Pets in Space® 4

by S. E. Smith

  Hicks broke the silence with a whistle of appreciation. “Holy shit. Well, there’s a clue at least.”

  He and Mira both looked up. “What?”

  “Sheri hacked our nav system. Well enough that Baker didn’t notice.” Hicks clucked her tongue. “Pretty elegant too.”

  Rayan nodded. “There were some impressive tools on her omni, given how quickly she’d sliced through some of the electronics on Hodur.”

  “So, she could have crashed us? Sabotaged our systems so the next transit put us into the path of an asteroid, or through the sun?” Even as Mira asked the question, Rayan rejected the idea. Sheri was a lot of things, but she wasn’t cold-blooded enough for that.

  “She could have, sure. But she didn’t. Instead she added a few things.” Hicks typed in another set of coordinates, and a map appeared in the holodisplay above her station. She pointed at a hazy red area near the destination that blocked off all the easy-to-access routes. “See that?”

  Mira shifted to lean forward, studying the projected map. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “If you think it’s a probability marker, showing where customs interdiction is acting for the next two months, then yes. It’s exactly what you think it is. Because that’s what it is. And there’s dozens of them.” Hicks shook her head, and Rayan could almost hear the credits stacking up. Without having to worry about an interdiction, they could take bigger cargo. Make better profits. Even without the market, they’d have an advantage their competitors would kill for.

  “Why would she do that?” he asked at last. The reason seemed obvious, the same as her warning them away from… “Pull up a path to Farhope.”

  Hicks glanced at him, then tried several different routes. None of them worked. After a moment, she pulled up the planet itself. It had been hazed over with red in the system, the words Do Not Visit. Active APB scrolled around it in the nav image.

  “It changes nothing,” Mira said after the silence had stretched out long enough. “That tender will be here if we don’t leave, Hicks. You have a course heading. Take it.”

  “Aye, Captain.” The pilot opened a channel shipwide. “Buckle it down if you don’t want to get hit by it, folks. Shift to Transition in Five.”

  Sheri had shown her loyalty to the crew, even knowing they were likely to send her to die. Or gas her out the airlock themselves. Whether a last act of defiance or not, she’d picked a side between IntCom and the Sentinel. He looked at Mira. “You can’t leave her behind.”

  “I can and will.” She met his stare with cold rationality. “Even if I had other ideas, I won’t piss off Ariadne without leverage. Not at this point. You need to figure out where you stand, Barr.”

  He nodded, then noticed the empty perch looming next to the sensor station. “Where’s Darcy?”

  Hicks spun in her chair. “Thought he was with you.”

  “Obviously not. I’ll check the galley. Last thing we need is to have him get pissed off because transition threw him around the ship.” He opened the hatch and headed into the hall.

  Mira’s voice chased after him. “We can’t hold up the Sentinel for you, Barr. If you’re going to secure him, do it fast.”

  Part of him believed she could read his mind, that somehow the captain already knew the idiotic plan he had half-formed in his brain. He and Mira had worked together for so long she often understood him better than he did himself. The only other person even close to knowing him as well was currently floating in space. Where he’d left her.

  At the next intersection, Rayan turned left to charge toward the docking bay. He dropped down the ladder to the hatch, the ship’s launch just outside. Darcy would be fine. Even if hurled about by the sudden acceleration of the Sentinel’s transit drive, the goanna was unlikely to be seriously hurt. Baker could ease Darcy’s poor temper with another dose of that carrion paste she had developed.

  He dropped through the hatch and sealed it above him. Fortunately, he didn’t have to power up the launch to disconnect it from the Sentinel—a security adaptation he’d insisted on at one point early in their careers.

  The next second would determine his fate. And Sheri’s. Knowing he could help her made the choice as easy as it was irrevocable.

  He typed his code into the system and listened as the magnetic locks disengaged. Outside the viewscreen, he could see the primary body of the Sentinel as it rotated away. Momentum carried him in a straight line along the angle of rotation, drifting. As soon as the launch was free, he went weightless, but it was simple enough to pull himself back into the seat and buckle in.

