Her Last Run

by Michael Penmore

  “You seriously need to upgrade to sonics.”

  “Why?”

  “Besides the fact this contraption looks like it is ready to blow us to New Cairo? Last time I tried to take a shower at your place, I had to wait ten minutes before the water warmed up. And then it turned cold in the middle of the wash!”

  Isabel brushed off her comment with a smug smile. “Cold showers build up stamina.”

  Nadie snorted. “I’ll remember to thank you for that in my victory speech after I decide to take part in the interstellar marathon.”

  “You’re welcome in advance. Don’t get my name wrong. It’s Rocarion. Profession: gunrunner extraordinaire. Although I’ll be enjoying my retirement by then.”

  Nadie had nothing else to add. The following rooms were dreary, empty or filled with abandoned crates and boxes. One had a series of hooks stuck in the ceiling. Another housed a long defunct maglev crane. One sank in complete black darkness, so much so that Nadie thought she had closed her eyes and tried to open them. At some point, they waded through stacks of broken furniture. Isabel let this part of her ship for dead. Out of sight, out of mind.

  “I never knew the Anvil was so full of junk,” Nadie grumbled at last, dragged down by the amount of detritus around her.

  “My junk, one man’s treasure.”

  “What man’s?”

  “Adam Beck’s.”

  “Who’s Adam Beck?”

  Isabel shrugged. The air was getting hotter. She unzipped the EEF jacket, revealing a dark top underneath. “You’ve got holes in your knowledge, Nads. I don’t have time to fill them in. Read him up on the net.”

  After about forty seconds of taking shortcuts, they shot out into a hallway. Nadie drew in several exaggerated breaths.

  “Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad,” Isabel told her.

  “Shh. I know where I am. I’m trying to remember which door we used so I can avoid it till the end of time.”

  “You’re a twonk, Nads.”

  “Thank you, queen of quirkiness,” Nadie grinned. Now that the ship stopped looking like an abandoned museum, she revelled in riling up her friend. “You’re a custodian of curious junk.”

  “No time to debate this. Come on, the cockpit is up ahead.”

  Isabel made a stomping sprint to a door on the far right. Nadie followed with light steps. They almost reached the edge of the opening sensors when an unexpected jolt sent them both reeling into bulkheads. The whole ship started to bob and shake as engine power began to surge through its structure.

  “Thrusters,” Isabel identified the source of the Anvil’s growingly aggressive trembling. Someone was taking her freighter to the air.

  * 11 *

  On opening the door, two male silhouettes appeared to be already enjoying the Anvil’s driving seats. The one on the left was responsible for the liftoff. The one on the right was assisting. The jumping and shaking of the view across the front window were a sign neither of them knew exactly what they were doing.

  “Throw that lever,” said the pilot Troy Sandy to his helper Jacob Pace.

  “This one?” Pace did as he was told and the Anvil pitched decisively to the starboard, throwing Isabel hard against the door frame.

  “Throw it back! My bad. That must be the lateral axis enhancer. That’s been out of use since Jadzee O’Bannion retired from the soaps! How in hell does Isabel Rocarion manage to fly this unwieldy thing?”

  “With great care and skill,” Isabel sizzled. Not only had she just had a close encounter with a solid wall, someone else was flying her ship! The two hapless guys looked back, Troy with surprise on his face that quickly changed into a nonchalant smile, Pace with indifference. She rushed to stand at the back of their seats, gasping and raising her hands as though she was preparing to slap them on their heads. “Sandy, get out of my seat, boy.”

  “I’m not a boy,” the pilot stopped smiling, but he extricated himself in two seconds.

  Isabel took his place faster than the speed of sound. The jarring and clacking sounds the Anvil was making as it rotated pierced her heart as though a handful of sharp iron pokers were attacking her chest. She grabbed the stick and evened the course with a yank and a battle of wills. “This isn’t one of your needle-light fighter crafts, Sandyboy. You were gonna wear my engine out.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Troy Sandy protested. As a sign of how relaxed he was, he smiled a winning smile and ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, cocking his head left and right.

  “Nadie?” Isabel called on her friend.

  Nadie read Rocarion’s mind. She stepped in quickly and slapped the back of Troy’s head with an audible splat. Troy didn’t see that coming and he face-planted into the nearest support pole.

