There's a rule about rescues, Farah mused. You don't dive in to save someone from drowning if you aren't strong enough to swim with them to shore.
If they found the Tempest intact and used its quantum jump drives to get back to the Adventa Galaxy safely, then all would be well, but even Farah was realistic about the chances of that. If the Tempest could bring them home, wouldn't Bretton have used it to come back by now?
Adding to the multitude of reasons against a rescue mission was the fact that it wasn't just the skeleton crew of five bridge officers whose lives she risked. There were also the rest of the original crew of the Baroness, all of them survivors from Dark Space, all locked away in the ship's stasis rooms, and all ignorant of the fact that their vessel had been commandeered by a resistance movement from a planet called Avilon.
Put it all together, and going to Noctune seemed like a skriff's errand. Farah had heard the crew whispering behind her back, and she'd seen the tight-lipped smiles they gave her whenever she walked by. She'd known what they were thinking.
So one night, about a week after setting course for Noctune, Farah had found herself alone on deck with Commander Tython, and she'd decided to do something about the looming threat of mutiny. She'd waited for just the right moment, and then she'd walked up behind Tython, drawn her sidearm, and pulled the trigger.
The rest of the crew had been fast asleep in their beds at the time, so she repeated the process, sneaking into one crewman's room after another until all five of them were incapacitated.
The weapon had been set to stun, of course. She wasn't a murderer. Once they were all unconscious, Farah had used a grav sled to carry them to a row of empty stasis tubes. Then, one by one, she'd wrestled them into position and activated the tubes with the auto-wake timer disabled. That done, she'd checked the rest of the crew's stasis tubes, just in case any of them accidentally woke up. She'd been surprised to find them all with the same settings. Clearly the former captain of the ship had been just as paranoid as her—and with good reason: from what she'd heard, he'd been killed during a mutiny.
But there was a price to pay for being so wise; Farah had spent the last six months in complete isolation. With no one to talk to, she'd begun talking to herself. She told herself it was to keep her vocal chords working, but the road to madness was littered with better rationalizations than that.
Skriffy as a space rat or not, her lonely mission was finally at an end. The Baroness was about to arrive at its destination.
Farah traced the bright, kaleidoscopic patterns of light that raged just beyond the bridge viewports. Legend had it that one could go skriffy just from staring out into those spinning strands of light for too long.
"I'm not that superstitious. Then again... I am talking to myself, aren't I?"
Farah wondered what she would find at Noctune after all this time. Perhaps the Tempest had suffered some catastrophic failure of its jump drives and none of the crew were sufficiently knowledgeable to fix them. Or maybe Bretton had landed on Noctune with the Gors, and the Sythians had found and destroyed his ship in orbit, leaving him stranded on the Gors' icy home world.
A small voice in the back of her mind whispered to her about other, darker possibilities, but she refused to listen. She couldn't turn back now, so she had to leave room for hope to live and breathe inside her weary soul.
Not that she had a soul. Omnius had resurrected her and Bretton along with everyone else who had died during the Sythian invasion. They were immortals now; they didn't even age. Perhaps that was why she found it so hard to believe that Bretton was really dead. Death had long-since ceased to have any meaning for them.
An automated countdown began, and Farah shook herself out of her thoughts. She took the gangway back from the viewports and hurried down the stairs to the crew deck. Finding the nav station, she sat down and began configuring the displays in preparation for the reversion to real space.
The countdown reached zero, and a bright flash washed away the rainbow-colored swirls of SLS. As the brightness faded, it was reduced to a myriad of twinkling pinpricks—the flickering candles of the universe.
Farah held her breath and pulled up a star map. She'd set most of the ship's systems to auto, so by now the gravidar station must have finished a preliminary scan of the area.
The star map showed Noctune dead ahead, a few moons in orbit around it, and a small field of...
Farah shook her head and squinted at the map. Her heart was beating so hard she felt like it was about to explode. There was a small field of debris orbiting the planet.
