Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Runstom, this is Captain Yakimoto. We got word that you went down to check on your ship and I wanted to make sure everything is alright.”

  “Everything checks out so far,” Runstom said. “We’re going to warm up the engines and run some diagnostics to be sure.”

  “Excellent, good to hear it. You’ll have clearance to launch in a couple of hours. The spaceborne enemy force is already dispersing, and our Defenders onboard are rounding up all the hostiles left behind.”

  Jax motioned for Runstom to mute the comm. “Ask her what will happen to them.”

  Runstom frowned, unnerved by the fact that Jax still cared anything for bloodthirsty gangbangers. But he complied. “What happens after the roundup, if you don’t mind my asking, Captain?”

  There was a pause before the reply came back. “The captain apologizes.” Lieutenant Commander Ploughy’s voice once again came back. “She’s got her hands full, as you might imagine. As for the enemy combatants onboard, well, they should be POWs. However, your friends back at Justice are insisting on coming out to pick them up and return them to Barnard for trial.”

  “Trial,” Runstom said flatly.

  “Absurd, I know,” Ploughy said. “We do all the fighting and Justice wants to treat enemy soldiers as mere criminals. Well, I suppose we can afford to throw them a bone once in a while.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Officer Runstom. This day was a great victory for Modern Policing and Peacekeeping.”

  “Of course, Lieutenant Commander,” Runstom said, showing Jax his disgust with a frown.

  “In just a few hours you’ll be on your way to Epsilon-3, correct? Visiting the civilian domes under construction there?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Be sure to give the administrators on Epsilon-3 all the details of the Space Waste attack. As I understand it, it’s your job to convince them they would benefit from peacekeeping services.”

  “Yes, that’s the reason for my visit,” he said. He hadn’t given the assignment much thought, what with the bullets flying around. Now that Ploughy had mentioned it, it was a good point to bring up when he met with the E-threers.

  “Be sure to let them know then, Public Relations Officer Runstom. Be sure to let them know that had the Space Waste attack on this transport been successful, surely Epsilon-3 would have been their next target. After all, why else would they have come to Epsilon Eridani?”

  “Right,” Runstom said. He stared at the comm. Since when did ship commanders give a rat’s ass about public relations? “Of course, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Bridge out.”

  The comm went silent. Runstom looked around at nothing, too many questions circling his head to pin one down.

  “Is it just me,” Jax said from his sunken position in the acceleration couch, “or was that weird?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Dava watched the Space Waste pilot as he walked nonchalantly up to the door that led to some kind of massive laundry room. “Uh, hello? Oh, hi there. I think uh, someone left me behind. Can someone escort me to the brig?”

  Confused voices drifted from the room. After a moment, Lucky Jerk stepped back slightly, hands in the air. He edged his way around the corner of the doorway but kept in view of those within.

  “I’m not armed. They already took my guns.”

  Dava watched the barrel of a rifle poke through the doorway. “Just stay right there,” came the voice behind it.

  “No need to point that thing at me,” Lucky said, continuing to slowly back away.

  The Fender was forced to come all the way through the door. It took him a second to notice Dava flattened against the wall and he flinched, pointing his gun at her. By now Lucky was far enough down the hall so that the other three wouldn’t be able to see him from inside the laundry.

  He raised Dava’s pistol at the Fender. “Ah ah,” he chided. “I wouldn’t point that at her if I were you.”

  The Fender’s barrel swung in Lucky’s direction. The fingers on Dava’s left hand hooked into the opening in the purple helmet, pulling the guard toward her. Then the blade in her right hand slid silently into the exposed neck.

  There was a gurgle, but that was all her victim managed as hot blood washed over her hand. She left the knife in and pulled the rifle away as he slumped to the floor.

  “Chaz?” A call from inside the room. “Chazzo? What’s happening?”

  She put the butt of the rifle to her shoulder and raised the barrel. She hated the noise and the sloppiness of such a weapon, but it was no time for finesse. She knelt on one knee and braced a shoulder against the wall, then motioned to Lucky.

