Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  J: Yes.

  He didn’t care if it might crack their cover as distant cousins who didn’t like each other much. He wanted, no, needed to be in the same room with her, even if he couldn’t hold her, or comfort her for the loss of Malámselah.

  “The very first thing I’m going to do when we hit ground zero is rent an entire bathhouse for the night,” declared Bhatta over the private command channel. “As it is, they’ll probably have to cremate my exosuit. It has its own ecosystem of bacteria by now.”

  Liao’s clumsy sabotage of the system engine had damaged the ship’s environmental controls. With Yarsulic’s guidance, Jess and one of the passengers with integrated systems expertise had repaired it as best they could. All the crew had stayed in their exosuits the whole time, and most of the passengers had followed suit. Better stinky than dead.

  “Mine, too,” agreed Kerzanna.

  Bhatta and Yarsulic shared the engineering console, with Bhatta as the acting captain, strapped into the foldout seat, and Yarsulic standing, but tethered, in case the gravity compensators failed. Kerzanna, acting as navigator and weapons control, sat at the working weapons console.

  After securing the cats’ inflated and sealed orange habitat to holdfasts on the wall, Jess strapped himself into the seat of the nonfunctional weapons console, in the far end of the donut-shaped engine pod. No one could see him, and for once, his only job was to make sure the shipcomp did what was needed to help them survive reentry into realspace above the Mabingion orbital elliptic.

  “This is Acting Captain Bhatta with your two-minute warning to transit exit.” She sounded calm and competent over the ship’s announcement system. She’d gained confidence in the last five days. “Strap yourself in now, if you haven’t already done so, and power up your exosuit, just like we did in the drills.”

  Jess touched the controls on his suit, and the room went silent, but not for long, once the system drive engaged. He’d directed his percomp to use the suit’s heads-up display to show him system status, so he could make sure the comm packets and emergency broadcasts went out on all available channels the microsecond the Faraón hit realspace.

  The transition into realspace shook the ship with bone-rattling vibration, but their repairs and patches held. The crew member monitoring the inert nav pod reported no activity.

  “Commencing active scan sequence,” said Kerzanna.

  “Acknowledged,” replied Bhatta.

  “Inverter coil six heating up,” warned Yarsulic. “If it gets to fifty, I will take it offline.”

  The shipcomp signaled an incoming broadcast.

  “Injured merchant Faraón Azul, this is the High Command Cutter Nove Planetan. Please state the nature of your emergency.” The voice was an actual human’s, but he sounded bored.

  Jess kept his exasperated sigh to himself. Why had he gone to the trouble of including all the details in the emergency messages if the military wasn’t going to read them?

  Bhatta identified herself as the acting captain and succinctly told the man about the jackers, their escape, the ship’s condition, and the nav pod problem.

  A new voice came online. “This is Commander Agostino. How many survivors are we talking about?”

  “Twenty-eight. No, twenty-seven. Our pilot died fifteen minutes ago.”

  “My condolences. He or she must have been a damn fine pilot.”

  Jess let out the breath he’d been holding. The command crew had agreed to tell everyone that Senior Pilot Malámselah had saved their collective asses, and Jess had made it so in the shipcomp’s records. Bhatta didn’t want to be fired for interstellar piloting without a certification rating, and “Laraunte Kane” and “Cadroy Joffalk” didn’t want to be discovered by the ruthless people he supposedly owed money to. Yarsulic thought his good buddy deserved to be thought of as a hero because he’d saved them with the warning about Liao’s betrayal. They’d transferred Malámselah to the only movable autodoc and stationed it in the engine pod. Bhatta said he liked being surrounded by friends, and maybe she was right, because he’d lived a lot longer than the autodoc predicted.

  “We’re too small to take your people on, especially since your airlock is gone. Can you make it to Mabingion Station?”

  “I think so, but we have no positioning jets, so we’ll need tugs,” replied Bhatta. “And we don’t know the stability of the nav pod.”

  “Tell you what. You continue nice and slow toward Mabingion, and we’ll send over a few spare drones to get close-up scans to see what we’re dealing with.”

