by Rick Partlow
"Tall," I shrugged. "Deep-chested, with digitigrade legs and three-fingered hands. Dusky skin, with dark striations. Big, liquid eyes, high foreheads and some kind of spiky mane of what almost looked like feathers. Why?"
"On the Predecessor site I was sent to," she told me, voice almost trembling, "there were several bodies, suspended in some kind of stasis. The techs seemed to believe they were Predecessor corpses."
"And what did they look like?" I asked her, a cold fog blowing over my soul.
"You just described them," she replied, confirming my worst fears.
"Aw, fuck." I rubbed my eyes tiredly. "Things just get better and better."
"Do you think they've actually contacted the Predecessors?" she asked quietly, almost as if she was afraid to say it.
"I don't know what to think," I sighed. "Hell, I'm afraid to think, Captain McIntire."
"Kara," she corrected me, in a tone so soft and matter-of-fact that I looked up to make sure it was really her.
"Okay...Kara," I felt like my mouth was uncomfortable with the word. "I'm Cal."
"Nice to meet you, Cal," she smiled, offering me a hand. I laughed quietly, realizing just how outlandish this all was.
"The pleasure's mine, Kara," I took the hand. "The pleasure's all mine."
* * *
I let Kara grab a nap while I took the watch, and she was still asleep by the time the sensors told me that the Patrol ships had moved on. I gave it another half hour to make sure they weren't being tricky, then kicked us away from the rock on maneuvering thrusters. The jolts must have woken Kara, because shortly I saw her floating up from the cabin, still a bit groggy.
"We under way?" she asked me, pulling herself into the acceleration couch.
"Uh-huh. Just about to hit the impellers."
"Do we have a course laid in?"
"Ever heard of a place called Thunderhead?" I wondered.
"Thunderhead...?" she repeated slowly, before comprehension lit up her eyes. "But...that's in the heart of the Pirate Worlds."
"What better place for a couple of wanted criminals in a stolen starship?" I grinned. A quick check of the instruments told me we were far enough away from the rock to activate the impellers, and I gently began feeding the warp units steady jolts of energy. The impeller effect boosted us away from the asteroid cluster, out into interplanetary space. "Besides," I went on, "there's someone there who can help us."
"Help us?" Kara frowned disbelievingly. "From what I've heard, there's not man, woman or child on any of the Pirate Worlds that wouldn't slit your throat for the nano in your blood."
"No doubt," I agreed, setting the ship on a course that would take us to our designated jump point in a bit less than an hour. "But it always helps to have friends."
* * *
It had only taken me a couple days in T-space to remember why I hated star travel. It may sound romantic to someone who's only been to orbit, or never been off their own planet, but it really amounts to spending days or weeks sitting around in a cramped tin can, breathing reprocessed air, drinking reprocessed water and eating really bad food.
I glanced down at the piece of cardboard masquerading as a pita sandwich, lying half-eaten on the command console. I'd spent the first twenty hours in T-space sleeping, and the last ten eating---my body needs a lot of food to repair and restock itself after a combat high. I'd been hungry enough to make even the processed soy products the courier's autochef spat out seem appetizing---for a while.
Now, my hunger was slowly subsiding, the microscopic nanotechnological machines in my blood busily rebuilding me from the inside out from the raw material I'd given them. Most people get the normal nano injections at birth nowadays, even on a backwater like Canaan, to maintain their systems against blood clots, viral infections and cancerous growths, but I had a deluxe setup thanks to Colonel Murdock's technicians.
My nano could rebuild broken-down tissue, allowing me to heal minor injuries in a couple hours, and was designed to break down all liquid and solid wastes to provide energy for my augments. One side-effect of this was that I got really hungry after using my implants. Another, and one that had taken a little longer to get used to, was that I could go for several days without going to the bathroom. Came in handy during long ViRdramas.
Tossing the sandwich down with a sigh of disgust, I stared at the deactivated viewscreen. There was nothing to see in T-space; it was just as incomprehensible to our limited senses as it was to any known instrument. Even the theoretical types who'd designed the Transition drive didn't know exactly what it was, only that it existed and we could use it. In that sense, hyperdimensional physics resembled religion.
