by Eric Thomson
He turned his head to look at Avril, see what she had to say and found his answer. Her eyes pleaded silently, and that touched him deep down. She didn't want him to leave, yet didn't want to stand in his way either.
“Does your offer of employment still stand, Captain Ducote?” He asked in a strangled voice.
“Yes, Zack, it does,” she whispered. “But if you want to go back to the Corps, take what Hera is offering. It’s what you deserve.” Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She seemed convinced he would leave her to return to his world.
A band of steel tightened around his heart, and he felt torn in half, between the Marine Corps and Avril Ducote. He no longer doubted that she loved him. She had comforted him two nights earlier when he finally broke under the strain of the last few months. Holding his head tightly against her breast, she had stroked his head and gently talked him through the worst of it. Avril Ducote had shown him understanding, acceptance and tenderness. He couldn't leave her, even though she had set him free, even though he didn't love her as she loved him. Yet.
At that moment, Zachary T. Decker realized that he had finally left the Commonwealth Marine Corps for good. He wanted to face the future with Avril Ducote, and live the life of a free trader, far from the intrigues and the violence Hera Talyn's offer carried. His healing would take a long time, but with Avril, that time would be bearable. He smiled sadly at Talyn.
“Sorry, Commander. I've already accepted a better offer. Avril and I are going to make a go of it.” Zack sensed rather than heard Avril sob and pulled her against him tightly.
Talyn smiled back.
“Somehow, that's what I figured, and I told my superiors you'd turn it down. I guess there’s nothing left but to wish you good luck. You're both extraordinary people who deserve happiness. Your service record will still be amended to read that you voluntarily retired today, at your old rank, after a detail with Intelligence. You'll be getting your back pay, eventually.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
“If ever you change your mind, or want to contact me,” she tossed a small data wafer at him. Zack caught it with his right hand, “the procedure's on there. Remember, the Fleet needs all the friends it can get to stop scum like Amali.”
“Friends like Kinnear?”
“And you, I hope.”
“I'll try commander, but no more manipulation.”
“Promised. Good luck, Pathfinder, Avril. Oh, yes, one last thing. If you go to Trevan's Shipyards at Wyvern, they’ll give you a new rear ramp for Demetria. Trevan's already have a credit note in your name to cover the cost. It's the least we can do.”
“Thank you,” Avril nodded. “Goodbye.”
Without glancing back, Talyn climbed up the ladder and vanished into the frigate's airlock.
Less than an hour later, the two ships separated. Zack and Avril watched from the cockpit as Charles Martel gracefully sailed away, magnificent against the backdrop of stars. With a flash of light, she vanished into hyperspace, off on a new mission.
“Any regrets, darling,” Avril looked at him anxiously, stroking his cheek with the back of her hand.
“No.” Zack sighed. “Sure I wanted to go back, but I don't know if I could have handled it.” He shrugged. “After all this shit, I don't really know who I am anymore, but I do know you're more important than anything else in my life right now. And if I need to find my balance again, I'd rather do it here, with you.”
“I love you too, Zack,” Avril smiled and softly kissed him on the cheek.
“Where are we off to?” He asked.
“Any Outworld will do. We must find a cargo and get the ship working again.”
“Then how about Aramis?”
“Zack!” She eyed him suspiciously. “You're not thinking of taking your friend Tren to task for his little deception, are you?”
“Nah,” he gave her his patented aw-shucks grin, “not at all.”
“I don't believe you, Zack Decker.” She frowned.
“Okay, okay.” He raised his hands in surrender. “So I still think the bastard deserves one on the kisser but don't worry. We'll knock each other around a bit, but after we each put a few good ones in, he'll pull out a bottle of whiskey and we'll get stinking drunk telling each other lies about fights we were both in.”
“You’re bloody impossible, Zack.” She laughed at his disingenuous manner. It proved he was on the mend, and that made her happy. “Course two-one-five mark seven-zero, Mister Decker.”
“Two-one-five mark seven-zero it is, Captain. And if those little green squiggles are more than just decoration, the sublight drives are ready, with the hyperdrives standing by.”
“By God, I do believe we’ll make a true spacer out of you.”
“Only if you know how to teach an old monkey new tricks. What's our heading anyways?”
“Aramis. It sounds as good a place as any to start. I would like to hear more about your past from your friend Tren Kinnear.”
“Just make sure you don't believe everything he tells you. And never take him up on a job offer. I know how dangerous that can be.”
“Yes, but it has some nice side-effects.”
“Aye, Avril, that it does. Perhaps I'll just buy Tren a big drink to thank him. After all, if it weren't for him, we wouldn’t have met.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But somehow, I’m sure we were fated to meet, eventually.”
Before Zack could reply, Avril engaged the hyperdrives and set the autopilot. She rose and held out her hand.
“The ship can sail herself now, Zack. What do you say we celebrate your signing on as first officer and shareholder of Demetria?”
