Mission Pack 2: Missions 5-8 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  “Fine,” Tanny snapped. As she stalked back to the cockpit, she yelled without turning. “Send me the coordinates. Let’s get this over with.”

  # # #

  The coordinates from Scarecrow included an astral depth of 6.5. Not being an integer meant it was off the standard travel lanes in the astral. Being lower than 4.0 meant that someone was running a high-end star-drive—possibly military grade. The flat gray space was deserted when they arrived. Tanny put the Mobius into a null-velocity position relative to realspace.

  “Well, we’re here,” Tanny said, slouching back in the pilot’s chair with her arms crossed. “So, what? We just wait and hope someone shows up, preferably not with an ARGO battle group ready to dust us?”

  “Something like that,” Carl replied offhandedly. His eyes were only for the astral. A grin broke out on his face as a ship appeared not ten meters from the forward windows.

  “Jesus!” Tanny exclaimed. Scrambling to an upright position in her chair and grabbing for the controls. But Carl put a hand out to stop her.

  “Easy,” he said reassuringly. “That’s Scarecrow.”

  The ship was a single-seater, bigger than a Squall or a Typhoon, but only enough to cram in a bunk and a star-drive. Its hull was sleek and angular, painted blood red. Though it bristled with armaments, all pointed straight at the Mobius, none of them were powered. The pilot waved. She pointed first to herself, then to the Mobius.

  Carl gave a thumbs up, and then poked the index finger of one hand into a loose fist made by the other.

  “Swing us around, and dock airlock-to-airlock,” he ordered, using his rusty naval order-giving tone.

  “Wouldn’t the comm have been easier?”

  Carl chuckled. “She had her ship cloaked while parked in the middle of nowhere, neck-deep in the outlaws’ astral.”

  “Great,” Tanny replied. “Charlie’s got her conspiracy scanners on overload?”

  “Paranoid people live longer.”

  “How any of you crazy bastards are still alive is beyond me,” Tanny muttered.

  As Scarecrow maneuvered her ship to dock, Carl headed for the cargo bay and the airlock. It had been a long time since he’d seen his old wingman. It would be nice having a matching set of crazy on board.

  # # #

  The cargo bay had begun to smell. There just wasn’t enough room to store all the food Kubu required, and he wasn’t picky when it came to the state of the meat he ate. Those two facts had conspired to create a horrific “lick the tarp clean” policy where Kubu’s food was laid out on stain-resistant nano-mesh cloth tarpaulins on the cargo bay floor. Most of the crew limited their exposure to the smell as best they could. Tanny and Esper visited Kubu to keep him company but couldn’t stay as long as they might have liked; Esper had even tried going down in her EV helmet to filter the air. Roddy needed to get through to access most of the ship’s systems but got in and out as quickly as he could. Mriy didn’t mind the smell as much as the rest of them, so she’d started to bond with the big sentient canid.

  Carl hadn’t been down there in days. As captain, he felt it was his duty to be there when Scarecrow arrived. Kubu looked on from a non-threatening distance away from atop a pile of discarded laundry that served him as a bed. His growth showed no signs of stopping, and standing next to Carl, they could look one another square in the eye.

  A dull tremor in the floor told Carl that the two ships had docked. Someone—either Tanny or Scarecrow—must have been getting sloppy, since he hadn’t expected to notice the connection at all. A minute or so later, the airlock cycled. When the door opened, a vision from the past stepped out.

  Scarecrow was scrawny as ever, a fact accentuated by her mousy features. The years had treated her well. No sign of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She hadn’t gotten doughy or gray-flecked in the hair. Her normally frazzled blonde hair was tamed in a mop of tiny, jaw-length braids that bounced as her head snapped this way and that—she rarely looked with just her eyes. She wore a bulky flight jacket that probably concealed an armored layer beneath, and baggy pants lined in pockets. A blaster pistol dangled in a holster around her waist, and her forearm was covered by a TeleJack.

  With a few button presses on that interface, a second tremble in the floor told Carl they her ship had just released from docking. “Hey, Blackjack. Long time, right?” She strode over and grabbed Carl’s hand as he stuck it out. They clapped one another on the back. The smell of her hair brought back old memories.

