“What?” Nadie erupted. “In your dreams, Isa. No way.”
“I have a way.”
“Care to share your super secret yottafast propulsion system that’s ahead of everything else in terms of speed?”
“Sure. It’s a fish called Marlin.”
Nadie laughed. “Don’t tell me then. What you’re saying is impossible. We’re talking more than 20 light years in distance.”
Isabel smiled darkly. “Ten hours. The Anvil will do it. I could stake a million cosmos on that.” Her hand instinctively went to her side, searching for the money bars she’d been given. The suede gloves met the unfamiliar fabric of the EEF uniform. Isabel cringed. She was still wearing that. A thousand cosmos for her coat!
“Gambling is against the Colonial Army regulations,” Jacob Pace killed the prospect of a friendly wager.
“Shucks. Remind me to tell you you’re no fun, Paceman.”
“Fun doesn’t get the job done. We’re about to do something extraordinary together. Let’s not diminish the moment with some paltry game of luck.”
Nadie straightened up in her chair. She had just finished a session of typing on the ship’s well-worn keyboard. “Jump coordinates loaded. Ready to press the button.”
“Then punch it, Nads.”
They watched as it happened, the flash of white followed by the sensation of darting inside a space ocean. A jump to faster-than-light speed created a liquified composition all around the ship. Entering long space still made her heart skip a beat. It had been fifty years since the Discovery made its test flight. After all this time, concerns still existed. The engine could break down. The computer could develop a glitch and make the ship drop out in the wrong place. Rare as these instances were, they happened in the past, and reports still mentioned them from time to time. Rectifying an FTL booboo was never just about a simple redial. In some extreme cases, errors obliterated the ships or made them vanish without a trace.
Isabel could spend minutes just staring past the windscreen. Pace forced her to abandon the reverie after seconds, which was just enough to make sure the jump had worked. “Corporal Chu, are we on course?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you are dismissed. Isabel Rocarion and I will discuss matters on a need-to-know basis. Interference will not be tolerated.”
Look at him go. Isabel rolled her eyes at the man’s insufferableness. She reached out to grab Nadie by the wrist. “Stay.”
Nadie extricated herself as gently as possible. “No can do, Isa. You’ve got this. He won’t do you any harm.” She read Isabel’s tense move as a plea for help.
The gunrunner smiled and nodded in Pace’s direction. “Not for me. Someone’s gotta protect him.”
A groan escaped Pace’s lungs. Nadie stiffened at once. “Sir.” She stalked out of the cockpit with nothing more to say.
Isabel felt left alone. She had the feeling she’d drawn the short straw. Pace was unpleasantness smothered in aura of negativity. Something unnatural dwelt inside him which unnerved her to the brink of terror. She’d never choose to stay alone with him in one room, yet here they were.
The first thing Pace did was to ensconce his lean body in the co-pilot’s chair. Isabel wrinkled her pretty nose. That place did not belong to him. He defiled it. Nevertheless, her eyes were strangely drawn by his frame, tall but not particularly broad, just the right balance between fat and thin. There was no suggestion of an ounce of excess fat on that body. Keeping such shape would require a lifelong dedication to an iron regime of diet and workout. Isabel had scarce regrets about her own form, but she was quietly envious of the stability he had achieved on the outside.
What lived inside him was a staggering contrast. She despised the ideas he represented.
Pace sank deeper in the chair. He swivelled it toward her. “Why the long face? You are about to become privy to one of the universe’s best kept secrets.”
Her hands clutched the armrests and moved the chair so they were perfectly aligned. She crossed her legs and buried her worries under a well-practiced smirk. She couldn’t escape her fear, so she had to face it. And crack jokes along the way. “On my knickers. You’ve got IBS.”
“No.” Pace didn’t even blink.
“You had emergency testicle removal?”
“Your crude jokes have no effect on me.”
“That remains to be seen. Your hair is a transplant from your anus.”
