by Jay Allan
Rigel hung down a side street. Rada hustled to the corner. Two blocks up, he turned another corner and she jogged to catch up. Around the corner, the air was thick with the smell of leaves. A dark plaza opened around her, dotted with trees. Apartments rose to both sides. She slowed. Ahead, a solid wall of residences closed her in.
A shoe scraped behind her. She whirled. Rigel emerged from behind a tree, teeth shining in the darkness. “Hey there.”
Rada’s heart pumped. “Evening.”
He walked forward, completely at ease. “Do I know you? You’re following me like I know you.”
“I live here. Right over on Blake.”
He stopped ten feet from her, hand in his pocket. “Don’t move. Hands where I can see them. Time to find out who you are.”
SHIP’S LOG: 3
“Esson is right.” Captain Ffel glared across the row of dissenters. “We have lost not just the war, but the Way. We will go to Earth, find our gutbrothers, and go home.”
Tton glared back. “This is defeatist. We were left behind to act as reserves. Our missiles can put the aliens to their final death.”
“Along with all other life on the world,” I said.
“That which is strongest will survive.” He turned to the others. “Is this not in accordance with the Way?”
“This is not open to vote,” Ffel said. “The time of calm is gone. We exist in emergency. And I am the captain.”
“Then I call a vote for a new captain.”
I despaired. So many stood with Tton, hungry for vengeance. Perhaps Ffel could have denied them their vote, but he would not do so for the same reason he would not nuke the planet with no intent of taking it.
Excepting Tton and Ffel, our crew contained nineteen eligible voters. By rule, Tton would require six-tenths of them to ascend. Twelve of nineteen. The vote began. The first six were split. Then three straight tentacles rose for Tton. My spirits sank. Yet as they went around the room, Tton’s lead grew no larger. At the end, the vote stood eleven for Tton, eight for Ffel.
“This is absurd,” Tton said. “The majority is mine.”
“The majority is not enough.” Captain Ffel bobbed his sensepods to the pilot. “Set course for Earth. Let our surviving gutbrothers know we will be there soon to bring them home.”
“I will not let you throw away the lives of our dead. Not when we can still claim victory.” Tton drew his weapon, aimed it at the captain’s head, and pushed the button.
CHAPTER 9
They stared at each other across the darkness of the box canyon of apartments.
“Who do you work for?” Rada said.
Rigel laughed. “You first.”
“Your employers, they’re murderers. Did you know that?”
His grin collapsed on itself. “I know your voice. That look on your face. You’re her, aren’t you?”
She shook her head. “You don’t know me.”
“Pence! Rada Pence.” Rigel laughed. “Nice cham job. Can’t hide who you are, though. Not from me. I spent days studying you. Every video out there. I’d know you from your walk.”
“Why? I’m no one. What could I matter?”
“You and your friends couldn’t shut up. Nobody’s sloppier than a drunk sailor who thinks he’s about to be rich. You would be amazed at the money you can make hanging around in bars waiting for fools to out themselves.”
“Oh yeah? And what’s your cut of the prize? Look at you, living in a Skylon dump. Spending all day slumming around bars. Why, it must only be a matter of time before you can afford to buy your own station.”
“They pay me well enough.” He reached for the device on his hip. “I think it’s time for you to meet my friends. I’m sure they can’t wait to hear how you made it off Nereid.”
He glanced down at his device, fingers flying over its screen. Rada lunged toward him. He looked up, gaping, and stumbled back, striking at her face with his free hand. It was a wild swipe and it landed with little force. She hammered her fist into his left hand. The device spun away, clattering on the pavement.
Rigel dropped his shoulder and bulled into her. He outweighed her by fifty pounds and she flew from her feet. She landed on her side with a grunt. She didn’t know much about fighting, but she knew it wasn’t a great idea to get in a wrestling match with someone who could fold you in half. She scrambled away, grabbing for his device.
