by Alex Stewart
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He was rising to it, the unmarred side of his face darkening to match the part still inflamed from Ertica’s toxin. Attracted by the disturbance, a few of his shipmates started wandering over to watch the show.
“Just kidding,” I assured him, with patent insincerity, the trace of mockery in my voice belying the conciliatory words. “You know.” I blew a couple of air kisses. “You seemed to be getting on with her much better than I did.”
“Think that’s funny, do you?” His ego must have been even more tender than his face, because he swung a punch at me without any warning at all. Unless, that is, like me, you’ve sparred long enough and often enough to be subconsciously aware of even the tiniest shift in the weight of the person in front of you.
Which meant I was probably aware of the attack even before he realized he was starting to make it, and ducked out of the way long before it could land. I made a big show of blocking it, though, far more slowly and clumsily than I normally would, which was surprisingly hard to do; when you’re fighting you rely on instinct and muscle memory, which needs a lot of conscious thought to override.
“Quite funny,” I admitted cheerfully, hoping there were a nice lot of witnesses around. I was pretty sure I could ride a couple of punches, make out I’d cracked a rib or something, and get hustled off to the infirmary in jig time.
Since I wasn’t too bothered about getting hit, I risked a moment’s distraction to see what was happening around me. A couple of the troopers guarding the pressure doors were already running towards us, leaving only one man or woman guarding each of them; the ones left behind were leveling their weapons, presumably in case the brawl was nothing more than a diversion, and they were about to be rushed by a group of suicidal would-be escapees.
“Simon!” Clio was running too, I noted absently, a bemused-looking Neville a few steps behind, drawing his sidearm—although what he thought he was going to do with it was beyond me, as I suspected gunning down a Guilder or two would turn out to be a seriously counter-productive career move.
Deeks lashed out again, and I planted myself where it would catch me on the side of the face, just at the fullest extent of his arm: the blow landed more lightly than I pretended, with an impact that jarred my jaw, compressing the cheek against my teeth, and, by great good fortune, opening up a minor cut that let me spit out some blooded saliva in a suitably dramatic fashion.
“Get off him!” Clio launched herself at Deeks, a compact bundle of ferocity which took the pair of us by complete surprise, headbutting him in the groin. Deeks howled, and collapsed, leaving Clio free to kneel on his chest and attempt to twist his ears off.
“Clio!” I took her by the arm, and tried to haul her back to her feet. The rest of the onlookers from the Ebon Flow were surging towards us, no longer passive spectators, and clearly intent on avenging their fallen comrade. “Back off!”
“When I’m good and ready!” I’d never seen her this angry. She gave Deeks’ ears a final vengeful twist, and got back on her feet, glaring a challenge at his oncoming shipmates. “Come on then, if you think you’re hard enough!”
“Will you calm down?” I tried to push her behind me, but she was having none of it, ducking under my elbow to stand at my shoulder, her fists cocked.
We’re coming! In the distance I could see Rennau, Rolf and Lena boiling out of our own quarters, a handful of our shipmates behind them. Another Guilder thing, I belatedly realized; attack one member of a ship’s crew and you attacked them all, irrespective of whose fault it had been to start with. But the crew of the Ebon Flow obviously felt the same way, and by the time our reinforcements arrived, Clio and I would have been pounded to mush.
At least that was probably what they thought; after the fight in the alley, I was feeling pretty confident that I could at least hold them off until our friends arrived. And I’d been hoping to contrive a trip to the hospital anyway . . .
“Be careful what you wish for,” I muttered under my breath.
Clio glanced at me. “What?”
“Never mind.” I braced myself for the charge. At least none of them seemed to be carrying weapons, so we’d be down to fists and feet, which suited me fine.
“Stop this at once!” Ertica’s voice cracked across the open space, and I turned in surprise to find her striding towards us, a look of exasperated disdain on her face. “Or if you must squabble like children, take it somewhere else. People are trying to sleep in here.”
