by J. S. Morin
The comm panel spoke with Yomin’s voice. Paranoid inklings of being chased through the ship sprang up in an instant before being swept away by cool logic. “We’ve got an incoming call from Ithaca. It sounds like a prank—maybe an inside joke I’m not privy to—but something claiming to be Don Rucker wants to talk to Tanny.”
“But she’s not—” Carl cut himself off. Of course, Tanny wasn’t here, but the mere fact of the inquiry told him everything he needed to know. Don Rucker was on Ithaca, which meant someone had leaked their location. That was a matter to deal with later. Asking for Tanny meant that he believed she was on board the Mobius, which meant that someone had told him Tanny was there, or at least let him assume without correcting him. Those were the sorts of lies that painted targeting reticules on the backs of skulls.
“Put him through to me.”
A few seconds later, a low-fidelity feed of Don Rucker’s voice came through to Carl’s quarters. “Carl. About time I got someone useful. I’m getting a little sick of your lapdogs running me around the garden like I’m a hobby horse. Where’s my daughter? Put Tanny on.”
Carl cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and ran through a few practice sniffles. Then he opened the comm. “Don… I’m sorry. The exchange we were making… there were complications. There was a firefight, ship to ship. And then… I mean… oh, Jesus. Don, she’s not coming home from this one.”
“My little girl… dead?”
Carl dropped his feigned grief in an instant. “No, Don. She’s not coming home because she’s not here. She’s not on board the Mobius or either of the other two ships I’ve got with me out here. Why? Because she stabbed me in the back and ran off with those lunatics living in the jungle of my moon. Listen, it’s a long story and I’ve got two fucking dead ships out here undergoing repairs. You want a full accounting? I’ll fill you in personally as soon as I get back. Until then, sit tight, enjoy the local cuisine, and don’t hassle my people.”
Carl shut off the comm before Don could respond. His heart was pounding in his chest. He’d just plowed through a breathless diatribe aimed at one of the galaxy’s most dangerous men. Shunting aside Carl the Worrier for a moment, he punched in a different comm ID and opened a new channel.
“This is Kwon. Good to hear from you, Mobius,” came the response.
“Sephiera, listen to me. I let Don know that Tanny’s gone native. I need you to get to Mort and tell him that. He’ll know what to do.”
“What’s Mr. Rucker going to do?”
“Nothing, providing you get to Mort so he can put a leash on him.” Carl ended the comm. He could only hope that Mort had a good plan, and didn’t go with Mordecai The Brown’s Special Multipurpose Plan, which involved a lot of fire, followed by stern glares for anyone who voiced an objection.
# # #
In theory, the comm system of your basic starship was among the simpler of subsystems. There wasn’t all the crawling through the whole ship like life support repair demanded, and it didn’t take an advanced degree in nanocircuitry the way computer core diagnostics required. Normally, it was an antenna, a transmitter, and a receiver, none of which was terribly complex. Any one of them could be cobbled into working order with borrowed parts from other ships’ systems. But Amy had customized the hell out of the Mermaid and had a kooky setup that baked in encryption at both ends.
For two days, Roddy had pored over the records in the ship’s computer, comparing them against the maze of circuits and processors. He soldered and spliced, snipped and rerouted. It was beer work, and he hadn’t brought any beer. But the alternative was getting Amy’s help, and she hadn’t said a word to him. He’d made a few seemingly simple requests, but none of them baited a response.
For two long, frustrating days, he had put up with Amy’s bullshit. The ignored questions. The studiously averted gaze. The finding fascination with the mundane, unchanging readouts of a ship in astral travel. It wasn’t Roddy’s fault that she had a mental detonator tied to her family. Everyone had family issues, but most people didn’t lose their fuse over simple small talk. No wonder she and Carl got along so well. No one could tap-dance on his tongue quite like Carl. If Roddy was on his own repairing Amy’s crazy comm system, then so be it. He didn’t need her help.
