by A. R. Knight
“Deepak,” Aurora said, “I’m tired of this. Aren’t you?”
As the officer opened his mouth, likely to spew some threat or another, Aurora flipped the table.
The big, faux granite thing went right up and over as Aurora pushed it, smashing into the officer and driving him into the wall behind. Deepak picked up on Aurora’s tactic and proved he wasn’t playing the officer’s game by putting his body between the two guards and Aurora, causing their rapid shots to fizzle into the room’s floor.
“Sorry,” Aurora said, pushing Deepak into the left guard, then squatting as the right lined up another shot that flashed over her head.
Low gravity assisted again when Aurora sprang from her crouch, a move that would’ve netted her a nice little hop on most planets, but that, on the Nautilus, sent her rocketing into the right guard’s chest. As Aurora drove the guard back into the door, she looked and grabbed his pistol-wielding hand with her own left.
The other guard pushed Deepak to the floor, clearing the way for his own shot, only to find his comrade, courtesy of Aurora’s snappy grip, shooting him. Aurora pressed the trigger two more times while driving her elbow into her victim’s gut, getting grunts that meshed quite nicely with the shouts from the thrice-shot guard.
The fourth blast killed the yells.
Aurora, pinning the other guard, pressed her foot into the ground at the intersection of door and floor. Twisting her shoulder, using her waist, Aurora flipped the guard over her, pulling the pistol free with the move and sending the guard to the ground. The man hit the floor with a gasp as the air left his lungs, eyes popping open and seeing his own pistol aiming right in his eyes.
“Move again,” Aurora said, “I dare you.”
The guard stayed real still.
“Smart man,” Aurora continued. “Deepak, mind seeing if our friend’s still alive under there?”
The admiral, after taking the pistol off the burned down guard, hesitated before clearing the table. Threw Aurora a look that said here was a moment made for mistakes.
“Don’t shoot him,” Deepak warned.
“But I really want to.”
“I know, but he’s the only one that might get us out of this alive.”
Aurora cocked her head, “Pretty sure he’s the one that’s trying to kill us, Deepak.”
“There’s a bigger story here,” Deepak countered. “Just, don’t fry him. Not yet.”
Aurora waved the pistol towards the table, “The longer you make me wait, the more likely I am to start burning holes in it and seeing what happens.”
That, at least, put Deepak into action. The man stepped over the surrendered guard and pulled back the table. The officer, so arrogant a moment before, had one hand over his nose trying to stop blood from leaking out, while the other held his own small sidearm like a wriggling fish. Even Deepak winced at the view.
Aurora adopted her best shark impression.
“Drop it,” Aurora said, keeping her pistol on the downed guard, “or your buddy here takes one to the heart.”
She felt the odds were even that the officer gave a damn about the guard, but Aurora worried more that the guard might try something if death vanished from his immediate future than the officer getting off a good shot with his little limp gun.
“You’re all brutes,” the officer snarled, the cocky spice dying fast into a sniveling brew. “As if violence can solve all your problems.”
“Sounds like it created them,” Aurora said. “Might as well end them too. You were saying my friends might be in trouble? You might want to elaborate, before I melt you and take my chances.”
“Aurora,” Deepak warned, and Aurora badly wanted to send the admiral some angry replies, but kept her focus on the officer.
Why the hell was Deepak defending this officer? What did Deepak know that he wasn’t sharing?
“You want to save your friends?” The officer said, dropping his sidearm. “Fine. Take me to the bridge and I’ll broadcast the coded message. All around the ship, they’ll stop. Your friends will survive.”
“You can’t do that from here?” Aurora said, then glanced at Deepak. “He can’t do that from here?”
“The Nautilus doesn’t let you broadcast ship-wide from anywhere.” Deepak, without getting Aurora’s permission, helped the officer stand. At least the admiral kept his pistol ready. “That’d be chaos. The bridge is the closest place we can use.”
Fine. Facts were facts, and Aurora wouldn’t fight that one anymore.
