by M. D. Cooper
Five minutes later, she was back at the row of seats in the detention area. Lashes attempted to maneuver herself to the chair occupied by BAMF on their previous visit, but the officer wasn’t interested in where she wanted to sit and shoved her into the first seat they came past.
Behind her back, Lashes’ knuckles slammed into the hard plastic and she cried out, “Ow! That fwucking huwrts!” It also hurt to speak, so she got her internal med-nano working on her split lips. Chances were that she’d need to use them for more than talking before this jaunt was over.
“Shut up,” the officer replied before stalking away.
He hadn’t bothered locking her into the seat’s restraint system, and Lashes twisted her arms around, trying to find a more comfortable position. The bug hadn’t sent a coded ping that it was back yet, but she figured it was just a matter of time. She was about to rise up and move to BAMF’s prior seat when the muted sounds of commotion from the outer office reached her ears.
A stream of curses and the sounds of a scuffle came through the doorway into the detention area, and a minute later, two officers burst through the entrance, Red pinioned between them, but still putting up ferocious resistance while they muscled him toward the row of seats.
One of the officers was a large blond man, while the other was a lithe, but muscular woman. The man had a scratch on his face, and the woman’s hair—which must have been in a bun at some point—was a tangled mess.
“You fuckers!” Red screamed. “You can’t do this to me! She attacked me, I have to get home, my wife is making my favorite dinner and I promised I wouldn’t be late!”
“The sooner you get in the goddamn chair, the sooner we can sort this out,” one of the officers grunted.
Two more officers followed and began the process of uncuffing the man and getting him down into the chair.
“Tom, no! Don’t uncuff him yet,” the blond officer called out. “Get the restraints ready first.”
Red pulled his arm out of Blondie’s grasp, and took a swing at the woman who held his other arm. She yelped and ducked, still managing to hold his arm. The two officers in the rear lunged forward, and the entire group went down.
Lashes did her best not to smile at the scuffle taking place at her feet. It wouldn’t do for the vids to sot her amusement.
“Get the fuck off my face!”
“Ow, that smarts!”
“Look, get his leg there before—”
“Arrghh!”
Lashes listened to a stream of curses and poorly executed directions for at least a full minute before Lieutenant Sedna came in and shot the man with tranquilizer pistol of some sort.
“Sweet fuck,” she swore. “It’s like this is your first day! Get him in a cell and check him over. He probably has some sort of contraband if he’s putting up a fight like that.”
Sedna watched without speaking as the five officers hauled the now-unconscious man out through another door that Lashes assumed led to cells in the back.
Once the sounds of the brute’s unconscious body being dragged through the corridors faded away, she turned to Lashes.
“So, what happened out there?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Guy walked into me and made some pretty insulting comments,” Lashes replied before looking away. “I shouldn’t have hit him, but he pissed me off…and I guess I was amped up from the fight at the restaurant.”
“You get in a lot of fights for such a waif,” Sedna said, her expression softening just a touch. “What were you doing back here? I saw the vids, you were just standing in front of the station.”
Lashes forced a blush to rise in her cheeks and her lips curled up into an embarrassed smile. “Well, I was coming to see you…and here I am.”
She picked up a ping from the bug; it was on its way back from its mission. She needed to get to that other chair and fast.
Sedna chuckled. “You know, there are other ways to see me than to get in a fight. Coming through the door without restraints on works a lot better when you’re trying to impress a cop.”
Lashes gave a soft laugh and looked down at her knees, noticing that her pants hadn’t fared as well as she’d hoped—there was a rip in the right knee. She looked back up at Sedna, keeping her expression demure with just a hint of anticipation.
“Yeah, add that to a long list of poor life choices,” she said.
“I checked up on you,” Sedna responded after a moment. “I found the ship that your missing friend came in on—figured it out after looking over your customs data. Has a dumb name, the Ludicrus Star, but a great rep here on the station. One of the guys onboard had a DNA profile that matched up with your woman Petra. He’s gone though, left on another ship yesterday.”
“Really?” Lashes asked, genuinely surprised that Sedna was offering this information.
“Yeah, the ship’s name was the Gettsbird.”
A name and everything—and all it took was getting punched a few times. More painful than seduction, but far less time-consuming. Lashes figured it was worth going for broke. “Where are they headed?”
“Stationmaster’s logs show them on an outsystem lane or a point stellar-east of here. Most people that jump from there go to Bollam’s World,” Sedna said as she reached down and gently pulled Lashes to her feet.
“What are you doing?” Lashes asked.
“You don’t think I can spot a hustle when I see one?” Lieutenant Sedna laughed. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve seen more tricks than you’ve dreamed up in that pretty head of yours.”
Sedna turned Lashes around and undid her cuffs before reaching around and gently massaging her breasts and letting out a long, hot breath against her neck.
“So, now it’s my turn to get my payment, something I’m going to take out of you in spades.”
Lashes shivered in her arms, letting out a soft moan. “Do you want me to fight?”
Sedna laughed as she spun Lashes around to face her. “Maybe, we’ll see how things go.”
