Mica thought about warning Marchenko, but hadn’t decided if she wanted to interact further with the person responsible for her odious duty. Also, Banerjee would likely hear any whispered asides. Nobody else was talking, and all work had stopped.
The admiral’s gaze raked across the ground crew, lingered on Mica, then lingered even longer as it drifted upward to where Marchenko was draped over the side of the cockpit with her butt in the air.
“That looks like a volunteer,” Banerjee said, his deep voice resonating in the quiet hangar.
“Got it,” Alisa said, her own voice barely audible. She pulled out of the cockpit and jumped from the ladder, clenching a ring dangling from a chain necklace. She blinked in surprise when she found herself staring the admiral in the eye. “Oh. Hullo, sir.” She whipped her hand up for a salute, nearly taking the man’s eye out with the chain.
Mica rolled her eyes, starting to feel surprised that the fleet runner had made it back at all.
“Definitely a volunteer,” the admiral growled, his eyes narrowing.
“For what, sir?” Marchenko asked brightly, seemingly oblivious to the man’s irritation.
“You see that mystery ship that got brought in last night?”
“Just heard about it, sir.” Marchenko peered toward the front of the hangar. The engineers peered back.
Mica tried to catch her captain’s eye, wondering what was going on, but like most people in the hangar, he was looking at Marchenko and Admiral Banerjee. Waiting to see if she got a dressing down?
“The engineers are making sure it’s fully functional. We need someone to take it out for a test flight.”
“It’s a Starseer ship, isn’t it, sir?” Marchenko asked. “An old one.”
“I wouldn’t care if pink monkeys brought it from Earth a thousand years ago. If it can fly, I’ll paint it with Alliance colors and add it to one of our squadrons. The Blessed Suns Trinity knows we’re short on spacecraft. We need every extra piece of equipment we can find.”
“Er,” Mica said, not realizing she had spoken until the admiral looked over at her.
“You have a problem—” his gaze dipped to her name tag, “—Coppervein?”
Mica had been introduced to the admiral when she and a handful of other graduates from the abbreviated officer “academy” had arrived, but she apparently hadn’t made enough of an impression for him to have remembered her name. Maybe that anonymity was a good thing, something she should strive to maintain.
She could imagine all sorts of problems resulting from adding a centuries-old ship to their squadrons, but all she said was, “No, sir.” One wasn’t supposed to er at admirals, after all. Nobody else had.
“Good,” Banerjee said. “Marchenko?”
“I can fly anything, sir. Does it have weapons? If you give me a new gunner, we can clean up any leftover imperials loitering around outside our asteroid base.”
Mica had no idea how long Marchenko had been here, but she seemed undaunted by the admiral’s rank—or the fact that he hadn’t stopped glowering at her.
“You’ll take an engineer,” Banerjee said. “Captain Brandt said his team found some quirks.”
Quirks? Mica didn’t like the sound of that.
Marchenko looked toward the cockpit of the fleet runner, then lifted her eyebrows in Mica’s direction. “I believe she’s an engineer, sir.”
Mica’s mouth dropped open. She had wanted to examine the ship, not fly somewhere in it. Especially not if it had quirks. What did that mean? That it would blow up as soon as it hit the vacuum of space?
“Take her then,” Banerjee said before Mica could come up with a convincing excuse as to why she couldn’t go. As if going out in a quirky ship wasn’t bad enough, Mica did not want to fly with someone who took it as a challenge to make her colleagues puke. “And be quick about it,” the admiral added. “We’re mustering out of here at 0800 hours in the morning.”
Banerjee walked away before Mica could come up with a tactful way to protest an admiral’s orders. She should have opted for an untactful way and consequences be damned.
Marchenko slapped her arm. “You’re welcome.”
“What?” Mica stared at her.
“I saw you ogling that ship. And cleaning this mess couldn’t be any fun.” Marchenko waved at the fleet runner, but turned the gesture into a head scratch. “I wonder why he picked me. Does he expect trouble out there? Did he deliberately choose one of his more talented pilots, just in case?”