  “Too long,” Carl agreed. They separated and he looked down at her with a grin. She looked good; the years had been kind since he’d last seen her. Of course, that wasn’t the sort of thing he could just blurt out. But he’d gotten so used to seeing her in a flight suit or uniform that he always remembered her as a pilot, not as a woman. Realizing that he’d let a silence build between them as he stared, he said voiced the first unrelated question that came to mind. “How’s the head?”

  Somewhere in the depths of his brain, Ladies Man Carl slammed his head against a desk.

  She shrugged. Like all her mannerisms, it looked like someone had jerked too hard on a puppet’s strings. “Better lately; still not great. Nice ship you’ve got here. Pretty soon you’ll be able to buy a fleet of them.”

  Anyone else would have said it with sarcasm and would have told him he could have bought a better ship. But Scarecrow got it—got him. This was a home more than a vehicle. As much as he loved Rhiannon, Scarecrow was like a sister who shared common interests.

  “So, you gonna keep us in the dark on this one, or tell me what scheme you’ve hatched to make us rich?”

  Scarecrow’s eyes darted to Kubu, who was watching in silence. He opened his mouth to let his tongue loll in what passed for a smile. “Can we trust the canid?”

  “He’s part of the crew, and hardly knows how to use the comm, let alone anyone to call.” Carl winked at Kubu. “Think of him as a giant six-year-old.”

  “With a taste for raw… what the hell is that, a deer?” Scarecrow asked, jerking her head at the tarp.

  “A moose,” Carl said. “Minus the antlers. Kubu, c’mere and meet an old friend of mine.”

  Kubu’s eyes widened, as did his grin. He bounded over, tail wagging. “Hello. Nice to meet you.” His English was improving, though his voice was getting deeper than the engines’ rumble.

  Scarecrow didn’t flinch. She wasn’t a flincher. She had never needed to be. There were a lot of skills and talents that went into making a top-notch combat pilot: steady nerves, spatial awareness, teamwork, bravery. But the one that Scarecrow had in spades was killer reflexes. As she reached up to pat Kubu, she used her off-hand. If Carl were a betting man (and barring crew intervention, he usually was), he’d have put money that if Kubu lunged for her, she’d have her blaster out of the holster and the trigger pulled before Kubu closed his jaws.

  “You’re a friendly one, huh?” she asked conversationally.

  “Nice hair,” Carl said. “I still remember you showing up first day at flight school, looking like you’d been struck by lightning.”

  “I miss the look, but loose hair is a bitch to clean out of a starship,” Scarecrow said. She pointed to Carl’s scalp. “But I could same about you. You look like someone’s used you to paint a Monet.”

  “Don’t go getting cultural on me, Little Miss Old Earth,” Carl said, unable to keep a smile off his face to lend weight to his complaint. “And you still haven’t answered my question. What’s this big job?”

  “You’re dense. I told you in the message I sent. I. Found. It.”

  “Found what?” Carl asked. He’d probably lost a million things over the years. Build up too much history with someone and vagueness took on the aspect of a haystack filled with needles.

  “The Odysseus.”

  Carl froze. Though his eyes remained open, they weren’t seeing what was there in front of him any longer. Squadron 333 had been assigned to the ENV Odysseus for their final mission. It had been lost at the Batt
le of Karthix and not the euphemistic “loss” that meant it was blasted by hostile ships or crashed into an asteroid. It was gone, and no one knew where, not even ARGO high command. Carl found his thoughts wandering to that fateful battle. The Eyndar fighters swarmed orbital space around Karthix IV, the volley between the Odysseus and the Eyndar carrier ship, and of course the disappearance of the Odysseus into astral space, leaving a few hundred Typhoons to face not only the Eyndar fighters, but the carrier as well.

  A beeping of button presses on Scarecrow’s forearm interface snapped Carl from his daydream. “Two minute is about enough vape-time, Blackjack. Back to 2561.”

  “What do you mean ‘found it’?” Carl asked.

  Scarecrow flashed her sparkling white teeth—still with a tiny gap between the front two that she’d never gotten cosmo’ed. “That’s a better question. I mean, I know where it ended up. I’ve been looking since the day we broke free. I’ve pieced together leads, rumors, and survey data. ARGO might have given up on it. Earth Navy might have wanted it all to go away. But I wasn’t ever going to give up figuring out what happened.”