  He nodded and blew out a deep breath, then sprinted past the door, firing the pistol wildly into the room as he went.

  The response took a few heartbeats, but then with a shout, a Fender appeared in the doorway. She wasn’t wearing a helmet and Dava could see the tight braids of her red hair as she lifted her rifle and took aim at the retreating Lucky. Dava blew out a breath, held, then fired a single shot into the back of that exposed head.

  The next Fender was close behind the first and he jumped as his comrade pitched forward. Before he could spin around to face her, Dava flipped the rifle to automatic and sprayed him into a messy lump.

  She waited for thirty seconds in silence. Once the last Fender’s body completed its slow-motion topple in the half-gravity, she could see Lucky poking around the corner at the end of the corridor, waiting for her signal.

  Another half a minute of silence while they remained frozen. Then she inched to the doorway. Keeping low, she peeked in. Then she stood and lowered her weapon.

  Lucky jogged up to the opposite side of the door. “What happened? Did the last one surrender?”

  She nodded into the room. The last Fender was slumped against the side of the boarding tube, a small hole between the eyes of his helmetless face.

  “Oh,” he said, lowering his pistol. “Lucky shot, I guess.”

  “Come on,” she said. “Pick up one of those rifles and give me my pistol back.”

  The raider that Moses and his team had come in on appeared to be in one piece. Within a few minutes, they were inside the cockpit. Lucky was shaking his head at the console.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Xarp wake,” he muttered.

  “The Longhorn?”

  “Nothin’ but Xarp wake.”

  “Jansen,” she said. She knew the sonovabitch would run as soon as he could. “We need to get out of here.”

  “In this?” Lucky looked at her. “No way, Dava, no fucking way. We lift off in this raider and they’re going to eat us to pieces out there. Look at this contact map. It’s all ModPol fighters. Like a swarm of insects.”

  She watched the red glyphs dance around the map. Wasn’t it Space Waste that was the swarm only hours before? “What’s this?” she said when a small yellow blob appeared very close to the center of the map.

  “Oh, uh.” He zoomed in. “Looks like maybe it’s a small ship on the hangar deck of the Garathol. I would have guessed all the fighters would have launched.”

  “But it’s yellow.”

  He cocked his head in thought. “Right, so a civvy ship, not a fighter.” He tapped at the console and some data spilled onto a nearby terminal. “OrbitBurner, 4000-class based on the ion drive sig. Definitely a civvy.”

  “What’s it doing on the Garathol?”

  He shrugged. “Not capable of interstellar jump, so must have hitched a ride. Diplomat, civilian contractor, whatever. Not police and not military.” He looked at her. “That’s our ticket.”

  “Does it have any weapons?”

  “Probably not, which is a good thing if you’re trying not to attract attention.”

  She sat back and folded her arms. “But if it’s on the contact map, the engine is running. The hangar decks are on the aft end of this big-ass ship, way down on the bottom. And we have to get to it without getti
ng noticed.”

  Lucky flipped a switch and the contact map blinked. The red swarms dimmed and tiny green dots appeared in the space between the Garathol and the spot where the Longhorn left its Xarp wake. “Countermeasures,” he said. “Captain 2-Bit don’t run from a fight without leaving behind a mess. ModPol’s gonna have to clean ’em up before that OrbitBurner can go anywhere. Probably just running diags on the ion drive right now.”

  She nodded and stood. “Okay. We have time. Let’s go.”

  They both flinched as their armpads buzzed. “Emergency all-call,” Lucky said.

  Dava looked at her pad.

  THOMPSON: anyone out there?

  Lucky gasped and started to speak but Dava waved him silent.

  DAVA: where are you?

  THOMPSON: some hold. Lots of ammo here.

  DAVA: sit tight. Radio silence. I’m coming.

