The niceties didn’t last long.
“Ow!” Lucas winced, his face mashed down against the table in front of him. The men in suits had led them through a door, down a corridor, and through a set of double doors into a room with padded walls. To mute the sound, he’d realized with a shiver. Now they had sat them down around a bare metal table, and apparently their intention was to take turns bashing their heads into it until they confessed to counting cards, or agreed to leave their winnings, or to never come back, or to crawl back into their mothers’ wombs… he wasn’t really sure what the point was, actually. Other than to hurt them for cheating.
“Do you like counting cards?” the brute behind him said. “I’m curious. Do you think it’s fun?”
“A little.” Lucas’ voice came out garbled, his lips mooshed against metal.
“Did I say you could talk?” His head came up, and his head went down again. Any second now, Darren could do his thing. That would be fine with him. “We don’t really like it when people waltz in here at Spacegold and count cards, no we do not.” The man rolled Lucas’ head side to side, mashing his nose into the table. “So when someone does just that, like what you went ahead and did just now, you know what we like to do to ‘em?”
“Probably this.” Darren’s voice was cold as steel again, all playboy pretense tossed aside. He reached up, grabbed the man behind him by the shirt, and pulled him overhead, throwing him down onto the table. Lucas was freed as his assailant rushed around to subdue Darren. But Darren had leapt up on the table and put the third man into a choke-hold with his thighs. He flipped himself over, and Lucas heard a sickening snap from the man’s neck. He fell limply to the ground.
Caspar took off a shoe and threw it with the precision of a dart into the groin the man who had held Lucas down. He doubled over, gasping for air. The lone standing guard had pulled a blasting pistol, but it didn’t do him any good. Darren grabbed his wrist with one hand, and put all his weight into the man’s elbow, snapping it the wrong way. He screamed, retreating against the wall. Darren took the pistol up and finished him off, then took out the man on the table.
“Do you have to kill everyone we run into?” Lucas tipped back his head, trying to stop his nose from bleeding.
“You’re welcome.” Darren turned to go.
“He’s one of those people, isn’t he?” Lucas said to Caspar. She was retrieving her shoe. “The kind that decides how he would kill you the first time he meets you.”
“I think he’s the kind that comes up with four or five ways he would kill you, and makes preparations for one or two of them should the need arise.”
The two of them exited through the double doors.
“Where’d he go?” she asked him.
Lucas shrugged. “He doesn’t tell me much.”
Ahead, through another door across the hallway, they heard the slap of fists on flesh, and ran inside.
Darren had put down another three men, and was in the process of picking the lock on Mulligan’s cuffs. Tompkins and Adams were there, too. Adams’ face had gone ashen.
“Oh, Sir!” Tompkins said. “So happy to see you again. And—” His eyes widened when he saw Caspar. “Lieutenant, if you don’t mind my saying so, you are an absolute vision of beauty to these sore eyes.”
“I mind.” She went to Adams first, undid his cuffs, and checked to make sure he was responsive.
“I’ll live,” Adams grumbled. “If you can get me to a drink.”
Lucas spared him a laugh, then freed Tompkins. “Working on it, Adams.”
“We should not delay.” Darren stood by the door again, Mulligan beside him. “Can he keep pace?” He nodded at Adams.
Caspar’s face flushed in anger. “Are you serious? When it was Mull, you were all chivalrous hero, but if it’s his life in the balance, you don’t really care at all?”
“He’s our engineer,” Lucas said, “and we need him for repairs. Without Adams, we never leave Ceres, and you don’t get your ride.”
Darren blinked. “I will carry him.”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, son!” Adams half-laughed, half-coughed as Darren came around behind him. “Buy a girl a drink, first. Whoa!” He looked around, blinking. Darren had hefted him up in his arms. “It’s my arm, dimwit, not my legs! I’m fine. Put me down!”
“Can you run?” Darren asked.
“Try to get away without me slapping you here to Sunday once I’m back on my feet, and you’ll find out.”
“Very well.” He dropped Adams unceremoniously. The engineer squawked in protest, but stood.
