Ashla hid behind the doorway to Luna’s bay and peered out into the noonday sky outside. Even here, in the back of the landing bay, Ashla could feel the breeze caress her face and tickle her hair. It was the feeling of freedom and it was so close.
The feeling was ruined by the armed MP sitting on Ashla’s assembler.
“You built that?” Dothin whispered from behind. She could hear the awe in his voice.
Ashla smiled and nodded. “I called her the Lunar Seed. She’ll get us anywhere in the system we want to go.”
Lita held the big weapon she’d gotten from Cel and stood against the wall on the other side of the door. “Better get her started up.”
Ashla nodded. She pulled her link and opened the private channel.
“Luna, can you hear me?”
“Affirmative, Ms. Vares.”
“Okay,” Ashla said, trying to kill the butterflies in her stomach. “Is there anything keeping you from flying?”
“Negative.” Ashla sighed. “I am unmoored, and my power cells are at 100%.”
“Good. How much of your start-up checklist can you complete without the guard there noticing?”
“I can activate all primary internal systems quietly. But I cannot begin primary engine ignition without him noticing.”
“Okay. Okay. Power up as much as you can silently and wait for my cue to start the engines.”
“Affirmative.”
“There’s only one of them,” Dothin said. “Maybe we can get his attention and then knock him out.”
Ashla thought that was a great plan, until Lita grimaced and shook her head.
“That only works in the vids. Unless he’s a complete idiot, he’ll call in a contact report and request backup. Then we’ll have his whole squad in here after us.”
Ashla fidgeted with her link, watching the screen display Luna’s start-up cycle. “So...what do we do?”
“We wait for Cel’s diversion.”
Ashla kept her eyes on her link, watched as line after line dialed up to 100% and turned green. But soon that was finished, and the only thing Luna could activate would alert the guard. She sighed, stuck her link in her pocket, fidgeted with her fingers, sighed again.
The weight of her backpack felt heavier than it ever had, even though Cel admonished her to only pack essentials. Then, try as she might to pack the music box, she couldn’t fit it. In the end she had to leave it behind. Cel had led them through a false wall in her bedroom down a long ladder in a hollow spot in the tower’s metal endoskeleton. Once they reached sublevel nine, where Luna was waiting in her bay, Cel handed her a second link.
“Take this,” she’d said. “It’s not much, but it’ll book you a ticket out of the system and allow you to live in relative comfort for a while.”
“Where do I go? What do I do when I get there?”
Cel had shrugged, knelt to match her eyeline, and looked at her with sad eyes. “I don’t have many answers for you, Ashla. All I know is that you’re not safe here and the only way I can make you safe is to try and get you as far from here as possible.”
“But I don’t want to go without you.”
Cel smiled. “Don’t worry. Once I get the distraction going I’ll jump a ship and meet you at the rendezvous.”
A great blast erupted from underneath her, shaking the floor and echoing noise through the air ducts. Ashla squeaked, then held her breath.
“That’s it,” Lita said, peering through the doorway. “He’s coming. Get behind cover.”
Ashla did. Despite her curiosity she kept from peeking. She waited.
“Please, don’t shoot sir,” Dothin said, scaring Ashla even though she expected the words. “I’m just a lost tourist.”
An unfamiliar voice started to say something then a heavy thunk stopped it. The unfamiliar voice groaned but a second thunk silenced him.
“Okay, Ashla, come on.”
Ashla hopped out from behind cover and stepped over the lifeless man on the floor. “Is he dead?”
“No,” Dothin said. “He’ll wake up, albeit with a concussion and a nasty headache. Nice work Officer Tarquin.”
Lita led the three of them to Luna. As she ran Ashla said, “Okay Luna, begin ignition, and open the storage trunk.”
“Affirmative.”
Ashla tossed her backpack into the trunk and then climbed the ladder to the cockpit to finish the pre-flight checklist by hand. Dothin followed suit and climbed up himself.
“Ms. Vares,” Lita said. Ashla looked at her, saw her smiling. “Good luck!”
“You too, Lita. I hope we see each other soon.”
