Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  The family didn’t have money—yet, Mother said—but they had access to it, and they had some kind of influence that her dad would flash around whenever he needed it, as, apparently, they had needed it to get on this ship to get Colette to Montreal to the boarding school before the beginning of the semester.

  Which seemed stupid to her, because she had started other schools in the middle of the year, and had always, always outperformed everyone in her class. It never mattered whether she arrived with one month left or five, she could work her way around the entire system and do better than anyone else, once she figured out what was needed.

  “Take them,” the guy with the intense eyes, gesturing at Colette’s parents.

  Then he took one step into the suite, and looked down at Colette.

  “You, little girl, can stay here, if you’ll be good.” He actually spoke in some kind of fake sweet voice, as if she would be fooled by his tone, even though he had just ordered some guy with a rifle to take her parents.

  Colette opened her mouth so she could tell the guy with the intense eyes where he could stick his “good,” and then she saw her dad’s face. It was drawn and tense.

  Her mother was shivering. Her mother often looked terrified over stupid stuff, but she never shivered.

  And her dad—tense was not his normal way of dealing with anything.

  He frowned at Colette as their gazes met.

  “She’ll be good,” her dad said to the guy, but didn’t look away from Colette. “My daughter, she’s perfect.”

  Colette actually felt tears prick at her eyes. Her dad never said that, not with feeling. He was always telling her how impossible, intractable, and stubborn she was, how she could do better if she only settled down. And sometimes he would despair, and say,

  Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez, you have every opportunity and you’re always the smartest person in the room. Why are you constantly throwing that away?

  His disappointment pissed her off, and made her work harder at doing the best she could and causing trouble. He never noticed the best, but he always noticed the trouble.

  She’d been waiting for that perfect word from him her whole life. And now he said it, to some guy with intense eyes and another guy holding a laser rifle, and the weird part was, Dad seemed to mean it.

  Then he really scared her, because he mouthed, I love you, and took a deep breath and said to the guy with intense eyes, “What do you need from us?”

  Dad sounded calm, even though he clearly wasn’t. Well, clearly to Colette, probably not to the two men.

  “I need you to go with him,” the guy with the intense eyes said, nodding toward the guy with the laser rifle. Not saying his name, either, which was a bad sign. “We can restrain you and take you if need be.”

  Dad gave Mother a hard look, and she swallowed visibly, then nodded.

  “No restraints needed,” Dad said. Then he and Mother walked out of the door as if being taken by guys with laser rifles was an everyday thing.

  The guy with intense eyes gave Colette one last glare.

  “Be good and you’ll be fine,” he said. Then he closed the suite door—and stupid idiot that he was—turned on the parental controls.

  Which she had already monkeyed with Day One, in case anyone got Ideas. Her parents knew better than to use something that simple on her, but the concierge and the ship’s crew didn’t.

  And neither did the guy with the intense eyes.

  She waited a good thirty seconds before moving, and then she went into her room and lay on the bed, because she knew that would be what the guy with the intense eyes would expect—some kid, paralyzed by fear.

  She’d show him paralyzed.

  She’d show him fear.

  Once she had him all figured out.

  A KID.

  Alfredo Napier thought kids weren’t allowed on ships like the Blue Moon. Adults knew the dangers they were undertaking when they traveled on a ship like this, but kids? They were under the age of consent, and even if their parents thought it was a good idea, the Starrborne Line, which ran these old ships, did not allow kids on the Titan-Plano to Earth-Houston run.

  The company’s explanation was pretty simple: in order to make good time on that run, it had to travel older, lesser used routes, not as well policed, and without as many stops or amenities.

  In reality, the route these ships traveled was the only route that allowed hazardous cargo. If a ship got into trouble out here, it was twice as likely to be abandoned as it was to be rescued.

  Napier had always taken that fact into consideration when he chose his targets.

  He also appreciated the fact that everyone on board had signed a waiver, protecting the Starrborne Line from liability should something untoward happen. Not that he really cared if the passengers had given permission for their own deaths on an ancient ship without the proper protections against certain kinds of hazardous cargo, but because he almost felt as if the passengers had given him permission to run his own business the way he wanted to.

  A kid.

  He shook his head as he hurried to the bridge. A kid changed everything and nothing.

  She’d seen him. She’d seen them. But she was what? Ten? Twelve? Young enough that no one would believe anything she said. So all he had to do before they blew the ship was put her into one of the lifepods and jettison her with quite a bit of force toward the Martian run. If she survived, then good, and if she didn’t, she would die in the pod, not in his custody on the ship.

  And he wouldn’t have to think about her.

  That was the problem with kids.

  They haunted a man in the middle of the night, interfering with his sleep.

  He made a small fortune doing his work.

  The last thing he needed was to second-guess himself. The last thing he needed was to lose even more sleep.

  COLETTE SAT UP on the bed. She already hated this room. Square, boxy, brown, the bed one-tenth as comfortable as the bed she had had at her last school. She felt like calling up some paint program and trying to permanently deface the walls.

