Unclear Skies

by Jason LaPier

  Dava managed to feel a little guilty about taking it, but it wasn’t like she would keep it. They’d be back to Epsilon-3 within another day or two and Jack and his ModPol buddy wouldn’t even notice it was gone. As for Dava, Thompson, and Lucky, it gave them something to do that kept them out of trouble. In a way.

  “So you can scoop up the BatCaps in this thing?” she asked Lucky. Already, blips of debris were appearing on the proximity radar.

  “Sure can,” he said. “Even a civvy like this might come across a distress call. So there’s a low-power tractor beam. Finding them is the harder part, but I know the pattern they went out in. I’ve done BatCap retrieval before. Every Space Waste pilot has to at some point. You know how Moses is about those BatCaps.”

  “Right.” Moses and his obsession with continuous improvement. He was probably drawing lines in the dust on the floor of a cell at that moment, trying to analyze what went wrong.

  “Hey, do you think someone will come back out here looking for the BatCaps?” Thompson said. “Maybe that could be our ticket home.”

  Dava thought about it. “A lost battle. Moses would definitely come back for them. He’d want to know what happened.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Finally Thompson said, “Well, fuck that idea. If Jansen is in charge now, he’s not coming back here.”

  “Here’s one of them now,” Lucky said.

  After several minutes of patient navigation and course adjustment, he’d hooked the BatCap and pulled it into the emergency bay. She sent Thompson to go down to the airlock and retrieve the memory out of it. They wouldn’t bother keeping the rest of the shell.

  When Thompson came back up, she popped the memory module into one of the deck consoles. The camera array on it captured a full range of all the space around it, so they used the holovid display to see it in three dimensions. The video picked up at the point when the BatCap was deployed. It shot across space and then came to a rest just outside of the battle that had already started. A few fighters launched from the Garathol and the Waster fighters were making short work of them. This, Dava had seen from the raider. She scrolled forward.

  To the point of the breach and board. She continued to scroll but at a slower pace. Where had it gone wrong? A wriggling sensation started in her neck and crept through the back of her head and into her brain. This hadn’t just been a failed mission. This had been a clusterfuck. Trying to piece the events together, trying to make sense of it – how much did it matter? Wasn’t it really a distraction from the loss? The grief?

  “There,” Lucky said. “Look, off to the upper right in this back corner. See those blips?”

  There were two, then five, then twelve or more. Within a few minutes of realtime passing on the video, several dozen new ships had come into the battle.

  “Can you get their origin?” she asked him.

  “Sure, just a matter of reversing the trajectory.” He tapped at the console. “I’m going to pause this and put the local system map up on the HV.”

  The video winked out and in its place was a zoomed-out view of where they were sitting in the Epsilon Eridani system. Epsilon-5, the gas giant, loomed off to one side. It was empty, so empty. The only asteroids were several AUs out.

  “Did we have a BatCap closer to where those fighters appeared?” Dava asked.

  “Should have,” Lucky said, adjusting their course and accelerating before she could order it.

  An hour later they were looking at another video. They scrolled forward to the timestamp when the fighters appeared on the first video. On this one, they were already in view, so they scrolled backwards and watched the fighters pulling back into their hiding spots.

  “Asteroids,” Lucky said. “That’s weird.”

  “They’re not real,” Dava said. She bent close to the holovid, but it was hard to see everything, even as she looked at it from different angles. “Right here. Pull this up on the flat screen, high-res.”

  “Okay,” Lucky said. “Here we go.”

  The asteroids weren’t asteroids at all. They were cubic shapes of metal, clumped together somehow. When the video played forward at slow speed, they could see the rocks break away as the fighters came through.

  “Well shit,” Lucky said. “I’ve heard of this. Some special kind of stealth tech. They magnetize all that shit to the hulls of the ships. Then when they’re ready to go, they just turn off the magnet. The metal rocks there are just thin, empty boxes and just drift out of the way.

