by J. S. Morin
“It’s the goat’s milk. Never trust a cow to give you an honest creamer.” Nebuchadnezzar held up one hand in a wave as Mort departed, never so much as hinting that he cared what help he’d actually been. But Mort knew he was going to have to find a way to get Carl and Chuck as far from one another as possible.
# # #
Roddy was rarely excited to get a comm. Traditionally, comms portended work, emergency instructions, or someone looking for a favor. So he was mildly surprised to find himself bolt upright in the engine room of the Mobius at the sound of the chime, nearly hitting his head on a power conduit. Installing the new fuel regulator had taken his mind off the screw job Carl had gotten in the briefing, but the prospect of another visit from Shoni boiled away his indignation in an instant.
Scrambling to pick up his datapad, Roddy deflated. He should have set up a custom alarm to know who’d commed him. Rather than an invitation to rub fur with the only girl within light-years, it was from Tuu Nau, the captain of the stuunji vessel that had rescued him and Amy.
HONORED RODEK.
I HAVE WORD FROM RAI KUB, WHOM YOU ONCE SO NOBLY SAVED FROM A FATE BEYOND FATES. HE WISHES TO REPAY HIS DEBT TO YOUR CAPTAIN IN ANY WAY HE CAN. WOULD IT BE POSSIBLE TO PASS THIS MESSAGE TO THE SAVIOR, CARL RAMSEY?
Roddy blew a dejected sigh. The last thing Carl needed right now was another offworld connection, one he wouldn’t be able to do anything about with Chuck Ramsey bolting his feet to the planet. And it was unlikely this Rai Kub character had any money. His idea of “repayment” was probably a blessing or something equally non-fungible.
The message stared up at him, the little reply prompt at the bottom tapping its foot. There was probably some polite way to refuse Tuu Nau and Rai Kub without offending them. Hell, considering the esteem in which they held the “saviors,” Roddy could probably tell him to go orbit an asteroid and it wouldn’t hurt their reputation—at least not much.
Just as he was setting his datapad down, it chimed again, setting his adrenaline levels spiking anew. But this time it was from Amy.
AIR CIRCULATOR IN MY QUARTERS ACTING UP. PLEASE CHECK BEFORE ORBIT.
At least Amy had said please. Most of the muckity-mucks in the syndicate were doing their damnedest to forget that particular word had ever existed. Put them in new uniforms and most of them thought they were back in the navy again. For a laaku and a civilian, that meant back to the bottom of the rank heap regardless of whose friend he was.
But the whole air circulator thing was a load of crap. The life support systems, including ancillary bits like air filtration, were all tiptop. Niang’s people had been up and down the Mobius since the moment it landed. Popping in a clean filter was standard operating procedure these days, which made it odd that Amy would have any complaint about it. Actually, it made it nothing but odd.
Roddy closed a panel on the fuel subsystem controls. He stowed his tools except for a couple basics to keep up the pretense. Then he headed up to see what was going on in the captain’s quarters of the Mobius.
Two other maintenance techs were bustling around the ship. One was servicing the hydraulics for the cargo ramp. The other was tinkering with the loaders on the food processor. Both gave Roddy a deferential nod in greeting as he passed by. If they thought anything of him slipping into Amy’s quarters and shutting the door behind him, they didn’t let on.
It was cleaner than he could remember seeing it since first reinstalled following Carl’s impulsive ejection of the dual-purpose escape pod after they crashed on Ithaca. There was nothing of Carl’s inside except for his naval medals still hanging on one wall. The rest of the belongings were Amy’s, since she was still allowed to fly.
Roddy tapped a foot as he scanned the room for signs of something amiss. “OK, Amy. What did you hide in here?” His suspicious mind had ruled out Amy wanting her air circulator checked out almost instantly. But what had she wanted him to find in there instead? With a shrug, he found the air vent he’d have opened if he were to have taken her request at face value.
The louvered cover popped off easily. Just inside, held in place by a short strip of slap tape, was a non-transmitting datapad, one of the little models they give kids to keep them off the omni. Not coincidentally, spies in the holovids used them to deliver stolen data and pass messages. Roddy grinned. He wondered if anyone had ever used one for that purpose before the holovideographers on Mars gave them the idea. He doubted it.
