The shopkeeper had flicked directions to her console. A friend, someone in Chinatown. El hadn’t been to Chinatown, and so she went.
Best part about San Francisco was Chinatown. There weren’t fewer people — more, if anything. It’s just that they were used to being around a thousand other people, so they made less of a big deal about it. It was easier to get to where she needed to go. The gunsmith’s shop was dim, not in a gloomy way, but in a way that said the sun was bright and hot and in here was quiet and calm. She’d liked the old man with his wrinkled face and serious eyes. He’d listened to her story, and then he’d said something that changed her life.
You are a coward, he’d said. Like he was surprised by it, to see someone still wearing the Emperor’s colors in his shop, wanting to buy shooting iron, but who wanted to be anywhere except where there was violence. Because her colors said death from above, her rank and role emblazoned on her chest. She flew destroyers for the Emperor, and killed his enemies. Except she did it from the air-conditioned comfort of a bridge.
El had wanted to get angry, but the old man wasn’t trying to get in her grill. He wasn’t trying to take her coins. He was trying to find out what she needed. So she’d half-agreed, using a nod rather than words, and the gunsmith had shuffled off to get a small step ladder. He’d climbed up to a higher shelf, found an old chunky plastic box, like a construction worker might carry their lunch in, and laid it out between them. When she’d opened it, she didn’t know what she was looking at, so he’d explained.
It’s a gun, he’d said. It fires bullets.
Solid rounds? Like a PDC? She’d been incredulous, because it was like looking at a dinosaur’s thigh bone. PDCs could fire plasma, lasers, or solid rounds where the bullets alone were the size of baguettes. This thing was chunky, but a lot smaller than a baguette.
Yes, but no, and he’d sold it to her for an extortionate sum of the Emperor’s credits, because the gun was rare, and because the exchange rate was already in the toilet. It was a pistol-sized shotgun, a weapon that fired tiny pellets instead of a discrete slug of metal. The barrel, he’d explained, was short, so that the pellets would spread out like a deadly basketball-sized circle of death at about ten paces. Useless for long distance, but great for a coward whose hands shook. Also great for use on a ship where you didn’t want to hole the hull. It held one round at a time, kicked like a mule, and would turn whatever part of a person it hit into airborne chum.
Primitive, but effective.
She pointed the nose of her gun out the flight deck’s doorway, into the ready room. The burble of the coffee machine was still on, three cups set out ready for use. Nothing unusual about that, Hope was the kind of person who made coffee for everyone when only she needed it. But Hope wasn’t here, and neither was Penn. Also not unusual; Penn had his own cabin — a shanty they’d rigged out of a store room, because the rest of the Tyche’s crew quarters were spoken for — and Hope was so high on stims she couldn’t sit still for more than two minutes. Like she needs the coffee.
There were only a couple of ways something inside the Tyche could jam the signal. One, Hope had a psychotic break and was sabotaging the ship. Ridiculous, because if there was someone who cared more about the Tyche than El or the cap, it was Hope. Two, one of those fucking bugs had got on board — unlikely — and was wreaking havoc. Three, it was Penn.
Smart money said Penn.
Motive? He’d snuck a message out and wanted them all dead now. Seemed reasonable for a spy, and El was pretty sure he was a spy. Or, how about: he wanted to take her ship. That also held water; he’d been right upset at the captain about Nate’s approach to solving their current set of problems. Deal with the crew (that was El and Hope), and take off when the lockdown was over. Penn would think Nate wasn’t coming back alive, and that was unfortunately a view that El shared.
The coffee machine hissed and spluttered, drawing the nose of El’s weapon like a magnet. With a kind of detached amazement she noticed her hands were shaking, and that made the gun shake too. It wouldn’t matter, because even if her gun was moving around like a weather vane in a hurricane, it’d still tear a hole in the general direction it was being pointed.
Her hands never shook, though. Shaking hands crashed ships.
