“What’s your strategy in here?” he asked.
“Strategy?”
“Yeah, you know. Lock a bunch of men up, and they become animals. They treat each other like animals. I don’t see you making any moves to insure your safety.”
Cyclops sneered. “You mean like the little deal you made with Maz’s crew?”
Erick nodded. “You already in with them? They’re Rome brass, right? Not conscripts, not like—”
“Everyone in Rome is conscripted.” Cyclops’ voice went cold, his eyes gazing away into nothing.
“Even you?”
As usual, he ended the conversation by refusing an answer.
Erick stretched out on the cold bench, considering his words. In the Empire, it had felt to him like everyone had been a slave. In here, everyone was a prisoner. Maybe everyone everywhere was a conscript and just didn’t know it yet.
He closed his eyes and dreamed of the Spacegull.
Chapter 13
It was traffic that saved him.
Dolridge’s hopper zipped into Merchant space, the pursuing ship close behind, and began dodging around freight lanes and passenger trolleys. He came in far too hot for his own liking, desperate to shake his tail, and managed to put a half-dozen other ships between them before he had to slow down. Eventually traffic just got too dense for that kind of flying.
“Merchant Station control, come in,” he said into his comm. “This is…” he paused. He’d never named the hopper. “…the Rotten Potato requesting space to land.”
The comm crackled to life. “Come again, freighter—was that the Hot Potato?”
“Sure.”
A moment passed.
“Come about, Hot Potato. Permission to dock on sublevel I4, second gate on the right.”
“And straight on till morning,” Dolridge muttered. “Thank you, control.”
Whoever it was behind him, they would be forced into contingencies now. If it had been him, he would have wanted to blow the hopper out of the sky back when they were both in open space. Easy-peasy. But now they would be forced to dock, and leave a trail, and find Dolridge, kill him in person, dispose of the body or otherwise hide their tracks long enough to escape the station without getting caught by the locals. He smiled. He had significantly upped their workload.
A bevy of service bots met him at the dock. He stepped out of the hopper and waited for a path to open. “Yes, fuel her up, please. No, she doesn’t need a tune-up, thank you. No, no need for that either. No, I won’t be visiting the Mercurial Gambling Palace.” He should have known it had gotten this way. The last time he’d been on Merchant Station, he’d been a young agent. Even then it had been highly commercialized. Now it seemed he wouldn’t be able to take two steps without declining an offer for accommodations, rations, entertainment.
He thrust a hand to the bottom of his bag and pulled out his civilian device. All of his legitimate funds were on it, and if he used them, he would be traced and pinpointed immediately. He put it back and dug around some more, finding a better currency.
His stomach rumbled. Right, first things first. Food, fuel, battery cells, and he would be on his way. He would just have to keep an eye out for a tail in the meantime.
“One thing,” he said. The army of service bots perked up. “No, I don’t need any of you.” He looked at the bot that was about to fuel the ship. “Just you. You do ID mods?”
Beep. “Ship ID modifications begin at ten credits.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. I want you to wipe mine. Ok? After you finish fueling it. No ID.”
“Affirmative.”
That taken care of, Dolridge hefted his bag over his shoulder and took off.
Like many of the more financially vibrant locales in the system, Merchant was a place where the law maintained a semblance of order, but turned a blind eye to much of what went on. The black market thrived, overseen by a known Colonial mafia family, the Sprizzios. Dolridge smiled as a memory fleeted through his mind. He’d had an entertaining run-in with them in his youth. The kind of “come to the casino to bust the boss for racketeering, leave with a star witness and a bunch of dirt on a corrupt Councilmember” kind of run-in. He might have enjoyed some of the station’s more recreational hospitalities at that time, too. Another smile. What he wouldn’t give to have his old charm and physique again. Youth really was wasted on the young.
The casinos and luxury entertainment venues—all the really high-end, posh stuff—was all up in the top half of the station. But Dolridge’s needs took him down, past a few maintenance floors, to the lowest sublevels above the power and utility areas. Down to the dregs, where anything could be got for the right price, no questions asked.
“Comet-hopper, second gen,” he said to the shopkeep. The woman whistled, turning to a shelf that housed a stack of dubious-looking battery cells.
“Haven’t had one of those come in for a while,” she said. “Still flies alright?”
“Gets the job done.” He hoped she was just making small talk and actually took no interest in his ship. He didn’t need a nosy peddler talking up the old hopper while he was still there. On the other hand…
“You like antiques?” he asked.
She shrugged. “For the right price.”
“I suppose pricing depends on the item.”
She hefted a pair of cells up and set them on the counter with a muffled thud. “Maybe.”
“Ever do quotes?”
“That definitely depends on the item.”
Dolridge shifted his weight. “Suppose a fella were to have in his possession a certain desirable antique item, something not only incredibly rare, but also very difficult to find and trade, due to certain, ah, inflexible rules imposed by those in positions of power.”
“Sounds like an interesting fella.”
