Interim: On the run from the Galactic FTL Police

by P. K. Lentz

  It was actually Ascher’s second surprise since boarding. About an hour ago he’d supervised the loading of a rather strange last-minute addition to the ship’s cargo: a woman in a hibernation capsule.

  He supposed there must be occasional cause for Fleet vessels to transport passengers in hibe, but it was something Ascher hadn’t seen himself in a decade of service. Perhaps Hunter was transporting some criminal or dignitary for a reason unrelated to its well-known primary assignment. The injured or ill were sometimes placed in capsules to prolong their lives while awaiting medical attention. But what reason could there be to leave the Commonwealth for treatment?

  Even if Ascher were inclined to devote much thought to the matter, the impending neurilace upgrade was a much more immediate and personal concern. With his erratic hardware there was no telling whether or not the downlink would even succeed.

  With all his pre-embarkation duties complete, Ascher lay sweating in his berth, awaiting the moment of truth. At last a synthesized voice sounded over his comm.

  “Encrypted transmission will commence in ten seconds. Nine...eight...”

  Ascher remained tense as he blinked the neurilace lens into place over his right eye. At least that seemed to be functioning.

  “Four...three...two...transmission commences now.”

  Only silence followed, but this was normal; there would be no audio during transmission, just a confirmation immediately afterward.

  Not two seconds into the broadcast Ascher felt the familiar ache behind his eyes, heard a hiss and crackle in his ear. The interference persisted until ten seconds later when the ship’s voice declared, “Transmission complete.”

  The display on Ascher’s neurilace lens screamed failure. Flicking it back in disgust, he resisted the urge to cry aloud. Fortunately there was no way his superiors could know the truth short of direct inspection, which was not standard practice. They had no reason to suspect anyone might have missed the transmission, not even deliberately, since it had been broadcast at highest priority with Division-level Command encryption, impossible for a crewman to override.

  He was safe, then, so long as the upgrade wasn’t anything vital.

  ***

  CHAPTER SIX

  Vice-commander Daniel Sallat stood at attention before Whisper of Death’s captain, Jan Bohringer. The Captain did not really demand strict adherence to formality by his first officer, but Sallat persisted as a matter of form.

  Bohringer looked more haggard and unkempt than usual. From behind his desk he gave Sallat a cursory wave, bidding him commence his second regular briefing since the insurgent attack.

  “Repairs proceed apace,” Sallat began. “The breach is nearly sealed and hull integrity is holding. Casualty count has settled at seventeen missing and presumed dead, six more with minor injuries. Groundside comm is ninety-five percent restored. Eight groundside SES assets are confirmed killed. Five who were missing have been relocated, but six remain unaccounted for.

  Orbital batteries have struck sixty-four groundside targets identified as centers of resistance or their support facilities. Cooperation from planetary authorities is less than enthusiastic, but Merada Commission assures me we have nothing to worry about on that front. All things considered, my recommendation remains the swift, if temporary, removal of all groundside assets to orbit.”

  Captain Bohringer flicked a few fingers in the ‘move-it-along’ gesture that Sallat knew well. “What of the lead on Zerouali?” he demanded.

  “The freighter Lady of Chaos has been placed under observation,” Sallat reported. “Anyone attempting to exit the vessel will be discreetly apprehended.”

  Bohringer exhaled sharply in a half-scoff, half-sigh. “She just had to hole up with the one man in the galaxy we’re not allowed to kill.”

  Sallat let his captain’s complaint go unanswered. When Intel had discovered, minutes too late, that Zerouali had been smuggled onto Lady, Intelligence Section had immediately commenced an investigation into that vessel.

  A hundred flags went up. If machines were capable of showing wild excitement, these did. A boarding party of Fleet marines poised to storm Lady had been recalled just in time, and an urgent translight beacon dispatched to Reissa. Now Whisper watched and awaited instruction.

