With a little expert help from Ernie, the JPs brought the ship in to land just a dozen meters away from the wreckage of what was Kingsley Babcock’s home.
Mach peered at it out of the viewscreen. “What a crap hole.”
“I’ve lived in worse,” Ernie said, his voice low with a drawl that sounded like he gargled with fusion oil. “I once spent three ST years on an unnamed jungle planet, living in nothing but a dirt hole with leaves for a roof. Looks to me like Kingsley’s got himself a bit of paradise all to himself down here, what with his domes and all. Nothing on here to hunt, though, apart from hyperthermia in the winters and rotten lungs in the summer.”
Lassea looked up at him with wonder before snapping out of her distraction. “Um, we’re good to go when you are, Cap… I mean, Mach.”
“Right, to the airlock, then. Ernie, make sure it’s closed behind me. I’ll bring Babcock in by myself, make this quick and easy.”
“You got it,” the big hunter said, lumbering behind Mach and shutting the airlock door behind him as Mach stepped through after putting on his EVA.
Mach checked his suit and helmet; the ship came supplied with two atmosphere suits that generated both air and gravity. The new designs were much improved on the old versions. Gone were the robotic-like bulky exteriors to be replaced by sleek almost skin-fit GraphTech Adaptive material that would naturally adjust its composition to suit the temperatures of the wearer. Even the helmets were small, essentially a tight-fitting cap with a transparent cloth for the face and a breathing grill that was flexible enough to allow natural speech.
Checking his comm connection on his smart-screen, Mach gave the order to open the external airlock door. With a hiss the ramp lowered and Mach stepped out, right into the barrel of a heavily armored disruptor rifle.
Chapter Thirteen
The wind howled, blowing dust into Mach’s face mask, yet the rifle didn’t move a millimeter, its wielder remaining as calm as a statue.
“Mach, you okay?” Danick inquired over the comm.
“Just fine, kiddo, you guys stay in there. I’ve got this.”
Mach lifted his hands up to show that his palms were empty. “Hey, Kingsley, old pal, long time no see.”
“Name, rank, number,” Babcock said emotionlessly as though Mach was just some random Joe who had turned up out of nowhere.
“Kingsley, it’s me, Mach. You got the message from Beringer, right? We’re here to pick you up.”
The disruptor rifle crackled as its energy core heated up.
“Name, rank, number,” the old man said again.
It seemed the old guy had lived in quite a rough state. His skin was gray and sallow, his cheeks sunken so that his face looked skeletal beneath the wiry gray stubble and wild locks of patchy white hair.
The threadbare suit he wore had more holes in it than the Phalanx-E.
Mach sighed and complied with his question. “Carson Mach, unranked, unaffiliated. Kingsley, it’s me, look! I’ve got Sanchez and some other crew with me in the ship.”
“Huh. You best follow me inside,” he said. The old man turned and headed through a thick plastic curtain into a ramshackle dome that looked handmade.
Inside, Mach could hear better now that the sandstorm wasn’t blowing into his face. Kingsley placed the rifle against an old metal workbench; upon its surface were strewn dozens of small mechanical parts and half-constructed gadgets of some kind or another.
In numerous rows, running lengthways down the dome, small green plants were growing. The humidity meant the dome’s panes were running with moisture, creating an almost tropical atmosphere. Mach realized Kingsley had enough food here to last him for months on end. It was all a very impressive setup; especially the two little droids that were attending to the vegetable garden.
“Are you coming through?” Kingsley said from a door at the end of the dome. Mach followed inside, expecting to walk into another weapon but was relieved when he saw his old friend now sitting on a tatty chair as he rifled through a pile of printed paperwork.
A small drone with numerous articulated limbs hovered about Kingsley’s head, chirping something Carson didn’t understand. Whatever it was, it made Kingsley laugh. He and the drone turned to regard Mach.
“What’s so funny, old man?”
“I’m sorry, Mach,” Kingsley said. “Squid has a strange sense of humor… and, after all these years, I’ve kind of gotten used to it. Having someone else here is… peculiar.”
