Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  Nobody moved. I wanted to cry. Fay had been right. I’d unleashed too much chaos to control.

  Before I could finish sighing, a short woman ran for the door, long brown braid flapping on her back. The rest of the mob broke with her. Somewhat ingloriously, Pete, Shelby, and I squeezed into the hall behind them.

  “Any trouble ahead?” I asked Fay.

  “Probably. This is turning into one big mess.”

  I needn’t have worried. Low-key though this place was supposed to be, being imprisoned in any form fills you with a steady drip of wrath, and with so little else to occupy your attention, all you can do is churn and churn until that emotion hardens into thick and salty wrath-butter, which the prisoners spread across their former captors with howls of joyous rage. Our pace barely slowed, but by the time the mob had moved on, revealing the prone bodies of four bloodied men, I wasn’t sure any of them were still alive.

  “What’s happening?” Fay said.

  “Sudden redistribution of power,” I evaded.

  The prisoners broke into a straight run. We were carried along with them, an undammed river sweeping through the hallway, the reception area, and the deserted security station, where the women paused, briefly, to pound it into splinters. Out in the street, several of the escapees peeled off their jumpsuits and ran naked into the city.

  “They sew tracking pins into our clothes,” Shelby said, as if that’s what I was thinking about just then.

  A mounting crowd of prisoners and gawkers clogged the narrow street, a hooting nudist maelstrom. Baxter waited behind the wheel of an open cart. We piled in and he peeled out, roostertailing dust.

  “Let’s see CRS or HemiCo make any sense of that,” I said.

  “I’m going to strip.” Shelby gave me the owl-eyes. “I’m telling you that so you can turn away.”

  Baxter swung around a corner. Clothing rustled as Shelby wriggled in the bed of the cart. A white jumpsuit fluttered past me, tumbling in our wake. Soft skin mashed into my back.

  “There’s one more pin in my wrist,” Shelby said, changed into breezy Martian shorts and a baggy, very unMartian t-shirt. She nudged a tiny gray nub just beneath the skin of her left wrist, smaller than a grain of rice.

  “Let the robot do it,” Pete said.

  “I’m driving,” Baxter said flatly. We passed under the shadow of an intradome tunnel, then reemerged into reddish sunlight.

  I sucked my teeth. “Anyone think to bring a knife?”

  Pete gave me a “Don’t be a fool” look, then pulled a pen-like object from under his shirt. Matte black, shaped from a single piece of hardened carbon, the knife was terribly strong and equally sharp.

  “Hold still,” I told Shelby. Baxter cut around oblivious pedestrians, swaying the cart and jolting the knife.

  “If I lose a hand, I’m taking one of yours.” She squeezed her eyes shut. I held her wrist and hovered the knife over the gray nub embedded beneath her skin.

  “Shouldn’t we pull over?” Pete said the moment after I touched the blade against her skin, parting it like wrapping paper. The cart plopped into a pothole and I yanked the knife away. Blood welled from the small, clean cut. Shelby pinched the wound with her fingernails. The tracking pin skittered on the cart’s floor. She mumbled something obscene, leaned down, and flicked the pin out the side of the cart.

  “Poof,” Pete said. “Invisible.”

  With the surgery complete, Baxter turned hard, beelining for the port.

  “What’s going on out there?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” Fay said. “They shunted me out of their comm lines. I’m like a man with his ear pressed against his neighbor’s wall.”

  We tore through the streets, dodging foot traffic, bikes, other carts, and missile-sleek minicars. All told, we’d spent six or seven minutes inside the CRS facility, another ten on the cart. You couldn’t fly through New Houston. There was no superspeed tube network underneath it. Someone had tipped CRS to our scheme, but judging by their confused response, that intel had arrived at the same time we did.

  Feeling downright Baxtery, I suspected HemiCo’s bugs had betrayed us. Could be they’d just now cracked Fay’s encryption. Or, more sinisterly, they’d waited to feed CRS our plans until we’d committed to their execution, hoping our misdeeds would take us out of the picture without getting their own hands dirty. Whatever the case, CRS’d had twenty minutes to mount a response. HemiCo’d had an unknown amount of advance notice. Potentially enough to have a team waiting to snag us at the spaceport.

