The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  She threw off her belt for a second to cross and look down through the starboard window. Sure enough, she could see the nose of the other ship.

  “Snuck up in our blind spot,” Vey said through the coms. “We can’t get a good make on it because the ‘Day is in the way. Any idea what it is?”

  “I think it’s a smaller commuter ship, maybe a Snapdragon or Lilac class. I’ll try to verify.” Sydney Stedland reseated herself at the navigation station and set about identifying the vessel.

  “What should we do, boss?” Svetlana asked. As the chief engineer, the stocky Russian woman was in charge when her captain and first mate were off the ship, but it wasn’t a position she was comfortable with. “Arm weapons?”

  “Depends on what Sydney finds,” Vey replied. “Neither Snapdragon or Lilac classes carry ship-to-ship ordinance.”

  “It’s a Snapdragon,” Stedland confirmed.

  “How the hell did anyone find us?” Teal asked.

  “I have a funny feeling I know who it is,” Vey replied. “We’re hailing them now. I’ll keep you three in the loop. Don’t worry; they don’t have any way to attack us.”

  A few seconds passed in silence while the pursuing vessel used forward thrusters to slow its momentum and match speed. The three ships were flying more or less in a row, their noses all tilted and even. The belly of the Snapdragon class ship was facing the Doris Day, a defensive measure in case the other ship opened fire, and so the cockpit was not visible.

  “Clea, is that you?” Vey’s voice carried the sarcastic timbre he so often adopted when dealing with recalcitrant parties or people.

  “Hello, Logan,” a woman’s voice came through the speakers on the bridge of the Doris Day. The crew listened to their Captain, who was currently on Gringolet with five other members of their crew, banter with Staples. Of the three, only Corin Teal, the coms officer, had heard her voice before, but they all knew her by reputation.

  “Couldn’t you have had the good grace to die on Mars?” Vey asked.

  “Not sorry to disappoint you,” Staples replied. “But a lot of people are dead.” There was a pause. “Did you know, Logan?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Vey’s answer was without condescension or guile. “I really didn’t, Clea.”

  “Is my crew alive? Are they all right?”

  “I’m no killer, Clea.” Vey sounded sincere when he said it, but his crewmates knew that it wasn’t true.

  “I’m not at all convinced of that. You’re working for an evil bastard of an AI that’s trying to bring about the end of the human race.” Teal, Stedland, and Ivanova all looked at each other at this, but they remained silent so as to hear to how their captain would react.

  “You have proof of this, I assume?” Vey asked. Whatever sincerity had affected his voice earlier seemed gone already. “Signed documents, that sort of thing?”

  “You must have seen the broadcasts from Mars by now. What more evidence do you need?” Staples asked.

  “Oh, I believe you about the AI,” Vey replied, condescending as ever. “I can’t imagine what else would have been able to reprogram a thousand automatons without anyone noticing. But that doesn’t mean that our employer has anything to do with that.”

  “Have you met your employer?” Staples asked. “Face to face, I mean.”

  “I don’t meet most of my employers face to face. Better for all the faces involved, I find,” Vey retorted evenly.

  “And what does your employer have you looking for on my ship, Logan? Is it an automaton? One who might actually resist kidnapping?”

  The three members of the Doris Day’s crew looked at each other again. That was exactly what they were looking for.

  Vey was not so easily persuaded. “That proves nothing, Clea. So there are AIs now. It was bound to happen sometime. For all we know you’ve been working as a personal courier for the AI that started the attack on Mars and we’re working for the corporation that developed it and wants it back.”

  “Well, you’re half right,” Staples laughed humorlessly. “Last chance, Logan. Give me back my ship.”

  “And where did you get that ship, Clea? I don’t seem to remember you having a spare one lying around. Stole it from some poor crew on Mars, did you? Why do you get salvage rights and I don’t?”

  There was no answer from Staples. Instinctively, Stedland looked over at the other ship. It had inched closer over the course of the captains’ conversation, and now it lay only a few kilometers off their starboard beam. The name, written in dark letters, was visible in the ambient light from the engines: Tyger. She was just thinking that it was closer than she’d like when it dipped downward at an intense angle.

