by Anthology
A big number.
Yes!
“Thanks, Barry. I appreciate it and understand completely.”
***
It took four days to clear just two turrets from the mouth of the first cave. Walt took out the first within seconds of arriving. He did it with what he swore was a purposeful and carefully aimed shot.
The second turret pulverized Jazza’s Cutlass, and they had to tow the wreckage back to Vista Landing for repairs. Jazza herself went home in stasis. She took hits to a shoulder and both of her legs before survival protocols triggered her flight suit and ejected her. Unfortunately, the system didn’t account for proximity to the cavern walls.
Jazza did not rejoin them for the moon mine job.
On the fourth day—running low on patience, ammo and foul language—they finally came up with a solution. It was ugly. It was dangerous. But as they worked deeper into the moon, it was the only thing they found that worked.
“All right, Boomer,” Gavin said, “hold behind that outcropping.”
Boomer’s Avenger crept to a halt beside him. Deep inside the warren of caverns, the moon’s rotation was enough to give them a sense of up and down. Still, holding a relative position inside a small spinning moon was not as easy as one might think. Stabilizing thrusters fired continuously in short, irregular bursts.
Gavin checked his orientation and distance from the walls. He was in place. The tag team system they’d come up with had been working pretty well, using one ship to draw fire while a second swept in to blast each turret. It was tedious and sphincter-tightening work, but the moon was nearly cleared. Only a small handful of tricky defenses remained intact.
“Okay,” Gavin settled his hands on his flight controls. “On my mark.”
He left the mic open and triggered a timer on his navsat. He watched Boomer’s ship ease slowly into the turret’s line of sight to the steady countdown of the timer. Right on cue, Gavin hammered his thrusters and sped into the cave, just as the first blast from the turret struck Boomer’s shields.
Gavin yawed to the left, swinging the nose of his ship until he could see both the turret and Boomer’s ship. The old man’s Avenger bucked under the constant fire. The shields held, but the blast forced the Avenger back out into the tunnel before Gavin could take a shot.
Gavin fired, and the turret’s twin barrels swiveled with such impeccable precision and speed that they looked like identical empty dots. “Oh, sh—” the barrels erupted in a fusillade of crimson light.
Gavin fired again and had no clue if he was anywhere near the mark. The turret’s aim was flawless, however. There was an odd pulling sensation when the cabin lost pressure and his suit pressurized, squeezing around his limbs and chest.
Another barrage hammered into him and he felt the Cutlass crunch ass-backward into the wall of the cavern. The ship rolled, nose pitching wildly to one side. Gavin saw an open blackness of empty space yawn into view. He punched it, hoping he was heading back out into the tunnel and not to his death inside the smugglers’ cave.
Relieved, he saw Boomer’s Avenger flash by beneath him. But dread gripped him again when the walls of the narrow tunnel loomed to fill his entire view. He reversed thrust, hunched tight around the controls and braced for impact.
It was bad.
He hit hard, and the impact sent him careening down the cavern. He tumbled over and over, willing his ship to hold together. When he finally forced himself to release the flight controls, the ship righted itself.
“Holy hells,” Boomer breathed. “Gav? You alive, buddy?”
His chest heaved like he’d been running. “I seem to recall some idiot bitching about this job being boring.”
Walt, exploring a tunnel in another part of the moon, answered, “That sounds like it was directed at me. You two okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. I just got blown up!”
“Simmer down, son,” Boomer said. “I’ve been blown up plenty of times. That was nothin’. I, uh…I don’t think you’re taking another crack at that turret until we get your ship patched up, though.”
“Oh, really? Ya think?” Gavin’s comms flashed on an incoming line. “Hold on, guys. Call coming in.”
Boomer laughed, saying, “They probably heard us planetside and want us to keep the noise down.”
“Very funny. Actually, it’s Dell. Now shut it.” Gavin accepted the incoming line.
“Gav?” He couldn’t tell if Dell sounded scared or angry, maybe both. “We got a problem, babe. Jazza’s out of here. Says she’s taking a ship unless she gets her cut of the turret job before she goes.”
