by Jason Letts
“So annoying. He’s probably just scrounging for charges or food,” Rion said.
“The cannon covers are rotating away. He’s getting ready to fire again,” Bailor said, slightly alarmed.
Rion wondered if they’d face a weapon that the decoys couldn’t handle, now that they’d already used that tactic. They weren’t that far from the solar arrays, introducing the possibility that errant shots could reach them and lead to other problems. In the midst of all this thinking, the console lit up. For a second Rion thought it was Lena, which would make this the worst possible time to come calling for them.
“Looks like it’s the ship behind us,” Bailor said.
If monkey dressed as a clown suddenly came bouncing into the cockpit, Rion couldn’t have been more surprised.
“What? Since when do pirates get the urge to chat? Usually it’s shoot first and pick through the scraps. What could they possibly have to say to us?” Rion asked, beside himself as he stared at the console.
“Do you want to answer it?” Bailor asked.
Rion’s hands dropped in his lap and he rolled his head around his neck. Why did they have to deal with this now? A reluctant nod signaled to Bailor to open the channel.
“You’ve been caught by the Penetrator! Abandon all hope because there is no escape,” came a boisterously obnoxious voice flooding the cockpit.
Rion looked over at Bailor, wondering if this was some kind of joke. He had a sour expression on his face. Rion covered the microphone with his hands.
“What? Are you kidding me? What a stupid name for a ship. Who would have a ship and call it the Penetrator?”
The question should have been unanswerable, but Rion’s spinning mind searched for a match anyway. That word was familiar. It hit him that he did know someone who would name their ship that. And then once he thought of it, there couldn’t be any mistaking it was him. Bailor’s scrunched up face had gone slack and dumbstruck. Rion slowly pulled his hand off the microphone and leaned in to answer.
“Wud?”
CHAPTER 13
“How do you know that name? I’m not Wud. I’m the Unrepentant Huntmaster,” he said, sounding defensive.
“Because only one person ever had to gloat he was penetrating ships when breaking into them,” Rion said.
A moment’s pause from that nasally voice felt like an incredible treasure, but it was shattered as soon as Rion started to enjoy it.
“Who is this?” he demanded at last. Considering he was chasing them with his finger on the launch button, it might’ve been prudent not to antagonize him, but Rion couldn’t help himself.
“I’m surprised you were ever able to get a ship after you skittered off with every charge you saved stolen from you. Do you need another Martian lasso to the head to knock some sense into you?”
Bailor erupted in laughter.
“I know that voice,” Wud said, sounding angry enough to breathe fire. “And who is that laughing?”
“Is Ollie still with you or did you get hungry and eat him?” Bailor asked.
“No, I didn’t need that runt around taking half my loot for keeping a seat warm. But enough chit chat, Rion and Bailor. That piece of junk you’re flying is about to be shredded. Say goodbye to life. I’ve waited a long time for this and it’s going to feel so good,” Wud said.
The channel cut out and the Penetrator began spraying compressed matter rounds with frantic carelessness. Continuing straight on ahead ended up being the safest route, but that made turning around impossible.
“He’s got to ease off the trigger eventually,” Rion said, wondering how many rounds Wud’s uncontrollable anger would end up wasting. But the shots kept coming and Rion began to suspect that their nemesis had every centimeter of the ship packed with ammo.
“If he’s going to keep bumbling along after us, we should feed him some mines,” Bailor said.
It was a good suggestion and Rion cued them up immediately. Moments later the ship dropped one, two, and then three behind them. Rion said a silent wish to send Wud off to the afterlife.
But the streaming fire miraculously got better and managed to strike one of the mines, setting off an explosion that left the Penetrator with enough time to get clear.
“Lucky shot,” Rion grumbled.
With their adversary at an elevated position and the arrays getting uncomfortably close, Rion sent the ship into a dive and attempted to thread the needle by navigating through some of the long, thick poles holding the array together on the back end. He only considered himself a “B” pilot, but that had to be better than Wud, who was always allergic to learning anything.
Weaving and swerving, the Assailing Face forged a trail through the thicket of obstacles that was murderously tough to follow, but somehow Wud managed to avoid crashing and stayed with them. They exchanged fire intermittently whenever there was a line-of-sight shot, but Rion always managed to get out of the way in time.
“I’m really missing those satellites right about now,” he said.
“Tell me about it. We do have the EMP and the auxiliary engine,” Bailor said, but Rion was less keen to go that route.
“I don’t know what that would do to the arrays. The last thing we need is to be caught wrestling with this fool when Alliance ships start swarming in to see why the power cut out.”
But he had to get the upper hand somehow, and that wasn’t going to happen while in this thicket of angled polls. Knowing it meant they’d be out in the open and subject to more fire, Rion peeled away from the arrays and headed out.
“Get the face ready. Let’s show him what he’s really up against,” Rion said.
He brought the ship up to maximum velocity and then cut the main engine, using the auxiliary to spin them around and slow them down. Flying backward, the ship’s face came on, beaming light at the ship closing in on them. Three missiles came roaring out of their cannons, following the shining rays from the eyes and mouth.
