by Sara King
Metal scraped against metal, protesting.
“It’s the environmentalists who’re the worst, though. They go out there with their vid equipment and journals and document their behavior, trying to prove they’re not a menace. You know how many of those morons’ bones I had to go clean up?”
Metal screeched and caught. Athenais grunted and heaved, sweating, her fingers sliding against metal as she struggled.
“Six. Well, seven if you include that guy and his wife, but when the cats were done with them, we couldn’t tell them apart. We just threw everything in a bag and sent it back to headquarters. Let the guys behind the desk deal with sorting them out. They’re the ones who—”
Athenais let out a triumphant shout and squeezed through.
Behind her, she heard, “Just so you know, every time you interrupt me, I think I’m going to reduce your rations.”
Athenais stormed through the hall like a thunderhead. Rabbit and the colonel’s doors were closed, the sounds of sleep emanating from each.
Good. The tart was hers.
She stepped into the helm in time to hear, “…buy you an ass-hugging miniskirt and a tanktop that shows what little boobs you have. That’ll be your uniform for the next four months, and I’ll hire some thug outta a bar to grope you every chance he gets and then cut your rations every time you sock him.”
Athenais grabbed the back of Fairy’s chair and swung her around. Fairy’s jaw dropped and the comset fell from her stunned hand.
“How did you…”
“Let me get one thing straight, you incompetent twit,” Athenais growled. “I’ve been around longer than the Utopia. I know every trick on and off the books. Rabbit may like you, but you screw with me and you’re gonna wind up space debris. Capiche?”
Fairy nodded, mouth still open.
“Good. Now get out of that chair.”
Fairy jumped out of the seat and stood, wide-eyed, as Athenais sat down and began working with the console.
“What are you doing?”
“Hacking into the system,” Athenais replied.
“Why?”
“I’m taking over the ship.”
“Oh.”
Athenais checked the logs, found the approximate time Rabbit had locked her in her room, and then went to the recovery data and entered the keystroke database. It had every button ever activated on the ship, right down to the first day Retribution first left dock. The database was an obscure tool that salvage teams reviewed in order to discover what had gone wrong before a crash. Athenais found the codes she was looking for and glanced up.
“Got a pen?”
Staring, Fairy handed her one.
Athenais wrote the codes on the back of her hand and stood.
“What’s that mean? D-2, C-1, D-1…?”
She went over to the captain’s panel and entered 8Q579K.
“Password accepted. Greetings, Dallas.”
Athenais snorted and began entering new information.
“New password created, effective immediately. New owner Captain Athenais Owlborne. Personal preferences set.”
She peered at the map of the ship and highlighted Rabbit’s room.
“Localized quarantine now in effect in area 2B. Manual overrides disconnected.”
Athenais slapped the case shut again and handed the pen back to Fairy. Then she sat down in the pilot’s chair and deleted the recovery databases. Satisfied her keystrokes couldn’t be traced, she brought up the autopilot and began examining their route. As she had suspected, their destination lay in the Black. She resumed autopilot and leaned back with a sigh.
“You…changed the codes?”
She peered at Fairy out of the corner of her eye. The young pilot looked stricken, nauseous.
“If you’re gonna puke, go do it in the head. I’d hate to have my ship stinking of vomit.”
Fairy was suddenly shaking all over, her face scarlet. “You’re…you’re…”
“The new captain? Yes, I know.”
“You’re nothing but a selfish whore!” Fairy threw the pen into Athenais’s face and left. As soon as she was gone, Athenais locked the doors behind her, irritated.
Some people were just sore losers.
Ragnar woke with his every fiber screaming, his head a pounding wash of agony. It took several minutes for him to realize through the haze that something was poking him in the ribs.
“Someone’s gonna catch you,” a horrified young face whispered to him. The boy lacked a tattoo, but something about his manner marked him as a Stranger. Seeing Ragnar’s eyes open, the kid grabbed him by the aching fingers and started tugging.
