“Although there could be someone left alone because their intended mate died or had a different preference,” I said.
“True, but they’re not very plentiful,” she said. “It makes it much harder to find someone compatible. And being off-world, I’m not there and ‘available’ to be re-matched easily.”
I waited a minute, then asked, “So, is that it for options?”
Rei shrugged. “I could probably hook up with an older man who’s left a marriage, or lost his wife. But he’ll already have done the whole family thing and probably won’t be interested in that. If he were, he’d have stayed with his wife.”
“Unless he simply didn’t love her,” I suggested.
“Wrong,” she said with a snort. “These are marriages arranged strictly on the basis of genetic compatibility and congenial neural oscillation adhesions. There’s no question of love or lack of it. These people are destined to get along.”
“But you said they can leave the marriage if they’re not happy.”
Rei puffed her cheeks, slowly blowing out another sigh. “Sure, but it doesn’t happen very often. Sometimes one partner might suffer a brain disease or injury, but usually when it does happen, it’s because their careers or interests take them too far apart physically.”
“You’re a tough case,” I said, shaking my head. “So, how about this radical idea? There are more men in the universe than the ones born on Eri.”
Rei looked scandalized, her golden eyes widening. “Marry a non-Erian? My mother would go freneza, for one thing,” she said. She stared up at the catwalk stretching across the cargo pod, far above our heads. “I don’t know. That idea would take getting used to.”
I slowly got to my feet and brushed cargo pod dust off my jeans. “Well, then I suggest you stop thinking about it for a little while,” I said. “You can’t do anything about it until we finish this mission for Lanar, anyway. Things might seem different in a few weeks.”
She nodded. “I know. But being dumped by a seventeen-year-old who’d rather be a monk . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It’s pretty bad. And having to watch Baden and Maja tripping over each other isn’t making it any easier.”
I laughed as I collected my shoes and slipped them on. “They are a little overwhelming, aren’t they?” I hesitated. “Rei, does it bother you about Baden? I mean, I know you two were close . . .”
She smiled then, a real smile that touched her eyes. “No, and I told Maja that. Baden was a nice diversion on long runs—really nice,” she said with a wink. “And good experience. But I never thought of it as anything more than that.”
Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “Speaking of couples, I haven’t been as completely unobservant as you might think. You and Hirin—”
Her words were cut off by a jolt that shook the ship. I stumbled and fetched up against the plasteel wall of the cargo pod with a thump.
“Ouch! What the—”
“Captain! Rei!” Baden’s voice sounded over the ship’s comm. “You might want to get the hell up here!”
I pressed the implant in my left forearm as I straightened up. Rei ran for the ladder that led to the upper decks, and I followed a few steps behind.
“On our way!” I told him, and as I pounded across the cargo pod behind Rei, the things I’d been worrying about seemed small and far away.
Chapter 3 – Luta
Moving Targets
I REALIZED AS Rei and I climbed past the engineering deck that the pounding I’d heard on my way down had stopped. Viss sat planted in a skimchair, punching commands into the engineering console.
“You okay here, Viss?” I yelled as we scrambled past.
“Keep going, Captain,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Just let me know what’s happening.”
“Keep the shipwide comm open!”
Another impact, slightly weaker than the first one, shook the ship as we neared the top of the ladder. One of Rei’s hands slipped off the metal rung, but she didn’t even stop moving. I was only a rung below her by this time, and if she’d fallen, we both would have landed on the unforgiving floor of the cargo pod far below. As it was, I was right behind her as we pounded up the corridor to the bridge.
Hirin’s voice reached us as we arrived, issuing commands in a steady, level voice. He’d taken a spot at the pilot’s console in Rei’s absence. He heard us arrive and slid out of the way neatly for Rei to take his place, but I didn’t move to take the captain’s seat. I’d been absent, and he still had the chair. Somehow I’d thought about it on the way up from the cargo deck, and this seemed like the only way to handle it. I dropped into a skimchair at the secondary pilot controls and locked it down.
