by Jason LaPier
“AAAhhhhnnnnNHHHHH!” the pilot screamed, his body contorting with almost mock-athleticism in the absence of gravity. After a few seconds it went limp, and he hung there, arms dangling like a scarecrow-bot.
“Shit, guys,” Jax breathed. “I hope that’s you.” He didn’t know how to fly a ship, so he figured he was dead either way if it wasn’t Stanford Runstom or George Halsey on the other side of that hatch. He punched the close button on the cockpit door and floated over to the hatchway.
He hit the release and Runstom came through. He quickly spun around and slammed on the button to close the hatch. He looked wounded, blood oozing from different parts of his uniform. Jax tried to look into his eyes, but the officer was looking down, eyes squinted in pain.
There was a low boom and the ship seemed to drift slightly, an odd sway that moved around them while they floated weightless in the center of it.
“Stanford,” Jax started.
“Halsey,” Runstom rasped quietly, looking at the closed hatch.
“Shit.” Now Jax read the pain on Runstom’s face differently. He wasn’t good at dealing with grief, but he suddenly thought of his mother and it felt like something was tearing apart his stomach. “Stanford,” he said, putting a hand on the officer’s shoulder. “He was a good man.”
Runstom swallowed a couple of times. “That asshole was the closest thing I’ve had to a friend in years. He didn’t deserve to go like that.” He closed his eyes for a moment and Jax stayed quiet, despite being terrified of the danger they were still in. After a few seconds, Runstom opened his eyes. His lips quivered and pursed and his forehead creased as his eyebrows tensed. Jax could only guess what was going through the other man’s mind. Pushing down the pain, burying it for another time. “We don’t have much time,” the officer said finally. “We have to move.”
Runstom grabbed the floating pilot and briefly checked his pulse. He took a restraint band off his belt and pulled the pilot’s arms together and bound them. “Strap this guy into one of those,” he said to Jax, pointing at the harness-seats. “And then get up to the cabin. I’m going to warm up the engines.”
Jax did his best to strap the unconscious pilot in, and then floated into the cockpit. There were four seats, each facing a long, narrow window that looked into the blackness of space. Runstom was already strapped in, and Jax picked a seat at random and followed suit.
“I’m detaching the boarding-tube now,” Runstom said, and Jax could hear the crack in his voice. He cleared his throat and then turned with a quick jerk. “Do you have the notes I copied for you?”
“Yeah, of course. They were the only thing I grabbed when the alarms started.” Jax had a standard, prison-issue satchel strapped to his body. He pulled the collection of papers out of it and handed them to Runstom.
Runstom took the notes and quickly found the page he was looking for. He set them down on the console. “I’ll need to navigate away from the barge a few thousand meters, then we’ll be hitting Xarp speed.”
“This thing can do Xarp?” Jax asked, trepidation in his voice. Warp was light-speed, and that was terrifying enough, but Xarp was even faster; a speed appropriate for mammoth interstellar vessels, but insanely dangerous in such a small ship. His experience with space travel was about to compound as it went from a day and a half of looking at the stars through a porthole the size of his hand to a faster-than-light escape from a murderous space gang.
“She’s an interplanetary, military personnel transport. Designed to be launched in packs, usually about a hundred or so at a time, delivering squads of elite soldiers to a target without warning. Usually sent from deep, deep orbit on the outermost part of a system, where a warship can sit undetected.” Runstom looked up from the console for a moment, but not at Jax. Not at anything in particular. “She’s not much for luxury. All engine and fuel storage. Designed to bring the fight to your enemy’s doorstep.”
Jax looked around, wondering if he had missed some kind of informational plaque on the way into the cockpit. “How the hell do you know all that?”
Runstom shrugged. “ModPol training, mostly. Plus my grandfather was in the Sirius Interplanetary Navy. And … I guess I probably watch too many documentary vids.” He grabbed the throttle and the ship started to move with a jolt.
“Stanford,” Jax said tentatively. “You do know how to pilot this thing, right?”
