“There’s no time,” said Bronze, sliding back the airlock hatch.
“You will make time for this.”
With his hands on the handles and about to haul himself up into the airlock, Bronze had every intention of ignoring the captain’s melodrama, but a hard-baked instinct made him stop and look.
Fitz was ten feet away. The hand cannon he wore in his elaborate thigh holster as a fashion accessory was now out in his hand.
“You find the tracker,” said Fitz,” and I’ll blow the hell out of it with this, without damaging my ship.”
Bronze hesitated. He already had EMP bombs in a webbing belt, and less time to use them with every passing second.
On the other hand, the way the captain was pointing his handgun at Bronze’s chest made a compelling argument.
Bronze nodded and threw down to his captain one of the fast-fit pressure suits hanging on the inside of the airlock.
He lifted himself inside and waited.
Outside in the void, the approaching pursuit ships spun about and retro burned.
They were almost upon their target.
BRONZE
Bronze ignored the pain from the tether pulling tight against his wounds, instead floating serenely in his analysis trance.
Fitz was patrolling Phantom’s underside, armed with flashlight and Kanha Wei’s cheap-looking headset.
Bronze, meanwhile, was inside his own mind, but his body was being flung out from the ship’s upper hull on a 50-foot tether, kept taught by centrifugal force as the asteroid she had landed on spun along its orbital path.
When the Special Missions Executive had rebuilt his shattered body following the defense of Station 11, he had officially been declared dead. In secret, they had improved his basic human design, often in ways that they had not seen fit to tell him, as he slowly discovered over the subsequent years. SpecMish’s replacements for his melted eyes did more than let him to see things that others could not. They also allowed him to record what he could see.
Record and compare.
“Two minutes until they’re in firing range,” said Zan Fey from a distant galaxy. “In sixty seconds, I take extreme evasive maneuvers. With or without you on board.”
Bronze pushed her words away.
And those of Captain Fitz’s excitable response.
He was almost there.
Habit seemed to have driven Fitz to land on this tumbling rock, shaped like a half-kneaded lump of clay. Maybe hiding here, tethered to the planetoid would buy them a few extra seconds. Maybe the pursuers only knew their general vicinity and would have to fly a search pattern to locate them. Quantum-linked trackers might be commonplace in the holo-dramas, but Bronze had used them in real life, and they were neither as simple, nor is accurate as the dramas would have them.
Whatever Fitz’s thinking, it had made it simple for Bronze to take a good look at the upper surface of the ship, and compare it with the extensive covert observation he’d been making of it ever since Rho-Torkis, looking for anything that had changed while Phantom was being ‘refitted’.
Combing through his artificial memories felt profoundly wrong, like putting on clothes soaked in cold oil. But it worked.
He opened his eyes.
He’d found it. At least, he’d found something.
At the base of the port side secondary horn was a finger-sized bulge that hadn’t been there before the refit.
He pulled at the tether, reeling himself in.
Phantom was in complete darkness, the asteroid facing away from the sun’s illumination, but he saw the bright disc of sunlight race across the asteroid’s surface toward them.
“Get your ass back inside,” Fitz shouted.
“Negative, I have eyes on the device. Base of the port side secondary horn.”
Bronze blinked as the rock’s rotation suddenly lit up the scene below him. His captain had his legs already inside the airlock, but was hesitating, looking up at Bronze’s approach.
What would he do?
The man was former Naval Intelligence, an organization that considered itself a rival of SpecMish. Some would say they were sworn enemies, and the two rivals had been known to murder each other’s operatives.
All Fitz had to do was cut Bronze’s tether and tell his wife to hit the gas.
He was close enough to see that Fitz had lost his habitual grin and was biting on his lower lip.
But then the smuggler clambered out of the airlock and across the hull to the secondary horn, which he began sweeping with the headset. It flashed with a color sequence running from fiery orange to deep glowing red.
“Well, whaddaya know?” said Fitz. “Damned thing does work, after all.”
