Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2)

by Edward W. Robertson

  She angled to starboard. It wasn't enough to make it look like they were peeling away. Just enough to try to escape the dead zone—and, if something was out there closing in on them, to force that something to adjust.

  A red dot popped into being on the nav. Well inside the long-range scanners. Inbound, curling to match their course.

  Webber swore softly. "Where'd that come from?"

  "Don't know." Rada cut down and harder to starboard. "But I consider it a very good sign that we can see it at all."

  The other vessel adjusted to her adjustment. The computer predicted it would close within standard combat range within ninety seconds, but who knew what "standard" meant for the UFO. Rada called up visual. The ship was well within range, but the Tine's systems appeared to be having problems grabbing the image. Blocks and blurs flickered on the screen. With a ripple, the image cohered. The ship's body was a spike jutting from a concave bowl. From the bowl's forward-pointing rim, three smaller prongs jutted forward.

  Rada knit her brow. "That look like a Swimmer ship to you?"

  "How should I know?" Webber said. "I've only seen two: the one on the FinnTech vid, and the one crashed in Founder's Bay."

  "I've seen three. They like curves. Cohesion. This looks like a medieval torture device."

  "Could be a fighter," MacAdams rumbled. "Whatever it is, it looks nasty."

  She edged up the Tine's engines, keeping within the bounds possible for a ship that wasn't carrying a Motion Arrestor. No need to give away all their tricks too early. The UFO boosted forward, closing faster. For a moment, she was struck with pure wonder: a moving, reactive nonhuman vessel. They had known for a millennium that such things existed. But it was another thing to witness one with her own eyes.

  "Time to see what this thing can do." She ordered up a single missile. A green speck sprung up on the nav, lancing toward the other ship. The jamming and aggressive posture all but guaranteed its hostile intent, but if by some miracle the UFO didn't mean them harm, the lone shot would serve as the Tine's final warning.

  The enemy made no adjustments. A trio of missiles blipped from its bow. Rada now had no way to communicate with her missile, but she'd sent it off with orders for a full evasion protocol. As the counters closed, the rocket spiraled madly, juking this way and that, abandoning all attempt to near the UFO in favor of its own survival. The three incoming missiles slowly closed the web.

  "Those rockets," Webber said. "They aren't…" He spun his hand, searching. "Flocking."

  Rada pulled up their data on a side screen. "You're right. They're hemming ours in, but nowhere close to peak efficiency."

  "Don't tell me their missiles are worse than ours."

  "That's probably too much to ask. I think it's the jamming. They can't risk a single signal getting out. They've got it clamped down so tight their missiles can't communicate with anything more complicated than flashes of light."

  "Meaning ours can't, either."

  "This is good," MacAdams says. "Every extra second it takes them to dust us is one more second we got to send this back home."

  She wasn't sure about that. Dumber missiles favored offense. But it meant they had a better chance of sneaking past the aliens' defenses, too. Rada got the computer humming on simulations and revised engagement plans. As it ran permutations, she gave it a much simpler secondary task: approximating the distance the UFO had been at when the jamming began.

  They had more than enough footage to prove the Swimmers were still hostile to humanity. That they'd been keeping people from attempting to plunge further into the galaxy. Now, all Rada had to do was find a way to get that proof back into the inner System.

  "Conditions favor offense," she said. "I say we go full Battle of the Black Gate. Unload half our arsenal at once. If it doesn't kill them, it could wing them. If they pull back to give their missiles more time to react, we might be able to scoot far enough away to get our comms back."

  She wasn't sure if it was an order or a suggestion. MacAdams and Webber both nodded. Rada put together a hasty attack package from the computer's selections. On tactical, the Swimmer vessel neared the edge of the transparent green sphere surrounding the Tine's position.

  "Green means go!" Webber whooped.

  Rada launched the first volley. She followed it up with a dribble of missiles, then fired a second cluster. Another dribble. Then a third cluster. With any luck, the steadiness of the attack would keep the enemy's defenses thinned, giving the batched rockets a chance to punch through.