  To Bohringer this was a headache on top of disaster, the last thing he needed now that his vessel had become the victim of the first hostile-fire shipboard casualties in Fleet’s history. Perhaps he was taking his frustrations out on Merada, the bombardment of which, in Sallat’s mind, was far too indiscriminate. Bohringer had granted Intelligence wide discretion in groundside target acquisition. To battery crews more accustomed to cratering barren moons on practice runs, it was occasion for perverse excitement.

  A more delicate hand was needed, Sallat realized. Even if the attack on Whisper of Death had failed to constitute a serious blow to Merada’s quest for Commonwealth membership, Bohringer’s subsequent lack of restraint had set it back a century. The whole planet was against the Interim now. Before long its government would be forced to choose between joining the mob or being trampled beneath it.

  “Anything else?” Bohringer prompted. His exhaustion was apparent.

  “ETA of Hunter in the Dark is twenty-one hours,” Sallat added. “That’s all, sir.”

  “Thank you, Commander. Dismissed.”

  “With respect, sir, I suggest you take some rest. Matters are well in hand.”

  “Suggestion noted,” Bohringer said. “And rejected. You’re dismissed.”

  With a quick, unacknowledged salute, Sallat left the captain’s office.

  ***

  Gareth guided Mela into a wide, unlit chamber on Lady’s hab module. The door shut behind them, plunging the room into total darkness apart from the dim yellow glow of an access panel. When Gareth keyed a particular sequence into that panel a soft hum filled the air.

  “You ready for this?” he asked Mela softly, standing close behind her.

  A soft blue light began as a sliver at the room’s center and slowly expanded toward the walls. Mela took a few curious steps toward the advancing threshold of light. Reaching it she stopped, a breathless statue. Her gaze was locked on the floor, where nothing seemed now to separate her own feet from the surface of her homeworld miles below.

  Of course, the appearance was far from reality. Were there truly nothing but a transparent film beneath them, the dizzying view from inside the rotating hab module would have been enough to make even a spacer ill. Instead, the floor here was essentially a chamber-wide vidscreen which right now showed the best available projection of Merada--one captured from the opposite end of Lady entirely, in fact.

  “What do you think?” Gareth asked the girl after allowing her a minute’s wide-eyed silence.

  In those wide eyes was a mix of awe and sadness. A tear slipped loose, and Mela began to tremble. She collapsed to the floor.

  Gareth knelt beside her. He should have expected this.

  “There’s nothing to cry about,” he said. “Let’s have dinner.” Guiding the girl back to her feet he took her to the table in one corner of the room, where he’d already set out their meal. “I made it myself,” he said. “It’s Terran black bear from stock that made the Crossing. Insanely rare. You’ll like it.”

  But by the time Gareth seated her at the table, tears were coursing freely down Mela’s cheeks. “I want to go,” she sobbed. “Please just take me back down there.”

  Gareth took the seat opposite her. “I can’t do that, Mela.”

  After a few more weak sobs the redhead lifted her weary eyes to plead with him. “Yes, you can! I’m an adult and it’s my decision. I want to stay!”

  “What would I tell your parents when they woke up without you?”

  “You tell them I changed my mind. Or I can leave a message. Whatever--I don’t care! I just don’t want to go!”

  Reaching across the table, Gareth laid a hand atop Mela’s. “You’ll like your new home,” he said. “You’ll have
your whole family with you. You’ll know the language when you get there. You’ll make friends, build a life. You’ll be happy.”

  Mela’s lips pursed. Gareth sensed the impending outburst seconds before it came.

  “I--don’t--want--to! I want to go home--and home is down there!” Crying hysterically, Mela withdrew her hand from Gareth’s, balled it into a fist and slammed it down hard on the table. Then she lowered her face into her folded arms and wept.

  Gareth watched patiently. Maybe Mela would come out of this spell and they could at least enjoy the meal. More likely not. He felt tremendous pity for her. Shortly she would fall unconscious to awaken years later in a new home she didn’t know or want. He’d have liked nothing more than to grant her wish and leave her on Merada. True, it would be tough to explain to her parents, the actual paying clients, why the daughter with whom they’d boarded hadn’t made the voyage. But such a trivial concern was hardly enough to dissuade him from following his conscience. The family would have no legal recourse.

