by M. C. Planck
“Captain Falling. Thank you for your assistance earlier.” Captain Stanton clapped his hands to his side and performed a half-bow. The gesture was entirely unnecessary, but mildly romantic.
“I’m glad we could help.” Stanton was not really her type. Fleet guys never were. But she could certainly appreciate him as a fellow spacer.
“May I introduce the commander, Lieutenant Kyle Daspar.”
She was amazed at how much seething hatred Stanton could inject into such a simple sentence.
“A pleasure to meet you, sir.” Formality seemed to be the appropriate tack. A spacer might appreciate her for her merits, but a civilian, promoted to authority on political strings, would expect to be deferred to and flattered.
“Please. Just call me Kyle.” He seemed flustered, uncertain. In his face Prudence recognized a familiar suspicion. Authority never trusted the tramp freighter, never understood why someone would hop from system to system unless they were running away from something. The idea that someone might be running to something never satisfied them. Prudence’s dream, her restless search for something better, only sounded like escape to them. They never looked forward, only behind; never up, only down.
She sighed, resigning herself to the coming interrogation. Curiously, his eyes flickered, and for a moment she thought he was disappointed. Perhaps she was seeing things. After all, she was tired, and there was enough disaster here to throw anyone off their game.
“Captain Falling, I have a few questions I need to ask.”
He was beefy, in a compact way, like ten kilos of steak packed into a five-kilo bag. His jaw was set in perpetual defiance, expecting hostility even while his stubborn eyebrows projected innocence. But he wasn’t as hard as a soldier. His curly black hair was short and neat, but not severely so. She could, with a generous stretch of creativity, imagine his lips pouting in a cute, boyish way, a depth of feeling that most spacers and soldiers had beaten out of them long before they became old enough to interest her.
As much as she detested the uniform, she could still admire the physical package. Languidly she let her eyes communicate this ambiguity. He responded with more contradiction: instead of swelling under her unspoken compliment, or following up its implied half-invitation, he seemed to be struggling not to blush.
But Captain Stanton had no patience for their emotional fencing match. “Perhaps the commander would like to start with the formalities. We have a narrow window if we wish to capture one of those mines.”
Daspar was unhappy with being rushed. His face flashed a grimace, which she assumed indicated violent outrage, given how tightly he had a lock on his emotions. She could feel his repression, like you could feel the energy of a tight spring just by looking at it. It was a state she was all too familiar with.
Just to provoke him, she played into Stanton’s hands. “You’re going after a mine?”
Stanton nodded. “Thanks to you, we disabled all seven. Once blind, they went on null trajectories. Capturing one and dissecting it constitutes a level-one military goal. We need to know who did this, how they did it, and what else they can do.”
Noticeably missing from his list was “why” someone would do it. But she couldn’t really hold it against him. He was Fleet. “Why” wasn’t part of his domain.
“You need to get some rescue operations here, too,” she reminded him.
“Yes,” he agreed, “but that constitutes a level-two humanitarian goal. We don’t even have a mutual defense treaty with Kassa.”
She ventured a tiny piece of bait. “After this, you might get one.”
Reassuringly, he didn’t take it. Looking at her with a slight narrowing of eyes, he said, “I don’t think that is particularly relevant, Captain Falling. I’m just pointing out that it’s not a level-one problem. The populace here is not in immediate danger. My military goal will delay humanitarian aid by no more than a few hours.”
“Thank you, Captain Stanton.” She let her real gratitude inflect her tone.
He responded with a ghost of a smile. Probably the closest a Fleet officer was allowed by regulations. “I’m offloading what medical supplies we have. I can also offer you two armed guards. You’re the only operational vessel on the planet right now, which puts you at an undue risk. Especially while you’re flying relief missions for strangers.”
No doubt he thought he was being generous. But she didn’t want a couple of goons hanging around. “That’s not necessary, Captain Stanton. We’re known to these people, and we trust them.”
