I squeezed the joysticks and set speed to maximum. “Trac. Setting course for whatever they’ve left of each other.”
Chapter 27
Salvation Station appeared to be intact, externally at least, but hung alone in the middle of the Black without a single ship around it. The entire area covered by the ship’s defense systems was utterly lifeless. The navy fleet were presumably all still cushioning their truncheons, and the residents of the station had all been evacuated to a safe distance.
The unaccounted-for component of the star pilot fleet was also nowhere to be seen. There were no gutted ships or floating bits of wreckage that I or the shuttle’s scanners could detect, so apparently Salvation’s defenses hadn’t been deployed. And yet, the close-range sensor was absolutely lit up with blips.
“There,” said Warden, pointing to the docking bay entrance as we neared it.
“Mystery solved,” I murmured, worried. The entire bay was packed with star pilot ships of every size and shape. I recognized a couple, but these were mostly the smaller names, the ones who had fewer stories to rip off and consequently less investment in the lynching of Jacques McKeown. Very little care had been taken to park inside the lines, and we were forced to land the shuttle in the far corner, where the rear thrusters caused considerable trauma to a No Smoking sign.
We left the ship in pairs, Warden lending me a shoulder to take the weight off my leg—a gesture that should be attributed more to the need for expedience than anything else, as she was quick to point out—while Jemima pulled a still-catatonic Daniel along like a dogwalker with a particularly dozy terrier.
My concerns grew when we passed through the docking bay entrance into the concourse, because something had done serious damage to the doors. They were buckled and dented, and a large number of boots had made a concerted effort to widen the door frame. The nice new floor of the concourse beyond was tarnished with the very same scuff marks that would have so distressed United Republic regulations.
But at least it gave us a trail to follow, and finally some sign of life became evident. There was a noisy bustle coming from up ahead. As we rounded the curve, we saw a small mob of star pilots in the wide plaza in front of the Quantunnel gate. They were clustered around something. And it was very easy to imagine it being Robert Blaze sprawled upon the floor, getting a boot to the teeth every time he tried to explain that he didn’t know where Jemima was.
I hurried as best I could with a dodgy leg and Warden weighing me down, but as we drew nearer, things recontextualized. I could see Blaze, not on his knees or stricken by tormentors, but standing upright in the middle of the throng, wreathed with fatherly smiles. And as we drew even nearer, the clamor of voices could be separated out into a storm of individual questions.
“How many more pilots do you need?” one pilot was asking.
“Where are the refueling stations?” asked another.
“I might have some outstanding convictions in Ritsuko; is that going to be a problem?” a third, rather anxious-looking pilot asked.
Blaze answered whatever questions he could make out with suave confidence, reassuring concerns and directing gazes toward features. Maybe I was a little delirious at that point, but for a moment, he looked like some kind of messiah in the marketplace, surrounded by love-struck peasants fighting to touch his holy hems.
“I told you,” I said, heard only by Warden. “Star pilots are star pilots. Even when they’re acting like mercenaries.”
“Mm,” she replied, heard only by me. “I can’t help but feel that you will remember this moment differently if it transpires that Robert Blaze is Jacques McKeown.”
As I mulled that one over, Warden detached from me, leaving me to lean on a nearby planter that I found much better company. “Gentlemen!” she said, in a schoolmarm voice that pierced right through the clamor and caused the crowd between us and Blaze to part like the Red Sea. “We have some internal station matters to discuss. If you would all feel free to explore, we can consider your futures here later.”
Most of the pilots obeyed, spreading out to wander the evacuated halls, staring enraptured in all directions. The relief that radiated from Blaze when he saw the kids almost had physical presence. “Ms. Warden,” he breathed, shaking her hand earnestly. “Mister . . .” He confidently stretched the same hand toward me, but it wobbled a little when he noticed the state I was in. “Dear god. Are you all right? What happened?”
