by Alex White
If she didn’t do anything, she might not survive to the next race.
Nilah pushed more of her magic into the ship, tensing up at the exertion required to penetrate its basic portals. The Capricious’s network materialized in her mind like a fortress. Primary engine control would be heavily guarded, so she couldn’t go after it right away. If she could take out the defense program, she’d gain access to the ship’s core functions.
Find the point no one watches. Somewhere on the Capricious, a pantry lock began to slide open and closed. Nilah toggled it repeatedly, thrice per second for ten seconds. When she felt the hot surge of the ship’s defense program, she jolted back out of sync. She dove back in and started slamming the closet door in the captain’s quarters. When she finished that, she opened all the cabinets in med bay, then closed them in alternating intervals. She led the defense program on a wild goose chase, burning down its resources in the process.
Half of the defense program went to protecting all portals, so Nilah moved on to toilets. Then she flipped light switches. She adjusted the temperature by one degree on alternating decks. She turned on music in the crew bunks. She locked all the showers on cold.
Finally, she moved to fix the two-seventy engine. The defense program appeared before her, stretched thin with her probing—defenseless against her magic. She tore open its threads of code with a mighty pull of her spell, and it dissipated.
She bandaged the engine as best she could. The fix wouldn’t bring the engine to full, but it beat nothing.
She then patched into the intraship comms system and listened to the chatter. They’d been attacked by five ships, and it sounded like Boots and someone named Orna fought them off. The pilot sounded excited to have her engine back, so Nilah set to work on the artificial gravity. The racer didn’t much feel like helping her kidnappers, but she also didn’t want to be blown to bits.
Nilah inspected the long-range communications array and saw only hopelessly destroyed wreckage; so much for calling for help. The next best thing: force them to put her somewhere less secure in the future. With the defense program out of commission, she cross-wired the force field generators on her cell, burning them out with a loud hiss and a chemical stench. They’d have to be completely gutted and replaced.
The spells had taken a lot out of her, but Nilah’s days on the racetrack had done a lot to prepare her: two hours at a stretch of hard synchro with her car under intense conditions. Even in her beaten state, she could handle more punishment.
She crept out of her cell, where she found a hardwired console with field controls, lights, and all other types of access. With her hand directly on a conduit, she could do a lot more damage. She patched into the ship’s speaker system as she sealed the bridge doors.
“Listen up. This is Nilah Brio, and your ship is mine.”
Orna’s remote landing protocol did a better job than Boots would have. The Capricious’s two-seventy had taken damage, and it spun lazily as it drifted through space. Boots was sorely out of practice, and docking with a cartwheeling ship wasn’t a challenge she felt like facing. They passed through the open cargo bay and into the scaffolding, but before the mag locks could engage, the ship stopped spinning.
The screech of metal tore through Boots’s eardrums as the Runner scraped along the ceiling and slammed into the wall, snapping off one of its maneuvering thrusters. The starfighter listed before Orna cut the power in half and sent them plummeting to the deck. Sirens and proximity alarms went wild with the teeth-rattling crash, and Boots opened her eyes to find she still lived. It had been a painful impact, but not nearly as bad as taking a direct hit to the power core. The ship would still fly again … one day.
Boots’s arms settled over the control sticks, and she realized the artificial gravity had returned. The cargo bay slammed closed, and the swell of pressurization echoed through the chamber.
Ranger’s heavy footfalls sounded from above on the rear engines, followed by the metallic thud of the suit landing hard on the cargo deck. He tromped out in view of the canopy, but Orna wasn’t inside him. His chest plate hung open, exposing the cushions where a rider might sit, which meant Orna was still hanging around on the ship. It wasn’t pointing its guns at Boots, probably because it was empty, but she hadn’t forgotten it tearing a man from the cockpit.
Right on cue, a knocking came on top of the canopy, and Boots turned to see the quartermaster standing directly on top of her, brandishing her high-cal slinger.
