by Rick Partlow
“Your language is stupid,” the Tahni complained. Sandi couldn’t tell if he was being insulting, annoyed or simply playful. “Yes, I know we are planning on stealing fusion missiles from one of your military storage facilities.”
“Not just fusion missiles,” Sandi corrected her, “but weapons designed to destroy whole colonies at once, to wipe out all life on a world like El Hondonada or Tangier. Weapons that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands.”
“You say that like you believe I should care for the lives of your species.”
Shit. This was worse than talking to an AI simulation; at least those pretended to be human.
“There was a reason we didn’t use these missiles on your people,” Sandi shot back. “There was a reason we went to the trouble of invading your world and got our Marines and pilots killed when we could have sat back and killed every single one of you from orbit. These missiles don’t discriminate between the guilty and the innocent, between adults and children, between cartel bosses and shopkeepers.”
“I know your moral beliefs are based on different assumptions than ours,” Fontenot put in. “But I’ve also learned enough about your people to know you do have beliefs, and that the idea of preserving the lives of the young is one of them. Did you leave that behind when you left your people?”
The Tahni made a subtle humming sound, something Sandi had learned was a placeholder for their language, like an “umm…” was for a human.
“You know I did not, Fontenot,” Kan-Ten answered. “Yet my desire not to harm the young does not outweigh my desire not to be executed by Brunner for betraying her. If death meant nothing to me, I would never have surrendered to your Marines on my homeworld.”
“I’m not asking you to die,” Sandi insisted, wanting to motion with her hands but restraining herself; who knew what the gesture might mean to a Tahni. “Just to help us. If this goes the way we’re planning, Brunner and her father won’t ever know what we did. But we can’t let her or anyone else get their hands on these missiles.”
Sandi heard the soft steps on the ladder from the cargo bay at the same time that Fontenot acted, lurching out of the cockpit and grabbing the scruff of a jacket collar, yanking the dark figure out into the dim glow of the chemical ghostlights that lined the cockpit bulkhead.
“Wait!” The voice was Tomlinson’s. Sandi recognized his short, thick frame before he spoke, before she could make out his hang-dog face. “Hold on!”
“What the hell are you doing sneaking around here, Tomlinson?” Sandi demanded, stepping closer, getting in his face despite the fact that he was probably strong enough to snap her in half; she trusted that Fontenot was even stronger. “Trying to sniff around so you can go running to sell us out to Brunner again?”
“No!” He held up his hands palms out, pleading. “Look, I’m really sorry for that. I didn’t understand, I didn’t know what they would do with it!”
“You did not understand,” Kan-Ten spoke up, surprising Sandi, “that if you put a list of available weapons in front of violent criminals, that they would attempt to obtain them?” There was a strange tilt to his head. “Is English the primary language on your world?”
“I was scared!” He insisted. “I don’t have anywhere else to go!” His face looked anguished and he seemed helpless, despite his obvious strength. “My home…” He choked on the word. “On the world where I was born, Canaan, my family, my friends, everyone I know is part of the New Society of Friends Church. Neo-Quakers, people call us. We’re pacifists, we don’t believe in war, don’t believe in killing another sentient being for any reason.” He shrugged. “I…There was this girl, and we’d been betrothed to be married, but there was another boy who was obsessed with her. He raped and strangled her to death.”
His eyes closed for a moment, and Sandi thought he was trying to control his emotions so he could keep talking.
“I found him and I beat him unconscious. When he was lying there, I took a rock and I smashed in his skull.”
“Shit,” Sandi murmured. Now she was feeling bad for despising the guy.
“The Church Elders understood why I had done what I’d done…but they had no choice. The law was the law, and while I was not imprisoned, I was excommunicated---‘shunned’ we call it. No one would hire me, no one would sell to me, no one would shelter me. I had to get off of Canaan, yet I had no money. The war had just begun, though, and the Marines were looking for recruits. I’d already killed, so what did it matter?” He let out a long, ragged breath, his shoulders shuddering.
