But they were all loyal and good at their jobs. Considering they were all—by definition—criminals, the captain ran a tight ship, and the crew got along remarkably well. They weren’t pirates. They were smugglers. It was the same thing to the various governments they disobeyed, but to the moral makeup of the crew, it made all the difference in the world.
A whole bunch of people called out his name as he entered. Because regardless of whether he was friends with each of them individually or not, his last-minute escapades today had made it so they were all going to get paid well at their next stop. It was kind of nice being the hero.
“Just in time,” said Tui. “Get yourself one of these Sharmalans. The yellow sauce is to die for.”
“I did nearly die for one earlier.” Then he took one of the sausages and wrapped it in some of the local bread, which was sort of like a fluffy tortilla. He took a bite and enjoyed the savory explosion of juices in his mouth. Some taste engineer really earned his chops on this one. He added some sauerkraut and took another bite. And then Katze Yeager, one of Tui’s security team, pointed at Jackson’s neck.
“What happened there?” she asked.
Everyone turned and looked.
“Looks like a hickie,” Katze said.
Jackson reached up and felt his neck, then looked in the reflective surface on the wall to see what they were talking about. There was a nice little bruise where Fifi had given him her goodbye bite.
“That’s definitely a hickie,” Katze said.
Jackson had to agree. That’s exactly what it looked like. Had Jane sent Fifi to give him a little love peck? Was the Maiden of Death weakening?
“That’s just a bump I got during that shoot-out down at the surface.”
“Of course, you did,” another one of the crew said.
The others all laughed. And Jackson wondered—maybe Jane was giving him some kind of come-hither in her weird robot language.
The banter moved on. Jackson enjoyed his sausage, some chocolate-covered mango strips, and a few glasses of the crew brew, then bid the others farewell and headed back into the corridor for his room. The spin was up to a full G, and so he simply strolled along the corridor that led eternally up, music wafting from some room up the hall.
He proceeded to his room. Because of the Tar Heel’s size compared to its crew complement, everyone had the perk of private quarters, a remarkably rare thing to have as a spacer. Even so it was a small spot that was just big enough to include a sleep station, a place to stow his personal gear, a foldout desk, and a magnetic stool. The room recognized his presence, and the wall lit up, displaying the picture of a fantastic lagoon where the crew had vacationed a year or so ago while waiting for Shade to arrange some work.
He looked at the room, thinking about the captain’s woods and fishpond, and the cubby seemed very poor in comparison. But it was enough, he told himself. The captain had told him to think of his future, but he’d already been working on that. The plan was to keep making runner money for a few more years. Big money. Then get himself his own ship. And this cubby allowed him to funnel every spare dime into starting his own business.
If not on this ship, then he’d hire onto another. Even without plugging in, he was still a top-tier pilot. Somebody would be hiring. Though the odds of finding another captain this good to work for, and another crew this solid, were slim.
He shucked his clothes and crawled into his sleep station, a bag in a partially enclosed area, tethered so that he wouldn’t float off and get injured during periods of weightlessness. The surface of the bag was soft and cool and felt good against his skin.
Out his port, Jackson could see a couple of the radiators extending, the long sections of honeycombed material that shunted the heat generated by the ship out into space. Planetside the air did that for you. Out here, unless you were sitting on a hunk of frozen asteroid, there was nothing. It was radiate it or shunt it all into a heat sink and jettison that into space. That was the fun part about life on a ship, you were always only one equipment malfunction away from roasting or freezing to death. But it made for an incredible view.
As he stretched and lay there, his thoughts turned back to the old days, and the war for independence on the planet Gloss. He told himself it must have been because of those few minutes he’d spent driving the Citadel.
Jackson had only been a boy when the rebellion had started. The hab he’d grown up in had been bombed. His parents had spoken against the Collectivist takeover, been branded as dissidents, and then executed. He’d been forced to watch them swing before being loaded onto a train to spend the next few years surviving in a tent city hell. When the rebels had become desperate enough to start drafting child soldiers, he’d jumped at the opportunity. Anything was better than fighting for scraps in a refugee camp.
Most of his peers were sent to the infantry, to be fed right into the meat grinder, but Jackson’s reaction times and mental acuity had tested astonishingly well, so he had been trained to drive one of their few remaining mechs. But by that point in the war, they’d needed more than just drivers. They needed warriors who could become one with the machine.
Embargoed by all the civilized worlds, most of the rebels’ equipment was secondhand trash, picked up from arms dealers so unscrupulous they made Captain Holloway look like a saint in comparison. They only had a handful of weapon systems that could go toe-to-toe with the enemy, and Jackson was one of the few who possessed the raw neural processing power to fully link with such a device. They were so desperate for pilots that his brain surgery had been done in a tent, using black-market equipment, by a medic who had been in veterinary school when the war began. Of the three prospective pilots given implants that day, Jackson alone survived the process. He’d been fourteen years old.
With a bootleg mech and less than a week of training, Jackson had been sent to war.
