by Jason LaPier
Finally she reached the section of the ship close to where the other raider would have breached. She was in a shaft that ran parallel to a main corridor, one that was identical to the first corridor her own team had entered after boarding, but running along the starboard instead of the port side. Every several meters there was a grate where the air flowed into the hall and she stopped at each, careful to get a good look through before passing.
She was at the fourth one along the main corridor when she heard the noise. Shouting, running, a few sparse shots – the popping of pistol fire, which she guessed to mean Wasters who lost their long guns or ran short of ammo – and then the zapping shots of stunners. She flattened herself and crept close to the grate to try to get a look.
And almost choked when the floor of the hallway was blotted from her vision by the heavy slap of a head against metal. She held her breath and blinked slowly, willing herself into control. The face she saw was distorted, the surface shaped into little diamonds formed by the lattice of the grate. It was Jerrard, his helmet bouncing away and revealing his cornrowed hair, the gold hoop in his right ear poking through the grate like some kind of prize or lure. His black skin turning red in splotches. He was one of the few like her, one of the few “doomed to domed”. His eyes glazed over in pain. He couldn’t see her, but she could see the gray barrel of a gun pressed against the back of his head.
Then he shrank. Became not just a head, but a body. Flung against the far wall, his hands and feet shackled. She twisted her head, risking detection by getting so close to the grate, but desperate to see who else was out there. There were four, maybe five others also bound, leaning against the far wall, a dozen or more ModPol Defenders with weapons trained on them. Others marching down the hall. The zapping of stunguns drifting with them.
With the noise and the activity, she felt invisible and she hurried further down the shaft to the next grate. The same scene played out as her comrades were chased down, stunned or otherwise incapacitated, and then bound.
She tried to count them but lost track. Who was left? She could recognize most of them but some of their bodies were twisted away from her. None were Moses.
One more grate at the end of the corridor. She could see the bottom of the heavy doors to the bridge. The last stand. Three of them, ammo expended, blades out. Moses in the middle.
They’d been unable to get through to the bridge. She could see the shadows in the distance on the opposite side. They were trapped. Moses was trapped.
She gasped.
Bit it back as quickly as she could, but the sound had escaped. And no one turned, no one looked down.
Moses raised his blade. It was no mere dagger, more like a machete that he’d modified years ago. It gleamed like a mirror. His right hand, farthest from her, brought it up high.
And in the reflection of the metal she saw his eyes. She saw his eyes look right at her. Hang there for a long, hard second. He put his lips together. Pursed them. Opened them just enough to blow slowly.
All those years ago, when he took her in. She was just a kid, a dumb kid looking for trouble. And he was more than happy to oblige: he had enough trouble to share with all. But he gave her rules. Nothing so hard and fast, not like the stick-up-the-ass schools in the domes. But there were lessons – and the lessons were always hard and fast.
Before the strike, he would tell her, whether it was to pull a trigger or to slice with a blade, before the strike, a small breath is necessary. Just blow, he would say. No huffing and puffing, just blow a kiss. Hold. Strike.
He brought the blade down, and she could no longer see his eyes. Blow, hold, strike. But there was more to it than that. The hard lesson learned was that the blow and the hold were necessary, but in that moment that followed, to strike was a decision. In that moment you knew if the strike was going to find its mark, and if it was not, then you did not take it.
As his blade came down, she saw its surface no longer as polished and bright, but instead muddied with drying and darkening blood. With a clatter, it fell to the floor. The other two Wasters glanced at him, then dropped their own blades. Moses folded his hands before him and put his shoulders back, straightening to his full height, towering over the cautiously advancing Defenders.
“You bested us,” he boomed with the twinkle of amusement in his voice. “You beat us this time. Congratulations.”
“On your knees!” one of the Fenders ordered, leveling his barrel.
“But be warned,” Moses continued. His voice strong and rhythmic, and she had a childhood memory of her father, one that went all the way back to Earth. Her father who’d been a leader, both a spiritual leader and a community leader. She was too young to know how much power his words had in just keeping people living one day to the next.
“Be warned,” Moses repeated. “Our forces will regroup. They will return at another time. And when they do, we will have revenge.”
They stunned him for an eternity before he kneeled.
* * *
For a time she’d lain prone in the hot, dry duct. Tamped down the emotions threatening to bubble up. Self-admonishment. Anger. Fear.
No. She would not abide fear.
She listened to his last words in her head. Regroup. She couldn’t help him now, not while they were on their heels. If she was going to help him, she had to get off the Garathol, she had to get back to the Longhorn.
Breaking radio silence was a bad idea, but she needed to know the situation. Any messages she sent would be sufficiently encoded, but just transmitting a signal would give away her position. She decided to risk it.
DAVA: On the Garathol. Ambushed. Forces scattered. Moses captured. Sitrep?
COMMAND: Dava, Capt. T. responding. Incoming MP fighters have us outnumbered. RJ ordering Xarp-out.
DAVA: Running?
COMMAND: Tactical retreat.
