by C. Gockel
“Aye,” Dakad replied. “You’re with me, Whiteside.”
Chapter Eleven
“What’s going on at the jumpsite?” Nova asked when she arrived at their rally point, still fastening her flight suit. A glance at the overhead screen showed that the other two squads stationed here were also mobilized. She held a new data sleeve up to let its sensor record her retina and begin to download her programs. “Is everyone deploying?”
“Yes,” Rolyn answered. “Dead silent around here. It’s all going down at Siolet and the ‘site. There’s going to be one big rebel ass-kicking when I get out there, I promise you.”
They listened to the urgent messages reporting the sudden appearance of one of the Shri-Lan’s rare carriers at the jumpsite. A hail of Shrills had descended upon the Air Command ship stationed there, forcing them to scramble both of the local squadrons to protect the partially complete relay station.
“How far out are we?” Nova’s screen showed that the planet’s position along its orbit put them in fairly easy distance to the jumpsite. They could arrive there within the hour. “You’d think they’d wait until we’re elsewhere.”
“They’re brilliant tacticians,” Rolyn said as he pulled his helmet over his head. “Looks like you’ll be collecting a few points today, Whiteside.”
“Yeah,” she said, but even to herself sounded lacking in enthusiasm. The colonel’s accusation buzzed around her head like some annoying insect. She tried to swat it by remembering why she was here. This was about joining her squad and doing her job and maybe dispense a little justice to those who had murdered their friends. “Make sure to say ooh and aah when Dakad can hear it.”
“Ladies,” Dakad shouted when the displays showed that his squad was assembled and their sections confirmed. “Saddle up. Let’s get this furball swept up before they get here. They took out the relay at Callas so who knows what else is coming through that hole.”
Nova tapped Rolyn’s helmet and rushed for her Kite. Nikki, her favorite hangar jockey, gave her a leg up onto the wing and she slid into her pilot couch with a giddy sense of anticipation that she quickly suppressed. The Kite recognized her neural link when she engaged the interface and the systems came online. Like the others, she would wait until they reached the battlefield before deciding to rebalance the command functions of the plane. Nova preferred to handle her Kite manually and target enemy ships via the mental interface while some of the other pilots did the opposite. She hovered off the ground and listened to the count as each section moved into the chutes and from there into space.
“Section Four is a go,” Flight Control announced.
Nova halted outside as she waited for the other two in her section to fall in. “Come on, come on,” she said, impatient to be gone. She turned briefly to give a thumbs-up to Rolyn when something far below the flight deck caught her eye. A cruiser attached to the shipping docks seemed strangely out of place there, Those spaces were usually occupied by the boxy transporters that never entered planetary atmosphere as they plied their trade between orbiters and base stations. Occasionally, a cargo ship from outside the system docked there to save the expense of landing. But the ship down there now was a private passenger cruiser of Caspian build, not the class of vessel used by Air Command. Certainly not a vessel meant to haul anai oil or frozen fish.
She considered only briefly. If that ship was a smuggler, choosing this moment to remove the mince from the station, any evidence she had against Trakkas and his men would be gone. She swooped out from the station and then immediately cut her speed. “Whiteside lame,” she said. “Returning to base.”
Dakad kept his usual expletive-laden comment to himself. “Shake it out or pick up another plane, Whiteside.”
“Heard. Don’t wait for me.” She circled wide and ran a few tests that would seem legit on sensors while taking a closer look at the shipping docks. “Tower, is there a shipment coming in today? Any type?”
“Affirmative,” she heard the harried reply from the tower where everyone was too busy with the remaining launch to worry much about a kink in her wing or questions about shipping. “Are you coming in?”
“Yes.” She hovered into a chute on the upper deck. A private cruiser on the shipping level? None of this, including the attacks on the jumpsite or Siolet, felt right. “Do your job, Whiteside,” she mumbled even as she slid over her wing and to the ground. “They know what they’re doing. You just go shoot some rebels.”
