“I’m afraid it is necessary, Adam. This planet is of strategic importance to us, and you have fifty grams of our rhodium. We want to make sure you are playing by our rules.”
Eve shook her head as she bit her lip, and my mind spun with an attempt to come up with a solution to the problem.
“Are they just going to be at the government center with our computer expert?” I asked.
“Yes, we’ll let the rest of your team take care of getting into the bunkers. We’ll babysit your tech and make sure that he finds the correct computer to upload our code.”
“We could probably use the help in the bunkers. We don’t know what kind of resistance we’ll get there. A few marines will be useful.” I tried to keep my voice steady, and I felt like I was successful.
“If your team is ready to enter the bunkers as soon as the code opens the doors, you should be fine,” he replied, and his voice started to sound frustrated.
“How many Marines will Commander Tunar-Roz bring with her?” I asked.
“Four or five. Enough to make sure your data-head is taken care of.”
I didn’t like the way he said ‘taken care of,’ but I took a deep breath to calm the beast in my stomach.
“Well, we can use the help,” I said as I shrugged at Eve. “We’ll let you know when we are getting ready to start the mission.”
“We can send them down right now. That way you can get to know them.”
“Thanks for the offer, but we’ll only be down here for an hour or two, then we’ll be back on our ship and in orbit.”
“They’ll come on board,” he said curtly.
“No,” I said. “We have a policy about allowing armed soldiers on our ship.”
“You’ll have to change it. My people will need to be on your vessel,” the man’s voice made it clear that he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Too fucking bad for him. There was no way I was going to let them on Persephone. Not only would they outnumber us, but they would see exactly how little crew we had.
“Why?” I was getting better at this shit. A few weeks ago I would have told him to fuck off. Now I knew I had to tip-toe around delicate situations.
“To make sure you don’t leave with our rhodium without completing your job.” He said the words with obvious annoyance as if he was explaining facts to a child.
“What changed your mind?” I asked as I looked over to the cars. Just as I turned to watch her, her hacksaw finished cutting the lock, and the top glass hatch of the car popped open.
“I didn’t change my mind, I reconsidered your original request,” he said.
“That wasn’t my original request, sorry.”
“It sounds as if you are telling me no, Captain Adam.”
“Your marines aren’t allowed on my ship. Sorry. If that is a deal breaker, we can take the rhodium you already paid us and go home.” My adrenaline surged as soon as I said the words. I knew we were going to have to fight Lith Dae sooner or later, but I wanted to have the fight once I’d taken care of the drones.
Captain Renalta didn’t answer, and my mind sprinted through an escape scenario. Eve, Paula, and I would need three minutes to get back to Persephone, and I doubted that the Lith Dae Navy ships would be able to get a position on us before then. We could flee back to Queen’s Hat and try to recruit more for our crew, but Persephone’s warpdrive was still charging. We would have to hyperdrive out of this solar system, wait for a few dozen more hours, and then head back to the station. Then we’d have to wait another forty hours before we could come back.
Not including recruitment time. It would probably take us two weeks or more to fully outfit Persephone. Eve had said that she put out a call, but had gotten little interest because of the current jobs open on the space station. It was possible that we wouldn’t be able to recruit who we needed.
If we left Uraniel, we might not be able to come back before Lith Dae took control of the drones and killed the citizens in the bunker.
“We’ll stay off your ship then,” Captain Renalta finally said, and I let out a slow breath.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said.
“Commander Tunar-Roz and her Marines will meet you at the government center tomorrow night. Let me know when you are beginning your mission.”
“Alright,” I said. I knew I couldn’t wiggle out of them attempting to babysit us without him guessing my intended betrayal.
“I’ll talk to you then,” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied, and I heard the transponder beep.
“Zea, you heard that?” I asked.
“Yeah. That’s fucking bullshit. Pretty sure they are going to try and kill me once I finish their upload.”
“Or they will wait until we open the northwest bunker,” Eve said.
“What are we going to do?” Zea asked. “We could kill them, but then they’ll know we aren’t playing their game, and then they will attack Persephone. By the way, when we are all down on the planet playing ‘escape the killer bird-drones’, who is going to be flying Persephone?”
“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh.
“I can fly her,” Eve said.
“No, I’ll need you down with us now so that we can know what Tunar-Roz and her Marines are thinking.”
“We don’t need Eve’s magic to know what they are thinking!” Zea hissed through the transponder.
“Let’s finish with these cars, try to find some metal we can use as armor, plant the booster, and then get back in orbit,” I said. “We still have plenty of time to come up with a plan. Zea, I’m counting on you to rewrite their software so they don’t know we have tampered with it. Focus on that for now.”
“Ugh. Our plans…” Zea moaned, and then the transmission beeped to indicate she’d closed the line.
“Fuck,” I said to Eve after I put the transponder back in my pocket.
“At least I have the first car unlocked,” Paula said with a half smile. She was sitting in the driver’s chair and messing around with the electronics under the dashboard. Almost as soon as she shot me the smile, the car’s engine turned over. “And it’s going!”
“Great job,” I said.
