by J. S. Morin
But there was a time and a place to throw a multi-tool in Carl’s plans, and Roddy had probably already done enough to the Mobius with his multi-tool.
He waited.
He watched.
He began to grow apprehensive as the Sokol moved to intercept. The Mermaid had unusually good astral scanners. What were the odds that a backwater gunship running contraband for a backwater criminal family would have anything to match? Whatever they were, Roddy was leaning toward betting the long shot.
“Unidentified Vessel, power down and prepare to be boarded.”
Roddy usually wasn’t in the cockpit for that part of the job. Carl heard that spiel with regularity, and played it by ear whether to fight, trap, run, or con his way out of it. Something Carl had said once stuck in Roddy’s mind: “If you don’t want a fight, lie. If it doesn’t work, you’re no worse off.”
Standing up in the pilot’s chair, Roddy accessed the Mermaid’s computer and found a voice modulation program. He selected male human baritone and opened the comm to reply. “Vessel Sokol, this is Deputy Marshall… Edward van Halen of Earth Interstellar Enhanced Investigative Org. You are interfering in an official investigation. Cease pursuit and clear the area immediately.”
As he waited for a response, Roddy took a moment to reacquaint himself with the weapon systems on the Mermaid. For a former fighter pilot, Amy hadn’t armed the ship nearly as well as he might have hoped. Apparently Typhoon-grade plasma cannons were hard to come by in the days before she’d joined up with Carl again. His next hope was that her stealth package could…
Roddy slapped himself in the forehead. Here he was, contemplating a fight when he could have avoided getting spotted in the first place if he’d put less trust in the Sokol having scavenger-grade scanners and just activated the damn stealth mode. Not that it would do him much good now. Knowing he was out there, wide-area dispersal fire would be enough to light up his position, and a trail of ions would give him away if he moved.
But he wasn’t alone. Carl and Hatchet weren’t playing it off as if they’d never met him. The Hatchet Job was on an intercept course for the Sokol. Outgunned on a datapad was one thing, but Roddy still liked the odds of the Mobius and Hatchet Job in this fight. Two on one, with years of Earth Navy tactical training and flying together… he liked those odds a lot. In fact, they probably didn’t even need the help of the much smaller Mermaid in this little scuffle. Roddy’s hand edged toward the astral controls as he weighed his options.
The Mobius flashed past, come and gone through the astral before he even got a good look at it. The Hatchet Job wouldn’t be one-on-one for long.
Roddy’s hand hovered over the star-drive throttle. Amy’s ship could drop to seven—that was how he’d gotten there in time. At that depth, he’d be alone unless someone had military grade equipment to come after him. Or a wizard. Roddy mentally tacked that to the end of the list in case there was anyone else crazy enough to make a habit of bringing one along to work as a manual star-drive.
The fight broke out at a depth of around three. Roddy watched on the astral scanners as the two friendly ships circled their prey. The Sokol was nearly identical in size to the Hatchet Job, and both displaced nearly twice the mass of the Mobius. But the Hatchet Job was a ballerina compared to both. It twirled and jerked, managing to keep a surprisingly tight bead on the Sokol with its forward guns as it maneuvered to evade return fire. He’d never watched Hatchet fly before and couldn’t help being impressed. Where the hell did Carl dig up all these crazy pilots for his old squadron?
But for all their dancing and evasions, all three ships took a pounding. At close range, the multiple turrets of the Sokol were catching targets by virtue of superior turning speed; the Mobius just wasn’t about to keep out of the line of fire, and the Hatchet Job was simply too large to miss from such short range.
Roddy’s breath quickened. He looked down at his hand on the astral throttle, wondering why it hadn’t moved. At a depth of seven, he could be out of harm’s way regardless of the eventual outcome. But the lack of certainty of who’d win kept him from making a run for it.
Gritting his teeth and closing his eyes, he gave the astral throttle a pull instead of a push, and sent the Mermaid plummeting toward a depth of just three astral units. From an evolutionary perspective, this was a poor decision. Laaku had a keen natural instinct for self-preservation, observed most evidently by their surrender to human forces upon first contact. But Roddy had spent too long among a particular brand of reckless human to let his friends go into battle while he floated safely in the astral within scanner range.