She bit down on the curse that wanted to jump out of her throat. That sonovabitch Jansen. He was going to abandon them to save his own ass. Her pad buzzed again.
COMMAND: Dava – if you can get out, do it.
She took a breath. There was time to think, but how much, she couldn’t say. There were the raiders; she could make her way to one of the breach points. They would be guarded, but maybe not heavily. If there were only a few, she had a chance at taking them out. The real problem would be once she detached. She’d have to fly it, which she was barely capable of. Flight systems were largely automated so she could get a ship from A to B, but to get it safely through an armada of ModPol fighters … even if she managed not to get blown away, she’d have to reach the Longhorn before it Xarped away. If she didn’t make it, she’d be hunted down. The raiders had no more than subwarp capabilities and ModPol would have no problem tracking her.
She could hide, that was always an option. The massive Garathol was full of dark corners and air ducts. How long could she stay undetected? And where would it go? Straight to the ModPol outpost in Epsilon, of course. Still fucked.
For lack of a solid decision, she’d started to move through the shaft again, heading in the vague direction of the breach where Moses’s team had come in. It was at least worth taking a look at what kind of guard was posted.
She froze when she got farther down the hall and heard the tramp of boots. From her floor-level vantage, she watched through a vent as the bottom halves of purple uniforms approached Wasters that had been bound and facing the opposite walls. She watched as the Fenders turned them around and marched them aft. They must have had a brig of some kind near the cargo holds at the back end of the ship. She held her breath as she watched them go.
One Waster remained against the wall. He slowly turned his head to glance over his shoulder. Then turned his body, his hands behind his back. Looked left and right and cocked his head.
She angled her head as best she could to see up and down the hall from behind the grate in the shaft. She couldn’t see any Defenders and it had grown quiet.
“Sonovabitch,” she whispered.
“Lucky!” she hissed. “Lucky, down here!”
He flinched and glanced around, trying to find her voice. Finally he crouched down and peered at the grate.
“Hello?”
“Lucky, it’s Dava.”
He duck-walked closer. “Dava, what are you doing?”
“Lucky, you got a multitool on you? The screws are on the outside of this grate.”
He blinked, then padded around his belt pouch. A moment later he was popping the grill away from the duct.
“Shit, Dava, you look like you’ve been through a gangbang at a chainsaw factory.”
She came out of the duct and stared at the empty corridor for three full breaths. “Lucky Jerk,” she said quietly. “I think they forgot you.”
“Where’s the rest of your guys?”
She looked at him. “As fucked as your team. We should get to your raider.”
“So we’re all alone?”
“Yeah, we are. And we need to get out to the Longhorn before they leave without us, so let’s move.”
They hustled down the corridor. The chamber that Moses’s team had boarded into was just a few dozen meters away. When they approached the door – which had been blasted off its mounts – she held Lucky back against the wall so she could peer in.
She pulled her head back and held up four fingers. She looked Lucky up and down. They’d taken all his weapons. She lost her rifle in her brawl with the Defenders and only had a pistol and her blade, which was out of poison cartridges. Lucky was lucky, but other than that he wasn’t much use in a fight. Even if he could occupy one of them she’d have to take the other three on at once.
Unless she could break up the party.
* * *
Runstom’s heart dropped into his stomach when he saw the cargo hold door open. It had taken him longer than he’d hoped to go find a disguise for Jax and now he was too late.
He’d gone fore to the midship crossway without encountering any trouble. From there, he could hear gunfire coming from the starboard-side main corridor. Instinctively, he’d wanted to get involved, to rush in and help out the ModPol Defenders. But he had nothing but a stun-stick. He was never issued a weapon or even armor, and he was just as likely to get clipped by friendly fire as he was by a Waster in all the chaos. So he’d repeated the mantra in his head: Not my fight. Not my fight.
Instead he’d gone up the port-side main corridor, the one that branched off to the living quarters. Along the way he’d passed the mess hall. The door was open and some Defenders had been looking after a boarding tube that had crashed down through the ceiling. He’d waved and moved on as quickly as possible.
He’d gone to the laundry after that in order to raid uniforms. The problem with Jax was that he was too damn tall, so Runstom had pawed through the small number of maintenance jumpsuits until he found the longest he could. It would have to do.
Then he’d made his way back, and the second time he’d passed the mess hall, one of the Defenders had stepped out to stop and question him. Runstom had all kinds of credentials in his WrappiMate and the antsy guard had felt a need to triple check everything. Oddly enough, he hadn’t even asked about the jumpsuit. In the distance the occasional pratter of gunfire could be heard and Runstom could tell the guards were itching to be in the fight instead of stuck waiting to see if any Wasters would retreat to their ships.
Eventually they’d let him pass and he would have run back to the cargo holds if he didn’t think it would attract unnecessary attention. He’d done a swift, quiet walk.
And the damn door was open.
He jogged to it, stepping gingerly around the broken bodies of fallen Wasters. The fight had come to the holds, and that meant someone opened the door: either gangbangers or Defenders. He wasn’t sure what was worse when it came to Jax. Either one might want his skin.
