Just keep telling yourself that, Rachael, she thought harshly. The last thing you need to do is fall for the shmuck.
It didn't take her twenty minutes to get ready, but the man was waiting for her by the airlock when she arrived anyway. He was dressed in black, as usual. He was really too pale to be wearing such somber colors all the time. At least his clothes didn't look at as out of place as the ones he usually wore; this was almost a uniform. Rachael shook her head and led him through the docking tube into the habitat. He sure as hell wasn't discreet, whatever he was.
She stumbled across the threshold into the docking bay. Kara-Nor didn't quite have Earth-normal gravity after all, it seemed. She was irritated that none of her people had bothered to tell her. She turned to warn her passenger, but he glided smoothly across the mismatched interface with the same grace with which he always moved, and her irritation shifted to him. No one had the right to be that graceful. It wasn't natural.
The interior of the habitat wasn't what she had expected. She'd been inside many orbital habitats in her travels, but this one had to be the dirtiest, most depressing one she'd ever seen. Many people lived in poverty on Federation worlds, but here they seemed to be at a whole new low. Piles of rusting equipment and trash littered the hallways. The air stank, and her head began to throb: low oxygen. Instead of the spacious, airy openness of most asteroid habitats, Kara-Nor was a maze of narrow, low-ceilinged corridors.
There were actually beggars along the docks.
"Interesting place," her passenger said. "I think I could learn to like it."
She just turned and stared at him for a moment. There had been genuine interest in his voice, but no compassion. He might have been discussing a vid he'd seen an advert for, for all the emotion he put into it. It only reinforced her sense of something alien about him.
"I think I need a drink," Rachael said.
"That sounds like an excellent suggestion."
"I’m glad you agree." She made it clear from her tone that she didn't care what he thought. It bounced off him like every other insult.
Rachael walked along the line of docks until she found a spacer's bar. It was even more of a dive than she was accustomed to. Several unmoving bodies lay near the door; she wasn't sure they were alive and didn't care to touch any of them to find out. She settled her coilgun on her hip. This was something she could handle. She'd been in hundreds of these places, and they were all the same.
Her passenger drew a few looks as they entered, if only because he didn't look like a typical starship crewman. His lack of visible weapons may be a problem, she thought. Why didn't I think to give him a gun? Rachael found an unoccupied table and settled with her back to the wall. The man hesitated briefly before sitting down. It was the first time Rachael had seen him look uncomfortable.
"Something wrong?" she asked.
"I prefer to have my back to a wall," he replied.
"Yeah, me, too."
He shrugged and glanced around the room, frowning. He settled gingerly into the chair across from her.
A tired-looking woman came over to the table after a few minutes. "What'll it be?"
"Local brew," Rachael answered. "Two," she added when it didn't look like her passenger was going to speak up.
"Right," the barmaid said. "Two glasses of miner's piss coming up." She stalked off to the bar.
"I assume that isn't meant literally," the man said.
"I wouldn't bet on it," said Rachael. She was covertly watching a man who seemed unduly interested in their table. "Not in a place like this."
"I truly hope that you are trying to be funny."
"Yeah, that’s me, a comedian."
The barmaid reappeared with two dirty glasses filled with a cloudy, vile-smelling amber fluid. Rachael tossed her a couple of credit chits and sighed. At least the stuff was probably potent.
Her passenger simply looked at the glass quizzically. Rachael was once again struck by how strange he was.
"What's wrong?" a gruff, drunken voice said. "Our beer not good enough for ya?" The man she'd had her eye on earlier was standing behind her passenger.
This ought to be interesting, she thought.
She didn't know how right she was.
"Well?" the drunk local demanded.
"We just got our drinks," Rachael said reasonably. "My passenger isn't feeling well. Why don't you let me buy you one?" She held out a chit.
"I wasn't talking to you, bitch!"
Her passenger stood up quickly then. Actually, he seemed to flow up out of his chair. He was a full head taller than the drunken man. "I believe you owe the lady an apology."
