by Ian Cannon
“Huh?”
“I said the best you can do is to call me—”
“Look—just hand over the goods.”
“What goods?”
“Huh?”
“I said what goods?”
“What do you mean what goods?”
“You don’t know what goods means?”
“Huh!”
“Look, I’m not handing over the goods, moron,” Ben said at the end of his patience.
“I have a gun, Ben!”
“Yes, Rogan, that is a gun.”
“I’ll make it shoot you.”
“No you won’t.”
“I won’t? Wait—yes I will!”
“And get kicked out of the Guild for shooting on one of your own? Go ahead. They’ll hunt you down, and you know it.”
“With this kind of payoff,” Rogan responded, “maybe I take that problem.”
“You mean chance.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing, dummy.” Ben gazed up at Tawny’s faraway perch. Tawny had been right earlier. She had Rogan lined up for a plasma kill from miles away. Rogan knew it. He wouldn’t fire.
Ben grinned superiorly. “Hot shot, you tracking this buckethead?” There was no response. A stitch of concern crawled up his spine. His grin melted. “Tawny,” he said sharply. Still no response. That only meant one thing. Tawny was in some trouble of her own. He looked back at Rogan, had to think of something to say, quick. “You pull that trigger, we both die.”
“That’s no guarantee. But if I don’t pull this trigger, I lose out on nearly a million yield bits. That is a guarantee.”
“No, you’re wrong, Rogan. We both die. That’s the truth.” A lie.
Rogan’s eyes glanced up toward Tawny’s asteroid. It was somewhere up there in all that tumbling mess. He was being scoped right now. He knew it. Made him nervous.
Ben grinned at him. “You should really get a sniper. They’re awesome.”
Rogan hardened. “Doesn’t change a thing.”
“I just told you, we’ll both die,” Ben insisted.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Oh bi-lords, Rogan,” he said, then adjusted his footing to face him square. “Then stop your squawking and get to it, see what happens.”
He could see Rogan breathe under his bio-suit, shoulders rising, then falling. The gun adjusted in his grip. Ben tilted his head. Was he calling his bluff? Was he actually about to shoot him? Jeez—where was Tawny?
An explosion wrenched the hut door into shreds. The impact blast fanned out, knocked them both off their feet. Ben landed, looked up. His friends from the hut were back. And they were pissed. Tracer bolts stitched back and forth, he and Rogan both yelling into the comm device and firing away at the hut. Blasts pelted the surface all around Ben, throwing lunar pebbles everywhere.
He got to his feet, pounded the ignite button on his suit. The jump boost went BOOM! He rocketed straight up painfully, grunting against the sudden jolt. The mag tether yanked against his flight pulling the capsule up with him. He looked down. The firefight raged, but Rogan looked to be giving them Ae’ahm hell. Fine, forget Rogan.
He looked up, directly up, through the asteroid field and beyond. REX was up there somewhere in all that space. “REX, you got my signal?”
REX said, “Yeah, Cap. Locked on.”
“Where’s my wife?” He couldn’t block the frantic note in his voice.
“Well, she’s going to meet us at the secondary rendezvous.”
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s trouble, Cap.”
“Okay, fire everything up. I’m coming in hot. And I mean hot!”
Tawny didn’t know who they were or how many there were chasing her, nor did she know where they had come from, but she suddenly found herself on the run. One second she was operating solo. The next second, she was hauling narse. She only knew she was running out of places to go. Way out here on the edge of the corona tail, there were only tiny rocks, not much more than boulders, a few tons each, hardly large enough to land on or launch from. Leap frogging from one asteroid to another was getting difficult.
Plus—she wasn’t the only one with a midrange weapon. They’d already proven that, blowing her footing out from underneath her not a second after she jumped. The blast propelled her out of control through space. Now, she crashed into a ten-ton—“Ooph!”— bear hugging it like mad.
“Rear imaging!” she called breathlessly. Her visor overlay rotated one-eighty. The asteroid field displayed at six o’clock. “Track movement!” Three red highlights popped up tracking her pursuers, each showing a few hundred meters distance.