He drew his hand cannon and pressed it close to the spot Bronze had identified. It was a strange-looking weapon. Fitz didn’t pull the trigger and there was no sign of it having been fired, but by the time Bronze joined him on the hull, Fitz was sweeping the area again with the headset. This time it didn’t light up.
“Well done, Mr. Bronze. Let’s hope that was the only one.”
OSU SYBUTU
The pursuit ships came in on four parallel vectors, each a couple of thousand klicks apart from its nearest neighbor. They passed Phantom and the asteroid she was hugging 20,000 klicks north of the ecliptic.
“I think we were safer when their tracker was still functioning,” Fitzwilliam quipped. He turned and grinned at Osu. “Let that be a lesson to you, kid. Don’t rely on bargain bucket surveillance equipment. If someone’s worth pursuing, shell out for something with a better signal resolution.”
Osu grunted a noncommittal reply, glancing at Zan Fey to judge her response to her husband’s performance.
She sat in a dour silence, her stiff Zhoogene posture a bastion of indifference to Fitzwilliam.
Osu was convinced he’d been asked to the flight deck to act as Fitzwilliam’s unwilling foil in a ghastly marital argument.
“They’re coming about,” said Zan Fey.
She zoomed the main display in on one of the pursuers. It looked like a larger and sleeker version of the FVA-7 Spikeballs that had arrived too late to see off the rebel bombers that had nuked Osu’s home. Sleeker they might be, but they were still squat and ugly, bristling with oversized force keels that must be screaming in protest as those ships made what would have been the tightest turn Osu had ever seen… if he’d never encountered Phantom.
The ship in the display eased out of its turn, and Zan Fey eased the image back to show a much wider perspective.
An amber line pulsed ahead of the four pursuers, a projection of their likely heading.
They were coming straight for Phantom.
“Releasing tethers,” said Fitz, busy on the controls.
“Shields active,” Zan Fey reported.
Osu’s ride on the Phantom was as comfortable as relaxing on a waterbed. But he heard crumps and hisses, the sound of metal being placed under strain. Then the display showed Phantom lifting off from the tiny rock.
The pursuit was on.
“Taking laser fire,” Zan Fey reported. “Shields are holding… a little too well. Estimated weapons power 50 megawatts for each ship. That’s nowhere near full power.”
“Let’s jump,” said Fitz.
“Can we?” Osu questioned, not sure why he didn’t shut up and play dumb like any good legionary while the Navy was carrying them through a combat zone. “I mean, don’t we need to wait for jump engine recharge?”
“Normally we would,” Zan Fey answered, not looking up from the screen in front of her face. The jump engines spooled, blowing a banshee whine through the flight deck and twisting Osu’s guts inside out. “We do have a little jump juice,” she said. “We can’t jump outbound even as far as the nearest planet. But spacetime remains elastic for a while after it’s been stretched.”
“We can jump back to Tej Prime,” Osu exclaimed. “Reverse our jump.”
The jump engine’s whining settled down to a low throb. Osu’s gut
stopped twisting, but his fear only increased when he realized the tactical situation. “That’s why the pursuers are firing on low power. They want us to jump back.”
“Where a reception party will be waiting to capture us,” Fitzwilliam agreed. “I’m assuming Izza has a trick up her sleeve.”
“We are going back to Tej Prime,” she answered. “But not quite from where we set out. All hands, prepare for jump!”
Osu felt the power surge and gripped the arms of his chair so hard, one snapped.
There was a brief sensation of falling through nothingness, and then Osu felt the familiar sensation of being squeezed like a pip back into real spacetime.
“What have you done?” Fitzwilliam screamed in horror.
Osu assumed Fitzwilliam was referring to Zan Fey’s jump, but, no. The captain turned and stared aghast at Osu.
“I just had them reupholstered!” he wailed.
Osu, in turn, was pointing in horror at the flight deck window, which was filled with the banded clouds of a gas giant, so close that he could see fractal details in the swirling vortices of the outer cloud layer.