“Me too.”
“Thank you so much, Ms. Tarquin,” Dothin said.
“Good luck, Mr. Lanseidis.”
“We’re set to go,” Ashla said. “Hurry, Lita, get back to the ladder.
Lita nodded and sprinted off.
Ashla closed the cockpit and raised the ladders.
“There’s a helmet under your seat. I’d advise putting it on.”
“Got it,” Dothin said.
Ashla donned her own helmet, felt it connect to her flight suit.
“Are we ready to go, Luna?”
“All systems are green.”
Ashla activated her energy barriers, switched the g-buffers to full-auto and applied power to the lift inertials. Once Luna was off the ground Ashla hit the throttle hard. The engines roared and Luna leapt for open air, folding and covering her landing gear.
Dothin celebrated their newfound freedom with a series of anxious, wordless sounds. Ashla ignored him, could barely hear him under the sound of her own laughter.
An alarm sounded and Ashla’s attention switched to the array. Two blue dots were on an intercept course. The alarms only sounded because they were targeting her.
“Unidentified ship, this is Captain Durk of the Alliance Peace Corps. You are ordered to drop speed and follow a course leading back to the palace immediately. Do you copy?”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Ashla said through her uncontrollable smile. “You’re breaking up.”
“No, I am not. If you do not drop speed and change course I am authorized to fire on you.”
“Hit me with your best shot,” Ashla said, and cut the channel.
“What?” Dothin asked. “Are they--?” but Ashla cut Luna into a high-speed turn so tight even the g-buffers couldn’t compensate for them. Dothin fell silent. Ashla executed the breathing exercises she’d practiced and hoped Dothin wouldn’t be seriously affected by the high gees. In her turn she pushed both speed and altitude, keeping her tail to the enemy fighters.
The fighters indeed fired at her, but thanks to distance, Ashla’s maneuvers and Luna’s barriers nothing made contact.
“Luna, are we ready to break blue?”
“I’ve been ready.” The unintentional snark coming off Luna’s response sent Ashla into another fit of laughter.
“Hold on Dothin!”
“I’ve been holding on. Do I need to hold on harder?”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
Ashla pulled back on the control stick, peeling Luna into a gentle climb. The enemy ships kept firing, but soon they wouldn’t be able to touch her. Luna was too fast for the average aerosol fighter. Soon she was in a vertical ascent, listening as the engines sang.
“Come on, Luna. Stick together. I fixed the problem, so this will be nice and easy, right?”
“Engines are taxed by the heavy burn but operating at 95% efficiency and well within comfortable parameters.” She couldn’t expect much comfort from an accountant, but Ashla appreciated Luna’s attempt.
“Ms. Vares?” came a familiar voice over the radio.
“Huh?” Ashla asked. She had cut communications. She shouldn’t be receiving. She wondered if the high-gees were making her hallucinate then—
“Ms. Vares.”
“Elder Hando?”
“What are you doing, young lady?”
“I’m getting away from here, what do you th
ink?”
“Return to the palace before you get hurt, Ms. Vares.”
“Cel thinks if I stay they’ll kill me.”
“Ms. Vares, if you come back here, I promise to get you access to see your father.”
Ashla gasped. Everything left focus for a minute. Her scopes and gauges blurred. As the shock receded clarity returned. “What? What do you mean? Is my father alive?”
“Ashla,” Dothin said. “It’s a trick. You can’t—”
“Come back now, Ms. Vares and I will let you see him.”
Had it been Captain Eldaghast, or one of her tutors, maybe she would have obeyed. Maybe she would have cut thrust, rolled back and returned. But this was Elder Hando speaking and Ashla knew she couldn’t trust him.
“No.”
“Nhazeshon.”
“What?” Ashla asked. She recognized the word the Elder had said but her mind couldn’t parse it. She felt sleepy. And why not? She’d been through a lot over the past few days. Maybe it was catching up on her. She found her eyelids feeling heavy. Her eyes couldn’t quite produce their normal laser focus on the controls, and everything started looking blurry.
“What’s happening?”
