Rebel Stars 1: Outlaw

by Edward W. Robertson

  "We're matter. Nothing more. When the electrical charges quit firing between the billions of networked neurons that comprise my brain, then the simulacrum of consciousness known as Simmon Andrels will cease to exist. He will never exist again. The wants of that lost simulacrum will no longer be relevant."

  A point of light appeared from the darkness. The Tine. Rada tried to wipe her eyes, but her faceplate got in the way. "So what do you want that matter to be a part of when you're no longer Simm? A star? An ocean of methane? A core of molten rock? The Simm I know might be gone, but you can still exist as a piece of something greater. Can't you?"

  He was quiet for a long moment. "An icy mountain. Somewhere clear and bracing. Wise men always live on mountains, don't they?"

  "And you will, too."

  "Just make sure it's hard to get to. I don't want a bunch of neighbors coming around to sell me cookies and raffle tickets."

  She laughed, dislodging tears. "Can you be wrong about this? For once, please, just be wrong?"

  "I'll try." He went silent again, but she could hear his breathing.

  Oddly, she couldn't hear the familiar hum of the Tine. She called up the ship on her device. It was unpressurized, breached in multiple locations. The ship estimated it would take five-plus hours for it to seal the holes on its own. That timeline was irrelevant, however, as the life support was completely shot.

  She called up the box's long-range scans—they were clunky and crude, but they'd be capable of recognizing if the UFO came back—and started to do some math.

  "Hey," Simm said. "Thank you for knowing me."

  She snapped up her gaze. "No. Don't you dare."

  "I know that I'm not very flashy or sexy. I appreciate that you wanted to be with me anyway."

  "People put on flash to distract you from their lack of substance. You might not have glitz, but you've got too much you to miss. And right now, I need you to hold on." The line remained open, but she could no longer hear his breathing. "Simm?"

  Silence. Silence; silence; then: "I love you, Rada."

  The moving star grew brighter. According to her device, the Tine was only two minutes out. "Hang on, Simm! You're so close!"

  He didn't reply. She tried to check his vitals through his suit, but there was nothing left to check.

  On the hull of the Fourth Down, she sat, wrapped her arms around her knees, and closed her eyes. She could feel the survivors walking nearby, vibrating the surface, but no one spoke to her. She envisioned removing her helmet. It didn't seem like such a bad idea. Her device warbled, informing her the Tine was in position above.

  "Um," Webber said. "Ma'am? Your ship is here."

  She didn't reply.

  "I don't mean to…interrupt. But our oxygen's getting short. And if that stranger returns, I'd prefer to be gone, know what I mean?"

  Rada looked up, found his eyes. "There's no point."

  Webber shifted his gaze side to side. "In leaving? I'd beg to differ."

  "Beg all you want. Want won't change facts."

  "Your ship's pretty shot up. You just lost someone, didn't you? I'm sorry. I am. We've lost people, too. They gave their lives to try to hoist our sorry asses out of here. If you want to sit here, that's your call. But can you at least loan us your ship?"

  "My ship won't do you any good," Rada said. "Its life support is trashed. It lost atmo. My suit's only good for a few hours. The box has a few more, but that won't go far split five ways."

  "Oh," Webber said. "Shit."

  "My new plan is to take a seat and put up my middle finger."

  He sat down beside her. Given the lack of gravity, it didn't take any pressure off the joints, but there was something comforting about sitting.

  "Who are you, anyway?" he said.

  "My name is Rada Pence. I almost knew your mom."

  He lowered his voice—ridiculous, since they were on a private channel. "I don't know what you mean. My mom's been dead for years."

  She waved a hand. "Forget it. Forgive me if this is too personal, but would you rather die when your suits run out of air? Or would you prefer to climb into the box and prolong things another hour?"

  "Thanks for the offer," he said. "But I think we'll make our last countdown in the shuttle. We won't get far, but—" His eyes went wide. "Hey, this is no big deal. But I just figured out how to save our lives."