Plasma flashed in all directions as the Mermaid emerged into the fray. The Sokol was hammering at the Mobius, whose shields flashed with each impact. But the main thrusters of the Mobius were dark. The ship was adrift. As the Sokol pursued, it kept in the shadow of the turret’s arc, preventing any hope of return fire. If it weren’t for the Hatchet Job, they would have been doomed. But Hatchet’s ship kept up a withering fire of its own, forcing the Sokol to switch targets and face the remaining threat.
What now?
It was a question Roddy should have asked prior to placing himself in the same astral depth with the three larger vessels. But now he found himself in a vessel with shields that might not stop a single salvo from the Sokol, a stealth cloak that wouldn’t have been half as effective as simply remaining at the deep end of the astral, and wonderful maneuverability that was hampered by a controls setup that was decidedly unfriendly to laaku physiology.
“Fuck it,” Roddy muttered. He plotted an intercept course for the Sokol and opened fire.
The Mermaid was respectably armed for a civilian ship its size, but it wasn’t a warship. It’s needle-like bursts of red plasma splashed across the Sokol’s shields.
“Who the hell’s in there?” Carl’s voice came in clear over the comm. Roddy made a point to check the system setting and see if he could get the reception on the Mobius to come in with such fidelity. Of course, with the Mobius getting pounded like an action-vid bully in the final act, comm upgrades would probably be low on his to-do list.
“Yo, I was in the sector and thought you might need a hand,” Roddy replied casually, hoping to keep the tremor of fear out of his voice. How did Carl and Amy do this for a living? He spun the Mermaid in an evasive roll as one of the Sokol’s turrets swiveled in his direction. Lances of plasma barely missed the hull.
“Roddy? Get the hell out of here! That thing’s not equipped for a fight like this. Get back to Ithaca and—”
“Can it, peach-fuzz,” Roddy snapped. “I didn’t come all the way out here to let you get killed. And it looks like I got here just in time.”
“Just in time to ruin a smooth deal. We were—” the comm cut out momentarily. The Sokol landed a vicious series of hits on the Hatchet Job, punching a hole in the shields and taking out the main starboard thrusters. “Let’s pick this up later, OK?”
Why had the comm gone out while the Hatchet Job was taking fire? The Mobius, derelict at the moment, nonetheless appeared to be stable. That meant Carl was on Hatchet’s ship, not the Mobius. At the moment, neither location seemed much better than the other in terms of survival.
One advantage to being nearly dead in space was that without all sorts of evasive maneuvers and sudden changes of direction, the turret gunners’ job was easier. The Mobius, with limited use of maneuvering thrusters, had rolled over and brought its turret back to bear on target. The Hatchet Job’s gunner continued to find its target. Roddy, flying strafing runs too fast for the Sokol to track, managed to inflict cosmetic damage to the vessel’s shields.
After yet another unsatisfying pass, Roddy slammed a fist on the control console. “Worthless sight-seeing dinghy. Who’d believe a fighter pilot outfitted this thing?”
All three of the larger vessels were in rough shape. Roddy’s mind raced. If the Mobius and Hatchet Job could separate, maybe one of them could flee through the astral. As it stood, neither would be able t
o survive long enough to hold position for the transfer. As Roddy was reaching for the comm to suggest just that course, he saw the shields on the Mobius fall. It wasn’t a blip, as the Mobius was prone to, or a single generator gone down. The entire vessel was unprotected.
Carl wasn’t on board. He was on the Hatchet Job, Roddy knew. Why the crews had shuffled around, and who ended up where, he couldn’t say with certainty. But the Mobius was his ship. Roddy had poured beer-tinged sweat into those engines for years, had lost sleep debugging the life-support controls, had manually emptied the waste reclaim on more worlds than he cared to count. Fuck whoever was going to blast it to scrap while he watched.
Roddy hit the throttle, only to reverse thrust a second later, bringing the Mermaid to an undignified halt between the Mobius and the Sokol’s guns. There was a flash. Then everything went dark.
