by Sara King
“Dallas, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to…” Stuart trailed off under Dallas’s glare, then shrugged. “Whatever we do, let’s do it fast.”
“I don’t want to burden you,” Mari said, shaking her head. “I want you to escape.”
“We will escape,” Dallas said, “And we’re bringing you with us.” She reached behind the technician and yanked the blue vial out of her hand and threw it in the regen tank, to Mari’s horror.
Dallas grabbed another medical handheld from the shelf and thrust it into Mari’s hands. “Auditors walk around in threes. If you come with us, it actually increases our chances of getting out of here by a lot.”
Mari swallowed, staring down at the handheld. “What do I do?”
“Be nosy, like you’ve got a right to look into anybody’s business. Be authoritative—auditors don’t answer to anyone. And bitchy. You’ve got to be bitchy.”
“You want me to be like Our Guiding Light,” Mari said.
Dallas grinned. “Exactly.”
Swallowing, Mari tucked the handheld under her arm. “Your friend said we have to hurry.”
“He’s Stuart,” Dallas said. “The parasite that put the hole in my head.”
Mari blinked and took an instinctive step away from Stuart.
“She wanted me to put the hole in her head,” Stuart said defensively.
“Yeah. Don’t be afraid of him. If he’s changing hosts, it’s gonna be with me, not you. Trust me, okay? He’s a friend.”
Mari bit her lip and held Dallas’s gaze. She nodded.
“Okay,” Stuart said, ushering them both out the door, “Let’s go.”
Mari stayed close to Dallas, letting Stuart lead. She was wide-eyed, on the verge of tears. Her hands were clasped in front of her, white-knuckled. Even her walk was stiff.
“You can’t look like you’re about to start crying when we go out there,” Dallas warned. “You’ve got a doctorate in How To Wreck Somebody’s World—look snooty. Sneer. Be rude.”
“I will,” Mari said. “It’s just…hard.”
“Think of Juno,” Dallas said as they started down the stairs. “You’ve got to loosen up. Look more commanding. Neat-freakish. You look too soft and fluffy.” She paused, frowning. “Stuart, hold on a second.” She reached forward and tugged Mari’s sleeves down, then buttoned them tight. She buttoned the coat up to the top button and straightened the pockets on the front. Then she pulled her hair away from Mari’s face and twisted it behind her head in a tight bun. “Anyone got a pen?”
“Here,” Mari said, handing her a fishbone hairclip. “Use this.”
Dallas did, then stood back and grinned. “Wow. You look positively anal.”
“Damn it, Dallas!” Stuart shouted.
“Fine! We’re ready!” She snatched up her handheld and trotted down the stairs ahead of him. When they reached the bottom floor, Stuart stopped them.
“Are we prepared for this?” he asked. “We all know what we’re doing?”
“Just follow my lead,” Dallas said. “Walk fast, with a purpose. Ignore them if they talk to you. Show no fear, okay?” She slapped the clipboard against Stuart’s chest. “No. Fear.”
Beside her, Mari was standing straighter, her chin lifted.
“Let’s go.” Dallas stepped out into the hall.
Behind her, Stuart and Mari fell in step. They strode fast through the hall, their shoes thudding on the stone.
A group of soldiers saw them in the hall and waved them down. “You there! Citizens of Xenith! Stop.”
Dallas did not even look. She turned left, into the docks. Behind her, Stuart and Mari followed. The soldiers rushed after them, shouting.
“Clipboards,” Dallas whispered, without losing the rigid scowl on her face. She strode forward, completely ignoring the fact that two hundred rifles suddenly moved from where they were stuck in blobs of concrete.
She went to one of the men playing ping-pong, squinted closely at him despite the fact he was aiming his rifle at her, and said, “You’ve got a crack in the shoulder joint of your armor, soldier.” Shaking her head, she jotted down a note on her handheld. Then she went to the man behind him. To her relief, Stuart and Mari were doing the same.
