Star Peregrine

by Jake Elwood

  The outer door rumbled shut, and Unger turned to face them, opening his faceplate. Alice opened her own faceplate in time to hear him say, "Keep your helmets on and your suits sealed. The roof is still wide open. We could lose pressure any time."

  They followed him through the lock's inner doors and into a cavernous building that smelled of grease and metal. It hadn't been designed as a docking bay for ships, but it served as one now. This wasn't Alice's first visit. She'd come to the Boot several times over the years in the Free Bird. At first the bay had been filled with abandoned mining equipment. The revolutionaries had removed it piece by piece, freeing up more and more room. Now the bay had space enough to accommodate even the Kestrel.

  "So far we've met no resistance," Unger said. "We've done scans, but scanners can be fooled. This building is probably empty. But 'probably' isn't good enough. Our job is to make sure."

  They broke into pairs, Alice and Collins earning a frown by choosing each other. "Don’t shoot your shipmates," Unger said. "But you can shoot anyone else. Look in every corner, every cabinet, every duct. I don't want any surprises popping out later and biting us on the ass."

  Gantries and balconies lined all four walls, and scaffolds and moveable towers cluttered the middle of the vast room. Unger sent teams climbing. Others headed for the middle of the room and the equipment there, a mix of abandoned mining machinery and apparatus for servicing ships. He sent Alice and Collins along the front wall at ground level.

  "Look sharp," he reminded them. "Don't stare at your teammates half way across the bay. Look at what's in front of you. Look at anything that might hide a person with a gun. Think about where you might hide a booby-trap. Stay paranoid."

  They moved off, bouncing along a dozen meters apart so that one ambush was unlikely to kill them both. Alice glanced up at the sky, faintly blurred by a force field, exposed by the open roof above them. All that vacuum made her shiver. She liked honest steel and glass between herself and the void.

  They picked their way through the blasted rubble of the front wall beneath the gaping hole where the missile had struck. More detritus littered the floor of the bay, including something that looked like a warped hull plate. She shivered, imagining it blasted free of the corvette by a missile. She hadn't seen the battle; the windows in the mess hall only gave a view to the side. She'd heard all about it from a spacer stationed in the Forward Observation Room.

  Collins waved a hand, and she looked at him. He gestured to a booth set in the tangled metal against the front wall. She nodded and circled around as he approached a narrow doorway. She took a quick glance behind her, then lifted her rifle to her shoulder, took aim at the doorway, and nodded to Collins.

  He launched himself forward, sailing through the air in a long slow dive that carried him through the doorway. There was a moment of tense silence, and then his head and shoulders emerged. He looked at Alice, then jerked back inside the hut. He would have been looking pretty much straight down the barrel of her rifle. She tilted the gun up a few centimeters.

  Collins peeked out, then emerged from the booth. He gave her an 'okay' hand sign and they continued their search.

  "Rose. Where are you?"

  The voice belonged to Unger. Alice moved toward the middle of the bay, and saw him waving to her from a doorway along the far wall. "We need you over here."

  She crossed the bay in long, bounding strides, her head swiveling as she scanned for danger. When she neared the doorway she slowed to a cautious shuffle. There would be full artificial gravity once she moved beyond the bay. Low gravity was useful for servicing ships, but the offices and living quarters had the heavier gravity that people needed for bone density and muscle tone.

  Unger backed through the doorway, gesturing for her to follow. She stepped over the threshold, her limbs suddenly heavy, the laser rifle dragging at her arms. Unger tapped a panel on the wall and a hatch slid shut behind her. He tapped his bracer. "Make sure your radio's off."

  She nodded.

  "We found some of your Free Planets people. We need you to talk to them."

  Déjà vu washed over her as she followed Unger into the station's mess hall. Harper and another marine, looking menacing and indestructible in their armored vac suits, stood at either end of a long table. Nine tired-looking people, helmetless and wearing unmatched vac suits, filled the benches on either side of the table. They kept their hands palm-down on the tabletop and watched the marines with wary eyes.

