by K. D. Austin
“Be alert. This place shouldn’t be this empty.”
Arden nodded to him. “I agree. Hopefully, our contact has just cleared the area so our meeting can be discreet, but we better be ready for anything.”
A form stepped out of the shadows of the locker row to Lance’s left. Lance’s gun was in his hand and pointed at the intruder’s chest in less than a second. The new arrival was an odd-looking man, tall—almost as tall as Arden—but so thin as to appear skeletal. The half-black, half-white suit he wore only added to his freak show air. He stepped up to Arden, causing both Lance and Salvor to tense, but he kept his hands at his sides to indicate his peaceful intentions.
“You must be Arden,” the strange man said. “I was sent to meet you here. Then he slowly raised his hand and showed a gold coin.
Lance recognized the holographic insignia of the Hairy Hand Pirates rotating around it. He’d always thought the band could’ve picked a better name, but who knew what pirates thought was intimidating.
Arden flashed a similar coin with the Scourge’s cat-o’-nine-tails whip emblem to the man. The Hairy Hand pirate nodded. “Please follow me.”
And without looking behind him to see if they were coming, the strange man began to stride off deeper into the transit-hub lockers. Arden immediately followed him. Lance paused long enough to exchange a questioning look with Salvor. He didn’t like the man or the situation. He could see that Salvor felt the same way. There was no trust lost between pirates. They both took off after Arden with Hanna bringing up the rear.
The Hairy Hand led the group to the back of the locker area, stopped in front of the last locker at the end of the front row. Opening the locker using his palm print, he removed a permaplast transport case. The case was barely smaller than the locker, so it took him a few moments to maneuver it out. Once he had it in hand, he typed a code sequence into the top of it. There was a quiet beep, and then the case popped open. The man pulled an object out of the case, then turned and looked at them again. What he had removed from the case was odd-shaped and covered in a layer of protective wrap.
“The Khsharayan artifact,” the strange man said matter-of-factly, holding the package toward Arden.
Lance gaped and realized his shock was mirrored on every other face. They were hoping to get info about the artifact, not the alien treasure itself. A part of Lance was actually disappointed. This was too easy. He had been expecting some type of intrigue or at least a map. These were pirates after all.
The Hairy Hand opened his mouth, maybe to encourage Arden to take the wrapped artifact, but was interrupted as a hole suddenly opened up in his chest. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped to the ground.
Chapter 22
Hanna was so stunned she couldn’t even move. For a moment she just stared at the Hairy Hand pirate, unable to understand what had just happened. The next moment she was flying through the air and hitting the floor behind the front row of lockers.
Hanna felt a familiar sense of panic as she realized that Lance was on top of her, pinning her to the floor. But in that same instant, Arden landed right beside her as he and Salvor dove out of harm’s way. Without even glancing at each other, Lance and Salvor drew their weapons and leaped in opposite directions. Lance covered the corner they’d just dived around, and Salvor ran down to the opposite end of the row of lockers. Both of them leaned around the edge of the lockers and began firing at someone or something in front of them.
Lance whipped back around the corner as whomever he was firing at apparently decided to return the favor. A bright blast flew through the space he had been in just a microsecond before, and the entire row of lockers shook as other blasts smashed into the front of it.
Salvor yelled to Lance. “There’s too many of them! We can’t hold this position.”
“They’re blocking the exit!” Lance said with an even grimmer than usual expression on his face.
Salvor’s response to this was to crow loudly. “Well, if we can’t find another way out, this is going to get really interesting!”
He turned his back again and crouched down as though getting ready to pounce. Hanna grimaced. Salvor found flirting with death interesting.
“Arden, what’s going on?” Hanna asked, hoping he could help her make sense of the sudden turn of events.
“As I feared, this rendezvous was too easy. Clearly, it was a trap.” Anger flashed across his face but was quickly replaced with his normal calm demeanor. “We are pinned down, outnumbered, and have no way out. Lance and Salvor will defend us to the best of their very considerable abilities, but this isn’t a firefight we can win. You have to help them!”
Hanna stared at the pirate leader, confused. “I’m not a fighter.”
“No. You’re the best hacker in the galaxy. Think about what you did to the GalMar fleet or to Lance himself.” Arden pointed above their heads.
Hanna lifted her eyes in the direction of his finger and noticed a net wireless broadcasting point bolted to the top of the lockers. Despite herself, Hanna smiled.
“You are brilliant,” she said and pecked him on the lips impulsively. She leaped to her feet, pulled the necessary cables from the wrist of her EXS, and jacked into the transmitter.
In seconds Hanna had passed the laughably simple security and was deep inside the local net. With just a few more seconds of searching, she found what she was looking for: the station’s security robot cameras. The hovering cameras transmitted live video feeds to station security. Her group was pinned down behind the lockers and unable to see the attackers or determine any clear exits from this room. The security robots, however, had no such limitations. Hanna immediately hacked into the one with the strongest signal, hoping that it was in the locker area already, and patched its video feed through to her HUD.