"Jeez, are you still eating?" I heard Kara's voice behind me, swivelled in my acceleration couch. She'd been sleeping for at least ten hours, probably for the same reasons I had, and looked a bit disheveled.
"Just finished." I waved at the remains of the pita sandwich. "Want the rest?"
"I ate while you were asleep. My bodily requirements seem to come in an opposite order from yours." She moved around to lean against the console, facing me. "You were making a lot of noise in your sleep."
"Always happens." I turned away from her, uncomfortable with the subject. Most of the dreams had involved Rachel---I kept waking up with images of her as she had been in the automed.
"You must really love her," Kara said softly, as though she hadn't listened to my answer.
Looking her in the eye, I was surprised at what I saw there. It was a wistful, almost envious look, one that seemed totally alien on her hard professional face.
"Tell me about her," she said in almost a pleading tone.
"Rachel's like my conscience," I mused, eyes watching a scene from twenty years ago. "I start to lose hope, give up on my job or my world, and she's always there at my shoulder, convincing me to keep fighting the good fight. She believes that I can do anything, and I guess she makes me believe it, too."
"She'll be all right," Kara put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. "We got her to help in time."
"I know," I said. "Intellectually, I know. But the last time I saw her, she was lying in an automed with her arm blown off, and that's the sight that's going to stick in my head until I see her again." I snorted, shaking my head. "If I ever see her again. I just wish..." I trailed off, embarrassed.
"What?" Kara prompted.
"Well, it's just that...you see, Rachel lost a daughter during the Occupation," I explained. "That was over ten years ago, but she still has trouble with the idea of having any more children. We've talked about it, and she promises to think about it, but the timing was always bad." I shrugged. "I always pictured us having a family someday, but now... Now I don't even know if we'll ever see each other again."
"I'm sure she believes you'll come back."
I leaned back heavily in my chair. "Rachel once said to me that even though my job got pretty dangerous sometimes, she never worried about me making it home as long as I promised her I'd come back. She said she always trusted me to keep my promises because when I left Canaan to go into the Academy, I swore to her I'd be back---and even though it took me nearly seven years, I came back."
McIntire laughed softly. "I could never see myself getting married. I always thought I'd go nuts stuck with the same man for that long. How long is your contract? Ten years?"
"Till death do us part," I told her, a snapshot of our wedding flashing across my memory.
"A Lifetime Contract?" Kara's eyebrow rose. "God, you don't see many of those anymore."
I shrugged. "You do on Canaan. At least you did till a few years ago."
"Is it...exclusive?" I glanced up quickly, saw the look she was giving me, and felt a tingle go through my stomach. I suddenly noticed the brief shorts she was wearing---normal on-ship garb, but they nicely exposed her long, tanned legs.
"Yeah," I said, trying to keep it from sounding like a regret.
"And you've never..." She leaned closer to me, face just inches away from mine.
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br /> "No." I shook my head. "Never."
"Why not?" There was a playful note in her voice, and I felt both a sudden urge to run and the helpless realization that this was a very small starship. "What she doesn't know won't hurt her."
Her eyes seemed to swallow me up as she drew closer, and I felt the soft touch of her lips on mine. I took her by the arms and gently pushed her away, acutely aware of the erection pressing against the inside of my pants.
"Because I made a promise," I said with what I hoped was a tone of finality.
I let loose of her and fell heavily into the seat, wondering if I'd set the artificial gravity too high---there was this weight I could feel across my chest that made it a little hard to breath.
"Damn," Kara said softly, staring into space. She seemed genuinely shocked.
"Sorry," I attempted. "It's not that..."
"Oh, I understand." Kara shook her head, a small, bemused smile slowly spreading across her face. "Goodness, Constable, you're certainly a throwback, aren't you?"
"That's me all over, Captain McIntire." I laughed at the irony of it. "A high-tech throwback."
