by A. R. Knight
“I don’t care what you’re here for,” Lamya replied, dropping her eye to her rifle’s scope. “We are here for you. Leave the suit, now. I won’t ask again.”
“She sounds serious, Gregor,” Rovo said. “I’d rather not get shot again today.”
“Quiet, rookie,” Gregor said, then started walking towards Lamya. “If you stop us here, then we’re all going to lose. The agents will win.”
“The agents?” Lamya laughed. “Gregor, you always sound crazy, but now you’re in another world. Tell the kid to get out of the suit.”
Three choices. If Rovo left the suit, they lost their advantage. Gregor and the rookie would find themselves prisoners, locked away in a holding cell and waiting until someone decided to cook’em or cast’em out into vacuum.
Gregor could fight. Maybe he’d make it to Lamya before the squads burned him down. Rovo, without a single power pack for his weapons, would get a couple lumbering swings in before lasers melted him away.
Which left . . .
“Before you shoot,” Gregor said. “Call the bridge. Check with the admiral. Aurora should be there. They’ll clear us. Vouch for what I am telling you.”
“And if they don’t?” Lamya said. “If they tell me you’re the same damn intruders that we’re supposed to be handling?”
“Then we’re right back here. A trigger’s pull away.”
Diplomacy. The words felt slimy in his mouth, weak and sad. Begging for his life, trying for miracle tactics to survive. Every minute on the Nautilus save the scrap in the med bay had been a crap sandwich. Rovo, though, didn’t deserve to die this young. Gregor could grit through this for the rookie. Just this once.
Lamya, holding the rifle one-handed, brought the wristlet to her mouth. She started speaking into the computer when the overhead lights flashed. The red warnings blinked away, returning to their usual silver-white. As the squad leader that ought to have torched Gregor and Rovo lowered her wristlet, a shaky voice crackled over the Nautilus intercoms.
“Stand down,” Deepak announced. “The intruder alert has been canceled. All squads are hereby ordered to disarm and return to regular duties. The threat to our ship has been neutralized.”
The admiral repeated the order a second time, and Lamya’s incredulous face grew more and more suspicious as she heard the words. Gregor would’ve felt the same, would’ve figured some trick had been pulled. But when something breaks your way, you have to push the advantage.
“You heard the admiral,” Gregor said. “We’re not the threat, Lamya. Let us go.”
The squad leader gave Gregor a stare hard enough to crack granite, then dropped her rifle.
“All right, Sever,” Lamya said. “You have your chance, but we’re coming with you. Things turn out like I think they will, there’s going to be shooting.”
Gregor couldn’t agree more.
Nineteen
Threats and Bets
Eponi held onto the bravado like a star that would grant her every wish. The rush suffused her twitchy hands as they gripped the Prisa’s flight sticks, her eyes as they blinked from the scanners to the systems and back again, searching for a flaw and knowing they would find none. She listened to Sai say the words Aurora had set for them, putting a fatherly spin into the demands that Deepak would have to carry out, and every damn sentence pushed Eponi closer and closer to the edge.
You did not desert DefenseCorp without consequences. Those were dire enough. But threatening to ram a DefenseCorp ship? An Odin-class cruiser, with man-hours and material tons by the millions, no less?
There would be no coming back from this. Eponi wouldn’t fly a kart again, no matter how much cash she made—not that she’d live long enough to make much. No racing team, no bank-rolling brand would risk angering DefenseCorp.
A deserter could be let go. An enemy would be killed.
“I think that was it,” Sai said, letting go a long exhale as he wrapped up the list. “Did I get it all?”
Eponi filtered Sai’s speech back through her own haze, “Let’s see, you had’em pull the lockdown, declare any agents to be hostile, and clear our records? That about covers it.”
“How much you think they’ll do?”
“Better be all of it,” Eponi said, “or I’ll goose these engines and poor little Deepak’s gonna be so much space dust.”
