Fractured Stars

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Like novels?” Dash murmured against her lips. “Or could I share details of the schematics on the imperial bases we’re thinking of attacking?”

  McCall blushed, embarrassed that he knew she was thinking about mundane things instead of experiencing primordial emotions of adoration and ecstasy, the way women in romance novels always did.

  “I’m open to schematics,” she said, in case he was truly curious. “I could share quotations from reports on criminals I’m searching for.”

  “I would find that interesting.”

  “Good.”

  She went back to kissing him, wanting him to enjoy it and not wonder what was wrong with her.

  Dash smiled against her lips again, and for the first time, she had a sense of him in her mind. A deliberate telepathic sharing? Or an accidental one? His presence was so subtle that she would have missed it in a busier moment, but she sensed that he was enjoying himself. And being with her.

  That made her feel content, like she was doing something right. Something normal.

  Dash went back to massaging her scalp. That improved the kissing experience even more. For a while, her mind even turned off, something she’d barely known was possible.

  Thoughts crept back in, however, when they went from kissing to snuggling, half-dozing in each other’s arms. McCall realized they hadn’t resolved their problem of what they would do after she got her ship back. Would Dash give up his dreams and come with her? Would they simply part ways, seeing each other infrequently when their paths crossed? Should she consider giving up the life she’d painstakingly built for herself over the years to go with him?

  She looked up at Dash’s face, wondering if he was following her thoughts, but his eyes were closed and his even breathing suggested sleep. It was just as well. She’d never imagined herself as the kind of woman who would give up everything to follow a man, and she wasn’t sure she could envision it now, especially when his path, if he stayed on it, could only lead into danger. She’d had enough danger this past week to last her a lifetime, and she hoped she could find a way to get her ship back without storming a cyborg compound.

  Still…

  She reached up and touched his beard. It would be a shame to part ways with the first man to know what she was thinking—and to not mind how weird it was. Why couldn’t the universe be a little simpler? Why couldn’t—

  A shadow moved in the aisle, and McCall jerked back. Dash stirred, his eyes opening in confusion.

  “Get away from him,” a cold voice told her.

  Walters stood with a blazer rifle pointed at the back of Dash’s head. Fear smashed against McCall like an icy tidal wave.

  Dash lurched to his feet, spinning and reaching for the weapon.

  But Walters jumped back, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Don’t!” he screamed, his eyes wild.

  “What the hells are you doing?” McCall demanded at the same time as Dash raised his hands and said, far more calmly than she could have, “What’s this about, Walters?”

  “It’s about you being a suns-cursed Starseer.” The weapon shook in Walters’ hands, and his finger was tight on the trigger.

  McCall, terrified the man would accidentally shoot, wanted to ease out of her seat and find a stun gun. But she didn’t know where she had left the one she’d carried on the moon. Back in her cell? In one of the cabins?

  “You’re mistaken,” Dash said. “Please put the weapon down. I’m the only pilot here.”

  “Bullshit. I can fly. Well enough to get us back to the base. The base you don’t want to take us to. I heard you talking. You’re diverting to some moon. Why? So you can turn us all in? Or give us to other Starseers who can reprogram our minds and make us their slaves? Do you work for the empire? Do they?”

  McCall looked over the seat backs, hoping to see someone who could help, but the shadows lay thick in the cabin, and if anyone else was back there, they did not stir.

  “I’m loyal to the Alliance,” Dash said. “The same as you. What makes you think I’m a Starseer?”

  “You got past the guards when nobody else could touch them. Then you read Aleksei’s mind. He told me so. He said nobody saw him go outside. There’s no way you could have known about the ration bars. Then I was watching when you took this ship.” Walters jerked the rifle toward the hull briefly, and Dash tensed, as if he might spring, but the rifle whipped back, aiming unerringly at his chest.

  McCall remembered that Walters had been the only one to take down one of the robot creatures on his own. If he fired at Dash, there was no way he would miss, not at this range.

  “One of the law enforcers opened the hatch for you,” Walters said, “and let you start firing at him. You tricked him with your mind, didn’t you? Are you tricking all of us now? Making us believe you’re on our side when you’re not?”

  McCall patted in her pockets. All she had was the netdisc she’d been toting around. She pulled it out, but short of throwing it at Walters, she doubted it would be useful.

  “Whatever I am,” Dash said, making his tone soothing, “I’m not a threat to you. I’m loyal to the Alliance, and I hate the empire. I always have.”

  Did Walters’ eyes grow the slightest bit glassy? McCall had no doubt Dash was trying to manipulate him into lowering the weapon; she just didn’t know if it would work.

  She tossed her netdisc across the aisle, hoping it would draw Walters’ attention, if only for an instant.

  He didn’t notice it fly past in the dark, but he flinched when it clanged on the deck behind him and glanced over his shoulder.

  Dash sprang, trying to rip the blazer from Walters’ hands as he smashed into him. Walters roared and kept his grip. They struck the seats on the other side of the aisle, then pitched to the deck in a tangle of flailing limbs.

  The rifle went off, crimson energy flaring in the dark air.

