Mutiny on Mercury (Stark Raven Voyages Book 5)

by Jake Elwood

  "Well, of course I lied!" Uncle sounded honestly indignant. "If you thought the cargo was spoiling, you wouldn't get cute. Hold it for ransom, try to drive the price up."

  Chan shook his head in disgust. "What's really in the box?"

  "Plants, just like I said."

  Instead of answering, Chan leaned forward, bracing an elbow across the man's folded arms, and fished the hand laser out from under his knee. "I'm all done being lied to," he said. "I'm going to call Liz and get her to open the crate, and if she tells me you lied, well …" He pushed the muzzle of the laser against the side of Uncle's nose. "It won't be good for your profile."

  "Guns!" The hoarse cry was almost a shout. "The crate's full of guns. They won't go bad, and we'll still pay for them." He eased his nose away from the weapon. "But not if you shoot me."

  Chan leaned back, releasing the man's arms, but he kept the laser in his hand. "Guns," he said.

  "For the revolution, yeah. We're going to give Telemachus a black eye."

  "You're with the Sons of the Dawn?"

  "Bloody right I am!" There was pride in the man's voice, despite his undignified position.

  "All right then." Chan heaved himself up, eliciting a grunt from the man as he did so. Chan stood, and Uncle rose a moment later, bracing his hands on both walls as he worked himself to his feet. Chan handed him the laser.

  "You'll get your guns," he said. "We just have to pop up into orbit and collect them."

  Uncle gaped at him. "But you said that Liz woman was going to—"

  "I lied," Chan told him. "It's rude, isn't it?"

  "Oh, for …" Uncle tucked the laser into a pocket. "When can we expect delivery?"

  "Soon," Chan told him. "Anywhere from two hours to a day. It depends on how much attention Orbital Guard is paying."

  "All right." Uncle straightened his clothes, shooting Chan a resentful glare as he examined a tear in his sleeve. "Same spot as before, then. We'll have a man on site to take delivery. He'll have your money. If you don't get cute, we won't get cute. Good enough?"

  "Good enough," Chan agreed. "Let's not meet again."

  "No," Uncle said. "Let's not."

  Joss was stretched out on her bed, fully dressed with her overnight bag beside her, staring at the ceiling and trying to doze when the call came. "Hello?"

  "No names," said Hammond's voice. "Do you know who this is?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. You are going to be arrested. Get out of the hotel now."

  "What?"

  "Go!" he shouted, and broke the connection.

  She dialed Rhett as she swung her feet to the floor. He answered instantly, of course. "Tell the others to get out of the hotel. The police are inbound." The door hissed open and she stepped into the hall. "Then warm up the ship, I guess."

  Unlike Joss, Rhett didn't waste any time with foolish questions. She could hear Liz's phone ringing through the wall as Rhett said, "Very good. Might I suggest that you all keep your com links open?"

  "Good idea." She unsnapped the ear bud from the side of her phone and pushed it into her ear, then pocketed the phone. Liz swore in her ear a moment before the door hissed open and the pilot stepped into the hall.

  "Where's Chan?" said Joss.

  "I'm about three blocks away," he replied. "I'll meet you at the spaceport."

  Joss didn't answer, just headed for the stairs at a trot, Liz at her elbow. A leap took them to the landing, where Liz's fingers sank into Joss's arm. The two of them dropped into a crouch.

  Cops were swarming into the lobby, dark figures with guns in their hands, their armored jackets and visored helmets making them bulky and anonymous. Joss froze, despair filling her, but Liz hauled her upright. "Come on!"

  They reached the next floor up in two bounds. They were dashing toward Joss's room when a door opened beside them, a sleepy-looking man in a business suit just stepping out. Liz, still hauling Joss along by the arm, planted a shoulder against the man's chest and shoved him back into the room. They two of them raced past the man, spent a moment fumbling with the latch on his balcony door, and burst outside. A moment later they were on the roof.

  "This is much better with pants on," said Liz. "What next?"

  "Face the front of the hotel and turn right," Rhett answered promptly. "Run in that direction."

  They complied. "We're running out of building," Liz reported. "I hope you know what you're doing, buddy."

