by Dan Thompson
The next punch indeed came higher, right below the shoulder blade. His knees buckled again, and his face slammed against the side of the cage, but he managed to find enough breath to gasp, “Yeah, that’s the spot.”
“Fuck!” Perry shouted. “Fuck you both!”
The punch came again, and Dieter managed to laugh along with Winner.
Elsa scrubbed the blood off the side of her neck. Her arm was stained with it, and the bustier was a total loss, but those would be covered by the rest of her uniform. She checked her reflection in the mirror over the wet bar. She was still a mess, but a presentable mess. Either way, she looked a hell of a lot better than Captain Gallows with the top part of his head spread across the ceiling and wall like paint.
She pulled on her shirt and jacket and buttoned them up. The intercom switch was on the desk. She reached across to it rather than step too close to the body again. Blood was starting to drip from the ceiling.
“First Officer to the Captain’s ready room,” she said.
Stepping back from the desk, she assumed a commanding pose, feet apart and hands behind her back.
The door opened. “Logan says we’re …” Celeste Davies trailed off.
“Close the door.”
“What the hell happened in here?”
“Close the door. That’s an order.”
Davies shuddered but complied. When she turned back from the door, Elsa had taken a step closer. That kind of thing always unsettled the junior officers, and it had precisely the desired effect on Davies. She looked back and forth between Elsa and the captain.
“You had a question?” Elsa asked, her gaze steady on Davies.
“Yes, ma’am. I wanted to know what happened to the captain.”
“What does it look like happened?”
They both turned. The gun was still loose in Gallows’s grip, his hand holding it across his chest at an odd angle. Elsa knew a close examination of the body would also show the wound to the back, but she was going to make sure that never happened.
“It umm ...” Davies shook her head. “It would appear that he shot himself, ma’am. Is that what you meant when you said he would yield?”
Elsa shrugged. “I did not expect it to be quite so bloody, but Father Chessman and I have no tolerance for disobedience. Once I made the penalties clear to him, he opted for the easier solution.”
Davies turned to glare at her. “Easier solution? I’m surprised he didn’t simply shoot you.”
Elsa chuckled. “Killing me wouldn’t have saved him from a slow and painful execution. It would have only ensured that he witnessed the same for his sister and nephews first.”
“His sister?”
“Margaret Arnault, widow. She works the shipyards on Pinot’s Hammer, where she lives with two sons, aged nine and fourteen.”
Davies turned back to look at Gallows’s body. “I never knew.”
“I’m sure he thought we didn’t know either, but he was sloppy.”
“Would you have really?”
Elsa turned and put a hand on Davies’ shoulder. “No, I wouldn’t have, not by choice. But when Father Chessman gives an order ...”
Davies nodded. “You follow it.”
“Good.”
“What now, then? I mean, what are your orders, my Lady?”
“That’s the proper response. The Sophie’s Grace is now thirty-six hours overdue. That’s too long for a simple weather delay. We’re going to leave a coded message for them with the automated systems here and then start backtracking their course on a search pattern.”
Davies blinked twice. “Excuse me, ma’am, but we’re going to search open space?”
Elsa shook her head. “No, not open space. We’re going to search a very specific region. I know when they planned the hijacking, the position they would have been at when they turned toward us, and from that we have their planned course. We merely need to backtrack on that course with a spiraling helix search pattern. We must find that ship.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Elsa spared a brief glance back to Gallows. “Father Chessman’s instructions were explicit on that point. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you have your orders.”
“Come on, Carlos, it’s been three hours.” Michael leaned close to the hole beneath the sink. “How long is this going to take?”
“It’s not as simple as you’d think, Skipper.”
Michael shook his head. “Considering how bad everyone made my navigation mistakes sound, I’d have thought it would happen almost on automatic.”
Carlos sighed. “Maybe on one of those big multi-sail ships, but the Sophie’s got one tight little sail, and in a half-sail configuration, it’s pretty damn stable.”
“But you said we had weather. You know, real weather.”
“It’s not like I haven’t tried,” he grumbled. “Look, it’s one thing when I’m setting up some simulation in advance that only has to present him with a navigation problem to steer around. This is different. I have to push him in a specific direction on short notice.”
“Yeah, so you said you made some fake winds ready to fake him out with.”
“Four of them, sir, only four, and after three attempts, none of them have been in quite the right spot. The second one was close, but the others didn’t put him against the wind much at all. I need to get him to turn to port when he should go starboard. So far all I’ve done is made him turn to port when he should have banked down.”
“But we only have two hours left by your estimate.”
“That’s the low end. It might be as far as six.”
Michael shook his head. “And I’m still no closer on the door.”
“Is it still in mode six-eight?”
Michael stood and went back to the entrails of the door’s controls. Carlos’s little device was blinking at him. He looked at the display. “Error 8A,” he said.
“Check the contacts again. One of them is probably loose.”
He ran his hands through the tangle of wires and found one of the little metal clips dangling loose. “Yeah, it’s the yellow one. Where does that one hook up again?”