“What about this guy?” Aurora said, nodding down at the guard who’d done a great job holding to her don’t move order. “And his cooked friend?”
Deepak offered up a decent solution. The three of them left the conference room, Deepak using his admiral’s security to lock the room behind them while sending out a security alert to resolve the situation.
“Keep your weapon holstered,” Deepak told Aurora as they left the room. “Someone sees you walking with a pistol pulled, there’s going to be trouble.”
“Because there’s no trouble already.”
The officer laughed, a weak thing, “For you? It’s just beginning.”
Aurora rolled her eyes at Deepak, “Sure we can’t just shoot him?”
“Aurora,” Deepak sighed, “If you kill this man, then there will be nothing I can do to keep you alive. To keep me alive.”
And Aurora’s hard face slipped at Deepak’s words, not because of what he said—any mission put Sever’s lives at risk, this wasn’t much different—but because of how he spoke, how he looked.
Despite having the officer disarmed, bloodied and in their custody, Deepak seemed very, very afraid.
Seven
Knife Fight
The civilized conversation lasted until the guest quarters door slid shut behind them. A full-sized bed sat to the door’s right, with a small desk alcove topped by a dark monitor past that. On Sai’s left, a thin closet sat closed. Gray dominated.
The Nautilus was not a luxury hotel. It was, however, a good place for a fight.
With the door’s click, the young man who’d followed Sai all this way slid a short, slim knife from a pocket up his sleeve. Sai backed away as the man advanced, the assassin taking his time to ensure Sai had nowhere to move.
Behind the crimson uniform, the man looked fit. His hair frizzed a little more than expected for a DefenseCorp regular, but the black stripes running up the sides now seemed to mean something other than a squaddie. Certainly no regular recruit would carry a thin stabber like this one.
More ominous, the man’s smile stayed light and fixed. His eyes bright. As if killing Sai was his day’s feature event.
Well, the man would be disappointed.
The thrust came with a twitch, a straight jab at Sai’s neck that would’ve finished things at a stroke. Would’ve, except the man’s eyes betrayed him, falling from Sai’s face just before the strike, verifying the target, the aim, the speed.
Sai sidestepped into a shoulder charge, feeling the blade knick his neck. Sai’s ram hit harder, pushing the man off his feet. As he fell, Sai grabbed the man’s knife wrist and twisted, feeling tendons strain and seeing the blade drop to the floor. With his foot, Sai stomped on the blade, trapping it.
Pain shot through Sai’s gut, and he looked down to see the man recoiling for another jab, the man’s left hand flattened out like an arrow.
Not happening.
Sai heaved, whipping the arm he held and sending the man careening up and into the room’s ceiling, courtesy of the Nautilus’s light gravity. Back first, the man grunted as he struck, his head cracking back as Sai let go the captive hand to seal the move’s momentum. When the assassin dropped, a little slower than what Sai would see on thicker worlds, he had no way to control his descent. No way to do anything except fall straight down. Right onto his own knife.
The assassin had missed Sai’s neck.
Sai didn’t.
He sat on the bed. Looked at the red wet on his hand, the
n wiped it off on the dead man’s uniform. The crimson didn’t quite match the blood, but close enough. Sai felt his heartbeat slow down, his breathing come back to a normal pace. The fight had been so fast the adrenaline came rushing in after it was over, spiking as Sai tried to find a next step to take.
Of all the places in the galaxy, for years, the Nautilus had been safe. Nobody would dare assault a DefenseCorp cruiser, and even if assassinations or shadowy plays swept the civilized world, Sever Squad never had the standing to warrant a target on their backs.
Until now, apparently.
The man’s wristlet didn’t offer any clues. Its screen had gone dark, and no matter what Sai did, the thing wouldn’t wake up. Sometimes, the more fanatical tied their wristlets to their bio signatures, wiping the machine if its owner died. Maybe that happened, or the wristlet locked itself. Either way, Sai wouldn’t be getting answers there.
