by Ian Cannon
Ben said conversationally, “So in other words, the status is quo. Sounds good.”
King Oto looked down the row to General Ona’Oona. The general, wearing his usual critical glare, said, “The subject vessel is being equipped as we speak. The download process is complete,” he tilted his head untrustingly at Ben and said, “yet again.”
The king nodded to the bailiff core, which had been doubled, and they moved in. But Ben took a step forward calling, “What about the other guy?”
Rogan…
He heard Tawny sigh in frustration. They had discussed Rogan’s fate beforehand, but he allowed her, her disdain. He held his fair share toward the man, too.
The king said, “The one called Rogan. He is a Guilder. He is a mongrel. We would have him put to a palace cell … but we have no charge against him. Yet he is lame. We have very few options but to make him a ward of the Orbin state.”
“Then what?”
“We will inform the Guild we hold one of their own and have them send for him.”
Ben nodded. Fair enough. He said, “They’ll execute him for his crimes against a Guild member. Namely my wife and me.”
“That is not our concern,” King Oto said.
Ben inhaled big and glanced at his wife. She gave him a patient go ahead and get it over with look.
Ben cleared his throat and said, “He saved my life, Highness. I’m here to fulfill our bargain only because of him. If you’re willing and just, my wife and I have a better idea.”
When the Orbinii jail guards shoved open the door, Rogan looked perfectly pathetic sitting in a dark corner on the floor in his holding cell. The medical swath was still wrapped over his eyeless head. He had obviously not detected the cot sitting on the opposite side of the room. Or perhaps his own self-loathing drew him toward the dark and lonely corner. It suited him.
Ben stepped in. Rogan looked up looking puny, frightened. Ben clicked his tongue and said, “Congratulations, Rogan, you’ve earned the honorary title of mongrel from the Orbin Royal Council.”
“They’re going to put me away aren’t they?” he said as a three-year-old might who had been relegated to his bedroom for poor behavior.
Ben said, “No. They’re putting you on a jail boat.”
Rogan plopped his head back against the wall looking miserable. He groaned, “Jail boat …”
“What’d you think was going to happen, Rogan?”
He gave him a hopeless smile and said, “I thought I’d be at Nubbie’s right now.”
Ben shook his head with a condemning look and said, “Nubbie’s?”
“You never been to Nubbie’s?”
“No. I can honestly say I’ve never been to Nubbie’s.” He accentuated the word with a shot of revulsion.
Rogan smiled in deep, needful reflection. “It’s a real high-class joint. Molta-Danora. Brew their own, you know. And the dancing girls—shew-wee. There’s this one, she’s from Golotha, she does this thing where …”
“Yeah, sounds real classy,” Ben interrupted completely uninterested. “Look, you can forget Nubbie’s. They’re sending you back to Speculus.”
“The Guild?” he said sounding shocked and puny.
“Yep.”
He groaned, “Sympto’s going to want his money.”
“Yep.”
“I don’t have his money.”
“Nope.”
He dropped his head between his knees. “I’m so booster-boofed.”
“Maybe not,” Ben said.
Rogan’s head came back up as if to see him. He said, “Huh?”
Ben said, “You’ll be making a stop on the way, and if you’re smart you’ll never see Sympto again.”
“Stop? Where to?”
Ben smiled at him, couldn’t refute the irony. He said, “You’ll see.”
Rogan scoffed, “Oh, ha ha—that’s funny.”
“From there, you’ll be free to go.”
Rogan said, “Great,” sounding deeply petulant.
Ben shook his head grinning sadly down at him. He sighed, “This deal went raw for you didn’t it?”
“Raw as meat,” Rogan said.
Ben looked back at the guards who stood at the entrance watching the transaction. He squatted down next to Rogan, got close, and said, “You almost got my wife killed, Rogan. So I’m only going to tell you this one time. Are you listening?”
Rogan reacted to Ben’s sudden closeness, looking up blindly, and said, “That’s all I can do.”
“Good,” Ben said. “If you ever see me coming around the corner, it means I’m coming for you, Rogan, and I’m coming to take more than just your eyeballs. So, buddy … you better run. You better run far and fast. You got it?”
“Yeah,” he said, defeated. “There’s only one thing. How am I going to see you coming?” He yelled, “I ain’t got no eyeballs!”
Ben came to his full height still looking down. With a final word, he said, “I know it’s not your strong suit, Rogan, but … think about it.” He turned and walked out, the cell door slamming behind him.
It left Rogan frowning in the dark, sitting on Ben’s last words.
Think about it.
Okay, so an Orbin jail boat was coming to collect him.
But they weren’t delivering him to the Guild.
Instead, they were taking him to some mystery stop.
Then he would be free to go.
Rogan tilted his head like a dog putting a riddle together.
Then he’d be free to go?
And if he was smart, he’d never go see Sympto again?
See Sympto.
See!
Rogan grinned.
They were taking him to an out-of-the-way med colony.
He smiled big.
He was going to get new eyeballs!
He tilted his head the other way, confused—wait a minute!
How was he going to afford new eyeballs?
New eyeballs cost a lot of yield.
Plus they’d have to bribe the flight crew.
Bribe the med colony.
That takes at least …
Rogan grinned, whispered, “Half a million.”
The repair crews were finished. REX looked good, as good as Ben had ever seen him look. He was patched, polished and whole—ready for space flight. They also reattached his mag-spires, turnstile and all, and fitted him with new cargo containers. They were uniform in color, shape and size. They even replaced a few shorted circuits, replenished the armory, even loaded a full capacity into the bubble gun. He no longer looked like a big discolored patch-up job. Everything was painted a suitable light gray with fresh, dark russet highlights. Even the viewport was clean, pristine and mean. The Orbinii obviously didn’t want them carrying out this task against the Cabal looking suspect. It only suited Ben’s needs. He swam in the view momentarily. He liked what he saw.