“I’m going to open this ship, and you’re not going to do anything stupid.”
Boots shrugged and held up her hands. “What would be the point?”
Orna bared her teeth and locked back the hammer. “You wrecked my ship, so I’m including ‘talking’ in the list of stupid things you could do.”
The quartermaster climbed to the wing while the canopy slid open, all the while keeping her weapon trained on Boots. Together, they climbed off the ship, and Boots got a good look at the outside.
The fighter had suffered cosmetic damage all over, and Boots saw the telltale signs of overthrust ringing the outer boosters. The spotless paint job appeared to have been attacked with a knife. Sections of the fuselage were warped from numerous impacts, the nozzles would have to be changed out before it would be airworthy again, and the landing struts had taken a shearing hit.
Angry lightning flashed in Orna’s eyes as they crisscrossed the wreckage, cataloging each tiny nick and dent for Boots’s indictment. Orna’s breath heaved in her chest; her cheeks flushed with anger. Every muscle in her body was coiled taut, and Boots prepared herself for a beating.
Then the quartermaster’s gaze left the ship long enough to recognize a new, critical fact: all of her tools and special projects were gone.
All of the color that filled her livid form drained away through her feet, and she whipped her head around in wide-eyed horror. Her gun left Boots, and Orna stomped from place to place, screaming at the voids where her precious instruments had once lived.
Boots could only look on in fear; to move or speak would be certain death. But then, failing to put some distance between them might also spell doom. Ranger stood impassively by, a nightmarish giant of clacking armor, its fingers twitching with each howl Orna made.
When Orna had finally confirmed the passing of her most favorite spanners, the quartermaster rolled over to Boots like a molten wave of star stuff, her gun snapping into place at Boots’s forehead.
“You need to think about what you’re doing,” breathed Boots. “Think about what Cordell is going to say.”
“How many people have I killed for less?” Orna’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks, leaving only the blue of a gas flame.
“I know, but I … but I didn’t leave the tools out …”
Orna’s lip quivered. Whether she was about to cry or had merely lost control of her face, Boots would never know, because the next words she heard were:
“Listen up. This is Nilah Brio, and your ship is mine.”
It’d come from the speaker system, and bounced off every wall to hit Orna again and again.
The quartermaster smiled—not a happy grin; more like a tiger being released on its captors to lay waste to their flesh.
“Pilot,” said Nilah, “you’re going to lay in a course for the jump gate and get us to Taitu, or I’m going to depressurize the bridge. Do you understand me?”
Orna’s eyes sliced into Boots, but the frightful grin never left her face. For her part, Boots only raised her hands and shrugged. Any comment might be taken as an excuse for execution.
“I say again,” came Nilah, “do you understand me?”
Orna laughed out loud: a hoarse bark, like she’d been punched in the gut. Then the laugh came again, longer and more sustained. It died to a chuckle, and she checked her weapon’s clip, spun on a heel, and marched for the door. Boots started to follow, but the quartermaster’s pistol barrel swung in her direction without even a broken stride.
Boots raised her hand
s, backing away slowly, as her captor disappeared into the bowels of the ship.
“That’s just what we were doing, sweetheart,” said a man’s voice over the ship intercom. “Keep your pants on.”
Nilah pressed her palms to the sides of the console, projecting her speech across all intraship comms. “Call me sweetheart again and you won’t have air to do it a third time. Identify yourself.”
“Cordell Lamarr, captain of the Capricious. And you’re Nilah Brio.”
“Why have you kidnapped me? Money? You’re not getting anything.”
“You seemed like you were in a spot of trouble, swee … Nilah. We couldn’t just leave you unconscious on Gantry Station,” said Cordell. He cleared his throat. “Also, uh, our quartermaster didn’t know who you were.”
Nilah snorted. “And that’s a reason to kidnap someone?”
“She figured you had a beef with Boots, and that was a good reason to bring you along.”
