“You can’t keep your promise from here?” the captain asked her softly.
It was a grim thing. Jane hated even talking about it, she’d especially hated doing it to him, but it was what Jackson had wanted. It was the only way he’d accept being able to go on living after what he’d done. “They broke my link when they damaged his block. I’m guessing they used a direct nanite attack. I can’t do anything remotely.”
Shade sniffed. “I hate to sound cruel, but I think you’re fretting for no good reason. Yes, you made a promise, but it’ll only matter for a few hours at most before the biobomb those terrorists put in Jackson’s back detonates anyway. He was dead before he ever came back from Swindle.”
“Just because I don’t know how to defuse that bomb doesn’t mean Warlord doesn’t. What if he can shut it down? Then we’re condemning Jacky to a lifetime of murdering people he wanted to help, against his will! We’d be condemning him to living his own nightmare. I can’t do anything remotely, but if you let me go back—”
“Sorry, Jane. Warlord isn’t going to be interested in sitting down for a polite conversation. We’re persona non grata now.”
“You might have missed it, since you were distracted down in your lair,” Shade snapped, “but there’s a suspicious vessel headed our way.”
“From Big Town? I thought their navy was junk?”
“No, Jane, it’s from out of system. We can’t identify it yet, but it’s at least our size,” said the captain. “It made the jump in from Nivaas and has been running dark ever since. It could just be going to Big Town to trade, but my gut is telling me Warlord called in some outside help to run us off because he doesn’t like how we’re tailing his orbital. If he’s grabbed Tui also, then he sure as hell isn’t buying our story about parking here because we’re doing repairs.”
“He’s not going to let our ship that close,” Jane said. “But I don’t need the ship.”
“What, you’re going to think happy moonbeams at him?”
“Bushey has a plan.”
“Bushey?” the captain asked. “No offense to my new security chief, but he’s not exactly a master strategist. He’s a good noncom but I didn’t hire him for his imagination.”
Jane hadn’t known about the incoming mystery ship when they’d come up with this idea, but that complication didn’t change anything for what she intended to do. “The Tar Heel is just our launch point. Katze is willing to go too. It would just be the three of us. If I can get to Big Town, all I need to do is get with a hundred meters or so of Jackson, and I should be able to sneak one of my bots in line of sight, then I can fix his block…or activate the kill switch…If I have to.”
“Big Town will pick up the striker,” the captain said.
“We aren’t planning on using the striker. We can get a lot smaller than that.”
The captain’s eyebrows rose, and then he must have figured out her intent because he said, “Pods won’t work.”
“It’s the only way. Each of us goes into one of the pods. Then you shoot us out of the missile tubes.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Shade asked.
“We’ve got a handful of old Amonite stealth pods,” he explained. “They’re for covert insertions. The Amonites quit using them because they’re so stupidly dangerous flying them toward a target is a great way for the helpless marines inside to get lanced out of space.”
“Swindle’s orbit is a crowded mess. There’s enough debris his radar won’t pick us up.”
“You’ll light up his sensors with your heat signatures. And then it’s bang, bang, bang, and all three of you are gone.”
“The pods have heat traps and cold exhaust.”
“You can’t carry enough cold exhaust to close that much distance.”
“We worked it out. We’re all willing to try.” Katze and Bushey had been down on Swindle with Jackson and left him for dead once already. It looked as if they didn’t want to do that again.
“Damn it, Jackson…” The captain looked up at the ceiling and said to himself, “One more trip. All I needed was one more trip.”
“There are daily shipments between the farm orbitals and Big Town. We’ll hide next to one. I’ll bring my bot squad. Big Town’s security is a joke to me. They’ll never even know we’re there.”
“This has no chance of working,” Shade said. “All three of you are going to die. You know that, right?”
Jane shrugged.
The captain sighed. “You quadruple-checked Bushey’s numbers?”
“Of course.”
Shade looked at him incredulously. “You’re actually going to allow this? Are you stuck in rerun? You just did this with two other crew members. And what? We sit around waiting for them, with what’s probably a pirate ship bearing down on us and no security team to repel potential boarders?”
It annoyed Jane that their aloof broker who thought she was so much better than the rest of the crew acted as if she knew anything about their jobs. “Even with Tui, Bushey, and Katze out, you’d only be down a quarter of the security people.”
“Including the most experienced ones, and my best specter.” The captain sighed. “Those numbers aren’t exactly helping your case, Jane.”
“Please, if I get to Jackson soon enough, I can stop the hack. If we sit here and argue, I might arrive too late. Warlord’s using an aggressive tech. I fear bringing Jacky back from this hack would turn him into a vegetable. I’ve got to get to him before that happens.”
“And if you get there too late?”
She didn’t reply. He already knew the answer to that one. Jacky was a good, kindhearted man. She couldn’t let him be a tool for evil. She’d promised. “What would you do, Captain?”
“He’d be a berserker. A slave warrior that doesn’t stop until he’s killed.” The captain looked at her earnestly, not wanting to trade three lives in the off chance of saving two. “You know what I would do. I just wish I’d been strong enough to pull the plug myself yesterday, but I thought maybe, just maybe, if anybody could pull this off, it was Jackson. It’s why I was dumb enough to let Tui talk me into letting him go too.”
