Angus showed up for his shift on time, nosy and presumptuous as ever.
‘Morning, evening, whatever,’ he said, pulling himself through the opening. ‘Anything new?’
‘Nothing,’ Sig said. ‘We’ll find her.’
‘Aye, your optimism is just what the boys want to ’ear,’ Angus grumbled.
‘You’re welcome,’ Sig said, pushing away from the captain’s chair.
‘Hang around some,’ Angus said. ‘Those twats in back aren’t much for talkin’.’
‘I’ve noticed,’ Sig admitted. ‘But they’re good at their jobs.’
‘They better be,’ Angus growled. He was blocking the bridge exit, and his posture suggested no intention of moving. ‘Bah, could be worse. ’Ere’s the nicest tub I’ve ever frozen my arse off in.’
‘Vladric is a man of high taste,’ Sig said.
‘You two go back aways, eh?’ Angus said. ‘Crowned you gov’nor ’o Lethe for your troubles, then saddles you wi’ this job. ’At’s a chum for you.’
Sig didn’t like where this was going.
‘Curse of competence, I guess.’
‘Right, yeah,’ Angus said. ‘How’d you two become mates?’
‘We’re ghosts,’ Sig said. ‘All ghosts get along great.’
‘Aye, but you don’t just pal around with Vladric Mors ’less you’ve earned your keep. So what was it, then?’
Sig tried to assert himself.
‘Enjoy your shift, Angus,’ he said, motioning towards the hatch. ‘I need some rest.’
‘Not so fast, mate,’ Angus warned, holding up his hand. ‘I heard stories about you.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah, it is,’ Angus said. ‘’Ow many firstborns did you gut back in the day? This whole crew ’as blood on their hands. Gimme a number, I got a wager with Theron.’
If they were on Brotherhood, or anywhere else where his Ceti rank mattered, Sig would have denounced the man on the spot. Instead, he bit his tongue.
‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ he said.
‘C’mon mate, I ain’t judging you for it,’ Angus insisted. ‘Or maybe I am. I know how it is, when you’re young and desperate. That’s what Vladdy looks for in nubs, y’know. Desperation. Easy to find ’round ’ere. Finds a man drownin’ in shit an’ offers a line, for a price. Men will do anything to save ’emselves. Won’t they?’
‘I’m not in the mood for a deep chat,’ Sig said, starting towards the exit again. ‘Stay on the sensors.’
‘Stay on this,’ Angus said, extending his middle finger. ‘I like knowing who I’m working for. We been thawed out two weeks and don’t know fuck all ’bout you, except that you’re Vladric’s mate and a bloody politician. You ain’t marauded in years, but he put you in that chair anyway. So tell me a story, Sig. We wants t’ know.’
‘This is what Vladric wanted,’ Sig said cautiously. Angus was a menacing man, especially up close.
‘Well he ain’t ’ere, now is he?’ Angus growled. ‘Seems we got lots o’ time. So start talkin’ before we get too restless.’
The fact he said ‘we’ made Sig think that Angus had planned a mutiny. It was to be expected: promise six men a bounty and they’d find ways to split it with one less person. If telling a story would defuse some tension, then he’d tell him one.
‘What do you want to know?’ Sig asked, resignedly.
‘Told you, I want t’know how’d you get so tight with Vladric.’
Sig took a deep breath.
‘The year was 2724,’ he started. ‘We met on Magellan.’
Magellan was the first outpost built beyond Eris, completed long before construction on Brotherhood even began. At the time, it was the largest station ever built, and as the launch point for Outer Rim colonisation, one of the busiest.
Angus was old enough to remember what it was like.
‘Magellan, eh?’ he said. ‘I got a lot o’ good memories there.’
‘Outer Rim projects weren’t taxed back then, so the place was a labour goldmine for corporations,’ Sig explained. ‘I went there looking for work like everyone else. They set up employment kiosks and we queued behind them. I was turned away from every one. No skills, they said. Had no choice but to wait around and hope a gig opened for a blank slate like me. After a few nights sleeping on the hangar deck, I saw a new kiosk – scrap metal propped on two cones – with one guy standing behind it and no queue. A rickety sign on top spelled “Ceti”.’