Piloting a Thunderbolt 5 that was practically an antique, he’d somehow survived. Driven by stick, a T-bolt was about as responsive as a tractor but connected directly to his brain, twenty tons of armor had felt like a seamless extension of his body. For the first time in his life he was able to hit back at the cowards who had ruined his whole world, and he had plenty of hate to give. He’d spent the next few years stomping Collectivists like the roaches they were. Outnumbered, outgunned, it didn’t matter, because the rebels had justice and God on their side.
Jackson had been a good pilot. Really good.
The tide even turned for a bit. The rebels actually gained ground. Briefly, the people of Gloss had even started thinking they might have a real shot at freedom again, and Jackson was one of the handful who had saved that dream.
Only it had all turned into a nightmare when the desperate Collective had transitioned to net war and sent a worm to invade the linked pilots’ brains. Their antique firewalls never stood a chance. It was like being possessed by demons. Even now all he could remember about those dark days was the demons whispering in his mind while Gloss burned before him.
The captain had saved him from that fate, which was why Jackson would be loyal to this crew until the day he died. He’d failed his people…but he had survived, so he owed it to those who hadn’t to make something of himself.
After he’d escaped the hooks that had been sunk into his brain, Jackson had made a vow. Never again would he connect his mind with a mech. The last time he’d done so, he’d lost his freedom, and his friends had lost their lives. The risk was just too great.
Jackson drifted off to sleep thinking about a future with money and independence. Maybe a house at that lagoon. Maybe a huge tract of land on one of the new worlds. But as he fell into sleep his brain, like the addict that it was, turned to the old days, and dreamed about the wetware flooding him with intelligence and desire. It took him back to when he operated like a god of flesh and metal on the field of blood, the battle joy singing in his veins. Back to the time before the monsters found him.
* * *
Shade sat alone in her quart
ers, with a receiver set against her left temple. She couldn’t trust that the captain’s pet specter, Jane, wasn’t watching and listening, and so this was the only way to send a private message. The tiny implant the company had put in her brain translated and encoded it.
“We have it,” Shade said.
Even though the coded message was traveling at the speed of light via tight beam, her handler was currently about ninety million kilometers away. So she had to wait about ten minutes to get a response. Five minutes to get there, a few seconds to compose an answer, then five minutes back.
Norman Johnson’s response was deciphered by the implant in her brain, “You need to get a different host. This crew you’re working with almost botched the operation.”
“My host is fine.”
Another ten minutes.
“Your captain is a cowboy,” Johnson said.
He was, but this idiot was still wasting her time. “Who is my contact at the gate?”
A delay.
“We are working on it.”
Shade’s alarm rose. If gate security found the mech, there would be serious repercussions. “You don’t have that locked down yet?”
A delay.
“Our mule was hit by a wrench. She’s out. We will find another in time. Proceed as planned.”
The mech was the lynchpin in their new strategy on Swindle. A risky one. And Shade was not going to take the fall for someone else’s mistake.
“We can wait.”
A delay.
“This is too high-level an op. We have other assets. Proceed.”
Did they really expect her to believe their asset inside gate security had suffered an accident with a wrench?
“Is it the Syndicate? If it is, they will scuttle the whole thing, and the big man will be hanging in the wind.”
A delay.
“It was an accident. They happen. Proceed.”
Shade didn’t like it, but as usual she’d get the mission done, no matter what.
* * *
Jane saw each of Grandma’s short messages leave. Shade used a very clever program that enabled her to temporarily highjack and aim the ship’s tight beam. As Jane had done before, she piggybacked the messages. And as before, the packets shed her pig, which was maddening.
And worrying.
The captain had entrusted her with the information security of this ship. And Shade was the one dark box she’d not been able to open. It posed a risk to the captain and crew.
It posed a risk to Jane.
For years she had thought she’d been watching all communications to and from the Tar Heel, but then she’d discovered Shade’s secret comms that had been sneaking out right under her nose. Nobody else had noticed because the Tar Heel used its tight beams constantly, flickering them in a random search pattern searching for potential impact dangers, and Shade only borrowed the array for a fraction of a second each time she sent a message. The responses she got looked like sensor static to the rest of the crew, but not to Jane. She was good at picking the secret patterns from the chaos.
Jane received an alert whenever Shade activated her program now. She’d intercepted several of the messages hidden in the beams, except they were in a code even she couldn’t crack. Of course, the captain hadn’t ordered Jane to do this. She was watching Shade because her instincts told her not to trust the broker.
Jane adjusted the piggy’s slant and this time the message did not shed. Ten minutes later, Jane found where Shade’s message had been sent, an unlicensed installation way out in the Nivaasian system. Immediately after Shade’s conversation, that installation sent a regular message packet to be relayed through the gate.
Jane may not be able to hack Shade’s messages yet, but she might be able to finally discover who she was talking to. So she piggybacked that signal too. Maybe she’d get lucky and be able to track the message to its final destination on the other side of the gate.
