Mission Pack 3: Missions 9-12 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  Roddy shook his head as he downed a mouthful of Sommeil. “You need Esper for that conversation. But let me clue you in on something. Stick around here long enough, this place will start to feel like home. You’ll put your mark on us, same as Esper did, same as Amy did, same as Yomin is doing.”

  “What about Archie?”

  “Jury’s out on Mort-Bot 2700. But you’ve got potential. You don’t like what’s up? Put your foot down. Hell, half the crew would sink toward the crater.”

  “You jest at my size again.”

  “Of course I do. Same as I give Carl shit about his gambling and Mort about his casual relationship with the laws of physics and Esper with her hypocritical religious wizard routine. Can’t make you one of the crew without treating you like one.”

  Rai Kub eyed Roddy and wrenched the spigot off the keg. Roddy winced but held his tongue. The Kanalwasser poured out in a chugging stream for lack of an air intake. Rai Kub tilted it back like a can and swallowed intermittently until it was gone. He peered into the dark of the empty keg. “I see nothing.”

  Roddy sighed. The Bradbury had better have plenty of booze on board, because Rai Kub was going to be murder on their stash. “Better try again. Lemme go find you another.”

  # # #

  The bridge crew of the Bradbury was silent.

  “Play the message again,” Captain Dominguez ordered. “And run a filter to clear out as much of the interference as you can.”

  A scratchy voice filled the bridge over the loudspeakers. “Mayday. This is Chet Malcolm of the Thunder Bay. My ship was attacked by stuunji rebels. They got most of my cargo, but I managed to hide the you-know-what. Wouldn’t want the Persians finding anything… know what I mean. Please hurry. Hull’s holding together with prayers and slap-tape. I’m in my EV suit for life support.”

  “How close is that vessel?” Captain Dominguez asked, staring out the forward window. Zammos had a supplier or operative in the area. Whoever this Captain Malcolm was, he was clearly aware of Project Thermopylae, possibly in a transport capacity. Possibly he had direct knowledge of Zammos research.

  Ensign Fong turned to face her commanding officer as she reported. “We had the broadcast for long enough to track the precise location. If we alter course right now, we can be there in 27 minutes.”

  “Security assessment.”

  Lieutenant Commander Petrov clasped his hand behind his back. “The location provided by Ensign Fong is the third planet of system G5910. Black security, of course, like 99 percent of the Disputed Zone. Not within any unofficial territory of the stuunji rebel colonies.”

  “Risks?”

  Petrov shook his head. “Only exposure. No stuunji vessel is a threat to the Bradbury.”

  Exposure. It ran counter to the Bradbury’s overarching mission of quietly taking care of company business in the Eyndar/ARGO Disputed Zone. But there were already a number of petty criminals whose silence was only as good as the deal Earth Interstellar offered them after their arrests. The chance to gain significant intelligence on Zammos with minimal expenditure of time or resources was too good an opportunity to pass up. The ship, the mystery cargo, and most of all, the captain could all be potential sources of great value.

  “Lay in a course. Let’s go find out what the Thunder Bay is hiding.”

  # # #

  This was Carl’s least favorite part of the plan. He hadn’t paused to consider the scarcity of human crew aboard the Mobius until it came time to draw straws to see who would be the decoy aboard the newly christened Thunder Bay. Amy was piloting the Mobius, so that took her out of the running. Mort was… well, there was no putting Mort in an EV suit and sending a distress signal for Harmony Bay, funny as that would have been. With Yomin and Esper on special assignment, that left Carl as the only one drawing—so of course, he lost.

  The scent line in his EV suit gave the pumped air a whiff of bacon, making him hungry when he knew it would be hours before his next meal. Carl checked the power level on his blaster for the tenth time. It still read 96 percent, which was the best his energy pack ever showed. With a craftsman’s eye, he appraised the cockpit layout and decided it was the misbegotten child of a carnival ride and a kiddie computer flight sim. He was just as glad he wasn’t flying it and began to think that even in counterfeit terras, he’d overpaid for the wreck.

