Kismet

by Watts Martin

  So the best thing to do will be to stay put even if she gets a chance to escape, to keep them focused on her, until Jack’s completed his end of the run and sent a rescue team back. They probably won’t get there in time to save her. But saving her isn’t the important part.

  “You holding up all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You just made a…whimper. It wasn’t happy.”

  She forces a casual shrug. “Oh. I’m, uh, running through a few options. Trying to figure out what gets you out alive and the databox back.”

  “And gets you out alive?”

  “Still working that part out.”

  “I don’t want to think I’m just leaving you there helpless.”

  “You know I’m not helpless.”

  He doesn’t say anything in response. After a few seconds pass she closes her eyes.

  A beep sounds from Jack’s virtual console and he twists around. “They’ve sent a set of coordinates,” he says after a second.

  “I guess that’s an implied ‘we accept.’ No other message?”

  “An eight-hour time limit.”

  “Okay. Send the coordinates to Kis, and we’ll get underway.”

  Jack taps out a few more commands.

  After a few seconds, the ship speaks. “The flight will be approximately seven hours twenty-three minutes.” The cockpit instrumentation fades in around Gail’s seat like a greeting, and the engine drone kicks in.

  Jack clears his throat. “So where are we going?”

  She touches a control, bringing up the course overlay, studies it. It’s not very far—in space navigation terms—from where the SC71 wreck had been. “I have no idea. There’s no platform in the standard set of…” She trails off. Shit, but there was, wasn’t there?

  “What?”

  “I think we’re going to Alexandria.”

  “I’ve never heard of it, outside the historical context on Earth.”

  The ship chimes. “Signaling departure from New Coyoacán.” The docking connections audibly release, making soft rings throughout the newly repaired hull.

  “It’s a historical context here, too. The only platform on the River that ever had a complete catastrophic failure. It was small, more a tourist and research station than a habitat, but they still lost close to four thousand people.”

  “Casting off.” The ship begins to move, and the disorienting falling-up vertigo kicks in until the feel of Kismet’s own acceleration overtakes it.

  “What happened?”

  She shakes her head. “Depends on who you ask. There’s three official stories I can think of, and they all blamed a mix of bad luck, spotty maintenance and cutting one corner too many during construction. That hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theories, but it never does, right? The most popular one is that Earth wanted to ‘prove’ River life was dangerous and engineered a catastrophe to scare us into coming home. But there’s at least one story for every group somebody still hates. Which is pretty much every group.”

  “And of course any investigation that doesn’t find evidence to support a conspiracy is just proof of how wide-reaching the conspiracy is.”

  “I see you’ve met a few conspiracy theorists.”

  “Interpol is funded directly by the Illuminati.”

  She laughs.

  After the acceleration eases, she unbuckles, grabs her drink and pushes off back into the cabin, catching herself and swinging into the seat opposite Jack, clipping herself in. “God. I know I should try to get some sleep—we both should—but I’m not sure I can.”

  “I don’t think I can, either.” He glances ahead at the star-filled cockpit, then down at the floor. “You have any ideas yet? On what you can do to…”

  “No, but I should still have Kismet there after you leave.”

  He looks up at her. “Are you sure of that?”

  “No. But what I’m hoping is that they’re going to force me to fly it for them—which works in our favor—or, more likely, they’re going to send you off in one of their ships. So that leaves me with them, but also with Kis. That just means I need to get somewhere I can get to her.”

  “You make that sound like it’s going to be easy.”

  She shrugs. “It’s easier than not having her to get to. I’m a good improviser.”

  He sighs, leaning to the side and looking at the beverage station. “Can this thing do beer?”

  “Yes, but don’t let it. Get one from the refrigerator.”

  “Okay.” He unbuckles and floats a couple meters toward the aft, opening the fridge and pulling a bottle out of the rack. He looks at it critically, then back in the box. “No lager?”

  “I don’t like lager. And all those beers are low carbonation, which lager usually isn’t. Get a zero-g lid from right there.” She points.

  He shuts the refrigerator and grabs a lid. “Yes, captain.” It only takes him two tries to get the lid on, and he manages not to lose any beer in the process. She’s impressed.

  After he’s been sitting in silence for a few minutes, Jack stares into the plastic bottle. “I don’t know why I agreed to this.”

  “Because we’re not just saving Sky and three others, we might be saving thousands of lives.” She stops herself from saying millions, because it sounds too far-fetched, too nutty. But it might be true.

  “I know.”

  She sips her drink. “Now, if you’re wondering how I roped you into it, frankly I have no idea. I didn’t think I was that good at sales.”

  Jack smiles, but doesn’t say anything.

  “You’re pretty good at sales, too. Better than I am, maybe. You sold Nelson on you turning.”

  His face darkens and he stares at the bottle. “Let’s just think about what we’re going to do when we get to Alexandria. And maybe try to get some rest.”

  Gail frowns. “I was just making a joke.”

  “I know.” He shakes his head once. “Sorry. I just…” He trails off and takes a drink of the beer.