Pace’s self-control was an inspiration. One of his eyebrows furrowed. The rest of the face didn’t follow suit. “To business, Rocarion. I have to admit, with considerable pain, that you are quite a resource. I may have a job for you.”
Isabel fought off the surprise trying to take hold of her face. She felt immeasurably proud of stemming the coming tide of blinking. “Another task for the resistance?”
Pace’s fingers drummed a little beat on his lap. “No.”
Isabel cocked her head and took the measure of the man. Apart from the fingertip staccato, he wasn’t moving at all. His face might as well be dead apart from the small specks of light burning inside his deep grey eyes. She couldn’t read what he was thinking. “If you need guns, I can recommend someone who’ll be more enthusiastic about taking a contract from you.”
“Who?”
“Top of my mind? Buck Taggart.”
“Serial rapist and murderer?” He said it without a flinch and this was the moment when the game changed. Now Isabel knew she was dealing with a real monster, because Pace wasn’t perturbed in the slightest. Most people would jump, shudder, or at least give a stardamn blink when talking about hardened criminals with pure evil in their blood. Pace knew who they were talking about. And he didn’t care.
“His complete lack of scruples and remorse will ensure you two get along like best buddies.”
Pace put his hands together in front of him. “Perhaps we would, except he’s been dead for the past two years.”
A wicked smile crept on Isabel’s lips. “I know. I’m the one who shot his balls off.” She folded one hand into the shape of a gun. She pointed the shooting fingers toward Pace’s crotch and pretended to use it. Again, the Arbiter didn’t react in any way. It was really disheartening. “Oh, I give up. Your dullness is indestructible. You’re as in tune with your surroundings as a wooden plank.”
“Sensitivity is a distraction. I prefer focus.” Pace’s rustling voice was a perfect match for his casual pessimism. He followed his statement directly with a question, but the curiosity was as fervent as a doused flame. “How did it happen?”
“With Buck?” She got a nod out of him. She chalked that as a win. “The usual. He was after my guns, tried to shoot me but missed. I shot back and didn’t miss. Big, slow and stupid as a barn, I don’t think anyone would miss him. I’d be very surprised if he crawled out alive from the kiboosh I left him in.”
“Pray tell.” The fires in Pace’s eyes shifted. Was he enjoying the tale?
“The kind of wound I gave him doesn’t rank well on recovery chart. Acute blood loss should kill a big guy like that in twenty minutes. I stranded him in the desert wastes on Eridanus Three, two hundred miles away from the nearest settled outpost. I took his ship and sold it off for a bad penny, cause it was a piece of trash. I’m quite proud of it, actually.”
“Of leaving another gunrunner to die?”
“Of giving a slow death to a violent and unstable beast. I did mankind a service, free of charge.”
Pace leaned slightly forward. “A rare generosity, and another glowing endorsement of your skills. My organisation could use someone like you.”
“Your what?” She already knew he wasn’t talking about the resistance, so who was he talking about? It didn’t matter. She wasn’t interested. She should have started from a different question. “Use me? You’re hiding from rain under the wrong tree, mister. I don’t get used by no one. Plus, I’m not an organisation type. Lost every membership card I ever took out.”
“I’m not talking about joining y
our local library. We don’t have membership cards.”
“Great! So let’s end this talk and go grab some sleep. It’s ten hours of boredom before Origo.”
Pace sat back and watched her so intensely she could almost hear her skin peeling. Instead of going away like she suggested, he opened another chapter. “Have you ever heard of the Ypsilon?”
Isabel scratched her cheek. “Is it a new brand of energy drink?”
“It is the greek letter Y. Pronounced like the question. Why. The best question of all. Why are things happening? Why are we where we are?”
“Why are you boring me?”
“You are already grasping its power, I see. The humble why informs and assists us. We can glean the true meaning of what happens around us if we ask the right question and seek the answer to it. Ypsilon was created to do that. We define the most relevant questions, gather knowledge to answer them, and use that knowledge to protect the best interests of mankind. We work to make our universe a safer, better place for everyone.”
