Velocity Weapon

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “Confirmed: shitpile,” Nox said over the comms.

  Jules clenched her jaw. “Looks like it’s been abandoned awhile—perfect place to drop a cache for pickup later.”

  Nox snorted.

  “We’re not on top of the signal yet.” She glanced at the tablet Velcroed to her wristpad. “It’s up ahead, to the right. Picking up anything, Lolla?”

  The kid skulked in after them, squinting at her pad. “Nothing new. Power signature is coming from the left.”

  “Can’t imagine what they’d be powering.” Nox ground the broken husk of a lightrod under his heel. “Lights aren’t even on.”

  “Let’s not stick around long enough to find out.” Harlan ducked under the door and slid it shut after them, dropping his pick tool into an oversized pocket. “Jules, point.”

  “On it.”

  The little blue light on her wristpad indicated the cache was forward and to the right. A half-rotted door was the next room’s only defense, easily stepped over, opening into a room just as moldy as the first. She couldn’t remember if she’d gotten her allergy shots already that year. Shit. A little itch prickled at the back of her nose and she snorted to stifle the urge. There was no way in the void she’d sneeze while she had a weapon in her hands. Nox would never let her hear the end of it if she did.

  Another empty room—some rotted cardboard, a few broken injectors, and a scorch mark or two on the floor. Usual junkie squatter affair. Maybe her mom had been here.

  Don’t think about Mom.

  “Clear,” she said.

  Nox crossed to a pile of rags and flipped them over with the toe of his boot, checking for anything valuable. A rat scurried out and disappeared through a crack in the wall.

  “Maybe that rat stole our score.”

  “Shut up, Nox. It’s not in this room, anyway. Next room.”

  “Always the next room,” he muttered, but quietly enough that Jules figured he hadn’t intended for her to hear, so she let it slide. He could be a big enough dick when he wanted to be—there was no use calling him out when he was trying to keep it to himself.

  The next door sagged on its bottom hinge, the top long since broken or rusted away. The floor had a swoop in the grime, proof that someone had opened it recently. Jules tried not to get her hopes up. She peered around the crack, lighting up the inside with the flashlight on her stunner. Nothing new—the same junkie bullshit—but that didn’t mean the place was empty. It was a small enough room. The locator might be pulsing bad data and the cache was in the next room over. These things got fuzzy on small scales.

  She grabbed the handle and pushed the door open. The knob came off in her hand, the rotted wood surrounding it crunching away with all the resistance of wet paper. She sighed, threw the knob on the ground, and kicked the thing the rest of the way in.

  Nothing. The room was clear, her little wristpad light winking up at her to tell her she was in the right spot. There wasn’t even another door, or hallway, to follow.

  “Tough luck,” Harlan said.

  “We should check out the other rooms, the ones Lolla was picking up energy from. Could be the tracker is fuzzed by the building.”

  “There’s nothing here.” Nox stood in the middle of the room and swung his arms out, spinning in a circle. “Nothing but dirt and rats. This place doesn’t even have scrap metal left to strip out—look—the walls are coming down.”

  He struck the wall with the butt of his stunner, splitting an already deep crack even wider, and wiggled it around until a fistful of plaster fell out and crashed to the ground in a powdery heap. Light—soft, dim, and blue—spilled out of the hole in the wall.

  “What the hell,” Nox said.

  Jules grinned. “I told you the cache was here.”

  She shoved Nox aside and shined her light into the hole. A space wide enough for two people to walk side by side extended down the length of the wall, turning sharply at the end to wrap back around toward the left side of the building—where the power was coming from. White LEDs covered with domes of frosted blue plex lit the wall from below, lining the path, but doing little to illuminate the space past waist height. She didn’t need a lot of light to see the scrapes of a pallet jack in the dust on the ground, or the familiar black crates at the end of the hall.

  “I see the crates,” she said, trying to keep her voice even and cool.

  “How the hell’d they get in there?” Nox said.

  “Who cares? I know how we’re getting in. Help me tear this crap out.”

