Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m still the outsider here. But four days from now we’ll all probably be dead, so what is there to lose?

  “Thanks,” I say, and step in.

  A bunk juts from the left wall, blankets meticulously tucked, a door to the bathroom opens to the rear, and a cargo box that looks as if it may be used for a table sits on the floor against the right wall. It’s exactly the same as my cabin. Feeling cramped, I sit down on the box and he follows me in, leaving the door open. Wrestling on a shirt that’s the same dull uniform gray that everything washed time and again in a ship’s water-recycling system becomes, he says, “Shit. I don’t think I have any cups. Hold on a second and I’ll go get some.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t need one.”

  With a grin, a look as unfamiliar on his face as it has lately been on mine, he sits down. The top of the bottle comes off with a quick twist. “To comrades,” he says, swallowing deeply. His eyes fill with water and he passes it to me.

  “Right.” I take the bottle, tilt the neck toward him in a salute, and take a swallow of my own. Instantly, my tongue curls up and I have to force my throat to open wide enough for the burning liquid to pass. “Oh my god, what is that?” It streams into my stomach with the same caustic flow as molten lava.

  “Like it? I got it as part of a trade for some mining tools we lifted a while ago. We had about sixty bottles, but we’re down to just a few. Good stuff.” He takes another drink.

  You’re insane could be written on my face. The stuff tasted as if it were radioactive pond scum filtered through gasoline. He extends the bottle to me, but I shake my head “no.” So he puts it on the floor between us. The closeness of the cabin makes it seem like a good idea to have something solid between us.

  “How long—?” I start.

  “I know—” he starts.

  We both stop. This time he waits for me to go first.

  “So how long have you and Vitruzzi been flying together?” I’m fidgety and find it hard to sit still, so I grab the bottle for another drink. My throat rebels with slightly less outrage this time.

  “Since just after the Soldier’s Rebellion. I was in the hospital when it happened, just three months shy of my time being up. I’d been part of a suppression squad, dealing with a manufacturing riot on Obal 4 and lost my real leg. Vitruzzi was my doctor.” He takes another long gulp. “She’s brilliant. The technology that saved my leg from amputation, bioregeneration, she developed it. I was the first patient to have the procedure done. Took eight months to get everything working right, but Eleanor was persistent. Stubborn, in fact. She wasn’t going to fail. Anyway, we had a lot of time to get to know each other.”

  “So what’s she doing flying cargo now?” I still haven’t puzzled this out.

  “I’d already been planning on buying my own cargo ship when my time was up. Had a few bucks saved, and planned on working as a pilot until I could get the rest together. Flying interstellar cruise ships or corporate jobs. You know, where the real money is.”

  Strahan’s personality isn’t exactly a model of the conventionally affable, easy-going cruiser pilot, and I smirk at the idea of him giving deck tours to sliced and molded women in overpriced evening gowns. Catching my expression, he smiles back.

  “Yeah, it was just an idea. Anyway, V decided it was time to change careers after the shit hit the fan during the Rebellion. She had the capital and she was able to get the weapons contract because of her standing in the medical branch and high-profile achievements, and we went into business together.”

  He’s avoiding telling me the full story, but I know it’s no good to press. There’s a reason, probably a damn good one, that Vitruzzi decided to “change careers,” as he puts it. “And what about Desto?”

  “Bomani? Another deserter. He was into small-time black-marketing on Chum Miro. That’s where the Sphynx came from. He needed a job and we needed someone who wasn’t afraid to break the rules. Desto and Bodie are the best two guys I’ve ever had at my back.”

  “Best two guys, huh?”

  “Except recently. I mean…well, you took care of business out there on R’Kadia. So, now I’ve got three…”

  I hadn’t intended to fluster him, but his surprising embarrassment is amusing. I take another drink, beginning to enjoy the signature fireball spreading through my guts. If not for the nutrition bars helping absorb the asbestoslike liquid, I would probably have a hard time walking. The room is beginning to feel hot and smaller by the second. We both look at the bottle so we don’t have to look at each other. Neither of us are much for small talk, apparently, so I decide to make my exit. Maybe the booze will help me catch a few minutes of sleep. But he asks another question.