  Jess wondered how many drones the cutter carried, because the Faraón’s sensors counted at least seventy of them swarming over and into the breached hull. Agostino obligingly sent a live feed back to the Faraón with the results. Unfortunately, the drones couldn’t tell them anything about the nav pod, other than it was probably dead. No one in the command crew liked the “probably” part.

  Thirty minutes later, the comm system intercepted a repeating ping.

  “…ews. Hailing the Faraón Azul, this is Bayonet Media News. We’d like to talk to you about your situation. This is Bayonet Media News. Hailing…”

  “How did they find us so fast?” Yarsulic sounded dismayed and disgruntled.

  Jess fought the impulse to duck his head like a turtle drawing in. Kerzanna had mentioned it as one of the bomber’s tells.

  “Luck and opportunity, most likely,” soothed Bhatta. “I’ll bet they monitor every known frequency. We’re just lucky that the Nove Planetan was a lot closer. If we answer now, we control the narrative.”

  “They’ll be bees to honey. It will be a madhouse,” Yarsulic grumbled.

  Jess-the-bomber certainly hoped so, since he’d gone to the trouble to arrange it.

  CHAPTER 16

  * Planet: Mabingion * GDAT: 3242.015 *

  KERZANNA WOKE SLOWLY to the sound of gentle snoring in her ear. Except it wasn’t snoring, it was purring. The pillow under her head began bobbing up and down. She cracked one eye open to see a small, dark furry face with green eyes focused on her as the cat named Igandea kneaded the pillow next to Kerzanna’s head.

  The room was still shadow-dark, but that didn’t mean anything, since it had no windows and they’d paid extra for do-not-disturb service. Kerzanna lifted her arm so Igandea could snuggle into the curve of Kerzanna’s chest and under her chin. Joy palaces made their profits on up-charges, so they’d probably make them pay extra to clean up the cat fur.

  She tried to go back to sleep, but her full bladder and busy brain wouldn’t let her. Not until she determined their situation and confirmed the plan of action. Stupid Jumper brain.

  She rolled onto her back and reached out to feel for Jess’s solid form, but the space was empty and the bedding cool. It had felt both strange and right to share a bed with him again. Too bad she hadn’t been awake to enjoy it.

  “Chamber 3930, lights, twenty percent,” she said out loud. The room comp obligingly raised the soft, ambient lighting to where she could see her way to the fresher without tripping over a cat.

  Every joint creaked like a rusty hinge and every muscle felt tight, but not painful. Her hands seemed steady when she held them out. It could be the Jumper-rated pain patch Jess had thoughtfully saved for her, or it could be some new and delightful symptom of her ever-evolving waster’s disease. Adrenaline was her enemy, and she’d been mainlining it for five days straight.

  Since Jess had paid an outrageous amount for “Tatyana Vasil,” and her new cohab, “Ziad Edisson,” to do whatever kinky things they wanted for four days in their guaranteed-private room, Kerzanna indulged herself in a long, hot shower. Dreary, incompetent, ungracefully aging Ridderth hovered near the bottom of anyone’s list of perfect cities, but at least it had water in abundance.

  Twenty minutes later, the forced air of the solardry frizzed her longer, now red-streaked hair into a tangle, but she’d tackle that problem once it finished drying. It was time to put more red color drops in her eyes, and the mirror told h
er she’d need to reapply the skin-matched permaseal over the Jumper tattoo on her neck to keep the lighted parts from showing. Fark, she was collecting beauty regimens.

  “Chamber 3930, list messages,” she said as she padded out into the front room in search of her clothes. She’d been one IQ point above comatose by the time she and Jess had sealed themselves into their supposed love nest, so her memory of anything after that was hazy at best. She’d been stumbling with exhaustion, hanging onto Jess to stay upright; the staff probably thought she was chemmed. She did remember he’d destroyed both their percomps soon after they’d left the Faraón Azul, so they couldn’t be traced. The man was hard on percomps.

  “Text message for Madam Tatyana Vasil from Master Zee Edisson from two point one hours ago. Shall I read it to you?” The room comp’s lifelike synth voice was sultry and tinged with a British Isles accent, in keeping with the joy palace’s theme of a huge preflight Western Earth castle. The staff and sex workers all wore fluttery, fanciful versions of fairytale clothes that looked extremely impractical for any activity she could think of.