  “Sonovabitch,” Thompson said.

  “Bring up the system map again,” Dava said. “And show me the approximate location of the ModPol outpost.”

  He did, then flashed a point on the screen near the gas giant. “We believe it to be somewhere in this area.”

  “It’s too far away,” she said. “Too fucking far. These fighters are not defending that base. They were here before we got here, before the Garathol even got here.”

  “An ambush,” Thompson said.

  “They knew we were coming?” Lucky said.

  “Yes,” Dava said. “And they let us board anyway.”

  “Because on the Garathol, there was another ambush waiting,” Thompson said. “What the fuck.”

  Dava stared at the empty space just outside the viewport. She couldn’t see it, but right now there were pieces of Space Waste drifting away out there, spreading out into the nothing. Pieces of ships. Pieces of her friends. Pieces of her family. Now part of a fragmented sky.

  It had been so well planned. Let the Wasters think they’re in control, let them board. There never were any weapons to steal. Just Defenders, in force. And while those Defenders were slaughtering Wasters onboard the Garathol, the stealth ModPol fighters came out of a cluster of asteroids, minced the Waster fighters to pieces and drove off the Longhorn.

  And now Moses was captured, along with a number of others. Joining Johnny Eyeball and Freezer. Last she heard was that they were transferred to a new zero-G facility in the outer Barnard system. More intel from Jansen. Dava had wanted to go after them, but Jansen said the facility was too well guarded, too state-of-the-art. Her bosses had hinted that if they could lift some fancy new experimental weapons from ModPol’s transport, they’d have a shot at going after the prison. And Dava had let herself believe that.

  The wriggling sensation in her brain was back. It felt like failure – but not a mission failure. Another kind of failure. Failure to listen to her gut? Weakness, because she was trying to trust her team?

  As she turned the players around in her mind she couldn’t allow herself that excuse. She knew who to trust and she knew who not to. The skill was innate; like an animal, she could smell a liar, a deceiver, whether she could prove it or not. Trust – that never really was her issue. She hated working with a team not because she couldn’t trust her squadmates.

  Blips on a screen. Digital representations of a bloody fight, of lives snuffed out. Background noise.

  She hated working on a team because she felt she had to protect her squadmates. Johnny and Freezer, when they were arrested, she felt like she had lost them. She had failed to protect them. Even for someone like Johnny who could handle himself, she felt responsible. She didn’t understand why, but at least she understood what she felt.

  And she lost Moses too. Tried like hell to convince him not to endanger himself. And when he insisted on coming, she was unable to protect him. When she saw him cornered, she was unable to rescue him.

  Why was she so concerned with protecting them? It hadn’t always been that way. Moses treated Space Waste like family and it must have finally sunk in, because that’s what they were to her. After learning to be strong without anyone, going so long on her own, she’d found another family. It was painful to carry that weight again, but it was a pain she didn’t want to live without ever again.

  Things had gone beyond what her stubbornness could shelter. If she wanted to keep looking out for her kin, she was going to have to do more than seek solo missions. She was going t
o have to get them together to work as a force. She would use that force to break down those that had brought harm upon her family. And those that had betrayed her family.

  She stepped away from the consoles, to the back of the bridge. The sound of Lucky and Thompson murmuring words like ambush and bad intel and mole and setup faded into the background. Out of her pocket, she pulled out the piece of paper that Psycho Jack had forced into her hands before he left the OrbitBurner.

  Basil Roy faked the detector.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Do you know. How. Much. That. Ship. Cost?” Chief Suri Pattenbird slapped the table with each word. She raised her reddening palms and lowered her voice to a tremble. “First you get boarded. Then you abandon ship. Then—”

  “But Chief—” McManus started.

  “Then!” Pattenbird’s voice rose again to full volume. “Then we go back to locate it and it’s gone! Some moon-hick made off with one of our armored prisoner transports!”

  “I know, Chief,” McManus tried again. “It’s just that—”

  “What the hell were you even doing out there anyway?”

