“I am fixing the ship,” said Hope. “It is literally what I am doing down in this cramped compartment.”
“Hope, Captain says we need to be in the air. Will she fly?” She patted the console again. “Will my baby fly?”
“She’ll fly,” said Hope. “You worry about the cargo. I’ll worry about getting the magic smoke back inside these components.” The rig’s faceplate slid shut, and Hope vanished back below the deck. The crackle of arc welding started back up.
“Copy that,” said El, feeling herself smile. She wasn’t worried about Hope getting the Tyche back online; the Engineer knew the ship better than she knew her own damn self. El was more worried about where their cargo was, and where their deck hand was, because the captain didn’t pay El to lift heavy things. He paid her to fly the ship. She turned back to the console, lights already coming back on. She tapped in Dock Control, flicked the comm switch on, and said, “Dock Control, this is Tyche. Seeking confirmation of cargo delivery and launch clearance. Please advise, over.”
The communicator sat silent for a second before a man’s voice spoke. “Tyche, we have you on lockdown. No ships, in or out. Over.”
El sighed. One of those assholes. “Dock Control, this is Tyche. Please repeat your last. I thought I heard you say we were on lockdown. We have Republic clearance to launch. Repeat, Republic clearance. Over.”
“Tyche, I don’t care if you’ve got clearance from the Senate themselves. Your ship is on lockdown.” Then, after a pause, “Over.”
El drummed her fingers against the comm for a second. “Dock Control, let’s park that for a moment. Do you have a status on our cargo? Over.”
“Tyche, your cargo is waiting lifting of the lockdown. Over.”
“Dock Control, I’d like to understand what the relationship between lawful cargo being loaded onto my ship and your unlawful lockdown is. Please advise. Over.” El looked at the comm, waiting.
She didn’t have to wait long. “We feel you might try and escape lockdown, Tyche. Over.”
El laughed, keeping the comm on. “Dock Control, your feelings don’t come into it. We have lawful, I repeat lawful Navy cargo to come on board our vessel. Do not bring us into your family counseling session with the Navy.”
“Tyche—”
“Did I fucking say ’over,’ Dock Control? No, I didn’t. What I said was, give us our fucking cargo, or by God the heavens will open up and shell you and your miserable tower with the unholy vengeance of the Navy’s best and brightest lawyers.” She tapped the comm again, then said, “Over.”
There was a long pause. “Copy that, Tyche. Cargo has been released for your receipt. Over.”
“Thank you, Dock Control. Over and out.” El flicked off the comm, feeling the warm rose glow that could only come from putting a minor bureaucrat in their place. The Tyche seemed to share her feelings, the console coming alive under her hands. “My good girl,” she said, again.
• • •
El was waiting at the open doors of the cargo bay as the Dock’s automated loader brought the Navy’s cargo towards them. It wasn’t moving very fast, which felt a lot like Dock Control was still fucking with her. But it was okay: she felt the wind on her face, closing her eyes for a second. God, she loved flying, but she also loved fresh air and the sound of birds. Hard to get the latter with the former these days. Too much time inside a hull out in the hard black, not enough time with her boots on the ground. The captain — Nate — had promised shore leave. Two days did not shore leave make. She’d seen the inside of the dock, got wind on her face, and that’s it. Not that the dock wasn’t nice as far as concrete jungles went. The Tyche sat on a pad, open sky above her. The painted logo under her wings — a woman’s face, winking at you like she knew the secrets of the void — made El smile just like it always did. The Tyche herself? Older than her looks allowed, the sweep of her A-frame still elegant, the twin drives at her rear looking like they could still pound out nuclear fire as good as the day she rolled out of the shipyards.
A silver tube connected the Tyche’s docking area with the spaceport proper a couple klicks away. The tube was part of a network of walkways like any other spaceport, filled with confused, meandering passengers and ship’s crew in a constant hurry. Perhaps missing the inside of that wasn’t such a bad thing. Tyche’s pad was like a hundred others on Arlington, a collection of bays of different sizes for different ships. There were a lot of ships here, but that wasn’t too surprising. Despite Enia Alpha being close to the end of the Republic’s reach, it was a successful mining world. That attracted business, and interest, and even tourists.