  Maybe if she was trapped in here forever. In the meantime, she had the tablet.

  Colette had stolen the tablet because it had basic access to every single part of the ship. No one had figured out she swiped it; the stupid concierge had believed he had misplaced it, and they had issued him a new one, since the first thing Colette had done was shut off the locator on the tablet itself. Basic Survival Thievery 101.

  The second thing Colette had done was taken that basic access and amped it up to full access in every shipboard department she could. The only areas she couldn’t access were navigation, engine controls, life support, and all of those other things that someone could sabotage and kill people with.

  She would need Captain’s Codes for those areas. Or at least senior officer codes.

  In the weeks that she’d had the tablet, she hadn’t been able to crack those codes. She had been beginning to think she couldn’t access any of that important stuff from a passenger cabin because of location controls. But if she got to the bridge, she might have been able to do it.

  The option of going to the bridge was gone now.

  She needed to remain confined to quarters until she figured out how to spoof the system, and make it think she was confined to quarters while she roamed the ship.

  Before she did any of that, though, she activated the automated distress signal. Every tablet had access to the distress signal, and, she suspected, so did all of those holographic concierges on the lower levels.

  She hoped someone else had activated the automatic distress signal as well, but she also had taken a measure of the guy with the intense eyes. He looked like someone who didn’t let a lot go by him.

  He had probably tampered with access to the automated distress system before he had started into the passenger cabins. Because Colette and her parents hadn’t realized something had gone wrong on the ship until the guy with the laser rifl
e had shown up.

  She doubted any other passenger noticed something wrong either. People were pretty self-involved on this ship, which had worked to her favor, until today.

  She took a deep breath. She was going to pretend that today was no different than any other day, because if she thought about her parents, she would panic, and panicking would get her nowhere.

  So she scrolled through the back end of the tablet, the stuff hardly anyone outside of engineering knew how to use, and found the manual distress signal.

  She had hoped it would be relatively easy to operate. Instead, it contained an array of choices, many more than she expected. She scrolled through all of them, until she narrowed it down to three: she could notify other ships; she could notify specific rescue units throughout the solar system; or she could notify a single person.

  She had no single person to notify, and if she notified other ships randomly, she would probably notify Intense Eyes Guy’s ship as well as some other passing vessel.

  All of the choices required the Blue Moon’s exact location to be input manually. Which made sense, since she was asking for a rescue, and the system had no way of knowing that the rescue was needed because people with guns had boarded the ship, rather than some systemic breakdown somewhere off the beaten path.

  Colette dug, found the ship’s exact coordinates, discovered that they were deep inside the Asteroid Belt, and that made her stomach jump. Right in the middle of nothing at all.

  And, to her unpracticed eye, the ship looked like it wasn’t moving at all.

  She didn’t like it.

  Focus, focus, focus.

  She made herself go through all of the components of the secondary manual signal slowly, entering the exact coordinates of where the ship was right now, which route it had taken, but not the route it was expected to take. Because she didn’t know if Intense Eyes Guy was stealing the ship itself.

  She set the secondary signal to repeat in half-second bursts, and programmed it to go only to the rescue units on Mars, the Moon, and Earth.

  Her heart thumped as she activated the secondary signal—and prayed it would go through.

  NAPIER MADE IT to the bridge just in time to see the distress signal beacon activate. The damn thing glowed red on the navigation console. He smashed the blinking light, then pressed the comm chip embedded into the pocket on his chin.

  “One of those idiot crew members activated the automated distress signal. Someone jettison the thing off the ship, and send it closer to Mars.”

  He had to explain where he wanted the beacon to go, because on a previous job, the genius who had taken a similar order had ripped the beacon off the ship, and let the still-active beacon tumble into nearby space.

  That hadn’t ended well for anyone, although Napier, as was his habit, managed to avoid the authorities, more through luck than anything else. The genius who hadn’t thought the order through, however, wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Since his luck had run out.

  Napier’s hadn’t, yet, but he didn’t like how this particular job was going. He really didn’t like this bridge. It was narrow and had a high ceiling made of two different materials—one clear, so that the crew could see the starlight (or probably show it to passengers who paid a premium). The other material was an exterior cover that fitted over the clear material and gave the bridge double protection against anything and everything.

  It also made it pretty easy to find. Napier had originally thought of sending a contained burst torpedo into the bridge, taking out the crew in one quick action, but he hadn’t done it. Because he had done his due diligence and discovered that the Blue Moon, as an ancient passenger liner, didn’t have a secondary bridge like most cargo ships.

  There had been an actual possibility that the explosion would have destroyed all of his access to the ship’s systems, and he didn’t have an engineer on his team. If the engineering sector on this ship had been as old as the ship herself, then Napier would truly have been screwed.

  Of course, someone had updated the entire interior. The passenger cabins had gotten a facelift, but the rest of the ship had been completely rebuilt—and off-books too.