Runstom was quiet, concentrating on the stick. “Every ModPol grunt has to fly patrol for a couple of years before they get to start doing real police work.” The ship shuddered and Runstom quickly reached for the panel in front of him, hitting a button and flipping a switch. “Of course, this thing is just a little different than a one-man patroller.”
The view panned to the left as the ship rotated, the side of the barge disappearing to the right. Jax leaned forward to angle his head back and forth and take in the view without unstrapping himself. As the emptiness of space opened up before them, he looked at the rear monitor to see the barge coming into view. There was another small craft next to it on this side, tethered by a boarding tube. Next to that he could see the boarding tube that was once attached to their newly acquired vessel, now just floating idly, a jagged hole in one side of it where it was half-hanging from the barge like a misplaced tentacle. Despite the lack of wind in space, it flapped oddly.
“I think the barge is decompressing,” Jax said, watching the monitor.
“Nothing we can do,” Runstom said quietly. “I don’t know if anyone but Space Waste is left. Our problem is that they probably expected all boarding parties to detach at the same time. So we have to get out of here quick before they figure out something is wrong.”
Jax looked away from the monitor and back to the view from the window. There was a ship in the distance, but with no frame of reference he couldn’t tell if it was a large ship far away or a small ship close by.
“That’s the command ship,” Runstom said before Jax could ask. “She’s pretty far out, but she’s got some fighters close by. That’s the contact computer.” He pointed at a crude holo-screen positioned front and center of the cockpit. It displayed a large red blob surrounded by a handful of green dots. Another green blob sat farther off from the rest. “The red one is the barge. The little green ones are combat vessels. Small fighters and personnel assault ships like this one.”
“And the big green one is the command ship,” Jax guessed.
Runstom angled their vessel in a direction that would take them away from the barge and the command ship equally and they edged forward slowly.
“Faster might be a good idea,” Jax said, realizing suddenly that he was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his fingers hurt.
“To run is to be chased,” the officer said quietly. “We’re just one of them for another minute or two, then we’re nothing but Xarp-wake.” He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. “I’m surprised nothing has come across the comm. They must be keeping radio-silent.”
Jax thought about that as they inched ponderously away from the action. He thought about these gangbangers, who seemed to him like fictional space pirates, with their ridiculous weapons and uniforms. The fact that he had not really gotten a good look at any of them only served to fuel his imagination more. The very idea that they were so organized; able to cripple the barge and board it, all while maintaining such a committed level of stealth. Radio silence meant sticking to a plan, it meant discipline and competence. These were qualities one didn’t associate with anarchist space pirates.
He hadn’t noticed the wide but short flat panel that ran part-way across the center of the top of their viewport until it lit up and blinked red a few times. It stopped blinking and a series of numbers appeared on it.
Jax looked at Stanford and opened his mouth, about to ask him what they were looking at, but the officer had a grave look on his face as he stared at the numerical sequence that lit up the cockpit. “It’s message traffic on the comm.” He frowned and looked straight forward deter
minedly, as if he needed both eyes on the road at that moment. “I don’t know what it means.”
“Oh,” Jax said, realizing. “It’s code.”
Runstom cast him a sideways glance and Jax read interest on his face for a fraction of a second before he re-gripped the throttle and stared back into space. “Code?” he asked idly.
“Like a cypher.” Jax tried to get at his satchel, which was wedged between his thigh and the seat restraints. “Want me to write it down? We could try to—”
“Forget it,” Runstom said. “And hold on. Xarp in thirty seconds.”
“Stanford?” Jax said quietly. “Where are we going?”
“I flipped a coin,” the ModPol officer said. “We’re going to go find that superliner.”
CHAPTER 10
Runstom and Jax stared out of their wide, short viewport, marveling at the magnificent beast only a few hundred kilometers distant: Royal Starways Interplanetary Cruise Delight Superliner #5.