“Think you can make us?” Clio turned on her at once, the lightning bolts of her fury finding a new conductor.
“Clio!” I took hold of her arm, trying to calm her, and she shook me off. “She’s not our enemy.”
“Of course she is, she’s a sodding Freebooter. Which you’d have noticed if you ever listened to what she says, instead of staring at her all the time with your tongue hanging out!”
“Whereas your tongue seems to be getting quite the workout this morning,” Ertica remarked, in the faux conversational manner which, in my old social circle, was the verbal equivalent of a stiletto between the ribs.
And Clio rose to it, swinging a punch at the Freebooter’s face without pausing to think.
I’d like to claim it was quick wits which led me to intervene, but in all honesty there was no time to think, and I acted purely on instinct. Before Clio’s fist could make contact I threw myself into the gap between the two women, receiving a right hook to the jaw which made my head ring, snapping me round towards Ertica; I just had time to register her impressively proportioned décolletage looming up in my field of vision before my face collided with it, and rebounded as Ertica took a belated step backwards.
For an instant, I staggered, regaining my balance, and, if I’m honest, enjoying the moment as much as any straight man would under the circumstances: then I clutched my face, screaming a good deal louder than seemed possible through a mouth now surrounded by soft tissue swelling up to what felt like double its natural size. It felt as though my entire face had been scorched with a blowtorch—I’d never felt such intense pain in my entire life, and sincerely hope never to do so again.
“Now look what you’ve made me do,” Ertica said, sounding no more than mildly tetchy about the whole thing. I tried to focus on her face, but my eyes were swollen into narrow slits by now, and I could barely pick out anything around me.
“Do something!” Clio demanded. “You must have some sort of antidote!”
“Must I?” Ertica sounded amused. “And if I did, what are you prepared to offer me in exchange? That is how you people think, isn’t it?”
“Get back, all of you.” Of course, Neville was taking charge, whether anyone wanted him to or not. That’s what junior officers did in a crisis. Started issuing orders, so everyone else would feel reassured. My datasphere began to hum with message traffic. “Medical emergency, internment area. Exposure to Captain Ertica’s dermal toxin.” A reply, through his handheld, too encrypted to read: fortunately I could still follow one end of the conversation by listening to his voice. “No, if he’s breathing well enough to make that much noise we can pretty much rule out anaphylactic shock.”
He was right about that, at any rate: I fired up the bio monitor in my neuroware, looking to check out how bad the damage was, and, to my relief, found it mostly superficial. If anything it seemed to be healing remarkably fast; Ertica must have given me a relatively low dose. Something to be thankful for, anyway: unless, of course, Neville realized I’d recover on my own before too long.
Baines, I sent, finding to my relief that the Freebooter engineer’s ‘sphere was so close he must have come out of their quarters to back up his skipper—or possibly just to enjoy the spectacle of Guilders brawling among themselves, which I’d no doubt he’d find highly entertaining. Tell her to say it’s serious.
Why should I? He was quick off the mark, I’ll give him that.
Skip says no deal. Play along, I might get you some leverage.
That your word
as a Guilder? Sharp, as well as quick. Something I might have realized sooner if Ertica and Rollo hadn’t done most of the talking.
Yes. There was no time to waste, even if I had been in the mood for a long conversation. Which I most emphatically wasn’t, since my face still felt like it had been dipped in acid. (Which, come to think of it, was pretty much what had actually happened.)
“He’ll be fine,” Ertica said, apparently trying to reassure Clio now, although I was pretty sure that would be more to pre-empt any retaliation by the crew of the Stacked Deck than because she actually cared how the girl felt.
“If he gets to the infirmary fast enough,” Baines added.
“Right,” Ertica agreed, not missing a beat, which told me a good deal about how much her crew trusted one another.
