by Daniel Young
“We aren’t going to Zenith,” Lana snapped. “I told you that.”
“Maybe you’d like to go to Urval instead,” Quort rumbled.
“You’re out of your head,” Liri countered. “No one in their right mind would want to go there.”
“You can drop us off at Zenith and Quort at Urval,” Jackson called over his shoulder. “Then you and Lana can ride off into the Keter sunset in the Blackout for all I care.”
“Woolzi take the Blackout,” Woolzi cheeped. “Good smuggling ship.”
Liri cocked her head and studied him. “You’re right, Woolzi. It is a good smuggling ship. We could go around to the Kizcury Transit Hub and clean up.”
Jackson straightened up and turned all the way around to confront this group with whom he was now saddled. “You can clean up anything you like as soon as you take us back where we belong and drop off anyone else who wants to be dropped off. That includes Quort, and if I think there’s any chance you won’t do him right in our absence, we’ll fly to Urval first and go to Zenith second before you fly away to fame and glory.”
“Fame and glory,” Liri mused. “It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Jackson went on. “I’m going downstairs to do a complete inventory on this ship. I don’t want to run into the Keter Legion or the Krakzid or anybody else without knowing exactly what resources we have at our disposal. Quort, you and Liri and Lana are coming with me.”
“What about me?” Roy countered. “What am I supposed to do—stand in the corner?”
“That would be an improvement on running your mouth,” Lana barked.
Jackson nodded toward the pilot’s station. “You stay here and make sure our furry friend here doesn’t get any bright ideas about sneaking off to Doing-Doing or wherever behind my back.”
Roy cracked a grin and called over to Woolzi. “You hear that, you big teddy bear? You mind your manners and follow captain’s orders, or no Doing-Doing for you.”
Woolzi laughed. “Dear old Doing-Doing.”
Jackson swatted Roy’s shoulder. “Pay attention, Roy. I’m trusting you. Keep an eye on him, and keep an eye on our trajectory. Stop him if you see him deviating at all.”
“You betcha.” Roy sauntered to the pilot’s station and took his place at Woolzi’s shoulder.
Jackson pointed at the other three. “Let’s move out. The sooner we do this, the sooner we can all go our separate ways.”
Quort ambled toward the exit with much glaring and sulking at the rest of his erstwhile crew. Liri and Lana hesitated and then followed him, a little less than willingly.
Jackson started to leave the cockpit when Roy caught his arm. Roy restrained him and whispered in his ear. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Which part? Going back to Zenith or inventorying our supplies before we get into another fight?”
Roy nodded toward the rest of the crew. “I mean them. She’s a lot stronger than you think. She isn’t burdened by any blood debt for you anymore, and the other two don’t have any love for you. They’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”
Jackson looked between Roy and the retreating twins. Roy was talking about Liri. While Jackson watched, Liri paused on the threshold to look back at him. Her eyes swam in a field of semi-nonexistent blood vessels, muscles, and the phantom shape of her skull under the skin. He could even see her teeth through her cheek.
Of everyone on the crew besides Roy, Jackson trusted her the most. She might just as soon kill him as look at him, but somehow he didn’t think so. Maybe the simple fact that he’d saved her life and now she’d repaid the favor counted for something in this crazy old world.
Her sister was a completely different ball of wax. Jackson didn’t trust Lana as far as he could throw her. She was dangerous. Lana would turn on anyone without thinking twice. Liri might be the one person alive that Lana actually felt any loyalty for at all. As far as Jackson was concerned, Lana wasn’t capable of loyalty for anyone else, and she might not even be capable of loyalty to her sister. That wouldn’t surprise him one bit.
Then there was Quort. Surly, abrasive, suspicious—what could you expect from a creature taken to another planet as a slave? God only knew what the poor guy had witnessed and suffered since leaving Urval.