  “So… your plan…” Carl spread his hands and made a ‘keep explaining’ motion.

  “How much do you think the salvage is worth on a top-secret Pandora-class battleship?”

  # # #

  The rest of the crew was waiting for them. Carl preceded Scarecrow into the common room, and she dropped her duffel bags by the door. Roddy paused a slapstick action holovid, and the room went silent.

  “Hi,” Esper said, breaking the ice.

  “Hey, Bus Stop,” Scarecrow said to Tanny when her spastic glances around the room settled on the Mobius’s pilot. “Didn’t know you were still latched onto my boy.”

  Tanny sat at the edge of the couch, chin in hand. Her glare could have melted steel. “Hi, Charlie. Glad to see you’re still alive.”

  “Everyone,” Carl said, ignoring the tension between the two women. “This is Amy Denise Charlton, call sign: Scarecrow.”

  “Civilians usually call me Charlie,” she added.

  “Scarecrow, this is my crew,” he continued. He pointed to them one by one as he made the introductions. “This is Roddy, the guy who keeps the Mobius in one piece.”

  Scarecrow nodded. “Laaku mechanic… I’ve heard that’s the way to go.”

  Roddy raised his beer in toast. “Nice to meet the girl who kept Carl alive long enough to hire me.”

  “And Mriy, in charge of ship’s security.”

  “Never met one of your kind before,” Scarecrow said. “We conquer your world recently?”

  Mriy narrowed her eyes. “Fifty years.”

  Scarecrow offered a shrug. “Sorry. I’m not much on politics. Welcome to ARGO, though.”

  “My sister, Rhiannon.”

  “No shit?” Scarecrow asked, fixing a wide-eyed stare at Carl. “You fly with your sister now? Smooth as ice, Blackjack. Good man. She looks older than I pictured her from your stories.”

  “Most of those stories are from when she was a kid. She grew up at some point,” Carl said. “I think it was a couple months back.”

  “Cheers,” Rhiannon said. She raised a bottle of knock-off French wine and drank. “No shortage of booze on this ship since these guys raided that smugglers’ trade depot.”

  “And you already know Mort and Tanny,” Carl concluded.

  Esper cleared her throat. It was easy at times to overlook her, since she wasn’t as loud or obnoxious as the rest of his crew.

  “Oh, and Esper,” Carl said. “Mort’s apprentice.” It was nice to have something to call her now. For her first few months on the Mobius she had been a bit of an empty file, not good enough at anything to call it a permanent job, not bad enough at anything to kick her off the ship.

  “Two wizards?” Scarecrow asked, taking a step back and angling her TeleJack away from Esper. “How much trouble is my A-tech in?”

  “Loads,” Carl replied. “But you can always buy new, right?”

  Scarecrow responded with a playful elbow in the ribs. “Right. Rich. I remember. Damn, I’m so used to fishing for terras, I don’t think of that.”

  “Speaking of rich,” Roddy said. “Mind telling us what this big heist of yours is? I assume it’s a heist. No one comes around promising to make us rich by paying us.”

  “I’ll get you a heading,” Scarecrow said. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s just… well, this one’s been a long time coming. Be nice to make it a surprise… for ARGO. Got it?”

  “Right…” Tanny said. “Still sleeping in a Faraday cage so the cloaked probes can’t read your brain waves? That why your ship doesn’t broadcast ID, even when you came out of cloak knowing who we were?”

  “We should probably tell them,” Carl said.

  From her seat on the couch, Tanny sat upright. “You know?”

  “Go ahead,” Scarecrow said. “Just get us started toward those coordinates I gave you. You got someplace I can crash a couple hours? I haven’t slept since I sent that comm.”

  “That was five days ago!” Esper exclaimed.

  Scarecrow rubbed her eyes. “Wow, really? Time flies.”

  “Use my bunk,” Carl said. Let the crew think what they want. “Forward starboard quarters.”

  “Gentleman as always, Commander,” Scarecrow said with a wink. As she shouldered her duffels, she added, “Tell them the whole thing if you want. They should know what they’re getting into.”