Through the lovemaking scuffle that followed, Lashes managed to fall into the chair the bug was waiting on. It scuttled up her sleeve and she sighed with relief. As much fun as Sedna was being, there was no way the cop would look favorably upon a data breach.
Plus, bugs were hard to train and BAMF would be pissed if she didn’t come back with it.
Shit, she thought to herself. We have to go FTL again…BAMF is going to be pissed anyway.
BOLLAM’S WORLD (OR MAYBE NOT)
“Bollam’s World!” Ramsey exclaimed. “There’s no way we’re going there, we have to catch the Gettsbird before it leaves New Eden.”
The crew, including Petra, were assembled in the rec room, listening to Lashes report what she had learned from Sedna—information which had been confirmed by the bug.
“Damn straight,” BAMF nodded. “You’re not taking me FTL again.”
“Seriously?” Lashes sked. “You just gonna stay in New Eden for the rest of your life?”
“Yes,” BAMF replied simply.
“I found the ship in the system’s traffic stream,” Stick said. “They’re going slow. If they do jump to Bollam’s World, we can leapfrog them and get there first.”
“I already said that we’re not going there,” Ramsey shook his head emphatically. “That system’s a disaster. Black hole shifting all the orbits around, and the Hegemony taking over so they can turn it into a proxy state.”
“You can’t just give up!” Petra said. “Please, he’s my brother!”
“Riiiight,” Stick whispered loudly.
“No one is giving up. We just need to stop them before they get to the jump point,” Ramsey said. “Girl, what’s our departure time?”
“Stick,” Ramsey addressed the pilot, “get up to the bridge. I want us off the tug as soon as possible. You boost as fast as they allow here.”
“Are we going t
o shoot it out with them?” Lashes asked with a worried glance at Petra.
“Course not,” Ramsey replied. “We’ll figure out a way to get them to divert somewhere.”
“Where?” Petra asked. “How are you going to get a ship to divert somewhere it doesn’t want to?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get closer,” Ramsey said.
An hour later, the station tug had let go and they were flying under their own power. The Gettsbird had a ten-hour head start, but they were boosting at a more leisurely pace. Stick flew the Van on a parallel path that appeared as though they were trying to get to the jump point in a hurry, and not like they were right on the Gettsbird’s tail.
The Van didn’t have any antimatter onboard—well, they did, but it was undeclared and they weren’t about to use it and call the New Eden Space Force’s wrath down on their heads. Not yet, at least.
Ramsey watched the heavy fusion burn deplete their supplies of deuterium and lithium far faster than he would like. The math showed them having enough fuel to intercept, but they would have to spend a month drifting back to the nearest station afterward.
Or, they could use their antimatter pion drive to get to a jump point and scratch New Eden off the list of places they could ever return to.
He was in the galley pouring a glass of orange juice when Stick called down from the bridge.
Ramsey walked to the bridge, spilling a bit of juice on his hand while climbing the ladder.
“WTF! Colonel, you know…we have covers for those for a reason,” Lashes said from below him on the ladder.
Ramsey looked down to see a splash of orange on her white shirt.
“Uh…sorry.”
Lashes took a quick pit stop in the head while Ramsey continued on to the bridge. BAMF was already present, and Stick stood beside a projection of the New Eden system on the main holodisplay.
“Now, you see here,” she was saying to BAMF, “this is where the jump point is, and this is where they are, and this is where we are.”
“Fool, why is my ship a flying banana?” BAMF growled.
“Because bananas are a part of a healthy diet. Got all sorts of nutrients,” Stick replied and raised an eyebrow at BAMF. “A big girl like you should know that nutrients are very important. You have all those muscles and mods to feed.”
“Put my ship back or I’ll feed you my fist,” BAMF sneered.
“Fine, fine,” Stick replied. “You don’t need to get so testy about it. I was just trying to promote good health. We spend a lot of time cooped up on this ship, you know. Sometimes I don’t think we get nearly enough exercise.”
“What’s going on?” Ramsey asked.
“Ah! Colonel!” Stick said with a smile. “I don’t think our friends out there are going to the jump point. They want people to think they are, but they’re not. At least I think they’re not. Girl, what do you think?”
“Right, right!” Stick agreed. “They’re not accelerating! If they enter the dark layer at their current velocity, you see, they’ll take a month to get to Bollam’s World! It should only take them two weeks.” As Stick spoke, she waved her arms about.
“Only a fool would spend that much time in the dark,” BAMF commented.
“It does seem unusual,” Ramsey said. “Where could they be going, then?”
“Well, well,” Stick grinned far more than the situation required. “We have two candidates here! One is a station out in the New Eden Kuiper belt that doesn’t see a lot of visitors. Apparently, they’re some sort of cult that doesn’t believe in movement and are terribly dull people to be around. The other is this moon around this ice-giant planet, Euphrates. It’s not exactly terraformed per se, more like it was gently encouraged to have a breathable atmosphere and then left as good enough.”
Lashes had arrived during Stick’s explanation and she asked, “Which do you think is more likely, Stick?”
