The engineering section’s nightshift stood at attention.
“At ease.” She smiled to a young ordinary seaman with the brightest orange hair she had ever seen. That stuff was orange enough to start a fire.
“Ma’am, the remote-piloting station is ready.” Womack lied very well when he set his mind to it. “With your permission.” He hooked his thumb at his bunch.
At her small nod, he dismissed his section, who filed out. Frankie gestured at Womack and went through the motions of standing at the rigged console, where wires and fuse boxes competed for every available centimeter of flat surface. When the deck had cleared, she leaned closer. “Is my stuff in already? With the detonator?”
A furtive nod confirmed it. “The ship’s fueled to capacity, everything that needs charging has been, there’s food and water and a medikit, and a couple of e-suits with stunners.”
“And the bomb, still armed and ready?”
“Yes, Ma’am. Checked it at least half a dozen times…” he glanced at his watch, “…in the last fifteen minutes.”
They exchanged tight grins. She noticed a dark red mark from the bridge of his nose to his cheekbone. That was new.
“Another fight?”
“Nah. Just biz gone wrong,” Womack said around his crumpled cigarette. “Good luck out there.”
“Thanks.”
With the cargo hatches leading to the main ship closed and locked, she rushed to the reefer gangway, climbed onboard and kicked the lever to release the grille steps, which descended to disappear below deck.
Inside, the smell of John’s cologne and fresh produce made her shut her eyes tight. Man, not only was she seeing him in her head, but she was smelling him everywhere now?
Get a grip, Beaumont.
Trying not to see—and smell—him in everything she touched, she dug in her bag, slipped the detonator in her pocket and sat at the controls. After cracking her knuckles, she clipped on the five-point harness.
A fleeting shadow registered at the edge of her peripheral vision. She turned to see Womack giving her the thumbs-up from the “piloting station” before speaking into the comms. No doubt to announce to the dockmaster that everything was a go.
She powered up the engines. Tail hatch rising, Frankie leaned back.
“Here we go,” she murmured to herself. Then in a louder voice announced, “Tower, Reefer One ready for launch.”
“Standby Reefer One,” crackled the comms speaker. They all thought she spoke from the relay on the launch ramp, not from the bridge on the reefer itself. She wondered what people would think. Not that it mattered. She’d come to the decision early after Womack and she had realized remote-piloting the damn thing wouldn’t be a feasible option. Not one which would insure one hundred percent success. And one hundred percent success was the lowest she’d go. No room for error when dealing with the Imbers.
After a long wail of siren, the huge cargo hatch slowly slid upward, creating a widening rectangle of pitch black dotted with the occasional star. Despite the many protective layers of armor plates—John had been right, that thing was built like a bunker—she still felt the cold seeping into the bridge. A shiver tightened her nape.
“Reefer One, stand by for launch sequence in five…four…three…”
Frankie gripped the holy-shit handles on either side of the nav console so she wouldn’t be tempted to mess with the automated launch.
“…two…one. Launch activated.”
A series of clacks reverberated along the deck under her feet. Then a godawful grating noise of metal against metal made her grimace as the rails powered up to propel the ship out of the Magellan. Slowly at first then with gathering speed, the rail pulled the reefer forward. Fast. Faster. A grunt left her when the huge hatch swallowed her ship. The violence of the launch lifted her feet off the deck. Hands on the controls again, Frankie leaned forward so she could survey the many consoles. Who knew a damn reefer had so many buttons to worry about?
“Magellan, this is Reefer One. Launch successful. Heading and speed as planned.” Switching to launch-ramp channel, she added, “See you on the other side,” for Womack’s benefit.
Soon, because of the hull thickness, she’d lose communication capability with the Magellan. Already Bentley replied something she barely understood because of the static crackling like sheets of plastic.
She checked her watch. 04:07 glowed acid green in the bridge’s low light. The same color as the orbital pipeline. With any luck, she was going to hit that thing hard enough to make the alien scumbags regret ever having set their metal claws into her planet.
