by M. D. Cooper
Leslie flashed her a glare. “I think the smell is getting to you. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear anything about me being pink.”
“I guess that’ll do,” Rika allowed. “Of course, you know what that means.”
“What?” Leslie asked.
“Means we have another damn day of waiting on this ship! Chase is going to kill us when he finally catches up.”
EPSILON
STELLAR DATE: 10.21.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: NMSS Spine of the Stars
REGION: Epsilon, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Well this isn’t what I was expecting at all,” Rika said as she watched the holodisplay in the engineering bay render their ship’s destination. “It looks like a crappy Serenity.”
“Serenity?” Leslie asked, an eyebrow cocked as she glanced at Rika.
“Yeah, it’s a place out in the Perseus Arm. Big gas giant with five terrestrial-sized moons around it in a klemperer rosette,” Rika explained.
“Was that one of the places that general of Tanis’s visited? The purple one?”
“Jessica, yeah. She told me about it when I ran into her in the I2’s mess a few weeks back. She’s an unusual woman.”
“Purple’s not that weird,” Leslie replied with a shrug. “I once knew a guy who was colored like a kaleidoscope. Gave you a headache to look at him for too long.”
Rika laughed, wondering if Leslie was pulling her leg. “She’s not unusual because she’s purple, but because she’s part alien.”
“What!” Leslie exclaimed, her mouth hanging open. “There are aliens, and you didn’t tell me? How could you not tell me about aliens!”
Rika was tempted to reach out and smack her upside the head. “Not sentient aliens. She has alien microbes in her body. Part of a marketing stunt, from what she said.”
Leslie whistled. “That’s some weird marketing stunt. I didn’t even know the ISF did marketing.”
Rika’s eyes narrowed, and Leslie’s lips split in a toothy grin.
“Asshat, you knew all about Jessica’s alien microbes.”
“Uh huh, but messing with you is fun.”
“Stars,” Rika groaned. “We’ve spent far too long on this ship. We need to get off.”
“Well, that’ll happen sooner or later,” Leslie said, gesturing at the holodisplay. “Not sure that we’re going to get a warm welcome there, though.”
Rika nodded as she turned back to the display. The ship’s destination was a barely perceptible blob in the darkness. Around the blob were six equidistant points, each glowing faintly in the darkness of interstellar space. “Welcome to Epsilon.”
“Brown dwarf, or just a random rogue planet?” Leslie asked.
Leslie snorted. “You’ve been around the ISF AIs for too long. These are Nietzscheans, not the FGT. No one here has the tech to suck that much mass off a brown dwarf.”
“Not only that, but you’d have to do it really carefully to keep masses balanced and the rosette stable,” Rika added.
Leslie chuckled. “Look at you. Get a bigger brain, and now you’re all ‘Professor-of-Orbital-Dynamics Rika’.”
Rika scowled at Leslie. “I run a fleet of ships, you know. Understanding this stuff is a part of my job. What’s with all the ribbing, by the way?”
“Dunno…like you said, we gotta get off this ship. Too much proximity to Nietzschean assholes.”
“OK, then.” Leslie turned to Rika. “What’s the plan?”
Rika pursed her lips as she watched a higher-resolution visualization of the rogue planet and its six moons load on the display. “Well, Tanis did tell me that Admiral Gideon was known to be involved in some special projects. It was why she sent me his location. Looks like this might be one of said projects.”
“Imagine if we’d pushed past this location, and they hit us from behind with a fleet of that size…” Leslie said. “We owe Field Marshal Richards a beer for this one.”
“Don’t plan your celebratory drink just yet,” Rika cautioned. “We’ve just found it; now we have to do something about it.”
“Meaning?” Rika asked.
Rika pulled up the EM data, and overlaid it on the display, looking at the planet’s van allen belts and the moon’s positions.
“Looks like the moons must have been pulled within the place’s magnetic field,” she commented. “Makes sense; you’d want to keep as much interstellar radiation at bay as possible.”
“Which puts the moons up close to the planet, and gives them a lot of velocity,” Leslie added, earning her a sidelong look from Rika. “What? We live in space, of course I also know orbital dynamics. Plus I’m fricking old. Don’t forget that.”
“I guess cats age well,” Rika said with a laugh. “OK, seriously, let’s talk options.”
“Fission?” Leslie shook her head. “Barbarians.”
“Ever wonder how backward we all must seem to the ISF and Transcend?” Rika asked as she stared at the holodisplay, willing it to give her some sort of answer.
“Very.” Leslie’s tone was resolute. “Very, very. You know what’s great about them, though? I mean, you could tell that, for their level of tech, making mechanized warriors was something they’d only read about in ancient history. But when you all said you wanted to remain mechs, they didn’t bat an eyelash. In fact, Finaeus got a team to work up how to give you the best of both worlds.”
Rika nodded slowly. “They’re pretty decent folk, that’s for sure. Could really use their help right about now; I’d kill for a set of girly legs.”
“Still a no-go on your interstellar brain radio, eh?” Leslie asked.
Rika snorted. “That was your best one yet—and no, it’s still registering as ‘initializing’.”
“Can you have solid holes?” Leslie asked, laughing. “OK, OK, I’m getting my shit together, I swear. It must be all the bacon, gave me a chemical imbalance or something.”
“I bet Tanis would disagree,” Rika replied with a wink. “So, task one is to spin around and begin our braking burns. Meanwhile, we have to concoct some sort of story about why we’re here. Easiest on
e there is the truth; Kansas was attacked—though we may need to tell them it was by a huge fleet, so they believe us. We can use the Nietzschean defeat in the Albany System to back up our claims of general loss and destruction.”
“If we can convince one of the Nietzschean officers to play along, that’ll help,” Leslie said. “Sofia—though she seems to be constructed of granite—is a realist. Maybe I can wear her down.”
“You gonna curl up on her lap and purr?” Rika asked with a snort.
“Think it’ll work?”
“Well, I’ll try a few options. Everyone has a price; let’s just hope hers is payable in tender we possess.”
“Sooooo,” Rika hesitated. “If we don’t get blown out of the black while docking, how do we pass muster after docking? Like I said, neither of us look much like Nietzschean officers.”
“No,” Leslie shook her head. “Not even a little bit. If we were docking under normal circumstances, I imagine we could get by without too much scrutiny, but you know we’ll be under a microscope. And there’s the part where we have a ship full of Nietzschean prisoners.”
“Who we can’t kill,” Rika added. “We gave them our word.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Leslie sighed. “So unless we get Sofia to work with us—and probably even if we do—we can’t be on the ship when it docks.”
Rika sighed and leant against a support column. “OK, we did get kinda carried away there. Blowing it is secondary to surviving and getting the hell out of here. We know where it is; we can always come back later. Even just give the details to Tanis, and let the ISF come in and smoke the joint.”
“Is that a euphemism?” Leslie asked with a lopsided grin.
Niki ignored the woman’s comment.
“Honestly, escape should be pretty easy,” Leslie said as she considered the shipyards and space stations orbiting the planet and its moons. “It’ll depend where they send us, but if we can get to another ship before they realize that we’ve bamboozled them, we might be able to sneak away.”
“That’s a pretty big ‘if’,” Rika replied. “It’s not going to take the Niets long to realize that shit went down here. They’ll lock whatever station we dock on down tight as a…well…something really tight.”
Leslie snorted. “You have such a way with words.”
“Is bacon-drunk a thing? If it is, then it’s happened to you.”
Niki soldiered on.
“Is that believable?” Rika asked. “Even if we could fix it up, the thing’s not interstellar-capable. The Niets hacked up their a-grav DL transition systems pretty bad; I don’t think we could install them on the shuttle.”
Rika grinned at Leslie. “I like where Niki’s head’s at.”
“Don’t dissect my idioms, Niki. They don’t survive close examination.”
Leslie snorted and slid off the console she had been sitting on. “Well, then I should go see if Sofia will cooperate. Not that I’ll trust her even if she agrees, but maybe she’ll give me something we can use.”
A CHAT WITH SOFIA
STELLAR DATE: 10.21.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: NMSS Spine of the Stars approaching Farthing Station
REGION: Epsilon, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Not for the first time, Leslie found herself surprised that a ship of the Spine’s nature had such a large lockup. It wasn’t uncommon for military vessels to have a small brig—in case someone got unruly between the stars—but this ship had twelve high-security cells in addition to a small brig.
The only thing that made sense to her was that the Nietzscheans expected an evac to involve kidnapping political prisoners.
One thing’s for sure about the Niets, they’ve never been above using people as bargaining chips.
Rika and Leslie had granted Sofia her own cell—largely because Admiral Gideon had been enraged at her betrayal—a luxury that Leslie hoped to use in turning the colonel.
Leslie wore her black, stealth armor, which had been repaired by the ISF’s nanotech over the intervening days, though it was still only able to reach ninety-two percent stealth effectiveness. Her helmet was clipped to her belt, and she carried no weapon—other than her lightwand.
The first cell on the left was Admiral Gideon’s, and he stood at the door with rage in his eyes as he peered through the small window.
Each of the windows could be turned opaque, or one-way, but Rika had insisted the Niets be able to look out. She said there was nothing worse than being in a cell with no windows.
Leslie had experienced that once or twice as well, and hadn’t argued the point.
“We dropped out of FTL,” Gideon said loudly enough for the sound to carry through the door. “I felt it. You have no choice but to go to Epsilon. They’ll capture you, and then all of this will have been for nothing.”
Leslie paused and walked to Gideon’s door. “Oh, so I should just let you out? Give up?”
“I could ensure you were granted leniency,” he said, doing his best to soften his tone—not that it was remotely believable.
“Well, we’re not really the give-up types, especially not to Nietzscheans—you should have been able to tell that by how we’re still fighting you, all these years later.”
“Fat load of good that’s done for you,” Gideon shot back. “You’re pathetic.”
Leslie rolled her eyes and turned away. “Between the two of us, you’re the only one here that looks pathetic.”
She walked two cells down to Sofia’s. Peering in, she saw the colonel laying on the slab, arm over her eyes to block out the light.
“Care to have a chat, Sofia?” she asked.
The colonel didn’t respond for nearly a minute, but eventually she lifted her arm and glared at Leslie. “About what?”
“What we’re going to do when we get to Epsilon.”
Sofia shifted her arm back over her eyes. “That’s going to be a fucking mess. Have fun.”
“Care to go for a walk?” Leslie asked. “I bet the cell’s gotta be getting really old.”
Eyes peered out from under Sofia’s arm once more. “Around the ship?”
Leslie snorted. “Well, we’ll stay inside the hull, but yeah, around the ship.”
A second later, Sofia was standing beside the bunk stretching her arms into the air. “You said the magic words. Let’s have our little talk.”
Leslie palmed open the cell door, and stood aside as Sofia walked out.
From inside his cell, Admiral Gideon began to yell, spittle hitting the small window. “You’d better keep your mouth shut, Colonel,” he screamed. “Or it’ll be your head on a pike! I’ll fucking see you dead, if you help them. You’re already looking at a tribunal as it is!”
Sofia’s jaw tightened as she walked past the admiral’s cell, but she held her tongue, not even turning her head his way.
“Real peach, isn’t he?” Leslie asked, once the doors to the passageway containing the cells closed behind them.
Sofia sighed and turned to Leslie. “He’s a bit trying. Where are we going?”
“Wherever,” she shrugged. “You lead the way.”
“A change of clothes and a shower would be nice.”
“Your quarters it is.”
Sofia began walking down the passage. “You’re just going to let me use the san and change? What if I have weapons in there?”
<
br /> “Well, I’m not an idiot. I’ll have eyes on you the whole time.”
The Nietzschean colonel glanced over her shoulder. “I could have something hidden, take you out.”
“I’ve already sent a drone to examine your quarters. Our nanotech is a lot better than yours, so it’s doubtful you’ll get one past me.”
A chuckle escaped Sofia’s lips. “We got one past your Colonel Rika.”
It was Leslie’s turn to sigh. “Yeah, she got a bit cocky, there. Still, you know how it is. Send enough electrons through anything, and it goes down.”
“Everything dies to ‘zot’,” Sofia uttered the old adage.
Leslie nodded, but didn’t reply. They turned down a corridor and walked to a ladder leading to the upper decks. Sofia placed one hand on it, and then stopped, looking back at Leslie.
“How is it that a bunch of mercs have better tech than the Nietzschean Empire? Is it true about the Intrepid and the fleet at Albany?”
“Not sure what all you heard, but if it’s that there’s a fleet called the ISF, and a distant nation known as the Transcend running around cleaning up the mess peoples like you Nietzscheans make, then yeah, that’s about right. You work for the bad guys, by the way. Orion. They’ve got their hand up your emperor’s ass, puppet that he is.”
Sofia turned and began to climb the ladder. “That’s a lot to swallow.”
Leslie flushed a passel of nanoprobes up the ladder shaft to keep an eye on the woman. She didn’t think that the colonel would try to cold-cock her when she followed after, but it didn’t hurt to be safe.
“Move a few meters from the ladder when you get to the top,” Leslie instructed. “As for swallowing the truth, you saw our ships and their shields. You’ve seen our stealth tech in action—or haven’t seen it, I suppose.” She chuckled as she waited at the bottom of the ladder for the colonel to complete her climb and move aside.
Sofia followed Leslie’s instructions without any subterfuge, and a minute later, they were in officer country, just down the hall from the colonel’s quarters.
“So, I know what the Intrepid is,” Sofia said once they resumed their walk. “Who is the Transcend, and this evil Orion group?”