# # #
Roddy awoke on a familiar couch, staring out a glassteel dome that was dented and scorched. He didn’t feel dead, which was both welcome and somewhat surprising. Two chairs from the kitchen blocked his view of the holovid game being played by the chairs’ occupants—a pair of laaku-sized humans, probably children.
Forcing himself upright, Roddy looked around for adult supervision. Finding none, he took a sniff of the air to see how the environmental systems were holding up. There was a whiff of ozone and hints of naphthalene, but nothing alarming. He cleared his throat. “Hey. Um, where can I find Carl Ramsey?”
Both children turned. The game paused. The larger of the two, a girl, spoke. “Oh, you speak English. Mr. Blackjack is downstairs talking with Mom and Dad and some other people.”
Mr. Blackjack, huh? “Thanks kid.”
There was an expectation of dizziness or aches when Roddy took to his feet, but there seemed to be nothing grievously wrong with him. A headache nagged, and his belly was empty, but that seemed to be the extent of it. On the way past the Mobius’s fridge, Roddy grabbed himself a bottle of beer.
“Well, look who the fisherman dredged up,” Carl called out with a grin as Roddy stepped onto the metal grate landing overlooking the cargo bay. “Figures you manage to sleep through the hard work, but since you put yourself between my ship and a kill shot, I think I can live with it.”
“What happened?” Roddy asked. A bunch of people gathered in the cargo bay of the Mobius. Hatchet he recognized. Same with July and that lizard who raced in the Silde Slims and apparently now worked for him. Esper was off to the side, watching everyone. Reebo and two humans who looked vaguely familiar were standing around.
“You bought us enough time to fire back,” Hatchet replied. “Ballsy move, chimp. Saved our asses.” There was a hardness in Hatchet’s eyes that made the compliment fall flat. The fur at the back of Roddy’s neck stood up.
“Of course now we’ve got three ships adrift,” Carl said. “Took us hours of EV with tow cables and a couple working maneuvering thrusters on the Hatchet Job, but we have all the ships docked into a makeshift space station. If you’re feeling up to it, head over to the Hatchet Job and give Niang a hand getting their engines online. We’re going to need the boost to keep life support up.”
Roddy took a steadying breath. There had been no recriminations after Carl’s insinuation he’d wrecked their exchange with the Sokol. There had been no mention at all of Roddy’s warning or the terse response to it. “Yeah. I can do that.”
“Glad to have you back,” Carl said. He pointed to the bottle in Roddy’s hand. “Beer and all.”
# # #
Jean Niang was in the engine room of the Hatchet Job when Roddy found him. It was nicer than Roddy would have imagined from a guy named Hatchet. Big and spacious, with enough room for a human to swing his elbows without whacking them on a coolant pipe or data conduit. Parts from the fuel regulator were splayed across the floor in an organized disassembly. Some components looked worn but serviceable; others were obvious scrap metal.
“Where’s the guy who normally does Hatchet’s maintenance?” Roddy asked by way of greeting. It was nice and noncommittal. He’d be able to judge Niang’s mood by his response.
Niang pulled his head out of the access panel for the fuel systems. “He was on thirty-two hours without sleep. I sent him to catch a few Zs while I took over getting this bird flapping again. Wouldn’t mind a couple extra pairs of hands, if you’re up to it.”
Roddy ambled over, careful to avoid disturbing the arrangement of components. “If you don’t mind me asking, how’s the Mobius?”
Niang paused and turned slowly, giving Roddy a sly smile. “In surprisingly good shape. The engines are practically slag from plasma blasts, and the shield generator blew out permanently, but secondary systems held up remarkably well. It’s almost as if someone took my carefully tuned and optimized engine config and loosened it up until it could handle a beating of energy spikes and overloads without cascading through the ship’s systems.”
Roddy’s eyes widened. “It was you.”
Niang chuckled and tossed Roddy a distribution node. “Yeah, it was just me and Yomin on board when your text comm came through. We didn’t know what to make of it. You were pretty vague. But I checked it out, and you’d reset most of the ship’s systems to the sloppy standard you’d been holding to. I was all set to tear it down and put everything back the way it was when I stopped to think about why.”
“What’d you come up with?”