One missed, one collided with another of Wud’s seekers, but the third hit home and sent the ship careening off at an angle. After the explosion, the damage became more evident. Its engines had gone out and the left prong was in shambles. It wasn’t a direct hit, but the Penetrator was in bad shape.
“What should we do with him?” Bailor asked.
“It’s tempting to leave him like this, but we can’t. No, I’m not talking about rescuing him, either. Let’s go in and finish the job,” Rion said.
What he had in mind was getting in a little closer, blowing a few holes in the hull, and checking for life signs with the infrared scanner before washing their hands of Wud forever. The Penetrator drifted harmlessly on, its days of doing any kind of breaching numbered.
“Do you have any last words for Wud?” Bailor asked.
“You do the honors,” Rion said, setting the ship in his sights.
“There’s no honor when it comes to Wud. He reminds me that whether its corporations, governments, regencies, or just the odd assortment of kids stuck alone in a spaceport, it seems inevitable that those who are most greedy and ruthless will find a way to be pains in everyone’s sides. On behalf of all of us from that derelict docking platform, we are glad to be rid of this pain and wish him good riddance that’s also speedy and certain.”
Rion nodded, about to hit the trigger when a blast erupted right in front of them. The flash against the windshield was blinding, but the shaking of the ship, which was knocked back, proved more troubling.
“What was that? We’re losing power,” Rion said, trying to get a grip on their movement, but the engine responded sluggishly.
“I don’t know,” Bailor said. “He hit us with something.”
Rion clenched his teeth as some ideas about what might’ve happened came to him. The most likely was that Wud had launched some kind of small bomb at them, knowing his weakened state would draw them in. It was possible that the bomb even had an adhesive that stuck to the hull, or a proximity sensor that activated it. Either way, something had slipped past the scann
ers.
It confirmed his worst suspicions when the windshield cleared and he saw Wud’s ship reactivate its engines and begin to pull around. The missile damage had been superficial, and now Wud had control.
In a dark moment, Rion began to draw parallels to the fight this ship had when Reznik died. She’d gotten predictable, he’d underestimated his enemy, and it was going to cost them their lives.
Unless they did something drastic to shift the fight.
“You need to pull the lever on the wall,” Rion said to Bailor, who turned to him with a look even more devastated than when they’d been hit.
“I can’t!”
“You have to. It’s our only chance. We have to do it now,” he said, getting up and leaving the cockpit.
“We never practiced,” Bailor pleaded, but he got up and went to the lever as he was told.
“You know what to do,” Rion said, breathing heavily. He went to the corner near the doorway to the cockpit on the cabin side.
It was miserable to have to reach to the very bottom of their bag of tricks to deal with Wud, but if the alternative was dying to that scumbag, they had to try anything.
A tile of the wall came off with a hard smack, exposing a gap that led into a secret chamber. Rion climbed into the tiny space that was barely bigger than his body. It was dusty and the air had a stale quality to it. The chamber was a second cockpit connected to the auxiliary engine.
“Count to three and pull,” Rion yelled, reaching behind his head and shutting the panel.
That was three seconds Rion had in which to pray it would all work. When Bailor pulled the lever, Rion could hear gears shifting to release him from the rest of the ship. The divided vessel he was in had the barest of systems, including an air tank that would last less than half an hour. That wouldn’t even get him back to Mercury if he had to run for it.
But a half an hour was an eternity away when the most dangerous part was in the first minute.
Another blast rocked the ship, this time from a missile that Bailor detonated immediately after launch, simulating an explosion on board that blew the ship into chunks. The auxiliary engine worked in concert with this effect, looking like sparking electrical damage that incidentally pushed Rion directly toward Wud’s ship.
The auxiliary engine’s cockpit was almost as bad as the flying coffin’s, but it did have a tiny windshield and console that allowed him to track Wud’s ship in the dark. Another moment or two and he’d be in range. He needed Wud to fail to see through their scheme for only that much longer. The ship’s innocent-looking spin was lining up a cannon preparing to fire armor-piercing bolts that would make any ship a pincushion at close range.
Rion held his breath, lined up the shot, and fired.
The streaming bolts eviscerated the Penetrator’s central prong. When an explosion followed, Rion could tell it was for real. Wud must’ve thought he’d done the unthinkable and defeated the Assailing Face, watching it blow up in front of him, only for the pieces to suddenly start spewing projectiles at him. The cockpit burst open, revealing a cavity of mangled metal and wires. Wud’s corpse was somewhere in there, a pain in the side to the very end.
Rion pulled his miniscule vessel around and went to reattach to the rest of the ship. It was another credit to Heath that it all worked perfectly, even after suffering the brunt of bomb and missile explosions.
When he finally crawled out of the second cockpit and returned to the cabin, Bailor was there with arms upraised. Smiling wide, he wrapped Rion in a big hug. They were still alive and there was one less vicious pirate trolling the galaxy.
“You know what I realized? Wud was the one attacking the power plants here and the tourist ships around Jupiter. We were getting blamed for his wrongdoings!” Rion said.
Bailor shook his head.
