Blowback

by Lyn Gala

  She stopped at the door and turned back to look at them. Kada continued typing without pause, but Tom crossed his arms and glared at her. “You should have someone to watch your back.”

  “My back can vanish into smoke. Watch Kada’s back,” she said. Tom would have kept arguing, but she headed out the door and closed it behind her. Damn, that woman really could frustrate the hell out of him, more than Ramsay even.

  “The first time you came to see Hou, you weren’t marked, were you?” Kada asked in a complete change of topic. Tom really only cared about food, but being around Da’shay was giving him patience with people who could not get to the point.

  “Nope.” He shrugged. “And I still don’t know where the food is.”

  “Go to the painting of the gas world and look for the floor access,” Kada said. Tom nodded and headed for the painting Kada mentioned. In the floor in front of it was a thumb-sized access point. Tom pressed his thumb to it and a blast of cold air swirled around his feet as a refrigerated shelf rose from the floor.

  “They’ll know you accessed it.” Kada sounded wary, but Tom pulled off several pieces of fruit, some strips that might be either chicken or tofu and a large loaf of bread. He touched the front of the unit to make the rest sink back into the floor.

  “I figure they know I need to eat. You want some?” Tom watched Kada. As wary as the man was acting, Tom wasn’t eating anything until he’d seen the other man try some.

  After a second of staring, Kada nodded. “Yes.” He finally stood up from his computer display, but he waited for Tom to move without taking his eyes off the food. Weird. Tom tore off half the bread and handed it over with some of the strips and a piece of fruit. Kada took it and then sat down again, carefully arranging the food in his lap so he could type again. Tom walked over to see what he was looking into, putting his share down on the desk. When Kada started by eating the strips, Tom did too. They were bland, too bland to hide any of the really interesting poisons.

  “I’ve worked for Master Hou for six years now. Keeping a master happy is a skill,” Kada said after a few minutes of silently eating.

  “I suppose.”

  Kada looked up from his work. “You haven’t thought about it?”

  Tom stopped and took a second to think about it right then. “I piss most people off, but Captain Ramsay and Da’shay always seemed happy enough to have me around.”

  “Captain Ramsay…was he your first master?” Kada gave Tom odd little glances while keeping most of his attention on his screen and his mouth half-full of food.

  Tom snorted. He’d followed the captain about as faithfully as a slave might, but Ramsay would cut off his own dick before he’d let someone call him a slave owner. “Not likely. He was the captain I was serving when Hou blew us up and had us arrested.” Tom shook his head. He didn’t mind an honest fight, even if that fight left him on the worse side, but explosives just didn’t seem right. “That was about as unfair a move as I’ve seen.”

  Kada laughed and Tom glared at him. “You really are new to your mark. Masters aren’t fair. I spent six years working to make myself invaluable to Hou and he trades me to your Master. Is she going to keep me or return me?”

  “Don’t really know for sure. I’m guessing she’ll give you back soon enough.”

  Kada frowned. “I hope it’s soon enough. Master Hou has very exacting standards. Not many humans can meet his expectations and I am very skilled in both managing a genta household and coordinating the sort of data genta expect.”

  “So you understand Da’shay?” Tom asked, not believing that for even a second.

  “I understand genta in general. Master Da’shay is very different.” He paused. “I’ve never had a genta ask for rumors.”

  “Are you finding any?” Tom moved to look over Kada’s shoulder, and for a second, the man froze as if he expected Tom to slip a knife between his shoulder blades.

  “More than I expected. I can provide Master Da’shay with all the details.” He touched his screen and a half-dozen feeds and documents vanished.

  “You trying to hide something?”

  Kada looked up and he had that half-panicked expression on his face again. Most days Tom didn’t understand people and today was no exception. “You know, I could offer some invaluable advice.” Kada’s voice was slow and cautious.

  “How’s that?”

  “If you’re a slave, you’d better pay better attention to your master. You’re the favorite now, but with that attitude, you won’t be for long.”

