Shattered Lamps (Osprey Chronicles Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  Jaeger never knew what to do with Occy when it came time to discuss strategy. On the one hand, The Tribes had carefully designed the octopus-human mutant to be a deadly tool, a weapon of war. He had been grown in a tube, with military and advanced science training programs downloaded directly into his brain in lieu of a normal, healthy childhood. He was, quite possibly, the most brilliant engineer Jaeger had ever met.

  On the other hand, he was an eight-year-old boy.

  She felt like that should count for something.

  “I need some time to unwind,” she decided finally. “Twelve hours in a cockpit is exhausting.”

  Occy blinked up at her, his long lashes fluttering, the corners of his mouth tugging into a pout.

  Jaeger turned away sharply. The kid had been practicing his puppy-dog look over the last few months, and he was getting damned good at it. Too good. A few minutes under that angelic gaze and Jaeger could see herself selling Manhattan Island for a couple of shells and beads.

  “Shoo,” she said brusquely. “We’ll meet in the command lounge at nineteen hundred hours for debriefing. Then movie night.” She started the long trek out of the docking bay, patting Occy on the head as she passed.

  “Monsters?”

  “Fine,” she nodded. “We’ll watch Monsters. Again.”

  Satisfied, Occy towed himself down the corridor, zipping ahead of them, his tentacles a blur of whirring motion. He turned up a side juncture and vanished.

  “It was my turn to pick the movie,” Toner grumbled.

  “There will be no Girls Gone Wild marathons.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m not that kind of monster. I like wholesome family entertainment, too.”

  She gave him a side-eye. “Oh yeah? What movie did you want to watch?”

  Toner grinned, exposing a double row of shark teeth. “Jaws.”

  Jaeger and Toner turned up the juncture toward the central column, Baby bobbing along behind them. The big tardigrade stopped as they stepped past the threshold into the rotating column. Jaeger turned back to her. “What’s up, babydoll? I thought we trained you out of this. You can come inside the house.”

  Baby only stared at her, face-hole faintly puckered.

  “You didn’t train her out of anything,” Toner grumbled. “She trained you.”

  Jaeger smiled tiredly and fished in her pocket for a few old raisins. She offered them to the tardigrade, and Baby bobbed forward, happily vacuuming up the treats as the juncture door slid shut behind them.

  Now back in the embrace of the grav-spin engines, Jaeger, Toner, and Baby trudged up the central column, past the newly-repaired general crew quarters and storage and maintenance modules.

  “Virgil, cast the sensor feed and data to the command crew screen,” Jaeger said as they entered the smaller but more comfortable command crew lounge.

  The wide display screen across from the galley kitchen flickered to life as Jaeger unsnapped her utility belt and tossed it over a chair.

  “The tracer appears successfully planted,” Virgil said. “The signal strength is quite good.”

  “Great.” Toner reached into one of the kitchen cabinets and pulled out a bottle of fizzy, bright yellow liquid. He dropped lazily into the love seat. Baby had claimed the sofa long ago, and as sturdy as the furniture was, it hadn’t been able to stand up to the nesting prowess of a two-ton tardigrade. The entire thing had devolved into a mush of padding and fabric—just the way Baby liked it. She purred as she curled up in the corpse of what was once a couch.

  Jaeger filled her bottle with fresh water from the drink dispenser and joined her small crew in the lounge.

  “So.” Toner sipped his mystery soda as he studied the video feed from the tracer. “I see rocks.”

  “The Creeper vessel is navigating a particularly dense section of the asteroid belt,” Virgil said. “So, yes. Rocks.”

  “Virgil, what are the Osprey’s sensors showing us?” Jaeger asked.

  “Not much,” the AI admitted. “The asteroid belt is made up of tens of billions of celestial bodies the size of a basic fighter or larger, and countless smaller asteroid fragments. The Osprey can occasionally sense ships or unusual objects if they deviate significantly from standard orbital paths or create a particularly powerful engine discharge but locating or tracking individual ships in the belt has always been like seeking a needle in a haystack.”