Of course, Runstom hadn’t actually flipped a coin. Jax saw him as a cop, through and through, and as such, he knew the officer left as little to chance as possible. Cops in the holo-vids were always saying that they “like” someone for a crime. The operator came to understand that this did not mean they enjoyed the company of the suspect in question, but rather that of all their choices, if they had to pick one person to be guilty, this was the one. That small “like” was a code-word that represented lots of reasoning, possibly some hard evidence, and, more often than not, a fairly large helping of instinct.
The ship was massive, like a floating city or a small moon (if a moon could be oblong in shape), a seemingly perfect oval when viewed from any angle. The clean, white surface was dotted by small half-bubbles of glass; although they only looked small in comparison to the rest of the drifting hulk. Up close, those little bubbles were a few thousand meters in diameter, giant pockets of different flavors of paradise. Endless beaches, tropical islands, quaint villages, majestic mountains, vast canyons, hip and sleepless clubs, rolling green hills. Any paradise you might dream of, you could find fabricated just for you in one of those immaculate domes floating through deep space.
They had started out by Xarping randomly once, then again. The third time, they headed to the last logged position of the superliner based on the notes Runstom had made, since that was the only reference they had. The officer explained that the first two jumps were necessary to throw off any pursuers. The gangbangers could easily plot a trajectory based on their first Xarp away from the barge. Following that trajectory at Xarp speed was extremely difficult, but by stopping, turning, and Xarping elsewhere, Runstom pretty much guaranteed their escape.
Once they came out of Xarp the third time, the wake of their target (in the form of radioactive discharge) left a clear path for them to follow. It didn’t take them long to catch up. The gargantuan ship was barely capable of Warp speeds, and most of the time she cruised around at sub-Warp. Her flight crew only used full Warp to shorten up some of the longer stretches between the outer planets.
Currently, she was making a lazy trek somewhere between the orbits of Barnard-4 and Barnard-3. There were numerous docking bays up and down the sides of her hull, used by small shuttles that ferried passengers to and from inhabited planets and moons wherever a sub-orbital docking station was absent.
“How are we going to convince them to let us dock?” Jax said as they took in the sight. “As in, dock our stolen-from-a-space-gang-who-stole-it-from-a-military-outfit personnel transport?” He shot a glance at Runstom. “Do you think they made markings on the outside? We haven’t even seen the outside of this ship!”
“Yeah,” Runstom said calmly. “I’m assuming they did.”
“Oh.” Jax tried to match the other man’s passiveness. He looked back at the superliner. “So you have a plan?”
“I tell the truth,” Runstom said. “Well, part of it anyway. We were in a ModPol vessel. It was attacked by a space gang. We escaped by commandeering one of the attackers’ ships and fleeing at Xarp speed. By luck we happened on the superliner’s wake, and we followed it. We’re almost out of fuel, and we just need to dock and ride it out until the cruise ship gets closer to B-3.”
“Huh. Sounds like a reasonable story, I suppose. Although, I just have to point out: it sounds a little … well … made up.”
“I can beam them my ModPol credentials. They’re coded to my genetic profile. Impossible to counterfeit. And if they need further corroboration, they can ask the fly-boy tied up in the back.”
The fly-boy in question – the Space Waste pilot they more or less kidnapped (Jax was pretty sure Runstom never read the man his rights) – was named Prosser. That was about the full extent of information they got out of him during the flight. Any attempts to communicate with the gangbanger usually resulted in a spew of vulgar threats against his captors, and given the reputation of Space Waste, they were inclined to believe him. After two attempts to question Prosser, Jax couldn’t bear to listen to the guy anymore. His nightmares were bad enough already.
Jax remained unconvinced of Runstom’s plan, but it actually worked out pretty well. They got authorization to dock with the cruise ship and had their gangbanger pilot (he refused to talk to anyone on the superliner, too, of course, but evidently his presence alone supported their story) transferred to the small brig on board. Runstom even convinced them to give their newly acquired transport ship a quick paint job. They had never gotten a chance to see the outside of it, not that it mattered to either of them. They got a room reserved for emergency use, down in the servants’ quarters, and managed to scare up some spare clothes.
