Angelo lowered his head even further and burbled out an angry, animalistic noise from the back of his throat. But it was a defeated sound. Either he’d been talked around, or the moment to atomize us all out of spontaneous berserker passion had been lost. We’d drawn it out too long.
Then, a new ship screamed by overhead, mere yards from the tops of our vessels. Everyone on the bridge reflexively ducked, and I saw Angelo almost knock all his teeth out on his own sword. The newcomer then decelerated, executed a tight, flashy turn, and joined our little discussion circle, like a flashy young stud in a leather jacket arriving at the singles bar.
It was the filth. The Interplanetary Security Service, the “policed” part of the phrase “policed section of space.” Their ships were unmistakable—metallic blue and almost perfectly cone shaped, the most powerful engines available at the back, tapering down to a point at the front, where a selection of blasters and torpedo cannons awaited the unwary troublemaker. They’d suffered massive cutbacks as a result of—what else?—quantum tunneling, and ever since then had had a rather psychotic eagerness to poke their noses in at the first sign of conflict.
But there was something odd about this one. Instead of immediately hailing every ship in the vicinity with an ear-cracking siren and a reading of the rights, it was just hanging there in space, silent and unmoving after its flashy entrance. I briefly met Angelo’s gaze as we both wondered where this was leading.
And then a projector mounted above the ISS ship’s cockpit window burst into life, displaying a gigantic holographic screen across space directly in front of its nose. An immediately recognizable face appeared, grinning, its orange skin neatly juxtaposing the ship’s blue coloration.
“Henderson,” I realized.
“A good morning to you all,” he said. His voice was coming through the ship’s comm system slightly out of sync to the movement of his lips on the holographic screen. “Don’t mind me if you were in the middle of something. I’m just going to sit here murdering every single person that tries to harm Danny.”
“How the hell did he find us?!” I hissed, partly to Warden and mostly to myself. “Trac. He must have figured out we hadn’t left the system yet, and of course we were stupid enough to just head straight to the most obvious trebuchet gate.”
“Possibly,” said Warden quietly. “Or possibly it’s because I texted him and told him where we were.”
I banged my forehead against the touchscreen, as a consequence of all the strength flooding from my upper body. “Why did you do that?” I asked, lips deformed against the glass.
“Think, McKeown. Henderson’s main interest is keeping Daniel safe. If your former colleagues truly intended to destroy our ship indiscriminately, then our desires temporarily aligned.”
“Oh. Of course. Sound thinking. Maybe next we could dissuade muggers by handcuffing ourselves to a Bengal tiger.” I threw myself back in my seat and waved my hands manically. “Hey! I’ve got an idea! How about we all stop ringing up the plying supervillain!”
“What stake hast thou in this dispute?” demanded Angelo.
Henderson smiled without humor. “I’m just a father who’s concerned that his son isn’t having the best holiday he could possibly have with his new best friend, Jacques McKeown.”
“DAAAD,” screamed Daniel, covering the top of his head with both hands. Jemima, who’d been standing in front of him watching the display, flinched at the outburst.
“Is he truly the traitor Jacques McKeown?” asked Angelo, jabbing into the communication screen with an index finger like a German sausage.
I tried to think of precisely the right thing to say that would appease every party, but my thought process took slightly too long. “Oh, I should hope so, the amount he cost me,” exclaimed Henderson, filling the pause. “Traitor certainly seems to fit the bill.”
“Then thou shalt bear witness to his destruction,” replied Angelo, his voice descending gradually into a vicious hiss.
“Sorry if I’m being stubborn, but actually, no, I don’t think I will. I don’t think you’re going to blow up that ship. I think you’re going to do that thing where you go inside the ship and take everyone alive, and then bring them to me. You’re going to do that because I’m telling you to.”
A few of the ships in Angelo’s party were rotating slowly toward the ISS ship, anticipating a change in the dynamics of the situation. “And for what reason should we obey thy commands?” asked Angelo, an offended edge to his tone of voice.