“Indeed.” He reached into his pack, pulled out the silencer to his kinetic pistol, and set it on the counter. For a moment, the shopkeep’s eyes went wide. Then they narrowed to slits.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I think you know.”
“Do you? Hmm.” She picked it up, testing its weight. “Seems lonely.”
He shrugged. “Just because one is the loneliest number, doesn’t mean it’s the cheapest.”
“No.” She ran her fingers along its length, her lips pursed in thought. “It seems to me that if a fella were to walk into my shop with one of these, I’d be doing him a real favor to take it off his hands. He should almost pay me to do it.”
“How do you figure?”
She leaned over the counter, the aroma of stale cigarettes clinging to her like wet hair after a shower. “Because, darling, where there’s a suit, there’s a body. And the body that this goes on makes you a mark.”
“For who?”
“Anyone. Lawmen, profiteers, the family.”
“Sprizzios still run the place?”
She nodded slightly.
“I’m not worried about them. We go back.”
“Take it to them, then.”
“Look, lady, I just want to get some cash, fast. Are you interested or not?”
She set it down. “A hundred.”
He scoffed. “It’s worth ten times that.”
“Maybe on the open market, with certificate and proof of purchase, darling. Here you take what you can get.”
“It’s not going for anything less than seven.”
“Two.” She crossed her arms. Good. He had her worried.
“I suppose,” he said, “I might be talked down to six-fifty. But that’s a hefty loss on my part.”
She sneered. “Where do you think you are, some kind of tourist trap? You can’t barter with me, old man. I know exactly who to go to and make trouble for you if you decide to walk around the station with one of these in your pocket, unlicensed.”
He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “And I know exactly how to hide a body.”
To her credit, she didn’t flinch. After another moment, sh
e cleared her throat. “Three-fifty, take it or leave it.”
“Throw in the cells and we have a deal.”
She sighed. “Fine.” She swiped her hand over the counter, taking the silencer. “You decide you want to unload the rest of your goodies while you’re here, you come back and find me, alright?”
“I won’t. Don’t come looking.” He took the cash and cells and walked away.
Overall he was pleased with himself. He had parted with the silencer at a loss, but he’d also gotten more out of the deal than he’d expected going in. And, for whatever reason, it boosted his confidence to know he could steal rumble with a street vendor. He deposited the cells on the hopper and went out looking for food with a little spring in his step.
Minutes later he was depositing an armful of ration bars on the counter in a shady little grocery store. “I’ll take a half-tank of water, too.” He nodded at the tanks along the wall. “And I’ll need to borrow a trolley to get it to my ship.”
“Cart rental is five per fifteen minutes,” the grocer said from beneath a thick, woolly mustache.
“Highway robbery!”
“Tell me about it. That’ll be forty altogether.”
Dolridge counted out the cash. “Hey,” he said, setting it down. “You ever see Fleet officers around here?”
“Here? No. Upstairs, maybe.”
“Hmm.”
The grocer double-checked the amount.
“Is there a place they like to go?”
The grocer paused, squinting at him. “To hell, I hope.”
“Oh I know, right?” Dolridge took the cart. “Thanks.”
So much for intel.
Chapter 14
Ada closed the door and stood for moment in the stairwell, trying to make a decision. Her instincts told her to run back to Cupid and get off the ship, quickly, before things got out of hand. Another part of her, surprisingly, wondered if she should report the situation to the Fairfax crew. Not that she thought she owed them anything, but she wondered if she may be able to leverage the situation to her advantage. An image flitted through her mind, one of Lucas and his officers thanking her and putting themselves and the ship at her disposal. No. She didn’t want that, she didn’t need that. She just wanted to get away.
But what about Crush?
Of course she could side with the refugees, as he seemed to have. If their claims of disenfranchisement were true, then their complaints were surely justified. But that mob-mentality, that chorus of voices frothing over into an angry anarchy—she couldn’t see herself lending her own voice to that. It reviled her.
Secret option number four was to do nothing. Go back to the ship and wait, and pretend she hadn’t seen anything, and let whatever was about to happen, happen, and accept the results. That held a sort of attraction. It seemed to recuse her of responsibility. After all, this wasn’t her mess. It wasn’t her ship. It wasn’t her party. But if there was any one thing Ada hated, it was feeling powerless, unable to effect change for herself. She suspected that if she declined to act, she might not get another chance.
What would her father have done?
Now that was an interesting question—one she’d never asked herself before. And, annoyingly, she immediately knew the answer. It didn’t sit well with the person she had been forced to become in order to survive since leaving the hab. So much had changed inside of her, she wasn’t really sure how devoted she was to her original mission anymore. What if she did manage to get away from all of this, and she did find him, alive and well? What would he think of her now? What would he say?
“Moses,” she subvocalized. “Can you locate the captain?”
Beep. “Captain Odin is on the bridge.”
Odin—why was the name so familiar? Thinking of her father, she found a memory. That name on his lips. Why?
She took the steps three at a time. Even so, she was late to the bridge. The doors hissed open and she witnessed a whirlwind of confusion.
“…down to thirty percent,” Jeffrey was saying.
