The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  Faintly, through the open doors of both Buford's office and Janet's anteroom, he heard an angry shout. "HARB? THE FUCK? THERE ARE TWO MORE FUCKING CARTS!"

  It was Buford's turn to quietly guffaw. Harbinger sighed, and said, "Let me go talk her down, sir. I think I can be of best service down the hall, at this point."

  "Agreed," huffed Buford, still trying not to laugh. "Dismissed, Colonel."

  Harbinger exited the office, walked past Janet – who was also trying her damnedest not to laugh, to the point of tears – and thence down the corridor to Delaney's office, where his wife was standing outside the door, hands on hips, staring at the now six carts sitting there waiting to be processed.

  "I will kill the next son of a bitch who rolls up here with a cart," she promised. "I'm on to this shit, now – I'll be watching through the Mesh."

  "Instead," suggested Harbinger, "why don't you go back into the office, sit down, and I will tell you what I just heard from the general." He didn't make it a question, and even though his wife outranked him, and glared at him, she nevertheless turned on her heel and walked into the room.

  He followed her, and said, as she sat down, "He's calling your Great-Uncle Chris to send over a couple of SFMID analysts to help go through this mess. And yes, it's going to get worse, because most of this crap has been sitting over at SMS for the last hundred years instead of being submitted to SFMID as it came in. He also said the Joint Chiefs have laid down the law to SMS and all other agencies that anything referring to piracy is to be submitted directly to SFMID from now on, so it can be processed in real time, or as close to it as possible." Watching her visibly cool down as he spoke, he finished, "Sound good to you?"

  "Yes. But I need another hot dog, now." Suddenly her eyes filled with tears. "Harb, I hate this. I love my babies, but these hormone shifts are already making me absofuckinglutely crazy."

  He nodded, understandingly, and walked over to the desk, grabbing a chair on his way there. He sat down next to her, and put an arm around her. "I know. Another thing he said was he's going to insist you take maternity leave and go home in five months. He won't cut you off entirely, but he thinks you should be home with Kat so you can relax and deal with your last trimester in a calm and happy state."

  She sniffled, and snuggled closer to him, which was difficult given the chairs they were sitting in. "That's probably a good idea," she admitted.

  A wheel squeaked outside the door.

  Delaney sat bolt upright. "I WILL FIND YOU AND END YOU," she roared.

  Someone ran for their life. The footsteps faded away toward the suite's entrance.

  Harbinger just shook his head and chuckled, sadly. Delaney sat back again and relaxed, but still had murder in her eye. "Do not fuck with the pregnant woman," she growled.

  Her husband started to say something, but on second thought, wisely kept his mouth shut. Instead, he walked out to the corridor and brought in two of the carts. He placed one of them within easy reach of his wife, and took the other one over to her conference table.

  Then he looked at Delaney, with a raised eyebrow.

  "Okay, I get the message," she said, rolling her eyes. "I guess we'd better dig in."

  ◆

  Things were quiet and calm for a few hours. Around 1500, Harbinger called out for delivery from the in-building Ledo's Pizza, which made Delaney happy. To tell the truth, he'd been on sort of short rations himself, lately, so it made him happy, too, although he made a mental note to make sure he hit the gym for PT every day. Otherwise, he'd gain twenty pounds, quick, nanos or no.

  The rest of the afternoon went quickly, as they both closed in on the end of their respective carts. He was relieved; there hadn't been another peep out of Delaney about how horrible it was to be in durance vile, doing all this paperwork. She was actually humming a little as she worked. It drove him slightly nuts, but he approved of anything that kept her happy.

  Thus, at around 1700, he was completely and utterly surprised, when, out of the blue, she shrieked, "Yehudit! No! Holy fuck, what the hell is that thing?"

  "Wha—" He turned to look at her. She was looking straight in front of her, wide-eyed, and was clearly freaking out about something he couldn't see.

  "Ohmygodharbitsanalien!" she rushed out.

  "Say again, over?"

  She looked at him, her eyes still wide and still a million miles away. "Yehudit found something in Iraq . . . it's an alien in some kind of . . . bowling ball?" she ended, almost quizzically.