“The things I saw, the things I did…,” he trailed off. “I felt as if God had truly abandoned me, as if I had descended into hell. I came out here because I didn’t feel as if I belonged in the presence of good people.” He chuckled softly. “And out here, somewhere among the dregs and the victims and the killers, I have found my faith in God again.”
“This is alternating between depressing and boring the shit out of me,” Fontenot commented. “Do you have a reason somewhere in there why you were spying on us and why I shouldn’t snap your fucking neck for it?”
The harsh lack of sentiment shook Sandi out of the empathy she’d been feeling and back into a safer and healthier skepticism. She watched Tomlinson’s face, but didn’t see any fear, only conviction.
“I’m trying to make things right,” he said. “I’m trying to do better, to make things better for the people who live out here.”
“By preaching at them, mostly.” The flesh half of Fontenot’s face twisted into a sneer. “I’m sure that’s going to improve their lives, knowing God sees them working their asses off for peanuts so some crime boss can live high on the hog.”
“I’ve tried to spread the word from the Book of Life,” Tomlinson admitted. “Some have taken to it and some haven’t, but there won’t be the opportunity for any to come to know God if we allow the spread of abominations like these Planet-Killers. Mr. Borges believes we can use them to take back what La Sombra has stolen from him, but I’ve heard a lot about Jordi Abdullah, and he’s not a man who’ll give in without burning everything down around him first.”
“So, to make up for your sins,” Sandi said, “you’re willing to risk your life and go against the boss?”
“There’s nothing left for me in this life anymore.” His eyes cast downward, maybe in shame or maybe in sadness. “I’m not afraid of death, only of the thought that I might die unworthy and never see my Selah again.”
Sandi grunted, unconvinced. What, she wondered, would Ash do?
Which Ash? The one who says he loves me or the one who shot Garces in the head?
“What do you think, Korri?”
The cyborg hissed a sigh out of half of her mouth.
“We either trust him or kill him,” she pointed out. “And another body’s going to be hard to explain.”
“Fine.” Sandi waved a hand in assent at the heavy-worlder. “But if you betray us again, motherfucker, I swear to your bearded, white-robed God that one of us’ll kill you before they get us all. Do you understand me?”
He nodded, not saying a word.
“What about you, Kan-Ten?”
The Tahni wasn’t looking at them or anything else, his eyes nearly invisible under his brow ridges as his head dipped forward. She wondered if he was asleep or praying or something.
“My choices are limited by the fact that someone outside the two of you knows that we were conspiring,” Kan-Ten spoke, head still bowed toward his chest. “If he reports you, I will be included in the betrayal whether or not I actually join you. My only options are to either side with you or go to Brunner now, before Tomlinson has the chance.” He finally looked up, eyes fixed on Fontenot. “You have been an ally and companion to me, Korri, and I would not be the one responsible for your death.” He turned to Sandi. “What is it that you propose?”
“We can’t do anything until we have the missiles,” Sandi explained. “If we sabotage the operation and leave them where they are, we’re handing them
to Jordi Abdullah. We have to go through with the heist. After that…” She shrugged.
“After that, we wait for the opportunity. Leave your ‘links open for local traffic and watch for a message from me. If things go just right, they might never even know what we did.”
Fontenot barked a laugh.
“When,” she asked with the cynicism of an old soldier, “have things ever gone just right?”
Chapter Fifteen
Reality exploded around Ashton Carpenter and Peboan filled his senses through the interface in glowing lines of blue and green and brown and the white of massive ice caps and the distant glow of a star just slightly too far away, and he abruptly realized that he’d never been in combat alone. During the war, he’d first piloted assault shuttles and later missile cutters, and both types of vessel had a crew of two: a pilot and a crew chief to handle commo, secondary weapons and emergency repairs. Fighting the Acheron on his own was going to be like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle while running a marathon.
