Last Man Out (Poor Man's Fight Book 5)

by Elliott Kay

  “We also don’t know if they put anything on our holocoms,” said Gina. “I haven’t found anything yet, but I’m not an expert. It may have slipped right by me.”

  “The point is, you should all be careful with data storage and be mindful of what you use your holocom for,” explained Naomi. “We all need them, obviously, so we’re gonna have to suck this up, but being aware is—”

  “Can they even do this?” asked one student.

  “Can’t we take them in somewhere to get scrubbed?” asked another.

  “Not if this is standard practice here,” answered Nigel. “Who’s going to do the scrub? Can we trust them? Shit, this is terrible!”

  “Did they do this to you last time you were here, professor?”

  “No,” said Vandenberg. He seemed as concerned as the rest. Maybe more. “Nothing like this at all. It must be a recent practice. This is troubling.”

  “That’s a polite way of putting it,” scoffed Nigel.

  “We don’t have reason to believe we’re being actively spied on,” Naomi continued. “Like I said, it’s something to be aware of, but apparently everybody on this planet has to deal with it. It’s a reminder we’re not on Fremantle. We can’t take anything for granted. We can’t assume we have the same rights or protections here. Just…be aware, okay?”

  “You might want to check your cash balances, too,” said Tanner. Heads looked up at him with enough shock and alarm to make him almost regret saying it. “They didn’t take any from me, but it’s good to check, is all.”

  “I’m gonna wind up sticking my holocom in my backpack when I sleep,” muttered Kim.

  “So they didn’t charge you with anything?” Nigel asked Tanner.

  “No arrest, no charge. Self-defense. They were pissy about it, but it’s over as far as I can tell. All they want now is to know where I am.” He shrugged. “I’m here.”

  “Yes. Well. Thank you, Tanner, Naomi. Antonio. Gina.” Vandenberg gave the latter a nod. He cleared his throat. “As Naomi says, it’s a reminder not to take anything for granted. We’re not back home anymore, so focus on our work. We’ll all feel better once our camp is established and we’ve gotten the preliminaries out of the way. The best thing we can do right now is to make sure we all know where we’ll be sleeping tonight.”

  “Guess the security services will know where everyone is sleeping, too. That’s comforting,” grumbled Nigel.

  * * *

  Time brought perspective. Collaboration revealed new possibilities and new options. Within an hour of the final arrival, the camp was fully set up. The last equipment from the haulers was carried down the hill with the help of antigrav lifter belts and a little elbow grease. Yet it was the teamwork between Nigel and Gina that gave everyone a little relief.

  “Okay, we don’t think they’re running any sort of audio recording relay out of our holocoms,” Nigel began. He sat beside Gina at a table outside the shelters, with control pads from survey gear laid out along with their holocoms. Classmates gathered around. “We would find that kind of program consumption on an activity audit. And they’d need an especially strong signal to boost it out of this canyon, given how the geology here is so disruptive. Everything we send and receive here has to be relayed up from an overhead satellite back to the city like we’re in the Stone Ages. So they can see anything we send or receive, but if they want to dig through your files they have to take your piece away to do it.”

  Gina picked it up from there. “It doesn’t look like they messed with any of our survey gear. None of it seems to have even been turned on since it was packed. Presumably, they figured we would run the gear through personal holocoms, but we don’t have to do that. Almost everything has its own control and data storage.”

  “Meaning we can run our surveys and analysis without worrying about privacy?” Vandenberg asked, perking up at the news.

  “Looks like it, yeah,” said Gina. “As long as we’re disciplined about not using our holocoms for survey work, we should be fine.”

  “Excellent. Then we can get right to it.” Vandenberg scooped up a boxy white object from the table. With only a few quick moves, Vandenberg had it unfolded to its full one-meter wingspan. The peregrine drone’s antigrav engines hummed through their start-up phase.