The aft viewscreens showed cloud wisps behind them too – they were inside the gas giant – but behind the planet’s outermost layer was a hoop of fairy light dancing along a black disc.
Fitzwilliam joined Osu in looking at the window.
He gave an appreciative whistle. “Inside the Dyson ring. Nice job, my lady.”
“No signs we’ve been spotted,” said Zan Fey, “but we are as blinded by the interference from the ring as, hopefully, everyone else.”
“Let’s make sure it stays that way,” said Fitzwilliam. He began piloting the Phantom away from the outer clouds, making directly for the enormous artificial structure.
“That’s brilliant, Captain,” said the chief mechanic from Engineering.
“Thank you, Catkins. Yes. Yes, it is. Umm… tell me again what’s so amazing.”
“Jump engines are recharging at triple the normal rate, sir. We’ll be ready to go in forty minutes.”
“Even better than I’d hoped,” said Fitzwilliam, beaming. “Keep checking the dials, Chief. I’ll see if I can speed things up further.”
Phantom pushed on toward the ring at a breakneck velocity, slowing to a crawl in the last moments before entering its structure.
“I haven’t forgotten what you did to my chair,” the captain growled over his shoulder. “The repair bill is coming out of your cut of the spoils, Sergeant.”
“We haven’t actually discussed payment yet,” said Osu.
“Pfft!” Fitzwilliam hissed. “Keep it quiet back there, man. Can’t you see I’m busy? This is a tricky maneuver, even for me.”
They entered the ring a short distance behind the flux tube that hooked the disc into the gas giant’s magnetosphere.
Close up, the ring consisted of bundles of what looked uncannily like charcoal bricks secured in bundles by black wire netting.
The scale was deceptive, though. Each lump was the size of a house, each knitted bundle a city block.
That did mean, however, that Phantom could flit through the gaps between the bundles.
Osu peered at the wire, not quite believing what he was seeing – or, rather, not seeing. It had a dull black gleam, just enough to make it barely visible against the blackness of the void, yet he saw afterimages of brilliant pinpricks of light that weren’t there.
He closed his eyes. The afterimages grew even brighter behind his eyelids.
“Shields aren’t registering any significant energy deflection,” Zan Fey reported.
“I’m seeing afterimages,” said Osu. “Could that be x-ray radiation?”
“Perceptive – for a human,” said Zan Fey. “I see colored waveforms. The shields are cutting out x-rays and any other high-energy EM radiation. You’re registering exotic radiation. Don’t worry. Ships systems are hardened against it. Your mind isn’t. Exposed humans sometimes experience troubled dreams. Paranoid fantasies. That kind of thing.”
“My dreams are already troubled. And me being here on the ship – with the likes of you two – ma’am, Captain – feels like paranoid hallucination to me.”
“That’s the spirit, my boy,” said Fitzwilliam.
He pushed Phantom faster, looping around a node that seemed to connect the knitted bundles. Close up, it revealed itself to be a flattened sphere with docking ports at either pole. Federation-built industrial battery rings clamped themselves to its surfaces like warts.
“Catkins, speak to me,” he said. “How’s it looking now?”
“Four times the nominal recharge rate, Captain.”
Fitzwilliam sped up, chasing the green flux tube just ahead as it rotated along the disc, though never getting closer than about a hundred klicks. It seemed they were limits to even this man’s willingness to show off. “And now, Catkins?”
“The faster you go, the faster the recharge. It’s off the scale. We’ll be ready to jump in ten mikes.”
“I’ve preset a backup jump solution,” said Zan Fey. “It will take us to one of the inner planets. Is that where you want to go next?”
“No. We go immediately to Eiylah-Bremah.”
“Don’t you want to check again for any trackers? It’s common practice to leave more than one.”
“Not with such an expensive device it isn’t. No, Izza, we will head straight for Eiylah-Bremah to pick up the remainder of my crew.”
Zan Fey swiveled her chair around to face Osu. “And you? The Legion colonel ordered you to bring back Arunsen to Joint Sector High Command immediately. Will you?”