He could have asked Brunner for an assistant, but then he would have had to train them in the space of an eighty-hour Transition, and he still wouldn’t have trusted them to handle it. He didn’t trust anyone here except Sandi.
Shit. He’d been trying not to think about Sandi. The thought of her in danger was distracting…hell the thought of her was distracting, period.
As if on cue, a polychromatic warp corona burst like fireworks a few thousand kilometers off to his port and the Amador re-entered realspace. He engaged the Acheron’s plasma drive and led the bigger ship towards orbit around the isolated periphery colony world, ignoring the insistent hails from the system’s traffic control system.
Am I making a mistake?
He laughed at the thought. It was Sandi. Of course he was making a mistake.
“Approaching orbital insertion, Acheron,” Brunner told him, her voice distant and tinny in his physical ears while the rest of his consciousness was submerged through the jacks into the interface. “Cargo shuttle launching in one minute.”
It was less than a minute, because it was Sandi flying it and she was nothing if not impatient. The ungainly, bulbous lifting body shape separated from its niche in the Amador’s side on the glowing puffs of maneuvering thrusters, leaving a gap like an open wound in her side, and then her main drives ignited in a flare of star-bright brilliance and she rocketed forward, nearly leaving Ash and his cutter behind.
“Shuttle go for orbital insertion.” That was Sandi, her voice penetrating to his senses in a way that Brunner’s had not.
“Roger shuttle,” he responded, forcing his vocal cords to work, pulling himself out of the interface long enough to speak. “Follow me in.”
Acceleration pressed him back into his padded seat, punishing at three gravities but somehow a step removed as long as he concentrated on melding with the ship’s systems. Fighting under acceleration was why pilots needed the jacks. Oh, an AI could have done it, if it was sophisticated enough; but armed, autonomous AIs had been illegal forever, and while the Commonwealth government pretty much ignored the Pirate Worlds, any report of a cartel using those would have been enough to provoke a military response. War was bad enough when humans were pulling the trigger.
The Acheron leapt ahead of Sandi’s boat, a miniature sun at her tail and active sensors at her bow, watching carefully for any military ships in orbit. He didn’t expect any---this had been a backwater even during the war, far away from anywhere and not worth having. The Tahni had never sent more than a token force to raid it, and the poor bastards who’d been stationed here in the lone missile cutter squadron stationed to defend it had left at war’s end. All that was left was an underground depot filled with obsolete weapons, stored here with minimal security because who would bother to steal them?
He pushed down a surge of righteous indignation at Admiral Krieger’s corruption and concentrated on the thickening atmosphere, feeling it through the interface as if the ship’s BiPhase Carbide hull were his own skin, a skydiver plunging down from the edge of space. An aurora of charged particles glowed around him for dozens of kilometers as the ship’s plasma drive ionized swathes of atmospheric gases, and when he began to feel the buffeting of thermal blooming against the hull, he switched over to the turbojets. The leonine roar of their raw power echoed faintly around him, and the ship’s control surfaces adjusted and flexed in natural rhythm with his muscles.
A layer of thin, filmy clouds yielded dreamlike, and the western hemisphere of the planet was laid out beneath him, shallow seas rimmed with ice sheets and persistent, hardy tangles of green-trimmed thorns twisting along the courses of rivers as they flowed down from mountain glaciers, fighting to keep the ice at bay until they reached the shelters of the valleys. There, the ecology expanded as the temperatures occasionally climbed above the freezing point of water, and green and red and purple blossomed in places on the world’s largest continent.
The civilian settlements passed by in barely perceptible flashes of buildfoam and cement and native stone and wood, the roads connecting them so scantly maintained as to be almost nonexistent and half-buried under snow. It was cold here. It always seemed to be cold in the places where humans were sparse. The hot places were occupied, were endured, were adjusted, but not those worlds where the warmth of the primary star was lacking. There, land could be had free and people didn’t care where you came from or what you’d done because who else would come here unless there was nowhere else to go?
