by Jay Allan
“Interesting.” Vance steepled his fingers under his chin, and his angular features grew even more vulturine as he contemplated the news. “Well, I’ll file your report, and we’ll see what command has to say, but if all of that is true, and Brondi has taken to openly opposing the fleet, he’s going to be in for more trouble than he’s bargained for.”
“Yes, sir. May I be dismissed now, Commander?”
“Of course. You sound like you could use some downtime. Your voice is a little strange.”
“Strange, sir?” Ethan asked.
Vance nodded. “Like you’re hoarse. You sure you’re not coming down with something?”
Ethan hesitated before shaking his head. “Not that I’m aware of, sir. I must just be tired.”
“Well, barring any emergencies, I’m taking you off active duty until Six returns with his report, so go get some rest. We don’t need you making the other pilots sick. Dismissed.”
Ethan nodded and turned to leave the commander’s office. He let out a long sigh as the door swished shut behind him. Damn you, Brondi, with all your millions of sols, you couldn’t afford to get me a better vocal synthesizer? My voice is a little strange? That can’t be good. He would just have to speak as little as possible until his mission was over.
Ethan walked down the corridor to the rail car tunnel at the end, punched the summon car button, and waited for the next car to arrive. He needed to retreat to his quarters for a vaccucleanse and to formulate a plan to sabotage the Valiant. Ethan watched as the control panel beside the doors to the rail tunnel ticked down the ETA for the next car. After a moment of idle contemplation, he realized that he didn’t even know where his quarters were, so he pulled the mission data card Brondi had given him out of his pocket and slotted it into the input just behind his right ear to examine the contents of the card more privately than a holo reader would allow. That implant had come in handy over the years. It was essentially a small computer which fed data straight to his brain.
As he searched the document, Ethan heard someone shout out behind him, “Hey, Skidmark, aren’t you going to let me buy you that drink?”
Ethan mentally closed his link to the data card and turned to face Gina. She walked up to him with a sarcastic smile. “I like to pay my debts. Who knows, maybe I’ll even give you tips to help you lure some unsuspecting sclut to your quarters for the night.”
“Really? You’d do that for me? I’m touched, Gina.”
Her expression became exasperated and she stopped a half a dozen feet away from him. “No, you depraved pervert. Just a drink. Come on.” Not bothering to insist further, she turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come.
Ethan hesitated, considering her offer for a moment before deciding to follow her. He broke into a light jog to catch up, and then he flashed Gina a winning smile. She rolled her eyes and looked away.
He supposed it couldn’t hurt to mingle a bit. After all, he’d need to gather some information about the Valiant in order to properly sabotage it. The people to talk to in order to glean that information would almost certainly be pilots and engineers, all of whom he would find inside the ship’s rec halls.
They reached the rec hall they’d passed earlier called “The Basement,” and Ethan stepped up to the control panel to key the door open. The door swished aside to reveal a large, darkly-lit room with a ceiling full of uncovered pipes. The walls were filled with floor to ceiling holoscreens and dark gray furniture was arrayed before them. Small knots of pilots were lounging there, drinking and playing games. A long, elliptical bar counter stood in the center of the room, and on the other side of that, Ethan glimpsed a padded arena where a group of pilots were busy battling each other with small, remote-controlled assault mechs while dozens of others looked on and cheered for their favorites to win. Ethan followed Gina up to the bar, and they sat down together.
Gina raised a hand to call the bartender over. “Egrit!” The bartender turned and nodded to her. He was a scary-looking man with a bald head, multiple glowing blue and red tattoos on his arms and face, and a few spiky subcutaneous piercings in his knuckles. Ethan felt like he’d met a dozen men just like Egrit during his time on Etaris.
“Yea?” Egrit asked.
“Two black mavericks,” Gina said, and offered her upturned wrist to the man. He grabbed her wrist none too gently and passed a wand over it before turning to a cooler behind him and pulling out two frosty transpiranium bottles filled with bubbling black beer. Black mavericks were brewed from heavily fermented Forlissan Black Grass and Chorlisean Wheat. The result was a meal in a bottle that could knock you out cold if you weren’t used to it. Ethan wondered that they were even allowed to serve such potent drinks to pilots, but he supposed that they weren’t on the active duty roster, so it didn’t matter much.
