by Rick Partlow
Grieg said nothing for a moment, still seeming as if he might be about to order the mercenary commander summarily executed, but finally he nodded.
“You set them up as a Judas goat,” he deduced. “How are you tracking them?”
“Come inside,” Salvaggio invited him with a sweep of her hand toward the door. “I’ll show you.”
Dusk fell over the ruins of the house in a cloak of ruddy gold, adding some beauty to the charred and scattered wreckage. Whatever had laid waste to the homestead had been fairly recent, at least within the last few years. Grass grew tall over the cobblestone walk, but Terrin could still make out the steps. Brush had overtaken the interior of the house, but it still held its original boundaries at the corners. Dirt had begun to bury the collapsed sections of roof, but what had survived the destruction still held in place, giving shade to whatever animals called it home.
Terrin paced through the tall grass, Salvaggio’s pistol hanging heavy in his right hand, trying to see further into the shadows of the house’s interior, wondering if it was safe to go inside or if the floor would collapse under him. Something flew out of the open section of roof right over his head, screeching like a damned soul and he nearly shot it before he realized what it was. It flew in impossible silence, wings not making a sound, and disappeared into a nearby thicket.
“Barn owl,” he told Franny, after he’d recovered his breath. She had one of the flechette guns to her shoulder, but she lowered it and let out a whooshing sigh. “We used to have them on our ranch back home,” he added.
This place made him miss their old house, made him wish he’d spent more time there before he’d left on the mission with Logan.
“What the hell are we hoping to get out of this?” he murmured, shaking his head.
“The people at the farm down the road said this was the last place Lana Kane lived,” Franny reminded him. He squinted at her, wondering if he still detected resentment in her voice.
“They had no reason to trust us. We’re strangers in a stolen car.” He jerked his head toward the rover. “A stolen car with about a quarter of a tank of whatever it runs on left.”
“Alcohol, I think. I could smell it. And it would be easy to distill out here. Probably a lot easier to fabricate an internal combustion engine out here than it is to replace worn out fuel cells or capacitors.”
He sniffed, accepting her explanation because he had no idea.
“Look, you don’t think I was actually going to give Salvaggio the data crystals, do you?” He’d been meaning to ask her for over an hour, since they’d gotten away from the town and were sure they weren’t being followed, but it had been hard for him to come up with a natural way to broach the subject. He still hadn’t, and he winced at how awkward it came out. “I was just trying to string her along,” he went on. “Trying to give us a chance to get out of there somehow.”
“Well, it worked,” she judged curtly, not sounding convinced. “Congratulations.”
She turned back to the rover and he took a step after her, ready to keep arguing despite a little voice whispering in his ear he should shut up. When he spotted the blur out of the corner of his eye, he thought at first it was another owl, or maybe a deer—he’d seen a deer along the way, so he knew they had them here, introduced at the same time as the rest of the Earth-based wildlife, after the world had been terraformed.
Something about the cadence of the crashing steps didn’t sound right for anything four-legged and he spun around in time to see a flash of brown hair and blue shirt streaking away from the back of the house and into the field of sagebrush, heading out toward a stand of gnarled trees and the cover they offered. It was a boy, a young teenager at the oldest.
“Hey, wait!” Terrin yelled, bolting after him.
He wasn’t sure why he was chasing the boy, he just felt the imperative to do it, as if they were drowning and this kid was the only lifeline they’d been thrown. The boy was fast and Terrin hadn’t had the chance to run in months, and despite having starred on the track team in college, he thought the kid was going to outrun him and disappear into the trees, leaving Terrin panting and embarrassed, but fate intervened and the boy tripped. He was young and agile and he didn’t fall flat on his face the way Terrin might have, but the misstep cost him time enough for Terrin to make a lunging grab at his shoulder.