There was a clank from further back in the ship. Could be the Tyche settling. El wasn’t sure she knew the sounds the newly rebuilt bird made as she slept, but she was also sure that wasn’t the settling of metal. That sounded like an airlock closing. She wished Nate was here. Or that Kohl was awake. Because this was their kind of deal. El was just the damn pilot.
• • •
The problem with thinking about Kohl was that it made El want to go wake him up. Find something in that sickbay that would jumpstart the big man like a rusty old combustion engine, the kind that Hope said were fun to work on. How something could be fun to work on that leaked oil everywhere was a mystery to El, but that’s why she flew ships, rather than grubbing around inside ’em.
She was babbling. Babbling in her own goddamned mind.
The gun still shook in her hand, but it seemed fine with leading the way so she let it. Her feet trod the deck plates of the Tyche, but slowly, one after the other, like making a noise would trigger instant death. It could, for all she knew. Internal comms were down, external comms were down. On this ship was one person she could trust but who was still basically a child, and another who she could not trust, not even to put the right amount of sugar in her coffee. El didn’t want to shoot the wrong one, but more than that she didn’t want to die, so the next few minutes would be hard for everyone concerned.
The ship was nice and flat, flight deck, ready room, and Engineering all on the same basic altitude but Engineering way towards the back. You got to Engineering via the crew deck. Down and up, easy as that. Let’s go check on Engineering first. El walked slow and quiet down the gangway, giving a quick look over the edge of the metal ladder leading down to the crew deck. Nothing moving down there, just the steady glow of the Tyche’s lighting, the soft hum of ship systems, and the quiet dry hiss of life support.
Life support.
El’s eyes were drawn up towards the pipework in the ceiling. Conduit, air, water, all flowed through the ship. Big tubes leading from Engineering like a big heart, pumping blood to everywhere else. Tubes big enough to hide in, if you were inclined. You could even put things in there, like a bunch of cockroaches that lived inside people’s heads.
And here was El, without her helmet. She’d seen the damn vids. She’d seen what those Ezeroc did to people. Hell, she’d even taken the time to read some of the files Hope had flicked up to her console. It wasn’t pretty reading. It wasn’t fun reading. It was the kind of reading you did that made you go everywhere with your damn helmet on. It was the kind of reading that made you sleep in your helmet.
Her helmet was in her room.
She gave a quick glance behind her. Horror holos always had some motherfucker come up behind you with a sharp knife and end your brief ride in a shower of gore, and El wasn’t up for that today. But there was nothing there. Her cabin was right next to the ladder, just down there, so she backed up, nice and slow, and nice and quiet. Another glance down the metal ladder showed nothing. Not even a shadow moved.
The door to her cabin was shut, like it always was. El monkeyed down the ladder, leaned against the sill to her room, keyed the lock, and pointed her pistol inside.
Empty.
Not entirely empty. Her locker, her bunk. Just not her helmet. Her helmet was next to her bunk, or it had been when she was here last. It wasn’t here now. El moved inside her room, a last quick check outside — still clear — and then looked under her bunk. In her locker. On the shelves. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She tore stuff out of her locker, a console, some clothes, some spare ammunition, her old Empire flight suit.
No helmet.
Could she have left it somewhere else? Think. No. She was sure it’d been here. Some fucker had taken h
er helmet. Some fucker who maybe, just maybe, wanted to infect a crew. Have some live samples. She wiped at her face with the back of a hand, feeling the sweat there. She hissed, “Penn.”
• • •
El could just wait in here. It’s what she’d been doing for the last ten minutes. Door shut, locked from the inside. Gun in her hand, cold steel resting against her skin.
There were two problems with that approach as she saw it.
The first was that Hope was still out there in the ship. Hope, who hadn’t had her twenty-fifth birthday yet if you still thought Sol years counted for jack. Hope, who was useful and important for keeping the Tyche flying. Hope, who was also her friend, and as a general rule you didn’t let your friends be eaten by insects.
The second was that the room was getting hot. El had stuffed her old flight suit into the life support’s air vent, blocking it. That was a temporary solve, because she’d eventually suffocate. She’d need Nate to get back, and Nate wasn’t coming back.