  When Rayan looked up again, the Sentinel of Gems stretched away from him, its hull shifting to look almost red. An eyeblink later it was gone, and he was alone.

  Floating in the quiet e-pod felt like an eternity, especially knowing what was coming at the other end of her wait. As designed, the pod kept the temperature comfortable and the oxygen levels high enough to stay alert. Sheri peered out of the tiny, reinforced portal in the ship’s hatch, but whatever direction she was pointed in, there was nothing to see. Not even the tug she knew had to be approaching. Failing at that, she flopped back into the gel-filled cushion that provided the single-occupancy pod’s seating and tried counting the rivets that held her bubble of life secure against the void.

  An alarmed, angry chirp almost made her jump out of her skin. She twisted around on the seat and scooped up a meter and a half of flame-red scales and poor attitude. Darcy whipped his tail back and forth until she released the goanna, and he scrambled a short distance away to watch her, clinging to the wall with his head tilted, both pairs of eyes blinking.

  Sheri held up her hands. “Okay, that’s fair. I grabbed you without permission. I just didn’t expect to see you. Does Barr know you’re here?”

  Asking the question out loud, she knew the answer was no. Rayan would never have sent Darcy off without him, not knowing she’d be taken to Ariadne. The bond between them wasn’t the strange empathic connection she’d seen between rangers and their wolves, but there was no denying that Barr held genuine affection for the lizard.

  She moved as well as she could to make space on the gel. “You can come up here by me if you want. Bound to be warmer than the deck plates there.”

  Darcy looked at her, then decided he trusted her enough to clamber up and tuck in next to her. She stroked her fingers along his spine. The river-rock smoothness was comforting, like touching sun-warmed stones in a well-crafted mosaic. The goanna flattened against her, stretching out under the attention with all the selfishness of a cat, drawing a chuckle out of her.

  “I guess I’m forgiven, huh?” The moment of amusement was cut short by the clang of docking clamps locking around her e-pod. She placed a protective hand over Darcy as the pod started to move, the mild acceleration pressing them both deeper into the gel.

  To Sheri’s surprise, they didn’t open her pod immediately. That mean the tug was either automated, or the crew was small enough that Ariadne didn’t want to risk Sheri overpowering them. Not that it would do her much good. Without a transit drive, the only place she could go with the tug would be Nobu Station. The trip back to the station’s docking berths was slow, at least another fifteen minutes, though she couldn’t decide if the time was passing too slowly or two quickly.

  What she needed was a plan. If Barr were here, it would be easy—they’d fight their way free and head toward the most defensible position until an opportunity could present itself. The thought made her recall how it had felt to fight beside him, the easy way they seemed to know each other’s moves and rhythm. Even sparring, they’d been well matched despite the size differences.

  He'd made his choice, and she couldn’t fault him for it. She’d fed him lies since they first met; it was a stretch to expect him to come around to her side in light of that. But she was who she was, no apologies. And if she was going to die, it was going to be on her terms.

  When the tug had docked, she heard someone tapping in the equalization code o
n the outside of the e-pod. Sheri tucked Darcy against her torso and stood as well as she was able and waited on her side of the hatch.

  She pressed a kiss to the top of the goanna’s diamond-shaped head. “Ready, D?” Unlike before, the lizard didn’t look askance at her suggestion, and unless she imagined it, wiggled better into her grasp. The hatch opened, and as soon as there was space, she hurled Darcy into the face of the security guard waiting for her.

  The man stumbled backward, screaming as the goanna hissed and thrashed. Sheri charged after, grabbing the arm of a second guard and twisting the man’s stunner to face into the group as he opened fire. A third guard took the shot full in the chest and collapsed, muscles contracting in random jerks and fits.