  “Yes, please.”

  Computers didn’t care if she thanked them, but the politeness made her feel better. She found her new underwear and bra on top of a neat stack of her striped pants, long ruffled blouse, and bolero-like vest, suggesting Jess had straightened up after her. She remembered he was a folder. She was a draper, or a hanger, or a drop-clothes-anywhere kind of person, especially when she was tired. It probably drove him crazy.

  “From Master Zee Edisson: Coming back with food and drink. Don’t start without me. End message.”

  “Delete message, please.”

  “Certainly, Madam.”

  She wouldn’t be starting anything without her boots. Wherever they were, she’d bet her socks were with them, unless LZ dragged them into the orange cat habitat wedged into the corner of the bedroom. The yellow tabby was inexplicably fond of rolling in and drooling on smelly socks.

  During quiet moments, she felt a nagging conviction that she’d forgotten something big, something vital, something urgent. Since the annoyingly elusive sensation had only started after Varemba gifted her with the locked message packet in her mind, she assumed it was her non-minder’s brain trying to accommodate the foreign object, for lack of a better word, lodged in her memory. She owed Varemba for healing her, especially since the “aftermarket” ramp-up she’d so casually repaired had probably saved lives on the Faraón, but Kerzanna was more than ready to be done with playing courier.

  “Chamber 3930, display weather forecast and news, please.”

  As the wall opposite the gigantic bed lit up, she checked her internal chrono for the time. Great gods of chaos, Jess had let her sleep twenty-one hours.

  So much for their original plan to sleep a few hours, then slip into the Ridderth afternoon rush and find accommodations in a less glitzy part of town, where people were better at minding their own business.

  She needed to be planning farther ahead than the next meal, but too many unknown variables bogged her down—she wasn’t a minder forecaster, able to see the patterns in seemingly unrelated data and predict likely future scenarios. Her thoughts kept circling back to Jess. He was fast becoming as necessary to her as breathing. Her hormones alerted her to his nearness even at the most inappropriate times. He settled her. He made her laugh. The prospect of returning to her solitary life was increasingly bleak, but she’d rather space herself out the nearest airlock than make him watch her die day by day.

  Kerzanna licked the powdered sugar off her fingers. “It was clever of you to create the media feeding frenzy to cover our departure, but did you have to make it a named story and the number one newstrend in the galaxy?” After nothing but cheap mealpacks, the fresh egg-soaked, fried flatbread tasted sinfully good. Jess had brought back enough food to stock a small restaurant, and they’d already eaten half of it. Well, mostly she had. She was still replenishing her reserves after nearly continuous use of her “aftermarket” ramp-up system to help keep the Faraón flying. Her bones would probably ache for days.

  Jess shrugged one shoulder. “The ‘Rescue of the Faraón Azul’ must have hit a slow news cycle. I remembered Ridderth has flocks of independent journalists, especially after that Ridderth media company broke the ‘Mabingion Purge’ story. I hoped they’d create enough of a crowd for us to get lost in the mix once we got on the ground. I didn’t expect them to send out ships to livecast our progress and make a planetwide drama out of it.”

  Kerzanna speared a cube of fresh peach from the bowl on the table between them. “Bhatta is too much in the spotlight for us to send the cats to her now.”

  Neither she nor Jess had trusted the pet-intolerant military or the negligent Mabingion spaceport authority with the welfare of the two cats, but people on the run couldn’t provide a suitable home for them, either. The friendly, fearless cats deserved to be on a ship with passengers to indulge them and crew who could care for them. Bhatta already adored them.

  “Ridderth’s government systems are still as porous as ever, so I inserted records for an obscure city ministry that’s responsible for small animal veterinary health and quarantine. When we leave tonight, it’ll deliver the cats to her.” He fished a piece of orange melon out of the mixed fruit bowl and put it on a small plate on the short table behind him, where Igandea sat waiting. Kerzanna suspected he’d miss the cats as much as she would.

  “Did you have any pets growing up?” she asked. His expression flatlined, and she sighed. The oddly domestic atmosphere, with familiar echoes of their briefly blissful life together four years ago, made her forget how any questions about his past made him shut down. “Sorry.”