“As you wish, Captain. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He stood there, waiting to be excused.
“Captain Falling,” Daspar said. “My directives do not overlap with Captain Stanton’s. I understand your ship is legally registered out of Altair?”
Daspar was reaching into his jacket for papers, terrible papers that would place her ship under Altair’s orders, while Stanton waited eagerly. All of Prudence’s sympathy for the captain of the Launceston evaporated. The bastard wasn’t being nice to her, he was just happy to get rid of the cop.
“I’ve busted my ass helping these people,” she snapped, “for sixteen hours and no pay. I’ve dumped a cargo to help them. You are not going to commandeer my ship now.”
“I have the authority to do so.” Daspar tried to hand her the papers. In disgust she knocked them out of his hand, and they fluttered to the ground.
“No,” she said, fighting back tears. It felt too much like being trapped, too much like being chained. Too much like losing everything. What the League took, it might never give up again. That was its way.
“Captain, I must insist,” Daspar said, and his tone was not what she had expected. Hard, yes, but underneath, something else. Something striving to reach out to her, make her understand. “At least this way you can get paid for your efforts. I can make sure Altair reimburses you, for time lost, for fuel, for expenditures.”
Casting about for a way to control her emotional reaction, she thought of what Garcia would say. That mercenary bastard would never let emotion get in the way of money. “For our cargo?”
Daspar paused, thinking. With a little surprise, she realized he was not considering whether or not it was worth it, but whether or not he could pull it off. Not whether she deserved the promise, but whether he had the authority to make it.
“Yes. For your cargo, if it’s unrecoverable.”
It was a good deal. It was a deal she had to take, both by the law of Altair and by the law of economics. But it still made her insides clench in terror to say the words. “Accepted, Commander.”
“Please,” he said, “call me Kyle.”
They flew hops for another sixteen hours. Kyle used his authority on the refugees, cutting through the sea of complaints to find the ones that needed help now, the ones dying or without water, instead of the merely injured and without food. He browbeat those who had plenty into sharing with those who had nothing, threatened the aggressive and comforted the meek, appointed officers and managers, and assured everyone that Altair Fleet was on its way. With no more than his voice and his badge, he brought order out of chaos.
Prudence would have been impressed, if she had been able to think about anything other than how tired she was.
Standing on the bridge, he watched her fly. The scrutiny made her nervous, vaguely, but the blanket of exhaustion muffled everything.
This was the last trip they would make tonight. An arctic research station had gotten a radio working and called for help. Bombed out of their installation, they would freeze to death soon. They’d already burned what was left of their building for warmth.
Garcia had stayed at the refugee camp, organizing the distribution of supplies. Prudence had cajoled the rest of her crew into one more flight.
“Melvin,” she said over the intercom, “give me a heading.” They were using the targeting system to home in on the radio signal. Without GPS, it was like finding a snowflake in a blizzard. But GPS depended on global satellites, and those had
been the first things destroyed by the attack.
“Left three degrees … Wait. There’s another one. There’s some kind of radio source out there, to starboard. And it’s close!” Melvin was exhausted, too. He slipped into panic without any resistance.
“Is it moving, Mel?”
A pause. “No … I don’t think so.”
Kyle was helping Jorgun with his console, working the communications system like an old pro. He’d said the police system wasn’t that different. Now he pointed out something Jorgun would have missed. “It’s not another colonist. The signal is wrong—it doesn’t plug into our comm protocols.”
She resented his automatic suspicion. That was her role. “Maybe they jury-rigged a system.”
“No,” he said, contradicting her without hesitation. “It’s too regular. I can’t decode it, but it’s repeating. It has to be a distress beacon. It has to be one of theirs. The enemy.”
Jorgun offered his best to the conversation. “If they’re in distress, we should help them. It’s the right thing to do.”
