by King, Sara
“Yeah, to Hell with that,” Corey said. “South Fork and Thirtymile have three hundred people, tops. A couple dozen guys with guns show up…word’ll spread. Silver City’s on the other side of the planet, and big enough to get lost in. You’re taking us there.”
Magali’s not gonna survive that long, Joel thought. “What about them?” he asked, gesturing to the eggers on the ground. “Nephyrs are gonna find them if we don’t get them some help.”
Corey laughed. “Good. It’ll give the Nephyrs a distraction.”
A distraction. Joel remembered saying similar things, in his youth. He would make a great smuggler, Joel thought, disgusted.
Joel stared at the console in front of him. Magali was still back there, and the Coalition was closing in. If he took them all the way to Silver City, none of the eggers of Yolk Factory 14 would be there when he got back. They would be back in the camp, to be lined up, condemned, and murdered as traitors to the Coalition.
“I’m the pilot,” Joel said, “And I’m taking you to South Fork.” He reached for the console.
The egger behind him grabbed him by his chin and hauled upward, until Joel’s neck felt like it was about to break. The man’s rifle was suddenly pressed against his cheek. “We ain’t givin’ you that option, Runaway,” the wan-faced egger said softly. “You take us where we wanna go or your brains are gonna start bubbling.”
Joel focused on the cold metal barrel digging into his cheek, then he looked back up at grinning man behind it. Softly, he said, “Honor is one of the fastest, most customized atmo-jumping ships ever brought this far into the Outer Bounds.”
The man jammed the rifle deeper into his cheekbone. “So?”
“So,” Joel said, “It’s a standard 450-TAG fitted with enough boosters and frame support to hit Mach 5 in ten seconds. There’s maybe three people on the whole planet who can fly it, and one of them is sitting in this chair. You kill me and you’re gonna have a hell of a time going anywhere, much less out of Nephyr search-range.”
The idiot grinned at him. “Guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
Joel narrowed his eyes. “Guess we will.”
The man released him. Gesturing with his rifle, he said, “Get us to Silver City without any more lip and maybe we won’t sell this fancy scrap heap to the highest bidder when we get there.”
Joel leaned forward in his restraints, pressed unnaturally toward the console by the gun that was once again jammed against his brainstem. When he didn’t move, the egger behind him said, “Now, Runaway.”
“Silver City, huh?” Joel said. Silver City was a good choice. The Coalition would never look there. It was where Joel would go, if he were looking to disappear.
Which he was, wasn’t he? He’d done everything he said he would do. He’d spent hours ferrying eggers away from that place. He had to think about himself, now.
…Didn’t he?
“You gonna get this thing movin’ or I need to jump-start your brain?” The gun tapped him again. Tap. Tap.
“I’m thinking,” Joel muttered.
“Ain’t much to think about,” the egger said. “You take us where we want to go and you get to live.”
Joel looked at the controls and saw Magali’s face, agonized and tear-stricken, huddled against the wall of a cave, her hands still shaking from using the gun that had saved his life. He saw her spill her life’s story, confident he couldn’t understand a word.
Then he saw the Nephyrs get her. Joel squeezed his eyes shut, forcing that image from his mind.
Tap, tap, tap.
The barrel of the gun brought him back to the present.
You are a smuggler, Joel thought. A smuggler can’t care about the sheep.
Joel put both hands on the accelerator. Honor started picking up speed, and the eggers on the ground quickly passed out of visible range.
Then, Magali isn’t a sheep.
And, right then, Joel knew he had to save her. He started gaining altitude, putting more distance between themselves and the abandoned eggers on the ground. He casually switched off the inertial dampeners.
“Now, ain’t that better? Everybody wins.” Behind him, the man had relaxed, lowering the gun from Joel’s head. “See? We might even let you keep your—”
The man’s words were cut off when Joel jammed the forward power as far forward as it would go. The ship’s engines screamed joyously, and suddenly Joel was being slammed into the back of his chair with all the weight of a thousand-pound man. The eggers fell to the back, howling in surprise.