  There’s something about his tone that’s off. She isn’t sure just what, but she’s been picking it up intermittently. When he first said Purity accepted the deal, when he made the Illuminati joke, and especially just now when he reacted to her comment about selling the plan to Nelson. “Okay. I get it. So let’s think about that some more. You’ve heard my ideas about what to do when we get there, so let’s hear yours. This is more your forte than mine, right?” As she speaks, she ramps up her visual system, studying his face carefully while trying to make it look casual. She hates to do this, but she has to know.

  “I think you have it right. I’ll hand you over to them. They’ll more than likely interrogate me, too. If I pass, they’ll send someone to fly back with me—hopefully on one of their ships—to Panorica.” He’s looking a fraction of a degree away from her eyes rather than directly at them.

  “And then?”

  “Whoever they send with me isn’t likely to have biomodifications, given Purity ideology. So I’m going to have a significant advantage fighting them. After they’re neutralized, I’ll fly the ship back to the Ceres Ring.” There’s a slight twitch, a flinch, something she wouldn’t have caught if she wasn’t cheating. But then he notices her stare. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  She blinks, resyncing her eyes to normal. “To see if you’re lying.”

  “What?” He draws back with a flinch anyone could pick up, bouncing against the seat back. “What do you think I’m lying about?”

  “I don’t know, Jack, but I’d damn well like to find out before we get there, because I don’t think you believe what you just told me.”

  “You’re just mistaking stress for lying. You think this is any easier for me?”

  No, not appreciably, and sure, they’re both stressed. But she can tell the difference. She meets the challenging glare he’s giving her. “Kis, plot a course for the Rothbard Republic.”

  “Yes, Gail.”

  “What?” Jack tries to bolt upright, jerking agains
t the zero-g restraints. “No! Have you lost your mind? We have a time limit. Kis, don’t change course!”

  “You are not authorized for piloting controls.” Kismet sounds faintly reproachful.

  “I guess this isn’t the best time for a vacation, and pretty much the entire solar system will want us dead, but Rothbard doesn’t have extradition treaties with anyone. Of course, eventually they’ll start sending assassins. I don’t know which ‘they,’ since I think we’ve got about a half-dozen candidates by now, but if we pay off the right—”

  “They have Laurie!”

  She stares at him.

  Jack holds the side of his head with both hands. “They have my daughter. They sent me…pictures. Pictures of her at home. Her in the yard. Her with Claudia. Her alone. They’re not pictures we shared. They’re ones they took. And they’re dated today.” He closes his eyes. “I didn’t ‘sell’ them on anything. I just gave them an opening.”

  Christ. How could they have pulled that off so quickly? They wouldn’t need an ansible, though, would they? One-way messages to the inner system only have a half-hour delay right now. They’d have needed to get people in place damn fast, but Burke Junior has the resources for that.

  But they haven’t kidnapped his daughter, yet. They’re just surveilling her. So she and Jack can do…something. “Then they don’t have her, they just—”

  That gets him to look at her. “They’re at the house, Gail. That’s as good as having her.” She’s never seen that kind of look on his face before. She isn’t sure she’s seen it on anyone’s face before. Maybe Sky’s, after their mother died. Not just sadness: sadness with anger. And a lot of that anger? It’s aimed at her. Dragging him in was her crazy idea, not his.

  She unhooks, kicking off toward the ceiling and “sitting” on it, staring down at him. “So were you planning to tie me up for real, and to really fly the databox back to Panorica?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you still planning that?”

  It takes him a longer time to repeat himself. “I don’t know.”

  “The RJC knows we’re coming out here. That means if you show up at Port Panorica without me, you’re going to be stopped. Lantern doesn’t know that, but you do.”

  “It’s up to the PFS there, not the RJC. If Lantern has someone inside, they’d be tipped off to let me through.”

  She rubs her temples. He’s right. “Jack, you can’t let them bring the databox back to Earth. You know what’s going to happen.”

  “No, Gail, I don’t. I have a hypothesis about what happens. But what happens to Laurie if I don’t isn’t a hypothesis.”

  What happens to her when Corbett gets his hands on her, what happens to Sky without the countermeasure—those aren’t hypotheses, either. But she isn’t his daughter. Sky isn’t his daughter. In the abstract, no one should trade a million people they don’t know for one they love. But this isn’t abstract.

  “All right.” She curls into a ball in midair. “I guess we have to find a way to save everyone.”

  Chapter 24

  Kismet chimes. “We are approaching our destination. Please secure any loose items.”

  Gail unzips the duvet holding her in place and pushes herself free of the bunk she’s been in the last two and a half hours. She may have drifted to sleep intermittently, but it wasn’t restful; hearing Jack muttering to himself once or twice snapped her to full, paranoid wakefulness. Even so, being in her bed, surrounded by her sheets, her pillows—she’s missed that. It’s not as comfortable as the hotel bed was, not even as comfortable as Sky’s couch. Especially in zero-g. But it’s hers. She needed this time. It’d have been nicer if she hadn’t been so terrified, but she still needed it.

  Jack hasn’t fallen asleep, either, but at least he’s not sitting there holding a gun on her. Yet. He’s going to have to, unless the plan changes radically. But that part of the plan isn’t broken—it’s the part he has to play after they separate, when she can’t see him, that needs fixing.