  He itched to call over to the Mobius. The odds of the Bradbury catching a short-range comm broadcast were slim. It would be nice to hear a little ribbing from Amy about being stuck in a drifting coffin. Just the sound of her voice over the comm would have done wonders for the gnawing in his gut. Carl tried creating a Patient and Calm Carl, but that version of himself didn’t live up to his billing.

  “Thunder Bay, this is a humanitarian rescue. Power down and prepare to be brought aboard.”

  That was just protocol. Carl was getting rescued either way, and there frankly wasn’t much of anything powered on aboard the Thunder Bay to begin with. Roddy had only juiced the engines enough via umbilical to lay an ion trail to make it look like the Thunder Bay had arrived under its own power.

  There was one last part of the plan from Carl’s end, and that was to avoid questions. He tapped a sequence into the chest console of his EV suit and squeezed his eyes shut. This part was going to suck.

  The EV suit began a subroutine that Shoni had programmed into it. In seconds, Carl felt lightheaded. In a panic, he clawed at the controls to undo the sequence he’d set in motion, but the subroutine couldn’t be interrupted. He gasped for breath, but that only helped quicken the onset of hypoxia. The rational side of Carl’s brain went numb, forgetting that Shoni had warned him exactly what was happening to his body. He passed into unconsciousness convinced he was suffocating.

  # # #

  It was a vial the size of Yomin’s little finger, but it contained the key element of the heist. In her mind, the bulge in her pocket was as obvious as a stallion out for stud. But while the trillions of nanoscale robots weighed virtually nothing, their heft dragged on Yomin as she worked.

  The ship had changed course, and the Bradbury would be docking with the decoy ship any minute. It was off-hours for Xeno Astrology, so Yomin used their lab as her access point. The panel beneath one of the workstations came away easily, and a pillaged diagnostic computer core plugged in via external cable in a matter of seconds. This wasn’t a proper location for patching into the bridge systems, but there weren’t many viable access points that weren’t routinely patrolled by security. As it stood, Yomin had to siphon data from the real-time backup storage system for the scanners. It was on a six-second delay from the live feed, but that wasn’t a concern for this operation. Timing wasn’t critical. Waiting long enough was the key.

  Yomin hated waiting. Her service aboard the Bradbury had been anything but boring as she passed the time until Carl’s plan came together. But now as she watched the readouts from the short-range scanners, all she could do was will the chronometer to speed up.

  There was a tiny vessel, a Pruss-class ship in horrendous shape, floating just off the port side of the Bradbury. The tactical station had gleaned no ship ID from it but had manually labeled it the Thunder Bay. Yomin tried to fit the name to any lyric she’d heard from Carl’s old songs, but nothing came to mind. Either it was something she’d been lucky enough to avoid hearing thus far, or someone had talked Carl out of making in-jokes when dealing with a transgalactic megacorp’s black ops ship.

  Another of Carl’s songs was still stuck in her head from the other day. Tick, tock, tick. Time keeps on slipping…

  She shook her head to clear it and watched the recovery process. The tiny ship was in too bad a condition to dock, so they were bringing it into one of the shuttle hangars. Good, Yomin thought. Keep that main hangar bay clear.

  “Hey,” an unfamiliar voice called out. “What are you doing in here?”

  Yomin sat bolt upright, slamming her head on the underside of the console on the way up. “Ow! Dammit. You trying to kill me?”
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  “I asked what you’re doing in here?” The speaker was a middle-aged woman with what appeared to be fixed datalenses over her eyes. Her ID badge identified her as Dr. Sara Yang.

  “Preventive maintenance,” Yomin replied, rubbing at the spot where she’d hit her head. The rubbing wasn’t doing anything for the pain or the sudden wave of dizziness, but hopefully it might buy her a little sympathy.

  “Your ID badge says Cryptographic Sciences,” Yang said, grabbing said badge and pulling it off Yomin’s uniform.

  “I’m cross training. Give that back.” She spared a glance down at the feed from the scanners. Retrieval was complete. She needed to get started on her part of the plan.

  Dr. Yang eyed Yomin with a narrowed gaze through her datalenses. She backed toward the comm panel by the door. If she called security, the plan could fall apart. Yomin reached back for her SlyTek Sidekick but realized she hadn’t even brought it aboard the Bradbury. She was unarmed.