  Harbinger was still almost completely at sea. "An alien bowling ball? In Iraq? What's Yehudit doing in Iraq? Isn't school in session? And how are you talking to her?"

  "No, Harb, she got a message to go there . . . and she found this thing two miles down in the ground, and brought it up and it cracked open and holy crap Grumpaw is flying the Bandersnatch and Great Uncle Chris was shooting at it with the plasma turret gun . . . They’ve got the Constitution in orbit dropping Rods on it . . . " She nearly collapsed. "They got back to the house," she sighed, painfully.

  Harbinger leaped out of his chair and ran back down to Buford's office, where Janet was on her comm with the Bandersnatch. She looked at him, put a finger to her lips and shook her head when he started into Buford's office. "President," she whispered.

  "Delaney is freaking out," he whispered back.

  Janet's face fell. "Damn it. Sorry, Harb. I—"

  Another scream came from down the hall.

  "I'd better go find out what that's about," said Harbinger, hastily, and beat feet back to Delaney's office.

  "What now?" he asked, breathlessly.

  "Devorah! Chicago! A building went over . . . Hancock Center? Yes. Her ambulance crew, they're going to find survivors . . . "

  "Holovid on," snapped Harbinger. The office holovision turned on, tuned to one of the news channels, and sure enough, there were live shots from Chicago of a massive trail of wreckage stretching north from the base of what had been the Hancock Center, all the way up to Lake Shore Drive. "What the hell d'you suppose caused that?"

  "Another bowling ball," whispered Delaney, still in a state of near-collapse. "It went in at an angle, underneath the building's foundations, and popped them straight up in the air. That's when it fell over." Her eyes got big again. Bigger.

  "Raven! Raven, what's wrong? I can barely hear you!"

  "How are you hearing all this?" wondered Harbinger.

  "The Mesh," she said, brokenly. "The Mesh. It's carrying their emotions back to me. They vibrate. Like a faster-than-light radio. Something's wrong with Raven, but she's too far away for me to get anything but a general feeling of danger."

  "By my count, there's only one sister left unaccounted for. Have you heard from Yael, yet?"

  "No, but I . . . Shit! Yes! Fuck! Something just tore Phobos in half. Is Yael on Mars already, on her tour?"

  "Likely. The Princess ought to be on Mars about now," speculated Harbinger. "I think your grandfather had your Uncle Jack keeping an eye out for her – something about his ship being in dock for an overhaul."

  "Harb." She looked at him, pleadingly, her face tear-stained. "What's going on? Why are my sisters in danger?"

  "I don't know, but—"

  Delaney's comm buzzed. She grabbed at it, and looked at the screen. "Grumpaw?" She clicked it on. "Grumpaw?"

  She listened for a moment. "Yes, I heard. All of my sisters."

  She listened again. "Chicago? Okay, we'll meet you at the front entrance in five. I love you, Grumpaw."

  She listened again, briefly, then clicked off. "Harb, I need a minute," she said, decisively. "But go tell General Buford my Grumpaw is rotating in and landing in the front parking lot in five, and picking the two of us up; I don't want anyone to freak out and start shooting at the Bandersnatch."

  Harbinger nodded. "Okay. We're going to Chicago?"

  "Yep. That's what Grumpaw said."

  "All righty then. Love you. See you in a minute."

  "Love you, too, Harb."

&n
bsp; Chapter 6

  The Musician, Redux

  "Don't shoot!"

  The plaintive cry came from forward, near the pilot's station. Raven, her gun up and her blood pumping with adrenaline, ready to shoot any pirate she saw, stopped short. Because of that, Pete, who was looking to the side, ran into her, making her stutter-step forward, but she didn't lose her balance as she glanced quickly around the bridge. Her eyes went wide, and her mouth formed a little "O" of surprise.

  "Where the hell are the pirates?" gasped Blake, who'd narrowly missed smashing into Pete, and got her feet stepped on by Rafe for her trouble.

  Indeed, there were only four people on the bridge, all sitting on the floor – the pilot, the navigator, the second mate, and the communications officer, who was actually lying on the floor, bleeding a bit from a cut on his forehead where the guy who'd tried later to impersonate him had pistol-whipped him during the bridge invasion.

