by C. Gockel
“Seal your suit!” Luka shouted as he ran, fumbling at his exosuit’s controls. If the KemX explosion pierced the Beehive’s hull, they’d lose air mix violently fast.
The circular ramps were dizzying, and Luka had time to decide that whoever designed them should be launched into the nearest black hole.
They had just cleared the third level when the whole ship shook, and the grav compensators stuttered. Jerzi stumbled, and Luka dragged him up. Luka could have run faster, but he didn’t want to chance leaving Jerzi behind. Not again.
The ship shuddered again, throwing off his gait and triggering sharp deja vu from when he’d been aboard the Berjalan. He grabbed Jerzi’s arm and dragged him into the nav pod. Mairwen was already at the nav console, fingers moving so fast they were a blur. The nav pod door sealed and locked quickly behind them.
“Our hull is intact,” she said. “It’s okay to unseal for now.” Luka gladly opened the exosuit so he could hear and breathe better. Jerzi did the same.
She pointed to the co-pilot seat. “Jerzi, lasers.” The interface popped into view.
Jerzi adjusted the angle on the holo. “What am I looking at?” he asked. “Oh, I get it. Like an oversized 3-D scope.”
“I highlighted targets on the spacer. Their torp tubes are priority. Be ready to fire on my mark.”
“Copy,” he replied. He adjusted the holo viewing angle again. His expression settled into his detached sniper’s look.
Luka moved out of the way to a corner, only to discover it was already occupied by the medical and xeno kits. He couldn’t imagine when she’d had time to drag them in. He leaned against the wall instead, trying to stay focused. Mostly all he could do was stare in wonder at Mairwen, who’d saved their lives so many times he was losing count.
“Jerzi, tube is coming around. Five-second burn. Track target movement manually.”
“Ready,” said Jerzi. They both sounded so calm.
“Now,” said Mairwen.
Jerzi powered the laser, counted the burn time out loud, then shut it off.
Mairwen watched her display intently, then smiled slightly. “Dead bang.”
Jerzi smiled in response but didn’t take his eyes off his targeting display.
“Luka, I need your help.” Her voice was suddenly thready.
Luka was deeply alarmed. She never asked for help. He was beside her in a heartbeat. She was ash pale. “What do you need?”
She pointed to icons on the navigation interface with shaking fingers. “This is us, this is the spacer. Their airlock is gone. They’re spinning out, but they’ll get control soon. They’re guessing we used regular debris lasers on their torp tube, so they’re trying to get away. We have to be within a hundred K for our lasers to slag the other torp tube before they can use it on us, but we can’t be closer than fifty K, or their lasers can cut us open.” She closed her eyes a moment, then opened them and met his gaze. She looked deathly tired.
“I’m having trouble reading. I can control the system drive, but I need you to read out the distance and angle to me every ten seconds, or sooner if something changes fast.” She pointed at two numbers on the interface.
“I can do that.” He knelt in front of her and read off the first set of numbers.
She made a minute adjustment to a control on the interface, then closed her eyes and went inert, like a power switch had been turned off. Although he was scared out of his wits for her, he waited the full ten seconds before reading off the numbers again. Some of his terror eased when she opened her eyes. How would she get any rest in ten-second intervals?
“I’m fine,” she said, so softly he almost didn’t hear it. She met his gaze with the hint of a smile, and he realized with astonishment that she was teasing him. He smiled back at her with all the cockiness he could muster, but he was sure his anxiety was still glaringly obvious.
A shipcomm alert startled them all.
“Attention. Four transit displacement signatures detected.”
If Luka had been a religious man, he would have been praying right about then, because the arrival of four new ships meant they were either saved or damned.
He read off the numbers again.
25 * Interstellar: “Beehive” Ship Day 02 * GDAT 3237.045 *
LUKA’S DEEP, STEADY voice soothed her like velvet. As long as he was safe, all was right with the universe.
“Active-scan detected from unknown ship A.”