“How many more do you want?” she asked as she gestured to the other cars parked near us.
“All of them,” I said. There were five more besides the one she had just started and the beat up one we had driven from Persephone.
“All of them? Really?”
“Yeah. It only took you a few minutes. I have an idea which might work, but we are going to need as many cars as you and your sister can retrofit with drone controls.”
“Sounds like my kind of idea. Next ones will go quicker.” Paula slid her long legs out of the car, and then she rolled her tool cabinet to the next vehicle.
“You have a new plan?” Eve whispered to me when Paula started cutting with her saw.
“Kind of, but it puts you in danger,” I replied, but I knew she was already getting the information from my mind.
“Ahh, I see,” she said with a careful nod. “Yes, it is risky, but it will allow you to be with Paula and Kasta when they go into the bunkers. It still doesn’t help us with Persephone, though.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Juliette was a real pain in the ass, but I’d give all this rhodium to have her here with us right now.”
“She wanted to come.” Eve shrugged, “but her work on Queen’s Hat--”
“I get it,” I said, but then another idea came to me, and it quickly charged to the front of my mind.
“What if we--” I started to say.
“It is even riskier for me, but I do like the idea,” Eve interrupted me.
“Can you do it?” I asked.
“I will need to do it. It is the only way.” The vampire woman’s smile faded, and her eyes glowed with intensity.
“I don’t know if it is the only way, but it takes care of a lot of problems.”
“Second car is done!” Paula called out as she started the engine.
�
�Great, job,” I said, and the beautiful blonde woman gave me a wink before moving to the next car.
“Zea,” I said after I had pulled out the transponder.
“Yeah, Captain?” she answered.
“Slight change of plans. I need you to set everything up so that Eve can put the code into the government center’s terminal without you being present.”
“Uhhh. Come again?”
“You are going to stay on Persephone. Eve is going to go to the government center with Lith Dae, and Kasta, Paula, and I will work through the bunkers.”
“You want Eve going alone with all those fucks?” Zea asked with obvious surprise.
“Yeah,” I said. “Can you do the code so that she--”
“Adam, it will be really hard for me to write something Eve can just plug in without seeing the kind of setup they have in the government center. I have no idea what the operating system looks like or what kind of hardware they are using. Fuck, it’s probably going to be in Russian. I’m gonna to need to be there to figure it out. Maybe we can try to bust in there tonight when the gates go down? Then I can look at it before tomorrow’s mission.”
“That will raise the alarm with Captain Renalta,” Eve said.
“Hey, we have drones. You all keep forgetting,” Paula called over from the third car. She had gotten it open and was fiddling with the dashboard.
“What did she say?” Zea asked.
“Drones,” I replied.
“Hmmm. You know, that might work. If we got a few to go with Eve, I could watch from their cameras. I could walk her through trying to plug it into their system. Then I could control it from Persephone. Worst case, I can just have her type the shit in manually. Will take forever.”
“Good,” I said.
“But back to my first question: you want Eve alone with those fucks?”
“Zea,” Eve said as she leaned in close to me. “You don’t need to worry about me. Commander Tunar-Roz and her warriors are the ones who should be worried. They have no idea what I am capable of, and they will only live for a few moments once they find out.”
Zea was silent for a few moments, but then she let out a long whistle. “Fair enough, I’ll do my hacking thing, you do your vampire thing, Paula and Kasta will do their drone thing, and Adam will give emotional support.”
“Emotional support?” I asked with a chuckle.
“Well, or you can just shoot a bunch of people. You know, whatever you feel most comfortable with.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to shoot that many people,” I said, and then Paula got another car started.
“You both should start taking these back, so we don’t lose any time,” the engineer said as she moved to the next one.
“Got it,” I said to Paula before turning back to the transponder to let Zea know we were cutting the communication.
Then Eve and I jumped in the first pair of cars to take back to Persephone.
I was feeling better about the bones of my plan, but as Zea told me back on Queen’s Hat, our plans tended to be a list of shit that didn’t happen.
Chapter 11
The rest of the day was a whirlwind of activity. Kasta finished building the booster, and we used one of Persephone's aerial drones to attach it to the top of one of the tallest buildings in the city. There were thousands of bird-drones perched up there, but they didn’t attack the drone or the tower, and I guessed they wouldn’t have attacked one of us if we were up there. I believed Faddy’s recording when the painter said that they only came out at dusk.
The booster would allow for Kasta to pilot the cars throughout the city. It would also allow anyone up in Persephone to pilot drones in the city with only a second or two of lag. It wouldn’t work with a combat style droid, but Zea wouldn’t need tactical feedback to help Eve hack the government center terminals.
That left the armor for the cars, and we found enough scrap in the factory to do the job. It was a thick steel alloy, and I figured they had used it to make buildings or the construction equipment used to dig up the excavation site. The metal wasn’t as lightweight as I would have liked, or in large sheets, but there was enough to plate the top glass hatches of ten cars, and we yanked as much as we could into the shuttle before we high-tailed it back to Persephone. We got back just in time and got into orbit a few minutes before dusk arrived.