Ragnar groaned and allowed the boy to pull him to his feet. The mere effort of standing left him utterly exhausted. Hungry, his fevered mind thought. Need to eat… He leaned against the vase, waiting for his head to steady.
“You sick?” the boy asked, giving him a squinting look.
“Food,” Ragnar managed. “Need food.”
“Well, you know where the grand hall is,” the boy said, giving him an even more suspicious frown. “They won’t let you in there if you’re sick, though.”
After three yeits in a row, Ragnar’s cells were screaming for sustenance. He moaned and dropped his head, barely able to stand. Remembering his family, he said, “I need a ship.”
“You a dockworker?” the boy asked, frowning. “Wow. Better get moving. Mom says they’re pulling in a shipment of floaters today.” The boy tugged on his hand and Ragnar stumbled.
“You sure you’re okay?” the boy asked. “Your hand feels weird. All cold and mushy. Like seaweed.”
Ragnar pulled his hand out of the boy’s grip, willing it to retain human form. It was a struggle, but he finally regained control. His vision stabilized and he took a staggering step down the hall.
“Where are you going?” the boy cried, catching up with him. “The docks are that way.” The boy shoved him in the opposite direction.
“Thanks,” Ragnar muttered, suppressing the desperate, carnal urge to kill the boy. He started walking and, after watching him a few minutes, the boy went in the other direction. Ragnar continued down the endless hall, glancing out the seaward window. He had to find a ship. He moved to the other side of the hall, keeping his head down when several brightly-armored Warriors passed him. When they were out of sight, he hesitated at a window, trying to get his bearings.
From his vantage on the third story, Ragnar could look across the tiny landmass and see the huge palace wall rising over the opposite horizon, completely circling the island. In between, he saw no shuttle-pads, just crops, trees, and some ponds.
Apparently, all the people of Xenith lived in the huge walls together. Ragnar glanced behind him, trying to judge the size of the corridor. He supposed the roof could be big enough for a shuttle pad. He glanced back out the window, staring up at the top of the huge structure on the opposite end of the island. Forty stories or more.
Ragnar slumped to the window sill, utterly exhausted. His body hadn’t seen that kind of abuse since escaping Millennium. Even then, he had Athenais’s food to rejuvenate him. Here, he had no idea where to find something to eat. In less than ten hours, his body would start eating itself. From that point onward, it would continue to eat itself until Ragnar provided it food.
It was one of the side-effects of the yeit, one of the reasons why he only used it as a last resort. Ragnar glanced up at the roof again. What if he reached the top and there was no ship? How many hours would it waste to search the entire wall? He had to get his priorities straight.
Food. First he needed food. Morgan and Paul could wait.
But, since the entire structure was basically a forty-story circle, he had no idea where to begin. Would these people eat together or separately? Did they live in communal quarters based on class? Were there markets or was it a socialistic society? Were certain levels off-limits to certain classes? Would he have more freedom of movement dressed as a Warrior or a Stranger? Which was more like
ly to be killed for a mistake? He’d seen the Emperor throw the Warrior’s life around. Were all classes like that? Or were some more powerful than others? There were the Priestesses…
But the Priestesses had looked more like prisoners than objects of worship.
Edging on delirium, Ragnar decided that Strangers would have the best access to food. He just had to figure out where they made it.
“No, she didn’t let me out,” Athenais snorted, insulted by the thought. “I let myself out.”
In the com camera, Rabbit went to the door, saw that the console was dead. “Attie…”
“I want an apology, Rabbit,” Athenais said, lazily leaning back in her chair. “I’ve changed the codes. It’s my ship now. I’ve assigned the little tramp cleaning duties. In the kitchen. Where she belongs.”
For the first time in at least a decade, she saw Rabbit’s Buddhist-schooled face draw tight with anger. “Damn it, Attie! This is her ship! I paid for it, and I gave it to her.”
So much for Zen, Athenais thought, amused. “I’m a pirate.” Athenais grinned at him through the com. “What can I say?”
