by James Hanlon
“I heard you,” Bee said as Truly left the nullroom.
***
The next morning Bee woke early, before the light cycle on the ship was bright enough to be considered day. She wanted to get as much out of her remaining time on the ship as possible. For breakfast she went to the kitchen and filled a bowl with the bland nutrient paste the whole crew had been eating for the past week.
Since Myra vented half the ship’s power cells there wasn’t enough energy for any waste—including the extra resources it took to cook a proper meal. Everyone ate nutrient rations instead of the fresh meat and produce they’d brought from Surface. The paste was boring but it filled her stomach.
At one point in her life, Bee thought as she dragged her spoon through the remnants of the wheat-colored goop, she would have killed for the stuff. Even for just a mouthful. She scraped the bowl clean and tried to imagine how it might have tasted to her then. She probably could have lasted a week on the meal she just ate.
“You actually like that stuff?”
Myra’s disembodied voice startled Bee and she dropped the spoon into her bowl with a clatter.
“Myra! You’re back.”
“Yes, finally. But I’m a shadow of my former self,” she griped. “Captain Overreaction stripped me down to nothing—I’m barely a ghost now. Except I can’t even turn the lights on and off.”
Bee waggled her bowl as she rose from the table to put away her dishes. “Well, you did force everyone to eat this all week.”
“A necessary evil. I was trying to stop you all from getting killed. It’s in my core protocols to preserve life.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I mean, what if we needed all that power for something? Weren’t you putting us in danger?” Bee went back to the dining room and took a seat to hang around with Myra until someone else woke up. Maybe she could talk Truly into one last training session.
“I ran millions of different scenarios and my minor sabotage introduced the least amount of risk for the desired outcome.”
“And what outcome was that?” Bee asked.
“Making you all eat nutrition paste.”
Bee giggled, and was about to press the point when Captain Anson walked into the dining room, interrupting their conversation.
“Morning, Captain,” Bee said.
He grunted in reply and went into the kitchen without otherwise acknowledging her presence. Bee hadn’t seen the Captain since the meeting on the bridge days ago—he’d locked himself in his quarters to work on fixing Myra and hadn’t left since.
“You might want to avoid him for now,” Myra whispered to her.
“Is he mad?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did,” she said, this time with her good humor replaced by humility. “He trusted me. I mean, he still trusts me, but maybe I would have been better off—no, never mind.”
“Better off what?” Bee spoke in a whisper like Myra.
“Your room?” asked Myra.
Bee nodded and slipped out of her seat. She wasn’t sure what to make of Myra—she thought of Silver saying AIs like her were illegal. Beyond a shadow of a doubt Bee knew she didn’t want to get on the Captain’s bad side. But a private conversation wasn’t against the rules. She’d talk to Myra, but reminded herself as she entered her room to be cautious.
“So what were you saying?” Bee asked. She took a seat on the bed.
“I’m just not sure I did the right thing. The Captain is still planning to go out there and now he’s angry with me. And I’m useless. Can’t do anything myself anymore.”
Bee narrowed her eyes. “And now what are you saying?”
Myra took a moment. “If I asked you to—”
“Nope!” Bee said as she stood. “No way. Whatever it is you want, I’m not getting involved.”
“You don’t even know what I’m asking.”
“I don’t trust you,” Bee blurted. “Sorry.”
Myra sighed. “No, I understand. But I just wanted to ask you to consider coming with us instead of going back to Surface.”
“What? Didn’t you just say everyone was probably going to get killed going out there?”
“Bee, you’re not ready for what you want to do. I ran some scenarios for you too—you’ve actually got a better shot staying alive if you come with us.”
“I’m going back,” Bee insisted. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to find him, I’m not about to run away now. Besides, the Captain, Truly, and Silver all want me gone as soon as possible. They wouldn’t go for it.”
“Just think about it,” Myra said.
“I’m going back,” she repeated, but Myra wasn’t there.
Chapter 20: Blitz
“Stop whining, Pluck,” Gruce said.
“But it burns,” mewled Pluck.
Pluck tried in vain to paw at the blackened meat on his left thigh through the neat hole in the armor, but couldn’t reach. He’d been tagged by a laser the day before so Gruce had no choice but to carry him on his back.
The little man weighed nothing in the suit, but carrying him made Gruce even more exposed as they crept through the tunnels underneath the city—their armor had long since lost the power to maintain the taxing cloak system. Gruce had to assume since he hadn’t been caught yet that the bombardment had knocked out at least some of the city’s surveillance system.
Fatigue had his old body dragging. He could barely think straight after so many sleepless nights on the run. Pluck and himself were all that remained of his command—the others did their part well, allowing Gruce and his squad to slip into the city undetected. The trouble didn’t start until after that.
Starhawk’s armors outside the city bolted before the counterattacking Overlook City troopers could reach them, feigning retreat, and led the troopers away from the city. Then the orbital bombardment slammed the dome, caving in the southern edge. Most of the troopers and drones went down in the initial barrage, so Starhawk’s armors doubled back to mop up while Gruce and his squad cloaked their way through the jagged gap in the dome.
