by S. A. Tholin
"What about honour and duty?"
"Fancy words, and maybe there's some of that too, but look at us. We're a thousand light-years from home, in the belly of a patchwork junker. Our medic has no face and our commander has gone berserk. We're being hunted by RebEarth and a human houseplant, and you know what it feels like to me?" She waited for him to shake his head before continuing: "Wednesday. It feels like Wednesday. And that's not right, is it? Given everything that's going on, we should be at breaking point, don't you think? Somebody should be crying or panicking or going ahh I can't take it anymore, but look at us. We're in gear, in formation and ready to go."
"It's Thursday, actually," Lucklaw said.
"Whatever." She flashed him her best little predator grin. "That airlock is about to open and bullets are going to start flying, and all I can think is: come on already, let's go!"
"If that's how you feel, then I'm glad this is your last tour."
"Excuse me, Corporal?"
"Cool it, Hopewell." Florey took up position behind them, his APF swelling to envelop her. "Remember, quick and quiet."
Yeah, she remembered, and so did her muscles. No further instruction necessary - even Lucklaw had been through enough training exercises to do this in his sleep. Although, as the airlock hissed open, she thought she could see the corporal twitch. Nervous? She hadn't thought it possible, not now, not when everything was about to get real, but maybe she was wrong about him. Maybe he wasn't stupid. Maybe it was possible to be smart and brave or afraid and brave, and the only stupid person on the team was her, but -
- but violet light spilled into the shuttle and she wasn't Hopewell anymore, she was kinetics and she was propulsion, she was firing synapse and instinctive muscle.
Through a mist of evaporating condensation, she and Lucklaw burst from the ship. Side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and she loved him in that moment, loved how his every move synced to hers, loved how they were as one. No 'i' in teamwork, a loose thought flitted through her brain, but I love you.
"On your knees! Hands behind your heads!"
Florey's rifle punctuated her sentence, one plasma-licked round flashing across the hold and through the office window. A spatter of coffee and blood hit the wall, but one of the man's feet remained on the desk at an awkward angle.
I love you too, she thought, and then one of the orange overalls reached for his gun. No time to think, but she hardly needed to. One quick squeeze of her trigger and he was gone; another and the second man was dead too. He hadn't gone for his gun, but he might have, if she'd given him enough time to think about it. Or maybe he would've surrendered. Not that it mattered.
"Nine to go." She kept her voice to a whisper, even though suit comms made such efforts unnecessary. The Cephalopod seemed to demand it of her, this great groaning pile of stolen, mismatched junk whose outside was sleek white, but whose insides were a winding dark. Xenon light strips glowed a dim violet, and pipes hissed liquid nitrogen from leaking joints. The ship looked to have been cobbled together with components near the end of their life spans - old bones for a new baby. It was a kind of resourcefulness and ingenuity that she might have admired, if it weren't for the fact that the ship's bulging hull was the only thing standing between her and cold space.
"I count eight," Lucklaw whispered in response. She frowned, checking her sensor readings again, but the corporal was right. Eight contacts - three on what had to be the bridge, and another five on the deck below.
"Guess my suit's glitching again. Going to need you to check it later."
Lucklaw gave her an exasperated look and she could sense the disrespect about to trip off his tongue.
"We'll take the bridge first," Florey said. "Need to secure control of the ship before we clear it."
His voice had changed. If she told him, he'd refuse to admit it, but it definitely had. Gruffer, lower and - stars - was that a hint of a rolled r? He even moved differently; the easy gait that made him so suited for shadow work traded in for a determined stride and shoulders held high and straight enough to carry the weight of a planet.
No substitute for the real thing, though. One glance from Cassimer and his command-o-vision would've spotted the piece of gum she'd stuck to the inside of her helmet. Florey hadn't said a word. A little thing, but now he was making tactical decisions and though she'd been his partner for the past five years, she couldn't help but doubt.
◆◆◆
Entering the bridge was like walking straight into a childhood memory. Red-panelled walls listed and bulged around scattershot portholes. Strings of fairy lights wove haphazard patterns in the ceiling and turned the silver foil of discarded food wrappers rainbow-coloured. The captain's seat - a smouldering hole burned through its headrest - was a little boy's idea of cool; all red leather and white racing stripes, glaring light strips and two sets of extra-large cup holders.