“We’ve got to get to your ship. Now.”
“We’ve got to get a core first.” Lucas moved to block the door.
“No time. Things have reached the boiling point here. Your problems are about to get a lot bigger than a mafia casino.”
“No core, no power, and then none of us escape.”
Darren frowned. “We’ll get to your ship first. Then I’ll get you a core.”
Lucas looked around. Caspar shrugged. “He’s been helpful so far.”
“I don’t appreciate being yanked around like this,” Lucas said through gritted teeth. “But you have saved my life a few times in the past hour. Your plan it is. Let’s move.”
—
They found the sleek mafia ship right where they had left it. Tompkins helped Lucas bring Kwon’s body on board—we don’t leave our own, Lucas said once more—and they left the dock. The tubes zipped past out the windows as they left Rust far behind.
“How did you get past the grid?” Darren asked. He sat in the front, beside Caspar. Mulligan and Lucas stood behind them.
“Your girlfriend knows your password.”
“You mean Mulligan,” he said. It was neither a question, nor an admission. “So you registered in my name.” He leaned back in his seat. “Of course they took your ship. They’re looking for me.”
“Who is?”
He sniffed. “Who isn’t?”
They approached the door and were hailed by surface security. Caspar sent the ship’s registration, and the doors opened without a hitch. “Pays to know the right people,” she said.
“I think you mean it pays to steal a ship from the right people,” Lucas said.
Tompkins leaned up into the cab. “Hey, they stole ours first! What we did, that was just… you know. Squid pro quo, or whatever.”
Lucas broke out into a laugh. Caspar joined him. “Almost, kid. Better luck next time.”
After all that time spent underground beneath a cave beneath an ocean beneath another level of ground, the black void seemed almost welcoming, like coming home. Only it was harboring some unpleasant house-guests. Warrior-class Empire ships passed back and forth in a slow rotation around Ceres, a tiny armada choking off the minor planet from the rest of the system. Lucas felt a chill up his spine. Never had he felt so vulnerable and exposed.
“Uhhh… should we be concerned about them?” Caspar’s eyes were wide.
“They won’t bother us,” Darren said. “They believe us to be with the Holubs. Just keep broadcasting the registration.”
“Ok, sure, but… what about the Fairfax?”
“Oh! Let me!” Tompkins squeezed into the cab again, pressing himself between Lucas and Mulligan. “Let me use the console, Lieutenant—I’ll get them for you!”
Lucas was pushed back so that Tompkins could move forward. The private ended up bent in half over Caspar’s chair. She leaned away from him as his fingers flew over the comm console. “Tompkins to Fairfax,” he said. “This is Tompkins. Fairfax, you read?” There was no response. “I don’t understand,” he said, pulling back. “We set up this special channel after we found them before.”
“Maybe the channel works fine. Maybe they had to pull out of range.” Caspar nodded at the warships. She pulled up a display of bodies in range, and ran a search for Pallas. “Or,” she smiled, “maybe their ride just parked down the street a few blocks.”
Lucas peered up around T
ompkins. The display showed Pallas had moved on beyond Ceres—still easily reachable, but farther out than when they had left the Fairfax. “That’ll do,” he said. Caspar eased them away from Ceres orbit and out toward Pallas’ trail. As soon as they pulled away, they were hailed with a livefeed.
Caspar cleared her throat. “How do you want to handle this, Sir?”
Lucas looked at Darren. “I thought you said they would read the registration and assume we were with the Holubs.”
Darren shrugged impassively. “That’s what logic dictates should happen. Why they are hailing, I cannot say.”
Lucas ran a hand over his face, immediately regretting it. It felt like one big bruise. “We have to answer. Otherwise we seem suspicious.” He pushed Tompkins back out of the cab. “Lieutenant, put me through.”
“Aye, Sir.”
Lucas cleared his throat. On the viewscreen, the bridge of a warship appeared. An Empire warship. A young commander stood in front of the chair, his uniform crisp.