Turning the device on, Roddy scanned for messages. The thing was an Escher’s stairwell of jumbled files that followed no naming convention he could puzzle out. They had innocuous, often cutesy names, like “Princess_Pea_01,” “OrchestralLullabyMedley,” or “Bubbles+Apple_Pie.” It didn’t take long for Roddy to decide that this actually was some kid’s datapad. Aside from it being taped to the inside of an air duct, it was completely innocuous.
There were kids on Ithaca. Enough of the former navy personnel had decided to settle in that the five-and-under crowd was in evidence around the Odysseus, mostly raising hell running up and down the halls of the former battleship. But none of them were likely to have the sort of parents who’d hand Amy a datapad for purposes of passing covert messages. That left one pair of non-native-Ithacan children and their former Half-Devil parents.
None of the files were properly marked, and even a search by date and time revealed nothing within the past week. That alone was a clue. No kid was going to let a datapad sit idle for a day, let alone a week. And the Mobius hadn’t even been back that long. Someone had scrubbed the entries to make that gap obvious to anyone who looked closely.
“My name is Bond… Rodek Bond,” Roddy muttered to himself. “Now where would you crazy apes hide your secret messages?”
He ran a search for “Mobius” and nothing came up. Then he tried “Ramsey.” Again, the result came back blank. Then he tried “plan” and a short list came back: “PlanningTeaParty,” “From_Airplanes_to_Starships,” “PlanetOfMysteries,” “Plants+of+Old+Earth.” The list included several more entries, but Roddy saw what was happening. He ran a search for “the.” The list was considerably longer, but every single one of them contained the letters “T-H-E” in order.
“Bleeding pipes, who the hell encrypts the files on a kids’ datapad?” All he was able to search were file names, not contents. Hopefully Amy wasn’t expecting him to decrypt the damn things himself, or she was in for a big damn helping of disappointment.
He tried a few more searches, starting with Half-Devil call signs. “Blackjack” and “Scarecrow” got him nothing. Too obvious, perhaps? “Juggler” brought up one entry, but opening it revealed that it was actually a kiddie flatvid about actual juggling. Still, it was good news that the encryption key was baked into the files. Not secure at all, but just enough to thwart search algorithms. “Vixen” came back with one entry as well. This time, Roddy found what he was after.
# # #
Roddy.
First thing: Niang has been assigned to the Mobius. You’re off the team, officially, but Chuck won’t tell you until it’s too late. Your stuff is getting offloaded overnight. Or it would, if we were still going to be here. Niang’s with us on this: the Mobius is leaving. Tonight. You’re with us if this is going to happen.
Esper and Mort don’t know about this plan yet, but I have to think they’ll be with us. Can’t exactly leave them coded datapads, right? Amy’s helping on point. Jax is obviously on board, since this whole thing was his idea. Blackjack’s being guarded too closely to pass him a message, so we’re kidnapping him. Won’t be anything new for the likes of him, so he’ll be fine. Yomin and the robot have got bits to play, but getting them in was easy. That girl’s got a bad case of Outlaw Fever if you ask me.
We’ve got one unwelcome guest. Some syndicate flunky named Vasquez got assigned as security officer. He’s got aft starboard bunk. One of them marines, I heard. Can’t have him along, if not for his own good even. I’ll space that numpty myself if I have to.
You’ve got t
wo jobs.
One: make sure nothing’s taken half apart so we can leave about 2200 tonight. Ship shape and Bristol fashion. Might be a hairy ride on the way out.
Two: Figure out a way to stow a bunch of our personals in the hangar so we can bring ‘em on quick.
Depending how bad things go, Blackjack might not be circling back this way for a while. Rest of us, might be never. Ain’t the place any of us were thinking, and we all know it.
Cheers,
Vixen, JJr., Lisa
# # #
Roddy deleted the message. No part of it would be difficult to remember, and it was incriminating as hell. Still, it had been a while since he’d been on a proper heist. The thought of unraveling his own syndicate’s security actually brought a grin to his face.