Oh, boy, she thought. "Let's all calm down, okay? He's ferschnicket," Rachael said, waving her hand. "He's drunk; let it go."
No one was listening to her.
"The apology," her passenger said. "I'm waiting." It seemed that the lights dimmed then, or the shadows thickened around him, or something. Rachael was never sure afterward exactly what she had seen. Fear hit her like a dark wave.
"Fuck you," the drunk sputtered, and shoved the tall man -- or tried to, anyway.
Her passenger didn't even sway. "I'm waiting," he said again. His voice had a cold, hard edge to it.
"Wait in hell!" the drunk shouted, drawing his stubby-barreled gun.
There were cries of alarm as people dove out of the way, but no one seemed inclined to interfere.
Caught off guard, Rachael was still reaching for her pistol when the drunk screamed. She hadn’t expected things to sour so quickly. His scream stopped her as she was rising. It was the most soul-wrenching sound she had ever heard, born of terror and pain beyond anything the human mind was capable of dealing with.
The suddenly – unfortunately for him – sobering man was staring at the stump of his hand where something was attached. His gun was gone. A grey, scintillating mass slowly crawled up his arm, devouring tissue and bone alike. It didn't stop there, either, and Rachael had to look away as the mass spread over him and his screams became less human and simply the bleating of a dying animal.
Her passenger was watching with an odd look in his eyes, his head slightly tilted. Other people were screaming now, too. Rachel grabbed her passenger's arm. He turned on her with a look that almost made her run screaming herself.
"We need to get of here before the habitat police show up. They don’t take kindly to killing."
He nodded sharply and gestured for her to lead the way. She'd expected him to say something, but he looked contemplative.
They made it back to the ship without incident. Rachael cycled the lock and then turned on her passenger.
"Okay, what the hell did you do to him?" she demanded.
"I killed him," the man answered simply.
"Yeah, but you used some weird nanotech weapon on him or something!" Rachael was nearly hysterical. She wasn't usually fazed so much by death; she'd seen her share of it. But the way that drunk had been killed filled her with disgust and revulsion. She had never seen anything so horrifying. The cold smile of satisfaction on her passenger's face as he watched was the worst part.
"I should not have done what I did, but what is done is done. I can no more take it back than I could have made him be civil in the first place."
"I want to know what exactly you did to him!"
"No, you don't." There was gleam in his eyes that sickened her.
"No?" she asked. She swallowed convulsively against her suddenly heaving stomach. She was badly shaken, no longer as sure as she had been. "You'll tell me if you want to continue being my passenger. I'll not have something like that loose on my ship."
"You have little choice but to take me where I wish to go," the man said. "We have an agreement. Or do I need to make alternate arrangements?"
She was certain that there was a threat inherent in his quiet words. She had no doubts at all that he would kill her if she didn't comply with his demands. What have you gotten yourself into, Rachael?
"No," she whispered.
"No, what?"
"No, you don't need to make alternate arrangements. I was distraught. We'll leave as soon as we can."
"Very good. I'll be in my quarters."
Chapter Twenty-Five
"We should declare war on the bastards now!"
"May I remind you that it was our ships that started shooting first?" Admiral Meleeka said testily.
"Kasimira," Admiral Pyotr Kazakov said in a tone that set her teeth on edge, "are you discounting all of the ships that have been lost in recent years in 'unexplained' incidents? I think it is clear that the Concord possesses advanced technology, possibly alien in nature, which it is using to slowly eat away at the strength of our Fleet like a cancer."
"There has never been any proof that those attacks are linked to the Concord," Meleeka said, "and plenty of proof that says otherwise."
Kazakov's aide whispered into his ear.
"I have sources that say otherwise, Kasimira."
"Well, Pyotr," she said delicately, "as director of Fleet Internal Security, I can tell you that I haven't seen anything that suggests it is true. If you have some hard proof, then present it."
