by J. S. Morin
“You figure out where we are yet?” Carl asked. It was one thing being lost in the astral with Mort aboard to guide them back. For all her apparent prowess, Esper was still falling from the nest. Whether she could fly solo still remained to be seen.
“Yeah, computer came back about twenty minutes ago with a result. We’re past the limit of safe dynamic update to navigation.”
“Huh?” Reebo said.
Amy gave him a quick glance. “We’re so far down it’s not safe to move. We could overshoot into a star before the nav computer could compensate. It’s not completely certain how deep that is, either. There’s a margin of error on the calculation of three standard units.”
Carl let out a low whistle. “What kind of orbit are we talking here?”
“About twenty-five. If you ever wanted to poke your head into another galaxy, now’s the time. We could be there and back by tomorrow.”
Carl scratched at the back of his neck. “You feel OK giving us a quick nudge into ARGO space?”
“Maaaaybe? Why?”
“Well, I think our number one issue here is a lack of practical experience at this shit. That’s on me. I think it’s time we brought in some contract help.”
Amy’s lips curled into a grin. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”
“I think so.”
Niang cleared his throat. “And what would that be exactly?”
Carl slouched against the wall. “Time to get a few old friends together from my old squadron.”
# # #
The Galveston was the Ramsey Syndicate’s biggest freighter. It was also their only freighter. A quarter kilometer long and mostly empty space, it had an astral drive that could manage five standard astral units. That was the typical limit on civilian travel since that was as deep as search-and-recovery patrols swept for wrecks and disabled ships. It was the deep-drop star-drive that Roddy needed for this job.
Ithaca was in the middle of nowhere, off the map as far as the omni was concerned, not to mention standard comm channels. Without setting up some sort of secure astral relay, they were a desert island in the Black Ocean. Since Roddy was here and Niang was off playing space outlaw with Carl, it was up to him to get that astral relay installed.
The door to Cargo Bay 6 stood open, yawning into the astral void. From inside his EV suit, Roddy was protected from both the airless vacuum in the hold and the twelve-pack of beer calling to him from the mess hall. In theory, he could have taken command of the operation from the bridge, monitored progress via remote cameras scattered throughout the ship, and given his brain a good soaking. He had enough competent mechanics and computer techs that his expertise wasn’t required. What he needed was protection from himself.
Roddy wasn’t built for command. Three days as Carl’s stand-in had been enough to teach him that. His first day on the job he’d drunk himself stupid at a party thrown in his own honor. The second day he’d woken up with a hangover the likes of which he hadn’t experienced in decades. Today he’d decided he didn’t have enough years left to piss another away, and he needed to get to work.
“I’m getting comm traffic from the relay but just the ID feed,” Roddy said into the mic in his EV helm. “We making any progress connecting to another relay station?”
Chang’s voice buzzed in his helm. “We’re sending a standard handshake signal. Even five deep it might take a while to grab a link. Hang tight, boss.”
Boss. Hidden behind the privacy of his face shield, Roddy grinned. As much as he hated the bullshit of the job, he liked the respect. Even if this gaggle of Earth Navy castoffs were pumping perfume up his vents, it smelled nice.
Roddy gazed out at the relay beacon. It looked like a miniature space station, with a central core surrounded by docking rings that were, in fact, antenna mounts, and navigational lights that were actually emitters. Doss and McKinney were out there in EV suits, tinkering with manual settings, monitoring circuitry for installation error codes, and just generally looking like they were doing shit. Chang was pulling the heavy load, but his work was all software. Roddy knew the mechanic’s life well enough to know when looking busy mattered more than actually being busy. It wasn’t Doss or McKinney’s fault that there wasn’t much for them to do but glue their eyes to their scanners and watch in case brand new, perfectly functional equipment decided to cough up a lung.
“Got it!” Chang shouted, causing Roddy to wince. He made a mental note to adjust the audio filtering on his EV helm’s speakers. “We’ve got comm traffic in and out.”