“Well, what would a bunch of human smugglers be doing at a station where no one moves? I doubt they even need more people…probably have enough as it is. But that moon? Who knows,” Stick said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t really want to go to either if I had a choice.”
“Girl,” Ramsey asked, “what do we know about the moon?”
“Pretty obvious, then,” Ramsey said with a nod.
“What’s obvious?” Stick asked.
“The ship we’re chasing is the Gettsbird, the moon is owned by a company called ‘Getts’,” Lashes said with a tilt to her head.
“So?” Stick asked.
“So, it’s ‘Getts’ with ‘bird’ on the end,” Ramsey said.
“You sure?” Stick asked. “I thought they were just mangling the name of some old battle I read about once.”
“A bird battle?” BAMF said with a shake of her head.
Ramsey looked at the holo, where the Gettsbird was shown as a slice of pizza flying through space. An indicator hovered beside it, labelling the ship Pepperoni.
“Fool,” BAMF muttered. “How you fly at all is a damn miracle.”
“Girl, can you put the proper display up?” Ramsey asked.
“What?” Stick asked, looking around. “I’m hungry.”
An instant later, the slice of pizza was replaced by a starship, and the label read ‘Gettsbird’.
Stick nodded sagely. “Ahhh, I see how you came to that conclusion, though I’m not totally certain there’s a connection.”
“Imma beat a conclusion into your stupid head,” BAMF growled. “They’re going to that moon!”
“OK, OK,” Stick said. “No need for violence, I’ll entertain your flight of fancy.”
“Well, BAMF,” Ramsey clapped BAMF on the shoulder and smiled. “Looks like we don’t have to drug you and dump you in the cargo hold. No dark layer necessary.”
BAMF shot Ramsey a dark look, but didn’t say a word.
“Don’t alter course yet,” Ramsey said. “But slow down a bit, we don’t want to overshoot that moon.”
* * * * *
Forty hours later, the Gettsbird dipped below the cloud cover of the moon—cleverly named Gettsmoon—and Stick admitted that it may actually be their quarry’s destination.
The crew and Petra were gathered in the rec room to discuss their approach.
“What have we learned about this place?” Ramsey asked.
“It’s small, but dense,” Lashes replied. “About a half-g on the surface, which is mostly covered in water. As you can guess it’s close enough to its planet, Euphrates, that it flexes a bunch. Makes for a lot of underwater volcanic activity.”
“So, it’ll be warm?” Ramsey asked.
“Depends. They don’t get much light from the star, but Euphrates has one of those little fusion suns that works its way around the planet every hundred hours or so. Gettsmoon’s OK at night, but during the day it gets up to fifty degrees.”
“Looks like we’re in nighttime for another forty hours or so,” Stick commented.
“Well, it’s all making sense now,” Ramsey said.
“What, orbital dynamics? I always wondered if you really got that,” Stick said.
“No, Stick!” Ramsey said, exasperated with his pilot. “Petra’s brother was investigating some sort of bacteria that was found on a moon’s ocean vents. Here we have a moon, currently being visited by her brother, that has oceans, and probably a good number of underwater volcanic vents.”
“So, it is related to his work?” Petra asked with a frown. “I thought he owed money for hookers and drugs, or something.”
“If we came here for nothing…” BAMF cast a baleful eye around the room. “No amou
nt of toast points is going to get you out of this.”
“I don’t think so,” Ramsey said. “Remember the note?”
Everyone looked at the note still sitting on the on the end table where Petra had set it down. It still emitted a foul odor and no one really wanted to touch it, but they couldn’t throw it away, either.
“I just know he’s in trouble,” Petra said, her voice wavering. “You can’t turn back. He’s so close. Let’s just go down. I know you can find him and bring him back to me.”
Ramsey gnawed on his carrot for a moment. “We’ll go down. Can’t hurt to check it out. If they’re all on the up and up, we’ll have a good laugh. If they’re not, we’ll concoct an overly complicated plan and get your brother out of there.”
GETTSMOON (MOST DEFINITELY)
The Van’s shuttle settled down in a low valley filled with old equipment, left out to rust in the moon’s humid air.
It was the middle of the moon’s long night, and they were certain no one had seen them coast through the cloud cover and over the moon’s only significant landmass, an island only a few hundred kilometers across.
Ramsey stepped out of the shuttle, painted black like the Van with a red stripe along the side, and scanned the area as Lashes and BAMF filed out after. BAMF seemed different without all her bling—the removal of which had almost cost Ramsey the use of his left arm—not smaller, but bigger somehow, and far too silent and stealthy.
“Smells gross,” BAMF commented and Ramsey gave a sharp nod, the leafy end of his carrot drooping in the cool breeze.
“Smells like ocean,” Lashes said. “Nothing wrong with that, it’s refreshing. I wouldn’t mind swim while we’re here. Been awhile since we’ve been dirtside.”
“New Eden data feed said that there are things that live in the ocean that would strip your skin off in five seconds flat,” Ramsey said.
“Seriously?” Lashes asked. “Who would seed their oceans with stuff like that? Wasn’t this system built by the FGT? I didn’t know they were sadists.”