COLD COMFORT (BOOK 2)
Cold Comfort
Copyright 2015 Eric Thomson
Omnibus edition 2017
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published in Canada
By Sanddiver Books
ISBN: 978-0-9948200-4-4
One
“Bastards are learning how to aim. That was the last of the counter-measures.” Frustrated beyond words, he slammed a calloused fist against his console and swore at the empty launcher, at their pursuers, and at the universe in general.
The small freighter shuddered as its failing shields barely blunted yet another anti-ship missile. Alarm sirens blared, warning them of impending system failures all over the ship while the damage control AI fought to stay ahead of the cascade.
“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Her sad eyes nearly broke his heart.
He tried to put on a confident smile, but she wasn’t fooled.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope, love. Those damned assholes don’t have us yet.”
She smiled weakly at his heartfelt use of profanity, fingertips reaching out to touch his cheek with such tenderness that he felt tears welling up.
They’d been waylaid by a pair of pirate sloops on the edge of an unremarkable and mostly uninhabited system in that gray area where neither the Commonwealth Navy nor the bad guys held ultimate sway. Arranging an attack like that, on a fast and nimble trader, was too much work for too little profit, which meant it wasn’t a random piece of interstellar bad luck. Zack Decker’s past had finally caught up with him.
Even though he’d killed the head of the wealthy Amali family, a thoroughly corrupt man who’d been trying to build his own cyborg or more precisely cybug army, there were still plenty of people who wanted his head.
Walker Amali had also been the de facto leader of the Coalition that sought to bring the Outworlds and colonies back under the sway of the dominant central systems. The other members of that conspiracy remained powerful and, more importantly, still had a long reach. It had taken them a year to track down Demetria, as his ship was kn
own, and now it was payback time.
“Shit.” Decker roared in frustration as another warning light turned red. “The aft turret’s done for.”
“And the keel turret isn’t doing much better.”
He slumped back, staring at the tactical schematic. As a former master gunner and sometimes ship weapons specialist, he could read the situation all too well, and it showed him that there was no way out. At least he’d had a year of happiness after turning down the chance to be reinstated in his beloved Marine Corps. Perhaps he should have taken the offer and spared her what was about to come, but it was much too late for regrets.
“Listen,” he locked eyes with the woman who’d become his entire life, “they want me. Those assholes back there are working for the Coalition, if not the Amalis directly. It’s too much of a coincidence to be anything else. We won’t hold on much longer, so I’m going to surrender myself to them. With any luck, they might agree that not having to expend any more ordnance is worth giving you a way out. I’ll climb into the rescue pod and let them pick me up.”
“No.”
“It’s your only chance.”
“No.” Her voice rose to a shout. “I’ll not buy my escape with your life, Zack. I love you too much for that.”
He sighed. The reaction wasn’t unexpected. She might have been scared, but there was a granite core beneath that soft exterior.
“And anyways,” she continued, “they won’t let me go, no matter what. Pirates never leave witnesses behind, so it’s beside the point. We’ll fight it out. Maybe there’s a frigate near enough that heard our distress signal and all we have to do is hold on a little longer.”
Decker shook his head, feeling despair set in. The Navy wouldn’t be sailing to the rescue, not this time. If the Coalition was behind the attack, they’d have made sure to specify an area where no naval patrol was scheduled for some time. Even the Fleet’s operational secrets weren’t safe from them.
He stabbed an angry finger at the communications console.
“Pirate vessels, this is Zack Decker. I know that it’s me you want, and I’m prepared to save you some expensive missiles. If you let my ship go, I’ll surrender.”
“Zack, no!” The plaintive note in her voice was almost more than he could bear.
She needn’t have worried: the only reply was another volley that finally overwhelmed the shields. A powerful energy surge coursed through the hull, tripping safeties and triggering more warning sirens. The light in the cockpit flickered and then went out as the AI redirected the remaining power to critical systems.
Moments later, the marauders’ main guns opened fire and plasma arced through the void. The glowing rounds struck both nacelles hard, and the ship shuddered as they were torn off and sent spinning away.
“We’ve lost the hyperdrives.”
“That means they’re going to board us,” Decker snarled through clenched teeth as he desperately fired back with his pitifully few remaining guns. “If they just wanted us dead, they’d have targeted the main reactor.”
The freighter shook again as more plasma struck, this time destroying the sublight drive nozzles. One of the rounds ate through the metal far enough to activate the fusion reactor’s fail-safe, designed to prevent a catastrophic explosion. With the main power cut, most of the cockpit control panels went dark.
“We’re on battery power only.” Though her voice quivered with fear, she still managed to work through the damage control problems like the seasoned starship captain she was. An unaccountably strange mixture of pride and tenderness turned his guts to water.
“They’ll be launching a shuttle any moment now.” He struggled to push the emotions aside and concentrate on survival. “It’s a good bet they’ll latch on to the main airlock rather than try to cut through the hull. We’ll ambush them there and then fall back towards the hold. Maybe if we make it too expensive, they’ll back off.”