  “Ouch.” He rubbed his nose. “I hope it isn’t broken.”

  Isabel ground her jaw and spat out, “You’d deserve it. Rich kid playing at war.”

  Jacob Pace observed her from the side. His face barely changed but his voice was definitely sneering when he said, “Isabel Rocarion. I am glad you and the other stray lamb decided to join us, at long last.”

  “Cut the shnitz, Paceman. Nadie, join me.”

  Nadie swiftly replaced Pace. He cleared the chair without the slightest hint of protest. The man knew it was the women who knew how to control the freighter. In their hands, the Anvil’s flight was smooth sailing again.

  “That’s our exit,” Nadie pointed to the large exit doors with picturesque outer space behind them. “No blast doors, no energy field. It’s just standing there, wide open for us.”

  “I don’t get it. The EEFers should be all over us by now.” Isabel squeezed out through a thin opening in her mouth. A lot of her focus went into undoing the errors Troy Sandy had made. A switch here, a slider there, little things which stacked up into a near-catastrophic pile of wrongdoing. He’d overburdened the front thrust. Isabel got behind the wheel just in time to redistribute energy and weight evenly. Within seconds, she had full grasp of the Anvil’s flight path. She chased away the ugly hum and everything sounded much better under her supervision than when Sandy nearly destroyed the drive.

  “You’re welcome,” Pace said with a tone that suggested he knew something Isabel didn’t.

  The controls sapped out so much of Isabel’s attention that she forgot to bite Pace with something sarcastic. “Nadie, give us half impulse.”

  Nadie activated the main engine. It gulped down a tidal wave of rocket fuel, fired up, and the ship sped up, cutting the distance to the open gate in three seconds. The Anvil moved past the blast doors and the black silk of space welcomed it with open arms. It looked a lot emptier now than it did when the ship floated in, carried by a tractor beam. Most of the EEF ships had moved out of their way: the war fleet had assumed their attack positions over Rockwall.

  A weird jumble of feelings overcame Rocarion’s thinking. Freedom was hers. She could smell it, get drunk on the joy of cosmos opening up before her. But its flavour was also tainted somehow. There should be warning shouts and shots. Someone should be chasing after them, trying to grind them to a halt. Except, the Higher Power made no move. Someone upstairs must have watched their departure in an eerie quiet. Not even a single fighter ship scrambled to see them out. Isabel’s hands hovered over the helm at the ready. Triple somersaults, displacement rolls and other high-velocity manoeuvres lined up in her head. They weren’t needed. The Anvil flew away on a straight path in the cleanest getaway in Rocarion’s lifetime, and right after Nadie tripped a ship-wide alert, no less. Isabel felt the bitter taste of disgust under her tongue.

  “It doesn’t stack up,” Nadie summed up the dilemma in one sentence.

  “Righto. I’m as happy as the average clam that we’re out of the elephant’s do-do, but this fly out isn’t from a page I’ve read. Bells and whistles, I haven’t even seen the cover of the book we’re in.”

  “I bet it’s pretty. Your face is all over it,” Troy offered from behind.

  “I bet it’s not,” Isa
bel shook her head. She wasn’t in tune with the fighter pilot’s joking. Her eyes shifted to the other man in the room, the one who seemed to be emanating negative energy without doing anything at all. She picked up that bitter disgust swelling in her mouth and packed it into addressing him. “I’m surprised to see you here so soon, zombie master Pace.”

  Pace looked to the front and over Isabel’s head. His uncaring attitude vexed her as much as the thinly veiled mockery of his words. “I didn’t dilly-dally, like some.”

  “If I didn’t have a flicker of trust in Troy-boy, I’d say you two were planning to jump out of the sector. You’d happily throw our exceptionally handsome butts to the wolves.”

  “Troy-boy, huh?” Troy beamed her the kind of smile he was lucky she couldn’t see. He rocked to his tiptoes and back. “Give us a minute by the lonesome and I’ll show you what this boy can do.”

  “Only a minute?”

  “Bleh,” Nadie knew what sort of ridicule Isabel meant, but she stuck out her tongue anyway and mimicked cleaning it. “Troy, say something useful for a change, or shut up and be gone.”