The racer started to respond, but her voice distorted and fell out of sync with the ship as she was cut off. A powerful presence cleanly sliced her connection to the Capricious … did the defense program reboot? It couldn’t have; she’d ripped that thing in half. She slapped her hands back onto the console and linked into several low-level circuits. Once again, she saw the shape of the network in her mind, humming pathways and conduits pulsing with light.
In her mind’s eye, a black shape, swift and vicious as a cat, swept down upon her, rending her from the ship with a howl. Her psychic connection fizzled out, leaving her back in the real world. Nilah screamed, pulling back her now-cooked palms and blowing on the hot skin. It had to be another mechanist intervening, but Nilah hadn’t seen anything like that before. At the academy, she’d done a bit of countersynchronization, but hadn’t been very good. She’d always been a tuner.
Still, she wasn’t about to back down. People didn’t die in PGRF racing, but it was still a dangerous sport, full of quick thinking and daring wagers. She was the best in the galaxy, and she’d be damned if she let some trash from a defunct warship take her out.
Gingerly she laid her burning hands across the console screen, tentatively feeling for a connection. As soon as she penetrated the ship, the black shape was upon her. Nilah weaved across pathways and pipelines, throwing interference and shields into her path as she fled. To her surprise, the other mechanist made no effort to avoid these traps, instead smashing through them with no regard for his or her own safety. Nilah wove a sever circuit into the infrastructure, and the other mechanist slammed into it, vanishing from the system with a woman’s scream. Nilah grinned as control of the ship returned to her.
Whoever the other mechanist was, she had no tactics or talent. Her strategy was blind attack with as much strength as she could muster, and that was her undoing. With a little finesse, even the strongest opponents could be destroyed.
Except the jet-black presence began pouring in from a conduit in the midship, flooding across the systems and obscuring them from view. Nilah found herself retreating again, ceding more control than she’d intended. When she was ready to retaliate, the other mechanist disappeared. She was about to try to tap into the camera system to find her opponent when the inky shape reappeared, knocking out the lighting and camera systems outside the brig.
“Bloody—” Nilah began, but stopped short when a tall, raven-haired woman stomped into the room with her, slinger at the ready.
Oddly, the gun wasn’t what transfixed Nilah as she surveyed the newcomer—it was the woman’s taut, sweat-slicked arm muscles, covered in tiny scars like she’d gotten in a fight with a wildcat. The scars crisscrossed every inch of exposed skin, rising to her face. The largest cuts ran across her cheeks, just under her icy eyes. Her chest heaved with each quivering breath, but her gun remained steady and locked on Nilah’s head. The racer knew beyond the shadow of a doubt: this was the enemy mechanist.
“Hi,” Nilah said, never breaking contact with the ship’s console.
The woman’s eyes bored into her—a snake transfixing its prey. She snapped back the hammer on her slinger. “If I pull this trigger, you won’t exist anymore. I won’t even have to scatter the ashes.”
“Do you know who I am?” asked Nilah.
“Yeah, I know your name. If you don’t take your hands off my ship, I’ll write it on your tombstone.”
The woman looked down her nose and cocked an eyebrow, and a prickle of heat traveled over Nilah’s skin. She told herself it was the cool malice of the statement, but there was something about this brute.
Nilah grimaced as she fiddled with the ship’s controls, disabling a set of safety overrides. “I’d love to take my hands off, but … I’ve switched engine containment to manual, so if you don’t back down, I’ll blow us all to space dust. Are we crystal?”
The engine bucked like a wild animal as Nilah adjusted the shields inside a half dozen times per second. Before she’d taken the safeties off, she imagined it would be like tuning her car on the fly during a normal run on the track. Faced with the raging energies of a destabilizing core, she realized she’d underestimated the ship’s scale. This wasn’t a race car; if she made a mistake, or broke contact for even a second, the whole thing would go critical.
The woman’s eyes went wide, and she pressed her palm to the ship. The mechanist’s dark cloud circled the periphery of systems, but Nilah knew she wouldn’t interfere. She only wanted to see for herself.
