Red gasped on the ground, and Keene knelt down, grabbing a fistful of tailored suit, pulling the man’s chubby face closer.
“What’d you say? I can’t hear you.”
“Can’t…”
“Can’t what,” Keene said. He shook the man by the lapels. “Can’t what?”
“Can’t…breathe,” Red said, and then his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he went slack with a quick jerk. Keene shook him and slapped his face, but the man wouldn’t respond.
“You killed him,” Derek said, like he couldn’t quite believe it. “You just killed him.”
“Give me that,” Keene said and grabbed the drink from Derek’s limp grip. He threw the remaining contents on Red’s face, but the fat club proprietor didn’t stir and remained quite dead.
After another minute, Keene got back to his feet. “Holy crap.” He ran his hands through his hair. Deafening silence, louder than the bass-heavy music being played in the club below the soundproofed office, hung in his ears.
“I think that’s an understatement,” Derek said. “You killed the wrong guy.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him.”
“What’d you expect when you jumped him? You were like a rabid dog there, man. Look at the poor fat bastard. His heart probably gave out.”
“Just give me a moment to think,” Keene said. He tried closing his eyes, but no thoughts—at least, no good ones—came to mind. Just the man’s feet kicking helplessly, and then that final jerk. “We gotta get out of here.”
“You think?”
“Cameras.”
“I don’t have a camera.”
“Are there any damned cameras in the room,” Keene said. “Check.”
“Daria said nah. Red takes—took—girls up here.”
“What a gentleman. A real loss for society.”
“You’re not looking so good for society right now yourself,” Derek said. He headed over to the bar and poured himself a few fingers of vodka, then decided better of it, tossed the glass over his head and just pulled straight from the frosted bottle.
Keene walked around to the desk and took stock of the man’s body. It proved too much, and Keene shifted his eyes skyward, staring at the ceiling. But no amount of remorse or regret was going to fix the situation.
And they still had Jack the Diamond to account for. This lead had been a bust, and it might’ve been the only one they had. If Jack found out how bad Keene had blown it…
Keene turned his gaze towards the desk, his eyes falling on a series of locked drawers. A quick tug indicated they were shut tight. He dropped down and started rifling through Red’s jacket pockets.
“So much for dignity,” Derek said, drinking even more from the bottle.
“We came here for one reason. That hasn’t changed.”
“Man, screw Jack. We gotta get out of here.”
“We will.”
“I mean, like off this rock. We gotta leave. We can’t come back.”
“That was always a given.” Keene looked up. “Stop drinking.”
“I can’t help it.”
Keene stood up straight, and it was enough to make Derek drop the bottle outright. Then Keene got back to business, rifling through Red’s coat pockets in a desperate search for anything that might help them out of this jam.
“There’s got to be something,” Keene said. Within his own chest, he could feel his heart slowing down to a calm crawl, even more steady and stoic than normal. His hands fell upon a keycard, and he tore it from Red’s back pocket with an excited grunt.
Swiped it across the card reader atop the desk. Nothing for an eternal moment, then a triumphant beep.
It flashed green, and the desk’s three drawers popped open. Keene now set his hands to work amidst the contents, tossing useless documents and club invoices over his shoulder as he looked for something—anything—that would be useful.
At the bottom of the third drawer, Keene slammed his hand in frustration against the bottom. Nothing.
“Because anger worked for us last time,” Derek said. “Might as well go back to that well.” He walked over to the side of the desk and picked up a piece of paper. “Says this guy was a Coalition informant. He informed on his own damn family to save this place. Maybe you did do the world a favor.”
But Keene didn’t hear him. He knocked again against the bottom of the drawer, his head tilted to once side. He tried a different drawer, and the same sound rung out. Another tap on the first one produced the same hollow, empty noise.
The drawers all had false bottoms.
“You still got that knife you carry around to impress chicks, pretend you’re tough?”
“No one’s pretending anything,” Derek handed the ornate bronze blade to Keene. “Be careful with that. It’s sharp.”
Keene, without looking, grabbed the blade from his friend’s outstretched palm and thrust the sharp point into a small crack at the bottom of the first drawer. After some wiggling and pressure, the panel came loose and popped out.
Keene reached down, grinding his fingernails beneath the edge of the panel.
His eyes widened as he took sheaths of old-style paper credits out, still uncut in a giant block.
“Print money?” Derek came over and picked up a sheet of bills, ten wide by ten high.
Keene set to work on the other two drawers. The second contained a similar haul. The third, however, held a holo-drive. With no computer in the office, the pair couldn’t access the information. But they had a foot high stack of credits—in hundreds—staring at them.
“It might be close to a million,” Keene said. Far more than he’d ever dreamed of seeing in his life. People on Apollus didn’t have this kind of cash. He held up the drive. “Check this out.”
“Could be something. Could be nothing.”
“Not like we have anything else,” Keene said. A knock at the door made him stand bolt upright. He brought the knife out in front of his body, readying for a fight. “We need to get going.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying, man.”