“Trouble?” I asked Hirin.
He flashed a grin. “Something like that. Innocent-looking C-class starrunner passed within a few hundred klicks, turned when he got behind us, and came in with a flash-pack torpedo.” He turned his palms up. “Don’t know what he was thinking. Even without shields it wouldn’t breach our hull, but it shook us up a little. You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Where is he now?”
My question was answered by a thump on the starwise side of the ship.
“What does he want?”
“Good question,” Baden said. “He should be on standard trader channel, and I’m trying to get through to him with a signal, but he’s not answering.”
“Try other channels. Pirates?”
“Could be. So far, pretty ineffective ones.”
A flash of movement drew my eyes to the main viewscreen, and I saw our attacker speed past and turn to make another run at us.
“We haven’t fired on him?” It wasn’t really a question, since I would have known if we’d let fly with one of our own torps.
“Not yet,” Hirin answered. “It’d feel like zapping a fly with a flux laser. I thought Baden would get him on the comm, and we’d see what was what.”
Baden pushed himself away from the comm console. “He won’t respond. I know damn well he can hear me.”
“Fire a—” I started.
At the same time, Hirin said, “Viss—”
We both stopped short. Damne. My fault. I was sitting at a pilot’s console, and Hirin had the chair. I shouldn’t have been giving any orders.
But it sure is hard to break a habit like being in command.
“Sorry,” I said. His was only an echo behind mine.
He didn’t let it rattle him, though. “Viss, I’m going to fire a torp in his path to let him know he’s not dealing with a sitting duck here.” He nodded at Baden, who keyed in the code.
My face radiated heat, and I knew it must be blood-red, but I pretended I didn’t notice the blush. It was the same order I would have given, which should have made me feel better, but somehow it didn’t.
“I’ve got his drive signature and ship registration,” Yuskeya said. “The registration could be faked, but we’ll know the sig if we run across him again.”
“Good job,” Hirin said. “Baden, is that torp ready?”
“Whenever you are, Cap—Hirin,” Baden said. He didn’t turn around, but I knew that suddenly I wasn’t the only one red-faced.
“Fire whenever you can get a fix on his trajectory, then. Get close, but don’t hit him. He doesn’t seem to have shield capability, and I don’t like killing people unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
A few seconds of concentrated silence passed, and then Baden said, “Firing.” A hollow crump reverberated up through the Tane Ikai, nothing like the impact of our attacker’s flash-pack torps, but enough to let us know that our own torp was away. I’d been a little miffed when Hirin had armed the ship without my knowledge a month or so ago, but in the circumstances he’d been right. I’d decided it was nice, after ten years without him, to have someone watching my back again.
But I had to figure out this two-captains-one-ship thing soon, before it drove both of us crazy.
Once again, however, I was distracted by events beyond my control. Baden’s
aim was brilliant, and the torp sailed through the vacuum toward the starrunner, on a course to skim past it. We were all surprised to see a bright burst of radiant energy as the ship’s shields flared and the torp detonated, obscuring the starrunner for an instant. When the flash dissipated, he was still there, but accelerating away from us rapidly.
“What the—I thought he didn’t have shields!” Hirin yelped.
“None registered,” Yuskeya said. I glanced over at her. She sat frowning down at the data on her console. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Baden frowned at the screen. “That little bastardo. What kind of game was he playing, anyway?” His fingers skittered over the comm board. “Wonder if he’s trying to send any messages right about now?”
“Pursuit?” Rei asked briskly, her hands steady on the piloting controls. She carefully didn’t address the question to either of us in particular.
Hirin looked the question at me, and I shrugged. “What would we do with him if we caught him? We’ll report it when we get to Mars. We have the ship sig.”
“I got reams of ship data before Baden fired the torp,” added Yuskeya. “Figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a scan. No cargo in his hold, just one pilot.”