Kazakov frowned. "I don't have anything concrete. I've simply heard things." He shrugged.
"And on the basis of that hearsay, you ordered the search and seizure of Concord shipping – and to shoot if necessary – which is what has gotten us into this little problem."
"I'd say sixty-two thousand dead was more than a little problem," Admiral Kiyoshi Akimoto interjected.
"I wasn't trying to trivialize the loss of our personnel, Kiyoshi."
Admiral Wincenty Ludwiczak was director of Naval Intelligence. He was usually quiet at these meetings, but now he spoke up. "I wish we knew what the Concord was thinking. My sources indicate that they've had unexplained losses of their own. I don't think they blame us for those losses. I do know they are aware of sentiments here in the Federation." He carefully didn't look at Meleeka when he said it, but he knew she'd been in contact with her counterpart in the Concord. "They are prepared to defend themselves from us if necessary. They feel there is an alien threat out there that we are ignoring, possibly within our own Fleet."
Kazakov shot him a look of pure hatred. "Of course they'd say it was aliens or something. They know all about aliens, don’t they? This business at Sabine was the final straw. How did they think we'd react to such unprovoked aggression?"
"I'd hardly call it unprovoked," Meleeka said. "And I expect they think we will react reasonably to the attack. The message they sent prior to the attack made it clear that this was a reprisal for all of the merchant ships we've destroyed or seized. They are sending us a message."
"And what message would that be?" Kazakov sneered.
"That they can hurt us, badly, anytime they want to. They used antimatter for a reason, Pyotr. We can't even salvage the wreckage at Sabine. We also know they didn't use the most advanced ships or weapons that they could have for the raid. They are warning us to stop attacking their ships. Considering that you ordered the Fleet to destroy civilian ships, we're lucky they didn't respond with an antimatter strike to the civilian population at Sabine. It would have been justified under the articles of war."
Several of the admirals at the table winced at that, although Kazakov looked like he would have preferred it. It was very true that the Concord could have done just that. Antimatter strikes would have killed most of the population on the planet instantly, and the rest would have died within a year from nuclear winter and radiation poisoning. It would have made Sabine uninhabitable for at least a thousand years.
Utopia, in the Groombridge 1618 system, stood in mute testimony to the ferocity of such weapons. Utopia had been the site of the bloodiest machine uprising in human history. It was the reason sentient artificial intelligences, usually referred to as machine intelligences, were banned in the Earth Federation. Three billion people had died there, seared away by a rogue machine intelligence in liberated energy from antimatter strikes or smothered under the clouds of radioactive dust. The planet was quarantined, since it appeared that the machines were still active there. They had burrowed deep into the crust of the planet, safe from orbital strikes. The fact that the Concord promoted machine intelligences was another strike against them -- one of many.
"We can't just let them get away with this," Kazakov said angrily.
"I'm sure that's just what their admirals said," Meleeka replied.
"I think a reasonable response would be to back off slightly," said Akimoto. He hurried on before Kazakov's indignation could ripen. "We stop destroying their ships, but we close our ports to their merchants. I think if we just ignore them, we can hurt them quite badly with a simple economic boycott."
"And if they send warships into our space?"
"We ask them to leave, but otherwise ignore them like any other Concord ship, unless they make an overtly aggressive move. Then if they attack us, we'll have full justification for going to war with them, and we just might be able to sway public opinion to support the war."
Consciousness came to Jennifer as suddenly as it had left her. She was sitting on the floor, propped against the wall behind the bar. The black-haired woman was perched on the bar. Jennifer's pistol was next to the woman. The woman's tattoos were gone, and her skin was a dark olive that made her bright blue eyes really stand out. Jennifer cautiously raised her hand to her head. She felt like she'd been hit with a log.
"What the hell did you hit me with?" she asked.
The woman smiled and pointed to Jennifer's left.
"Fuck!" she shrieked. There a monster there.
