by C. G. Hatton
The Man smiled as he poured the wine. “Don’t be hard on yourself, NG. We train our people to survive and improvise. We expect a lot from them. LC Anderton is one of our very best, is he not? Don’t be surprised that he evaded us. He has a talent for it.”
•
They gave him his pistol back and he kept it held loosely in his hand, dangling down by his thigh, until they were through the airlock and walking back onto the ship. It was strange how safe it felt, how much distance a set of two doors could put between him and a universe full of crap.
LC tucked the gun back into the small of his back as they walked. Gallagher was still chuntering about McCabe. He blocked him out and called silently to Sean. “What’s the emergency?”
“Are you back onboard?”
“Safe and sound.”
“Thom needs you in the engine room,” she sent, sounding relieved. “He said he needs a hand if we’re going to be ready to leave on time. What happened out there?”
“I’m sure Gallagher will explain,” LC replied, bemused that it felt like no one could manage anything without him. What was it all of a sudden? Usually when he needed to bug out in a hurry, there was an extraction team waiting for him and nothing to do but snooze until he got back to the Alsatia. He didn’t work well with people depending on him. “Tell Thom I’ll be right there.”
He made his excuses to Gallagher and wandered down to the engine room. It was dark except for a pale blue light flickering deep inside the vast space, casting shadows on the tangled mass of pipes and chambers. He climbed down and followed the light to the centre where a small control room nestled amidst the machinery. Thom was sitting in there, leaning on the main panel with his nose almost touching the screen.
LC approached quietly and watched from the doorway without a word as the kid intently manipulated some kind of device, both hands straining with the effort, finally groaning and dropping his head onto the panel.
“Hey, what’s up?” LC said cheerfully, leaning against the doorframe.
Thom sat up suddenly, with a look that was half embarrassment and half relief crossing his face. He gestured towards the screen.
“The life support recycling unit is shot,” he said with frustration. “It blew when I fired it up and I can’t get the remote to reach the pod to replace the control module. You want to try?”
LC squinted at the display. “You can’t get the what to do what?”
“The remote,” Thom said. “It’s a piece of shit. The module keeps slipping.”
LC nudged past him and dropped into the second chair, swivelling round to peer at the screen. “Pretend I know nothing,” he said, “and explain to me exactly what you’re trying to do.”
Thom turned and looked at him, his expression switching to a mix of hurt and indignation. “You don’t have to test me all the time. I know what I’m doing.”
“I’ll know that when you show me I can leave you to get on with it,” LC said, resisting the urge to laugh. “Come on, show me what you’re doing.”
Thom talked him through it patiently, flicking through schematics and finally bringing up a real-time shot of a remote drone. “There’s no AI,” he said.
LC nodded like he was encouraging the younger engineer to carry on explaining something that he already knew. It was absurd and if Gallagher knew what was going on, he’d get thrown out on his ear. But Thom seemed oblivious to it and the faster he could get the kid back to work, the faster they’d get out of here.
“So we have to control remotes manually,” Thom continued, “to get into the enclosed units we can’t reach. But the remote is being a bitch.”
LC watched while Thom tried it again, and again. He could see straight off that there was no way the remote was going to manage it, no matter how careful anyone was to operate it. The kid was about to try again, give him credit for not giving up, but LC had hit the limit of his patience. He looked back at the schematics, one glance enough to sear the entire system into his memory.
He stood up. “Wait here.”
The life support unit was massive, an inner core sealed against contaminants and an outer compartment of moving parts and huge conduits. LC found the main access panel, eased the lockpick away from the edge of his wristband and quickly broke open the locks, ignoring the warning notices declaring mortal danger.
There was a sharp intake of breath behind him.
“Don’t say it, Thom,” he said, climbing through, “and don’t start anything up, for Christ’s sake.”
The compartment was crammed full, an intricate and elaborate three-dimensional jigsaw of machinery and pipes that had just enough gaps and spaces for him to climb and struggle his way through. Knowing the route was one thing, getting there was something else. It was difficult going, about as tough as anything he’d ever done and he got stuck twice, almost lost an arm when a hefty rotor shifted suddenly as he leaned on it, and irrationally thought he’d run into electrobes when he imagined the band on his wrist tingled in warning. It was ridiculous. The ship had no AI so there couldn’t be any of those damned things in here. And anyway the bio-readings on the band hadn’t made any sense to him since the lab so they were pretty much meaningless and he didn’t even know if the warning mechanism still worked.
He took a tentative breath, balanced precariously as he was. The meagre amount of air in the compartment was stale and tinged with an acrid scent of chemicals, but nothing hit his lungs the way electrobes would. He felt fine. He felt more than fine. He clenched and unclenched his left hand. If the crap he’d picked up at the lab had that kind of effect on an open wound and could neutralise shocking amounts of alcohol, he reckoned it could probably fend off the side effects of electrobe poisoning. No wonder people wanted to get their hands on him to get hold of it. A curse, the guy in the lab had called it but then the man had been half mad and laughing and had somehow got the drop on him. LC could still feel the cold of the jab against his neck, sprawled half stunned on the floor amongst shards of broken glass, with a madman screaming in his ear. He’d managed to yell out to Hil before passing out and that was all he could remember except for disjointed memories of the heat of an explosion behind them as Hil dragged both their asses back to the ship.