Quort had one thing going in his favor that the others didn’t. He wanted out. He wanted to get as far away from Keter as possible. He would fight and die to do it. He shared that with Jackson and Roy. Jackson could count on Quort to put all his strength and energy into the project, which tipped the balance in Jackson’s favor.
Woolzi was a wild card if ever one existed. Jackson expected the creature to do anything, no matter how outlandish, at a moment’s notice, just for the excitement of seeing what would happen. Jackson had dealt with Silden before, and they always acted this way. The Silden had a reputation among captains and crews of the Zenith Militia. They were the worst tricksters and mischief-makers anyone ever had the misfortune to deal with.
Right now, Jackson had this inventory in front of him. He was leaving Woolzi in Roy’s charge, which wasn’t what he’d like to call a safe bet, either. Still, he couldn’t leave Woolzi alone, or put anyone else in charge of him.
Liri gazed back at him with her clear eyes. The light shone through her skin and made her irises sparkle. Jackson was leaving the cockpit with her. He made a decision then and there to trust her. If Lana tried anything downstairs, Jackson would have Quort to help him, and hopefully Liri, too.
He shook Roy’s hand off his arm. “It’ll be okay. You let me handle them. You take care of up here.”
11
Jackson checked the Blackout’s layout on his way down the catwalk. The upper deck consisted of crew quarters, the captain’s office, the commissary, the infirmary, and a recreation hall. All these compartments were deserted, and mostly stripped of anything valuable. What could you expect after years in storage?
He found Lana and Quort standing nose to nose at the bottom of the stairs …or they would have been nose to nose, if Lana had been tall enough to come up to Quort’s nose.
She didn’t come up to his chin, but she propped her chest right against his muscled torso and glared up at him through eyes narrowed to slits. They spat and hissed at each other, but they kept the words low and hardly vocalized. Jackson didn’t hear what they were saying. He didn’t need to. They both kept their hands on their weapons, ready to draw at any second.
Liri leaned against a wall, inspecting her fingernails. Jackson barged up to the adversaries. “Any guesses where they keep the handheld weapons on this coop?”
Liri jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Second from the left. Fifth through ninth from the end, you’ll find acylated Smiasmiam in five-thousand-sog drums.”
Jackson raised an eyebrow at her. “How do you know so much about this ship?”
“You don’t spend as much time as we have on stolen Legion vessels without learning how they do things. The Smiasmiam is on an automated feed track. As soon as one drum runs low, the track empties it into the new drum and changes the feed to the new supply. The ship won’t stop running until the system uses up the last drum to the last acylated drop.”
Jackson headed for a bank of panels in the aft wall. Some clear substance showed him racks of weapons inside, but he didn’t see any way to open them. “How do you open it?”
“There’s a code lock under the door rim there at the bottom. It’s keyed to the crew’s fingerprints. You won’t be able to open it.”
Jackson shot her a scowl. “Thanks a million for telling me before we came all the way down here to check.”
She pivoted to one side. Quort and Lana hadn’t moved. They kept glaring at each other in murderous hate.
Liri stuck her fingertips under the rim of another seam between matched steel plates in the wall. She pressed her fingertips into it, and it popped open, revealing what looked like a speaker underneath. “Woolzi, can you unscramb
le the code lock on the weapons storage stock?”
Woolzi’s voice chirped through the speaker. “Code lock—yes!”
The panel in front of Jackson unlocked, and the door hinged back to reveal all those weapons lined in rows. Jackson surveyed them. They were all the little handheld devices he and his crew had picked up on the planet’s surface—both the carrot style and the disc style.
He took one down and studied it. “How exactly do these things work?”
Liri pushed herself off the wall and strode to his side. She pointed to the button on the side. “This is the main firing mechanism. You can adjust the pulse by turning this bezel here. If you press the button down past the trigger, it will lock into place, which starts the countdown timer.”
“How long is the timer?”
“Five seconds.”
“Is the timer blast any stronger than a regular pulse?”