“We have a chance if we don’t dither,” Jane said.
“How are you going to exfil?”
“Same way we got in.”
“That’s no good. The Tar Heel might not be here when you get done. If that’s a real warship, we’ll have to cut and run.”
“I’ll figure something out,” Jane said and waited. She knew Jacky was like a son to him, even if he was a bit gruff about it. He had to know this was the only way.
Say what you will about the captain, but when it came time to make a decision he wasn’t the hesitating sort. “Okay. Get the tubes loaded.”
“They already are,” Jane said.
Shade looked at the ceiling. “Lord above,” she said in disgust.
* * *
Jackson felt like his skull had been run over by a truck.
“Tui?” Even with his healing mods, Tui was still in really bad shape. Fain’s men had come in, put Tui back in the chair, added more restraints, and then really worked him over. They were alone again for now.
“Yeah, brother?” he said gruffly.
“You ready for a night on the town?”
“Hell yeah.”
They both rested a bit, their heads hanging.
Jackson was fading in and out of consciousness. There were his thoughts, and then there were other thoughts. Those were still fuzzy, indistinct, but were growing increasingly loud. Every time his heart beat, agony pulsed through his brain. The pain was designed to wear down his concentration, to make it easier for the virus to claim him.
“Fifi?” But Jackson couldn’t see her anywhere. “Fifi.”
“I think Fifi’s gone to the big robot party in the sky.” Tui motioned with his chin.
Jackson followed the direction and saw her. Fifi’s exterior was made of a carbon titanium mix. An armored exoskeleton worthy of the gods. Bu
t she had ports for eyes and lances and appendages, which were weak points in her armor. Openings. And someone had taken a thin metal stake and driven it into one of them, nailing her to the floor.
“So long, brave soldier.”
“We’ll get another chance,” Tui assured him.
“Yeah,” Jackson agreed, and then felt the itch move position in his brain. That wasn’t good. He looked at his timer. Just a little over seven hours until spine melt. It was a race between bad ends.
“Have the nanites breached you?”
“Not yet,” Jackson assured him. “But I’ve got a bit of an itch inside my skull, toward the back and to the left.”
“Like some tiny bug crawling around in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Not good.”
“Better than torture, I suppose,” Jackson said.
“Not by a long shot. I can handle this. You stay focused, man. You stay with me, you hear?”
“Sure, Tui. No problem.”
“It can be reversed, right? Happened to you before. We can fix it again.”
“You know what became of all the other hacked pilots on Gloss? Dead. Only one other made it off planet. I heard they never could regrow all his brain back. All day long he was seeing ghosts and swarms of flies. He eventually ran off, disappeared out into the desert. Never seen again.”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
“I’m sorry,” Jackson said. “I drew you into this cluster.”
“You didn’t draw me in. I came willingly.”
Frustration roiled around Jackson’s mind. What else could he have done?
“Sometimes life deals you a rotten hand. And then another. And then another. And another. You just play them the best you can.” Even in his sorry state, Tui was more worried about others than himself.
“Yeah.” And then the itch inside Jackson’s head moved again, then stabbed him with a sharp pain. A new, different kind of pain. That couldn’t be a good sign. A minute or so later the pain subsided, and Jackson took some large breaths to calm himself. He didn’t remember pain like that the last time.
Doctor Tiny Ears came back, now wearing a bandage on his head. Jackson pretended to be further along than he really was, hoping to be released from his bonds so he could pound the man’s face into the edge of the table and finish what Tui had started, but Tiny Ears wasn’t fooled. His sensors knew Jackson’s brain readouts.
As the minutes clicked by, more stabs came and went.
If only LaDue had believed him. She should have given him the freedom to run this operation. She shouldn’t have sent him to the Lucky Monk. That was surely what had done them in. But how could she have known? What evidence did she possess at the time that could have convinced her, especially when she had the lives of her cell at stake?
Jackson wondered about the captain, Jane, and the others. He couldn’t blame them for leaving him. Nobody was coming to rescue him. This was a job, not a suicide pact. He wondered what job Shade had lined up for them next. Right now, he suspected they were all in the mess hall eating another celebratory meal, talking about the money they’d earned and what they would do with it. Then they’d raise a glass in memory of him and Tui. Hopefully, they were on their way to the gate. Heck, maybe they’d gotten lucky and had already traveled through, never to look back.
They’d been a great bunch of shipmates. Couldn’t have asked for better. Though he really should have gotten a date with Jane. Just one. Deep down, he suspected she was the one.
He calmed his mind. Told himself it wasn’t over until it was over. Maybe he’d get a chance.
If it came, it came. If it didn’t, it didn’t. The only thing he could do was wait and watch.
The itch and stabs began to give way to echoes of heightened alertness and euphoria, and he knew his window was closing.
* * *
In his stateroom, Captain Nicholas Holloway looked over the readouts for radar, infrared, electromagnetic, and other signatures. The mystery ship was still on an intercept trajectory. Jane and her crew were nowhere to be seen, but he knew they were there, three stealth pods, hurtling toward Big Town. The heat sinks in the pods had done their job, and now the signatures were gone. Winked out, one by one.