“Otherwise he’s a goner,” Rollo added, not wanting to be left out. “Though they sometimes last for hours. Mind you, the way he’s feeling now, he probably doesn’t want to.”
“Not helpful, Rollo,” Ertica said waspishly.
“Make way,” Neville said, probably waving his gun around or something, and the troopers who’d left their stations at the pressure doors took hold of my arms, providing some much-needed support. “Can you walk?” The last addressed to me, in the slightly exaggerated enunciation of someone trying not to let you know how bad things look.
“Just about,” I managed to force past my swollen lips, and staggered a bit, to reinforce the point.
“Simon, I’m so sorry.” Clio sounded really upset, far more so than I thought the accident warranted; which, at the time, I put down to embarrassment at having lost her temper so publicly. “This is all my fault.”
“You think?” Ertica asked acidly.
No, it’s not, I assured her. This is all down to me. Which happened to be true, even if she thought I was only saying it to make her feel better. The troopers began to half-lead, half-carry me away towards the pressure hatch.
“What about me?” Dazed and in pain as I was, it took me a moment to realize the querulous new voice was Deeks. “I need medical attention too!”
“Like me to kiss it better?” Ertica asked, and the ensuing argument lasted until the raised voices were finally cut off by the pressure hatch sliding closed behind me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In which I find what I was looking for, and discuss politics.
To the Leaguers’ credit, they got me to the infirmary pretty quickly, although for obvious reasons I don’t remember much about the trip; I was bundled into a sled at the end of the corridor on the other side of the hatch, and then out again after a few minutes of rapid changes of direction in all three planes, but since I was effectively blind and in pain the whole time, that wasn’t a lot of help in getting orientated. I was pretty sure from the echoes of our footsteps that we’d moved into a corridor, then on into a room, but other than that I didn’t have a clue.
“This way,” a reassuring voice said, as a hand took hold of my arm. “Can you sit up there for me?”
I emitted a strangulated gurgle of assent, which was the best my swollen mouth could manage, finding shortly thereafter that “up there” meant the kind of examination table common to doctor’s surgeries throughout the Human Sphere.
“Close your eyes . . .” the voice went on, in the same soothing monotone. Which was the single most pointless request I’d ever had, since they were now swollen completely closed in any case. A moment later I heard the hiss of a spray, and something cool began to leach the heat from my burning face. Only as the pain receded, and my muscles spontaneously relaxed, did I realize how cramped and tense they’d become. “Does that feel any better?”
“Much,” I mumbled. I tried opening my eyes, and felt a flare of panic as they refused to respond.
“Take it easy,” the voice said. “It’s not that quick. Although you should recover a lot faster than the other guy.” For a moment I wondered who he was talking about, before the penny dropped: Deeks. “We synthesized a new antitoxin after treating him, once we knew what we were dealing with. Just in case anyone else—“ a short, hesitant pause, while he searched for a tactful phrase, “um, came into contact with her.”
“Lucky me,” I slurred. I checked my biomonitor again, and found the traces of toxin in my system already noticeably reduced. At this rate I’d be clear of the stuff within a few hours. Which was both good news and bad. I needed to be here for a while if I was going to search for a node, and crack it if I found one, but if they knew how fast I was recovering they might just send me straight back to the internment area. I swayed a little, and put a hand down to steady myself against the surface of the couch. “Ough. Still feel a bit groggy.”
“I’m not surprised.” My eyes were open a slit now, and a blurry image of someone in a white coat suddenly filled them. I couldn’t make out much in the way of facial features, but he seemed to have dark hair, and be mercifully free of any visible tweaks. He shone a light directly into each eye, and seemed pleased with my reaction. “Your pupils are dilating and contracting normally. That looks promising.”
“Good.” I might as well attack the problem head on, then, instead of hedging around it. “Does that mean I can go back to my friends now?”
