by Natalie Grey
They all had some of the same reasons, though.
“Things have really gone to shit, huh?” Fedden asked them.
There was a sudden burst of laughter and a few of the mercenaries nodded.
Fedden grinned up at them. “Crallus was never the best of us, but he didn’t get in our way, right? We had a place to come back to, exchange information, get some bigger jobs. Crallus didn’t take too much. It worked…but now he’s getting weird.”
No laughter now. The nods became serious. No one liked the way things had been going recently.
“When was the last time Crallus helped any of you get a job?” Fedden asked. “I’m not talking those shit ones guarding cargo ships, twenty guards for a whole damned hauler and no way in hell of making your bonus. I mean the good jobs.”
No one answered. Crallus hadn’t helped them out recently.
“But when was the last time Crallus called you up to bitch about how you were doing, how much of a take you were sending through, or ask you to go do a favor for him?”
Mercenaries called out answers. For most, it had only been a few days. Crallus hadn’t asked much before that, but he’d been insufferable for a while now. Everyone here was quick to see that this could easily become the new normal.
“Not to mention,” Fedden added with a grin, “when was the last time you got back to base, had some food, and thought it might actually kill you?”
They were laughing again.
“And while he’s always talked about raising rates,” Fedden finished, “he’s actually going to raise them this time. When he’s asking more of us than he ever has and giving back less!”
Their faces were angry now, and he knew he’d successfully tapped their discontent.
Now came the sell, and he could only hope he’d done enough.
“You know why he’s going back to his base, right?” Fedden looked at their expressions. They didn’t know. Good. Offering new information was one of the best ways to get allies. “He’s gotten the syndicate dragged into something bigger than he is. Him and his Torcellan? They’ve fucked up, and they were willing to throw us into the crossfire to fix it.”
There was a sudden furious silence.
“That’s right.” Fedden walked in a slow circle, his voice rising. “You remember Crallus sending those ships off to Devon? Getting those people killed? Well, he tried to throw me at them too. Turns out he never thought I’d survive. He’d just get to execute me without having to do it himself.”
“You shot him,” someone called from the gallery above.
“Like you never wanted to!” Fedden yelled back and there was another burst of laughter. Some of the mercenaries pounded on the railings in approval. “I tried it, it didn’t work. But I wonder—did he ever even ask if you wanted things to change? Did he ever even ask if there was something bigger behind the Torcellan’s plans? No, he just told you all to abandon your contracts and sit in a cage waiting for someone to come shoot at you.
“He’s pissed off someone bigger than you can imagine,” Fedden continued. “You know why he’s retreating? He sent those three ships and they got destroyed, so he and that Torcellan, they sent seven more ships. State of the art pirate ships. Get’ruz Shipping, not a small outfit. All those ships got destroyed too, and they were only trying to take on one.
“Well, now Crallus is running—him and the Torcellan. They want us to go with them so we can be security, just sitting there waiting. Does that sound like a good idea to anyone?”
Heads shook, and there were growls and a few derisive shouts.
“Doesn’t sound good to me either,” Fedden told them. “So here’s my plan: we lay a trap for this one ship rather than waiting for them to learn about our base and kill us all. I can get a message to that ship to tell them the terms—they won’t be able to resist coming to meet us. And when they’re dust, we’ll start a new syndicate. Half the fees of Crallus’, none of the bullshit he’s been pulling lately, and a hell of a lot more jobs when our clients hear who we managed to take out. Who’s with me?”
Only a few hung back; the rest called out acceptances. Fedden pointed out their captains with easy familiarity and beckoned for them to come down to join him.
“Come on down and I’ll lay out the plan. Let’s get this show on the road.”
18
“Okay, but are we actually sure this is going to work?” Gar paced around the bridge, throwing concerned glances at the viewscreen, where a ship was growing closer by the second.
“Of course not.” Barnabas sat quite composedly in the captain’s chair. “Nothing is ever sure. Take a seat, won’t you?”
He was wearing hooded robes with the hood presently pushed back, and as to the rest of his disguise…
Well, Gar couldn’t believe they were going to try to pull this off. From start to finish, the plan was insane.
“They haven’t noticed us yet,” Shinigami pointed out.
“How can you possibly know that?” Gar glared at one of the speakers and rubbed his face. It was another human mannerism he had picked up. “We’re going to get blasted off the side of the ship like we’re target practice. Which we will be. For an automated system, no less.”
“Shinigami thinks it’s unlikely they’ll notice us,” Barnabas soothed.
“Unlikely.” Shinigami snorted. “No, I said they won’t. Their security systems look for active ships without the Boreir Group security codes, and we won’t be an active ship when they see us.” There was a pause. “You are going to turn me back on, aren’t you?”
“That depends on whether you intend to keep making insane plans,” Gar shot back.
Barnabas chuckled.
“Laugh it up, blondie,” Shinigami muttered. She flickered into existence as a projection.
Barnabas shut up and glared at the projection as it took a seat. “It’s a wig.”
“It’s blond. Also, you look ridiculous.”
