by Natalie Grey
“Punish— Jeltor, why are you acting like it already happened?” Barnabas frowned. “You said it was just a few minutes ago. We’re en route. Should we—”
“Don’t bother,” Jeltor expressed sadly. “There’s nothing left. He nuked it. A few ships got out, mine included. Many of the rest…” He paused. “They were civilians, Barnabas. On vacation. There was only a nominal military presence there. He picked a target that couldn’t fight back and he—” He broke off.
Barnabas’ face was white with fury. “He attacked civilians?”
“He said it was justice for our Navy helping you. He’s demanded they turn me over to face his justice as well. I…don’t know what else.” Jeltor gave a sound like a sigh, and his jellyfish-like body turned several brilliant colors before returning to its normal blue. “I stopped watching the message after that.”
“You did the right thing,” Barnabas said.
“I know. I know he had to be taken down—”
“No, I mean not listening to the message. From what little I saw in his children’s memories, he’s…not entirely sane.” Barnabas shook his head, his eyes distant as he thought through the memories from Uleq and Ilia Yennai. “I don’t think there’s much to be gained from listening to him.”
“All the same, could you send the message to us?” Shinigami asked.
Jeltor nodded. “I’ll transmit it in a moment. In the meantime, I suppose I should go back to Jotuna and see what they want to do with me.”
“What they want to—” Barnabas sputtered. “They’re not turning you over?”
“They might.”
“For the love of— We will meet you at Jotuna, then.” Barnabas’ voice was cold. “And I will explain to them that if they want to bow to the whims of a complete madman, they can turn themselves over, or no one. Koel Yennai is a megalomaniac. We are not bargaining with him.”
Jeltor paused but bobbed in a way that Barnabas knew was similar to nodding. “I would be glad to have you speak in my defense.”
“No defense is needed,” Barnabas contended. “But I will be glad to speak to them, yes. I will see you—”
The klaxons wailed, and Shinigami flickered in her seat. When she came back, she was wearing armor—and a cold expression.
“There’s a Yennai scout ship on our scanners,” she reported.
“Jeltor, we’ll have to call you back,” Barnabas relayed hastily. He ended the call and nodded to Shinigami. “Let’s get this scout ship before it gets word back to Koel.”
3
Shinigami cloaked the ship at once. The term actually covered a whole range of technologies developed specifically for her. She’d be visible to sharp-sighted individuals looking out of particularly clear windows on ships that were very close to them, but otherwise, they would not be seen.
Which was good, given that they should almost certainly assume the ship had already seen them—
A moment later, she did not need to assume. The ship angled toward them and accelerated, weapons primed. The Shinigami’s scanners caught a budding electrical charge. The scout ship had intended to paralyze them, then call for help.
Shinigami maneuvered the ship up and over the trajectory of the Yennai Corporation ship, then flipped end over end so that the Shinigami was above and behind it.
Living organisms were predisposed to maneuver according to their idea of where “up” was. They liked rising above the plane of battle, as if they were still preoccupied with the idea of planets and gravity, and that ships should go “up” to fly.
Sometimes she wondered how these species hadn’t managed to exterminate themselves before they ever got off-planet.
The scout ship slowed as it approached their last known point and fired two small missiles—the minor sort—to see if it could make the Shinigami swerve and somehow reveal itself.
It hadn’t accessed its big guns yet.
“I have an idea,” Barnabas said. He nodded to the image of the scout ship on their screens. “Would you be able to take control of its systems?”
“I don’t see why not.” Shinigami made her avatar shrug. “Of course…that does mean our cloaking won’t work. They’ll be able to see us with Mark 1 eyeball.”
“You don’t sound particularly worried.”
“I’m not. It’s just that we’ll need to keep moving, and you and fish-boy there—” she jerked her head at Gar “tend to lose your lunches when the rollercoaster goes on for too long.”
“That’s all right,” Gar said serenely. “We stocked up at the last station.” He produced two air sickness bags and passed one to Barnabas. Gar opened his with a flourish. “Do your worst.”
Barnabas gave a small sigh, but he took his bag without complaint. “Go on. I wasn’t particularly attached to my lunch in any case.”
“That’s the spirit,” Shinigami said encouragingly. “Attachment is the root of all suffering, you know.” She smiled as she delivered the Buddhist principle, knowing that it would make Barnabas twitch.
It did. He tried to hide it, but she was an AI, so she could see the minute wince that passed over his face.
She chuckled as she zoomed in to follow the other ship. She drew up underneath it, signals tangling with its built-in protections, and felt a wave of amusement when the other ship jerked and swerved. Someone must have seen her from a turret.
“Idiot,” she muttered. “He’s got his hands on the controls while he’s searching for us. Don’t they have any sort of computer intelligence?”
“That’s a question we should do our best to answer.” Barnabas’ voice was somewhat muffled by the bag. “It will inform our strategy. Whatever you find in his systems, make a note of it.”
“I’m not like you, Chief. I don’t just forget things I’ve seen.” She swooped out of the way as the scout pilot tried to fire preliminary missiles at them. “Too slow!”