Ride ’em, piggy. Ride.
A few minutes after Jane went back to work, the icon of a red flower appeared on her visual. It was a particular red flower, with blue spots on its petals. The kind that in all her travels Jane had only seen grow in one place—a small town on the coast, back on Savat.
She felt a tingle of alarm, as she always did when reminded of home.
The icon meant that one of her sisters was trying to contact her. Of course, Jane never talked directly to any of them. That was far too dangerous for all of them. Instead they communicated using a method they’d devised years ago to hide their messages from the scientists who had made them. There had been thirty of them then. Thirty genetically engineered sisters in the sibling cohort of Mary 231.78. Now there were only four of them left.
Jane selected the flower, and in the corner of her visual a video played. It showed an outdoor café on a street in a city on another planet that Jane knew would take two gate hops to reach. In front of the café were a number of tables. There was a lime-green napkin on one of them. A few tables away was a set of dishes some diners had left for pickup. At another table was a man and woman and a child. There were bottles and plants and a hundred other items, including the positioning of a number of chairs, and Jane read them all in the blink of an eye.
It was all about how those seemingly incongruous items had been arranged. Everything in that video meant something. It was a language known to only four people in the whole universe.
It was a message from their 22nd sister. It was a warning. The geometric folds in the napkin said there was a new hunter snooping around. Possibly part of an Iyer Affiliate. The color indicated the emotion of wrath. The tablecloth, fear. The bend of the leaves and number of plates and even the shape and position of the crumbs told her that 22 was still upset with Jane accidentally drawing attention to them, and a hundred other subtle things.
Jane read the message again to be sure.
She sighed.
So Savat had not given up on finding the daughters of Mary 231.78.
Jane closed the message. She would have to tread carefully.
Chapter 8
For Jackson, the next few days were occupied with maintenance on the ship and some friendly games of longball in the corridor. He was outside helping repair a spot on one side of the cargo area that had taken a micrometeorite hit, when the captain announced they were only a few hours away from the first gate security check and that all the crew were to prepare themselves in case the authorities wanted to board and inspect the ship and its cargo.
Checkpoint security was not something you wanted to mess with. At least not openly. And so Jackson finished his work quickly and returned to the ship.
Gates were some of the most valuable things in space. The more a government could control, the more powerful it became. The ISF owned this one, as well as about two dozen others across seven systems. Just as with planets, their security system extended for hundreds of thousands of kilometers around them. Nobody wanted to build something that cost a significant percentage of a planet’s GDP only to have it threatened by malcontents.
Gates were always located a good distance from a system’s star and a few degrees off the orbital plane of any planets or smaller objects. The math that explained why was far over his head, and he was no slouch in the brains department. He might be rough around the edges academically, but as much real-world work on mechs and ships as he’d done, he figured that was as good as any engineering degree from a planetside university. Especially since out here failing an exam meant dying painfully. However, even halfway comprehending the crazy physics behind gate travel caused nosebleeds in geniuses. It was all frankly way beyond Jackson’s grasp.
There were two gates in this system. One was dedicated to traffic between Nivaas and Earth. The second could be adjusted to transit to a few other systems. That was where they were heading.
There was always a specific route you had to use to approach a gate. Any ship or object outside of that approved route was deemed hostile and targeted for elimination. Three years
back, at one of the seven Earth system gates, some poor ship strayed into a forbidden zone. There were many conflicting stories about how and why it had strayed, but what everyone agreed on was that the ship had been lit up by the gate defenses. Ten thousand people had been on board, and ten thousand dreams of a home on some new colony world had been instantly snuffed out. Of all the stories, Jackson figured the story claiming it had been a hijacking and ransom gone bad was probably the most accurate.
So, if you wanted to stay alive, you followed the approved route to the gate. And along that route were various security checks.
The first checkpoint was usually millions of kilometers away from the actual gate. This one was an asteroid that was maybe twenty-four kilometers in diameter. Part of it was being mined, while the other half housed the security forces. Five other ships were already lined up at the checkpoint ahead of them, waiting for processing.
As it approached, the Tar Heel called in and was given parking coordinates. They took up position. And waited.
And waited.
The next day, ten gate cops, a dog, and a horde of sniffer bots boarded the ship. Eight of them spread out on a quest for contraband. The others interviewed crew members and took DNA samples.
Nerves were high, but the crew played it cool. Nivaas was an independent colony, but they paid for ISF protection and to use the ISF gate system. If Splendid Ventures had decided their Citadel had been stolen, rather than accidentally destroyed, surely Nivaas would have asked the ISF to be on the lookout for it. But the cops seemed bored as usual, and Chief Hilker was an artist when it came to hiding whatever they were smuggling. There were places on this ship that Jackson didn’t even know about, and he spent most of his duty hours repairing her.
Six hours later, after reconciling the manifest with the cargo and everyone on board, the gate patrol cleared the Tar Heel to proceed to the next checkpoint a few million kilometers away.
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