He poked his head through the open door. “Jax,” he whispered. He listened and heard nothing. If anyone had opened the door, it was probably Defenders looking for ammo. Maybe they knew a way to override the internal lock. “Hello?” he said out loud. “This is Stanford Runstom. I’m not armed.”
He heard the pang of bending metal and a hushed curse from the back of the hold. “Stanford?”
He ran to the back to see Jax’s head sticking out of an air vent. “Jax, what the hell?”
“Oh, uh.” Jax squirmed forward and got half his body out of the opening but had nowhere to go except a two-meter drop to a crate below. “Can you help me down?”
Runstom climbed atop the crate and took Jax’s arms and helped him in what ended up being more or less a controlled fall.
Jax picked himself up and stepped down from the crate, dusting off his leather. “I kind of got into a mess. But the good news is, I think I’ve officially resigned from Space Waste.”
Runstom looked him up and down, instinctively looking for signs of injury. “Right, good. Put this on,” he said, tossing the jumpsuit.
Jax frowned as he stripped off his jacket. “I’m going to miss this badboy.”
“Really?”
Jax sighed. “No, fuck it. Turn around so I can take my pants off.”
* * *
The jumpsuit was just a little too short but as long as Jax kept his arms folded, it wasn’t too noticeable. Runstom led him to the aft of the ship where there was an elevator that went down to the hangar decks. They didn’t encounter another soul along the way. Runstom thought he could still hear the occasional gunshot to the fore of the ship, but he knew it was too far away to be a possible threat.
Once at the hangar level, he took Jax to the port side where his OrbitBurner was parked. Two Defenders guarded the deck entrance.
“Yes?” one of them said as though Runstom and Jax were interrupting a very important standing-around session.
“Stanford Runstom, Public Relations.” He showed his credentials and they barely glanced at them. “I’m going to check on my ship.”
Jax looked down at the patch on his chest. “Rodriguez,” he said. “Just a tech. Going to check out his ride. You know, make sure it wasn’t damaged during the fight.”
“Whatever,” the guard said and waved them through.
The other stopped them. “Hey, you got that OrbitBurner in there, right? 4200?”
“Yes,” Runstom said. “4200 LX.”
He whistled. “Got the LX even, damn. Wish I could take a ride with you in that.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” the first guard said. “It doesn’t even have guns on it.”
“Fuck you man, it’s got a rec room. Hey,” he said to Jax. “What kind of burn rate does the ion engine get on that baby?”
“Oh, uh,” Jax said, glancing at Runstom who could offer him no help. “Dude. It’ll make you weep.”
The guard laughed. “Yeah, yeah I bet it would.”
In an instant he seemed to lose interest in the conversation and after an awkward moment of silence and staring, Runstom and Jax moved on.
Minutes later they were on the small bridge of the OrbitBurner. Runstom sealed the doors and made sure the comms were all silent. He flipped on the contact map. Almost nothing but friendlies. And a lot of them. There’d only been a handful of fighters in the hangars on the Garathol. The rest must have come from somewhere else.
“Okay, listen, Jax.”
Jax plopped into an acceleration couch. “Holy crap, what a week it’s been. Are we really going to get out of here in one piece?”
“Yeah, we are.” Runstom came over and stood in front of him. “But we need to talk.”
“Uh, sure.” The B-fourean waved his hand as if presenting a topic of discussion. “Public relations. What’s that like?”
“It’s … interesting.”
“Back on Terroneous, I’m kind of known as the fix-it guy,” Jax said wistfully. “Can’t wait t
o get back there.”
Runstom frowned and looked away. “Look, Jax. I’ll get you back there, I promise. But …”
“But what?”
Runstom could feel pressure building inside his head, countered by an emptiness in the pit of his gut. He needed Jax, and yet he wanted to protect him. And Jax was just an operator, none of this had anything to do with him. But who else could he turn to?
“I need your help, okay?” Runstom felt his face crunch together as he glared through his guilt. “Something is up. Something that doesn’t fit. And … well …”
“What makes you think I can help?”
He sighed. “You’re the only one I can trust.”
“Well, same to you. I mean back on Terroneous—”
“Jax, you’re the only one I can trust in the whole goddamn universe, okay?”
There was silence for a time and then Jax said, “What’s going on, Stan?”
He waved a hand at the situation around them. “This. Space Waste attacks are increasing. ModPol Defense – it’s growing. Justice used to be the ModPol mission. The Defense division was just there as a contingency. Now it’s ballooning. I’ve never seen a force the size of the one they had on this transport, not since wartime.”
“That sounds bad,” Jax said. Runstom could see the tension building in his friend’s face. “That sounds like I’m not going home.”
“You will, I promise,” Runstom said. “I just—”
The was an insistent beeping sound then, an incoming transmission request. Runstom looked at Jax and then walked to the front to turn on the comm.
“Runstom here.”
“Lieutenant Commander Ploughy, on the bridge of the MPP Garathol. The captain would like to speak with you, Officer Runstom.”
