by Rick Partlow
“And yet you still believe.” Kan-Ten gestured toward the crest. “You still hold to the old faith. How, without the Emperor?”
“The True Emperor is still out there.” Vala-Kel paced around the table, hands across his chest in a restless pose. There was a manic nature to his expression, something fervent and fundamental. “He waits for us. Our sin as a people is in not searching for him, seeking to find the proper physical vessel for the Spirit Emperor. We have given up on our faith when we should have merely given up on the individual.”
“And the others here believe so?” He stepped over to the crest himself, seeing the way the dim lights of the office played shadows from its deep engravings. It was hypnotic, in a way. “They, too, seek the new Emperor? For what purpose? Do you believe this new physical vessel can reclaim our heritage?”
“If he cannot,” Vala-Kel countered, “then he is not the true Emperor. When we find him, we will know it.”
“I do not understand,” Kan-Ten admitted sadly, turning away from the crest and back to the male. “I do not understand how you can still hold true to the faith after all that has happened to our people.”
“Faith is nothing if it is never tested, brother.”
There was no arguing with the spirit behind those words, so Kan-Ten didn’t try. He was constructing his next question carefully when a kick came at the base of the door. He still found that vaguely scandalous; back on Tahn-Skyyiah, only outer doors to homes were kept shut, and only on them would visitors be required to announce themselves. The door opened and the one who’d introduced himself earlier as Rhin-Jan stepped through.
“We have an intruder,” he said, though his demeanor was not that of fear or alarm, but merely curiosity. “It is the human who was with your old comrade.”
“You travel with one of them, Kan-Ten?” Vala-Kel wondered, eyes fixed on his. “When last we parted ways, you seemed determined to never live under the rule of the humans.”
“And I never will,” Kan-Ten assured him. “She is not my ruler, she is my friend, and has fought beside me more times than a mortal may remember, including just now when the other humans would have killed me.”
“Is this so, Rhin-Jan?” Vala-Kel asked of the male who had been there for the battle.
“It is.” Rhin-Jan made a gesture of assent. “The human even shot two of her own kind to protect our people from their guns.”
“Then I would meet this rare human.” He motioned to Kan-Ten and followed him out of the office and into the main room that had once been a shop floor.
Nearly two dozen males were gathered there, surrounding Korri Fontenot, tensed and waiting for a signal to attack. The woman didn’t seem intimidated by them, despite the fact that she’d turned over her handgun; Kan-Ten saw one of the males examining it carefully and he hoped the warrior wouldn’t accidentally shoot himself. Fontenot had a pressure cut over her right eyebrow that was still oozing blood, and an incipient bruise along her jawline on that side, but she was steady on her feet and she’d quite obviously run all the way here to make it this quickly. He wasn’t certain how far they’d come, but if the maps of the city he’d studied during their flight were accurate, it had to have been at least four or five kilometers.
“Are you all right?” she asked when she saw him approaching behind the crowd.
From the look on her face, he assumed that his appearance was as battered as hers, and he certainly remembered being punched and kicked more than once while on the bottom of a pile of humans.
“I shall endeavor to continue my existence,” he told her, and he saw her lip quirk. He had insisted many times that he didn’t understand the human concept of humor, but he wasn’t quite being truthful; he simply thought it would be funnier to them if they didn’t think he was doing it on purpose. “This is my old companion from my service in the Tahni High Guard,” he went on, gesturing in a human way toward the other male. “His name is Vala-Kel.”
“I’m Korri Fontenot,” the woman introduced herself, doing a good job of pretending the name didn’t mean anything to her. “Thank you for saving my friend from those assholes.”
He saw a look of momentary confusion on Vala-Kel’s face and translated the human insult into the Tahni language for him. The warrior showed a vague amusement and replied to Fontenot in halting English.
“I am no lover of humans, female. But you have been a friend of my friend, so no harm will come to you from us.” He looked between her and Kan-Ten. “But though you be welcome here for as long as you like, my brother, the human cannot stay. It would make too many of us uncomfortable.”