All around them, the ground troops were rustling, looking for some sort of signal. When they received none, they reluctantly put their guns back against their shoulders and watched the proceedings, still lazing about the room. Dallas grinned inwardly. She knew from experience that they would have liked nothing more than to shoot all three of them. The Space Corps hated auditors.
Dallas was working on her third inspection when a fuming corporal stormed up behind Stuart.
“Where are your uniforms?! Where is your clearance?! How did you get down here?!”
Dallas turned on him before Stuart could begin stuttering. “Are you questioning how we conduct our business, corporal?”
“We’re at war, you addlebrained pissheads!”
Dallas peered at his nametag. “Corporal Jin. I see.” She wrote his name on her handheld and beside it put ‘Good Man.’
He was not intimidated. “I want clearance badges from each one of you. Right now.”
“You are in no position to make demands, corporal,” Dallas said.
“I can put you damn fools under arrest!” Jin snapped. “You are mucking up our routine in a war zone. That’s a capital offence. You could be tried as traitors to the Utopia.”
Dallas scoffed. “The war is over, corporal. This planet has been pacified. We are mucking up nothing. Now go about your business before I include you in my report.”
The corporal scowled at her. “It’s also Utopian law that you display your clearance badges at all times.”
Dallas smiled viciously. “We like to be accurate. How can we be sure you’re not fudging things if we don’t mingle? Take a look at this, for instance.” She turned and tapped a startled soldier on the helmet, making the concrete image flicker. “Chameleon one point-oh-two. Obsolete for thirty years now. The Utopia has put out billions of credits to ensure that its ground forces have the most up-to-date equipment available, and yet I see a soldier wearing this piece of crap. Thank god he wasn’t in any serious combat. His helmet could have malfunctioned long enough for one of the natives to get a clean shot.” She tapped his helmet again, making the image flicker to the tense face of a young soldier and then back to concrete.
“You’re the reason we don’t have the supplies we need,” the corporal snapped. “You and your cronies over there get paid millions of credits to create datawork that requires millions more credits to analyze and file. Then you make up orders for new headgear to replace perfectly functionable armor when we’re stuck eating seaweed and fish because we ran out of rations.”
“You’ll have to speak with supply about that,” Dallas said. “We are not responsible for the mistakes of incompetent clerks.” She turned her back on him and went back to her evaluations. She grinned under her façade, knowing what he would say.
“I made those orders,” the corporal said in a strangled voice. “They were not filled. Headquarters did not give us enough funds to buy what we needed at our last point of harbor.”
“Listen, corporal.” Dallas turned on him. “We have jobs to do. If you want to waste someone’s time, go complain to your sergeant.”
Instead of retorting, the corporal hesitated, peering at her intently. “Where have I seen you before?”
Dallas flinched, and she was sure the corporal saw it. “Back on the ship,” she said, trying to hide her flood of nerves.
“No,” the corporal said, “Somewhere else. On a different mission.”
Suddenly, from the row of bags and instruments lining the wall, Mari shouted, “You call this a field medical bag?! There’s nothing in here but a few bandages! No medications, no instruments…not even proper sterilization equipment! This is garbage! You would lead these troops into combat action without real medical supplies?!” She lobbed the bag across the do
cks and stormed up to the startled corporal. “Who’s in command, here? You?! Because I’m going to report you to my superiors, you stupid bastard.”
Both Dallas and the corporal stared at her, stunned.
“Look at this,” Mari snapped, shoving a handful of plastic contraptions under his nose. “Do you know what this is?!”
“No…” the corporal began.
“Of course not!” Mari spat. “Because they’re missing their tops. Someone twisted them off. Round plastic spheres, commonly used as ping-pong balls when troops get bored!” She jabbed her finger at the two men who were quickly hiding their ping-pong paddles.
“But I—”
Mari threw the plastic devices at him. “They’re useless now. Each could save a man’s life in the field, if they were intact. Now they’re just meaningless pieces of plastic. Who dismantled those devices, corporal? You?!”
