Tilted Axis

by David Ryker

  She stopped, suddenly, hand hovering over the terminal.

  “What are you doing?” Ward squeezed out, barely able to keep his eyes open.

  “It’ll destroy the ship,” Arza said, an air of calm in her voice. “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  “I can’t — I… I can’t — he’ll —”

  Ward took her hand and slammed it into the terminal before she could stop him.

  The cockpit juddered and a dozen explosions rang out in quick succession.

  Ward’s seat shook violently and the ship tore itself into chunks.

  The cockpit and nose expelled itself from the bloated carcass and flung them into space in a section of the Siljan not much bigger than the dropship they’d used on Aeolus.

  They hurtled forward, end over end, a section of the nose stretching out in front of them, and behind, a chunk of body that made the whole thing shaped like a flying pizza slice.

  The rest of the yacht came into view for a second, one huge golden sail like a crooked wing, the mangled body of the yacht crouched under it, sending chunks into the abyss with every twist.

  The terminal lit up with new instructions and Ward pulled his attention back to it, ignoring Arza’s shouts of indignation at his actions.

  ‘EMERGENCY THRUSTERS ACTIVE - EQUALIZE?’ The last word was flashing, a button beneath the heading.

  Ward didn’t understand exactly what it was asking, but he pressed it anyway.

  The ship snapped sideways all of a sudden, a burst of thrust righting them with neck-breaking force.

  “Jesus!” Arza yelled, her hair slapping her in the face and her arm swinging across and clattering into Ward’s cheek.

  He swore and pulled his hands up, blinking with shock as the little craft somehow pulled itself out of the tailspin and leveled off.

  A loud, positive ding echoed in the cockpit and the screen returned to a more normal color, the warning signs all gone, replaced now with two bars, both over three-quarters full of green. Ward blinked himself clear, letting the blood flow out of his head and back into his body, and stared at them. The one on the right read ‘Fuel’ and the one on the left read ‘Oxygen’. Below the second, a figure was slowly counting down.

  He gingerly took hold of the stick and pulled on it fractionally.

  The push of thrusters somewhere under the cockpit let him know that the emergency craft — a detachable section of the larger yacht, had some sort of thrust system. Though it didn’t seem very strong, and the fuel was limited. Probably a compressed gas setup, he guessed. And as for the oxygen — well, they had whatever was in the cabin, and he assumed what was in an emergency tank somewhere under his feet. All he knew was that he didn’t have much of either left, and the Gate was still a long way off.

  Arza was silent, near catatonic.

  Ward took them around with as much speed as he dared, easing off the throttle and letting their perpetual motion do the rest.

  After a few minutes, he reached out and took Arza’s hand, squeezing gently.

  She turned to him, her eyes wide and sheened with tears.

  “It’ll be okay,” Ward said reassuringly. “We made it.”

  She pulled it out of his grip and looked at it like it didn’t belong to her. “No, it won’t.”

  “I’m sure he’ll understand,” Ward laughed. “I mean, it was life or death, right?”

  Arza’s voice was cold and grave all of a sudden. “I don’t know what you’re laughing about. You were the one flying it.”

  Ward’s laughter died in the air.

  After that, they flew back in silence.

  24

  They limped back through the Gate and straight into a Peacekeeper blockade.

  Ward pulled them to a stop and stared at the horseshoe of ships. There were three on each side, arched around them, blue and red lights flashing on their hulls. In the center was a seventh, much larger ship. A Peacekeeper command vessel. It was about fifteen meters tall, with a central body in an upright cylindrical shape, and two wings that curved from the sides and in, like downward turned jaws of a stag beetle.

  They were maybe only forty meters or so from the lead ship and clear on its bridge, a wrap-around length of glass, were three figures. Ward didn’t recognize two of them, but he knew exactly who they were.

  In the middle, in the same Peacekeeper-gray jumpsuit, albeit studded with medals, decorated with gold filigree and matching epaulets, and a hat with a black visor stretching down over his forehead, a fleet commander stood, hands behind his back. He was a senior officer in the Peacekeepers, and the command ship had been brought out of the nearest space station to accommodate the other two people with him.