  She wanted to not care. To remain drowned in the molasses of her apathy. With anyone else, she might have—but the look in his eye told her that she had the option to go on. To squeeze some meaning from this bitter rind. If only she could bring herself to stand up.

  Rada got to her feet. "What've you got?"

  Webber stood, grinning. "You ever see a flick called Frankenstein?"

  18

  It was, in his modest opinion, the kind of idea that deserved songs written to it. To it, and to the person who'd had it.

  They went to work.

  Rada took the box up to the Tine. Taz helped Lara to the shuttle. MacAdams and Webber climbed back inside what was left of the Fourth, opened up the hold's main storage, and gathered all the welding equipment into a big floating mass.

  Outside, Lara had the shuttle parked over the nose of the Tine. The box was waiting for them. Webber and MacAdams loaded up, climbed inside, and were deposited beside the two ships. Webber fired up the torch and made the first weld, painstakingly slagging one of the shuttle's skids to the nose of the Tine.

  MacAdams grunted. "Don't have to be perfect."

  Webber glanced up. "It has to get us there."

  "You know, maybe we should shoot for perfect."

  It wasn't. It was a nail-biting, heart-jarring mess of scrap, solder, and prayers. Webber knew that if the UFO returned, the Tine's sensors would pick it up long before his eyes, but whenever he could afford to look away from the weld, he glanced up at the stars. Rada peppered him with questions about what they'd been doing here. He answered without reservations, beyond care. Halfway through the job, Taz showed up with more scrap looted from the wreck of the Specter.

  With her help, and that of the Tine's autonomous repair units, they had the two ships lashed together within four hours. The Tine would do the heavy lifting, rocketing them away to the nearest habitat. The shuttle would be nothing more than a bubble of air that would, with any luck, sustain them through the journey. To Webber's eye, it looked beyond frail. Like an orange stuck to an apple by a handful of skewed toothpicks.

  The repair units returned to their mother. The crew piled into the shuttle's cramped airlock and headed for the main cabin. Rada and Lara were already there. Lara's broken legs were packed into a heap of cushions and foam. Webber buckled in.

  "If you believe in anything," Rada said, "now's the time to ask it for aid."

  She had installed her device in the arm of the shuttle's chair. She gestured over it. Scant acceleration lowered Webber into his seat. Most of the shuttle's displays were dedicated to shots of the struts and welds holding the two ships together. Although Webber stared at them so intently they could have been melted by the heat of his gaze, the connections held.

  With the wreck of the three ships fading behind them, and the acceleration steady, Rada eased back in her chair. "If you need to cry, now's the time. Just keep it under five minutes."

  MacAdams chuckled. "You always run your ship this tight?"

  Rada tried to grin and failed. "I wish I were kidding. We can't accelerate at anything near normal. Not unless we want to tear ourselves loose from our engines. Deceleration will be equally slow. This shuttle wasn't built to handle starship ranges. Oxygen is going to be very, very tight. Can't afford to waste it crying."

  "What about calling in a rescue?" Lara said.

  "I don't want to risk any transmissions until we're out of here and up to speed. At that point, I'll try a Needle."

  "Can't count on anyone to help us," Webber said. "There's nothing in it for them."

  "Damn right," Taz seconded.

  Rada called their posi
tion up on screen: an orange speck surrounded by an ocean of black. "At our current course and acceleration, we'll reach Hoeffel Station in 31 hours. At our current rate of consumption, we'll suffocate in 38 hours. So please—no exercise, no panic attacks, and definitely no post-disaster athletic sex."

  "You want me to wait 31 hours?" Taz said. "Better call another emergency ahead to Hoeffel. 'Cause once I get there, they are gonna get crushed."

  Everyone laughed, welcome for the opportunity to vent a little steam.

  Once they settled down, Webber caught Rada's eye. "Now that we're away from immediate threat of death, you mind answering a few questions? Like who you are and what the hell you're doing here?"

  "What, you're going to test a gift blade on your thumb?" she said dryly. "Like I told you, I've been searching for you for a long time. It was dumb luck I found you before you got ashed. As for why you? We might want to have that conversation in private."