“Boarding! That’s the word I was looking for. Sorry, I’ve a lot on my mind. What was that? Oh, well, let’s say, thirty thousand of those stupid moon dollars you have?”
I could still feel Warden’s hand on my chair’s headrest, gripping hard enough to pull the upholstery tight. There was nothing we could do but watch the exchange like a pair of frightened kids hiding behind the sofa while their parents argue.
“Begone from this place, Terran worm,” growled Angelo, to my simultaneous relief and increased tension. “There is no honor in thy grubby offerings.”
The permanent half smile froze on Henderson’s face. Clearly he was used to the discussion ending after money came into it. I got the feeling we were about to see what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. “All right. I like this, it’s cute. Fifty thousand. Come on, boys, that’d buy a lot of cheap wine and back-alley hand jobs.”
Angelo and the cadre of John Carter types from which he’d presumably constructed his lynch mob were a prideful bunch. Tribal living on hostile planets drums that into you. And while they were star pilots, they weren’t hurting for euroyen as much as the rest of us. This was partly because they preferred to catch their own food, and partly because they often had side gigs taking suicidally dangerous bounty-hunting jobs. And while Henderson’s offer wasn’t dissimilar to such a contract, they did it more for the honor and the chance to relive the glory days. Not for money, and certainly not money being dismissively tossed at them as if from a strip club patron.
Soon, all their weapons were trained on the ISS ship. I very much doubted Henderson was actually inside it, but after honor and pride Angelo’s lot were pretty big on symbolism, too.
“Perhaps thou should slither away now,” said Angelo. “And butt thy nose elsewhere, lest we slice it from thy face for thy tone.”
Henderson’s smile had now entirely disappeared. He shifted in his seat, planting his chin upon his hand to regard the enemy he had just created for himself, and his bottom row of teeth ground back and forth. “Well,” he growled. “This is what happens when you try to meet someone halfway.”
The screen disappeared. All was still. I glanced nervously at Warden, and she returned an identical expression. “What happens now?” I asked.
“He’s probably going to run away or start shooting,” suggested Jemima. “I mean, that sounded like the sort of thing you say just before you do one of those two things.”
As it turned out, she was wrong: neither of those things happened. Instead, I noticed movement on the outside of the ISS ship and commanded the interface to zoom in.
It took me a moment to recognize Carlos. It was the first time I’d seen him without his tuxedo: he was on this occasion entirely unclothed except for some kind of shiny black shorts for modesty’s sake. He crawled his away along the ship’s hull toward the nose cone, moving across by bending and straightening his massive arms like some kind of giant red caterpillar with a fist on each end.
He paused briefly when he reached the outside of the cockpit window, then jumped. He launched himself with such power that the ISS ship was sent spinning in the opposite direction. His body sped horizontally across space, leaving what looked like a red comet tail composed of what I think might have been hairs.
His target seemed to be a ship right in the middle of Angelo’s armada, which, like the others, hadn’t moved, because they were all waiting to see where this was leading. Carlos almost missed it, but he extended a hand as he went pas
t and managed to grab one of the torpedo tubes. He spun around it a few times, then, momentum sufficiently built up, brought one of his fists down upon the top of the ship.
It went straight through the hull and up to the “wrist.” Then the entirety of Carlos’s mass clambered inside the hole. He had a cat’s ability to inexplicably fit through small gaps.
On the communication window, I saw Angelo, all poise and posturing forgotten, slapping at something offscreen, presumably his own communication device. “Brothers!” he cried. “Answer my call! What ails thee?”
All we could hear from our end was a combination of static and indistinct crashing and groaning noises that were equally likely to have come from comms interference, from metal being torn apart, or from people being torn apart.
What we could be sure of was the look on Angelo’s face, bathed in the glow of the video screen as he watched live feed that we couldn’t see, and it was ghastly. His tanned complexion was turning the color of a normal person’s skin.
The sound suddenly became an earsplitting roar of wind, and at that same moment, I saw Carlos emerge from the hull of the stricken ship like a jet of pus spurting from a burst pimple. He kicked away toward another target and the ship, now empty of life, began to gently spin as it drifted away.