  Light flickered from the opponent's nose. Rockets streaked outward in an unfamiliar pattern the computer struggled to define. Those at the front of the wave burst, detonating the Tine's closest missiles. The UFO spun ninety degrees and boosted hard, putting extra space between itself and the incoming waves of death. Rada smiled and sent off two more batches. A significant chunk of her armament—but if they could keep the enemy engaged, it would be worth the risk.

  She rammed the engines to peak burn. She had to admit she missed the visceral kick of hard acceleration. Space opened fast between them and the Swimmers. Webber cycled through the comms, which remained as dead as a stone. Considering what she'd flung at the enemy, tactical didn't look as busy as it ought to. Orange and red explosions spangled the darkness. The horizon should be lighting up from one side to the other.

  Tactical updated. It predicted a missile would get through the UFO's defenses. Not just one—several. Rada's heart boomed. Should she come around? Press the attack and ensure its destruction?

  MacAdams jerked his chin to the side, as if reading her thoughts. "Stay on target."

  He was right. Even at full burn, it would take a few minutes before they were out of jamming range, assuming that jamming was being done by the UFO. Besides, if they were truly keeping the entire sphere of space around the main System on lockdown, there had to be multiple vessels patrolling the Kuiper Belt. Maybe dozens. No telling when backup might arrive.

  A drizzle of missiles penetrated the Swimmers' defensive pickets. A red line lanced from the ship. A missile flashed into a cloud of heat and smoke. The red line reappeared, connecting to a second missile. It flashed on and off until every one of the penetrating rockets had vanished.

  A single thought pounded across Rada's brain, hammering away all others. They were dead.

  16

  Screams pierced the terminal. Then a new voice roared forth, blotting out the others, rising to a wail. Kansas. His eyes flew open.

  Across from him, she stood with her arm raised, pistol pointed at the ceiling. Her face was clenched so tight her cheekbones looked ready to slash through her skin. She pulled the trigger. The bullets made no more than a loud puffing sound, but they tore through the ceiling with a series of cracks. Dust sifted to the floor.

  Kansas opened her eyes and turned to one of her guards. "Get him out of here. I have to stop that freighter."

  Gloved hands grabbed his wrists, twisting them behind his back. Plastic cuffs sealed around his elbows. Any other day, Ced would have been furious, but he'd already won. Gotten the Hive's people to safety. Didn't matter what Kansas did to him now.

  He was escorted ungently from the port and into the back of a car, the rear seats sealed away from the front. The windows were tinted so dark he clearly wasn't meant to see out of them. The car fought its way through the pedestrians, arriving at the auxiliary office/detention center where he'd first gone to see Rada. The guards stripped his clothes and replaced them with gray pants, a gray shirt, and gray slippers. They put him in a cell and closed the transparent wall behind him.

  The room had a cot and a toilet. Neither had been cleaned recently. On the wall, fresh graffiti declared that "WEBBER WUZ HERE." Doubting that Webber had been allowed to take anything into the cell besides his person, Ced wasn't inclined to get close enough to determine the substance the man had used to make this proclamation.

  With a sense of obligation, he kicked the see-through wall a few times, but it didn't so much as ratt
le. The other walls were just as sturdy. He stretched out on the cot and slept.

  He got up lazily, having acquired the perfect amount of rest between sleeping too much and sleeping too little. The cell was darkened. So were the empty ones across from him. He sat up, picking grit from the corners of his eyes. Kansas had promised to kill him if he moved to release the Hive's people. That's why he'd done it—if she'd axe him, putting the demands of Valiant Enterprises over the closest thing she had to a friend, then the Locker had no hope. Should it matter that, when it came down to it, she hadn't been able to pull the trigger?

  He didn't think so. What mattered was that, after all she'd done, Ced had believed she would have shot him.