  On the left was Moozana, his tall profile and widely domed head apparent even from this distance. He had his arms folded silently, his shoulders pulled down and back in an angry show of posturing.

  But it wasn’t Moozana that was holding Ward’s attention.

  On the other side of the commander, another Martian stood. He wasn’t as tall as Moozana, his head not quite as wide. His high, wrinkled forehead gave way to a more humanoid skull, his wider chin and low jawline making his head seem nearly square, the bald patch on top of his cranium seemingly flat between the pointed corners of his gray ears of hair.

  His long, thin nose seemed to run forever down his face, his thin, darkly pink lips turned down into a snarl, his bushy eyebrows obscuring the burning orbs of his nearly-yellow eyes. He was standing against the glass, hands raised and planted on it, head slightly bowed with rage, shoulders hackled like a cat.

  Even before Arza whispered “Dad,” so quietly that he wasn’t really sure she’d said it at all, Ward knew he was looking at Ferlish Arza.

  After nearly a minute of deathly silence they were hailed and Ferlish Arza’s voice filled the cockpit, the disdain dripping from his voice like acid, each word like a droplet searing Ward’s skin. “Get. Out. Of. My. Ship.”

  Ward set his jaw and exhaled. “Shit.”

  Arza, next to him, was shaking.

  Ward shook his own head and threw off the nerves that had seized him all of a sudden.

  He pulled his communicator from his pocket and laid it on his knee, tapping quickly. In a few swipes he established a link to the lens over his left eye, paused the recordings, and started a data transfer, uplinking to the OCA’s central network automatically so that it transmitted straight to Cootes’ encrypted terminal. All the footage they’d recorded thus far was beaming out. Everything from the shooters’ apartment to Klaymo’s, to the bean, the Solar Club, and of course with Fairbright and at the port. It might just be Ward’s only defense.

  Once the transfer was going through, he added another recipient and started firing the data to Moozana, too. It was all he could do.

  He took a breath and grabbed Arza’s hand, pointing to his eye. “You need to take that out — destroy it. Get rid of it. If they find it on you — well, it’s not going to help your case when you deny you knew I was working with the AIA.”

  Arza touched her cheek. “And what about you?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  Ward tried to smile. “I’ll leave mine in. It won’t record, but I’ve set it to live stream to Cootes.” He forced a laugh. “Who knows, maybe it’ll help him find out which hole they’re about to stick me in. If they don’t just shoot me first, that is. If they don’t think to scrape my eyeballs, he might be able to piece together a location and mount a rescue attempt.” Ward let out a long breath. “Though I doubt he’d try.”

  Arza brought her hand up to her eye to slip the contact lens out and Ward went back to staring at Ferlish, edging the ship forward nice and slowly while the download ticked up toward completion. When it got there he tapped in a code, wiped the communicator clean and felt an intense heat on his leg as the internals liquidated themselves using tiny thermite charges embedded in the device. When the smoke stopped coming up, he gripped each end in his hands and snapped it over his knee. Just for good measure
.

  The commander’s voice came over the airwaves as he did, stern and unforgiving. “We’ll escort you to the Gate. Follow us to lower hangar six.”

  The horseshoe began to disperse around them and the lead ship pulled gently backward and turned, flying down toward the Gate’s Central Terminal, the Martians’ original eight-bulbed colony ship.

  The Peacekeepers hemmed their tiny craft in as they circled around and underneath to what would have been the bottom of the Gate. Though that term was a little incorrect, because of the way that the thing had been built — that being with rotating bulbs that generated artificial gravity on the outer edges — meant that it didn’t really have a ‘bottom’ as such.

  Still, they were guided toward an airlock and ushered into one of the bulbs — the second from the end — and set their ship down on the outer wall, feeling the tug of gravity return as the pressure equalized and the airlock filled with air.

  Ward killed the engines and watched as the command ship settled and the front section began to split, a gangway pushing itself toward the floor between the mandibles.

  Ferlish was already storming down by the time Ward was out of his seat and reaching for the door release.