Something was wrong with the viewport. She didn't know enough about ships to say exactly what, but the stars stretched and wavered, the outline of Cato no longer a smooth semi-circle, but an oscillating tilde. The funhouse mirror effect completed the sense of childhood déjà vu.
"It's like a damn amusement park in here," she said, although it was less park and more travelling fun fair; the kind where the rides were as cheap as their construction, and the rollercoaster thrill came from not knowing whether or not you'd come back down with all limbs intact. "That's not duct tape, is it?"
A rhetorical question, because of course it was. The RebEarthers had cobbled together a ship from the remains of a hundred scrapyards, and the irregular black rim around the viewport was in fact household adhesive.
"That had better not be the only thing holding this bucket together. And maybe we should go a bit easier, yeah?" she said, eyeing the bullet holes in the bulkhead. To be fair to Florey, she was fairly sure they were her fault - he'd taken out the captain, and though the viewport was spattered with blood, they hadn't yet been sucked out into space.
She wasn't keen on using firearms onboard ships. In space, there was no margin large enough to make her comfortable, and she couldn't help but feel that Cassimer might've gone about things differently. He might even have tried talking or negotiating - the commander might be reticent, but he wasn't entirely undiplomatic.
"Got a match on the one by the coffee machine," Lucklaw said. "Sheppey, Thor. Wanted in the Protectorate for three counts of murder, in Kalevala territory for aggravated assault, and he has no less than five outstanding warrants for unpaid speeding tickets. Looks like you made the universe a little purer today, Lieutenant Hopewell."
"I do my best," she said with feigned humility, and then the details of Sheppey's bounty popped on her HUD. "50k bonus merits! What do you say, Lucklaw, should I buy a sports car like yours?" Another rhetorical question. She'd coveted his Ibis ever since he first showed her pictures (boastful bastard). Of course, hers wouldn't be show-off gold-plated like his - the Hopewells might not be as wealthy as the Lucklaws, but at least her family had class. Also, 50k probably wasn't enough for the gold-plated version. Not that she'd want it. Although, if she could afford it, it would look real nice in the sunshine on her beach house driveway.
"Should split it with the team," Lucklaw said, grunting as he pulled the lump of a captain from the pilot's seat. "Nobody likes a bonus hog."
"If this wasn't my last tour, maybe I'd give a damn."
"Cut the chatter." Florey, impatient, still doing that awful Cassimer impersonation. "Any matches off the captain?"
The dead man didn't look like much, nor did he look like he was from Kepler. Too pale, too heavy-browed and far too hairy, with tufts of black hair sprouting from underneath his collar. It was hard to imagine a Kepler native leaving the house like that. Even booze-beach tourists took more pride in their appearance. In Hopewell's experience, nobody could live for long underneath Kepler's perfect sun without striving for similar perfection.
"None. To be honest, we don't even know if this was him. Sitting in the captain's s
eat doesn't make you captain."
The look on Florey's face made her want to laugh. Lucklaw touch a nerve? She wanted to prod it, make the lieutenant squirm in his metaphorical captain's seat. He might've parked his arse in it, but didn't deserve to be comfortable.
"If someone hadn't been so kill-thirsty, we might've questioned Mr. Sheppey," she said, raising her visor to glare at Florey.
"We're outnumbered in enemy territory. Couldn't afford to let them live long enough to raise the alarm."
"Fair enough," she said, but it wasn't really. Cassimer wouldn't have explained himself to her or anyone, and he certainly wouldn't have taken her insubordinate tone in stride. Using her tongue, she peeled the gum from the inside of her helmet and resumed chewing, and deep down she wished someone would give her a stern look and tell her to spit that out, Lieutenant.
"Lucklaw, get set up. The lieutenant and I will sweep the ship."
Lieutenant. Not Hopewell, not Innocence, and certainly not Hopey. At last, a hint of irritation.
