by J. R. Mabry
There were 127 souls aboard the Talon. She had to do everything in her power…
“Why wait?” Chi asked.
“Wait for what?” Jo asked.
“Chief engineer Ocampo put Little Shit together in under twenty minutes. Why not do another one? It will cut our time in half.”
Jo leaned forward, thinking about it. Maneuvering under standard power, they could block its launch from the Eisenhower. And once launched and cloaked…it could work.
But it gave Jo another idea. She punched at the arm of her chair again. “Mr. Ocampo, can you put a nuke in an escape pod?”
Again, it took a moment for the engineer to answer. Well, he is busy, Jo thought. Soon, however, his voice came through, sounding harried and rough. “Uh…yeah.”
“How quickly?”
“Remote detonation or timer?”
“Remote.”
“Seven minutes.”
“Do it. Put it in the captain’s pod. Send the detonation codes directly to me for neural activation.”
“Also, can you fake a C-drive core breach?”
“We routinely ramp it up to test it. We could prolong that without any permanent damage to the core—but it would certainly look like trouble at a distance.”
“Perfect. Do it.”
“Aye sir.”
She punched the comm button on her chair. “Security Chief Dixon.”
“Dixon here.”
“I want twenty volunteers from security to make their way quickly and calmly to the escape pods. Arm them with regular blasters, but make sure they’ve got silicone disruptors hidden on their persons—we’re going to need them.”
Dixon didn’t respond for a moment. “Uh…yes sir.”
Jo knew they didn’t trust her. She was green. This was her first time in the chair. And she was doing crazy shit. The fact that they were even going along with her amazed her.
Jo turned to her navigator. “Mr. Chi, thank you for the brilliant idea. And by the way, turn Little Shit around and reload its original flight plan. We may not survive this battle, but that sleeper ship calling the shots sure as hell won’t, either.”
Jeff reached out with his mind. He found her. He felt the sticky elasticity of space as he willed himself onto her bridge. He saw the tactical screen, the tense determination on her face. At the same time he was aware of every aspect of the battle taking place all around her. He felt her rising pulse, could almost taste the sweat on her upper lip—and wanted to.
Something in his chest twisted at the sight of her. Something precious to him, something lost forever, had suddenly been found. It wasn’t his Jo, he knew that. And if Danny had taught him anything, it was that the versions of the people he knew in this world could be vastly different than those he knew in his own.
Was that fair? he asked himself. After all, Danny had risked everything to help them escape. But he had a knot in his stomach when he thought about it, one that he couldn’t quite figure out.
Why not check it out? he wondered. He reached out in the other direction and found Danny. His friend was in a dark room, licking the breasts of a woman—a prostitute?
He moved toward Jo again, just staring at her. He could hear the things going on around her, but he wasn’t really paying attention. It was enough to see the way her black hair swooped over her shoulders, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, the angularity of her jaw. He noted how the red rebel uniform hid her breasts, making her look flat-chested, even masculine. That only made her hotter. He wanted her so badly his soul ached. He realized that his body, so far away, actually had an erection, but it was an academic fact, like the rules of calculus or the tendencies of particle physics.
I have to go to her, he thought.
And that was all. He knew it was a bad idea. He knew nothing about the rebels or the details of this conflict. He had studied the events out of sheer curiosity, certainly, but he hadn’t lived them—they were just more academics.
But here was the one thing that wasn’t academic or theoretical. Here was Jo, in the flesh, giving orders—orders that his own body would kill to obey.
I need a drink, he thought. But he didn’t. He was just conflicted, and didn’t know how to sort it out in the moment.
He watched her until the ache simply became too great for him, and he allowed his consciousness to return to the cramped confines of his cabin. Okay. Shit. What am I going to do now? he asked himself. He’d never needed guidance before—or never felt like he’d needed it. Not once. But now… But there was no one to ask. He wished he could speak to the shaman, although a part of him also realized how absurd that was. What did a traditional healer from Peru know about his troubles? And why should he care?
