Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  He stopped for a moment in the doorway, though he did not turn. “You want to pay me some money?”

  You could always depend on a mercenary, Marin thought. “You want to pick up Harrison Shapiro’s contract?”

  “Like the rest of us,” Jazinsky muttered, “most of whom had the choice – go legit or go to Jackson for twenty-five years.”

  Now van Donne’s blond head swiveled, and the look he gave Marin might have flayed the flesh from his bones. “Subcontract,” he rasped. “You need me, you pay me, I put the Mako in the air at Celeste. Shapiro can kiss my sweet round ass.”

  With a snort of ribald humor, Ramon seemed to propel the trio out of the lounge, and Marin permitted himself a chuckle. Vaurien was less amused, and Jazinsky’s pale blue eyes spat daggers after van Donne. It was Travers who leaned closer to Richard and observed,

  “You don’t look happy. Something’s not right.”

  “Ship or crew problems?” Marin wondered.

  “No such luck. Those are easy fixes.” Vaurien toyed with the last piece of croissant. “I spent a rapturous half hour trying to understand the new round of data out of Barb’s lab. She left me behind a long time ago, but I like to think I can follow the concepts. This, though…” The thought trailed off into silence.

  “The Zunshunium? The drift mines in Alshie’nya scooping the stuff out of space?” Travers speculated.

  “No, that part of it’s sorted,” Vaurien mused. “Zunshunium. I like the name. According to the last reports I had from the Wings of Freedom, they were ahead of their time frame. They modified two holds to contain the stuff – which is hotter than hell, you understand.”

  “I been trading messages with Paulie Wymark,” Ingersol added. “Like I was saying when we walked in here, I know – fact! – I’ve got the Arago configuration nailed. The top-fuel, and the Zunshu hull alloy, I can work them both. If Paulie and the gang on the Wings let it get away from them, bring the job home, Rick. Me and Barb can do it right here.”

  For a moment Vaurien froze, coffee halfway to his lips. Then he finished the movement, swallowed, and looked at Travers. “You see? We can do the hull alloy that’s going to armor Lai’a inside the guts of Hellgate. We can work the fuel that’s going to jumpstart the hyper-Weimann engine inside the e-space layers of the drift. Item by item, I can handle it. It’s when you put all the pieces together ...”

  “You start to get freaky,” Jazinsky finished. “Oh, yeah. It gives me the shivers. The kind where your bone marrow feels a lot like jelly, and the room suddenly gets too bright, and you break out in a sweat and want to heave.” She made a vague and yet grand gesture with her mug. “Do you realize we’re standing on the threshold of the future? We’re doing a pirouette right on one of history’s pivot points!”

  “That, my dear, is the reason I change my underwear so often.” Vaurien pushed his mug across the table. “Somebody get me more coffee. Please. We’re doing things that have never been done before … we’re off the map. Literally.”

  “Scared of the dragons out here?” Jazinsky was too tired to tease, but the old banter she shared with Vaurien was automatic.

  “Dragons,” Richard echoed. “Strange you should say that.”

  Travers glanced sidelong at Marin. “Come again?”

  But Vaurien seemed to shake himself awake. “Elarne,” he said thoughtfully. “The Vast. The Resalq call it ‘the stormy side of the sky.’ A webwork of wormholes that undermine everything we know as reality and every place we think of as normal.” His brows rose. “You ever wonder if Elarne is the normal space, and we’re living in a dimensional bubble … stuck in three dimensions like flies in amber … while the trans- or multi-dimensional creatures to whom Elarne is normal space look down on us and wonder how we get by, stuck like that.” He paused long enough to take a fresh mug from Ingersol. “In which case, you ever give a thought to the worm in the wormhole?”

  With deliberate movements, Jazinsky set down croissant and coffee, reached across the table and laid a palm on his forehead. “You’re delirious. Give me your hand. Somebody ought to take your pulse.”

  The soft beep of a scanner issued from Bill Grant’s outstretched hand. “How long since you got any sleep, boss?”

  “Sleep?” Vaurien batted Jazinsky’s hand away and knuckled his eyes, leaving them bloodshot. “What’s that?”