  "They . . . they disappeared, about half a second before you came through the hatch," replied the pilot, obviously having trouble wrapping his head around that.

  Raven flipped the thumb safety on her 1911 and slowly and carefully holstered it, mindful of the suppressor. "Really," she said, now completely expressionless. "Anse, what did you see?"

  From the bridge's overhead speaker, Anse replied, "Raven, believe it or not, I saw exactly what they say they saw. One moment the pirates were there, getting ready to repel your entry, and the next moment, they just popped out of existence."

  "Popped."

  "Yeah, popped. Like they imploded or something."

  "Make sure you keep that video safe, Anse. Space Force MID at Devlin's are going to want to see it."

  "About that," piped up the navigator.

  "Yes?"

  He pointed at the controls. "Can I get up and take a look? I think we've overrun our breakout point."

  "How lovely. Yes, of course, all of you can get up. How did that happen? Didn't the captain say we had another 20 hours or so in warp at dinnertime last night?"

  "Nominally, yes, but it can vary, depending on the curvature of space and how densely-packed the gravitational waves are. It looked like we were actually going to be early, but how early is never easy to judge." The nav sat down in his chair and looked at the instruments. "I thought so. See here," he pointed, "we got an alarm about fifteen minutes ago that meant we were approaching the optimal point to break out."

  Raven sighed. "I never knew anything about that. Mom and Grumpaw just fly warp by SOP. I never learned to fly either of their ships, so I have no idea about that."

  "Not the usual meaning of SOP?" asked Pete, quietly.

  "'Seat of pants.'"

  "Ah."

  "What it means," said the nav, "is we'll have to overshoot the system and come back from the opposite vector. Except we've already overshot, at Warp 5, and we're on our way to Concentra, about a hundred, hundred and fifty light years thataway." He pointed vaguely out the front port.

  "Well, we can stop, right?" said Blake.

  "Yes, ma'am," agreed the nav, "but the problem then becomes losing our relative velocity so we can turn around and make the run back to Devlin's. Probably at a lower warp speed since we're practically there, but we're likely to be late no matter what we do." He sighed. "I told those morons we needed to start slowing down pretty much as soon as they took the bridge, but the leader just laughed and said something like they weren't stopping at Devlin's, anyway."

  Raven glanced around again, noting that Rafe was helping Ashraf up to his seat by the comms panel, and Blake was handing him the first-aid kit she'd found hanging next to the hatch.

  "Okay," she said, "not to be a bossy bitch, but maybe you should get on with that."

  "Yes, ma'am," chorused the pilot and the nav.

  "We heard the captain brevet you," added the pilot. "The pirates were listening in to try to figure out what you were going to do next, and that really frightened the hell out of them." He grinned.

  "I surely wish I knew how they were here one moment and gone the next," mused Raven. "But that's not my problem, it just means I completed the mission."

  "No, you didn't," said someone in a gruff voice, from the hatch.

  They whirled. A man was standing there, breathing hard, looking madder than hell, and holding a pistol, pointed right at Raven.

  Surprised, she raised her right arm, palm out, as if that were going to do any good at all.

  "How did he . . . " started the pilot, wide-eyed.

  The man pulled the trigger. The gun fired.

  For Raven, time slowed down.

  She saw the flash-puff of gunpowder flaring and smoking. She saw the action cycle, and the spent cartridge go flying up and to the gunman’s right. She saw the 9mm bullet come out of the barrel of the compact 9mm pistol the man was using. But it was taking forever to cross the ten feet of distance between them.

  Strangely, she felt no panic and no alarm. She just knew that bullet wasn't going to hit her. And then she felt power surge through her—

  Come to think of it, that's kind of like what I felt when the blast doors opened . . .

  —and a transparent, round shield flared into being about a foot ahead of her hand.

  The bullet slowly hit the shield, crumbled – in slo-mo – as frangible ammo does when it hits something hard, and fell equally slowly to the deck as mostly small copper chunks and powder.

  Raven dropped her arm, flabbergasted, and time sped back up to normal. The copper chunks went clink on the metal deck.

  " . . . get there?" finished the pilot.

  "The fuck?" yelled the pirate, madly.

