Byers walked away. He stood in the corner, staring at the wall. He was silent a moment. The emptiness of the brig filled with the heaviness of the realization inside Jaxwell’s head. “I won’t help you take down my father.” He sat cross-legged in the corner and leaned forward, his forehead resting against the wall.
Bayne stared at his back, wishing he could beat the secret out of Jaxwell’s head. He left before he could give in to his desire.
“Tell you anything good?” Wilco asked, still twirling his knife.
Bayne knitted his brow, coming to a realization of his own. “Maybe.”
13
The war room smelled of dust and stale air. Like a forgotten library, a collection of unused things. Not that the war had stopped, but the planning and strategizing had. They hadn’t convened in the room since Triseca. Bayne stopped taking the counsel of others. Hep believed he was partially responsible for that.
The captain offered him the opportunity to make a choice, a chance at redemption. And he chose to stay aboard the Blue. He chose to follow Bayne into this fight that he didn’t fully understand. But there had been a rift between them ever since. Bayne stopped talking to him, stopped taking him on away missions. He had become a pariah in Bayne’s eyes.
But the captain also stopped seeking the advice of others he had once relied on. Mao, Sig, Delphyne before she left. His trust was shaken, and Hep knew that was because of him.
Which made Hep’s presence in the war room so confusing.
Delphyne’s presence only confused the matter further.
“What?” Delphyne finally said, snapping at Hep for staring at her.
“I thought you left,” he said.
“I did. I came back.”
“I thought you had red hair.”
“I did. Now it’s blue.” Despite her brusque responses, a smile spread across her face. “Any other keen observations?”
“I’m glad you’re back.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but closed it without saying anything.
Bayne walked in a moment later, followed by Mao. He wasted no time in prefacing the purpose of their meeting. “What was Jaxwell’s mandate in this sector?” he asked Delphyne.
She closed her eyes and moved her lips like she was reading something. “To protect and further the interests of the Byers Clan.”
“Can you be more specific than that?” Bayne asked.
“No,” Delphyne said. “That’s literally what his mandate is. I read it. It came straight from his father.”
“Is that normal?” Mao asked.
“No,” Delphyne said. “I scoured the Byers intranet while I was aboard the Burning Sun. I read the mandates of several other ships in the Byers fleet. Different classes, different sectors, totally different mandates, ranging from escort of civilian contractors to engagement of hostile pirates. None of them were that short and none of them came directly from Jasper Byers.”
That seemed to mean something important to Bayne and Mao as they both fell into silent thought. Delphyne closed her eyes again, maybe rereading the mandate or analyzing it now that she knew it was important.
Hep raised his hand. “Why am I here?”
Bayne pressed on, seemingly ignoring him. “When I questioned Jaxwell, he assumed I kidnapped him for ransom. He said he wouldn’t help me extort his father. He didn’t seem to connect me to the contracts he submitted to the broker. When I pressed him, he didn’t seem to be aware that I was even the target.”
“Could he be lying?” Mao asked.
Bayne shook his head. “He didn’t outright say he didn’t know, but I could read it on him. And I don’t get the sense that he’s a good liar.”
“He’s not,” Delphyne added. “He had no need to be. As the son of one of the most powerful men in the system, he’s used to getting what he wants. He never has to resort to deceit.”
Mao began pacing around the table, chin up, hands clasped behind his back, like a philosopher strolling down the beach. “The broker would not implicate such a high-level client and burn a bridge with the Byers Clan with a lie. So, assuming Jaxwell was unaware you were the target, that means someone else wrote the contracts and used Jaxwell as a middleman to submit them to another middleman. Jaxwell’s position in the Deep Black makes him the perfect candidate. He’s further from the scrutiny of clan and United Systems overseers, and closer to the sort of element that would accept bounty contracts. Someone obviously wanted to remain anonymous.”