  "Jump to the parking garage." Rhett's voice was as calm as if he was telling them to climb stairs.

  Joss eyed the gap between the buildings. It had to be ten meters or more. "I'm not so sure about this, Rhett."

  "I have calculated this carefully," the robot replied. "If you employ alacrity, you will make it."

  Alacrity. Great. There was no time to indulge her doubts. She ran, bouncing high above the surface of the roof with every step, trying to time her steps. At the last moment she had to take a shuffling half-step, which cost her some momentum, but her foot came down on the edge of the hotel roof and she flung herself forward into space. Liz was a blur of motion beside her, the drop below her yawned like a vast and hungry mouth, and she would have screamed if she could have found the breath.

  The parking garage, a two-story cube of gleaming aluminum, rushed toward her, and she saw with cold certainty that she wasn't going to make it. The wind of her passage chilled her skin and whipped her hair out behind her, and in the corner of her eye she saw Liz clear the roof of the garage by centimeters. Then Joss crashed hard against the cold aluminum wall.

  She hit chest-first, the impact driving the air from her lungs, and scrabbled frantically at the rooftop with her arms. For an instant she held, and she felt a surge of hope. Then she started to slide, her fingers scraping the smooth surface of the roof, her lungs burning with the need to breathe, to scream. The edge of the roof clipped her chin, knocking her head back so she was staring up at the sky, one arm slipped free, and then Liz's fingers closed on her wrist.

  For a moment the two of them stayed like that, frozen at the edge of the roof. Then Liz planted her free hand on the roof's edge, grunted, and hauled Joss upward. Joss got a hand on the roof and did her best to help as Liz dragged her up and back. Joss wriggled and squirmed, and in a moment she was lying beside Liz on the rooftop, panting, sobbing with relief.

  "Oh, pull yourself together. It's a third of a gee, for Pete's sake." Liz stood, then hauled Joss onto her feet. "Let's go."

  "There should be a service hatch on the far corner of the roof," Rhett said. "To your left."

  "I see it," said Liz. Joss followed her across the roof at a run and watched as Liz tugged at the handle of a hatch set into the roof. "No good. It's locked."

  "There are trees to your left," Rhett said. "It's your best chance to reach the ground uninjured.

  Joss felt her jaw drop. He wanted her to leap into a treetop? But Liz was already starting toward the side of the building, and Joss was suddenly ashamed of her own constant fear. If Liz can do this, I bloody well can. It's falling, for God's sake. Anyone can do that. I can fall. And I can fall without whining, too.

  Liz slowed as she reached the roof's edge, surveying the ground below, but Joss could see a bushy treetop straight ahead. She dashed forward without slowing, caught a glimpse of Liz's astonished face in the corner of her eye, and leaped blindly from the roof.

  It was a deciduous tree, she had no idea what kind. It billowed in front of her like a green cloud, and she spread her arms wide and screamed in the instant before she hit. There was an explosion of soft leaves against her face, then a scraping, stabbing impact of twigs and small branches. The sound of breaking wood filled her ears, something clubbed her just over the eye, and she fell. Down and down she went, branches slamming into her and then breaking away, until at last she came to rest with her body splayed across a thick branch.

  She lay there for a moment, staring upward, and saw Liz come sailing through the air and into the tree. Liz, in her annoying fashion, landed like
a monkey, catching a branch and swinging forward, her feet thumping into the trunk and arresting her momentum. A moment later the branch in her hands broke, and Liz plunged to the ground.

  Joss chuckled, feeling guilty for doing so, and turned her head. The ground was just a meter or so below her, and she squirmed her way down, dropping lightly onto a layer of mulch at the base of the tree. Liz, sprawled on the ground nearby, sat up and glared at Joss as if the whole thing was her fault. Then she rose to her feet. The ground was littered with broken twigs and branches, and Joss suffered a pang of guilt for the damage they'd done. Well, we better finish getting away, or it was all for nothing.

  "What now, Rhett?"

  "Damn it," Liz interrupted, "I dropped my ear bud."

  "Head inside the garage," Rhett said. "There is an underground tunnel that the police may not have blocked yet."