We stared at each other in embarrassed silence that she finally broke by fooling with the ship's databank, bringing up a holo of Thunderhead.
"Have you ever been there?" she asked me.
"Never had the pleasure. The only reason I know anything of it at all is that I got a message about two years ago---a holodisc delivered by a tramp freighter captain. It was from Deke Conner, my partner in the Boys. He wanted to let me know that he was still kicking, and that if I ever needed a place to hole up, he had come into a little business out in the Pirate Worlds." I frowned. "Odd, that he thought I might run into that kind of trouble, isn't it?"
"Not that odd, if you've ever been to the Pirate Worlds," Kara muttered. "Paranoia is a way of life there. They see everything the Commonwealth does as a plot against their way of life."
"Well, we're not ones to cast aspersions on anyone else's conspiracy theories," I pointed out.
"Touche'," the Captain replied a bit ruefully. "At any rate, I've been to Thunderhead, and the main reason the Cabals managed to hang onto it is that no one else wanted it. It's a big, heavy world with a lot of iron ore and a huge moon. In a few million years, the moon will probably slow down its rotation rate, but it's still young enough to have a seventeen hour day." She rubbed the back of her right hand, a habit I assume she'd picked up while trying to get used to the laser implanted there years ago.
"The spin, and the high iron content give the planet one hell of a magnetic field, and the moon causes some of the most unstable weather patterns you've ever seen on a habitable world---hence the name. There's also a shitload of volcanic and tectonic activity, and the magnetic field winds up causing various cancers in at least a third of the population."
"Cancer?" I arched an eyebrow. "Good Lord."
She nodded knowingly. "Yeah. Only the wealthy and powerful can afford nano injections on the Pirate Worlds. The average age of death there is eighty, if you can believe that."
"Christ," I hissed. "Why the hell would anyone live there?"
"Most of the people don't have a choice. Those with the luxury of being able to leave are too hot to go anywhere in the Commonwealth, and those that aren't usually have accumulated enough money and power to compensate for the environment." She eyed me curiously. "Where does your friend fit into those categories?"
"There's one thing you'll learn real quick about Deke." I smiled, remembering a cocky grin, a swaggering walk. "He doesn't fit too well in anybody's categories."
Interlude: Damiani
Zero-gravity ballet was, Andre Damiani finally decided, overrated. It had taken him several years of dutifully attending dozens of performances to come to this conclusion, and he deeply regretted the lost time, but it had finally dawned on him here, at the McAuliffe Station performance of "Swan Lake."
With virtual reality chips cheap and readily available, actually attending a performance in person had become a pastime of the idle rich or fanatical enthusiasts; but Andre felt that to fully appreciate an art, you needed to see it performed live, warts and all. So there he was, in his private luxury box at the outer wall of the performance hub, watching, with a sudden feeling of ennui, the dancers weave their intricate web of movement in the freedom of null-grav.
Enough. If there was anything the empty, cheerless life of his father had taught him, it was the stupidity of wasted time. Slipping into the complimentary magnetic overshoes, he unstrapped from his couch and headed out the door. The corridor without was empty but for the menacing bulk of Trint, his Tahni bodyguard, who had waited dutifully for him during the concert.
"Leaving already, Mr. Damiani?" The tall humanoid asked in unaccented Basic.
Andre smiled wanly. "I'm afraid my fascination with this particular art form has run its course. If we hurry, however, we can be back at my Pacific Rim villa in time for the Cyberball championships."
"Yes, sir." Trint followed him down the corridor to the lift station, eyes and augment sensors carefully scanning for any potential threat.
Trint, Damiani mused, had been quite a find. He had to credit his Security Chief for that one. As a Tahni, the bodyguard was visually intimidating enough, but what really counted wasn't visible to the naked eye.
And wasn't that always the case? Damiani chuckled to himself.
The lift took them quickly back to the docking bay, where Andre's personal shuttle was mated to one of the umbilicals that bristled like spines off of the transport tube. Tourists clanked up and down the corridor's metal plates, looking strangely comical as they walked jerkily, their legs raising too high with each step, looks of half-panic on their faces. Andre was much more practiced with the magnetic shoes, and walked almost normally, while Trint looked as if he'd been born in zero-gravity.