  Tom could feel his guts tangled at the idea that Da’shay would get tired of him. God knows, others had. That’s one reason he stuck to doxies most days, but Da’shay was different. She’d pursued him. And then this little pipmouse was suggesting that she’d get tired of his attitude. “Are you trying to piss me off?” Tom demanded as he took one step closer. “You can keep your fucking opinions to yourself.”

  Tom stopped suddenly. Kada was leaning slightly forward, as if he was preparing to defend his stomach, and his eyes were dilated. Tom could just start to smell the sourness of his body. “What the hell are you afraid of?” Tom asked as he looked around. There wasn’t nothing on the screen and the room was still empty of anyone except themselves. Tom had to admit that he felt a little vulnerable without Da’shay there to enforce her ownership to anyone who might decide to break down the door, but he sure as hell wasn’t afraid.

  Kada straightened up. “I’m not. You’re distracting me.” Kada might have denied it, but Tom could see the fear in every line of his body. If the man had been armed, Tom would have expected him to draw his weapon at any time because he was showing every sign of a panicky sort of terror and terrorized people were dangerous.

  “I ain’t the one having conversation about who’s the favorite.” Hell, last time Tom had a conversation like that, he’d been nine years old and he already knew he was about to lose to a three-year-old Andy.

  It wasn’t that their ma had favored Andy as much as it was that Kevan Teppe had loved his own son about as much as he’d hated Tom, so with their ma refusing to play favorites, that had put Tom pretty low on the totem pole. He hadn’t liked that feeling much and he didn’t appreciate anyone reminding him of that. It wasn’t even that he blamed Andy…well, not much. Of all his brothers, Andy was the one Tom could stand. Lester hadn’t lived long enough to do anything to Tom personally, but the way his illness stole all their ma’s attention away was enough to make Tom hate that brother and Carl and Evert were plain ugly human beings. Sometimes Tom wondered if he wasn’t going to run across them some day and have the chance to arrest ‘em both.

  Tom sighed as he realized that whatever he said had just about sent the little twerp into blind panic. People didn’t make a half-credit’s worth of sense. “Maybe we could make a deal,” Tom suggested. “You don’t go talking about Da’shay and I—” Tom stopped. He wasn’t actually sure what Kada wanted.

  “You won’t hit me?”

  Tom blinked. He might have laughed, only Kada had a real serious tone. “I ain’t never hit someone who wasn’t big enough to hit back and you ain’t.”

  For a long time, Kada looked at him. “You really haven’t been a slave long. Avoiding getting hit is always good, but if you’re in a household, you’d better watch out for people getting more creative than just throwing a punch.” Kada gave him another look. “Either that or you’d better hope you get sent out to work one of the farms or quarries. Out there slaves stick together. In the houses, someone’s going to go out of their way to make you look like a fool and take your place as favorite.”

  “Are you trying to say you’re out to steal Da’shay?”

  That made Kada look up. “No!” Then he sighed and sagged. “Nevermind. You’ll figure it out for yourself. But if you have any influence on your master, I would like to go back to Master Hou soon. Eventually that idiot who took over my job is going to figure out how to get around the traps I set in the system. I’d prefer to reclaim my spot befor
e that happens.”

  “Okay,” Tom agreed. Personally, he’d go out of his way not to work for Hou, but if Kada liked the genta, Tom wasn’t going to try to argue him out of it. Without anything else to do, Tom headed for the windows. He touched the surface, but the glass didn’t react to him. The one blue window and four pink ones all refused to change color, so Tom studied the layout of the city towers he could see from the enormous windows.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Captain?” Tom had been sitting with his back to the blue tinted window, but now he stood. Da’shay walked in behind Ramsay and she headed straight for Kada. “What are you doing here, sir?”

  Ramsay had a look on his face that usually came right before him ordering someone to scrub grating with a wire brush. “Did you give her a kill code for the Kratos’ security?”

  “What? No.” Tom was offended that Ramsay even asked. “I never even built one in.” Tom knew plenty of soldiers did that—built in secret codes that would cancel out security protocols so they could get on or off the ship when they wanted to. Every second who’d ever come onboard went searching through the system to find ‘em, but Tom never bothered and Becca was too smart to get caught at it if she did.

