planned to take any special time with anyone on the slaver’s ship anyway. Still, he hoped to dispatch a few so slowly they knew they were dying and who had done it to them. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could dispatch a few slow enough they’d even understand why he was helping to usher them into the next life.
Chrissie interrupted his thoughts. “Nervous, sir?” She glanced down at his hand.
His fingers were playing a tattoo on the knife handle. “A little nervous and a little excited. You?”
Chrissie shook her head. “My part is easy. I’ve done this
a hundred times. You have the hard part.”
Fugget shouted, “Saddle up, children. We have places to go, things to see, and people to do.”
All around York people began pulling on EVA suits. They weren’t the bulky mechanic’s suits, but the thin tough survival suits used in emergencies for quick, repeated transfers. Many of the suits were patched and re-patched, painted and repainted, monogrammed and tattooed. Chrissie’s suit was a shocking pink, certainly not at all like York’s standard issue black. Once he saw her up close, he realized her patches were awards and decorations from skyriding competitions.
Fugget shouted, “Comms on channel 4.647. Face plates down, now.”
York was sure the Master Chief continued to shout, but his voice flowed quietly over the speakers in York’s helmet. “Inside hatches secured and sealed. Opening interior airlock hatch doors … now.”
As planned and practiced, Chrissie stood on the right side of her skyrider. York stood on the left. He bent down, gripping the handles in the exact spot he’d been told to grab. He flexed his knees and waited. This was the glaring point of unknown in his plan. He wasn’t sure this would work, though Chrissie and Goober had agreed piloting the skyriders to a pinpoint destination wasn’t a problem. Goober had said in his typical non-military jargon ‘easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, soft and breezy’.
Chrissie reached inside the tiny craft and flipped a switch. Tiny wings slammed into their open position. Normally a skyrider’s wings were only extended after digging deep into a planet’s atmosphere, but for this operation, they were barely getting close enough to capture a smidgen of gravity from Liberty’s big moon. Wings zipped open on other skyriders across the huge bay. A dozen skyriders with two people per vehicle stood ready. Looking around, York realized these people made up a strange looking assault group. Skyriders tended to be small wiry teenagers. Each one was paired with a large, well-muscled much older adult. Each team had one pilot and one fighter, but they didn’t look so much like a dozen combat teams as they looked like sets of father and son, mother and son, father and daughter, or in one case, mother and daughter.
Fugget called out, “External doors set for explosive breach in five, four, three, go, and one.”
At the word go, York pushed against the skyrider. It slid easily across the deck plates, picking up speed as he raced for the hatch. At the exact moment he heard Fugget say one, he felt more than heard a dozen outside hatches blow free from the ship, opening the bay to the empty space. Air sucked at him as he dove into the skyrider feeling Chrissie slam down on top of him. The wind quit whirling around them as she slammed the dome down sealing them inside the little cigar-shaped fiberglass coffin.
Their race toward the door picked up speed until they were sucked from the cargo bay, shot into space by their own push and by escaping air. Chrissie reached around York, as if she was hugging him. Instead of clasping him, she grabbed at the controls in the front of the skyrider, shifting their course, making what minor adjustments she could make in the rapidly dissipating air gusting forth from the huge open bay.
York couldn’t help with this part of the plan. He managed to crane his neck around enough to glance through clear dome, sighting eleven other skyriders adjusting course toward the location the slaver’s ship was hiding. One of the skyriders started a spiral spin, but a quick flick of a wing tip settled it into a stable course within the precise formation around him. Half of the skyriders looked as if they were upside down in relation to Chrissie and him. Up and down were matters of perspective only and didn’t really matter in the long run.
He caught the edge of a shadow as the cattle hauler slid between his small squadron and the sun. It passed them by, picking up speed and maneuvered into a course skimming the moon’s gravity well, aiming directly at the slaver’s ship. The huge freighter should be able to absorb the blows when the slavers open fire with their guns once they spot the cattle hauler coming at them. Hopefully, the slavers wouldn’t see the freighter too soon. According to York’s plan, the attackers expected the slavers to see it. In fact, if the old cattle hauler wasn’t seen in time, the freighter was useless as a diversion and the captain would have to turn on the lights and start broadcasting on open frequencies to get their attention.
York was excited. He was glad the skyrider teams put the most experienced rider on top. Chrissie’s slight weight pressing against his back was negligible, conversely if he’d been on top, she’d surely have felt his growing erection. The suspense was starting to affect his normal calm. He was grinning like a skinned skull on drugs.