Gar made a noise like a distressed velociraptor and buried his face in the bag, and Barnabas wrinkled his nose at the smell.
Shinigami would have been more amused, but her attention was well occupied between her maneuvers and her attempts to get into the systems of the scout ship. Small as it was, it contained a veritable trove of both information and weaponry.
Its programs and offensive capabilities had clearly been designed by a ruthless and powerful organization. Whereas the purpose of scout ships was usually to find information and allow the rest of the fleet to deploy as necessary, this one also possessed the ability to kill mid-sized ships.
Shinigami thought of Koel Yennai’s children, and of Barnabas telling her that Ilia had been ordered to kill Uleq. To her surprise, she felt sad. Koel had built his family and his organization the same way—as trained killers, all of them determined to show strength before anything else.
When had things like that started to make her sad?
She didn’t have time to think about it. She flipped and fired countermeasures to evade another set of missiles, then returned to hug the top of the scout ship. It tried desperately to evade her. It might not know what she was doing, but it was determined not to let her do it.
It didn’t have much of a chance. As it twisted and turned, banked sharply and flipped, Shinigami stayed right with it. She hacked her way into its systems slowly but surely until finally she disconnected the manual controls and swung the scout ship to face her. She held it, floating, and smiled.
Barnabas and Gar, both of whom had been doubled over their airsickness bags, looked up with interest.
“Just a moment…”
Shinigami worked her way into the messaging systems. There, in no less than three distinct places, she found embedded location tracking for any messages, as well as a subprogram that scanned and mapped any pulsars to send back.
That last one amused her. Humans had once done the same thing. They’d sent a tiny craft called Voyager out into the stars with a map of pulsars engraved on a plaque that would lead anyone who found it back to Earth.
It had been a remarkabl
y hopeful gesture from a species that had decided to trust that the universe was more likely to be a good place than a bad one. Those who made Voyager had wagered—wagered with their descendants’ lives—that it would not fall into the hands of anyone who would come and steamroll Earth.
Shinigami thought this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.
She didn’t mention any of this to Barnabas, who would probably wax poetic about the power of hope and how the universe wasn’t an inherently bad place. For someone who liked to think of himself as a jaded vigilante he really was hopelessly idealistic sometimes.
She snickered to herself quietly as she corrupted the data the messaging systems had attempted to relay back. Koel wasn’t likely to think it was an accident the location tracking didn’t work.
On the other hand, she didn’t want to give him any more clues than she had to about her capabilities. Embedding random number generators and white noise into his data was a fairly basic technique, and something he couldn’t reverse-engineer.
She nodded to Barnabas. “You’re good to go in three…two…one.”
Barnabas focused on the ship displayed on his screens. He wished he could see Koel’s face right now. Something about the male unsettled him in a way few people did. The hint of madness behind the eyes, perhaps. Koel was an entirely rational, logical person…
After you factored in his completely sociopathic view of the universe.
“It’s all beginning to come apart for you,” Barnabas mused, “isn’t it? You’d spent so long being careful, working from the shadows, and then as things began to accelerate, it all went wrong.
“You hold us responsible for the deaths of your children, perhaps. Yes, I was the one who ended their lives. But you were the one who raised them to be what they were. You were the one who terrified them into believing that you were a god, with infinite power over their life and death. Had I not been there, Ilia would have killed Uleq on your orders. You made both your children murderers. Do not rage at me for bringing them to account. Indeed, you have no one to blame but yourself for the fact that they are lost.
“Though I do not believe for one moment that you ever wanted your children to live their own lives and build their own destinies. You wanted them to glorify you, nothing more.”
Barnabas paused. What he wanted was for the Yennai Corporation to be extinguished. He also wanted Koel Yennai to face justice.
And he wanted those things to happen with a minimum of collateral damage.
But what could he say that would not prompt Koel to kill more innocents? He did not even know what Koel’s aims were. Perhaps the deaths of his children had spurred him to action earlier than he had planned. Perhaps he hoped to establish some sort of empire.
Barnabas needed to end this, and for that…he needed Koel to want to kill him more than anything else.
“You would never have succeeded.” He scoffed. “Your children were weak. They begged for their lives, and would have betrayed you in an instant if they thought it would save them. That is what you have built, Koel. Your underlings are like whipped dogs who cringe and cower for a single bit of kindness from you, and then when you need them most…turn on you.
“You will be destroyed by your own folly. You wanted power, no matter the cost to anyone else, and your legacy will be ruin and failure. It will be me they will remember, not you. It will be my name on the lips of billions. It will be my vision that shapes the universe.”
Barnabas cut the connection.
“Your name will be on the lips of billions?” Shinigami asked him. “That sounds like your nightmare.”
“I was going to say,” Gar murmured.
Barnabas shrugged. “I couldn’t think of anything that would piss him off more than to tell him that I was going to get everything he wanted.” He shuddered. “Who in their right mind would want to be known by billions? He should have asked Bethany Anne if being in charge of everything brings any joy.”