“Drop your weapons,” Joel snapped over his shoulder. “Right now.”
“Stop it!” Corey cried. “Now, smuggler!” Joel heard the sizzling crackle of an energy beam hitting the wall near the floor. Joel’s heart skipped and a spike of adrenaline sizzled in painful arcs through his chest as he imagined what had been damaged.
“Drop it!” Joel screamed.
“Now!” the man screamed. The gun fired again. A bolt tore through along the floor beside Joel’s foot. Joel flinched. He could think of at least twelve places in the cockpit where an energy beam, if triggered in the right spot, could kill them all. His hands tightened on the controls.
Joel hadn’t wanted to do it this way, but the moron wasn’t giving him a choice.
Before the man could fire off another shot, Joel threw the ship into a downward plunge, making his gut roil as his body started to float, then abruptly pulled an arc, hitting positive Gs, crushing the eggers back to the floor under their own weight, then started to spin. Behind him, he heard people scream as they tumbled against the walls like bingo balls inside a mixing basket.
Sorry, he thought, straining to keep conscious through the added weight of his body against the chair. He hadn’t flown in three years, so he wasn’t sure how much he could take anymore. For the average untrained, unaugmented pilot, it was seven to eight Gs. Joel was praying he could handle more than that.
Ideally, Joel would have put his passengers to sleep, but he wasn’t sure he could withstand what they could not. Joel had the training, but his ships had always been advanced enough to compensate for at least some of the added pressure, giving him no real advantage over the eggers. Even twenty years ago, when he had been flying for the Coalition, his body had been cushioned in the most advanced inertial-dampening fields available.
Which meant he was in for a hell of a ride.
Joel cut his spin, then immediately pulled up and shot skyward, nose vertical, then threw the ship into a second, more violent spin. In the back, men were screaming, now. He winced, knowing they were breaking bones, knowing he didn’t have time to do it gently if he wanted to help Magali and the other eggers.
The first thing I need to do once I get Magali, Joel thought, as he pulled them out of the upward climb at the dark, purplish edge of the stratosphere, flipped the ship in an arc, and dove straight down, superheated atmospheric plasma blotting out his view of the ground through his viewfinder. Is get someone to take out my lifeline.
Joel’s ship had built-in signal scramblers, in case his merchandise ever got fitted with a government tracking device. That meant, as long as he stayed within twenty feet of his ship and his ship stayed powered, the Coalition wouldn’t be able to pin his location to anything closer than a two-thousand-kilometer-wide radius.
Which, if what Magali had said was true and there were dead Nephyrs at the base of that cliff, was probably the only reason he wasn’t a drooling vegetable.
Even in the ship, the moment he went back into range of the camp computer, he was taking a big risk. He had been out of the loop for three years… Who knew what kinds of new tracking technology the Coalition had developed in those years? And who knew whether or not Martin had kept his own technology up-to-date. So much in the smuggling world depended on up-to-date tech…
Joel dragged the ship through the nadir of its latest arc at about a quarter its normal atmospheric power, knowing that full power without inertial dampeners would kill them all. As it was, he w
as feeling dangerously light-headed, with all the blood of his body rushing to his brain. Much more pressure and one of those teeny blood-vessels would develop an embolism—which Joel knew from experience was all-too-often the death for a good smuggler, much more common than the firing squad.
Then he was through the nadir and building upward speed, the G’s once again tugging the blood from his brain, leaving his vision feeling narrow and his head light.
Just hold on, Joey-baby, he thought, clamping down his chest and abdomen as hard as it could go, emptying his lungs in a scream as he tried to keep the blood where it belonged. Just hold on…
He brought the ship out of the arc and leveled it out. Behind him, he the ship echoed with every beat of his heart. He tentatively glanced over his shoulder.
The three eggers in the cockpit with him were lying in various, bloody angles of disarray.
Joel brought the ship to the ground and got out of his harness. He was advancing on the eggers, reaching for the closest discarded weapon, when Corey opened his eyes.