They were cruising at such a slow speed he felt he could walk faster. They only had the speed they’d manufactured in their run across the deck and from the push of the storage bay’s explosive decompression. They’d jumped at the last possible moment, giving them as short a flight as they could possibly get. According to Chrissie, they’d feel the slight grab of the moon’s gravity, helping to slingshot them around to the back and give them enough momentum to take them to the slaver’s ship. He reached back and fingered his knife handle in anticipation.
Chrissie tapped him on the back of his helmet with a finger and leaned down, pressing her helmet against his. “Relax, York.” It wasn’t following strict military protocol for an enlisted rating to call an officer by his first name, yet it did help him relax. “I can feel your muscles tensing up. They haven’t even spotted Dad in the cattle hauler yet. Wait! There! They have him lit up.”
York strained his neck higher. He could only see out of the corner of one eye. The cattle hauler was taking cannon fire from the slaver’s ship. They couldn’t see the slaver’s ship firing from behind the bulk of the moon. They could see explosive shells ripping their freighter apart. In complete silence, the old ship broke into a dozen pieces, flaring and dying, odds and ends scattering across empty space.
Chrissie patted him on a shoulder, “Dad will be fine.” York was sure she was trying to convince herself more than him. “I’m sure he got out in time.”
If Captain Altamont got out too early, the slaver’s would have blown the ship apart fast enough to spot their small fragile skyrider squadron with its even more fragile cargo. If the man stayed at the controls long enough, the slaver’s would be forced to deal with large pieces of debris heading their way and may not notice the real attack coming at them from another angle.
TWENTY-SIX
Petty Officer Chrissie Altamont flipped her skyrider into a gentle curve, catching the weak gravity waves from Liberty’s moon. The small craft spiraled much like an arrow headed toward the mark. York couldn’t feel any motion, but felt her weight on his back become less and less. Glancing up through the clear dome, the moon appeared to spin around their tiny craft, however, the skyrider’s nose was pointed straight at the slaver’s ship.
The massive ship ahead of them was growing larger with every spin of the skyrider. Blossoms of light flared across the front of the enemy ship matching equally bright clusters of light as repulsar rays slammed into and pushed away large chunks of the old cattle hauler floating towards it. The slavers ignored pieces not headed in their direction and pieces too small to damage their ship. Everyone agreed a skyrider fiberglass body wouldn’t register on the slaver’s screens. York hoped everyone was right.
The slaver’s ship appeared to grow in size from a small model to the size of a small building in the span of a breath as his fragile squadron slipped into range. Chrissie retracted the skyrider’s wings at the last moment and gliding in, she slid along its hull, coming to a stop in the middle of a broad metal expanse. No one spoke over comms. All was proceeding as planned. Twelve small hatches popped open and a small flood of bodies popped out, their EVA boots sticking to the surface with ease.
York stretched quickly and did a fast count. They still had twenty-four people with them. Everyone was scooping out weapons from the skyrider bellies. Half of the tiny craft took damage in the landing. Chrissie flipped a switch on her skyrider, closing the canopy and locking the flyer to the
hull. York knew she’d do everything possible to retrieve it if they survived.
Fugget and Rodriguez wrestled the pieces of a search and rescue drill into place. The master chief had wanted to leave the weight behind, preferring more weapons with the intention of forcing their way into the ship through a hatch, using explosives if required. York insisted if they could get inside sight unseen they could do untold damage before anyone knew they were there.
The men quickly drilled a hole in the ship’s hull, slipping a camera through the hole as a slurry of putty sealed around it. They didn’t have any schematics on this ship and didn’t want to accidently breach a compartment that, for all they knew, might be filled with stolen children. Fugget gave a thumbs up and set the drill to cut a human sized hole. He slapped a one-way membrane over the hole, losing only a few small wisps of air, certainly not enough to set off alarms. Leaving the drill behind, he dropped through the hole. The membrane oozed around him letting him pass through while keeping the air inside the ship.
York was only slightly peeved. His plan called for him to enter the ship first. Peeved or not, he found it hard to fault the master chief as the man would have had to step backwards to let the ensign through. He did manage to drop through the membrane-covered hole before Rodriguez and the other nine fighters of their assault team. They quickly spread out through the cabin, determining the space was occupied, yet still secure. The skyrider pilots quickly dropped in behind them.
As always, York felt a small sense of disorientation. His discomfort wasn’t from the gravity shift. His workouts had trained any queasiness out of him. The odd feeling was from dropping through a hole in a standing position and coming into a cabin through its wall. It might feel perfectly normal to someone born in space or who spent years working in low gravity, but he was planet born and raised. Odd was odd and he tried not to let it confuse him.