  “So what will you do once we get your brother off the Fortress?”

  It’s the first hint of optimism I’ve heard in regard to David, and it’s strangely comforting. “You mean if we don’t all get blown into tiny molecules of space-born carbon?” My optimism, on the other hand, is tempered by my realism. “Business as usual, I guess. The black market is fairly competitive, and we’ve got a lot of experience. We’re done with Rajcik, though, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  He gives me a considering look. “Sounds a little pointless to me,” he says and hands me the bottle.

  He isn’t trying to pick a fight or pass judgment; the comment comes across as a detached observation, so I let it slide. Taking the bottle, I bring the subject back to him and Vitruzzi. “If you and Vitruzzi are partners, why is she captain?”

  “She’s smart, she’s capable, and she had the money. I’ve never been anything but a soldier. It just makes sense. I don’t want to be in charge of a ship. This crew is…they’re more than friends, you know? Eleanor just has what it takes to lead, and it’s easier for me to follow. She knows how to keep things from coming unraveled. It’s hard to explain.”

  He doesn’t need to. I know exactly what he’s saying. It’s not hard to take command, but people like Strahan, and like me, reject leadership. Independence is easier; inviting people to rely on you is asking for trouble. It’s asking to be let down, or to let them down. And that’s hard to live with, that kind of pressure. It just means you have more to lose. People like Strahan and I have seen how ugly the universe can be. We have that joyless ability to look ahead and see all the bad things that can happen, and who wants to be responsible for leading others into them? It’s not cowardice—in a twisted way, it’s hope. If you’re not close to people, you can’t hurt them. We’re quite a pair.

  Swigging another drink from the bottle, I’m astonished to find it more than half empty. We’d killed a lot of it while talking. It’s strange how easy it is to be with him, now that we’ve both relaxed and forgotten to be enemies for a second. Or maybe it’s just the rotgut, melting away my instinctive caution and numbing my live-wire nerves. Whatever, it’s time to go. “Look, thanks for the drink. I should get going. We don’t have much time left before we reach the Fortress.”

  He gets up too. “We should take another look at the disc in a couple of hours. I know there’s something we’re not seeing, but it’s there. We just have to keep at it.”

  Is he stalling me?

  “Sounds good.”

  He nods but looks distracted. Nothing left to say, I start to step through the door. Strahan stops me with a hand on my elbow. I turn, and his face is inches from mine. I can feel the heat that radiates from his body. Or is it just me?

  No.

  Yes.

  No.

  As delicately as I can, I pull my arm out of his grip.

  “Strahan, this can’t happen.”

  “Why?” His eyes are gentle, and the same color as fall leaves right before the icy winter wind takes them. The emotion in them is intense, confining. It’s hard for me to speak.

  “It’s just not possible. I can’t let anything complicate this mission.”

  On a hair-trigger, his face grows hard and his brows knit together. “Damm
it, Erikson, are you so focused on killing that you don’t know how to live?”

  The strike-first-or-strike-back instinct in me makes me want to hit him, but I bottle it. Yanking my elbow from his grip and careening into the corridor, nearly falling down the stairs in his doorway, I lurch toward my bunk. There’s a thump against the wall behind me, like a fist striking it in anger, but I don’t turn around to look. Maybe it’s impossible to get along with someone so like yourself. Maybe it’s just impossible for us.

  SEVENTEEN

  “We should’ve killed him.”

  I’m sitting in the navigator’s seat in the Sphynx’s flight control deck, both hands clasped tightly around the seat mounts, staring across a few hundred meters of space at the Temptation’s stern. It isn’t that the seat isn’t stable; the reason my knuckles are white is because we’re about to let Rajcik go.

  Venus sits at the helm, swiftly punching through systems checks. Whether she’s ignoring me or just can’t hear my under-the-breath comment through the din of her own clamorous thoughts isn’t important. Vitruzzi made it clear that we’re holding up our end of the deal, believing, recklessly in my opinion, that Rajcik might still be useful.