Jeff sat up. He felt guilty. How would Emma feel if she knew the feelings he was having for Jo? It would crush her. He couldn’t bear to think about it, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the thought created a desperate ache in his stomach.
He took a quick sonic, savoring the feeling of the pulses on his skin. Then he dressed and headed for the bridge.
As he walked on, Nira shouted, “Captain on the bridge!”
They all began to rise, but he gave the almost liturgical response, “As you were.”
Jeff noted the crew members were all present—all except for Emma. He nodded at Nira. “Anything to report?”
“Nothing sir. Quiet flight.”
He’d expected to be pursued. Maybe they still would be. “How far to neutral space?”
“Eighteen hours, sir,” Mr. Pho said.
“Are you just dropping by, sir, or are you taking the helm?” Nira asked.
“I can’t sleep anymore,” he said. “But you all need to. Let’s start rotating off, four hours each. Mr. Nira, you’re first. When you return, you can fill in for Mr. Pho.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you sir.” Nira surrendered the chair and padded off the bridge, no doubt to grab a bite and a nap in her own, even smaller, quarters.
Jeff took the chair and wondered where Emma was. Probably sleeping. He should have let Nira stay, should have gone to lie down next to Emma—maybe make love to her. The thought made him feel even more conflicted than he already was. He wondered if it would feel like a lie. He decided he already knew the answer to that.
He needed to distract himself. He read through the hourly crew reports. Everything seemed to be ship-shape. He was considering how awful it would be to work a puzzle in his neural where no one could see it when Mr. Pho looked over his shoulder.
“Uh…Captain, I’m getting some trajectory predictions I can’t reconcile.”
Jeff cocked his head. Finally, something to solve, something solvable.
Mr. Pho put their course on the main viewer. “When we set out, I plotted this course, sir. The blinking red light should be our position.”
“What do you mean, should be?”
“I just ran a stellar cartographical check using the neutrino sextant program—”
That was standard procedure, Jeff knew. “And what did you find?”
Another course appeared, superimposed over the original one on the display.
“That is our actual location,” Pho said, pointing to a green blinking light.
Jeff saw an elliptical trajectory that seemed identical for the first three-quarters of its arc, but began to diverge very slightly as the arc reached its end. The blinking lights were almost on top of each other. Almost.
“Have you run a diagnostic, Mr. Pho?”
“Waiting for the results now, sir—wait, here they are. Uh…” He studied them, then sat up and looked at Jeff. “Nothing, sir. Everything is working normally.”
“Well, something’s off.” Jeff said.
“Yes sir.”
“So what is it?”
“I…I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, let’s start testing. I’ll get Dr. Stewart up here to work with you.” He leaned back and shot a glance at Mr. Wall. “Mr. Wall, will you please summon Dr. Stewart to the bri
dge? Tell her we have a mystery to solve.”
Chapter Nine
“The Captain needs twenty volunteers for a tactical launch of our escape pods.” Security Chief Dixon’s thick Jamaican accent was musical but staccato. Leif Arnesson heard the order through his neural, but chose to ignore it. He had always been the kind of guy who needed to finish one job before he could move on to something else, and he was only halfway through his weapons check. They were in the middle of a firefight, after all, and weapons systems required constant attention. He had gotten good at running three diagnostics simultaneously, but it required focus. Dixon could wait.
Except that, apparently, he couldn’t. Leif brushed his almost silver-white hair from his eyes and studied the three panels he was monitoring. All good, except for a power fluctuation in one of the starboard particle cannon arrays. He was about to chase that down when he felt a tap on the shoulder.
“Too good to volunteer for the captain?” Security Chief Dixon asked, his lips tight, his perpetually bloodshot eyes drilling Leif to his place.
Leif looked around. There were a few engineers in the bay, who immediately looked away and pretended nothing was going on.