“You’re crazy,” whispered the woman.
“No,” Nilah grunted. “I’m the best tuner in the galaxy … and right now … I need concentration.” She spared a nod at the slinger. “What’s your name?”
“Orna.”
“Orna, disarm your slinger and toss it over here.”
The woman did as she was told, and Nilah’s eyes roamed over the rest of her body. Someone like her would have more than just one weapon.
Nilah sucked in a quick breath as the engine almost escaped her control. She couldn’t keep this going forever, and this woman was too much of a threat. “Strip to your skivvies and kick your clothes over here.”
“What?”
“You’ve got more weapons. I’m sure of it.”
Orna shook her head. “You’re not going to kill us all.”
Nilah’s heart thudded. “I am. I defy death every time I race.”
The tall mechanist took a large step into the room, bringing her into arm’s reach. “A pampered, pretty thing like you? I doubt it. You want to live just as much as everyone else.”
Nilah’s hands were glued to the console, and it took all her concentration to keep the system contained. She could do nothing as Orna reached up and wrapped her hands around the racer’s throat, squeezing lightly.
“Put the containment fields back,” Orna growled into her ear, “or I’ll snap this skinny neck and end us all.”
Nilah tried to reply, but Orna’s vice-like grip pulsed, silencing her. The engine core thrashed wildly at its surroundings, scorching one of the control panels. If she didn’t set it right soon, there wouldn’t be enough left to save them.
Orna whispered into Nilah’s ear, hot breath tickling her sensitive skin. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve done to survive against far worse threats than you. I’m impressed that you carried it this far, but no more negotiations.”
Klaxons blared once again, and the radio echoed through the ship. “This is the captain again. I hate to bother you down there, but we’ve got two jump ships rolling up on us, and they’re not responding to hails.”
Orna’s grip tightened, and blood filled Nilah’s cheeks. She took a last reedy breath before her airway closed altogether. Dizziness overtook her, and she started to lose control. Nilah didn’t have a choice; she set the fields back the way they were, returning the systems to nominal operation.
Her assailant relaxed just enough to let her have a tiny sip of air. “Now let go of the console.”
And for the second time that day, color drained away from the w
orld around Nilah, and time sunk into syrupy slow motion. She recognized it instantly: Mother’s spell.
Nilah’s body lagged under the weight of magic, and her eyes strained to follow commands. The ship’s systems, however, were millions of times faster than a human body, and with her hands still on the console, she connected to the external camera feeds.
It didn’t take long to find the two bright yellow cruisers half a kilometer away. They must’ve jumped in next to the Capricious to get that close without a fight. And the Capricious, lacking its own jump engine, would never get away. Intricate designs crisscrossed the newcomers’ hulls like silver vines, and she couldn’t identify the make.
She did, however, recognize the missile launchers emerging from pod bays on both ships.
Patches of color ran across the Capricious’s plating where Mother’s spell was either unstable or ineffective. Nilah thought back to Mother’s murder of Cyril. He’d been in color as well, and able to move normally, which meant … Nilah swiveled the camera and cross-referenced the locations against the ship’s critical systems. Flicking through the internal cams, Nilah saw a cone of color extending all the way down to life support.
The recent arrivals were planning to drive a spike through their hearts—no running, no evasion, no shields.
She flicked back to the exterior cameras. Flashes popped along the enemy hulls as a half dozen missiles launched toward them. She tried connecting to the amp to retarget the captain’s shields, but they wouldn’t move without him. Ship dispersers wouldn’t target in time, since they still had to physically swivel.
She thought back to her car, the way it had teleported when she mixed energy from the Arclight Booster into Mother’s spell. There had to be a dimensional element to Mother’s power, the way space bent when it was broken, but the effect was unpredictable. If she could dump energy into the spell again, maybe she could bend space once more. But then, who knew where they’d end up?
Missiles closed on the Capricious like a school of hungry piranhas.