  When Yang looked away to make out the buttons on the comm panel, Yomin made her move. Dr. Yang was probably twenty kilos heavier than her, but most of it was doughy, middle-aged flab. When Yomin crashed into her from behind, both women went down in a heap against the door, Yomin on top. Yang’s yelp of surprise made her drop Yomin’s ID, and the datalenses she wore smarted against Yomin’s fists as she punched repeatedly into that astonished, disbelieving stare.

  “Stop! Get off me! Security!” Yang waved ineffectually at Yomin but couldn’t stop the barrage. Unfortunately, holovids had made knocking out a heathy adult human look far easier than it was in real life. She had bloodied her own knuckles and cracked one of Yang’s datalenses, but the nosy scientist was very much still conscious. Yomin switched to hitting her in the mouth to at least stop her from screaming.

  Yang scrambled to get away, rolling to her hands and knees and crawling in the direction of the workstations. Yomin clung to the heavier woman as best she could. The two tussled as Yomin tried to get leverage to force Yang to the ground. Instead, she was carried along. Fists and her limited bulk weren’t getting the job done. As they neared the open panel where Yomin had been working, she grabbed the computer core and yanked it free of the cables that tethered it.

  For a moment, Yang managed to break free. But the next, Yomin brought the computer core down on the back of her head with a crack. She winced as Yang fell limp to the textured floor. In a corner of her mind, Yomin’s conscience sat on its haunches, rocking back and forth and covering its ears. It was a medical corporation, after all. The med bay had to be top notch.

  Leaving behind the bloody computer core, Yomin burst into the corridors of the Bradbury. She was smeared in blood—some hers, some not. There was a chance she’d broken bones in her right hand. Patting her pocket, she felt the vial of mocked-up nanobots. There was nothing to do but panic.

  “Help!” she shouted, racing down the halls. “Something’s attacking me!” Closing her eyes for a moment, she wiped her bloody hands across her face.

  She bowled over an ensign in a maintenance uniform and watched with grim amusement as a security guard pressed himself against the wall to get out of her path. At one intersection, a medical tech tried to grab her, possibly to lend aid, but she shrugged him off in a blind panic that was only half feigned. Anyone who managed to stop her would blow the plan.

  Bellamy!

  The chief wizard burst from his quarters with a scowl fit to call thunder from a clear sky. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded. But something genteel and old world prevented him from barring Yomin’s path with his bulk. He cringed back as if she bore a wasting sickness from the middle ages or was some sort of perfume sales girls at one of the shiftier stores.

  The door to Esper’s quarters opened, and Yomin practically dove through. Once closed safely inside, Esper dragged Yomin to her feet.

  “That was close,” Yomin said, panting. “Hurry. Bellamy is right outside.”

  # # #

  With a nod, Esper scrunched up her face, and the lights in the room went out for a solid five seconds. She took the vial from Yomin and held it up for examination, as if discovering it for the first time.

  The door slid open, and Bellamy stormed in. His thumbprint must have overridden any personal privacy authorization required. “What’s the meaning of this? First this one is shrieking like a banshee down the halls, and you…” He aimed a finger at Esper. “You just used magic without authorization.”

  “And saved my life,” Yomin said. She pointed up at the vial Esper now clutched as she struggled from her knees to catch her breath.

  “What’s…?” Bellamy seemed at a loss.

  “I extracted this scientific substance from her body. It seems to have been eating away at her from within. Dead now, whatever it was.”

  “Take that to the med bay. Her, too. I want answers as to what’s going on here.”

  Perfect.

  Esper gave a nod and tried to slip past, supporting Yomin by the upper arm. “Yes, Wizard Bellamy.”

  He stopped her with a palm on the shoulder. “And afterward, we’re going to have a long talk on protocol regarding the use of magic on this ship. Understood?”

  Esper looked him squarely in the nose. The temptation boiled beneath the surface to raise that gaze a centimeter or two and meet him eye to eye. How much easier would the takeover of the Bradbury be without Bellamy Blackstone standing in their way? But she remembered Lloyd Arnold and the helpless feeling of being pulled unwillingly into a hostile mind. She’d grown in strength since then, but Bellamy was no Lloyd Arnold. Most of all, while the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts had done many things to her mind, it had yet to turn her into a murderer. She kept her gaze from shifting upward. “Understood.”