When he tumbled out of the unit clutching the burnt out control module, Thom was still standing gawping.
LC got to his feet, dusted himself down and handed over the scorched module. “There you go.”
He hung around the engine room watching Thom work until the power plant, main engines and auxiliaries were fired up and all systems were online. There was no AI but it all seemed pretty much automated. They reported in then he told Thom to go rest up, offering to take first watch because he wanted some time alone and down here was probably the best place to get it.
He sat in the tiny control room with his feet up on the panel, flicking through display screens of all the information they had access to and breaking into the encrypted areas that were supposedly restricted. It was all low security, manufacturer’s defaults designed to prevent the unqualified from tampering. There wasn’t anything thrilling but he got a good look at the ship and its systems, noting a few bolt holes for future reference and checking out the cargo with nothing other than passing curiosity. He reckoned Gallagher’s legitimate cargo was full of domestic supplies and McCabe’s crates had the look of narcotics from the outlines on the scans he could access. It looked like McCabe and two of his guys had booked in as passengers, taking spare crew quarters. He made a note of where so he could avoid them.
He poked into a couple more areas, casual boredom more than anything, and was about done when he was bumped abruptly out of the system. He sat up and stared at the console. Three attempts later and it was impossible to resist a closer look at what was ditching him out. He engaged a direct connection from the implant and went slowly, spotting a couple of traps and nudging back when it threatened to fire a spark his way. The link was clear and smooth, far better than he would have expected from a rust buck
et with no AI, and he was sure the protections were more sophisticated than a cargo freighter out here should ever need. But it had nothing he hadn’t broken before.
He got through the barriers that had stopped his manual search and hit a black wall. Total void. The sudden backlash that hit his neck and spiked into his head knocked him back physically as well as mentally. He wasn’t sure if he blacked out completely but he opened his eyes to a screen that showed detailed maps of the crew deck as if that was where he’d left it. Flickers of light danced on the edges of his vision. The engines were still running and no warning klaxons were screaming out. If it hadn’t been for a sting of warmth where the usually cool implant nestled below the skin on his neck, he would have thought he’d imagined it.
He rubbed his neck, feeling around the sore spot, and looked at the screen, tempted to go back in and crack it. He had about an hour before they were due to leave. But Thom would be back before then and it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to explain to the kid what he was doing. He seriously doubted that a ship like this had anything of value to hide anyway. It had probably been a blip – it was old enough and decrepit enough to have obsolete systems that didn’t match up to other sections of its operations.
LC flicked the screen back onto routine maintenance and went for a run around the engine room. It wasn’t the Maze but parts of it weren’t far off.
Thom reappeared after his break even more eager to prove himself as an engineer which suited LC just fine. They worked out a system of six-hour shifts and doubled up on the first to see them safely out of dock and through jump – in case of any problems with it being such an old ship, LC had said. He watched what Thom was doing until he was fairly sure he could blag his way through a solo shift, sent the kid off to take first rest and sat through his watch in the control room, watching numbers scroll and hoping the life support unit wouldn’t blow again. He’d never appreciated what it took to keep a ship flying. The guild worked with AIs on some of their smaller ships and as far as he knew the Alsatia had a whole legion of staff to keep the cruiser moving. He’d never had anything to do with it. And sitting here watching all this, it was a responsibility that he didn’t want so instead he ran scenarios through his head, trying to figure out what he could have done differently and always coming back to the fact that Mendhel had been alive when they’d left him on Earth.
He pulled the stolen implant from his pocket. He’d tried to get into it a couple of times but his head had been too screwed up to get anywhere and he was wary about damaging it.
He sat back and stared at it, tumbling the tiny device over his fingertips. He was getting tired of running and he’d hit the end of the line at Sten’s World. This implant was his only way of finding out who had taken Anya and right now, he had no chance of hacking into it. He tossed it up into the air, catching it deftly and pocketing it.
By the time Thom came back, LC was feeling jittery and ready for a change of scenery even if it meant the risk of running into people. He showered away the dirt of the engine room, grabbed a snack and tucked himself securely in the mess with a beer. DiMarco was on the bridge, flying the ship, so there was no moonshine but the beer was doing the trick. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. It was the sugar, he reckoned, that was keeping the shakes and aches away. Pure carbohydrate and after four beers, he felt almost normal again.
Until Sean appeared at the doorway and the buzz in his head reminded him that he was far from normal.
“Hey,” she said with a smile. She wandered in, took a fruit juice from the fridge and sat opposite him. “How’s Thom doing?”
“He’s fine.”
She smiled again. “He told us what you did with the life support unit. I think you impressed him.”
He downed the rest of his beer and leaned forward to put the bottle on the table, making a row of five empties, uneasy at what he was hearing. “He’s easy to impress then.”
“Gallagher’s concerned it might happen again.”
He shrugged. “It might. We’re watching it.” He knew he sounded hostile and he had no openly obvious reason to be.
