by Elliott Kay
Recognition.
“Oh, holy shit!”
“Nevermind,” said Tanner, running his finger over the grenade’s dial. “I’ve got it.”
The pirate scrambled to his feet and ran for the airlock.
“Should I shoot him?” asked Gina.
“No,” said Tanner. “This is better.” He took the bundle of fuel cell rods from her by its handle of tape and ran after the pirate.
Shouts and shadows at the other end of the airlock vestibule heralded new trouble. Tanner didn’t want any of it. Thankfully, the fleeing pirate was bound to cause a delay among his friends. It was all Tanner needed.
He barely stepped across the threshold to the pirate ship, hooking the bundle of fuel rods around the corner of its airlock. The grenade followed. Tanner tugged the hatch closed behind him but didn’t latch it shut. He hauled ass back across the vestibule.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled with each step. Numbers ran down in his head, perhaps too fast given his adrenaline. Anything that increased his pace would only help now. Tanner twisted himself around the exterior hatch to the airlock, throwing the portal shut. He slammed his hand down on the emergency seal.
The explosion on the other side of the vestibule rocked both vessels, but only one suffered an internal catastrophe. Tanner fell onto his back, hearing alarms and feeling vibrations along the deck. He didn’t hear the sound of air rushing out of a breach in the hull or the sudden silence of the void.
“We’re moving,” declared Gina. “We’re moving fast.”
* * *
Stalker shook as if hit by some enormous hammer—from the inside. Ivan fell back across his chair at the center of the bridge, arms flailing to catch himself.
Alarms blared. The ship shook again, this time as if something tugged at it. “Status. Status!” Ivan demanded.
“Something exploded on the lower decks,” Static reported from her station. “The sloop tore free from our clamps! We’re in a spin!”
“Aw shit, we’ve got hull breaches and power loss,” warned another voice on the bridge. “The oxygen tubes ignited before they sealed off. Fires in three—no, five compartments.”
By the time Ivan climbed back to his feet, he saw Static slowing their spin. Readings on the tactical board made it clear her job wasn’t easy. The board also showed the sloop hauling ass away from Stalker. They didn’t have to worry about the prey suddenly becoming the predator, at least. “Have we got casualties?”
“Couple reported in engineering. Nothing from the boarding team. Lower deck’s a mess.”
“Oh god, I think we lost Tink and Paolo out on the vestibule, too.”
“Shit,” Ivan fumed. Every hand lost or hurt would only make recovery harder. The holocom mounted on his earring buzzed. It was the wrong way to contact him in an emergency. Everyone knew that. Ivan tapped the device. “What?”
“Shoot that fucking ship, Ivan!” Vince shouted. “Shoot it!”
A holo screen appeared beside the captain, showing Stalker’s quartermaster as he clung to a passageway rail for support. He’d never seen or heard the other man like this. “Vince, what the hell happened over there?”
“It was an ambush. We lost everybody. I barely got out. If I hadn’t headed off Mark’s guys and shut the corridor hatch behind me—”
“Spin is under control,” announced Static from the helm. “Still fighting power loss. That sloop is hauling ass.”
“Shoot it!” Vince demanded.
“We don’t have power for the cannon along with everything else,” warned Static.
“And we’ve gotta get out of here before any patrols come investigate,” Ivan considered. “We’ll have to limp into position for an FTL jump as it is.”
“You’ve got the missile tubes,” Vince pressed. “Blow that fucker to hell.”
Ivan’s mouth bent into a skeptical, disdainful frown. “I’m not gonna waste missiles on a ship we can’t loot. They’re not shooting at us. What the fuck happened over there, anyway?”
* * *
“Oh my god, did that work?” Tanner asked the ceiling.
The sloop hummed along, building up speed without exploding. Nobody stood up from the deck to kill him. The airlock didn’t fly open to blow him out into space.
He wasn’t dead.
“You’re bleeding,” warned Gina. She knelt beside him, looking him over with concern. “Try to roll over. There’s blood pooling around underneath you.”