“I look like a Torcellan.”
“Only if nobody looks too hard,” Gar muttered. “I just want to ask again, are we sure this is going to work? Because this. Is. Insane.”
“None of it is insane; every part of it is logical. I’m an AI, so I literally can’t be insane. I only make good plans.”
“I was with you right up until that last part,” Barnabas told her. “May I remind you that you once suggested using guided missiles during an interrogation?” Also, he added silently, let’s not tell Gar that was his interrogation, shall we?
Good call. “That was entirely logical. First, I didn’t think you were going to get anything more out of them, so we didn’t need it to be an interrogation anymore. Second, I wanted to use them, so it was only logical to do so. Third, unrelated to the missiles but important, we’re almost ready to dock. You should get to the airlock.”
“Indeed.” Barnabas’ lips twitched. He stood and flipped the hood over his face. The white-blond hair of the wig was just visible beyond the hood and the skin of his hands, made artificially paler, looked Torcellan if one only glanced at them. He nodded to Gar. “I leave the ship in your hands. I will communicate when it is time to turn it back on.”
He left the bridge before Gar could again plead with him to call the plan off.
He had to admit it was an audacious plan; there was no doubt about that. Boreir Group controlled an entire planet and several moons, around which they had positioned a massive security system. The autonomous weapons systems that comprised it were attuned to spot engine emissions, heat, communications of any sort, electrical activity, and many more subtle indicators of approaching ships.
Any object giving off any of those signals and not broadcasting the correct security codes on the correct channels would be blown to smithereens.
They had thought about trying to evade the system, but a quick review of its capabilities and known kills showed that this would probably be far too time-consuming to pull off within the window they had. After all, they needed to do this while the Yennai Corporation
bigwigs would probably not be on the lookout for small flickers in their transmissions from the subsidiary groups.
And taking out the system—or even part of it—was the sort of thing that might attract too much attention.
The answer they came up with had been elegantly simple—attach themselves to a Boreir Group ship, power down, and use its signal to mask them and get them through the shield.
They had chosen their ship carefully. It was one of the smaller cargo haulers that had completed its delivery and was returning empty to pick up another load of munitions. Since it was not filled with valuable explosives and it wasn’t one of their bigger ships, it wasn’t presently being guarded by other ships whose crews might see the Shinigami.
You could fool electronics, but fooling the eyes was a lot more difficult.
That had been step one. Step two was getting Barnabas onto that ship to get the security codes for their use on the way out and wreak whatever havoc he could, before sneaking him back off, undocking, and flying away to land on the planet.
“Since we’ll be there anyway…” he had explained to Gar.
Gar apparently did not agree. He’d been pleading with them for the past two days to reconsider.
Barnabas shook his head and smiled. Gar would learn. He was willing to bet that within six months Gar would be making plans that were just as audacious. He was already beginning to give as good as he got when they all traded insults.
Meanwhile, Shinigami was guiding the ship ever closer to the cargo hauler. They were still a ways out from the shield, so she could take her time. Her systems were in overdrive as she scrambled their signals and masked her emissions so that no one on the ship would notice them, and she had to align the ships carefully before docking so that the sound of it wouldn’t reverberate through the hull.
It was difficult to guide two high-speed ships into perfect alignment, but Shinigami had reflexes better than any human pilot. She had the two ships right next to one another before her airlock extended and coupled to the other ship’s.
She scanned their frequencies and saw no alerts from any quarter. Whatever was happening inside the ship, no one seemed to have noticed their presence yet.
“You’re good to go,” she told Barnabas.
“Thank you.” He stepped into the airlock and pushed himself down the corridor, briefly weightless. At the other end, he attached a small override module and allowed Shinigami to work her magic on the passcodes that held their side of the airlock door in place.
Shinigami scanned the hallway inside and waited until it was unoccupied before opening the door. Barnabas turned himself the right way up, stepped through, and closed the door behind him.
Going offline now, Shinigami told him.
Gar will turn you back on, Barnabas assured her. And if he doesn’t for some reason, I’ll make sure to do it before I kick his ass so you get to watch.
You’re the best friend an AI could ask for.
I’ll remind you of that.
He set off into the corridors with a smile. A few moments later he felt Shinigami’s silent presence in his mind disappear, and Gar reported quietly in his earpiece.
“The ship is offline.”
Thank you, Barnabas murmured back. They hadn’t wanted to fit Gar with a communication chip just yet, but he had a receiver that could translate Barnabas’ silent communication into speech for him. We’ll stay radio-silent from here on out unless something goes very wrong.
“Understood.”
Barnabas heard footsteps coming up the corridor toward him and he bowed his head, moving purposefully. He must keep his face hidden. If anyone looked closely it would be clear that he wasn’t Torcellan.
“Hey, you. Captain says to—” The alien’s voice broke off as she approached Barnabas. His eyes flicked up and he saw her examining him.
Damn. Shinigami, things are about to get—
He remembered that she was not there to talk to and stopped his monologue. A moment later, scanning the alien’s mind, he realized that she was terrified.