Sai nodded slow, looking not too thrilled with that potential outcome. And why wouldn’t he? Man had a family, chose to leave’em, in a decision that Eponi could never reconcile. She’d been forced to play this game, swing laser smut all across the galaxy at the behest of a dangerous dealer, but Sai? He could’ve stayed home. Could’ve tucked his kids in every night and whistled them awake with the morning light.
Eponi’s jealousy had bled away to pity over the missions, and she couldn’t let go of the feeling now, watching him watch the too-small faces on the bridge through its giant glass bulge. He’d chosen to dance with a devil that wouldn’t ever let the song end.
Maybe Sai knew that and didn’t care.
The comm crackled and Sai tapped its broadcast open. This time, Sai’s left console fluttered and morphed into Deepak’s clear face. No transmission jaggies here, seeing as Eponi calculated Deepak’s nose sat fifty meters away from her cold metal cockpit.
“I’ve done as you asked,” Deepak said, and Eponi could swear the man had aged a few years between the time she’d seen him in the bay and this moment. Renard stood behind the admiral, free and frustrated on the bridge, an obvious counterpoint to Deepak’s assertion. Sai’s low sigh showed he noticed the bastard too. “What are you both going to do? And where is Aurora?”
Sai seemed to be at a loss. Man wasn’t ever much of an innovator if the problem didn’t involve slinging two wires together to make something go boom. Eponi swiped away the system status on her console, joining it into the call and plastering up a wild smile she’d used to strike nerves in her kart racing opponents.
“Here’s the thing, Admiral,” Eponi said. “You’re a liar.” Deepak opened his mouth and Eponi waggled a finger. “Ah ah ah, nope. Keep that trap shut for a minute. See that man behind you? Don’t know if you were listening when Sai read off the instructions, but that space roach there is an agent, and ought to be in stun cuffs. You want real points with us, you’d be sending him out the airlock right about now.”
Deepak, and the admiral caught a smidge of praise from Eponi here, kept himself together. Gave Eponi a full three seconds to consider whether she wanted to add an appendix to her verbal takedown.
“Are you finished?” Deepak asked when Eponi kept things tidy. “Renard, along with the other agents on board this ship, are not mine to arrest. They belong to DefenseCorp as much as I—“
“Okay, I’m going to stop you there,” Eponi interrupted. “We’re not concerned with who’s got the right to do what. We’re looking for results. I’m not seeing any.” Although Eponi did see Renard looking ever-more angry, and that brought with it a perverse pleasure. Given that Eponi would be blown to pieces whenever Nautilus decided to get its fighters in the air, she’d take that joy. Would revel in it. “So I’m going to count to five, and if that man’s not on the ground with cuffs on his wrists, then we’re going to have a party.”
Sai’s eyes had made it to about moon size as Eponi started her count. Deepak sputtered, but two of the troopers behind him had better ideas. Renard didn’t fight as they slipped the cuffs over the officer’s wrists, binding him up and pushing him closer to the camera so Eponi could see the job had been done.
“One,” Eponi said, leaning into the camera as if to take a closer look. “Admiral, looks like your own staff have a better play on things than you do. Now, tell me you’ll put the target on the agents like Sai kindly asked you to?”
The big play, this one. Aurora didn’t think Deepak would do it, wanted Eponi and Sai to ask anyway, put the heat on the admiral and get all those mild-mannered officers running coffee on the bridge to wonder if their lives were about to end
because Deepak decided to protect a bunch of spies instead of his loyal staff.
When Deepak refused, Aurora would hop on through the Nautilus’s back-up comm center and declare the admiral a traitor to his own staff. She’d call for an uprising, and boom, they’d have a spark on their hands. Eponi and Sai would fly back in, offer support, and help kick all the damn agents off the ship.
Easy.
“You understand the choice you’re giving me?” Deepak said. “If I agree, this ship will be torn apart in the fighting.”
“If you don’t, it’ll be torn apart right now,” Eponi replied. “Choose a side, admiral. I’m getting bored out here.”