  * * *

  It took several minutes for them to make their way back to the cargo holds. There were no more guards in the main corridor that led fore to the bridge, but heading aft toward the holds, there were guards posted in the crossway. She thought about taking them out but there were too many – at least six – and she didn’t want to risk detection. So she and Lucky backtracked and opened a duct. From there it was slow progress to the back of the ship, but eventually she was at the four-way break where she had parted ways with Psycho Jack.

  They crawled through the still-open grate and dropped down into the hold.

  “Tommy,” she whispered. “Tommy, are you in here?”

  “Dava?” Thompson, not whispering, came around a stack of ammo crates. “Holy shit, am I glad to see you!”

  “Hey Tommy,” Lucky said quietly, giving her a short wave.

  “Fuck, I think I’m even happy to see you,” she said and staggered toward them.

  “Keep it down,” Dava whispered. She braced Thompson as she nearly fell. Though she was scolding the other woman, she was swallowing back tears. “I thought you were dead.”

  Thompson panted and lowered her voice slightly. “Got stunned. Bad. Still coming out of it.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  She cracked a short, unamused laugh. “Woke up lying in a pile of my friends, gunstripped and tagged,” she said, indicating a kind of spray-on plastic stamp on her pant leg. “Door to the hold sitting here wide open. Last thing I remember is some Pollie opens the door, grabs Jack, zaps me. And then I come to and they don’t even bother closing the door.”

  “Is this the weapon cache?” Lucky asked, peering at the crates.

  “I wish,” Thompson said. “Nothing in here but standard issue shit. Cartridges, stunpacks, flashbangs, smokebombs. Not even anything really explosive. I figured if I was the last one left I’d at least blow a hole in something.”

  Dava sighed. Her leg was throbbing and she was too exhausted to think, but it all sat wrong. “So much for Jansen’s intel,” she muttered. “There probably are no weapons. ’Cept those with Fenders on the other end of ’em.”

  “Yeah, where the hell did all those fuckers come from?” Lucky said.

  “We’ll figure that out later,” Dava said. “Lucky, give Tommy that pulse rifle. Even in her condition she can handle it better than you can.”

  “Hey, I nailed a guy between the eyes,” he said as he handed it over to Thompson without resistance. Dava gave him her pistol in return.

  “Thanks. Those bastards took my Tommy-Gun,” Thompson said. Then her face flattened and she looked from Dava to Lucky and back. “Ah fuck. We’re it, aren’t we?”

  “Pretty much,” Lucky said.

  She nodded with mild acceptance. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Get off this ship,” Dava said. “Come on. We need to move.”

  * * *

  An hour had passed and Runstom and Jax were still waiting for a green light to launch. Runstom had been checking the radio chatter from time to time and said that the Space Waste command ship had left a bunch of counter-somethings around. The way he described them, Jax thought they sounded like small magnetic bombs: if a ship got too close to one, it would attach and then detonate with an electromagnetic pulse. It was apparently more of a nuisance than a threat, but there had already been one incident where an incapacitated fighter lost control and crashed into a larger destroyer.

  The conversation was heavy on Runstom mumbling about ModPol and Jax had a hard time following him. Had the man gone completely paranoid in the months since they’d been apart? Or was there some actual conspiracy that he was stumbling upon? And more to the point, what was Jax’s role? He just wanted to go back to Terroneous and live peacefully and quietly. Was that so much to ask?

  He offered to get them both something to drink and excused himself. Runstom was too busy sifting through electronic correspondence to give him directions, so Jax wandered off. The ship wasn’t that large, but apparently big enough to have some kind of recreational room, or so that guard had said.

  It wasn’t hard to find. Once he left the bridge, there were stairs down to the embarkation chamber, which he’d come in through, and a passage in the other direction that wound down a spiraling set of stairs into a room at least four times the size of the bridge. That was his guess anyway, but the lights were off so it was hard to tell.

  The stairs deposited him in the center of the room and there was a glowing panel on the wall directly across from them. He carefully walked through the darkness and poked through the interface until he found the light switch.