“No, I—”
“Ignorant destruction of government property, brazen neglect of soldiers’ safety, and casual and insidious negligence. People could have died for this, corporal! Who’s your medical officer?! Do they know about this?”
The corporal stared at her.
“Answer her!” Dallas barked.
“The medical officers are back on the ship,” the corporal sputtered.
Stuart joined them, his voice ominous. “You left the medical officers of an entire platoon back on the ship? What if you had met with enemy fire?”
“Who authorized this?” Dallas demanded.
“I want names and identification numbers,” Stuart said.
“Someone is getting flogged for this incompetence,” Mari added.
The corporal straightened. “I’ll get the list of names for you. If you’ll please follow me back to the ship.”
“Retrieve the data yourself,” Dallas snapped, moving over to the supplies that the troops had piled against the wall. “And get these troops to their domiciles. We’re filing a Section Eight on the whole unit.”
The corporal reddened. “We don’t have domiciles for them yet,” he gritted. “We just got here.” There was a missing, ‘moron,’ at the end of his sentence.
“Then get them back on the ship,” Stuart said.
“Without their gear?” the corporal demanded, growing heated.
“They can take their personal equipment,” Dallas said. “Leave everything else. I intend to catalogue every single item that is missing from your unit’s database, right down to the cotton swabs.”
The corporal gave her a long, cold look, then turned to the men lazing about the bay. “You heard her! Get up. We’re going back to the ship. Grab your gear and move!”
In five minutes, the docks were eerily silent. Even the shredders and their operators had returned to the ship.
Mari collapsed against the wall, shaking. “That was horrible! I probably got that young man fired!”
“It’d be better for him if he was,” Dallas muttered, watching Stuart run off toward the door to retrieve Howlen. “The Space Corps is a shitty place to work. Now let’s go.” She hurried to Retribution and walked around it once, quickly, to make sure it was undamaged.
Dallas was opening the airlock when Stuart jogged up to them with Tommy slung over his shoulder.
“Anyone see you?” Dallas asked.
“Don’t think so,” Stuart said. “But Tommy’s not any better.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Mari asked, peering into Tommy’s slack face.
“We’re not sure. He was like this when we came to get him. We think Juno did something to him. Maybe poison.”
Mari’s eyes widened suddenly. “I know what this is. It’s wash.”
“That a disease?” Dallas asked. She fumbled the code to the airlock and cursed, starting over.
“It’s a drug. The same drug I gave you when… Oh, Spirits, this is… This is…” She held her hand to her mouth, wide-eyed, shaking her head.
“Bad?” Stuart suggested.
“Horrible,” Mari whispered. “We can’t take him with us.”
“Well we’re not leaving him here,” Dallas said firmly.
Suddenly, the corporal came walking around the leg of the ship, saying, “Now I remember where I saw you from. You’re captain Dallas York, right? The one they fired for reckless endangerment and insubordination? A fairy, right? It was all over the news—”
He stopped short when he saw Stuart. His eyes caught on Tommy, slung limply from Stuart’s shoulder. “Wait a minute.”
Dallas pulled her gun and aimed it at the corporal’s face. “Listen to me, Corporal Jin. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to.”
Corporal Jin’s hand strayed toward his own weapon. In an instant, he had it up and aimed at her. Dallas found herself staring down the point of a laser pistol, knowing that one tug with his finger could put another hole in her brain.
“Put the gun down, Captain.”
The gun began to shake in Dallas’s hands, but she refused to lower it. “Listen, Corporal, go back to your ship. Retribution is my property. We’re not hurting anyone. We just want to go home.”
“That ship was here when we took the island,” Jin said.
“Yes,” Dallas said, “We’ve been stranded here awhile now. We wandered into the wrong section of space and they caught us.”
“I heard you signed on with a pirate,” Jin said, narrowing his eyes on her.
Dallas took a deep breath. “I was kidnapped by a pirate. Please. I don’t want to shoot you.”
“I don’t want to shoot you, either. I served on your ship. Bloody Mary. Had a blast even though it was haunted.”