He caught the inside of the kid’s collar and the full weight of the boy jerked at Terrin’s shoulder, but he kept his hold and the teenager went down, legs flying out in front of him. The boy struggled to scramble back up, but Terrin put an arm across his chest, leaning into him. The kid didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound, just snarled at Terrin with feral rage, teeth snapping.
“Just wait a second,” Terrin insisted, panting with exertion. “We don’t want to hurt you! We’re just looking for…”
“Put the gun down and let my brother go.”
Lana Kane was just there. One second there’d been nothing but dirt, rocks, and sagebrush and the next, the woman was standing there, standing a meter in front of him, a compact pistol stretched out in her left hand, pointed between his eyes. She looked different than she had on board Trinity, less the fortune-teller con artist and more the wilderness scout in rough, homespun pants and jacket, a floppy, brimmed hat pulled down over her hair.
“Oh, thank the Lord,” he breathed, coming to his feet and releasing the boy. “I didn’t think we’d find you…”
“Put the gun down,” she repeated, voice harsh, eyes dark and cold, “or I’ll shoot you in the head.”
“Put yours down, Ms. Kane,” Franny insisted. Terrin risked a glance over at her and saw the flechette gun at her shoulder, aimed at Kane. Her stance was wide and she was leaning into the stock, evidencing a training he was surprised to learn she had. “Neither of us want to hurt you or your brother, but we need those data crystals.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Kane said, not lowering her weapon, apparently not as impressed with Franny’s firearms prowess as Terrin was. “Did Salvaggio bring you here?”
“She brought us to Revelation from Trinity,” Terrin confirmed. “We were in her jail, but we escaped and came to try to find you.”
“You escaped,” Kane repeated, straightening, her pistol going to her side, her face twisted into obvious skepticism. “How the hell did you escape her jail?”
“She was trying to get us to go along with helping to find you and get you to give back the data crystals so she could sell them to Starkad,” Terrin explained. He grinned, feeling a bit self-satisfied now that he’d actually found Kane. “I went along with it until she was getting ready to take us out of the cell, then Franny grabbed her gun and we used her to get the vehicle.”
Kane appraised them both, mouth dropping open.
“Mithra’s swinging cod, please tell me the two of you aren’t that stupid. Momma Salvaggio screwed up and let a couple of eggheads like you grab her gun? And I bet there was a unicorn with cotton-candy wings outside, ready to fly you away.” Her voice dripped with scorn as she pulled her brother to her side, draping an arm over his shoulder. Standing side-to-side, it was easy to see the family resemblance in the set of his dark eyes, the narrow jaw and flowing brown hair. He still hadn’t said a word.
“She let you go, you morons. She wanted you to lead her to me, and now you’ve gone and done it.” She used her pistol as a pointer, indicating the stolen rover. “You two get in that damned truck and get out of here before you get the both of us killed. She’s probably tracking it right now.”
“Oh, shit,” Franny hissed, her eyes going wide.
Terrin’s stomach twisted inside out and he rocked back on his heels, filled with a sudden paranoia. Kane was right and he was an idiot. The realization smacked him upside the head and his mouth worked as he tried to formulate an answer and couldn’t.
“Just give us the data crystals and we’ll leave, then,” Franny said. Her voice was harsh and grating, as if she was paving over fear with stubborn anger.
>
“Those crystals go nowhere until I get what I want for them,” Kane shot back. She shook her head. “Besides, handing them to you would be the same as giving them over to Starkad.”
“Then we’re going with you,” Terrin insisted. “We stay with you until we get those data crystals back, like it or not. Your only other alternative is to shoot us, and you’ll have to be fast to get us both.”
“I think I could manage it,” Kane growled, taking a half-step in front of her brother. Terrin’s breath caught and he thought she might actually go through with it, but a noise from back down the dirt road brought all their heads spinning around.
Terrin felt the jolt of alarm before he even recognized the sound for what it was: truck tires. Something was coming.
Kane bit off a heated curse and motioned for them to follow. “All right, damn it,” she acceded. “But we have to go now! Alec!” she called to the boy. “Come on, we’re going!”
