He hit the button to turn on the audio but concentrated on starting the engines and getting the shields up. He needed to pick up the rest of the team before he could take off for the atmosphere. He hoped there wasn’t a fleet of law-enforcement ships waiting in orbit.
“…got our ship,” a male voice blasted over the comm. “Get out here.”
“Well, stop him!”
“Working on it, but do you want me to fire on our own ship?”
Dash realized nobody was comming him. This ship was on the same channel as the other one and the enforcers who had gone inside. Did they realize he was listening in?
As soon as he had the thought, the comm went silent. They must have switched channels.
“I’m taking us up,” Dash said as McCall slid into the seat next to him, her stun gun back in her pocket. It wouldn’t do them any good now.
He tapped the control panel, and a holodisplay popped up, showing him the terrain around them and the position of the other ship. It was hovering above them, poised to fire.
“Shields are up, right?” McCall had removed her gloves, and she twisted her bracelet as she watched that ship.
“Yes. Ours are, and so are his. But we won’t be able to pick up the others without lowering them.” Dash pointed the nose of his purloined craft skyward, not wanting to be under the other ship if the pilot opened fire.
“No way to manipulate that one’s mind, right?”
“No, I already tried. He’s definitely not going to fall for anything now that—”
The other ship fired, and Dash cut himself off. He hadn’t wanted to attack a law-enforcer craft—temporarily sabotage, yes, but shoot down and possibly hurt the pilot, no—but he didn’t see that he had a choice. He couldn’t flee, not with the rest of the team waiting for him.
He took a deep breath and started evasive maneuvers while returning fire. He could have asked McCall to help shoot—she was in the co-pilot’s seat, and it had access to weapons—but he didn’t. It was bad enough she’d had to stun people out in the open where a camera might have caught it. He didn’t want anyone finding out she’d willingly helped him attack a law-enforcer ship.
The ship rattled as his opponent fired relentlessly. The law enforcers must have decided it was worth taking down their own ship to capture him—or to ensure they didn’t lose a vessel to escaped prisoners and have to explain that to their superiors later. Dash had no trouble understanding that line of thinking.
He flew behind the dome, using it for cover and luring the other ship away from the portion of the valley where Rose and the others waited. He didn’t want to risk them being hit by stray e-cannon blasts.
The other ship stuck to him, firing hard and often. Dash twisted his craft in the air, doing his best to take as few hits to the shields as possible. He returned fire, aiming for the rear of the other craft, the engines. But his opponent was twisting and rolling too.
Aware of McCall watching intently, Dash felt self-conscious. It was the last thing he needed to worry about just then, but he wanted to win the fight, to prove himself the superior pilot, with her watching on. The problem was that he wasn’t sure he could. So far, the other pilot had proved every bit as effective as he, and Dash worried as his shields took more hits and gradually lost their integrity. Would he have to flee to the mountains, try to find a way to evade this pilot, and then come back later for the others?
He thought about flying the craft close to where the stunned law enforcers lay in the snow, so that his enemy would have to stop firing lest they be hit, but Dash couldn’t bring himself to do something so cowardly, not even if his life was at stake.
“I’m going to try something,” McCall said.
“Go for it,” was all he could manage to say, looping around to avoid the other pilot’s attempt to strafe him from above.
“Wish I was better at lying,” she muttered, then tapped a few controls on the comm.
Making it look like their transmission would come from another source? Dash felt his brow furrow in confusion, but he was too busy flying to ask.
She opened the comm to the other ship. “Law-enforcer pilot, this is McCall Richter, an independent skip tracer who’s often helped your office find criminals.”
Dash didn’t know what she was doing and worried she would incriminate herself further, but he couldn’t spare the mental energy to check on her thoughts.
“I’ve been kidnapped by the loon who’s flying this ship,” she whispered loudly. “He threw me in the back and threatened me if I didn’t stay put, but I managed to grab a comm unit.” She looked over at Dash and mouthed, “Sorry.”