  She reholstered her stunner and put both arms through the hole, prying away at the weak wall until she and Nox had cleared a space wide and tall enough for them to shimmy through. She’d worry about how to get the wraith crates out once they’d surveyed the hidden spaces.

  Jules popped through first, sweeping the space with her light—no new info. Nox came behind her and covered their rear, but the hallway dead-ended in the direction away from the crates.

  “Kid should go back,” Nox said.

  “I agree,” Harlan said. “Sorry, Lolla, but we don’t know what’s in here.”

  “Please. You want me to walk right back out the way we came? If we’re being watched, it’s already too late. You need me.”

  “She’s right. No arguments, Harlan. This is my op.”

  He sighed loud enough to kick up a puff of dust from the wall. “Fine. Let’s make it quick.”

  Their footprints were the only ones disturbing the dust, so someone must have remote-piloted the wraith cache through the tunnels. Jules stood watch over the crates while Harlan dropped to one knee, flipping open the plastic latch. A row of vials as thick as her thumb lay encased in molded charcoal foam, their contents a silvery-grey liquid that shimmered as Harlan picked one up. He popped a tester strip into the valve top, and nodded as the paper turned green.

  “Shipment’s good.”

  “Let’s pack it up and get out of here before they come back for it,” Nox said. He dropped down alongside Harlan and helped him get the lid closed. “We don’t want to be here when they come back.”

  “Don’t think they ever left,” Lolla said.

  Jules’s skin prickled at the haunted echo in the girl’s tone. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Over here,” Lolla called, voice bouncing down the hall.

  She followed the kid’s voice while Nox covered her rear, her stunner held out and ready—though the grip grew slick as her palms sweat. The kid hunched at the end of the hall, just around a turn, and someone else hunched down across from her. No—not someone. It was a someone, once, but now it was just a corpse. The mold-stink of the rooms before had covered most of the stench, but there was no hiding that sickly sweet reek of decay. The man—guessing by the stubble on his chin—had probably been there a day or two. His stomach had already blown and dropped its sludgy insides into a black puddle of rot.

  “Get away from there,” Jules said, shoving the sleeve of her jacket over her nose and mouth to keep from gagging.

  “I don’t recognize him,” Lolla said. She hadn’t gotten up yet. Just kept hunkering down across from the dead man—her feet carefully positioned to avoid the puddle—like they were having a normal conversation. “He’s not from around here, or at least not part of any crew I know.”

  “Who the fuck cares where he’s from?” Jules grabbed Lolla by the shoulder and jerked her to her feet, giving the kid a shake. “He’s dead. Not like we’re going to deliver the news to his next of kin. Let’s get the hell out of here before we find out what made him dead, all right? We just want the score. Don’t want murder.”

  “One of the runners?” Nox asked from down the hall.

  “Yeah. I mean, he’s got the clothes, but I don’t recognize the face.”

  “Maybe the deal went bad.”

  “Maybe.” Jules eyed the body, realizing she was doing the same damn creepy thing Lolla had been doing. She should know that man, should recognize him as one of the three she saw moving the cache of
wraith. Wasn’t any doubt in her mind he was one of them—they’d all been wearing those Velcro-strapped, army-green jackets with black knit hoods pulled up to cover their faces. But she couldn’t tell which one, and that bothered some part of her she’d long since buried. Shouldn’t you be able to recognize someone you’d seen after they died? Shouldn’t she feel… sorry for him? Or something?

  “Jules.” Nox’s voice held a warning, and she froze. “Step back.”

  Slowly, she slid her gaze around to regard the door at the end of the hall—a door that was suddenly brighter. Blue light seeped from around the frame, pulsing to a stuttered heartbeat.

  “What the fuck is that,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

  “Think we found the generator.” Nox brought his stunner level with the door’s entry pad.

  “Don’t shoot it, you moron,” Lolla snapped. “This… man has been here too long for us to know how he died.”

  “You think the door killed him?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Don’t shout,” Jules hissed, then felt ridiculous. Whispering so a door wouldn’t hear her.

  “Murderous door seems like a good thing to shoot.”