“I didn’t realize you were aboard,” she apologized, bowing her head.
Barnabas came to a halt and simply looked at her. Whoever this alien believed he was she was treating him with deference, so he would act as though it was his due. When she looked up, he nodded slowly and followed her with his head as she edged around him and set off again. He could feel her trying not to break into a run.
Please let him not know who I am. When did he come on board? I have to tell the captain. He probably knows already…
Her thoughts, fractured and afraid, faded as she moved away and Barnabas frowned slightly.
This was a complication he hadn’t anticipated. This crew member, and likely others, seemed to believe he was not only a Torcellan but a very specific one. What if one of them had specific questions?
He would need to take less time on this ship than he had anticipated, and be more cautious. At the very least they were afraid of him, but who knew how far that would get him?
He made his way to one of the rooms that gathered communications and batched them out. The sheer volume of emitted communications on all frequencies made these places dangerous for most life forms while the communications were active—but Barnabas was not “most life forms.” Gritting his teeth against the hum and the static charge in the air, he eased his way inside and shut the door behind him.
Step three was to hook into their communications so they could come and go at will. Who could say when they might need to come back, or what protocols they would need in order to land? Barnabas affixed another device and began to search through the ship’s protocols.
To his delight, everything was organized very neatly within its data banks. The ship itself was programmed to respond to the queries passed along by the shield system, feeding the information broadcast by them to another algorithm in the ship.
Barnabas had not anticipated that the shield system would emit part of its own key, but that was genius. Very few people would think the solution might lie there, of all places. He found the algorithm and copied it, then studied the itinerary.
Shinigami had devised a protocol that would change the ship’s destination and auto-steering but not prevent the captain from receiving any route change instructions sent over Boreir channels. The ship would return itself to the trajectory Barnabas wanted it on, even if the captain somehow figured out that they were going to the wrong place—but it was extremely unlikely that he would.
This ship would return to the black and deliver the munitions to the middle of nowhere, and as soon as it was far away it would dump the coordinates. Barnabas could figure out what to do with the munitions later.
He would have stayed, but the knowledge that the people on board were on the lookout for a particular Torcellan changed his mind. He hastened back toward the airlock, opened it, and climbed inside. Once across the little corridor he rapped on the Shinigami’s door and waited for Gar to open it.
The Luvendi was frowning when the door swung inward. “Is something wrong? You’re back sooner than I expected.” He fell in beside Barnabas as they made their way back to the bridge. “About ten minutes until we pass through the shields, I think.”
“Nothing’s wrong, precisely.” Barnabas pressed his lips together as he thought. “But they didn’t just mistake me for a Torcellan, they mistook me for one they’re afraid of. So somewhere out there, there’s a Torcellan who goes around hooded like this. Someone who’s high up in their organization.”
“Or the Yennai Corporation.”
“Or that. Good point.” Barnabas took a seat in the captain’s chair and considered that while the cargo ship passed through the shields. He noticed Gar radiating tenseness as they went through, but after a while it was clear that the shield had not noticed their presence.
“Let’s turn the ship back on,” Barnabas instructed. “And go catch us some munitions dealers.”
19
Carter had been aware of Rald le
aving Tethra within a few minutes of it happening. He had a hopper prepped, so it was quick work to find Oemuga and follow him.
“Be safe while I’m gone,” he told Elisa seriously. “If you have so much as a hint that Rald has come back, you go hide with the Ubuara.”
“I don’t think I can fit inside any of their houses.” Elisa laughed at his fussing. “The kids certainly could, though.” She regretted saying that when Carter went pale. “Carter, we’re going to be fine. For all we know, this Shrillexian’s truck is going to sink into the swamp or something.”
“He got the jump on Heddoran,” Carter reminded her. “I don’t like that. Look, maybe for the next few days—”
Elisa put a finger to his lips with a smile. “We’ll be fine,” she repeated. “Now go. The sooner you warn them, the sooner you can come back.” She handed him a big bottle of Pepsi. “For the road.”
“God, I love you.” Carter grinned and kissed her. He knelt for two very sticky kisses from the twins—they had clearly gotten into the hakoj pallets again—and headed off to the hopper.
To his surprise, Heddoran was already there. He took up most of the hopper and was glaring at anything and everything. Carter assumed this was the Brakalon’s way of hiding his pain. He was frankly surprised that the former guard captain was even able to walk.
“I know,” Heddoran grizzled when Carter opened his mouth. “But no one knows that camp better than I do. If you want to defend it you need to bring me…and I have to tell them it was me who gave away their location, too.”
Carter took one look at the Brakalon’s face and gave up his plan to talk him into another course of action. “Very well, then. Hold on.”
He tried to pilot the hopper as gently as he could, but with the Brakalon on board it was a bumpy journey. And since Rald being on the roads necessitated that they fly the long way around to stay out of sight, it was a long journey as well. It was late afternoon before they arrived, and the mines were just letting out for the day when the hopper set down in the main square.