by Rick Partlow
Logan’s pulse was pounding so loudly in his ears he barely heard the man finish with: “You have one hour to return Ms. Salvaggio’s employees to the docking bay, unharmed, or your woman here dies unpleasantly.”
The video froze on the harmless-looking man’s pleasant features and Nance scowled, slapping the control to cut the feed to the screen.
“We could rip right through their fucking docking hub and core them like an apple with our main gun,” Tara Gerard snapped, pounding a frustrated fist into her control panel. She bared her teeth and looked back to Kammy. “Just say the word, Cap, and I’ll rip them a new one and show them who they’re fucking dealing with!”
“There are innocent people being forced to work on that station!” Mira exclaimed, eyes going wide. She pulled herself along the safety rail, planting herself in front of Logan. “You can’t just kill them!”
Logan regarded her silently, knowing she was right but still filled with rage and wanting to strike out. He felt Katy’s hand on his arm and his breathing slowed, the pulse-beat beginning to fade along with the red haze over his vision.
“What’s the word, Boss?” Kammy asked him.
“Mira’s right,” he declared firmly. “We can’t take the chance of just blowing the shit out of them, as satisfying as it might be. But Tara’s right, too.”
“Of course I am,” the Tactical Officer agreed. “About what?”
“They don’t know what they’re dealing with,” Logan explained. “And they don’t know we give a damn about the innocent civilians inside the station. They think we care about Lyta,” he went on, beginning to feel a plan of action coming together even as the words spun out of him like a spider’s web. “They think we care about her enough to give these guys up without a guarantee they’ll even return her to us.”
“You noticed that too, huh?” Kammy wondered.
Logan nodded. Breckenridge very carefully had not said they’d exchange Lyta for the bounty hunters; he’d just said she’d be killed if they weren’t turned over.
“He thinks he has all the cards,” he went on, wishing he could pace. He thought better when he walked. “We have to show him he has next to nothing…” He trailed off, remembering why they were here. “And we have to get what we need out of Monk and Ham, Grieves and Jackson, whatever you call them.” He pointed to Nance, snapping his fingers and making a rolling gesture. “Get me Acosta. He’s down in Security with the prisoners.” He pointed to the flat-screen displays. “On video.”
The Security section was just a generic compartment, but the Spartan engineers had managed to bolt in a few holding cells, just clear, polymer, soundproof boxes with a cot built into the side. In the video pickup from the comm screen, Monk and Ham were visible in adjoining cells, floating listlessly. Acosta turned to the call of the screen with what might have been annoyance on his face.
“What is it?” he demanded, adding “sir,” after he saw it was Logan.
“They have Lyta,” Logan told him. “You may have as little as an hour, and we are going to find out where they took Terrin before we turn those two back over to them.”
“Oh, great,” Acosta sighed. “Get back to me in an hour, then.” He reached out toward the screen and the feed went dark.
“What now?” Kammy asked him.
“Nance,” he said, “get me this Breckenridge on the horn. I want to talk to him. And Tara….” He nodded to the woman. “Find me a target.”
Milo Breckenridge wiped a thin sheen of sweat away from his high forehead, then tugged at the tight collar of his dress suit.
“Why’s the gravity so damned high down here, anyway?” he complained to no one in particular, leaning against an ugly, utilitarian metal desk. He didn’t know who it belonged to, but he was sure they were lower in the pecking order than he was.
“It’s ‘cause we’re closer to the rim, Mr. Breckenridge,” one of the guards, an affable fellow with a much larger concentration of muscles in his arms and chest than brain cells in his head, replied. Breckenridge glared at him, but the man seemed pleased with his scientific insight.
“It’s to make prisoners feel less comfortable.”
The real answer came from an unexpected source: their captive. She seemed more awake and aware now that the effects of the sonic stunner had worn off, though her words were slurred somewhat from her swollen lip. Even with the bruised face, she gave him the distinct impression she could kill him in a second if someone was unwise enough to loosen her restraints.
“It’s not that easy on the guards, either,” the big, dumb one grumbled, his back resting against the stone wall, arms crossed.
“No one cares about prison guards,” the woman remarked with a hint of a sneer on the half of her face that wasn’t bruised. “And I imagine no one else wants to live out here.”
“Since you’re feeling so talkative,” Breckenridge said, stepping closer to her, leaning over but not too close, “why don’t you tell me your name?”
She regarded him coolly with a single green eye, the other refusing to open.
“Why? Are we going to have long conversations deep into the night regarding the nature of humanity and become life-long friends?”
Breckenridge laughed, forgetting the drag of the extra gravity for a moment.
“Oh, I like you already,” he told her. “You probably clean up pretty nice. But you also managed to put half a dozen of my people in the clinic, even though they were wearing armor and you weren’t. So, why don’t you avoid getting any more damage done to that face and tell me your name?” He smiled with all the insincerity he could work up in one expression. “I’ll start. I’m Milo Breckenridge, and I run things here at Trinity when Ms. Salvaggio is away.”
