by Ginger Booth
“He’s good at it. Let’s get back to celebrating, shall we?” He gave his ex a surreptitious caress. “We’ll talk later. Yes?”
“Definitely,” Cope purred. “Or not talk.”
Ben took that for a promise of the finest kind.
“Gimme.” Ben tugged playfully on his wedding ring, still on Cope’s finger. They were stripping for bed that same evening. Cope joined him in his cabin. The engineer came in late, checking on things as usual. He spent far too long cloistered with Teke covering last-minute second thoughts about the micro warp test tomorrow on the skiff.
By now it was nearly 01:00. Ben would have waited til dawn.
The engineer hadn’t brought his own ring aboard, if he even owned one anymore. He’d lost three in the brief years they were married, of successively cheaper designs. He kept taking them off to stick his hands in a machine, or wash the grime off. But Ben kept his wedding band in the drawer with his combs and brushes in his cabin. He still wore it sometimes to repel advances.
The ring slipped easily off the engineer’s hand and nestled firmly on the captain’s. Ben held Cope’s eye in charged challenge throughout. “Anything can turn into innuendo,” Ben claimed, head back on his pillow.
“You have thick fingers,” Cope noted. He lay on his side, toying with the ring.
“Yours are slender and ever so clever,” Ben crooned.
His ex chuckled softly. “You’re right. Innuendo everywhere.”
Ben pushed him over flat on his back, and held him pinned for a deep and lingering kiss. “You’re not escaping this time, John Copeland.”
“Do I look like I’m running?”
“Not yet.”
They both laughed, then got busy, intent on exploring as the years fell away, the changes wrought by time found and appreciated. The familiarity overruled them all. Ben’s body knew its own, intimately, as they graduated from sightseeing to more intent pursuits.
And Ben froze as he heard a sound. Cope’s caress continued, but he caught his hand. Yes, that squeak was the trapdoor hydraulics. Ben’s heart started thudding in a different way as he lunged for his comm.
“Computer, who opened the trapdoor?”
“Chief petty officer Judge Frampton.”
“Dammit!”
86
In an explosion of bedding, Ben pulled on minimal clothes, Cope struggling beside him.
“All hands, security breach!” Ben announced ship-wide, still fastening his pants. “Security to the hold. Teke too! Hurry!”
He didn’t bother with his boots, just flew into the corridor barefoot. Hunter’s door banged open across the way. Teke lurched out of Cope’s cabin ahead of him, still fully dressed. He ducked across the officer country corridor to his lab room, as Ben dodged him.
Ouch! The steel slats of the catwalk dug into his heel. But Ben was already adjusting his gravity to vault over the railing and sail down into the hold below, Cope right behind him. The trapdoor was closing.
“Computer, secure all pressure doors now!’ Ben hollered as he hit the deck. Zan and Wilder dropped down from the aft catwalk just seconds behind him, Zan in the nude. All four donned pressure suits as fast as they could.
“Chief! Grapple the skiff!” Ben ordered, ignoring the fact that his lover was struggling into a pressure suit beside him. Cope shot him an exasperated look, but gathered up flopping-open suit and helmet and shuffled to the engineering podium. All of them were consummate p-suit users, experienced at damage control. And they all had Yang-Yangs for backup – including Judge. For them, suit and helmet in hand was close enough for even an explosive loss of atmo.
That’s what Ben had in mind. Until the physicist hurled himself down from the catwalk. “Dammit, Teke! The pressure doors were a hint!” Ben was already half-clad and making for the trapdoor.
“Bite me, cap! I stopped for the remote. You’re welcome!”
“Good thought. Get your p-suit on. Chief, we got him grappled?”
Cope growled, “I don’t know what he did to this. No. Still trying.”
Teke got both legs into his suit and popped a helmet on his head. By now Ben and the security pair were already fully suited. “Cope,” Ben prompted gently. “I need to open the trapdoor.”
“Go for it.” The engineer’s fingers were still flying over his console, trying to wrest back control of the grapples.
“Teke, secure his suit. You two stay inside.” Ben belatedly realized that the miner was now listening in on every word they spoke through the helmets. “Judge, stand down! Or be fired upon!”