  “How’s Yuni doing?” I said, referring to the indie pilot we’d hired to take us up to rendezvous with Fay in orbit.

  “Unmolested,” Fay said a few seconds later.

  I eased back in my seat. Another half mile, according to the constantly updating dashboard map, and we’d reach the port. Our shuttle could launch as soon as the hatch shut behind us. Once airborne, we’d be virtually impossible to catch.

  We plunged beneath the doors that would take us to the final dome before the spaceport. A massive clunk rang through the tunnel.

  “What’s that?” I craned around. A cart shot through the doors behind us. Doors which, impossibly, were drifting closed. “We’re being trapped!”

  We crossed the portside doors. Another clank rattled the air. The other cart dodged around a dawdling bike, humming angrily. A strip of pavement led straight to the port built into the far wall of the final bubble. Anonymous men in dark armor clung to the side rails of the other cart. Rifles were slung from their necks. The cart swung wide around us, outpacing us toward the spaceport. Its doors narrowed.

  Baxter cleared his throat. “Frontier. Plan D?”

  “Still available.”

  “Seems prudent.” Baxter popped open a dashboard panel, spilling bandages, a disposable omni, and a half dozen transparent, floppy sheets. A little larger than an open hand, these had small canisters attached to their ends. He held one out, keeping a hand on the wheel. “Anyone who needs to breathe should smush one of these on her or his face now.”

  I grabbed a mask and snugged its edges against my skin. My ears popped. The cart of armed men wheeled in front of the spaceport entrance. Troops hopped out to shepherd onlookers inside the building. Others knelt in front of their vehicle, training their arms on us.

  “Buckle up and get down,” Baxter said. He cut a sharp turn toward the blank dome wall. A seam appeared around a rectangle of retracting plass.

  “Is that a door?” Shelby said, her disbelief unmuffled by her breathing mask. “Like, to open Mars?”

  “Did you know this Plan D?” Pete said.

  I shook my head hard. “What the hell’s happening, Baxter?”

  “The chance we’d have to use this was too small to risk upsetting you,” Fay said.

  Dust and scraps of trash tumbled toward the emergency door revealing itself two hundred feet away. The bubble’s air whooshed into the lesser pressure of Mars’ native air, obscuring the doorway behind a swirling cloud of debris. Through the brown-orange haze, I couldn’t tell if it would be wide enough for us to pass through.

  “But there was enough of a chance that you came up with this plan,” I said.

  Fay sniffed. “I don’t like being surprised.”

  “You hypocrite,” I said, boiling over with fear and frustration and hope and exhilaration.

  The soldiers watched us turn away and scurried to get back on board their cart. We hurtled into the cloud of dust around the emergency door. Unseen objects rapped into the indomitable plass wall ahead of us.

  “Those idiots are shooting at us!” I screeched. “Inside a dome!”

  Baxter leaned into the wheel. We shot through the gap. If I’d reached out, the door’s transparent edge would have shorn my arm off.

  Bitter Martian air battered our faces and probed icy claws under our clothes. The cart bounced over a rocky plain. To our right, ships and shuttles rested on tarmacs and landing pads. Yuni’s vessel sat far from the others, a dingy finger
of carbon with almost no wings at all. A ladder led up to a dark hole in its side. We roared toward the ship.

  When we were fifty yards away, a torrent of dust and smoke tore across the ship, frothing madly in the thin air and low grav. Baxter slammed the brakes, yanking us against the cart’s seatbelts. Inside the dust cloud, an oversized Veetle touched its rails to the ground. The dust thinned. A door painted with the crimson crescent moon of the HemiCo logo swung up. Half a dozen men jumped to the orange soil.

  “Hands up!” The black-suited soldier’s voice was unnaturally faint in the Martian atmosphere. “Get out of the cart!”

  “That isn’t fair!” I said.

  Baxter put up his hands. “Frontier Assessment.”

  “Ready,” Fay said.

  Baxter nodded to us. “Get out the other side of the cart. Be ready to drop down on your face.”

