by Aaron Hubble
Abram pulled back on the control and the Olibert shot straight up and corkscrewed around an asteroid. On the sensor screen Malone watched one of the ships suddenly change direction and move off the screen. Confused, he watched the other two ships disappear from the screen as well. He looked toward Abram for answers, but only saw the same quizzical expression on the pilot’s face.
“Why—”
His words were cut short when he was violently thrown against his restraints. All of the air was forced out of his lungs and the cockpit went dark. He could feel the ship tumbling through space, but the hum of the engines and the ever present vibration under his feet was missing.
“What just happened?” Luana asked. He could hear the fear in her voice.
Abram toggled several switches and then opened a panel near his feet. He pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and looked into the panel.
“Nothing. No power. They pulsed us.” He slammed his fist into the control panel.
“Pulsed us?” Malone asked.
“EMP. Takes out all of the electronics. We’re dead in space, and if I’m not mistaken, we should have visitors anytime now. They’ll board us, take what we have, and, if we’re lucky, they’ll kill us quickly.”
Malone heard Luana’s restraints unbuckle and fall to the side, clinking against her chair. He could just see her face in the dim glow of flashlight.
“Like hell they will. I haven’t gotten my girls back.”
She marched out of the cockpit. Malone saw Abram look at him. The grin was back on the pilot’s face.
“Have I told you how much I like your wife? Great gal. Scary. But really great.”
Malone got up and followed her out of the cockpit, realization dawning that she was their only real chance of getting out of this mess.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Malone moved around the dark engine room. He was looking for the master control relay. The engines needed to be manually started after the massive pulse they had just gone through. Being the mechanic, it made the most sense he was the one to do the wrenching. Still, he wanted to be out in the cargo hold with Luana and Abram. Waiting for the pirates.
There was this part of him that still felt the need to be her protector even though she’d proved several times on this trip she was more than capable of taking care of herself.
Still, he wanted to be near her, to watch her back even if she didn’t need it. She’d assured him he was more important in the engine room. Even if they successfully fought off the boarding party, they would need to make a quick escape.
The narrow beam of the flashlight illuminated the master control relay box. He hurried over and removed the cover to find a tangle of wires and dark electronics.
He swore.
This was going to be harder than he thought. The relays would need to be bypassed and then the engine primed and started by the manual sequence on the other side of the room. Under normal circumstances with adequate light, tools and help this was an hour job. At least. With none of those things, he didn’t know how long it would take, but he knew they didn’t have an hour.
He raised his head above the bottom edge of the window to check on Luana before things got crazy.
Luana would have been impossible to see if he hadn’t known where to look. The faint red glow of the emergency light revealed her dark outline where she hid in the lattice work of steel supports that made up the skeleton of the cargo bay. Positioned above the airlock, she reminded him of a black widow spider, silent and still in her web. Her prey was on the other side of the door and she was ready to strike. Abram lay hidden behind several cargo containers, two pistols gripped in his hands.
Malone had tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant that she knew what she was doing. He was terrified for her. So many things could go terribly wrong. Even with their strained relationship barely hanging by a thread, the thought of losing her and the girls made his mind go down very dark roads.
A dull thud vibrated through the hull of the ship.
The pirates had arrived.
He shoved his hands into the relay box and began frantically clipping wires and pulling relays, hoping he had the right ones. It had been a while since he’d worked on an engine like this.
More sounds echoed through the cargo bay as docking clamps engaged and secured a seal with the airlock of the Olibert. There was a hiss of equalizing pressure and then Malone heard the clunk of the lock disengage and the creak of metal hinges swinging open.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and his hands flew through his task. He prayed while he worked.
Cautious footsteps reached his ears. He tried to pick up how many individuals there were, but he couldn’t spare any bit of his attention. He needed to focus on restarting the engines.
There was a muffled thud and then shouts. A gun or several of them, he couldn’t tell, went off. Worry and fear compelled him to poke his head up and look out the window.
He had to see.
It was hard to make out much in the low light, but he saw several bodies on the floor. To the side, he saw Abram engaged in a hand-to-hand battle with a large man. His gun lay on the floor.
Three other men stood in a circle around a blur of motion he recognized as Luana. Her movements were precise, controlled, and elegant. She struck out at the pirates and danced around their blows. They would advance and she would strike out with the piece of metal rod she’d taken from Abram’s store of supplies.
One pirate raised a pistol only to have it batted away by the metal rod and then find the rod under his chin. The force of the blow knocked him off his feet. He sprawled to the deck and lay motionless. Thinking Luana was distracted, the other two men charged her.
Malone yelled to warn her.
Luana leaped onto a cargo container and then vaulted over the men, landing lightly behind them. She swept the metal rod out and clipped their feet from underneath them.
They quickly scrambled to their feet only to find her waiting. The first received a round house kick to the temple. The second man was able to finally catch her in a bear hug, but Luana snapped her head back, smashing her attacker’s nose.