  "Found it," said Liz, scooping up her ear bud and jamming it in her ear. "What's the plan?"

  "Follow me," Joss said, and led her around the parking garage at a run.

  Chapter 5

  Chan jogged down a shadowy corridor, completely disoriented. There was something about running that unnerved a person. He could feel panic nibbling at him, making him foolish, clouding his judgment. His vac suit was in a locker by the spaceport. A couple of minutes earlier he'd seen a sign for the spaceport, but he'd passed three intersections since then, and he doubted he could find his way back.

  What if they post a cop by the lockers? I'll be stuck. I'll be a rat in a trap, scurrying back and forth with nowhere to hide.

  He didn't even know what kind of building he was in. It was just a blank corridor, three or four meters wide, with pale shafts of light coming in through windows set in the ceiling. He saw a corner ahead and picked up the pace, hoping to get his bearings.

  He hit the corner at a dead run, using the far wall to stop, and swore. A pair of cops were coming down the side corridor toward him. One of them pointed at Chan, and they broke into a bounding run.

  "Damn it!" Chan pushed off from the wall and sprinted back the way he'd come, breath sawing in his lungs. His legs felt as heavy as if he was back on Earth, and a stitch was forming in his left side. Terror made it easy to ignore the pain, though.

  "This way," said Liz in his ear, and he looked around, half expecting to see her beside him. He'd forgotten the phone bud in his ear, he realized.

  "Rhett," he gasped. "I need some directions, buddy." A doorway loomed before him and he said, "Looks like I'm entering something called 'Delta Nine'." He glanced back over his shoulder as he passed through. "I'm leaving the Grasston Building."

  "You're going the wrong way," Rhett said. "Turn around."

  "Cops behind me," he panted. They were closing, too.

  "Take your next right," Rhett said. "When you come to a staircase, go down."

  He obeyed, and found himself running down a corridor lined on both sides by closed shops.

  "Look for Noodle Planet," Rhett said. "Take the side corridor between Noodle Planet and Omega."

  He saw the noodle shop, dashed toward it, and almost collided with a security grill that blocked the narrow lane between shops. "Damn it! It's locked, Rhett!" He looked around wildly. Directly across the corridor was another gap between shops, a dark opening no more than half a meter wide. "What about the other side of the corridor?" he asked. "By the oxygen store. There's a gap. Where does that go?"

  "That opening doesn't appear on the tourist maps," Rhett said. "I don't know where it goes."

  Chan hurled himself across the corridor, the two cops no more than a dozen paces away, another cop rounding the corner behind them. He flung himself into the gap, twisting sideways, his chest and back brushing the walls on either side as he shuffled along. Will they shoot me? I'm a sitting duck here. There's no way to dodge.

  "Come back, buddy." There was a cop following him through the gap. The man was having a hard time of it, his armored jacket scraping both walls. "Give up. You won't make it."

  Chan ignored him, concentrating on the glow that marked the end of the narrow passage in front of him. He popped out into another corridor, looking around frantically for more cops.

  Wide windows in the ceiling flooded the new corridor with light and made the air uncomfortably warm. It was a service corridor of some kind, dirty, lined with garbage bins and wiring cabinets, pipes snaking along the walls and ceilings. Chan ducked back as an automated garbage hauler went past, the sides of the trash box barely clearing the walls of the corridor. Run, for Buddha's sake! Just pick a direction and go. Not that it matters. Wherever I go they'll see me and—

  A flash of inspiration hit him and he turned to sprint after the trash hauler. In the box he'd be out of sight, and he'd cover some ground while catching his breath. The machine was moving quickly, and Chan had to run flat out to catch it. A final leap brought him in reach, and his grasping fingers caught the top edge of the box. He hauled himself upward, glancing back at the little alleyway he'd come through. The pursuing cops were still out of sight. He caught a glimpse of a man's hand reaching through the gap an instant before he tumbled over the side and into the box.

  He can't be sure I'm in here. And he might not be able to catch up. I have a chance, now. He stared up at the ceiling as it raced by, took a deep breath, and burrowed deep into the trash, hiding himself from sight.