“You saved the day, John.” She wasn’t sure he’d agree though.
Damn, she was already getting cold. Small crafts had never been her thing. She preferred the bigger ones like the Magellan. Quieter ride, warmer interior. Frankie left the controls to go rummaging around in her duffel bag. A sweater should do it. She donned it directly over the coveralls—sexy—then slid back into her seat. John’s seat.
“Dammit.” Her breath rose in coiling ribbons.
Guilt was an impossibly potent venom eating at her.
A poison of her own stock. She could’ve told him and accepted the consequences. She could’ve at least let him know he’d lose his poker partner. His friend. She knew he cared for her. As she did for him. Sometimes, she even wondered if she more than just cared for John O’Shaughnessy. But that facet of the prism she preferred to leave in the dark. If she pretended it wasn’t there, maybe it wouldn’t exist. A coward was what she’d become. A coward who’d let a friend down.
But I’m saving humanity. That should count.
Yeah, right.
Frankie adjusted heading and speed to rendezvous with her target. Gs accumulated and made lead of her legs. The ship turned much faster than she would’ve anticipated given its size and insectoid shape. A complete about-face and she had the reefer heading the right way. Behind her lay everything and everyone else. They’d wait behind natural barriers—planets, asteroid fields. They’d wait for the light show, which should be a clear enough sign that her mission had succeeded. No light show meant failure. Humanity back with its tail between its legs.
She wouldn’t let that happen. No way. She patted her thigh to confirm the detonator was still in her pocket. Not that anything could happen to it. She just wanted to check on it again. Truth be told, she’d keep it in her hand if she dared. But just in case…
On the nav console and its backlit chart table, the Magellan shrunk to another speck on her radar. Just another blue dot among thousands. Of those, about two dozen bore navigational tracks that resembled thin blue spider webs stretched across the screens. Each had a heat signature. In John’s refrigerated reefer, she’d appear on no one’s screens. No blue dot to mark her position or track. Good thing. Because as far as the Imbers were concerned, her ship didn’t exist.
Speaking of which…
In the large bubble tacscreens all along the bridge—that thing had a great view, practically no blind spot—an image seared an imprint of itself onto her retinas. Earth choking under a glowing green mesh. Still a fair distance away but with the enlargement to its max she could see quite a bit. She’d watched old vids where the blue planet—blue, for God’s sake—looked like a pristine glass ball. Not anymore with the Imber overmining and dumping slag into the atmosphere. A second Saturn is what they’d done. Alien scumbags.
A small sound caught her attention. “Christ, don’t tell me there’s a malfunction already.”
Scanning from her seat revealed nothing so she faced the tacscreens again. Not two seconds later, the fine hairs on her nape rose in waves. Frankie whipped around, stunner out of its holster at her hip.
“Holy…”
Her heart must have stopped for two seconds. Minimum.
John stood in the interior hatch. Blood covered one side of his head as he leaned precariously on the jamb. Through matted bangs that reached to his nose, bright blue eyes stared out of a glistening, crims
on face.
“You lying bitch.” He let out a mirthless laugh.
Frankie barely had time to flick the autopilot on and vault out of her seat as he slowly slid along the hatch to land in a heap on the unforgiving deck. “John.”
“Don’t touch me,” he growled. Shoved away from her to lean back against the bulkhead.
She tried to see the source of blood but abandoned her search after he smacked her hand away. His eyes resembled two chips of blue ice. Just as hard. Just as cold. He’d never looked at her this way before. But she wouldn’t squirm. She refused. Her mission was vital. Everyone depended on its success and she’d be damned if anyone—even John—would make her feel bad about it.
“I had to,” she murmured. “You know that.”
“Bullshit.”
“No. Not bullshit. It’s true. Even if I had told you? Then what, huh? Tell me what would’ve happened.”
“Trust would’ve happened. Would’ve kept happening.”
“What, you no longer trust me?”
“No.”