“You’re making a logical error,” Shinigami told him. “Bethany Anne doesn’t enjoy power, because she’s legitimately trying to make things better and balance the interests of her citizens. That’s a thankless shit-show. If you don’t care about them, though, and you can just trample all over them on a whim, power’s much easier to handle.”
“Ah, yes—the perpetual logical error of thinking that my enemies have even the dregs of a moral code.” Barnabas sighed, then nodded meaningfully to the scout ship on the screens. “As much as I hate to say it, that pilot cannot be allowed to tell them where he found us.”
Her face was cold and hard as she directed the missile that turned the scout ship into dust. At this range, with the ship trapped, they only needed one. She could have vented the ship, of course, but who knew what automated systems might remain in a Yennai Corporation ship?
No. Only dust was safe.
A thought occurred to her, and her avatar smiled. Human mannerisms were becoming second nature to her now.
“What is it?” Barnabas asked her curiously.
“Koel Yennai is dangerous,” Shinigami stated. She looked at him. “Some enemies, you wonder if they can change. You wonder if you should offer them mercy.”
“Like me,” Gar interjected softly. Barnabas and Shinigami turned to him in surprise, and he gave a small smile.
“Yes,” Shinigami agreed. “Like you.” She nodded at him, then looked back at the screens, where the rubble of the ship tumbled and glinted in the light of the distant sun. “But he’s gone out of his way—many times—to show that he will not change. That we should not make the mistake of trusting him, no matter how helpless we think he is.”
She smiled again, a rictus that chilled both Barnabas and Gar to the core.
“The only possible thing to do with Koel is destroy him completely.”
4
The bar at Huen Base was dirty and reeked of smoke. Zinqued’s eyes burned as he threaded his way between the tables. There was one alien in particular he’d searched for and tracked through what seemed like an endless set of systems, and to find her here, of all places…
It was good that she was here, Zinqued told himself. If she were here in this absolute hellhole, she’d almost certainly hear him out.
After their last run-in with the Shinigami, his captain had decided to go on the straight and narrow. Paun had given up stealing, or so he declared. He’d gone off to join some religious order, and was probably weaving baskets somewhere. Or teaching underprivileged children how to juggle.
Zinqued didn’t know the specifics, and he didn’t care. What he did know was that he’d managed to buy Paun’s ship from him and he’d gotten Chofal, the ship’s engineer, to sign on with him as well.
Paun clearly hadn’t thought it was a good idea to sell the ship to Zinqued. He seemed to know that Zinqued wasn’t done with his quest to find the Shinigami and steal it.
But no one else had wanted to buy the damned thing. The Julentai was a bucket of bolts, an old Torcellan Gav-class frigate that was held together with spit and a prayer. There were an abundance of deathtrap ships for sale. Paun’s wasn’t anything special, and he’d had no luck unloading it.
Zinqued had sold everything he had to buy the ship, but it had been worth it. He’d never owned his own ship before, and it was liberating. He could go wherever the hell he wanted, and take whatever jobs he wanted.
Sure, he’d promised not to steal anything anymore, but it was his opinion that promises you made to a creature with glowing red eyes and bloody teeth didn’t count.
So, with the Julentai at his disposal, he’d started tracking down one person in particular. A person who knew something about the Shinigami…and who might want revenge.
He’d tracked her through four stations before he heard a whisper that she’d come here—on the straight and narrow as well—and taken a job in one of the many factories that produced a nutritional paste for the variety of aliens in known space.
It was a miserable job. The paste might be nutrit
ious, but it was nasty. The factory owners usually used cut-rate ingredients, anyway. To keep the factories vermin-free they were usually on desolate moons like this one, so there was nowhere to go if you wanted to quit.
It was about the last place anyone in their right mind would go. By choice, anyway.
It wasn’t long before he spotted her. She was a Hieto, just like he was, so she didn’t make too much of it when he sat down next to her.
“Are you Tik’ta?”
At that, she looked up sharply. Her eyes were flat and hard. “My name is Hino. I don’t know any Tik’ta.”
“Sure, sure.” Zinqued smiled. “Just like you never tried to steal a ship called the Shinigami and watched your captain and crew get killed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m Hino. I’m just another factory worker here.”
“I saw you telling the story of the heist,” Zinqued said, amused. “On Uto, not too long ago. Someone brought up that they’d seen a human ship, a pretty thing with a new paint job named Shinigami. You told everyone to not even try to steal it. You said it was owned by a demon and that he’d killed your captain.”
She gave up trying to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Fine. But not so loud. Here, I’m Hino. I have to keep this job.”
Zinqued saw the bitterness in her expression. She was penniless now. What had happened to her after he had seen her on Uto?
“You sold the ship,” he guessed.
“I had to.” She looked at him bleakly. “Stealing ships was all we knew how to do. We wanted to try smuggling, but we weren’t sure if he’d find us and tell us we couldn’t do that either. Some of the crew left, they were so scared. Nothing good to smuggle, anyway. You couldn’t step on anyone’s turf without them coming after you. And when we tried to go straight, there were permits and certifications and deposits and—and bribes. We tried to do what he said, but it was impossible!”
“He ruined your life,” Zinqued said smoothly.