“So, Mom and the kids want off this rock? Can’t say I blame ‘em.”
If they were going to rescue Carl from Chuck Ramsey’s smothering brand of paternal protectionism, that was all well and good. Roddy had somehow pissed off the old man himself, which was never a good sign, especially when the reins of power had so clearly changed hands. Chuck might have been a blowhard, but he was learning the ropes from an expert noose-tier. Don Rucker wouldn’t pull a mechanic off a ship’s duty roster at the last minute just to give him a promotion or a vacation. Roddy found it unlikely that he’d be in for any sort of assignment at all if the Mobius left with Niang in his place.
The good news is that Shoni was slated to be part of the Mobius crew under Jaxon’s command. Getting her onto the ship a little early wouldn’t take much convincing. The rest would be a little more work.
For the time being, Roddy still had significant sway over the duty roster of the mechanics in the syndicate. He could make sure that the task of clearing out his quarters on board would fall through the cracks. Loading the best of the syndicate’s booze into the cargo hold might take a little creative mislabeling of some crates, but it would be worth the effort in the long run.
The ship was already fit to fly. Making sure no one tinkered with it in the meantime sounded doable. Roddy glanced out the window of Amy and Carl’s quarters. The hangar of the Odysseus was nearly vacant, with just a few mechanics puttering around. He would miss the place. Roddy couldn’t remember the last time he’d had everything he needed for repairs, maintenance, and upgrades all right on hand. For that matter, he couldn’t remember having people under him to assign odious jobs like clearing the waste reclaim or doing a coolant swap.
He gave the hangar a quiet salute. “So long. Too bad Carl’s family is fucked up, or we could have had some great times together.”
# # #
There were parts of the Odysseus that were all but deserted by the Ramsey Syndicate. Most were in what they referred to as the “crash zone,” the portion of the ship still navigable but damaged during the battleship’s arrival on Ithaca. Power was intermittent, lighting was spotty, and the structural integrity was hit or miss. Once in a while, maintenance crews would get sent down to close off a shorted power circuit or block off a hazardous corridor, but those were strictly punitive assignments. No one came down willingly.
This made for the perfect place for Yomin and Archie to hide out for a bit of uninterrupted data work. They found a junction station, and Archie forced the inert door with robotic muscle. Inside, there were panels that could expose direct lines to half the ship’s systems. Yomin plugged a portable computer core into one of the data lines.
“So, what’s the plan?” Archie asked, bending over to watch as if he could see the data flowing through cables as she worked.
Yomin tapped away at a hand interface while staring through her datalens. “Well, if we’re leaving at 2200 and Ramsey Senior thinks we’re leaving at 0600 tomorrow morning, that means we’ve got eight hours of repairs and refitting to prioritize. Then we’ve got to get everyone the hell out of the way, shut down any security protocols that’ll stop us from making orbit, and do our best to ground the other ships.”
“Sounds simple enough.”
“Then I must not have explained it well enough.”
Archie loomed over her, watching her type. “Anything I can help with? I know you’re just keeping an eye on me, but I’m no slouch with computers. Recent phenomenon, I assure you.”
“This isn’t a Harmony Bay system. What do you know about military systems?” This wasn’t the time for learning on the job. Yomin had a tough schedule to hit and potentially three or four other data specialists working against her, if anyone was keeping tabs on the syndicate’s systems.
The robot scratched at his cranial case. “I mean, how different can they be? Plus, I’m a quick learner.”
“I’ve got this.”
“You sound nervous. Come on. Let an old wizard show his chops when it comes to parallax-based data transfer and security scan protocols.”
Yomin turned and stared. Though the datalens, she got additional visual information. It identified Archimedes Perseus Antonopoulos, wizard, born on Earth. Nothing in that condensed bio would explain him knowing how to put those words he’d used together into a cogent sentence. But he wasn’t exactly a wizardly wizard these days, and he’d been stuck in that robotic body for long enough to adapt to the lingo.
“I didn’t bring a second interface. See if you can bring up one of the built-in terminals.” That ought to keep him busy, she thought.