  “We need to take their leverage away.” She floats past Jack toward the cockpit. Kis has drawn a red circle around the platform they’re heading toward, a few degrees up and starboard from the ship’s current facing. It’s not big enough to make out any details yet. Just like the SC71, the circle has no markings around it; the platform isn’t transmitting anything. Not surprising.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we can grab a hostage, too.”

  “At best we get a staring match out of that, a battle to see who blinks first. That’s not an answer.”

  She buckles in. “Then I’ll come up with something else after you leave.”

  “So the plan is to leave you behind and hope you come up with something.”

  “For right now, yeah.” She zooms the display in and leans forward.

  Alexandria reminds her of nothing so much as the salvage yard she’d met Nevada at. It’s bigger, but it’s still a basic cylinder, docks at the bow off a stationary center spindle—and, like Emerson Salvage, it’s orange. Not the same ridiculous bright shade, though: darker, more somber, more bronze. A hue appropriate for the physical library-slash-storehouse-slash-museum the platform aspired to be. The color’s only visible on the bow of the station, though: that’s the only part of the structure with operating lights. The rest remains in darkness.

  Two smaller ships, one not even Kismet’s size, have hooked to the spindle, but it’s a third ship that commands attention: a cargo liner, easily four times her ship’s size, of a design older than most of the settlements across the River. The liner’s bow forms a simple square, the cockpit, cabin and quarters taking up different levels. The rest of the ship is a grid of girders for containers to lock into, open to space, with fuel tanks and engines at the rear. It’s ponderously slow, but hellaciously cost-efficient if they’re at a full or nearly full load. When platforms were spreading like mushrooms across this sliver of the asteroid belt they could hit that easily, but now these ships are mostly relegated to non-perishable items you’re willing to wait weeks on.

  She frowns at its identification circle. It’s got one, but it’s not right. It’s displaying metadata from a passenger liner. Tapping controls, she arcs Kismet in the hauler’s direction, turning on her ship’s strongest lights to help fill in what the beacons on the docking arm don’t illuminate. The cargo liner’s cab is connected to Alexandria with a long, flexible boarding tube like an umbilical cord. There aren’t any containers locked in; instead there’s a mesh grid along the bottom she knows isn’t standard kit. Nodes cling to the mesh, hanging like dew clinging to a spider’s web, tiny metallic egg sacs. “What are those?”

  Jack pushes forward and looks at it, too, then shakes his head.

  Kismet chimes again, and a message window fades in over Gail’s control board. “We have been given docking clearance.”

  No vocal contact, and the message is, in its entirety, the docking port number. “Okay. Go slow and do a full circle around the platform. We want to do as much of a visual scan as possible.”

  “All right, Gail.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Anything out of place.”

  What makes something out of place? One answer comes into view almost immediately: a gaping hole in the station’s side toward the aft. It’s large enough that Kismet could fly into it. The hull around the hole has been stripped away for meters in each direction, skin and meat carved from Alexandria’s magnificent, ruined carcass.

  “That’s what destroyed the station?”

  “Yes and no.” She studies it as they slowly glide past. “I mean, yes, it was an asteroid hit. The station had drifted from its proper orbit and its defenses didn’t break the rock up. It punctured the outer hull and took a slantwise tumble on the inside. The repair systems couldn’t work fast enough, fires started, failures started cascading.” She points at the hole as it rotates out of view. “I’m sure that started as the original breach, but a lot of plating’s been sc
avenged. Some recently.”

  As they proceed along Alexandria’s side and curve around the back, the breach seems less out of place—the station shows the effects of floating in space with no maintenance for four decades, a myriad of dents and pockmarks and scrapes left untended. The remains of a second docking spindle hang off the aft. The bodies and everything else recoverable of note had been removed within a year of the accident; then the pirates and salvors moved in to start stripping junked parts. It’s a wonder there’s enough left for Lantern to have cobbled together a base.

  It’s not until Kismet completes her orbit that signs of life reveal themselves. Parts of the hull near the bow, around the working lights, have been repaired and repainted. They didn’t get the right amber color to match the original, but they came awfully close. It seems strangely image-conscious for crazy bioterrorists. The docking spindle looks like it’s had sections entirely rebuilt. And to someone who’s been doing salvage work for as long as she has, the high-gain antenna mounted about halfway down the arm sticks out like a flag on an asteroid. She points at that, too. “They had to bring a lot of new equipment with them.”

  “So that’s that something out of place.”

  “Yes. And now that we’re close, you can see the cargo ship’s salvage, too.”

  “I can?”

  “The lower engine isn’t in operating shape.” She starts to point, then waves a hand. “Trust me. And I don’t think the crew quarters have power, just the cabin.”

  Kismet slows further, moving toward her assigned docking port, maneuvering herself into place.

  “I thought Lantern had the backing of an insane trillionaire.”

  “One who’s trying not to have this operation attract a lot of attention, right? There’s only a few of those haulers still in service, so they refurbed a junker. I just want to know what they’re planning to do with it.” She zooms in on the silver nodes.

  A series of bangs and hydraulic hisses cuts off his response. Kismet chimes. “Docking is complete.”