“Are you crazy… ma’am? Whether that colonel was Department 9, Naval Intelligence, just plain Legion, or whatever, you’ve made us fugitives now.”
She regarded him through those unique pink and blue eyes of hers. “Possibly. We also saved your life.”
“Very true. We are all very grateful, ma’am.”
She sighed. “It’s exhausting saving everybody all the time. I’m gonna check on the crew. And that includes Lynx, Fitz. You should pay more attention, he’s become somewhat… needy.”
“Okay,” Fitzwilliam replied, his voice saying it clearly wasn’t okay. “I’ll call you back when we’re ready to jump.”
“Is there a problem?” Osu asked the captain when the flight deck hatch shut on Zan Fey.
Fitzwilliam put his feet up on the flight console and crossed his hands behind his head. “Be more specific.”
“The Lieutenant, sir. She sounds… resentful.”
“I know, doesn’t she? She’s an alien, Sybutu. I’ve found the best strategy’s to smile at her until she is in a good mood again. I suggest you learn to develop your own strategy and quickly.”
Osu wanted to scream at the idiot. He trusted Colonel Lantosh and Colonel Mannix, maybe even that Militia officer, Yazzie, and they were the ones who had set in motion this pairing with the smuggler rogues. Surely there had to be more to this pair than the bickering clowns they appeared to be.
But he couldn’t see it. And he was sick of the sight of Fitzwilliam.
“Permission to check on my legionaries, Captain.” He thought of Green Fish in the med bay. He should check on her first. “Sorry. I meant to say my marines.”
“I got this,” Fitzwilliam answered cheerfully, waving him away. “Off you pop.”
Osu hurried away in search of someone he could respect.
There had been many close escapes in the last couple of days. Getting away from Fitzwilliam on the flight deck felt like the biggest escape of them all.
VOL ZAVAGE
Relaxing in the temporary safety of the jump tunnel, Vol Zavage contemplated the slumbering form in the medical bed and smiled at what he was about to do. He rested the data slate against the side of the bed and began to read in a long-dead Kurlei language.
Through slumbering valleys,
Fractal fire cascades within the lattice folds.
Bloated with mutagenic mists,
&
nbsp; My hidden jewel, lays within,
Comes the Change.
And without, scarred by pressed servitude.
Was that a smile, come to the edges of Green Fish’s mouth?
Those lips. So plump and rough edged, quite unlike the rubbery slits of his own kind. They looked so unfinished.
Raw.
Primordial.
Her smile dimpled.
Was she mocking him from sleep?
No matter. He continued the ancient poem.
Bury,
Withhold.
Treasure,
Our secluded riches.
She was grinning now. And yes, he could feel her gentle teasing clearly in his mind now.
Perhaps this was a little ridiculous.
He was reading from a collection of classic works in K’Linh, the language of the old country that had once dominated the Southern Hemisphere of his homeworld, not that he’d ever been within a thousand light years of the place.
The language was long dead in its spoken form, its people and their cruel empire buried within history texts. Yet its subtleties came from a vocabulary in which each word had many meanings. Every line of K’Linh poetry was rich with artfully constructed ambiguities.
He grimaced. Constructed ambiguities summed up his life right now. He needed a commander he could trust to do the right thing.
Sergeant Sybutu wasn’t that man. Oh, he respected him enormously as a Legion NCO, but the sarge didn’t understand what was happening any more than Zavage did.
He leaned closer to Green Fish and breathed in her scent. He couldn’t protect his love if he didn’t know where an attack might come from. Nor she him. With all the tension and deceit washing through the Phantom, even here in jump transit, he didn’t feel secure.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” he said automatically, not wishing to burden her. The rescue from the hospital had aggravated her wounds. She needed to concentrate her energies on healing. But what kind of lover hid harsh truths from their partner? That was the human way, not his.
“I want to face forward to confront my enemies,” he said. “Instead I look behind, wondering which friend is really my foe. I’m a simple being, Green. I need a foundation of simple truths I can believe in.”
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