“Lieutenant?” Her squad’s ground mechanic had come over to where she stood.
“Check the port lifts, Nik. Wagging all over the place.”
“Where are you going?”
Nova raised a hand to signal an urgency of a personal nature and dashed off into the direction of the deck’s hygiene station. She passed it and, still berating herself for this departure from protocol, entered a lift and dropped to the shipping level.
It was quiet down here. No clanging of transport containers, no shouts, curses or laughter from the work crew. With the alert, the docks had been cleared of non-essential personnel and only the elevator hub would still be staffed. The security team assigned to patrol these passages was nowhere in sight. If she was right about them, today presented the opportunity to load up the cruiser moored to the locks. Perhaps they had even been aware of the impending Shri-Lan attack.
But was that likely? Trakkas might well be a greedy opportunist but he was also a seasoned Air Command officer. Beryl and his group were crude and pitiless, but each considered himself as the embodiment of soldierhood. Perhaps that included smuggling and even murder but never treason. News of a rebel attack would not go unreported.
Nova hurried to the end of the corridor and slipped through the unmarked door. Instead of climbing the scaffold to the unfinished catwalk, she moved silently down the ladder and onto the floor. There was still not much to be heard but the steady hum of well-designed machinery. The relays feeding electric power down to the planet were green-lighted and the elevator itself was in motion.
She heard voices to her left and slipped into a space between the orderly stacks of bins. Someone hurried past her. He came from the direction of the locks, a cylinder in his hands. She stepped forward again to see where he was going with it, whatever it was.
Then she saw a pair of legs, clad in the cargo hands’ orange coveralls, splayed out on the floor. The rest of the body was bent around the edge of the companionway to the main entrance from the station. Beyond him lay someone else, this one unmistakably dead, the upper body crisscrossed with laser burns.
Nova’s hand moved to her side only to realize that she was in her flight suit and, appropriately, her gun belt was still back in her quarters. She raised her arm to activate her com unit. “Security, Whiteside—”
The barrel of a gun stabbed below her ear hard enough to bring her teeth down onto the tip of her tongue. A hand shot out to grasp her wrist before she could complete her call. Two people in civilian dress, one Bellac, the other Caspian, dragged her into the open space near the tether. Someone pulled her data sleeve off her forearm and searched her for additional devices.
“Get rid of her,” someone nearby said. The voice belonged to a Centauri woman standing near the elevator monitoring station.
“Stop!” another voice, this one much more familiar, rang out.
Nova turned to see Djari rush toward them. He was not wearing the coveralls identifying him as ring crew and the gun at his thigh was also not standard issue.
“Leave her to me,” he said. “I’ll take care of this.” He grasped her arm to pull her away from them.
She twisted out of his grip. “What is this? What are you doing?”
“The question is: what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with your squad.”
She looked around. “Is this part of what’s happening out there? The attack at the jumpsite? Djari, what is going on?”
He glanced over to his companions. “You have to get out of here, Nova. I never meant for thi
s to happen with you here. Please! There is still time.”
“Time for what?” She was suddenly very alarmed by the fear and worry on his face. “I was just told that you’re with them . With the Shri-Lan. I can’t believe that!”
He looked away. “You really had no idea? You never suspected?”
“No! Gods, Djari, I trusted you!” She reconsidered. “Well, I thought maybe you were getting into the smuggling going on here with Beryl’s gang. But Shri-Lan? Those animals?”
“Animals? It’s your people who are the animals on Bellac, Lieutenant. And that’s not being kind to animals. You have destroyed the peace of this planet.”
“You wouldn’t even be on Bellac if not for the Union,” she said, not really interested in rebel rhetoric at this moment. She glanced at his gun.
“You’d be dead before you can even touch that,” he said with a nod to the nearby rebels who, although out of earshot, were watching intently, weapons poised.
“Why, Djari? Please just tell me.”