“All right, you big apes,” Roddy said affectionately. “Load that anti-matter chamber and let’s get out of here.”
“You sure you wanna do this?” Doss asked.
“Listen, kid. We’re out in the middle of nowhere’s back garden, and Ithaca might be even more remote. But this thing’s aiming a signal straight back home. Anyone who gets close enough to check the tight-band signal’s gonna have to slog through five dummy signals, but if they checked out every course, they could backtrack it right to the Odysseus. Without the pass code, this thing’ll blow long before they get close enough. Maybe take a nosy fucker out with it.”
“That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” Chang asked.
“You guys had a nice big navy around you. You got used to having a fleet to back you up, and a whole intelligence division. In the jungle, you had to worry about a bunch of dumb animals that couldn’t work a food processor, let alone sophisticated comm equipment.”
“You’re forgetting the marines and Azrael,” Chang pointed out.
“I was talking about them,” Roddy insisted. “A wizard and a bunch of walking drug adverts with more chem than blood in their veins. Point is: we’re going to be attracting a different sort of enemy, the kind that spends a lot of time lining up crosshairs and tightening nooses before making a move. In this business, you gotta be huge if you can’t be mobile or anonymous. Don Rucker can get away with half the galaxy knowing his business because even ARGO doesn’t want a piece of him. But we don’t have that kind of muscle, and Ithaca can’t up and move, so we gotta do everything we can to keep that jungle shithole a secret.”
“Got it,” Doss said. “I mean, I was with you all the way up to using an anti-matter bomb. Handling this shit without two backup systems in place seems risky.”
“Quit being a baby. That thing goes off, you’d never even feel it. Now plug that core into the detonator and let’s get back to hell.”
# # #
Sweat dripped onto Carl’s chest from a mop of braids. Amy rolled off and collapsed beside him, pulling up the sheets. They were both short of breath.
“So what are we really up to?” she asked.
God. Dammit. It hadn’t taken Amy long to learn Tanny’s old trick of interrogating him after sex. Carl could lie during sex, which he considered to be a basic survival instinct in his line of work. He could lie before sex, which he’d always considered the best way to get it. But somehow, in the immediate aftermath, he just couldn’t muster the mental wherewithal to put on a fake Carl and evade.
He shook his head. “Crew’s too green. No instincts. Especially Niang. Fucking dumping our take.”
Amy propped herself up on an elbow and looked into his eyes. Her sappy gaze was something he’d never seen out of Amy in all their years together prior to dating her. Those hazel windows into her heart just melted his. “You’re not just doing this for old time’s sake? Rounding up your old buddies at your fancy new clubhouse? Maybe bragging a little? Showing off?”
“All the above,” Carl replied. “But they’ve still got more to offer than these datapad checklist jockeys.”
“Oh, really? Rib-Eye owns a chain of restaurants. You think he’s going to come play outlaw with us?”
“Hatchet will. He’s colder than the void and knows his left from right.”
Amy wasn’t ready to give up so easily. “Vixen and Juggler got married; they’ve got two little ones of their own now.”
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“And that hasn’t stopped them from taking merc work.”
“Jackhammer has a cushy job in private security. You couldn’t afford him.”
“But Samurai would come if I said the word. So would Cricket, even if it was just a sight-seeing job for him.”
Amy slumped back down and closed her eyes. “You’ve thought this through.”
“I’ve been thinking it through since we started this little venture. This was my big worry—too big a criminal empire for how few actual criminals I had in it. I mean, I half expect some of these guys would comm customs inspection before breaking orbit. I need underlings that will shoot first and ask questions never. The kind of people who won’t lose sleep over stealing for a living and who won’t file a report at the end of a job. Maybe I can whip this crew into shape, but they need some role models.”
“…who play poker, shoot pool, and can fly a Typhoon.”
Carl grinned. “That’s a bonus.”