“I will escort you back to the hotel,” Kan-Ten told Fontenot in English, then switched back to his native language to address Vala-Kel. “After that, I would most appreciate if I could return here in the morning, so that you might tell how you wound up on this world.”
“That is a story that will take some time, my brother.” Vala-Kel’s face and stance were of satisfaction, as if things had progressed just as he anticipated.
“As the humans say,” Kan-Ten made a gesture of leave-taking as someone handed Fontenot back her weapon, “I have nothing better to do.”
***
“This place is a dump,” Sandi murmured in Ash’s ear.
He grunted agreement but didn’t look up from his feet. Walking in magnetic boots in microgravity was a pain in the ass at the best of times, but here on Brea it was a nightmare. The tunnels carved through the guts of the nickel-iron asteroid were narrow and claustrophobic, and the strip of metal lining the “floor” was barely a meter across; every few steps they were forced to slide to the side, their toes barely hanging onto the lining, to let someone else pass.
Chemical strip-lighting ran along the ceiling, cheap and easy to install but illuminating poorly and casting swathes of eerie shadows in their wake. The walls were damp, dripping with condensation and slimy to the touch, and the temperature in the corridors, away from the main ventilation fans, was kept at just above freezing. “The Belenus Independent Mining Cooperative” was a fancy name, but the whole thing seemed to be run on a shoestring.
“Next left,” Sandi said, nudging him. He looked up and saw the light glaring from the open doorway a few meters down the corridor.
It’s a fucking tunnel, not a corridor, he corrected himself. I’ve seen better engineering in the Pirate Worlds.
The light and heat swallowed them like a blanket as they stepped into the conference room. It wasn’t much as these sorts of things went, no big holographic projection tanks, no virtual reality headsets, just a ring of two-dimensional flat-panel displays surrounded by concentric rings of metal strips for attendees to anchor themselves. The room was already packed, at least thirty people crammed into a chamber only ten meters in diameter, and Ash was suddenly wishing for the wide-open spaces of the Acheron’s cockpit.
The crowd inside the conference room was a motley bunch of ne’er-do-wells, closer to what he’d seen at gang summits in Trans-Angeles than a military pre-mission briefing. Vat-grown spacers’ leathers were mixed with remnants of old military and Corporate Council uniforms and flight suits, cheaply-fabricated bright-colored flash, and, in one case, a bright yellow fedora. Beards, long hair, braids and tattoos were the norm rather than the exception, and the only ones who looked at all conventional were a pair of young men in blue utility fatigues with some sort of unit patch that Ash didn’t recognize.
Everyone was armed, which was also unlike any other asteroid station he’d ever been on, and he and Sandi had buckled on gunbelts as well when they found out they could. Because, well, why wouldn’t you, when everyone else was?
The woman at the center of the circle of display screens had the typical, string-bean body of someone born in lower gravity and the slump-shouldered, bleary-eyed look of the chronically overworked. She wore utility trousers and magnetic boots and a stained and faded t-shirt under a heavy, armored jacket, and her dark, curly hair was tied into a pragmatic bun. She speared Sandi and Ash with a
glare as they found a spot on the metallic strip and Ash suddenly realized they must be the last ones to arrive.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, stepping into place beside one of the uniformed men. “Our ship just docked.”
“You’re from the Acheron?” the tired-looking woman asked, her expression suddenly turning from disapproval to laser-focused interest.
“Yeah,” Sandi told her. “Hollande and Carpenter.”
“Welcome, I’m Trisha Nassir, Chief of Operations for the Belenus Mining Cooperative.” The woman nodded to them. “Sorry to put you on the spot, but the Acheron is going to be the star of the show for us.”
“We are?” Ash blurted, eyes going wide as he looked over the rest of the pilots and crews in the room and saw them staring at him.
“Let me get to the briefing,” Nassir touched a control on her ‘link and the displays switched from an image of the Co-op logo to one of a huge, ungainly mineral barge.