Farah jumped up out of the nav station and ran over to gravidar to get a closer look at the debris. Optical scans revealed familiar components. In-depth scanning showed that the debris was mostly duranium. The clincher was what she saw when she switched back to an optical display and zoomed in on the largest piece of debris. Light amplification overlays revealed details that never should have been visible in the weak light of Noctune's sun. She saw a sheet of metal, curled and blackened at the edges. A trio of Imperial-white letters were emblazoned on one side—EST. If the other half of that hull fragment was spinning around out there somewhere, Farah was sure it would have read TEMP.
Farah sat back with an incredulous snort, her eyes busy filling with a suspicious warmth. "You selfish kakard, Bret. Six months and this is what I've got to show for it?" She shook her head. "No."
Bretton wasn't dead. She refused to believe it. She tried to calm herself, to remember that she'd already allowed for this possibility. Debris didn't mean that Bretton was dead. He might be frozen and half-starved to death somewhere on the surface of Noctune, but he was not dead.
Farah toggled the ship's scanners for an in-depth scan of the planet. It was only 60% complete by the time she thought to wonder about what had destroyed the Tempest.
Her thoughts went to the Baroness's cloaking shield, and she turned to look at the engineering station where she could activate that shield.
She may as well be cautious and keep a low profile. Rising from the gravidar station, she hurried over to engineering.
Just as she was about to sit down, a thunderous boom roared through the ship's sound in space simulator (SISS). Damage alarms screeched and alerts popped up all over the engineering station. Aft shields had dropped from blue to green.
Boom!
Another hit. This time the dorsal shields flickered into the green.
"Frek!" Farah queried the ship's computer to locate her attackers. She found them moments later—two Sythian cruisers racing up behind, and a massive battleship pacing her from below.
Farah's mind raced. She couldn't fight back without a bridge crew to man the control stations, and even then, she'd still be short the gunners and pilots she needed to put up a proper fight. Running was the only viable option, but fuel was far too low for that.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The deck shuddered underfoot and acrid smoke began drifting through the bridge. The lights flickered out, and then the red glow of emergency lighting cast the bridge into a bloody gloom. Damage alerts flashed up all over the engineering console with a steady flood of information that any competent engineer would have forwarded to his repair crews by now. Except that she wasn't a ship's engineer, and she didn't have any repair crews.
Farah noticed that the ship's aft and dorsal shields were already in the yellow at 47% and 36% respectively. Her hands flew over the shield control board to equalize power by draining the shield arrays on the other sides of the ship. After that, she set shields to auto-equalize, and a dialog appeared at the bottom of the main display:
Shields Equalizing...
Then another flurry of attacks made those efforts useless, battering the ship's dorsal shields down into the red at just nine percent. The SISS filled the air with a continuous roar that made it hard to think. Farah was about to bark out an order for someone to turn down the volume, but then she remembered that she was the only one on deck, and she did it herself.
Sud
denly, she saw the folly in betraying her crew before they could betray her. She'd made it to Noctune all right, but she wasn't about to make it any further.
Then a desperate idea occurred to her, and Farah's eyes darted to the comms station. She ran over and quickly hailed the battleship running below the Baroness. Her message was short, but to the point.
"We surrender!"
Farah wasn't expecting an answer, and even if she got one, she wasn't expecting any kind of mercy. The Sythians had systematically slaughtered humanity for more than a decade.
Then the comms board lit up with an incoming message and Farah's eyes grew round. She keyed the message for playback, and the ship's speakers crackled with an alien voice. It took a moment for her to focus on the speaker enough to pick out words, and it was another moment before she recognized those words. The alien hissed at her in Versal, not Sythian.
"Lower your shieldsss and prepare for boarding, humanss. Do not resist or you shall be killed."