“What? What do you mean ‘out of here’?”
“She’s leaving,” Dell said. “Leaving the company, I mean.”
Walt cut in on the squad channel. “Hey Gav, I’m all finished in here. You want me to come take a look at tha—”
Gavin juggled channels. “Hold on, Walt.” He squinched his eyes closed, sore, frustrated and confused. “Dell. Where’s Jazz going? You mean she’s quitting?”
Boomer kept the chatter going on the squad channel. “Sounds like he’s getting an earful, Walt. Glad she didn’t call me.”
“Tell her Gavin just got blown up.”
“That would improve her day significantly.”
They both laughed.
Gavin spread his hands in an open-armed shrug for no one’s benefit but his own. “Would you please shut the hell up?”
They did. Dell did not. “What did you just say to me?!”
“Not you, babe. Walt and…you know what? Never mind all that. Just tell me again, what’s going on with Jazz?”
His mobiGlas vibrated. Gavin swore silently and balled his fists to keep from shooting something. From within his pressure suit, it was difficult to activate the mobiGlas. He managed it while Dell filled him in on Jazza’s desertion. She was going to look for work with one of the smuggling outfits hidden in the Olympus Pool. Paying work. Blah. Blah. Deserter.
Gavin finally powered on his mobiGlas display. There was a message from a contact marked “unknown,” but Gavin knew exactly who it was from.
“Dell.”
“I tried to talk her out of it, Gav,” Dell sounded close to tears. “I really did.”
“Dell, listen to me.”
“What?”
“Get Jazza back. All right? Do whatever it takes.”
“I’ll try, Gav, but…”
“Whatever it takes, okay? We’re going to need her. We’re going to need everyone and then some.”
“What’s going on, Gavin?”
He keyed his mic to transmit on both channels, “Everybody, listen up. They only got two bids on the Navy contract. We’re the low bid.”
“Is low bad?” Boomer asked.
“Dell,” Gavin said, “have Jazza join us in Oberon. We’re working ’round the clock until we’ve cleared the last few turrets.”
Gavin sat in his damaged Cutlass, cheeks stretched in an unfamiliar grin.
“Guys,” he said, “we just won the Navy job.”
***
“Go on in, Miss Brock.” A lieutenant held the door open for her. “Major Greely and his guest are already inside.”
The major’s guest. How wonderful. Morgan Brock smoothed the front of her pleated skirt and then swept through the doorway into Greely’s conference room. The major and his “guest” stood near the head of the table. Greely was looking more Marine than Navy in his shirt sleeves. The man had arms as thick as most men’s legs.
“Brock. Good of you to come personally. Let me introduce you to Gavin Rhedd, one of the co-owners of Rhedd Alert Security.”
Rhedd was younger than she’d guessed, a handsome man with a sturdy frame. He’d made the curious decision to wear a weathered, civilian flight suit to the meeting. Perhaps he needed to convince everyone that he was, in fact, a pilot. Still, the rig fit him well. He looked uncomfortable but not self-conscious standing beside the granite slab that was Major Greely.
“Pleased t
o meet you, Miss Brock.”
She refused his extended hand and put an end to the pleasantries.
“So you’re the cherry that low-balled my contract.” She made it obvious that it wasn’t a question. “Let me be entirely clear. The termination clause stipulates that I participate in a transition meeting. Let’s not pretend that I’m pleased by the opportunity.”
“Well okay, then,” Greely said. “I suppose that will do by way of introductions. Let’s get started, shall we?” He took a seat at the head of the table and motioned for each of them to sit. “Now, the award and protest periods are over.”
“There will be an appeal filed,” she said.
“I don’t doubt that, Morgan. But my office and Navy SysCom have every reason to believe that the award will be upheld.”
“I’ve invested two years cleaning up the run through Min and Charon,” she said. “And we both know the workload is scheduled to increase dramatically. I’m not handing that over without a fight.”
