by M. D. Cooper
This wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. What was he going to do with her? He wanted information about Sykes and instead she was pushing this back on him, invading his thoughts. Where had she learned about Mercury? Why?
She had allowed herself to get caught. Cal turned the thought around in his mind, looking at it from her perspective. Apparently, she didn’t fear the M1G. She didn’t fear him. Had he been her ultimate goal, or someone else?
“Tell me about Andy Sykes,” he said, clearing his throat. “You were sitting with him at Ngoba Starl’s place. You helped him get off Cruithne. I have the surveillance data to prove it.”
She shrugged. “He’s a good-looking man. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t help myself.”
Again, he couldn’t see if she was smiling behind the hair.
“I have the power to get you out of here if you cooperate,” Cal said. He flinched inwardly as he said it, feeling like he was giving up his only bargaining chip.
Petral shrugged. “Maybe I like it here. You think about that?”
“Why did you surrender to the M1G?”
“I didn’t surrender.”
“Maybe all you’re doing is buying time for your friend Captain Sykes.”
“Maybe I needed a place to stay and I knew the M1G would give me three hots and a cot. What does any of it matter to you, Mr. Kraft?”
“Ngoba Starl sent four ships out of Cruithne during the battle,” he said. “I think you already know this. One of those ships had my company’s property on board. I’ve received other information that leads me to believe your Andy Sykes is carrying that property. It would be better for you if you just confirmed what I want to know—especially his destination. That would save everyone a lot of trouble, including his kids.”
Petral snorted a laugh. “What do you care about kids?”
“I interact with kids a lot in this new line of work,” Cal said, watching her closely. He’d almost said ‘seeds’ in place of kids. He wondered how much she knew about the Weapon Born project. He didn’t want to assume she had information and then inadvertently give up information she didn’t know.
“You run a daycare, now?” she asked. “That’s nice.”
Cal smiled. “Something similar. “How old are Sykes’ kids? Ten and twelve, I think. The twelve-year-old is a little old for my program but the ten-year-old would be a good fit.”
“It’s your program?” Petral asked.
“I assist.”
“Of course. Look, I don’t know what you want from me, Mr. Kraft, but I’m tired and I’d like to get some sleep. They won’t turn the lights off and I can’t lay down with this cable tied to my hands, so I’d rather just get some peace and quiet before the M1G does whatever it is they’re going to do. Quit wasting my—”
He caught her mid-sentence with the back of his hand across her mouth. He felt her jaw shift as he hit her, as she bit her tongue. Cal smiled to himself. Her head snapped back, revealing that beautiful face.
Cal stood in front of her with his fists clenched, forearms tense, ready for her to come at him with a head-butt, to flex against the cable, anything.
Petral let her head hang free for a few breaths before lifting her face again. She squinted at him against the lights in the ceiling. A bruise was already forming on the right side of her face.
“Feel better now?” she asked.
Cal pulled his right arm back and hit her with a jab to the left side of her jaw, not hard enough to break teeth.
“You know where they’re going,” he said. “You’re going to tell me.”
“I’m not telling you shit,” Petral said. She spat blood on his shoes.
Cal cracked his knuckles, considering her.
“You think you’re some kind of player,” Petral said, face hidden in her hair. “You’re just a roach who managed to scrape his way to the top of the garbage pile. You’re still trash.”
He hit her again, taking no pleasure in the strike. He thought about the needle gun in his pocket, about ending her life right now.
If the terminal reports were correct, Sykes barely had enough fuel to get away from the Ring. His choices were limited to Cruithne, Eros, Toro, Ceres and a few dozen other close by stations that might sell him fuel. He wondered if Sykes might try to get clever and just hit another side of the Ring. M1R Space Traffic Control didn’t have a flight plan on record and had been too pre-occupied with their fire and the garrison commander’s shuttle to worry about the ship it had landed on. He shook his head at the incompetence.
“And you think you’re some kind of operator,” he said, “laying your little traps all over the local network to try and trip me up.” He sighed. “But here we are. I’m a big believer in keeping people who challenge me, Petral Dulan. I think the right thing to do in this situation is keep you close to me. The M1G wants to charge you with various crimes but I think they can put that on hold for a while. You know Andy Sykes. I think you have a pretty good idea of how his mind works. That could be a lot of use to me. And if you don’t want to help me, maybe I’ll show you firsthand what it was like on Mercury.”
He turned and looked at the blank wall on the opposite side of the room. He hoped she might try to attack him from behind but she didn’t do anything. He frowned, not liking the situation. Nothing explained why she had surrendered to the M1G except she wanted to be here, which meant he might be doing exactly what she wanted.
“It’s a little funny to me, actually,” he said. “People still talk about Mercury like it’s a place—a planet—but it’s just a bunch of debris in space now. We destroyed a whole planet, mined it out of existence. I grew up listening to protest beacons my whole life. Used to tune into them to help me sleep. For me, nothing will ever be worse than that place. When you mention it, all it does is remind me where I’ve come from. You think I’m a roach, that’s fine with me. We’ll see who’s still alive at the end of all this.”