From anyone else, her reaction would’ve been “Oh well.” But from this man… Frankie swallowed hard. “Fair. Now can I look at your damn head?”
“No.”
Gingerly he stood and walked his hands along the bulkhead until he’d reached one of the recessed storage niches. John muttered under his breath as he opened then went through the medical kit, tossed aside what he didn’t need and generally made a mess of things. Gauze and a suture gun in hand, he walked by her to sit at the controls.
“Here, I’ll do it.” She took a step but froze.
He cut a glance over his shoulder. “I told you to leave me the fuck alone. It’s my ship, my bridge, my deck, my blood, my seat, my fucking air.”
The urge to take a strip off him almost overwhelmed her good judgment. After a few deep breaths, she sat half her butt on the edge of the nav chart table, crossed her arms and watched her friend tend to his injuries. Blindly—stubbornly and stupidly—John fingered his skull and seemed to find what he was looking for because he zeroed in on the crown of his head and pressed the tip of the suture gun. The dry little clack of a suture being applied made her wince. A few more followed. Sweat poured down John’s neck and seeped into the collar of his stained T-shirt. Frankie couldn’t take it anymore.
“Don’t,” he snapped.
“You’re going to make it worse. It’s going to infect now.”
“Why do you care, you’re dying anyway, right?”
“Hey.”
“Hey what?” He dropped his hands on his lap, closed his eyes briefly. “I should’ve just let you go.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Twin blue suns seared into her soul when he stared at her.
Guilt, that toxin that had entered her bloodstream since she’d formulated her plan, chose that grand time to make a comeback. In force. Tears welled in her eyes. She angrily rubbed them away with the heel of her hand. In a tiny, selfish part of herself, she was glad John had cared enough to follow her on the reefer. But, at what price? His poor head.
“What happened to your head?”
John sneered. “Ask your boyfriend Womack.”
“Womack isn’t—Womack did this?”
“Yeah, the show must go on. Sneaky little shit.”
“Me or him?”
“Choose.”
Frankie nervously twirled a strand of hair around her index finger. “Okay, we still have time to about-turn and drop you back on the Magellan before the rest of the fleet begins to wonder what happened.”
Numbers rapidly flashed in her head. Time, a precious, precious commodity, was slipping away. The rest of the ships would wait for the sign, which wouldn’t come because the reefer wouldn’t yet be at the rendezvous point. Shit compounded by more shit. They couldn’t mount another attack without the Imbers discovering a pattern. Movements in human ships never went on so close to Earth. The invader had become very territorial. Plus, they wouldn’t have enough fuel for the entire fleet to go back, regroup, and return to Earth. They’d need to dig for more, find other asteroids with the veins they needed. Decades would pass. Kids were getting sick from poor nutrition as it was. Just too damn long. They had to do it now.
“No, we’re not.” He stood, letting the things on his lap just drop to the deck. With an alcohol wipe, he washed his hands and face. “We keep going.”
Her heart did a quick little dance. Tap-tap. “No. Out of the question.” She shook her head as vehemently as she could without causing damage. “No damn way you’re coming with me. Not this time.”
The thought alone chilled her to the bones. John, a lover and bon vivant, dying this way. It contradicted and offended every principle in her. She was in charge. She’d go.
“We’ll turn the reefer—”
“No, we won’t.”
Right on the heels of fear came anger. “It’s not about you, John, dammit. There’s no need for two people to do this thing.”
Frankie meant to walk around him to get at the controls but he barred her way, dwarfed her with his height and palpable fury. But she refused to be cowed and sidestepped to circumvent him. A long arm blocked her access.
On a snarled curse, Frankie planted her palms on his chest and shoved as hard as she could. She knew how much it took to move the tall man. Instead of fighting back, he gripped the front of her sweater—and coveralls underneath—and hoisted her to him. She’d expected a tirade or at the very least one stinging tongue-lashing. Instead he shocked her with a kiss. His mouth landed like knuckles on hers. As if her body had suddenly dispensed with her brain, she seized his T-shirt in two fistfuls. Not to push him away. To pull him to her. John replied in kind. Palms hot and heavy landed on the small of her back and crushed her to him. Against her belly, his erection pressed to make a home.