  "I don't have anything to hide."

  "It's not about you. It's about a kid named Pip."

  Webber's mind hit a brick wall and slowly slid down it. "Did you say Pip?"

  Rada nodded once. "Get me?"

  "I do," Webber said. "And it's okay."

  "You're sure of this?"

  "The only reason I'm alive is because of these people. They deserve to know why we went through what happened back there."

  "I doubt if I can explain all that," Rada said. "But I can fill in some gaps. Your mother. Jain Kayle. Have you heard?"

  "Heard what? I no longer have any ties to that name."

  "She's dead. I'm sorry."

  She stated this so factually Webber thought he'd misheard. He had imagined hearing this news before, as much out of spite as from the chance her murky business would some day get her killed. During these flights of fancy, he had imagined himself to be stoic, vaguely sad, yet ultimately untroubled. Not only because everyone had seen this coming from miles away. But because she had alienated all those who should care most.

  Hearing the news for real, however, he found himself unable to speak for three full seconds. "What happened?"

  Rada told him about the meeting that had never taken place. About how she and Simm, her deceased partner, had investigated, following the trail to Dinah, and then, through a combination of hunches and full-on data-hounding wizardry, uncovering the fact he'd faked his death. And, finally, had dislodged his name from Winslowe.

  "Okay," he said, although it wasn't really okay at all. "Why are you looking for me in the first place?"

  "Before your mother died, she sent me a message. One that only you could decode: 'Hey Pip: when the rabbit sees a shadow, where can he go?'"

  "I see." Every eye in the cabin was fixed on him. "What do you think it means?"

  Rada spread her palms. "I was hoping you could tell me that. I'd say there's a strong chance it's related to the fight that went down over the Specter."

  "How you figure that?" MacAdams said.

  "The ship that killed Jain—it was the same ship that showed up here. That killed Simm."

  There had been a lot of pregnant pauses in Webber's life lately, but this one was as total as the vacuum.

  "My mom's message," he said. "It's a set of directions."

  Rada's eyes snapped to his. "To what?"

  He took a shaky breath. "I can't not follow this. Somebody killed my mom. The rest of you, though, you can walk away. So here's the big question: do any of you intend to come with us?"

  Taz stared at him. "Who are you, really? What did you know about what was going to happen out there?"

  "I had no idea about any of this. I've been cut off from that life for years."

  "Then it's a pretty big coincidence that you wind up on the pirate barge destined to collide with your mom's ass-crazy conspiracy."

  "It's less of a coincidence than it sounds," Webber said. "Gomes was after the biggest score she could land. And so was my mom."

  Taz pressed her lips together, then sighed. "Yeah, I'm out. Even if everything's like you say, it's like you say. I don't have any ties to this."

  "I'm in," Lara said. "For Gomes' sake. She pulled me out of a bad place. Without her, I'd be long dead. I owe it to her to find out why she had to die."

  MacAdams narrowed his eyes. "I'm in, too."

  "Huh?" Taz whirled on him. "What do you care? We were in this for the cash, nothing more."

  "And that 'nothing more' is why I ain't been happy with my life for years and years. This? This sounds like the chance to do something that means something."

  "I don't know about that," Webber said. "But I do know where we're headed next."

  Rada leaned so far forward in her chair she was apt to fall from her straps. "Tell me the course."

  He shook his head. "Let's land first. Give everyone the chance to make sure they've made the right decision. Once we're patched up and off the station? I'll tell you exactly where to go."

  ~

  Rada maintained comm silence another twelve hours, then sent a Needle to Hoeffel. They offered to deliver emergency supplies at emergency rates. She informed them that she was just fine, thank you, but would let them know if circumstances changed.

  With a backup solution to the oxygen problem in place, MacAdams and Taz took one look at each other and retired to the cargo hold. Webber didn't know if it was spurred by the residual "Holy shit we made it" of the battle or by their impending breakup. All he knew was that it was the loudest sex he'd ever heard.

  A few hours later, he woke to zero gravity and the sound of metal groans. The cabin was dark, lit only by displays. The ship was flipping around in preparation for its deceleration. It righted itself and braked, gravity returning.