The women split into pairs, with Paula and Kasta working on installing the drone controls, while Zea explained her software to Eve. I couldn’t really help the vampire and hacker, so I offered my assistance to the twins. They declined my help and said that they wanted to get the process for the control installation figured out first before they could use me.
I found myself with nothing to do, but the rest of my crew exceptionally busy. I didn’t like the feeling, but then I realized that none of us had eaten for at least twelve, maybe even fourteen Earth hours, and I was sure they were all starving.
I wasn’t the best cook, but I could salt and pepper some steaks, throw them on the grill, cut up a salad, and bake some potatoes. We had only used Persephone's kitchen a few times, but I’d not had a chance to cook yet.
The captain was said to have the most important job on a starship, but anyone with half a brain knew it was really the cook, so I felt a bit of excitement when I thought about making a meal for my friends.
Persephone’s kitchen was large, state of the art, and we’d filled the pantry and fridge with tons of food. I soon had five steaks grilling in butter on the stove, salted potatoes baking in the oven, and bowls of salad chilling in the freezer. Whoever bought our supplies also filled up the kitchen’s wine fridge, and I poured five small glasses out before setting the table.
“Crew, report to the galley,” I said over Persephone’s broadcast system when the potatoes were a few minutes from being done.
“It smells amazing!” Zea was the first one to speak when the four women walked in, and she eyed the meal with hungry eyes.
“Oh, it really does,” said one of the twins, and the other one agreed with a nod of her blonde head.
“It’s all ready,” I said as I grabbed a basket of bread rolls and set them on the table. There were actually six long tables in the galley, and we occupied only half of the one nearest the kitchen.
“It was my turn to cook,” Zea said apologetically.
“It’s fine. You were busy,” I said as I gestured for them to sit down again. They quickly found seats, and I sat at the head of the table between Eve and one of the twins.
“This is our first meal together on Persephone with Kasta and Paula.” Eve smiled. “Should we say a prayer?”
“Uhh. Prayer?” Zea asked. “Like, Jesus or God or something?”
“I do not know much about religion,” Eve shrugged. “I only know that I once prayed for freedom, and love, and the chance to help others. Now I have it. There might be someone watching over us, or maybe not, but in some of the books I once read, they would give thanks before a family meal.”
“Family?” One of the twins asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Of course.” Eve’s smile was infectious, despite it showing off her fangs. “We are joined by our desire to help others. We have different reasons for our mission, but here we are; together as a family.”
“I like it,” the other twin said. She sat closer to me, and I guessed by her scent that she was Kasta, even though I couldn’t be sure because of the smell of the food.
“Thank you for this meal,” Eve brought the palms of her hands together and closed her eyes. Zea, Kasta, and Paula quickly did the same, and I followed their example. “Thank you for our friends who are our family. Thank you for the love I feel for them. Thank you for the luck we have had so far, and the luck we will have tomorrow. Thank you for the opportunity to help others.” Eve didn’t say anything else, and we all opened our eyes to look at each other.
“Let us eat,” Eve said as she began to cut into her steak.
“That wasn’t… bad,” Zea said with a l
augh.
“We should do that before every meal,” Paula said.
“I agree,” said Kasta.
“Maybe one of you could say it next time?” Eve said after she chewed her bite of food.
“We would like that,” the twins said after they glanced at each other.
“Adam, this steak is great! Yummmmm,” Zea made a show of leaning back in her chair and putting her hand over her stomach. The rest of the women agreed.
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll need to get a cook soon, and a navigator, and a--”
“I don’t think we need a navigator,” Paula interrupted me.
“No?” I asked.
“Zea showed us how to use the system, it seems easy enough. She was fast at it.” Paula turned to the hacker.
“Yeah, but you both are--”
“Don’t be modest. We are all smart. One of us can do it. We’ll only get better as we get used to Persephone’s navigation tools.”
“Huh. Don’t we need someone full time?” I asked. Every ship I had ever been on had one or two crew members who only planned the ship’s hyperdrive courses.
“If we were in battle, and going to be jumping between hyperdrive, warpdrive, and folding systems, we might need someone focusing on the task entirely, but one of us can step away from the cannons or drone work to focus on that,” Kasta said.
“I like the idea,” Eve said. “We can have dedicated roles for people as our crew grows, but we should all be cross-trained. I am not particularly skilled with math, but I would like to know how to use the navigation system to plot a hyper or warpdrive course.”
“I’ll teach you!” the three blonde women said at once, and then they laughed at each other. The sound was infectious, and I found myself smiling. Zea definitely seemed more at ease around the twins since I talked to her.
Yes. You did well with her. She still nervous about the future with you and me, but she knows she has a place on Persephone, and by your side.
Eve smiled at me when her voice entered my mind, and I gave her a nod.
“Uh oh,” Zea said. “Eve and Adam are doing their brain-speak thing again.”
“We are happy to be here,” Eve said before I could answer. “When Adam first saved me from the tube, we had to escape from the Elaka Nota building by taking the sewer. We were covered in filth, penniless, and in the slums of the city. We have come far.”
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