No response. So much for trying to stall by talking.
He tapped his foot impatiently as Teke manually broke Cope’s phenomenal focus and forced a helmet on him. The skiff remote control board he perched on the chief’s engineering podium as he struggled to fasten the other man’s suit.
Ben opened a private channel to those two first. “Teke, remind me. Can that board override manual piloting from the skiff?”
“No.”
Dammit. “Cope, you’re tracking? Save what atmo you can.”
Cope lurched an arm to his panel and stabbed a few times. “Depressurizing, cap. But you’ll lose most of it.”
“Computer, open trapdoor, override air cycle.” The doors dilated, retracting into the floor to leave a two meter gaping hole in his hull straight out to the stars. All the air in the cargo hold rushed outward toward an immense Pono, filling a third of his view. In the couple seconds this required, Ben patched Zan and Wilder into his private channel. Fully armed, they’d already been strategizing on their own.
“Behind us, cap,” Wilder ordered.
“Stay inside,” Zan growled. He hopped into the hole first, clamped two lines, then dove out, Wilder hot on his heels.
Ben followed suit, ignoring the hunter’s opinion. He carried laser pistol and rifle, same as them.
“He’s already in the skiff,” Zan reported, followed soon with, “It’s locked.”
“Blow it,” Ben directed. “Watch your aim! Don’t burn any equipment inside.” Dammit, they couldn’t afford to lose time repairing this skiff.
He was outside by now, clinging to his own hull and considering the tableau. Zan on the skiff’s hatch. Wilder seconds behind him. No more room at the door. Ben chose to hurry to the skiff’s bow, pointing aft on Prosper, shifting his attachment point along the way.
“Judge,” he hailed. “Why?” People always wanted to justify themselves, he figured. To explain why they were absolutely right, while doing absolute wrong. “I took you in like family. How could you betray me like this?” Ben didn’t feel betrayed in the slightest, nor even a little bit hurt. He felt like a moron for trusting the smooth talker. But saying that wouldn’t gain him any leverage.
“You’re a mushroom manager!” Judge replied. “Fed me shit and kept me in the dark! You think you’re all pretty and righteous, you and Cope. You rego frills! But you’re no different from Vultures. Just bankrupt cuz you’re fools. All starry-eyed idealists.” His voice assumed a falsetto. “‘Save the settlers! Be like Sass Collier!’ Well, you’re not, are you!”
“You know, I’m getting damned sick of being called a frill!”
“Ben,” Cope growled.
“WE’RE NOT REGO FRILLS!” Ben reached the tie-down he wanted and latched on, by the skiff’s excuse for a bridge. He automatically played out the range he wanted on the line, then hopped upward. “Sophie is a frill. I see gay guys in bars. Some are frills. I’M NOT A FRILL!”
“Cuz that’s what’s important here,” Cope muttered. “Watch out, Ben, his thrusters are live.”
Wilder finally noticed where his captain was. “Cap! Get down from there!” ‘Down’ wasn’t too specific. They were in zero-g, with the skiff’s ‘up’ inverted from the ship’s, and ‘forward’ reversed as well.
Ben was too ticked off to listen. He already had a grip on a hand-hold by the window, peering in at Judge in the skiff’s lonely seat. These toy ships were death traps. He splaye
d himself across the window and pounded on it, feeling it give under his gauntlet. “Hey, asshole! I’m talking to you!”
The p-suited Judge shook his head in disgust. “Get off, Ben. I don’t want to hurt you. The money’s just too good.”
“What are you trying to do?” Ben demanded. “This is a rego skiff! An eggshell with pretensions of grandeur. Prosper is the only real ship out here!”
“I got transponders and extra air,” Judge returned defensively. Indeed, Ben could see a pile of air tanks hovering in the upper corners of the bridge, out of the way. “Gorky will get me when the time is right.”
“Not before I blow you out of the sky!”
“You ain’t gonna do that. You care too much about this next-gen star drive. You still think you can claim ownership, the patent, even if the Vultures got it. Difference is, if I give it to them, they’ll reward me, see? I’m not doing you any harm. You won’t kill me.”