“Is she away a lot?” the mercenary asked, seeming as innocent as a newborn babe. Breckenridge was sure if she could have batted her eyes, she would have.
“Enough that I get to make the important decisions,” Breckenridge confided. He hauled off and kicked the leg of her chair and smiled when he saw her flinch just slightly. “Like whether to use enhanced interrogation techniques against prisoners.”
She nodded just slightly, like she was giving him his due.
“My name is Lyta Randell,” she told him. “I command Wholesale Slaughter’s infantry company.”
“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Breckenridge clapped his hands together as if he’d just completed a difficult task. “So, tell me something, Lyta, why did you and your boss kidnap two of Ms. Salvaggio’s most valuable employees right out of a busy nightclub and then set off a damned bomb in the Customs kiosk to smuggle them out of this station?” He cocked an eyebrow. “Why would you do such a thing on our peaceful place of business?”
“Your men had information we needed,” Lyta said easily enough he knew she’d been rehearsing the answer. “We tried to ask them nicely, and I think they might have been willing to help us, but your dumbass drunk of a Security Chief got her feelings hurt and pulled a gun, so we went with Plan B.”
“That sounds exactly like something Officer Lopes would do,” he admitted readily. In fact, he’d already seen her do it on the video feed from the club. “And honestly, I respect your willingness to do whatever you needed to close the deal. I operate by the same principle. Which means I will do whatever I need to do in order to get Mr. Grieves and Mr. Jackson back.”
“That’s up to Colonel Slaughter,” Lyta said. “The mission comes before the troops.”
Breckenridge frowned. Her tone was more troubling than her words. He wasn’t necessarily sure he believed she was disposable, but he definitely believed she was willing to die for the mission. It was an uncommon attitude among mercenaries, and unless she was the exception in this Wholesale Slaughter company rather than the rule, he might have to rethink how he was going to deal with this situation.
“Mr. Breckenridge?”
He turned at the call, curious because it wasn’t the big, dumb guard the Security officer in charge had assigned to watch L
yta. This was one of the clerks manning the data terminals, watching the input from the internal and external security cameras and the communications center. The woman wasn’t wearing a Security uniform, just the normal work coveralls of the station staff, but she looked a great deal more intelligent than the self-appointed expert on spin gravity.
“What is it?”
“There’s a transmission from the mercenary ship, sir,” the woman told him, “the Shakak. It’s a Colonel Slaughter and he wants to speak to you personally.”
Breckenridge grinned.
Excellent. Now they’d find out just how much this woman was worth to them.
“Bring it up,” he encouraged the woman, losing patience and shoving her out of the seat, hunting for the control until he found it himself.
A woman in a grey uniform appeared on the screen, her face thin and dark and angular, her expression businesslike.
“This is Milo Breckenridge,” he said. “Where’s Colonel Slaughter?”
“Wait one for the Colonel,” the woman told him curtly, reaching past the video pickup to hit a control.
Impatience and irritation surged through Breckenridge’s bloodstream like adrenalin. It was a cheap trick, an old trick, but one that worked every time: asserting your dominance by making the other person wait. The video feed went dark for just a moment, and when it returned, it brought with it a face he’d seen before in the security feeds. The man was young, younger than Milo by at least five years, though with some of the stress lines of hard experience aging him at the corners of his eyes and his mouth. His hair was blond and short for a mercenary’s, though certainly longer than the regulation for most of the militaries Breckenridge knew about.
“I’m Jonathan Slaughter,” the officer said. “You have Lyta Randell, my infantry commander. I want her back.”
“Unless you want her back in pieces,” Breckenridge replied in a low growl, letting the anger from the disrespect get the better of him, “you’ll send back Mr. Grieves and Mr. Jackson immediately.”
Slaughter didn’t reply for a moment, glancing off to the side of the video pickup, one of his eyebrows cocking upward in what might have been a questioning gesture. When he turned back, it was with a confidence which could only mean he’d received the answer he wanted.
“You have an unmanned supply barge decelerating to match velocities, Mr. Breckenridge,” he said. “It’s ten thousand kilometers out. You may want your external cameras to take a good look at it.”
Breckenridge scowled at the screen, but went ahead and switched the call over to the Operations Center.
“Sensors,” he snapped, “do we have an incoming barge?”
The screen had split; he still had Slaughter’s image on the left side, while the right displayed a pasty-faced, overweight younger man who’d obviously neglected to take advantage of the complimentary sun lamp time every employee was afforded. Breckenridge reminded himself to send out a memo about that.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Breckenridge,” Pale-face stuttered. “It’s in its final braking boost right now, coming in around…” The man’s eyes hunted off-screen as he checked a reading. “Just over nine thousand kilometers. Should be prepping for off-loading soon.”
“Do we have a drone feed of it?” Breckenridge asked him. “Optical?” At the man’s hesitant nod, Breckenridge clucked impatiently. “Then put it up on my damn screen instead of your white, lumpy face!”
The drones weren’t much, just free-floating cameras attached to transmitters and a set of maneuvering thrusters to keep them in the correct orbit around Trinity, but they extended the range of the station’s sensors in a cheap and ready way. The military didn’t use them much because their signals were easily jammed or hacked, but his customers weren’t usually so technologically sophisticated.