  “That’s a stunner,” Lolla pointed out. “What are you going to do, paralyze a door?”

  “Fucking Harlan and his no-kill policy.”

  “What’s going on down there?” Harlan shouted down the hall, footsteps echoing toward them.

  “Mystery murder door. Stay put, or draw its fire. Who the hell knows,” Jules shouted back.

  “What?!”

  “Guys. I’ve got an idea.” Lolla’s fingers crept, slowly, into her pack. The pulsing of the door light didn’t change. “Hackpatch.”

  “Think that’ll work?”

  “It does, or it doesn’t. Either way, we have to move eventually.”

  “Fair point. Prepare to scatter.”

  “Scatter to where, Miss This-Is-My-Op? It’s a door. This is a hallway. We have no idea what the range on that thing is.”

  “Well, our corpsey friend has his head intact, so I’m guessing it won’t hit high.”

  “You expect us to jump?”

  Lolla tugged the silvery disc of a hackpatch out of her pack and flicked it like she was picking off a piece of lint. The sticker slapped against the door’s entry pad, a perfect hit, its internal circuiting establishing a connection to the pad as it began to decode the entry mechanism. Pulses of coppery light flickered across the hackpatch’s surface. Lolla used top-notch tech—the best she could buy, augmented by her own skills. Those things decrypted most entry systems in seconds. This was taking way too long.

  The lights around the door flickered. A low hum of power building echoed in the hallway.

  “Jump!”

  “Seriously?”

  Jules grabbed a rough ledge in the wall and yanked herself up, shoving with all her strength to get beyond whatever killing ray that door was building up. Lolla dropped down, throwing up her pack in defense—the thing was lined with a half dozen materials Jules didn’t understand. It was a slick move. She might be all right. Light blasted the hallway, searing Jules’s eyes with brilliance. She flinched, her arms shaking as he struggled to maintain her hold, fingers wobbling.

  “It’s open,” Lolla said.

  Jules dropped to the ground, narrowly missing the black pool of guts as she landed in a crouch. The door, indeed, had opened. The light that’d blinded her was just normal illumination, enhanced by the whiteness of the room beyond. The entry pad blinked a cheery green all clear.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Nox had crammed himself like a spider suffering multiple joint dislocations into the place where the wall met the ceiling, legs quivering. Only by the grace of the tread on his boots against either wall was he stable. His whole body looked ready to collapse at any moment. “What?” he demanded.

  Jules stifled a giggle and straightened, trying to look composed.

  “Get down.” She killed her stunner light and peeked through the door, scanning the large room beyond. Stainless steel tables dotted with medical equipment took up the bulk of the furniture. Test tubes and all the other accoutrements of laboratory work were the only decor in the room. No people, so far as she could see. Not even a resident AI to welcome them.

  “There’s some sort of lab here. Let’s check it out.”

  Harlan appeared at the end of the hall with a crate of wraith in his hands. “Not what we’re here for.”

  “My op. My rules.” She flashed him a grin. “And besides, aren’t you curious?”

  Lolla on her heels, Jules stepped into the lab. The lights dimmed, then went out. Red LEDs lining the tops of the walls flickered—and the low, mounting wail of an alarm pierced the night.

  CHAPTER 6

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3771

  DAY TWO OF SURVIVAL

  Bero flashed his schematics onto the medibay screen and gave her time to study him inside and out. He was all at once the strangest and loveliest ship she’d ever stepped foot on. She grinned, despite the shock deep in her bones, and surveyed all Bero offered.

  Ten-year-old Sanda would have whooped for joy. A whole spaceship to herself. A first-rate, state-of-the-art vessel under her command. She’d dreamed of it as a girl. Played space pirates with her brother, Biran, between the cargo crates at their fathers’ warehouses. Back then, her imagination had supplied her a crew. A starscape teeming with likely marks for her pirate brethren to swoop down on.

  Wasn’t much joy in it, now.

  The Icarions had gone all out with this experiment. She wished they’d kept their interstellar fiddling to spaceships, not weapons, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about that now. She forced herself to be grateful for Bero. Without him, there was no calculating the variety of ways she might have died.