“Almost as peculiar as the reasons why I’m here.”
“I know,” the older man said. He picked out a particular leaf of paper and handed it to Mach. “Here, thought this might be of use to you.”
“What is it?”
“You’ve not forgotten how to read Salus Common in these intervening years, have you? Perhaps taken a few too many stims and burned up your brain cells.”
“I see that you’re still a sarcastic douche after all this time,” Mach said, sharing a smile with his old friend.
Mach put his attention to the piece of paper and started to read. It was a star map and an algorithmic set of coordinates with some of Kingsley’s scrawled handwritten notes. “I can’t read your writing,” Mach said. “Are you sure you didn’t retrain as a doctor while you were hiding out here?”
“What would I practice on, plants?”
“Droids… you seem to have enough of them around this place.”
“Plenty more in places you can’t see.”
“Yeah, like your friggin’ proximity mines. How’d you stealth them?”
Kingsley stood up and rubbed his lower back. “I’m sorry, Mach, I had forgotten they were even there. I had my drones up there alert me to your arrival, but it’s been so long since anyone has come here that it had slipped my mind that they were still floating about in orbit. Was there much damage?”
Mach shrugged, his attention still on Kingsley’s report. “Nah, just lost our main fuel cell. We’ve got auxiliary left. But…” He pointed to the rough sketch of a location on the piece of paper. “If you think we’re going there, you’ll likely have more luck getting this old wreckage there. We won’t have the fuel. Besides, what’s so special about this place?”
“It’s why Morgan and Beringer asked me to join you. I think I’ve figured out where this supposed Atlantis ship might be.”
“What? How?”
“Why don’t I tell you on the way to Feronia?”
“That’s not the location of these coordinates,” Mach said, knowing that Feronia was a couple of days L-jump from here, which was the opposite end to the place marked on Kingsley’s report.
“You’re still sharp,” Kingsley said with yet more of that sarcastic tone. “We’re going to Feronia to get a decent ship. How else do you think we’ll travel into contested space and survive? I hear the shipbuilders have a new experimental model they’re working on.”
Mach raised an eyebrow. “And how’d you know about that?”
“This old man has ways and means. Now come on, if we’re doing this, we better not dally around here. We’ve got a new ship to procure… somehow. And I’ve got some information from Beringer that you might find useful.”
“Grab your stuff and let’s go, then,” Mach said.
“I’ve got everything I need,” he said, grabbing his stack of papers and nodding to Squid. “Lead the way, Mach.”
The two men walked through the dome. Kingsley stopped and snatched up his modified SamCore PXP disrupter. “This old girl’s been with me this whole time. Never let me down.”
Mach stopped and shook his head. “I doubt you’ve had much shooting to do out here. I guess we’re the first people to turn up here since you arrived.”
“A man can still keep his skills sharp with some target practice. I’ve machined the barrel on this to increase its accuracy. I’ve redrilled the disruption chambers and amplified the signal using a series circuit booster. There won’t be a more powerful PXP in the Salus Sphere, you can rest assured of th
at.”
“Can that Frankenrifle magically shoot eros out of its chambers? Because given what I had to pay to get Sanchez and Adira out of the clink, we’re gonna need to find some funds from somewhere if we’re to get a ship capable of travelling and surviving in the contested sector.”
“I’m sure you’ll improvise something,” Kingsley said with a grin that brought back some of that old roguish charm and wit that Mach had once grown accustomed to. He’d missed the mad hacker.
When the two men boarded the battered Phalanx-E, Mach had introduced him to the crew and the JPs. They were all sitting in the mess, sharing a coffee and eating some of the CWs least-worst precooked meals.
Danick seemed to have calmed down after his mini-heroics.
Lassea sat next to Adira. The assassin was showing the young girl how to twirl a combat knife. Adira gave Kingsley a simple nod and brought her attention back to Lassea as though disinterested with the whole affair, but then perhaps she was. Adira wasn’t really her fully functioning self unless she was involved with some kind of violent or shady activity. Mach was sure she would have all that and more sooner rather than later. He would certainly need her on Feronia.
