by M. C. Planck
“We’re safe, guys. Prudence says we’re safe now.”
“Jorgun, you half-witted genetic cesspit—” Garcia unloaded a lifetime’s bitter frustration into the nearest target. Prudence flicked off his intercom.
“Garcia sure can swear, can’t he?” Jorgun said with a grin. “Like you told me, Pru, we all have our own special talents.”
Jorgun was a giant, seven feet tall and well proportioned. He could crush Garcia like an eggshell. But Jorgun was incapable of violence. The best he could do was to glare silently from behind dark glasses. It had worked a number of times, browbeating port officials into being less obnoxious, but if he forgot his role and took off the shades, they could see his eyes were laughing. It was just a game to him.
Now he thought the game was over. He was trying to raise Jelly on the comm again.
Prudence held her breath, involuntarily.
The gravitics display winked on. The mine had passed them, was still sailing blindly out into space.
Melvin really must have hit it somehow. The odds were impossible; not merely astronomical, but impossible. Far more likely the damn thing had malfunctioned on its own, but Melvin would never accept that. The man would be impossible to live with now.
She laughed at the irony. Complaining about living conditions when you expected to be dead was Melvin’s shtick, not hers.
Turning on the intercom, she shouted over the noise.
“Shut up, Garcia!”
The swearing stopped.
“We’re safe. It missed, and it’s not even slowing down. It’s on a dead run.”
“I told you I hit it,” Melvin crowed.
Garcia, a rational person despite his cavalier attitude toward the truth, was too stunned to say anything. At that moment Prudence remembered what they shared, why she had kept him on the ship so long. They were the only two with a shred of common sense.
The distress beacon was still calling.
Sighing, she pushed caution aside, and entered a course for planetfall.
The Ulysses floated out of the sky on a cushion of gravity. Prudence sat at the helm, her fingers twitching, ready to spook and run at the shadow of a threat.
The beacon lay in the middle of a burnt field, whining plaintively. A village was over the hill, or had been, once. Now it was a smoking pile of rubble.
Nothing stirred below; the field was quiet and still. On this silent world, it seemed like a warning siren.
“Melvin, give me a targeting sweep.”
The comm panel told her he was trying. It also told her the result.
“There’s nothing down there made of metal. ’Cept the beacon.”
“Sweep the horizon,” she said. Melvin tended to think a little too directly.
“Hang on—I got something out in the woods. Aft of us. Light metal—it’s bouncing up and down!”
Reflexively, she touched the controls. But left them unmoved.
“Tell me if it starts coming at us.”
“It’s gone now,” Melvin complained. “How can I tell you if it’s coming, when it just blinks in and out?”
She sighed. Melvin was used to space, where things were neat and clean. Planetside, there were always obstructions and distractions. She sighed because she sympathized with Melvin. Space was better.
Gently she rotated the ship until it faced the mysterious woods. Hovering for a moment, she stared at the view-screen, trying to pick out details. But the trees yielded no secrets.
The thought of landing twisted her stomach into knots. Anything could be buried in that innocent field: plastic explosives, a magnetic grapple, electrifying cables. The Ulysses belonged in the sky, the only place it was safe. If somebody out there wanted her attention, they would have to play their cards first.
Very slowly, she started going back up.
The watching woods parted. A figure stepped out into the open and waved both arms in a universal, timeless signal.
Over here.
“The metal’s moving again—now there’s more! What the hell is going on, Pru?” Melvin was obviously too absorbed in his radar screen to look at his visual. At least he couldn’t panic and open fire. The laser was dead.
“Somebody down there is asking for our help, Melvin. But they’re not alone, and they’re not stupid. The metal you’re detecting must be hand weapons.”
“Weapons! Don’t go down, Pru. Get us out of here,” Garcia’s voice demanded through the intercom. He hated being strapped into the passenger lounge, but there were only two seats on the bridge. Prudence had had the other two removed years ago, one of the best decisions she had ever made.
Melvin voiced his opinion by aiming the defunct laser at the woods.
But Jorgun cast the deciding vote. “Is it Jelly?” he asked, and Prudence’s heart wrenched.
“No, Jor, it won’t be her. She lives in Baliee, a thousand klicks away.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed. Too simple to understand that meant hope for her. Too innocent to guess that hope was all there was.
Prudence took the ship down again, heading for a spot halfway between the woods and the beacon. The tiny figure watched her.
She punched up the zoom on the visual display, brought the man into focus. Dirty, bearded, disheveled. At this range, his face was inscrutable.
The feet of the Ulysses touched ground, unsteady with the tension between mass and apparent weight. She left the gravitics on, ready to spring up, to safety.
The man waited, unmoving. Her turn to play a card.
“Jor,” she said, hating herself for using him. “Open the boarding hatch. But stay on the ship. Do not get off, for any reason. Just let them see you, okay? Wave to them.” She had to use him. He was huge, intimidating—from a distance. They would take his size for strength. If it was a trap, they might change their minds and flee. If they attacked, then Jorgun was the only crew member she could afford to lose, the only one who could not use a weapon.