El turned to look out across the docks, the ships clustered there, many with noses pointed at the sky. Tyche didn’t need to point; unlike those other ships she had more than fusion rockets at her rear to get her going. The Endless Drive could tease reality into looking the other way, sure, but it had to do that through physics El would never understand. Hope might, but she might not as well, because being a good Engineer wasn’t about theory, it was about practice. El would take Hope’s practical knowledge every day of the week, even Sundays, because she kept the Tyche flying right.
It’s just that not knowing how it worked itched, in a way El couldn’t scratch. She’d read the literature, talk about configurable energy density fields being able to … create, if that was the right word … negative space. Anti-matter to interact with matter. Throw in a little dark matter for gravitational lensing, and it’d suck a ship through space like water syphoned through a hose. Manipulate all that for traversing the universe? Sure. The same tricks could be used for lifting the Tyche, or giving the ship artificial gravity. It worked, which was important, but she’d like to know why. Or maybe understand how.
Why or how aside, the artificial gravity was nice. Freighters often packed some of the tech in an Endless Drive. Enough to get some gravitational lensing belowdecks for artificial gravity. Not enough for jumps, because most captains were happy to pay the Guild their extortionate rates to use their Bridges. The Navy still used Endless Drives in their frigates, but there were fewer of those to go around as the prevalence of Guild Bridges made travel between the stars faster and safer. Faster and safer was fine as far as El was concerned, but it took some of the fun out of things.
There was a crump of a far-off explosion. El looked towards the city center. Smoke was pushing dark cotton balls against the blue skyline. Arlington was far away from where the serious business of mining occurred, so it wasn’t mining charges, even if they’d been stupid enough to use rock-ape tech like that to punch a hole. Could be an industrial accident, but that wouldn’t explain why the port was on lock down.
The silver tube connecting the rest of the spaceport to the Tyche opened to reveal the swagger of October Kohl. As he walked towards the Tyche, she saw he had what looked like blood on him, which didn’t bode well, because — and this wasn’t errant conjecture, this was October Kohl she was thinking of — it meant the explosion in the distance was probably his fault. But she said nothing about that.
Instead, she said, “You’re just in time.”
“I am?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, pointing with her chin at the automated loader. “Cargo time.”
“You load the cargo,” said Kohl. “I need to go clean up.”
“You load the cargo,” disagreed El, “because you’re our deck hand.”
Kohl gave her what was meant to be a murderous stare, but he looked to also be a little drunk, so the effect was spoiled by being lopsided. He grunted. “Fine.”
“You’ll get dirty anyway,” she said, “and have to clean up again.”
“I said it was fine,” said Kohl.
El smiled, and waited for the loader to arrive. Kohl would get their cargo loaded, and while he did that she would enjoy the air for a little bit longer. Or maybe a lot longer, if Hope couldn’t release that lockdown.
Hell, it was Hope. Of course she’d be able to release the lockdown. El smiled, enjoyin
g just a little more air that didn’t come out of a bottle.
CHAPTER FIVE
“What do you mean, you can’t release the lockdown?” Nate’s voice was stressed by two things: distance (he was at the bottom of the ladder leading to Engineering) and actual realized anxiety (the Tyche was on a pad, burning up docking credits, and they had a cargo that needed to be elsewhere like, yesterday). ’Ladder’ might have been a stretch, it was more of a preamble to the airlock that sealed Engineering away from everything flammable.
Hope wiped her hands on the rag she had tucked into her belt. Ran a still-oily hand through her now less-than-pink hair and sighed. “I mean, it’s a lockdown, Cap. They have locked us. Down. There wouldn’t be much of a lock in the down if the lock could be broken.”
“What do you mean … look, I’m coming in.” She heard his hands on the railing.
“Please don’t,” she said, and then he was there. Head looking around Engineering, eyes widening.
“What have you done to my ship?” he said.
