Galactic Outlaws (Galaxy's Edge Book 2)

by Nick Cole

  “I remember now.” His voice sounded small and hollow and strangled.

  “Goth Sullus,” Rechs said.

  There was a long moment in which Gex was undoubtedly running through any aces in the hole he might have left to play. Apparently he found none.

  “About that… okay, here’s the actual deal-y deal. Those guys, the guys who’re Brotherhood and working for that dude… they’re all ex-leejes. Ghosts from Nether Ops. Except they’re the ones that got drummed out for some mass murder on Ulori that went bad. Work off a ship called the Siren of Titan. Old fast-attack cutter from some war no one cares about. But it’s real trick and slick if you’re into that sorta thing. So, main guy’s name is Daeth. Daeth Hunda. Real bad. Very bad guy in fact.”

  Gex stopped as though hoping all that might be enough.

  “Last time I ask, Gex. Where is Goth Sullus?”

  Gex shook his head. He put one hand on his hip and wiped his forehead with the other. Rechs knew the man was actually considering shooting it out right there and now rather than telling Rechs what he wanted to know. Both ways would end badly for Gex. It was just a question of how soon.

  “Okay, okay… truth is…” His voice shook. “Like I said, they’re drifters. Not a fixed operation like here.” He threw his hand wide as though he were taking some hard-earned pride in the derelict remains of an old warship. “So exactly where they are… I don’t actually know, my friend. Just know they were crewing for him out of that ship. Got a heads-up, via our internal comms net, that they were headed to Andalore. We always let each other know what we’re up to. If you’re going to pick up their trail, well, then Andalore’s the scene, and that’s all I mean.”

  He slapped his hands together and held them up, indicating he was done.

  Rechs turned and strode toward the Crow. Already the boarding ramp was extending down onto the deck. He circled his fist at the wobanki, and the engines began to spool up for takeoff.

  “Don’t tell Daeth where you heard it,” shouted Gex over the engine’s roar. “That guy’s a real psycho.”

  22

  “And all I’m saying is that the glass sea wasn’t as nice as you made it out to be,” Keel said with a wave of his hand. “It was pretty, but you set the bar a little too high, pal.”

  Ravi shook his head, his eyes narrowed into slits as if Keel had insulted his mother. “You are a very bad judge of beauty.”

  The mention of beauty made Keel think of Leenah. “The princess give you any idea how much longer it would take to get the hyperdrive repaired?” As they’d exited the atmospheric blizzards of Mother Ree’s planet, a hailstone the size of a snub fighter had punched through the Six’s shields and damaged the hyperdrive.

  “Difficult to say.” The comm light blinked. “Lao Pak calls again.”

  “Pass,” Keel announced, as if he were an executive reviewing business deals.

  A short while later, the comm light stopped blinking. “This is odd, indeed,” Ravi said. “This transmission was seventy percent shorter than the average from Lao Pak. I am wondering why it was so short.”

  “Pre-recorded?” Keel ventured.

  “Yes. I am thinking so.”

  “Bring it up.”

  Lao Pak was seated on a makeshift throne—a command chair salvaged from an old Ohio-class battleship. The pirate king began with a foul-mouthed tirade in his native tongue. Keel couldn’t understand much, but he got the gist of it: Lao Pak hadn’t found room in his heart to forgive him again.

  Then Lao Pak composed himself and said, “This message from Admiral. It coded so you can’t see his face. He want Maydoon now.” Lao Pak shifted in his seat, his eyes darting about the room. “You hurry up.”

  The screen darkened, and a black channel recording came up, a silhouette of man, his voice heavily distorted. “I have been made aware that the bounty hunter Wraith has been retained to find the location of the Maydoon family. Instruct Wraith to contact me directly with the location, once it has been acquired. Payment will be deposited upon satisfactory proof of location.” The silhouetted man paused. “I… shall look forward to seeing just who has taken up the name of Wraith.”

  The cockpit lights came up at the end of the recording. “I’m famous,” Keel quipped. “All the scheming admiralty of the Republic are dying to rub shoulders with little old me.”