Another knock. Keene advanced toward the door, slow, deliberate, the blade at throat level. He opened it a crack, and a rush of loud music flooded through the thin opening.
“What do you want?” Keene had to scream to be heard over the obnoxious noise.
“It’s me.”
“Who’s me?”
“Daria. What’s going on with you? Derek said it would just be a minute.”
“How about giving us another, would you sweet cheeks?”
She said something in protest, but he slammed the door.
“Who was that?”
“Your girlfriend,” Keene said. “Grab the money. It’s time to go.”
“Sweet cheeks? You might be hopeless.”
“You don’t pick up that money—”
“What, and stuff it in my pants?”
“Or stay here,” Keene said. Derek stared at his friend, who he had known so well just twenty minutes before. Then he scooped up the stack of bills and the pair darted out the door.
“This, lad,” Jack said, pointing at the holo-drive, now decrypted and projecting classified files into the ether of his hideout, “this is better than I could have dreamed. Cigarette?” He outstretched a hand-rolled stick of tobacco. Keene declined. The swagger and certainty that had possessed him in Red’s office had largely vanished, although an ember remained. “So you killed the rat bastard, eh?”
“By accident.”
“Hope death is hard on old Red.” Jack blew out a thick plume of nasty smoke towards Keene. “He sold a lot of good men down the river. Including your parents.”
“You knew my parents?”
“Sure, I met ‘em,” Jack said. “Good people. They worked in the Resistance.” He raised an eyebrow, the one over his
bum eye. “You didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
“The fire that got ‘em, almost got you and your sister, it was set by the Coalition. A tip from Mr. Anderson. He used to sell munition back then to the Resistance. Then turn around, it seems, and drip his list of clients to the Coalition, one-by-one. All on that drive, boy.”
Keene sat down on a wobbly stool. The room swam. No, he hadn’t known. Yet, somehow, he’d gotten vengeance through some twist of fate.
“There’s one other thing we wanted to ask you,” Keene said when his voice returned.
“Don’t know much about your folks, but—”
“You got a spare ship?” Keene nodded to Derek. For some reason, Keene was doing all the talking now, and not doing a bad job of it. Before, in the dim dive bar, he could hardly string two words together without stumbling and imagining Jack slitting his throat for screwing this whole operation up.
“What the hell would a lad like you do with a ship?”
Keene grabbed the bag from Derek and dumped the cash on the table. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and stared.
“You got one or not?”
“The Blue Maybelle. Ain’t the best name, but damn if she ain’t a good ship.”
“We’ll take it,” Keene said, not pausing to think.
“This don’t cover all of it boy. You got a lot here,” Jack said. “But it takes effort to make money clean. That costs.”
“We need to leave.”
“You need to finish the job I gave you,” Jack said, a glint in his eye. “One day or another. Until then, you do what I say, when I say it, lad.”
Keene looked into the man’s eye. Neither of them blinked. It wasn’t a sweetheart deal, but that wasn’t going to present itself. So, not a day after his initiation into the world of thieves, bandits and outlaws, Keene said, “Sounds like a deal.”
The Blue Maybelle took off with a stuttering start, neither Kip Keene nor Derek Dash having any semblance of a clue how to pilot a spacecraft.
“Pull it up,” Keene said. “Damn it, pull her up further.”
“It says ride it out,” Derek said, thumbing through the holo-manual at a seizure-inducing rate, “and then adjust the yaw.”
“The hell’s the yaw?”
“Pitch and yaw.” Derek flipped back through the endless stream of text and video tutorials. Audio explanations would start and stop as he brushed over the contents, breezing over relevant—but, in the current moment of borderline disaster, irrelevant to their immediate survival—content. “Pilot stuff.”
“Real helpful.” Keene threw his entire weight into the controls, yanking the craft up into an almost vertical orientation. He could feel the weight of his body trying to rip straight through the chair, so powerful was the acceleration and subsequent force leveled on his body.
Keene jerked the sticks forward, and the craft leveled out before heading into a semi-steep dive. A slight adjustment and The Blue Maybelle was righted and on a smooth ascent.
Derek flicked a switch and the machine jerked a little bit before settling into a perfect flight pattern.
“Autopilot,” he said, and pointed at the first page of the manual, “good to know the basics.”
Keene rubbed his forehead and laughed. “Well, shit.”
“No kidding.”
The gear-like pendant around Derek’s neck finally settled down and stopped swaying.
“You brought that along?” Keene said.
“It’s a reminder of home.”
Keene stared at the twelve-pointed object that looked like a square with little notches cut out to form smaller, stair-step square points. The middle was a hollow circle. A chakana, a talisman for those about to traverse the bridge of the stars.
“You believe that’ll help us?”
“We just survived,” Derek said. “And look, we’re already there.”
The machine beeped to indicate that their one light year journey had culminated.
“That must be why this thing cost so much,” Keene said.
“Fusion cores, baby.”