This time, the ship Carlos was streaking toward had the presence of mind to start firing, as did most of its colleagues. The area of space immediately surrounding Carlos became a confusing mess of blaster fire, torpedoes, and crisscrossing vapor trails. Carlos either took every hit and suffered no damage or employed some arcane movements of his insane body to ensure that at no point was any part of him in any of the uncountable firing lines.
Halfway to his apparent destination, his path of movement suddenly turned a sharp ninety degrees. But it didn’t seem to have anything to do with having been hit by a blast, as the new path was just as straight and determined as the first.
“Tell me,” I said to my equally transfixed crewmates, “that that plying thing did not just kick flip off a torpedo.”
The originator of the torpedo—and Carlos’s new target—registered all of this too late. The pilot made an attempt to get out of the way, but their engine wasn’t warmed up. With spooky accuracy Carlos shot straight up their torpedo tube without even touching the sides. Angelo immediately called the stricken ship, whose pilot managed to get almost a whole word out before that audio feed also descended into loud crashes and violence.
I caught Angelo’s gaze after he switched the feed off. He scowled, his upper lip curling around his nose like the bread of a steak sandwich. “You may have this fight alone, coward,” he growled, before cutting communication.
His ship peeled away from the gathering and sped off in the general direction of Ritsuko. His surviving allies quickly followed his lead. Soon our ship was alone with the ISS vessel and the two drifting ships whose pilots were now too dead to escape.
Carlos emerged from the top of the second ship he had taken care of, and he clung to the hull, mournfully watching his potential targets disappear, like a child watching their mother get back in the car without them on their first day of school. Then what passed for his face slowly turned to look in our direction.
Warden jerked into life. She threw an order in my general direction—“Call Henderson”—and ran for the captain’s chair. I hailed the ISS ship, and in the same time, Carlos leapt onto that ship’s hull, preparing to steppingstone over to us.
The communication screen sprang to life with a new feed, and Henderson’s face appeared. I hadn’t been able to make out the scene behind Henderson when he’d been on the holographic screen, but seeing it on the communicator, it surprised me. He was sitting on the captain’s chair of a bridge considerably more efficiently laid out than mine, and I saw uniformed ISS agents behind him, some nakedly resentful, some hovering nervously around, making sure he was satisfied with their performance.
Which meant he actually was onboard that ship in person. That made sense, if his bodyguard was here, too. It was a risky thing for a professional in a dangerous lifestyle, and that further meant that he was taking Daniel’s abduction a lot more seriously than his manner of speech suggested. I felt myself shiver with intimidation.
“Henderson,” said Warden. Henderson did not smile.
I looked behind me. Warden was standing behind the captain’s chair, holding Daniel tightly by the shoulder with one hand and holding my blaster to his temple with the other. Daniel, for his part, was directing his usual resentment toward the face of his father. Jemima had been vaguely hovering around the room and was settled safely away from Warden just next to my position.
“So, what’s the plan, Penny?” asked Henderson, his chummy tone of voice inconsistent with his rock-solid face. “’Cos I can see you’ve clearly got this all worked out.”
“Call Carlos back,” said Warden. Carlos, somehow informed on the events by means I couldn’t even guess at, was still perched on the top of the ISS ship’s hull, watching us intently like a pointer dog. “Daniel will be returned to you when we are outside your sphere of influence. But if you make any moves against us while we make for the trebuchet gate, he dies.”
“Ugh, will you please stop it?” moaned Daniel. “We all know it’s an act and you’re just embarrassing yourselves.”
There was an awkward pause, then Henderson’s face broke out into a wide, warm smile. “Ah, you’re right. This was all completely set up and you’re not actually in any danger at all.”
“Why do you always have to mess with everything I do?! I HATE you!”
“Oh, forgive an old man for wanting your trip to be exciting. But do your dad a favor, Danny—just go along with it. We’ve put so much effort and money into all the actors and set pieces; it’d just break everyone’s hearts to know you saw through it so quickly.”