Sure enough, the hand-sized orb was floating above the opposite set of middle-row lockers. From its perspective, Hanna could see the attackers massed in the entrance she and the crew had come through. There were eight of them lined up in two ranks sporting formfitting dark-gray full-body armor. They weren’t GalMars, at least not any division Hanna had heard of. She briefly wondered if the story she’d made up for Lance’s mind-hack had some credence after all. A rogue GalMar cell didn’t seem so fictitious now.
The attackers’ chests bore a deep-red stacked Vs insignia. Their one-piece helmets were completely smooth except for one large, round, dark lens in the front center. Overall, they looked faceless, inhuman, and absolutely terrifying, even without the massive weapons they each carried. It may not have been a GalMar uniform, but it definitely followed the GalMar code of inspiring terror in their victims. Also, they definitely attacked like GalMars if they weren’t. They were carefully aiming at the edges of the lockers the Scourge crew was hiding behind, ready to blast Salvor or Lance if they popped around the corner again.
From the corner of her eye, Hanna saw Lance tense as if preparing to pop back out for another shot. “Lance! Stay put!” she said, surprising the man into stillness. “They’re expecting you. They’d drop you before you got your shot off.”
Hanna was pretty sure Lance was looking at her funny, but since she was too busy looking at her HUD, she couldn’t be sure. She had pulled up the building schematics, and they showed a second exit from this room. Excitedly, Hanna pointed the security bot’s camera in the direction. No good. A group of three attackers had entered the room through the other entrance and were sneaking up on them from Salvor’s side of the locker. This new threat had almost made it to the Scourge’s position while the main attackers at the entrance kept them pinned down.
Hanna screamed at Salvor, “We’re falling for classic distraction. Three hot on your head!”
Salvor responded by pulling a flat disc off of his shoulder. He squeezed it, and the disc let out a triple beep.
“Two seconds to contact!”
“That’s one more than I need,” Salvor said and casually tossed the disc around the corner. An intense flash of light flare
d around the lockers, and a deafening explosion shook everything. This was followed by a painfully high-pitched squeal. Hanna clapped her hands to her ears and fought off a nearly overwhelming nausea. As her HUD cleared the static caused by Salvor’s weapon, Hanna saw all three of the covert attackers lying motionless on the floor.
“Salvor, do you have any more of those things?” Hanna asked hopefully.
Looking a little embarrassed, Salvor shook his head to indicate a negative. Hanna turned to Lance.
“Lance, do you…” she started to ask excitedly, but then she saw Lance’s face. He was staring at Salvor with an expression of exasperation and disbelief. Then he snarled at Salvor.
“I can’t believe you had one stun mine and wasted it on the smaller attack group.”
“It made an impression. Anyway, the other guys don’t know we don’t have more.”
Lance nodded, but the conversation ended as explosions rocked the lockers as the initial attack squad renewed their assault with vigor. Hanna checked her HUD again and saw that three of the attackers from the entrance were charging, while the five remaining were keeping up a constant barrage at the lockers to keep the pirates pinned down.
“Salvor! They’re charging your side again!” Hanna said. “Don’t let them get us in a pincer move.”
Hanna watched thinking of how she could use her hack to attack. The three charging attackers grabbed an arm of one of the unfortunates that Salvor had dropped with his stun mine and began dragging their fallen comrades back to the entrance. In the meantime, the other five troopers never let up on their barrage. The lockers were being shredded under the assault, and it didn’t look like they would be able to offer protection much longer.
As the last stunned trooper was dragged over to the entrance, Hanna saw something that gave her an idea. She quickly had the security robot scan the room. They and their attackers were still the only people in the locker area. The fact that no transit authority had shown up yet indicated this attack had been as planned as Arden suspected. Seeing all of the attackers massed at the entrance, Hanna smiled.
“Got you now,” she said.
As the lockers began to collapse around the pirates, Hanna hacked into the fire-suppression systems. As soon as they were under her control, she pointed the systems at the entrance where the attackers had conveniently gathered together and turned them all on at once. Eight high-pressure streams of flame-retardant foam smashed into the attackers and knocked them down the entrance corridor like so many bowling pins.
As Hanna watched the faceless assault team fly backward on her HUD, she caught a glimpse of something pop out of the hand of the front guy in the group.
Her mind tried to argue that what she knew she had seen wasn’t possible. Hanna zoomed the security bot’s camera onto the object that was surfing around on top of the rapidly hardening foam. How had they gotten one of those? Her mind reeled as Hanna watched a tracker with the Scourge insignia vanish into the fire suppressant. Her heart sank right along with it.
They had a traitor in the group, either on the station or here with them. Her first thought was Venus, but she was on the station. How would she have gotten a tracker to someone down here? Of course, Venus could have contacted someone off world and sent the tracker with them. But how would they have had time to arrive here so quickly? It was a possibility, but it seemed more likely to be someone a little closer.
Hanna looked at Salvor breathing heavily and still poised to attack if necessary. She knew he enjoyed a good fight, but it seemed impossible that he had set the group up. Then again, once Hanna was looking for a traitor, it seemed suspicious that he’d conveniently had a stun mine—a weapon that let him fight aggressively without actually killing—to use against their enemies. And that he used it so poorly tactically.