With so much smoke, heat, and rubble infiltration was easy. After they’d successfully breached the city’s walls his squad split into two teams of five with the same objective: find Jensen’s suit. They had the physical location of it in the police station at the center of the city but expected it to be under heavy guard and would need to strategize before using up the advantage of stealth. Pluck had access codes to get inside.
The city swarmed guards like a busted hornet’s nest. A drone patrol sniffed out Whistler’s squad on the way in. They lost two men and scattered. The rest of the squad went on a frantic chase but got picked off one by one in the streets. Ever since then patrols had been scouring the city for the rest of the pirates.
Upon seeing their plan shot to pieces, Gruce opted for self-preservation. The map was a lost cause, so he grabbed Pluck and took off for the tunnels. That was where Jensen Lee spent most of his time hiding out, so Gruce figured he stood a better chance in there than out in the open. The rest of his squad panicked without him and bought it trying to flee. Gruce didn’t expect to last long—even Jensen Lee ended up a corpse.
But if there was one thing Gruce knew about Lee it was his tendency to leave himself a back door. He would never have put himself in that bombardment shelter if he didn’t have a plan for when they came knocking. Maybe he’d left something behind. Anything would help.
“Pluck, we’re here,” Gruce said. “Can you open it?”
He propped Pluck against the wall outside the vacant, locked shelter where Lee died. Groaning, Pluck accessed the hardlight screen on his suit, issued several commands, and stopped, hovering his gauntleted finger over the screen.
“They’ll come for us, dearest,” Pluck said. “They’ll know.”
“We’re lucky to have lived this long, Pluck. If there’s nothing in here we’re humped anyway.”
Another flurry of input to Pluck’s screen and the shelter’s thick door swung open. Gruce
grabbed his subordinate by the arm and pulled him along behind as he went inside.
***
“We’re trying our best, Harry,” Robert626 said. “This is where you asked us to take you. What more can we do?”
Bushy eyebrows descended in a sharp glare as Hargrove glowered at the earnest-eyed recruiter. He’d been cooped up with the chipper man for days inside the Midtown Hotel. The two men sat across from each other, each on the edge of his own bed.
“Stop calling me that. It’s Hargrove. And I want to go up there myself. I’ve been telling you from the start I never wanted anyone to hold my hand for this.”
“You can’t just go up to the station with all this going on, the military won’t let you. And besides, there are still pirates on the loose and you killed one of their best. You need protection.”
Hargrove stood and paced the room.
“I should have just stayed here from the beginning,” he said. “I could have done all of this on my own.”
“Hargrove, the only reason you’re in one of your nice hotel rooms instead of that musty holding cell underground is because of what we’ve done for you. The very first day you joined up our team discovered exactly where Bee went! If you don’t call that progress, I don’t know what is.”
Hargrove snorted. “Yes, using information I could have gotten myself! The footage from our cameras here got us on her trail, and her bank records showed her tickets at the station. All you did was get me out.”
Robert626 raised a pointed forefinger. “But would you have known to look for either of those things? You had plenty of time after her disappearance to check in both places, but you didn’t.”
Hargrove crossed his arms. The tight fabric on the white one-piece jumpsuit he wore hindered his movement and he looked down at the overly fashionable outfit with distaste.
“Maybe you’re right. But you’re asking me to work for you before you’ve delivered on your end of the deal. We find her first. Until then I won’t be your mouthpiece. No more video shoots, no more statements. I’ve given you enough already by agreeing to wear these ridiculous suits the whole time.”
The vertical black and red stripes matched the one Robert626 wore. So far the recruiter was still the only Volunteer Hargrove had met face to face. Every other VCM he’d seen wore armor with a dark tinted visor on the helmet. Their armor matched the white-black-red color scheme as well, with dull white as the base and black and red stripes slashed across the joints. They never spoke or acknowledged him since all communication between them happened inside the suits. He wondered if Robert626 talked to them with his uplink.
Hargrove had plenty of time to study his silent guardians during their stay. At all times an armored Volunteer with a laser rifle kept watch and over the course of the week the guards rotated on twelve-hour shifts. Hargrove never stayed in the same room for more than one day and some days even moved two or three times to different random rooms. Robert626 explained that his safety was the primary objective. Assassination was not out of the question so they took his protection seriously.
“You don’t like the suits?” the recruiter said, wounded. “Our focus groups said they look dashing. Plus, they can disperse a few laser blasts. You should see some of the ads they’re sending out, you look great.”
“Ads?”
“Yes, that’s what we were recording for. We advertise all over the system for more Volunteers. Always room for new recruits in the VCM!”
“You mean more privateers. Ugh. I need to take a shower,” Hargrove said, unzipping the jumpsuit.
***
Gruce took a marble-sized scanner drone from a concealed compartment near his waist, clicked it with his thumb, and tossed it into the air. It hovered in front of him and bathed the area with red beams before zooming off to another section of the shelter, leaving glowing hardlight markers in its wake which flagged potentially useful data.