“Jasper?” Bayne said. “But why the back-channels? After what he thinks I did to Triseca, no one would fault him for issuing bounty contracts on me.”
Thought consumed them again, and Hep was left wondering why he was in the room. They were the best minds on the ship, and he was just the fill-in comms officer. And now that Delphyne was back, he wouldn’t even be that.
Bayne broke the silence. “There was something else Jaxwell said. After I pressed him, he said he wouldn’t help me take down his father. Instead of extort. Something changed. He stopped assuming I took him for ransom after he found out I was the target on those contracts.”
“Maybe he thought you targeted him for revenge,” Mao said. “Or to put an end to the contracts.”
Bayne shook his head. “I watched him as he realized something. It was deeper than that. He totally shifted from defensive to passive. He just stopped fighting.”
Delphyne opened her eyes. “Jasper isn’t targeting you because of Triseca.” She said it with certainty.
“How do you know that?” Bayne asked.
“When did you encounter the first bounty hunter?” Delphyne asked.
“One week after Triseca,” Mao said.
Delphyne closed her eyes again. Her lips moved as she nodded, having a private conversation with herself. Then she decided to let the others in on it. “The timeline doesn’t add up. To route a contract through Jaxwell, to the broker, and then out to subcontractors would take a week by itself. Then for the bounty hunters to track the Blue, even the best among them couldn’t do that in under a week. The contracts were issued before Triseca.”
The revelation was heavy. It filled the room and made Hep forget the smell of dust. It made him suddenly happy to be in war room, a place designed to plan for the worst, to plan an attack, because he knew what that revelation meant. “The Byers Clan issued a contract on an active duty Navy captain.”
Energy seemed to shoot through Bayne. He suddenly couldn’t stand still. He paced a meter length of floor, bouncing on the balls of his feet, hands clapping together. “But why? To cover up Ore Town? If it was something that needed covering up, then the Navy wouldn’t have ended up planning a joint attack with the Byers Clan to attack Parallax at Ore Town. There wasn’t enough time between me leaving Ore Town and alerting Central of the situation for Jasper to attempt to silence me. The contract is about something else.”
“What else is there?” Mao asked.
There was only one other thing. And it suddenly made sense. Hep knew why he was in the room. “The Rangers.” Mao and Delphyne looked at him like he had two heads. Not Bayne. Some part of Bayne already knew.
“Connect the dots for me, kid,” Delphyne said.
Hep was surprised to see Bayne look at him expectantly as well. “Well, if the bounty hunters caught up with us a week after Triseca, realistically, the contract was issued about two months before that, a little after Ore Town. Like you all said, Byers had no reason to try and cover that up. Only thing worth covering up after that was what the captain learned about the Rangers…”
Delphyne shrugged. “I don’t know what that means. What did you learn?”
Bayne retold the story of the Rangers’ end. How they were offered positions as commissioned officers in the Navy as reward for their efforts in defeating the warlords. How those who refused were lured to a remote location in the Deep Black under the guise of one last mission. How they were massacred. He told it robotically now. Empty of the fire. He’d detached himself from the story.<
br />
Delphyne looked like she was going to vomit. “That is… I can’t…” She sunk into her chair, pulled down by an invisible weight, her words dying on the tip of her tongue.
Mao continued as if unaffected, though Hep was getting good at reading the micro-movements in his expression. “But, if Hep is correct, what reason would Byers have to cover that up? A scandal of such magnitude would rock the United Systems, but business would likely continue unimpeded for a conglomerate as expansive as the Byers Clan. They are hardly an altruistic bunch. They are self-serving.”
They all seemed to come to the same realization at once.
“They would only act if it served their interests,” Delphyne said.
“If the coverup served them,” Mao added.
“If they served in the coverup,” Hep said.
Bayne’s fire returned. “They were complicit in the massacre of the Rangers.”