“It’s the… wait.”
“What?” Michael turned to look back through the bathroom. Carlos’s face was there, visible between the pipes, but he was looking at his pad. “You’ve got something?”
“I’m pushing him starboard this time, and it looks… damn.”
“We missed again?”
“No … shit, this is bigger than I expected.”
“How big?”
“Grab something!”
“What?”
“Grab something now!”
Chapter 28
“They always say it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it can get any worse.” -- Peter Schneider
DIETER SAGGED FORWARD against the side of the passenger-cargo cage, his weight mostly supported by the cuffs on his wrists. The actual kicks to his knees and ankles did not hurt so much as did putting weight on them afterwards. He looked down at Winner, but only with his right eye. His left was swollen mostly shut.
“How you doing, champ?” she asked.
“Yeah, champ,” Perry chimed in, slamming a fist into Dieter’s ribs again. “I bet some of these are broken by now.”
He gave a small whimper and took as deep a breath as he dared. “My back … pretty good now.” He tried to smile and tasted blood in his mouth. “Could go for a foot rub. Maybe a … pedicure, you know.”
Winner nodded to him, but she was no longer smiling. “Sounds good, champ, but don’t get the nails colored. It’s not your style.”
“Dunno,” he replied. “I hear … it’s the new thing.”
Perry kicked at the cage again. “You want your nails done? Fine … where did I put those pliers?”
Dieter cringed as much as his body would let him, but he never had to face that. Instead, he w
as suddenly pulled away from the cage, completely off the deck, and then slammed back down against both. He heard Perry crying out against the background of creaking metal and bone-deep, grinding vibration. Sparks flew from somewhere overhead, and he heard a klaxon sound. Somewhere beneath it all, he heard a low-pitched whine resolve down into a repeating thump and then nothing.
It was Winner who spoke first. “What the hell?”
Dieter smiled for real this time. “Sails,” he said. “Fucked ’em worse than I thought.”
“Good for you,” she replied. “You did a fine job.”
Somewhere in the distance, he heard Perry calling. “Nick? What happened? You all right back there? Nick?”
Dieter chuckled but regretted it immediately. The pain in his ribs was too intense.
“What?” Winner asked.
“If what I think happened …” he paused and struggled to his feet again. It was worth the pain to breathe again. “Two down, two to go.”
Winner nodded. “Awesome. Should we leave any for the others, or can I go again?”
Dieter coughed, blood splattering against the mesh of the cage. “Think it’s pretty much first come, first served.”
“Then let’s get back in line, champ. I don’t want to get stuck with leftovers.”
Michael crawled back across to the door’s panel. His ankle hurt too much to stand on it. He could hardly believe it, but he thought he might have sprained it when he momentarily landed on the ceiling during the violent down-tach. Carlos was groaning in his cabin, his body visible in the distance through the hole beneath the sink.
“You all right in there?”
A grunt was the only reply.
“All right. I’m pretty sure we’re stopped now.”
“Good guess, Skipper.”
“Then back to the lockpicking?”
Carlos grunted again. Michael took that as a yes and checked the connections between the lockpicker and the entrails of his door panel. The red and green clips had come off entirely, but at least he remembered where they had been attached. He picked up the yellow clip again and made a guess at where it had been connected before. He looked at the little lock-scanning gadget and cleared the error. “Restart Mode 6?” it prompted him. He clicked yes.
Sagging back against the wall, he looked back toward the intercom. “Hope that hurt, Richard. I hope it hurt bad.”
Perry and Stefan met in the medical bay. What was left of Nick’s body lay on the table between them.
“At least I don’t think it could have hurt much,” Perry said. “It happened too fast.”
“And the sail generator?”
Perry shrugged. “It’s not destroyed or anything, but one of the mounts is cracked, and the polarization filter took a beating as it spun down.”
“Can you realign it?”
“In theory.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s possible to do this kind of repair in the field. It wouldn’t be a hundred percent, but it would be enough to get back to quarter-sail, maybe even half.”
“Then what’s the problem? Do we need another hand?”
“No, the two of us could probably do it. It would take us most of the day, but we can’t calibrate it.”
“Calibrate? What’s stopping you?”
“It’s that damn engineering panel. Sure, we could operate the sail from the control panel on top of the generator, but we can’t do any diagnostics. Without that, all we can do is guess at the alignment, spin it up and try to engage. If we guessed right, we’re in business. But if we guess wrong …”
“Let me guess, we end up like Nick.”
Perry nodded with a grimace.
Stefan leaned forward against the table. “Then we’d better guess right.”
Perry shook his head. “Too many variables. Even if it was only thrown off a few degrees, we don’t know which direction, and you know the tachyon capture math even better than I do. Four axes to deal with, and that filter needs to be within a degree to even put up a quarter-sail.”
Stefan frowned. “So, plus or minus 5 degrees, four directions, that’s…”
“Yeah, whatever. It’s a lot, so you can guess if you want, but I’m not going to be the one up there throwing the switch.”