Angus slapped his thigh.
‘Bloody hell!’ he said. ‘Vladric was behind it?’
Sig nodded.
‘Told me he had a ship and was looking for a crew. No experience? No problem. Promised to teach me the ropes on the job. Turned out that “ship” was a shitty little two-seat harbour tug.’
‘Ha!’ Angus roared. ‘And you agreed?’
‘Like you said, I was drowning in shit,’ Sig reminisced. ‘We flew to all the staging areas around Magellan offering towing services but kept getting turned away. Wasn’t long before we were out of money, food, and I was cursing myself for trusting him in the first place.’
‘Why the fuck would you trust him?’ Angus asked.
‘Because he had this charisma,’ Sig answered. ‘He was such a hopeful bastard. It was authentic. You wanted to believe him. You’d never know it today, but back then he was the most upbeat, optimistic son of a bitch I ever met. But when things went bad, I wanted out. And he begged – literally, begged me – for one last chance to prove himself.’
‘Begged you?’ Angus scoffed. ‘Bugger that.’
‘Vladric Mors was more afraid of disappointing his sole employee than he was of starving to death,’ Sig said. ‘He asked me to trust him, said that he had a plan and to “just go along with it”. So I did.’
Sig paused. He really didn’t want to tell this part of the story.
‘Well, what’d he do?’ Angus demanded.
‘Vladric flew us beyond Magellan’s radar coverage, pointed us in a random direction and fired the thrusters,’ Sig said. ‘Then he dumped the fuel we had left. I fought him for the controls, thinking he’d lost it, but he beat me down. Demanded that I trust him. You could see the insanity in his eyes. I was scared for my life.
‘Turns out he set us adrift in the main shipping lane between Hera and the Belt. We were “rescued” six hours later by a corvette named the Glamour. Good Samaritans, just two of them on a luxury rig that could fit twenty. A firstborn named Robert Andiron greeted us at the hatch. Some attractive woman was with him. She was high or drunk, giggling, incoherent … I never got her name. Robert never bothered to introduce her.
‘He was going on about what a great sport he was rescuing us, bragging that it would get him laid. Vladric did all the talking, stroking his ego, asking questions about the ship, talking shop about flying. Once we were under way, Vladric whispered for me to get ready. I had no idea what he meant.
‘As soon as Robert took the helm, Vladric shanked him with a screwdriver. Never even saw where he had found it. Right in the armpit, all the way to the handle. When the woman rushed to stop him, I launched myself at her. I don’t know why. I just grabbed hold of her neck from behind and held on for dear life.
‘I’d never seen blood in zero-G before. I … panicked. There was screaming. Dying. Next thing I knew, Vladric was telling me to let go. I didn’t realise I was choking a corpse. Robert was dead as well. And we had a ship.’
‘The “Glamour”?’ Angus snickered. ‘Vladric’s first boat was named the bloody Glamour?’
‘I watched her corpse for hours,’ Sig said. ‘It … taught me something. About the way things were. The way they still are. Vladric went about like nothing had happened. The Glamour’s hold was loaded with provisions and a corestack packed with CROs that he was able to launder before anyone knew that Robert Andiron was missing. We had struck the mother lode, all on a wild shot.’
‘Luckiest bastard alive,’ Angus said. ‘Rumour ’as it he’s got the
Gift. That’s some story. So how many firstborns ’ave you waxed since then?’
‘Why does that matter so much to you?’ Sig rebuked. ‘I stopped counting years ago.’
Angus smirked.
‘I just want to win a wager,’ he said, moving away from the hatch. ‘Don’t take the high road with this crew, mate. Everyone ’ere hates ’imself for one reason or other.’
Big Eye interrupted their conversation, which it wouldn’t unless it found something.
The two men looked at each other as if they’d seen a ghost.