  The speed in which new schematics pop on and off the pilot display creates a chaotic strobe effect, fracturing my focus. But Venus seems to be absorbing the split-second information with casual ease, speaking in her customary rapid clip as she does.

  “There’s a slight tension that we can’t work out of the ejector coils, but it’s easily offset if we just run the core rotor at .05 amps higher…” Her voice becomes part of the background as she explains each observation, quickly oversaturating my interest.

  “Whoa, hold it, Venus. Can you go through that a little more slowly?” A curious image catches my eye. “That can’t be what it looked like.”

  Shrugging, she reverses the system feed, stopping when I point. “There.”

  A starboard missile launch tube glows from the display in as much stark detail as the real thing.

  Scanning the image closely anyway for a few seconds, I just want to make sure I’m not mistaken. “I’d really like to know how you’ve managed to hide functioning weapons systems from Admin inspections.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s not that hard actually.” She smiles. “You see, the missile tubes are here, beneath the cargo bay floor, instead of on the outer flanks of the ship like it was originally designed. Bodie, Desto, and Pat built the new launch tubes after the captain brought the Sphynx to Spectra 6. The Admin had just yanked off the launch activators and pulled all the tube plating off. Bodie and the guys rerouted the afterburn jets into the old tubes, covered them with heavier graphite plating, and added a little extra piece. Lead inner walls. Pat took some radioisotope aluminum freezers and lined the tubes with their parts to keep the lead from getting too hot. So, the jets help keep the inside of the ship warm, but the heat can’t get to the lead walls, which makes it impossible for scanners to see what’s inside. Namely, the missile tubes.”

  Vitruzzi hadn’t been bluffing when she’d told Rajcik we’d be keeping him in missile range. This bird is still hot. I look closely at the schematic and have her zoom out so I can see the outline of the whole cargo bay. As I suspect, the armory doubles as the loading room, and the missile tubes can be fed directly from inside. They’re well camouflaged; I hadn’t suspected a thing when I’d been there to get ammunition from Desto. The vault being reinforced by blast walls and located midship isn’t just a convenient accident. If the ship were attacked or damaged, anyone inside would be safe and able to feed and probably even launch the missiles until they ran out or the threat was eradicated. And from the outside, there’s no way to tell what secrets lay hidden in the heart of the Sphynx.

  “So where are the ejection portals?”

  “The hydraulic doors, disguised as off-gassing vents beneath the main engine. If anyone even notices them, they know not to open them without depressurizing first. We’ve got the real off-gassing chambers linked into the tubes, so if we need to shunt into them, I can either do it from my console, or from the backup console in the armory.”

  “There’s a system controller in the armory?”

  “Yep. It’s all there, in another room. You get to it using a code in the door keypad.”

  “Who knows the code and how to operate it?”

  She looks up from the display and raises an amused eyebrow. “You have to be in the secret club, Aly.” Satisfied with my nonplussed expression, she continues, “Kidding. It’s all of us, the regular crew. And Pat.”

  I almost have to laugh. They’ve been in total control of this situation from the minute Rajcik landed on Spectra 6. Vitruzzi could say the word anytime and blow him out of the sky inside of seconds. With the Temptation’s onboard weapon detection system, Rajcik knows it, which explains why he hasn’t tried even once to shake us in the six days that have passed since we left Spectra 6.

  Why hadn’t they told me any of this? Rationally, it makes no sense for me to resent being kept in the dark, about everything, starting with the tracking device and going all the way to the Sphynx’s battle capabilities. Why would they have trusted me with information that could have benefited Rajcik? They couldn’t have taken any chances; if I’d been lying about my loyalty to him, I might have given him everything he needed to sweep into Agate Beach and take anything he wanted any time that was convenient for him, even if Vitruzzi’s crew didn’t go for the joint-effort assault on the Fortress.