“Are you okay? Where’s Antonio, is he—?”
“We’re fine. Let me look at you.”
Tanner winced. He felt it now. “Yeah, that definitely hurts. Something on my back. Doesn’t feel too bad.” He sat up straight, then winced again as he realized he probably should have followed her instructions.
“That’s the adrenaline talking. You’ve got a cut along your back here.” She pushed aside the torn fabric of his shirt. “It’s not very deep. Did one of them cut you?”
“No. I guess I got grazed by a ricochet.”
He heard the rustling of cloth behind him. Gina tugged away the scarf from the dead pirate on the deck at the edge of the airlock hatch beside Tanner. “I don’t think you’ll bleed out. Here, hold this in place,” she said, pressing it to his wound. “I’ll go find a first aid kit.”
Tanner looked back across the passageway. Beyond the bodies, Antonio sat against a bulkhead. Blood stained his clothes and his face. “Hey. You okay?” Tanner asked him.
His classmate looked back almost with fright. Then he looked away. Antonio nodded, but didn’t speak.
“Attention, passengers and crew,” called a weary voice over the passageway speakers. “This is the captain. We have broken free from the pirates and have made it out of weapons range. The pirates are not pursuing.”
A couple of cheers erupted in the background before the speakers cut out. The passageway fell silent again. Tanner looked to the bodies strewn in the cramped space. “We did it.”
“Yeah,” said Gina. “Guess you live up to the hype.”
“They’d have had me if I’d been alone. I couldn’t have pulled this off without you.”
Her mouth curled into a grim smirk. She patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t make it weird.”
Tanner laughed. “I meant both of you.”
“Yeah, it was also the captain and the crew being on the ball. Listen, I’m more than happy to let you take all the credit on this one. In fact I’d prefer it. No offense, but I’ve seen what your life is like and I’ve got my own past. I’m perfectly happy to be forgotten here.”
“Deal. As far as I can help it, anyway. Antonio?” he asked, looking to the other student.
Antonio bowed his head and waved the question off.
With Tanner holding the scarf in place to staunch his bleeding, Gina picked her way through the dead to find a first aid kit. Tanner pushed himself to his feet, looking over the carnage for whatever else needed doing.
The awful stench registered in his brain. Somehow he’d disregarded it until now. Rapid footsteps echoed down the passageway from around the corner. Flashing yellow lights overhead caught his attention, too. Only one of the airlock’s successive hatches was closed. He’d been laying halfway into the other one, alongside the body of one of the pirates.
Tanner grabbed the pirate’s arm with his free hand to drag the body the rest of the way in. It wasn’t smart to rely on only half the airlock’s protection. The hatch swung shut on its own as soon as the body was clear.
It happened only seconds after the rush of footsteps stopped right at the intersection.
“Oh my god!” blurted a woman’s voice.
“Holy shit, there’s so much blood,” said Nigel.
Behind them, someone vomited.
“Are they all dead? What the hell, are they all dead?”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“What are you doing?” asked Olivia.
“Huh?” Tanner let the dead man’s arm drop. The body was out of the way now. H
e staggered closer to the intersection, tripping over another lifeless limb but keeping himself upright. His classmates and the professor were all there. Horrified.
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Oh god that smell!”
“Yeah, it’s gross,” Tanner agreed. He sympathized as Kim covered her mouth and Nigel turned green. All he could offer was a weary wave. “Don’t worry about it. ‘s natural to get sick.”
Several students withdrew as he came closer. Others looked on in shock.
“Are you okay?” asked Naomi. She stepped out of the small crowd to come to his side, then stopped short as her foot nudged a leg on the deck. She moved past it, but it required conscious thought. “You’re hurt?”
“Gina’s grabbing a kit. It’ll patch up. Long as we take care of it quick I should be fine.”
His eyes rose again to meet the professor’s. Vandenberg stood in the middle of the group, his face as stunned and as grave as anyone else’s. “We saw everything on the monitors. You… you ambushed them.”