“URGH,” went Daniel, rolling his eyes. “Fine.”
“Oh my god,” murmured Jemima, audible only to me. I looked at her quizzically. “It’s not an act. It’s all real, isn’t it.”
I glanced briefly over at Warden before answering. “Yeah.”
“Is she going to kill us?”
I had something snarky prepared, but then I caught the look on Jemima’s face, and some long-forgotten instinct made me think better of it. “Not if I can help it,” I whispered sincerely. “I’ll stop it before it comes to that. Promise.”
“Well then, let me just get back into character,” said Henderson jovially. He disappeared downward off the screen, apparently rolling forward off his chair, to the confusion of the ISS officers behind him. Then he rose back into view with a face like a gathering storm. His eyes flashed white hatred from the shadows formed by his lowered brow.
“Take us to the gate, McKeown,” said Warden, still holding the gun to Daniel’s head and not breaking eye contact with Henderson’s image.
I didn’t need telling twice. I slid us into forward thrust, and the ship accelerated apologetically past Henderson’s ship and toward the massive corkscrew that still hung patiently in the background. I was acutely aware of Carlos’s eager gaze boring into us as we swept past, ready to spring at the slightest instruction.
“Penny?” said Henderson conversationally. “You’re going to die.”
Warden pretended she hadn’t heard. But I almost heard the click of all her joints locking solid.
“I know, philosophically, we all are, eventually,” added Henderson. “I’m just saying that you probably have more reason to philosophize about that than others. We’re going to find you. We’ll know how far the gate sends you and we’ll find you.”
“McKeown,” said Warden. “Do you know how to make a fire-and-forget jump?”
In the back of my mind, my survival instincts immediately leapt to their feet and started swearing and banging a drum. “Yeah,” I said warily. “I’ve never done one, but it was covered at flight school.”
“Please explain what it is, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening?”
Suddenly I felt like I was back in my childhood home, relaying messages between parents. “You try to cancel out of a trebuchet jump just as the gate begins to fire. It makes the gate’s firmware crash, and you get launched right as the gate starts decalibrating. There’s always an element of randomness to a gate jump, but this gives it a much wider range. And it’s impossible to track.”
“So you know what to do now, don’t you.”
I sighed. “I was kinda hoping I didn’t. ’Cos it sounds like you want to hurl us into a completely randomly chosen point of the Black.”
She tensed up more, if that was even possible. Her hand tightened audibly around the gun. “Are you unwilling to do it?”
I turned in my chair and took the controls. “No, no, I’ll do it. Just thought maybe you might like to save a bit of time and shoot us all in the heads instead.”
No one replied. The trebuchet gate grew larger and larger in our view. On the video feed, Henderson watched, face still, like the crowd watching the condemned prisoner walking up to the scaffold.
Then he suddenly shot forward in his seat, eyes blazing. “How the hell do you think you’re going to walk away from this, Warden? Walk away from me?! You think you can hide out there, in space, of all places?” He slapped himself on both cheeks in mock concern. “Oh, whatever shall I do? Surely I can’t just find some scumbag who’ll take money to hunt you down? Who in the Black could possibly fit that bill? Oh, that’s right!” He slapped his forehead. “Absolutely anyone!”
I killed the feed. We were inside the corkscrew now, and a giant metallic spiral filled my view. The gate’s automated systems interfaced with the ship’s computer, and the instruction panel appeared in the middle of my screen. After setting the destination as vaguely as possible for a spot in the middle of the Black, a countdown from thirty began.
They had indeed covered fire-and-forget jumps long ago in my pilot training, mainly to tell us not to do them. But the trouble with teaching people not to do a thing is that you have to tell them about the thing first. So I knew that it could be fairly easily achieved by repeatedly jamming the gate’s Cancel button when half a second of countdown remained. I watched the numbers tick down, my knuckle hovering over the touchscreen.
Will Save the Galaxy for Food Page 13