  “Don’t worry baby, I got ammunition for you too.” Troy’s smile vanished after Nadie turned in her chair and pinned him with her eyes. “OK, I’ll behave for now. And I can confirm the idea of leaving passed his lips.” Troy waved broadly in the Arbiter’s direction as though this was irrelevant, but added, “Three times, I think. I said no. You can now thank me.” He made a flourishing bow, or as much of it as the cramped space allowed.

  Isabel made an eye roll and a smirk, unseen by anyone but Nadie. “Yes. Thank you very much, Troy-boy. Now vamoose from my cockpit. We’ve got enough pilots already.” Troy didn’t need to be there and her already bad mood was slumping into even lower depths due to overcrowding. She was doing Troy a favour, too. Whenever she started stabbing at Pace with a choice bundle of harshness, the fighter pilot could get into the crossfire and lose an inch of his self-confidence.

  Troy grabbed the nearest bolted thing. “Oh no. There’s no power that will move me from this spot. You’ll have to tell me what happened in the dragon’s den first.”

  Nadie stood up and made a few suggestive stretches with her arms. “Troy? Do as she says.” The way in which she spoke to him strongly suggested she was preparing to use other, less pleasant means of persuasion, like a chokehold.

  “OK,” Troy replied slowly. Seeing that he was outmatched for the time being, he said, “I’ll take your explanations later. Someone has to go and tell the others we’re safe. I like to be the bringer of good news. But call me soon, all right? The anticipation is killing me.” He made a phone out of his hand just before crossing through the door.

  Just as soon as he disappeared, Isabel released some tense air. One less man in the room could only be a good thing, although she’d prefer it to be Pace. “Nads, bring us to full speed and prepare the reactor for a jump. Don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired to my armpits with this system.” She twisted in her chair toward Pace and crossed her legs. Her right boot moved back and forth like a pendulum. Whenever it neared Pace, she imagined kicking the Arbiter in the groin and smiled. “Now, Mister Colonial Congressman, you will tell us where to go next.” She hoped Pace would do something that constituted a reason to complete that imaginary kick.

  By her side, Nadie cleared her throat in anticipation. Like everyone on the ship, she was keen to find out about Libertalia’s secret location.

  Pace tilted his head to look straight in Isabel’s glasses. “Do I detect a hint of hostility?”

  Isabel felt anger raise her body temperature. “You tried to steal my ship, scum of the planet Earth.”

  Nadie chuckled. She really appreciated the jibe. It was like one of her own. But she straightened up and cut short her merriment. Pace was her superior, and her head was still full of delusions about restoring the Colonial Army structures in the near future. She wanted to continue the fight.

  Pace fronted Isabel and regarded her closely. “A curious choice of words. We’re all Earthers here.”

  Isabel felt the slight change in Nadie - her friend went stiff, feeling insulted. As for herself, Rocarion didn’t care one way or the other. “I left Earth behind a long time ago. But I have a feeling you’ve been there quite recently.”

  It was a palpable accusation of split loyalties that risked taking Nadie over the edge. Pace dodged the thrown gauntlet by saying, “You disobeyed my direct order. You’re a loose cannon.”

  Isabel bared her teeth. “I am not your puppet. We did good work back there.”

  “Yes. You, the Corporal and the Space Marine Captain. Three amigos go save the universe. Excellent show of insubordination leading to certain disaster. Luckily, I was there to do damage control.”

  “What exactly did you do?” Isabel tightened her grip on the armrests. She was gearing for a confrontation. She could see how Nadie’s apprehension cranked up to eleven.

  “I had a friendly chat with the Captain. Convinced him stopping us was against his own personal interests. But that’s not important right now. I need to know you two are on the side of the mission. If we were still on Rockwall, I’d put the disciplinary proceedings against you under way.” Pace’s chill could freeze a burning oven. The proceedings he had in mind were swift, harsh, leading to prison or death of the subject. He created the system for arbitrary witch hunts, not justice.

  With a twitch, Nadie’s alabaster skin flushed to a red rose. She was a soldier of the Colonial Army and she had acted against orders. This stuff mattered to her. Pace’s threat impressed her.