From the readings, it looked like the spacer they’d targeted was firing its trim jets all at once, apparently in an attempt to startle her into moving the Beehive away. She couldn’t think why the spacer hadn’t just engaged its system drive and taken off, since it had gotten what it came for.
Actually, she was having a hard time thinking at all. Despite her bravado for Luka, because he’d looked so vulnerably scared for her, she wasn’t fine.
As soon as she’d woken from Haberville’s slap patch and staggered out of the engine pod, she’d downed two abandoned cups of cold coffee in the nav pod to help counteract the residual effects of the anesthetic, knowing the caffeine would be a double-edged sword. It had helped her to recover enough to use full-tracker mode to find Luka and Jerzi, and then to kill Haberville, but she was now perilously close to flatlining. Her stomach felt like she’d swallowed lye. When she wasn’t losing focus, she kept seeing spots, and the lights made her head throb. She was afraid if she tried even a single second of half-tracker mode, she’d pass out cold.
“Incoming broadbeam message from unknown ship B.”
It took her two tries to hit the shipcomm key to play the message out loud.
“This is the Concordance Command dreadnought Khong Met Moi. Stand down and identify your ship.”
The message was in Mandarin and English, and accompanied by the Space Div identification signature that was almost impossible to counterfeit. Mairwen aimed a tightbeam comm at the dreadnought and spoke as clearly as she could. “This is transport Beehive. Luka Foxe from La Plata Security in temporary command. We’re under attack by exploration spacer. We need help now.”
She never realized how much energy talking took. Her vision grayed out, and her hands became too heavy to hold up to the interface.
From far away, she heard Luka’s voice. “This is Foxe. Our only pilot is badly hurt. If you don’t help us now, we’re dead.”
She regretted that she hadn’t told Luka how much she loved his voice. The world faded, and she fell into black, and silence, and oblivion.
“...ljósið mitt, you have to wake up.”
She felt more than heard the murmur of Luka’s vocal vibrations through her body. She awoke enough to realize she was being cradled in his lap, her head against his chest. His scent curled up into her nose and soothed her.
Her left hand had an IV unit that was delivering fluids or nutrients, she couldn’t tell which. Her right hand, too. She was still in an exosuit, and they were still in the Beehive’s nav pod, so not much time could have passed. She tilted her head up to meet Luka’s gaze.
“Hi there,” he said, with a soft smile.
“Are we safe?” Her voice sounded weak to her ears.
“The dreadnought’s pilot talked Jerzi through getting us stabilized. They’re setting up an airlock join, and Jerzi’s down there now. The spacer is disabled, and its crew is under lockdown. When we blew their airlock, it damaged their system drive guidance. I’m guessing the KemX set off the thermobarics they took from the Beehive.”
“How long?”
“You passed out twenty minutes ago. You need to listen. Jerzi and I took apart the overload flux line and cleaned the laser guidance system, but if anyone looks at the lasers themselves, they’ll see the modifications. None of us knows anything about it. If there are healers on the Khong Met Moi, I won’t let them near you, and I won’t let the medics put you in an autodoc.”
“Thank you,” she said. Her hands felt cold.
“There’s more. Eve Haberville saved us with superb pilot skills
, led us safely through the forest, and led the assault on the base. She was trying to rescue all of us from the hold when she was tragically killed by the thieving, murdering spacers. We escaped and blew the airlock with the KemX. Jerzi and I didn’t like Eve, but we concede she was a hero.”
It was simple, believable, and hard to disprove without a telepathic scan. She tried to smile at him, but was feeling numb, so she wasn’t sure she was successful.
“Okay,” she said.
He gently pushed a lock of her hair out of her face. “So, what made you suspect her?”
“Engine comp. Left it open. Saw the message she sent to the spacer. Too late.” She knew she was sounding like a newsfeed burst, and made an effort to string words together better. “She gave them our names… told them to say they were from La Plata. Wanted all the hybrid samples. She surprised me with an anesthetic slap patch.”