More importantly, Eponi kept one eye on the scanner up on her console, watching for those red blips indicating something had been launched to come find them. The dots hadn’t shown up yet, but Eponi had no doubt they would. Whether Deepak scrambled fighters or Renard’s agents found their own ships, no way the Prisa would be left to hold the cruiser hostage all that much longer.
Deepak stepped back from the camera spitting his image into Eponi’s eyeballs. Big decisions had to weigh on the minds of those who made them—one of many reasons why Eponi tried to stay away from the things—and Deepak didn’t look any different here. He swept a long look over the levels spreading out beneath him, and Eponi wondered whether he’d get angry looks in return, hopeful, pleading faces, or the firm resolution from people prepared to die to . . . what, defend the agents?
Eponi couldn’t believe that. The spies held a certain respect among the squaddies, mostly because they came up with the contracts that kept cash rolling in, but everyone knew a friend that’d died due to bad intelligence. Everyone knew the agent’s operating principle: the ends justify the means.
“Okay,” Deepak said, flipping away the begrudged tone that’d stained his earlier talks with the formal command Eponi recognized. The king putting on his crown. “Broadcast this throughout the ship. We’re ending the lockdown. All soldiers are to return to their previous stations and normal duties. Any and all agents, however, are to report to loading bay C-17. For the safety of this ship, its soldiers and its crew, this order goes into effect immediately.”
Eponi muted her mic, kept her mouth shut, but failed at keeping the surprise away from her cheeks, her eyes. Deepak had actually done it. Hadn’t quite put the agents in chains or kicked them out an airlock, but he’d split the ship.
“I’m stunned,” Sai said, echoing Eponi’s own thoughts. “Didn’t think the admiral had that kind of spine.”
“Would’ve lost a lotta cash on that bet,” Eponi agreed.
Deepak looked more than a little drained after delivering his speech, but he approached the camera again. Opened his mouth like he was about to deliver a stern warning to the ship holding him hostage, when the admiral’s look twisted off to the side. Behind him, Eponi saw Renard, stun cuffs dropping away from his wrists as the supposed soldiers let him free, reach for a pistol.
“Behind you!” Eponi said, then realized she still had the mic muted.
Before she could tap it off, before she could repeat the warning, the feed cut. Eponi jerked up, looking through glass, space, and glass again to see what she could see. Flashes blitzed around the bridge, a light show punctuated by bursts as missed shots struck things with a tendency to explode.
Eponi and Sai had no way to tell who was winning the fight, no way to tell whether Deepak or Renard still lived. She tried punching another call through, but the hail went unanswered.
“Aurora said we would be starting a war,” Sai said. “I guess that’s what we did.”
“Didn’t think it’d actually happen.”
“At least we’re not dead.”
Eponi would’ve agreed, would’ve said how relieved she was that she hadn’t had to plunge this beautiful ship into the bridge. Eponi wouldn’t have said that she wasn’t sure she could’ve gone through with it, had Deepak called her bluff.
But she didn’t have to make any admissions, because the damn scanners beeped out an alert that trumped the bridge’s light show and its implications. Four small craft, lighting out from the Nautilus and spraying out in a wide sweep towards the Prisa.
“Those didn’t come from the fighter bays,” Sai said.
“Because those aren’t our fighters,” Eponi replied. “Who wants to bet that Renard’s people brought some insurance?”
“Not me.”
“Coward.”
They were done threatening the bridge. Deepak had put the flames into play. Aurora had to take the internals from here. Eponi punched up the engines, fed some power back into those laser-deflecting shields, and breezed the bridge as the Prisa kicked up and over the Nautilus. Those four dots flew around, forming up behind them.
“Mind going to a turret?” Eponi said. “Or were you going to play swipe shooter?”
Sai started, then picked himself up from the chair, “No, definitely not swiping. I’ll get back there.”
“Thank you.”
The first ice-colored blue shots whisked by as the dots closed. Eponi did a double-take at the laser color as she flipped the Prisa rightward, getting ready to loop around the Nautilus and use the big ship’s bulk for cover.