She and her brother took off at a jog and Terrin rushed after them, back into the stand of twisted and gnarled trees, adapted from whatever they’d originally been to survive in the arid conditions here on Revelation. They twisted together as if bonding for added protection against the harsh realities of the world, clustered in groups of three or four, their branches so interwoven he could barely tell where one ended and the other began. He nearly tripped half a dozen times over winding roots and half-expected to hear Franny go tumbling over somewhere behind him, but she was somehow able to avoid the arboreal minefield.
Beyond the forest ran another road…well, more of a hiking trail, but parked on it was a vehicle. Smaller than the one they’d stolen, it lacked an open bed for cargo, with just two rows of passenger seats.
“Get in,” Kane barked at them. “But leave behind the guns and everything she gave you. There’s bound to be a tracking device somewhere you wouldn’t even think of.”
Terrin’s face fell. He gestured at himself, then at Franny.
“We…umm…we kind of got these clothes from Salvaggio, too,” he admitted.
Kane rubbed at her face and showed her teeth in a frustrated snarl.
“Lose them, then.”
Terrin’s eyes went wide and Franny’s expression reflected pure horror.
“We’ll get more where we’re headed,” Kane assured them. “Just strip to your skivvies and get in, or I’m leaving you here.”
Terrin opened his mouth to say something, closed it again, looked helplessly over at Franny. She threw her flechette gun to the ground and shrugged out of her borrowed shirt. Luckily, she’d kept her own underwear.
“Don’t just stand there,” she told him. “Get your damn clothes off.”
16
“Have I mentioned how much I love this damn ship?” Kammy murmured, speaking softly, as if the ships orbiting the planet on the main viewscreen could overhear their conversation.
Revelation was a world with a lot of red and brown to go with its blues and whites and greens, not hospitable even if it was habitable. The color combination made the starships floating in geosynchronous orbit over the northern hemisphere stand out plainly in the magnified view from the optical telescopes. A monolithic, silvery wedge sliced across the ruddy mountain ranges separating east from west, the streamlined, overpowered lines of the Starkad heavy cruiser Sleipner, the most dangerous ship in their fleet. Beside it, recklessly close in astronomic terms at only a couple of thousand kilometers away, was the mercenary starship, a bulk freighter converted with welded-on armor and shoehorned weapons systems. She was vaingloriously named the privateer Fortune, though it wasn’t clear if she had, as of yet, earned one for Momma Salvaggio.
“It feels unnatural, somehow,” Katy Margolis declared, scowling at the holographic image from where she and Logan hung off the bridge safety railing. “How can they not see us?” She shrugged, the motion bringing her down toward the deck rather than raising her shoulders. “I mean, even without a fusion drive, we have to be running hotter than the background.”
“We are,” Tara Gerard confirmed, sounding awfully smug about it, Katy thought. Well, maybe she ought to be. She’d worked as hard as anyone to get this ship ready for action while Katy and Logan had been canoodling on the coast. “If we shut down the field, we’d be visible on thermal if they were looking. But the field distorts our thermal signature along the spacetime that propagates it. So even if they happened to turn their scanners this way just to check the jump-point, they’d see a spread out, wonky reading that wouldn’t look anything like a starship.”
“Of course,” Kammy interrupted good-naturedly, “that only works until we get close enough for the distortion to be really noticeable against the background. Then they’re gonna figure out something’s messed up. But it’s better than sending up a signal flare every time we wanna move in any direction, like before.” He grinned, what was usually a very amiable smile, but this time seemed more wolfish than usual. “We could still be on top of them before they ever realized what was happening, blast right through their reactor and send them tumbling right out of orbit. Make a great light show for the locals when they re-enter.”