  “Right.” Toner sounded annoyed. “Which is why the captain has spent months sifting through said haystack, looking to plant a tracker camera on one of these elusive needles. You’re telling me that after all of our hard work, you still can’t locate the Creepers’ main base of operations?”

  “Our hard work?” Jaeger lifted an eyebrow.

  “Do not discount the value of my moral support.”

  Jaeger rolled her eyes.

  “That appears to be the case,” Virgil said. “The captain spotted eight Creeper mining vessels in the belt. The subsequent chase destroyed two, and she successfully planted one with a tracer. And…Osprey’s scanners are still not able to detect these vessels.”

  “It’s like they’re ghosts,” Jaeger mused. “Can’t even see the damn things unless we plant a camera right on it.”

  “Don’t tell Occy,” Toner said. “He already has nightmares about these things. Let’s not tell him they can apparently turn invisible.”

  Jaeger nodded at the display screen, where the tagged Creeper vessel continued its rapid weaving through asteroids. “Virgil, based on this feed, you should be able to estimate its speed and trajectory. Can you give me even a rough estimate of where they might be in the belt?”

  The screen blinked off. “Allow me a moment to calculate, Captain.”

  “So.” Toner drained the last of his bottle. “These Creepers. They’re crawling around the solar system, more and more in the last few months. We know they’ve been raiding Locauri settlements, but we’re not sure why. For all we can tell, they’re stopping by to snack on the Locauri. You’re sure they’re getting into skirmishes with the Overseers, but the Overseers are so stuck-up they won’t talk to us and confirm. When the Creepers aren’t picking fights and being a major pain in the ass, they’re strip-mining asteroids….then blowing them up?”

  “It appears that way.” Jaeger leaned back in her chair and scratched the top of Baby’s head.

  “Why?”

  Jaeger frowned at the ceiling, which, in the Escher-like architecture of a grav-spin module, was also the aquaponics garden. “Good question.”

  “For funsies?” Toner suggested.

  “Maybe? I doubt it, though.” She nibbled her lip. “From what I saw, their mining operations significantly reduced the mass of the asteroid itself. Easily enough to destabilize its orbit in the belt.”

  “Blowing it up would turn it into a billion tiny unstable rocks instead of one big unstable boulder,” Toner said. “Tiny rocks don’t hurt as much if they hit you.”

  Jaeger nodded slowly. “Maybe. For small ships like fighters and their mining vessels, a bunch of relatively small rocks flying in unpredictable directions is more dangerous than one big unstable rock. It’s easier to dodge one rock than a thousand.”

  “But if you’re big and slow-moving,” Toner said slowly.

  “Or not moving at all.” Jaeger nodded.

  “Then you’d rather risk suffering a little asteroid rain than getting smashed by a small mountain.”

  Jaeger met his look over the coffee table. “They’re protecting something in the asteroid belt.” A wide smile cracked her tired face. “I told you. I told you they had a base hidden in there somewhere.”

  “That would appear to be the case,” Virgil said as the display screen flickered to life once more. Now it displayed an overview of the entire solar system. One small red dwarf star, orbited by two relatively small, rocky planets with a handful of moons each, and farther out, four gas giants.

  Separating the rockies from the giants was a wide belt of asteroids.

  Virgil had hi
ghlighted a thin sliver of the asteroid belt in green. “By my calculations, the Creeper vessel we’re tracking must be somewhere in this region of the belt.”

  “Bring up the video feed again side-by-side.”

  The display screen split, showing the system overview on the left side, and the visual tracer feed on the right. The visual feed no longer displayed the rapid navigation of asteroids. It took Jaeger a moment to process what she was seeing.

  Four dark slashes, like the bars of a jail cell, split her view of a long, shadowy tunnel dotted with multicolored lights. The tunnel's walls and ceiling had the smooth, manufactured look of metal, dotted with the fuzzy outlines of what might have been conduits or side tunnels. Based on what she remembered of the size of these mining vessels, the tunnel must have been massive.

  Toner laughed. “That little bird done landed in the nest!”