  McCall cursed and flattened to the deck as a beam shot past her shoulder. It scorched a hole in the hull. Three suns, would the fool cause a shuttle breach that would endanger them all?

  “Let go,” Walters cried amid clanks and thumps. “You—”

  The white nimbus of a stun gun flared in the aisle, and McCall lifted her hand protectively. But it faded without hitting her. The sounds of the fight also faded.

  McCall rose to her knees and peered over the seat backs. Rose stood in the aisle, the stun gun in hand. She’d struck Dash and Walters with her shot, so both men lay unmoving, still tangled together on the deck.

  “I guess we better hope we don’t need a pilot in the next twenty minutes,” McCall said, fighting for casualness.

  How much of all that had Rose heard? Had she intended to stun both of them? Maybe she’d only meant to hit Dash. Maybe she believed everything Walters believed.

  “Yes.” Rose lowered the stun gun.

  McCall wished she were better at reading faces. Not that Rose seemed to be giving much away, even for the perceptive observer.

  The blazer rifle was wedged between the men, but their grips on it were slack now. McCall edged forward, keeping an eye on Rose, and crouched to pull it away from them. She couldn’t imagine Rose deciding to shoot her, too, but she also wouldn’t have guessed Walters’ suspicious observations over the last few days would turn into this outburst.

  “He heard about the course change,” Rose said. “Walters.”

  “Ah.” McCall didn’t like that her quest was delaying the others, but if the group hadn’t broken out of prison, they would have been delayed even longer. “This should only take a few days. If Dash wants to drop me off on the moon and take you to your base, that’s fine with me. I can find Axton and my ship on my own.”

  Which was true. Dealing with a colony full of grouchy cyborgs might be more difficult, but she would find a way. She always had.

  Rose nodded. “Good.” She pointed over her shoulder. “I’m going to get a couple of men to drag Walters back to… It’ll have to be a cell, I guess. That was more than a civil protest or argument.
”

  McCall looked at the deadly rifle in her grip, then at the scorch mark in the hull. “Yes.”

  As Rose turned to get her men, McCall blurted, “Will Dash be in trouble?”

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything, in case Rose hadn’t overheard much of the argument and didn’t yet know about Dash’s Starseer talents, but it was too late to retract the words. And McCall needed to know. She had come to care for him, and now she was worried on his behalf. She knew how carefully he guarded the secret of his special abilities and that it affected how some people saw him. Whether or not they would be willing to work with him.

  “I’m not sure,” Rose said. “I can keep Walters out of Dash’s hair for the rest of this trip, but I can’t keep him from speaking. He’ll probably tell Admiral Walters when we get to the base.”

  He would probably tell everyone, McCall thought glumly. The young man did like to hear himself speak. But the admiral sounded like the most problematic person. He was Dash’s boss, and presumably, he had the power to kick Dash out of the Alliance.

  After what he’d said about how much being a part of it meant to him, her heart ached on his behalf.

  17

  “There she is. Selva Moon. It and its planet are the first inhabited worlds considered to belong to the border territory rather than the core.” Dash spread a hand toward the holodisplay where Selva’s blue and green sphere rotated below them. He suspected McCall knew more about the moon than he did, but he felt it part of his job as pilot to play tour guide.

  She stood beside his seat, one hand on his backrest and one holding her netdisc as she followed whatever real-time news reports she was devouring now that they were in range of the moon’s satellites.

  Dash appreciated her voluntary proximity to him and how comfortable they had grown with each other during the three days it had taken to fly here. He’d been trying to enjoy it and ignore the tension that had arisen between him and the Alliance people since Walters’ attack. And vocal outburst. Dash feared they all knew about his mental talents now and that he wouldn’t be welcome at the Alliance base once he dropped off his passengers.

  Even though he’d contemplated leaving the organization to join McCall, he had imagined it being a voluntary choice and that he would be able to return if real fighting broke out and they needed pilots. The idea of not being able to fly with them because of some fluke of birth that he couldn’t control frustrated and distressed him.

  McCall pursed her lips at something on her netdisc display, then looked at the image of the moon.

  “Have you been here before?” Dash asked, forcing his mind back to the task at hand.

  “Once. In part to look for a cyborg who owed people money and in part as something of a pilgrimage for Scipio.”

  “Androids go on pilgrimages?”

  “Since we were in the area, he wanted to visit the factory where he was made.”

  “Is that normal?” Dash had never heard of androids having any interest in their origins or feeling kinship toward others of their kind. Supposedly, they didn’t feel anything. They were simply ambulatory computers. He decided not to share those thoughts with McCall.

  “I’m not the best judge of what’s normal.” One corner of her mouth quirked wryly, but her expression soon faded to a more pensive one as she considered her holodisplay.

  “Find out anything interesting yet?”

  “I asked the owner of the shipyard and also the nightshift black-market fellow I mentioned if they’d seen my ship,” McCall said quietly.

  She wasn’t an exuberant person by nature, but her tone was especially subdued now, so Dash could tell without touching her thoughts that she hadn’t heard anything good.

  “They haven’t seen it?” he asked. “Or they bought it, scrapped it, sold off the parts, and are now lying?”