“Nhazeshon.”
Ashla grunted. Her arms felt heavy now. Her head wanted to roll back against the headrest of her chair. She shook her head but couldn’t chase the sleep away. Panic filled her but couldn’t break out from underneath the exhaustion.
“Ashla?” Dothin called from behind. “Ashla, what’s--?”
“Luna.” Her voice sounded weak. “Break contact with this channel.”
“I am unable to. This channel—”
“Nhazeshon.”
“Ashla! Pull the circuit.”
“I don’t...” Her grip on the stick relaxed. Her hand on the throttle pulled back, bleeding speed. She was so close but the only darkness she saw was behind her eyelids.
“I don’t know what to do, Ashla! We’re not going to make it!”
Ashla’s eyes closed, felt something like a blanket of apathy cover her desire to escape. Her fingers twitched, wanting to shut Elder Hando off, she couldn’t will it to move.
“Ashla, please!”
“Communications circuit,” she whispered, trying to point as she fell deeper into herself.
“Nhazesh—” something shrieked and Ashla’s eyes snapped open. Her head pounded, she felt sick and exhausted, but her body was her own. She looked and Dothin’s hand was held out in front of her, holding a broken circuit.
“Is this the one?”
Ashla nodded, took the circuit. “Yeah. Belt yourself back in.”
She pushed forward on the throttle and aimed Luna’s nose upwards again.
“Here we go.”
Ashla’s pain and nausea could not detach her from the awe she felt as the blue bled out of the sky ahead, replaced with distant shining stars.
“We did it, Luna,” she whispered. “We broke the blue.”
Luna’s response was a shrill klaxon. Ashla looked at her sensors again.
“What is it now?” Dothin asked.
“An Alliance Cruiser is targeting us,” Ashla said.
“Can we get away from it?”
“We already have.”
Ashla angled Luna away from the cruiser, switched power from the main engines to the N-space slip drive and engaged.
Chapter Twenty-Two:
That Increases Knowledge
“Thank you, Lodebar Station,” Salazar heard Kahula say behind him. “We have received landing instructions and will commence our final pattern now.”
Salazar sneered, shook his head, and pulled on the Jessamine’s control yoke, following the virtual guides to Lodebar station’s landing depot.
The station filled his view, a squat bell-shaped center with six habitat sections radiating from it. Below the habitats protruded the big ship docks where four huge cargo haulers clung to the skin of the station like a hummingbird levitating with its needle-thin beak in a flower. Below these were the small internal docks where ships like the Jessamine would land inside an extended enclosure.
As Sal curved the Jessamine in towards her landing bay the bridge door slid open and the unmistakable clomp-clomp of the Kid’s boots entered.
“What are you doing in here, Kid?”
Vance dropped into one of the open crew seats. “I don’t know about this, Captain. There’s a lot of grease says some serious scuff is going down in this system. Are you sure we want to land here?”
Vance’s concerns had mirrored the rest of the crew’s. So far, he’d been pulled aside by several members of his team, individually or in groups. They all agreed Renzo was scum and he had it coming for double-crossing them.
“But maybe a Defense Minister is...you know...above our paygrade.” Those had been Lanjer’s words.
“We need money to survive, yes?” Sal asked Vance as he further steered the Jessamine into her berth.
“Yeah.”
“We need a job to get the money, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re not likely to get any jobs from Renzo, right?”
“Right.”
“So consider my interest in Renzo’s partner an extracurricular activity on top of getting us a job.”
Vance sighed. Salazar could feel the eyes of his bridge crew boring holes into his back. Vance had the courage to broach the subject again.
“Sure, but what if you find out where the partner is? We’re good in a fight but I’m not excited about going to war with the whole sawking Alliance.”
“You let me worry about that.”
Salazar thumbed the switches to lower the Jessamine’s landing gear. He dropped all power to the main thrust and let the Jessamine work out the final landing. Once her landing gear was down and locked, he turned his chair to face Vance. “What?”
“What’s the good of revenge if you’re not around to, you know, do the avenging?”