Which, Andre thought, was quite a joke, considering that, in the strictest sense of it, the Tahni bodyguard had never been born at all.
The Council Director keyed the palm pad, stepped through the lock into the shuttle...and pulled up short. Lounging carelessly in the passenger cabin, hanging half-out of a restraint web, was a tall, rangy male with a shit-eating grin on his all-too-familiar face.
"Evening, Mr. Damiani." He threw the Director a casual salute with one hand, the other stroking the end of his bushy brown mustache.
"Dramatic as ever, I see." Andre moved on inside, Trint following him.
"Hard habit to break," the man said. "Hey there, Trint," he added, nodding to the Tahni. "Long time."
"Never quite long enough," the bodyguard returned softly, regarding the human with a look so cold it could freeze mercury.
"Close the lock, Trint," Damiani ordered, not taking his eyes off the other man. "If my Chief of Security has gone to all the trouble of tracking me down and sneaking aboard my shuttle, I can only assume it means that he has something vital to discuss with me. At least," his tone went hard, "he had better."
The tall man grinned. "Well, it does help to keep in practice." He glanced casually over to make certain Trint had secured the lock before continuing. "We've got some major shit hitting the fan, sir."
"It's not that damned High Priest again?" Andre sighed heavily. "I swear to God, if that man drags his feet another day, I'll slice off his testicles..."
"Nothing so minor, I'm afraid," the Security Chief replied. "You remember the scout pilot...the one who discovered the site?"
"Don't tell me your hired guns haven't gotten to her yet?" Damiani raised an eyebrow. "If you can't deal with one burnt-out scout jock..."
"She's a little more resourceful than we'd anticipated," the tall man said wryly. "She's DSI."
"What?" Damiani exclaimed. "You mean to tell me that all this time, you didn't know..."
"The DSI, as you damn well know," his Security Chief growled, "has more employees than any of your corporations, and half of them are undercover. I could hardly be expected to have a working knowledge of every lookout
and mole they have on the frontier."
"Funny," Andre shot back, "since that's precisely what I pay you for. At any rate, it's taken care of simply enough. Call Gregorian. Have him bring her in...she should damn well trust her own Director, eh?"
"Gregorian hasn't been totally honest with us. The conniving bastard's known who she was since the beginning, but he didn't want to admit he was spying on a Council operation. He's already tried to kill her once---she won't trust him again." The man frowned, bit his lip hesitantly. "But that's not the worst of it."
"This begins to remind me of a bad joke," Andre muttered. "Do go on."
"She looked up an old friend from the Department---a freelancer who had gone Cyborg, become a street surgeon on a backwater colony on the frontier. We...I had the local cultists go after her, try to make it look like a religious raid on Skintown. You know how the Pred's feel about the Skinners. But something went wrong, and the local cops stumbled into it, busted up the cult compound."
Damiani's eyes narrowed, and the tall man could see something dangerous behind them.
"Do tell me, my old friend," he enunciated, "that they didn't find anything."
"We sent in the local CSF Investigator and the Patrol officer in her pocket to salvage things. But the Planetary Constable...we think he may have penetrated the priest's headcomp. My Investigator sent in a team to take him and the girl out, but they got fragged, and---well, we're not sure exactly how, but the Constable and the girl got onto the Council station. They stole a courier and blasted out on impellers." The Security Chief sighed, rubbed his chin. "The impeller pulse trashed the docking bay, and a couple of ore freighters went up and blew the whole Goddamned thing straight out of orbit. By now...hell, they could be anywhere in the damned Cluster."
"You're telling me that one backwoods cop did all of this?" Damiani was incredulous.
"Not just a cop," the tall man said, voice grim. "His name is Caleb Mitchell. During the War, he was part of a top-secret commando unit called Omega Group." Unnoticed by either of the humans, Trint's eyes narrowed, and the bristly Mohawk mane stood up straight at the crown of his head.