  Ramsay sighed. “Da’shay broke into the Kratos and got confrontational while I was in my underwear. She does make things uncomfortable.”

  Tom rested his hand on his gun and struggled to come up with something polite to say. “She got in on her own then. I always figured that if a captain threw me off a ship, there wouldn’t be any reason for going back.”

  Ramsay pressed his lips together. “You never do change, Tom Frieden. Just to refresh your memory, I threw Da’shay off the ship and you chose to follow her.”

  “She had a plan. Any plan is better than sitting on our asses doing nothing.”

  “Not so sure about that,” Ramsay muttered. Then he held up his hands. “Not to get in another fight with you. I should know better than to argue when you have your mind set. You never do change your opinions, even when you’re dead wrong. So, what’s this emergency that’s so great that I’ve got to be pulled out of bed when I was up all night? Twenty hours without sleep and I start getting a little less reasonable in my outlook.” The captain hadn’t even pulled his white hair back into a pony tail, so it hung around his shoulder.

  Tom looked over to Da’shay since he really didn’t know why she’d gotten the captain. “Look!” Da’shay said. She’d been talking to Kada and Tom could see the incriminating report up on the screen—the one that said Command had arrested the crew of the Reseda days before it’d blown up.

  Ramsay gave first Tom and then Da’shay a confused look before he went over to look at it closer. “Seems like it might be an arrest report.” His voice was cautious.

  “She already outed you as Corps,” Tom said. No need to leave the man wondering.

  Ramsay got all stiff. “She…what? I never—”

  “Told Hou,” Da’shay interrupted. Instead of getting upset with her, Ramsay glared at Tom.

  “It ain’t like I told her to,” Tom defended himself. “She pretty much does what she wants, including going to get you. It’s probably best she did, though. If that report Hou dug up is right, we’ve got more trouble than a dead crew.”

  Ramsay gave Tom one last glare before he went to examine the report. “Someone must have filed it wrong—put the wrong year on it, maybe. There’s no way another ship could have picked up Smyth six days before our meet.”

  Da’shay had a hand on Kada’s shoulder and he gave her a simpering smile that made Tom clench his teeth. “Verify accuracy,” she told him in a good impression of Hou.

  Kada gave a nod. “Navigational satellite registered the passage of a ship Reseda’s size into the Alsha system eleven hours before the arrest. Ship identification was removed from the record. An outgoing ship of the same size left the system thirty-seven hours, twelve minutes later. Again, an anomaly in the satellite computer system removed the ship identification, but no other data was lost during that time period. Captain Hatzis was assigned to Alsha at the time and no daily report was filed on this date. Finally, all seals and regulations are correct on the actual document.”

  “Sounds like plenty of evidence,” Tom said, suddenly uncomfortable that he hadn’t asked for that proof.

  “If I believe a report from a known slaver’s employee,” Ramsay said. “I’m not so sure I’m ready to make that leap of faith.”

  “You can. Firm footing when your leap ends,” Da’shay said. “Whispers in whispers.”

  When Ramsay’s expression turned cranky, Tom stepped in before Da’shay could piss him off anymore. “Assuming that’s true, Da’shay and Hou came up with two theories. Either Command is trying to get rid of her or they’re trying to start a war. I figure since she was on the bomb when it went off, the first is more likely, but Da’shay seems to be favoring the second.”

  Da’shay twirled around and headed for Tom, reaching out to catch him around the waist before moving to a spot behind him and resting her forehead against his shoulder, her arm wrapped around him. “Command wouldn’t kill genta-girl,” she whispered. “World caught in cobwebs of palest blue until Tom and his gift cut through the threads with all the red.”

  “Is she saying something?” Ramsay asked.

  Tom shrugged. “About the only part that I get is that she doesn’t think Command would target her.”

  “So you think they’d cause a war? That doesn’t make sense. Tom, you weren’t around during the last war, but let me tell you, there weren’t any winners. Command has enough generals that still remember that; they wouldn’t go out of their way to cause another one.”

  Da’shay stuck her head out from behind Tom. “Presentation of data. Drops and drips forming pools in which worlds slip.”