Glancing down at the mangled mass of half-repaired circuitry, Roddy tried to form an estimate of how long it would take to finish. He was learning as he went, so the solution involved recursive equations, but those were still easier than the repairs themselves. Squeezing his eyes shut, he envisioned the numbers, the variables, the possible solutions. He ran through with different assumptions. Then he checked the chrono on his datapad and the estimated time to intercept the Sokol. He wasn’t getting this done on his own.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
For the first time since shutting him down, Amy turned in the pilot’s chair and looked at him. “How hard was that?”
Roddy paused to consider, but decided not to provide a rhetorical answer. “I don’t talk about mine, either. It’s just… well, seemed like a human thing to talk about.”
Amy snorted. “I don’t exactly fit in with humans.”
“Seem human enough to me.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
Her face was impassive. This was obviously an old wound, long since scarred over. Carl had recruited the Half-Devil squadron from the ranks of Earth Navy’s misfits. Amy had never fit the profile as far as Roddy could tell. She was a little odd, maybe, but she was smart as hell, knew all the operational stuff, and was Carl’s equal as a pilot. He couldn’t picture her as the up-on-charges sort like Hiroshi “Hatchet” Samuelson. Since his brief meetings with Juggler, Vixen, and Samurai, he’d formed an impression of rebellious, amoral gunslingers that formed the core of Carl’s squad. But the more he considered it, he wondered if Amy wasn’t a different sort of outcast.
“Humans… to hell with ‘em, am I right?”
Amy chuckled silently and shook her head. “What is it with Carl’s friends? Esper, Mort, Mriy. None of them act like regular people, and only Mriy’s got the excuse of not being an actual human.”
“Not sure about Mort. Wizard’s like its own species… but is that why you volunteered for this job? To get away from all the human bullshit over on the Mobius?”
“I thought it would be like our other trips, with his regular crew. But it’s not. And seeing Vixen and Juggler… why do they get to have it all?”
“Sister, you’re talking to a guy who sees his own kind maybe three or four times a year and usually just on a supply run. You don’t find a lot of respectable laaku in our line of work.”
“Most of the ones I know are mechanics.”
Roddy pointed a finger and winked. “There you go. See, there’s plenty of stuff laaku do better than humans. Mathematics, physics, spatial artwork. You can debate the philosophical arts. But what’s that stuff got in common? It’s all respectable work, the kind you can make a nice living at on Phabian or one of the Core Colonies. On the sinister side of the law, you’ll find bookies and hackers, maybe an assassin here or there. But you don’t see those guys unless you’re connected. You want to find a high-intellect, low-respect occupation that the galaxy needs by the freighter-load and that laaku are generally accepted to be naturally better at than humans? Mechanics. Everything breaks, and all someone wants is a guy to fix it. They don’t give a shit who that is—unless you’re an all-human organization like Earth Navy. You get onto one of the joint-species ARGO warships, the whole engineering department will be laaku.”
“So…”
“So I’m asking you, as a fellow non-human, to help me put this comm system together before we reach the Sokol.”
Amy smirked. “I was wondering how long it would take you to ask. It’s a three-hour repair, and you’ve been at it for thirty-eight.”
“More like forty-four,” Roddy countered.
“I didn’t sleep. You did. I docked you those six hours. You had another two before I kicked you out
of the way and did it myself.”
“Can’t blame a guy working with incomplete instructions on a system he’s never seen.”
“You should run a check and fix the mag boots on your EV suit.”
Roddy cocked his head. “Huh?”
“Hatchet. He might seem all smiles and back slaps, but he knows you only saved us from a fight you got us into. He can’t chew you out or threaten you in front of Carl, but if you mysteriously float off into space because the mag cuts out on a gravity-free wreck…”
Roddy nodded. “Gotcha.” He dug out his EV suit and began checking over the systems. It was a welcome change to be working on something he could pull apart down to the component level and reassemble after an all-night bender.
Amy climbed into the back with him and Roddy scooted aside to make room. The ship’s interior was little more than a one-seater cockpit and a bunk. There wasn’t a spot inside where a human could stand upright, even one of Amy’s stature. In Roddy’s experience, humans got a little crazy when cooped up in such small space, but he suspected that her problems went back a lot farther than her ownership of the Mermaid.