“Well, then,” Jax said, after taking a look at their meager accommodations. “Now all we have to do is find a sat-transmitter somewhere on this boat that’s the size of a metropolis.” He sat down wearily on one of the bunks. “If only we had some kind of equipment that we could use to detect a transmitter. Not that we could detect one unless it was in use anyway.”
“Right,” Runstom said. “We’re going to have to do this the hard way. We canvas the ship. We talk to everybody.”
“Ugh,” Jax groaned. “Ask a cop how to find a needle in a haystack, and they’ll tell you: ‘One straw at a time.’”
Runstom grinned. It was the first time in the few days they’d known each other that Jax saw the officer actually look happy.
“Jack, this is Bob. And this is Karr, and this is Jainel.”
“Hey, everyone,” Jax said, reaching out to shake hands with the woman first, then the two men. The three of them were dressed in standard-issue Royal Starways maintenance jumpsuits, which were all gray with thin lines of reflective silver running along the sides and down the arms and legs. Like a lot of the working class on the superliner, they were obvious B-foureans, pale-skinned and tall. None of them stood up as he shook their hands; they barely looked up from their lunches.
There was a bit of an awkward silence and Runstom broke it by saying, “We work for the government.” He paused, as if trying to remember his line, then added, “The Barnard-4 Planetary Government.” The three maintenance workers ignored him, and he nudged Jax.
“Yeah, that’s right. We work for a division of Planetary Defense,” Jax said. This turned some heads, but also inspired some scoffing. Jax cleared his throat. “Nothing military or anything,” he said hastily. “We work for the Rogue Celestial Object Detection Center.”
“What the heck does that mean?” the worker called Bob asked with a tone of mild interest. He was the youngest of the three, with short, mousy, brown hair and a distinctly smooth chin.
“Means another way to waste money,” Jainel said after a grunt. She was a middle-aged woman with blond hair, cropped short above the ears. She didn’t look up from her lunch.
“Well, uh.” Jax struggled to remember Runstom’s instructions to just relax as he pretended to be someone else. He directed his answer at Bob, since he was the only one of the three not presently stuffing his face. “We look for cel
estial objects – uh, mostly asteroids – that are on a path that might intersect with Barnard-4.” Bob arched an eyebrow, so he added, “You know, we try to make sure there aren’t any asteroids out there that might hit B-4. Like that one in the holo-vid.”
“Oh yeah?” Bob said. “You mean like Day of the Asteroid?”
“Yee-ah,” Jax said, drawing the word out. That wasn’t the flick he was thinking of, but he decided it didn’t matter. “That’s it.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Runstom said. “The government is installing some – um – detectors …”
“Asteroid detectors,” Jax said.
“Right, asteroid detectors. On every superliner. Since uh – since they …”
“Since they regularly cover so much of the solar system,” Jax finished.
“Cool,” Bob said, his lunch now completely forgotten. “So what do you need from us?” he asked. Jainel looked at Karr and they both rolled their eyes.
“Uh,” Jax started, but he was at a loss for words.
“Well, the problem is, our man Jack here misplaced one of the detectors,” Runstom said, putting a hand on Jax’s shoulder. The three maintenance staff looked at Jax with mild disdain.
“I was drunk,” Jax admitted, forcefully curling his lip into a half frown, fighting the urge to smile.
“Yeah-ha,” Karr and Jainel said together, breaking into laughter. Karr pointed his sandwich at Jax. “Man, I’ve been there buddy.” He waggled the sandwich and for a flash Jax thought the stuff between the bread looked like another laughing mouth. “So drunk you don’t even know where you’ve been or how you got home, right?”
Jax nodded and the man and woman laughed again. Bob joined in with a silent, open-mouthed smile, but it didn’t last. “Hey,” he said, suddenly concerned. “Does this mean we’re not going to be able to detect any asteroids headed toward B-4?”
“Yes,” Runstom said.
“Well, maybe,” Jax added, seeing fear cross the young man’s face.