  One of the struts connecting the shuttle to the Tine popped like dry spaghetti. Webber's heart leapt from low anxiety to warp nine. Rada eased back, then braked again. The other struts held. The crew let out its breath in collective relief.

  "That must have been one of yours," MacAdams said.

  Webber swore. "Bet you two hundred it's got your fingerprints all over it."

  "Deal. Now pay up."

  "We haven't even landed yet!"

  MacAdams waggled his hand. "When we installed those, we were all suited up. How many prints you think I left through my gloves?"

  Webber rolled his eyes. Losing the bet was the worst that happened to him the rest of the trip to Hoeffel, however. Which turned out to be a standard ring spinning at low gravity in the middle of nowhere. It had once been a safe haven leading deeper into the Outer, but since the introduction of the Lanes, it had diminished. For a time, it looked like it might shrink to nothing. Eventually, however, its slow, easy lifestyle had become a draw, bringing in a trickle of people looking to escape the faster pace elsewhere without having to isolate themselves inside a tiny rock in the Belt.

  Most of the ring's circumference was dark, uninhabited, with one main inhabited cluster and several smaller ones dispersed around its curve. Webber was skeptical it would have the facilities to repair the ship, but Rada assured him she'd called ahead and arranged everything. They'd hardly landed when a full brigade of suited mechanics jogged onto the landing pad. The foreman stopped to talk with Rada while the others went straight to work. Rada concluded the conversation and joined the crew inside the terminal.

  "They're an unusually enthusiastic bunch," Webber said.

  "Money is rocket fuel for enthusiasm." She smiled. "Did I neglect to mention my boss is Toman Benez?"

  She put them up in a pair of apartments in a quiet part of town. Not that that narrowed things down; in Hoeffel, everything was quiet. Jons would have stuck out like a corpse on the steps of a church.

  With this thought, Webber went to the window and gazed down on the rock garden in the square. Removed from the battle by two days and millions of miles, it felt like a movie, a news clip, some college kid's graphic arts thesis. Yet it also felt as though it was still happening, that he was at that very moment frantically stuffing washers and bolts i
nto the airlock, or staring frozen at a screen while the green dot of a missile grew inexorably closer.

  At night, he dreamed about the marines landing on the hull of the Fourth Down. Gomes and Jons were there, and they tried to raise their guns but couldn't. They couldn't even scream. The marines opened fire. Gomes and Jons juddered with the impact and were knocked from the hull. At once, they were somehow flash-frozen, their stiff bodies spinning away from the ship, faces hoary with frost.

  He didn't see much of Rada. When he did, she looked distant, haunted, as if she were paging through photographs of a childhood she refused to tell stories about.

  Lara was sent to the hospital, where the treatment would have her back on her feet by the same time the port crew had the Tine back on its fins. Webber visited some. She slept a lot. When she woke, sometimes they said nothing. Other times, they reminisced, or she asked him about his old life, how it felt to have started over so completely.

  When he was alone, that's when he got angry. With no other routes open to him, he spent his nights swiping around the net, hunting for pictures or rumors of the UFO. He found a thousand leads, but none felt right.

  Four days after reaching Hoeffel, Webber woke and found MacAdams on the balcony, gazing out at the tepid street.

  "Taz left," the big marine said. "She waited to tell me she had a ride until after they'd sealed the doors."

  "You guys in love?" Webber said.

  "No." MacAdams rubbed his jaw. "No, nothing like that. But I would have liked to see her before she left."

  "It never goes the way it should, does it? It's always less than. Disappointment. Heartbreak. Maybe the problem isn't with the world, but in ourselves."

  "Always wanting more than we can expect to get? Bet you're right."

  "I'd say we should be happy with anything that isn't outright disaster," Webber said. "Because usually, it's a bigger mess than vomiting in zero G."

  MacAdams laughed. "I think I'm checking out of this conversation."

  "The two of you were good, though, right? For a while?"

  "We sure were."

  "Then what more can you ask?"