A plot of heat signatures was superimposed on the local starmap within their helmet UIs. The odds of that track being anything other than a disabled ship were minimal. The time to intercept, risking a very high-profile burn from this location, was twelve hours.
If it was a Lightspear, it was right where Vladric said it would be.
‘That’s why we kill for ’im,’ Angus muttered. ‘The bastard’s never wrong.’
Drifting aimlessly through space, Myrha Obyeran considered the cycle of simplicity in her meaningless life:
Sleep. Loathing. More sleep. Time wasting away. Repeat.
Instead of battling for the highest honour of House Obyeran, she was the equivalent of an actress in some staged drama, worshipped only because she shared the name of a king, handed a crown by a father who didn’t trust her to earn it on merit alone.
One week after her escort ships vanished, the Lightspear came alive on its own, all systems functioning normally.
At which point, she forcibly shut the whole ship back down.
It drifted. And drifted. And she meditated on her actions, reasoning that her motivation was not spite or anger, but a rational necessity. If her father did not truly believe in the ideals he had founded an entire culture upon, then she would make him. Ultimately, her defiance would make House Obyeran stronger. By thwarting his succession plan, he would be forced to reconsider what he wanted their House to stand for – after he moved past his anger, just as she had to.
Myrha passed the time by making challenges for herself, attempting repairs to the damage she had inflicted on the Lightspear, wondering if Maez had already returned. That would be glorious. But more likely, his suffering was just as prolonged. Her father had certainly taken measures to ensure that his Lightspear could never return before her own.
Sadly, there was more dignity in her brother’s lost cause than what she was doing now.
Every glance outside shattered her calm and restored the anger that would never subside. A glittering line of dust broke the shroud of blackness in the distance. The Orionis sun was the brightest star in the Milky Way, and the pale bluish hue of the Triton Worlds stood out like sapphires on a coat of velvet. There was no question she was in the Hades Terminus. Had this been a real test, finding her way back to Hyllus would have been possible; difficult without astrometric data, but with a functioning engine and power plant, it could be done. With a Lightspear, you always had a chance.
That was the whole point of The Voyage Home.
Myrha pushed herself away from the bridge and into the long corridor running the length of the ship, smiling her hands along the smooth, cold bulkheads. Their whole culture, the Obyeran way, was illuminated by the Lightspear. Yet she had attacked this beautiful creation and shut her down out of spite for her father.
Ashamed, she resolved to bring the ship back to life.
Moving towards the reactor compartment, Myrha considered giving her a proper name. It was her father who had imposed the Lightspear collective on the fleet. Her ship should be different from the rest.
As she passed the short hallway leading to the dorsal personnel hatch, the unmistakable sound of docking clamps latching onto the hull startled her.
Myrha had cursed her father often in the past weeks, but none as loudly as this. King Obyeran had come to whisk his daughter home like some delinquent child. And with her Lightspear shut down, of course she hadn’t seen him coming.
Like a child.
In a rage, she bashed the emergency release hatch to greet him.
For several milliseconds, Sig froze, and so did his crew.
No one was expecting the hatch to open, least of all Drake and Theron, who had just armed the charges that would blast it apart. Those explosives were now floating between them and an enormous pale woman in a survival suit.
Experts that they were, the Glasnard brothers had designed a pyrotechnic masterpiece to get the hatch open quickly. They had used two sets of explosives: one consisted of six shaped charges that would punch through the door’s outer shell and shatter the locking mechanism behind it.
The second set was placed like tape along the perimeter of the hatch, close to the frame. This charge delivered the functional equivalent of a blowtorch, converting its mass into a controlled plasma stream that would melt anything in direct contact. A loaded demolition ‘spring punch’ was next to Drake; immediately following the detonation, the miniature battering ram would deliver several thousand pounds of force to bash the weakened door in.
None of this was relevant now, as Sig’s view of the scene abruptly vanished in a blinding white flash.
Myrha’s honed combat instincts instantly grasped that the breach explosives had been knocked loose when the hatch opened, and the warrior in her took action to save her life.
Her right arm grabbed the railing beside the hatch and yanked hard.
