Ghost of Jupiter (Jade Saito - Action Sci-Fi Series Book 1)
Page 14
She didn’t feel okay. How long had it been since she’d left Gibson City Station? A day? Two? That time had been filled with trauma and loss. This plan wasn’t going their way just yet. They were looking at the same situation but seeing two different versions.
She decided to bring up something that had occurred to her during the group’s discussion. “Marco, I think we should help Tommy. He lost his ship helping us. I feel terrible about it. I have my own problems and need the money, but…” She closed her eyes. “Tommy just lost everything he had. I’m going to give him some of my share when we get paid. He’d do the same for any of us.”
Marco searched her eyes for a moment. “What do you want me to say?”
“That you’ll help him! Isn’t that how you guys operate? Aren’t you friends?”
Marco seemed to think carefully for a moment. “You’re right. We’ll look into it when this is over.”
That didn’t seem like much of an answer to Jade, but she decided to let it drop. They had to get paid first.
Chapter 14
Thanks to his injuries, Tommy felt half-coordinated, like a toddler, and Jade helped him into his exo suit before fighting her way into her own. She strapped a pack full of tools to her back. Tommy still felt weak and could only manage to move by limping, so he had to burden Jade with the equipment. The sooty, raging winds of Balenos A buffeted their exo suits and sapped their strength, but the pair made it to Ghost of Jupiter after traversing the magnetic-pulley system one at a time.
“I need to rest,” Tommy said after they took off their helmets, safely inside the ship with its internal air scrubbed and purged. “Not as tough as I look, you know.”
Jade chuckled. In light of their injuries, losses, and trauma, Tommy was glad he was able to lift her mood, even if just with a small joke.
“Here. I’ll help you out of the suit,” she said. She unzipped his heavy suit and yanked it downward off his legs. Wearing his flight suit underneath, he sat on the deck and rested against the smooth metal of the corridor wall. Jade wiggled out of her own cumbersome suit and piled it atop Tommy’s.
“Hang out here for a sec,” Jade said. “I’ll make us some tea. I have some genmaicha I picked up on Gibson City!”
“Sounds good,” he said with a smile, having no idea what genmaicha was.
He watched Jade saunter down the corridor and disappear into her tiny cabin. Despite the painkillers and fatigue he was grappling with, he could still feel a thrill as he watched her slink around in her formfitting flight suit. It had been difficult to stay cool while she helped him out of his exo suit. He’d done his best. He couldn’t let her know how much he was into her.
After a minute, the hissing sound of boiling water came down the corridor.
Jade leaned out. “I’m glad you can help me fix Ghost. It’ll be good to hang out like we used to,” she said.
“Agreed,” Tommy said. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He took a deep breath, trying to breathe out the pain that was returning to his…well, most of his body.
It was interesting, he thought, that for people seeking their fortunes in space—like he and Jade were—a ship became home. It reflected their personality, their values. It carried customizations and conveniences suited to their individual tastes, such as Jade’s tea kettle. He thought it was cute how pumped up she got over tea and all its varieties. Tea wasn’t necessary in space, nor was it easy to make in microgravity, but every pilot had their own essential comforts, and Tommy’s ship was no different.
Well, not anymore.
For now, it was time to look forward and help Jade get off planet.
A few hours of tests and inspections revealed the scope of the ship’s problems. Aside from the most obvious issues with her damaged canopy and flaky holoemitters, she had substantial damage to her hull. The sensitive components of her d-field projector had suffered damage in the crash and would have to be repaired before the system could function again. One of her sensor instruments had taken damage, and one of the particle cannons had been sheared entirely off the ship when she impacted the other vessel. The other instruments and equipment had been kept safe from harm, contained behind various hull plates and panels.
The most pressing issue was the port thruster. It wouldn’t start when Tommy tried to power up the drive systems. It had power, but didn’t generate thrust. Fortunately for Tommy, the Mark IV’s main engines retracted within the ship upon landing, and he could work on them without having to be outside. Unfortunately for Tommy, thrusters were the most complicated part of a ship—other than the reactor—and the work he could do on them was limited.
He decided to work on the holoemitter first so that they would have full displays for systems, comms, and mapping to help with the repairs. That way, Jade could run diagnostics and relay information to him while he worked. Having the holos back up would give Jade something to do and help her feel like her cockpit was in order. Even if the ship still needed more work, he wanted her to have the comfort and normalcy the holos would give her.
“You’re lucky,” he said to Jade as he hunched over the console, figuring out how to remove the emitter. “Without your d-field you’d be dust. I think it overloaded the generator when you made contact, then his ship got pulverized and the debris deflected upward off your hull.”
The holoimager cover was flush with the rest of the console. There was no indication that complex holographic-projection equipment sat underneath until Tommy removed the smooth safety cover with a click. He waved Jade over and they lifted out a cylinder two-thirds of a meter long and heavy enough to require the pair of them to extract.
They set the cylinder down carefully on the deck. Tommy grunted with the effort and found he had to gasp and wheeze to take a full breath after they finished. Henning’s words about poisonous-atmosphere inhalation came back to his mind.
