Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  And the floor shook.

  CHAPTER 23

  The raider bobbed and swayed, but it was nothing too jarring with the lack of gravity. Dava floated down the line of her assault team as each man and woman showed their weapons and ammo and she ticked them off the list on her handypad. All sixteen were required to have an operational long gun, sidearm, and blade. She knew the blades wouldn’t get much use, but she’d have felt unprepared if they didn’t have them. Their armor wasn’t much to look at, being patchwork leather, but it was reinforced with an alloy lining.

  For her own blade, she didn’t bother with the anticoagulant she’d been using. For this mission, she’d loaded it with a paralyzing poison that came from the first of four stomachs in a large-mouthed lizard-like creature that lived in some particularly nasty swamps on Terroneous. The poacher who sold it to her wove a story about how the beast swallows prey whole, coats them in the paralyzing venom, then digests the immobile victim over the course of a few days. Injecting it into the bloodstream with a needle – or a blade designed to distribute cartridges of poison – was supposed to result in immobility within seconds. She only wished she’d had a chance to test it before the mission.

  She snapped each one of them into their wall restraints as she checked them off her list. She flipped the handypad over to the external cameras. It wasn’t much to look at, a battle like this. Two behemoths in the distance, streaks of white rocket flare streaming between them, the almost harmless blinking red of laser targeting systems. Swarming, swirling fightercraft like angry insects. From this view it was an organic chaos. She knew in a few days they’d be reviewing the footage from the Battle-Capture probes, which would provide a much better view. Moses never let them go into an operation without his BatCaps. Always something to learn, he would say.

  The intercom squawked to life. “Capo Dava.” Sandpiper, the raider’s co-pilot.

  She floated to the comm, bracing herself on a hand-hold when the ship took an unexpected dip. She hit the button. “What’s up, Sandy?”

  “Moses just radioed in,” she said. “All the transport’s fighters are engaged and the main guns have been disabled. We’re clear to breach.”

  “Good. Prepping for breach.”

  They had only waited a few hours post-Xarp before Basil Roy’s detection software picked up the ModPol transport. It was near enough that they could close the gap quickly, and far enough from the ModPol outpost to give them the time to do it. Once they’d gotten in range, the Waster fighters launched and slowed the transport down. The Pollies had their own fighters, but it was clear they didn’t have many, so the raiders had launched soon after.

  For the past twenty minutes she and her team had sat near the edges of the skirmish, waiting for the superior Longhorn carrier to take out the handful of anti-spacecraft guns on the Garathol.

  Dava flipped the handypad back to the checklist one last time, then hit the comm. “We’re ready, Sandpiper. Bring us in.”

  “Aye, Capo.”

  Dava made her way to her own restraint and strapped in just before the throttling pull of max-speed thrust accompanied by the terrible screech of the engines.

  * * *

  Breach. Something else she couldn’t see from their drop-capsule, but she could imagine it: the spider-like raider sinking dagger-legs into the hull of the Garathol, the cutters coming down to slice a clean hole, the tube crashing through, the temporary seal expanding around it.

  And then the drop. She closed her eyes and the universe jolted as the transport’s artificial gravity pulled the capsule down the chute like sucking a bean through a straw.

  “Breach complete, seal is good,” Sandpiper said into her ear. “You’re clear to pop the hatch.”

  She unstrapped and looked momentarily over her squad. Each man and woman looked back at her with hard eyes.

  “Release,” she said.

  In near synchronicity they popped their straps and thirty-two boots hit the floor. She hit the door release and it flipped down, creating a ramp into the room. Whether it had been occupied before was unclear, but it wasn’t at that moment. She waved the squad in and they double-timed past her two by two.

  It was some kind of mess hall, large enough to accommodate the drop-capsule, but not much larger. There were tables and chairs piled to either side, blow into disarray by the breach. There was only one exit.

  “Barndoor, you and that scattergun are on point.”