Sanchez entered the mess with the grace of a panther, his footsteps making no noise despite the heavy boots he wore. The others, including Mach and Kingsley, turned to look up at him.
“That thing’s fucked, but it should hold for a while,” Sanchez said, his face and arms were smeared with grease and he wore a pair of welding shields over his eyes.
“Sirs, are there repairs I could perhaps assist with?” Squid said as it hovered above Kingsley’s right shoulder as if it were a pirate’s companion parrot.
Danick approached the drone and looked on with wonder. He was so green he’d never seen any tech outside of the boring stuff made available to junior recruits.
“How does it float?” Danick asked.
“It has a name,” Kingsley replied. “It is Squid and you may address it as such; otherwise, it’ll get a little cranky. Squid, why don’t you take Danick with you to the stern of the ship and see what kind of mess our friend Ernesto has made of the repairs.”
Sanchez flipped the welding shields up and narrowed his eyes. “You always were a sarcastic lizard’s-ass,” he growled.
“Better than a knuckle-dragging ape with body odor issues,” Kingsley retorted. The old man patted Sanchez on the cheek with his gnarled hand as he made his way through the mess. Sanchez wrapped his big arms around Kingsley, swamping him like a Koranian Conda wrapping its massive coils around a small mammal.
“Great to see you again, Babs,” Sanchez said as he hugged his old friend.
“You too, Sanchez… now could you please stop breaking my ribs, there’s a good chap.” The hunter dropped him and gave him a wide grin. Mach found himself smiling too at the reunion of his associates.
“While Squid and Danick are fixing Sanchez’s repairs,” Mach said with a wink to the big hunter, “shall we go through Beringer’s info and figure out some kind of plan?”
“Make me a brew of that good coffee and I’ll divulge what I know,” Kingsley said as he took a seat opposite Adira and Lassea. He placed his pile of papers onto the table’s surface and spread them out.
Lassea got up and fixed a cup of coffee for everyone and rejoined the group.
Mach, sitting next to Kingsley, looked over the information. Among the blocks of text were photographs of old tablets and carvings, all of them showing a gigantic, geometric ship. Each one was slightly different, featuring a range of armaments and other attachments Mach couldn’t identify.
Among the text were a series of coordinates listed in a table.
“These,” Kingsley said, running a thin, bony finger down the list, “are locations of the previous one hundred and twenty sightings of our Atlantis ship, including the last one at Orbital Forty.”
The crew stared at him, waiting on his every raspy word.
“Okay, so how does that help us?” Mach said, prompting him.
With a shuffling of papers, Kingsley pulled out a piece of paper covered with what looked like random scribbles.
“Doodles?” Adira said with a dry, unimpressed expression.
“Non-Euclidean geometry,” Kingsley said as though it were as simple to understand as an old game of noughts and crosses. “I applied one of my own filters to the coordinates and I found a pattern among the chaos. There was a signal just before it arrived at Orbital Forty. One of the Qerfs picked it up, but it was out of usual communication frequency range and was encrypted. I’ve… almost managed to decrypt the signal.”
“Okay,” Adira said. “That sounds… promising. So this location you’ve identified, what’s there?” She pressed the tip of the combat knife onto a hastily scrawled map with an inked circle around it.
“That, my new friend, is the last known source of the signal.”
Sanchez grunted as he used a wet towel to clean the grease off his face.
“What is it?” Lassea said, looking up at her new object of fascination. She’d barely taken her eyes off him since he’d come aboard, but Mach could see why. If any young JP wanted someone to look up to, to feel secure around, Sanchez was it… as long as Lassea didn’t get to know him too closely; she might not like some of the more… combat-oriented activities he had gotten involved with over the years.
Giving Lassea his attention before regarding the rest of the crew, Sanchez said, “We’re gonna need heavy arms if we’re to go into that particular contested zone.”
“Why’s that?” Lassea asked, her shoulders tensing.