  The back of the cockpit flapped sideways and the door that had once opened onto a plush corridor now let out into the cold and metal starkness of the hangar. Chunks of singed carpet clung onto the bottom edge and splintered panels of wood hung from the rear, remnants of the larger ship that had endured the explosive exit the escape craft had taken.

  He moved around the corner of the ship and watched Ferlish Arza come at him. He was maybe fifteen centimeters taller than Ward, a little narrower in the shoulders, and probably twenty years older — but he was still moving like a steam engine, his clenched fists swinging at his sides like sledgehammers.

  Ward let out a breath, hardened his stomach in case of a gut shot, and clenched his jaw, making no attempt to block what he knew was coming. He’d seen enough guys walk toward him with that look before.

  Ferlish twisted a little, sliding his left foot forward, dropping his right shoulder. Ward saw it, thought about countering, thought better of it, screwed up his face, and let Ferlish hit him with a heavy right hook.

  His fist hissed in the air, cracking Ward square in the cheek.

  He tried to roll with it a little, at least enough so that his cheekbone didn’t fracture, but not so much that Ferlish wanted to hit him again.

  It didn’t work, though, because Ferlish did.

  The next hit came with his left, a hard uppercut to the gut.

  Ward’s feet left the ground, the wind jumping out of his throat, along with a strange noise he couldn’t remember ever having made before.

  He landed and stumbled sideways to his knee, clutching at his ribs with his left hand, his right swimming in front of him on the floor.

  For an old man, Ferlish could hit like a heavyweight. But Ward supposed that you didn’t get to be a senior advisor in the UMR’s Defense Committee without knowing how to handle yourself.

  Ward tried to speak, but there was no air in him to do so. His heart beat in his ears, his lips forming words his throat couldn’t capitalize on.

  He felt Ferlish’s hand on his collar, the hot moisture of his breath on his ear. He was kneeling next to Ward now, pushing his head toward the ground. Ward’s elbow shook under the pressure.

  “You are finished,” he whispered.

  Ward shivered.

  “You hear me? You are goddamn done. Dead.” He shoved Ward’s head down and pushed himself to a stance, the tips of his polished dress shoes entering Ward’s field of vision.

  While Ferlish straightened his blazer, a five-buttoned, double-breasted Martian formal jacket, Ward desperately resisted the urge to throw his shoulder into the old man’s gut and go to work on his face. It would have given him a flush of sadistic pleasure in the moments before his execution. And yet something in the back of his mind kept him down. A voice telling him to hold back. A voice he’d never heard before. Usually there was a different one saying Punch him and see what happens. But not this time.

  Maybe it was a sense of reason finally beaten into him. Maybe something else. As bad as things were, hitting Ferlish was only going to make it worse. And as much as he hated just rolling over and accepting his fate without a fight, there was still more on the line than just his pride or life — Tremel Chang was still in danger, and Fairbright and Zenith were still bankrolling half of Aeolus and the Bureau to boot. Ward still had some moves left before the game was up yet. He just had to figure out what the hell they were.

  “Dad,” Erica said, now emerging from behind the ship. Her voice sounded distant through the blood-rush in Ward’s head.

  Ferlish’s feet slid out of view and clipped away toward the ship.

  Ward gulped down big breaths, forcing his stomach muscles to uncurl and his lungs to fill.

  “Get on the ship, now,” Ferlish commanded in Martian, throwing his hand toward the Peacekeeper command ship.

  “Dad—”

  “Now, Erica,” he said with the sort of condescension that only a raging parent could muster.

  “No,” she said suddenly, holding firm.

  Ward looked up, seeing her standing there, looking like a child in the shadow of her father, her fists clenched and trembling at her sides.

  “Erica,” her father said again, more definitively this time.

  “No, Dad,” she said. “Stop. Listen.”

  Ferlish’s eyes narrowed, his lips quivering with fury. He didn’t like hearing no, that was for sure.

  Ward pushed himself to his feet and staggered past Ferlish so that he was level with Erica, making sure to put enough distance between her and him that it didn’t further stoke Ferlish’s fire.