“I think you were deliberately chosen because your ass volunteered you, Lieutenant Talent,” Mica grumbled.
“It is a fine one, isn’t it?” Marchenko patted her backside. “You can call me Alisa, by the way. I don’t insist on Marchenko. Or Lieutenant Talent.”
“This is going to be a long trip, isn’t it?” Mica asked, not offering her own first name.
“It better not be longer than—” Marchenko tapped the blue-beaded earstar draped over her helix “—eighteen hours. Or we’ll find out if an old Starseer two-seater can fly to the nearest planet.”
Mica eyed the dilapidated mystery ship. “We’ll be lucky if it can clear the hangar.”
“Good thing I’m taking an engineer along, isn’t it?”
Mica grumbled again, not bothering to utter anything articulate this time.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be fun. An adventure.”
“You’ll probably get us killed.”
“Are you always this pessimistic?” Alisa asked. “Most people don’t say such things until after they’ve flown with me.”
Mica eyed the dirty towel slumped on the deck near the ladder, the one she had thrown at the private. “I find that hard to believe.”
*
“If I’m reading these controls right, the engines, thrusters, and life support check out,” Alisa called down from the cockpit. “Either that, or I just ordered takeout, and the delivery robot will be here in ten minutes.”
“Funny,” Mica said, peering under a panel on the side of the crystal ship. Her earstar was turned on, a holodisplay floating beside her head and showing the engineering team’s best guess as to the schematics of the craft. Apparently, the Starseers had never seen fit to upload such things to the system-wide net. Fortunately, despite the eccentric appearance of the ship, the guts were familiar enough, even if they looked like something that should be on display in a museum rather than in their hangar.
“The Starseers made up a lot of funky words while they were on their planet mutating themselves into wizards,” Alisa said. “And they labeled their control panel with some of them.”
“Does that mean you won’t be able to pilot us?” Mica tried not to sound too hopeful.
“Nah, I can fly anything.”
A touch on Mica’s shoulder made her turn from the panel.
“Lieutenant?” Captain Brandt frowned at her. He removed his cap, revealing damp blond hair matted to his head. He looked like he had been working hard, making Mica feel ashamed of her earlier whining.
“Sir?” she asked.
“I’m not sure why the admiral picked someone so… green,” he said, and Mica tried not to bristle, “but be careful when you two take this out. We fueled her up and replaced all the circuitry since a lot of the connections were faulty. I wouldn’t fire the weapons. They’re older than the ship. If we add this to our squadron, we’ll have to upgrade those. Oh, we also added a magnetic field generator, because the radiation protection in this hull is laughable. It’s clear the Starseers didn’t want to have children. Even though we checked everything out thoroughly…” Brandt trailed off with a frown.
Mica shifted from one foot to the other.
“We’re not sure what killed that pilot,” he said quietly. “Or what he was doing in this ship to start with. We looked up everything we could find on the sys-net, and our suspicions about the ship’s age were mostly correct. The Starseers called them dodgers, and nobody has produced them since their people were defeated and the empire was est
ablished. Three hundred odd years ago. Nobody’s even seen one in ages. It was assumed they were all blown up, along with the planet Kir.”
“So, having one floating past our secret asteroid base was unexpected.”
“It was indeed.”
“If we’re just going out for a flight test, I think we’re ready,” Alisa said, folding her arms and draping them over the side of the cockpit. “Unless you two are bonding in a private and personal way and need more time.”
Captain Brandt’s lips thinned as he looked up at her. “Does your squadron leader appreciate your mouth, Lieutenant?”
“Not as much as he’d like to.” Alisa grinned and patted the crystalline hull of the ship. “Mount up, Coppervein. We’ve got a mission to accomplish, a war to win, and people to get home to.”
“Flying a derelict around an asteroid will cause those things to happen?” Mica asked.
“You have to start somewhere.” Alisa held up the chain that she’d retrieved earlier and carefully tucked it into her pocket.
“Stay safe, Lieutenant,” Brandt said, nodding solemnly to Mica as he backed away. “Clear the deck,” he called and waved to someone in the control room who would cycle the atmosphere and open the hangar doors so they could fly out.
Mica pushed the ladder along the ship so she could climb up into the cockpit. In the narrow dodger, the second seat was behind the pilot and appeared to be simply for a passenger rather than a gunner or co-pilot. Perhaps its location would keep Alisa’s crazy flying to a minimum. Mica didn’t get airsick as a general rule, but if she felt the urge to vomit, she would be sure to direct it at the woman who had volunteered her for this mission.
The canopy closed, sealing them in. It appeared to be made from a material similar to Glastica, but had a prism-like aspect similar to the rest of the hull. Marchenko poked at the controls for a minute before speaking.
“My patch shows our air is fine,” she said, touching the front of her flight jacket, “and the ship’s control panel, what I can read of it, agrees. No grav though, so strap yourself in.”
“Trust me, I did that the instant my butt kissed the seat.”
“Kissing? So soon? Your butt moves fast.”
“Does your mouth get you in a lot of trouble, Marchenko?”
“Alisa, and not as much as it would if I served the empire. I heard their military has no sense of humor.”
“I heard they’re assholes.”
“That too.”
In the hangar bay, the already dim lighting dimmed further, and a red light flashed. The huge doors slid open, revealing the pockmarked sides of a crater and the stars of space beyond. The ships inside were all locked down to the magnetic floor, but someone’s multitool floated up toward the ceiling.
After a few clucks and uncertain hmm noises, none of which Mica found encouraging, Alisa seemed to find the button she wanted. The ship rose from the deck with a wobble of its lumpy wings. Aerodynamic, the craft would not be. Not that it mattered in space. So long as the thrusters worked.
“Marchenko and crew heading out,” Alisa announced, speaking to Control rather than to Mica, presumably.
Mica answered anyway. “Is one engineer considered a crew?”
“If you don’t think so, you could talk to yourself in different voices to fill it out.”
“Isn’t that the kind of thing that leads your superiors to send you for psych tests?” Mica slid her fingers over a panel behind her seat, wondering if she could access anything useful from here if the ship went haywire as soon as it left the hangar bay.
“Only if they find out. I won’t tattle on you.”
“Noble,” Mica murmured, opening the panel. Good, it actually allowed someone small to crawl back and reach the engine, life support, and almost everything else critical for flight.
“Should I be concerned that your head is already in the engine compartment when we haven’t cleared the hangar yet?” Alisa asked, guiding them over the locked down ships on the deck and toward the yawning doors.
“Just checking things. My head moves even faster than my butt.” Mica tapped her earstar on, muttered for it to record, and took imagery of the interior so she would know what everything was supposed to look like, should something happen later. Assuming this was what it was supposed to look like. The fact that the engineering team had been going over it didn’t mean much.
“Sounds like a recipe for vertigo. Taking us out.”
Mica was aware of the ship flying out of the hangar, through the crater, and to the surface of the asteroid, but she kept recording and checking wires, wishing she’d had time to examine the ship personally before they left.
“We have a flight path you want us to follow, Control?” Alisa asked. “Or should I simply take a couple of laps around the asteroid?”
“Take a lap,” a female voice said, “and then move off to test the ship at top speed. We want to make sure— What?” The voice grew muddled as the speaker seemed to turn away from the mic to talk to someone. “I’ll let them know. Lieutenant?”
“Still here, Control,” Alisa said, guiding them along the length of the crater-dotted, rusty red asteroid. So far, she hadn’t done any vomit-inspiring flying.
“The autopsy has been completed on the imperial pilot.”
“Autopsy?” Alisa looked back at Mica, raising her eyebrows.
Mica could only shrug. Nobody had filled her in on anything. Being a new lieutenant wasn’t much different from being a peon in the mines.
“The doctor identified an unknown substance in his bloodstream. Possibly a poison or venom.”
“Venom?” Alisa lifted her boots and peered around the floor of the cockpit, as if she expected a snake to slither out.
“We’ve got a chemist analyzing it further. Earlier, we had surmised that something might have happened to the life support, causing the pilot’s death, but now it seems likely that he was attacked before he got in. He must have fled in the only ship available. That one.”
“Fled from where?” Alisa propped her boots to either side of the control panel, apparently not ready to dismiss the idea of snakes. “This is a short-range ship. It wouldn’t have enough fuel for planet-hopping.” She glanced back at Mica again. “Right?”
“Right.”
“Perhaps an imperial cruiser in transit had it in its hangar bay.”
“So, the pilot was poisoned—or venomed—by his own people and then stole a ship and was able to get away, past their shields and grab beams?”
A new voice came on the comm. It sounded like Admiral Banerjee. “Just finish the test flight, Lieutenant. We’re busy packing up and need all hands here to help.”
Alisa closed the comm. “Nothing like telling me there’s packing to be done to make me want to hurry back.”
“Thus far,” Mica said, “I haven’t noticed that Alliance officers are overly skilled at motivating their troops.” Which was one of the reasons she was contemplating disappearing the first chance she got. She’d felt like a nobody since she arrived. She had expected to matter, to be able to make a difference. Instead, she might be doing nothing more than ruining her chances of having a successful civilian career someday.
“At least they don’t zap us with snagor prods,” Alisa said. “Imperial recruits get that.”
“Were you in the imperial army before joining the Alliance?”
“Hells, no. I flew freight back on Perun. Saw the seat of the empire up close. Didn’t like what I saw. My husband is back there. Daughter too. I’m hoping we beat the imperials into a pulp soon so I can go home to them. To a free home.”
Mica grunted noncommittally, skeptical that the war would end soon, and equally skeptical that the Alliance would be the victors. More than once since coming out here and seeing just how ill-supplied and ill-manned this base was, she worried that she had picked the losing side. But she resented the serfdom that kept her people forever bound to that asteroid, their paychecks a joke that went straight back to the imperial store, the
workers having no hope of ever making enough to own property or escape the mines. Some of the brightest children were culled, sent to school on one of the core worlds to earn degrees, as had been the case for Mica. She was supposed to be grateful for the opportunity, but the gift had been given with the understanding that she would never go back to foment unrest and that she would put her mind to work for the empire.
“What brought you here?” Alisa shifted her weight and stuck one of her heels up on the ledge between the control panel and the canopy. “You’re even newer than I am, right? I saw—” She yelped as a holodisplay appeared around her boot. She yanked it away, started to drop it back to the floor, then curled her knee into her chest and propped her foot on her seat. “What is this? I thought this old boat didn’t have holo technology. All I’ve got are gauges on the panel here.”
“I don’t know,” Mica said, leaning over the seat to better see the display, “but that looks like a map of our asteroid.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Think this is real time?” Alisa swiped her fingers through the holodisplay, using the gesture typical imperial technology accepted for zooming in. Nothing happened.
“If that was built when the ship was built, it will respond to whatever commands were used centuries ago.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t around then.”
“Neither was I,” Alisa said dryly. She leaned forward and patted around the top of the control panel.
Mica didn’t see any controls up there, but a soft hiss came, and Alisa jerked her hand back. A small square opened, and something that looked like a tiny weapons platform popped into view. A needle gun on an articulating arm thrust outward and aimed at the pilot’s seat. Alisa cursed and ducked far down, the entire ship lurching as her hands slipped from the controls.
Mica ducked low, too, but the needle wasn’t aimed toward her, so she kept her eyes above the back of the seat, watching to see if the thing shot.
A pale blue light flooded the interior, startling both of them further. It originated from the holodisplay. Mica leaned back in her seat, to get farther away from it.
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