The view from the drone feed was unremarkable, just a shot of the ugly, utilitarian lines of the cargo barge. It was little more than a framework for rounded cargo capsules, with a fusion drive and a ring of fuel tanks at each end. The automated flight systems were primitive and the ship was unarmed, mostly because it wasn’t worth stealing. Iron-ore powder from the asteroid mines for the fabricators and soy paste and spirulina from the system’s orbital farms for the food processors were necessary for the day-to-day life of the station, but they were easily replaced. And the ship itself was as cheap as you could make a spaceship, one of dozens making their way back and forth across the system, useless except for the fusion drives, which were cheap and readily available.
“I see the barge,” Breckenridge told Slaughter. “What the hell’s so important about it?”
“Sir?” That was Pale-face again. His image didn’t interrupt the feed, but Breckenridge recognized the voice. “The mercenary’s ship, the Shakak, it’s moving toward the barge.” A pause. “Our sensors say it’s accelerating at twenty gravities sir, but that’s not possible if there are humans in it, and sir…I don’t see any drive flare.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he exploded. Was the man trying to be a smartass? “Get me visual on them now!”
Now the screen was split into thirds, with Slaughter, the barge and…their ship. Breckenridge’s mouth dropped open. There was nothing extraordinary about the lines of their ship; it could have been any one of hundreds of private cargo ships he’d seen pass through the system over the last few years, small enough he wouldn’t have figured it could carry enough fuel to even maintain five or six gravities of acceleration for more than a few minutes.
And yet the sensor readings projected into the corner of the display said it was boosting at twenty-three gees, and not even glimmer of light shown from the fusion drive bell. It was absolutely…
“Impossible,” he murmured, unable to keep himself from finishing the thought aloud.
“They’re three thousand kilometers from the barge, sir,” Pale-face reported, still a disembodied voice. “And…oh, my God!”
He didn’t have to ask what had brought on the exclamation. He could see it just as clearly as the sensor tech could, see the readings on the screen. The Shakak had simply stopped. She hadn’t decelerated, hadn’t done a skew flip and a lengthy, painful braking burn, she’d simply stopped. Which was just as impossible.
She was close enough to the barge for them to both be in the same shot from a different drone feed, and the image switched to that view, replacing the separate feeds. The Shakak hung in the blackness like a lion crouched in the high grass, awaiting the approaching wildebeest as they galloped across the savanna. Something glowed a spectral blue, a shimmering oscillation in the space separating the two ships, connecting the nose of the Shakak with the still-firing bow fusion drive of the barge.
There shouldn’t have been any visible beam from any sort of energy weapon he’d ever heard of, not in a vacuum, but given the three impossible things he’d seen in just the last minute, the blue glow seemed almost insignificant. One of a few things should have happened when the energy beam struck the barge. The likeliest was nothing. The barge may have been unarmored, but it was also big and had a lot of empty space. Even a military laser might not do much to it unless it hit just right. The second was, if it did get that million-credit hit, the fusion drive would shut down. Damage to the fuel feed or the reaction chamber would have caused an immediate, automatic shut-down. And the last was if the beam had hit the fuel storage tanks. That could have caused damage, could have sent the metallic hydrogen fuel pellets scattering across empty space.
Instead, the barge seemed to ignite at the point of the hit, a singularity of glimmering light expanding instantaneously into a nova, a second star in the system, nearly as bright as the primary star.
It was the fuel stores, it had to be. Nothing could cause a blast that size but a fusion explosion. Whatever they’d fired had penetrated the storage tanks and fused the metallic hydrogen. Breckenridge let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, reaching out with trembling fingers to switch off the feed from the drone.
Jonathan S
laughter stared back at him with the eyes of the Sphinx.
“Your station’s walls are very thick,” he said. “We probably couldn’t burn through very far. But we could certainly destroy both docking hubs and put you out of business for months, if not years.”
“Sir!” A call from Operations split the screen again. Not Pale-face, but Koji, a Salvaggio employee and one of the weapons crew. “Do you want me to target their ship with the lasers?”
“Don’t be a moron,” Breckenridge told him. “Are you not watching this?”
He switched off the call from Koji impatiently.
“We still want our people back,” he told Slaughter. “I assume you want to work out some sort of exchange.”
“One hour,” Slaughter told him. “My shuttle will bring your men in and leave with Lyta Randell. Anyone targets the shuttle, we take appropriate actions.”
“Right.” The word came out as a grunt, as if he’d been body-punched. Mithra alone knew what Momma Salvaggio would do to him when she found out about this. “She’ll be ready.”
The screen went dark.
Lyta Randell was laughing softly. He wanted to put his fist into her face, or better yet, have Big Dumb Muscle guy do it, but the part of him that made a living assessing risks and rewards decided it would be a stupid impulse to indulge.
“Who the hell are you people?” he asked her instead.
“We’re Wholesale Slaughter,” she said, pride dripping off the words. “And don’t you ever fucking forget it.”