  He took a breath, then cocked his head in confusion. “I had orders.”

  “What orders,” she said flatly.

  “Uh, well, to go to Terroneous and pick up Jack Jackson, the fugitive.”

  “Sergeant McManus,” Pattenbird said with a wave of her hand. “What is ModPol jurisdiction on Terroneous, moon of Barnard-5?”

  He swallowed. “ModPol has no jurisdiction on—”

  “ModPol has no jurisdiction on Terroneous, moon of Barnard-5,” she said, once again slapping the table. “So tell me again, what orders?”

  McManus felt the sweat gathering under his arms. This particular reaming had been going on for almost twenty minutes. He didn’t even have a chance to shower or change since landing at Outpost Delta and warping over to Outpost Gamma. He hadn’t eaten except for rations back on the paddy-wagon. He sure as hell hadn’t accepted food or any other accommodations from Runstom and his goddamn fancy-ass OrbitBurner.

  This wasn’t the first reaming of his career. Normally his mode of operation was to figure out whether the shit could roll uphill or downhill. Downhill was easiest, but he’d had such a sparse outfit and they were all too close to him to throw to the wolves. Except Katsumi. With the flight recordings lost along with the ship, he might be able to pin something on her. But the reality was, she was the only pilot he had under his thumb – and only barely so. And in fact she had done a damn fine bit of flying with that bloated space-tank.

  Uphill was a no-go. He’d gotten the orders top-secret-like, direct from a terminal. He’d verified their authenticity, but there was no trail to the commander that logged them.

  The only thing he knew for certain – maybe – was that he’d been identified specifically for the mission. He’d gotten the pre-order to check the mission computer, with a directive to follow security protocol: no one else should retrieve it but him. And he followed protocol. He did his job. Almost to completion. Almost.

  With nowhere for the shit to roll, he’d have to take it himself. “There were secure orders,” he said. “They may no longer be accessible. I accept responsibility for the loss of the transport.”

  “And the prisoner?”

  He considered his answer for a moment. “No orders, no prisoner.”

  She stared at him long and hard, then swapped folders around on the table in front of her. “Since you’re so interested in prisoner transportation, I’ve got another mission for you.”

  He did what he could to douse the growing fire in his chest. “Yes, Chief.”

  “Space Waste attacked an interstellar transport coming out of Xarp in Epsilon Eridani. One of our supply ships.”

  “Coming out of Xarp? How’d they manage that?”

  She glared at him and he shrugged and waited for her to continue. “Defense was able to scramble a counter-force and rescue the transport. They took several prisoners. Now, you know Defense: they don’t want prisoners. Especially Space Waste. Space Waste prisoners are like a pot of honey, just asking to get swarmed. I don’t have to remind you that half the problem with Wasters is that they keep breaking each other out of prison.”

  “So Justice offered to give Defense a hand,” McManus guessed.

  “That’s right,” Pattenbird said. “So we need to go out there and pick them up. Bring them back to Barnard to the new zero-G maxi.”

  “When?”

  “Now. More or less. And there’s a lot of them. We’re going to use the interstellar prison barge. As you know, we haven’t used the barge since last year.”

  “Yeah,” McManus said softly. It’d been out of commission since Space Waste tore it apart to break out some of their comrades. ModPol had lost a lot of personnel that day. He was still saddened from time to time about not having George Halsey to kick around anymore.

  “It’s been rebuilt and reinforced, and now it’s time to bring it back into commission. Now since we don’t want a repeat of what happened the last time we used her, we’re stacking her up with triple guard personnel.”

  McManus nodded. A chance to bring some Space Waste scum across the galaxy to slam them into zero-G prison sounded like a vacation. And better yet, he’d be leading an army of guards. “So do you need me to help identify personnel?”

  Chief Pattenbird gave him a wicked grin, one that made his skin crawl. “You think after all of your fuckups, you’re going to lead the guard? I’m busting your ass down for this mission.”