  Sometimes it was flat out embarrassing when she went and got strange. Tom probably shouldn’t be one even to think like that because he knew that he’d done plenty of embarrassing things himself, but at least he knew enough to just not talk. Most times he didn’t have much to say, anyway. However, Da’shay had all the answers somewhere up in her head, and she couldn’t even get to them. It made Tom want to find the bastards that had hurt her and rip bits of their brains out. Da’shay reached up and caught his leash, tugging it just enough to make him feel his collar. Tom slipped a hand around her waist, and she leaned back into him without comment. He wondered how much reading she could really do, but then if she hadn’t run screaming away from all the unhappy thoughts Tom had rattling around in his head, maybe she couldn’t catch all that much. Maybe she could and she just didn’t mind sharing the unhappy. With how those bastards had ripped her up, he wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to tell him.

  “Present,” Da’shay said sharply. No one moved until she pointed a finger at Kada.

  Kada jumped, clearly startled. “Oh me? I’m sorry, Master Da’shay,” he hurried to say. “You asked for a number of categories. In terms of war preparations and concealed machines, I have a pattern over the last six years.”

  He hit a button, and a vid screen half the width of the room rose up out of the floor right in front of the line of art. A star chart appeared while Da’shay traced tight circles on Tom’s bare arm with her finger. There was Beystelle that rumor had as the training center of the Information Corps, Alsha where Captain Hatzis had picked up Smyth and Diadem where the Kratos had been blown up six days later. A system that was dedicated to mining, Iris, and its sister planet Minple were the planets closest to the central Command’s core planets before the map cut off. Tom’s homeworld, Beauteous, wasn’t anywhere on the map because it was clear to the other side of Corps space, closer to the meaiai than the slavers.

  In another color, the map had the slave colonies. The planet they were standing on, Nodar, and its sister planet, Sunkissed, were part of the same system and then there were Freedom and Bevattna and Vinden closest to the Corps border, all centers of smuggling. Farther in, Baj, New Terra, Suddi
, Kinder and Black Falls all showed up as little dots. Tom wasn’t even sure he could tell which of those five was which because the inner slave colonies weren’t any place he’d ever worried about.

  “War preparations are indicated by a number of factors in this area.” Iris, Minple, Beystelle and Diadem all lit up. “Increased metal production in Minple as indicated by increased personnel and the redirection of ships to the area has not led to increased materials. Based on an extrapolation of the workers and ships present ten years ago and the numbers present now, I estimate Earth Command is producing seven hundred and thirty tons of excess metals which are not appearing in any accounting. Deep space attack ships require 155 tons of steel and various other trace minerals, but a conservative estimate would place the number of deep space attack vessels that they could have produced in the last ten years at 42.”

  “If they were making them at all,” Ramsay countered. Da’shay’s fingers stilled as they rested against his skin.

  Kada ignored him. “Earth Command has transferred six hundred and sixty eight high ranking officers to Iris. Given that a skeleton crew for a deep space vessel is seventeen, that would put the number of ships currently running at thirty-nine. With Iris’ belt of meteor dust, ships would be easy to hide. Fuel consumption has also increased twenty-seven fold on Iris, with no official notice of any additional development.”

  “If all that is true, the government of the slave colonies would have caught that. It’s too obvious,” Ramsay said.

  Kada didn’t say anything and Da’shay looked around Tom, her fingers curled around his arm. “Say the colors that dart across your mind,” she said to him. Kada looked at her with mild panic.

  “She thinks you have something running around in that head of yours. I suggest you just spit it out,” Tom warned.

  “Tom,” Ramsay barked out. “Don’t go using that tone on him.”

  “You can’t go Tom’ing him,” Da’shay said sharply, pointing a finger at Ramsay. “You listened to his actions and not his thoughts. Didn’t see him with his brown and white and now you try to come in and ‘Tom’ him. He’s my Tom. Stop Tom’ing him.” Da’shay poked her finger in Ramsay’s direction and stalked toward him. Ramsay didn’t look even a little worried, but Tom reached out to catch Da’shay’s arm.