“Yeah,” Jade said, returning to the pilot’s chair and leaning on the forward console, resting her chin in her palm as she stared out at the fizzing life-support fields. “I lost my head. I got upset seeing the danger you were in. I guess I shouldn’t apologize. It’s just…fucked up. And now I sound like Henning on top of it. I can feel my mother frowning at my language already.”
Tommy laughed and spun the emitter housing around until he found a label. “Felgos IU-02 holographic imager. I’ll have to search for the specs on this one, but the flicker probably means a bad connection between the signal processor and the emitter array. It probably got bumped when you, you know, rammed the other ship!” Tommy laughed, and Jade joined in.
“You’re never gonna let me forget about that, are you?”
“No way!” he said.
“Seriously though,” Jade said. She paused, and he waited for her to finish her thought. “Have you…killed anyone? I just did and I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I should feel.” She raked a hand through her hair. “I did it just like that,” she said, snapping the fingers of her other hand.
Tommy stopped disassembling the emitter and sat on his heels, recalling a memory he’d done his best to let drift away. “We had to defend ourselves this one time. Another team of three opened fire on us. Maybe they thought it was an even fight and they’d scare us off. Anyway, the rest of the team bugged out after all three of us put rounds into one of their ships and we breached its canopy. We killed him. Law enforcement investigated it and said we weren’t at fault. In that system—I forget what it was called—there’s laws that protect bounty hunters. They’d had so many problems policing the system they needed the help, so they made things friendly for independents like us.”
He picked up a pair of ionic pliers, spun them around a few times, and put them back down. “Anyway, the three of us dealt with it in our own ways, I guess. Marco dismissed it without a second thought. He concluded that we’d protected ourselves and he had no regrets. I went to Henning to talk about it after. He changed subjects. So I had to deal with it on my own. It ate at me for a long time.”
He shrugged and resumed tinkering with the emitter. “Nothing, really. Things just went on and I stopped thinking about it. I concluded that the universe put us there just like it did the other guys. We were prepared and we reacted.” He shrugged again.
“Yeah, but…”
“Look, same thing happens to law enforcement. Any individual or group’s self-interest can put them at odds with others. When people want to uphold the law—or in our case, turn criminals in for a reward—and other people want to go outside the lines like our targets do, you’re gonna butt heads. Self-defense. What else are we gonna do?”
Jade was silent, so he continued, “I mean, we’re both colony kids, right? Did you want to stay on Senden forever? Did I want to stay on Althus Four and be a mechanic or a hydroponics tech on that shitty moon? No. So I make the most of what life has given me.”
Jade looked down at her laced fingers. “I didn’t know you’d thought about it so much.”
“I had to after that job. And look at what happened today. A lot of stuff happens out here.” He tinkered with a handheld torque hollow wrench, unscrewing the bolts that attached the emitter’s housing.
In that moment, the weight of the story, and of losing his ship, pushed down on him. So did the weight Jade now had to bear. Something cracked. His own words reflected back to his mind, as if echoing. Why come out here and get in danger and work so hard, if not to get what he wanted from life? Why should he continue to be so afraid of talking openly with Jade? He had to start somewhere.
He sighed, put down the tool, and looked Jade in the eye. “There’s something else.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You and Marco…” He fought to find the right words, to breach the barrier he’d built around this subject, without getting straight to the heart of it all. “He’s got a way with women and…as your friend, I mean, you’re my best friend. I have to tell you that he’s wrong for you. Dead wrong. You’re not getting from him what you think you’re getting.”
Jade stiffened. Her brow scrunched and she gripped the chair arms. “What? How can you say that? What are you talking about?”
“Jade, he’s a player. He’s smooth. He seduces people. It’s what he does. He has a way of drawing you in.” He avoided her gaze. “I think you guys getting involved is going to hurt the team, and even worse, he’s going to hurt you. I know what he wants from you. You should have someone who—”
Jade cut him off. “What the fuck, Tommy? You’re right, we are friends, but that doesn’t give you the right to butt in and try to take this away from me! How can you say that?”
“Come on! You saw how he was in school!”
“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “You don’t get to decide that for me. How do you think I feel, struggling out here doing boring work, scraping by, always on the edge of losing my ship and my livelihood? So what if Marco had girlfriends in school? I’m happy when I’m with him and I like the way he’s been treating me. I’m not entitled to that? To someone showing interest in me?” Jade’s nostrils flared. Tommy’d never seen her like this. His heart sank. “Do you know what it’s like to be me, to keep your head down all through school, watching a person like that who you dream of having but never could because you weren’t confident enough to do anything about it?”
“Yeah,” he replied, staring straight into her eyes. “I do.”
Jade blinked, and her gaze sank to the deck. “I’m not talking about this,” she said, rushing out of the chair and making for the doorway out of the cockpit.
“Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Forget I said it! Go and be happy with Mar—”
Henning’s voice cut in from the speakers in the cockpit, crackling with static. “Guys. This is Audacity. I found the fucking crate. Over.”
