by Erik Wecks
A Mercenary
in Escrow
A Deek Boomer Story
by Erik Wecks
Running
When Deek extricated himself from the eight-foot-tall lump of reddish-brown goo, he took off toward the Li Zhènfan without a word to his team. His gait resembled that of a leg-pumping, arm-flailing, frightened animal. It would hardly have been surprising to hear him shrieking in terror all the way through the alien forest. Droplets of the creature’s slime slipped off as he ran.
His team didn’t catch up until he was about to board his ship. At that point, his second-in-command placed all one hundred and twenty-five pounds of her five-foot-four frame in front of her commander. “Deek, we’re not going to run.”
Deek set his jaw and made to step around her without answering.
Mouse grabbed his arm with one hand while her other wandered to her sidearm. “Damn it, Deek! You will listen to me! We have to capture him!”
The angry outburst from his normally effervescent second caused Deek to stop moving and turn to face her. At any other point in time, he might have been amused. He towered over the young woman, and at thirty-two, he had at least a decade of experience on her.
Seeing the trouble, Pig’s eyes widened, and the prodigious hunk of human sinew and muscle bolted up the ladder as if someone had hit him with a zap stick.
Wonk, the ship’s tech and resident hacker, stopped before boarding and turned behind Mouse, ready to draw his weapon.
Deek waved him off with a slight shake of his head, then yanked his arm out of Mo’s grasp.
The tech shrugged and climbed aboard.
Irritated, Deek lashed out at the first thing that came to mind. “Gooeys aren’t ‘he’s or ‘she’s, Mo, they’re both!”
Mo’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t care if they’re the spawn of a hermaphrodite’s vomit! We can’t leave without that thing.”
Deek blew a calming breath out his mouth. The effort was only partly successful. “Mouse, what do you want me to do? I’ve touched the thing! The contract’s broke! Even if we had caught all the pieces, Tsunomo would have had our DNA off it in seconds. We’re going to get a black mark. More than likely, we wouldn’t have caught all the pieces anyway. You saw what that thing could do. One moment it’s a single mound of slime, then it divides into who-knows-how-many and bolts—all except for the piece that came after me. That one tried to drown me!”
“A black mark is better than dead, Deek. Let’s find another sack of gel and capture it. If we at least bring them something, we can skate out without dying. If we run, they’ll kill us.”
“You don’t know that, Mouse.”
Mouse rolled her eyes. “Shit, Deek! Multicorps like Tsunomo don’t let mercs like you and me run! They just don’t!”
Deek stepped back and tried to calm down. “Listen, Mouse, we can get out of this.”
Mouse put one hand on her hip. The other continued to rest on the gun.
Deek held his palms up. “Just hear me out. We can. Now, I was thinking while I was runnin’ back here, and I have a plan that I’m sure will work…”
Mo threw her hands up in the air. “No, Deek! I don’t want another of your plans! Your load of rat pellets landed us on the wrong side of a park boundary in the first place!”
Deek finally lost patience with his second and raised his voice, punctuating each word. “I will not become a slaver!” Pointing back into the forest, he said, “Those were sentient creatures back there. They talked to me in my head. I heard a lot of them, Mo. It wasn’t just one. It was a whole lot of them. If we capture a colony and give it to Tsunomo, we’d be breaking about a dozen inter-species treaties. There’d be at least one count of slavery for every sentient being in the blob. Hell, we might even face genocide charges. That’s a one-way ticket to the gasser, Mouse, for all of us. Besides, it’s just wrong, and I may be a filthy scoundrel, but I’m not a slaver. We have to run. Tsunomo has a destroyer hidden in orbit right now, waiting for the creature. At this moment, they probably have an attack drone sitting right over us, relaying this whole scene in real time back to the ship.”
The young woman’s eyes widened, and the blood drained from her face. “No shit, Deek? They talked to you?”
Deek continued to stare hard at his second. “No shit, Mo.”
Mo frowned. She looked at the dirt and angrily kicked the dust at her feet. “They’ve got a destroyer, and we’re not even armed. They’ll just melt us from orbit.”
“No, Mo, they won’t. They won’t fire on us while we’re in the park because they don’t want to let the feds know that they’ve broken the exclusion zone. That’s why we’re not dead already. If we weren’t in the park, the drone would have already replaced us with a crater.”
After a moment, Mouse nodded her head slowly. She glanced into Deek’s eyes and then looked back at the ground. “All right, Deek. We run. What’s your plan?”
Plans
In the mess room on the Li Zhènfan, Deek shrugged his shoulders at the end of his presentation. “It’s the only way.” He wasn’t sure he had been very convincing. He was up against the clock. If this was all going to work, they had to make their escape burn in a little over eight minutes.
Pig would do whatever he asked.
Wonk would do the calculations for himself and figure out that they were already all in. Every merc knew that when you were all in, the only thing you could do is double down and hope to God that you pulled an ace out of your hole and got all the way out. Halfsies weren’t an option for team Li anymore.