  Morning came. A panel opened in the wall, revealing a cubic-foot cubby. Inside, a tray held a tub of gray food and a sealed cup of clear fluid. He gave the cubby a cursory poke around, but it was far too small to squeeze inside.

  Eating was the only thing he had to occupy his time, so he did so slowly. The mush was slightly salty and just chunky enough to be off-putting. The water tasted like minerals. He finished and replaced the empty containers in the cubby. It sealed. Motors whirred softly within the wall.

  He sat on the bed. Anger built in him, steady and compounding. Anger at Kansas, for betraying the Locker to the same corporation that had corrupted the crews. At those first crews who'd betrayed their people to Valiant in exchange for more profits. And at himself, too. Why hadn't he gone with the Tine? To keep Kansas from using his tracking device to follow him straight to the ship, yeah, but he hadn't even tried to get out.

  Why? All the exploring he'd done with Stefen, all the roaming of the station's streets, parks, and tunnels, it hadn't been about mapping his way around the Locker. It had been about mapping a way out of it. He had always wanted to escape. He'd had years to make the attempt. Yet the only time he'd made a serious effort had been when Garnes assigned him to a full crew and tried to sacrifice him in a bid for more territory.

  The room darkened. The cubby reopened. The food was the same. He ate, placed the containers back on the tray. The cubby shut. The wall whirred.

  He'd stayed because he couldn't leave. Not out of fear of capture or punishment, but because he couldn't abandon the others to this place. The Locker was an engine that ran on the blood and youth of its people. It corroded hope. Made their souls small and weak. For all her supposed fearlessness, even Kansas had bowed to it. Until the Locker bowed to no one, none of them would be free.

  He had to change it. He would take over the Dragons. Cut all ties with Valiant. Continue the reforms. Both sides would come at him—Valiant, and the crews who'd grown fat with the company's aid—but he had to try. Otherwise, Valiant would consume them.

  Alone in the room, he laughed. He finally knew what he had to do, yet he could do nothing but sit.

  24 hours in, he still hadn't seen Kansas. He thought he knew why: if she let herself see him again, she would kill him. In the morning, he exercised, both to occupy his mind and to work up an appetite for the chunky gray mush.

  The morning after that, when the cubby opened, it revealed an empty tray. He bent over, inspecting it, then removed the tray and replaced it. The cubby closed. The wall whirred. He glanced at the ceiling. Were they messing with him? Or merely incompetent?

  By evening, his stomach rumbled. His mouth was dry. The small door in the wall slid open. The tray was back, but again, it held nothing.

  "You think this will break me?" He stared at the corners of the ceiling where the cameras must be. "Do you think I'm going to beg for my dinner? Scream and moan and cry? Kansas, you may be able to control everything else, but you can't control me. Go ahead. Starve me. I'll make you see exactly what you've become."

  He sat on the bed. In time, his stomach stopped insisting he put something in it, settling down to a low-key pang. He slept. He woke to a sand-dry tongue and a peeling lower lip. He moved his tongue around until the saliva returned. He went to the bathroom. Some of the richer people had water-flush toilets, but this was a vacuum model. It kept no water in the bowl, and had to close before it could flush. It had a small amount of water in its tank, but this was sealed off, inaccessible without tools.

  The wall whirred. He gazed down on a blank tray. Anger coursed through his veins, but he said nothing. He went back to the bed. She'd starve him, deprive him of water, wait until he understood she could do anything she wanted to him and hence he had no choice but to do whatever she wanted.

  Her game was no different from the crews. You lost the instant you agreed to play their game. The only way to win was to never play at all.

  He curled on his side. This seemed to help his stomach. He slept through most of the afternoon. He dreamed of following the tunnels beneath the streets and emerging on a sunlit peak that smelled like snow. He had never smelled snow, but somehow he knew exactly what it would be like: crisp, clean, as if the water in the crystals had only been created hours before.

