*
Pepper chooses backwards, and you begin to move through the cars door by door. He leads, and you follow.
OBSRV, you think. Yeah. You’ll do that. You’ll just fucking OBSRV.
Three more cars of death, corpses framed in their rooms, and you catch up. Five League agents ordering humans forward, killing any aliens they manage to catch.
People scream when Pepper kicks the door from the hinges and wades in. But the agents don’t. They’re expecting him.
They move in synchronization to turn and attack, as if sharing a single brain. Linked to each other in some deep, technologically enabled battle symbiosis. Gunfire rips through the walls as they open up, and you duck back into the space between trains and look through bulletproof glass. The thundering sound of air passing over the rubber, vacuum-proof flexible tube that connects the two cars deafens you, and mutes the sound of battle.
A multi-person ballet of death ensues. Pepper sprints into the mix, his trenchcoat flapping around him with each twist and turn. He leaps off the wall, almost hitting the ceiling, and flips around behind the first pair of attackers.
Like Pepper, these five attackers are more than they seem. Wherever the League rose up against the aliens who had once held humanity in its iron grip, they slaughtered former masters and sought to plunder their superior technologies.
Some thought the League was too far diminished, too obsessed with human-only worlds and too pushed back to the fringes. But here are their well-funded paladins, and they are faster than you, stronger than you, more vicious than you.
And almost as dangerous as Pepper.
Almost.
One is shot in the back and falls, writhing. Another’s head disappears. Was that a shotgun blast? You didn’t see one, but it’s hard to follow.
Number three’s chest is caved in when Pepper runs him through wall, and pulls him back out to use as a shield.
And then the remaining two withdraw, running right past you as Pepper chases them.
A sixth man carrying what looks like a grenade launcher melts out of a room and ghosts past you. He’s dressed in a suit, the same camouflage as you, and his eyes flicker sideways as he spots you.
It was a well sprung trap for Pepper. He’s focused forward, and here comes the high powered attack from behind.
But this man reads something in you. He isn’t going to leave you in his blind spot. He’s moving to pull out another weapon with his left hand.
He’s faster than you. Stronger, more dangerous.
But he wasn’t expecting you, and you have the drop. Simple physics.
Because, much to your astonished satisfaction, you’ve had your own firearm out and ready to fire, finger just outside the trigger, since you stopped by the window.
Just in case.
OBSRV!
Forget that crap now. There’s only flight or fight now. And flight was kicked in the nuts the moment this man started to twist and reach for his backup weapon, realizing that the damn grenade launcher would kill you both.
You fire from the waist, just out of general principle, as you’re bringing the gun up to your trained fire stance. He’s hit in the core, which barely registers on him. But once you’re up and ready, it’s two to the chest and two to the head.
For good measure you empty the clip into his face, revealing metal chips, machine eyes, and more. The man’s more metal than human. Which is why you stand over him and keep shooting until there’s nothing left.
“Give me the grenade gun,” Pepper says, suddenly back in the car. You wordlessly pick it up and throw it over.
He turns around and kneels.
When the door to the car opens, it reveals forty League soldiers, dressed in armor, carrying rifles. Where the hell had they come from?
Pepper fires the grenade launcher through the car, through the open doors, into the mass of soldiers. The doors close. But flame licks around the doors’ gaps, the windows bow out, and explosions rock everything.
He walks over and hands it over. “Pick a position, fire on anything that comes through.”
“I can’t do that,” you protest, even as you hold the weapon.
“You already killed a League agent,” he says, moving back into the car with survivors. “You’ve chosen your side. You’re in.”
He leaves you alone with the grenade launcher, and you reluctantly drop to a single knee.
Congratulations. You’re now responsible for a full-on, hundred percent, international incident.
*
Pepper gives the civilians instructions, and returns dragging a large case. “Get dressed, we’ll need these to stay on the train.”
Inside are spacesuits.
He’s right. Whatever the League is planning revolves around hijacking this train. Which means it’s not stopping on the East Coast. It’s going to dive right through the wormhole leading away from Rydr’s World and keep going.
You quickly pull a spacesuit on. It’s a transparent baggy film that hangs loosely around you until you press it to the helmet and make a seal. Then the material constricts and sucks itself in to you until it’s more of a second skin over your clothes.
All this time you’ve awkwardly kept the grenade launcher sighted on the far door of the train car.
Pepper looks at you, and a faint flicker of communications laser appears as motes drift through the air between the two of you. That makes sense, you don’t want the League hearing you over radio of any type.
“I need that launcher back,” Pepper says, and swaps you for a machine gun. “And this is your last chance. To get off the train. If you want.”
Get off the train. Return to HQ. And explain you shot a League agent? Covered Pepper with a grenade launcher?
If you were going to go rogue, you might as well see this through.
You’ve got no soft spot for aliens. Rydr’s World was run by Nesaru when your grandparents were your age. You saw the scars on their arms and tattoo barcodes. They told you about forced breeding programs with that aura of shame, but insistence that you know what happened.