It was Mouse who worried him. If he was honest with himself, he had hired her as much for her hero worship as for her piloting skills. When he interviewed her six months ago, he had almost walked away. She was way too young, but something about the way she could hardly speak around the famous Deek Miller had stroked his dirigible-sized ego. Talking wasn’t usually her problem these days—it was getting her to shut up. But during the meeting, she had been completely silent.
Deek glanced her way. His second sat scowling at her boots. She had unzipped and half removed her still-running adaptive camouflage jumpsuit, leaving her tank underneath. The effect was disturbing. It looked much as if his second-in-command had been cut off at the waist, only to reappear again at her black boots.
Wonk leaned against the food printer, arms crossed. “You’ve always said that we should keep it simple, Deek. If something goes wrong here, we end up as nothing more than plasma. That isn’t simple.”
Deek nodded. “It’s as simple as it can be, Wonk. All the easy options end up with us buried in some corporate hellhole or dead. Trespassing in a park is a fine and at most a month in the federal hoosegow for me. If the worst happens, then you guys can get a break for a month, and when I’m out, we’ll rendezvous and try to get our lives back. Better to get pinched by the feds than Tsunomo.”
Wonk nodded his agreement.
Deek decided it was time to get started. He didn’t want them thinking too hard about all the ways this thing could go wrong. “Are we ready for our burn, Wonk?”
“I’ve got one more thing to do. It’ll take me ten minutes.”
Deek glanced at the wall. “We break orbit in seven. Have it ready.” Without waiting for a response, he headed for the cockpit.
Mouse stood and followed him.
Deek took the pilot’s seat, leaving the navigator’s for her.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Mouse’s pink lips thin to a tight line as she slipped into the open seat. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Captain.”
“So do I, Mo.”
Consequences
Twelve hours, nineteen minute
s, and four seconds after the Li Zhènfan began its escape burn, its pulse regulator failed and the reactor overloaded. Before shutting it down, the computer shunted the reactor’s excess output through the engines, causing the ship to randomly tumble through the void.
It remained inside the park. At their speed, Deek estimated they would have an hour before they drifted across the border.
Without the reactor sending the ship’s heat into a dimensional rift, the Li Zhènfan became visible to anyone watching. In the cockpit, Deek started a timer while alarms squawked at him. Mouse had them shut off within a few seconds. For a couple of minutes, they sat there silently as the stars wheeled around them.
After waiting an appropriate amount of time, Deek punched the button on the radio and the emergency beacon. “Mayday! Mayday! This is the Li Zhènfan. We’ve had a reactor malfunction. We request immediate assistance from the United Species Park Service.”
He set the message to repeat and carefully watched the plot on his map. Everything would be decided in the next several minutes.
The Tsunomo destroyer dropped its cloak only six seconds after the Li Zhènfan started broadcasting. The Li’s distress call wouldn’t even reach it for another two and a half minutes. Deek pounded his fist on the glass top of his control station, causing it to squawk. “How did they do it? I could have picked a hundred different courses out of the system, and they’re right on top of us. Why does nothing ever go right for me?”
Mouse shook her head. “How are we going to get out of this one, cowboy?”
The park station that was Deek’s target lay another fifteen and a half light-minutes directly behind the destroyer. When they drifted outside the park’s boundary, the destroyer would be right there to ambush them. They’d barely even have to warm their engines.
Deek did some quick mental math.
Mo muttered quietly under her breath, “Shitzu. I don’t want to be captured. Better a clean kill in space than captured by Tsunomo.”
“Yeah, shitzu is right.” Then Deek thought a little further. …or maybe not.
At best, they wouldn’t even get a response from the ranger station until the timer read thirty-one minutes. They would be getting uncomfortably close to the border at that point. He needed to do something to extend the time.
Deek turned to his second. He tried to sound natural. “Mouse, I need you to go down to the life pod and make sure it’s prepped and ready. Get a food printer out of the galley and stow it.”
“Deek, we’re not really thinking of—”
“I don’t want to, but it may come to that. No questions and no arguing. I’ve got work to do.”
“If they find us, they’ll shoot us in the park or no. There’d be no way the ranger station would even detect it.”
“Probably so, but it makes a much smaller target than this thing. Besides, you said you’d prefer a clean kill to capture.”
“I’d prefer to live.”
“That’s still the plan, Mo. Watch and learn.” He nodded to the door. “Get going.”
The girl folded her arms across her chest, opened her mouth to argue but thought better of it, and did as asked.
Deek hated lying to his second, but in this case, it couldn’t be helped. Some part of him wanted to protect her like an older brother would. Now he was going to ask more of her than he had of anyone. He hoped that he was right to put his faith in her.
Deek waited until he heard the cockpit door close behind him. Then he thumbed the com and spoke quietly. “Wonk.”
“Yes, Captain.” His quick-witted tech had caught on and answered softly.
“I need those engines ready to fire in fifteen minutes.”
“I can’t. The heat sink won’t recharge for at least two hours, and I have some real repairs to do down here. Our homemade accident did more actual damage than I expected.”
“Emergency procedures, Wonk. Shoestring the repairs and knock out all the safeties. I don’t want to use the heat sink. We’ll need to be moving at full burn in twenty minutes. So I need them heating, now.”
The com clicked on to respond, but there was a moment’s hesitation before Wonk spoke. “What’s up, Deek?”