  The move was severe, the kind of turn that, at their current velocity and acceleration, should have been dangerous for their crew.

  “Clea?” Vey asked.

  For a few seconds the vessel was out of sight completely, and Stedland had just begun to realize what it might be up to when the Tyger slammed into the Doris Day at over five hundred kilometers per hour.

  The Tyger struck the other vessel more or less from underneath. Stedland, who had never refastened her safety harness, was thrown out of her seat and went sprawling across the control consoles. Her head met the polycarbonate window in front of her at a frightening speed, and she was immediately rendered unconscious. Teal and Ivanova were still belted, but the collision played havoc with their controls.

  The Doris Day was designed to operate in space, to survive minor meteor collisions, undergo the severe stresses of acceleration and vector shifts at high velocities, and to protect their crew from radiation, cold, and vacuum. The ship was not, however, meant to participate in a demolition derby.

  Several sections of the starboard and ventral portions of the Doris Day buckled under the force of many hundreds of metric tons of spaceship. Half a dozen portholes ruptured, venting air into space. Collision and decompression alarms blared throughout the sparsely populated ship. The Tyger fared no better. It rebounded away from the Doris Day with portions of its hull crushed and spewing air.

  “She what?!” Vey screamed at his navigator in the cockpit of Gringolet.

  “She rammed it!” Alex Shipiro said, stunned. “She just rammed her goddamned ship right into the ‘Day.” He hardly needed to confirm his analysis. They could actually see their ship through their starboard windows. The Doris Day, Logan Vey’s ship, their home and the source of their livelihood, had been violently knocked off course. They could see the other ship bounce away. The damage to the Doris Day was not visible from where they were, but if the condition of the smaller ship was any indication, it was not good.

  “Bitch!” Vey shouted. He threw off his safety harness and hefted his bulk out of Staples’ usual chair. A moment later he was seated at the tactical station. “I’m bringing the flak cannons online.” He warmed up the station, opening cannon housings, and began plotting firing solutions. “Get me broadside on that ship!”

  “Yes, Cap,” Terrance Okilo said.

  “Not the missiles,” Wilhelmina Jones, Vey’s first mate, warned. “We’re too close.”

  “I know, dammit,” Vey replied. The flak guns were more than enough to severely damage the vessel that had dared to ram his ship.

  Jones keyed her console to broadcast shipwide. “Buckle up, prep for combat maneuvers.” Her cold voice rang from every speaker on the ship. She only cared about preparing her crewmembers, but it would have the unintended side effect of warning the crew of Gringolet, not that they could do much to secure themselves trapped in a room.

  “Someone should go get that little girl, make sure she’s buckled,” Okilo said.

  “Are you kidding?” Jones asked, glaring at him.

  “She’s just a kid,” Okilo pleaded.

  “She’ll be fine,” Vey said in an obvious attempt to placate the man. His pilot was good, but he was soft. “Get me a good broadside on that ship and this won’t last long.”

  “Corin?” Shipiro spoke into the
coms speaker in front of him in an attempt to raise the three crewmembers they had left on the Doris Day. “Svetlana? Sydney? Everyone okay over there?” There was no answer.

  “Coms might be down,” Jones said.

  “Why would they ram them?” Okilo asked as he closed the distance to the other ships, rotating their stolen vessel up and over the Doris Day in an attempt to get a clear line of fire on the Tyger. “It doesn’t make any sense. They’d have just as good a chance of destroying their own ship as ours. A stress fracture could vent the whole ship.”

  “Staples is desperate,” Vey said. “I didn’t think she was this crazy, though.”

  As Gringolet took up position over the Doris Day, Okilo rotated the vessel ninety degrees to give his captain a clear shot. Before they could line up the broadside, however, the Tyger rotated on its axis, steered back, and slammed into the Doris Day again.

  The second hit was not as destructive as the first, but the blow compounded the damage both vessels had already sustained. The crew of the Tyger used a fresh side to ram the Doris Day, but Vey’s ship took the second hit in the same place as the previous one. More portholes gave way, more bulkheads buckled, and more air spewed into space. Pieces of hull were torn loose from both ships, and they drifted free lazily.