“Ugly motherfucker, isn’t she?” Nassir asked, but Ash could hear a fondness in her voice that belied her words. “She’s a big-ass fusion pulse drive at one end and a big-ass maneuvering thruster package at the other and nothing but magnetic clamps between them. But she can haul up to a hundred standardized shipping cylinders at a time, and each of those can hold 400,000 metric tons of iron ore powder suitable for use in industrial fabricators. She and the others like her are the lifeline of the Brigantia colony and the space station, and the contracts with them are the only thing keeping us in business at the moment, since the work on the moon base has stalled.”
A deep scowl passed over her face, and Ash had the sense she’d been scowling a lot lately. “Unfortunately, this is what’s happened to the last half a dozen barges we sent insystem.”
Another touch on her ‘link and the image became a video stream, and fusion fire bloomed from the drive of the ship, propelling it through the black, drowning out the starfields around it. It had, Ash thought, a certain grace to it in motion that it lacked at rest, the difference between a blue whale stranded on a beach and one breaching majestically from the Pacific waves.
“This is from a drone camera kept out at the edge of the belt,” she added. “We didn’t receive the transmission until hours after.”
There were twin bursts of light, miniature novae that were unmistakable to a pilot: two ships Transitioning in, cutters much like the Acheron in origin, though less refined. The Acheron had seen the benefits of Jordi Abdullah’s munificence as well as Captain Fox’s government funding, where these ships were pirates working for hire. Their fusion drives ignited as they matched velocities with the barge, pulling even with its bow and then using their maneuvering thrusters to angle their noses toward the cargo hauler.
There was only one reason for them to assume that attitude, and the long, fat cylinder that ran the length of the spine of each of the ships warned him what they were going to do before it happened. Both ships ignited their fusion drives for just a heartbeat, the thrust meant to counteract the recoil from the railguns. Ash winced as the electromagnetic weapons opened fire, pumping meter-long metal projectiles out at 20,000 meters per second.
Railguns and Gauss cannons were proscribed weapons for use in any shipping lanes; the projectiles just kept going long after they missed their target, permanent hazards for any vessel in that orbit. The military hadn’t even used them in the war for anything but planetary bombardment. The pirates didn’t have those sorts of reservations, nor were they concerned with Patrol inspections or Spaceflight Safety Board fines. The huge, tungsten slugs sliced through the barge’s maneuvering thruster assembly, their impact almost anticlimactic. There were no explosions, no light shows, no shower of sparks or clouds of burning gas, but the barge was doomed, for all that.
The two raider ships, their work done, disappeared with twin warp coronas, passing back into Transition Space as if they’d never been. The barge continued on, its computer systems still shepherding it insystem, oblivious to the attack.
“For those of you who rode here on the short bus,” Nassir explained, “the pirates just took out the barge’s maneuvering unit. It can’t make a deceleration flip, can’t even maneuver enough to use the gravity well of the star or any of the planets for a slingshot back to its destination. It’s a fucking dart now, heading straight for the star Belenus.” Her voice was bitter and ragged. “We’ve tried everything we could by remote commands, but the best we can do just using the main drive is to send it into interstellar space rather than crashing it into the star. Either way, no mineral shipment, no payment, no barge.”
“There’s no way to use Transition drive ships to take a new maneuvering unit?” someone asked---Ash couldn’t see who’d said it.
“Do you have any idea how big that maneuvering unit is?” Nassir demanded, sounding almost outraged at the question. “It would take a ship the size of a Fleet cruiser to haul something like that through T-space, and I don’t have a fucking Fleet cruiser on standby!” She raised a hand to forestall the next question, patience abandoning her demeanor. “And before you tactical geniuses ask, no, we can’t afford to equip the barges with deflector shields or defense lasers or magic fucking beans!”
She stalked back and forth, hands on her hips, the effect spoiled somewhat by the jerky motions of walking in microgravity with magnetic boots.