She stopped when Greely held a hand up, “The UEE wants us to find ways to enfranchise independents in those systems. You want to argue that point, do it with the politicians. But right now, I need a mission brief, and I think we’d all appreciate this meeting moving along quickly.”
Brock let the major win the point. If nothing else, she knew when to pick her battles. There was nothing to be gained from antagonizing him. There were more profitable targets for her ire. Content with the cool tenor of the meeting, she turned her attention to Gavin Rhedd.
“Yes, well,” the young man cleared his throat. His forehead glistened where it met his close-cropped hair. “I’ve read through the, uh…the After Action Reports.” Rhedd swiped through several projections on an old clunker of a mobiGlas. “Every ten days we escort a new shift rotation to the Haven research facility on Tyrol V. But what can you tell me about the security requirements for the staff transfer between the transport ships and Haven?”
The kid didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Maybe her Tyrol contract wasn’t quite the lost cause Major Greely made it out to be. Brock’s smile felt genuine as she started describing the ship-to-settlement transfer process.
This job was going to eat Rhedd Alert Security alive.
***
Min System was dark. In Goss, the jump points flowed with shimmering cascades of color. They boiled the Olympus Pool’s bands of gold, amber and blood-orange in a dazzling display of celestial mystery. Min, on the other hand, was entirely different, and Gavin wondered how many ships and lives Min’s jump gates had claimed before they were successfully charted.
The approach was well marked now. Nav beacons lit a ten-kilometer channel leading six Rhedd Alert escorts and their charge, a Constellation Aquila with UEE designations, to the jump gate. The automated beacons broadcast a steady stream of navsat and transit status data in addition to lighting the visual entry vector.
The gate itself loomed large. It was an empty disc, invisible if not for the faint light from the beacons. That light bent, distorting into the maw of interspace that, if entered correctly, would disgorge them out into the Charon System. Stumbling onto an unknown jump point had to be a terrifying experience. He’d seen images of dark gates, like the ones in Min, when the beacons were offline. Even knowing what to look for in those images, it was difficult to distinguish the subtle smudge that represented a portal through time and space.
“Gate Authority Min,” Gavin read from a scripted authorization request, “this is Rhedd Alert Security, performing in compliance with Naval Systems Command regulations, approaching VFR and in support of UEE research vessel Cassiopeia. Request clearance for transit from Min to Charon and confirmation of the approach.”
They didn’t need the call and response to make the jump to Charon, but their contract required record of specific communications at all jump gates, as well as of the UEE staff transfers at each end of the run.
The gods only knew how many times he and Walt had hopped systems unannounced. In reflection, it probably should have felt strange entering a jump gate with legal tags and without local law breathing down his neck. But times change, and if Gavin got his way, they were changing for the better.
He received the expected challenge and responded with ship IDs that matched the tags for each member of the convoy. Gavin had stumbled over the formal exchanges on the first few missions. No one had complained, but he felt better now that he had a degree of comfort with the cadence and timing of the exchange. Hopefully, that degree of comfort inspired confidence in his new pilots and the UEE scientists aboard the Cassiopeia.
They got their clearance and Gavin sent the order to enter the jump gate. He took point with Jazza, each of them in place along either side of the Aquila. They slid into the gate with a familiar falling sensation. The cockpit seemed to stretch, elongating out and away from him in a rush of sound and color. It felt like someone had set a hook in his insides and pulled, stretching his gut tighter and tighter. Then something snapped and he was reacquainted with the increasingly familiar constellations of Charon space.
“Gate Authority Charon,” he said, “this is Rhedd Alert—”
“Gavin,” Jazza’s voice was crisp. He was already checking his navsat displays when she continued, “We’ve got three ships inbound. Three hundred kilometers. Make that two-fifty! Gods, they’re moving fast.”
“Jazz, take Mei and Rahul to see what our new friends want. Walt, you and Boomer play goalie. If these guys take a run at the Cassiopeia, make them reconsider.”
A chorus of “copy that” erupted on comms and Gavin switched channels to address the UEE crew aboard the transport. “Cassiopeia, this is Red One. Accelerate in line with my mark and do not deviate from course.”
