Guided by Starlight

by Matt Levin

“This whole process would’ve been a lot easier if you hadn’t handicapped us from the start.”

  Isadora arched an eyebrow, but tried to keep the rest of her face still.

  “You badly underestimated the degree of antipathy the Union holds for the Horde. The fact that you let your settlement team enter some kind of arrangement with them has just invited more suspicion from the Union,” Katrina said with barely disguised contempt. “Even now, Parliament is holding emergency meetings about the threat our colony poses to the system. I believe you let your settlement expedition leader walk all over you.”

  Isadora didn’t particularly enjoy enduring Katrina’s criticism, but she got even more defensive when the woman began criticizing Nadia.

  “We need real leadership,” Katrina continued, making eye contact with Isadora for the first time. Alexander and Gabby just looked back and forth between the two of them in an awkward silence. “The kind that, frankly, it doesn’t appear you have the qualifications to provide.” After Katrina finished, it was so quiet in the meeting room that even the gentle hum of the heating vent seemed deafening.

  Isadora had no idea how to respond. But she knew that if she conceded the point—after all, she had never imagined herself to be particularly qualified—she would just appear weak and insecure. Thereby proving Katrina’s point.

  “The Preserver’s computer picked me because I have actually gone before the electorate during my previous career,” Isadora said in a deathly quiet voice, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart. “And because diplomacy is only one part of my overall job description.”

  Isadora, along with Vincent, had selected Katrina as the best person for the diplomat position just before Isadora had departed for Obrigan. At the time, she couldn’t believe their luck that someone important enough to have been assigned to the Anointer had ended up on their vessel instead.

  A brief trickle of doubt crept into Isadora’s skull. There were others with at least some kind of diplomatic experience on the Preserver. If Katrina was going to be a problem, Isadora could easily switch her out for someone more amenable.

  The thought horrified her.

  Was this who she was becoming? Someone who could coldly cycle real human beings in and out of cryo based on how loyal they were? A shudder passed through her, and she resolved to work with Katrina no matter the difficulty.

  Isadora stood up, walked to the edge of the desk, and leaned forward with one of her palms on the table. “You weren’t here when I had to make the first desperate decisions. When we weren’t sure whether we’d even have anything to eat. Did I make mistakes? Of course. But no one could have been perfect under those conditions. And I made every decision in full consultation with the rest of my initial staff,” Isadora continued, “all of whom were vetted by the Preserver’s computer.”

  Alexander and Gabby nodded along politely, while Katrina stared back with defiance in her eyes. “I’m here, ultimately, because I know how to manage people,” Isadora concluded. “And you are dismissed. I expect a report on your meeting with the diplomatic minister tomorrow afternoon.”

  Katrina gathered her belongings, wrinkled her nose, and headed for the door. “Ma’am,” she sneered on the way out.

  Isadora turned back to face the other two. Gabby sat wide-eyed, whereas Alexander had folded his hands over his mouth and nose to hide his expression. “I think that will be all for our first meeting. I’ll be in touch,” Isadora said.

  She could barely wait for the other two to leave before she stormed out of the meeting room, back up the staircase, and toward her private office. Somehow, despite having had the time to prepare for her cabinet meeting, it had gone far more poorly than any of her old meetings with Russ, Nadia, and Vincent.

  Isadora ripped open the door to her office, crossed over to her desk, and popped an anti-anxiety pill. Then she slipped off her shoes and threw them against the wall.

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  Just when Russ figured he and Riley were in the clear, one of the three Syndicate enforcers on their vessel turned her weapon on them.

  They were flying above the Zoledo cloudline in a small Syndicate vessel that was relievingly air-conditioned, but still not comfortable enough to make the two-hour flight to the Syndicate headquarters too relaxed. Supposedly, the enforcers were taking them to meet the head of their entire organization.

  Clearly, the plan had changed.