  “With you?” asked Ravi. “Or with Wraith?”

  Keel waved a hand. “Same person.”

  “Mother Ree was not so sure…”

  Keel frowned. “Mother Ree was a kook.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I wonder who this admiral is.”

  “We have Garret on board,” Ravi pointed out. “Perhaps he will be able to decrypt?”

  “Good idea.” Keel activated the all-ship comm. “Hey, Garret, come into the cockpit, will ya?”

  The coder arrived shortly. “Captain Keel?”

  Keel queued up the admiral’s black channel communication. “Can you decrypt this?”

  Garret smiled. “It’s already decrypted. All these messages run the same cypher ’crypt-strings. When I cracked one, I cracked them all. Hold on.”

  The skinny code slicer rummaged for a datadrive, unrolled it, and affixed the triangular device to Six’s osmosis port. Seconds later, the black silhouette begin to lighten in degrees of gray. It pixelated and added color until the image was as clear as if the admiral were standing in front of them all.

  Keel’s stomach dropped. Of all the people in the galaxy…

  “Hey, I know that guy,” Garret said. “How do I know that guy?” He snapped his fingers. “It was from when I was still in fundament school. He was a big deal. The hero… the hero of Kublar!” The coder smiled as if proud of himself for remembering.

  “Admiral Silas Devers,” Keel said. He got up. “Ravi, I’m gonna put on my armor and tell the admiral that—”

  Chee-chee! Chee-chee!

  The comm flashed a peculiar orange. Ravi brought the call up privately, so he was the only one to hear it. “This is Nightshade… yes.”

  Keel screwed up his face in confusion. “Nightshade? Ravi, who are you—”

  The navigator held up a finger. “Andalore. And you’re sure of this? And Tyrus Rechs just left? Good. From where? Even better. Half payment will be transmitted immediately. The rest will come upon confirmation of information. I do not need to tell you what will happen should… good.”

  Ravi turned to Keel, smiling. “Nightshade is an alias I set up. Information broker with a modest network. Mostly pirates and drunks, but this time a pirate with Beltazar Gex knows where Rechs is headed. Andalore. And we are positioned to get there first, assuming the hyperdrive is fixed in time.”

  “Gex?” Keel crossed his arms. “That scumbag?”

  Ravi shrugged. “A pirate with Gex, though given the particular way he hesitated in an attempt to hide his ridiculous style of speech, I estimate a sixty-two percent likelihood it was Gex himself.”

  Garret injected himself into the conversation. “Hey—I just got a reading on the war bot. Telos.”

  “Yes,” Ravi said. “That is what they informed me. They apparently just made the jump to hyperspace. You can use that knowledge to ascertain whatever delay is in your tracker.”

  “Okay, great!” Garret said. He sounded genuinely excited to do just that. “I just had a thought. Wouldn’t this Gex person know your voice, Ravi? It’s fairly distinctive…”

  “Ah, yes, this is being true. But I spoke to him through a vocal modifier. No problem.”

  “Andalore.” Keel said. The planet was important to that particular sector of Republic space. Some kind of data archive? Keel couldn’t recall. “I’m going to put my armor on and transmit the message so we can get done with this job. Set a course for Andalore as soon as we’re able.”

  Ravi looked at Keel with his large, expressive brown eyes. “You are actually going to share this information with Admiral Devers? I—given what you have shared with me about your past, I would not have calculated f
avorable odds…”

  Keel gave a grim smile. “Then you didn’t factor in the two hundred and fifty million credits.”

  ***

  “Pardon my blithering idiocy, Mr. Rechs, but isn’t Andalore a sector capital? Going there would seem ill-advised for one who is as desperately wanted by the authorities as you are.” KRS-88 clicked and popped.

  “Shut up, Crash,” Prisma said. She was peering over Rechs shoulder, studying every move he made as his hands set up the cockpit for the drop from light speed. Rechs moved his right hand forward and grasped the jump throttle. He moved it back slowly and studied the astrogation panel. When the readout confirmed they’d arrived over the jump coordinates, he pulled the throttle full back, and the streaming star field returned to normal.