Lance? He’d have the best reason. If the mind-hack hadn’t fully taken, then he might be secretly working against the Scourge now. After all, he had tried to kill them all before. But then, why would he have fought against the attackers?
Hanna glanced at Arden. He was smiling at her, but Hanna thought she saw something else in his eyes that seemed like fear, but that made sense. They’d almost been killed.
Hanna wanted to tell someone, but who? She decided she’d have to wait and decide. Until then she’d keep her eyes open. Right now they had to get out of this death trap before any more of the gray suits arrived. Confirming on her HUD that the attackers were all gone and fire doors sealed between them, Hanna stepped out from behind the crumbling lockers. The site that greeted her eyes was even less cheerful. The body of the man who had led them here was still sprawled on the floor. So was the case he had pulled out of the locker. Unfortunately, it was just as empty as his blankly staring eyes.
“Artifact’s gone,” Lance said, echoing her thoughts.
Salvor kicked the empty case. “Bova!”
Arden began moving about the locker room quickly.
Chapter 23
“What’re we going to do now?” Lance asked, looking down at the body of the former Hairy Hand Pirate.
Arden fidgeted with the case the dead man had pulled the supposed alien artifact from just a few minutes before, back when he was alive and there was still an artifact. After a few minutes of examination, he stood up. “It really was the treasure. Now it’s been stolen again. I don’t know how this Hairy Hand ended up with it or how he undoubtedly planned to double-cross us. I doubt this was it, though.”
“I’m guessing that was the GalMar cell that stole it to begin with,” Lance said. “They must’ve lost the artifact to the Hairy Hand somehow. Now they have it back.”
Hanna glanced at Arden, who nodded back. “They definitely fought like GalMars, but they weren’t dressed in official uniforms. They did have some special battle armor, though.” She quickly described what she’d seen through the security camera.
“They’re definitely professionals. Too bad we didn’t get more info from your contact, Arden,” Salvor said, nudging the body with his boot.
Arden knelt down beside the corpse. “Maybe it’s not too late. We have to know what information this man had. Who was he with? Where did he get the treasure? Does he know where Potts and his crew are?”
“Arden, he’s dead. It’s too late for him to tell us anything,” Salvor said unusually quietly.
“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t,” Arden said cryptically.
Hanna cocked her head. “Do you really think it’s possible?” She nodded toward the dead man.
Lance moved up beside the other three, his face a portrait of impatience. “Look, we need to clear out ASAP, or we’re going to be just as dead as this poor guy here.”
Hanna forced herself to reach over and put her hand on Lance’s shoulder. She still wasn’t comfortable playing this part, and the discovery of the tracker on their attackers had only increased her trepidation. However, she needed Lance to calm down. She was wary of any mind-hacking related activity in front of Lance, but she’d also foreseen the potential need and had put his acceptance of it into his own hacked memories.
If they had a chance of finding out what the Hairy Hand knew, she might find the answer to who the traitor was along with information about the treasure. “Trust me. We need to try this. It could give us all the answers we need.”
Lance looked into her eyes and nodded slowly. “Okay, but don’t take too long. You didn’t kill those guys, and I’m sure they can override the fire doors.”
She smiled at him. “Keep us covered.”
In answer to Hanna’s earlier question, Arden gently lifted the man’s left hand and pushed back his sleeve. “His computer implants will still be functioning for a short while. If this is going to work, you’ve got to do this now, Hanna.”
Hanna pulled the jacks she had recently had plugged into the transit station’s terminal and plugged them into the dead man’s wrist ports. His hand was still warm. Hanna hoped that indicated his implants hadn’t fully shut down yet.
Once the jack
s were in, her HUD lit up. She gasped. “Bova!” She was connected to a dead man’s system. Arden was right. But as Hanna scrolled through the information, she realized the man’s personal data was fading fast. She began copying everything she could. As she scanned his brain and prodded to find anything useful, the man’s leg thumped.
Hanna jumped. Salvor yelled, and Lance’s gun tracked toward the corpse. Even Arden stepped back.
Everyone watched the body for several seconds.
Salvor crept a little closer. “He’s dead, right?”
Hanna stared at her HUD, thinking through the implications of what she’d just done. Arden may not have begun to understand the true potential of a mind-hack. This wasn’t something she wanted to share, though. Information was power, especially among pirates.
Hanna looked back at Salvor. “Yeah. He’s dead. Probably a late nerve reaction. It happens sometimes.”
The man’s personal net flickered and disappeared. Then it came back. Hanna kept copying. It winked out again. Hanna waited, then sent a few test signals. Nothing.
“It’s gone,” Hanna told Arden.
“I can’t believe that worked.” Salvor was stunned.
“What did you find, Hanna?” Arden’s tone had a harder edge than normal. Hanna chalked that up to nerves from the ambush.
“Not a lot. But I did find a location. I think it might be where he was going to take us.”
“That’s something, at least. Maybe we can get some answers there,” Arden said, the excitement evident in his voice.
Hanna shot the information over to Arden, Salvor, and Lance. After studying it for a few minutes, Arden spun around and ran out of the lockers area by the back entrance. “Come on. I’ve locked onto the location. We need to get out of here before those GalMars or anyone else shows up.”