Gina raised her beer and held it out to Ethan for a toast. “To another day among the living.”
Ethan raised his own beer and clinked his bottle with hers. “To not being dead,” he replied and took a sip of his Maverick. He reveled in the strong, bittersweet flavor of the beer. It had been a long time since he’d had the sols to afford more than water. When he set his beer down, he noticed that Gina hadn’t taken a sip of hers yet. She was frozen with the bottle halfway to her lips, staring at him with eyebrows raised and a look of utter perplexity on her face.
“What?” Ethan asked.
She nodded to his left hand which was still clamped around his bottle of beer. “Since when do you wear a wedding ring, Adan?”
CHAPTER 9
Ethan couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to put his wedding ring back on after the holoskin. It was an old habit by now for him to wear the ring. He’d always considered it a kind of good luck charm, but now it was about to get him into a lot of trouble.
“Wedding ring?” he echoed. “Is that what this is?” He made a show of examining the simple silver band on his left ring finger.
“Yes, Adan, that’s exactly what it is. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. What, are you hoping that women will prefer a married man?” Gina shook her head. “That’s twisted, even for you, Skidmark. Where did you even find that? Rare to see a wedding band at all these days.”
Ethan decided to stick with naïveté as an excuse. “An old storekeeper on Forliss Station sold it to me. He said it would bring me luck.”
Gina snorted and narrowed her eyes. “And since when did you become superstitious?”
Another wrong move. Ethan turned to her with what he hoped to be a disarming smile. “Hey, what’s with the interrogation? I thought you just wanted to buy me a drink. It’s beginning to sound suspiciously like you want to get to know me better. Maybe you had an ulterior motive for offering that drink. Hoping to get into my pants, are we? All you have to do is ask, Gina.”
That did it. Ethan watched Gina’s expression turn from curious to furious in a matter of seconds. “You know what, you’re right.” She rose from her bar stool, taking her beer with her. “Enjoy your drink, Adan.” With that, she turned and stormed off, leaving him alone at the bar.
Ethan took another sip of his black maverick and caught a nasty grin from Egrit. “Someone’s not getting any tonight,” the bartender said, chuckling.
Ethan was about to reply that he wasn’t looking for any action, but then he remembered he had to stay in character, so he cocked his head and gave a haughty smile. “Don’t be too sure about that. I’ll have who I want, when I want, and how I want them—two or three at a time if it suits me. I don’t have to ask nicely, because they’re already begging.”
Egrit burst into gruff laughter. “Same old Skidmark!” He turned away, shaking his head, and Ethan smiled. It seemed like he’d managed to nail down Adan’s character perfectly. The boy had obviously been insufferably arrogant and rude with everyone around him. If he’d had redeeming qualities, Ethan wasn’t sure what they might be.
Taking advantage of the peace and quiet, Ethan mentally pulled up his dossier again and searched for d
irections to Adan’s quarters aboard the Valiant. After a few minutes, he realized that there was no mention anywhere in the file of where Adan stayed. Ethan frowned. If he wanted to rest and get cleaned up, he was going to have to ask someone where his quarters were—and wouldn’t that be a dead giveaway. Or, he could just get horribly drunk and feign amnesia … Why not? He’d be buying drinks on Adan’s tab. At least that way he’d get something back for the pain of extracting his identichip and implanting Adan’s in its place.
Ethan signaled to Egrit, who was busy serving an attractive looking woman at the other end of the bar counter. She caught his eye and smiled. Ethan was taken aback by that and rather than returning her smile, he looked away, embarrassed.
Then he remembered who he was supposed to be and he chided himself for responding so out of character, but it was too late. He tried for the bartender’s attention again, and this time he succeeded. Egrit walked up to him, and asked, “Yea?”
Ethan nodded to his beer and offered his wrist to Egrit. “Keep them—” He suddenly broke into a fit of coughing as his throat began tickling maddeningly. He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse now even to his ears. “Throat must be dry. Keep them coming,” he said, tapping the side of his beer.