  A conical grid represented Bero’s business end, a graphical nod to the massive electromagnetic scoop fronting the ship, slurping up hydrogen and everything else that got in Bero’s way. Coils of magnets hunkered behind the scoop, bleeding heat to the void even as they munched on interstellar feed. Just behind them, a bulbous hiccup in the otherwise ramrod-straight body. The CNO reactor—turning all the tasties of space into gamma rays blowing out Bero’s back end. The furnace heart of a star, thrusting Bero through space.

  “They made the old ramjet model work,” she said.

  “It’s always worked. It just wasn’t efficient in light of the Casimir Gates.”

  True enough. Eight percent c, no matter how pretty the ship, wasn’t anything worth mentioning when you had the gates ready to whisk you away to another star system in an hour, tops. The regs were tight and tariffs steep, and the fact that gates only opened between two systems made longer hauls a pain. Crossing all that intersolar space was still done the old way, with fusion rockets. But it was quick. It was safe. And no one had to worry about what society would look like after they’d spent a few hundred years crossing interstellar space.

  But the Icarions had chafed under the leash the Primes held, bucked against the constraint of the Prime’s gate placement. They’d wanted to traverse all of space, not just the systems the gates opened a door to. Sanda couldn’t fault them for that. She could fault them for a whole hell of a lot else, though.

  A safe distance behind the CNO reactor, she spotted the command deck, dwarfed compared to the rest of the ship’s scale. Low-g there, then. With half her leg missing, she was almost looking forward to it. Two docking mouths sprouted from the cylindrical command module, and the spurs of mass elevators reached up to two habs, rotating around the command center. Tiny on paper, massive on a human scale. At least she’d have plenty of time to learn her way around.

  “Which hab am I in?” she asked.

  “Research level one, on habitat one.” The corresponding spoke and hab lit up, outlined in yellow.

  “Any bunks on this hab?”

  “The whole ship is yours. May I suggest the captain’s quarters?”

  “Yes.
Yes, you may.”

  IV wheels squeaking, she followed green LED strips Bero lit up at waist height, guiding her through Bero’s straight corridors. All the doors were shut, Icarion’s garish logo glaring at her from each. She stuck her tongue out at them. Bero was polite enough not to comment.

  The captain’s bunk was mercifully on this level, toward the back of the hab. The door dilated before her, the touchscreen alongside it black and blank. Right. No more need for locks on this ship.

  Bero’s captain had been appointed a twin bed, quite the luxury on a spaceship of any size. A grey coverlet wrapped the bed with military precision, Icarion-orange pillows dotting the head. She’d been awake an hour, and already she was sick of Icarion standard-issue.

  Sanda fumbled her way through a shower, warm water revealing the jittery weakness in all her muscles. By the time she finished, it was all she could do to crawl to the bed and flop backward, leg sticking off the edge, her hair soaking a wet halo into the ugly sheets.

  “Sanda?” Bero’s voice was soft, concerned. She forced herself to rally enough to sit up.

  “Still here, Bero. Just… tired.”

  That wasn’t it, though, not really. At least, it wasn’t the kind of tired that could be relieved with a nap or a caffeine dermal. While she’d been smearing NutriBath over half the ship, jabbing away at schematics and running roughshod calculations, her situation hadn’t quite sunk in. But something about the domestic surroundings—the bed and the shower and the neat little dresser—brought home to her how alone she was.

  She understood it, rationally. Understood that her evac pod had kept her preserved past what was reasonable. Understood that while she slept, metabolism slowed to a crawl and body encased in preservation foam, Icarion’s self-labeled “dissent” had escalated into a full-blown war. Had wiped everything and everyone she’d ever known and loved clear off the map. Blown them into another reality, if there was such a thing.

  Hot tears streaked her cheeks, leaving salt-crusted trails on her freshly scrubbed skin. She wiped at them, seeking to stem the onslaught of sorrow, but her body had a mind of its own. Sobs shook her.