She took the circuit card Roddy was working on and turned it over in her hands. Then she absently confiscated Roddy’s multi-tool and set to work. There was no narration of her process, but Roddy followed along, figuring it out as she went. Two hours and fifty-seven minutes later, they had a working comm.
By the three-hour-and-four-minute mark, Roddy wished they’d left it broken.
# # #
“Still no word from the Mermaid,” Yomin reported. Everyone except Rachel and her children was gathered in Hatchet’s briefing room. Faces bore grim expressions all around. “And now we’re picking up a distress call from the Sokol. Can’t say when it came on, but it was there when we got our receiver up and running.”
Niang looked at the floor and shook his head. “Roddy should have had their comms up by now. If they reach that wreck without realizing someone’s aboard, they could be walking right into an ambush.”
“It would be just like Scarecrow to get the comm fixed and keep the damn thing off,” Hiroshi snapped. “It was a mistake sending her. Should have packed off Toshiro with the chimp. At least he can keep his brains in his skull long enough to finish a job.”
A pall fell over the room. If it had been quiet before, there was vacuum now. Carl took one step toward Hiroshi, then another. No one made a move to step between them. It was ludicrous, in a way, expecting a brawl between the two of them. Though Hiroshi only had a centimeter or two on Carl, his frame was well-muscled, while Carl had a physique best described via euphemism.
Carl stopped nose to nose with Hatchet. “You got a problem?”
“It’s about time someone wised you up. This isn’t your little hobby ship anymore, Ramsey. This is business. Time to stop dragging unqualified personnel on high-value missions.”
“Lt. Charlton rated higher than you across the board if I’m not mistaken,” Carl replied. There was an unaccustomed edge in his tone. Happy-Go-Lucky Carl was off duty. “If I hadn’t brought this squad together, she’d have a nice, boring civilian job. You would be serving time for murder. Oh? Was that confidential? Part of a sealed personnel file I pulled strings to get? Well, I think everyone in this room knows you for what you are. If I had a problem with that, I wouldn’t have brought you in on this job. But if you have a problem with Amy, I’ve got one with you.”
“If we lose that cargo, it’s on you. Should have been me on the Mermaid with Roddy. Pipsqueak was the only one who’d fit as a second passenger, but you could’ve had anyone else fly.”
“Why? So you can murder Roddy and make it look like an accident?”
There were intakes of breath around the room. Could it have been true? Was Hiroshi planning to kill Roddy? Esper knew Roddy had complicated their trickery, but Hiroshi had seemed to greet Roddy as a hero for his role in the battle that followed. Had it been an act? Sometimes Esper wished she had half the gift for sniffing out falsehood that Carl had for crafting it.
When Hiroshi remained silent, Carl pressed onward, poking a finger into his chest. Hiroshi batted it away. The muscles stood out in his jaw. “Think I didn’t know your plan? Faulty mag boots and two guys alone in a dead wreck? I warned Amy before she left, so your backup plan won’t pan out, either. You disgust me. I should never have saved you from that court martial. I should have let Admiral Rhodes pack you off to the Psych Shop to get that head of yours scraped clean. You’re finished here.”
Carl turned his back on Hiroshi. That, it seemed, was a mistake.
“Ramsey!” Toshiro shouted. “Get down!”
Hiroshi went for his blaster, triggering nearly everyone else in the room to do likewise. Instead of heeding the warning to take cover, Carl whirled and drew his own weapon. Tanny had always told Esper that Carl was no good in a fight, but his reflexes were amazing. The blaster was out of Carl’s holster in an instant.
Esper squeezed her eyes shut, then flinched at the sound of a shot firing. A body crumpled to the floor, and Esper peeked in Carl’s direction. But it wasn’t his body that had fallen. Hiroshi lay sprawled on the floor with a scorched hole in the middle of his chest. The blaster he’d aimed at Carl dangled from a lifeless grip.