“All right. Gotcha. Ypsilon is like Guardians of the Galaxy.”
The leather under Pace’s grip cracked. He didn’t like this quip at all. Another win for Rocarion. “Do you treat everything like it’s some kind of a jest?” Direct score! She could almost hear the crowds chanting her name.
Isabel milked it. “When you say ‘jest’, are you talking about some kind of juice? Oh, wait, I get it. You want to sound eloquent, like an old Earth valet. You mean a joke, right?” A sudden thought hit her. “Oh, wow. I really get it now. You are a valet. A faithful servant of someone else.”
That hit Pace right between the eyes. His face hardened. His shoulders straightened. His voice flowed flat with a sense of foreboding. “I entreat you to give this matter the attention it deserves.”
She chuckled. “You entreat me? No one says ‘entreat’ anymore.”
“I beseech. I enjoin. I request.”
Laughing uncontrollably, Isabel raised her hand to stop him. “Stop. I can’t take it anymore. What are you, a thesaurus?”
Pace stood up and towered above her. In the cockpit’s half light, he looked eerie and dangerous. His hands opened and closed. His eyes burnt, no longer grey insipid pools but two bonfires. The stare stopped Isabel’s laughter in its tracks. His voice was no longer quiet. “Ypsilon. The guardians of the galaxy, if you will. The watchers in the sky. We see and hear everything. We right the wrongs, we straighten the paths. Thanks to us, the war is ending. It could have gone on and on for years to come without any one being victorious. So many lives would have been lost. Progress would have ground to a halt. Instead, people can now bury the proverbial hatchet and go on to do greater things than kill each other. Join us, and you can be part of something greater than you are.”
An involuntary shudder went through Isabel. She sensed danger. Pace took her silence to mean he had her full attention. “You are reluctant. I can understand that. I will lift the veil so you can make your decision knowing fully that Ypsilon is on the right side of history.”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure why she did; it could have something to do with the way he looked at her. He reminded her of a crazed old cave-dwelling man who, after years of living without another human soul in earshot, suddenly decides to end his solitude and appears in the nearest village square with a gospel of the end of days drawing near. Someone like that is better given leave to finish spewing his harmless nonsense. Trying to stop him would only ensure him peeing on the carpet out of spite.
“Do you remember how the worlds were six years ago? Men at the pinnacle of division. Earth Council filled with ineffective fools. Colonies wallowing in grief, clamouring about systemic abuse from their homeworld. Growing discord had been running rampant for years. It simmered under the surface without monitoring and control. Then it broke open like a volcano, erupted into a misguided armed conflict. This conflict was predictable and avoidable, and yet it came as a shock to everyone but one man: President McLeish.”
The president who died, Isabel couldn’t help but think.
“I know what you are thinking. President McLeish is dead,” Pace showed a penchant for mind-reading. “But before he was killed, assassinated by ardent revolutionaries like your friend Nadine Chu, simpletons with small brains, he did something extraordinary. He rose to the occasion and issued a secret executive order. That order brought to life Ypsilon.
“McLeish was a shrewd man. He tried to stop the war by apprehending the Colonial ringleader, John Amicon. But the resources at his disposal were inadequate. Earth Expeditionary Forces. Interplanetary Police Force. The Earth Council itself. So many people, yet they weren’t enough to locate one man - the most dangerous separatist of our time. They didn’t predict the war and they didn’t stop it from coming. They are, in their own way, responsible for this senseless fighting. McLeish understood that a new approach was needed. Someone had to eschew old methods to operate from the shadows, unburdened by bureaucracy, working perhaps on the grey outer limits of the law. Ypsilon was made to gather intelligence and act upon it, to reach where no one else could, for the protection of order in the universe.”
Something cold embraced Isabel’s heart. She wasn’t interested in politics, but she knew the meaning of terms such us authoritarian and totalitarian. She saw where this was going. Pace was a traitor to the resistance, definitely. But not just any traitor. He had a plan. With his Ypsilon, he wanted to rule over the universe. This was even worse than him assuming dead people’s identities at will. Oh my word. What did she step into?