“Twenty times more powerful.” She sauntered back to her place and propped her shoulder against the wall. “When you fire a regular pulse, the weapon reserves some Smiasmiam for future shots. When you use the countdown timer, it detonates all the Smiasmiam in one burst.”
“That makes sense.” He put the weapon back and opened the next cabinet. It contained a collection of cannons and capsules labeled Smiasmiam: Caution: Combustible.
Another cabinet revealed repair equipment and other goods, arranged on racks where Jackson could see everything clearly. He shut the cabinet and headed for the fuel drum storage. “Let’s check the feed track and make sure there’s nothing wrong with it.”
He put out his hand to release the code lock. “You don’t want to do that,” Liri called from her place.
“Why not? We have to make sure the ship is completely operational, with no malfunctions.”
“You’ll be sorry if you do.”
“Why? We always did a complete ship-wide inspection of all systems before deploying in the Militia.”
“This isn’t the Militia. If air hits the drums, the Smiasmiam will become contaminated, and it will gum up the whole feed track. The ship will be dead in the water.”
Jackson pulled his hand away. “Oh.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the feed track. If there was, it would show up in the cockpit. Woolzi wouldn’t say the ship was operational if it wasn’t.”
Jackson frowned at the fuel storage compartment. He didn’t like this, but he supposed he had to accept it. He turned away with an effort. “I still don’t understand how you know so much about Legion vessels when you aren’t in the Legion. The Legion considers you renegades, which means you were once one of them.”
Liri laughed and smacked her knuckles against her sister’s shoulder. “Do you hear that, Lana? He wants to know how we know so much when we aren’t in the Legion.”
Neither Lana nor Quort moved. “I heard,” Lana muttered.
“If you know so much,” Jackson went on, “maybe you can show me around the rest of the ship.”
“There’s nothing to see. You’ve seen it all.” She waved her hand at the lower deck on which they stood. “These Rebels are simple, but powerful. That’s their beauty. There’s nothing to ‘em but the upper and lower decks—and the discharge ramp.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just a rear departure shaft for the Skeeter—which, in case you were wondering, is a reconnaissance craft for small maneuvers.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. What else is on the discharge ramp?”
“That’s it. The two decks, the discharge ramp, and the cockpit. That’s all there is to the whole ship.”
“Don’t forget the crew quarters, the infirmary, the captain’s office, the commissary, and the recreation hall,” Jackson said.
She shrugged again. “Like I said, there’s nothing to it.”
“So…is the Skeeter hooked up to the cockpit readings, too? Can Woolzi check if it’s completely operational or not?”
She looked up and inclined her head to one side, studying him. “You know, I never really thought about it. I don’t know much about the Skeeters. I never flew one.”
“You and Lana head down there and check it out. Set up a line of communication with Woolzi and go over the Skeeter with a fine-toothed comb. Make sure it’s fueled up and ready to rock if we need it.” Jackson tapped Quort’s elbow. “Come up to the cockpit with me, Quort. I want to talk to you about getting you back to Urval.”
Neither Quort nor Lana budged. If anything, they only glared at each other harder and more venomously.
“Quort!” Jackson snapped. “Let’s go.”
Liri stepped in. She took her sister by the sleeve and towed her away. “Come on. Let’s go downstairs. If we’re gonna fly all the way to Zenith and then all the way to Urval before we get home, we might as well do something while we wait.”
Jackson dragged Quort upstairs. The moment they stepped onto the catwalk outside the cockpit, Quort halted. No amount of pulling on Jackson’s part would make him move.
Quort cast a wary glance over his shoulder. “You make a mistake trusting those two.”
“What’s wrong with ‘em? I mean, apart from the fact that they want to hijack the ship and take the rest of us back to Keter, I don’t see anything wrong with ‘em. Liri seems reasonable enough, and Lana is understandably ticked about being taken away from Keter without her permission. You of all people should be able to understand that.”