“I said I’ll worry about that.” Sal stood from his chair and headed out into the corridor. The bridge hatch slid open for him, closed, then slid open again. Again, the clomp-clomp of boots on metal. Sal turned to his room, grabbed his duffel bag, and returned to the hall where the Kid was waiting.
“You say that like it’s easy,” Vance said. “but you know any slip up on your end might have the biggest government since the Shaumri Empire on all our tails.”
“Cut the slack, Kid. I’m a professional.”
“A professional smuggler, yes, not an assassin. We were all willing to follow you after Renzo because he was a sack of maggots who put us all in danger and got your friend laxed. Jin, I wouldn’t have minded if we’d thrown him out the sawking window.”
The Kid followed Sal through the corridors from the bridge to the forward airlock.
“But you can’t slap around an Alliance military official. It’ll get you killed, and it’ll probably get all of us killed with you.”
“Enough!” Salazar spun on the kid so fast it made him dizzy. Vance paled and winced despite himself. “Void, Kid, give it a rest. Is that it? You think I’ve lost my wrinkles and now I’m some jibbering crack fixated on revenge? Is that what you think?”
“No, but—”
“So give me a little respect, then. Grant me some trust that I’m not going to endanger this whole crew on a senseless attempt at revenge.”
Sal then noticed half the crew standing in the corridor, watching his little tantrum. The looks on their faces filled his guts with lead. The Kid made no more arguments. Sal had bullied him into submission for now.
He wanted to apologize, to tell the Kid and the others that he shouldn’t have shouted, maybe he shouldn’t have brought them all here.
But apology wasn’t in his nature. “That goes for all of you! You don’t trust the Captain, find yourself another ship!” Sal smashed the control to drop the crew ladder and stepped down it as it folded towards the deck of the station. He had to get away from them, away from the pity in their eyes
.
Sal’s link buzzed and his eyes popped open. For a minute he couldn’t remember where he was. His link glowed a dull yellow. The shapes in the shadows could have been anything. They seemed to move and writhe, awakening some long-lost terror of the dark.
Then he remembered he was in his hotel room on Lodebar Station. He sighed, threw the sheets away from his legs and dropped his feet on the soft carpet below. The smell of exotic tobacco ash and expensive booze filled his nostrils and tickled at distant forlorn memories.
Salazar grabbed his link. The light from the screen blasted his eyes making the surrounding darkness yet darker. Sal read the text from the new message.
Dalphene
Forty minutes
Ask for Sooro
“Lights.”
Soft warm lights bloomed, illuminating his room.
While querying Lodebar’s grid for directions to whatever Dalphene was, Salazar got dressed. He checked his hair in the wall screen set to mirror mode, threw on his long, gray coat, grabbed his link and headed out the door.
His link told him the Dalphene was a classy bar and restaurant off the mezzanine under the station’s central transit depot. It was a fifteen-minute walk. As he started on his way he sent a message to the Kid.
If you’re interested meet me at the Dalphene in twenty.
He sent the message but didn’t know whether he preferred the Kid to meet him or not. To be honest, he didn’t much want to go himself. After rising tensions on the Jessamine crescendoed into his tantrum at the airlock Salazar wasn’t sure he had a crew. And if he did, meeting this data broker might be the last bolt in the wall that separated him from them.
The transit depot was quiet. Planet-bound travelers and tourists were all sleeping, and so the people inhabiting the parks, restaurants and shops were all station folk, either second shifters going about their everyday lives or early-riser first-shifters getting things done before work. The air-recycling system created a permanent gentle breeze that smelled of lemon and fresh daisies.
Funny enough, the faux sky resembled early morning twilight, almost like it was programmed more for the planet-living visitors than for the citizens. Salazar liked it this way though. Salazar grew up in the ever-gloom of life under the mile-high towers of Angora. As a kid he was so pale an off-worlder would have thought him a ghost. But all the kids he grew up with were that way. At some point the city tried to push through legislation that would switch out the buildings’ synthetic lights with something that would offer normal amounts of UV radiation, but the plan got bogged down by the same old bureaucratic nonsense.
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