“They might not want our help, Jorgun.” Kyle was surprisingly gentle with him. She hadn’t expected that from a man wearing a League armband. “But I agree with you anyway. We should help them into the brig.”
“Are you kidding?” said Prudence. “My ship is unarmed.” All they had were rifles and handguns.
And the hidden pod of missiles, but Prudence was not about to reveal those. The miswired laser had been a regulations violation. The unregistered missiles were a crime.
“I’m not kidding.” His voice was hoarse. He’d spent hours talking, bullying, persuading. “These are the people that did this. They need to be held to account.”
“Letting them freeze isn’t good enough for you?”
Gray with fatigue, he stared at her.
“No. It’s not good enough.”
His eyes were like flames behind smoke: hot and black. She recognized the look of stubbornness, the spirit that would not back down. It was like looking into a mirror.
Casually, disguising the action as merely flipping the intercom switch to contact Melvin in his gunnery pod, she began the arming sequence for the missiles. Outside, the hatch panels would slide open; the electronic brains of the missiles would come awake, sniffing for a target, eager to be released on the hunt.
The sound of grating metal was washed away by the windstorm.
“Melvin. Direct us to the new signal.”
Melvin argued with her. “Why? Because the tin-horn sheriff says so? Screw that! Screw him.”
She was too tired for insubordination, too tired to stroke her crew into doing their jobs. “If you don’t, I’ll send him up there to take your place.”
“Whatever. See if I care.” Even while he dismissed her threat, he caved in to it. “Go right, five degrees. And down.”
Visual was worthless. The cameras, so finely tuned for empty space, were blinded by whirling flecks of white. They hovered a hundred meters above what the radar claimed was ground, and crawled slowly forward.
“Can we even see it this far up?” Kyle was obsessed.
“They’ll see us long before we see them.” Prudence kept trying to change his mind, mostly out of habit. She knew she would fail. “What if they shoot us down? It’s not just us that dies. That arctic team won’t last the night.”
“Land a kilometer away and we’ll walk in, if you’re worried about getting shot at.”
It was tempting: the walk would surely kill him, and that would be the end of her problems. But then she almost certainly wouldn’t get paid.
“Stop, Pru! You’ve passed it.” Melvin had become conscripted to the cause by sheer curiosity. “Radar says metal, but not ship-sized … it’s a boat or something.”
She sent the ship down, drifting through the white sky. If the enemy hadn’t fired yet, they weren’t going to.
“How do we know it’s not a mine, waiting to explode when some fool comes out to investigate?” she asked. It was the sort of thing a paranoid person would do. Like herself, for instance.
“Nobody would put a trap out here. They would have left it where it would matter.” Kyle was looking around, searching for something. “Where’s your suit locker?”
“Next to the air lock,” she said, trying not to sound too exasperated with his ignorance.
“I’m going out there. If I lose radio contact, take off immediately.”
A thrum, deep and distant, sounded in the far recesses of her mind. Her suspicious nature, flaring up despite the exhaustion.
“I’m going with you.”
He stared at her, shocked. “Don’t be foolish. Send one of your men, if you want. But you can’t leave the bridge.”
“Can I go, Pru? I want to see it.” Jorgun was grinning with simple excitement at seeing something new. How easy it would be for Kyle to pull one over on him, set up whatever trick he’d come all the way out here to prepare.
“We’ll all go, Jor. Suit up.”
This had to be what Kyle was here for. This had to be what all of this was about.
“What if something happens to you?” Kyle stood in her way, adamant as a wall. “Who else can fly the ship? We’ll all freeze out there.”
“Then you better not let anything happen to me.” She would not let him get away with it. Thousands had died on Kassa, and she was going to find out why.
“You can’t tell Pru what to do,” Jorgun explained patiently. “She’s the captain. She tells us what to do.”
“You’re being stupid.” The anger in Kyle’s voice was leaking out.