He reeled backward. She stalked forward, head low. Her fist flashed out, jabbing him in the jaw. With a twirl of the metal rod, she raised it up and then mercilessly brought it down across his forehead. The man crumpled to the floor. She turned and sprinted toward Abram who was losing his battle with his adversary.
Jumping onto the pirate’s back, she brought the rod around the front of the man’s neck and used it choke him. He immediately let go of Abram and began flailing his arms in an attempt to free himself from the menace on his back.
Abram regained his composure and advanced on the man. He landed a right and then a left cross to the man’s jaw. The last sent him to his knees. A knee to the temple finished him off.
Malone stood. The pair of wire cutters he’d been using fell from his hand and clattered to the metal deck. Luana looked up and saw him staring at her. In the dim light, he could make out the expression on her face.
It was a look of resignation. The look of a person who knew their darkest secret had been revealed.
*****
The flame danced off the lighter and Fulgencio stared into it, waiting for the call from his crew telling him it was time for him to come over and burn the captured ship down. He looked at the chronometer set in the control panel of his ship. An hour had passed since they’d left and he’d heard nothing. They were being unusually slow today.
Perhaps he would need to hold back some of their pay. Do something to get the message across that Fulgencio didn’t put up with sloppy or slow work.
Looking out the window, he saw the two ships disengage from each other.
That was odd.
What was even odder was seeing the freighter’s engines light up and begin to maneuver away from the interceptor ship. The freighter moved some distance away and then lasers streaked out from its underbelly and obliterated the interceptor in b
linding flash.
Fulgencio dropped the lighter and sat bolt upright. He grabbed the controls of his ship and began the sequence to restart his engines. Somehow his men had failed. It was inconceivable to him. So much so, he had let his engines get cold. The restart sequence would take several minutes. He looked up and saw the freighter angling its nose toward him.
He let his hands fall to his sides.
Fulgencio watched the ship’s weapons glow and the lasers streak toward him. After all these years of burning things down, he would finally know what it was like to feel the heat.
As his ship was ripped apart and he was consumed by the flames, Fulgencio smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Abram had gone back to the cockpit to guide the Olibert away from the debris field left behind by the pirate’s trap. Malone put the tools he used to get the engines going back into the tool box. It hadn’t taken him long to get the engines started after the fight was over. He worked better without the added pressure of armed men trying to kill him.
His head swam with what he’d just witnessed. Luana hadn’t gotten lucky this time like she’d claimed at the public safety office on Carrefour. He’d seen it all this time, and it had been terribly magnificent. Clearly, she was highly trained in hand-to-hand combat, but where had she come by it?
He heard the cargo bay door slide open and the soft tread of Luana’s feet across the decking. He snapped the lid shut on the tool box and stood, wiping his hands on an old rag he’d found at the bottom of the box.
She walked toward him, and leaned against a cargo crate opposite him. Malone watched her zip up her jacket and wrap her arms around herself. She looked at the floor and rubbed her upper arms.
Behind him, the drive engines hummed. He leaned against the outside wall of the engine room, feeling the heat radiating through the wall. He studied her. Right now, at this moment, she looked like his wife, but thirty minutes ago she was someone totally different. Something new and deadly.
Luana let out a long breath. “I suppose you want the whole story now,” she said.
“That would be nice.” Malone paused, collecting his thoughts. He had so many questions he didn’t know where to begin.
“I mean, the weapons were one thing, but I could dismiss them because you did work in a bit of a dangerous profession in the bar. But the fighting. Lu, you took out five men pretty much on your own. I’ve never seen anyone move like that.”
She nodded and wrung her hands. “I know. I put that part of my life behind me a long time ago and hoped I would never have to think about it again, but in the back of my mind, I always knew it would come back to haunt me.”
She took a deep breath and then looked him in the eyes. There was pain and uncertainty there.
“Before I met you, I was an intelligence officer for Deep Luna.”
“What? The company that ran the penal colonies on Titan and Europa?”
She nodded. “They recruited me after my second year at the university. They took me to their training facility where I received two years of highly specialized training in undercover intelligence, advanced combat tactics, hand-to-hand encounters, the whole nine yards. I was a different person and it was a life I was desperate to forget. At first, Deep Luna would send me into places to gather information on their rivals. Corporate spying and information gathering was what I excelled at. The pay was good and it was exciting for a twenty-three-year old.”
She stopped and twirled the wedding ring on her finger before going on. “Things were good. I liked what I was doing. If you remember, Earth was almost like a utopia. Money and resources were flowing back to the planet from the moons the penal colonies were mining. But like all good things, when you take advantage of a people, they’ll reach a point where they fight back. That’s what the penal colonies did because they were tired of being slave labor for everyone else. Europa revolted first.”
He nodded, remembering the revolts of 2212.
She looked up at him, but her eyes were dark and far away with memories.