The bartender frowned at him. “You don’t sound too good, Lieutenant. Maybe you should go get some rest.”
“No, I’m fine. Get me another drink and I’ll be even better.”
Egrit snorted. “Whatever you say, Skidmark.”
-o0o-
Alara watched Brondi offer her that gaping smile of his. “Either you’re planning to eat me, or you’re happy to see me,” Alara said as she walked up to the cell door.
“So charming,” Brondi said from the other side. “Your talents are being wasted in here, Sweet Thing. I could have you making more sols per hour than most people make in a week. What do you say? I’ll even let you have your pick of which of my pleasure palaces you’d like to work in.”
Alara found her hands closing in white-knuckled fists around the bars of her cell. “You’d have to implant me with a slave chip before I’d ever agree to that.”
Brondi cocked his head suddenly to one side, as though he’d just had an epiphany. “Why, that is a novel idea! I do believe I’ll take your advice, thank you.”
Alara felt dread and horror welling up inside of her, threatening to burst forth in a scream, but she clamped down on it, unwilling to give Brondi the satisfaction. Instead, she just glared at his loathsome, pudgy face, willing his head to explode. “What about Ethan’s bargain? I thought you were going to release us once he got your information for you.”
“Oh, yes, Ethan! About him…” Brondi’s grin turned even nastier and his wild, bloodshot gray eyes sparkled madly. “He’s not coming back, Sweet Thing.”
Alara’s face became stricken. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you see the story Ethan gave you was not entirely true. I did send him to sabotage the Valiant so I could be rid of the fleet’s perpetual meddling in my affairs, but … that was never going to work.” Brondi shook his head sadly.
“Ethan would never agree to do that.”
“Actually,” Brondi said, raising a finger to silence her objections, “he did, but it doesn’t matter. Not even Ethan knows what he’s really doing aboard the Valiant, and it’ll be too late by the time he figures it out. Right now your boy toy is a walking time bomb, just waiting to explode.”
“What you mean?” Alara demanded. She rattled the bars of her cell, and Brondi’s mouth gaped in another smile.
“Feisty! That’s going to come in handy in your new profession.”
“What have you done to Ethan?”
Brondi shook his head sadly. “The better question is, what am I about to do to you?” Brondi gestured to someone just out of her line of sight, and a pair of men came into view. One of them held a wicked-looking chip implanter, while the other held a stun pistol—and he was aiming it at her.
“Say goodbye, Alara. When you wake up, you’ll be going by Angel.”
Alara opened her mouth to scream, and she turned to run, but there was nowhere to go. The stun bolt hit her in the back with an electrifying jolt, and her muscles went to jelly. Before she even hit the floor, everything faded to black.
CHAPTER 10
As Ethan was ordering his third maverick, a group of half-drunk pilots strolled up to him at the bar. One of them pulled out the bar stool next to him and hopped up. Ethan spared him a grumpy look. It was Ithicus Adari, Guardian Three. The others stayed back, whispering and shushing each other, standing there looking stupid with knowing grins pasted on their faces. Among them was Gina. Their eyes met briefly, and Ethan saw that hers glittered with something dark and ugly. Ithicus draped an arm over his shoulder and said, “Hoi there, Skidmark.”
“Hoi brua,” Ethan said drily.
“Don’t suppose you’d like to join us for a short sim run.”
“Mmmm, I’m tired. I think I’ll just stay here.”
“Let’s make it interesting,” Ithicus said, ignoring him. “Sythians versus the ISSF. How about … the Rokan Defense. You command the ISSF and I’ll command the Sythians. You say you’re a 5A rating and you have a natural instinct for command—” A few snorts of laughter erupted from the group of pilots standing behind Ethan, and Ithicus shrugged his big shoulders. “Well, here’s your chance to prove it, Skidmark. You’ll have an advantage that the Rokans didn’t. You’ll know that the invasion is coming.”