  Rhett sat at a bridge station, using the Raven's exterior cameras to monitor the growing police presence outside. Eight men in vac suits surrounded the ship, and he could see an armored personnel carrier rolling across the spaceport toward him. He watched as it rounded the significant bulk of an Orbital Guard warship and headed straight for the Stark Raven. The enormous laser mounted on the back would be able to cut through the hull of the ship in about nine seconds, he calculated.

  Picking up his crewmates was going to be tricky.

  It had been a day of interesting challenges. He'd deceived the police interrogators and technicians and helped fugitives evade capture. Now it seemed he was going to add armed conflict with the police to his growing list of crimes. If they managed to escape, the crew of the Raven would have to add Mercury to the list of places they could never come back to.

  It was a good thing the solar system was a big place.

  "We're at the lock," Liz reported by radio. "We're suiting up."

  "Understood," Rhett broadcast, and powered up the ship's engines.

  The transmission from the police outside was immediate. "Stark Raven." The officer sounded young and perhaps a bit frightened. "Power down immediately or you will be fired upon."

  Rhett responded, promising to comply, and began sending a complex series of commands to the ship's computer. He would have to move quickly and with great precision. He calculated the time since Liz had checked in, decided that she and Joss would be about half way through suiting up, and sent the Raven's computer one final command.

  Execute.

  A distant hum from the stern of the ship told him that the Raven's laser turret was turning and coming to bear. There was a single panicky cry from the officer outside over the radio, and then the laser fired. Rhett watched the screen in front of him light up as the gun on the back of the APC glowed, then slid into two white-hot pieces. Then the Raven's laser turned and made one more precise shot.

  There was no need to touch the controls on the console in front of him. Rhett was able to communicate directly to the ship. He brought the Raven up to an altitude of twenty meters, watching men scatter as the engines roared. With ponderous grace the ship moved a hundred meters to one side, passed over the line of poles that marked the perimeter of the spaceport, and sank down again, coming to a rest in the sand on the far side.

  There was a frantic burst of encrypted radio traffic as the Planetary Security forces tried to understand what was going on. Shortly after that, the first men appeared between the posts, hesitating, staring at the ship.

  "I'm getting out of the garbage hauler," Chan said over the radio. "Ew. That's
disgusting. Anyway, I'm behind a restaurant called Mickey's, but I'm not in the public corridor. I'm in some kind of service area in the back."

  Rhett consulted his limited database of maps, did a quick calculation, and said, "Look for a staircase going up. Liz and Joss, I need you to go back in."

  "What? You retarded pile of scrap metal!"

  "I need you to collect Captain Chan's vacuum suit. He won't be able to join us directly."

  The cops left the cover of the fence line in a rush, spreading out as they ran toward the ship. They didn't stop until they were in close, out of range of the laser. He could see their legs on the ventral cameras. They were trying not to bunch up, but they were trying to stay under the ship without coming too close to the engines, so they didn't have much space to work with. His console pinged, and he knew they were trying to open the ventral airlock from below.

  He lifted the ship again, watching them scatter as the engines roared, and moved the ship another two hundred meters from the spaceport. He touched down and watched them mill around uncertainly. At last they came toward him, bounding across the sand, and he saw the damaged APC roll through a gap in the fence to join them.

  "We're in the lock," Joss said. "Is the coast clear?"

  "Largely," Rhett assured her. "I'll pick you up at the door." He took off, triggering another burst of encrypted radio chatter, flew over the frustrated cops, and returned to the spaceport. There were two uniformed figures in view, and he fired the laser at the ground between them, persuading them to scatter. He set the Raven down directly in front of the lock in the main hangar building and opened the aft airlock. The hangar lock slid open and Liz and Joss appeared, Joss cradling Chan's helmet, Liz running with the rest of Chan's vac suit draped over one shoulder.

  "We're in," Liz barked, and he lifted off.

  "Bloody hell," said Chan. "I'm on the second floor, but I'm trapped. There's three cops behind me, and every door up here is locked." Rhett heard a metallic rattle and the sound of Chan's labored breathing. "I'm almost at the end of the corridor. Let me see. There's a sign that says 'Sauna.' Do you know where that is?"