“We’re screwed, Wonk.” Deek shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “We’ve got a Tsunomo destroyer about two light-minutes away, outside the park. Unless we burn, we’re going to drift across that boundary, and if they’re in a good mood, they’ll simply smoke us. We won’t hear from the ranger station for at least another twenty. If Tsunomo smokes us for breach of contract, it saves the ranger station the trouble of filing the trespassing paperwork. They won’t care.”
“You’re sure that’s the only way, Captain?”
“Yeah, Wonk, it’s the only way to keep us out of Tsunomo’s hands.” He paused. “And don’t tell Mouse. She’s going to shit her pants when she finds out. It’s at least a year in the clink for me, so we spring it on her when there aren’t other options. Got it?”
“Screwed, indeed. I’m disabling the safeties as I speak. It’s going to be really tight. I mean really tight.”
“Then get to it. Private text messages. Understood?”
“Yep. Wonk out.”
Five minutes later, the Tsunomo destroyer sent a message to the ranger station saying they were happy to assist the wounded vessel. Deek didn’t even bother to protest. The park wouldn’t have listened or cared.
Shortly afterward, the door to the cockpit slid open and Mo strode in, wide-eyed, still clutching the tool she had been using to extract the replicator from the galley. When she spoke, her voice was an octave higher than usual and twice as loud. “You aren’t going to do this to me, are you, Deek?”
Deek just looked at the floor. “Calm down, Mo. How did you figure it out? Did Wonk tell you?”
Mo gave him a look that varied somewhere between disdain and hatred. “No one said anything. I figured it out for myself. Burning your engines in a federal park without a heat sink is vandalism, Deek. That’s jail time for sure.”
“It also means that they won’t let Tsunomo take us. They’ll intervene and get us themselves.” Deek folded his hands. He had no intention of sugarcoating this. “It’s a minimum one year, with up to three. That’s not that bad.”
“A year! Captain, you can’t do this. I’m not ready.”
He shrugged. “If we don’t burn, that Tsunomo destroyer plinks us out of the sky in forty minutes. If we do, the park service is forced to take action. Federal law trumps a corporate contract, so we stay alive.”
“You haven’t trained me!”
Deek leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers behind his head, and lied again. “There’s not much to it, Mo. Neither of the other two are qualified for captain. It’s either that or we take our chances in the life pod, and I don’t like those odds.”
Mouse nodded. She continued to frown as she stared at the ground. “I always thought I might like a ship of my own someday—and the Li’s a pretty tough little bastard—but that was supposed to be years down the road.”
Mo’s statement made the hairs on the back of Deek’s neck stand on end. He sat up. “You will come get me, won’t you? I mean, the merc permit goes with the ship, but it’s my ship.”
Called back from her reverie, Mo rubbed her hand through her hair and gave him a weak smile. She reached out for his arm and, just before touching him, pulled her hand back. “Don’t you trust me, Deek?”
Deek looked at her sideways and flashed a quick grin. The hairs on his neck didn’t lie back down. “Of course I trust you.”
He shrugged. “Besides, it’s a first offense. They’ll never give me more than a year.”
Cold Welcome
Deek shielded his eyes as he walked out into the baking heat of Tau Ceti C’s light. It was the first time he had seen true daylight in over three years. Under his left arm, he clutched a box containing his possessions. The blast doors of the prison complex slammed shut behind him with an echoing thud. Squinting into the glare, Deek reco
gnized three people waiting at the end of the electrified fence. He strolled toward them with long strides and a smile, his hands buried in the pockets of a camouflaged uniform he had worn when arrested three years prior.
None of them made any move toward him.
When he reached his crew, he looked down at the wiry woman who stood with her arms folded across her chest. She wore a pair of ’nocs pulled up like a bandana around her bright pink pigtails, and black-and-white deactivated camouflage, much like his own.
Deek smiled at the girl. “Mo, I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
She shrugged, and said flatly, “Neither was I.”
Deek nodded and then looked away, still smiling. He moved on to shake the enormous hand of the hulk standing behind her.
“Hi, boss,” said Pig in a sonorous bass.
Deek’s smile widened. “Hey, Pig.”
Pale, tall, and as skinny as a bean pole, Wonk stood next to the hulk, arms crossed, leaning against the fence, toothpick clenched between his lips. When Deek turned to him, he smiled a little too brightly and said, “Good to see ya, Deek!”
Deek tried to ward off the chill that ran down his spine at the man’s touch.
They weren’t happy to see him.
He returned Wonk’s smile. “So…I see you all survived.”
The girl stood straight and clenched her fists, her dark face flushing.
Wonk spat his toothpick to the ground.
Unfazed, Deek continued to smile warmly. “Well, I’m just glad that you’re all still together. That has to count for something.”
The girl only turned and started to walk away. The other two followed.
Deek shifted the box under his arm and kept his sunny disposition as he spoke to their retreating backs. “Well, I am glad.”
No response.
He was working hard to keep up. He tried the girl again. “I like the change in hair color. It suits you.”
The compliment was returned to Deek unopened and accompanied by a rude hand gesture.