There was a moment where their eyes met, then Joel realized Corey had the gun aimed at his chest.
“Fucking…smuggler.”
The man pulled the trigger.
A sudden burning in the right side of his chest made Joel blink. A microsecond later, the burning went numb. Then the flesh around it began to heat and heat, until it was an unbearable searing agony and he could feel the sickening feeling of his own flesh bubbling in his chest. He looked down, saw the air escaping from his lung, hissing between the charred flesh between his ribs, felt the awful pressure in his ribcage as the fleshy bag collapsed.
On the floor, the egger was chuckling, picking himself off the floor. “Thought you got us didn’t you, smuggler? Thought you—”
Joel kicked him in the nuts. Then he kicked him again and again, until he stayed down. He was gasping, now, his body struggling for air. The edges of his vision were waffling between red and black.
Picking up the egger’s gun, he collapsed with his back propped up against the console, struggling just to stay conscious. He watched the eggers sleep, his mind drifting at the edge of the warm envelope of the void.
Aanaho, Joel, he thought, What did you get yourself into?
When the first eggers woke, Joel had to strain to produce enough air to talk and stay conscious at the same time. “Grab your friends,” he said, making sure they saw his gun, “And get off my ship.”
The eggers eyed him warily, like a housecat that had suddenly gone feral.
“Now,” Joel said.
They obeyed. Joel watched them, dragging men and guns off the deck, into the swamp beyond. Joel let them take the guns. He couldn’t have found the breath to stop them, anyway. It was all he could do just to keep his eyes open.
I need help, Joel thought. Aanaho, I need a doctor.
But where could he go? The doctors who weren’t under Geo’s thumb were gonna be earning their paycheck from Coalition coffers.
Then he had a more disturbing thought: I can’t outfly Coalition like this. His fingers, ears, even his bones were tingling. Every breath left a sucking sound in his chest, as blood began to fill the cavity. His mind, already feverish from the festering leg-wound, began to drift in and out of consciousness.
Shit, Joel thought. Shit, shit.
Nanostrip wasn’t going to be enough. Not for this. He needed a surgeon, and fast. One that wouldn’t rat him out to Geo or hand him over to the Coalition.
As the last eggers were dragging the last of their friends off his deck, Joel climbed into the pilot’s seat and locked the doors behind him. He latched himself into place, then leaned against the restraints, panting, feeling dizzy.
Deaddrunk, he thought. Landborn’s place.
Chapter 38
Playing TAG
“Patrick, on the Liberty, you copy? Base just called me. They just had an unidentified ship land at the port,” Tatiana heard the woman on the radio say. “Something snazzy. Not responding to hails.”
Tatiana flipped open the com. “Pat and Miles are sleeping. Who are you and what’s the problem?”
The radio was dead silent for a good minute and a half. Then, “You’re that cyborg bitch, ain’t ya?”
Tatiana frowned, recognizing the voice from somewhere. “Jeanne?”
“I ever see you again, coaler, and I’m gonna add your teeth to my necklace.”
Tatiana remembered the ring of molars the woman had worn around her neck. She had thought it looked silly. “That’s nice,” she said. “But like I said, Pat and Miles are sleeping. You want to talk to them, you gonna have to convince me it’s important.”
“You let me talk to them, bitch, or I’m going to strip you down for parts. My composter could use an overhaul.”
“My coordinates are 39.04771 south, 68.99057 west. Bring it on.” Tatiana flipped the com off and went back to her romance novel.
In her idle inspection of the ship earlier that morning, Tatiana had found the brick of brain-candy under the greasy footspace where someone had left it as an impact-buffer between the radar unit and its oversized housing, and had been boredly skimming through the grime-stained pages ever since. The plot totally wasn’t doing it for her. The man, a beefy deep-space captain who had rescued the feisty-yet-fragile maiden from a horrid life of entertaining pirates, was a dweeb. He kept writing poems and buying her roses at every port. Roses?!?!
Not only that, but Tatiana was already three quarters of the way through the book and no sex scene. What the Hell?