He flung up a dismissive hand. Whatever she was attempting to do, he trusted her. And it wasn’t as if he could get in any more trouble with the law right now.
She pointed meaningfully at the piloting controls in front of him.
“Do you want me to try to do something?” McCall continued to whisper into the comm. “I think I could get to the engine room, maybe sabotage something. Can you give me instructions? Over.”
She muted the comm and leaned back.
“I’m just hoping to distract him and make him hesitate if he thinks there’s an innocent civilian in here,” she said. “Probably pointless since Axton will have reported about Scipio by now, and the law may no longer believe me innocent. But maybe the word hasn’t gotten out to all officers yet. He should be too distracted to look me up anyway.”
The comm flashed. “Shit, I didn’t know there was a civilian in there,” the pilot said. “Try to—” He broke off in a stream of obscenities.
Dash knew why. He’d succeeded in getting under the other ship’s belly and had opened up on the hull protecting the engines. Meanwhile, the pilot had stopped firing as soon as he’d realized a civilian was on board. A kidnapped civilian.
Under his battering, the other ship’s shields ran out of juice. Dash fired rapidly and sheared off a piece of the hull that had protected the engines. He twisted in the air and came in for another run. Smoke wafted from the bottom of the ship. The pilot continued evasive maneuvers, but he’d stopped returning fire. Dash chased him around the dome again, continuing to attack the engine compartment.
A burst of flames came from the hull. The ship angled downward, either to crash or for a forced landing.
Hoping he was out of commission for a while, Dash flew back to the other side of the dome and up the valley toward the Alliance group.
“Thanks, McCall,” he said. “I would have preferred to beat him with sheer skill rather than trickery, but sometimes, you have to take what you can get.”
“When time is of the essence, I should think so.”
The comm panel flashed with an incoming message from the dome. Dash, certain it would involve threats, ignored it.
As soon as he spotted Rose and the others waving on the ground, he took the craft down and opened the hatch without turning off the engines. They raced into the ship, and the hatch thumped as someone shut it.
“We’re all here,” Rose called up to him.
“Glad to hear it.”
Dash pointed the nose toward the darkening night sky and didn’t look back. He did look at the sensors for signs of other ships that might cut them off, but there were only two in orbit on the far side of the moon, and neither was heading in their direction. Frost Moon 3 wasn’t exactly a major destination for fleet, law-enforcement, or merchant ships, and he thanked the suns for that.
“Finally, sys-net access.” McCall smiled and rubbed her hands on the console.
“That’s the biggest smile I’ve seen from you,” Dash remarked.
“We’re getting off this moon, and I’m excited to find my ship.” She pulled up an interactive holodisplay, and her fingers danced in the air. But she paused sooner than he expected. “Your law-enforcer buddies left their orders up.”
Her voice had an odd note to it, and Dash glanced over. He was too busy piloting them away from the moon to surf through her thoughts.
“Were they not here to recapture the odious Alliance fugitives who escaped prison?” he asked.
“No. Their orders are to investigate the crash and the loss of one of their officers.”
“The crash?”
“One of their sheriffs.” McCall prodded a virtual button, and a video filled the display.
“Something happened to Axton?” Dash didn’t know of any other sheriffs who would have been loitering around the domes close to the prison. He supposed some others might have come to drop off prisoners, but the ashen expression on McCall’s face made him doubt that. He sensed growing horror within her as the video started playing.
It was grainy. It looked like a camera mounted outside one of the domes had recorded the airspace above it. The video showed a hulking freighter flying in from space, heading down toward the dome. A supply ship full of groceries? Or maybe it had come to pick up coal.
As the freighter traveled downward, a small sleek ship flew out of an exit in the top of the dome. It left puffs of smoke behind, as if it were damaged, but it sailed straight up toward the freighter without a hitch.