Carl walked over and looked down at the body. “Dammit, Hiroshi. Why’d you have to do that?” He holstered his blaster.
July stared wide-eyed, her breath shuddering. Backing for the door, she bolted and ran. It was one thing to love a man who made his living feeding the crows; it was another to watch the crows come home to roost.
When no other thought came readily to mind to explain what had just happened, Esper closed her eyes and sought solace in the Lord. She prayed for the soul of a man so lost that he’d pulled a weapon on a man he called friend. She prayed for Carl, because by the reactions of everyone else in the room, it had been his blaster that had fired the fatal shot. No matter the man, only a monster could pull that trigger and feel nothing. But she also prayed for herself and for understanding in a galaxy that too often defied all reason and righteousness.
“We don’t have time for this,” Carl muttered. “But we don’t have time to ignore it, either. Esper, see to arrangements. Funeral is in two hours. He may have pulled a blaster on me, but he was still one of our own, dammit. He doesn’t get to wipe out ten years that easy.”
Carl’s glance strayed across the room, and Esper saw Toshiro give a faint nod. “Since we’ve got a lot of work to do, someone needs to take command of the Hatchet Job. Grixlit… you were Hatchet’s first mate, weren’t you?”
The sitharn drew himself up tall, and a short frill around his neck flared and brightened to a jade green. “I was.”
Carl acknowledged with a curt nod. “Good. You’re now Samurai’s first mate. Miyamoto Toshiro, I hereby promote you to acting captain of the Hatchet Job. Your orders are to see to the repairs of your vessel, complete our mission to salvage the cargo on board the Sokol, and reach our headquarters on Ithaca in one piece. Understood?”
Toshiro stood at military attention and saluted. “Aye, sir.” Grixlit hung his head.
Carl pointed a finger at his next appointee. “Reebo, since Samurai’s taking command, the Hatchet Job is short a security officer. That’s you. When repair schedules allow, pack up your gear and find a new bunk. Yomin, stay on the comms. When you raise the Mermaid, apprise them of the situation here. No communication with Ithaca without my explicit orders.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Yomin replied. For the first time Esper could remember, Carl was acting like an officer, and for the first time she’d noticed, people were reacting as if he were in charge.
“All right, people, we’ve got two ships adrift and they’re not getting any closer to repaired while we stand here. Reconvene in the cargo hold in two hours. Dismissed.”
Everyone else filtered out as conversations spread in hushed tones. Esper remained behind until she was alone with Hiroshi Samuelson. Her thoughts wandered to Li
sa and Jaxon Jr., sleeping peacefully on the Mobius. Watching them had been a welcome assignment, more a joy than a burden. As a wizard, she wasn’t trusted working on any repairs, and her experience as a teacher made her the ideal temporary guardian. Mostly it involved squelching their sibling squabbles, vetting their holovid choices, and making sure they ate proper meals.
But now, it seemed, everyone remembered that she’d been a priestess. Esper recalled those days like a dream. Though still a believer, she had no business representing the One Church. But she doubted anyone aboard cared about such fine-sliced logic. They wanted solace of the kind she had been trained to provide.
Staring at Hiroshi’s unmoving features, Esper tried to remember him as the man who came to help Carl pull off a crazy scheme to rob some arrogant racing company. That was loyalty. He’d asked for nothing in return, and even though it was not a goodly act, it was still an act of friendship. The seeds of a eulogy took form in her mind.
The twitch of an eyelid stopped her musing short. Was it too early to be writing Hiroshi off? She rushed to his side and knelt. Calling for help seemed premature; she was the only help to be had, and if there was a chance of saving him, any distraction could be fatal. But up close, she saw how bad the injury was. The plasma bolt had boiled a thumb-size hole straight through him. If not for the application of such heat to the wound, he’d have soaked the floors in blood. Her metabolic magic sped the body’s own healing, but no human could recover from such a wound on their own. He needed a hospital, one with a trauma unit that could induce stasis.
Hiroshi’s lips moved, but no sound issued forth. He was trying to say something.
“What is it? I can’t understand.”