  “Aye, Dava.” The big man stepped to the door and leveled his barrel at it. His ink-black hair was tied in a loose tail for once. He nodded, and she hit the release.

  The door slid away to reveal a large, empty corridor littered with the flashing warning of a red alert. She led them through and headed aft, toward the cargo holds.

  They made the length of it without encounter. Jansen had insisted there would be a skeleton crew. It must have been an all-hands situation for them, all of them on the bridge or at other battlestations. The dead feeling the empty halls gave her was unsettling.

  The corridor T’d into a perpendicular hallway. She had them check corners, and still nothing. There was a sign that indicated holds in both directions.

  “Thompson-Gun, front and center,” she hissed in her loudest whisper.

  Thompson stepped through the crowd. “Here, Dava.”

  “Take half the squad,” she said, then looking over them, pointed at the lanky B-fourean in the back. “Including Psycho Jack. You go starboard, I’ll go port. Keep the comms open for now.”

  “Aye, Dava,” she said. She marked Jack and six others and motioned them down the hall.

  “And Tommy,” Dava said, grabbing her arm before she left. “Try to keep Jack alive.”

  Thompson nodded and turned to Jack who was hesitantly following. “Come on, Psycho. Try to keep up.”

  Jack shifted the strap of his shotgun over one shoulder uncomfortably. The jacket he wore wasn’t long enough and looked heavy, pulling his body forward in a slouch. “Right,” he said, shaking his head and plodding after Thompson.

  Dava felt a small pang of guilt, and it confused her momentarily. She knew Jack didn’t belong in their outfit, but he didn’t really belong anywhere, she could tell that. So why not use him? Why should she feel guilty?

  She pushed the thoughts out of her head and refocused on the mission. Waved to Barndoor to head for the opposite corner. Followed closely behind.

  * * *

  The gangbangers jogged around the corner and Jax had to hurry to catch up. Half of his brain urged him to lag behind. What point did any of this have for him? If he was trying to just stay alive, participating in a raid on a ModPol transport was not the way to do it.

  The other half of his brain reminded him that to be in ModPol custody was not going to do him any good either, and so he definitely didn’t want to get left behind. He’d been desperately trying to think of a way out of the whole thing since they came out of Xarp, but he found it impossible to focus.

  “Jack!” The one they called Thompson-Gun hissed at him and waved him over to a door the rest of the Wasters were crowded around. “You got those codes they gave us?” she asked as he approached.

  “Yeah, right, of course.” He looked at the panel and then at the expectant gangbangers. “This might take a minute, so um … cover me?”

  Thompson nodded vigorously, then gestured to the rest. “Fan out and watch the corners.”

  He stared at the panel. It was another numeric pad, not too different than the one he’d managed to open back at the Space Waste base. There was a glaring lack of edges to the thing though, and his trick of popping it open didn’t have any hope. They’d given him a list of codes to memorize – supposedly they were override codes – but he didn’t much trust them. It was the one they called RJ that gave them to him. He seemed to be in charge, but knowing that Basil Roy had faked the detection software put Jax in a cautious mindset. Roy and RJ were close to each other and distant from the rest of the gang, almost as distant as Jax was.


  But why would they want to fake a software interface? It made no sense to Jax, no matter how much he mulled it over. There on the bridge of the colossal command ship, he’d convinced himself the raid was effectively defunct. He was sure it wouldn’t go forward because they’d fail to detect the transport on time. If that had happened, he’d know that for whatever reason, RJ and Roy faked the software to save the transport.

  Then without warning, the all-hands alarm was raised. He’d been sitting in the mess hall at the time, trying to gather his thoughts and stay out of trouble. His hopes that the raid would be called off were dashed. They’d found the transport and were moving in on it. Which meant, what exactly? That the pre-recorded interface on the detector somehow revealed the target?

  Not that he’d had much time to think about it. Before he knew it, he’d been shoved into an ill-fitting outfit heavy with leather and woven metal, awkwardly armed with a gun he was told was only for close encounters, and hustled onto a small ship that reminded him very much of the one he and Runstom stole when they fled the prison barge all those months ago.