It wasn’t fair, and he knew it. He’d said they’d be boots-down for a week at least, maybe two. Get some R&R. They both knew she couldn’t leave the ship on a Republic world, what with the law after her for debts incurred when she’d made mistakes. Mistakes that cost her a Guild title and her wife. But by the stars: R&R wasn’t always about leaving the ship. It was about getting all the jobs done she’d put off for weeks while they were under sail, the little things nagging at her mind, the things that couldn’t get done when he was hollering at her for more speed or asking why have my turrets stopped firing. Sure, sure, people said it was about relaxing, but the Tyche was her ship, more than it was the captain’s, more than it was El’s. It made her relaxed to have the ship in good trim. It made her relaxed to work on things without being so goddamn rushed all the time. Having access to a few spare parts wouldn’t hurt either.
“Nate—”
“Captain.”
“Nate, you said two weeks—”
“I said a week, maybe two—”
“It’s been two days!” She jerked an angry arm at the exposed machinery on one of the fusion drives, the cowl stacked up against the opposite wall. Wires. Pipes. A little smoke — now where the hell was that coming from, that wasn’t supposed to happen — and above it all, the status panel. Not enough lights green, too many red. “I took her apart because I had two weeks!”
“A week!”
“It’s been two days!” She crossed her arms, glaring at him. “I don’t understand what’s so urgent.”
“Got a cargo,” he said.
“A cargo,” said Hope, “can wait another hour.”
“Got in some trouble, too,” he said.
She tensed. “Republic trouble?”
“Could be,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” she said, “or you don’t want to say?”
Nate crossed his own arms, blew out a lungful of air, and looked at his feet. Nice boots, planted strong on the decking like he owned the place. Which he did, just not here. Not in Engineering. This was her space, despite the empty spot on the wall where a Guild Engineer would hang her Shingle. Hope didn’t have a Shingle, not anymore. “Does it matter? Really. Either way. If it’s trouble, one way or another it’ll end up being Republic trouble.” He frowned, scuffed one of those nice boots across the metal decking, then looked at her. “Will she fly?”
What he’d said was true enough. There wasn’t any trouble that the Republic didn’t make their business. Not at the Core, not here at the slippery edge, and not anywhere in between. “She’ll fly true,” said Hope.
“Then what’s this problem with the lockdown?” Nate was still frowning at her.
“I wanted an hour,” she said. “One hour. Just one.”
“You can’t have an hour,” he said. He caught her expression, held up a hand. “Not because I’m trying to be an asshole. It’s because the city is, at this moment, on fire. There are people with weapons shooting each other. In an hour, there will be soldiers crawling all over everything that can climb up that gravity well,” and here, he pointed up, “because they’re after something. Someone.”
“Me?” said Hope.
“Hell no,” said Nate. “No.” He frowned again. His face looked better when it was smiling; like it was born to be happy, but had learned the hard way how to do unpleasant work. “Probably not.”
“Well, which is it?” she said. “Yes or no?”
“No,” he said, but like he didn’t mean it. “Look, Hope, you owe money. Hell, we all owe a little money—”
“Not like this,” she said.
“I’ll grant that’s a true story,” he said. “But you do not shoot up a bar where good Republic Citizens are going about their lawful business to call in a debt.”
“Spacer bar?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Hardly lawful,” she said.
“Also a true story,” he said, “but the spirit of the conversation remains the same. I’ve never seen anything like it. Or, not since, you know, the war.”
“Okay,” said Hope. “Okay.”
“Okay you’ll get my ship in the air, or okay we’re all going to jail?” He had his Captain Face on, impassive, waiting for the bad news, but she’d known him the longest of anyone on this ship, and she could see the hope there. Hope they’d made it out of this one. Hope that he wouldn’t let her down, because he was kind of stupid that way.
“I’ll get my ship in the air,” she said.
“Wait,” he said. “Whose ship is this?”