  As the Tyger rebounded again, it maneuvered down and below the Doris Day, which had been pushed further off course. The engines were still running, but the fact that the Doris Day had taken no steps to correct their list or any defensive measures at all told Vey that the ship was unresponsive or that the three crewmembers he had left behind were unconscious or dead.

  “She’s using the ‘Day as a shield, Cap,” Okilo said.

  “I can see that,” Vey growled. “Get me a shot.”

  “We’re twice as big as that Sol-side runner, Cap,” Vey’s first mate said. “We’ve got bigger engines to match, so our thrust’s the same, but when it comes to maneuvering thrusters? This tubby bastard’s got twice as much inertia. Besides, that crazy bitch doesn’t seem to care what she does to her crew.”

  Though the debris from the collisions interfered with his targeting radar returns, Vey could figure the physics just fine. Unless they got lucky or the smaller ship bludgeoned itself badly enough that it lost maneuvering thrusters, there was no way they could get a clear line of fire on the Tyger. Though Vey thought of Okilo as weak, he knew that he was a capable pilot. He was not, however, a match for that gothling Staples kept as her pilot. He had seen what that freaky-looking girl could do, and it was scarier than her taste in fashion. But Bethany Miller was not flying the other ship; Logan Vey knew this because she was currently locked in a cabin one deck down on Gringolet. This begged the question: who was flying the Tyger?

  Kojo Jang took his hands off the flight controls and looked at Staples. “We have hardseal,” he said. She noticed that he did not refer to her as “Captain.”

  The Delta V was exceedingly crowded. The small vessel was meant to carry six at the most, and right now there were eight of them. The shuttle consisted of only two small rooms into which Staples, Evelyn, Jabir, Yoli, Dinah, Jordan, and Evelyn were jammed tightly. Jang was not the best pilot on Gringolet, nor even the second or third best, but Bethany and Charis were captive, and Dinah was recovering from a concussion. Staples knew that her head must have been in bad shape because she willingly passed the piloting duties over to Jang.

  Fortunately, the crossing had been relatively easy. Vey had realized that he couldn’t get a bead on the Tyger, so he had ceased trying. As a result, Gringolet flew straight in a parallel course even with the Doris Day.

  Several hours earlier Evelyn had finally raised Jang and Yoli, they had had to decelerate to wait for the shuttle to catch them. Though it was designed for atmospheric flight, the Delta V was capable of spaceflight. All Jang had to do was set course before leaving the Martian atmosphere and push all of their fuel into the engines to increase thrust. The small ship didn’t carry much in the way of fuel, but since it was small and light, it didn’t take much to push it up to the Tyger’s speed.

  The Tyger was too small to contain a shuttle bay, but all ships were fitted with universal docking rings. Once the Delta V had docked, they had refueled it and conceived their plan to retake Gringolet. Staples had had little doubt that Vey would resist any reasonable attempt to defuse the situation. Whatever else the man might have been, he was known for reliably finishing his jobs. Their options were severely limited. The Tyger had no teeth to speak of, and it was far too risky to leave any crewmembers on their commandeered ship if they were going to ram it into another vessel repeatedly. It was Brutus who was flying the ship.

  Because the Tyger was a fully integrated ship, once he was uploaded to the computer core, Brutus was able to take over full control. Staples had pointed out that being a computer program did not guarantee that he would not be killed in the process. He had assured her that he was well aware of the fact.

  It was a simple matter for Brutus to bring the Tyger alongside the other ships in such a way as to hide the Delta V attached to its starboard docking ring. Patching Staples through the Tyger’s coms had been even easier. Just before Brutus had made his move against the Doris Day, Jang had uncoupled and dropped back, staying just below the engines of the Doris Day to avoid detection. Brutus had come very close to crushing the small shuttle in his first attack against Vey’s ship, but Staples trusted that the machine intelligence knew what he was doing.

  Jang had then pushed the Delta V across the gap to Gringolet. Staples had counted on Vey being too distracted, too angry, and insufficiently experienced at a tactical station to notice them coming. The bet seemed to have paid off; Gringolet hadn’t taken a shot at them or attempted to block their docking. She didn’t know if they’d run into an armed party waiting to ambush them, but there was nothing for it. They were committed, and the four members of the crew still on Gringolet needed them. There were only two rifles on the Delta V, but once they were onboard Gringolet, they could access more weapons lockers.