Petral didn’t answer. A drop of blood hit the floor between her boots.
Cal walked to the door and banged three times. The seals cycled and the sergeant stuck a pistol through the gap before he looked in. Cal gave him a smile.
“Everything all right in here?” the sergeant asked.
“Great,” Cal said. “I’m transferring your prisoner to my ship, the Mercy’s Intent.”
“I haven’t seen the order.”
“Check again,” Cal said. “It should have just arrived.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 09.16.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: En route to Ceres, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
Cara sat on the couch in the family room, watching her dad show Tim how to teach Em tricks. Fran sat on the other end of the couch with her eyes closed; she had said she was going to spend most of the day reviewing drive diagnostics. Her dad didn’t use his Link much and Cara still had trouble realizing when Fran was doing something online vs just taking a nap.
“Take the treat in one hand like this,” Dad said. “Keep putting him back in the sitting position until he does it on his own, then reward him. You reward every time he does anything you want.”
“Won’t he get fat?” Tim said.
“Don’t worry about that right now.”
Cara had to concede that Em seemed well-behaved for a puppy. His round brown eyes stayed fixed on Tim even as her brother couldn’t figure out the best way to share the treat, or kept changing how he wanted Em to do something. They had been working on ‘sit’ for nearly half an hour now and Em didn’t show any signs of getting bored. It was Tim who looked ready to throw the bowl of kibble in the air and run away.
But he didn’t. Cara still wasn’t sure how she felt about the dog. Em represented an irresponsible decision her dad had made—because Cara had decided she agreed with Fran. They could barely watch out for each other, let alone a puppy. Why hadn’t her dad just told Tim no? It wouldn’t have been the first time. And Tim needed to know he wasn’
t going to get everything he wanted. Life wasn’t all shells and cheese all the time. They were rabbits. Rabbits went hungry.
She couldn’t shake what Tim had said when he’d first seen her after she got back into the habitat, holding up Em by the armpits to announce, “Look what I got you, Cara! He’s a birthday present. His name is Em, short for Emily Dickinson the poet.”
Dad had been unconscious in the autodoc at the time, but Tim hadn’t said anything about that. He had wanted her to be happy about the puppy, who had just looked at her—tongue lolling—with an expression resembling curious joy.
For the first time, she found herself wondering if there really was something wrong with Tim. Why couldn’t he tell what was important? Why couldn’t he understand that Dad had nearly killed himself to get Tim safely back on Sunny Skies? What if Dad had died in that old EV suit? For some reason, Tim didn’t think of any of the same worries that Cara couldn’t shake, including the worry that she was going to end up as anxious as her dad. She had to be aware of circular thoughts and stop them before they got rolling, like her dad had told her.
The dog was cute but Cara wouldn’t allow herself to like him. What were they going to do during another firefight? They didn’t even have a leash. What would Em do in zero-g? She half-believed what Fran had said about pirates putting lowjack transmitters in dogs.
Fran made a complaining sound and sat up straighter on the couch. Her fingers twitched in her lap as she manipulated some piece of the engine control system.
“Look, Cara!” Tim said, his high voice almost like a shriek. “He’s sitting. I got him to sit.”
Em turned his head slightly to look toward Cara, his brown eyes meeting hers. She smiled for Tim.
“That’s great,” she said.
“It’s not just great, Cara,” Tim said. “I got him to do it. I did.”
“I think he decided to do it and the treats helped.”
“Tim,” their dad said. “Calm down.”
“Cara doesn’t like him.”
“I like him,” Cara said. “Just don’t act like you got him for me. He’s yours. You never asked me if I wanted to take care of a dog. I have a hard enough time taking care of you.”
“Cara,” her dad said, warning in his voice.
Cara noticed that Fran was watching her although she hadn’t moved her head.
“Are we going to test him for a tracking device?” Cara asked. “I’ll get the magnetometer.”
“No,” Tim shouted. He reached for the bowl of kibble as though he was going to throw it, then stopped. Cara watched him realize the puppy was cowering from the sound of his voice. Tim reached for Em and pulled him into a hug, then carefully put the dog down, picked up the bowl and threw it at Cara.
The bowl fell short. Bits of dried shell pasta scattered across the floor.
“Tim,” their dad said. “You need to calm down.”
“Why is Cara being mean to me?”
“Because you care more about that dog than you do about Dad almost dying to save you. It’s time you grew up, Tim. You can’t hide from everything that’s going on while you play with your new toy. It’s not a toy. You can’t just throw it away when you aren’t interested anymore.”
Cara clenched her fists. She knew she shouldn’t say this to Tim but she couldn’t hold it in anymore. If there was something wrong with him, she needed it out in the open. She couldn’t deal with trying to take care of their dad and Tim if she didn’t know what was really the problem.
Fran pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll be down in the engine section,” she said. “I need to concentrate on this.”
“I don’t want you here anyway,” Cara said.