Shade said, “You’ve sent them to their deaths.”
He had called Shade back in for a private conversation. It was time to settle a few matters. But her assessment wasn’t wrong. It was possible one or more of the pods could collide with a piece of space junk. At their speed even a tiny particle could punch through the exterior, through the person, then sail on out the back side. There would be a shock wave. A gaping hole. And death. If the three of them avoided that, then they still had Warlord and all of the Big Town Guard to deal with.
“Don’t underestimate Jane,” the captain said. “That girl’s more capable than you can imagine.”
Shade snorted derisively.
He wanted to tell her that Jane wasn’t just some little orphan stowaway whom he had decided to keep around out of pity. He would have loved to rub it in Shade’s face that Jane had been designed from the ground up to be the perfect combat controller, simultaneously running as many bots and programs as a team of normal specters could, by herself. Or that Jane had escaped from the clutches of the most technologically advanced society in human history and fled their isolationist planet where scientists routinely played god with the peoples’ DNA. He was one of the few outsiders who had ever landed on Savat, and he’d seen things there that had blown his mind, like experimental quantum nanotech with capabilities bordering on black magic.
But of course, he couldn’t tell Shade any of that, because she’d probably sell Jane out to make a buck. So instead he said, “They could use some backup.”
“You’d need a real fleet to get past those defensive pickets.”
“Don’t you have friends?”
“No.”
She was being stubborn. She had friends everywhere. Sometimes very big and dangerous ones. Hell, half the time he didn’t know if she had really gotten jobs for the Tar Heel herself, or if she was just using them as a pawn on behalf of some shadowy master. Part of their very lucrative arrangement was that he never asked, and in exchange, she never got them jobs that would require him to violate his code. The deal had worked well for both of them, up until now.
He sat on one side of the desk, she on the other. Only he was on the side that had to make the hard decisions.
“Jackson was right, wasn’t he? We never should have supplied Big Town.”
“Maybe. You think I know everything? You think they tell me everything?”
“Who is they?”
Shade frowned. “You know I can’t tell you that. Besides that, you don’t want to know.”
“Or what? Whatever superpower you’re really working for has me killed because I know too much?”
“I was going to say the less you know, the less you could be forced to testify about in court without perjuring yourself, though to be fair, my employers are the type that if they decided that you were too much of a security risk, they would arrange for you to accidentally drown in that Earth pond you’re so proud of.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No. It’s a choice.”
“That’s not very nice, Shade. Also, not very surprising…but certainly not nice.”
Shade exhaled. “Look, I don’t like this either. We had a good thing going, Captain. You like helping the helpless. Usually our goals coincide. Regardless of the law and the public proclamations, we both know sometimes governments need a little dissent, or one of their rivals’ dissidents to have teeth, or some colonists to not be pushovers. It’s all about the balance of power. They say one thing while doing another. It’s just politics.”
“It’s politics to you, but it’s my crew. Right now, of the hundred souls I’m responsible for, I’m down two, with three more risking their lives, all because you guys have a nice little cold war to maintain, and whoever you really answe
r to wants their warlord well-armed, albeit in a deniable way.”
“He’s not theirs, but the galaxy is a complex place, Captain.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “It seems pretty straightforward to me.”
“That attitude is what got you kicked out of the navy.”
“Pretty much.” He shrugged. “This could be the moment Swindle changes hands. And when your friends find out it was my crew who initiated it, they’ll be looking at you, Shade, wondering why their secret agent didn’t give them a heads-up.”
He could see the wheels turning in her brain, calculating the multitude of angles. “We agreed not to interfere with the business of our clients.”
“Seems to me, Warlord stopped being our client a few hours ago. He’s taken up position as the enemy. Call your friends.”
“They won’t risk it.”
“Call them.”
“And tell them what? That you want to meddle in affairs beyond your understanding, and upset their delicate balance of power? This is bigger than us, your crew, or your ego. If you put a dent in the CX supply, powerful men will take it personally. They will ruin you. That retirement you’ve been dreaming of? Gone. You’ll work the darkest edge of space for the rest of your days.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. My name will be mud.” Shade didn’t grasp most Earth sayings, but context would give her that one. “I’ve made my choice. I just regret I didn’t make it sooner.”
Shade was clearly so frustrated she was having a hard time maintaining her usual composure. “This is bigger than me, than you, than your precious crew. This is about maintaining the delicate balance of power. The people I work for are trying to prevent war.”
“Look around, Shade. They’re not doing a supergood job.”
“This is nothing. Losing a few lives on some ghetto orbital is just the cost of doing business. This is a blip. My superiors are concerned about the safety of billions of lives scattered across thirty worlds. There are three superpowers eyeing this system, because they know whoever controls the gates, controls mankind. What happens when one of the great alliances feels threatened? Or backed into a corner? Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep a bunch of greedy, ambitious politicians from accidentally killing us all? The people I work for try to keep the balance, not just here, but everywhere.”
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