“I don’t get one thing. All these super spy powers, and you didn’t save your sponsor McLeish from dying in a fireball? Something you’re not telling me, Paceman.”
Pace blinked. Within that blink, the fires of his eyes went out. The firebrand subsided back into the brooding man. “It was a different time. Ypsilon was a fledgling organisation. We have grown since then, built up our resources. Now we are ready to play a more active role.”
“Very enlightening. Are you going to turn into confetti after you finish? Or will you try to kill me because now I know too much?”
“Only if you try to expose us to the wrong sort of people.”
“Wrong sort?” That really disturbed her the most. Pace had already defined his group of enemies. “How do you judge who is wrong and who is right? Is Nadie the wrong sort too?”
Pace held his head up high. She knew that snooty expression. He was the one with truth and wisdom. She was but a speck under the sole of his mighty boot. “Corporal Chu isn’t ready to know the truth. Her faith is misplaced in the Colonial resistance. She wants this unproductive war to go on and on. It is all she knows. She’s a radical revolutionary who wants to facilitate the breakup of the worlds held by human hands. This would be catastrophic. Her views are divisive and disruptive. Ypsilon condemns revolution. It stands by guided evolution.”
Isabel had enough of his tangents. There was just one thing she wanted to know. “Why are you telling me this? Isn’t that a risk for your precious Ypsilon?”
“Not really.” Pace said it so blatantly she could feel her heart rate double in response to the anger welling up in her bosom. “But we can use someone like you, an independent with connections and a unique skillset. Someone without affiliations, yet with a reputation in certain circles. We have plenty of agents, but not nearly enough can handle delicate negotiations. Some people share an acute mistrust of authorities. A woman who walks outside of the beaten paths is rare.”
“You want me to be your link to the underworld.” Isabel’s eyes narrowed before they opened wide with fear brought by comprehension. “You want me to mingle with the shonking Syndicate? That messed up, psychotic bunch of drug-pushing, racketeering killers?”
“You connect the dots fast. In time, yes, that would be your job. But first, you’ll need to prove yourself. Once we are done in Libertalia, I’ll have a job for you in a place you know very well. Steel City.”
Breath stalled in Isabel’s ches
t. That name! The sound of it was like the shattering of an ice sheet over a frozen lake, with her falling through into the freezing water below. She had struggled through the early years of her life thinking of one thing: escape from that dark, desperate place where forced labour thrashed out knickknacks to meet overshot Science Consortium quotas. Steel and iron, acid and stone, anything that needed to be hammered together, processed or refined had known this industrial hellhole’s factories. Some were vast, some as small as one-man workshops. Every worker under supervision, day and night, by human or drone, and no product stayed with its maker. Everything was ordered and seized by the man upstairs who racked up billions of cosmos on people’s slavish work, all the while pretending he protected their interests.
Isabel had lived a rough-and-tumble life there. It nearly killed her. But she found a way out, a beautiful old ship that took her to the freedom among the stars. She was never going back, not even with her freedom guaranteed. “You’re asking the impossible. I have a past there.”
“That is exactly why I chose you. Don’t you want to know what you will get in return?”
“Not especially,” she carped, already knowing that Pace would tell her anyway.
“Same thing as you have out here,” Pace turned his back to her and looked to the smudges of stars passing the ship. To Rocarion, they were especially beautiful tonight. Maybe because this was the last time she looked at them and her brain wasn’t leaping to the threat of Ypsilon’s throttling grip over them. “An adventure. You aren’t a stay-at-home type. Curiosity and excitement is your game. I promise you a raft of thrilling experiences. Of course, you shall be amply rewarded for succeeding. Money, luxury items, connections in places of power. You will be able to come out into the open, wherever you please, whenever you want. Ypsilon will shield you from arrest, give you full immunity from any previous transgressions, as well as those which may transpire in the course of your employment. Your criminal record will be expunged.”
Her Last Run Page 17