  Slowly, I popped the far-facing door, raised my hands, and hopped down. The three others followed. Twenty yards away, the lead soldier shouldered his gun. His comrades continued to aim theirs at our chests.

  Fay’s voice was cold and sharp as starlight. “Drop and hold still.”

  I dropped next to the cart. Gunfire thunked into its side, rocking it. I screamed. I could see the soldiers through the foot-high gap between the ground and the cart’s chassis. One of them noticed me, took aim.

  A column of rosy light enshrouded the soldiers.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Heat washed over my face. My guts jolted; an explosion boomed across Mars’ surface. Shrapnel pinged the other side of the cart. Dust rolled over us in an orange wave.

  A while later, once my senses were halfway restored, I stood and waved at the smoky air. A perfectly round, black circle had been superimposed over the twenty feet of earth where the soldiers had stood.

  I blinked. Small chunks of debris hailed to the ground. I tipped back my face, trying to catch the glint of the Frontier Assessment high in the sky. A bite-sized chunk of flash-broiled meat plopped onto my upturned mask.

  “Where did that come from?” Pete said, brushing furiously at a dark stain on his shirtfront.

  Fay clucked the tongue it didn’t have. “Where do you think?”

  “You’re way up in space,” I said into my mike. “You could have killed us!”

  “Not likely.”

  “Oh my God.” Shelby hugged herself, shivering. On the horizon, three white contrails streaked into the sky.

  “I suggest you quit gaping and board the shuttle,” Fay said. “It’s time to get the hell off Mars.”

  Pedestrians swarmed everywhere. Somewhere among those confused and swirling people were company men, and if they found the two AI, it would be as if they’d never existed at all. At the bars, Baxter was woefully out of his element. He quickly resorted to the blunt tactic of identifying a drunk patron, buying him or her another drink, and simply asking if they knew anyone who made IDs.

  A curious phenomenon emerged: he and Arthur agreed the vast majority of the people they queried knew absolutely nothing about fake IDs, yet every single one of them had an opinion as to how Baxter should pursue his illicit deed, suggesting other bars, a photography studio two bubbles over, a novelty store down the block.

  Baxter thanked them and moved on. His nerves began to fray. Each minute they spent in New Houston brought them one minute closer to capture—and, he knew, to destruction.

  10

  The shuttle swayed off the ground and tipped its nose to the sky, enveloped in simmering folds of dust and smoke. The engines bawled, rattling the cabin. We shot up from an initial burn height so low it broke every law of God and man. An angry hand pressed us into the foamform seats. Through the porthole window, Mars fell away from us.

  “Everyone okay?” Fay said.

  “Minor abrasions to the biological contingent,” Baxter said. “And you?”

  “I don’t know if you know this, but missiles hurt! We’ll be limping home.”

  Shelby pressed her face against a porthole. “Where’s home?”

  Baxter smiled. “The Belt.”

  “The Belt?” she squawked. “Everyone who goes to the Belt dies!”

  “No they don’t!” Fay said. “Well, not all of them. Just the ones who try to hurt us. We simply disable the others.”

  “Where they float in space until they die,” I said.

  Baxter rolled his eyes. “Only if they’re from HemiCo.”

  To my right, the United Mars Orbital hung above the planet’s atmosphere, color-coded navigational lights winking along the spokes of its numerous ports, which varied in size to accommodate everything from personal shuttles to interplanetary container ships. Every port was attached to the hub of the main terminal, giving the UMO the irregular shape of an overcaffeinated spider’s web, or an early and hastily discarded prototype of the wheel.

  “You know,” Shelby said, “this is pretty goddamn boneheaded.”

  Baxter shrugged. “It was Rob’s idea.”

  “It’s less chaotic than it looks,” Fay said petulantly. “You’ll be onboard within nine minutes.”

  She ran her hands through the stringy hair at her temples. “Olympian Atomics was willing to throw in with HemiCo to keep me out of the negotiations. How will they react when I show up at the table?”

  “Civilly,” Baxter said. “Because if they’re rude, Fay will melt them from orbit.”

  Fay sputtered. “No I won’t!”