  Sheri spun, using the second guard’s elbow as a fulcrum to turn him into the path of the fourth and final guard’s shot. As her human shield collapsed to the ground, Sheri leapt in close to the remaining guard. A strike to the thigh, another to the gut, and the guard fell forward. She guided the guard’s face into her knee and felt him go slack in her hands.

  The first guard still struggled with Darcy. The goanna seemed to be a blur of angry claws and indignant trilling. Sheri gathered up one of the stunners and shot the man out of mercy.

  Once his prey collapsed, Darcy turned back into the mostly docile lizard she remembered. Sheri trilled, and the goanna clambered up onto her shoulder. “We need to get out of here. Find someplace safe to determine our next move.”

  Wisely, Ariadne had put them in an unused set of slips. That meant there’d be fewer chances for her to blend in and escape, but it also meant no one had been present to see her break out. Darcy jumped off her shoulder and scurried toward a large vent to one side of the dock.

  It was a terrible choice. She followed him anyway. Reinforcement guards would be coming any moment—honestly, it was offensive that Ariadne had only sent four in the first place. Like she didn’t think Sheri was dangerous. The gall.

  Sheri stood in front of the grate. She’d have to crawl to get in, but if she remembered the station’s layout, it would at least open into a larger main feed that went around the docking level. “I hate this idea, Red.”

  Darcy hooked his claws into the grate and tugged.

  Sheri dropped down to flip the latches on the grate. “Let me open it for us first. No point in telling them all where we went.” Not like they wouldn’t know anyway; the cameras monitoring the docks would give a good view of their exit. At least they wouldn’t be seen once they were in the vents.

  Once the grate was out of the way, Darcy skittered inside. Sheri paused long enough to raise a middle-fingered salute to the security cameras, hoping that at the other end somewhere, Ariadne was seething. She shouted, “That’s what you get for only sending four guys!” and crawled after the goanna into the darkness.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sheri found Darcy waiting for her in a wider space in the tunnel. The air here was cooler, and it definitely took its toll on the cold-blooded goanna. She pulled the lizard close and gave him some of her own body heat to help it stay warm, zipping her jacket around them both. “Just don’t freak out and start thrashing, okay?”

  Darcy looked up at her and gave a soft chirrup, eyes blinking. Up close, she could see the rainbow pattern of his larger, primary eyes. It was the most time she’d spent with one of the big, domesticated goannas, and she suddenly saw the appeal of the semi-popular pets. Her mind flashed back to something Barr had said on the Sentinel, and she stroked one of Darcy’s eye ridges. “In exchange for the warmth, I need you to take care of any rats we come across. Deal?”

  She could have sworn the lizard grinned in anticipation, but the scaly face hadn’t changed.

  Before moving on, she tugged out her omnidevice. She wondered if the crew on the Sentinel had noticed her hacks yet. After learning the truth about IntCom’s involvement on Adiona, realizing how she had been used only to be discarded as soon as she was inconvenient, it was easy to choose sides. Giving the Sentinel a bit of an edge while she still could felt like the best way to help, in the likely event that Ariadne would betray them.

  She opened up her omni and was surprised to find a single message waiting from Intelligence Command. It was as short as it was expected. Your exposure as an asset limits your future use to the organization and threatens ongoing projects. As a result, your services are no longer required by the organization.

  Shit.

  She searched her emotions, trying to decide if the abandonment hurt or not. It stung, because her pride had been kicked, but that was different from regretting any of the things she’d done. If anything, she had more to be proud of in her brief career with Mira’s crew than she had as an operative. Assuming she survived this—and she had to keep that hope alive while she could—it actually felt good to know she wouldn’t have to compromise herself for IntCom’s machinations. Instead of feeling adrift, she felt freed. She let out a slow breath.

  “I guess the cavalry’s not coming, Red.” She rubbed her chin against the top of the lizard’s head absently. “We’ll have to steal a ship ourselves.”

  Before moving on, she took a moment to disconnect her omni from the network. Her IntCom tools suite still worked, but it was only a matter of time before they sent a kill signal to her omnidevice and wiped those out. Hopefully she could find a hacker who could offload the hacking software into another device. It was too handy to not have access to in her suddenly independent life.