Stefan turned to the side and paced the small room. “And we were so damn close.”
“How close?”
“Half a light-year. Close enough to see it, but not close enough to be seen.”
“Would they even be looking?”
Stefan nodded. “Our Lady told me that she had strict orders from Father Chessman himself to intercept this ship. As late as we are, they might already be looking for us.”
“I suppose I could rig some kind of tachyon-pulse distress call. I doubt it would be readable past a few light-hours, but I bet they could detect it ten or fifteen light-days away.”
“It’s worth a shot, but what we really need are those damned routing boxes.”
Perry shook his head. “It’s not like I haven’t been trying. I’ve been working your musician for hours, and he hasn’t budged.”
“You’re giving up?”
“Hell, no. I can keep this up for days, even with that bitch distracting me.”
Stefan glared at Perry in disbelief. “Wait, you mean she’s awake?”
“Yeah, and she’s got a mouth as sharp as her knives.”
Stefan shook his head. “You idiot. I thought you were a professional at this, but you’re telling me that you’ve been torturing him in front of a sympathetic audience?”
“So what? It’s not like she can do anything for him.”
Stefan sighed. “He’s a musician, a performer. Give him an audience, and he’ll last forever.”
“No one lasts forever.”
“He’ll last longer than we have.” Stefan stood. “No, it’s time to deprive him of an audience, now and forever.”
Commander Collins reported to the admiral in the same private room in the officers’ lounge they had used before. “I’m sorry, sir.”
The admiral waved it off. “I read your report. It was good field work.” He poured a glass for Collins. “Still, some days you get the dog, and some days the dog gets you.”
“I almost ran into the Fletcher boy.”
“I saw that. He had left Cenita a few days before you arrived. Full Guild membership. That was a nice turn.”
“Yes, and according to his passenger schedule, he was making his way here.”
“I saw that as well. He should be here any day now. You two can have a proper reunion.”
Collins took a sip of the scotch. “Still, it’s not the reunion I was hoping for.”
The admiral chuckled. “There will be other days, Commander. You’ll have Bishop’s hide eventually. I have every confidence in that.”
Collins grumbled but hid it behind the glass. After being made the fool at Cenita, he was not so sure.
Dieter heard two pairs of boots coming down the ladder behind him. That meant they were both here. Whatever remnants of Nick that had been carried out before were not coming back in this lifetime. One of them walked right on past Dieter and Winner and went back to the sail generator. He did not see the point of that. Without the control panel, they did not have any real hope of—
“It’s nice to see you doing so well, Dieter.” The voice was behind him, but he knew who it was.
“Fuck you, Richard.”
The man laughed behind him. “You know, normally I don’t care that much about names, but for this, I’d like you to know just who you’re dealing with.”
“Yeah, a dick,” Winner jeered.
He sighed. “Yes, very funny, but the name is Stefan.”
Dieter shrugged as well as he could. “Bill, Jimmy, Stefan … it doesn’t change a thing.”
A hand slapped down on Dieter’s shoulder as Stefan stepped into view. “Such a brave performance, Dieter.”
Dieter tried to spit in his face but missed.
&
nbsp; “And you know all about performing, don’t you, Dieter.”
“Not that you’d ever know,” he said.
“Oh, but I do know. Richard, the loyal first officer, that was a performance, and you were my audience.” Stefan stepped away toward the aft end of the cargo cage. “And that’s what you’ve been doing, performing to an audience.”
“Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.”
“Ah, but I’m not your audience,” Stefan replied and started to punch the code into the lock. “She is.”
“So?”
“So I’m going to take away your audience.”
“No!” Dieter cried. “She doesn’t know anything.”
Stefan shrugged. “I don’t really care.” He punched the code into the cage’s lock. “Unless you want to tell me where those routing boxes are.”
Dieter clenched his teeth.
The lock beeped and opened.
“Wait!” Dieter cried out.
“No!” Winner shouted back at him. “If you tell them anything, Dieter, I will feed you your own testicles.”
“Ha! Now that’s the spirit!” Stefan shouted with a laugh, stepping through the door. “I’m going to have fun with this.”
“Bring it!” Winner shouted.
“Oh, I intend to,” Stefan replied, raising his booted foot high before crashing it down on her left collar bone.
Winner cried out in pain as bone snapped, but she cut it off short and raised her head again. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“Oh, we’re just getting started.”
Dieter saw that Perry had returned and was standing on the opposite side of the cage behind Winner.
“Hoist her up,” Stefan ordered, and Perry complied, pulling on the straps that cut across her chest.
She came up from her knees but could not get her feet under her. Her breathing came fast and hard as the position pulled her left collarbone into a bad angle. She tried to speak but only managed a grunt.
Stefan laughed and pulled something shiny from his pocket. As he slid it over his fingers, Dieter recognized what it was, some kind of brass knuckles, but polished steel with short sharpened spikes. Stefan put a second set on his other hand and held them up to Winner to see.