  Erica cleared her throat. Ward could smell the fear-sweat on the nape of her neck. “We need to talk—”

  “We’ve talked enough.”

  “No, Dad! There’s a lot going on here that you don’t—”

  “I know everything. I know that you stole my ship. I know that you disobeyed a direct order from Valvet. I know that you went MIA, with… with him.” He flicked a limp wrist at Ward. “I don’t need to know anything else.”

  “Arza,” Ward wheezed at Ferlish, regaining his breath.

  “Don’t you say a damn word,” he spat, switching to English with the fluency of a native.

  “Zenith Reinhardt,” Ward forced out.

  “What?” Ferlish narrowed his eyes.

  “Zenith Reinhardt,” Ward said, wincing. “They’re a corporation who own stakes in Fairbright, in Edelweiss, the—”

  “Company who handles our defense network satellites,” Ferlish cut in bluntly. “And Fairbright are a privatized defense contractor specializing in the production of weaponry.”

  Ward was gobsmacked. “You — you know?”

  Ferlish basically rolled his eyes. “Of course we know. You think that two shades armed with advanced military technology land in the Martian capital and what, the Defense Committee are sitting around with their thumbs up their asses? We know all about the U-LOP and Fairbright. We were in the process of procuring a warrant to search their plant when you blundered in there. Now… there’ll be nothing left to find, seeing as you were kind enough to let them know we were coming.”

  “I—” Ward started before Ferlish cut him off again.

  “Him, really?” He was talking to Erica again now. “You throw in with him? With this blezlach?” He was speaking in English still, probably so that the insults would carry over to Ward, despite them not being addressed directly at him. ‘Blezlach’ was Martian and equated roughly to some sort of infected and bloody anal pustule. It didn’t have a direct translation, but Ward had heard it used as an insult enough times to know which English words were about as offensive. He could think of maybe one. And still, he’d been called worse.

  “Dad…” Erica’s voice was dwindling now.

  “No, Erica — you’ve been
manipulated, and poisoned, and turned against your own kind. This human has filled your head with lies and slanderous accusations, and he’s kept you from us in an attempt to dissuade you from the integrity of your decisions.” He cast a spurious eye at Ward and Arza turned her head to stare at him too.

  Ward was stone.

  Ferlish sighed and unclenched his fists. “Think about what you’re doing. What you’ve done. The city, the yacht… Think about who this man is, and who you are. Are these the decisions you really want to make?”

  In the background, Moozana and the commander came down the ramp, followed by four Peacekeepers. They both looked stoic. Ward couldn’t read Moozana’s expression.

  Two of the Peacekeepers surged forward and Ferlish nodded at Ward. “Take him into custody, immediately — charge him with gross insubordination, espionage, and treason, for starters.”

  Ward didn’t resist as the two of them slapped electromagnetic cuffs on his wrists and clamped them behind his back. The attraction snapped the steel links together and held them tight. Ward grimaced at the pain, but didn’t make a sound. Any attempt to resist would cause the Pettler on Ferlish’s waist to fly out of its holster, and right now it was all about getting out of this alive.

  Ferlish walked forward, his hand rising slowly to cup Arza’s face. “Erica, my love, it’s time to come home. Your sister, your mother — we’re all worried about you. I’m not…” He hung his head and cleared his throat sadly. “I’m not upset about the ship… It’s… It’s okay.” Ward stared at him hard. Damn, he was good. Erica was melting in his hand. “I understand why you did it. And we’ll… we’ll get it all sorted out, don’t worry.”

  Erica started nodding. Slowly at first, and then all at once. “I’m sorry,” she burst out, sobbing twice before pulling her father into a tight embrace.

  All the strength, the determination she’d had fell away. The person Ward had known her to be over the last few days was wiped away in one fell swoop.

  He could see now who Ferlish Arza was, the intelligence and power of will at his disposal. He saw now why Erica was terrified of him and how he’d gotten to where he was. He was a formidable mind, like Moozana, a calculating, cunning, ruthless mind that missed nothing and forgave even less.