Farah must have gaped at the display for fully half a minute before she thought to comply with that demand. By then the Sythians had lowered her shields for her, but she disabled them anyway. After that, it wasn't more than five minutes before dozens of shuttles began streaming from the Sythian warships and landing in the Baroness's hangar bays.
Steeling herself, Farah started up the stairs from the crew deck to the gangway leading off the bridge. On her way, she checked the charge on her sidearm and flicked the setting from stun to kill—just in case. Surrender did seem like the only option, but there was always the dubious alternative of going down in a blaze of glory.
Only one thing held her back. If the Sythians wanted to take her alive and her ship intact, then why hadn't they done the same with Bretton? Perhaps he'd fought to the bitter end, but he might also have abandoned his ship after setting it to self-destruct. Knowing him he'd rather blow it up than let the Sythians get their hands on quantum tech, and if he'd done that, then maybe he'd been captured, too.
See you soon, Bret, Farah thought as she walked off the bridge. The doors swished shut behind her with a resonant boom, as if to warn her that there was no going back now, but she was long past the point of no return.
All that was left was to follow through.
Chapter 3
Ethan Ortane watched as a pair of heavily-armed goons unloaded the cargo crate from the back of his air car. He didn't know their names, but that went with the territory. It wouldn't be wise to participate in a resistance movement against an AI as powerful as Omnius without some degree of anonymity.
Thick cords of muscle bulged as the goons carried the crate to their grav sled. Ethan mentally nicknamed them Tall Goon and Short Goon. Tall was in charge, and he had the devlin-may-care swagger to prove it. Red-glowing tattoos crawled down from tightly rolled shirt sleeves, and the man's shaven skull sported some ugly scars that looked like they'd been carved out in a knife fight. It was all too familiar. Ethan had been exiled to Dark Space for stim-running, and even after all these years it was still easy to recognize another runner.
Ethan suppressed a scowl and pasted a pretty smile on his face instead. Stim-running had cost him his family once. He couldn't allow it to happen again. Just because he didn't know what he was delivering didn't mean he couldn't guess. He was an express courier making small deliveries to suspicious-looking people in deserted alleys, and Admiral Vee paid him as much as three cab drivers to do it. He would know. He used to be a cab driver.
It was hard to argue with a job when that job was the only thing between his family and a life of poverty, but Ethan was an old veteran of short-term gain for long-term pain, and he wasn't a big believer in ignorance being bliss.
Besides, Bliss was exactly what he was worried about. It was the super drug behind half of the crime in the Null Zone, a performance-enhancing panacea to everyone's problems. Take it and suddenly you become smarter and stronger than all of your peers, but stop taking it long enough and the withdrawal symptoms would turn your brain to mush. Those unfortunates turned into the deranged masses of the city's lowest levels. Psychos they were called.
Ethan eyed Tall Goon and Short Goon as they deposited the crate on their grav sled with a grunt. Then Tall walked over to him and held out a byte reader. Ethan handed over the credit chip that Admiral Vee had given him for this run. Tall began configuring the reader, and Ethan took the opportunity to shuffle a few steps closer, until he could watch the transaction on the reader's display. He had just enough time to see a large number flash up on the display before Tall noticed him watching and turned the reader away.
Ethan gave an innocent smile and said, "Business must be good."
Tall grunted and handed the credit chip back. "Keep your nose where it belongs or I'll cut it off."
"Sure thing." Ethan watched as Tall Goon strode back to his grav sled while Short Goon scanned the misty gloom of their surroundings with one hand on the pulse rifle slung over his shoulder. "Pleasure doing business with you!" Ethan called out, but neither Tall nor Short Goon deigned to offer a reply. As soon as both of them had slunk into the shadows, Ethan allowed the scowl he'd been suppressing to fester on his lips.
Rounding his car to the driver's side, Ethan hopped in. The car recognized him immediately and powered up when he flicked the ignition. He hovered up half a dozen meters past barred and lifeless apartment windows and then gunned the throttle, eliciting a roar from the car's thrusters. Inertia slapped him back against his seat.