  The medic growled eloquently, but before he could give Vaurien orders to go away and lie down, a quiet chime from the comm intruded. It was Greenstein, from the flight deck. Vaurien seemed to seize the call as his escape.

  “Dropping out in three minutes, Richard,” Greenstein told him. “Any change in plans?”

  “No – stand off and take a full sweep of the whole system,” Vaurien told him. “If it moves, I want to know where it’s going. If it doesn’t, I want to know where it is. Pipe the data to Barb, and if the place looks kosher, park us in a high orbit, and call some roach, name of … what the hell was it?”

  “Belczak,” Jazinsky said in the direction of the comm pickup. “Seems he murdered his way to command on Celeste.”

  “And therefore he has a lot of enemies,” Marin mused, “which might be something we can use.”

  “How long, Yuval?” Vaurien was asking.

  “Dropout in a minute or so. Give me ten to scan the system – it’s big and messy – and five to crunch the data. Where will you be?”

  “Here.” Vaurien swung his bare feet up onto the next vacant seat and leaned his head against the bulkhead right behind him.

  His eyes were closed, and Grant made doubtful noises. “Don’t get comfortable, boss. It’s harder on your nervous system to start to relax, maybe doze, and then jerk back awake.”

  “And don’t I know it.” Vaurien did not open his eyes. “Three cups of coffee, Bill. Stop worrying about me.”

  “It’s my job to worry about you,” Grant retorted.

  “Since when?” Travers pushed out from the table and dropped a hand on Marin’s shoulder. “You want to get geared-up, maybe preflight the Capricorn, in case we’re moving in a hurry?”

  “Since the skipper made me chief medical officer on this ship,” Grant said loudly. “Your health’s my bloody responsibility, Captain. You own my contract, so when are you going to start letting me do my job?”

  The question was a good one. Marin watched the pageant of expressions which played out on Vaurien’s expressive face, from frustration to amusement. He, Travers and Grant waited for Richard to answer, while the Wastrel gave that peculiar shimmy that told them she had dropped back into normal space.

  At last Vaurien said ruefully, “When this is all over, Bill. I’ll let you zonk me for a week. But I don’t think you’ll need to. When the DeepSky Fleet has pulled out, and the colonial governments are settling in to home rule, and the door’s been slammed on the Zunshu … I’ll put my head on a pillow and you won’t see me for three days.” He opened one eyelid. “Good enough?”

  “No,” Grant grumbled, “but it’s the best I’m about to get, so I’ll make do, and run about after you with vitamin shots. You can crash on the way back to Borushek. Two days, comm turned off, threedees shut down, the works. Just sleep and food, and a good hump, if there’s somebody on this flying asylum who’ll do it for you.”

  “Flying asylum?” Travers echoed. “That’s what we used to call the Intrepid.”

  Grant gave him a faint, haunted smile. “Don’t remind me.”

  “No comm, no threedees, nothing but sleep and food and ...” Vaurien opened one eye far enough to regard Travers with all due amusement.

  “You,” Jazinsky accused, “are the proverbial glutton for punishment.” She leaned over and dropped a kiss off-center of Richard’s wide mouth as she pushed away from the table. “A good hump, the man said. Doctor’s orders. Bill’s orders, which means a whole lot more around here than medical twaddle.”

  “You’re in charge,” Grant decided. “The first thing they teach you in med school: learn how to delegate.”
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  “You hear that Richard?” Jazinsky was on her way out. “I’ve been delegated.” She turned back for one moment, and one pale blue Pakrani eye winked at him. “I’ll be in the lab. I want to see Yuval’s scan data.”

  “And we,” Marin added, giving Travers a solid shove, “will be prepping the Capricorn.”

  They were in the service lift moments later, sharing it with two industrial drones on their way to the machine shops, and Curtis settled both shoulders against the brushed steel wall. He angled a thoughtful look at Travers, waited for Neil to wonder what was on his mind, and said levelly,

  “What’s the story with you and Richard?”