  Still, a spasm of, I don’t know, disappointment, regret…some emotion I’d rather not examine twists through me. Almost two weeks we’ve been together, working side by side, fighting, planning, hell, I’ve even risked my life for them. What does it take to make them trust me? Accept me as part of the crew?

  Venus stares at me quizzically, reading the thoughts playing across my face, and I turn away. Forget it. This is how it is. We’re partners. Not friends, not comrades. Business associates locked into an arrangement, a contract of defiance against the odds threatening to tear our lives apart. I better get used to it and stop letting things that don’t matter distract me.

  We’ve flown more than three-quarters of the distance to where Rajcik’s coordinates put the Fortress. Three hours ago, Vitruzzi and Brady informed the crew that the time has come to cut him loose. We’re so close now we can almost feel the Fortress’s malignancy like a black hole in our flight path. It’s a gamble to believe Rajcik will keep his promise and continue his intended mission instead of doubling back to attack the Beach, maybe the biggest gamble any of us have ever been forced to make. Vitruzzi says the settlement has an evacuation procedure in the case of such an event, and the equipment to know if he, or anyone, is coming. While I have my doubts about the settlement’s preparedness, each passing day reveals something new and astonishing about these people, pushing those doubts further into the dust.

  Vitruzzi hails Rajcik from the com room and I shove my concerns aside, all my focus on what’s about to happen. From our seats on the flight control deck, Venus and I watch the linked pilot’s VDU.

  “This is it, Rajcik. We’re done here. Remember, we did everything we said we would. You have your seeds and you have Vilbrandt. I suggest you take both of them and disappear.”

  Standing up before his video uplink and crossing his arms over his wide chest, his response is woodenly sincere. “Captain Vitruzzi, make no mistake. This won’t be the last time we see each other.” He lets his gaze linger on her for few seconds and motions to Thompson, standing behind him. “I want you to tell Aly something for me. Tell her I’m sorry to be losing such a competent crewmember, but it was inevitable. I knew that long before she did.” He pauses, and a cold feeling begins creeping through my guts. Outside the flight control deck screen, the Temptation’s main engines start cycling rapidly in preparation for hyperspeed.

  “Tell her she should have trusted her instincts when she realized I hadn’t left the escape shuttle on Obal 3.” Another pause, and a shadow comes
across his features as if he’s uncertain whether or not to continue. “She accused me of having no loyalty, and she’s right. But loyalty is one of her flaws, not mine.”

  Black eyes shining like crystals, he continues, “Just let her know: I gave her and David to the Admin before his misguided ideas of moral superiority convinced him to turn on me. Vitruzzi, are you listening?”

  She doesn’t respond, and he keeps talking. “Make sure she knows that her brother is at the Fortress. I made that a special part of my arrangement with T’Kai. I’ll be there too, waiting for her. And I’ll be looking forward to our reunion.” His teeth flash in a savage grin. “And one last thing. Give her this; it’s her payback for the mission. Tell her to enjoy.” And he reaches for his console.

  “What the hell…?” There doesn’t seem to be enough air in my lungs to finish the question. Stunned, I rise from the seat and stare into the empty void where the Temptation had been before it suddenly disappeared deeper into space, too fast for the eye to see. Rajcik has made his break, out of weapons range already.

  The flight control VDU abruptly goes black, then lights up with a new image: a video feed. I instantly realize that I’m staring into a prison cell. Dingy green-painted walls seem to absorb all the high intensity light coming from fixtures on the ceiling, but it’s the man sitting next to the wall, his head resting on his knees and his arms around his legs, that catches my attention. It’s David.

  The cell is completely empty besides him. He’s wearing the same clothes as the day I lost him in the Obal 3 sub docks, but now the gray material is spotted here and there with tarnished maroon streaks that can only be dried blood. The fact that I’m looking at my brother in a cell on the Fortress isn’t something my mind has to grasp; every cell in my body already knows it. My legs seem to disappear, collapsing from beneath me like so much rushing water. Falling forward, both of my hands come to rest alongside the display, but my eyes don’t budge from the console. I feel as if I’ve been hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer.