“And here I thought I’d performed admirably.” Paul shook his head, the disappointment in his voice belied by the grin.
She giggled. “Remember, you’re crew on a Gray ship now. To say you were adequate is the highest praise. ‘Admirable’ would simply be ostentatious waste.”
“Plus, you’re a commodore instead of an admiral, so… oof!” He fell back on the bed as she gave him a playful shove. “Anyway,” he continued, “if they don’t figure out where the programming is being done by the time we’re done with our resupply, I’ll make sure they have a breakthrough.”
“You think you can figure it out that quickly?”
“Sure,” he said casually. “The Grays are programming Humans on Cerberus, a station named for Scotia’s second moon, but it’s best if they figure that out on their own.” He tapped the side of his face. “Don’t want them taking an unnatural interest in my CPU, though, really, it’s more from my analytical skills than my implants.”
She laughed. “You figured that out from the start and you’re just telling me now?”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t going to tell you an hour ago!” He let his eyes wander. “I’m only Human, after all.”
Julia reached out a hand and helped him up from the bed. “Now that we know the timetable,” she said coyly, “we can afford to take our time.” She led him into the steam room.
Misdirection
Paul was taking the long way to the meeting. Most of the captains from the combined fleet would simply be heading straight there from whatever docking portal their shuttles had been assigned.
Paul preferred to know the back ways. He had a strong dislike for walking into any meeting without knowing a good way to go to ground if things went wrong. It was a habit he’d developed as a military policeman on the Rim planets.
Meetings with confidential informants often got messy and he had either needed to chase down a treacherous CI or, if things were really off-azimuth, disappear himself.
He was walking through one of the unlicensed markets that always spring up in otherwise unused square footage, especially on an orbital station. Management almost always looked the other way, knowing each vendor was one less mouth in need of government assistance.
The shop owners in this particular alley, however, seemed to be on an extended break. The shops, cobbled together mostly from old ship parts, were closed up. The light, confused customer traffic indicated the shutdown was relatively recent.
He looked up to the catwalks above the shops. The pedestrian flow up there looked normal, so the shutdown was only in this small area. It should happen any time now. The scent of ozone, just ahead and to the right, was definitely out of place.
A man stepped out from the space between two shops and tossed a net at him. It was, Paul had to admit, a great throw. The weights around the edges caused the net to wrap around him and a powerful current shot through his body, or it would have, if not for his expensive after-market implants.
He’d been in a similar incident on his way to Irricana, when an officer from the 538 had tried to incapacitate him with a stun-ball. In that case, the poor sap had been in direct contact with him and he’d easily turned the charge back on his assailant.
In this case, the fibres embedded in his dermis simply channeled the jolt down into the deck plating. He was completely unaffected, aside from being wrapped in the net.
Just for giggles, he decided to play along. He stood absolutely still and stared straight ahead.
“Haven’t seen many stay on their feet,” the man told him. “I’ll take it as a lucky sign!”
He stepped closer, ignoring the frantic shoppers as they scrambled to get away from an obviously dangerous situation. “You’re worth a bit of crust, you are,” he gloated. “I’ve got me a buyer who can’t wait to get his hands on you, Inspector.”
This was a modification of Paul’s favorite interrogation technique. He was being silent, after all, but the added appearance of helplessness was an incredibly effective inducement.
It also didn’t hurt that his would-be captor wasn’t the sharpest operator.
“A very pretty price. Enough for me to buy a nice little moon somewhere and retire in peace.” The man reached out for the net, but he flinched, looking up at almost the same time Paul realized something new had been added to the equation.
A large mass dropped on his assailant and Paul allowed himself the luxury of looking, now that he no longer needed to appear incapacitated.
A heavily muscled man had dropped on Paul’s attacker from the catwalk above. As he struggled out of the net, the newcomer, obviously a heavy rifleman, was slamming his fists against the bounty hunter’s head like sledgehammers.
The man’s head was against the deck and the force of the blows had nowhere to go except for the bone of his skull. The unmistakable sound of wet cracking left no doubt as to the man’s fate.
The rifleman stood, breathing heavily. “You alright?” he asked. “Saw you getting netted and thought I’d pitch in.” He treated the corpse at their feet to a casual kick. “I do hate bounty hunters,” he said mildly. “Got a price on my head in Spiria. Killed the nephew of someone important in a ground fight.”
“Some folks just can’t take a joke,” Paul mused.
“Ain’t that the truth!” The man held out a hand. “Jim Cuervo.”
“Paul Grimm, and thanks for the help,” he said with the requisite enthusiasm, though he knew it wasn’t deserved. He was never actually in any danger.
And Jim Cuervo was an absolute bastard.
There was no such thing as a coincidence, which was just as well because this would have been a whopper. Paul seriously doubted anyone would need to pay as much as the bounty hunter was expecting.
He also doubted the timing of his saviour’s intervention. It was a near-certainty he’d been the one to put the bounty hunter on Paul. He’d offered a massive payday to ensure exact timing, knowing full well the man wouldn’t live to collect because Jim planned on killing him as part of the ‘rescue’.
It was the most effective way to silence his co-conspirator.
The only unknown was what he wanted out of this encounter, but even that wasn’t much of a mystery. Anyone watching the dockyards would know Ava and Julia’s combined fleet was getting ready for the black.
He wanted to know where they were going and what their intentions were.
Having sorted that out, Paul decided to make use of it. An enemy spy was best turned without his knowing about it. He played up the gratitude angle, knowing it would pave the way for the man to make his play.
“I have no idea who put a price on my head,” he told Jim, “but I’m glad as hell you saved me from having to meet them.” He gestured to the far end of the alley market. “Can I buy you a drink while you think about how I can pay you back?”
“The next drink I say no to will be the first!” Jim declared. “There’s a good joint not far ahead.”
As they walked, Jim made show of glancing at Paul. “Grimm, you say? You wouldn’t be that fella who showed up here with the pretty young Marine, would you?
“Well there’s how you can thank me,” he offered cheerfully. “Most crews won’t take on a man who’s got a price on his head but, if someone with a good name, such as yourself, were to speak for me…”
“Well, that’s a hell of a lot less work than you just went through but I’ll gladly put in the good word for you.” Paul frowned. “What about the body?”
“Hmm? Oh him?” Jim chuckled. “The authorities don’t give a degausser’s damn about skip tracers. I could kill a bounty hunter right in front of a justice and probably get a tip for it.”
Technically, that was exactly what he’d done. They exited the alley and crossed a small bridge spanning a heavy vehicle lane. The meeting place was on the far side and several security details were there, waiting at the only entrance to the rented courtyard.
Paul stopped when they were still ten meters away from the well-armed gro
up. “I need to sit in on a planning session,” he told Jim. “Why don’t you go ahead and get us a spot at this bar of yours and I’ll catch up with you later?”
Jim nodded. “Place is called the Laughing Mongoose. Are you taking the fleet somewhere exciting?”
“Yeah,” Paul said absently, “let’s just say property insurance rates are about to go up on Spiria.”
He gave Jim a wink. “Keep that under your hat, though. We’ll be shipping out within the next few days. Chances are, you’ll be with us, so you don’t want to put yourself in any more danger than you need to.”
“Ha!” Jim gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder. “Giving a man a job’s a good way to keep him from flapping his gums.”
Paul watched the man walk away. If he had his own way, gums would be all Jim had left.
It was harder to identify a charred corpse if the teeth were missing.
Unfortunately, he had to let the man go. No sense planting false information if you killed the spy before he could pass it on.
Julia’s two pet Marines were with the group outside the entrance. She’d wanted to keep a close eye on them and, frankly, it didn’t seem like a good idea to leave them to their own devices on board the cruiser.
Rodrigues clearly wanted to talk to him. His eyes kept switching between Paul and the receding back of Jim Cuervo. He left the group and intercepted Paul before he reached the security details.
“That guy works for Kinsey,” Rodrigues said without preamble. “I hope you didn’t tell him anything.”
“I might have hinted we’re going to attack Spiria,” Paul replied.
“We’re gonna attack Spiria?”
“What am I, a mind reader?” Paul shrugged. “He went to all that trouble to get my attention; I felt like I should give him something to tell his boss.” Paul wasn’t entirely comfortable telling the Marine the true target. For all he knew, Jim might have been planted to give Rodrigues a chance to rat him out and gain credibility.
The meeting was all but over by the time he went inside. Privateer captains, at least the ones with strong fleet leaders, were surprisingly good at agreeing on a plan. Paul knew any comparable group meeting at CentCom would spend the first five hours hashing out the seating order.
“You’re just in time for the wrap-up,” Ava told him. “Our first target is going to be the Goat’s Head Arm. We need to grab ourselves a nice new Gray cruiser and maybe a few escorts to pull off the surprise. Once we have a believable Gray fleet, we’ll go to Cerberus and put a stop to their meddling ways.”
He should have known it would be a popular plan. It gave these captains a chance to advance their most promising senior officers to full captain rank. Not only would it mean a new captain with the close ties of gratitude, it also got rid of someone who might otherwise win their job out from under them.
“How’d they take the news about the Gray brainwashing program?”
She took a deep breath. “They’re nervous. Hells, they were all looking at each other as if they were wondering who might have been affected. The sooner we shut down that place, the better.” She nodded to herself. “First, we need some Gray ships so we can get in nice and close.”
“I saw how you were looking at the Ava Klum, Ava Klum,” he needled her. “Just don’t name it after me.”
Meet and Greet
Julia took a deep breath. The air on the Ava Klum was much better now, after the freezing-out. Every ship always had its fair share of pests, mostly brought in with the food supplies.
Even the Grays, who’d been operating the ship under a different name until recently, were not immune. Some kind of small lizard, barely more than a hand’s-length full-grown, must have arrived on the ship in one of their cargo shuttles. The Grays usually ate a flavorless dull brown paste that came pre-packaged, so their food, at least, didn’t cause infestations.
By most estimates, there had been several hundred of the creatures on board and they weren’t alone. Some kind of small, furry animal was aboard as well. They were the size of ordinary mice, but with nasty fangs that could let them take a good chunk out of an unwary crewman’s ankles.
On her way to the meeting, Julia had ordered the engineers to clear the ship, tank the internal atmosphere and open the outer hatches in an attempt to kill as many of the pests as they could.
Three hours of cold vacuum probably wouldn’t kill them all off, but it would make life more tolerable for the time being. There was always some little nook or cranny where something could crawl in and hide, only to emerge when the surrounding panels were no longer deathly cold.
At least a full cycling of the air had managed to filter out the mildly sulfurous body odor left behind by the ship’s previous owners. The smell had bad connotations to those who’d spent any time as a prisoner of the Grays.
“Coming out of distortion in three, two, one, mark,” Robin announced. She leaned over the helm console. “Right on target,” she added. “We’re deep in the center.”
“Reading the proximity transponders from the rest of the fleet,” the sensor officer declared. “Both fleets present and accounted for.”
“Very well,” Hale answered. “We have our orders. Keep every ship plotted and stay in formation.”
The fleet was relying on their focused radio arrays to coordinate their activity. They were hiding in the Goat’s Head nebula in the hopes of dashing out to snap up Gray ships on a nearby shipping lane, and they wanted to avoid giving away their presence through a stray radio signal.
The arrays were focused by copper-coated polymer lenses arranged in a complicated three-dimensional maze of cavities. The lenses gave the communications beams an amazing degree of focus, but you had to know almost exactly where your recipient was. If they were off by just a little, the beam would simply miss and, as long as they were here, they couldn’t rely on visual identification to align the arrays.
Unlike most nebulae, the Goat’s Head was relatively dense. Ships more than a few hundred meters away became invisible. The privateer fleet could hide near the outer margins and send a single scout ship out to keep watch.
The trip to the nebula’s horn would take a little more than a half day using pitch drives only. It would have been counter-productive for a hiding fleet to create a massive plasma blast as it dropped out of distortion at the nebula’s fringes.
As always, the old military maxim asserted itself. Sleep at any and every opportunity because you never know when you might find yourself locked into an unexpected and lengthy battle. “If anything comes up, Captain, you know where to find me.”
She left Hale to oversee the cruise to their ambush position and headed for her quarters. Paul was already there, collapsed on one of the couches, dead to the world.
After a moment’s thought, she slid out of the under-armor suit and stepped into the large steam shower.
At maximum flow, she could stand in the center of the five-meter-squared room and not see the dark walls. She sighed, enjoying the luxurious heat until she realized she’d have to go back out into the room to get her soap. She delayed the moment, unwilling to leave the delicious confines of the shower.
She wiped moisture from her eyes and opened them to find Paul materializing out of the mist. He had her bottle of soap. “Thought you’d need this.” He said playfully.
She let her eyes wander as he came into view and her eyes grew wider. The soap wasn’t the only thing he had.
Boarding School
Paul rolled over, his arm falling across an empty space. He smiled. He’d been an Imperial inspector for a long time and he’d lost a lot of his old military habits. Early rising had been the first to go.
He sat up and grabbed his under-armor suit from the floor. He pulled it on and indulged in a full-body stretch before heading for the bridge.
He moved along the transverse hallway leading from their quarters to the bridge. Just before the bridge entrance, a small storeroom had been converted into a satellite mess and he stopped in to grab a c
offee. He drained half a cup, refilled it, and resumed his progress.
He lost the coffee almost immediately as a solid youngster collided with him outside the mess door. Fortunately, the black liquid hit the floor instead of his underarmor suit.
“Sorry about that, Justice Grimm!” the lad’s eyes looked like they’d pop right out of his head at the enormity of what he’d just done.
Paul was something of an heroic figure to the thirteen year old. Banksy, the only thirtieth level Mining Guild member on board, had sought Paul’s assistance in bringing young Caleb up through the ranks when word got out they’d be returning to the mine.
Technically speaking, the facility now belonged to young Caleb. The miners employed the standard Guild tontine. Shareholders could only pass their shares to another holder. It prevented off-world interests from getting a toehold and, in this case, it left the entire operation in young Caleb’s hands.
Paul was a level eight, barely higher than Caleb, but he carried other weight in the proceedings. Banksy had sat the lad down and explained that Paul, the Imperial inspector, Knight of the Realm and a Roanokan Justice, was also a guildsman. He’d clawed his way up from what was almost the very bottom of Imperial society.
But he didn’t forget his humble origins for a heartbeat. He’d be there to help Banksy train the boy; help get him to level ten so he could legally assume control. More importantly, he’d apply his retinal scan to the the record of control as a Justice.
“Where are you headed in such a rush?” Paul asked him as he drained the last few drops of precious coffee from his mug.
“Banksy said Chief Engineer Savage needed control chips for the secondary ammunition shunts.” He hefted the circuit incubator to back up his explanation. “He said the chips don’t last long outside of cryo so…”
Paul laughed. “By ‘don’t last long’ he really means they start to die off after a couple of weeks in an incubator.” He clapped Caleb on the back. “I think you have time to walk.”
Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2) Page 20