  The whisper of the cubby woke him that evening. He went to it, touched the empty tray, and closed his eyes. He just wanted this to be over. He knew it was the hunger and the thirst weighing down his mood, leaving him listless and dispirited, but that knowledge did little to comfort him. They'd only been depriving him for two days. How bad would it be on day four or five? How long would they let this go on before deciding it was time to drag him in front of Kansas? If he was already this down, this close to defeat, how could he last?

  In his mind, he envisioned sweeping these thoughts together, then smashing them with a boot. He would hang on. Because he was the only hope the Locker had. At dinner time, when the miniature door opened on the same empty tray, he felt nothing but a prickle of amusement.

  He turned his face to the ceiling. "Kill me. End this. If I see you again, I will kill you."

  There was no response.

  He drifted to sleep thinking about which crews he could convince to help him oust Valiant Enterprises. Hours later, he sat up sharply, heart pounding. He'd heard something. A rumble. The room was shrouded in darkness. The cubby was still closed. He went to the transparent wall, pressing his face to it. No one in the halls or the other cells.

  A massive boom rumbled through the building, muffled yet potent. The ground shivered beneath him. He bent his knees, spreading out his hands for balance. Seconds later, a third explosion crumped in the distance, fainter than the others.

  His heart dropped. They hadn't been torturing him or trying to break him. The reason he wasn't getting any food and water was that no one was there.

  17

  Webber gawked up at the screens. "Those were…I mean…right?"

  "Lasers," MacAdams said.

  With all of the nearby threats disposed of, the UFO fired a barrage of missiles to deal with the second slew Rada had sent its way. The ship corrected course, matching its vector to the Tine. At the moment, they were outpacing it, but the enemy was accelerating faster than they could manage.

  Rada's head pounded. "If the source of the jamming is on that ship, we can't outrun it."

  "Back up," Webber said. "I'm still on this 'death ray' thing. If they have lasers, why haven't they torched us already?"

  "Lasers are like gravity. Their strength diminishes geometrically with distance. Theirs may only have the power to deal with short-range threats."

  "So we're outgunned. Against a faster opponent. And we've fired off half our armament. They'll close on us and carve us up."

  "That's what I'd do," Rada said. "Or toy with us until their backup gets here."

  "So what do we do? Split the Tine three ways?"

  "That leaves each of us with a third the engine power. And if we try to swarm them, they'll pick us off with the lasers."

  "We need to act," MacAdams said. "Right now. Before that thing backs us into a corner."

  Webber pounded a frantic drumbeat on the dash. "Get out the drones."

  Rada laced her fingers together and pressed her knuckles over her mouth. "We'll have to send eve
rything at once. Try to overwhelm them. Otherwise, it'll pick off the drones one by one."

  "We won't send them to attack. We'll program them to make a run for it. Try to get one out of jamming range. One's all we need, right?"

  "That might actually work. Meanwhile, we can outpace the drones. If the UFO depletes itself running them down, we just might be able to knock it out."

  She launched the first drone, giving the Tine a quick, whip-like yaw to impart that much more momentum to the departing fighter. They had five in all. She sent each one in a different vector, maximizing the space the enemy would need to cross to hunt them all down.

  After a moment's hesitation, the UFO made to chase the drone veering off at the most extreme angle. In response, Rada sent a simple course adjustment to the other drones, using a stream of photons that could still be sent and received despite the jamming. She didn't want to use these signals more than she had to—they were prefaced by a cycling key code, but if the enemy deciphered that, they could turn the drones against the Tine—but it made sense to do so at the start of the scramble, when the drones had the most time to make use of the adjustment.

  The enemy closed steadily on the first drone. As it neared, it slowed, peppering the unmanned vessel with enough missiles to keep the drone honest. Fully on the defensive, the drone made minimal counterattacks. The UFO edged closer and closer. The laser arced between it and the drone. The drone vanished in a shimmer of white heat.

  Rada sent a second photon burst instructing the drones to launch all missiles before the enemy drew within what appeared to be effective laser range. The Tine built space between itself and its foe, but the jamming remained constant.