Behind her, Rigel got to his feet and launched himself at her. He landed hard on her back, driving the air from her lungs. His hand clamped her wrist, bending it behind her back. She cried out. He snaked his left arm around her throat, took her neck in the crook of his elbow, and squeezed.
Her eyes bulged. She flapped at him with her left hand, trying to strike his groin, but he shifted his hips, bearing his body down on her. Something gouged into her left hip. She reached into her pocket. Her pulse thundered in her ears, her vision blurring. She drew out the plastic springblade, jammed it against his side, and punched the button.
He screamed and jerked back, trying to get away from the three-inch blade embedded in his body. His hold on her throat remained. She slashed at his arm. He rolled off her, kicking away. Blood dripped from his side and arm. Eyes blazing, he reached for his pocket.
Rada’s vision fogged red. This man had helped kill her crew. Her friends. Now he meant to finish the job. She scrabbled toward him, feinting with her free hand. He put his arms in front of him. She slashed them and he cried out and yanked them back. She plunged the knife into his throat.
He pawed at her, but his strength was gone. She finished him off, then stood, backing up, the knife held loosely in her fingers. He was bleeding everywhere. It was on her blade, her hands. A fountain burbled to her left. She ran to it and scrubbed off the worst of the stains, then ran back to Rigel, rifled his pockets, and grabbed his device.
Its screen was active. It was a map of the level. At the east and west sides of the station, the elevators were highlighted. Both were flanked by two green dots. As she watched, three more green dots inched toward the north. Toward Old Bog’s.
Toward her position.
She ran back the way she’d come in. There were no other elevators. There were emergency stairwells, but these were beside the elevators and would be covered by the dead man’s backup. The map showed no other exits. Figuring that if she could see them, they could track Rigel’s device, she shut it down and stripped out the battery.
The map had shown no other way out—but there were always back doors. Hidden routes from one level to the next. She used to think such things were rumors, but one night when they’d been discussing it at Shine, Stem had insisted they were real. Rada had told him that was nonsense, that the authorities would never allow such things. He told her to finish her drink and come outside. Then he’d brought her to the secret staircase through the station.
The problem, though, was that she’d been dead drunk. She had virtually no memory of the trip; she’d been magically transported, borne along on a cloud of booze. Rada knew the back door existed. She just had no gods damn idea where it was.
“Rada to Tine.” She jogged down the street, heading in the general direction of Shine. “Simm, are you there?”
“Copy,” he said, his voice tiny in her ear. “How can I help you?”
“I need an extraction.”
“You need us to pick you up? When?”
Hearing hurried footfalls, she jagged down an alley and into a doorway. “Right now.”
“It’s going to take about twenty minutes to dock,” he said. “Rada, what’s happening?”
“What’s happening is that I need to get off Skylon ASAP. Gotta go, Simm.”
She waited for the footsteps to fade, then resumed heading south. She combed her memory of Stem’s voyage to the secret staircase. It had started at Shine. It had ended inside … a book store? As soon as she had the thought, she remembered the smell of ink and paper. She had been absolutely delighted at the quaintness of it, the rows and rows of bound, p
hysical books lining the walls and the shelves partitioning the shop. Even more bizarre than its wares, the place had been open in the middle of the night—and its owner hadn’t seemed to mind when two clumsy, stomping people stumbled to the back and into the stairwell leading up from it.
She slowed and got out her device, running a quick search of the level. There was only one book store, Crooked Spines. Several blocks south of Shine. As soon as Rada crossed Split Street and entered the flow of pedestrians, she broke into a jog. Another memory surfaced from the ocean of her mind: the owner had stopped them on their way to the stairs. Stem had said something, some phrase, and the owner grinned and let him by. Something about whales? It had been a command of some kind—Stem had gotten this shit-eating grin and belted it out like a stage actor.
But she couldn’t remember the words.