  “I know you two were talking big back in the Nen Fatha market,” the enforcer said, alternating between pointing the barrel of her weapon at Russ, and then at Riley. The other two enforcers were still in the cockpit. Russ was still trying to decide whether they were acting in concert with their rogue colleague. “Maybe I think you don’t actually have all that much money. But I also think you’re gonna give me everything you have, right now. Unless you’d rather be a bunch of guts decorating the walls.”

  Russ exchanged grimaces with Riley. “Somehow I’m getting the sense you’re not acting under orders,” he said. It was an obvious shakedown. The enforcer was privy to the front he and Riley had used back in the marketplace: that they were big spenders looking to burn some cash. He had just assumed the enforcers would stay loyal to their organization.

  But he was dealing with the black market, and these poor idiots probably weren’t paid enough for their loyalty. The rogue enforcer thought she could rob Russ and Riley easily. It all made sense.

  But he wasn’t planning on getting robbed, and they didn’t have very much money left. Russ figured keying their captor into that fact wouldn’t work out too well. Might as well keep the charade up.

  “We’re not stupid enough to carry our money with us,” Russ said, trying to evaluate whether the enforcer had the training to shoot him first if he went for his gun. Maybe, maybe not. It wasn’t a risk he felt comfortable taking.

  Getting into a gunfight in the middle of an airborne vessel wasn’t the smartest idea. Russ wasn’t entirely sure their captor had thought through all the implications of her plan. He wondered whether she was stupid, or just figured that he and Riley were. At this point, it didn’t really matter.

  “We don’t have that much actual cash on us,” Riley interjected, building off of Russ’ fabrication. In a sense, she was quite technically correct.

  Riley’s steely resolve continued to impress Russ. She was staring down the barrel of a gun for the first time since they had thawed her out, and yet it hardly seemed to faze her. If she was mentally reliving the trauma of the Hegemony invasion back in the Sol System, her face showed no signs of it.

  “If you want our money, you’ll have to take us to an access terminal,” Russ said, not sure exactly where one might be. But such a trip probably meant turning around and heading back to Nen Fatha, or up to the northern latitudes to the Union colony. Either way, he felt confident they’d be able to take the enforcers once they were back on solid ground.

  The enforcer narrowed her eyes. “You think I’m stupid?” she asked.

  Jury’s still out, Russ thought.

  “I’m starting to think someone might miss you two pretty bad. Especially if you’re some of those rich capital snobs,” she continued. “So maybe I get some ransom first. Then I rob you once someone comes to collect.”

  Russ had to hand it to her. These Syndicate types certainly knew how to hustle, no matter how brain-dead they might be otherwise. But he guessed the enforcer was making up the plan as she went, and he could use that to his advantage.

  That was when the co-pilot came back into the main hold. His eyes went wide when he saw his colleague with her gun drawn. “Look, you don’t want to do this,” he said, an edge of panic in his voice.

  Russ and Riley exchanged glances. Sounded like their captor was acting alone.

  “The boss doesn’t pay me enough not to make easy money on the side,” the rogue enforcer sneered.

  “Lena Veridor won’t let you get away with any of this,” the other enforcer pleaded. “No money in the universe could
prevent her from hunting you down. And it won’t just be you. She’ll kill your family, your friends, anyone who smiled at you one time…”

  “She’s just a woman,” the rogue enforcer shrugged. “She’s not invincible.”

  “Look, we’re not going to let you do this,” the co-pilot said, his voice strained. “Lena wants to talk to these people. It’s not just your life you’re risking: it’s me and the pilot too. Failure isn’t tolerated.”

  The rogue enforcer hadn’t taken her eyes off of Russ or Riley the entire time, and she still had her weapon trained on them. But her face scrunched, as though she were contemplating the co-pilot’s pleading.

  “Just...lower the gun, please?” the co-pilot said. The man inched closer to his rogue colleague.

  The rogue enforcer’s jaw went taut again. “Nah,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I can handle thi—”

  She was cut off as the co-pilot went for her gun. He landed his hand on top of the barrel, leading to an intense tug-of-war as both enforcers wrestled over the weapon.