  “They don’t know about your silly scruples. The threat of force will convince them to play fair.”

  The pressure of acceleration eased from my chest. Minutes later, it disappeared completely; my straps kept me tight to my chair, but my arms and legs sprung away at the slightest twitch. Shelby’s blond hair rose and expanded like a baking loaf of hair-bread. The shuttle flipped over from nose to tail, stars wheeling past the portholes, and kicked in its engines, decelerating. Shelby’s hair flopped back onto her shoulders. The invisible hand pulled me back into my seat.

  “And if you look out the cabin to your right,” Yuni’s voice oozed through the speakers, “you will be able to see the Frontier Assessment on our first and final approach.”

  I strained against the plass and saw nothing more than what any idiot sees when he points his face up at night.

  “Unless you’re the galaxy,” I said, “I don’t see a damn thing.”

  Fay whistled an alien tune through our earpieces. A ship snapped into the upper frame of the porthole. Its long black body tapered gently. A smaller, outrigger-like structure paralleled the main body from just above the tail end to a little past its midsection.

  “Hi,” Fay said.

  “You look gorgeous,” Pete said.

  If a voice could blush, Fay’s did. “Thanks! I helped with the design.”

  The cabin hushed as we pulled closer. Near Fay’s tail, a black wing occluded the stars. Its back edge was razor-straight; the front edge curved like an exponential graph. A smaller copy extended from the outrigger. The sharp tip of each wing impaled a featureless ball of matter—engines? Moments after we grew close enough to glimpse a skein of lines connecting the body to the outrigger, the shuttle realigned itself again, and Fay slipped beyond the window.

  Gravity faded, ceased. The shuttle rocked gently. Muffled whirs filtered through the cabin. Yuni drifted from the cockpit and caught himself on the rungs lining the ceiling. Crablike, arms and legs flattened against the ceiling, he advanced to a control pad at the shuttle rear, fiddled with it, and then, with an oxygenated sigh, popped a topside hatch.

  “You should probably hurry,” Fay suggested.

  Baxter bounced out of his seat at a perfect angle to the airlock. I gave a soft push and crashed into the ceiling, scrabbling for a handle. Once I’d stabilized, Shelby grabbed my leg and climbed me like a monkey. Pete followed suit. I trailed them into the poorly lit airlock, Yuni floating behind me.

  “Abandoning your ship?” I said.

  “New Houston’s a little hot for me right now,” he said. “Bax
ter promised to take me back soon as he can.”

  “If a promise were a gun, Baxter wouldn’t know the butt from the end that puts the holes in you.”

  Past the airlock, five white spheres hung in midair, sporting handles like bowling bags. A fist-sized hole yawned from each sphere. Baxter grabbed one and stuffed his hand inside.

  “The floaterballs will take us to the flight deck,” he said. “The control’s intuitive, unless your brain is wired badly, in which case you will probably hurt yourself. Just move your hand the direction you want to go.”

  I slid my hand into the rubbery glove concealed inside the floaterball. Baxter gripped the handle with his free hand and straightened his ball-hand in front of him, resembling a club-fisted Superman. He pulled forward with a low hiss. I pushed my hand into the glove and was jerked after him.

  “Please be seated,” Fay said. “It’s about to get bumpy.”

  Baxter led the way through featureless halls. The screen room had been furnished with a half dozen recliner-sized objects shaped somewhere between a fancy coffee mug and the mouth of a daffodil. Baxter hovered over one and lowered himself into its bowl until he was engulfed up to his head. The chair convulsed, sucking tight, the vague bumps of his arms and knees showing through the shiny black material. I glared at the corner of the room, guided the floaterball over the open mouth of a seat, legs dangling, and descended, arms stiff to provide resistance against the lack of gravity.

  Warm, dry, blubbery material folded over me. It was like being swallowed by a dehydrated anteater. The seat convulsed, hugging me toes to neck with a steady but not unpleasant pressure. A pillowed rest cupped the back of my head, supporting me beneath the jaw and over my crown.

  “This is somehow as I always imagined God’s love,” Pete said.

  “Okay,” Fay said. “Off we go.”