  These same marines had captured Alice with the rest of her crew and had held them in the kitchen of the Free Bird. The scene was so similar that it raised goosebumps on Alice's shoulders, and she asked herself for the thousandth time if she was on the right side.

  "Alice Rose."

  She scanned the line of prisoners. Seven of them were strangers, but the eighth, a young man with auburn hair and a spray of freckles across the bridge of his nose, was familiar. He was also staring at her.

  "It's you, isn't it? You're Alice Rose. You were on the Wild Goose." The young man's brow furrowed. "No, wait. It was the Free Bird."

  All the prisoners were looking at her now, with expressions ranging from curiosity to open resentment.

  I'm not a bloody traitor. It's not us against the United Worlds anymore. You must be able to see that. Suddenly weary, she sighed and leaned her rifle in a corner. That drew a sharp look from Harper, which she ignored. She pulled out a chair and sat down across from the young man with the freckles.

  "You're Jimmy something or other."

  "Cartwright. Jimmy Cartwright."

  "I'm Alice Rose." She addressed it to the entire table. "I was on the Free Bird when we were captured by a UW Navy ship. Then the war broke out. The crew of the Free Bird is helping the United Worlds Navy, at least until we get out of the war zone." She swept her gaze up and down the row of prisoners. "The way I see it, the Dawn Alliance is our common enemy now. Once we've sent them packing, well, we can go back to fighting these boys if we have to." She jerked a thumb at the marines. "In the meantime, they're our allies."

  The woman beside Alice shook her head, but didn't speak. A man across the table nodded, drawing a scowl from the woman beside him. Jimmy shrugged and said, "Maybe you're right. I don't know."

  A gray-haired woman said, "I thought the Dawn Alliance was our ally now."

  That drew a derisive snort from another man. "When there's a weasel in the henhouse, it doesn't help the hens much to make alliances with him."

  "The Council made an alliance," the woman said stubbornly. "We should honor it."

  Jimmy looked at her. "Tell it to Garth Ham."

  Alice lifted an eyebrow. "Who's Garth Ham?"

  "He worked with us," said Jimmy. "Then the Dawn Alliance came storming in here. They started asking us where we were from."

  A gloomy silence settled over the table. Alice endured it for a few moments, then said, "And?"

  "And Garth was from Neorome. They dragged him away. And we haven't seen him since." He looked at the woman who'd argued with him. "That's the kind of allies they are."

  "He's from Neorome," she said. "So long as you're not from there, they treat you okay."

  "Neorome had the guts to stand against these scumbags," Alice snapped. "I might just change my citizenship. I'll stand with Neorome and Tazenda."

  The woman stared at her, not speaking. Finally she said, "There were dozens of them. They had guns. Lots of guns. What were we supposed to do?"

  "They're gone now," Alice said. "The United Worlds is who you've got to deal with now. I suggest you cooperate. They think they own the Green Zone, but they're not the ones using nukes."

  That drew a startled gasp from the prisoners. The gray-haired woman said, "They wouldn't."

  "They did," said Alice. "I've seen the bodies."

  A babble of questions and arguments filled the air. The prisoners calmed down considerably when they realized the Dawn Alliance had used a nuke against a UW ship, not a Free Planets colony. They were shaken, though
. In all the history of humanity, very few governments had been barbarous enough to use nuclear weapons in war.

  It took the starch out of them, and they started to talk. Harper set a small recorder on the tabletop and the prisoners poured out their story. It came out in a jumble, people talking over one another, interrupting each other, jumping back and forth in time.

  Nine people had been manning the station when the Dawn Alliance arrived. The invaders hadn't been gentle, but they hadn't killed anyone, either. They'd locked up the Free Planets personnel, then released them a day later. They'd played a vid clip, a selection of speeches from colony leaders announcing the new arrangement with the Dawn Alliance. Then a DA officer had interrogated them one at a time, and ordered Garth Ham dragged away.

  That was eighteen hours ago. The DA people hadn't answered any questions about Garth or his fate.