The implications clogged Hep’s lungs. The others choked on the idea. Hep imagined Bayne alone with Parallax in the corpse of his ship. Stabbed through the heart with information that shattered his understanding of the world. The fundamental rules of life were broken, rewritten, replaced by laws that contradicted everything they thought they knew.
That was how Hep felt now. Upside-down.
For the first time ever, Hep saw Mao fumble with his words. “But…why would…how?”
Bayne chewed the inside of his lip. If he hadn’t opened his mouth to speak, he would have eaten the inside of his face. “It doesn’t matter how and why right now. What matters is that it happened.” He walked away from them, likely not wanting them to see his expression twist up in anger or sadness or any emotion. He did not want them to see him react.
That frightened Hep. He’d seen Bayne in that state, so swallowed by his own emotions that the rest of the galaxy did not matter to him. His actions mattered only to him. As did the consequences. The fallout and how it fell on everyone around him were not present in his mind.
“But if we plan to keep ahead of the Navy and the Byers Clan, we need to know how deep the collusion goes.” They looked to Hep like he was any other member of the crew now, not a child, not a near turncoat, not a former pirate. The acceptance turned a sour pit in his stomach warm. Though it also caught him off guard, so he found himself fumbling to continue.
“I mean, it would help inform what we can expect to be thrown at us,” Hep said. “If the tops of both organizations are behind this, then the full force of both will be coming after us.”
Mao and Delphyne nodded.
Bayne’s entire body looked to have seized. His shoulders and neck were made of stone, sculpted with dynamite from a slab of volcanic rock. Hep considered walking to his side, placing a reassuring hand on the captain’s shoulder, the way Bayne had done for him on several occasions. That idea was fleeting, a hummingbird barraged with a sudden driving hailstorm.
“Bring me Horus.”
14
Sigurd arrived with Elvin Horus minutes later. Sig still refused to look at Delphyne. Or maybe he couldn’t. His cheeks turned red whenever he was in the same room with her.
Horus still stunk of liquor, though he appeared to be sober. The rum was probably seeping out of his pores at this point, given that he spent more time drinking than not. Bayne understood the impulse. Horus played part to a massacre of hundreds of innocent men and women, people he had fought beside. Then thousands of people he worked beside turned to vapor on Triseca. And he had reason to believe that those he served under in both the Navy and Byers Clan were responsible.
If not for the driving desire to put his swords through those same people, Bayne would be drowning in rum right now. But he was stone sober. And he didn’t care to give Horus pity right now.
“You served in Operation Welcome Mat,” Bayne stated, not asked. It immediately set the tone of an interrogation.
“Yeah,” Horus said. His gait slowed in the face of the question. As did the carefree look he so often adopted.
“Who else did?”
“Pardon?” Horus was on the defensive, exactly where Bayne wanted him.
“Captains. Who else captained ships on that mission?”
Horus sat slowly, like an arthritic into a rocking chair. “That mission was compartmentalized. Ships were stripped of their IDs, so we didn’t know who we were sailing with. All communication was routed through Central. No ship-to-ship comms.”
Bayne bent over, putting his face inches from the Horus’s bearded, rum-stinking face. “But sailors talk. Who were the other captains?”
Horus was a large man, taller than Bayne by six inches and heavier by seventy pounds. Most of that was muscle. At least, it used to be. By now, a portion of it was alcohol. But the huge man shrank away from Bayne like a child from a stern school teacher. The thick hair over his lip shook. “I…I may have heard a few names.”
Bayne had Hep copy the names of Captains Nemec, Hooper, Tisdale, and Ryme. “Go through the data we took from Centel,” Bayne told Hep. “Find out where those captains are now.”
“I can save you the trouble,” Horus said. “They all work for Byers. Scattered throughout the system. Ryme and Nemec are in the Black somewhere. All of us got honorable discharges and full pensions, but the pay was too good to pass up.”
“All work for Byers,” Bayne repeated.