Chapter 15
Tommy held out his hand, wiggling his fingers. Jade frowned, then realized he wanted her to hand over her communicator. She took it out of her ear and tossed it to him, and he caught it and fitted it within his own ear. Tossing it was preferable to handing it over. She didn’t want to make contact, or look him in the eye, after the things he’d said.
“Say again,” Tommy said to Henning over the comms. “You found it? What’s the condition?”
“I can see a corner of it. What’s there looks intact.”
“Okay. Can your cargo arm extract it?”
“Yeah. Prying it loose now. Probably have this thing in the hold and return to you within the hour.”
“Copy,” was all Tommy said before tossing the earpiece back to Jade. “I’m gonna finish the repairs. Which thruster had the trouble?” He stared at the holos instead of looking her in the eye.
Not wanting to speak to him, Jade pointed to the port side of the ship. Tommy brushed by her, moving down the corridor.
After a minute, Jade also left the cockpit, turning immediately to the right and entering her small cabin. She hit the button to close the door, which whooshed shut and sealed with the sound of metal on metal.
The maelstrom of emotions caught up with her, and something inside her gave way. She felt conflicted about the fate of the pilots she had killed, and miserable about Tommy turning against her over her growing relationship with Marco, whom she suddenly longed to hold. Her life was swirling out of control. And now she couldn’t even count on Tommy, her closest friend.
She was on a remote, hellish planet, with potential enemies hiding somewhere. She was worried about them coming back to get revenge, and despite being part of a team she felt alone, and vulnerable. She couldn’t even count on Ghost, for the first time since she’d bought him. The only thing between her and death was a thin life-support field.
What was with Tommy? What would happen if this situation were opposite? Would she say anything if Tommy was with someone she felt would hurt him? She supposed she could see herself doing that.
Tommy had always looked out for her and showed he cared about her well-being. Not just said it, but lived it. Could she hold that against him?
Jade reasoned that, back in the cockpit, she’d felt like Tommy was trying to take away the newest and best thing happening to her, one of the few good things in her life, and that he had no right to do that. She’d lashed out without thinking, without hearing what he was saying. Tommy’d always been a caring friend, even if she felt he was overstepping and saying things she didn’t want to hear.
She tried to get her emotions under control, breathing slowly and calmly, just like she did to get a grip on herself in the cockpit. She’d had enough of her feelings compromising her composure.
Jade looked at her face in the small mirror she had mounted on the wall behind her fold-down bunk. Her lips were set tight. Bruises peeked out from the collar of her flight suit. She took a few breaths, each one less shaky than the last. When she felt ready, she stepped out of her cabin, resolving to make things right with Tommy.
Jade found her friend waist-deep in a maintenance-access hatch. She called his name, and repeated it louder until he acknowledged her.
“What?” he snapped from within the square panel in the wall.
“I’m sorry I got upset with you. Can we talk?”
“Hold on.” He took a moment to extract himself from the compartment and then fell back on the deck with a grunt. His face and hands were smeared with turbine sealant and planetary soot, and he clutched a jagged piece of metal half the length of his forearm. He exhaled through his teeth and rubbed his lower leg with his free hand. “Shit.”
She crouched. “Still hurts?”
“Yeah. The osteo-nanos are great, but it’s still a broken bone. Hurts. A lot.”
“What is that?” she asked, nodding toward the piece of metal he held.
“Debris from the ship you rammed. There’s a part of your thrusters that maintains a magnetic field that…well, it helps with the engine. It’s a rotating mechanism and this got lodged inside. Somehow it
made it inside the compartment. We need to test the engine but it’s probably fine now. We should—”
Jade cut him off, patting the air with her hands. “Look, I think I get it. I understand why you’re concerned about me. It’s sweet, really. But I don’t see anything wrong with this situation. So he’s smooth. Whatever. I can handle myself.” She put her fists on her hips and struck a heroic pose like Tommy often did. “I’m a big girl!”
Tommy didn’t laugh like she’d expected him to. Instead, he just looked into her eyes for a long moment.
“Don’t worry,” she continued. “If he doesn’t treat me right, I’ll ram my ship right into his and show him who’s boss.” She grinned, uncomfortable making the joke but feeling sure Tommy would respond to it. She had to try and make things light again.
Tommy looked down. “I can’t let this go, Jade. Henning will tell you the same thing. We’ve both been pulled in by things Marco’s said. We’re a good team, but you have to be aware of how he operates. He says enough to hook you in, and has a way of changing course once he’s got you where he wants you. And I’ve seen how he looks at you when you’re not noticing. He’s—”
“That’s not fair, though. I—”
“But you don’t under—“
They stopped speaking over one another, and sighed at the same time.
Eventually, Tommy spoke. “I think we both said what we need to. We should try the engine.”
“Sure.” Jade didn’t know what else to say. The ship suddenly seemed too quiet, and the air filled with tension.
They made their way to the cockpit. Jade flopped into her seat, flipped switches, and chose selections from the holomenu. The engine spooled up, its thrumming increasing in volume, free of the earlier problematic tremors.
“Yes!” she said, pumping a fist in the air. “That’s my boy!” She patted the console, then held her hand up for a high five. Tommy stared at it.