“I’ll happily kill you,” Wilder cut in on the channel.
Zan offered, “You’ll never see me coming.”
“Get off this channel,” Ben growled. “I’m negotiating.”
“Bang-up job of it, too,” Cope commented from on their secure back channel. “Buddy, I’m begging you. Get off that skiff. Wilder, Zan, you better be secured to Prosper.”
“I have a plan, Ben,” Teke offered urgently. “Retreat. For the sake of the kids.”
Ben emphatically resented being reminded of his children right now. “Judge! Vultures will take our work, and throw you under the bus. You know them. You’re a criminal for stealing. Their claim comes from buying out Thrive Spaceways, not your theft. Think, man. Don’t do this.”
He knew he’d hit a nerve by Judge’s tone. “You’ve got three seconds to get off this skiff, cap! They won’t screw me over. Move before I toss you to Pono! You should have put Wilder in the shuttle!”
Grimacing, Ben was just thinking the same thing. The shuttle had grapplers, too. He flipped channels. “Wilder –”
“On it, cap!”
He flipped back. “Judge, last chance.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you!” Judge flipped him the bird. He reached for the thrusters.
Ben launched himself perpendicular, trusting his lines to pivot him, to slam against the hull. Ow. He took a hand hold to the gut, and maybe screwed up his air flow. Or maybe he just got the wind knocked out of him. He checked a gauge. No, he’d sprung an internal air leak. He started scrabbling for the trapdoor as fast as he could go, abandoning one of his tethers to go faster.
With no transponder squawking at this juncture, Judge and the skiff had vanished within seconds into the void.
“Any joy, Wilder?” he demanded.
“Haven’t got there yet,” Wilder reported sadly.
“Can we find him, Cope?” Ben asked.
“Not until he calls for Gorky.”
“I did mention I had a plan,” Teke noted peevishly. “Everybody inside first.”
“What kind of plan?” Ben asked, with a sinking feeling. He could only think of one option. His fingers missed their next hand-hold as Zan suddenly jerked on his line to haul him in, without warning. “Zan? There are courtesies.”
“Waste of time,” the hunter opined. “You’re last in.”
“Wilder, abort on the shuttle,” Teke ordered the security chief.
“Teke, you do not give orders!” Ben barked. “I do! Wilder, shuttle.”
“More protection in the ship,” Teke differed.
Wilder complained, “What are we doing?”
“Teke, stop. You’ll kill him,” Ben pleaded.
“I’m good with that,” Teke countered. “In fact…”
“Kill the bastard,” Zan voted.
“Cope?” Ben appealed, regretting for the umpteenth time that with this crew, he got no respect. “DAMMIT! I am the captain of this ship! I give the orders!”
He climbed into gravity inside the trapdoor compartment in the cargo floor. As soon as he was in and braced, the external doors contracted beneath him. Zan hit the override to simultaneously dilate the matching doors above them.
The president of Spaceways prudently elected to respond to the appeal. “Teke, you can’t act without the captain’s orders. Or it’s mutiny, just like Judge. Ben – captain – I agree with Teke’s plan, sar.”
Deft, Ben acknowledged grudgingly. His lover began by reminding him that Judge’s life was already forfeit, and didn’t factor into this. “Can I hail Judge?” He clambered out of the trapdoor, and closed it behind him. The air in the cargo hold was now up to a whopping 5% of breathable.
“Channel 5,” Cope allowed.
“Six minutes, Ben,” Teke interrupted.
Sighing heavily, Ben switched back to their private channel. He noted from his seat on the floor that the physicist was no longer with Cope. Wilder, way ahead of him, pounded on the galley door. Zan was headed that way, too. “Leave off, Wilder. OK, I’ll bite, Teke, why six minutes?”
“Optimal trade off. Far enough so we won’t get sucked into the warp. Close enough to reach with a strong signal. Now five minutes.”
No pressure. “Give me one-minute notices,” he instructed, then switched to hail the wayward skiff. “Judge, last chance. We will commence the test, even with you on board. Best guess? It’ll kill you. This is pure experimental technology, advanced physics.”
Judge scoffed. “Ben, it’s a star drive. You think I’m an idiot?”