  Tanner looked from one piece of gear to another. On most worlds, the peregrine’s sensors and the hand-held sweeper units would pick up magnetic, thermal, and other variations a good twenty meters down. On Minos, they would penetrate only a few centimeters at best.

  “Something wrong?” murmured Naomi. He hadn’t realized she’d stepped up beside him.

  “Hm? No, it’s fine.”

  “You look annoyed. Although I guess we’re all a little annoyed about being bugged.”

  “It’s not that,” said Tanner. “I should’ve thought of this.”

  “Huh?”

  “The survey gear. I should have realized the survey gear is clean.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I should’ve read the tech manuals on all this stuff before we got here.”

  Naomi took a step to his side, looking at him with wide, skeptical eyes. “What?”

  “I should’ve read the tech manuals.”

  “The whole tech manual for each piece? Do you really think Vandenberg and I have ever read more than the quick-start guides? Why would you read the tech manuals?”

  “I’m not some preternatural bad ass. The whole reason I’m still alive is because I read all the manuals, not because I have magic murder powers.”

  A few heads turned back his way. Tanner grimaced. “Sorry.”

  With the peregrine’s control unit in hand, Vandenberg activated its flight engines and gently tossed it up into the air. The drone fell less than half a meter before it caught itself and ascended, floating on antigrav and steered by little bursts of its tiny turbines. The professor put the drone into an aerial search pattern spiraling out from their current spot.

  A three-dimensional hologram of the canyon floor sprang from the control unit. The replica spread in tandem with the peregrine’s broadening search. Bright red dots appeared in the projection with figures showing exact coordinates and depth.

  In earlier times, initial procedures of a survey typically included a careful, tedious foot-search of the site. A team would spread out and follow a pattern, picking up every little thing resting within plain view that might be of interest. These days, one peregrine with the right search parameters was better than a dozen pairs of dedicated but unaided eyes.

  As it happened, this initial survey would involve both approaches, though nobody’s eyes would go unaided. “Naomi, could you and Tanner pass out our spectacles?” Vandenberg asked. “I’ll get it all tied in with the drone.”

  Sorting tasks and software settings took little time. Before long, everyone had their own set of identifier spectacles, each with micro-cameras on the frames and holo displays in the lenses to overlay computer info onto natural vision. Red markers from the peregrine scans appeared across the canyon floor, along with an infrared grid laid out by a handful of marker posts.

  Within an hour, the team had covered half the canyon floor. None of the peregrine’s hits turned out to be anything more interesting than bits of oddly but naturally polished rock.

  “So what do we do after this?” asked Tanner. The bag on his hip grew full with an increasing collection of Minoan obsidian. Not one looked like it had been shaped by intelligent hands. He also had a growing ache in his back.

  “After this, we scrape away a couple centimeters of topsoil and do it all over again,” said Kim. “We don’t want to damage anything waiting for us close to the surface before we get down to marking out spots to really dig.”

  “Across the whole canyon floor?” Nigel balked.

  “As much of it as might be of interest,” she confirmed. “Probably some of the landscape up above surrounding the canyon, too. This was in the plan. Did you zone out on this part when we talked a
bout it?”

  Nigel looked around. “How much of this is ‘of interest’ to the professor?”

  “All of it, probably,” said Kim. “Welcome to xenoarchaeology.”

  Chapter Eleven:

  Ripples

  “Admiral Yeoh’s talents for strategy and tactics are well known. Underlying those talents is a less flashy quality: her gift for putting the right people in the right place. A knack for personnel matters may seem mundane, but time and again it has made all the difference.”

  --Personal Profiles: A Raphael Public Media Project, June 2280

  “Somebody needs to double-check my work,” Lynette announced from the captain’s chair.

  The ship’s “doctor” looked up from the forward helm station, eliciting angry beeps from the simulator program over the controls. The first officer looming over the helm let out a groan. “If I’m not interrupting,” Lynette added with a wince of apology.