“Huh,” Baden grunted.
“What?”
He turned to face Hirin, eyes narrowed. “He just sent off an encrypted message to a PrimeCorp address.”
“How do you know that?” I squeaked, then caught myself and held up a hand. “No, don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know. Something you ‘picked up’ on Kiando, right?”
Baden turned his grin on me. “I can’t reveal my program sources,” he said virtuously. “But there’s no love lost between the people who work for Duntmindi Corporation and PrimeCorp.”
“Sounds highly illegal to me,” Hirin said, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “Don’t suppose you could actually read what it said, could you?”
“Give me a minute—ah, merde!”
“What?”
He hunched over his console, fingers flying over the touchscreen. He didn’t answer me. I waited. With Baden, you might as well not try to interrupt when he was like this. He wouldn’t hear you anyway.
Finally he sat back heavily in his skimchair and threw his arms over his head. “Cannibalizer,” he said cryptically.
“Cannibalizer?”
“If you don’t have the right code to enter on the receiving end, the message basically eats itself when you try to open it. Nice little encryption there; I couldn’t stop it.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “I got two words.”
“And those were?”
“‘Location’ and ‘Paixon’,” he said.
“Hmm. So he definitely knew it was us.”
“Not many Paixons around,” Baden said, “So what would a supposed pirate, and not a very good one apparently, be doing sending an encrypted message about our location to our Dear Captain’s worst enemy, following a botched attempt to—I don’t even know—bother us?”
Viss’s voice boomed over the ship’s comm. “Is all the excitement over for now? Seems to have gone pretty quiet up there.”
“I think so, at least for now, Viss. Want to give us a damage report as soon as you have a chance?”
“Will do, Captain. But I don’t think there’ll be much to report. Whatever he was firing at us didn’t seem to have much punch.”
“They were low-end flash-pack torps,” Yuskeya said, all detached professionalism. “But he had a few surprises in shields and engines. I’m transferring all the ship data to you if you want to go over it.”
There was only a slight pause before he said coolly, “I’d like to see that. Thanks.”
“Is everything okay?” Maja stood in the doorway to the bridge, pale but composed. “I was in my quarters when things went crazy, and I thought I’d better stay out of everyone’s way.”
Hirin stood up from the chair and crossed to her, swinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing her close. “It’s all right, honey,” he said. “I’m turning the big chair over to your mother and going for a double caff. Want to come, and I’ll fill you in on what happened?”
“Sure, Dad,” she said, although her eyes went to Baden. He smiled and winked at her, and she relaxed visibly, letting Hirin steer her down the corridor toward the galley.
“I’m assuming we want to get to Mars as quickly as possible?” Rei asked from the pilot’s console. The angry thickness that had suffused her voice for the past few weeks had thinned out, and the barely-contained rage that had stiffened her movements had relaxed, at least a little.
“Full speed ahead,” I confirmed, moving from the skimchair into the captain’s chair and sinking gratefully into its familiar shape. “Yuskeya, run that shipdata through the Nearspace Registry, when we get close enough to Mars to get the updated data, would you? I don’t imagine we’ll find anything concrete, but we’ll have our homework done to make the report at Mars.”
Baden turned to me. “With your permission, Captain, I’d like to try installing some new decryption software—something that might catch a self-destructing message sooner next time.”
I didn’t ask him where he’d get such a thing. I just smiled. “Go ahead.”
As the bridge fell silent with everyone busy, I had a moment to reflect. In the moment of crisis, the crew had held together. There’d been some bumps, but I quietly thanked the nameless pirate, or whatever he was. He’d inadvertently shown me something important, something that I should have been able to figure out for myself, and that made me feel a little better. This crew needed, above all else, to be busy.