  She winced, and he wished he had chosen more sensitive words.

  “They said they haven’t seen it.”

  “Do you want me to go down and talk to them?” Dash touched his temple to signify that his talking would be particularly thorough. Once again, he lamented that he couldn’t touch people’s minds from a distance, but then he remembered McCall’s observation that it was a gift to have the mental talents he had, even if they were weak compared to those of other Starseers. He vowed to try to remember that, to be pleased to have even a minor advantage in dealing with people, even if it might cause him to be booted from the Alliance.

  “Hm, maybe, but I’m inclined to take their word for it. The owner is known for being honest, giving people good deals on new ships, and making decent offers when they turn in used ships. And Alfonzo, the black-market man, has a cheek muscle that tics when he lies. After forty years in the business, he knows half the system is aware of it, so he usually tells the truth. I offered him a reward if he can find any information on my ship’s whereabouts for me, but…” McCall ended with a helpless shrug.

  The murmur of a conversation drifted up from the back row of passenger seats. Rose and two of the men sat there, talking quietly.

  Rose hadn’t spoken much to Dash since he woke from that stun blast, and she hadn’t given him any flack about detouring, but he could sense urgency from her. Apparently, when she’d been captured, the Alliance had been ramping up to make some big moves against the empire, and she expected plans and preparations to be nearing readiness now. She was eager to get back to help. She might become more obstreperous if McCall wanted to check the cyborg colonies on other planets first. That would involve a week of flying around the system. Dash knew she was good at her job, but he also knew it could take a lot of time and investigative work to locate those who didn’t want to be found. There was a reason she was paid well.

  “Will you fly over the cyborg camp?” McCall asked. “It’s on that southern continent there.”

  “Bolika? It’s not heavily populated.”

  “Hence its appeal to a group of people who don’t want to be bothered. There are some fishing villages on the coast but nothing major inland.” McCall swiped her finger through her holodisplay and brought up a set of coordinates and a map. “This is the location of the colony. At least it was two years ago. I flew by to make sure I’d found it before sending the location of one of its residents to the corporation looking for him.”

  “We’ll check.” Dash set a course to take them down from orbit and toward the lush green continent. More than a hundred miles of ocean lay between it and the more populous equatorial continent to the north, the one where the shipyard and largest city on the moon were located.

  “Be discreet. The last time I was here, they had some land-to-air artillery weapons.”

  “Meaning they’re likely to shoot us as we fly by?” Dash tapped a button to power up the shields.

  “It’s possible. It depends on how close we get.”

  “We’ll have to get pretty close if we’re going to identify Axton down there.”

  “I’m hoping to identify my ship parked somewhere nearby, ideally a few miles away so we can land and get it before the cyborg army descends on us.”

  Dash winced at the notion of a cyborg army. Even unarmed, such a force would be terrifying. And it sounded like these people were armed. He imagined some of them, especially those who had retired from the fleet after twenty years of service, may have been permitted to take their crimson Cyborg Corps combat armor with them. Even firing the law-enforcement ship’s e-cannons, Dash wouldn’t count on being able to knock out a man wearing that stuff.

  “What happens if your ship isn’t there?” he asked quietly, not glancing toward the Alliance people.

  “It might not be. It would actually be surprising if my first guess led us to it and Axton.”

  Dash knew she’d done more than guess, but he didn’t say anything. There were other ships in the atmosphere, launching from or landing on the main continent. He flew a circuitous route to avoid getting in their sensor range. Since their law-enforcement craft was stolen, he would have to be careful fly
ing it anywhere close to civilization. Selva Moon wasn’t a heavily populated or policed core world, but there would still be an imperial presence and contingents of law enforcers in the major cities. The empire made sure even the border worlds weren’t left wholly to their own devices.

  “If it’s not there, and you can drop me off in the capital—Argon—I would appreciate it.” McCall glanced over her shoulder. “I know you have obligations and other people waiting on you. I can continue my search on my own.”

  Dash frowned. “I said I’d help you find your ship and deal with Axton, and I intend to.”

  “You’re their only pilot.”

  “They can take public transportation if they get antsy,” Dash said mulishly, though he knew they couldn’t, not really. They were all escaped felons, and there weren’t any public transport ships where people weren’t scanned as they boarded. Nor would public transport take them to whatever asteroids the Alliance had its bases in this month.

  McCall smiled at him, a sad smile, and slid into the co-pilot’s seat to access the ship’s sensors.

  Dash grimaced as he turned his gaze back to the air below them, the terrain features growing more noticeable as they descended toward the jungle continent. He’d started to think of McCall as a friend—a girlfriend—and had been enjoying getting to know her better these last couple of days of travel. His soul cringed at the idea of parting ways now.

  “The sensors are detecting some buildings with solar panels collecting energy,” McCall observed, one hand surfing through the holodisplay, the other shaking her wrist so the charms on her bracelet jangled.

  “The colony?”

  “I believe so, and it looks like people are still there, that they haven’t moved it in the last couple of years.” She leaned forward in her seat. “I’m picking up a ship, the remains of one. There isn’t any power coming from it, and it’s mostly hidden by foliage.”