  “We’ve crashed,” said Veronica Roldan, gesturing to the bridge canopy and the bright landscape of the spaceport outside. “The damage is catastrophic. We’ll never fly again and now we owe the city a new passenger concourse.”

  Elise Jacobs turned away from the controls. She closed her eyes, bringing one umber hand to her face. “It’s terrible,” she sniffled. The lingering French accent from her upbringing on Gabriel only made her sound more melodramatic. “I can’t bear to look.”

  The simulator program let out a soft ping to complain of her inattention. Elise silenced the controls with a slap. She sniffled again. “It’s like I can still hear them.”

  Lynette looked past her shipmates to the Salvation spaceport. The concourse lay a good two hundred meters in the distance, with only a simple cargo hauler passing between it and the ship. The captain shrugged. “Y’know what? Fuck ‘em. It’s an ugly building anyway.”

  “Does this mean we’re pirates now?” Elise looked up with sudden excitement. “Good pirates, I mean. The singing kind. Like in children’s movies.”

  “It’s possible we’re breaking the law already, so why not?” replied Lynette.

  “What’s going on?” asked Veronica, dropping the sarcasm.

  “Finances. I’ve crunched the numbers three times. After expenses, taxes, fees, supplies, replenishment services, crew salaries, and this month’s loan payments…I think we’re in the black.”

  “What? No,” said Veronica. “That’s not possible.” She opened up the ship’s books with her holocom.

  “That’s what I thought the first three times.”

  “You said loan payments. All of them?” asked Elise.

  “Oh, we’ve got a good ten years to go on these balances. But we’re current.”

  Veronica frowned at the holographic chart in front of her. “What are we forgetting?”

  “That’s why I brought it up. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Port services? Guild dues?” suggested Elise.

  “All in there. That’s what I meant by ‘fees.’ It’s covered.”

  “No way,” Veronica murmured at her chart. “I can’t think of anything, either, but this is too good to be true.”

  “How much?” asked Elise.

  “Six hundred fourteen credits,” announced the captain.

  “Hah! I guess we should all cash out and retire now, right?” Elise laughed.

  “We haven’t even been flying for more than six months,” said Veronica. “We can’t be in the black already.”

  “We had a long-haul charter that paid for itself and left us with an open cargo hold,” Lynette pointed out, though she could scarcely believe the results. “All those critters from Fremantle sold pretty well once we got home.”

  “I wanted to eat more of them on the way back,” said Elise.

  “Then we wouldn’t have been profitable.”

  “But we would have been happier,” Elise teased.

  “I’m pretty happy right now if we can scrape our way out of the red and into the black in the first six months,” said Veronica.

  Lynette’s mouth spread into a sly grin. “You can thank the lobsters.”

  “Okay, I was wrong.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I was wrong about the lobsters and the crabs! You were right. They didn’t die. They sold at a solid price. It was absolutely worth the trip.”

  “And how much did you doubt me?” Lynette murmured.

  “Not enough to vote against taking the job! Stop trying to rub it in.”

  “Okay. I suppose.”

  “You were right,” Veronica said with a little less reluctance this time. “You found us a good run with a high profit. Now do it again. Captain.”

  Lynette clutched her hands over her heart. “She called me ‘captain.’”

  “I’m about to call you other things.”

  “What? Sorry, I’m back to work looking for jobs,” said Lynette, turning back to her screens. “You two do your simulations or whatever. Clean up the mess you made when you crashed. The flight line looks terrible.”

  As soon as she gave her screens actual attention, she found reason to stay invested. The latest mail drop included traffic from Fremantle. Regular drone services linked star systems together as best anyone could under the limitations of FTL travel. Every world had its scheduled drops managed by network hubs across the Union, with more developed planets sending out their drones more frequently than the rest. Earth, Luna, and Mars sent out drones every couple of hours. Fremantle hit the networks four times every day, making it half again as productive as any of Raphael’s four worlds.