Bored, Tatiana began to skim. She found the sex and slowed. The setup was picture-perfect. Candlelight. Champagne. Oils. More poems. The damaged heroine tentatively opening up, allowing the diligent captain into her heart, finally professing her own undying love as they listened to classical music on the ship’s audio system…
No sex.
She could not believe it. She stared at the final page for a full minute. After all that, she totally could not believe it.
Tatiana gave a disgusted scream, ripped the book in half, and hurled it across the room. “I wasted two hours on you!” she shouted. “Two hours! Damned piece of shit.”
From the door, Milar chuckled. “That’s why I was using it to cushion my radar unit.”
“Find another,” Tatiana growled. “I’m using that one to wipe my ass.” Then she jerked. “You read romance novels?”
Milar froze with a hunted look. “No.”
“And what the Hell is up with your buddy over there?” Tatiana demanded, jerking her thumb at the com system. “She threatened to add my teeth to her necklace.”
Milar frowned. “Jeanne called you?”
“Yeah, Jeanne. Her. She’s a bitch.”
“She’s a dangerous bitch,” Milar said, slipping past her to sit in the copilot seat. Reaching for the com, he said, “When did she call?”
Tatiana yawned. “I don’t know. Half an hour ago? Twenty minutes?”
Milar had no sooner flipped the com open than a sleek, gleaming warship dropped into the weeds ahead of them. A moment later, the hatch opened and a woman stormed out, a gun in one fist.
“Oh shit,” Milar said. He gave Tatiana a worried look. “You gave her our coordinates?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why, wasn’t I supposed to?”
Milar winced and headed for the door. “Not yet,” he said. “Every soul in Deaddrunk still wants to see you strung up by your nodes.”
“That’s impossible,” Tatiana snorted.
Milar gave her a long look that told her it was, indeed, possible. She swallowed. “Oh.”
“Just stay here while I go talk to her,” Milar said. “She lost sixty thousand creds’ worth of goods when the coalers swept the place after they picked you up outside Deaddrunk. I imagine she’s still a little sore about it.”
Tatiana swallowed hard. “Are you gonna bring your gun?”
“Jeanne won’t shoot anybody,” Milar said. Then, he looked at her and amended, “Well. She wouldn
’t shoot me or Pat.” He gestured at the pilot’s seat. “Just stay here. Wake Pat up for me, if you can. I may need some backup.” Then he turned and left.
Instead of using the intercom to wake Patrick, Tatiana yawned and activated the audio/visual receptors on the personnel hatch immediately outside the ship. Then she snagged her half-eaten bowl of popcorn off the airspeed indicator and kicked her legs up over the engine monitor, leaning back in the captain’s chair to watch the 2-D scene unfold. Milar was leaning against the open hatch, casually blocking the entrance to the ship with his big body. Jeanne was standing a pace down the boarding ramp, her face contorted in obvious fury.
“…of my way, Miles. She’s gonna get what’s coming to her.”
“She got me out of Rath in the belly of her soldier,” Milar said. “I owe her a big one.”
Grinning, Tatiana threw a handful of popcorn into her mouth and chewed. “That’s right, collie,” she told Milar through the console. “A few more hours in your room and we’ll call it even.”
“She called the coalers in on us,” Jeanne snarled. “And now the whole goddamn town is being watched by Nephyrs.”
“Not her fault,” Milar said. “She was scared.”
Tatiana’s grin caught. Scared?
“Scared?” Jeanne demanded. “You’re letting her get away with it because she was scared?”
“It ain’t her fault,” Milar continued. “Poor girl was in fight or flight. So she flew. Happens to the best of us.”
Tatiana pulled her legs from the console and sat up. “Fight or flight?” she demanded of the console. “What kind of horseshit is that? I called them with your gun to my head.” She scoffed. “Fight or flight. Pffft.”
“That cyborg runt almost got you killed, Miles. Or are you too goddamn infatuated you can’t see the landmine you’re stepping on?”