  The tracer must have lodged on the underbelly of the vessel. It had halted, its legs unfolding to latch onto the inside of the tunnel. For a moment, Jaeger saw the distant multicolored lights moving—drawing closer—before the screen shook and went dark.

  Toner fell back with a whine. “We lost the signal already?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jaeger had been ready to collapse into her bunk for a solid eight-hour nap. Now she sat on the edge of the recliner, giddy as she studied the solar system overview. “I figured they would find and remove the tracer pretty quickly. What matters is that we have confirmation,” she breathed. “They have some kind of base of operations in that sector. Proof.”

  Toner gave her a long side-eye, his face suddenly wary. “Now, don’t you go running off—”

  “Virgil. Pull up my hailing protocol.”

  Chapter Four

  Toner sighed and shook his head as the blank half of the display screen was replaced with the formal draft of the diplomatic message Jaeger had debated sending the Overseers for months. “Bad idea.” He tsk’d. “Bad, bad idea.”

  “You’ve been talking to Seeker too much.” Jaeger sank into the recliner, tucking her legs up under her chin excitedly as she tapped through her personal computer. “We have something they will want. Now is exactly the time to try to open up diplomatic channels with the Overseers.”

  “Jaeger, we have had exactly two real interaction with these Overseers. The first one ended with them nearly destroying our ship. The second one ended with us nearly destroying their ship. The stakes are high, and our good-talk ratio is pretty damned low, is all I’m saying. At least take me with you.”

  Jaeger shook her head. Toner was impulsive with a mouth that never shut up. In a tense negotiation situation, he was more of a liability than an asset.

  “In the nearly six months since we arrived, we’ve been politely ignoring one another,” Jaeger countered as she made some last-minute adjustments to the message. “They know we’re here. Hell, we know they’ve decoded our language. They could have come in force and destroyed us at any point. They haven’t. They’re looking for excuses not to pick fights with us.”

  She pointed at the solar system display. “So let’s give them a really good one. Let’s show them that we want to work with them. Let’s offer them something of value—the location of an enemy base.”

  “Or maybe,” Toner said, “just maybe, they’ve decided to ignore us only because we’re not worth the trouble. We’re one ship and one less-than-skeleton crew. We’re kind of impotent. We’re not a threat. If we show them we have initiative and an interest in politics, and we’re willing to stick our noses in where they didn’t invite us, we’ll prove that we’re capable of being a real nuisance.

  “The Osprey packs a punch, but in the end, she’s only one ship, and both the Overseers or these Creepers outnumber us a thousand to one. We need to keep our heads down because otherwise, it might get chopped off. Again, take me with you. I’m strong. I’m sneaky. Things go sideways, and we can always invoke Initiative Seven again.”

  Jaeger pursed her lips.

  “Look, Tiny—”

  Jaeger growled, and Toner put up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry…but listen to me. I know what’s going on. I get it. You ignore me and Seeker’s suggestions because, well, he’s not one of us, not yet, at least… and as for me. Well, I wouldn’t trust me either. I was built to fight. To take risks. To be impulsive. It’s cool you mostly ignore our input. Understandable. But this time, you’re wrong. Shit goes sideways and your plans fail, then your backup plans fail…that’s where I come in. I’m the backup to your back-ups. Take me with you.”

  Jaeger considered this. He was right. He was the best backup to her backups. A grenade to use in the most fucked up of situations. She nodded. “OK. But no talking.”

  “You know I will.”

  “I do,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I do. Just try. OK?”

  Toner nodded. “I still think this is a bad idea. We should just carry on ignoring each other.”

  “So what, then?” Jaeger sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You’re not wrong. But you’re not right either. We can’t just sit here forever.”

  “Hey. I’ve said it before.” Toner lifted his eyebrows. “Let’s go plant a flag on some little tropical island on Locaur and get busy. Build ourselves a tiny little empire ruled by the golden-eyed queen and her vampire consort.”

  “You and Seeker…” Jaeger grimaced. “Again, you’re not wrong. But you’re not right either. If we do that, then we’re no better than the fleet we left behind. We need to do this right. Besides, I suspect you’re only suggesting it to replay this weird fantasy of yours.”