The depot was a good hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, barely visible from the air under months-old snow cover hardened into pack ice. The domes curved naturally into the hills that surrounded the area, and only the broad, paved stretch of road kept clear from the landing field and the dull grey of exterior access doors ten meters tall in the side of one of the mounds gave proof that this place was the work of man.
“Attention unidentified aircraft, this is Peboan Depot. You are entering restricted military airspace. Turn back now or you will be fired upon.”
The voice was a woman’s contralto, clear and piercing and quite serious, blasting over the civilian traffic control frequency. As she spoke, Ash could see Gatling laser turrets rotating into firing positions at intervals around the perimeter of the base; not overly impressive as anti-aircraft emplacements went, but certainly enough to shoot down the Acheron and the cargo shuttle.
“Hold fire, Peboan Depot.” That was Sandi, and it was also not part of the plan…at least not part he’d been told about. “We’re working for Admiral Krieger. This is a scheduled pickup by his associates.”
Ash sniffed admiration. If this was an on-the-spot improvisation, it was impressive.
There was a pause, just for a beat, but it let him get a beat closer, a beat lower…
“Unidentified aircraft, we show no such pickup on our schedule…” The female officer began, but Sandi interrupted again.
“It won’t be on that schedule,” she snapped, feigning impatience. “Stop wasting our time or the next deposit into your private account won’t be so generous.”
Another pause. Closer, just a bit closer, almost in range.
“When I fire,” he transmitted over a private channel to Sandi, “break right and head nap-of-the-earth. The hills on that side should shield you.”
“She might still buy it.” He could tell from Sandi’s tone that she didn’t believe it.
Ash had a sense now of the discussion going on inside that depot, under the hills. Someone was arguing that it had to be Krieger, because who else would know about their setup? And someone else was pointing out that whatever signal they’d arranged---maybe a transponder code, maybe a pass phrase---wasn’t there, and it should have been if this was the Admiral or one of his people.
“But if it’s not him, and they know about us, we’re fucked! It could be the DSI or Fleet Intelligence or the Patrol!” Ash gave that half of the imaginary conversation a whiney, male voice, someone who’d been cooped up in that base for mont
hs with shit to do and no major human settlements for light years around.
“I’m not just going to let some strange ship land here and start loading missiles on their say-so!” That was the woman from the radio transmission, stern and hard-edged and annoyed with the male because he’d probably hit on her more than once and she was getting tired of having to tell him no.
“But if we open fire and you’re wrong…” Fear and paranoia. That’s what he’d be feeling. And maybe he could make her hold off for just a few seconds longer.
And that was close enough.
“Now!” He yelled it into the audio pickup, then dove back into the interface and triggered the proton cannon.
Lightning connected the cutter to the closest of the heavy Gatling laser emplacements, the ionized trail of plasma lingering like an afterimage long after the microsecond burst of charged particles had impacted its target. Water and metal and plastic transformed violently to vapor, and hoppers loaded with thousands of hyperexplosive lasing cartridges ignited and a section of reinforced duralloy wall four meters on a side blew out in a polychromatic fireball that belched a mushroom of black smoke into the powder-blue sky.
Ash was aware of the explosion, but only peripherally; he was already banking into a barrel-roll, an eyeblink ahead of a ravaging fusillade of laser-fire converging from three different turrets. They were remotely controlled, he was sure of it; there was no reason to expose a gunner out on the surface when you could run secure fiber optics deep inside the walls, to a control station safe from enemy fire.
The ship had paired capacitor coils and he used the second to destroy another of the turrets, clearing out the fields of fire for a ninety-degree arc around the cargo entrance.
He hoped to God they were remotely controlled.
“Come in on this vector,” he told Sandi, “in line with the main gates.”
One more to clear out, just to be sure. He banked right on the cutter’s belly jets, the upward thrust and abrupt deceleration plunging him into the padding of his seat. He was watching the indicator for the capacitor coils, the one he’d just fired drained and slowly climbing out of red and into yellow, while the other was edging into green.