  “Wait, what?” he blurted. “I’m a guard? But I’m a sergeant!”

  “And if you want to stay one, you’re going to do some time.” She leaned over the table and practically growled at him. “And these motherfuckers are nasty. The worst of the worst of Space Waste. You better make sure you get your shots – and I don’t mean that as a euphemism. Get inoculated, because you don’t know where these sick fucks have been and they will bite.”

  He swallowed down the gag in his throat. “Yes, Chief.”

  “Glad we have an understanding.” She stood and he started to get up but she put a hand out. “You’re not dismissed yet,” she said in a low voice.

  And then she left. He turned his head and watched her leave the small, dark conference room. “What the hell?” he murmured to himself. Where did she go? He wasn’t dismissed?

  He turned around and stared at the blank wall. Absentmindedly glanced at the corners, looking for recording devices. An old habit, and useless: anything like that these days would be too small to see or protected by a cloak.

  That’s when he noticed the shimmer in the opposite wall. The room was so dimly lit, he was tempted to blame it on his eyes. But something in the air made him feel like he wasn’t alone.

  “Uh, hello?” he said. He felt dumb, but he’d feel dumber if there was someone there watching him twiddle his thumbs.

  The wall shimmered for sure then, and a silhouette began to take shape. Then it was a shadow, and then it was a man.

  McManus stood with a jolt. He didn’t raise his hands, but his arms tensed. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Really now, Sergeant McManus.” The man was tall and toned under the tight-fitting chamel-suit, now deactivated into a muted gray. He pulled back the hood to reveal red skin and a hairless head. “I don’t go through the trouble of hiding in dark corners just to give my name to every asshole who asks for it.”

  “W-what?”

  He came around the table and got closer to McManus. “No, I won’t give you my name. But since we’re having a conversation, you’ll need something to call me.” He looked up and snapped his fingers, as if an idea just occurred to him. “I’ve got it – just call me X.”

  “X.” McManus’s eyes narrowed as he looked into the red-faced man’s eyes. He searched his memory, but he’d never seen the man before.

  “Yes. You’ve heard that pseudonym before, haven’t you.”

  “Yes.” Though what he’d heard wasn’t much. R
umblings in the corners of the dankest cop bars. A man who played all sides, who had a hand in every pie and a taste of every take. A man who didn’t get crossed. Except. “Right, X. I heard a rumor that you were connected to the B-4 murders,” he said firmly, unwilling to be unnerved by some chump in a chamel-suit.

  “Connected.” He seemed to consider the word, then nodded slowly. “I suppose we’re all connected, aren’t we, Sergeant? In fact, I’ve heard a fair share of rumors about you.”

  McManus scowled. This X could be bluffing, but probably not. McManus had definitely taken his take when the opportunities had presented themselves. Individual incidents that were too small for concern. But enough of them added up – well, he tried not to think about it. He was just doing what most of the rest of ModPol did.

  “Wait,” he said. “You gave the order to pick up Jackson.”

  X smiled. “Yes.” The smile flattened into anger. “And you failed to bring him in.”

  He threw his hands up. “Again with this. I was attacked by fucking Space Waste!” He jabbed a finger into the other man’s chest. “And you’re hiding in the corner while the chief reams my ass for it, telling me there was no order. What the fuck?”

  There was a cold, almost wet feeling under McManus’s chin. Then it sank in: it was hard, almost sharp. It was the barrel of a tiny pistol, and X held it there. He hadn’t seen the move, some kind of sleight of hand, but there was no denying its sudden presence. He pulled his finger back and lowered his hand and tried not to swallow.

  And then it was gone. Back into whatever fold it had come out of, X calmly staring him in the eyes, hands across his chest. “I chose you for a reason, Sergeant. It’s not because of all the dirt I have on your ass. I have dirt on everyone. You, I chose you because you got the shit end of the deal when that sonovabitch Stanford Runstom chased a case that should have been done and dead.”