Would have to fake it. As she crossed the street that housed Shine, she double-checked her hands for blood. A little bit around her fingernails, but nothing obvious. She spat on them and wiped them on her dark pants. She had just killed someone, hadn’t she? Someone who deserved it—someone who’d been trying to kill her—yet she wasn’t sure that was going to keep the guilt at bay.
She ran on. As she neared Crooked Spines, she badly wanted to check Rigel’s device and see if she was being followed, but she knew that could do little to help her and everything to hurt her.
The book store was at the top floor of a gray building with no decorations besides the signs for its businesses. Rada headed past the ground-floor deli to the stairwell. Her breath echoed in the tight space. As soon as she exited onto the second-floor landing, she smelled paper and ink.
She took a second to compose herself, then strolled inside. A handful of shoppers idled beneath the shelves, browsing with the steady rasp of pages. Rada clung to the wall on her way to the back. On the other side of the shelf to her right, soft steps paced hers. She gritted her teeth and walked faster. Two doors stood ahead. One bore the bathroom sign. The other showed a stylized whale. She tried its handle. Locked.
“May I help you?”
She flinched. Beside her, an older man crossed his arms over his potbelly, staring at her through a pair of antique glasses. Frizzy white hair wreathed his head.
“I need out.” She gestured to the door. “I’ve been here before.”
“Don’t remember your face. And I’ve got an eye for them.”
“It was just a few months ago,” she said, then remembered the cham job. “Sir, it’s an emergency.”
He lowered his voice. “Anyone who truly needs that door knows how to get through it.”
“Where’s your axe?” She laughed, squeezing her eyes shut tight, and tipped back her chin. As if the motion had dislodged something, the memory tumbled into her head. She opened her eyes and blurted, “Call me Ishmael.”
The old man grinned the same grin as he’d shown Stem and unlocked the door. “Safe voyage.”
The stairwell was dim and smelled dusty. The door closed behind her with a steely click, enfolding her in silence. She climbed up as quietly as she could, passing one landing, then a second with a doorway. If the locked door in the Crooked Spine was anything to go by, once she left the stairwell, she wouldn’t be able to get back in. Then again, it was probably safer than the elevators.
She was still 21 levels down from the port. No picnic. Then again, it couldn’t possibly be as bad as chipping herself free from an icy cave-in an inch at a time.
She slogged up. After a few floors, she tried to get a status report from Simm, but her device had no signal. The stairwell was hardened against radiation, which made sense, given that it was an escape route. It would have been easy to pipe in a net connection, though. Whoever had built the back door had wanted to ensure its users couldn’t be tracked.
The stairs felt endless, numbing her mind as they wore out her body. She counted off each floor. Five below the port, with her strength flagging, she took a break to prepare herself for the final push. She got so lost in the rhythm of climbing she was halfway up to the next landing before she realized she’d passed the exit to the port.
The door opened to a small round room with another door opposite. Rada pulled off her shoe and stuck it in the door to keep it from latching, then tried the other one. Outside, she looked on a plaza with a view of the ships outside in the vacuum. She went back for her shoe and exited.
Pedestrians and electric carts flowed in and out of the port. It was the people who weren’t moving that caught her eye, though. Two men in dark suits stood at either side of the entrance, scanning everyone who came and went. A man in an environmental suit walked past them pushing a bulky, rumbling cart. The man headed toward the plaza, drawing the eyes of one of the suited men. Rada moved behind a stand of three palm trees that joined together at the base of their trunk.
She started to speak into her mike, but a pair of women entered the plaza, pointing out at the stars. As Rada waited for them to get lost in conversation, the rumbling of the cart grew nearer.
She scowled, ducked her chin, and muttered, “I’m in trouble, Simm. They’re watching the port. I’m going to need a suit. Find an airlock. And walk directly to the Tine.” Silence over her device. “Simm?”
“Psst.”
The sound wasn’t coming from her device—she was hearing it in the air. She whirled. The man in the suit stood to her side, his cart parked at a second stand of trees.