  Russ figured that this was their window. With the weapon no longer trained on him and Riley, they had a real shot of disarming their captor and returning control of the vessel to the two enforcers who were actually planning on taking them to the hideout.

  But before he could even get out of his seat to rush their rogue captor, she finally yanked her weapon away from the co-pilot, and shot him. Two plasma bolts streaked out of the barrel of her weapon. One landed in the co-pilot’s chest, the other tore through the side of the aircraft.

  The deafening roar of the wind came through. Russ thought he heard Riley shout the word moron, but over the sound of the wind he wasn’t really sure.

  Russ’ brain made a series of calculations all in the time span of a second. With the aircraft’s integrity compromised, they needed to gain control of the vessel, working with the pilot or otherwise. That meant dispatching their captor as quickly as possible. Fighting back suddenly became the least-bad option.

  So he fought back. He rushed the enforcer in a split second, pushing her gun out of the way to keep Riley out of the line of fire.

  But then it was just a fistfight between the two of them, and only one of them had military training. Russ’ muscles protested more than they normally would have as he pinned the enforcer’s legs down and wrapped his arms around her head. Still, her neck snapped easily enough.

  Fighting against the violent winds, both Russ and Riley reached the cockpit, where harsh alarms were blaring alongside the raging of the wind. “What the hell happened?” the panicked pilot asked. Or at least that’s what it looked like his mouth was saying.

  Russ strapped into the co-pilot’s chair, Riley strapping in behind them. “Your partner went rogue and shot your co-pilot!” he shouted. “Think you can get us to ground safely?”

  Basic training back in the EDF required some amount of time spent in the flight simulator, but that had been a long time ago. And he’d trained on a very different vessel than the one he was in now. One that, according to the terminal, was rapidly losing altitude thanks to the dumbass enforcer who had fired her weapon. He figured the Syndicate pilot was their best bet at survival.

  “I don’t know if we can get this ship back in the air!” the pilot shouted.

  If they couldn’t regain altitude, that meant crashing was inevitable. Which meant all they could do was to brace themselves and try to come in as softly as they could. He looked behind him and saw Riley grimacing. Both of them knew how bad this looked.

  As their ship careened further downward, a large canyon system came into view. Sandstone walls cut through the planet’s surface in a winding pattern that stretched out as far as he could see. That seemed to give the pilot an idea.

  “If we can wedge ourselves into that canyon system, we might not break apart immediately!” the pilot said. “Help me guide the descent,” he told Russ, who reached down for the co-pilot’s control stick. Fighting against the stick caused a severe strain in Russ’ arms. White hot pain quickly turned to numbness.

  Their vessel entered the canyon system, the ground only a few thousand feet below them. Both he and the pilot tugged on their control sticks, trying to get the vessel to level out, as they approached the narrowing point.

  As their wings ripped into the sandstone cliffs, an awful screeching sound of rending metal joined the raging wind and the incessant alarm system. Russ and Riley locked eyes, as though they could somehow will the plan to work.

  It did.

  The friction generated by their ship getting wedged in between the canyon walls slowed them down. Sheets of rended metal and parts of the wings snapped off, flying by the cockpit viewscreen. By the time they were only about a hundred feet off the ground, they had slowed to a crawl.

  But then the canyon system widened again, and their vessel hurtled the last few dozen feet to the ground. The impact didn’t kill Russ, but it jerked him around hard enough to slam his forehead into the console. A sharp pain shot through his head, followed by a dull, persistent ache.

  The pilot hadn’t been so lucky. One of the beams supporting the cockpit viewscreen had collapsed during the crash and impaled him straight through the gut. He seemed conscious, still, but Russ figured it was only a matter of time before he’d be dead.

  He looked over and saw that Riley appeared relatively unscathed. Riley’s gaze shifted toward the pilot, and she must have come to the same conclusion that Russ did: he was a goner. She unstrapped immediately and crossed over to Russ’ seat instead. She pulled his head back to get a better look at his eyes and waved two fingers from side to side.