I gave him my most sarcastic smile. “Ran into some old friends of yours. Zoobs. We found them just as they were making a very convincing case to Jemima and Daniel that the Black isn’t as safe as they’d been led to believe.”
He hung his head. “All right. You’ve made your point. Maybe it was presumptuous of me to start preparing the Black for visitors before it was fully secured. But we had no choice. Money is always tight. I had to create the Cantrabargid experience because we needed a source of income as quickly as possible.”
“But that’s not going to be an issue anymore, is it,” said Warden, quietly enough to be heard only by the three of us. “Because you transferred all of Jacques McKeown’s money from that ID chip before you returned it to us.”
Two jaws hit the floor with almost perfect synchronicity, mine and Blaze’s. “How did you know . . .” he began.
“Partly because it was what I would have done,” said Warden, wearing the specific expressionless face I’d come to recognize as her smug one. “Mainly from how you reacted just now.”
“You . . . still have the money?” I said, stomach churning. The knowledge that all the money had died with Carlos had left me with a little sorrow, but once I’d thought about it properly, a great deal of relief, as well. Now I felt like a dumbfounded hobbit watching his friend refusing to throw that plying ring into Mount Doom.
His smile became rather fixed and desperate. He clutched his temples with both hands, then stretched them toward me, jerking them in time with his words as he thought on the fly. “Well, it’s just . . . you knew that . . . you weren’t . . . actually . . . entitled to . . .”
“And you are?” I interrupted. “Actually, shall we call all those pilots back over before you answer that question?”
He made some kind of coughing noise as a reply, but it was drowned out by a considerably louder noise. A deep metallic rattling, like a rumble of nearby thunder, that startled everyone present into looking at the Quantunnel gate that Blaze and his people had been constructing. Had been suddenly being the operative words.
“When the hell did you finish that thing?” I said, various predictions for the coming events running through my head as the shutters came down and crashed noisily into the floor.
“While you were on Cantrabargid,” said Blaze distantly, eyes fixed upon the grand metal archway. “Who let the shutters down?”
He was met by clusters of blank, concerned looks. Any thought that they might have loosened accidentally disappeared when the shutters started shaking and making the telltale clangs of a Quantunnel being activated. Presumably the actual tunneling firmware wasn’t installed, but only the origin gate required that, not the destination. That was how they’d been used to colonize distant space: just fly an unmanned gate as far as you can without needing to worry about keeping anything onboard alive, connect to it from back home, and pop through at your leisure.
The noises had caused a smaller version of the earlier crowd to reform, but when the gate fell silent, the entire room did likewise. The tension built up on our heads and shoulders like a cascade of unpleasant sleet, freezing us in place and slipping uncomfortably down our collars, before the shutters finally opened to reveal a rather generic military-grade transport bay that I didn’t recognize.
Although I certainly recognized the platoon of soldiers in black armor, because they were dressed identically to the ones I’d encountered trying to truncheon their way into the Jemima back on Earth. The moment the shutter was up, there was a mass eruption of chaos. The soldiers poured into the station with a storm of thudding fee
t (I noticed at more or less this point that their boots were all wrapped in canvas sacks), screaming for everyone to display their hands. A number of the pilots, including that anxious-looking one who had spoken earlier, immediately attempted to flee the scene.
Those of us who were nearer the gate—including Blaze, Warden, and myself—were grabbed and pushed to the ground, with the cushioned end of a rifle held against our temples. The more outlying pilots were merely held at bay by an efficiently established perimeter, although the soldiers threw a few more individuals to the floor for displaying offensive behavior, such as looking at them funny. I saw Warden open her mouth to come up with some devastating legal threat, but she was screamed into silence by the owner of the gun pressed to her head.
And barely five seconds after they had entered the room, everything was still and silent again. I could only admire the efficiency of the United Republic’s military as a gun barrel lodged in my cheek and ground my face into Salvation’s brand-new floor. The cuts in my forehead were throbbing again.