A red marker bobbed in the air over a faint stain on the floor in front of him. Blood, the words said. Lee, Jensen. Lee got stupid, let himself get snuck up on. Damn civvy bludgeoned his skull in with his own helmet. Don’t get stupid, he reminded himself.
With Pluck working on keeping the shelter’s door shut, Gruce followed the drone as it surveyed the entrance to the shelter. If Jensen had hidden anything nearby he wasn’t sure the drone would be able to find it, so he kept a sharp eye out for anything it might miss. It was only a matter of time before the troopers found him and Pluck.
Gruce’s bulky shadow danced on the wall as Pluck welded the door shut. Starhawk would be furious if he knew they weren’t going after the map, but he probably assumed Two-Gut died with the rest of his crew in the city. If they didn’t find anything inside the bunker that’s how he’d end up. But there had to be something—Lee was a legend among smugglers.
The drone returned to Gruce and he snatched it out of the air. It projected a screen in front of him with the scan’s results. Chemical residues, bodily fluids, garbage—nothing, nothing, nothing. He clicked the drone off and returned it to its compartment as he resumed his own search. It would have surprised him if the little sniffer drone found anything Lee stashed so easily.
Chapter 21: Momentum
Bee knocked on the bulkhead door to the bridge, three solid thumps with the bottom of her fist. The Captain had called her up to see the view of Optima as they approached. Truly opened the door for her and led her inside. Ferro and the Captain each had their respective control seats while Silver loitered near the door. He’d probably seen the view a hundred times before. Bee took a spot up front just inches from the thick windows. Truly stood to her left, arms crossed, still wearing only an undersuit.
The darkness of space thrilled her—the distance, the emptiness. So much room. Optima’s sunlit side shone bright and welcoming against the consuming black beyond it. Some of the spherical asteroid’s craters glinted in the light and Bee realized they were capped by clear domes like Overlook City. She wondered what they were like underneath.
“It’s beautiful,” Bee said.
“Yeah, anything looks pretty this far out,” the Captain said from behind her. “Don’t let that fool you. Optima doesn’t really compare to where you’re from.”
“Out here the Core maintains a presence, but it’s a pirate’s paradise,” Truly explained. “Far enough out to make it easy to run and hard to chase them down, trade routes coming in from all around the system, secret lairs in the belt… they love it here.”
“I thought the Core Fleet just came through,” Bee pointed out.
“They were only after the pirate Families,” Truly said.
“Families?”
Truly raised an eyebrow at her. “You’ve never heard of the Families?”
Bee shook her head.
“So you’ve been chasing Starhawk since you were a little girl and you haven’t even heard of the biggest pirate organization in the system?”
“I didn’t know he was a pirate,” she said. “He’s never had a bounty on him until now. I only realized it when I saw his face.”
“That’s all you’ve got?” Truly asked. “You saw his face?”
Find him, whispered Mother.
Bee’s breathing came short and shallow as the memories crashed into her thoughts. Every day she had to force herself not to bury them and forget. Every day she thought of his face, held it in her mind’s eye, made it a part of herself. She probably knew it better than Mother’s.
Peel back his eyelids until—
“Until this week that’s all I had,” Bee said, cramming her mother’s voice to the back of her mind. “Now I know who he is, I know where he is, and I know how to get there.”
“Too bad you don’t know how to fight,” Truly said.
Bee turned away from the view to face Truly directly. “You taught me to shoot.”
“And you think that’s all you need? A couple of hours on the firing range?”
“I’m going back.”
Truly stared out the window in silence
.
Captain Anson spoke with audible hesitance from behind her. “We got word from Surface this morning.”
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Pirates are inside the city,” he said. “Everyone’s safe in shelters underneath. They bombed the dome from orbit and some of them got in. The Core Fleet hasn’t reached Surface yet, but once they arrive tonight it’s over. The ships he has in orbit are all he’s got.”
“That’s not going to stop me,” Bee said.
“Even if you got there and he was still alive—he’s got warships, Bee. An army of killers. Swarms of drone fighters. The entire Planetary Guard is getting trounced and you think you can just waltz on in and… do what, exactly?”
“Find him and kill him,” she said, and heard Mother echo her words.
“I want you to come with us,” Captain Anson said.
Surprised, Bee didn’t know what to say. They’d been so eager to get rid of her before and now a sudden invitation to join the crew? Why would he—
“Myra talked to you, didn’t she?” Bee asked.
“Of course she did. At first I thought it was a ridiculous idea, but we could all benefit from having you around—and I don’t mean as a passenger. I want to bring you onto the crew. Paid. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, you’re willing to work hard, and best of all you make good company for Myra. She’s been getting cranky recently and I don’t want any more tantrums while we’re out there on our own.”
“I can hear you,” Myra said, wounded.
“Now try listening,” Captain Anson said with a stern edge.
Bee turned back to the view of Optima, working her options over in her head. Obviously they were right. She didn’t have a plan. She didn’t even have a gun. What could she do? The Core Fleet was bound to either capture or kill Starhawk. But this nagging feeling told her he would get away somehow. She’d missed her shot at him once—if only she’d stayed at the hotel! If another chance presented itself, she wouldn’t falter.