There are still Nesaru gated compounds, complete with orbital defenses and full security.
And those aren’t going away. Nesaru built those long before humanity was brought here. They won’t give them up, not without a fight that would cost both sides too much.
Awkward compromises had been reached. And time had passed. And Nesaru who worked side by side with humans had always been here, and had helped when humanity revolted and demanded self-determination here, as it did all throughout the known worlds. And for a while, Ryrdr’s World was a strong League of Human Affairs supporter.
But when the League began deportation, people refused. It was understandable, leaders argued, but would lead to humans acting like the Nesaru had when they had dominion. Humans would lose Nesaru technical expertise, finance, and technology. The success of Xenowealth worlds, fully integrated alien and human societies, led them to resist purism.
But you know of Nesaru that live in compounds, that despise humans as little better than monkeys. You read their sneering reviews of bumbling human efforts to deorbit wormholes and create a more directly linked system of worlds.
You understand the League, on a fundamental level.
Maybe once you agreed.
Until that single moment, when you walked through the car and saw those dead individuals. Each one, formerly a thinking being. This was the end result of League ideology. If you value one life, think it superior, eventually, taking the other does not matter.
“I’m staying on board,” you tell Pepper.
“Good,” he says, and behind you something detonates. The next time you glance back through the doors, the rest of the train is falling behind, emergency brakes shuddering it all to a stop.
If nothing else, you tell yourself, their lives will have been saved.
*
The spacesuits’ gloves are like gecko feet: they’re embedded with pads and microscopic nano-adhesives tha
t allow you to clamber up the outside of the car.
But you’re moving along at several hundred miles per hour. It isn’t wind you encounter as you crawl up to the roof, but a hurricane.
You’re flat to the roof, army-crawling along a tremendous, pounding resistance that wants nothing more than to bat you off your perch. The adhesive pads hold.
AGNT: RPRT!
Just barely.
It’s an exhausting, sweat-filled haul to get three cars forward from where you were. When you’re done, it feels like you climbed up the side of a building.
You dig your pads into the roof and shelter behind the several inches-high protection of a vent and pant.
OBSRVNG HIJACK IN PRGRSS, you tell your superiors. SURVIVORS IN BRAKED TRAIN.
An hour later, the train is still hauling at top speed as it passes through the last stop on Rydr’s World. Skyscrapers whip by, and for a while an aircraft paces the train.
You wave at it.
AGNT: RPRT!
You ignore the demands ghosting over your eyeballs.
Fifteen minutes later, you squeeze your eyes shut and feel your stomach lurch as the train hits that blank portal of darkness that is the wormhole leading out and away from Rydr’s World.
*
Pepper shouts. It’s joyful.
“Open your eyes, Vee,” he says happily, rapping the side of your helmet. “Open your eyes. You never see the full vista from one room window. Not like this.”
When you open your eyes the train is whipping past a giant mountain chain. There is no vegetation, and you’re deep in the valley. Overhead: the remains of a nebula is scattered over the entire sky. Impossibly jagged peaks rise for miles around you. You feel light.
There is no wind pressure thundering at you.
Five minutes later the train dives into another wormhole.
Right away a giant hand of wind smacks into you.
You open your eyes, and this time the tracks are on a bridge. It stands in the water, pilings driven down maybe ten feet. There is no land anywhere, you feel dizzy looking out at the horizon.
Where the sea laps, smoke wisps and rises. The pilings are burnished and polished, as if the sea is acidic.
Half an hour later you leave that behind. Plunge through yet another wormhole, and when you open your eyes you gasp. You’re out in space. There’s nothing but the darkness of vacuum and distant stars all around you. Track hangs in space, suspended in nothingness.
You stare at the heavens for twenty minutes, awestruck, until you realize the train is coming to a stop, and that it has been slowing the whole time.
Pepper taps you, and you turn. He points.
A starship approaches. Black paint against the black space all around you. You can see it by the stars it occludes: a darker space slipping over space as it gets closer.
Nav lights and docking lights pop on, and the frame is outlined: a giant functional cylinder strapped to a bell-shaped engine.
“What now?” you ask Pepper.
“Wait and watch,” he says.
OBSRV.
*
The League shuttles thousands of soldiers into the train after they cut in temporary airlocks near the front. Pepper counts ten thousand. That sounds right. They must be literally standing shoulder to shoulder to fit.
And to the front of the train, a sled is being prepared with a rocket attached to it.
“When we last had a full-on war between the Xenowealth and the League,” Pepper says, “we had a problem. Each wormhole is a natural border. A checkpoint. When they were in space, we stacked orbital firing platforms around the wormhole. Try to shove your ships through, and you’d get hammered. That’s how the Satrapy, the aliens, that’s how they kept us all in check. But once we had League and Xenowealth, the only way to push against each other was to foment revolution, play secret agent.
“Then, when the wormholes get moved down out of orbit, into oceans, it’s the same problem. Natural chokepoints. Then we start running track through them all, thinking of them as just subway stops, that’s when the League thinks, ah, now it has a military option.
