by R. M. Olson
She shook her head. “I haven’t even begun to figure out this sweet, sweet angel’s capabilities. I’ve barely played with the hyperdrive. If I’m in the pilot’s seat, three months with her is nothing. Besides, deep space isn’t nearly as boring as you’re making it out to be.”
She glanced over at the holoscreen. The blurred shape she’d been watching for the last hour was growing closer.
Much closer.
Her grin widened. “For example—”
She settled herself in her seat and touched the tips of her fingers lightly on the controls, breathing in deeply.
“Jez!” Lev hollered as a meteoroid shot past the cockpit window.
“Strap in,” she murmured. She barely had time to notice the blood drain from his face before they were in the middle of the narrow asteroid belt.
She half-closed her eyes and leaned her head back, flying by instinct. The ship danced between the hurtling balls of space-rock, responding to her lightest touch. She barely had to think a command and the ship read her thoughts through her fingers.
Beside her, Lev’s knuckles were white on the arms of his seat, jaw clenched, cords standing out on his neck.
“Loosen up, genius boy,” she said over her shoulder.
“Just fly, Jez,” he said through his teeth. She shrugged.
“I am.”
Another meteoroid skimmed the cockpit so closely that she could have reached out her hand and touched it. Adrenalin pumped through her body, and the world slowed, and everything was perfect.
And then, far too soon, it was over.
She pulled back on the controls regretfully, and the ship slowed and steadied on course.
Lev let out a shaky breath. “For heaven and the Lady and the Consort’s bloody sake Jez, what the hell was that?”
She sighed patiently. “I told you. I need to figure out what she can do. I can’t very well pilot her if I don’t know how she responds.”
“You—I’m fairly certain that sailing her out through Vitali’s vaults would be considered piloting her,” said Lev, still sounding shaky. She rolled her eyes.
“No, that was just flying. I need to get to know her. That’s why I don’t care about being in deep space. It’ll be fine. As long as I can do that every so often—” she trailed off, tipping her head back against the seat. “It’s all I need, Lev. Freedom, and a ship, and deep space.”
Lev shook his head, but he was watching her with the smallest hint of a smile on his face—not amusement, something else.
She frowned slightly. Whatever it was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to deal with it.
The sharp crack of knuckles against the cockpit doorway made her jerk her head up. She didn’t even have time to call ‘come in’ before Masha strode into the cockpit.
Jez narrowed her eyes and got to her feet.
“Jez.” Masha’s voice snapped out like a whip. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Jez gave her a lazy grin, her heart beating faster and her muscles tightening with anticipation. “I was taking her through her paces, Masha.”
“You took us through an asteroid belt. What were you thinking?”
“I was flying my ship.”
Masha narrowed her eyes. “Your ship? If I remember correctly, Jez, I found you on that prison ship because you’d crashed your ship into an astroid.”
Lev jumped to his feet and grabbed her arm before she could smash Masha’s smug face in. “Jez,” he said in a warning voice.
She jerked her arm out of his grip, not taking her eyes off Masha. “That wasn’t my damn fault,” she hissed.
“Perhaps not. But you’ve shown me clearly in the past two weeks that you are incapable of making responsible decisions. I’m sorry, but I can’t have you putting my entire crew in danger any time the urge strikes you. Someone could have been killed yesterday. The Ungovernable could have been damaged if the steering hadn’t reacted the way you assumed it would. This has gone more than far enough. You will not put this crew or this ship in danger again.”
“I didn’t realize you were the boss of me,” drawled Jez.
Damn this woman. Damn her to every hell that ever existed.
“Perhaps you’d better learn how to have a boss, Jez,” Masha said sharply. “You will set a course for deep space, and you will leave the ship on autopilot until Lev and Tae are ready to take us onto the prison planet. Do you understand me?”
Three months.
For a moment Jez couldn’t breathe.
Three damn months on autopilot. Three months sitting in deep space with a ship that spoke to her, that sang to her, and Masha expected her not to answer.
It would be almost as bad as being stuck in that damn hangar bay.
Worse. It would be like starving to death right in front of a plaguing feast.
She’d die. She’d walk out the airlock herself before she’d make herself do that.
“Jez,” said Lev again, stepping up beside her. “Listen to me.”
She took a deep breath. “Sure Masha,” she said through her teeth. “I’ll do exactly what you say. Over my dead frozen body, you bastard.”
Lev tapped his com. “Tae, Ysbel, I need you in the cockpit, please. Now.”
Masha’s eyes had narrowed further.
The woman was a stinking scum-sucker as far as Jez was concerned, but she’d always proved remarkably competent every time it came to a fight. Jez wasn’t entirely certain, if it came to it, which one of them would win.
One way to find out.
She grinned at Lev over her shoulder.
Tae appeared in the doorway, took one look at the scene, and stepped quickly beside Lev, placing himself between her and Masha.
Plaguing idiot.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Masha and Jez are having a discussion,” said Lev through his teeth, “and I think it should take place another time. Where’s Ysbel?”
“I don’t know.” Tae looked like he’d just woken up, long black hair tousled, eyes swollen with sleep. “What in the system happened back there?”