Keene popped his head out of the cockpit, looking for Lorelei. She was absent from the hallway, perhaps in the washroom or the bunks, no doubt sulking.
“We’re here,” he called. “A new life.”
Lorelei, unamused by being yanked away from everything that mattered at the age of sixteen, screamed back, “I hate you.”
“She is something,” Derek said.
“You stay away. I know where you’ve been.”
“Most jobs require past experience. Like it, in fact.”
“I reject your application.”
“To what?”
“To screw my little sister.” Keene slammed the side of his fist into the auto-land button, and The Blue Maybelle set down in a cloud of dust, an incalculable number of miles from home. “Let’s rock and roll.”
He headed to the armory and grabbed the pistol—a six-shooter that used actual munition, one that Jack had given him as a parting gift, said that his parents used ones just like it—from the metal locker.
Then, as the ramp dropped, revealing a planet white-washed by sand the color of snow, he stepped out into the blazing sun.
And thus began the career of the most notorious space pirate in Coalition history.
15 | One Day or Another
That day in the white sands proved routine. Rob a remote Coalition outpost. Haul the gear back to Jack on another planet. Jobs like this, Keene found soon enough, were what it took to keep The Blue Maybelle in the air, her crew fed.
Being under Jack’s boot was better than living beneath the Coalition’s. Most of the time. Still, Keene waited eagerly for one day or another, when it would be him, and him alone, leading the charge through the darkness of space.
One day or another proved to come after four long years, numerous smuggling missions, and a great many wanted posters for Keene and his ragtag crew. Since the beginning of his adventures, he’d picked up Johnny, a computer wizard liberated from lock and key on a Coalition scout ship, and Catarina, a genius and keen study of explosives and swordplay.
The former skillset had landed her in cuffs on the planet Quippu following an ill-fated bank robbery. It just so happened, however, that on this particular day Jack the Diamond needed a certain piece of equipment from security box 564.
Keene and the gang walked in right as she was being led out.
He decided to take her along with him. Stunning the guards, running from the slow local puddle jumpers, that wasn’t hard.
After that, Catarina and Keene got on well.
But running missions for Jack was growing tiresome, the demands bordering on indentured servitude. So when the news came across the ship’s intercom that a certain Corporal Adams was being honored on the frosty planet of Thori in a ceremony—his first public appearance in four years—Keene dropped everything.
He was going to nab this bastard who got Jack’s eye, all those years ago. The first mission would come full circle. Deliver him, and then be free.
The Blue Maybelle set down on an abandoned part of Thori. The darkened husks of long-empty buildings—from before the First War—quaked as the craft’s thrusters hovered over the surface. The auto-landing mechanism refused to engage.
Keene flipped a series of buttons and turned to the ship’s menu. Nothing. He mashed buttons, and the thrusters shut off. For a moment, the ship hung in the air, then the planet’s gravity took over and the craft hurtled the rest of the ten feet into the cracked street, sending up a plume of dust.
The force of the impact sent multiple buildings down, their rusted supports and ancient construction unable to bear the brunt of the shockwaves. A thick black cloud of dirt settled across the windshield, darkening the dim light of the planet’s moon. The Blue Maybelle groaned, and its e
mergency lights, a fluorescent pink, sprung on, casting a strange glow about the interior.
“Damn,” Lorelei said, her voice echoing around corners, all the way to the cockpit. “You think you would be decent at this by now.”
The lights made everything feel like a bad gentleman’s club. Keene twisted his multi-tool in the ship’s ignition, but it didn’t spring back to life.
A diagnostic hologram sprung from the console, indicating that part of the ship’s sensing mechanisms had been destroyed and the nano-fusion cores had been jarred loose.
“Should’ve read the whole damn manual,” Keene said. He unstrapped himself from the seat and stumbled out of the cockpit as his sense of equilibrium acclimated to this new planet’s environmental quirks. This was Keene’s first visit to this particular system.
Before, he’d never had a reason to set foot this deep in Coalition territory. But now, he was stranded here until they found parts to fix the sensing mechanism. And killed Corporal Adams.
Keene took an awkward step forward, his hands held out to his sides. Walking was different—smoother, faster, like a slightly sharper knife. It was subtle, sure, but the air seemed thinner, and his body weighed less.
He jumped, and his suspicions were confirmed: he could touch the ship’s eleven foot ceiling, whereas before such an attempt would come up with a handful of air.
Lorelei, on hands and knees, crawled into the hallway from the armory. She got up holding her head.
In the murky light, Keene could see a thin trail of what appeared to be blood. With pink ensconcing everything, though, it was difficult to tell whether it was just sweat. He took a few strides over, enjoying his newfound super-powers afforded by the planet’s generous gravitational field, and reached out.
Lorelei, even with her eyes on the ground, used her free hand to slap her brother’s arm away.
“Just trying to help.”
“You’ve done a pretty good job so far.”
“I’m trying. Let me get the—”
“The kit? Already there,” Derek said, and brought out a special syringe equipped with antidotes and vaccines to most known ailments.
The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3 Page 10