But instead of moving to find which panel might conceal a user terminal, Archie opened his mouth in a toothless grin. “I’ll do you one better. Plug me into a hardline connection.”
“You’ll still need a decryption processor. The system won’t grant administrative access to bypass.”
“Your computer core has a spare data port. Hook me into that too.”
She reached out to feel along his torso. “How many data ports do you have in there?”
Archie flinched away with a snort. “More than you can handle, little lady. And I think it’s rude to ask. Now let’s hitch this place’s security to a wagon and slap the mule’s rump.”
# # #
The cockpit of the Mobius was too clean. It didn’t fit the ship or all the stories Jaxon had heard before he’d joined up. Someone should have stopped the ground crews from scrubbing the character out of it. The cushions of the seats were factory new, with too much spring and not enough shape to them. The flight yoke had been regripped and tightened. There was a fresh coat of sealant over the floor that was still outgassing some preservative chemical, though it was no longer tacky to walk across.
One of the mechanics poked his head in. “Engine diagnostics check out. You’re at 98% efficiency. Maintenance logs are sketchy, but according to Rodek, it’s rare for this bucket to see better than 90.”
“Weapons and shields?”
“Within parameters. Though I’d like another few days to swap out the shield generator with something better suited to a Turtledove.”
Jaxon clapped the mechanic on the shoulder. “This is about as much a Turtledove these days as it is a Typhoon. It’ll do.”
“And then there’s the matter of the star-drive. We’ve got a spare system I can install. The one you’ve got is hopelessly outdated even if we could repair it. It needs—”
“It’s fine. You boys have knocked yourself out getting this bird spaceworthy. Grab your crew and pack it in for the night.”
“But, sir. You’re leaving first thing tomorrow.” Jaxon had to admire the earnestness in the man’s voice. Almost made him wish he could remember the poor bastard’s name.
“R&R, sailor. That’s an order.” He guided the mechanic out of the cockpit with a hand on the man’s back. “I’m bunking down for the night myself, and I’m getting some proper shut-eye here on board.”
“You’re not spending your last night in your quarters?” The mechanic sounded dubious but too polite to put a finer edge on his question.
“Last thing I need before a mission is two squabbling kids in the next room, keeping me awake. I’ll sleep better here.”
>
The mechanic wished him a goodnight and departed, rounding up his crew as he went. Jaxon cracked his knuckles and checked his chrono. Time was counting down.
# # #
Rachel Schultz crouched down and tapped Jaxon Jr. on the nose, then Lisa. It was dark in their quarters, and all three of them were dressed in black. “I’ve got a mission for you.”
“For me?” Little Jax asked.
“For the both of you. This one’s not play pretend; it’s real. We’re sneaking off on Uncle Carl’s ship, and we can’t let anyone see us go. Got it?”
Lisa rubbed her eyes with a fist. “It’s past bedtime, Mommy. Can’t we have a mission in the morning?”
“Sorry, loves. Real missions don’t care what time it is or whether bedtime came and went. Can you do this for me? Can we be extra sneaky quiet and not say a word until we’re tucked safe on board Uncle Carl’s starship?”
She looked into their faces, little copies of her and Jaxon, though it took a bit of imagining on account of the age difference. Each was carrying a cumbersome backpack filled with all the toys and clothes they couldn’t bear to live without. Little Jax yawned. “Can we have ice cream if we win?”
Rachel stood and put her hands on her hips. “I’ll do one better. Not only can you have ice cream for dinner, but I’ll let each of you have a turn in the turret, shooting the big guns.”
“Really?” Lisa asked. Both children’s faces had brightened, warring with their obvious sleepiness.
“Can I go first?” Little Jax asked, standing up on his toes to try to match his sister’s height.
“No, I get to go first because I’m older. That’s how it works.”
“Whichever of you is quietest can get their turn first,” Rachel said. “And I mean it. If we get caught, they won’t let us on the ship at all. We’ll all be in big trouble.”
“Even you, Mommy?” Lisa asked.
“Especially me.”
“We’re being bad?” Little Jax asked.