“Well, my first instinct was you’d sabotaged the damn ship. I mean, you’d been essentially demoted, so why wouldn’t you be keyed off at me? Have an engine blow up in my face and maybe you’d get the job back. But then, why warn me? I guess it wasn’t a warning to me personally, but if you wanted it to look like I was incompetent, why the warning?”
Roddy remained silent.
“But when I gave it some thought, I realized you’d been working on that ship for years. It probably had quirks I didn’t know about. I was pretty proud of getting those systems—which should never all have been installed in one ship—working together like a mechanical pocket watch. Then I started thinking about what the Mobius does on a daily basis. Manual astral drops, strange atmospheres, firefights… and I tried some computer models of how the systems would react. I had to use my datapad, because Ramsey’s computers are one step up from an abacus.”
“What’d you find?”
Niang snorted. “Couldn’t model Esper’s astral magic, but first good hit we took could have ruptured half the plumbing and blown out the maneuvering thrusters. When I changed the model, your patchwork stuff acted like a surge protection circuit for the physical and power systems.”
Roddy nodded. He couldn’t have come up with this shit on his best day lying. But he wasn’t going to disabuse Niang of his theory. “I know I should have brought it up before you left. But I wasn’t having a good time of it in my recovery. Glad the ship was in good hands.”
“And hopefully it will be again. I didn’t tell Ramsey about the bullshit you pulled. We both keep quiet about this, and we can both get back to the assignments we want.” Niang fixed Roddy with a stern glare, wiping the grime from his hands on the pants of his coveralls.
Roddy nodded again, this time more slowly. Jean Niang was no idiot, but he also didn’t want to fly with Carl. From a sanity perspective, who could blame him? “Coming through loud and clear. So what’s our status?”
Niang wiped his hands on his coveralls and sat down beside Roddy. “Don’t know how much flak you caught on the way over here, but you were quite the topic of debate while you were out. You showed up at just the wrong time to make an ease payday go south. Lotta sore feelings out there. There was a vote on whether to space you. It was one-to-zilch after Ramsey said he had the only vote. First time I’ve seen that bastard lose his cool. Ramsey stuck his neck out for you. Not sure how many agree with Hatchet, but it’s not unanimous either way. If I were you—and I’m hoping not to be for much longer—I’d keep my head down and my nose clean.”
Roddy nodded soberly. If he had to
keep to parts of the ship too small for a human to fit, so be it. He could be as inconspicuous as the buttons on a tuxedo. “And what about the ships?”
“The Sokol was fleeing when our last shot vented the interior to vacuum. So while we’re a bunch of dead ships slowly adrift with a live crew, they’ve got a bunch of corpses careening through the astral… with the cargo we were after. Sooner we get under power, the sooner we can catch up and make a little profit on this job. That’d go a long way toward bygones being bygones over your screw-up.”
Roddy set down the distributor node and popped open the beer bottle with his multi-tool. The smell wafted up from inside. Gnawing, clawing forces welled up in his belly, demanding the bittersweet contents. Gritting his teeth, he held out the bottle to Niang. “On me.”
Niang accepted, and Roddy let out a relieved breath. You couldn’t take back a beer you’d given freely no matter how badly you wanted it. “What about you?” he asked.
Roddy dropped to a seated position on the floor and began working on the distributor node. “Me? I’m giving the stuff up.”
# # #
Mort sat at a patio table, open to the mountain air of Ithaca. The observation deck offered a panoramic vista by which a contemplative wizard might take in the scope of the lunar surface without having to traipse the jungle floor. Thinning air and a stiff breeze even kept away the oppressive heat that was inescapable down in the valley. The mountain fortress had become a beehive of activity, most of it heavily wedded to science. The shadow of the planet above was about to block the sun in the commonplace eclipse that kept the cycle of days and nights on Ithaca erratic. It was a sight to behold and lost none of its allure in displaying the majesty of the cosmos and the power beyond the grasp of science.
Of late, he came here more and more often, but nearly always when dusk approached. With a cup of coffee and a good book, he could place his mind at ease and be free of the nagging and nattering that followed him everywhere since Roddy had stuck him back in charge. At least, most nights he could find peace and ease. This night, his most vexatious of vassals was petitioning him from across the table.