  “Me and Rick Vaurien?” Travers’s dark head shook. “We were lovers a long, long time ago. Neither of us is going to forget it, even if you wanted us to get a sudden case of selective amnesia –”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know.” Travers produced a rare, crooked smile. “Richard waited for me, when I went back to Fleet. I was too young, not ready to settle down to one partner, one future. He’s a lot older. Probably wiser! He was quite ready to settle, but me? I had to roll the dice one more time. Nearly got myself killed. You have no idea what the Intrepid was like in that last six months.”

  “I was aboard when she died.”

  “For a few days.” Travers shook his head. “You don’t know the reality of it, Curtis. You don’t want to know! Me and Richard? He waited too long, and he knows it. He matured a good few years ahead of me, and they made all the difference between ...”

  “Between you being Vaurien’s partner, and not,” Marin finished.

  “Yeah.” The lift opened onto the hangar deck and Travers stepped out. The cold raised a prickle of goose flesh along his neck and arms. “If you’re getting anxious about him and me – don’t. In many ways, I still love him, but not the way I love you. And if he can, he’ll be there when we handfast.”

  “All right.” Marin was a pace behind him, watching the flex of the big shoulders as Travers strode toward the dark, quiescent shape of the Capricorn. “I feel almost like an intruder at times.”

  “No need to.” Travers slowed, stopped to wait for him. “Richard might have been waiting for me, but the truth is – and it’s damned hard to say! – if I’d felt about him the way he did about me, I wouldn’t have returned to Fleet.” Both his hands rested on Marin’s shoulders. “I walked away from him because I was still looking for something. At the time, I thought it was the adrenaline rush, the challenge out here, dancing on the knife’s edge.”

  “And now?” Marin wondered, beguiled by the way the hangar lights danced in Travers’s dark blue eyes.

  In answer, Travers leaned forward and kissed him. “I found what I was looking for, and Richard’s smart enough to know it. He’s also forgotten how much he loves Barb. She wasn’t much more than a kid when he yanked her out of the pipeline before Fleet could get to her. She grew up while he watched – bigger than him, smarter than the three of us put together! You know what Richard needs?”

  “Tell me,” Marin invited. His left arm snaked around Neil’s waist as they strode on toward the Capricorn.

  “He needs somebody beside him who’s big enough, strong enough, to take part of the load off his shoulders … and who cares enough about him to get past the dumb crap he’s put himself through lately, and still be there in the dead of night, when he needs it.”

  “You mean, losing you?” Marin was halfway up the Capricorn’s side ramp, and angled a glance back at Travers.

  “I mean Tonio Teniko,” Travers said darkly. “You know he won’t answer the kid’s calls now.”

  The interior lights flicked on with a dry crackle and the vents began to blow hot air a moment later. “I can’t say I blame him. Dealing with a little fool who’s gotten himself right back into three different kinds of addiction, on top of serious mental instability – Richard doesn’t need that. Not now. No one has time to cope with Tonio’s kind of trouble.”

  Under any other circumstances the judgment might have been harsh, but Marin made it without hesitation. He slid into the pilot’s seat and reached for one of the combugs which sat in the rack at his right hand. Travers took the left-side seat, from which he could wrangle weapons, ordnance, Arago screens, while Marin handled power, navigation, sensors and engine alignment.

  As the combug slipped into his ear, Marin found himself listening to Greenstein, Jazinsky and Ingersol on the Wastrel’s busy loop. The system scans were complete, and Ingersol had popped a dozen drones into space to cover the outer orbits while the big ship drove in, through a realm of the immense gas giants, each mineral-rich in its own right, but beyond the technical reach of Freespacer operations, into the warm, bright orbits of the rocky worlds. Globes which were much more inviting to habitation.

  Most were barren, but three were well within the potential of the terraformers. One was much too hot to support human life without a great deal of reworking; one was too cold, its atmosphere frozen out into a thick rime of ice for two thirds of its year. The third, situated between them, was in the sweet spot, with just enough liquid water to generate a decent atmosphere, and enough gravity to hold onto it.