  By then, Rafe, Blake, and Pete had all drawn, and now they fired. The pirate went down hard, three bullets in the chest, his gun flying forward. It landed near Rafe, who kicked it away; the second mate carefully picked it up, but only after looking at Rafe and getting a nod, safed it, and stuck it in a cubbyhole next to his station.

  Raven felt the power, whatever it was, drain away. "Whoa," she said, wavering a bit. Then:

  "Yes, I did finish the mission," she said, to the supine and barely-conscious pirate. "Ashraf, please get someone up from Medical to transport this guy for care. I want him alive for questioning."

  "Yes, ma'am," replied Ashraf, wincing a bit, but glad to have something to do. "Not that I care if he lives or dies. He's the guy who hit me. The leader."

  "Hmm. Also, you need to get your security people to looking for this moron's companions, although how they ended up elsewhere in the ship is beyond me."

  The pirate laughed, raggedly. "They didn't," he murmured, barely loud enough for them to hear him. "Hadda use . . . airlock . . . to get back inside. They . . . didn't make it. Too far . . . away."

  The pilot and the nav looked at each other, and then back at the pirate. "He's raving," said the pilot.

  "Yeah," said the nav. "We'd know if an airlock cycled."

  The second mate, who, other than picking up and securing the pirate's gun, had been quiet up till now, just taking the whole thing in, turned to his console, tapped a few virtual keys, and looked at the result on the holoscreen. "Um, hate to burst your bubble, boys," he said, "but one did just cycle, A1, just abaft the bridge, about five minutes ago." He looked at Raven. "I also show D3 cycling when you spaced his buddies, ma'am, but of course that's a completely different airlock and a completely different time."

  "Of course." Raven looked more closely at the pirate. "Hmm, he does have a lot of burst facial capillaries, as if he was in vacuum for a short period," she observed.

  A truly awful thought was forming in her head. She shied away from it, because she really didn't want to think about it just then.

  Because what if it happened again? She shuddered.

  "You guys really need to get the captain up here," she said. "And while we're waiting for him, maybe we could finally slow down, get out of warp, and head back for Devlin's? I've got a gig to play tonight."

  ◆

  Twenty minutes later, C
aptain Jackson had arrived and resumed command, the orderlies from Medical had shown up with a gurney and transported the erstwhile pirate back to a secure surgery station, Ashraf's head wound had been treated and he'd been given painkillers, and the various decks had been scoured by company security but no further pirates had been found. The passengers who'd followed Raven and her three spec-ops folks up to the promenade deck had been thanked for their willingness to help, and had returned to their staterooms for whatever was left of the shipboard "night".

  The pilot and nav had gotten the Star out of warp, slowed her down with the sub-light mode of the drive, and turned her around, pointed back toward Devlin's Star. At the moment, they were sitting in normal space, waiting for the captain to order them back into warp.

  "On my way up here," said Captain Jackson, "I ordered a couple of engineers to go EVA and inspect the outer hatch of Airlock A1. As I expected but really didn't want to hear, they found fingerprints and traces of blood on the lock panel. We don't lock out airlocks during the warp run," he explained, "because, well, why would we need to do that?" He shrugged, with a wry grin. "In fact, I don't remember if they're designed to be locked out."

  "They are," said Raven, "but it's a subsystem nobody really uses, at least that's what Dunc told me. It's intended for use when the ship is docked at a crowded station, to prevent people from simply entering and leaving as they please. Of course they expect that such people would be, you know, sane, and in spacesuits, but whatever . . . "

  "Hmm," said Jackson. "I think I want to know – and the owners will want to know, if they don't already – about that subsystem. Anse?"

  "I'll dig it out, sir," came from the speaker. "You'll have the specs and manuals by breakfast."

  "Very well. Ashraf, you sure you're okay to continue shift?"

  "Yes, sir. The medtechs told me it didn't appear to be a concussion, just broke the skin and hurt like hell." He grinned. "I'll be okay."

  "Good man, but you get to Medical immediately if it seems like it's getting any worse. Number Two, I'll leave the conn with you; I can't imagine what you could have done to stop those fellows, short of keeping the blast doors closed, and we know that's not standard procedure. Although possibly that SOP may end up revised, as well."