Rabbit narrowed his eyes at her. “We need her help, Attie.”
Athenais laughed outright. “I don’t need her help.”
“Yes you do. She’s a better pilot than you are.”
Athenais’s eyes narrowed. “No. She’s not.”
“She took out forty-one ships on Erriat. The whole fleet. With ground interference. I gave her a two percent chance, even after seeing her fly. Frankly, I thought I was just going to join you in Orplex, because nobody else alive could have done that. Not even you.”
Her hands fisted on the arms of her chair. Was he actually serious? That whole show of awe had been real? Was he delusional? “I could have done it.”
“Face it, Attie. She’s better than you.”
“Do you want me to turn off life support in there?” Athenais growled. “You’re obviously not putting it to good use.”
“What’s Tommy doing?”
“The colonel is comparing maps of the Clover 4 system, looking for the best entry point. We don’t want to give Juno any more warning than we have to, and if we can—”
“There’s a nice debris field nine minutes out,” Rabbit interrupted. “Iron-based rocks approximately a hundred tons and above. Three small planets orbiting between Xenith and the rock field will cover our approach. From there, Xenith itself has three large moons, which should give us a decent place to hide on the final leg of our approach.”
Athenais sniffed. “We’ll let Tommy decide. He’s the expert here. You just run a goddamn bar.”
Rabbit shrugged and moved to the wall under the camera. All she could see was the top of his head.
“What are you doing, Rabbit?”
She heard a crash, followed by a thud and a ripping sound. The camera went dead. Athenais tried to switch views, but the other cameras in 2B were also malfunctioning.
“Damn it, Rabbit! A good closed-circuit costs several thousand credits! I’ll be taking that from your hide, you prick.”
Rabbit ignored her.
“The power’s off, Rabbit,” Athenais said with a sigh. “There’s no way to override.”
She heard some shuffling from the speaker, then nothing.
Athenais got up and threw the comset away in frustration. She strode from the helm and down the hall to the kitchen. Fairy was inside, drawing a bloated figure of a woman in some spilt flour. She was in the process of painstakingly adding buckteeth and warts. Underneath, it had ATHENAIS in capital letters.
And they wonder why I don’t find her mature enough to captain a ship, Athenais thought, watching the girl’s face screw up, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. Athenais continued to stand there as Fairy finished with the warts and started drawing horns.
“Rabbit’s pissing me off,” Athenais eventually interrupted. “You don’t need to make him a meal tonight.”
Fairy squeaked and hastily wiped out the image in the flour.
“I’m gonna be checking the maps with Howlen,” Athenais said. “Finish up in here and go monitor the helm. We’re off the trade routes already, so autopilot’s struggling. Probably gonna fall apart in two minutes or so.”
For once, Fairy did not complain. Athenais knew that the little wench would do anything to get her hands back on the controls. Hell, she might even believe she could somehow regain command of the ship, though Athenais had already made that impossible. Squirrel, maybe, but not some airheaded twit like Fairy. Too predictable.
Athenais left Fairy in the kitchen and went to the navroom to meet the Colonel. Inside, the lamps were off, the only source of light the luminescent planets and rotating rocks surrounding him on the six huge screens. Howlen was squinting at a grid on the console in front of him displaying the mass calculations of every object in the system.
Athenais flipped on the lights. “You’re gonna strain your eyes and I don’t feel like buying you new ones.” She stepped inside and glanced around at the images of Clover and its seventeen orbiting masses and their moons. “So what’s the consensus?”
“It shouldn’t be a difficult entry,” Howlen said. “There are plenty of weak points, places where surveillance wouldn’t pick us up unless they were right on top of us. Considering the sheer amount of territory they’d have to cover, I’d say they don’t have the resources. This isn’t Millennium—it’s a forgotten colony that somehow survived.”
“Then you don’t know Juno,” Athenais said. “Assume she’s got every high-tech gadget out there, and they’re all aimed at her weak spots. She’s as paranoid as a space-rat on crystal meth.”