“I told you why. You don’t belong here.”
“You’re not a rebel. I think I know you better than that. You care too much. I’ve seen it.”
“Don’t try that on me, Lieutenant,” he said. “Leave the head stuff to the non-coms. But if you have to know I’ll tell you that I used to have a family before Air Command came into the Rift. Blew away half the town looking for a rebel depot. My town.”
She looked up into his tortured face as he remembered. “I’m so sorry, Djari…”
“So I went to Shon Gat. Maybe to try to figure things out. Met Coria and some others and the things they said sounded right. Then you came and I thought maybe they were wrong.” His hand moved to the twisted scar along his cheek. “For a while, anyway. Then I learned more about your precious Air Command than I wanted to know.”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t have to be like this,” she whispered.
“It doesn’t?” he said angrily. “You were there! You held torn Bellac guts in your hands, making do without the tools only your people own. How can you still do this!”
“Nearly time, Djari,” someone called.
“Time for what?” Nova said to him.
“Time to go.”
She looked over to the Centauri at the elevator monitors. The climbers were controlled from the main command station on the admin level but this console dealt with emergencies. “What did you do? Is there going to be an attack on the station?”
“We can’t even get close. But we can still take it down.”
“What? How? This place is a fortress.” Would a scream from her alert anyone to their presence? The dampening around this area was designed to keep noise levels low. Were there even guards within earshot? Had they also been killed?
“The elevator. The climber is stacked with explosive. The sort that’ll blow on impact, like your concussion charges. It’s been on its way here for three days. It only has to hit the shields hard enough to detonate. I don’t want you here when that happens.”
“What?” Nova whispered. She gaped at him in terror and wonder. It would work. The shielding at the tether connection doubled as an emergency brake in case of climber failure. But had anyone considered an impact detonation at precisely that point? A large enough blast could disengage the elevator from the station, sending the ranch into space and, eventually, wrap large swaths of the tether around the planet at terminal velocity, like a whip across the landscape. “That’s why you went down to the surface the other day?”
He nodded. “And to make sure it’s done right we’ve got a few bottles of the boom juice up here as well.” He gestured toward several clusters of unmarked cylinders piled up near the tether’s terminal. “It was easy to figure out what Beryl was up to and get onto his crew. People stupid enough to give me access to this place. And too stupid to realize that dope wasn’t the only thing coming up the tether.”
Nova groaned. The bins allowed to pass through here without inspection by Beryl’s men would also have contained the explosive. Djari’s presence here, as a frequent receiver of goods from below, would be unremarkable as he removed his portion of the clandestine shipment.
“And the general? Did you murder her? Did you kill my friends, Djari?”
“No. That charge was set by one of the civilians that came up with her. I tried to get you out of there when I was told about it. I don’t want you hurt.”
“Listen to yourself! You’d murder hundreds of people up here but you’d feel sorry about me? This is crazy! Please don’t do this, Djari. What about those on the surface? This will be terrible for them.”
“And a lesson will be learned!” he snapped. He took a deep breath as he looked over to the air lock. “You can come with us, Nova. With me. You can leave all this. There is a better way.”
“How can you even ask me this? This is wrong, Djari. You know it’s wrong!”
“In the end it won’t be. There are always victims in a war. And this is a war, even if you choose to call us rebels.” He held his hand out to her. “Please come with me. I care about you. I want you with me. You matter.”
“You lied to me,” she said. Where was security? Did no one realize that there was something very wrong going on down here?
“You’re right to feel… betrayed, I guess. Once all this started I didn’t want you to get involved with this. But I wanted you so bad. You’re so… I just wanted…” He ran his hand through his hair, looking for just a moment like the man who had caught her attention and her heart in the slums of Shon Gat. “I’m sorry it went this far. I should have stayed away from you.”
“Djari, dammit,” one of his cohorts called. “We’re done. Let’s get out of here!”