“Your captain has asked for volunteers,” Dixon asked. “But I demand compliance.”
“But sir, I’ve got three diagnostics going, and—”
“Mr. Arnesson, is there a reason you’re not leaping for this assignment?”
“Sir?”
“Perhaps a bullshit psychological reason?” Dixon raised one eyebrow, his hands behind his back.
Leif looked down. “I let her down.”
Dixon inclined his head slightly. “We all let her down. We let a usurper take her place, and because none of us thought she was strong enough to stop him…we didn’t stop him, either.”
Leif looked up and saw the sincerity in his superior’s eyes.
“I want to help, but…I don’t want to see her. I’m…I feel…”
“I think the word you’re looking for is shame, Mr. Arnesson. It’s a tragically underused word in the military. Embrace it. Learn from it. It is telling you something true. But I want you to hear the next thing I’m going to say.” He leaned in so that his head was almost touching Leif’s. “Failure in the past does not justify failure in the future.”
Leif looked down again. “No sir.”
“Do you want to advance in this man’s army, ensign?”
“I do, sir.”
“Then plant your ass in an escape pod within the next thirty seconds or you’ll be cleaning lint out of blaster hardware for the next fifteen years.”
“Yes sir. But…there’s a power fluctuation in one of the starboard—”
Dixon raised one eyebrow, his lips pursed in a look that said, Do not fuck with me.
“Yes, sir,” Leif said. He stepped away from the panel and began to jog toward the nearest pod launch deck.
“Run, you sorry excuse for a security officer!” Dixon shouted.
Leif ran.
Ten minutes later, Jo was staring out the port of her escape pod, designated as the captain’s pod with an eagle ornament over the door. She saw flashes in the distance, evidence of the extended battle going on all around them. Jo had never seen this many ships engaged at one time. If the RFC’s full complement of battle cruisers wasn’t present, it would soon be. The Authority fleet outnumbered them, of course, and always had. They’d survived this long by fighting sneaky, fighting dirty. She hoped she was faithfully carrying on that tradition.
Just before launching, engineering had instigated a sustained burn of the C-drive core. She knew what it would look like to the captain of the Eisenhower—a core breach, especially when the pods started launching. If the Eisenhower was smart, it would turn tail and put as much distance between itself and the Talon as possible.
And it looked like that was exactly what was happening. The great lumbering beast of a ship was turning about, showing the giant cones of her exhaust ports to the Talon as it prepared to run. Jo opened a channel to the bridge on her neural. “Release pods,” she said. Then she pressed the manual release on her own pod, and was pushed back against her restraints as the g-force of its acceleration pushed her away from the Talon—directly past the massive exhaust cones of the Eisenhower.
She was the bait. She knew the captain’s pod would be irresistible. A captured captain was prestige, a round of drinks on Sol Station, a step toward a significant reputation as a battle-seasoned hard-ass—which was every captain’s aspiration.
But she was also the hook. The sheer irresistibility of her would be their undoing. It would be she that wins the reputation. She felt a swelling in her chest, and let a smile slip onto her angular lips.
Sure enough, just as she was slipping past their midships, a tractor beam arrested her flight. There was a jarring jolt as her inertia was interrupted and reversed. The pod began moving backward toward the aft docking bay. She glanced at the nuclear device, hastily disguised as a thermal duct. A glance wouldn’t betray its presence, but a detailed search of the pod would. She felt her pulse quicken at the thought, but chose to trust the arrogance of the Authority not to investigate too carefully.
Her neural contained a short-range transmitter, standard with all neural models, capable of reaching a transceiver anywhere on board a ship. Her neural wouldn’t be able to reach the Talon, nor would she be able to interface with the Authority computer without the proper clearance protocols. She glanced up and blinked, completing a test handshake between her neural and the nuke’s detonator. Online and operational. She grinned as the pod touched down in the bay.