Oh, we’d managed long skip runs before with not much excitement to break the monotony. But that was when everyone was getting along. With various complications making things awkward and nothing substantial or dangerous to distract us, we couldn’t handle it. We’d all turned to solitary diversions to try and keep our minds off our problems. Rei’s martial arts workouts, Viss’s dogged overhauling of every engineering system. Hirin’s obsession with PrimeCorp and its misdeeds. Yuskeya’s compulsive reading. My immersion in building virtual solar systems on my datapad. Even Baden and Maja—would they have been quite so involved in each other if they hadn’t been trying to avoid the other shipboard disturbances?
As we scooted for Mars I thought about it. I couldn’t manufacture crises (and wasn’t hoping for more, I swear it), but maybe I could keep them busy. I’d think about it.
As it turned out, keeping the crew busy would be the least of my problems.
Chapter 4 – Jahelia
Hunter and Prey
ONCE MY MESSAGE to PrimeCorp was away and I was sure the Tane Ikai wasn’t following me, I engaged the autopilot, stood, and stretched. The encounter had left me exhilarated and oddly hungry, so I made my way to the minuscule galley at the rear of the tiny bridge and pulled off a mugful of steaming cazitta. I took it and an energy bar to the bridge and settled in my chair, the rich licorice scent of the drink filling the air. I smiled.
That had been fun.
“Are we done here?” asked Pita from the bridge console.
“I think so.”
“Want me to automate a full report and shoot it off to PrimeCorp Main?”
“No. I told you, I prefer to write the reports myself. That last message will do for now.” I pursed my lips, annoyed at myself for being annoyed with a machine. Pita is the computer in this lovely little ship that Alin Sedmamin so kindly gave me for this assignment—the Hunter’s Hope. Pita’s a PAREA, which is one of PrimeCorp’s cutesy little acronyms designed to increase their products’ appeal to consumers. PAREA stands for Personality-Attuned Realtime Electronic Assistant, which is simply a marketing-friendly way to say that the programming is “tweaked” for each user. She’s experimental, and yes, I’m letting them test her out on me. The pay for that alone was pretty damn good, for the privilege of letting them take readings from my brain while I looked at pictures and answered questions. A lot of questions. But it
did pay well.
The hardest part of the experiment is having to listen to her, now that she’s installed on the ship. She doesn’t talk like any other computer I’ve ever known—supposedly she talks like me. I’m not sure I like that, or that I agree. But it’s all part of the deal. I’ll admit she’s come in handy a few times, so I can’t complain too much, but she is annoying. That’s why I named her Pita. It’s my own little acronym. Pain-In-The-Ass.
“I think that went well.”
“Alin Sedmamin might not approve of your tactics,” Pita said mildly. “I don’t recall any instructions to actually attack the ship.”
“Oh, let me have a little fun. I’ll worry about Sedmamin later.” The oily PrimeCorp CEO might think he had me in his pocket, but he was only a means to an end, after all. Pita didn’t say anything else about it.
I grinned now at the memory of the rich male voice filling my cramped bridge. “Unidentified vessel, this is the far trader Tane Ikai, registration port New Cape City, Earthside. Respond.” I knew that voice, although the owner wouldn’t realize he’d been recognized.
I’d chuckled as I answered him, even though he couldn’t hear me. “Not yet, Mr. Baden Methyr. We’ll talk soon again, but not yet.”
Pita had flipped on the new F-shields then, just in case the crew of the Tane Ikai wasn’t too happy about the torps, but I didn’t expect them to return fire. Everything my research had told me about Captain Luta Paixon and her crew made me think I was safe enough unless they truly started to feel threatened. The F-shields were more new tech I was testing for PrimeCorp, and they should remain be undetectable by the Tane Ikai unless something impacted them.
This was only for fun. Testing the waters, to use an old nautical term.
Their shot across my bow seemed like a good time to end our little skirmish, and once the torpedo impact had revealed the existence of my shields, there wasn’t much more fun in it anyway. I told Pita to change course, engaged the new burst drive—also thanks to PrimeCorp—and took off.
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