“Oh dear,” he said. “The hatch to my cart appears to have fallen open. I hope no one climbs into it before I have the chance to close it.”
Rada muffled a laugh. She waited for the suited men at the port to glance at a woman approaching the doors, then walked to the cart and climbed inside. The cart lurched forward, grumbling so heavily Rada couldn’t hear anything outside. Two minutes later, it drew to a halt. Simm tapped on the side. She climbed out into a deserted hall. They walked through the port, crossed the umbilical to the Tine, and took off. During the launch, Simm breathed more and more frantically, clutching the arms of his chair.
“What’s the matter?” Rada said.
“Flying,” he said tightly. “Terrible.”
“Think of it like a ride,” Rada said. “Aren’t rides supposed to be fun?”
He scowled at her and took a deep breath. He calmed down as soon as the ship leveled out.
On the main screen, Skylon receded slowly. Simm bugged his eyes at her. “What happened?”
“The man who sold us out,” Rada said. “He’s dead. I killed him.”
Simm’s gaze snapped to her face. “You … killed him? On purpose?”
“He attacked me. He was choking me. It was self-defense.”
“This is exactly what Toman was afraid would happen.” He was blinking compulsively, eyes darting back and forth, returning to the panic he’d fallen into during takeoff. “This is a disaster. We’re no closer to the answers and now we’ve murdered one of the enemy. This could lead to war!”
“I don’t think he had the chance to tell his backup who I was.” Rada reached for her pocket. “And we’re not empty-handed. I got his device.”
The anxiety vanished from Simm’s face. He fiddled with the device’s interior before replacing the battery and turning it on. He blinked twice, then his fingers blurred as he navigated its interior.
“Encrypted. Naturally.”
“So what’s next? Deliver it to the LOTR and see if they can crack it?”
“First, I have to tell Toman everything,” he said. “But you may have just saved us from a fate worse than death.”
-o0o-
According to the time her body had been keeping, it wasn’t yet midnight, but Rada was exhausted. While Simm processed the device, she went to her bunk and fell dead asleep.
She woke hours later. On the bridge, Lonnie had gone to bed. Simm was still absorbed in the stolen device. Rada glanced at the screen, but the usual ETA wasn’t displayed.
“When will we be back at the Hive?” she said.
Simm shrugged. “That’s not possible to say.”
“Why on earth not? Is there something wrong with our nav?”
“Our nav is fine.” He pulled himself away from the device, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. In the low light of the cabin, his untanned skin looked even paler, spectral. “But we’re not going to the Hive.”
“Something’s wrong.” Her stomach dropped. “Toman wants to call off the whole thing.”
Simm laughed, genuine but hesitant, as if he were taking an unfamiliar ship for a spin. “Would you believe the opposite? We’re not going to the Hive because we’ve been ordered to go to the waypoint instead.”
“The waypoint? Start explaining. I’ll let you know once I’ve caught up.”
“Portions of the man’s device were encrypted. I have bundled those and transmitted them to the Hive, where the Lords of the True Realm may or may not be able to crack them. However, prior to his encounter with you, the dead man had sent and received several transmissions with lesser encryption. I’m still working on them, but they made a much bigger mistake—they didn’t obscure the transmissions’ headers.”
“That tell you where they originated from.”
He nodded. “The waypoint. Our charts show it as empty space, but if we can find and ID the ship sending the transmissions, we may finally discover who’s behind all this.”
Rada sat down beside him. “How far away are we?”
“It’s out on the fringe. No more than a few hours.”
The memory of the previous night watched Rada from beyond the light of her mind’s center. To keep it at bay, she read through what Simm had pieced together, then operated as a sounding board while he picked away at the encryption, devising new routines to fling at its walls. She didn’t understand much of what he was proposing, but her job wasn’t to understand. It was to coax him into voicing his ideas out loud.