by Joe Vasicek
“That’s the trouble, though, isn’t it?” said Helena, folding her arms. “We can’t very well expect to be left alone when every starfarer between here and Gamma Oriana believes that there’s a thriving new settlement at this system. Just how many agents do you have spreading the word about this colony of yours?”
She glanced at Jeremiah, who swallowed. “Just me,” he said. “It—it was just me. My wife’s on that ship, you see, and—and I thought it was best.” He cringed at the weakness of his answer, but there was no better way to say it.
Helena narrowed her eyes. “Oh? And which one is she?”
“Her name is Noemi,” he blurted. “She’s almost nine months pregnant by now. Is she—is she all right?”
“You mean to tell me that you left your wife when she was pregnant?”
“I say we space them,” said Salazar, his lips turned up in a sneer. “Set an example, and send a message.”
“That’s one option,” said Helena. Jeremiah’s knees went so weak that they seemed ready to collapse.
“You’d be making a grave mistake,” said Captain Elijah, the rising tension evident in his voice. “The people of this sector wouldn’t stand for a massacre of that magnitude. They’d—”
Captain Helena laughed in his face. “They’d what, captain? Sell out their independence to the Imperials? Hobble together a strike team powerful enough to drive us out? I hardly think so. Like you said, they’re outworlders—the only thing they want is to be left alone.”
“You can do what you want with me and my ship,” said Jeremiah, his voice low. “Just—just please, don’t hurt my wife.”
Salazar took one good look at him and burst into loud, harsh laughter. Jeremiah’s desperation turned to rage, and he clenched his fists even as he cringed in fear. But before he could lash out, Captain Helena raised her hand for silence.
“Touching. But there’s no need to beg—it would be a waste to kill you.”
Relief flooded through Jeremiah’s body like a refreshing splash of cool water. When he looked to Captain Elijah, though, the furrows on his brow had only deepened.
“You say you’re here to colonize Zarmina,” said Helena. “Well, and why shouldn’t you? We have no operations on the surface. If you want to go down there, I don’t see why we shouldn’t allow it.”
“What are your conditions?” Elijah asked in a low voice.
Salazar chuckled, while an almost imperceptible grin spread across Helena’s face. The room suddenly felt much too small for all four of them.
“Simply this,” she said. “First, none of you will ever be allowed to leave the system. We can’t have news of our presence here leaking out to the empire, after all. Second, all of you will be confined to the surface. Any access to space will be at our discretion. Third, all of your hydroponics and food production equipment will remain in orbit with us. We’ll send you food and supplies in exchange for the natural resources you extract, which of course will be the fourth condition.”
They’re turning us into slaves, Jeremiah realized. His muscles tensed, while Elijah’s cheeks turned bright red.
“That’s—that’s inhumane,” said Elijah, the veins starting to pop on his forehead. “I wouldn’t think of subjecting my people to such conditions!”
“It’s that or breathe vacuum,” said Salazar. “Or perhaps you’d like to leave some of your women with us as well?”
Jeremiah drew in a sharp breath as chills shot down the back of his neck. Elijah opened his mouth to protest, but Helena silenced him with a wave of her hand.
“Those are your options, Captain. You may either submit to our conditions and live, or reject them and die. I’ll let you go now to inform your people—and remember, if you don’t come to a decision soon, I just might change my mind.”
She nodded to Salazar, who palmed open the door and motioned for them to step through.
“This is intolerable!” shouted Elijah as he led them out. “You can’t do this to us—it isn’t right!”
But Jeremiah knew that the negotiations were over.
* * * * *
“Jeremiah!” came a frantic girl’s voice. “You’re back!”
Jeremiah looked up in time to see a pretty black-haired girl running up to him from across the main corridor of the Hope of Oriana. Before he could say anything, she threw her arms around him, making him tense.
“Hello, Mariya,” he said a bit awkwardly. “It’s good to see you.”
It wasn’t, really, but with the crisis of the past few hours, that seemed like the best thing to say.
“When the pirates took over, we all feared the worst. Noemi—”
But at that moment, Noemi stepped through the hatchway at the far end.
Instantly, he left Mariya and rushed over to his wife. Her deep green eyes lit the moment she saw him, and she hurried to meet him too. Her stomach had grown enormously in the past few months, so that she was unable to run, but that hardly mattered. He laid hold of her arms—how thin and frail they seemed—and gave her a desperate kiss.
“Jerem-ahra,” she cried as their lips parted. Her shoulders shook, and she took him by the waist, holding onto him as if she would never let him go.
“I’m okay, Noemi,” he said. “I’m all right—kargadi vard. Everything is going to be all right.”
“You stay? No go?”
“That’s right—I stay.”
She bit her lip and took a deep breath as if to suppress tears. He held her close, careful not to put too much pressure on her pregnant belly.
“I never should have left,” he whispered, as much to himself as to her. “This whole mess, the pirates—I’m sorry.”
Whether or not she understood his apology, he couldn’t help but feel that everything was his fault. Even if she didn’t blame him for it, that wasn’t enough to relieve his guilt.
I’m so sorry.