  At least the weapons system on this ship hadn’t been upgraded. It should have been before someone got the brilliant idea of transporting a Glyster Egg on this vessel. Because Glyster Eggs were the holy grail for people like him. If he had a Glyster Egg, he could raid ships to his heart’s content.

  Of course, no one was supposed to know that the Egg was even on board. He had only found out because he had paid informants in every single outpost that launched vessels into this part of the solar system. If he managed to get his hands on the Egg, the informant who sent him here would get a really big bonus.

  If.

  Napier hadn’t been able to find out if the Egg was actually on board, and if it was, where it was. Each cargo bay was supposed to list the cargo on its exterior manifest, but ships like this, which carried hazardous cargo, rarely did. That’s why he needed the internal cargo manifest, the one only the senior officers got to see.

  And that, Napier was beginning to realize, was going to be harder than he expected.

  THE AUTOMATED DISTRESS signal shut off after five minutes. The tablet listed the distress signal as damaged, but Colette suspected someone had tampered with it. She had expected that.

  She also figured, given that laser rifle, that the bad guys had come for something in particular. She was guessing, based on the history she’d studied (trying to keep up with Dad), the entertainment she consumed (trying to ignore Mother), and the crime reports she’d examined on the sly (trying to learn new tricks) that these guys weren’t here to steal the ship. If they had been, they would have locked every passenger in their cabins and dealt with the passengers once the ship left the established shipping routes.

  Colette figured they were taking something from it. If they had planned on kidnapping a passenger—well, first, they wouldn’t have come to a ship this low rent, and second, they would have known that a kid was on board. She was on the passenger manifest, after all, even if her age wasn’t alongside her name.

  But if the bad guys were trying to take people, they would have wanted to know who they were up against amongst the passengers—or, at least, she would have wanted to know.

  She knew it was a fallacy to expect every criminal in the universe to be one-tenth as smart as she was. Dad always said that if they were smart, they wouldn’t be criminals, and Colette agreed with him when it came to crimes of opportunity, but the bands that worked the shipping routes—or rather, the bands that successfully worked the shipping routes—had to have a lot of smarts because they terrorized the routes, and never seemed to get caught.

  So she wasn’t going to get anywhere by underestimating the intelligence of the people who had taken over the ship.

  Hazardous cargo would seem like a no-no for these people, but not all hazardous cargo made everyone sick. Some hazardous cargo was dangerous in the wrong hands.

  On her very first day with the tablet, she had searched through the cargo manifest, trying to find whatever it was that had knocked the per-passenger price on this vessel so low. When she had seen the ad for this vessel, and its “reasonable” prices, she wanted to see what kinds of diseases Dad had signed her up for.

  She had planned to throw that in his face when he left her at that boarding school in Montreal. She had even planned the speech:

  Not only are you confining me to some Earth backwater, but you’re guaranteeing that I will die of [insert disease here] at [insert average age here].

  It had taken her three days to find the correct cargo manifest, and another three hours to break into it. To her great disappointment, she hadn’t found any disease-creating items listed. Instead, she found a tiny weapon that shouldn’t have been on a ship like this at all.

  That weapon, called a Glyster Egg, should have been in layers and layers of protective material with a protected cargo seal inside a protected
cargo unit inside a protected cargo bay. Instead, the Glyster Egg was in some kind of box that “in theory” protected it from any kind of accidental detonation.

  The thing was the theory wasn’t that grand. She’d found at least three other ships that had been victims of accidental detonation of Glyster Eggs in the five years since the stupid things had been on the market (or invented or stolen or released by some dumb government or something). Those ships had floated dead in space, in one case for a year, before anyone found it—because the stupid thing had been designed to disable all the functioning systems on spaceships with one simple movement.

  A handful of other weapons could do that, but none were small like the Egg, and none had an actual targeting system. So if she wanted to—if she could get out of this stupid room without being noticed, and if she trusted herself to touch the Egg, and if she could figure out how to use it, and if she knew exactly where the bad guys’ ship was—she could enter the coordinates into the Egg, then squeeze the Egg’s activation system, and voila! the bad guys’ ship wouldn’t work at all, ever again, end of story.

  But she didn’t like all those ifs-ands. She couldn’t quite calculate the odds—there were too many variables—but she had an educated hunch that she would be better off trying to get to the bridge or engineering or somewhere and wrest control of the Blue Moon from Intense Eyes, before ever trying to activate the Egg and make it work for her instead of against her.

  Of course, she didn’t actually know if he was here for the Egg. But he was stupid if he wasn’t. Because if she were a big bad thief who preyed on ships coming through the Asteroid Belt, she would steal the Egg.

  That was assuming that Intense Eyes had her brains. She wasn’t sure he did. Yeah, he had taken over the ship, but he hadn’t known about Colette, which meant he hadn’t researched the passengers, which meant he didn’t know that he was about to get into really bad trouble—if even one of her distress signals had gotten through.