Blue meant high energy. Burst cannons that’d deliver a helluva punch, but that sucked up energy like Eponi sucked up those cocktails on Wexer. These four fighters weren’t playing for a long engagement, then. They wouldn’t have much shields, much engines.
They wanted a quick kill.
“Sorry to disappoint,” Eponi said to nobody.
Time to see whether the Prisa would back up her words.
Twenty
Finding Kaia
So far, being housed in a hardened shell juicing Rovo with numbing, energizing chemicals had been a good experience. Turned out Rovo rather enjoyed not getting shot, squashing his enemies, and the clank clank clank as his heavy feet slammed along the concourse towards the comm center.
Lamya, Gregor, and half her squad followed—she’d left the other to watch the weapons labs—and the ensemble had Rovo feeling like a true leader, marching at the head of his soldiers to some grand destiny.
That grand destiny, after a lift ride, revealed itself as an understated, windowed wall. Unlike the bridge, which squeezed its bulk into a smaller and more defensible door, the Nautilus comm center parlayed openly with the entire ship. Rather than hardened steel, the comm center revealed itself to the concourse through a glassy wall broken into partitions, each one willing and able to swing aside for anyone who approached. Scanners peeked out from the lines between those partitions, hunting wristlets to scan.
Behind the glass, Rovo caught looks aplenty turning to see his clomping force as they drew closer. Rovo’s suit had him almost hitting the concourse ceiling, his metal arms going wide enough to cover half the hallway’s width. Imposing in any circumstance, terrifying in the Nautilus and its stellar confines.
Turned out the comm center hadn’t been left without protection. Another squad, gathering together after Deepak’s order to stand down, broke apart as Rovo approached, settling into a panicked scramble. Their commander, pulling at his rifle, slowed as Lamya went around Rovo and called for a halt.
“They say they’re not the enemy,” Lamya declared to the commander, to the squad and their itchy trigger fingers. “You heard Deepak’s order stating the same.”
“I heard him say we shouldn’t trust the agents,” the commander replied. “I don’t know who that might be.”
Deepak’s second, stunning order had come through while Lamya’s squad readied up to ditch the mess hall. Treat every agent as a potential threat, herd them all to a docking berth Rovo couldn’t remember. Rovo figured that must’ve been Aurora’s doing. Turn the tables on the bastards and send’em running.
Good.
“Me either,” Lamya said. “I do know, though, that we’re not agents. Not the man in the power armor, nor this civilian here.”
“I want to trust you, but . . .
” The commander kept looking over Lamya’s shoulder, at Rovo.
Maybe the rookie should speak for himself.
“Don’t know who you are, commander,” Rovo said, keeping the armor still. As unthreatening as he could. “What we’re trying to do here is track back an incoming message. It has nothing to do with the Nautilus or the agents.”
Not strictly true, not strictly false. The best kind of message.
“Then why are you in power armor?”
“Because an agent nearly killed me,” Rovo replied. “Without this armor, I wouldn’t be alive.”
Another bullseye strike on the veracity scale.
The commander took another look beyond Lamya, at the armed squad behind Rovo. The man’s fingers left his rifle’s trigger behind as he no doubt came to the correct conclusion that his squad would take any conflict’s wrong side.
“Okay,” the commander said. “We’re not even supposed to be here anymore, anyway.” The man took in a breath, assumed the straight posture that came with confidence in his decision. “Squad, let’s head towards the docking bays. See if there’s somewhere we can help.”
The commander’s squad embraced their leader’s directive to save their own lives and headed off, not a one bothering to look back towards Rovo. When you’d escaped Hell, why would you linger?
“Thanks for the help,” Gregor said to Lamya as the group approached the comm center’s glass. “I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt them.”
“I know,” Lamya said. “I know you would have, though.”
“Yes.”
Rovo winced at that. Gregor had to figure out when the truth could do more harm than good.
Lamya’s squad broke out around the comm center, watching the concourses as they intersected in front of the glass-walled space. Gregor and Lamya went inside, leaving a door open for Rovo, who’d have to abandon his power armor to fit.