“And,” said Hope, ignoring the question and pointing at the drive cowling, “I need you to move that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s heavy,” she said. It was. When the Tyche was shiny new, all her parts had been minted with the latest and best technology the Old Empire had available. The drive’s cowling was no exception. It was a ceramic, a printed material with polytopes at its core. It wouldn’t dent or bend, and if it did somehow crack, the fractures wouldn’t travel. By today’s standards it was old tech, but it worked well enough. Despite being mostly air, and what wasn’t air was an amalgam of powder and a few metals for good measure, it was heavy enough to be annoying, and she was already annoyed enough as it was.
Nate nodded at her, then turned and hollered down the ladder. “Kohl? Kohl! Get your ass to engineering.”
October’s voice came back muted by two things: distance and annoyance. “Why?”
“Something heavy needs moving,” said Nate. He winked at Hope.
She sighed. Time to get to work.
• • •
Hope kicked back in her chair, the acceleration couch feeling like an old glove. Soft in all the right places, strong where it was needed, a little faded here and there. The gimbals at the base let her spin around, the room turning about her as she thought about the lockdown. The problem with the lockdown was the way it worked — convincing the Tyche that Dock Control was, uh, in control, and not the Tyche’s own Helm.
She’d broken a couple of lockdowns before, but not a Republic one. There was one ace in the hole, a thing that could get them off this perch and into the air where they belonged. The Tyche, she was ex-Empire. Retrofitted with all the right codes, transponder all legal and above board, but the coupling between the transponder and the real Tyche, well that was a complex mix of wires. The tech who’d installed it had looked flustered most of the time he’d been working on it, always talking under his breath about fuck they got me doing this shit for and well it doesn’t say that in the manual. She’d watched over his shoulder, a thing she knew hadn’t helped his state of mind, but his Republic uniform hadn’t helped hers, so Hope felt that made them even.
She put a foot down on the deck, slowing her spin. Hope reached out her hands to the console in front of her and typed. The systems responded to her touch, engineering specs and console windows popping up on the holo. She rubbed a thumb across her jaw, not knowing (o
r caring) if it left a grease smudge on her face. An alert from the console, a bright and angry red, flashed as she violated a few protocols supposed to be inviolate. It didn’t describe what she was doing right now in the manual.
Kohl leaned next to her. “What you doing?”
She gave him a glance, then turned back to the console. “Fixing things.”
“Fixing,” he said. “What’re all the alarms for?”
“Things that aren’t fixed yet,” she said. She paused. “Kohl?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m working, Kohl.”
“Okay,” he said.
“And,” she said, “you being here is not helping me work.” It wasn’t just that he was a distraction. It was that he hated her. She knew it, he knew it. Everyone knew it. She felt … judged by him. By this bad man full of bad habits. Even that wasn’t the real problem; the problem was that she didn’t blame him for hating her. Not really. Not after what she’d done. Hope had run out on her wife to get out from under the heel of the law, and it’d been a problem everywhere the Tyche went. It didn’t matter that the captain had said no way this was your fault and busted her out from a cell he’d shared with her one night. If you believed the Republic propaganda, it was deviants like her that led to the fall of the Empire. They weren’t wrong. They weren’t right. But Kohl thought they were, and she understood.
So, she needed him to not be here. Because thinking about all that, thinking about Reiko, was not helping Hope solve the lockdown situation.
He sniffed, coughed, leaned back. She heard clicks from his spine. “Okay,” he said. “Cowl’s back in place. Need anything else?”
She considered a new alarm that popped up on the display floating in the air in front of them both. “No,” she said. Not from you. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.” He turned away, swung onto the handrails leading down from Engineering, and slipped from view.
Hope typed a little more. Saw what could be a deal-breaker here. While she could convince the Tyche, bless her heart, to ignore the Republic’s lockdown, there was a corresponding coupling on the docking platform. A series of clamps held the ship in place. Nothing too serious; a couple of hours with a cutting torch would see them gone, if they had a couple of hours to burn. The could just fire up the engines, tear themselves away, but that would leave damage, and damage to landing gear led to questions, and the questions led to inspections, and inspections led to jail. The clamps on the docking platform were under Dock Control, which meant Republic fingers were holding her ship on the ground.
Tyche's Flight (Tyche's Journey Book 1) Page 4