  Toner shrugged. “What else is fantasy for?”

  She shook her head. “We can’t settle on Locaur without permission. You know that. Humans have always had a bad habit of doing that, and it leads to a lot of misery. We can’t start those old nasty habits all over again. I won’t allow it. We need to be better.”

  “Come on. Art’s people love us. They won’t care if we ask for one measly island.”

  “It’s not just them, Toner, and you know it.” She sighed. “As much as I wish it were. The Overseers have an established presence in this system. Like it or not, they’re the alpha-dog. If we want to build a permanent home, we’ll need their blessing, too.”

  “And this is how you want to get it? By ringing them up out of the blue and offering them the general location of the Creeper base?”

  “It’s a start. Once we can get a face-to-face meeting with them, the real talks can at least begin.”

  Toner let out a dramatic shudder.

  “What? We’ve got escape routes planned if things get violent.”

  “Yeah, I haven’t been sleeping through team meetings. The jet packs are cute, but what if they get confiscated at the door?”

  “Then we fall back on Initiative Seven.”

  “Ah, right.” Toner leaned back in the love seat, picking at something between his teeth. “Initiative Seven. How many times did we practice that one in the simulation?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “And…how many times did we survive?”

  “Well, you survived seven.”

  “Hah. No, no.” He waggled a finger at her and hopped to his feet. He went to the kitchen and pulled a pouch of something red wiggly out of one of the storage cabinets. “I didn’t survive any times. I got blasted out into the cold vacuum of space seven times.” He came back to the lounge, ripping open a corner of the pouch. He tilted his head back, squeezing the slurry into his open mouth. It was too thick and chunky to be blood.

  Or, at least, entirely blood.

  Jaeger gagged on the tangy, metallic scent of pureed liver.

  “Shut up. I don’t bitch about your cookies and cinnamon rolls.”

  “You absolutely do.”

  “Anyway.” He drained the last of the pouch and dropped it next to the recycling chute. Not in the chute. Just next to it. “Out of nineteen practice rounds, I get exploded in twelve, and in seven of them, I merely get blasted into s
pace for that thing—” he pointed at Baby “—to save me. My frozen, dormant corpse hauled home by two tons of farting tardigrade.”

  Baby lifted what passed for her head in Toner’s direction and let out a low growl, her face-hole dilating to show extra teeth.

  Toner jumped away from her with a high-pitched yelp. “See? It hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you.” Jaeger scratched Baby’s pebbly skin. “She just won’t put up with your bullshit. You said it yourself. Dormant. Not dead. You can survive in cold vacuum.”

  “You can’t.”

  Jaeger flushed. “I survived the simulation.”

  Toner stared at her.

  “Once.”

  Toner continued staring at her.

  “Okay,” she mumbled. “I almost survived once.”

  “Right.” He plopped back onto the love seat. “And I almost fucked the Queen of England, once. Where’s my crown? This isn’t grade school, kiddo. There are no participation trophies. Survival is graded on a pass-fail basis only.”

  “Your concern is flattering.” She reached across the coffee table and patted his knee. “But I’ll be fine. If you’re too chicken to come with me, I get it. It’s a scary universe out there.”

  Toner glared at her.

  She smiled blithely.

  “Fine,” he snapped. “Send your stupid message. Charge off into the lion’s den. Depend on me to save your ass again.”

  “Oh, do I have your approval now?” Jaeger held up her computer, fighting back a grin. “That’s fortunate because I sent the message three minutes ago.” She tapped the emblem on the shoulder of her flight suit and mouthed, “I’m the captain.”

  Toner threw his hands in the air, tilted his head back, and wailed. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

  “Stand aside,” Occy cried, appearing at the mouth of the access tunnel. “The noise they make will cause Baby to awake!”

  Baby lifted her head and added a sonorous bellow for emphasis. Toner jumped and spun, startled by the boy’s sudden appearance.

  Jaeger fell back in her recliner, laughing as Occy joined them in the lounge. “You never should’ve read him A Midsummer Nights’ Dream,” she told Toner. “He’s going to be reciting laps around you.”