A terrible blast popped her eardrums. There was a simultaneous explosion of pain in her left ribcage, as she was sent tumbling through the Lightspear’s main corridor.
But Myrha smiled, even as she crashed into the bulkhead.
This was the challenge The Voyage Home was meant to be.
When the lens flare in the camera dissipated, Sig saw dark stains where Drake had been crouched. Debris and body parts were still caroming throughout the airlock.
Half of Theron was spinning over the spring punch.
Angus, Larry, and Jaz were stunned, trying to shake off the concussive effects of being inside a metal tube during an explosion.
‘Angus, can you hear me?’ Sig shouted.
But he couldn’t. None of them could.
And the Obyeran woman must have known it, because she flew out of the Lightspear hatch like a railgun slug.
Myrha didn’t know who they were, only that they were not Obyerans. She ignored the extent of her injuries, knowing that her body was already repairing them with unnatural rigour.
The first encounter was with a rump of a man who was still disoriented from the blast. Planting her mag greaves in front of him, she stopped her momentum by slamming the butt end of her skythe in the centre of his mask, punching a deep crater into his face.
As she shoved the haemorrhaging, convulsing husk aside, a searing pain lashed through her as raw voltage boiled her blood. Another lesser creature had fired a stun weapon into her, screaming insults, eyes wide with terror. But she refused to be stopped. With sheer willpower, she ripped the wire lead out from her stomach and lunged for the man who had fired it, skythe in hand. With a flick of her wrist, she separated the man’s head from his shoulders.
As globules of his blood merged with her suit, she spotted the last man between her and the attacker’s ship, the older one who commanded this pathetic group, as he tried to flee.
She would not let that happen.
Sig’s mind was racing to find options.
Lethal force was the only response that made sense, but it was the only one they couldn’t use.
Jaz had landed a direct hit with the stun gun and had been decapitated for the trouble. She couldn’t be human. No one moved that fast, that fluidly, all while sporting what appeared to be a mortal wound. Yet she had just killed two men within a span of five seconds, and was on her way to kill Angus.
Then she would come for him.
Angus had just crossed the breaching module connecting the Black’s airlock to the Lightspear’s. In just a few moments, he would be inside the ship. The
Obyeran woman was a leap or two behind.
It suddenly dawned on Sig that the module was still pressurised.
Taking her brother’s arm off was nothing in comparison to killing men in hand-to-hand combat.
Her prey was just ahead, banging furiously on the airlock hatch. Slaying him would bring no satisfaction. But she would be that much closer to finding the captain, whom she would thank for giving her a worthy trial before taking his life.
‘Open the door, Sig!’ the man screamed.
Myrha made a note of that name, wondering if that was the captain.
‘Motherfucker!’ the man shouted. ‘Open it!’
Engaging her mag greaves, she charged towards him – upside down from his perspective – skythe at the ready. He began screaming; her heart filled with a primal bloodlust.
The skythe was arcing downward when the hatch suddenly opened, followed by the awful sound of screaming, ripping, snapping metal.
Myrha was slammed sideways and then hurled backwards with terrific force.
She knew it was a structural breach, and a catastrophic loss of pressure was under way. All the air in the attacker’s ship was rushing out into space, taking her and anything not bolted down with it.
With as much strength as she could muster, she stabbed the skythe into the nearest bulkhead. But the blade snapped on impact. By pure luck, her other hand managed to catch an edge and clamped on for dear life.
Her prey slammed off the bulkhead in front of her and hurtled past. Unable to look behind, Myrha came to the awful realisation that the only airflow was coming from the attacking ship.
It took all her strength not to give up. Her survival suit was torn. Myrha took one last breath and held it.
When the rush subsided, she turned and saw a star field instead of her Lightspear.
Sig assessed the outcome of his gamble.
If a fire’s advance could no longer be contained by isolating compartments, starving the entire vessel of oxygen was a last resort. So Sig had remotely opened the hatch of every compartment on the ship except the bridge, and the airlock keeping Angus out.
The Tabit Genesis Page 26