  He stared at the panel, willed it to give up some secret that would allow him to live through this goddamn raid. With a sigh, he gave one of the so-called override codes a try. The panel buzzed at him at an alarming volume and he flinched. He glanced over his shoulder to see the others looking back at him.

  “Well, one down,” he muttered to himself.

  He tried another, received another buzz. From behind, he could hear hushed conversation and his paranoia wondered if they were discussing his disposability. Then his paranoia saw a wink of movement just above his eyeline. He squinted. Was that a tiny lens inside the bubble at the top of the panel?

  It moved again, no more than a millimeter.

  “Copy that,” he heard Thompson saying.

  He found himself unable to move. Someone was looking at him through a camera. He needed to call out, to warn them, but he couldn’t get his brain to act.

  The action returned to his frozen limbs when the door suddenly slid open. His flailing arms couldn’t decide if they should grab for support or reach for the shotgun slung across his shoulder. His legs knew they wanted to move away from the door, but couldn’t agree given one hundred and eighty degrees to choose from. Before he could completely stumble to the ground, he was yanked into the dark space beyond the door.

  “Wait,” Thompson called. “Jack, wait! What – eennnaaahhh!”

  With a flash of blue sparks coming from the end of a long black stick, she spasmed and collapsed, the sound of her strained howl clipped off behind the closing of the door.

  * * *

  Dava’s team came to a significantly spacious corridor, one clearly meant for moving bulky cargo back and forth. There was a splotchy trail of dark-brown dust that ran almost all the way down it in an odd, meandering pattern. She bent down to get a closer look, then felt it with her fingers. “Dirt,” she said quietly to anyone who might be listening. Must have been that some part of the cargo was plantlife. Food. Was probably loaded in zero-G and then sank to the floor when the artificial gravity was turned on, based on the odd way it lay.

  At her best guess, all the soil-based cargo had gone to the inner holds along the left side of the massive corridor. She decided they should start the search for the weapons along the opposite side. She moved her team down to the first door, leaving two at the corner they’d come around to keep a lookout. Ahead, there was another corner further down that also turned inward toward the center of the ship. A small passageway, probably for moving between the larger halls, though only for moving people, not cargo. She put another Waster at that corner to watch the passage.

  Jansen had given them a handful of override codes that he said may or may not work, according to his inside source. One of these days Dava would like to meet this mole of his, but she got the sense that she never would. She motioned for Barndoor to cover the door while she attempted some of the codes on the panel.

  “This is useless,” she muttered after the third attempt failed. Worse, she was uncomfortable with the unnecessary buzz the panel made on every rejection, which seemed to get louder each time.

  She hit her comm. “Thompson, come in.”

  “Copy,” the reply came back quickly.

  “Any luck getting anything open?”

  “Negative. Jack is trying to override one now.”

  “We’re going to need him over here when you’re done.”

  “Copy that.” There was a pause, then just before Dava closed out, she heard Thompson’s voice again. “Wait. Jack, wait! What—”

  “Thompson?” Dava whispered. Nothing. “Dammit.”

  “I can probably blow it open,” Barndoor said.

  She looked up at him. It wasn’t the stealthy method she was hoping for, but there was a finite amount of time before the transport became unstable due to the shelling and the breaches. Maybe it was time to choose expedience over patience. Her eyes fell to his scattergun. “Not with that thing.”

  He looked at his gun, then slung it over his shoulder. “No, of course not. I brought charges.”

  “I don’t remember putting charges on the manifest.” She wasn’t against explosives, but preferred not to use them unless they were really necessary. Inside a spaceship, they seemed as unnecessary as it got.

  Barndoor looked down uncomfortably. “I think Moses put them on there.”