  She half-crouched through the reinforced ventilation tunnels, moving toward the active dock where she used to work. There’d be launches there, and no shortage of them. If she was lucky, there’d be a shuttle with a transit drive, but that felt like too much to hope for. She could at least bribe her way onto a corporate launch, and from there get passage to someplace where she could lay low for a bit. Maybe Kanaloa. Warm beaches and rum drinks sounded pretty good at the moment.

  At the next exchange, she had to change to crawling again. She pushed the stunner ahead of her in the tunnel, while Darcy squirmed inside her jacket. “Don’t think I’m having a picnic out here,” she muttered. “You could always come out if you don’t like it.”

  The goanna clambered around her side in response, crawling up onto her back to perch between her shoulder blades. A moment later she felt his head pop out to rest on top of hers.

  “Well as long as you’re comfortable, I guess.” Sheri chuckled and went back to bellying through the ventilation.

  As she’d expected, the other docking bay was busy, with nearly all the slips filled and a bustle of dockworkers and crew moving about in the broad open area. Dressed in her dockworker’s togs, it would be easy enough to blend in with the crowd as long as no one saw her coming out of the vents. All she’d need was a distraction to keep people looking the other way and she could find her way onto an unwatched ship.

  A commotion at one of the launches caught her attention, and she looked through the vent to see the source of the noise. Eight security guards surrounded a hulking figure she immediately recognized. Barr’s hands were raised, and several guards covered him with lethal weaponry while another clapped restraints around his wrists.

  Except that didn’t make sense. He was gone, just as the Sentinel was gone. He shouldn’t be here.

  Darcy chirped, and Sheri reached up to pet him. “Yeah, I see him, D.” Maybe he’d come to find Darcy. Once he’d searched the ship, it wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out where the goanna had gone. Whatever his reasoning, he was clearly being arrested—annoyance flared when she saw he had somehow warranted twice as many security guards as she had—and she refused to leave him to whatever the Spider Queen had planned.

  With ninety percent of the bay’s occupants looking toward the arrest, she was able to sneak out of the vent unnoticed. She grabbed a cloth cap someone had left on a crate and tugged it low to shade her face, then fell in behind a group of laughing crewpersons and followed them out of the bay into the hall.

  There was on
ly one direction they could take Barr. Whether he went to the brig or directly up to C-Level where Ariadne held court, the guards would have to bring him by the elevator hub. Sheri opened the door to the maintenance ladders nearby and slipped inside to wait.

  Rayan hated being restrained. Hated being herded. The phrase like an animal to slaughter drifted into his mind, and he shoved it away, hard. Going to face Ariadne would be bad enough. Viewing it as a lost cause wouldn’t help him any. She was a reasonable woman; if he offered to put his fists in her service, she should recognize the bargain. The things she’d make him do would blacken what was left of his soul, he had no doubt, but if he could use the only skill he had to get Sheri back? His soul was a small price to pay.

  One of the guards pushed him around the corner toward the lifts, cracking him in the kidney with the butt of his flechette rifle. Rayan narrowed his eyes and glared over his shoulder at the man. “Do that again, and I’ll kill you barehanded.”

  The venom in Barr’s voice made the guard blanch and step back, until he remembered Rayan was bound in restraints. He struck Barr a second time, finding his smile as he did so. “I’m betting not.”

  Rayan didn’t flinch, and the guard struck him a third time, with enough force to send pain shooting along his nerves. There’d be damage from that one, but it was worth it. Layth would complain, but Barr getting hurt gave the doctor something to do.

  Then he remembered he wasn’t likely to see Layth, or the rest of the Sentinel crew, again. Rayan turned and walked the rest of the way to the lift doors.

  “That’s more like it.” One of the other guards, not the one he’d threatened. Rayan worked to commit the voice to memory. If he survived this, he’d make a point of reminding these assholes why Ariadne felt the need to send eight guards for one man.