As soon as contact was made, he abruptly pulled away and released her. John looked as stunned as she felt.
He opened his mouth but no words came out.
Frankie, panting, tried to voice what she knew went on in his head—or she thought she knew… Maybe she didn’t understand the first thing about her friend. “I…I’m—”
“Just drop it.” He stared at the portion of deck between their feet. A symbol of what separated them.
But then again, was there a separation between them? Friendship could bloom into something more, couldn’t it? Had it?
“You can’t stay,” she murmured, stopped when the lump in her throat rose again. “You can’t, okay? Please.”
“I’m staying. Period. It’s my ship and I know what it can do. Have you ever backed that thing into New Ankara’s service docks? They’re twenty-two meters wide. This ship is twenty-one and a half abreast. Plus, this is what friends do for each other, Frankie.” John’s expression turned from pained to mocking. Her old friend was back. She wondered if the aroused man was still in there somewhere. She wanted him to be there.
Selfish, immature, yes, but still…
“Friends,” she repeated in undertones. Her smile must have resembled a grimace more than anything.
John nodded. And here came that corner grin that spelled trouble. God, had she been blind the whole time? All these years? Did he think of her as more than a friend?
“Friends sit on a doomed ship,” he went on, “knowing it’s a stupid plan at best, knowing there are other planets somewhere that could spare a few square kilometers for us. But noooo, we’ll go kill ourselves instead, for the good of humanity. That’s what friendship is. And apparently, it’s a disease that’s about to enter into the terminal stage.”
Frankie couldn’t help a snort of laughter which she quickly repressed. “That’s not funny.”
“It is. You’re just too stubborn to admit I can make you smile whenever the hell I want. Ha. Suck it up, Beaumont.”
“What now?” She couldn’t believe they were going through with this. Both of them… “John, it’s crazy. You can’t stay. I don’t want you to stay.”
&n
bsp; He gave her a penetrating look. “It’s no longer about what you want, is it? It’s about the whole lot of us bipeds gifted with opposing thumbs.” A mean smile pulled her friend’s lips wide. “For what it’s worth, that sneaky little shit Womack got a taste of his own medicine before he put the pipe to my skull.”
“The pipe?”
John slowly worked his left arm and grimaced. “That crunching, it can’t be normal.”
She couldn’t believe Womack had attacked John over the mission. Everything was spiraling out of control. This was supposed to have been a simple plan. Go in, drop the charge, detonate. So what if humanity lost one member. Others would replace her. Bentley would take the Magellan into the fight, Qiu would work the comms. All as it should be. But now this.
“How did you get on the reefer then?”
“Crawling, mostly. Womack hits like a granny. I woke up in the back of my ship and—” His words trailed as he focused on the front tacscreens.
She followed his gaze. There it was. The autopilot had taken them within spitting distance—relatively speaking—of their goal. She’d never personally seen Earth and its moon from so close before and couldn’t help but stare in wonder at what had once been the cradle of humanity. Some said there were still people down there, struggling for survival, just as their brethren did in space. Frankie wasn’t sure about that. How could people survive under the Imbers’ invasion when they mined every continent, every island and hunk of rock? Yet this was what John and she were prepared to die for. A mined-out planet with a pitted moon. But there was an atmosphere down on Earth, with some flora and fauna, with all the space they needed, unlike crowded, disease-infested stations and colonies. They’d build special habitats if the air was too bad, start over. And it was home, dammit.
“Wow,” John breathed.
For her eloquent friend, the fact he could only utter an inarticulate sound when faced with Earth made her smile. Wow, indeed. Her smile disappeared when a few Imber ships crested over the Earth’s curvature on their way to the lunar power plant.
She snarled a curse. “Look at them. Like it’s all theirs.”
“Not for long.”
Metal Reign: An Impulse Power Story Page 4