I was in a perfect position to watch the president of the United Republic step through the gate onto the station, or at least her lower half, which was wearing what looked like men’s formal shoes and a gray pinstriped suit. With slow, deliberate, measured steps, she approached the soldier pinning Robert Blaze and knelt cautiously beside them, as if regarding a turd the dog had left on the carpet.
Now that she had crouched into my visual range I could see that she was quite a small woman, not much more than five feet in height, with a helmet of tightly brushed brown hair and a complexion almost as orange as Henderson’s. There must have been something up with the artificial sun at Cloud Castle, which Jemima and Daniel were spared from because they never left the house. “I only have one question,” she said in a soft voice. “I am willing to ask it as many times as are necessary. Where is my daughter?”
“She’s over there,” said Blaze, trying to point through the use of eyeballs alone.
“I said, where is my—what?”
“I’m over here, Mum,” said an unhappy Jemima from somewhere behind me, apparently having hidden herself among the onlookers.
She stepped forward, to a point just in front of my face, and her mother walked smartly over and hugged her, in a rather perfunctory manner I felt was more for the benefit of outside observers than either participant. When they parted, she was clutching both of Jemima’s shoulders. “Where are you hurt?”
Her question turned a little uncertain toward the end as she saw that Jemima wasn’t exactly sobbing with gratitude, but was directing an unhappy tight-lipped gaze downward. “I’m not hurt, Mum. I wasn’t kidnapped.”
The president of the United Republic shot looks of hatred all around. “Which one kidnapped you? I’ll make sure they—”
“I WASN’T kidnapped, Mum!” Jemima finally looked her in the eye. “Dan got a new ship, and we decided to go exploring in it. It was my idea.”
“Your . . .” She made several confused pseudo-words as she attempted to update the internal image she had of her daughter. “Why didn’t you tell me where you were?”
Jemima’s voice shook, growing in volume and confidence. “I didn’t think you’d care that much!” She gestured vaguely at me and everyone else currently making out with floor tiles. “And I didn’t think you’d, you know, completely flip out! At the people who saved me!”
“Saved you?”
I only realized that the little switch in my head had flipped on after I heard words coming out of my own mouth. “Yeah! You’re lucky we found them when we did, ma’am. They flew straight into unpacified territory.”
The president detached her hands from Jemima’s shoulders, presumably because she would need them to get a proper grip on events. She made a meaningful jerk of the wrist, and my new soldier friend pulled me to my feet, his rifle’s laser sight maintaining a lurid red pimple on my forehead.
“You are?” asked the president.
“Captain . . .” My eyes flicked to the side for less than a nanosecond. “Handsome. Of the Star Pilot Volunteer Peacekeeping Corps.” I saluted, trying my best to not let it look sarcastic, like my salutes usually do.
“I’ve . . . never heard of such an organization,” said the president. She seemed a lot less confident than she had been when she walked in: she was fidgeting with her elbows and her gaze was darting all over the place. I guessed that she was taking in the shiny new surroundings and drawing some conclusion along the lines of “this doesn’t look much like a pirate ship.”
“We’re very new,” I explained. Two seconds old, to be precise, I thought to myself. “Please accept my apologies for not rescuing your daughter sooner. There’s a lot of space to patrol out here, and we don’t have much funding.”
The president scrutinized me through narrowed eyelids. “How, exactly, are you funded?”
Robert Blaze made an embarrassed little laugh into the piece of flooring against which his face was being held. “With difficulty.”
The president took a few dazed steps backward. “Daniel’s father told me that he and Jemima had been kidnapped by space pirates.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, scratching my head. “This guy who told you that, would you consider him trustworthy? Or has he ever done anything that might make you think he’s a bit dishonest? Or a bit manipulative?”