She could just see the bay doors closing through her viewing port. She had expected them to retrieve a few more of the pods, and her anxiety rose as she realized she would have no backup here. Her security men would be safe—as safe as people in escape pods could be in the middle of a firefight—but they wouldn’t be here. Apparently capturing the captain was the only thing the Eisenhower cared about. That was good information.
And maybe that was a good thing. If she needed to detonate while she was still aboard, she wouldn’t put any of the rest of them in danger. Of course there was always the possibility that they were bringing the others in through a different bay. She pushed the thought aside.
She heard a banging on the outside of her pod hatch. She took a deep breath and set her face to something approximating crestfallen defeat. Then she pushed the button and waited for the hatch to swing wide.
Climbing to the floor of the deck, she saw herself surrounded by a security team, blasters pointed directly at her. I think I’m getting used to this, she thought. She marveled at how calm she was. She had a plan, after all, and so far most of it was going as she’d hoped.
“Put any weapons on the ground,” the security chief barked.
She had brought a blaster, just for show. She unholstered it and let it drop onto her boot. She kicked it away.
“Any others?”
She didn’t meet his eyes, but shook her head.
“Get moving, through those doors.” He motioned with the muzzle of his blaster toward a set of insulated doors at the back of the bay.
They marched through the bowels of the ship directly to the brig. Several of the security force stepped aside, guarding each side of the sliding metal door. When the door opened, she stepped inside.
She was being handed off to the gaolers. They processed her, forced her to strip and shower. She was glad to see that they allowed her privacy for this, or that at least there was the semblance of privacy. In place of her own uniform she was given a white paper jumpsuit. She put it on without complaint.
Along the way she’d felt the dampened lurch of the C-drive kick in, but it had been a short burst. They’d gotten some distance from the Talon, but not much. They wouldn’t want to be seen leaving the battlefield before it was over. Indeed, she expected they would simply jump to the aid of another ship—at least, that was what she would do.
A subordinate gaoler
with pretty, bobbed red hair led her to a cell, and waved her in. A security officer stood behind her, blaster at the ready. Jo didn’t give them any trouble. She stepped into the cell and sat on the poly stool to one side of the bunk. The cell wasn’t palatial by any means, but it was bigger than an ensign’s cabin aboard her own ship. The door to the cell slid shut, affording Jo a view of frosted white security glass.
She blinked at the brightness, the antiseptic white of the cell. Moments passed, but they seemed elongated. She felt a heaviness in her chest she didn’t understand. Other than her breathing, nothing moved or changed in the cell. There was no indication of anything going on outside of it. Time seemed to be standing still.
She knew she might have to wait until a lull in the battle to be summoned. She hadn’t thought of that, and it was a major flaw in her plan. She weighed the damage she’d be able to do as part of this ruse against what she’d be able to do at the helm. She felt a sinking feeling in her gut, realizing her error. She had expected her confrontation to be quick, but of course there was no way to guarantee that. She was a gnat, an annoyance, a prize of war now, nothing more. They would not bother with her until the fighting was over for the day.
Which left the Talon adrift without firm leadership, without even a Shallit to command her. Sure, she’d given Chi the helm, but Chi was a navigator, not a commander. She’d keep things safe, keep things together, but the girl wasn’t built for war.
“I just fucked everything up,” she said out loud. They are listening, she thought, and then internally kicked herself. Her mind raced, trying to think through all the ways they might possibly interpret what she’d just said. But the most obvious meaning was the one that her ruse rested upon. She relaxed.
Then the door slid open, and the pretty gaoler was there. She stepped aside and waved Jo out. “The Captain wants to see you.”
Jeff watched as Mr. Pho studied his test results. The kid’s head seemed unusually oblong and pointed. It had never bothered Jeff before this moment. Hovering over the navigator’s shoulder, Emma glanced back and forth between her own data pad and the navigator’s console. “Anything?” Jeff asked.