# # #
As solutions to problems went, the astral relay had misfired. In Roddy’s imagination, it had gotten them in contact with the Mobius crew, and Roddy and Carl had hashed out the issues with the ship’s systems that may or may not have been tampered with by persons unknown. Instead, it had heralded a massive downloading of news and entertainment from the past six years, as Odysseus personnel caught up on the chunk of civilized life they had missed. They had managed neither real-time contact with the Mobius nor had they exchanged drop-offs of text communications.
Roddy sat in his office—he had a fucking office!—tapping away at a terminal with his feet. There was a fine line between letting Carl get his job done in peace and sounding like a panicked academy freshman freaking out over being on his own for the first time. Roddy was growing well accustomed to fine lines. He sipped coffee from a permatherm mug and glared plasma bolts at the unopened beer bottle sitting at the edge of the console. Every time he wanted the beer, he took a sip from his coffee instead; he was getting jittery from the caffeine.
Trying a new tactic, Roddy plugged in an entirely different comm ID. Moments later, the video screen brought up a bleary-eyed image of Rhiannon Ramsey. “Oh, hey Roddy. Should have known it wasn’t going to be Brad.” She still had issues calling her brother by his middle name.
“Sorry, kid. Just wanted to check in and see how you were doing. You… uh, heard from Carl lately?”
Rhiannon reached off-camera and Roddy heard liquid pouring. She lifted a half-filled tumbler of amber liquid and threw it back in a single gulp. “Nope.”
“If you do hear from him, can you just gimme a heads-up?”
Rhiannon looked away, and the sound of pouring resumed. “Sure, whatever.”
Clearing his throat, Roddy tried to step through the social niceties. “So, how’s life back on the touring circuit?”
“Look, I don’t know where my brother is. You don’t really care about my singing career. Are we done here?”
“Hey! I toured in my day. I can’t help that I’m a little worried about Carl. We got our astral relay up and can’t get him on the comm.”
“Welcome to my life. I went years without being able to find him. But I’ll make a couple comms, OK?” The image went dark and the screen blinked with a comm tracking number and duration of call.
Most people didn’t see the similarity, but Roddy did. Carl was just like her, under the veneer of casual competence and ease that he projected. As good a liar as he was, Carl couldn’t keep a poker face indefinitely. A few beers and a couple holovids into an evening, he got just as petty and bitchy as his little sister. She just didn’t care enough about Roddy’s opinion to hide it.
That still left the laaku with a problem. He was 80% sure he hadn’t fucked around in the engine room of the Mobius before it left Ithaca. That was 20% short of how sure he needed to be. With no signal back from the Mobius, he couldn’t drag that percentage any higher, and the nagging worry was that it might slip lower the longer he went without hearing from them. What if something had already happened?
# # #
Fate. Kismet. Destiny. Maybe there was something to it all. But more likely it was a particular cluster of synapses common to people like Carl and Amy that drew them to a place like the city of New Melbourne on Delos. Carl remembered walking the avenues around the spaceport with his regular crew—even if Esper was only a passenger back then. It seemed like eons ago. It was last year. Soon he’d be turning the chronos back even farther.
“So these guys we’re here meeting, they part of the old squadron,” Niang said. It was one of those non-questions that probed for confirmation.
“Yeah. Vixen and Juggler,” Carl replied. “One guy, one girl.” He left out the kids.
“Them the two always hanging on each other?”
“Those are the ones,” Amy confirmed. “They got hitched just after leaving the service.”
Niang shook his head. “Man. Life on the outside. Can’t hardly imagine after thinking all you lunatic Typhoon pilots had got yourselves blown to dust at Karthix.”
“Most of us did,” Carl reminded him.
They traveled in a pack, Carl in the lead. The whole crew was together since this was secure space. Carl was only a mildly wanted man, and he had a wizard along—even if Esper was no Mort. This was a rendezvous, not a job. Strictly low danger. Just thinking that made Carl wish he hadn’t. Nothing that seemed easy ever turned out that way.