“Putting an end to that cost us. I ran some checks and the main engine is in terrible shape. Some parts of the hull really aren’t fit for high-speed travel. I hate to say it, but we should dock immediately because there’s still a chance something could rupture and leave us no better off than Wud.”
Rion checked the console and went snooping around below deck as the ship crawled back to Mercury. What he found was that Bailor’s analysis was mostly correct. Even if the ship wasn’t so unsafe, its power output was a fraction of what it was previously. If Lena called for help, it could take them a year to reach her.
Hours later, they limped into the first visible station and docked the ship the second they could. The air recycler, electrical, and navigation systems were all about to collapse completely. Taking a look at the ship before going through an airlock, Rion wondered if it would ever fly again. The only good thing it had going for it was that it could still receive the transmission from Lena.
They knew that because the notification went off on the console the second they were about to leave the ship. Rushing back to the cockpit, they saw the transmission flashing on the screen.
“The chancellor’s station is out in the middle of nowhere, a place no one would have any business going. It’s roughly along Saturn’s orbit, but the closest planets are Jupiter and Mercury,” Bailor said.
“How long is it going to take us to get there?” Rion asked, already anxious to get going. Just getting out to where Saturn was would take long enough.
“Again, that depends on how fast we’re going. If the ship was in perfect working order, nearly three days would do it. Thankfully, we don’t have to fly around the sun. As it is right now, it could be weeks, and that’s if nothing further breaks down on the way.”
It went without saying that taking weeks to get out there wasn’t going to work.
“I’m not going to have Lena die because we couldn’t arrive fast enough!” he said.
“You really care about her, don’t you?” Bailor asked.
The remark caught him off guard. It seemed inevitable Bailor would catch on, but he didn’t expect to be confronted with it right now.
“I guess I always have,” he said, hoping Bailor wouldn’t see it as any kind of slight to their friendship.
“I hope it works out between you two. Something good has to come out of that dingy bay where we lived,” he said. “But to return to the problem at hand, we might need to dust off some of those skills we developed when we were back there. The fastest way to a station might be to break into a ship and steal it. There are certainly plenty around here.”
Rion looked around, thinking Bailor was probably right that the most expedient path might be through a stolen vessel, but somehow considering what they were doing this all for it didn’t seem right. All around were travelers from every planet of the solar system, piloting every manner of civilian ship. Maybe it was worth causing one of them a terrible day in exchange for the return it might bring by defeating the chancellor.
“There’s no chance we could get the ship fixed in time,” Rion said, seeing that the station’s mechanic and engineering corps were mediocre at best. “We have to leave the Assailing Face behind and get there on another ship, but stealing one isn’t what I want to do. Yeah, we’ve done horrible stuff to get where we are in the name of doing this, but when does it end? We’d be no better than Wud. There’s got to be another way without perpetuating the trickery and corruption we’re trying to end.”
Bailor shrugged, happy to go along with whatever Rion had in mind. The problem was Rion didn’t have much in there, leaving them wandering around the corridor staring at people camped outside of their airlocks. Through the windows he caught glimpses of the various ships, including a Gravilinx XX that had a very respectable engine.
Rion tugged on Bailor’s arm and together they approached a pair of tan older folks just returning with bowls of noodles.
“Excuse me,” Rion said to them. “I know this is going to sound strange, but we’re in a tough situation and need to get out of here quickly. The problem is, our ship is damaged and we can’t wait around for repairs. If you’re not in a hurry, we’d be willing to trade
our remarkable, one-of-a-kind ship for your respectable-but-commonplace one. Are you interested in talking this through?”
The couple looked at him like his head was made of butter and was melting over a baked potato lodged in his throat.
“Can’t you scammers leave me alone for one day?” the man grumbled before escorting his wife through their airlock and into the safety of their ship.
A sympathetic smile from Bailor did little to lift Rion’s disappointment. He really didn’t want to resort to stealing, but if everyone treated him like this, he might have to.
They went to the next floor up, where the undisputed pick of the litter was a Voidjet Meta parked in the far corner. The ship looked like it was going blindly fast even when it was sitting still. When the owner stepped out of the airlock, Rion was surprised to see it was a slim blonde woman who probably hadn’t yet hit thirty. The odds of getting her to trade ships seemed dismally low, but he forced himself to try.
“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, but we’re desperate for help. A friend of ours needs us to get her out of a dangerous situation over near Jupiter, but our ship was attacked by pirates and isn’t going anywhere without a couple days’ worth of repairs. It’s a phenomenal, unique custom build, has an awe-inspiring reputation, and I’d be happy to show it to you and trade it for your Voidjet. We’re desperate, and I promise you on my life that this is not any kind of a trick. You’ve never had anyone come to you from more of a place of honesty than we are now.”
The woman listened to him attentively enough and then looked at Bailor and the surrounding area. Something raised her skepticism and she took a step back toward her ship, but she didn’t leave.
“Give up my Meta? You’d have to have the Assailing Face,” she said, scoffing.
“We do.”
Her eyes shot back to him, and Rion began to gather from her pilot’s clothing and equipment that she was serious about spaceships. Their ship lit up her eyes like it did for him when he was a young boy.
“They say anyone who touches the Assailing Face dies,” she said.