  It still hurt when he shut her out like that, even though she knew better than to ask in the first place. She picked up the temporary bracelet-style percomp he’d given her. He was building better ones for them both. As “Tatyana,” she had an affinity for color coordination, currently centered on bright red. She slipped the bangle onto her wrist and pretended to admire the contrast to her shiny glitter-gold fingernails and ultra-feminine filigree skin art she’d let the body parlor talk her into, in celebration of her new cohab. Her mother would have been so pleased.

  For his new “Zee” persona, Jess had adopted a fondness for shiny metallic jewelry and stylized lightning-patterned face art, shorter red-streaked hair to match hers, and his eyes were now icy electric blue, which made his brown skin seem more golden by comparison. His sweater and scarf made his shoulders look wider, and his tight pants and high boots drew lots of eyes to his memorable thighs and backside. And lucky woman that she was, she had plenty of old memories of seeing him naked to keep her warm when the waster’s disease inevitably claimed her and made her body a statue.

  Jess abruptly stood and walked away from the table, then turned back to her. “I don’t want to have secrets from you.” He looked frustrated. Neither of his eyes twitched, so it was just Jess talking.

  “I don’t think it’s altogether your choice.” She pointed to her temple to indicate the “friends” that could immobilize him with seizure-like symptoms to keep him quiet. Besides, they had no future because she had no future, and he deserved so much more than she could give him. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  He wrapped his arms around himself as he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I am an orphan child of Rashad Tarana.”

  His words sank in, and she felt her jaw drop. She’d have sooner expected him to tell her he had a group marriage and twenty children, or was an alien spy from the Andromeda galaxy.

  It made an appalling kind of sense that he’d volunteered to serve in the Citizen Protection Service. The CPS had rescued the six thousand shattered adult citizens and became the guardians for the nearly three thousand equally shattered orphaned children. Who better than top CPS minders to help the survivors recover from the ordeal and heal the post-event stress trauma? And who better to recruit than people who saw the CPS as their saviors?


  She didn’t know whether to apologize to him on behalf of the civilization that had destroyed his homeworld, or ask him for details, which was like asking an accident victim to relive their trauma. She shook her head. No wonder he didn’t tell anyone about his childhood. And no wonder he’d been able to buy property on Branimir without meeting the stringent residence requirements. No member planet of the Central Galactic Concordance could or would refuse immediate full citizenship to a Rashad Tarana survivor.

  His inscrutable look might have fooled others, but she saw worry and resignation, like he was afraid his admission would change how she thought of him. She stood to face him. “You are not your past.” She crossed her arms to quash a selfish impulse to reach out to him, to hold him tight and get lost in the warmth of his embrace. He’d think she pitied him, or wanted comfort. “You’re the strongest, most resilient person I’ve ever known.”

  He looked at her a long moment. He drew breath to speak, then closed his mouth. Finally, he shook his head. “You always surprise me.”

  Kerzanna raised an eyebrow. “Says the man hosting a frelling convention in his brain.”

  The tension eased in Jess’s shoulders and a corner of his mouth twitched. “You have a point. It’s a fair cop.” His accent was pure British Isles.

  She sat back down at the table and poured herself more kaffa, the sweet, lightly stimulating warm drink to which she’d developed a slight addition. “So, Master ‘Edisson,’ how do we go about finding one man in a sea of twenty million so we can meet with him and deliver the goods?” She pointed to her head.

  He gave her an amused grin. “We go fishing, of course.”

  Of course his method involved percomps and Ridderth’s local data net. He’d spent almost every waking hour on the Faraón developing loosely organized drifts of code snippets that combined and broke apart seemingly at random, but queried all public systems for key phrases of interest, such as Tuzan the Janitor. He’d sent them out at each comm buoy and space station, and ever since, they’d been busily harvesting potential data points and squirreling them away in unused corners of the public net. Now that he was hooked into the local net, he’d collected his gleanings and sent out better-tuned queries. At least, that was Kerzanna’s simplistic view of the technical process Jess had patiently but fruitlessly tried to explain to her. She’d have a better chance understanding the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the Central Galactic Concordance government’s expansionist economic policy.