“Jez decided to take us through an asteroid belt,” said Masha in a cold voice.
Tae shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “What?”
“I was testing the controls,” she said, rolling her eyes at him. “Like a responsible pilot.”
“I don’t think the word ‘responsible’ could be applied to anything to do with you,” Masha snapped. “This discussion is at an end.”
“This is my damn ship, Masha.”
“It’s not your ship.”
“Jez, Masha.” Lev stepped forward beside Tae, holding up his hands. “Let’s—”
“No!” she snapped. “I’m sick of this. Masha decides what we do. Masha decides where we go. We get Masha’s permission before we plaguing sneeze. And I’m finished. I don’t know what she wants, but I know damn well what I want. I want a ship, I want deep space, and hell, I’ll help Ysbel get her family back. But not like this.”
Masha had gone very quiet, and there was a look on her face that might have made Jez nervous, if she hadn’t been so angry.
“Well, Lev?” Masha asked, her voice sharp as a razor blade. “Tae? I won’t command a crew who doesn’t agree with me.”
“Command? All you’ve done is almost get us killed,” Jez growled. Masha gave her that piercing look of hers.
“No, Jez. That was you. I got you out of jail. I brought you together so you could pull off the heist. I wiped you from every database in the system, I made it appear that you’d all died in an explosion.”
“By blowing up my ship,” Jez growled.
“And you, Jez?” Masha continued, voice hard. “I brought you in because you are a very good pilot. But you seem intent on making sure all my work was for nothing, by putting everyone’s lives in danger. You may not believe it, but the five of us on this ship are not the only people in the system, and getting into deep space is not the only thing that matters. That’s not why I did this.”
Jez wrenched her arm free from Lev’s grip and grabbed Masha by the collar. She didn’t even see Masha move, but she felt the unmistakable shape of a heat-pistol muzzle pressed into her stomach.
“Stand down, Jez,” said Masha, her voice dangerously quiet.
Jez’s whole body was buzzing with adrenalin, every sense sharp and clear. To her side, Lev and Tae stood helpless and horrified.
“Sorry, Masha,” she said through gritted teeth. “You’ll have to shoot me, then. Because I’ll be damned before I take one more order from you.”
Masha narrowed her eyes, and Jez’s heart rate sped up. She’d seen heat-gun wounds. It wasn’t a nice way to die.
The door to the cockpit burst open, and Ysbel stumbled through. All four of them whirled around, Jez’s hand loosening from Masha’s collar and Masha’s pistol slackening from Jez’s stomach.
Ysbel hardly seemed to notice the scene in front of her. Her face was set and expressionless, but there was something haunted behind her eyes.
“Ysbel?” asked Lev at last, his voice strained.
“Lev,” she said hoarsely. “That chip our crazy pilot got—it has some information. I think you should see this.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TAE RUBBED HIS eyes again, blinked hard against the sleep he’d been rudely jerked out of a scant few minutes earlier, and shook his head in a sort of awed exasperation as Jez let go of Masha’s collar, an expression of disgust on her face. Masha holstered her pistol, expression cold, and turned to follow Lev and Ysbel out of the room.
What a way to wake up.
Bloody idiots. It was probably inevitable at some point. It just would have been nice if it could have happened while he was awake.
Jez hesitated a moment, then followed the others, and, with the two main combatants out of the room, Tae went after them.
Back on Prasvishoni, before he’d been arrested, he’d been the oldest surviving street kid in their sector, which made him their motley gang’s de-facto leader. He’d broken up plenty of fights between starving, angry kids who’d been pushed past the breaking point.
He watched Masha’s stiff posture, Jez’s slouch and the anger steaming off her like heat, and sighed.
Maybe this was almost the same thing.
Ysbel, Lev and the others had already gathered around the makeshift table in the cramped cabin by the time he stepped in behind them. He squeezed in through the doorway, and pushed between Masha and Jez to the table.
He could almost feel the loathing between them. Although Jez, typically, seemed already distracted.
He wished, for just a moment, that he could forget about everything that was stressing him that quickly. His jaw ached from where he’d been clenching it, even in his sleep, for the past two weeks.
He’d thought after they’d pulled off the job on Vitali and made their escape he’d be able to relax. He hadn’t counted on waking up every night to the faces of the starving kids he’d left behind on Prasvishoni.
Masha was right—there wasn’t anything he could have done to help them. If he’d gone back there, he would have been back on the streets in days, and back in jail in weeks, government pardon or no. Street kids were considered an infestation, and the government’s views on how to deal with an infestation were depressingly brutal. Even if he’d gotten them out of the city and off the planet, they’d have simply starved or frozen on one of the outer-rim settlements, trying to eke a living from the thin, terraformed dirt or begging or stealing in the dirt-eater settlement towns from others who’d been forced, or had chosen, to do the same. It was no life. No matter how much he’d dreamed about it, it was no life.
But he was all they had. And he’d left, and they probably thought he was dead. Would Caz be their next leader? The kid was only seventeen, but he’d already grown up way too quickly. Like Tae had. Like they’d all had to.