Chapter 18
“It’s good to have you back,” said Captain Elijah, laying a firm and heavy hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. “Though I wish it could have been under more favorable circumstances.”
“So do I,” Jeremiah muttered. He glanced around the mess hall. Polished metal benches and tables stretched lengthwise from the front of the Hope of Oriana back toward the passengers’ quarters. Half a dozen black-clad pirates guarded the way to the bridge and the docking bays, holding them as prisoners on their own ship. The room was half filled with other colonists taking their regularly scheduled meal, but they all kept to themselves.
Noemi stood by his side and slipped an arm around his waist. It was impossible for him to express how he felt to be back with her. His legs felt light and insubstantial, as if the gravity had shut off and he were floating in midair. His heart still pounded from the realization that they were together.
For the moment, at least. With the pirates controlling the system, that could change at any time.
As if in confirmation of this, Captain Elijah glanced over his shoulder at the black-clad guards. “Let’s take this conversation to the dream center,” he said under his breath. “I have a room there where we can talk in private.”
He stepped toward the hatchway and was soon thronged by a large crowd of other colonists, all anxious with questions. Noemi moved as if to follow, but Jeremiah led her away to an empty table, away from the center of attention. He didn’t know what Elijah wanted to talk with them about, but if it was important, he figured it would be best to wait so as not to draw suspicion from the pirates.
Mariya soon joined them, sitting down on the bench across the table. “Noemi missed you something terrible,” she said. “It’s good to see you both together again.”
Jeremiah nodded, though he couldn’t help but notice that her words sounded a bit forced. She looked up at him through her eyelashes, but he glanced away as their eyes met.
“Did you get my message at Zeta Oriana?” he asked, more to fill the silence than anything else.
“Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Noemi couldn�
��t get enough of it—she must have watched it more than a hundred times! I helped her with the translation, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, the pregnancy has been progressing quite well. The doctor says everything looks healthy—no complications or anything. She’s due in a week, but really, the baby could come at any time, so I’ve done my best to stay with her in case she needs me.”
Making yourself indispensable, Jeremiah thought to himself. Just like a good second wife. He shifted uneasily and pulled Noemi a little closer, perhaps a bit possessively. Mariya stretched out across the table and put her hands on his, but he moved them away.
“Thanks for looking after her while I was gone,” he said.
She bit her lip and nodded. Has anything changed? he wondered. It was a lot harder to read her than it had been only a few months ago. Things had changed, certainly, but the tensions that had driven him off of the Hope of Oriana were still there.
He started to stand up from the table, but just as he did, Mariya’s father Jakob walked over. “Jeremiah!” he said, giving him a firm handshake. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks,” Jeremiah said weakly. Mariya’s father commanded a presence that made it impossible to leave. As he took a seat next to his daughter, Jeremiah found himself sitting back down.
“I’m not going to lie,” said Jakob, putting both his hands on the table. “I’ve still got a bad taste in my mouth from the way you left.”
“I—I’m sorry,” Jeremiah stammered. “I didn’t—”
“Well, none of that matters anymore. We’ve got bigger problems on our hands right now, so let’s put that behind us until we put these bastard pirates in their place.”
He frowned. “In their place?”
“You heard me right,” said Jakob. “You don’t expect Elijah to just turn over and submit to them, do you? There’s too much of the Outworlds in him. And even if he did, you can bet your starship that the rest of us wouldn’t take it lying down.”
Jeremiah glanced in alarm at the guards on the far side of the room. Though Jakob kept his voice low, the fervor with which he spoke made his skin feel clammy. It would be one thing if it were just him fighting for his independence—it was quite another thing to risk Noemi’s life as well. She smiled and put a hand on his knee to reassure him, but it gave him little comfort.
“Not here,” said Mariya in a hushed voice. “Later—talk later.”
She smiled and rose to her feet, sharing a few words in Deltan with the others. Without warning, she leaned over and kissed Jeremiah on the cheek. Before he could react, she was already halfway to the door. He glanced at Noemi in alarm, but the expression on her face was unreadable.
“My daughter is a good girl,” said Jakob. “You’d do well to reconsider her.”
“Thanks, but—”
“Never mind, we’ll sort it out later. There are more important things to deal with now, after all.”
“Yeah,” said Jeremiah. That much was certainly true.
* * * * *
The main corridor was packed. All the bunk rooms were full, with clusters of people out in the hall, blocking the way through. They talked quietly among themselves with wide, frightened eyes. The pirates had commandeered the forward sections of the ship and forced everyone else to the back, putting a great deal of strain on the life support systems. Even though the ventilators were running full blast, the recycled air smelled thick of body odor—something that was bound to get worse during the voyage from the Lagrange point to the planet itself.
Jeremiah and Noemi stepped through a crowded hatchway into the dream center of the Hope of Oriana. Reclining chairs radiated outward from half a dozen computer cores, filling virtually all of the available floor space. Wires ran along the ceiling, connecting the cores with view screens and other feedback relays. The place was filled to capacity, with even a few dreamers lying on mattresses next to the door. Their unconscious bodies looked eerily like corpses, especially with the helmet-like dream monitors covering their eyes.