  A massive green-and-blue world spun before them. Off to port a small forest moon orbited.

  “Zergagi aru antanku tak?” asked the wobanki as he reset the flight master bus and checked the power systems readouts.

  “We’re sneaking in,” said Rechs, scanning the stars.

  “Won’t they track our transponder?” Prisma asked.

  Rechs was surprised at her knowledge of star flight. But what did he expect? Kids were getting smarter every day.

  “Normally, yes. But until we reach the inner traffic control hub, we’re flashing a stolen mining vessel code. We won’t be required to provide full verification until we’re on final for Andalore.”

  “Oh.” Prisma seemed to accept this answer—but as usual, she quickly had a dozen more follow-up questions. Rechs was learning that she loved to ask questions. And he didn’t so much mind teaching her. Over the course of the jump, he’d decided to begin educating her on blasters, starting with the standard blaster. He’d taught her how to strip it. Clean it. Reassemble it. Calibrate it.

  But not fire it. Not yet. He’d told her only the most basic information about firing a weapon. Including the philosophy that guided every bounty hunter—a philosophy that should guide every person who ever picked up a weapon, in Rechs’s opinion.

  “I know you want to kill this man,” he had told her as she worked under his watchful eye. “I understand that. But you never shoot with your heart, girl. Or your emotions. Those have nothing to do with what’s happening when you decide to point this at someone.”

  He was holding a T19 needle blaster. He’d used it for assassinations. Easy to conceal. Low blast signature. Accurate to twenty meters. No recoil. Long barrel. She needed two hands just to lift it and steady it. But he would show her exercises that would train her arm to be steady, strengthen her so she could hold her sidearm in one hand. And he could tell that one day, if trained right, she’d be able to hold one in each hand. But not yet. She needed to walk before she flew.

  She’s just a little girl, that voice reminded him.

  And:

  “Hang out on the edge. Wait.”

  Those thoughts came and went as he taught her how to clean, maintain, and prepare to fire a killing weapon.

  “You shoot with your mind, Prisma.”

  She’d made a face then. Given a small little girl’s chuckle. It was the first time he’d ever heard her laugh.

  “What?” Rechs asked. His voice was gruff and old compared to her perfect embodiment of youth.

  “My school studies say there’s no such thing as the mind.”

  Rechs thought about that as he took up the weapon she was cleaning and inspected it. It had been fairly scored with carbon. He was making her clean every edge and groove. Her hands were dirty and her face was smudged where she’d wiped away the sweat as she worked. He noticed she often bit her tongue while she concentrated on a particular problem. That was not a good habit.

  He handed the weapon back to her and pointed out an area that needed her attention.

  “And what do you think about that?” he asked.

  “About what?” she asked as once more she began to clean.

  “The mind. Is there one, or is it all brain and meat?”

  “Well… the Council of Reason says it’s only brain. There is no such thing as a mind.”

  “I didn’t ask what they say. I asked you, Prisma. What do you think?”

  “Well…” She applied her cleaning wires to the part he’d pointed out. She bit her tongue as she drew the wire brush back and forth with determination.

  “Breathe,” he reminded her. “You always breathe during a gunfight. You shoot better. Think better. And go on living. If you breathe.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled. He watched her tiny shoulders rise and fall once more. He’d begun to enjoy this little automatic response even she didn’t know about herself. It was a delight to him, and Tyrus Rechs could not remember experiencing many delights in recent years. Or any.

  But he knew once… long ago, very long ago… there had been things that had delighted him. People, too. Seeing her do this automatic little thing even she didn’t know she was doing was like the memory of all those lost good things. Familiar somehow, and Tyrus Rechs did not know why.

  “I think…” She took another deep breath. “I think that sometimes—like when I’m sick and my whole body hurts—my mind says this is okay, Prisma. You’re fine. This won’t last forever. Or when I’m sad, even though nothing is wrong with me. That’s the real me. The inside me that talks to myself even though I feel a certain way. Not my brain. So I never agreed with my official school studies. But I just gave them the answers they wanted to hear because that’s what you have to do in the Republic. Daddy says—”

  And then she stopped. Abruptly. She focused on the part of the weapon he’d given her to clean, yet he suspected she didn’t see it at all. She scrubbed and held her eyes open until the tear that had tried to form dried.