While he was stepping out of the bridge, Garcia stepped in, carrying a short, stubby gun. The splattergun was designed to repel boarders. Its projectile disintegrated into a hundred tiny particles when it left the barrel, which made it less likely to puncture hulls and more likely to hurt people. Prudence hated the crude weapon. It was, like Garcia, undiscriminating in picking its targets.
“Where’s he going?”
“To make friends,” she answered.
“I came up here to tell you to escape while we still can. Not to watch you send Jor out to die.”
“Shut up, Garcia,” she repeated. Despite his protestations, he didn’t go running after Jorgun to stop him. Instead, he stared at the zoomed image on the display.
“That guy hasn’t been eating well.” Trust Garcia to notice something like that. He never missed a meal.
Carefully they watched the display, looking for clues. They heard the boarding hatch open. They heard Jorgun’s shouted welcome. Then, and only then, the man relaxed, his shoulders sagging. With his hands raised, he stumbled toward the ship.
Behind him, faces appeared, peering out of the foliage. Scared, tired, hungry faces.
Prudence met the man at the boarding hatch. Standing at the top of the gangway gave her power, rendered him a supplicant at the foot of the throne. A simple trick, but it had worked on more than one dockside petty official.
“Thank Earth you’re here,” the man said.
“Captain Prudence Falling, of the Ulysses,” she introduced herself. The formalities were there for a purpose. They gave structure to the negotiations, reminded everyone exactly where they stood. “And you are?”
“Brayson James.” There was no argument in his voice, only despair. “A pumpkin farmer. Or I was. Until we were attacked.”
“Attacked by who?” Garcia whispered fiercely from where he was hiding behind a bulkhead. “It freaking matters, don’t you think?”
It did matter, rather a lot. Knowing which planet launched the attack would tell them where to flee. “By who?”
“Burn Earth if I know. The bombs just fell out of the air. No warning. If I hadn’t been out in the field, trying to fix an irrigation line, I’d be dead with the rest of my family. They dropped a bomb right on my house, Captain. They aimed for us.”
“And those people?” Some of the crowd coming out of the woods were carrying weapons, but they no longer looked dangerous.
“Refugees and survivors. We haven’t eaten right for a week. Too afraid to go near town for any supplies that might be usable. They didn’t leave right away, Captain. They stayed and hunted us for days. We only figured it was safe now because you weren’t already dead.”
“Nice that you were thinking of us,” she said, but without heat. She would have done the same in their shoes. “You set the beacon?”
“Yes. And the seven before it. This is the first time a bomb didn’t fall out of the sky on it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Someone in the crowd answered with a shout. “Get us out of here!”
The Ulysses was a freighter, not a passenger liner. Its life support couldn’t keep a hundred people alive for the four-day trip through node-space to the next colony, let alone the long journey to Altair.
“I can’t take you to off-planet,” she said carefully. Unhappy crowds were not prone to listening to reason.
But Brayson stared at her, his face set into ugly hardness, like badly poured concrete that could never be smoothed over. “We’re not running away. And we’re done hiding. Take us to the capital.”
TWO
Secrets
The Launceston came out of node-space fast, silent, and ready for anything. Regulations called for battle stations when exiting any node, since one was necessarily blind to local conditions on the other side, and “surprise” was a dirty word in military-speak.
Lieutenant Kyle Daspar had his own reasons to expect shenanigans. Following up on an anonymous tip wasn’t really what an up-and-coming police detective with political connections was supposed to be doing. But his orders came from on high, and plenty of hints had been dropped about how it might be important to the League, so there had never been a chance of saying no. His instincts told him there were unseen angles to the situation. And he didn’t like surprises any more than the military.
The trip had been miserable. Three nodes and twelve days out from Altair, on a small ship with six angry soldiers. They looked down on him for being a civilian, they despised him for being a League officer, but they hated him because their captain did. And their captain hated him for a perfectly good reason: the papers Kyle carried from the League gave him command of the ship.
You can’t make a captain a servant on his own ship, not even a patrol boat the size of the Launceston. Not without making him hate you and everything you stand for. The heavy-handed blundering of the League was its own worst enemy.
But the League had other enemies. Some of them were political, like the Alliance, the chief opposition party despite its sheer ineffectiveness. Some of them were vocal, like the vid celebrities and their talk shows, although equally ineffective. But some of them were secret: deep, dark, and biding their time, working from within to expose and destroy.
Like Lieutenant Kyle Daspar.
But that was a thought too dangerous to dwell on for a man as deeply undercover as Kyle was.
“Orders, Commander?” Captain William Stanton had been icily formal from the first instant his gaze had lighted on Kyle’s armband, back in the Altair spaceport. Kyle had hoped the man would at least swear out loud while reading the orders that had seized his ship, but he had been disappointed. Stanton had simply become colder. If Stanton had made an outburst, Kyle could have forgiven him, and then at least they could have had a human interaction. But the captain was too well trained. He folded up the orders precisely, handed them back to Kyle frostily, and proceeded to follow them literally.