"You're leaving me here?" Lucklaw stood underneath a string of fairy lights, red and blue and violet dancing over his twitching face. She supposed she should feel sympathy, should be remembering what it had been like to be new, but in truth, she'd been born a thick-headed hard-charger. She couldn't ever remember shaking like that, nor ever crying to a superior about being left alone.
"It's not your first day in primary school, Corporal. Sit down and do your job."
"Yes, sir. Only, the commander -"
"The commander's not here," Florey snapped, really snapped, raising his rifle, and for a second, Hopewell thought she might be forced to wrench the weapon from his hands before he did something stupid. But then he relaxed - and she wished she could do the same. "The commander abandoned us to play hero, and that's why there's only three of us, and that's why you have no one to watch your back. Do you understand, soldier?"
Lucklaw muttered a yes sir and turned his attention to the Cephalopod's systems. His task was simple: seize control and use the vessel's comms to send an emergency message to Bastion. Easy stuff; nothing that required backup or hand-holding, but Hopewell could understand why he'd objected. The Cephalopod was a bizarre creation and the bridge her brain, a red and pulsing space, tacky in every sense of the word. Staying on the bridge seemed wholly unappealing, and Hopewell knew for sure that if it were her, she wouldn't be able to resist the fraying edges of the duct tape, pulling a little bit here and a little bit there, picking at it like a dirty plaster until oops.
Not that the corridors were much better. The violet light of dying xenon made for poor visibility, and they had to go slow to avoid the ship's many health-and-safety violations. Floor tiles creaked and buckled, exposing electricity-spitting wires. A ceiling panel hung loose, swaying erratically in front of an air-conditioner that was kicking out more carbon monoxide than oxygen. The walls were a soft silver material dotted with brass rivets in a nonsensical, swirling pattern. The overall impression was one of space-faring antiquity.
I'll never complain about Primaterre tin cans again, she texted Florey. It was easier to bear the claustrophobia if she could deflect it with a bit of banter, even if she was still angry. Mainly because I think we're about to die.
Relax. If she made a Cascade fold in one piece, she's tougher than she looks.
Yeah, or maybe the fold had been the nudge to topple the row of poorly duct-taped dominoes. She intended to reply to that effect, but then the ship groaned - a long metallic sigh - and suddenly collapse seemed too imminent to joke about.
Florey stopped, indicating a padded door at the end of the corridor. She nodded, rifle at the ready. Her own sensors showed garbled nonsense, but Florey had linked his readout to her HUD, and she could see them in there, all the little RebEarth eggies in their basket.
"Concussive. See if we can't take a prisoner or two."
She nodded again, reaching for her grenade pack, but then the door slid open and -
oh shit
- she dove behind a corner, followed by Florey, whose APF crackled and flared under the impact of gunfire.
"They knew we were coming."
"How?" Florey sounded so crestfallen she wanted to smack him. How? He should know better than to ask stupid questions in the middle of a damn ambush.
"Doesn't matter," she replied and winced as another burst of bullets cut searing boreholes through the wall. "Need to end this before there's a damn hull breach. Expand your APF; I've got a few presents for them."
"Hang on - I've got movement. Two of them are breaking away. They're..." Florey turned his head sharply towards a door at the other end of the corridor. "They're making to trap us. Going to turn this damn corridor into a kill zone. All right. Okay."
Electricity swelled around her and the lieutenant needed say no more. This Florey, with his boots firmly planted on the ground, she knew as well as she did herself. Two concussive grenades went from her pack into the room at the end of the corridor. Before the light and screaming died down, Florey was already making his approach.
She made it halfway down the corridor, and then fell, one second running and the next eating floor tile. She tried to stand - tried to breathe - but couldn't.
Bullets whined over her head as Florey turned back for her, firing down the corridor. He grabbed her hand, pulled her to her feet and told her to run. Easier said than done, because her ribcage ached, and when she spat her gum out, it was pink with blood.
She stumbled over the threshold of the room as the last glittering mote of the concussive faded. Sleeping quarters - nice quarters, nicer than the habitat - and the bunks had been turned on their sides and stacked into a barricade. Thick velvet drapes hung from floor to ceiling, their hems smouldering from the concussive blast. Smoke had begun to fill the room.