“Yeah.” Tanner nodded. “That’s how you win.”
Antonio put his hand over his mouth. He sprang to his feet to whirl around the corner and out of sight.
Whatever else Vandenberg wanted to say, the words failed him. He shook his head before he turned and walked away. His students followed. Tanner looked from the bodies on the deck to the backs of his classmates.
He’d survived the fight. Now he wondered how much he had lost.
Chapter Ten:
Dirtside
“Interstellar expansion presents an incredible opportunity to free ourselves from our past. New societies and new ways of life may flourish on new worlds. Cultures may develop without the scourges of racism and sexism, or colonialism, or slavery, or economic exploitation. It is tragic, then, that so many worlds have recreated painfully familiar power structures.”
--Damisi Achebe, Union Assembly speech, June 2280
“Nobody believes you came all the way out here to spend three months playin’ around in the sand looking for pottery and belt buckles. Not with your history. You turn up on my doorstep covered in blood, with a bunch of dead bodies you claim were pirates, and you think you can stroll off to your little archie-yo-logical field trip school like everything is fine?”
Mitchell Vanstone loomed over his desk, staring down the three newcomers. Only one of them spoke. “Belt buckles haven’t turned up in the archeological record here, so yeah, finding the first would be pretty cool,” said Tanner.
The planetary Chief of Police sank back in his chair. Vanstone was a thin man, with wiry muscles and more than a few grey hairs. He still had decades, perhaps a full century ahead, but the scent of smoke and the bottles in the cabinet off to one side of his desk suggested he might be pushing the limits of longevity treatments.
He cracked a skeptical grin at Tanner’s response. “Cute.”
“Are we under arrest?” Tanner asked. “Where are the rest of our classmates? Where is the crew of the ship?”
“The crew’s fine, already released. Your classmates aren’t under arrest, either. They didn’t kill anybody. Far as I know, they’re out getting their shit together for this field trip or whatever you’re claiming.”
“Field school.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then can we go? We landed four hours ago and we’ve been here ever since.”
“That’s not even half an hour for each of the people you all killed in cold blood.”
“Antonio didn’t kill anybody,” said Tanner. “Neither did Gina.”
“No. No, they only helped. And yeah, I can see your buddy isn’t the cold-blooded killer type. He’s got a clean record as far as we can tell. Soccer stars tend to be easy to research. ‘Gina’ here, on the other hand…”
Vanstone tapped a key on his desk, bringing up a holo screen. It bore text, an image of Gina’s face, and a couple of organizational seals. “Minos isn’t party to much in the way of interstellar law enforcement agreements. We’re the independent sort. But we’re signed up with a couple of data-sharing organizations. Every few months, we get our archives updated. A lot of that includes petty stuff from all over the Union, but we aren’t hurting for data storage. Sometimes having all that on file gives us little details we appreciate from time to time.
“Did your classmate Gina here ever tell you about being busted for practicing prostitution without a license on two different planets?” He turned the holo screen for his guests.
Tanner looked to Gina, who abandoned her pensive expression for something colder. “Every planet has its own laws. Sometimes it’s tough to keep track.”
“We issue permits on Minos, darlin’. If you’re interested, I can direct you to the office.”
“What’s this have to do with anything?” asked Tanner.
“Oh, I wondered if you knew who you’re traveling with. Seems you didn’t know so much. Makes you wonder what else she hasn’t told you, huh?”
“I killed four people with a blowtorch this morning,” said Tanner. “You think I’m worried she didn’t have a work permit somewhere?”
“You should at least ask yourself some follow-up questions,” Vanstone taunted.
“Follow-up questions. Okay. Why does Minos route incoming ships through a few narrow lanes? How do those predictable channels make space traffic safer than randomized courses? If your hired security goons have four corvettes, two frigates, and six gunboats, where the fuck are they all day? Who profits from all that open piracy? Why are the victims of piracy treated like criminals? What kind of pay does the planetary Chief of Police pull in every year, and does that match his lifestyle?”