  She didn’t check with each drop. It wasn’t like he wrote every single day. Neither did she. But he wrote often enough. As it turned out, this drop got them caught up to their last visit. The stamping indicated it was entirely video. She considered taking off for her cabin, but the stamps also noted the brief length. Lynette’s eyes flashed to her shipmates.

  Veronica and Elise were already back on the landing simulation for Phoenix’s medical officer. Elise’s time and training as a nurse in the Archangel Navy were every bit as valuable to the crew as anyone with a “doctor” to their name. Veronica and Lynette went back to the Academy. Though their careers split after that, Lynette knew how solid she’d been while serving on Los Angeles. Buying Phoenix had been Lynette’s idea, but it became a joint venture the moment she mentioned it to Veronica years ago.

  Lynette turned the volume down on her projector before she opened the message. If the contents seemed like too much for mixed company, she could always cut it off, but she doubted she would have anything to hide from her personal physician and her best friend.

  She didn’t expect sirens and flashing hazard lights in the background.

  “Hey, so first off, I know I already told you how much it meant to see you this weekend, but you know how it is,” Tanner began. “Soon as you were gone, I felt like I needed to tell you again in case all the other times I told you in person weren’t enough. You’re wonderful. As soon as you show up it’s like the sun comes out again.”

  “Tanner, what the hell?” Lynette murmured. His wrist-mounted holocom’s recorder showed mostly his face, but as he passed storefronts along the street she caught the reflections of billowing smoke and emergency response aircars in the windows.

  He didn’t look upset or hurt. He looked chagrined.

  “The rest of this is kind of awkward,” he continued.

  “Uh-huh,” she grunted.

  “I wanted to get this out before I got caught up in anything. Didn’t want you to hear this from someone else first and then worry ‘til I sent word. So, uh… you were probably right about that whole ‘lost and found’ storage solution I had. Anyway. First things first, I’m okay. Wasn’t in the building. Wasn’t even on the same block.”

  “Oh no,” Lynette grumbled. Her hands came to her face, less out of worry or horror than exasperation as Tanner rotated the camera to show the boat shop and the smoking crater of its upper floor. Overhead, emergency airvan
s doused it with coolant spray.

  “The fire guys tell me they’ve spotted a couple bodies inside with weapons and body armor. Maybe it was the guys from my alley. Maybe this is a new pack of assholes. I dunno. The cops don’t know yet. Mostly I wanted you to know it wasn’t me. I’m fine.”

  Her face tilted downward into her hands. She sighed. “Guess it was a good thing we slept on the ship all weekend,” Lynette muttered.

  “Guess it’s good we stayed on your ship while you were here,” said Tanner.

  Lynette looked back up to the image. She saw his face again.

  “So the other thing, real quick: it looks like I’m gonna be off-planet for the summer and a bit of the fall. I wanted to let you know before you took any other jobs bringing you back here in case that would be a factor. I got offered an internship with an archaeological dig on Minos for the summer quarter. It’s extra course credits and, uh, I’ve got this little housing issue, too, so I figure why not?”

  “Minos?” Lynette asked the recording. “I could tell you exactly why not!”

  “Okay, I know exactly why not,” Tanner muttered. “But like I said, I was offered. Asked. Kind of intensely. It’s a long story, I’ll tell you in the next letter.”

  He mumbled out the dates of the journey and the field school, but as he spoke his attention was drawn off camera. “Listen, I gotta go. Cops want to talk to me again. I’ll send a follow-up as soon as I can. But thank you for everything. Again. Always. Talk to you soon.”

  The message cut out. Lynette stared at the final frozen image.

  “That guy,” said a voice right beside her.

  Lynette jumped in her seat, startled by the two women looming at either side. Elise looked at the image in awe. Veronica shook her head.

  “What’s he mean by ‘lost and found?’ He pick up a box of bombs on the street or something?” asked Elise.

  “With his ridiculous life? I wouldn’t put it past him,” said Veronica.

  “What the hell, you two?” Lynette gasped. “Did you listen to the whole thing?”