“This is a shoestring operation, ladies and gentlemen! We are living hand-to-mouth! We use fusion pulse drive barges because they’re stone cheap, but even then, there’s only so many of them we can afford to build in any period! All this,” she waved at them expansively, “all of you, this is a short-term desperation play. You are our last hope, our Hail-Mary, and if you don’t come through, we’re all going to be looking for jobs sweeping floors on Brigantia by this time next month!” Her dark gaze swept over each of them and Ash felt like shrinking back from its ferocity. “Do you all track what I’m saying? Any more stupid questions? Good.”
Nassir manipulated her ‘link and the image went back to the pirate cutters, zooming in on them.
“As you can see, these are your standard converted military surplus missile cutters.” She shrugged. “They might have been stolen, they might have been pieced together from parts, might have been bought on the black market, who knows? But someone slapped a railgun on each of them and hired them out to whoever’s trying to run us out of business, and they’re a huge pain in the ass. And yes, we have tried arming the barges, but the best we could do was some industrial mining lasers, and these cutters can just jump out and jump back in before we can get a lock on them.”
She clasped her hands behind her back, thoughts gathering behind her eyes. “All of you came here in Transition drive ships, of course: small freighters, transports, even one lighter.”
She was looking at the two uniformed mercenaries with that one, Ash noted. He was impressed. If their company could afford to send a lighter out here, they must have some serious juice. “Lighter” was a generic term for any medium-size Transition drive freighter that had been converted to a paramilitary vessel by adding armor and weapons, but it was still expensive enough that most guns-for-hire couldn’t slap one together.
“Your ships and your help will be important to the mission, but you all face one problem; freighters and even the Savage/Slaughter lighter don’t have the multiple jump capacitors that a missile cutter does. You go after them, they jump a few light seconds away, then jump back somewhere out of your weapons’ range and by the time you build up the charge for another Transition, they’ll have fired on the barge and gone their merry way.”
She pointed a long, delicate finger at Ash and Sandi.
“That’s where you two come in. The Acheron is our only cutter, and from the specs you sent in, it’s got enough firepower to take on the pirates. So, while everyone else will be cruising in formation around a single barge, you two will be our reaction force. We want you doing multiple minimum-duration Transitions to stay within commo range from the barges, and if there’s an attack
on any barge, you’re the ones we call.”
Ash groaned inwardly as he thought of the reactor fuel that would burn, and the miserable experience of navigating dozens of micro-jumps.
“We’ll have reactor fuel available for you on one of the freighters,” Nassir said as if she’d read his mind. “And yes, it’s going to be a stone bitch. But we’re up against it here. Can we count on you?”
Ash looked at Sandi and she rolled her eyes impatiently at the dramatic tone.
“Well, yeah,” she snapped. “What the hell else are we gonna’ say? We took the job, and when we take a job, we complete it.”
“We’ll do the best we can,” Ash added, trying not to sound as strident as Sandi.
“That’s all we can ask,” Nassir said. “Everyone, your watch assignments will be sent to your ‘links. Report to your ships at 0200 local time…that’s three hours, so if you have anything you need to do here first, do it quick.”
People began filing out of the conference room and Ash held back with Sandi, letting the others go first to avoid the crush at the bottleneck into the corridor.
“You’re the Ashton Carpenter and Sandrine Hollande, aren’t you?”
Ash winced when he heard the words; it wasn’t the first time, and it usually ended badly. He turned, his magnetic soles scraping against the metal floor plates with a sound that set his teeth on edge. The voice had been a clear alto, a bit high for the face that had produced it. It was one of the mercs in uniform, a straight-backed, earnest-faced man about his age, with skin the color of well-aged teak and hair cropped so close to his scalp that it was barely a shadow. The one with him was shorter and stockier and much paler, with the look of a man who didn’t want to be here and didn’t care if you knew it.
“Depends,” Sandi equivocated, cocking a skeptical eyebrow at the man. “Do we owe you money?”
“You two were awarded the Medal of Valor for the Battle for Mars,” the mercenary said, and Ash could almost see the capital letters coming out of his mouth, wreathed in awe. Then his face twisted in confusion. “What the hell are you doing here?”