Even as he spoke, they both knew that the pirates would never back off. Not after they’d stalked them for days, waiting for the moment Demetria had to drop out of FTL and recalibrate her drives for the next jump. If they were under contract to the Coalition, they had to produce results or face their own deaths at the hands of professional killers, like those employed by the secretive and deadly Sécurité Spéciale. It was as powerful a motivator as any for the degenerate beings that crew those ships.
Decker stood up and worked his tense shoulders.
“Come on. There’s nothing more we can do here. The AI can handle what little is left.”
He jogged aft, down the passageway to the small armory and pulled out a pair of scatter guns. Though they both carried plasma pistols already, in Zack’s case his beloved Imperial Armaments fifteen-millimetre blaster, taken off a Shrehari raider years before, dealing with the boarding party would require something more substantial.
“Here.” Decker held out one of the stubby, shotgun-like weapons and a box of ammunition. She took it and worked the action, making sure it was ready to fire. He slung the other one over his shoulder and then took a pair of plasma rifles off their racks, along with power packs and ammunition clips.
“We’ll use the scatter guns when they step out of the airlock. It’s too tight for plasma down there. The rifles will come in handy when we draw them into the hold, where there’s more space to fight.”
A loud thud reverberated through the hull.
“They’ve latched on. It’ll take them a few minutes to work their way through the hatch.”
He wished he had some armor on hand, but they’d never gotten around to buying any, an oversight that might shorten what was already likely to be a short fight.
Once settled into position near the airlock, they could hear the pirates working their way through the latching mechanism. Decker had a brief moment of terror when it occurred to him that they might not have sealed their shuttle to the ship. It would mean catastrophic depressurization the instant they defeated the locks, and there was no time left to put on pressure suits. But, he quickly reasoned, there was no point in boarding the ship if they intended to kill them right away. Another brace of missiles would have done a thorough enough job.
The noise suddenly changed from a frenzied scraping to a more deliberate staccato.
“They’re through,” he whispered. “Get ready - it won’t take them long to breach the inner hatch.”
In the reddish glow of the emergency lights, the corridor looked like an antechamber of hell and Decker was determined to make it so for the pirates.
With a painful screech, the final barrier gave way. Several beams of bright, white light cut through the gloom, propelled forward by large, dark, humanoid figures. Demetria wasn’t a big ship, and only four of the intruders could fit in the passageway at once. It would have to suffice for the first volley.
“Now!”
The confined space erupted in a frenzy of shots as they pumped round after round at the pirates, the force of the impacts making them stagger as they fought to get their bearings and return fire.
“Buggers are armored,” Decker shouted. “Aim for the faceplates.”
It quickly became apparent that they weren’t expecting this much resistance and when one of them collapsed to the deck with a shattered visor, his face shredded, the other three took a few steps back into the airlock compartment.
“They’re running.” Hope, for the first time since the pirate ships descended on them, filled her voice.
“No.” He grabbed her arm as he rose and pulled her back around the corner with such force that she almost bounced off the bulkhead. “They’re about to toss something nasty at us.”
“How do you know?”
His hard grin was almost demonic in the low light.
“I’ve done it often enough when I was boarding pirate ships during my time in the Corps.”
A metallic thunk confirmed Zack’s guess.
“Close your eyes and cover your ears.”
The high pitched whine of a flash-bang
spooling up pierced through their skulls, then a light brighter than the sun washed out everything while the sound of an exploding fusion bomb resonated through the ship.
Fighting the pain and disorientation, Decker peered around the corner, just in time to see the pirates creeping through the hatch again, their lights aimed in his direction. He fired off three rounds in rapid succession, but the storm of ball bearings and tiny tungsten darts did nothing more than annoy the boarders. It would have to be plasma now, and that meant falling back until they had enough room to use the longer rifles.
He grabbed her by the arm again and pulled her aft towards the cargo hold. There was no point in speaking. Their ears still rang from the grenade’s violent explosion.
Demetria was running half empty, and there was ample room to move about between the neatly stacked containers. They took cover as far from the entrance as possible and dropped the useless scatter guns in favor of their rifles, waiting for the pirates to appear.
Zack put his lips against her ear, inhaling the clean scent of her soft blonde hair. Another pang of despair wrenched at his guts.
“Let them all in before shooting. I’ll take the first, you the second. After that, it’s potluck.”
She nodded, her face showing determination mixed with sheer terror. It was all about to end. If only he’d taken up the offer to rejoin the Corps...
The first pirate cautiously entered the hold, rifle held high, ready to sweep them away. His helmeted head swiveled left and right as he sought them out among the cargo. A second one followed, then a third.
“Fire,” Decker shouted.
Where their armor had held off the scatter guns’ payload, it wasn’t quite as capable of absorbing plasma hits, and the lead boarder fell, his chest stitched with several smoking holes. To their credit, the other two quickly returned fire, joined by a further pirate who’d remained in the corridor until now.
Cargo containers weren’t meant to act as protection against concentrated plasma and the pirates’ volleys quickly ate through the thin metal, sending clouds of vaporized aromatic oils into the air. Decker, seeing an unexpected opportunity, decided to take advantage of the improvised smoke screen and shifted his position to the right, to take them in the flank.