The tiny drive in Sai’s pocket, though, offered a better chance. Sai could plug it right into the monitor, but staying in a room with a body seemed like a poor call. Someone would walk in, whether to use the room or to clean it, and seeing Sai using a computer instead of getting help might get a bad reaction.
“Thanks for the help,” Sai said to the corpse as he stood up.
A peek back into the guest room hallway confirmed it empty, so Sai went across the hall and down a room, leaving the body shut away behind him. A nasty surprise for someone.
Sai winced. A nasty surprise? Was that how Sai thought of bodies these days? Had he really seen so many deaths that they rolled off his conscience like water rinsed off his katana’s blade?
In a mission’s middle, suited up with enemies all around, allies to rescue and objectives to accomplish, Sai could turn to those distractions and keep on going. Push through to the end and then on to the next before placing what he’d done and seen into the right mental context. Even in those weeks post-Dynas, hunting a destination among the stars, Sai and Sever had tossed the time away together talking, laughing, surviving.
Standing in the guest room, immaculate and without personality, Sai realized he was really alone for the first time in too long.
He wavered.
Doubts clawed in the silence, telling Sai that his choices had caught up with him. That his whole plan—take the higher paying Sever role to guarantee his family’s livelihood—wasn’t working anymore, not when he’d left behind DefenseCorp’s death payout and the better gear to prevent that death in the first place.
Here he was stabbing out assassins, considered a criminal by a powerful enemy, and sitting alone with a drive on it containing who the hell knew what.
Sai reached into his pocket, pulled out the little thing. Deepak wanted him, or at least someone on Sever to find it. He rubbed his finger along the drive’s plastic surface, eyes pulling to the dead monitor.
He couldn’t leave now. Those choices were made. If, though, Sai made it out of this one?
Take what cash he could get from his accounts and go back to his family. See what time he could get back, if any.
The monitored played nice with the drive and pulled up its contents. File after file splayed out, dozens. Sai figured someone had dumped everything they could on here. The file names themselves didn’t offer clues: all cryptic, random letter and number series that spoke to a code Sai didn’t have time to break.
Clicking on a few at random, Sai stared. The first offered up equations, a formula series leading to what appeared to be a component configuration, like what Sai might expect to see if he built a new explosive. The next showed off blueprints for a strange new suit, codenamed Casparian. Unlike most power armor, the suit seemed small. Light.
The last offered up a hierarchy. Sai recognized the face, one of two at the top. The officer from the video back on Wexer. The other, a dark-haired woman Sai didn’t recognize. Beneath them, a half-dozen on the second line. There wasn’t any title, no official DefenseCorp layout.
Whatever this organization was, it lived outside the standard channels.
He yanked out the drive. Slipped it back in his pocket. Sai could’ve kept browsing through the files, and would, but a safer place to do that would be back on the Prisa, where he could make sure no other assassin would be waiting for him.
Or anyone else.
The assassin had followed Sai from the Quartermaster, but he hadn’t been looking for Sai specifically. At least, it didn’t feel that way. Sai had been the target because Sai had shown up where the target would be. If someone had hunted him, odds were good there might be more.
The woman had said to be careful.
If Sai had gone running towards the Quartermaster, he took his damn time getting back towards the Prisa. Looking out for the crimson uniforms with those black stripes, Sai took the moving walkways slow and watched. The Nautilus and its continual commotion that’d been so nice upon arrival held a different bent to it now, one that screamed a hidden enemy in every sound, every action.
Was that call for medical to respond to a critical event in the med bay an accident, or an intentional act? How about the overhead banger a minute later calling for a security check-in not all that far from the Prisa’s docking bay?
What about the dinner special flashing on all the monitors? Were meatballs a coded sign for a mutiny?
Sai shook his head, laughed, and drew some curious looks. No way the assassins were using the food menus to communicate with each other. There were dangerous people on the Nautilus, but maybe they just wanted to off Sever as deserters. Nothing more than a plot to get the crew back where DefenseCorp could take shots at them.