  Outside in the corridors, Esper breathed a sigh of relief. “You really OK?” she said softly once she and Yomin were alone.

  “Busted a hand on a nosy scientist who barged in on me. We’ve gotta hurry. Carl’s already on board.” Esper quickened Yomin’s metabolism and felt along the smooth skin of her hand for broken bones beneath. The little bits of Earth within her body recomposed themselves beneath her touch, and in seconds, there were no longer any fractures.

  With a wizard escort, no one barred Yomin’s path to the med bay. Esper strode in, tightening her grip and dragging Yomin inside like a misbehaving child.

  “Medic,” Esper snapped. “Get over here at once.”

  A woman in a doctor’s uniform scowled as she approached but composed her features upon seeing Esper. Yomin’s condition caught her attention. “What happened here?” Her ID claimed her name was Doctor Elizabeth Stanton.

  Yanking Yomin away from the doctor, Esper shoved the vial into Dr. Stanton’s hands. “Forget her. This substance was the cause. Some scientific attack. Wizard Bellamy demands to know what it is.”

  The doctor’s jaw tightened, and she shot a look at Yomin. “What does our esteemed wizard think it is?”

  “Nanobots,” Yomin said, feigning exhaustion. She sagged in Esper’s grip.

  Dr. Stanton raised an eyebrow. “Bellamy thinks this is—”

  “I do,” Yomin snapped, gasping for breath after the brief outburst. “Invisible. Attacked from inside. Ship just taken on board… It’s a trap.”

  The doctor’s eyes widened and unfocused. Esper could imagine the little gears and doodads spinning and making little puffs of steam inside her head. Dr. Stanton rushed to one of the scanners and stuck the sample vial beneath.

  Yomin and Esper turned to one another and grinned.

  # # #

  Carl awoke. Always a good sign. He was in an EV suit. Usually not a good sign when waking up. It made rubbing his eyes to clear them a lot more complicated, and he needed clarity. There was a metallic clang, then footsteps. Two pairs. Voices.

  “Captain Malcolm… can you hear me?” the voice sounded kilometers away, but that was just the EV helmet getting in the way.

  It started coming back to him. Chet Malcolm. That was his cover ID. He was o
n a rusty little tub waiting to get picked up by the Bradbury. It seemed he’d blacked out for that part, because as he lifted his head from the floor, he saw two figures in tidy medical uniforms with the Harmony Bay logo emblazoned at the breast.

  He felt around the floor. Where was it?

  “Lie still,” a voice ordered. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Carl wasn’t sure if medical malpractice covered heists going wrong, but if he didn’t pull things together in a hurry, the two medics were making a horrifically inaccurate prognosis. He reached for the release and breathed fresh ship air as the helmet rolled aside. With the improvement in his peripheral vision, he found what he was looking for, wedged in between the pilot’s chair and the internal hull.

  “Just relax and hold—”

  The two techs froze in place as Carl pulled a blaster on them. He held a finger up to his lips as he sat upright. The derelict ship wobbled around him momentarily before settling into position. “This is nothing personal, boys,” he whispered. “You two were planning to save my life. It didn’t need saving, but the thought counts for something. This baby’s on stun. Now, nobody likes getting shot, stun or no. So I’ll make you two a deal. Hand over you comms, and I’ll let the two of you lie here quietly and claim you got stunned. No one’s getting killed today, but a few might get hurt pretty bad, and I’d rather you two fine, upstanding gentlemen were in shape to help out. If that’s too big an ask, just close your eyes and I’ll make it quick and painless—well, less painful. I mean, this thing packs a wallop… enough to down an azrin, in fact.” He patted the blaster and looked from one tech to the next.

  They shared a glance. One nodded. Then the two of them reached into their pockets and slowly drew out their personal comms and handed them over. Carl gave them a nod, and the two medics lay down and closed their eyes.

  “Night night,” Carl said, giving one a pat on the cheek.

  A klaxon blared. The two medics snapped to attentiveness, eyes open. But they faced Carl’s drawn blaster. “Don’t go changing your minds over that.”