  As the lights flickered to life, he felt cold metal against the back of his neck.

  He raised his hands. “Uh, Stanford?” There was no immediate reply, so he added, “I’m not armed, you know.” He had to leave his shotgun and his pistol back in the cargo hold when he changed into the maintenance uniform, and was thankful he never had the opportunity to fire either one.

  “Turn around.”

  He did. Dava, Thompson, and another Waster stared at him, their guns lowered. “Let me guess,” Jax said. “You’re stealing our ship.”

  “Your ship?” Thompson said.

  “Technically, it’s Stanford’s,” he said, as if that would mean something to them.

  “Whatever,” she said. She frowned and turned away to pace around the edges of the room.

  “Don’t mind her,” the man said. “She’s just upset because she lost her favorite gun. And a bunch of her friends died.” He was small in stature and young. He tapped at his name patch, which read, “Lucky” Jerk. In ink, an additional set of quotation marks had been added around the word Jerk. “Call me Lucky. You’re Psycho Jack, right?”

  In his head, Jax imagined drawing a sarcastic set of quotation marks around the word Psycho. “How’d you get past the guards?”

  “Well, there were only two of them,” Lucky said with a twist of his hand that told Jax he didn’t want to know the rest of the story.

  Jax sighed. “Look, guys. All I want to do is get back to Terroneous.”

  “Then you’re in luck,” Dava said. “Because we just want to get back home too. We just have some business to take care of first.”

  Jax felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time. There was a slow burn that rose up his chest and into his throat. “You do your fucking business somewhere else. Get the hell off my ship.”

  He felt the breeze of air that the movement caused before his eyes registered the sight of it, and then her blade was at his throat.

  “Great, you going to scare me, Dava?” he said. “Threaten my life yet again? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? For the past year of my life I have lived in constant fear.”

  The blade came away and she stepped closer. “Some day you and I are going to sit down and have a talk about what it means to live in fear. And then you will know that you know nothing about it.” She turned away from him as the burn in his chest went cold. “And then you will understand why it is that I do the things I do.”

  She walked away and joined Thompson, who’d fo
und the minibar.

  “We don’t have to steal your ship,” Lucky said, drawing Jax’s attention away from Dava. “We can just stowaway. I figure you’re not going to the ModPol outpost. Not in this thing.”

  “No,” Jax said. “We’re supposed to go to Epsilon-3.”

  Lucky cocked his head and his eyes went upward like he was trying to decipher that statement. “Epsilon-3. Why?”

  “I guess there is a new colony under construction there.”

  “Really?”

  Jax scrutinized his face. “You didn’t know about it?”

  Lucky shrugged. “No. Did you?”

  “No,” Jax admitted. He raised his voice. “Dava. Did you know there was a colony going up on Epsilon-3?”

  She and Thompson turned from the bar with drinks in hand and glared at him. “No,” she said.

  “Who the fuck would want to live all the way out here?” Thompson said, then went about refilling her cup.

  Jax turned it over in his head. The officer that Runstom had talked to on the radio was very clear that Space Waste was here to target the new colony. Why else would they be here? That was the question he posed. But it made no sense. Space Waste had specific intentions of attacking the Garathol, boarding it and raiding its holds. There was never any talk of going to any planet, and certainly no one had mentioned a new colony.

  “If there’s construction going on, then there’ll be interstellar flights,” Lucky said. “Moving materials and people in.”

  Jax shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess.” Then his hopes rose. “Right, of course. We can probably find a way back to Barnard from there.”

  He stepped past Lucky and approached the minibar. He didn’t know much about mixing his own drink, but he took a cup and an amber bottle and poured until it looked like something a bartender would hand him. He took a sip and swallowed fiery fruity sweetness, then finished off the rest and poured another helping.

  “Psycho Jack likes his brandy,” Thompson said.

  “This is a shitstorm,” Jax said. “What was the target? The rumor was experimental weaponry.”

  “Yes,” Dava said. “That’s what we came for.”