Her bio-suit said, “Images are best-guess displays. Too much motion in the field, Tawny.”
“Fine. Jump status?”
“Twelve percent. Eighty-seven seconds to full charge.”
Eighty-seven seconds. She was being shot at. That was an eternity.
She crawled onto her knees feeling the asteroid try to spin under her motion. “Gun!”
The M-209 swiveled on its arm back to firing position. It wound up, an indicator showing a charge.
“Locate and target motion, quick!”
Three reticles populated, each struggling to lock onto their targets. “Oh, come on!”
“Incoming!”
She looked up, saw it, a light zipping through the rock field. She screamed, fired on impulse. Her beam pounded a rock not twenty meters from her position. A few tons of oar pulverized. The explosion swallowed the sky, blinded her. She flinched. A second explosion thrust her off her rock. Screaming, she floundered through the vacuum until she crashed into another boulder, hard. Felt like she’d broken her back. A siren wailed inside her helmet.
“Breach!”
She groaned, “Stable… ize.”
Her suit emitted floxa-foam around the tear in her lower back sealing off any atmosphere leak. It would save her life, but restrict her capacity to jump.
She blinked, shook her head. What had happened? Best guess—she blew the rock into bits creating a screen for the incoming plasma bolt, which in turn, struck the screen and erupted. Lucky lucky. But…
Where was REX?
Where was Benji?
She was running out of time. Needed help.
Had to keep moving.
Ignore the pain.
Her jump status showed twenty-nine percent. It was enough to get her off this rock. She looked out at the field for a place to land, frantic.
“Enemy target approaching,” her suit said.
She didn’t bother looking back. It would take too many valuable seconds. She needed a landing site.
There! Straight below. Four hundred meters. A big one. At least big enough to land on. Through a sea of spinning stone. She could jump, let the frictionless environment do the rest. If she made it at all.
“Jumping!” she screamed.
“Up, baby, up!”
It was Benji’s voice in her headset. She looked up. REX roared overhead, thrusters glowing hot. The ship was nearly a thousand tons of RX-111 cargo vessel, a forward cockpit, squared fuselage with heavy armor, and long mag-spires rotated to the up position like huge vertical fins. Auto cannons blasted away. Lasers stitched the sky casting a blinding light down on her. Explosions highlighted targeted hits, small boulders exploding… and a few enemy pursuers. He thundered by in a big, fat streak.
She jumped straight up leaving the asteroid belt below and moving headlong into open space.
Ben pounded the emergency thruster control reversing their flight. Too late. The entire ship sank into the asteroid field. He didn’t care. He was saving his wife’s life.
And in doing so, he was saving his own.
Rocks thudded hard against the hull—boom bang boom pow!
REX went, “Ouch ouch oooh ouch!”
“Sorry, REX!”
“I’m breached. Starboard mag-spire control hub.”
“Okay, sealing now.” Ben wheeled around, punched the proper commands in the ove
rhead panel. “Yeah, that’ll be a repair.” He looked forward. “Do you see her?”
“Yep. She’s floundering.”
“Stay on her, REX. We’re getting out of this mess.”
Boosters jetted. REX ascended the rock field, spun about. “Yeah, I see her,” Ben said. His wife was a dot, spin wheeling off the bow. It made his heart surge in his chest.
“I’m grabbing her,” REX said. Tow cables fired from the underside fuselage. “Got her. Go meet her in the …” REX noted he was suddenly talking to no one. Ben was already gone. “Nevermind,” he said.
Down in the primary cargo bay, the airlock thudded open. Tawny was on her hands and knees. She’d already unharnessed her gun. It lay at her side.
“Tawny!” Ben cried barreling toward her. He hit his knees initiating her helmet release. It folded back. There she was looking at him with those fierce, Raylon warrior eyes, and that Raylon fire-hot red hair falling free. He threw his arms around her, kissed her face, kissed her eyelids, kissed her cheeks, kissed her lips. She did the same, started to laugh. There was no humor, just relief and gratitude.