Three RebEarthers lay sprawled on the ground, already clutching for their weapons, but Florey smashed through the barricade and put a bullet in the first. The remaining two were smart enough to yield.
"On your knees. Hands behind your heads. Hopewell, secure the prisoners." Florey glanced over his shoulder. "But keep your head down. Still got two out there."
"One of them shot me." She groaned as she bent to pat down the first prisoner. A busted rib, her HUD informed her, but it felt worse. An automatic message to Rhys unsurprisingly netted no response.
"Yeah, shit... I'm sorry. You okay?"
"What doesn't kill you, et cetera." She shrugged and tried not to think about how lucky she'd been. Her HUD reported two hits, one to her lower back and the other right below the neck. Armour-piercing bullets, of a high enough calibre that her suit had only just about mitigated the impact. Several reactive plates had been destroyed.
"Didn't see anything on my sensors. Didn't see anything at all, but I should have. Damn it, Hopey, I'm sorry."
Yes, he was, and about more than this. "The sewers probably damaged your suit worse than we thought. Can't rely on sensors, got to keep your eyes peeled."
A smattering of gunfire interrupted her. Florey, back pressed against the wall, shouted into the corridor:
"We've got two of your people in here. Want to see them alive again, put down your weapons and surrender."
"Surrender?" The second prisoner, writhing underneath Hopewell's thorough frisking, spoke up. Early forties, with her prematurely silver hair bound into a bristling braid. Very pale, very thin, with the unhealthy air of someone who spent more time in space than on good old-fashioned ground. "Why, so that we can die at the hands of Primaterre torturers?"
"As long as you're alive, there's always a chance you might escape," Hopewell said. She had no idea how these people had lived as long as they had with such a defeatist attitude. It was -
Something brushed past her, soft and quick, and for a second, she thought of home, of a sun-golden kitchen and a tabby cat rubbing up against her calves, and stars, she hadn't thought of Mikey in years, but when she turned around she half-expected to see him there, yellow eyes insisting that she h
urry up and get that can of tuna open. There was no Mikey, of course, and no RebEarth ship's cat either - no nothing, in fact. Only a thickening veil of smoke.
"You afraid of ghosts?" The RebEarth woman stared at her.
"What?"
"Don't engage, Hopewell," Florey said, and this time, she felt inclined to follow his advice. The smoke was so dense that she could barely see the other end of the room. Weird RebEarthers and cat-ghosts would have to wait.
"We need to put out the fire before the whole ship goes up." She made for the nearest drape, but was forced to retreat when the men in the corridor opened fire.
"Stay put. Lucklaw, does this ship have a fire suppression system?"
"Yes, Lieutenant. It should automatically detect and put out any fire."
"Well, it hasn't. Any chance you could engage it manually?"
"One moment."
In the corridor, pipes began to shake and quiver, rattling louder and louder until one of the pipes burst. White foam sprayed in a thick arc, nowhere near the burning sleeping quarters.
"Turn it off, Lucklaw!" Florey shot Hopewell a look as the foam sputtered out. Tiny puffs of chemical fire suppressant danced in the air.
"Playing havoc with your sensors?"
"Yeah, and now we have no visual either." He swore, but that was okay - that was part of Florey's thinking process. Although, full-blown flames were licking the walls now and something really ought to be done about that. Maybe the RebEarthers could put it out - surely they didn't want to burn alive.
"Hey, you." She nudged the first prisoner, whose bald head was inked with dense plumage. "You want to -"
He turned around and there was a damn rifle in his hands and he pulled the trigger -
A diagonal blaze of bullets cut across her torso. She fell, landing hard on her back, air punched from her lungs. The straw-like ends of a silver braid brushed against her visor as the female prisoner straddled her, and she had a gun too, too big for her gnarled spacer hands, too big for Hopewell to see anything but the maw of its muzzle. Metal pressed against her helmet and she made a strange little squeak, like the sounds Mikey would coax from mice. You shouldn't let him hunt, it's cruel, Chastity had said; but it's in his nature, Hopewell had protested, but now she wished she'd saved a few of those mice, because dying like this - dying, unable to muster more than a squeak - made her feel so very little.