“Fuck,” she said to the room. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Nothing for it: time to get moving. She stood, tasting fear in her mouth, and then keyed the lock on the door. It opened with a hiss to an empty corridor.
She led the way with the gun. El stood outside her room for a second, then reached a fumbling hand behind her to close the door. It locked with a beep. That beep was too loud, too obvious in the quiet of the ship. Something from down the metal stairs hissed, and she heard something moving towards the ladder. So she pointed the pistol over the side and pulled the trigger. There was a massive boom, the gun bucking hard in her hand, and she screamed, “Stay back, Penn! Stay back, you motherfucker!”
El ejected the casing from her gun, the plastic popping as it hit the deck. A new shell inside, she closed the breach.
Silence.
In any normal day there’d be a bunch of people shouting at her for firing a weapon inside the ship. Hell, she’d be one of the people shouting. Not this time. No-one made any noise, no-one at all.
She edged her back along the crew deck towards Engineering. She kept swinging the gun about, trying to point it everywhere at once. When her shoulder bumped against the ladder to Engineering, she almost screamed, because she hadn’t expected to make it, and thought a monster had come to get her. Nope, just a ladder then an airlock. She keyed the lock, and the door opened with a hiss and a clank.
Inside were Hope’s console and acceleration couch, the console dark, the couch empty. Engineering itself was dark, the only lights coming from backscatter from the status indicators on the reactor. At least the Ravana still had something useful to give the universe.
“Hope?” El moved farther into the darkened room. She made sure not to point her gun too close to the reactor, because while it was unlikely the weapon would blow a hole in it, using any kind of firearm next to a reactor was against the general gist of shipboard survival rules. Systems in here blinked and thrummed. It was cool, at least, the life support still working fine.
El looked up at the top of the room, where the ducts for air were. She couldn’t see shit. Fuck this — if I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die being able to see it coming. She tapped on her suit’s console, asking the Tyche for a little more brilliance. The ship obliged, bringing more light, and El could then see a couple of things of an alarming nature.
First thing: Hope’s rig, with the visor and the manipulator arms, was on the floor next to her acceleration couch. It was bent and twisted, the visor smashed.
Second thing: there was a rent in the pipework in the ceiling. Rent out, like something had come from that pipe and into this room. Something large, bigger than El’s shoulders. Something the size of a man, like Penn.
Fucking Penn.
She pointed her gun at the hole, making her way back to Engineering’s airlock. El cycled it open, slipped through, and locked it behind her. Back to the crew deck. Time to check on Kohl. El stopped at the top of the ladder from Engineering, listening for a second. She got nothing but the sound of ship systems, so she slung her legs over and slid to the deck below. She dropped into a half crouch, pointing her gun in what felt like six directions at once.
The crew deck was where the sick bay was, and the captain’s cabin. And Penn’s makeshift room.
El moved to the sickbay. The big glass window showed Kohl still inside, still on the table, machinery still keeping him alive. She opened the door, slipped inside, locking it behind her. She moved to Kohl’s side. His skin was still grey, kind of pasty, but — and she wasn’t sure if she was deluding herself — it looked like there might have been a shade more color in his cheeks. Nothing obvious in here that looked like a pile of insects or a warrior drone. She shrugged, then leaned close to Kohl’s ear. “Kohl? October Kohl. I don’t know if you can hear me, but there’s something on the ship. Something on the Tyche. I … I don’t know what I’m doing. So, you know.” She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she turned to leave.
There, right there, outside the sickbay window, she caught a flash of movement. Something that twisted away from the glass in a way that didn’t look human. It was probably Penn, because that’s what her brain told her the face looked like, but it didn’t move the way people should move. Or it did, because it was only a flash of movement, and then it — he? — was gone from view.
Her gun was pointed at the glass. She hadn’t remembered raising it, but there it was. Her hands were still shaking. El moved to the window, pressed her face against it, trying to see where Penn had gone. “Penn!” He breath fogged the glass in front of her, the air of the ship whisking away the moisture a second later.
Move. You’ve got to keep moving.