"I thought I wasn't your type," the woman said. "May I introduce you to Ghost? She's a neo-panther. Not a monster." She dropped down off the bar to squat in front of Jennifer. "You're Jennifer Patterson, a member of the resistance here on Atlonglast."
"Who the hell are you?" Jennifer gasped. Now that the shock had worn off, the neo-panther was actually quite beautiful, in a scary kind of way. She'd never seen a cat that big before.
"Lt. Commander Tonya Harris, Sentient Concord Special Operations."
"Wait a minute," Jennifer said. "Sentient Concord?"
"You've heard of us, surely."
"Of course I've heard of the Concord," Jennifer snapped. Her head was killing her. "What I meant was, why the hell are you here?"
"I'm not really here to drink and fuck," Tonya said with a smirk. "Not that it doesn't sound like fun. I'm here because you're having a problem, and the Concord wants to understand what exactly is going on." She held out her hand and helped Jennifer to her feet; she was surprisingly strong.
"What do you mean, we have a problem?"
Tonya poured them both drinks. "Doesn't it seem that things keep going wrong, no matter how hard you try to fix them?"
Jennifer shrugged and sipped her drink. Normally she avoided the rotgut, but just now it seemed like a good idea.
"Let me put it this way," Tonya said. "Is there anyone around who doesn't seem to fit in? Someone that makes you uneasy, even though they haven't done anything directly that bothers you. You just think there's something wrong with them?"
Jennifer immediately thought of Cassandra. "What if there is someone?" she asked.
"We need to move cautiously, then. Is it just one person? Or several?"
"Look," said Jennifer. "No offense, but I don't know who the hell you are. You come in here and smash me over the head, and then you want me to trust you?"
Tonya smiled broadly. "Yes."
Jennifer shook her head. "Unbelievable." She tossed back the glass of whiskey, gasping as it hit her in the stomach like a punch. "Let's just say that there is someone who makes me uncomfortable. What then?"
"Is there anyone else you trust?" Tonya asked. "Besides me, of course."
"You are... I don't have words." Jennifer filled her glass again. She was going to regret it in the morning, but she had to make it till then for that. "There are a couple of people that I think m
ight be right to approach. They're new to the movement, and they have been outspoken about–" She caught herself; she'd been about to name Cassandra. Maybe she should avoid the rotgut. She wasn't ready to go against her. "I think they would receptive to what you have to say."
"Great, where do we find them?"
"We can go to them in the morning."
"Why not now?"
Jennifer shook her head. "There's a curfew in effect. The Feds would pick us up in an instant. Honestly, I don't know how you made it here without getting caught."
"We're very stealthy."
"You're going to have to be. Your…" She gestured at the giant cat.
"Neo-panther," Tonya supplied.
"Yeah. It’s a bit conspicuous."
"She," Tonya said firmly. "Don't worry about her. No one is going to see her."
"She's kind of hard to miss."
"You didn't see her."
"Okay. If you're not worried, I'll try not to be." Jennifer sighed. "Now what?"
"Well, we've had the drink."
Chapter Twenty-Six
The FSS Centaur sat seventeen light-minutes from Dawn. From there, the Concord's pattern of system-wide defenses could be clearly seen, and Captain Singh was glad that he had chosen to enter the system so far out. The Centaur had broadcast their message from Admiral Meleeka as soon as they arrived. He hoped it would be enough to keep the numerous Concord Fleet vessels in the system from destroying his ship and crew.
"I've got thirty-eight contacts, Captain," Chief Petty Officer Elliot McCray reported. "Twenty-four of those appear to be military vessels of various classes up to battle cruiser." The strain in his voice was obvious. The captain had ordered the ship to remain at clear stations, with the weapons powered down and missile ports closed, but that didn't mean McCray had to like it. "Passive sensors are detecting nuclear mines scattered all throughout the system. They are probably bomb-pumped grasers."
"Steady, Chief. Let them come to u–"
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