“Which she expected to keep you down for hours.” He stroked her hair softly. “You moved the kits, then tracked her.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’ll clean the engine comp before we leave. Wouldn’t want messy details to get in the way of a good story.”
She was flooded by emotion she could finally put a name to.
“I love brilliant men,” she whispered.
He tenderly kissed her forehead. “I love you more than any of those other men do.”
She discovered tears could come with happiness. “There’s only you.”
His smile widened and his eyes were bright. “Then I’m a very, very lucky man.”
He kissed her lips softly and rocked her in his arms for long moments. Her world shrank to only him, only the exotic, buttery pearwood scent of him.
Jerzi’s voice came over the shipcomm. “The lock is open and we’ve got company. I asked for a stretcher for Morganthur. They’re on their way.”
“Mairwen, promise me something.” The look on Luka’s face was suddenly serious. “I want you in my life, and to be in yours, but I know that may not be possible because of your former employer. All I ask is that if you feel you have to leave, tell me. Otherwise, it’ll become my life’s obsession to find you again.”
She lifted her fingers to caress his face, the attached IV unit on her hand making her clumsy. “I promise.” He was so perfectly handsome, so perfectly human. Maybe he could teach her to be, too.
26 * Interstellar: “Khong Met Moi” * GDAT 3237.047 *
LUKA LEANED BACK in the military briefing room chair and arranged his face and limbs in the attitude of relaxed boredom, in case anyone on the Khong Met Moi cared to look in. Jerzi was trying to do the same, but the younger man couldn’t quite stop fidgeting in small ways. Mairwen, of course, surpassed them both with her ability to remain completely, impassively still. Her only concession to her recent injuries was to sit instead of stand.
They’d been asked to wait while La Plata’s lawyer and Seshulla Zheer herself tried to pry them loose from Space Div’s care. The room had no door, and they weren’t being detained, exactly, but Lieutenant Commander Omharu, the Khong Met Moi’s security officer, didn’t want to let them go without more “fact finding.” Little clues had sparked Luka’s intuition, and he’d ruthlessly used his talent on the woman. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake of avoiding using his talent and putting them all at risk. What he’d sensed made him believe Omharu was a CPS telepath, whereupon he’d instantly ceased cooperating and demanded the team’s formal arrest or immediate release.
Commodore Morris-Seeley had been indifferently unresponsive, but the second in command, Captain Okeanos, had surprisingly taken their side and used a fine knowledge of military code and procedure to keep Omharu at bay. Luka ordinarily disliked being a pawn in someone else’s conflict, but in this case, he wasn’t going to complain.
Luka’s talent said Okeanos was a good man—idealistic, loyal, and surprisingly lonely, probably from having to work with people like Morris-Seeley and Omharu. It was Okeanos who’d finally communicated with the La Plata ship that had accompanied the Space Div contingent to let them know there was a problem. So now they were stuck in jurisdictional limbo.
In truth, Luka was almost completely out of patience with everyone and everything. He’d been glad to get Mairwen onto a large, well-armed ship where she could recover her strength. He hadn’t left her side the entire time she was being examined and treated, and both he and Jerzi enforced her wishes with the medics when needed. She’d refused drugs and full-body imagers, but allowed them to use a portable bone knitter on her ribs, and to reapply dermaknit to her burns, lacerations, and leg wound. He would have liked a diagnostic scan on her brain, in case it was swollen from the concussion, but conceded that discovery of her secrets would kill her a lot more quickly than a possible mild brain injury.
When she’d finally been released from treatment, he returned the knives she’d entrusted to his safekeeping, then allowed the medics to treat his own injuries. Luckily, his thigh was knitting nicely and his shoulder bone had only been bruised, not fractured, as he'd feared. Multiple microjets of meds flushed the blood out of his tissue, leaving only hints of bruising. Jerzi’s broken nose and black eye were almost erased, and he said his bullet wound felt a lot better.