“Holub Orca, this is First Officer Ernhardt of the Empire ship Mesopotamia. You have been observed leaving Ceres, a world under quarantine. State your business.”
Quarantine?
“Mesopotamia, this is the Holub ship Orca.” Slick name, he had to admit. He was glad they had parroted it to him first, as it would have come to them in the registry. “We are on a short-range mission to Pallas. We have no intention of leaving the area. Are coming right back to Ceres.”
“Negative, Orca.” Ernhardt was studying his console screen. “We’ve had no word on any missions to Pallas. You’ll have to turn around and come back when your bosses have secured your flight through the proper channels.”
Lucas groaned inwardly in frustration. Pallas was close now—the Fairfax was close. But they couldn’t make a break for it under the noses of all these Imperials. It would be a suicide dash.
At his console beside Caspar, Darren typed a hasty message. He met eyes with Lucas and pointed at it. Lucas leaned forward and read, “callsign: god-maker.” He cleared his throat again and looked back at the viewscreen.
“Officer Ernhardt.” The man glanced up at him.
“Still there, Orca?”
“Yes. Just one last thing. Checking in with our callsign, god-maker.”
The man frowned and typed furiously at his console, then read the results. When he looked up again, his face bore all the signs of a young officer in the presence of their commander: solemnity, attention, fear. “Yes, Sir.” He stood and waved a hasty salute. “By all means, be on your way.” The feed cut out, and the looming warship backed off.
Lucas squinted at Darren. “Care to explain what that was all about?”
Darren was silent for a moment. “Not part of our deal,” he finally said.
Lucas folded his arms. He’d had about enough of being led in the dark. Once onboard his ship, he would get answers, he decided.
Chapter 15
Lucas breathed the biggest sigh of relief of his life, when, upon rounding the uneven shape of Pallas, they caught sight of the Fairfax.
“Still flying,” he murmured.
“Barely.” Caspar brought them around the stern and aft to the hangar bay. “Not sure why they still aren’t responding to my hail.” The massive doors parted, a puff of compressed air jetting out into space. “But at least the door’s open.”
She set the Orca down on the landing pad in the middle of the decompression chamber, where they waited for the doors to close and the airlock to cycle.
“Sir.” She turned to Lucas. “Permission to run a full inspection on whatever munitions we have left. I don’t like the idea of being in unfriendly space with so many warships and only half an idea of what we’ve got left after being robbed blind by pirates.”
Lucas smirked. “I was hoping you would go with our new friend to pick up the core he’s so far refused to tell us anything about.”
“I will be disembarking here and remaining on your ship,” Darren said.
“Oh.”
“I can drive the Orca,” Tompkins said. “Kwon and I did some testing, before… .” He lapsed into silence. He’d seen far too much death on this mission. They all had.
Lucas looked at Mulligan.
“She’s with me,” Darren said.
Lucas frowned. “Technically, she’s with my security force.” He supposed it was a good idea to keep the stranger near security, though—even if one of his privates had an obvious bias. “But I’ll allow it, if, Mulligan, you pull three more security to form a squad.”
“Guards,” Darren said.
“An escort.” Lucas looked back behind the cab. “That leaves me and Adams. Well, obviously he has to see a medic, and even if he were well, I’d want him onboard overseeing whatever repairs we have left to do in preparation for the core. And I’m sure not leaving my ship in the middle of all of this.” He looked pointedly at Darren.
“So where’s this core?” Tompkins said. Lucas grimaced.
—
“You could have told all of us,” Lucas said. He walked beside Darren, who had just given retrieval instructions to Tompkins in private. “What if something happens to him?”
“He’s fine,” Darren said. “He has the call-sign.”
Ah, yes. God-maker. One more nebulous mystery to throw into the pot.
They took a lift to the bridge, strolling down the empty corridor. “Where is everybody?” Caspar asked.
Lucas had begun to wonder if his face would freeze in a permanent frown.
The bridge doors hissed open, revealing a firing squad. Not mafia men. Not imperials.
“Pirates,” Darren said quietly. “Of course.” His eyes registered recognition as he looked at them. Lucas tensed.