  No, the real reason he wouldn’t send Mela back was one he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. Merada just wasn’t safe anymore. The image beneath their feet at this moment was in reality several days old. He didn’t dare use a live image for fear that Mela might witness some of the planetary bombardment that had been raining down on Merada regularly for hours now from the orbiting Interim warship.

  “Trust me, Mela,” Gareth said. “It’s for the best.”

  She looked up and wiped sad eyes, her tears beginning to subside. She shook her head feebly. “I don’t want to,” she whispered. “Please...”

  The look Gareth gave her conveyed his sympathy, and his regrettable answer. Mela sat quietly for a moment with head bowed before rising and walking out to the center of the wide chamber. There she sank to a prone position on the floor with forehead propped on folded hands. Gareth sat beside her, and together they stared down at the clouds swirling over her deceptively tranquil blue-green world.

  After several minutes Gareth withdrew a hypo of sedative concealed in his clothing and pressed it to young Mela’s neck. She let out half a surprised moan and went limp. When next she awoke she would be far from the home she knew.

  At Gareth’s spoken command, the recorded view of Merada flickered to black and was replaced by a live shot. A series of flashes lit the planet’s sky: Whisper mopping up the last of the EM screamers. Thankfully there was no sign of surface bombardment just now. Gareth had never seen anything like that before. From orbit it was nothing more than a faintly shimmering line arcing down through the planet’s atmosphere--then nothing. But the havoc that those innocuous streaks unleashed groundside was, no doubt, a hellish sight he never cared to witness.

  He wanted to think that Whisper took care to strike only legitimate military targets, something still they probably had no right to do, but somehow he knew that wasn’t the case. Perhaps it was just his personal mistrust of these would-be emperors of humanity. Or perhaps the Interim really were the merciless, unrepentant killers of Astynax’s vids. Whatever the truth, Fleet’s attack on Merada only strengthened his resolve to keep them from capturing Zerouali.

  Gareth sat with Mela a few minutes longer, stroking her soft red hair and considering her fate. It might prove some consolation to her that when she did awake to a strange new world, she would find an account in her name with more than enough funds to pay her passage back to Merada should she so desire. Naturally such generosity was not something he extended to just any passenger. Mela was different. He couldn’t help but feel some measure of responsibility for her happiness. Maybe he would time the account to open only after a year or two, just to be sure she gave her new life a real chance.

  Eventually Gareth stood and commed for someone to come take Mela away for hibe prep. As he left the room carrying the two plates of black bear, he thought of offering the meal to Zerouali. Even if her personality disagreed with him, he could hardly imagine her to be any sort of hardened criminal. But even if she were a beast, Gareth knew, he’d still choose her side any day over that of the tyrants who now rained death on innocent Mela’s home.

  He was nearly at Zerouali’s door when Aprile commed him.

  “I need to see you, Will,” she said. “Asap.”

  Halting, Gareth reconsidered his dinner plans. Zerouali would probably only reject his offering anyway. And he could stand to mend fences with his navigator.

  “You eat yet?” he commed back to Aprile.

  “No.”

  “Hab module mess. Five minutes.”

  On her acknowledgment, Gareth proceeded there to wait for her. Ten minutes later Aprile entered carrying an unwieldy mesh sack over one shoulder. She heaved it onto the floor where it landed with a metallic clatter beside the table on which Gareth had set their freshly heated dinner.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Weapons.” Kneeling, Aprile dug into the sack. “I’ll be carrying one. I suggest everyone else does the same.”

  Gareth looked on with mild surprise. “Where did you get these? I would hardly have known we had arms aboard without checking the manifest.”

  That wasn’t quite true. Armaments were a tightly controlled cargo at any port, so any captain knew of necessity what his ship carried and where. Nonetheless, whatever stock Lady had in the holds was for trade, not personal use.

  “I’ve kept a few on hand for just this occasion.”

  “You don’t really think we might need them, do you?”