“The third gen star drive only powers the real device,” Ben explained.
“Four minutes,” Teke supplied.
“Oh, yeah?” Judge challenged Ben. “What’s the real device, huh?”
“Not telling you that. For all I know, you’re broadcasting in the clear to Vultures.”
Cope clarified, “Cap, you’re both broadcasting in the clear, full spherical.”
Right. Ben resolved to be less forthcoming with the trade secretes. “You’ll die, Judge.”
“Three minutes. Cap, please give me the order,” Teke pressed.
Judge spoke at the same time. “I don’t believe you. Ben, there’s no way back from here. Die is cast. Judge out.”
Resenting the necessity, Ben switched back to the private channel and clambered off the floor. “Teke, initiate test when ready.” He switched channel again. “All hands, this is the captain. Stand by for immediate execution of the skiff test in…”
“Now 58, 57, 56…” Teke supplied on cue.
“In 54 seconds. Captain out.”
“Come watch, Ben,” Cope invited from the podium, holding out a gauntleted hand.
Without thinking, Ben rubbed his wedding ring. The gold band still embraced his finger inside his p-suit, where he should never wear it. He paused a moment to shoot Cope a hard look, but then accepted his hand. They knocked their helmets together to watch the small screen Teke fed them from the galley. The physicist monitored his test from the nearly wall-sized display above the foot of the dining table.
87
“All hands, test initiated,” Teke announced. “Please watch channel 3.”
Cope swallowed, and squeezed Ben’s hand again. He didn’t squeeze back.
“Discussion channel is 2,” the captain said coldly, and switched to it. “Kassidy, are you recording?”
“You bet your cute little ass, I’m recording!” she confirmed. “But, um, how to say politely…”
“Nothing’s happening,” Hunter completed her thought.
“I’ll take it, Teke,” Cope offered. “In this phase, we’ve turned on the instruments. They’re warming up and taking baseline readings. Just another minute or two. The star drive is also powering up. This device is an energy hog.”
Ben tapped the drive telltale on their screen, the last of the warm-up sequence to complete. One sensor was dead. Maybe Judge flicked it off, by mistake or design.
Cope continued his explanation. “When we have the baseline data, the micro warp will automatically engage. It’s programmed t
o jump twelve hundred seventeen kilometers dead ahead. No idea what this will look like.”
“Should be awesome,” Teke differed. “Fractal colors across the sky bleeding off excess power.”
“That’s one theory,” Cope allowed. He didn’t care. What mattered to him was that Ben stiffened as he recognized the number. Their wedding anniversary was 12/17. Cope was the one who hard-coded the jump sequence.
“Micro warp?” Willow asked.
No one deigned to respond. Least of all the engineer, who bent now to watch the power begin to feed his newest baby, the dragon’s tooth, son of a moose-bot, housed in a strange metal alloy invented under the rays of a distant star.
From there, in a fraction of a second the display exploded into a maelstrom of fractal patterns, greens and blues and purples and electric white, beautiful and other-worldly. Vast loops subdivided into smaller loops like soap bubbles. Tendrils stretched across the sky, dissipating into infinity. Leave it to a Denali physicist to draw their disturbing botany across the heavens.
Judge let out an ear-splitting scream, cut off in an anguished gargle.
Teke exulted. “Got a bead on it! Cope, we did it! Twelve-seventeen klicks, only 18 meters slop!”
“My God,” Cope breathed.
“You had a bead on that skiff all along!” Ben accused.
“Not until we turned on the test,” Cope attempted. Ben was already running for the shuttle. “Ben! The test turned on the transponder. For retrieval!”
“And I’m retrieving!” Ben barked at him. “Wilder, Zan, on me!”
“I’m going too!” Cope demanded, pelting after him.
“Chief, you stay and protect my ship! That’s an order, damn you!”
Cope’s space boots shuffled to a stop as armed guards beat him to the shuttle ladder.
Chief, Cope suddenly realized. His footsteps pounded again as he returned to the engineering console, swinging on the poor podium to brake his momentum. He kicked himself for not watching what effect that colossal light show and pocket catastrophe had on the Prosper.