She didn’t seem to take offence, reaching over and flicking on a music channel. “How’s the hand?”
He scratched absently at the bandage. “Painful,” he lied. “How’s DiMarco?”
Sean laughed. “He wasn’t impressed that you out-drank him. You want to watch yourself with him.”
LC smiled. He had to watch himself with everyone. He stood up, made his excuses and dropped the empty bottles in the disposal chute on the way out. The brief conversation had started a pounding in his head.
He was half way down the corridor when Sean called out behind him, “Hey, LC.”
He turned, automatically responding to his guild nickname and freezing in horror as he realised his mistake.
Chapter 6
The swirling dance of the vapour rising from the goblet was almost hypnotic. NG wrapped his hand around its stem, feeling the warmth of the wine working its way through the twisted metalwork.
The Man leaned forward. “Tell me about the laboratory.”
NG let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. “We understand it was a research facility. Bioweapons. Earth. Off the radar. Nothing they’ll admit to.”
“Pah. The arrogant isolationism of man has no bounds. Imagine what these creatures could accomplish if they dared collaborate.” The Man raised his goblet and drank deeply.
“Science and Legal are squabbling over the ashes,” NG said. He could feel from the fumes hitting the back of his throat that the concoction was stronger than anything he’d been offered in here before. It felt as if the Man was testing him. “LC and Hil were lucky to get out alive.”
The Man moved his pawn to take NG’s, the first casualty. “They should have come back to us.”
NG looked at the pieces on the board, each handcrafted with incredible skill, each casting a flickering shadow that gave the illusion of pent up energy, each piece eager for the chance to move. “They should have. We could have lost LC for good if O’Brien hadn’t managed to catch up with him before they left.”
•
Time slowed as he stood there, rooted to the spot, looking at her.
“It’s about two hours to the rendezvous,” she said softly and disappeared back into the mess.
She knew.
He made his way to his cabin, locked the door behind him and sat on his bunk, hands shaking. The noise buzzing around in his head was always worse when he was with people, and it peaked the more people there were around. He’d thought he was going insane at first, hearing snatches of words inside his head, and for a while he’d thought the implant could be malfunctioning, but it was only lately, when it was directed at him or about him, that he’d realised he could hear what people were thinking. It had given him the drop a couple of times and saved his neck twice on the orbital at Sten’s World, but to see Sean looking at him and know she was thinking about the guild and people he knew, and wondering if he could have changed the colour of his eyes, was too much.
She didn’t know for definite – that was the only saving grace right now. She had doubts that it was really him. He just needed to lie low and split when they got to Harbin. Whoever she was, she wasn’t going to be good enough to follow him.
He rubbed his eyes, the headache beginning to wear off. He stood up and couldn’t resist wandering over to look in the mirror over the small sink in the corner. His eyes were lighter than they used to be. He’d noticed it at Olivia’s place. She’d teased him and asked what drugs he was on. Sean must have seen an image or a description to know they were different now and that meant she must be after the bounty.
Crap. He was stuck on a ship in deep space with a bounty hunter and reacting like that when she’d called him LC wouldn’t have done his case any good if she was having doubts. He hadn’t had any choice but to use his last set of ID – he hadn’t been able to get anywhere near any of his drop boxes to pick up any m
ore. But yes, using an ID with the initials LC might not have been smart.
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. His hair was shorter than it had ever been – Pen had told him to get it cut, if nothing else, he’d said. Why his eyes had changed, he didn’t know but since the lab, he could see better in the dark, could heal inhumanly fast and now it seemed he was also immune to the effects of alcohol. And he could hear snatches of what people were thinking. As clear as if he was connected via an implant as long as they were close to him. God knows what the downsides were going to turn out to be – apart from the excruciating cramps and agonising pain, he could drop down dead any minute. If Sean made a definite decision that it was him, he was sure she wouldn’t hesitate in arranging an accident and stuffing him into cold storage for the journey back to claim the bounty. Right now his only advantage was that she had no way to extract him and clearly didn’t want to share the profit.
He checked the time. Two hours. Then they’d be heading for Harbin and he could get away. No problem.
He didn’t intend to fall asleep but he was exhausted. He was woken suddenly by Thom calling through the Senson and managed to get back to the engine room before they started to manoeuvre for the deep space rendezvous that McCabe had arranged. The conversation with Sean hadn’t changed anything. He knew he had to get away. Hiding out in the engine room at least gave him a place to disappear until they reached a port with other ships. He reckoned he could start to double back at some point and try to figure out a way to find out what had happened to Anya. The idea of going back to the guild was one that he’d long since abandoned. He needed to talk to Hil before he could even risk thinking about that.
LC slipped into the control room, muttered something to Thom about checking the cooling system and disappeared into the depths of the engine room. There were more than a dozen blind spots down there where a guy could hide away without being seen, nowhere near any moving parts and cosy enough to spend a few hours away from any prying eyes and intrusive noise. Machines didn’t think and being able to sit quietly with only his own thoughts for company gave him a chance to play the games with his breathing and heart rate that they were all trained in. He hadn’t practised in weeks and it was no wonder he was so jittery.