  Aprile held up a sleek, blunt-nosed rifle almost as long as her arm. “Maybe Fleet will just ask nicely if we’ve seen their girl,” she said, “but I tend to doubt it. If they suspect she’s here, there won’t be any questions. We’ll be lucky if there’s even any warning. I just hope they want her alive and not dead.”

  The images from Astynax’s disc flooded Gareth’s mind, and all at once he realized Aprile was right. He was treating this whole matter too lightly. It was one thing to make a dangerous decision, another entirely to plan ahead for its likely consequences.

  Planning ahead was exactly what Aprile was doing, by the look of it. By now she had laid out on the floor an array of weapons of varying shape and size.

  “About an hour ago an airlock alarm went off on one of the stern decks,” she reported. “Ilias went down to check it out.”

  Gareth felt a sudden chill. “And?”

  “Sensor malfunction. Or clever imitation of same.”

  “So it was nothing?”

  Aprile shrugged without looking up from her inspection of some type of pistol. “Right now we can’t afford to make assumptions. I’m going to spend the night prowling the ship. You’re welcome to join me.”

  Despite a newfound appreciation for the danger they were in, Gareth remained determined to play down the possibility of violence. Even if it was only an exercise in denial.

  “Is that really necessary?” he asked. “Lady has tiny glitches like that all the time. I’d be suspicious if there weren’t any.”

  “You want to be in charge?” Aprile said abruptly, and gave him a sharp, accusatory glare. Without breaking that gaze she plucked a sleek black rifle from the floor and thrust it at Gareth with greater than necessary force. “Then take charge,” she said. “You know how to use that?”

  She might have intended the question to shame him. If so, Gareth obliged her by admitting his ignorance. “I’ve fired weapons before,” he said. “Never at a human.”

  Hoisting an identical weapon, Aprile indicated a switch beneath her thumb on the rifle’s grip. “Couldn’t be simpler,” she explained. “This is the safety. Hit it once with your thumb and the light here goes green. Then just point it at the bad guy and squeeze the trigger.”

  Gareth hefted the deceptively light weapon and leveled it as if to fire. “I don’t want anything punching holes in my hull.”

  “It won’t. The beams are high-energy, low penetration, designed for shipboard combat. They’ll sear human flesh from the bone at highest sett
ings, but won’t even scratch fibresteel.”

  Gareth noticed that the weapon seemed in fact to consist of two barrels fused one atop the other. “What’s this underneath?”

  “Concussion grenade. The trigger is just up and forward of the other. Projectiles are tricky in zero grav, so think twice and fire once. If that thing ricochets into your face--”

  “Yeah, point taken. So who gets these? I’d rather not have the whole crew involved.”

  “They’re involved already, whether they know it or not. I agree we should keep it discreet, but I also believe a crew has a right to know when their lives are in danger.” She shrugged. “Your ship, your decision.”

  Gareth considered for a moment. After centuries of quietly avoiding conflict, in particular with the Interim, he had finally led himself and all those who trusted him right into it.

  More stumbled than led, truthfully. But however trouble had managed to come, here it was. As Zerouali had reminded him once already, quite needlessly, the Interim was not a forgiving enemy. Nor could they be counted on to behave in any manner one might call civilized. If Zerouali’s death or capture really was important enough to justify the current chaos on Merada, and if Astynax and his like were to be believed, then the thousand lives aboard Lady might represent nothing more to Fleet than acceptable losses in the achievement of their goal.

  Apparently it was time to start making hard decisions. That or give up and retire.

  “We arm the whole crew on the pretext of the Merada crisis,” Gareth announced at length. “I’ll patrol the ship tonight. I want you to rig up some kind of additional security on every airlock. I don’t care how primitive it is. In fact, the more primitive the better. Sometimes primitive is harder to fool.”

  “Can’t Ilias handle that?”

  “No better than you can. Besides, I have another job for him. I promise you’ll get your chance to prowl soon enough. In the meantime, if anyone tries to force entry while you’re working on the airlocks, feel free to shoot.”