“Then please,” Dallas said.
Jin glanced at Stuart, then back at her. “You had me fooled, right up until I realized where I’d seen you. After that, I let you play your game. Figured you wanted the bay cleared for some reason, so I let you do that, too.” He grinned and lowered his gun. “Just wanted to shake your hand, Captain. I’ve never seen better flying. Before or since. You saved our lives more than once.” Jin walked up, held out his arm.
Dallas lowered her gun with a gasp of relief and shook his hand. “Thank you.”
“Heard about Erriat,” Jin said. “They did all sorts of calculations on that fight, got reaaaaal nervous. You know you’re the only stick-fairy alive today, right? Like, the last one died a decade ago in a weed overdose.”
“I hadn’t known that,” Dallas said, still a little stunned that he wasn’t shooting her.
Corporal Jin grinned at her. “Those Utopian pisswads didn’t know what they were losing.”
Dallas glanced up at the ship, then back at him, an evil smile forming on her lips. “Well, if they haven’t figured it out already, they’re about to.”
Jin’s eyes widened. “You’re taking her up? Without authorization?”
“Oh no,” Dallas said, grinning evilly. “I’ll get my authorization.” She patted the rear cannon near her head and smiled.
Jin looked over the ship, then back to her. “After Bloody Mary, I’m not going to say anything’s impossible, but—”
“Then don’t,” Dallas said.
Jin looked like he wanted to say more, but then nodded. “Pleasure meeting you. If you ever stop by Roth and you’re in need of a drink, look me up. I could scrounge up a few other veterans of Mary and we could tell ghost stories.” He pulled an ID tag from his pocket and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” Dallas said, tucking the tag in her pocket, her grin widening. “I’ll do that.”
“‘Night, Captain.” Jin nodded to Stuart and Mari and turned and walked away.
“I’ll be damned,” Stuart said, staring at her.
“What?” Dallas asked, opening the airlock.
“You mean there really was a Bloody Mary?”
“Of course there was. Why?”
“You really piloted a ghost ship? All this time, I thought you were joking.”
“You didn’t believe me?!”
“All that stuff a
bout spinning heads and floating tables… That was real?”
“Get aboard,” Dallas muttered. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“Dallas?”
“Just get on the ship!”
Stuart stumbled inside and she followed, locking the door behind her.
“Put Tommy in his room,” she said. “And find me something to use to tie your hands behind your back.”
Stuart blinked. “Dallas, I didn’t mean to be—”
“So we can do the transfer, Stuart. I want you with me when I fly. Like hell I’m doing this solo.”
“Oh.” He stood there, staring at her.
She went to the helm and began checking the systems.
He was still standing at the air-lock three minutes later, when Dallas was finished running diagnostics and went looking for him. Seeing him still standing where she’d left him, Dallas walked up and peered at the suzait. “Are you taking a dump in there or something?” She waved her hand in front of his face concernedly. “Why are you just standing around?”
Flushing crimson, Stuart turned towards Howlen’s room with the comatose colonel still slung over his shoulder. A few minutes later, he returned with a shredded sheet.
“That’s all you could find?!” Dallas cried. “You think it will hold him?”
“It just has to be long enough to lock him in one of the rooms,” Stuart replied.
“No,” Dallas said immediately. “We’re leaving him here. I don’t intend to have you out of my head again. Come on. Let’s get this over with.” She took the sheet and started tying his hands behind his back.
When she finished, Stuart was staring at her again. Mouth open, this time.
“Stuart,” Dallas said dangerously, “Do not tell me that you’re sick or something. Did that last transfer mess you up? You get hurt when Athenais flung you around? Internal bleeding? Infection? What?”
Stuart shook himself and managed, “No, not sick. You’re sure, Dallas? You mean you want me in there…forever?”
She frowned at him. “Duh.”
His mouth fell open again. “You would willingly be my host—”
“Stuart, we don’t have time for this,” Dallas growled, grabbing him by the ear and yanking him towards the floor. “We have a schedule, remember?”