Her face froze with the kind of embarrassment known mainly to people being informed moments after launching an elaborate surprise party that they got the recipient’s birthdate wrong, but with the added spicy undercurrent of diplomatic faux pas. The pinkness to her features became vibrant enough to be detected even through her orange tan. She made that hand gesture again, several times, like an irritated conductor. “Let them up. Let them all up. And stand down.”
The baffled soldiers followed her orders. Warden was the first back on her feet, straightening her clothing and brushing a couple of hairs back in place. Blaze stood slowly, making sure to keep up his winning, inoffensive smile throughout. With their guns lowered, the soldiers transformed immediately from an elite platoon securing a hostile area to a congregation of extremely embarrassed, overdressed men.
“Jemima, we’re leaving,” said the president, in a manner of speech that involved moving the mouth as little as possible, as she moved back toward the open gate.
Jemima stepped forward automatically, head bowed and hands gathered before her, as soon as the words registered. But then her conscious mind got in on the action, and her pace slowed and stopped. She met my gaze, then turned back to her mother. “Aren’t you going to apologize?”
A weighty silence fell. The president seemed to have completely frozen stiff but for her eyes, whose gaze darted madly around the room, resting briefly on every face that stared at her expectantly. This, I realized, was a woman who had spent far too long in politics. I could almost hear the whirring of the gears in her head as she analyzed the possible outcomes. If she didn’t apologize, she risked offending some kind of foreign authority. But an apology from the president herself would be considered an official one, and that raised all kinds of issues. Would it be politically unsavvy to make such a statement without the blessing of her advisers or cabinet? Would it be considered an endorsement of this group that could still be pirates, albeit well-scrubbed ones? Would other groups be offended that we had received an apology? Would the pundits accuse her of being improperly dressed for contrition?
Let’s face it, she was only here in person in the name of some vote-winning show of personal strength and determination, I could tell. There were probably quite a few people back home who had already been sold the story that she was riding in, saber held high, to rescue her daughter from the oily clutches of subhuman off-worlders. Forget apologies, those people were going to froth at the mouth if she didn’t come home with a necklace of testicles.
Jemima untensed with a sigh, then addressed Robert Blaze. “We’re really sorry about, you know, all the soldier stuff.”
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Blaze said nothing, but he gave her an extra-special smile and nod that would have melted the heart of any woman of age like butter under napalm. Then Jemima turned to me again, and the next thing I knew, she was hugging me.
And this hug had a lot more warmth and friendship on her part than the one she had shared with her mother moments earlier. I met the president’s gaze over Jemima’s pink head and gave an apologetic grimace.
She broke off, not looking me in the eye, then saw Warden. There was a moment’s hesitation, which Warden ended by extending a hand to shake. Jemima took it chastely. Warden had been the one to initiate the kidnapping, after all. I supposed it took saving her life from slime monsters to graduate from handshake to hug.
Jemima stepped past her still-unmoving mother, through the Quantunnel gate, and into the hangar beyond. The soldiers seemed to take this as their cue to leave, too, and the rifles came up again. They slowly backpedaled toward the gate, shouting for us to not move throughout, all in accordance with some no-doubt vitally important code of conduct. After they had formed a rectangle directly in front of the president, they swept her through the Quantunnel gate like a broom. I saw Jemima give one last wave before the shutters came down.
A minute of awkward silence passed before Blaze ordered the shutters reopened, and a sigh of relief was collectively released when there was nothing beyond but the far wall that was supposed to be there. This established, he rubbed his hands together happily and turned back to us. “Well, I think that wraps up our temporary crisis,” he said, “unless there’s anything I’m forgetting about?”
“Are you Jacques McKeown?” I asked.
The assembled star pilots that hadn’t none-too-subtly legged it upon the appearance of the soldiers had mostly already drifted back to inspecting the station, it taking quite a lot to seriously rattle veteran star pilots, so it was near enough just Blaze and Warden left to hear my question. Blaze’s neck and arms immediately went limp as if his puppet strings had been cut.
Will Save the Galaxy for Food Page 30