“I understand more than you,” Quort snarled. “These renegades hold no loyalty to anyone but their own selfish lust for profit.”
“Is that what the Legion tells you about them? Enemies always paint each other as worse than they are. You heard what Lana said about you.”
Quort curled his lips back from jagged teeth. “The Legion doesn’t tell me anything. I trust no one but my own senses. I’ve seen these renegades do things that prove it.”
“Did you see Liri and Lana do it, or someone else? If they don’t recognize any law but themselves, then you can’t hold these two responsible for the actions of others. Liri saved my life in repayment of a blood debt. That tells me that she’s at least capable of some conscience and loyalty.”
“And the other one?”
Jackson shrugged and turned away. “It looks to me like they’re joined at the hip, so maybe Liri will be a positive influence on her sister.”
“You would trust all our lives to that?”
“I don’t trust our lives to anything.” Jackson started for the cockpit door again, but he stopped before going through it. Quort’s words struck home. He turned back and studied Quort. “If you feel that strongly about it, maybe we should go down to the discharge ramp and check on them.”
“There is no maybe.”
“All right. Let’s go. Do you know where the discharge ramp is?”
“If you say we should check on them, we should do it covertly. There is a maintenance footbridge between the bulwark gable and the interjection lever. We can see them from there, without them seeing us.”
Jackson waved behind Quort. “If you know that much, you know a lot more than I do. Lead the way.”
Quort went back down the stairs to the lower deck. He led the way to the far end beyond the fuel feed track and opened one of the many panels. “This passage leads to the footbridge above the discharge ramp. From there, we can look down on the Skeeter and see if the twins are carrying out your orders.”
Quort climbed inside. How he fit his massive frame in such a tiny space, Jackson couldn’t imagine. Quort crawled into the shadows, and Jackson wedged himself in behind the giant Urval.
Quort didn’t have any trouble dragging himself away. Jackson had to struggle to keep up with him. He had no idea how far he had to go before they came to the discharge ramp.
Now that Quort had infected him with doubt, he dreaded what he would find down there. Were the twins planning something even now? Jackson rummaged through everything he knew about them, which wasn’t much.
He’d saved them from
the Legion. It might have been unintentional, but he’d saved them nonetheless. They’d saved him and Roy from the Legion—at least, Liri had—and that was definitely intentional. Then they’d led him to the runway to find this ship. They were in this pickle now because they’d helped him.
He didn’t notice Quort had stopped until he bumped into the creature. “What’s going on? What’s the holdup?”
Quort stretched out in the crawl space, not moving. He muttered to himself under his breath. “Something’s wrong.”
“What is it?”
“Stay here,” Quort told him. “I need to check something.”
He inched forward much slower. Jackson got a look at his face when Quort turned sideways and examined the attachment bolts on the side of the wall by his head.
“What’s the problem?” Jackson asked. “Is this more important than spying on the twins?”
Quort grimaced. “These bolts are broken off. Those witches sabotaged them to stop us from seeing what they’re up to.”
Jackson’s stomach turned, but the next second, he discarded the notion. “That’s impossible. They wouldn’t have time, and they wouldn’t know we would come this way.”
“They must have. They want to kill us all.”
“Knock it off. Look.” Jackson scooted to Quort’s side. “See that? There’s rust around the bolt heads. This ship has been parked in storage for years. If the bolts are damaged, they could have gotten rusted from the weather or…or from anything. Liri and Lana only left the lower deck a few minutes ago. There’s no way they could know we were going to come down here to check on them. We only made the decision just now. Think about it, man.”
Quort scowled at him a moment longer. Then he turned away. “Fine. Have it your way.”
He started crawling again. Jackson took a firm grip on himself and got ready to follow. He’d never dealt with a crew like this before. The Zenith Militia was a cohesive, friendly, close-knit operation where everyone did their part. Discipline problems resulted in instant action and even expulsion from the Militia.