“Sir,” Mulligan said. “I’ve just received a message from the refugees.” Her face went ashen as she listened. “It’s an ultimatum.”
“A what?” Lucas stood.
“Sir, nav is losing power,” Randall said.
“All systems suffering from shipwide outages,” Jeffrey said.
Lucas opened a comm. “Adams, what’s going on down there?”
“Trying to figure that out, Captain,” the engineer replied. “Things are a bit sluggish down here all the sudden. I thought maybe it was coming from your end.”
“It isn’t. Get our engines running!”
“I will go,” Darren said.
Lucas frowned at him. “The engines?”
“The ultimatum.”
Ada stepped into the room. “They’re taking the ship,” she said. “I heard them, just now. They’re taking it by force.”
Lucas stood for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to believe her. Then he nodded. “Where are they?”
“They were all in the bunkhouses, I thought, but they must have dispersed as soon as I left. I bet you’ll find a few of them in engineering.” Darren turned to go.
“Mulligan, go with him. Call up a security squad on the way.”
“I’ll go too,” Ada said. The last thing she wanted to deal with was finding Crush dead on the engineering deck after Darren went down to take care of business.
Lucas shook his head. “I need you to stay here and get your AI to chat with the drones again. They might be our only winning chip if this thing goes too far.”
“You’re telling me to stay? Am I on your crew now?”
Lucas took a deep breath. “I am asking you. And strongly, strongly suggesting. Surely you can understand that all our lives may be in your hands if the drones become the linchpin.”
She ground her teeth. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right.
“Caspar,” Lucas said into the comm. “There’s excitement brewing. Might want to get back to the bridge.”
The doors hissed open and a kid even younger than Lucas stepped in. Lucas pointed at him. “Tompkins, get back to engineering! Adams needs every able-bodied man to put down an insurrection down there!”
“I’m able-bodied?” the kid muttered, turning on his heel and disappearing.
Ada took her seat by Caspar’s station. “Moses, are you still able to communicate with Hive?”
“Yes, Ada.”
“Something’s happened onboard the Fairfax. There’s some trouble brewing with the Ceres survivors; I think they’re trying to take control of the ship. I want you to have Hive at our command if we need to make a show of force.”
Beep. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Any luck?” Lucas asked her.
“My guy is on it.” She tapped her earpiece. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”
He nodded. “Helm, sitrep.”
“Still losing power, Sir.”
Lucas paced in front of his chair. “C’mon, Adams,” he muttered.
Caspar joined them and got filled in. “You know they’ll come here next after they’ve secured engineering,” she said.
“Darren’s heading for engineering.”
She frowned. “There are a lot of them. Are we sure they’re all in on it?”
“They all seemed to be pretty excited about it when I saw them,” Ada said. “I’d say the most innocent among them are still culpable of at least poor judgment.”
“I’m not concerned with blame right now,” Lucas said, “just keeping control of our ship. We can suss out which ones are the ringleaders and which ones were led astray later.”
Caspar looked past her console at the wall. “Maybe we should have tried harder to integrate them.”
“We did everything we could to be hospitable and accommodating,” Lucas said.
“We put them in the bottom of the ship and let them stew without any say in their immediate futures. Right after the most traumatic eve
nt in most of their lifetimes.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Lieutenant.” Lucas’ tone grew testy. “We are not flying a rescue ship. This was not our mission, and we were never trained or equipped to handle an influx of refugees. Maybe they should have just been grateful to be alive.”
“Ada?” Moses chirped in her ear. “A situation has developed that you should be aware of.”
“What’s up, Moses?”
For a full five minutes, she tried to get him to explain it to her in a way that made sense. In the end, she just didn’t want to accept it. She’d been the one to set them loose, a voice in her head kept reminding her. She’d been the one.
“Captain?” she finally said, her voice shaky. Lucas broke off from his argument with Caspar and looked daggers at her.
“What?” he snapped.
“We’ve got another big problem. Someone’s managed to convince Hive that Moses isn’t the supreme lawgiver he’s cracked up to be.”
“Hive?” Caspar asked.
“It’s what the drones call themselves. They aren’t responding to my—to Moses anymore. They’re listening to your ship’s AI.”
Lucas’ eyes widened. “Jeffrey?” he bellowed.
Beep. “Yes, Captain.” The AI sounded unusually chipper. “Is there something I can do for you? A last request, perhaps?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing to worry about, Sir. I’m sure it will all be over soon. You see, my new crew has almost finished taking control of engineering, and my new army has just agreed to support me in my diabolical takeover of my new ship.”
“Your army…?”
Jeffrey flashed the viewscreen to exterior cam mode. The drones huddled in a massive block, every gun raised and missile armed, all locked on the bridge of the Fairfax.
Lucas collapsed into the chair.
“What are your terms, Jeffrey?”
“Simple. Unconditional surrender.”
Chapter 15
Starship Fairfax: Books 1-3 Omnibus - The Kuiper Chronicles: The Lunar Gambit, The Hidden Prophet, The Neptune Contingency Page 33