“Welcome back,” one of the men said, gesturing to all of them. “Nice to see you again. We decided we like your ship real well, didn’t get enough of her last time.” He grinned unpleasantly.
Men came up from behind them and took Darren by surprise, a gun-butt to the head. He dropped like a stone. Lucas turned in time to see another coming for his own face. Then he knew nothing.
—
When he woke up, Lucas sat in his own brig, defeated. After everything they’d been through, here they were, locked up in a holding cell deep within the belly of the Fairfax, commandeered by the same pirates who had disabled her to begin with. He gritted his teeth and threw his head back against the wall in frustration. It didn’t help.
“You’ve been in and out of jail, pretty boy.” Caspar turned to look at Darren. He didn’t acknowledge her. “Got any bright ideas?”
“He didn’t make anything happen on his own,” Lucas said. “He had people inside. Isn’t that right, Darren?”
Darren closed his eyes, breathing slowly. Meditating? Helpful.
“Well we’ve got plenty of people on our side on this ship,” Mulligan said. “Let’s just brainstorm this a bit.”
“Everyone’s on lockdown. Nobody is trying to regain control of the ship.” Lucas rolled his head side to side against the wall. “It’s no use, kid.”
“Well… we’ve got Sock,” Caspar muttered.
“Hey!” One of their guards—there were four pirates pacing the hallway, all armed—tapped on the cell window with the nozzle of his weapon. “Cut the chatter, Fleeties.”
Lucas glared at him, but said nothing until the guard had moved on. Then he leaned forward to whisper to Caspar.
“Don’t you think they’ve locked her down, too? She won’t respond to our voices.”
“Sure I do,” she said. “The basic parameters of Fleet comps aren’t a big secret. They’ll have boxed her in every which way they can predict. But ours… has a few tricks up her sleeve, wouldn’t you say?”
Lucas’ eyebrows met his hairline. Was it that easy? It seemed ridiculous. But could it work?
Mulligan was nodding, realization washing over her a well. “Sick mods,” she whispered.
“Follow my lead,” Caspar said. She rose to her feet
and crossed to the cell window.
“Hey! Excuse me. Hello?” She knocked on the window. One of the guards glanced her way, then turned aside. She knocked again and he came to the window.
“I thought I told you to pipe down in there,” he growled.
“Oh, you did! Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s my friend here. He’s in trouble.” She pointed at Lucas. “See how pale he’s gotten? He’s got a condition. Totally manageable when he’s on his meds, but a nightmare without them. Could even get violent before he slips into a coma and dies.”
Lucas did his best to look pitiful, moaning a bit.
The guard scoffed. “Then I guess I’m glad it’s you locked up in there and not me.”
“Hey! He could die! This is serious. Do you really want to be the one responsible when your commander finds out you let die the only prisoner onboard authorized to give you what you’re looking for?”
“What we’re looking for?” The pirate came closer to the window, squinting at Caspar. Lucas held his breath. Was she improvising? “What would you know about that?”
“Not as much as he does!” She pointed at Lucas. “But he’s fading fast. C’mon, you don’t need to let us out or come in or anything; it’s not a trick. We just need you to walk down the hall there, use the dispenser, and bring us back the meds that the ship gives you.
Now the man peered at Lucas.
“He doesn’t look so good,” he muttered. “What does he need?”
“A medic pin. You know, a blood dispersal. Type O. Ask for Seldy—it’s the brand-name for the meds.”
“Seldy. An O-pin.” The guard repeated.
Caspar nodded, looking grateful. “You’ll save his life. Please, hurry!”
The guard stood there a moment, glaring. Then he turned, and, muttering, skulked down the hall to the dispensary.
As one, they waited in the cell with baited breath.
“Ship’s Computer,” they heard him say.
“Get ready,” Lucas muttered. He saw Darren stir.
Starship Fairfax: Books 1-3 Omnibus - The Kuiper Chronicles: The Lunar Gambit, The Hidden Prophet, The Neptune Contingency Page 10