He wasn’t in real danger. In a few weeks, Altair Fleet would be all over this planet. He would be safe on the ship until then—its life support could sustain people in deep space, it could certainly protect them from a blizzard. His Fleet would come and get him. He didn’t really need her.
She decided not to point that out.
“If you get off this ship without me,” she promised, “you won’t get back on it. I’ll leave you out there. Take us all, or stay here. Your choice.”
He surprised her. Even though she could feel the heat of his anger, he surrendered.
“Fine. Have it your way.”
Kyle fit into Garcia’s suit, albeit badly. Both men were thick, but in entirely different ways.
Melvin was complaining bitterly, but Prudence ignored him. She wanted as many eyes and guns as she could get around Kyle. She even gave a rifle to Jorgun, although she made sure it was unloaded. He would be useless if Kyle turned on them; but Kyle might not have figured that out yet.
Kyle had brought over two mag rifles from the Launceston, military-issue assault weapons. They were vastly more intimidating than her civilian equipment. With the imitation of perfect innocence, he even offered her one.
She accepted, gracefully. When his back was turned, she swapped them, taking the one he had set out for himself.
Her last precaution was to remove the medallion she wore around her neck. It was small, three centimeters across and a millimeter thick, but it was the most valuable thing she owned. Worth more than even the Ulysses.
It was the only link she had with her mother. A trinket, passed from mother to daughter, but the one tangible thing that had come from her hand to Prudence’s, from her exotic world to the cramped apartment Prudence grew up in.
Reflexively, she squeezed the medallion. It had taken her years to learn the trick, just the right pressures in just the right places. As a child she had struggled for hours a day to master this skill, to be worthy of her mother’s gift. Her father could only manage it one try out of ten.
The medallion unfolded in her hand, stretching out into a handle, and the blade sprung free. Ten centimeters long and as light as a feather, it was the sharpest edge Prudence had ever seen, heard of, or read about. Her father had claimed it was a single molecule thick. It would cut through hardened steel as easily as through water.
A ridiculously dangerous object to give to a child. But her fat
her had trusted her, had known she would treat it with the respect it deserved.
Letting it collapse into a disk again, she dropped it into a pocket of the suit, where she could reach it in a hurry.
“Are we ready?” Kyle was eager, despite his exhaustion.
She responded by punching the air lock release.
FOUR
Discoveries
Standing in the air lock, he checked the magazine on his rifle. Visibly, so she would see him doing it. Letting her know he had a functional weapon might prevent her from trying anything stupid. Her switch-up had been smoothly done, but he’d memorized the serial numbers of both weapons. An old cop habit, born out of the fact that professional-grade weapons imprinted their serial number on every round they fired. Knowing who had shot who was the sort of thing cops liked to know.
Call it lessons from cop school. Making sure everyone knew the consequences of starting a fight was the best way to stop one. Making sure everyone understood they would be held accountable for every shot they fired was the best way to make them shoot carefully.
Of course, that was on Altair, where squads of SWAT goons were a panic button away and forensics teams would pore over every square inch of the crime scene. Out here, on a primitive planet in the middle of an arctic blizzard, the rules might be different.
The lock cycled, exposing them to the outside. The big one, Jorgun, reached up to toggle his helmet mike.
Kyle put out a hand and stopped him. “Radio silence. Don’t let them know we’re coming.” He had to shout over the howling wind. Jorgun nodded, accepting the rebuke without reacting to it.
They trudged outside, sinking up to their knees. Jorgun stared up at the sky, entranced by the swirling patterns of snowflakes. Melvin was hardly more effective, wading clumsily through the snow.
But she slipped out of the lock, alert and aware, her eyes scanning the horizon carefully, looking up to make sure nothing had crept onto the ship above them.
As tired as he was, he found himself grinning. They should have hired a better actress. Instead, they’d sent a special operative to make sure he did whatever it was the League wanted him to do out here. She was good at her job; too good. She’d given herself away with her industrial-strength wariness, the trained habits of the professionally suspicious.