He looked at her, nose-to-nose. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Are you hurt?”
“A little bruised but okay, babe.”
He grabbed her face, hard. “Are. You. Okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”
He took a big breath and let it out. Everything went lax. Then he got to his feet and shouted, “Good, because I was freaking out!”
She laughed at him. Everything stilled. She got to her feet.
“What happened? What didn’t we see?” he asked.
“They had sentries. REX spotted them. They were closing in.”
Ben looked up. “Thank you, REX.”
“You’re welcome, Cap.”
Tawny looked up. “You okay, REXY?”
“Yeah, Boss. It’s just a few bruises.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It’s cool.”
Tawny looked at Ben. They shared a moment swimming in the cool-down. The action was done. Danger evaded. She said, “So, how’s the cargo?”
He made a face, stepped aside, presented Heiress Orona’s capsule still hovering on its grav cushion. She was inside angry-faced and wide-eyed, mouth moving a hundred miles an hour, soundlessly yelling commands and cursing ad hominems. Tawny nodded, tight-lipped and muttered, “Yep, she’s a royal.”
Chapter Two
At twenty light minutes from the Hominus IV asteroid field, the trip back to Orbin would take a few hours at two-max inner-warp. After their escapades, they were in no big hurry. Ben entered in the coordinates and speed calculations, compared them to the local, current traffic reports and set the course. REX reviewed it through his nav-circuitry and said, “Looks good.”
“Okay,” Ben said. “We’re set and met and the systems are go. Burn, pal.”
The inner-warps thrummed through the bulkheads. They could feel the gentle tug of acceleration against their artigrav support field as it adjusted, and they were off.
Ben lifted himself up from his snug pilot’s seat and onto the elevated rear cockpit deck, then cleared the pilot’s station into the central passage corridor of his craft. His feet clicked along the steel/alloy grating as he passed two passenger quarters to the left, two to the right. They were always empty.
At the end, a stairway led down into the main hold, the crew lobby. It wasn’t a large area, but homey, comfortable, especially for a crew of two. Alcoves to the right and left offered privacy seating with rounded viewports, each with a cosmic view.
Ben stared at the port alcove. His wife had personalized the area with her private effects—incense candles, soft overhead glow light, small collection of wines on a shelf—all the essentials one needed for hours of reading. She liked a large assortment of literature, from the romance adventures of Molta-Danora to the military docu-dramas of Malybur to the mystery thrillers from the non-partisan planets. He smiled to himself. She was a playful woman, always chiding him, poking him where his personality had buttons to poke. And she was impulsive, very emotional, always looking for a laugh. Sometimes a fight. She could even be reckless. It’s what attracted him to her initially. When he discovered her mind was also capable of the solitude required to absorb prose and narratives for hours on end washed in the peaceful, star-speckled vista of space, he fell in love with her. She was a multi-faceted woman. She was a dream for any stoic, half-lonely realist like himself, ready to be a part of something small and intimate, yet cosmically big. Like love.
His smile turned to a frown. He’d almost lost her today. It pulled emotions from him he wasn’t used to showing, wasn’t prepared to express. It scared him. Horrified him. He took a big breath and moved on.
At the far end of the lobby, an open utility lift lowered him down into the main cargo hold. He jammed open the gated door and stepped into the moderately-sized space, more narrow than wide with bulkhead ribs at the sides. To the aft was a ramp that led to a large vehicle hatch, there was an airlock chamber to the starboard, some hefty tie-down netting draped across the port wall, and a side-mounted, heavy-duty gantry crane that suspended their All-Terrestrial Vehicle overhead and above the center. The thing was mostly all frame and suspension, big heavy steel shock absorbers and fat rubber tires with a large flatbed on the back. Ben had made his share of alterations to it, not the least of which was a dual-barrel top cannon on a swivel.