He shook his head and pulled out a chair beside Lev.
At least he could help Ysbel get her family back. That was one thing he could do. And maybe, if he was busy enough, he could stop thinking about the people he’d failed.
Ysbel’s grim face, the haunted look in her eyes—that, at least, he could relate to.
“Alright, Ysbel,” said Lev. “Show me what you found.”
“This chip has some information on the prison itself, but probably not much more than you already know,” she said, her voice not quite steady. “It’s a political prison, and it’s as isolated as the government can make it. There are settlements for the workers families on the other side of the planet, and workers only go in and out weekly. No visitors. A situation I’m sure you, Lev, are familiar with.”
From the corner of his eye, Tae saw Lev’s rueful nod. “Yes, Ysbel. I am. And this is all useful information. But I’m not certain—”
“I haven’t finished.” She tapped her com and expanded the glowing holoscreen that appeared above her wrist, then pulled it around in front of her so they could all see. “The chip Jez stole—”
“Won,” cut in Jez.
“He was a transport driver. They go in to bring supplies to the prison planets. Once a week they stop in, but sometimes their schedule is interrupted. Like, for example, if the prison is moving prisoners. And then they might help with the transport.”
She tapped a point on the screen, and expanded it. “See, here. There will be prisoners transported in three weeks’ time. They don’t say their names, only their prison numbers. And their gender. And their age.”
It took Tae a moment to see what she’d seen. Then he sucked in a quick breath.
9877 - F - 37
9878 - F - 8
9879 - M - 6
The only children on the list.
Likely, the only children in the prison.
Ysbel’s children.
“Where are they taking them?” Lev’s voice was calm, as always, but Tae could hear the strain under it. Ysbel didn’t answer, just flicked the screen with an impatient gesture. Another page of data appeared. Lev peered at it, then swore softly and leaned back.
“They’re taking them to the Vault.”
Something icy dug itself into Tae’s chest, and he stared at the screen in front of him.
He’d heard stories about the Vault, back in his days on the streets. He’d never heard of someone making it out, though.
Ysbel nodded grimly.
“Why would they do that, Masha?” Lev asked, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“Ysbel’s dead, as far as the government is concerned,” said Masha in her no-nonsense tone, but there was still cold anger under it. “I know very little about Tanya. I looked up her records before I came to talk to Ysbel, obviously, but there’s very little on her—grew up on a farm, went away to Prasvishoni for university, came back home, got married, started a family. I can understand them putting her and the children in a political prison, if they survived Ysbel’s extraction. The government would certainly go to great lengths, including locking up two children, to prevent word of how it had dealt with Ysbel from getting out—her father and mother were cultural heroes during the war twenty years back. But transferring them to the Vault? I don’t know.” She shook her head slightly, her face grim. “It’s possible it has something to do with Ysbel’s disappearance. But, Lev, you know as well as I do what this means.”
Lev nodded. His face, Tae noticed, was as grim as Masha’s.
Jez shoved her seat back so it was balancing on two legs and put her hands behind her head. “So I guess this Vault thing is bad?”
Tae rolled his eyes in exasperation. Ysbel glared. Lev sighed. “Yes, Jez. It’s bad.”
“It means the only way we would get my wife out would be if I sent you in the front door with a handful of explosives and then set them off.”
Jez raised her eyebrows, looking suddenly interested. “That would work?”
“No. It wouldn’t work. But it would make me feel better.”
“Jez,” said Lev. “That’s the highest-security prison in
the system. What we did with Vitali is child’s play next to that. It means in three week’s time, we lose Tanya and the kids, permanently.”
Jez lowered her chair to the ground, looking, for once in her life, serious. “Oh. So. What do we do?”
Lev caught Tae’s eye, and Tae could see his question.
The thing was, what he was asking wasn’t possible. What Ysbel was asking wasn’t possible. He’d been trying for two weeks to break into the system, and the best he’d gotten was a hairline crack. Three weeks from now? There was no way.
There was almost certainly no way.
Just like every other damn thing he’d done with this damn crew.
There was something heavy and sick in the pit of his stomach.
He was clenching his jaw again, and he consciously tried to relax it. He’d been awake for ten minutes and he already had a tension headache.
Lev glanced around at the others quickly, but no matter where he looked he could see Ysbel’s face.
This was a terrible idea. Even if he and Tae had three months to find information and plan it, it would be a delicate thing to break three people out of a high-security political prison. And this?
If he agreed to it, he may well be sending this entire crew to their deaths. And there was almost no chance they’d be able to extract Ysbel’s family. Tae knew it too, he’d seen it in his expression.
But—
Eighteen months and three years when they’d watched their mother grabbed from in front of them and dragged off on a ship. When they’d almost burned to death in their own home. When they’d been taken to a prison planet.
They’d grown up in hell. A hell he’d sent them to. And if they were taken to the Vault?
He shuddered.
So he’d risk the crew of the Ungovernable. His friends. People who’d been willing to put their own lives at risk for him, more than once. Or he’d sentence Ysbel’s wife and children to something that would probably be even worse than death.