Ethan slowly turned to look at Ithicus. There was a sarcastic gleam in his dark eyes which told Ethan he was being mocked somehow and that Ithicus didn’t actually expect him to accept the offer, but Ethan was actually interested. He’d never witnessed any of the battles with the Sythians, and Roka IV had been his home. He wanted to see if at least one of the millions of massacres visited upon humanity by the alien invaders could have been prevented. Making the offer even more tempting, Ethan actually did have a 5A rating, and he was tired of people telling him that it was a fake. Maybe Adan’s had been, but Ethan had earned his rating back in the Rokan Academy, not from an unscrupulous vendor in Dark Space.
“Okay.” Ethan nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Ithicus’s grin flickered, surprise showing through. Obviously the whole thing had been a bluff to somehow irritate Adan Reese, but Ethan was not Adan. Ithicus recovered smoothly and his expression became smirking. “Want to make it interesting?”
Ethan frowned. He wasn’t sure what he was getting into, so betting on the outcome was a bad idea, but what did he really have to lose, anyway? “What do you have in mind?”
“If you beat me, I’ll switch places with you on your next rotation. You can stay in Dark Space on patrol, while I go to the frontlines. If you lose, you take a double shift out there and I take your patrol duty.”
Ethan’s brow furrowed. The frontlines? he wondered. What frontlines? “Ah … sure, but you have to give me odds. Everyone knows the Rokan Defense was an impossible fight to win.” Ethan didn’t actually know that, but it was a fair bet. He didn’t know anything about what had happened on Roka IV. He’d been mining for dymium on Etaris at the time, and he’d only heard about his world falling to the invaders after the ruins there were already cold.
Ithicus nodded. “That goes without saying, Skidmark. No one wins the Rokan Defense. You just have to beat my command and tactical ratings from my last run through the mission as the ISSF.”
Ethan swirled the last of his black maverick around in the bottom of the bottle, contemplating the black depths of the beer before downing it in one last swig.
“What do you say?” Ithicus pressed.
Ethan set his bottle down with a thunk and turned to his squad mate with a thin-lipped smile. “You got yourself a bet, brua, but you’re going to regret it.”
Ithicus matched Ethan’s smile. “We’ll see about that.”
-o0o—
All of a 20 minutes later Ethan was standing on the
simulated bridge of a venture-class cruiser. He’d taken a few minutes while the simulator’s holo field was energizing to review a few of the comments and mission reports made by other pilots in order to properly familiarize himself with the mission, and now he felt at least reasonably confident that he could make a good accounting for himself—whether or not he’d beat Ithicus Adari’s scores was another matter.
Ethan looked around the bridge. He was surrounded by other officers, some real, and some AIs. Before him lay the captain’s table, a holo table standing on a raised walkway that ran between the half a dozen different control stations on the bridge—three to his left and three to his right. Those control stations fed the captain’s table with a continuous stream of data, and there, overlaid on a glowing blue grid, Ethan was given an overview of the Rokan system and the forces under his command. Ethan spun in a slow circle on the deck, nodding to a few of his bridge crew as they stared expectantly at him.
All of this was intensely familiar. It evoked strong memories from his childhood, back when his only cares in the world had been his grades in school and girls. Back then, when he’d had something called “free time” he’d spent it hanging out at Roka City’s sim center with his friends, running and re-running simulated fleet actions, which were of course all pure fiction—the real ones were classified. Those missions had been created for the solitary purpose of entertainment. Ethan had been the commander of a venture-class cruiser on more than one occasion, and although the recreational sims did appear to have some distinct differences from this one, most of what he saw around him on the bridge was the same.
Ethan walked up to the captain’s table and ran a hand along the smooth black border of the glowing blue grid. This was the whole reason he’d become a pilot, and the whole reason he had a 5A rating today. He’d earned his 5A rating in sims long before he’d ever had a chance to earn it for real. Back then he’d had big plans for his life; on more than one occasion he’d imagined himself becoming a fleet admiral, commanding an entire flotilla of ISSF warships. That was before hard times had hit—before his mother had become sick. At age 17 he’d been faced with the choice of dropping out of school to get a job or watching them both starve, which wasn’t really a choice at all. Once he’d dropped out, there was no going back. No fleet recruiter would take a high school dropout—not back then, anyway.