Unerringly toward the freighter. What in all three suns’ hells? There should have been plenty of room and time for the ship’s pilot to navigate around the bigger vessel, but it flew in an inexorably straight line. The freighter shifted, trying to avoid it, but the hulking craft couldn’t move quickly enough. The small ship flew right into its belly and exploded in a fiery crash. When the light faded, nothing remained of it, save for a huge scorch mark and damage to the bottom of the freighter.
That sense of horror increased in McCall, accompanied by stunned disbelief. Dash understood why. The ship that had exploded had been purple.
15
McCall sat hunched in a passenger seat as Dash took the law-enforcement ship out of orbit and headed off to some Alliance base or who knew where. At the moment, she didn’t care. She was watching the replay of the crash on a netdisc she’d found and wishing the Alliance people weren’t using the only two cabins, so she could have a private place for herself. People chatted affably, delighted to be free from Frost Moon 3, but affable was the furthest emotion from what she felt. Maybe she could lock herself in one of the cells in the back—the ship had plenty of those—for privacy.
But it seemed too much effort to move. She nibbled on her bracelet as she watched the video again, wondering how that crash could have happened.
Her research identified the freighter as a vessel automatically piloted by computer and with no human crew or passengers, but the error hadn’t been on its end, so she didn’t suspect sabotage to the system. Not to the freighter’s system.
Something had to have been done to the Star Surfer. What else would make sense? The sky had been completely open, the weather clear. There was no reason her ship should have crashed into that freighter. Unless Scipio had been piloting it and had done it on purpose. To take out Axton and ensure he didn’t live another day? But why would her logical and rational android friend make such a decision?
And what of Junkyard? A hard lump in her throat swelled. Had he been on the ship? Or had Axton killed him the first day, so it hadn’t mattered to Scipio if the ship went down?
The thought brought tears to her eyes, and she scrunched lower in her seat, not wanting anyone to see her cry. Maybe it would have been all right if Dash had seen—this was a rare moment when she wouldn’t have minded a hug—but he was busy piloting the ship. Rose sat up there in the co-pilot’s seat as they no doubt discussed which Alliance base they would head to and what rebellions against the empire they would plan next.
Meanwhile, McCall had lost everything. Her ship and her two best friends. Technically, she could do her job without a ship, but she cringed at the thought of ferrying herself around on public transportation to meet with clients and search the local databases on planets not linked to the sys-net.
Why would Scipio have done this? Would he truly have given her up as dead and presumed he could go kamikaze in her ship? And would his program have allowed him to intentionally take a human life?
“No,” she mumbled, then sat up straighter in the chair. “No,” she said more firmly.
None of that sounded like Scipio unless someone had reprogrammed him. He was a personal assistant android, not a combat model. Even if he found Axton horrific, he would never try to kill the man. Nor would he destroy her ship for no reason. It wasn’t logical, and Scipio was always logical.
“Was Axton flying?”
Dash had said he wasn’t a pilot. Had Scipio abandoned the helm and forced Axton to fly the ship on his own?
McCall shook her head slowly. The Surfer had been aiming for that freighter. Even an inexperienced pilot should have been able to navigate out of the way of that freighter. Besides, Scipio wouldn’t have refused to fly for the same reason he wouldn’t have tried to destroy the ship. It wasn’t logical.
She drummed her fingers on the armrest and watched the video again. The smoke that had been coming out of the ship as it flew upward was odd. If the Surfer had been damaged, why would they have left port?
The smoke puffs were odd too. Not a single long stream of smoke that one would expect from a damaged craft. Long puffs followed by short puffs. It almost seemed a pattern for her to decode.
“Morse code?” She tilted her head, envisioning dashes and dots in the puffs. She didn’t think the fleet taught it, nor did people typically have a reason to use it in this space-faring era, but Scipio, with his encyclopedic knowledge, likely knew the code. And she… Well, her knowledge wasn’t encyclopedic, but she had read plenty of books about Old Earth and could look up a code easily enough.
“Let’s find out.”