That was part of the problem. Too many people followed orders without raising enough fuss. Furious that Stanton was going to make the trip unbearably difficult for him, Kyle had leapt into his role and played the tin horn to the limit. Theoretically, he meant to push Stanton to the point of rebellion, since making enemies for the League was part of his secret mission statement.
So much contempt crammed into the tiny confines of a patrol boat made for a very miserable trip indeed.
“Contact Kassa spaceport and get clearance to land.” Kyle could hardly admit he had no clue what to do next. All the tip had said was “Go to Kassa.” He still had a million kilometers before he had to come up with a new plan.
“Sir,” said the comm officer, “there’s no radio traffic from Kassa. Not even a navigation beacon.”
“What? That’s a violation of code, isn’t it? They can’t turn off their nav beacons.” Kyle was disgusted by the thought that he had come all the way out here to write somebody a maintenance ticket.
But Captain Stanton’s disgust had a more immediate target: Kyle. He could see it written all over the man’s face. It was an active kind of disgust, not the passive contempt he’d come to take for granted.
“Do you have something to say, Captain?”
Stanton answered in precise, clipped tones, each word carefully enunciated. “I believe the commander does not understand the full import of comm’s data.”
Kyle translated that in his head, from military language to ordinary speech. I think you’re a fucking idiot. And I hate you. Idiot.
“Feel free to fill me in, Captain.” It must be something important for Stanton to have brought it up at all, instead of just letting Kyle make a fool of himself.
“There’s no radio from the colony. None at all.”
“Why would they be trying to talk to us? They don’t know we’re here.” That was the point of coming in silent, wasn’t it?
Gritting his teeth in frustration, Stanton tried again.
“Commander. There is no radio traffic on the planet. No one down there is talking to each other.”
A blip appeared on the console in front of Kyle. He didn’t know much about spaceships, but he knew what that blip meant.
“Well, they’re sending someone out to talk to us.”
That finally cut through Stanton’s ice-block reserve. He leapt to Kyle’s side, stared down at the console, and reached out for the controls.
At the last instant, he stopped, a testament to the rigidity of his training.
“Permission to assume the helm, Commander.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Kyle was too relieved that the man had finally asked to be picky.
“Granted, Captain.” Kyle stepped out of the uncomfortable chair. Stanton sank into it, his hands and eyes already fully engrossed in the task at hand.
“Not emitting standard FOF, Captain. Permission to query.” It was the first time Kyle had heard the comm officer speak without sneering. The crew was too busy with the current threat to remember they hated him.
Captain Stanton answered instantly, assuming the authority he should have had all along. “Granted, comm. Gunnery, you are live.”
The other two men on the bridge silently took up their duties, slipping goggles over their eyes. Stanton put on his own. They would see the battle from any of a dozen different angles, hopping between the external cameras and computer-generated displays, but all Kyle would get to watch were several men in funny glasses talking to each other. Not the excitement one expected from a space battle.
“Query is negative.” The comm officer didn’t sound worried. He was too professional for that. But Kyle was a professional at listening to what people didn’t want to be heard.
Unable to bear being completely out of the loop, he ventured a question. “What does that mean, Captain?”
Stanton flicked him a pitying glance, no mean feat considering his face was obscured by goggles.
“It’s not one of ours. Or anybody that we know.”
“An unregistered ship?” It wasn’t unheard of.
/>
Stanton spared him one last comment before forgetting about him completely.
“It’s not a ship. Targeting, report.”
The gunnery sergeants spoke for the first time.
“DF negative.”
“T negative.”
They carried on like that for another thirty seconds, speaking their Fleet jargon so fluently it almost sounded like a real language. If it hadn’t been for the urgency in their voices, Kyle would have thought they were just putting him on.
Then Stanton reached for his console, pausing only long enough to direct a comment to Kyle.
“Hang on.”
To what? Instinctively Kyle went into a wrestling crouch, expecting anything. Stanton’s fingers moved, and the atomic engine flared into life, throwing Kyle to the deck with its force.
He slid to the back of the room, where he could at least latch on to a stanchion. Gravity moved under him, changing direction, made his stomach feel like it was pushing up to his mouth. The ship went both forward and up.
Stanton killed the engine, returning the world to normal. The grav-plating in the deck said down was down again, comforting Kyle’s whirling stomach.
A few seconds of tension, and then the comm officer made his pronouncement.
“NavProj says it’s null-vee.”
The words were gibberish, but the tone said victory. The men in the room relaxed, and Kyle relaxed with them. Stanton, perhaps rendered giddy with relief, offered Kyle an explanation without being asked.
“It’s a mine. But it’s powered by gravitics, not thrust. It can’t match our vector. This far from a planet, it maneuvers like a pregnant cow.”
Kyle paused, trying to formulate just the right response to show his legitimate respect without blowing his cover as a petty political hack. The delay cost him his chance.
“Captain! More bogies!” The comm officer, so recently urbane, now sounded perilously close to panic. “Five—six—seven!”
Stanton tried to focus his officer, get him back to thinking about his job instead of his possibly short future. “Mines or ships?”
“Too small to be ships, Captain. But…”