“If you insist.” Damn. It looked like I’d overplayed my hand; perhaps I could counterfeit a seizure or something. But before I could make a complete fool of myself, the medic carried on talking. “I’d rather keep you in for a few hours, though, for observation. Just in case there’s an allergic reaction to the antitoxin.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, hiding my relief. “You’re the doctor.”
“Just a corpsman.” He held out a steadying hand as I hopped off the table, and stood, turning my head in an attempt to see more of the room despite the narrow field of vision left open to me by the swelling around my eyes. “You don’t need that much in the way of treatment.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said, faintly surprised to find that it was true.
“This way.” He led me out of the room and down the corridor outside, steering me with a light pressure against my elbow. After a couple of dozen steps, he opened another door, and ushered me through. “You can rest up in here for a while.”
“Thanks,” I said, entering cautiously, and finding a small, utilitarian room, containing very little beyond a bed and a couple of chairs. Though I could just about make them out, I made a point of bumping into one of the chairs on the way to the bed anyway; it probably wouldn’t hurt to look a bit more incapacitated than I actually was.
“Just call if you need anything. There are plenty of people about outside.” He delivered the veiled warning pleasantly enough, as if it had been nothing more than a piece of casual conversation.
“Thanks. I will.” I pretended to take the remark at face value, and stretched out on the bed. “But I’m going to try and sleep it off.” I even managed a reasonably convincing yawn, which wasn’t that surprising considering how little sleep I’d had the previous night.
“Good idea. I’ll look in on you later.” The door clicked behind him, leaving me alone in the heart of the enemy citadel. Or, if not the heart, one of its organs, at least.
Almost as soon as he left, I dived into the datasphere, immersing myself fully in the flow of information. Baines had been right, there was a node nearby, dense with data, pulsing with it like a dwarf star of undiluted knowledge. I reached out cautiously, fearful of being burned, and deployed the sneakware, meshing with the outer layers as easily as I’d become used to doing with Jas’s visor. No alarms went off, and no roadblocks descended, so at least I’d managed to pass myself off as an authorized user. Heartened by this initial success, which I must admit I’d been expecting, albeit with a little more difficulty, I began trying to access some actual data, deploying the datanomes I’d reverse engineered from the recording of Baines’ fruitless attempt to do the same.
This time it wasn’t such plain sailing, and I had to modify a couple of things as I went along, but afte
r a bit of cautious poking and fiddling I finally broke through into an index. The rush of elation which accompanied my success was so strong I was even able to forget the throbbing discomfort of my healing face.
Right. Time to see what I could find. Prudence dictated that I make the most of my limited time, as the longer I was meshed in the more likely it was that someone would notice my presence, so I’d have to prioritize. I swooped through a nebula of interlocking data trails, looking for something worth filching. Plans of the base seemed like a good place to start, and I snagged one into my ‘sphere, realizing for the first time just how much you could cram into a hollowed-out rock this size.
The place was huge, a termite mound heaving with military personnel: though we’d only met a few in person, there must have been over ten thousand people living and working there, not counting the crews of the ships arriving and departing on an almost hourly basis. The whole moonlet was a honeycomb of living quarters, workshops, power plants, storage areas and weapon emplacements; not just graviton beams, but old-fashioned missile racks too, which could still be fired if the main generators went down. Freedom might be well within the League’s borders these days, but this place had been built when it was a frontier fortress, and hadn’t forgotten the lessons it had learned back then.
The cavern we were billeted in turned out to be surprisingly close to the surface, but almost the entire diameter of the base from the hangar bay where the Stacked Deck and the other impounded vessels were docked. Which made perfect sense to me. No one in their right mind would attempt to break out and recover their ships by force, but taking the precaution of making it as difficult as possible anyway certainly couldn’t hurt.
Feeling that I’d got hold of a prize well worth the risk, which Aunt Jenny would be more than satisfied with, I briefly considered withdrawing, then went back to the main index anyway. While I was here, I might as well see what else I could get away with: after all, it wasn’t as though I was likely to get another chance.