No need for a vast conspiracy.
Except the Prisa’s docking bay had blood on its floor. Smelled like charred clothes and burned flesh. Sai stood in the doorway and saw a ship that had its ramps up. That, going by the glass bits on the floor around the ship, had taken a few hits from something.
“Eponi?” Sai called, heading into the bay and letting the door shut behind him. “You there?”
Sai could see the Prisa’s cockpit from the ground, its windshield showing nobody in those seats. Maybe Eponi had left. Maybe she’d been taken.
Dashing to the lead strut, Sai lifted a small, hidden panel that revealed a square number pad. Most ships had these, emergency entry codes to get in if you lost your wristlet. Sai tapped in the code, which Eponi had set to Sever’s squad band frequency. The panel chimed and the ship’s ramp started descended.
Sai wished he’d searched the assassin for weapons and taken any. The body and its messy demise had thrown him off his game. Now he looked up the ridged ramp and wondered if he was running right to another fight.
Well, he wasn’t going to leave without his sword. Not to go back into the damn Nautilus.
Sai stalked up the ramp, taking the metal slow. Anyone paying attention in the ship would’ve felt the ramp going down, but that didn’t mean they had to know exactly where Sai was, exactly how fast he moved.
At the ramp’s top, Sai went into the Prisa’s central chamber. The rectangle space wasn’t huge, but the couches were nice. Seeing them made his skin itch from the burns he’d taken on Wexer, ones that hadn’t quite healed yet, even with the fast-acting cream sloughed over them. The stuff worked miracles, would—
Another crimson uniformed man dropped from the crew quarters above, landing poised in front of Sai with his rifle drawn, aimed, and ready to fire.
Then the man exploded.
Sai hit the deck as laser fire poured through the man’s remnants, burning them away. A few stray bolts struck the Prisa’s insides, marring the clean copper color. Standing behind the man, back towards the cockpit and holding her rifle high, was Eponi.
“Hey,” Eponi said as Sai looked at her from the ground. “What’s up?”
“I think we’re in trouble,” Sai said, before remembering he’d lowered the ramp. Scrambling up, Sai slapped the button to start it going back up. “And, nice shooting.”
“Helps when they’re standing still
,” Eponi said. “He must’ve thought you were me. So, thanks for that.”
“I do what I can.” Sai leaned down, picked up the man’s rifle. “Did you cause the mess out there too?”
Eponi slashed a grin, “They tried to take my ship. Not happening.”
“Yeah, well, they tried to kill me in the Nautilus, so I don’t think it’s the ship they want,” Sai said. “Have you heard from anyone else?”
“Not a peep.”
“Right,” Sai slung the dead man’s rifle over his shoulder and went into the Prisa, heading up towards his locker. “Better get ready then.”
“To go rescue our friends from a bunch of strange killers?”
“Damn right.”
Eight
The One Rule
Gregor didn’t make it ten steps from Rovo’s bed before one of the bots blocked his path up and out from the descending med bay rings. The robot, a secretarial machine, accosted Gregor with questions about Rovo’s name, age, and various personal habits that Gregor dished off with one head shake, shrug, or I don’t know after another.
“Look it up,” Gregor finally said when the robot started going in on Rovo’s health history. “I gave you his ID.”
Rovo had to have a health history with DefenseCorp. Had to. You didn’t make it all the way from hiring to a squad like Sever without a scratch. For a second, while the bot considered his statement, Gregor wondered whether he still held the Nautilus’s record for most infirmary visits without dying.
Deepak had given Gregor a scrapped together medal reading “Get Well Soon” for the occasion. It’d been in the power suit lost on Wexer. Except for his hammer, Gregor’s possessions tended to burn up or get blown away.
“Record located, thank you,” the bot chirped, and Gregor suppressed a sigh at the obvious outcome. “How should we contact you about his condition?”
Another momentary stump. No wristlet, no private quarters on the Nautilus.
“There is a ship, the Prisa. I’ll be there.”