  “You know if they changed the codes, all of this will be for nothing,” Yoli pointed out. It was clear from the venom in her voice that she had not forgiven Staples for her error of judgment regarding Declan Burbank. The news that their former crewmate had been killed on Titan Prime, ostensibly in a mugging gone wrong, had done little to improve her attitude.

  “There’s no reason they would,” Staples replied, trying to keep her voice even. “They’re in space, probably at half crew strength since they’ve got to split their people between two ships, and they’ve got hostages to manage. I can’t imagine they’d have time or even think of it.”

  “I’m just saying,” Yoli said, and Staples decided to leave it at that.

  The boarding party consisted of Jang, Overton, Jordan, and Dinah. The terse engineer had been willing to leave the flying to Jang, but there was no way that she was going to stay on the shuttle while the others retook the ship. Staples hadn’t even tried to talk her out of it; it would have been pointless.

  Jang stood and used his strong arms to open the hatch. Facing them was an external docking hatch in Gringolet’s hull. Beside it sat a keypad.

  “Moment of truth,” Overton muttered. Both he and Jordan were weaponless. Jang and Dinah each held a rifle, and it was they who would take the lead.

  Before Jang could enter the code, Staples’ watch beeped. “Captain.”

  “Brutus?” Staples asked, raising her wrist to her mouth. “I told you to keep radio silence. If Vey figures out where we are, this could be a hard fight.”

  “Advice that the iteration of me on the Snapdragon class vessel will no doubt follow. However, I am the Brutus on Gringolet.”

  There were eight people crowded in the hold of the Delta V, and they were all looking at Staples’ watch. Several seconds passed while they processed Brutus’ statement.

  “You copied yourself,” Evelyn said finally.

  “Yes, Ms. Schilling.” Brutus sounded regretful, as though he
were a child who had been caught pilfering cookies from the kitchen.

  “You lied to me,” Staples said with indignation. “You know damn well I wouldn’t approve of you copying yourself, so you didn’t tell me.”

  “An act which, while I find defensible, I must nevertheless apologize for. However, this is not the time. I wanted to let you know that Gwen and the others are in fact safe, at least for the moment. I only have access to the coms, but that is enough to know that Ms. Park is in cabin four on deck two. She is unguarded. At present, there is one armed guard outside cabin two on deck three, and that is where Mrs. MacDonnell, Ms. Miller, and Mr. Park are being held.”

  “Okay,” Staples nodded, though she knew that Brutus could not see her. “We’ll deal with your duplication later. We’re about to breach the ship.”

  Jang reached out for the keypad.

  “Treacle?” Vey demanded into his watch.

  His first mate shook her head. “Coms are down, Cap. Our watches are routed through the Doris Day, and since its coms are down…”

  “Can you tie our watches into this ship’s coms?” Vey looked around the room. Besides his first mate Wilhelmina Jones, only Okilo and the navigator Alex Shipiro were in the room. Both Shipiro’s brother Dennis and Tyler Treacle were somewhere on the ship. They had been tasked with searching for the automaton but could not be reached at the moment.

  “Think so,” Jones said. She moved to the coms station and began working. “Corin would be better at this,” she said.

  Vey grunted. Their coms officer was on the Doris Day, and there was no way to tell what his status was. All they could do was watch their ship be bludgeoned by the Tyger. It had been rammed four times now.

  Through the polycarbonate windows in Gringolet’s cockpit, Vey spent another second watching his ship accelerate blindly. Mercifully, the Tyger, which seemed to retain full maneuverability despite the collision damage it had taken, has ceased to slam itself into his ship. Vey found himself hoping that Staples and her crew had managed to hurt or even kill themselves. He was worried for the three crewmembers he had left behind, but he couldn’t help also totaling up the cost of repairs. It was difficult to tell without getting closer, but he estimated that he was looking at five or six hundred thousand dollars in damage, and two months in drydock to boot. He swore quietly.