  # # #

  As the door to Carl’s quarters thudded shut, silence swept the common room. Scarecrow had come and gone—at least temporarily. Carl could hardly believe how little she’d changed since he’d last seen her. Oh, she might have been a little more paranoid, but that seemed like a pretty reasonable trait to reinforce, given her obsession with a top-secret project. Otherwise, they might have been coming back from shore leave together, for all the difference the years made.

  Esper forced a smile. “She seems nice.”

  “Nuttier than trail mix,” Tanny grumbled, leaning against the doorway.

  Mriy put her ears back and flashed her teeth. “And hopefully deaf as all your kind.”

  “What do I care? She and I have an understanding.”

  Exploring Tanny and Scarecrow’s interpersonal differences didn’t seem likely to end well, so Carl cleared his throat. “Anyone want to know what we’re going up against?”

  A laaku snort mid-chug resulted in beer spilling down a certain mechanic’s coveralls. “No,” Roddy said as he choked. “I love our little tradition of getting blindsided, scrambling for our lives, and getting stiffed on our payouts. Why ruin a good thing?”

  Ignoring the jab, Carl continued. “I can give a quick version, but to put it in proper perspective involves a story.”

  Esper paused a moment in her inputting of a lunch into the food processor. “A true story? That’d be novel. Or is this one of those convenient stories that makes this sound like a good idea when it really isn’t?”

  Tanny smirked. “You’re losing the choir, preacher-man.”

  “It’s the story of my last mission for the Half-Devils, Earth Navy Squadron 333,” Carl said, standing up straight. “And it’ll be the truth as best I remember it.”

  “Pass,” Tanny said. “I’ve heard this one before. I’ll go punch in those mystery coordinates that—”

  Carl coughed discreetly into the back of his hand. “The, um… version I told you may have contained a few misleading elements.”

  The glare he got might have broken the will of a lesser man, but Carl weathered it with a weak grin. “How misleading?”

  “Everything past ‘let me tell you about my last mission with the Half-Devils,’” Carl replied. As Tanny took a ferocious step in his direction, Carl backpedaled. “Hey! It was classified! How could I pass up the perfect chance to make it a better story? You believed it, didn’t you? We weren’t even married yet, I was still trying to impress you.”

  “So you didn’t dust eleven Eyndar fig
hters, but get blamed for losing half your squadron? You didn’t get drummed out of the navy for disobeying the order to withdraw?” Tanny asked.

  “It fit my pilot-gone-outlaw backstory,” Carl said with a shrug. “It’s the sort of thing I could have seen myself doing.”

  “So what’s the real story, then?” Esper said. “And what’s it got to do with the job Charlie has for us?”

  “Settle in.” Carl gestured for Esper to finish making her lunch. “By the end, it should all make sense.” He paused with a furrowed brow, then added, “Hopefully.”

  # # #

  “So, this was back before the cease fire with the Eyndar. Me and the squad were assigned to a new ship, fresh out of some black-sec shipyard in an uninhabited system. It needed field testing, and in wartime, field testing meant finding some podunk Eyndar colony and wiping it off the stellar charts. It was a battleship, so it only had hangar space for four squadrons, so we just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to get assigned to it. Her name was the ENV Odysseus.

  “So, after a week of astral travel, we arrive at Karthix IV and Captain Ahab—seriously, I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he was a real piece of shit—he starts putting it through the paces. Orbital bombardment with particle cannons, plasma blasters, a couple experimental warheads, you name it. I only got the scuttlebutt version of the armaments since that wasn’t my business. I was a squadron commander, not a gunner or an ordnance quartermaster. The whole ship was top-secret, so everything was need-to-know. But you know me… I hear stuff I’m not supposed to.

  “Anyway, the Eyndar must have gotten a distress call out, because next thing you know we’ve got a rescue fleet bearing down on us. By this point, the planet below was uninhabitable. Every structure on the scanners was leveled, the biosphere toxic, radiation over a good chunk of the surface. Old Ahab did a great job testing the ship’s weapons. But that wasn’t enough. We could have given those dogs the middle finger, dropped into astral, and let them mop up after their dead planet. Instead, Ahab scrambled the fighters and engaged.