  After that, the prisoners had gone to work. Under careful supervision from DA troops they'd serviced one ship after another, refuelling and doing basic engine maintenance. There's been dozens of DA personnel around, but most of them had gone, departing on the refuelled ships. They weren't sure how many remained.

  Alice wasn't sure what made her look up from the table. Jimmy was talking, describing the last ship he'd worked on, a light cruiser.

  The marines, though, were no longer listening.

  Harper had his faceplate closed, as if to block out the sound of Garth's voice. Unger had a hand inside his helmet, a finger plugging one ear. The other two marines were gone. Alice hadn't noticed when they left.

  Harper retracted his faceplate. "Rose. You're with me. Unger, stay with the pris- with the liberated personnel."

  Unger nodded, and Harper headed for a doorway leading deeper into the complex. He made a curt gesture to Alice and she hurried after him. Once they were out of earshot of the mess hall she said, "What's going on?"

  "We found Garth Ham."

  The corridor opened onto a machine shop. It seemed to be the place where the Dawn Alliance had made its last stand. Laser burns decorated the walls and some of the machinery, and a line of pock marks showed where slugs had hit the ceiling and one wall.

  The bodies lay stretched in a tidy row along one wall. There were five of them, three men in infantry uniforms and a man and a woman in coveralls. The weapons of the marines had done terrible damage to all five bodies, and Alice looked away, taking deep breaths to keep her stomach under control. Blood and offal filled her nose and coated the back of her tongue, with just a hint of gunsmoke and machine oil underneath it.

  Alice took a deep breath and held it, not exhaling until they were well past the charnel house.

  Someone had died in the corridor beyond. She didn't notice the blood trail until she'd been walking in it for half a dozen paces. Her boots made a sticky sound with every step, and she decided it was too late to be squeamish. She kept on walking, swallowing bile, until she came to three jagged holes in the wall of the corridor, a scattering of cartridge casings, and a thick splatter of blood on the wall and floor.

  Blood and … tissue?

  She screwed her eyes shut and walked toward the sound of Harper's footsteps ahead of her. When she was sure they were past the gore she opened her eyes, just in time to see Harper, glancing over his shoulder, meet her gaze. She flushed.

  "It's pretty bad," he said. "You're handling it just fine."

  Alice, unsure if she could speak without throwing up, just nodded.

  "I have to show you something that's pretty bad in its own way," he warned her. "But maybe it'll help you feel better about what happened to her." He nodded in the direction of the bloody mess behind her.

  She stared at him, wishing she could turn around and run all the way back to the Kestrel. With her eyes closed.

  "It's through here," he said, and stepped through a doorway.

  The sight of a figure stretched out on a table made her think she was in a hospital bay. She stopped in the doorway, momentarily disoriented. This wasn't the surgery. That was on the far side of the base. This was a meeting room.

  Which had been converted into a torture chamber.

  The man on the table was a bloody mess. He wore nothing but a pair of ragged denim trousers. His feet were toward her, and his toes had been broken. All ten of them. No, all nine. One toe was missing, just a ragged, scabbed stump remaining.

  Burns covered the soles of his feet. More burns made a haphazard pattern across his stomach and chest. There were cuts too, a dozen or more, shallow furrows on his stomach and arms and shoulders. One nipple was gone completely. A chunk of skin the size of her palm was missing, hacked away, and Alice closed her eyes. At least he's dead now. His suffering is over.

  She took a couple of slow, deep breaths. Then, feeling like it was somehow her duty, she made herself open her eyes and look into Garth Ham's face.

  His own mother wouldn't have recognized him. His face was a lumpy, swollen mess, bruised and abraded, with the black circle of a burn showing on one cheek. His eyes were swollen shut. She stared at the slits and whispered, "Oh, my God."

  The puffy skin around his left eye twitched. That eye wouldn't open, but his right eye opened, just a crack. She watched his eye swivel around, and his head turned until his gaze was fixed on her. His lips curled in a gallows grin, splitting a scab under his nose. A single bright drop of blood appeared, and he rasped, "What took you so long?"