“Contact,” Jazza sounded calm, clinical. “They’ve got three F7 Hornets in a variety of configurations. They’re beat to hell with patchwork armor, but coming in fast.”
“They have any markings or insignia? What are their tags?”
“Nothing I can see through the mismatch of weapons and scrap parts.”
“Look out, they’re firing!” Mei said. “Holy hells, these guys are quick.”
“Gav,” Walt asked, “do we run?”
The After Action Reports from Brock showed a steady decrease in aggressive actions over time. Letting a new pirate outfit establish a foothold at one of their critical jump points seemed like a very bad idea.
“We fight,” he said. “We can’t afford to retake this ground every two weeks if we run scared now.”
“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,” Jazza said. “It’s three-on-three over here, and it seems these guys like to play with their food.”
“Walt,” Gavin said. “Take point. If they have friends, I don’t want to get herded into a trap.”
“Copy that.”
“All right, Jazz. I’m on my way to you.” Gavin pulled up hard, inverted over the Cassiopeia and accelerated toward the jumble of fighters.
Gavin had survived dozens of scraps before starting Rhedd Alert, but always as the aggressor. Being on the defensive was something new. It seemed strange that these crazy bastards were hitting six armed escorts.
“Jazza,” he was a couple hundred clicks out and had a good look at the scrum, “I’m coming up underneath you. Time to make this an unfair fight.”
“These guys are good, Gavin.” She grunted and her Cutlass rolled in a loose corkscrew, putting her behind one of the marauders. She fired and its shields blazed. It pitched, nose down and thrusters reversing, to push up and above Jazza’s ship. The other two marauders swung into position on either side, and the three of them slashed toward Gavin like a knife blade.
He rolled to his port side and tried to accelerate around them. At least they couldn’t all fire on him at once that way. Rahul strafed overhead, pouring fire into one of the Hornets, but the marauders held their formation.
“Jazza, form up on me. Let’s split these bastards up.”
“Got it.”
They met and swept around to rush the trio of mismatched Hornets. The marauders found Mei before he and Jazza were in firing range.
“Ah, hell…”
A barrage of precise bursts from wing-mounted laser cannons tore into Mei’s ship. It ripped entire sections from the hull, and escaping oxygen belched out in a roiling ball of flame.
“Damn it!” Gavin couldn’t see if Mei got out. He and Jazza blasted their way through the marauders’ formation. The Hornets scattered and reformed again behind them. “We’ve got a man down. Walt, we might need your help over here.”
“That’s what you get for staying to fight, Gav. We should have made a run for it.”
“We can talk about ‘shoulda’ later,” he said. “Get back here and…wait. Belay that.”
“They’re running,” Jazza sounded bemused. “Feels like they had us on the ropes, but they’re bugging out.”
Gavin watched thruster trails from the retreating ships. In moments, they winked out of Charon space.
“Cassiopeia is secure,” Walt said. “Are you guys clear?”
Jazza didn’t exactly answer him. “Now what do you think that was all about?”
Gavin’s HUD looked clear. Relieved, he found Mei’s PRB. Everyone was alive and they appeared to be alone on the Charon side of the gate. Walt and the Cassiopeia were nearing the extreme range of his display.
“Walt, hold where you are. Stay sharp and sweep ahead. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they attacked three-on-six.”
“Maybe,” Jazza said, “they knew they’d kick our ass.”
“Or maybe this was a feint,” Gavin said. “Let’s not get caught with our pants down if there are more of them out here. Jazz, you and Rahul watch my back while I get Mei. We’re taking the first shots if they come back through.”
There was a general clamor of agreement. Gavin was beginning to suspect that military comm-chatter was much more sparse and far less democratic than Rhedd Alert’s constant banter. Still, aside from Walt second-guessing his every move, Gavin was proud of the team.
“I wonder if they’re waiting on the other side?” Jazza asked.
Walt was quick to respond. “We are not going through that gate to check.”