He and Tawny rarely used the cargo hold for hauling goods. That was reserved for the twelve big storage units that sat outside the ship secured to the mag-spires—a pair of two-hundred foot long appendages—by a series of high-yield electromagnets. The big spires were tucked into their downward position giving the ship an extreme vertical configuration.
The place was empty, except for the heiress’ capsule. It looked lonely sitting off to the side. Ben approached it cautiously, not sure what he’d find staring angrily back at him from inside. But no one was there. It was empty.
“Starboard One,” Tawny said from behind. He turned, looked at her a bit blank. “She locked herself in while you were playing with REX. Insisted on being left alone.”
Starboard One. Passenger quarters.
“You let her out?” Ben asked.
“Just didn’t seem right.” Tawny still had her bio-suit on, peeled down to her waist and dangling toward the floor.
“What is she doing?”
“Huffing and puffing like an Imperium princess would.”
“Mmm. I’m surprised she doesn’t want the company after what she’s been through.”
“Oh, she does,” Tawny assured him. “Just not ours. Dirty pirates. Filthy spacers. You know, all that good, friendly, thanks-for-saving-my-life kind of stuff.” She put a tool away in its chest with a thud, shut the door.
“Ah. So much the better, then.”
She moved to him, put her arms around him. He enfolded her. They stared at each other, she looking directly up at him, he looking directly down at her. “That’s why we chose this life.” They kissed.
Ben sighed, discerned.
She squinted. “What’s on your mind?”
“I didn’t choose this life to see you in that kind of danger. It scared me,” he said.
“That’s why I have you.”
“I’m serious.”
She rose up on her toes, kissed him again. “I’m serious, too.” She pulled away, went toward the lift. “Come on, babe, time to check the list—get it over with.”
They sat at the center table in the crew’s hold with an optics diagram projected over the surface. A numbered list with sub-bullets displayed. It wasn’t an extensive list, but they had added to it over time. Now, there were ten items. These were their Space Rules.
Ben brought up a secondary window. It flickered a light blue, hovering in the air. He pulled it toward him reclining back in his seat, feet up on the table. “Okay, our contract papers for this job.”
&
nbsp; “Oh, boy,” she said.
He read, “Use any and all resources at your personal and or Orbin disposal to search for, locate, retrieve and rescue Heiress Orona. Upon her safe delivery to the Orbin homefront your compensation will be as agreed upon and yadda yadda yadda.” He looked over to his wife. “And that’s it. Minus our payoff, we’ve completed the job. Now for the fun part.”
He dismissed the window with a flick of his wrist, leaned up and pulled their Space Rules over to him. “Rule one.”
“You may have to translate,” she murmured.
He looked at her ridiculously. “Sweetheart, these are our rules. We wrote them. We agreed upon them.”
“They change all the time,” she rebutted.
“They don’t change. We just add to them from time to time.”
“Just shut up and do it,” she said.
He chuckled. “Okay, sweetie.” He continued, “Rule one. No actions will be taken to directly affect any war effort in the carrying out of combative measures.” He looked at her. “In other words, did we blow up, shoot at or otherwise destroy any military installations to fulfill this contract?”
She gave him an insulted look. “No.”
“Okay, then we’re good there. Rule two. Did our contract require us to…”
“Babe,” she said. This was the part where she always got bored. He’d have to hurry things along.
“Okay. Rule two. Assassinations. No. Rule three. Espionage. No. Rule four. Arms deals. No. Rule five. The delivery of military technologies. No. Rule six.” He paused, looked at her, said, “Oh boy.”
“What is rule six? Is that the politician one?”
Ben said, “Yep.” He read rule six, “We will not accept personnel as cargo as it relates to the military or political tactical transport of either side.” He scooted the window over. “When we got this job from Sympto, we deemed the contract in alignment with our rules.”
“Things changed,” she said.
“And now?”
“We’re definitely transporting a political figurehead,” she said.
Ben flicked his lips with his finger—up down, up down. He did that when he concentrated. It was a Ben-ism. He looked up. “That’s true, but what kind of sway could she possibly have in any political body? She’s just a kid.”