Fran put a hand on her hip and looked at Cara with a half-smile. “Last I heard, you weren’t the captain. The captain decides who’s on the crew or not. You want to run this place like a real ship? You keep your mouth shut and focus on the job.” She glanced at their dad, who was glowering over by Tim, and then walked out of the room.
Tim stood too, head bowed. He was shaking in a way Cara had never seen before. He looked at her angrily through his tear-filled eye lashes. “I got him for you,” he said. “You don’t like anything I do.”
His eyes blazed with raw hurt and she knew she’d gone too far. “That’s not true,” she said.
“You’re not that much older than me. You’re not smarter than me, either.” He pointed at the puppy, who looked clearly worried by the argument. “He needs us.”
Grinding pasta shells under his shoes, he scooped up the brown and white puppy and ran out of the room.
Cara watched him go, then looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to see her dad’s face.
“You could be nicer to him, Cara,” he said, slight rebuke in his voice.
Cara felt herself growing angry, not understanding why he was being so easy on Tim. “Why did you buy the dog for him?” she demanded. “How upset is he going to be if something happens to the dog?”
“Em seems to make him happy.”
Cara searched for the right words. “Tim is…he’s unbalanced. He’s not how he should be.”
“How do you think he should be?”
“Paying attention. Aware of what we’re going through right now. This isn’t a time to be a little kid. He needs to grow up.”
Her father rose and crossed the room and tried to hug her but she pushed him away.
“No,” Cara said. “And what if you doing things like this means the AI is messing with your head? That’s two really bad decisions you just made. Why did you let Petral convince you it was safe to go onboard the Ring at all? We never should have split up.”
Her dad stood over her for another few seconds before sitting down heavily on the couch. He put his hands between his knees.
“We’re all right,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”
“I’m afraid we’re getting caught up in something, Dad. Something very dangerous—more than it’s been already. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t even know what’s going to happen when we get to Ceres. Are there going to more of the same people who want to hurt us?”
He looked at her and seemed like he was going to say something, try to comfort her. Then he turned his gaze back to his hands.
“We’re doing what we have to do,” he said finally. “I’m not losing my mind. I’m trying to do what seems best. Sometimes you make a decision and realize it was a mistake. All right. You try not to make the same mistake twice.”
“A dog is a pretty big mistake.”
“We’ve got the dog,” he said angrily. “I’m tired of hearing about it. You don’t have to like the dog, but you don’t need to keep beating up Tim for what you want him to be. Accept who he is. He’s ten, Cara. You’ve forgotten what you were like when you were ten.” He shook his head. “You’re barely thirteen now. What happened to you being a kid?”
“Everything,” Cara said.
He nodded slowly, staring into the distance for a second. “Maybe,” he said.
Cara watched him. “Is Lyssa telling you something?”
“It was Fran. She said we’ll be out of fuel when we hit Ceres.”
“Are we going to have money to buy more?”
Her dad gave a short laugh. “Cash isn’t our problem right now. I even managed to get refunds on most of the non-delivered supplies back on the M1R. The problem is just Ceres itself. There’s a reason I don’t like to go there.”
“Don’t they have a mini black hole and real gravity?”
He smirked. “There’s no such thing as fake gravity, Cara. It’s all gravity.” It was a joke they’d shared before. “No, the problem is the government. They don’t like outsiders.”
“Even freighters?”
“We’re a freighter with no cargo. The only upside is that Heartbridge will probably have as much trouble there as we might.”
“You think we’re going to have trouble?”
He shook his head. “No. We’ll do what we alwa
ys do. Keep our heads down, fuel up, get out. I wasn’t planning on going to Callisto, but that could be the next stop. We’ll have to see what we can grab on Ceres. Or there could be something smaller out there, who knows. I don’t want to stay any longer than we have to.”
“How much longer?” Cara asked.
“Till Ceres? It was your flight plan.”
“Till we’re done with all this,” Cara said. She felt tired all of a sudden, angry with herself for picking on Tim.
“Can I have a hug?” her dad asked.
Cara nodded and slid closer to him.
He put his arm around her. “Has it been too long since we talked about rabbits?” Andy asked.
“It’s never too long.”
“I want you to tell me, this time.”
She looked up from his side and caught the worry in his face before he quickly hid it with a smile.
“What are we?” she asked.
“I think we’re rabbits,” her dad said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re fast and we keep our ears up, ready to run.”
Cara nodded. “That’s right.”
They sat for a while and her dad fell asleep. Cara waited, not sure if he was on his Link until his head fell back and he began to snore. Cara snuggled in closer, feeling his deep breaths, and counted the pasta shells Tim had tossed on the floor, imagining them as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres the biggest and all the rest of the noteworthy ones scattered with weeks in between. Em’s water bowl was Jupiter on the far side of the room near the vid screen. And far, far beyond that was Neptune. They still had so far to run.
Easing out from her dad’s arm, she turned down the lights and walked out into the corridor. Lights flickered on in the ceiling as she walked. Tim wasn’t in his room or in the garden chambers. She checked the command deck and found it empty.
Sitting at the communications console, she switched on the shipwide channel. “Fran?” she asked. “Have you seen Tim?”