“Anyone with specialized military training like I had was sent out into deep space to deal with the insurrections. I was part of that first mission to Europa. The fighting was intense, and we realized if we didn’t do something drastic, a lot of us would die. So, we pulled the plug on their life support and killed them all.”
Her hands fidgeted and she avoided his eyes. “I’ll never forget walking into that building after we’d done it. I stepped over so many bodies. So many dead people. I told myself they were just convicts who would have killed me without a second thought, but I also knew that wasn’t true. I knew what was going on. I had high level information on how the colonies were being stocked. Deep Luna and the other companies running penal colonies were paying off judges. The colonies were originally for the most dangerous criminals, but once they became profitable, the companies needed more labor. They bribed judges to sentence a lot of people who weren’t dangerous to hard labor in deep space.”
Her story made sense of what Malone had just witnessed, but his world was still shaken to its core. The woman who would tear up at a beautiful sunset, who cooed over every baby she saw, was a mercenary. A trained killer with the skill to take on three grown men at one time and dispatch with them ease.
Confusion and disbelief dominated his mind. He had questions, but words escaped him. Instead, he waited silently.
“Something broke inside of me that day. Soon after arriving back on Earth, I received orders to board a ship to Titan. The cons there had seen what happened on Europa and were digging in, ready for a fight. I couldn’t do it again. So, I disappeared. My training made it pretty easy. I found a transport to a backwater mining planet, got a job in a bar and that’s where I met you.”
Malone stared at her. Hurt and betrayal swirled out of the storm of emotions raging inside of him. “Everything you told me, where you came from, your family, it was all a lie?”
She met his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
He searched her face, unsure if he wanted the answer to his next question, but the need to know compelled him to push forward. “What about our marriage? Was that ever real or just a part of something else to blend into the crowd?”
She hesitated for a moment and looked away from him. “At first, you were a way to get off that planet and further away from Deep Luna and my past.”
They were the words he dreaded ever since they’d married. His breath caught in his throat. It felt like Luana had taken a knife of ice and shoved it under his ribs until it pierced his heart.
The pain was cold and intense.
Everything he thought he knew, everything he’d once leaned on for support had all been an elaborate fabrication. He had to reach out for the crate next to him in order to steady himself.
Luana grabbed his hands. He shook them off.
“I said at first, but it didn’t take long before I fell in love with you and our marriage became real to me. I became Luana Kay, your wife. That’s who I am and who I always want to be.”
Malone’s face twisted in pain. “How can I trust you? What’s real and what’s a lie? Is Luana even your real name?
She shook her head slowly. “It’s Claire. Claire Grace.”
A dark laugh escaped him. “Figures.” He shook his head. “What about when we couldn’t have a baby. I never understood why you wouldn’t have tests to see why we couldn’t conceive.”
Her face reddened and she looked up at the ceiling. “A good undercover intelligence officer might be required to use all options open to her.” She met his eyes and the meaning was clear. “A pregnant intelligence officer is no intelligence officer at all. They couldn’t risk us wanting to settle down and raise a family. They’d invested too much into us. As part of our acceptance into the program, we had to agree to be sterilized. If I’d let myself be tested, the doctor would’ve easily found that out. That would have brought up all kinds of questions that I wasn’t ready to answer.”
“So you lied.”
“So I lied.” Her eyes pleaded with him. “But I did it for us. Weren’t we happy for a time?”
He nodded and it was his turn to look away. “For a time. But what does it matter?” He threw his arms out wide. “It was all false.” Venom had leached out of the gaping wound where his heart had been and spilled over into his words. He wanted to hurt her. She deserved to have her insides ripped out like his had been. Malone wanted to watch her world crumble as his had.
“But I should have known that,” he whispered. “I’ve been blind and stupid for so many years, ignoring the signs.”
“What are you talking about, Malone?”
There was fear in her voice and it brought a dark satisfaction to him.
“You never committed to me or our marriage. When were you planning on running away? Is that why you put space between us and moved into town?”
“No. That’s not what happened.”
“I’m sure it would’ve been nice to unload the burden of being a mother as well.”
He saw her lips tremble. “How can you say that?”
Fury and hurt filled his voice. His world had shattered and hers should as well. He pointed at her, his finger shaking. “Because you just said it yourself! Everything about you is a lie.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “I’m still Luana, your wife and mother to your daughters. That’s all I want to be.”
“No. You’re not.” Everything was crystal clear to Malone. He knew what needed to happen. He straightened and his voice was cool. “You’ve as much as admitted it. We were a cover. It’s time to end the charade. We’ll drop you off at the next outpost—”
“What? Malone, no!”
He let the words flow out of him. It was the right thing. The thing she deserved. “It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? A way to just disappear and forget the past.”
“Not you. Not the girls. Didn’t you hear anything I said? You’re all that’s real in my world,” she said through tears. Desperation etched her face.