Ethan kept half an eye on the rear display as he climbed, watching as the slithering mist and skulking shadows of the surface were swallowed whole by overlapping golden halos of light, now pouring out in shimmering waves from the buildings rising to either side of him.
The higher you went in Avilon, the brighter and prettier things got. Climbing at a steep 45-degree angle, Ethan could even see a hazy slice of blue in the distance. Unfortunately, it wasn't the sky. It was the Styx, the planet-wide shield on level 50 designed to keep Nulls like him from poking their heads out into the paradisiacal upper cities. Anyone could live up there, but not everyone wanted to. In the Uppers Omnius ran nightly simulations to predict people's behavior and help them avoid making mistakes. Living in paradise meant a daily sacrifice of even the most basic freedoms, and on Avilon everyone had to choose: live free in the Null Zone with the crime, chaos, and poverty, or live with a nagging voice inside your head constantly telling you what not to do.
Ethan shuddered at the thought. He leveled out and joined the traffic on level 30. Up here the air was bright with city lights, and just five levels below, crowds of pedestrians walked the Null Zone's elevated streets. Ethan set course for Thardris Tower and let the car's autopilot manage his speed and heading for a while so that he could think.
Having completed yet another successful courier mission, on his way to receive payment for another week's work, Ethan should have felt a sense of accomplishment, but instead all he felt was despair and apprehension.
The last time he'd been making such easy money he'd known what he was delivering. Somehow this time he'd agreed to a don't ask, don't tell policy for his cargo. Maybe it was because he had a lot further to fall on Avilon. Here, poverty wasn't just a matter of living with less. The lower levels of the city were deadly. Ethan still remembered how he'd had to escort his wife to and from work with one hand on his gun, the other squeezing the life out of hers. He wasn't about to subject Alara to that again.
As Ethan flew into Admiral Vee's private hangar, he tried to keep that in mind. Hovering down between the gleaming hulls of expensive-looking air cars, Ethan powered down and left the vehicle.
He spent a few minutes waiting outside, leaning against the midnight blue hull of his courier car before Admiral Vee came gliding across the glossy black floor of the hangar. She was dressed in a flowing yet figure-hugging red gown, transparent in so many places that Ethan didn't know where to put his eyes. Long, silken legs stole a glance from him without his permission, and then he resorted
to staring at his feet.
"You're back early!" Vee said. The steady clock clock clock of tall heels striking the floor abruptly ceased, and Ethan noticed a pair of white feet appear right in front of his. She stood so close that her cloying scent almost suffocated him. The admiral's hand came to rest on his arm, just below the curve of his biceps, and he flinched at the touch.
Finally, he looked up, having chosen a wary frown as his greeting. She seemed amused that he was uncomfortable, which only annoyed him further. Ethan eyed her hand on his arm for a long, silent moment before reaching into his pocket and handing her the credit chip she'd given him earlier.
"I don't know if it's all there, since you didn't tell me how much our—" Ethan hesitated, searching for the right word. "—supporters were supposed to pay."
"Don't worry about it," Vee said. "What would be the point of them pledging their support only to withhold payment?"
Ethan smirked and gestured to Vee's luxurious hangar, with no less than ten expensive air cars landed there. "Maybe word has spread about your judicious use of their funding."
Vee laughed and flashed a grin. "Who says I'm using their money? Besides, we all have appearances to maintain. It's what we use to shield ourselves from the wrong kind of attention."
"Appearances lie. I prefer to shoot straight and live straighter. Speaking of which, I don't think you're being honest with me, Admiral."
Vee took a step back and withdrew her hand from his biceps to cross both arms over her chest. "Oh?"
Ethan nodded. "Your backers are criminals."
"Of course they are."
Ethan blinked. He'd been expecting a denial, an excuse or a justification—not a straight admission of the facts. He shook his head. "What do you mean of course they are?"
"So are you."
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