“Ah, Jeremiah,” said Captain Elijah from a little alcove in the far corner. “Come here, come here.”
Jeremiah held Noemi’s hand and helped her step carefully around the dreamers. As they went, Mariya came in from the corridor and wordlessly joined them. He gave her a puzzled look, but she raised a finger to her mouth and glanced over her shoulder as if to make sure that they weren’t being followed.
There’s something going on here, Jeremiah realized. Some plot to fight back against the pirates, and Noemi is at the center of it.
“Captain,” he said quietly as they reached the far side of the room. “Why did you call us here?”
“Shh! Inside, inside.”
Elijah hurriedly ushered them into the hardware maintenance room. Harsh fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, and stacks of computer cards and datachips filled a number of modular shelves along the wall. A couple of broken chairs sat in the far corner. Jeremiah helped Noemi down into one and took a seat on the floor.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” said Elijah, motioning for Mariya to take the other chair. She objected at first, but he shook his head and insisted until she sat down.
“Why did you want to meet us?” Jeremiah asked once the door was closed.
“Because the pirates have taken my quarters, and this is the only other place where we can meet in private.”
Noemi started talking, and Mariya listened closely and nodded. “She wants to know what plans you’ve come up with so far.”
“Plans?” Jeremiah asked. “What plans?”
“For getting these damn pirates off my ship,” said Elijah, “and finding a way to defeat them.”
Jeremiah frowned, and his arms began to tense. Why drag Noemi into this? he thought. What can they possibly expect from her?
“The ship’s computer shouldn’t be too difficult to hack,” Mariya translated as Noemi spoke quickly in hushed tones. “She can get into the code directly through the simulator. Even if the pirates put up a firewall, it shouldn’t take long to crack it.”
Elijah nodded. “The Hope of Oriana follows a modular design, with emergency seals that are designed to go off in the event of a decompression. The pirates are all in the forward part of the ship, so if we can depressurize that section enough to knock them out, it shouldn’t be too hard to overwhelm them and take their weapons.” He stroked his beard. “But that still leaves the Revenge.”
“She says it’ll be a little trickier to get into the pirate network. Without a hard line connection, she probably won’t be able to do it, so we’ll have to wait until we’ve docked with the main orbital at Zarmina IV.”
“And how long will it take her to break in?”
Mariya conferred with Noemi, who paused for a moment to think. “If she’s already got control of the Hope of Oriana, not very long—maybe a minute.”
“So we’ll have to wait until we arrive at Zarmina IV,” Captain Elijah muttered, looking off in thought. “That’s cutting it close, but if we can overwhelm them quickly enough and seize control of the station—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Jeremiah. “You want to fight back against the pirates, using my wife as your secret weapon?”
“Of course,” said Elijah. “She’s one of the best simulator programmers I’ve ever seen. Without her hacking skills, we have almost no hope of fighting back.”
“Don’t worry,” said Mariya. “She’ll be plugged into one of the dream monitors the whole time. If there’s any fighting, she won’t see any of it.”
“And what if you fail? What if the pirates figure out what you’re up to and crush this little rebellion before it starts?”
“Then we lose nothing,” said Elijah, his face grim. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but unless you want to spend your life trapped on that planet as a slave, we have to do something.”
Noemi put a hand on Jeremiah’s arm and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t afraid,” she said—then, turning to Mariya, b
egan to speak quickly in Deltan.
“She says this is something she can do,” Mariya told him. “We might not get another chance at this, and she wants to do her part.”
“But will she be safe?”
“So long as those pirates are on my ship, none of us are safe,” said Captain Elijah. “You want to help your wife? Help her do her part to fight back.”
Jeremiah took a deep breath and leaned back against the bulkhead behind him. “But what about the Revenge?” he asked. “Even if we retake the Hope of Oriana, we don’t have the guns or the firepower to fight back against a fully armed pirate warship.”
“If she can break into their network, we won’t have to,” said Elijah. He turned to Noemi. “Can you do that?”
She frowned as Mariya translated. A tense moment of silence passed, in which she screwed up her eyes and bit her lip. Please don’t do anything unsafe, Jeremiah thought as he squeezed her hand. If anyone has to be in danger, it should be me.
As Noemi answered, Mariya’s frown deepened. She gave Jeremiah a quick glance, but turned to Captain Elijah before meeting his eyes.
“She says she can do it, but taking control of the ship would mean making a—how do I say? A hard-link between her brain and the control systems, and that’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” asked Jeremiah. “How?”
Noemi squeezed his hand and spoke quickly, evidently anticipating his question. She gave him a look that seemed almost apologetic, but there was a resignation in her eyes that he couldn’t deny.
“I don’t know exactly how it works,” said Mariya, “but it has something to do with the speed of the computer cycles and the capacity of the human brain. Basically, she can only keep up the connection for a few minutes, before—”
“Before what?”
Mariya swallowed. “Before her brain overheats and she dies.”
Jeremiah’s hands went numb, and the blood drained instantly from his cheeks. The maintenance closet suddenly seemed unbearably cramped, the recycled air too stale to breathe. He fought the urge to grab Noemi and run.