  “Okay. You can focus your eye movements,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  “Nauseous,” Russ grunted. “But I’m okay.” He tried to rub the wound on his head, but he felt another jolt of searing pain from his right bicep. His left arm clutched his right in pain. “My right arm feels like shit,” he said.

  Next to them, the pilot let out a final groan and his head lolled forward.

  Riley peeled away his left hand and looked at his right arm. “Probably a muscle strain. Bad, but not severe. Definitely not as bad as a serious head injury. Just...keep me updated, yeah?”

  “Will do,” Russ said, feeling a sense of validation at his choice of someone with medical experience to accompany him.

  And then he refocused his mental energies on figuring out where to go from here. The mission parameters still stood: they had to get an audience with the Syndicate leader.

  But the impact had fried the ship’s comm system. Pushing himself out of his seat, he inspected the pilot’s body, but he didn’t appear to have any kind of comm device on him. He took an ID chip off of him on the off chance that it could help.

  A sudden sense of dread came over him. Even if they had survived an attempted kidnapping and a crash landing, that still left the two of them stranded in the middle of the Zoledo desert with no food, only a single bottle of water that Riley had filled back in Nen Fatha, and a crippled husk of an aircraft as shelter. “Any idea where we could be?” he asked.

  “Last thing I saw on my terminal before we crashed was that we were somewhere in the planet’s equatorial region,” Riley said.

  The Zoledo badlands, in other words. Most settlements on the planet were located well outside of the equator, where the temperatures were utterly unlivable. Given that the crash had also destroyed the ship’s air conditioning unit, Russ knew how desperately they needed to find accommodations.

  “If we head outside, we’re severely limiting our survivability time. We only have one bottle of water between the two of us,” Riley continued.

  Russ nodded. Considering the Zoledo heat, they’d go through the bottle in minutes of walking around the empty desert. And then they’d lose it all via sweat soon after. “We’re gonna get cooked without shelter,” he said, grimacing. Already, the sun was beating down on him through the cracked cockpit window.

  He realized, however, that Riley was looking past h
im. The window closest to Russ showed an artificial gap in the cliffs, as if someone had dug their way in. “Might be worth checking out,” Riley shrugged.

  The two gathered their belongings, pushed open the aircraft’s exit, and headed for the man-made mouth in the canyon system. Russ quickly realized that it was the opening for a hangar bay. Or at least, it would have been once. It was dark inside, but he couldn’t see any ships in view.

  Or much of anything else. After only a few seconds in the sun’s glare, the two stepped across the hangar threshold. Everything inside seemed barren: no tools or crates or supplies in sight. But the metal was undamaged, if rusted. That probably meant the base hadn’t been attacked. “I’m guessing this was abandoned,” Russ said. Once he and Riley were far enough in that no sunlight breached the base, they used their wristers’ light beam function to illuminate their surroundings.

  “You think this was Syndicate?” Riley asked. “Could be some kind of supply depot they gave up ages ago.”

  Russ looked around. The base seemed methodically cleared, without so much as a stray datapad lying around. Something about that didn’t scream criminal empire to him. “This is all too neat,” he said. “Hard seeing it as the Syndicate’s MO.”

  But if it wasn’t the Syndicate, then who? With two out of the other three major factions located at the other end of the system, that only left one possibility. “You think this is Union?” Riley asked.

  Russ shrugged. “It’s my best guess.”

  The two ventured deeper into the base. It struck Russ as generic as any other military installation he had been in: utilitarian, minimalist design, a high use of cheap metal alloys, and uncreatively boxy. “Hard to say what they were doing here,” he said, looking at a well-rusted railing. “This base could’ve been abandoned for a long time.”

  Riley shrugged. “There might be something in here. And besides, it was our only option. It’s a...a path that has been opened up for us.”

  Which was a strange way of putting it, Russ thought, but he didn’t have time to reflect on it. They arrived at a larger office—the one where the head honcho would’ve shacked up, undoubtedly—with a circular console in the middle.