“But it only gets to use it once.”
You’re both ready to bet that what’s on the sled is a bomb. It rockets through the wormhole ahead and detonates, and then comes the ten minutes later, delivering troops and hardware to secure the wormhole: the chokepoint.
Then comes more.
And more.
“They’ve probably had this starship mothballed in far orbit ever since wormholes were in orbit here, back in the day, and the League had ships out here, before it withdrew,” Pepper muses. “It’s not a warship, we’ve tracked all those and the negotiations made sure those withdrew. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. They’ve been smuggling troops one by one to this location for years, staging them in a station that we would have assumed was abandoned. I followed people out here. Followed the activity. Didn’t see it being this big.”
The League is invading. Not Rydr’s World. But the next habitable world upstream of this string of worlds connected by wormholes: Dawn Pillars. A center of trade and activity, a highly developed world. And unlike the polyglot Rydr’s, Dawn Pillars has a population that is almost all human. Very few aliens.
Ripe for League take over.
No OBSRV left, really.
You sit down and tap out a report.
There is no answer.
You wonder what that’s about. Is your department infiltrated with League? Are they just waiting? Are you that clueless, or ignorant?
Or are they just speechless because you dropped a bomb in their lap?
“What do we do next?” you ask.
Pepper’s looking up at the starship. “They hijacked our train, Vee. I’d like to return the favor.” He looks over at you. His dreadlocks are floating in the bowl of his helmet, making him look medusa-like. It’s slightly disconcerting. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to throw you at that ship.”
*
He’s not kidding.
Pepper has a half mile of a high-tensile thread, and he unspools several feet of it and ties it off on a tiny buckle on the back of your suit, near the small of your back. Then he throws you over the side of the train, lets you out about six feet, and starts spinning you around over his head like you’re a bucket on the end of some string.
The world cartwheels around you, and then stops as Pepper lets go, the timing impeccable. He’s slingshot you toward the dark bulk of the starship.
You fly through space, falling in, and then Pepper slows you down, using the brake on his spool.
After you reach out with your pads and grab the hull you look back and wave.
The thread yanks at you as Pepper activates a motor on the spool. Two minutes later he lands next to you, you both glance around, and then begin crawling around the hull of the ship.
The way in presents itself: a manual emergency airlock near a set of bay doors. You move to undog the first hatch to cycle in, but Pepper stops you.
“Not yet,” he says. “Not until they finish unloading.”
*
An hour later you both make your move. The manual airlock deposits you inside a cavernous cylindrical hanger. You scurry across the curved walls, weightless, using your gecko-fingers to grab any surface you can and then kick off.
“Keep up.” Pepper moves like a cat in the air, loose-limbed and graceful. A natural hunter. And he knows what he’s hunting. He’s taking you to the core of the ship.
You suddenly get the feeling this isn’t the first time he’s done this.
He has a silenced gun out, and everyone you cross in the corridors of the ship ends up spinning slowly in the air, a surprised look on their face, blood slowly drifting out of punctures in the forehead.
Swift, quiet, calm, suddenly violent.
And fast. You’re pushing off every bulkhead as fast as you can to keep up. You’ve bored down through most of this ship’s bulk in minutes.
The men guarding the co
ckpit barely have time to register the fluttering trenchcoat, the man spinning in the air and firing, dreadlocks spread out around his face.
He’s through them and into the actual cockpit of the ship in the blink of an eye, and shouts of outrage end with the silent thwack of Pepper’s response.
“Shove them out and lock us in,” Pepper orders. He’s floating around from control pod to control pod, his head cocked, as if getting advice from someone. Maybe he has quantum entangled communications of his own. Someone’s talking him through what the controls are, you think. Someone deep in the heart of the Xenowealth.
Screens flicker on, and you hear the wail of wind outside the door.
Glancing at the screens showed you what just happened: the ship vented its air. Airlock doors throughout are wide open to space, and you can see up on the screens random faces, tortured, blood beginning to leak out of orifices.
You look away.
“Any of them good about drills and who kept near their spacesuits will be trying to get back in here,” Pepper says. “So stay clear of the door, they might blow it.”
He’s listening to instructions and moving quickly from place to place, frowning.
Then the engines thunder to life, and he claps his hands.
“Oh, they’re not going to like this.”
*
There are no weapons systems on this ship. It’s transport, pure and simple. Which is how the League was able to leave it behind, hidden away from Xenowealth and Rydr’s World military negotiation accountants looking for just this sort of stunt when comparing inventories and current ship names and movements out of the area when Rydr’s World demanded independence.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be used as a crude missile. Pepper orders you into an acceleration pod to strap in, but keeps spinning around and flitting around to control the ship.
You’re not moving fast when you strike the train and track. But it’s fast enough to rip the outer hull of the ship and derail the train. It’s fast enough to twist and rip track.
The impact throws Pepper around the cockpit, his body smashing equipment. He wearily pulls himself out and gets back to the controls, firing the engines to pull the ship free of the track and turn it about.
The New Hero Volume 2 Page 28