“You can still stop this,” she whispered urgently. “Shut down the elevator. Please!”
“Not possible. The com link to the climber is down. The relay is recoded so the command center won’t notice. Nor will ground control. There are no brakes on that thing now. When it gets here it’s going to crash. We’ll take you away with us. I want you to live, Nova.”
Before she could reply, something large and dark and flying through the air drew their attention. The object landed with a thud among them and they all saw that it was the body of a Centauri. Everyone looked up to see four Union soldiers along the catwalk above them, guns aimed.
The rebels scattered at once, fleeing into the stacks where more soldiers awaited them. Laser fire lit up the air as the tracers found their targets. Nova spun and ran into a row of waiting shipping containers near the locks. She squeezed through a gap too narrow for Djari and headed for the doors. The overhead lights had turned orange as the rest of the station was alerted to a security problem.
She stumbled and fell over a prone body on the ground. Ignoring the sharp pain driving up from her knees, she groped for a gun among the dead man’s clothes but he was unarmed, a deckhand taken down by the rebels. She leaped to her feet when Djari came around the bins.
He raised his gun. “They got our pilot. Come with me or we both die here today.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said, furious. Behind them, someone screamed. Another voice shouted something. The flashes of light through the air grew more sporadic. It had taken only seconds for the soldiers to contain the saboteurs.
He gripped her arm and shoved her toward the air lock.
Before she had a moment to consider a desperate lunge for his pistol, a hulking shape stepped between them. “That’s our pilot,” Captain Beryl said and twisted the weapon from Djari’s hand before sending him to the floor with a chop of his powerful fist.
“They’ve cut the brakes on the climber,” Nova said quickly. “It’s going to blow when it gets here. I’m going to go after it.”
Beryl handed her Djari’s pistol. “What? How?”
Djari sat up, dazed by Beryl’s blow. He felt for his boot and withdrew another gun. Beryl spun around faster than she thought someone of his size could move when he saw her eyes widen in
surprise. He grabbed the front of her flight suit and tossed her behind a bin as if she were weightless. The first blast from Djari’s pistol tore a hole into the container, the second one a hole into Captain Beryl’s throat. The giant grunted in surprise as he lurched away, coughed a spray of blood, and collapsed.
Nova fled across the loading platform to the air lock. The interior door was open but when she turned to reach for the controls she saw Djari racing after her.
“Stay away!” she shouted and aimed her gun.
He raised his arms toward her and let his pistol fall to the ground. “Don’t leave me, Nova,” he made a shambling half-turn to look back. Three of Beryl’s men rushed toward them, looking primed to tear Djari’s limbs from his body in frenzied retribution for their fallen leader. She saw bared teeth and balled fists and now-holstered weapons on these men who had no intention of capturing Djari alive.
Her jaw tightened until she heard her teeth grind. “Mitigate, Whiteside,” she said and fired. Djari stopped and she shot him again.
She ran back to where he had fallen and knelt beside him. He turned his head briefly, squinting as if to fix her in his mind, and then he lay still.
“Alert the station that the climber is out of control and packed with explosives,” she snapped at the soldiers. She saw Ancel beside the writhing shape of Captain Beryl, his hand clamped over the man’s neck. “Tell them to open a secure channel to the cruiser out there. I want the Air Boss, and whatever damn engineer is still around to talk to me.”
They gawked at her, considering her news. “On the fucking double!” she shouted, choking back tears of anger and regret and disappointment and all the other things that had no place in this moment.
She did not wait to see if they complied. She fumbled her way through the air lock sequence and entered the private cruiser moored there. Although the ship was a standard model used for small hops and a minimal passenger load, she recognized powerful modifications likely to be reckoned with in a firefight. Its design was familiar and, like all ships of this class, equipped with a neural interface. She placed the headset over the contact module at her temples to connect with navigation. Closing her eyes, she prayed to some of the local gods, just in case, but the system recognized her flight grade and allowed her control.