For the thirty-six hours after that, he, Jerzi, and Mairwen all agreed not to be separated from one another. They asked for shared quarters, ostensibly out of politeness to the personnel who might temporarily be displaced to accommodate them. They slept in shifts, so at least two of them were always awake, acting as personal security for each other. They went everywhere together and were only apart when being interrogated about the events of the prior week.
The Khong Met Moi and the two accompanying Space Div frigates were still in the Insche 255 system. Luka hadn’t heard what had happened to the exploration spacer or its crew, or if the hybrid planet was being investigated. At this point, he really didn’t care. All he wanted to do was go home and spend a month curled up with Mairwen.
It was a new kind of hell being so close and not being able to talk to or even look at her freely, much less touch or hold her, and he was aching for her. He sensed she was feeling it, too.
She was, thankfully, looking much healthier after sleep and food. She still favored her left leg, where the projectile had pierced it, and the sealed laceration on her head made a visible furrow through her asymmetrical haircut, but her eyes were bright and her color was normal.
At every meal in the dining hall, he’d made it a point to load extra selections he thought she might like onto his tray, then surreptitiously transfer them to hers. She raised her eyebrow at him a couple of times and said nothing, but she ate everything he gave her. He was secretly amused by the taciturnity she’d steadfastly maintained since they arrived, mostly because it pissed off Omharu.
After ninety additional minutes of enforced leisure in the briefing room, Luka used the shipcomm to politely request that the operator ask Captain Okeanos to authorize food and drink for them, since they’d missed the second-shift dining hours. When someone finally came, it wasn’t with a meal, it was Captain Okeanos himself with two others. Luka recognized the older man who wore civilian clothes. The younger, uniformed man’s collar insignia indicated he was an ensign, but his size and demeanor were those of an enforcement guard.
The older man stepped into the briefing room.
“Razumovsky,” Luka said. He sat up a little straighter but didn’t stand. He was tired of games.
“Foxe,” the man acknowledged, then turned to Okeanos. “I’d like to talk to my clients alone for a few minutes.”
“Regrettably, privacy is hard to find these days, even on Space Div capital ships,” said Okeanos. His voice was a deep, rumbling bass. “This public briefing room will have to do.” His eyes darted briefly to two of the light panels in the room.
Razumovsky nodded. Okeanos and the other man stepped out into the hall and politely turned their backs to the open doorway.
“I see you’re all looking tolerably well, considering,”
Razumovsky said, eying the blue taped patches on the side and sleeve of Mairwen’s shirt and the round hole in the shoulder of Jerzi’s. “Zheer is wrapping up details with the commodore. You’ll have to be available for an official recorded statement for Space Div investigators once we get back to Rekoria, but I expect you’ll be released from here in the next thirty minutes.” His gaze rested on Mairwen. “I understand some of you refused medical treatment?”
“Oh, please,” said Luka, mindful of the monitors Okeanos had subtly warned them about. “Morganthur doesn’t like hospitals or medics. They tried to make it out like she wasn’t competent to decide for herself. We convinced them otherwise.”
Razumovsky nodded his understanding. “Do you need anything from your bunks before we leave?”
“No,” said Luka, and Jerzi echoed it. Mairwen shook her head.
“Sit tight. I'll be back soon.”
He left with Okeanos, but the ensign stayed put outside the door. Luka exchanged a look with Jerzi and saw he also thought it unusual for the ensign to stay.
Luka knew Mairwen would hear someone coming a lot sooner than he could, so he casually angled himself so he could see her instead of staring at the corridor. Besides, he liked watching the beautiful woman he was in love with. The woman who miraculously loved him back.
They didn’t have long to wait before Mairwen subtly flicked her eyes toward the door. About ten seconds later, Omharu tried to stride through the doorway, only to be blocked by the ensign.
“Sorry, sir, no one in or out. Captain’s orders,” The ensign didn’t sound the least bit sorry.
“Countermanded,” snapped Omharu. She tried to step forward, but the ensign blocked her again.
“Sorry, sir, you’ll have to take it up with the captain.” There was a perverse enjoyment in the ensign’s tone. Maybe Omharu had made more enemies than just Okeanos.