She put a hand to the door controls, leveled her pistol at the door, and then opened it.
No one there.
El ducked into the corridor, closing the door behind her. Always closing doors, she was, and never on the side of safety. She giggled, then swallowed it. The fear sweat running down her face was getting into her eyes. Check Penn’s room. Check the captain’s quarters. Then get to the cargo bay.
She made a cursory job of the captains quarters first, because it didn’t seem like the go-to place to be without the captain there. But she was getting into a rhythm now: enter the room. Check it. Leave. Close the door behind her. Lock it. Next one.
Except the next one was Penn’s room. A supply room under normal situation. The door opened in front of her to darkness. She kept the gun pointing into the dark, feeling with her other hand towards the room’s controls. There. Light switch. She flicked it.
Nothing happened.
If she was someone like Kohl, or even the captain, she’d have a light on her gun. Something to shine in front of her so she could see what was there. She didn’t have one of those, and her helmet was missing. It had lights on it, which would be more useful if it was with her.
It’s only a room. It’s only a room. Just go in, your eyes will adjust, and you can confirm that asshole’s not in there. If he is, you blow a hole the size of a grapefruit in his chest.
She edged into the room, her gun hunting the way. Her eyes adjusted, the dark turning to gloom. She saw the hammock they’d stretched out for Penn. El almost fell over, her boots slipping on something on the deck. She reached a hand down, her fingers coming away wet, slick with something more viscous than water. El held them up to the gloom. It wasn’t dark enough to be blood. It was some kind of … discharge.
This wasn’t going well. This whole day? Not going well at all.
Her head jerked up at movement, the darkening of the light, and she looked up to see Penn — it must have been — silhouetted in the light. His hands were on the doorframe, and he was leaning in, like his chest was heavy and he was trying to hold it up. She brought her gun up and fired, the flash bright, the hammer burst of sound deafening in the room. She hit nothing but air. Penn was gone.
She ejected the cartridge, the plastic popping as it hit the deck. She pushed a new one home with her thumb,
but she had to try a couple of times before she could get it in the breach. Her damn hands were shaking so much. She was panting, the breath coming in and out of her in big gasps. If there was something airborne in the ship, she was sucking it all in, but fuck it, if she was going to die, she would die after Penn did.
El made it back out to the corridor. One more deck to go. Cargo bay. Lots of places to hide down there. Just great.
You can do this. Penn’s unarmed, right? Or he would have shot you. Worst case, he wants to infect you with alien spores. He’s not going to shoot you.
Her rational mind wanted her to believe that, but it was a tiny voice compared to what the rest of her was gibbering. Not because it was wrong, per se, but because being infected with alien spores was not on her bucket list. Definitely not on the list at all.
The cargo bay was dark. Of fucking course it was dark. She pointed her pistol down the metal ladder. “Penn? You down there?”
Something hissed below. A leaking pipe? Something damaged on the ship? That wasn’t great either, but it’d need to be dealt with after the whole Penn situation.
“Penn, I’m coming down. We can talk this out.” Her voice was shaking, making a liar of her ability to say more than just two sentences let alone talking it out. She started down the ladder. A lot more slowly this time, because both her rational mind and her lizard hindbrain did not want to go down there. She reached the decking, putting a foot on it, wanting the solid metal to make her feel comfortable. To feel like this was home, and that she knew it, and that Penn was the alien here.
It didn’t help.
The cargo bay was dark, but like Penn’s cabin, it turned to gloom as her eyes adjusted. Panels, readouts around the bay cast small glowing pools of radiance. Just a big empty cargo bay, with lots of storage racks and rails and mount points to hide in, behind, or under. Magical.
Something hissed again in the gloom, and El pointed her gun in that direction. “Penn?” Then, “Hope?”
Her eyes were adjusting, and she could see something against the wall. Some kind of … structure. Like a whole bunch of papier-mâché. El walked towards it, her eyes picking out details in the gloom as she got closed. It was a kind of solid mass was attached to the wall. It looked like a person.
Tyche's Flight (Tyche's Journey Book 1) Page 22