Howlen gave her an odd look—probably too young to know what meth was, Athenais thought impatiently—and glanced back at his maps. “If that’s the case, there’s probably only one route.”
“Spill it.”
“On the ZY side of the system there’s a debris band. High-density, iron-rich rocks, one hundred tons plus, about nine minutes out. Matches Retribution’s mass composition. If we insert there, we can hop the three planets between it and Xenith and stay under her radar. Xenith has three large moons, so we could jump behind one to get closer.”
“Let me see that.” Athenais sat down and brought up the information on a separate console. “There’s gotta be another way.”
The Colonel got up, scowling. “Why’d you even send me in here if you weren’t going to listen to my advice?”
“You were an officer in the Utopian Space Corps. You should be used to it by now.”
Fuming, the Colonel left.
Athenais bent over the information, concentrating. Rabbit could get screwed. There had to be another way.
A little stunned that the pirate hadn’t docked her pay, Dallas dusted off her hands and hurried to the helm. Her heart-rate cranked up a few beats when she saw the autopilot timer flashing. She sat down and barely had enough time to strap herself in before the ship’s computer reset and she had to haul on the controls to avoid a red giant. Once the ship’s grav system settled down, she heard Athenais cuss at her from the navroom.
Remind you of anyone? Stuart said.
“Give me a break,” Dallas said. “I knew what I was doing. She’s just being irresponsible.”
Of course.
“Please.” Dallas settled into the chair and started fidgeting with the ship’s database. “Did you see what she did back there? I think she got into the recovery records, but I can’t figure out how.”
Don’t worry about it. She removed the ability, I’m sure.
“But this is my ship,” Dallas muttered.
Stuart was silent.
“It’s mine,” she insisted.
Cluster.
“Huh?”
Cluster!
Seeing the rapidly-approaching group of dots, Dallas started and jerked the stick backwards, throwing the ship’s gravity off again.
Down the hall, Athenais shouted, “Goddamn it, Fairy, you keep us flying straigh
t or I’ll wring your scrawny neck, you got me?!”
Dallas shut the doors to the helm.
“This is my ship, Stuart,” Dallas informed him. “You don’t like that, you can find someone else’s brain to live in.”
Sorry. You’re right. It is your ship, absolutely. It’s just had the misfortune of being commandeered by a pirate.
“That’s right.” Dallas made a disgruntled noise and scowled at the grid. She glanced to her right and saw the camera to Rabbit’s room was dark. She tapped the screen, wondering what was going on.
Probably more toothpaste, Stuart said dryly.
Grunting, Dallas returned her attention to the debris grid. She yawned and checked her watch. She had another thirty minutes until the computer could reset itself and she could turn on autopilot. She settled into the routine, making minor adjustments as objects appeared on the screen, light-years in front of her.
Behind her, the doors opened.
Dallas’s hands grasped the controls reflexively. “I’ve got another five minutes!” she cried, taking hold of the stick in a death-grip. “Go take a crap or something, you bitter old leprechaun.”
“You mind moving a moment, Dallas?”
Dallas’s jaw dropped and she turned. “Rabbit?”
The wiry little man was cut and bleeding in multiple places, and generally looked like he’d squeezed through a meat-grinder. Holding his head, he said, “Quicker would be better, in this case.”
Her mouth still open in shock, Dallas hopped up. “She let you out? She said she was gonna keep you in there for another couple weeks.”
“Attie just officially pissed me off,” Rabbit said. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like a few minutes to concentrate.”
“Uh, sure,” Dallas said, stepping back.
Rabbit made minor adjustments to the trajectory to avoid the tail end of a storm system and opened up the ship’s files. His fingers darted across the keys, rattling through the directories, entering access codes, overriding controls, changing passwords. In three minutes, he leaned back and looked up at her. “Would you mind placing your thumb on the screen, Dallas? First the left, then the right.”