She pulled up a notepad on the holodisplay next to the video and wriggled her finger in the air to record the pattern. Frost Moon 3 didn’t have real-time access to the sys-net, but she could connect to its scattering of satellites now and download from databases on the domes’ various servers. She pulled up the legend for Morse code and found she could translate the dots and dashes to letters.
It is a ruse.
“Dash,” she blurted, lurching to her feet.
He spun in the pilot’s seat as if he thought she’d been stabbed. Stabbed with certainty, maybe.
McCall sprinted up and dropped to her knees beside Dash, Rose looking at her curiously from the co-pilot’s seat.
“The smoke puffs,” McCall said. “It was a message.”
She held up her notepad display for him to read.
“It is a ruse? The crash was?”
“That must be what it means. Somehow, Axton faked everything. They must have flown in close and detonated some explosions, just made it look like my ship blew up.”
Rose’s forehead wrinkled. “To what end?”
“To get the ship is my guess,” McCall said. “Even a few years old, the Surfer is probably worth ten years of his salary. Law enforcement doesn’t pay that well, I know. Look, I’ll download the Dome Seven news feeds to see what they say, but I’m sure they reported Sheriff Axton as dead. That’s why an investigation team was sent out. But if the entire system believes he’s dead, he’s free to head off and sell my ship on the black market. Or keep it. He probably knows enough to go off the grid and not be found again. I would.”
Rose oozed skepticism. Even with her limited ability to read people, McCall could tell. Rose would want to head straight to her Alliance base, not veer off following hunches.
“That presumes he’s willing to give up his career, his benefits, and easy access to his friends and family,” Rose said.
“Yeah, so? You did it for the Alliance, didn’t you?”
Rose blinked. “Well, yes, but that was for a noble cause. For something important, more important than my comfort.”
“Different things motivate different people, Professor. I’m sure you know that. If we were on the Surfer, I could show you my list of human motivations.”
Dash gazed thoughtfully at McCall. Peering in
to her mind, perhaps. Well, let him. She had to convince him she was right so he would detour to… She didn’t know where yet. But she would figure it out. There was no way some over-muscled reject from the Cyborg Corps would elude her. She would find him, and she would find him fast.
“Figure out where he is,” Dash said slowly, “and I’ll take you there.”
Rose frowned at him. “This ship has been blatantly stolen. It’s not a good idea to roam the system in it. The first time we cross paths with a fleet or law-enforcement ship, we’ll be in trouble.”
“None of us would have gotten out of that prison without McCall,” Dash said, his voice turning hard. “Who wouldn’t have ended up in there if she hadn’t been standing up for me. If Axton has her ship and she can figure out where, I’m taking her to get it.”
Rose lifted her hands. “I’m not saying not to help her, just that you could drop us all off first. We might be able to find you a different ship to use, one that isn’t hot.”
McCall bristled at the idea of a further delay. The more time that passed, the harder it would be to track down her ship. If Axton intended to sell it to a black-market buyer, it would be taken apart and sold off in pieces. The same thing might happen to Scipio. She cringed.
“I’ll head to the base for now,” Dash said, “but if you figure out where he is, McCall, let me know. We’ll change course.”
“Thank you.” She rose from her knees and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Is that voluntary touching?” He grinned.
“You object?”
“Not at all. I’m basking in the preciousness of this rare gesture.” He reached up and laid his hand on hers, gazing into her eyes.
She didn’t find his directness as uncomfortable as she would have a couple of weeks ago—strangely, it didn’t make her uncomfortable at all. She noticed the warmth of his palm, and her mind took a wayward turn, envisioning him sliding his hand up her arm and perhaps to other spots.
Aware of Rose sitting right next to them, McCall blushed and extracted her hand. She patted Dash on the back so he wouldn’t feel her withdrawal was a rejection. Then she retreated to the rear of the ship to scour what news articles and reports she could get from Frost Moon 3. She needed information. A lot of it.
Fractured Stars Page 19