“That’s not quite half the captains involved in that mission,” Mao said. “But it’s still quite a coincidence that they would all receive such generous offers from Byers so close after a black ops mission.”
“They were silenced,” Bayne said. “It would take a high-ranking Navy official to arrange honorable discharges. Don’t know about Byers. High-paying positions that kept them all apart and away from Central. That would take coordination, someone with some pull.”
Bayne walked in circles, but he felt like he was the only thing not moving, like everything was spinning around him, out of control. He was at the center of a storm. He stepped forward from the calm of the eye toward the tumult, confident that the winds would calm for him.
He was wrong.
“Sir,” Graeme’s voice came through Bayne’s comm. “We’ve been targeted.”
15
The bridge was buzzing when Bayne stepped on deck. Lights flashing. Officers in and out of their seats, shouting over each other. Nothing being accomplished amidst the flurry of activity. It still surprised Bayne how quickly the crew fell apart without a leader calling the shots.
In the Rangers, someone would have stepped up if the captain and XO were gone. It could have been the next down the line, it could have been a radio tech, but it would have been someone.
“Report,” Bayne said. His firm yet calm voice returned some order.
“Two ships,” Graeme said. “They dropped out of a hard burn right on top of us.” That meant the Blue had no chance of detecting them on approach. It also meant that they had a near perfect location of the Blue. Even the best pilot in the system couldn’t drop out of a hard burn that close to a target without knowing exactly where they were. “Both Navy ships, sir.”
A knot tightened in Bayne’s gut. “Which ones?”
“The Illuminate,” Graeme answered.
“Jeska,” Bayne said.
Mara Jeska was one of the only other Navy captains who sailed the Deep Black on regular tours. She had charted nearly as much of the territory as Bayne. She was as comfortable, if not more, as Bayne in the Black, which made her the most dangerous opponent the Navy could send after him.
He knew they would task her with chasing him down. He feared they would give her command of a fleet.
“And the Glint,” Graeme continued.
“Bigby,” Bayne said.
Selvin Bigby, though not as experienced in the Deep Black, was one of two Navy captains who took trailblazing tours along known but not fully charted territories. He was a quick thinker, creative problem solver, and no stranger to skirting protocol to accomplish objectives. Bayne liked the man—they’d
shared countless drinks and stories over the years. And he respected Bigby—they’d sailed together on Bayne’s first tours after joining the Navy. They pacified areas still held by warlord sympathizers and brought territories under the banner of the United Systems.
It wasn’t quite a fleet, but it was as dangerous a force as the Navy could muster against Bayne.
“Orders, sir?” Graeme was shaking in his chair. A competent officer, but inexperienced. Bayne needed both right now.
He turned to Delphyne, who, along with Mao, had followed him onto the bridge. “Take your seat, Lieutenant. Graeme, hail the Illuminate.”
“Aye, sir.”
The soft hum of radio static filled the bridge. “Captain Jeska, it’s good to see you.”
“You can shove your attempts at charm up your ass, Bayne,” she answered.
A smile forced its way onto Bayne’s face.
“You know what comes next,” Jeska said. “You know the mandate when hunting down traitors and deserters.”
The words were like knives in each of Bayne’s sides. Coming from the Navy, the blades may well have been dipped in poison before piercing his skin. “You really believe I’m a traitor?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Jeska answered. “It matters what I’m ordered to do. That’s why I’m on this side, and you’re on that side. That’s something that never really took hold with you, did it?”
She always was the blunt sort. That was one of the things that Bayne liked so much about her. Except when he was on the receiving end of it.
“I suppose not,” Bayne said. “But what happens when the people giving the orders can’t be believed? They’re lying to you, Jeska. They’re lying to everyone. I have evidence that—”
“I don’t care,” she said, cutting him off. “This isn’t a courtroom. You surrender now, I bring you in peacefully, and I promise you that you can present whatever evidence you have and point all the fingers you want.”
The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set Page 25