The newcomers looked out of place. Reebo gawked at restaurant signs and stared at fashionable women more than society generally preferred. Yomin shrank into Reebo’s shadow. Niang looked like a caveman, still sporting the beard he’d grown in the jungle and never groomed into anything civilized. None of them had spent time in ARGO space since the loss of the Odysseus. Carl regretted not including any of them on the passenger runs to the borderlands, repatriating the survivors who didn’t want to join the syndicate. Yet another managerial error on his part.
A glass-fronted restaurant called to Carl like a homing beacon. He couldn’t have kept away if he tried. And he didn’t want to try. Though he had only been there once, Carl had to say that Duster’s Dogfight Diner was possibly his favorite eatery in the galaxy—and it had nothing to do with the food.
Slipping the hostess fifty terras in hardcoin, Carl got them a table with a spectacular view of the 3-meter diameter holovid battle taking place overhead. There was a match about to start. Red versus blue. Four pilots per side. The weapon of choice: the Typhoon III medium weight fighter.
Shortly after they were seated and someone took their drink orders, a woman in a slick gray business suit approached their table. “Captain Ramsey?”
Carl stuck out a hand, and she shook it. “That’s me. Which squadron am I looking at?”
“They’ve got the red team tonight. What’s playing now is just a highlight loop. Next match is in about twenty minutes. You missed your window for this round; we’ve already got a team to feed them.”
“Them?” Reebo asked.
Carl decided it was time for introductions. “Everyone, this is Miriam Teller. She owns this place. We’re here to do her a little favor.”
Miriam scoffed. “Little? These ringers are killing the betting action. I can’t get anyone to bet against them, and I can’t offer odds high enough to cover my losses. 1-25, and I get gamblers picking away at me.”
“Why not just boot ‘em out?” Niang asked.
“Or rig the sim?” Yomin suggested.
“And ruin the diner’s reputation? Plus, that Jaxon character worries me a little. Got a shark’s smile, that one.”
Amy turned to the crew. “That would be Juggler.”
Miriam shrugged. “Goes by Jaxon Schultz around here.”
“How long’s this been going on?” Carl asked.
“Going on about three weeks now. And the shin-kicker is they’re just here for the free meals. No bets, not even through a proxy. I waited days for them to sandbag, bet huge against themselves through a third party, and
walk off with a huge payday. I had private security on hand just in case. But they’re just having a grand old time, eating my food, and drying up the gambling action like damming a river.”
Carl slouched back. “What’s it worth to you for us to get rid of them?”
“This is a legal establishment. I don’t care for that edge in your tone.” Miriam had the look, too. Sure, she ran a gambling establishment. But gambling was A-OK, 100% kosher on Delos, so long as it wasn’t rigged.
Holding up his hands in mock surrender, Carl clarified. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Jaxon and Rachel are old friends and damn good pilots. But they’ve never been as good as me. I’ll break their streak for you.”
Miriam looked around the table. “I remember you and your friends taking on Viper Squadron a while back. These people are better than Viper ever was. And I don’t see any of your teammates from that battle.”
Carl furrowed his brow and looked around the table. Esper had been the only one there that day, and she hadn’t flown. No point overlooking the obvious. “That team of mine was shit. I had a cab driver and two non-pilots as my squad mates. This one’ll be better.”
“You better be right. The Schultzes don’t make any bones about being ex-navy pilots. Tried looking ‘em up once; all I got was service dates. My guess is they were scorched-planet ops. You know, off-the-record stuff the media would eat the navy alive for.”
Carl shrugged. “It’s just a computer game, after all.”
Overhead, a tiny holographic ship exploded. Miriam glanced up. “Yeah, but you’ll leave orbit one day soon, and who’s to say these two aren’t sore losers?”
Amy and Carl exchanged a knowing glance. “They are,” Amy said. “We’re counting on it.”
# # #
“Listen,” Carl said as the six of them huddled together by the row of simulator pods. “I don’t care which two of you come along for the ride, but someone’s gotta take a seat and play along. Me and Amy will take care of the heavy lifting.”
“Come on, Jean,” Amy chided. “You’ve stuck your head in a Typhoon sim once or twice.”