“There’s a new trading orbital there. Built by some of the Lavernans more vicious families—the exiled ones.”
Adira snorted. “You talking about the rumors of the Black Swan? That’s just a Summanus tale. Most of the traffickers and other assorted scum would often talk about the runs through that sector of space. Rumor was that the Black Swan, aka Marlene Laverna, had set up an unaffiliated black market trading post. Anything and everything is up for grabs. No restrictions, and apparently the place is protected by some old horan destroyers that were signed for decommission before Laverna got them and armed them to the max with restricted weapons.”
“Well, that makes things a little more interesting,” Mach added.
“If we get suitably armed,” Sanchez said.
“Like I said, it’s just rumor. Might not be anything in it,” Adira said.
The crew all looked to Mach, who looked across to Kingsley. “You really think we’ll find something there?”
The old man shrugged. “Could be a complete waste of time. It wouldn’t be the first time I made a mistake analyzing a rogue signal.”
“Wait,” Mach said, grabbing the man’s arm. “This signal… it’s the same one, isn’t it? The same one you found during the war?”
Kingsley swallowed and nodded his head once.
“We’re gonna need a bigger ship. Lassea, set a course for Feronia. We’ve got some dealing to do.”
Chapter Fourteen
Three days into the L-jump to Feronia, Adira had finally decided on her course of action. She stood in the shadows of Mach’s berth, the blade in her right hand. It was cool against her skin. She’d waited years to be in this position, to fulfill the contract taken out on Carson Mach’s life.
Such strange circumstances life had conjured to bring her here in this moment. For years she had sat inside her solitary cell, thinking about what she would do if she got out. Which contract she would be compelled to complete first.
When she first saw Mach’s face, she couldn’t believe her luck. Perhaps Fortuna herself had decided to smile down on her. Given her previous run of luck, or lack thereof, she’d be a fool to turn down this situation.
All it would take would be a single cut across the throat.
Mach slumbered the sleep of a man on strong meds. She didn’t even need to try that hard. She could sing while she killed him in his sleep and he wouldn’t even know it.<
br />
The subsonic rumble of the repaired LightDrive pulsated through her back as she stood there, leaning back against the titanium hull. She heard footsteps outside in the corridor and knew them to belong to Danick. He walked with grace but with a lack of subtlety. When she killed him, she’d make sure she was quieter than his heavy footfalls.
Lassea she would leave alive. They would need someone to pilot the bodies back to Fides Prime for their burial. Adira wasn’t a monster; she’d let them at least be remembered by their friends and family first.
Mach coughed and rolled on to his side before falling back into a deep, snoring slumber. Adira ghosted forward, the blade slicing through the dark of the room until she brought it up to his throat.
She leaned over, smelling his scent. He always had a nice musk to him, she thought, remembering some of their more enthusiastic bed exploits. Her hand wavered for a moment, but she shut out the memories and refocused on the pulsing artery in his neck.
Just one slice and it’d be done; she’d have enough money to escape the Sphere and finally make her way back to Titan, the Sol system… her home world. She’d never felt at home here in the Sphere with the CW. There were too many rules and regulations—too much politics for someone like her.
Mach’s prosthetic eye opened and fixed her with a blue-glow stare.
“If you’re going to end me, get on with it, I’m bored listening to your breath,” Mach said.
Adira jerked back. Mach’s words jolted her from her trancelike state. Suddenly her actions seemed foolish, the games of some spiteful child. Before she could say anything, Mach grabbed her arm and pulled her over his body, dumping her heavily onto the bed. Quicker than she’d ever seen him, he flung his leg over her so he straddled her waist, pinning her down.
She still held the blade in her hand and brought it up to his throat as he bent his head down toward her face.
“Do it,” he whispered. “Run me through, right here, right now.”
Her breathing quickened as his weight pressed down on her. His heat flowed through her thin suit; her palms moistened with sweat. “I had a contract,” she muttered. “It seems the logical thing to do. It’s just one more death, after all.”
Carson Mach 1: The Atlantis Ship Page 10