  Chapter 16

  Tom stood on the bridge of the Kestrel, staring through the windows at the corvette and fidgeting, wishing he could be out there. He'd broached the idea with Harper. The marine lieutenant had vetoed the idea with such scathing disdain that Tom hadn't even considered pulling rank. And Harper was right. Tom, as the only command officer left on the entire ship, was much too valuable to risk.

  Still, it chafed him to remain onboard.

  The crashed corvette lay at almost a thirty-degree angle, nose and port side down, at the base of the pile of mine tailings. She was right-side-up, which would help the scavenger team that stood waiting on the regolith.

  The crew of the corvette were still trickling out through the ship's main airlock. The ship had other locks, and breaches in the hull big enough to let a person slip through. Each of these points of egress was guarded by a spacer from the Kestrel. The main airlock was the only way out, and a marine stood waiting with a trio of spacers, searching each vac-suited prisoner as they emerged.

  Dozens of prisoners had come out already. They knelt in a dejected circle, ringed by a dozen armed spacers. Another marine perched in the gantry high above, watching the prisoners through the scope of his rifle. The marines weren't taking any chances.

  Not that the prisoners looked like much of a threat. They were battered and defeated, most of them staring at their own knees. They weren't dangerous, not individually, but there were so damned many of them! Tom shook his head, wondering what he was going to do with them all. Herd them into a storage room or something inside the base, he supposed, and leave them there. He had no way to deliver them to Garnet, and he couldn't order them all shot.

  The trickle of prisoners leaving the ship died away. The marine at the airlock sent in a couple of drones, one flying, one rolling, and spent a few minutes watching the screen on the sleeve of his vac suit. Then he gestured to the spacers with him and led the way onto the corvette.

  Tom realized he was holding his breath and made himself exhale. He couldn’t tear himself away from the window, though. He stared at the dark maw of the corvette's airlock until the marine's voice came over the radio. "Ship's clear. There's a medical team and nine injured in the surgery. I've got Hoskins keeping an eye on them. Aside from that, the ship is free of hostiles."

  Before Tom could speak he heard O'Reilly over the radio. "Roger that. I'm bringing in the salvage team." He would know what to look for, too. Tom stared through the window, watching O'Reilly enter the ship with half a dozen spacers behind him. They'd strip the ship of anything useful, starting with missiles. Whether the Kestre
l would be able to fire a Dawn Alliance missile remained to be seen, but they certainly wouldn't leave any missiles behind.

  The urge to help, to give obvious orders just so he could participate, was almost overwhelming. Tom bit his lip to keep himself from speaking, then walked over to his chair and sat down. Onda and a woman named Ng were the only crew left on the bridge, and even they were more than was required. The Kestrel held less than a skeleton crew. If the Dawn Alliance fleet returned their goose was cooked.

  "Captain? Sawyer here."

  Tom toggled the radio in his helmet. "Go ahead, Sawyer." With the faceplate up his voice echoed weirdly. Wearing a vac suit on a pressurized ship was always exasperating, and he wondered if he would ever get used to it.

  "I'm sending a crew onto the top of that corvette. We're going to grab a laser turret. They're using Bose guns. They're almost identical to ours."

  Well, that's a stroke of luck. But we'll have to talk to the Bose people. Get them to stop shipping weapons to the Dawn Alliance. "Sounds good," he said.

  "The installation would go faster if we brought the ship into the bay," Sawyer said. "We could do a proper repair on the hull, too."

  It was a tempting idea. If they grabbed the fuel they needed and anything handy they found lying around, they could be away from Rivendell in an hour or two. But the trip back to Garnet would be long and fraught with danger. The Kestrel had enough hull damage to make hyperspace travel dangerous. They'd have to skirt storms the whole way, and if a shifting storm front engulfed them, it could be disastrous.

  A light flashed inside his helmet, telling him he had a call on another channel. "Grab the laser turret for now," he said. "I'll get back to you about going into the bay." He switched channels. "Thrush here."

  "This is Harper. Can you come over to the base, Captain? We have a rescued prisoner here. I think you should hear what he has to say."