  Rechs waited.

  Then…

  “I think you’re right, Prisma.”

  She looked up at him. Just a little bit of the tear remained.

  He nodded. “That’s your mind, girl. That’s what you shoot with when everything around you is going from bad to worse. Not with your emotions or your reactions. Your mind. You think before you shoot, and during—and then not so much afterwards.”

  Tyrus shifted. He was getting sore from sitting. “The most important part about shooting is the before part. Because once you’ve started shooting you can’t put it back in the bottle, as they used to say. During the shooting, you shoot with your head because you have to see the blast you can’t dodge. You’ve got to shoot that guy who’s going to shoot you… first. Afterwards… you try not to think so much. Because you’ll think about those people you shoot for the rest of your life.”

  After a moment’s silence she gave a small “okay” and continued her work on the needle blaster. Rechs was sure she would remember everything he’d told her—even though it probably didn’t seem important to her now.

  He’d never told anyone any of these things.

  But he’d thought about them.

  ***

  Rechs spotted the mining freighter lifting off from the surface of the forest moon. He pushed the memories of Prisma aside. “Take us in close to that ship,” he ordered the wobanki.

  He swiveled the pilot’s chair around and switched on the active scanner. He nailed the freighter with a high-gain burst of EM detection from the Crow’s radar dish, and a moment later he had a pretty good readout of the schematics. The ship was automated, hopefully. He studied it for a few minutes more and found exactly what he was looking for.

  By now the wobanki had the Crow trailing the massive ore hauler and closing in on her stern. The big ship was on full departure burn as it struggled up and away from the moon. Already it was shifting course for an intercept with Andalore Prime.

  “What are we gonna do?” Prisma asked.

  Rechs tapped in a few settings and moved the throttle forward, flying the Crow right in underneath the belly of the big ore ship. He matched forward speed, spun the Crow on its axis, and angled the bow in close for a descent toward the hull. “We’
ll use this ship for cover and get in underneath local Republican detection. Once we find a site down there to hack into the planetary network, we can figure out if our target has been here or not. The Crow’s pretty fast, so we may have beaten them here.”

  “This seems easy,” Prisma said.

  “It isn’t,” Rechs replied. He hugged the automated freighter for final approach into Andalore’s atmosphere. “And you haven’t gotten to the drop yet. Tell me how easy it is after that, girl.”

  Prisma’s mouth made a small circle. Rechs suspected she was considering what he meant by “the drop.”

  “Strap in, we’re going atmospheric, and we’re gonna pick up a lot of chop this close to the hull.”

  Sure enough, the ship began to rattle and bounce. The wobanki and Rechs fought to hold course just beneath the speeding atmospheric hauler. The wobanki seemed rather used to this sort of thing. Despite the occasional warning alarm and the near-constant earthquake going on all across the flight deck, the cat seemed content to calmly call out the distance-to-hull readings. Rechs focused all his attention on keeping both ships from sudden collision.

  “Nachu twivonki meks,” the wobanki announced.

  “Okay… this is where the fun begins,” Rechs said. “Twenty to drop. Hold on, and don’t throw up. Whatever you do, Prisma, don’t do that… because you’ll clean it up.”

  The ship began to shake even more violently.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Prisma…” KRS-88 whispered. “I’ll clean it up for you.”

  The ship gave a sudden jerk.

  “Is this the drop?” Prisma asked cautiously. Rechs could hear the fear in her voice.

  “Not even close,” Rechs said with a smile. “But don’t worry. I’ve done this once before. It helps if you try to tell yourself you’re having fun.”

  Prisma whispered to KRS-88, who was holding on for dear runtime to the flight deck access walkway. “We’re having fun, Crash.”

  “If you say so, young miss.”

  A maw opened within the freighter, and shining metallic and silver rocks began to drop, destined for some remote part of Andalore.