“Whoa, Kammy,” Lyta Randell spoke up for the first time since they’d jumped into the system. Katy wondered if it still hurt her to talk—the bruising on the side of her face and jaw hadn’t faded yet. Katy felt a twinge of empathy followed by one of remembered pain and trauma from her captivity on Ramman, what seemed a lifetime ago now. “It might be satisfying to blow the shit out of a Starkad cruiser, but it’s also an act of war.”
“We blew the shit out of the Valkyrian,” Tara pointed out, reasonably Katy thought. “Well, she did, anyway,” the Tactical officer corrected herself, nodding over toward Katy. “How’s this any different?”
“The stakes, Lt. Gerard,” Acosta put in, emphasizing her newly-minted rank, probably to remind her she was officially, if secretly, in the Spartan Navy now. Acosta had been hanging back near the hatchway to the bridge, but as he spoke, he pushed forward closer to the holographic display. “At Terminus, we were securing a vital asset that could have turned the course of the history for all five of the Dominions, and there was no other choice than to prevent knowledge of its location from getting out. This is different.”
“It is different,” Logan agreed. Katy noticed he’d let the rest of them debate it while he sat back and listened to the merits of each argument before commenting and she tried to hide a proud grin. He was picking up the little tricks of being a commander. “For one thing, there are a planet full of witnesses here who know that ship is in orbit. If we come in and knock it out of orbit, Starkad will find out. And then, my father will have to either offer up Wholesale Slaughter—and us—as a sacrificial lamb, or we’ll be looking at open war with Starkad.” He shook his head. “And right now, I don’t know who’d win.”
An idea was forming in her head and she launched into it, hoping the threads would come together as she spoke—something she was much readier to do when it was just them than when she was in front of the top brass.
“We could come in off the ecliptic,” she mused, “where they wouldn’t expect to see a ship approaching. With our reduced and distorted thermal signature, they probably wouldn’t even see us. Then we could insert into orbit on the opposite side of the planet from their ships.” She shrugged. “We could launch a drop-ship from there, let it go in nap-of-the-earth under their sensor nets.”
“That’s not bad,” Logan said, eyes on the screen as he nodded slowly.
“They’ll have satellite coverage,” Acosta warned.
“They do have satellite coverage,” Tara confirmed, pointing at her sensor display. “Two in polar orbits, one in a geosynchronous orbit over Revelation City and another in a low planetary orbit.”
“I can temporarily blind the birds that could spot us,” Tara offered. “Just using the lasers. By the time they get their image back, the drop-ship will be under the cloud level and we’ll be out of orbit.”
“We can go into or
bit around their moon,” Kammy suggested, indicating the craggy, captured asteroid on the computer simulated display of the system. “Keep it between us and the Starkad cruiser.” He shook his head. His short dreads waggled back and forth in the microgravity. “Even if we can sneak you in, though, sneaking back out’s going to be the hard part.”
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Logan decided, and she heard the finality in his words. He shot her a glance, grinning playfully. “You up to flying the drop-ship?”
She snorted, returning the smile.
“Try and stop me.”
Terrin scratched at his chest through the rough, homespun material of his new shirt, eyeing the ragged hand-me-downs ruefully. The clothes Salvaggio had given them at the jail hadn’t been much, but the ones the people they’d met in the canyon had found for them were a definite step down. Franny didn’t seem any happier with the clothes than he was, and a good deal less comfortable with the company they were keeping.
Given the suspicious glares and dirty looks the people gathered under the lean-to were giving the two them, that went both ways. He couldn’t have told anyone where they were if they’d threatened him at gunpoint, so circuitous had been the route Kane had taken to the isolated canyon, just one winding dirt road after another, some of them through clefts in the rock he could have sworn were too small for her beat-up little rover to squeeze through, and half of them in darkness with no headlights. Yet when they’d arrived, there had already been a welcoming committee waiting for them, upwards of thirty people, most of them either old or young. It was hard to judge on a backwards Periphery colony with not much in the way of modern medical treatment, but he was fairly certain no one he’d met in the camouflaged lean-to was between eighteen and fifty. And not a one was glad to meet them.