  According to Greenstein’s preliminary scans, gravity was one of Celeste’s problems. It was forty percent over the Earth normal which was preferred by most human forms. The second of Celeste’s problems was the acid nature of the atmosphere. The gas mix enveloping the planet was oxygen poor, with a high content of sulphuric compounds, whipped out of a ground cover which had been laid down by monstrous volcanoes in the too-recent geologic past. The world’s topography was created by violent eruptions, several of which had come close to shattering the planet entirely. Volcanism was far from dormant now, but the safety valves had blown, letting off enough pressure for Celeste to settle down into an uneasy peace.

  The atmosphere was dense enough, but its oxygen content was twenty percent below any level which suited human lungs, and the winds which ravaged the planet lifted tornadoes of sulphur into the air. Celeste was acid. Machines would rot while they worked, structures would erode away. Anything man-made must be continually repaired and renewed.

  Yet the world was also so rich in minerals, it was literally the mother lode, the colonist’s dream come true. Before long, Marin knew, a major corporation would be in here, tearing Celeste to pieces for its easily accessible wealth. But until then the Freespacers were working it, and given the hostile environment, there was only one option open to them. Slave labor was a reality out here, far beyond the frontier.

  “I think we’re clear,” Yuval Greenstein was saying. “I see a couple of dozen ships, but they’re parked.”

  “They know we’re on our way in,” Jazinsky added. “There’s a hulk in a long orbit, you see it, Yuval? Looks like its engines are fried, but the sensors are good. Somebody had the smarts to shove it into a twenty-year orbit, let it monitor the outer system.”

  And Vaurien: “So they know we’re here. I’ll call us in, see if I can get Belczak on the air. Tag those ships. If they move – if you see something starting to run up its engines or power weapons, I want to know about it.”

  “I just tested every field,” Ingersol told him. “We’re in good shape. I serviced every Arago, right after the kicking we took at Ulrand. I also just looked at the scans, and there’s nothing big enough in this crappy system to give us much of a run.”

  “I’m sure there isn’t,” Vaurien agreed, “but the moment they know why we’re here, the prisoners are vulnerable.” He paused for a moment. “Barb, is there any chance of picking them up on sensors?”

  She made negative noises. “Not as such. One human looks exactly like another. You remember a few years ago, when the Confederacy wanted to chip recruits headed for Fleet? It never happened, and thank gods it didn’t … but right now, it’d sure help. But,” she mused, speaking slowly as she worked through some series of tasks, “I can see the mining sites, and there’s two – no, three – centers of
habitation. Difficult to call them cities or even towns. We’ll find the prisoners in one place or another. Laboring or whoring. And I’m seeing plenty of human signatures, some of them in high-density groups, like … maybe a lockup, or a stockade, out in the boonies. And in the towns, I’m seeing two, maybe three high-density groups in each settlement. Meaning the heat blooms of more than fifty human bodies in less than two hundred square meters. What’s that sound like to you?”

  “Boozer, restaurant, sexshops, VR den,” Ingersol said tersely. “So we’ve got a pretty good idea where they are.”

  The Wastrel was plowing in through the Celeste system as they analyzed the data, and Marin was satisfied with the Capricorn. She was flight ready, and with a glance in Travers’s direction he saw green lights across every board. She was also ready to launch.

  They sat back, and Marin called up the tug pilots’ data, into the Capricorn’s threedees. The system was depicted graphically, planets, moons, asteroid fields, ships and human presence. At this speed they were an hour out from Celeste, and an audio track whispered in the background. This is the salvage tug Wastrel, inbound to Celeste on business. Captain Richard Vaurien hailing Freespace colony commander Belczak.

  “That’s dignifying the man,” Travers observed aridly. “Colony commander?”

  “We might as well try a little flattery.” Marin divided his attention between the threedee and his partner. “You never know. Polish the man’s ego, and we might slither by without actually having to blast our way out of here.”

  Travers swiveled the seat around to look at him. “You think so?”

  “Nope,” Marin admitted. “But the attempt can’t hurt. Diplomacy always looks good on the report … and they’re getting an answer from Celeste.” He gestured at the threedee, where a green blip had begun to flash.

  The body of the message was piped directly to Etienne, for Vaurien’s attention, but the source was displayed in the threedee at once and Travers swore softly in surprise. It was issuing from the big transmitters aboard a ship identifying itself as the Hong Lung, which meant nothing to Marin, but the voices were all too familiar.