  Isabel found Nadie’s hand and caressed it. Their gazes met. Her cheeks burnt with desire to tear off the glasses and look at Nadie directly with her own eyes. She stifled the urge, as always. I got your back, she tried to say. She didn’t know the military code for that, but she recognised a friend in need and she did her best to show her support. Nadie was struggling with an inner conflict Isabel couldn’t understand. She knew one thing: Pace was making things worse.

  “Shonk off her, Pacemonster. This one’s on me. My decision, Nadie and dredge fuzz followed me to make sure I didn’t blow up the whole ship by mistake. You wanna play hardball about that? Come on, I’m ready. I’ll happily crack your balls in a sec.”

  “You’re covering for your underlings,” Pace said with an undertone of surprise, maybe even the slightest hint of admiration. The kind of awe a young boy feels when he tears off a fly’s wing and watches it twitch and jump in a doomed effort to fly away from its tormentor. “What a noble, yet utterly misguided gesture. I didn’t think you were capable of looking after anyone but yourself.”

  “Are you talking about me or your own amoral, despicable, bent out of shape arse?”

  Pace didn’t respond to that. After a while, Isabel turned back to the stick. She performed a few testing turns, and the Anvil responded with the grace of a much sleeker speeder. They were approaching the point of jump into long space. As much as she wanted to fight Pace, she had better things to do with her time. “How much longer to the jump spot, Nadie?”

  “Approximately ten sec.” Sinking back into navigation calmed the Colonial Corporal. She counted down. “Seven... Six...”

  Isabel looked to Pace. “OK. Your turn to redeem yourself. Where do we go from here?”

  “Ah, the moment of truth.” Jacob Pace sniffed the air. He seemed to relish in its dryness. “Set the course for the Origo System.”

  “The Origo System?” Isabel and Nadie spoke in one voice.

  “Excellent repetition skills. Now would you put that in the navigational computer, please, Corporal.”

  “Sir, there is no such thing as the Origo System. There’s the Origo Nebula, but there’s…”

  “There’s nothing there,” Isabel finished. “Apart from a big cloud of noxious gasses and the fame of a ship killer.”

  Nadie nodded sharply, agreeing with that statement. The Origo was no man’s land. No one had successfully navigated it. Ship captains who
had enough courage, or idiocy to venture in never came back. No one knew why, but the space legends abounded, from scientific theories to fishwife tales. Black holes; wormholes; recent supernovas; dark matter; new kind of powerful radiation capable of disrupting ship’s comms, life support and propulsion; hostile alien life forms; enormous scorpions crushing hulls with their pincers; the one-eyed Kraken… In the absence of hard data, everyone’s guess was as good as the others.

  Jacob Pace raised his left arm. His long and narrow index finger pointed between the women’s shoulders to the Anvil’s computer. “The Origo System.”

  Nadie shook her head in disbelief. “It’s a suicide. I’ve seen the cloud a vigintillion times.”

  Isabel raised one brow. “A vigintillion? You just made up that number, didn’t you?”

  “Does it matter? I’ve been around that neighbourhood more times than I can count. No way there’s a whole planet in there, let alone a place anyone could live.”

  “What are you playing at, Pace?” Isabel focused entirely on Pace. To say that reading a reaction from his solid face was a challenge, that would be an understatement of the millennium. The precision of his stillness was something inhuman.

  “I am not playing at anything,” the reply seeped languidly from his lips. “There is an Origo System in the place you call the Origo Nebula. Hidden from view, it is the perfect spot to conceal a great secret. Seasoned navigators and ship captains dismiss it out of hand, as your reaction has just proven. Where else to put a colony that’s meant to stay undiscovered?”

  Nadie looked to Isabel. Isabel glanced back. Nadie spoke first:

  “It does make sense.”

  Isabel sighed and gave up. “I regret to say I agree with you, girl. Origo Nebula it is.”

  “The Origo System,” Pace highlighted. “How long will we travel?”

  “Calculating.” Nadie burrowed inside the computer. It was a Mastrad, almost as old as the dinosaurs. It was reliable, but had a host of limitations, including speed of processing.

  Isabel closed her eyes. She moved her lips without producing a sound. She had an answer before the computer finished cracking the equations. “Ten hours.”