  “Of course he did,” she muttered. Moses and his boarding squad had breached on the starboard side, opposite the side Dava’s team breached on. Right about then he was probably knocking on the door of the bridge, threatening to blow it down like the Big Bad Wolf. She nodded to Barndoor and then gestured for two of the Wasters to join the two at the corner of the main corridor. She took the last over to the corner at the smaller passageway. From there they watched Barndoor retrieve a charge from his satchel and carefully affix it to the door.

  He jumped back and she flinched at his movement. The door began to slide upward, scraping the charge off like a barnacle as it did. He scrambled for his gun.

  “ModPol!”

  * * *

  “Help!” Runstom watched Jax flail helplessly, losing his balance as he twisted toward the closed door and landed on his ass. He spun his head back toward the force that had yanked him in. “Wait – uh – listen, I’m not really—”

  “Jax,” Runstom said, putting his hands up, palms out. “Jax! It’s me. It’s Stanford.”

  “St-Stanford? Runstom? What – what the hell are you doing here?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He reached down to help the lanky B-fourean to his feet. He couldn’t believe he was looking the operator in the eyes again, after all this time, and on this ship of all places.

  “Believe me, I wish I knew,” Jax said, brushing himself off. “I was hiding out on Terroneous, keeping a low profile, like you said—”

  As Jax straightened up, Runstom realized he was wearing a caramel-colored leather jacket and matching brown pants. He grabbed the arm of the jacket where the bent circle-of-arrows logo had been sewn on. “What is this? Is this a Space Waste logo?”

  Jax pulled away and looked down at his feet for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so. They kidnapped me – or saved me.” He looked up and shrugged. “Depending on how you look at it.”

  “How do you look at it?”

  “Fuck if I know,” he said and broke into a familiar smile.

  It made Runstom want to smile along. He thought he might never see this man again, or worse, would see him only in prison or dead. But he was too unnerved. How bad in the shit was Jax this time? Did he even know? “Let me guess: when they got you away from ModPol, they gave you the option to join them or walk the airlock.”

  “Pretty much.” The smile turned sour. “You knew I was getting picked up by ModPol?”

  Runstom sighed through his nose. “I found out too late.”

  “Oh.” Jax looked past Runstom, around the dim room, feigni
ng interest in its contents.

  “Jax, I was on my way there.” He took a step toward the operator and put a hand on his shoulder. “McManus got there first.”

  He huffed. “That guy is an asshole.” He swallowed and lowered his voice. “Did he survive? I don’t mean to – I didn’t see anything.”

  “The asshole is alive and kicking.”

  “Good,” Jax said with a nod, then he looked back at the door. “Shit. You zapped Thompson-Gun.”

  Runstom found himself caught between a shrug and a cocky twirl of the stun-stick, then he just holstered the damn thing into a loop on his belt. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t know if your friend—”

  “She’s not my friend.” The silence that followed extended for a few seconds before he spoke again. “Stanford, you don’t understand – I was good. I was fucking happy. All I want is to get back there.”

  Runstom squinted at his face in the dim light of the hold. “Back to Barnard-4?”

  Jax was visibly agitated, his hands uselessly working around each other in front of his stomach. “No. No, not B-4. Terroneous. I have to get back there.”

  “Why?”

  He dropped his hands, his shoulders drooping. “I’ve got … people. Friends.”

  “Friends?” Runstom wished he hadn’t said it. Was he that desperate for the other man’s friendship? Had he stopped to think about how empty his life had been in the months since they parted ways? He looked away, embarrassed by his own pathetic void.

  “God dammit, Stanford,” Jax said with an anxious laugh that bordered on pain. “Her name is Lealina.”

  “Oh.” He shook his head at his own selfishness. “Shit. Listen, Jax: I’m not letting ModPol take you in. I’m not even with the Justice division any more. And I’m not letting Space Waste – well, you know. I mean … did you really think they would let you go?”

  “I thought if I helped them I might be able to go home again,” he said with a dip of his head. “You know, buy myself out with my cut of the – the uh – the booty?”

  “But you know they don’t work like that.”