Vanstone’s brow darkened. “You might want to stop now.”
“I’m happy to stop whenever you open the door,” said Tanner. “We don’t even have to get to the question of whether you’re paying the pirates or the pirates are paying you.”
“Questions like that are dangerous, kid.” Vanstone leaned in over his desk. “Especially when we’ve got this little labor dispute going on around here. Things get complicated. People blow stuff out of proportion. And then they blow stuff up. Talk like that doesn’t help. Famous faces and names like yours showing up doesn’t help, either.”
“Your ‘labor dispute’ is a second generation signed into indentured servitude by their parents and a company not living up to its end of the original bargain.”
“Uh-huh. And you’re only here to play in the dirt.”
“I’m only here to play in the dirt,” Tanner repeated. “Open that door and I’ll be on my way. Far outside the city and away from your insurgency problems.”
“Or I could put you in a cell.”
“You could. Then you could sit here sweating and hoping that doesn’t blow up in your face.”
“I don’t take kindly to threats, son.”
“I don’t make threats. Too much ego bullshit. I’d rather be diplomatic because things get done faster. But I had to kill a bunch of people this morning ‘cause law enforcement here sucks, so I’m a little edgy.”
Vanstone let out a low chuckle. Whether it was forced or not, Tanner couldn’t tell. “I’ll take that as an apology.” He keyed a holographic button on his desk. The door to the hallway slid open. The challenge was clear enough: keep quiet and get out, or keep pushing.
Tanner took the pragmatic approach. He headed for the door. So did Antonio and Gina.
The police headquarters building wasn’t far from the spaceport. It was a sophisticated enough building, equal in tech and upkeep to anything Tanner had seen on Fremantle or back home in the Archangel system. Whatever Minos’s fiscal and labor difficulties, they seemed to have plenty of money for their security services.
Men and women in the uniform of Precision Solutions intermingled freely with the uniformed police. They shared workspace and common areas. He wondered about the lines between police and mercenaries, or if there was really much of a line at all.
“Hey guys,” Gi
na began as they broke into an open hallway toward the public lobby. Their surroundings included more civilians and fewer uniforms now. “Listen, about—”
“Have you ever met such a crusty, useless blowhard in your life?” Tanner interrupted. He threw her a grin. “Might as well have ‘manipulative prick’ on his nametag. Seriously, that guy is a natural born asshole. Can’t take anything he says seriously.”
Gina hesitated. She seemed unsure of what to say.
“He doesn’t have anything to use against us,” explained Tanner. “We might have embarrassed them with the pirates and they might not like me being here, but we didn’t do anything wrong or illegal. He wanted to rattle us and see if anything shook loose. I wouldn’t give his garbage much thought.”
She looked from Tanner to Antonio, but the younger man still hadn’t spoken much since the attack. He merely shrugged, seeming to want out of this conversation, too. Gina’s face seemed to brighten with a little relief. Tanner’s message was clear. She didn’t need to explain anything.
“Anyway, we’ve gotta find the others,” she said. “Hopefully everyone else has their holocoms back now so we can call them. There’s the claims desk over there.” She gestured to a window and counter embedded in the wall. Thankfully there was no line.
“Hi, we’re here to pick up personal property,” Tanner said to the clerk behind the window. “Tanner Malone, Gina Thomas, Antonio Chavez.”
“Yeah, hold on.” The uniformed clerk seemed half asleep and annoyed to be awake at all. “The window has your voice print. I don’t need any ID or any of that stuff.”
Tanner blinked. Voice print analysis and identification weren’t unusual tech, but for most of his life he was at least warned or asked first before he was scanned. Like the rest of his visit, it was a reminder he couldn’t take any civil liberties for granted.
“Your shit was cleared for release a while ago,” said the clerk. He walked around a corner to a back room without another word of explanation. The students could only hope he was retrieving their belongings and not going off for an unscheduled break.