Boarding REX was a breath of fresh air. He paused with his face to the ceiling, eyes closed, taking a full breath. Then it was off to the cockpit where Tawny awaited him. She’d removed the exo-suit legging and replaced it with a proper fitting to begin her healing process. She smiled at him as he entered. He smiled back and took his pilot’s chair.
“So what about Rogan?” she asked.
“He’s—”
“Never mind,” she said.
“Right. Disengaging,” he called, and REX lowered from the platform, spun about and faced irrefutably toward one tiny moon three inner-warp hours away.
Menuit-B.
Ben emitted the download information on the 3-D pad. Everything zipped up—bullet-pointed information, schematics, a holo-image of the moon.
“There’s the plan,” Tawny said.
“Yeah. Looks pretty simple,” he said. “We go in. Do the drop. Get out. What could go wrong?”
“Absolutely nothing,” she said. “So, let’s do it.”
Ben took a concerned breath and sat back in the chair. It caught her attention. She looked over, said, “What?”
/> “Tawny, are you sure about this?” he asked.
She gave him an interested look. “What do you mean?”
He cringed in thought and said, “Delivering war technologies. Escorting weapons grade material. Getting involved in espionage. What we’re about to do steps across every rule we ever devised to avoid the war. Plus, we’re about to foil the Cabal’s plans, big time.” He paused, said, “That’s your war effort. Those are your people.”
She put a hand on his cheek, made him look at her. “You’re my war effort, baby. You’re my people.”
Her words choked him up, made him smile. To the two gods of the solar twin system (and he didn’t care which one) he’d swear to either one of them, he loved this woman. He loved her more than anything.
More.
Than.
Anything.
He said, “REX?”
“We’re set and met, Cap.”
He took her hand and squeezed. “I love you, wife.”
She squeezed back. “I love you, husband.”
They shared a moment looking into each other’s eyes.
Ben said, “Burn!”
And BOOM—they were gone.
***
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Enjoy this opening excerpt from Doomed Cargo: A Space Rules Adventure Part 2
There were no two ways about it. This was bad. In fact, it couldn’t be much worse. She was booster booffed. Totally screwed. Tawny knew it the second she saw him.
Yep—she recognized that guy.
She sank a little lower in her chair, tried to be invisible.
Gazing back over, she checked to see if he’d seen her. She had to risk the eye contact.
Please, let him just leave, she thought.
Nope, he was busy guarding the exit. He was security.
Great. Now what?
She looked around staying as invisible as she could in the sparsely crowded room. Space freighter crews sat around the tables leisurely waiting for their turn to be released for departure. It was a roomful of hard-nosers and blue collars. Even a slimeball or two. Hubbub was low.
The room had two long viewports on both sides. It was beneath the lunar belly and attached to the rock by big overhead stanchions, an endless gray and black sky of jagged moon features. It was a planet turned upside down—a hard, rocky landscape above, the star-speckled sky below.
Through the port side she could see a full assembly line buzzing with activity. It was miles long, segmented into stages and passing huge pieces of fabricated superstructure along a stage at a time, like an enormous extrusion machine fashioning the monumental guts of the Cabal undertaking.
Through the starboard viewport was the rest of the moon. Out there, the Cabal had constructed the foundry’s pieces and placed them meticulously in accordance with their operation. It was a complex of platforms, towers, and cargo bays clinging to the landscape overhead.
The operation was massive, the biggest industrial venture she’d ever seen. They were turning the Stathosian moon into a machine—a big, fat planet killer.
This was the Menuit-B moon cannon.
These machine makers were her people. At least they had been at one time. Now she was back to sabotage their little operation for the Orbin Royal Council. They wouldn’t be too happy about that.
And damned if she didn’t know the guard standing over there. She couldn’t place his face exactly, and she couldn’t remember his name, but she knew him. And if he recognized her, too—the bi-hells would hit the fan.
Of all the pockets of people in the system, of all the tiny bits of humanoid-kind spread out across a hundred planets, of all the stupidest ways to get caught by the war machine, it would have to be right here smack dab in the middle of it on a mission to stop its march.
Balls.
She grumbled to herself. That’s what she and Ben got for breaking their Space Rules. No getting involved. And here they were … getting involved.
Good lords.
She glanced back at the guy. He was leaning against the wall inspecting his hand comm, probably reading holo-images from buddies and co-workers stationed at other areas of the moon project. He was doing anything but guarding his post. Tawny crooked her lips. She remembered him now. They’d served in the same outfit on the moons of Tremus and Jingut. It was during her time in the Confederation 791st frontal attack squad—the 791 FAS’s. They called themselves the cog-killers. He was a grunt. She was sniper support. He was a bad soldier. Too dumb to lead. Too dumb to follow. Big, physical, always with a wandering mind. It was amazing he’d survived the war long enough to be stationed on a Cabal-run military project. He wasn’t much good anywhere else.
Oh, what was his damn name?
Private something.
She scanned his rank insignia and had to hide a giggle. Still a buck private. Dumb-narse. Maybe his stupidity would work in her favor.
She scrunched her face, memories from a deeply-fogged past resurrecting in her mind. That guy—what’s-his-name—always ran with another dude. They had been buddies, inseparable. He was the big dumb one, the muscle. The other dude had been a scrawny little runt, but smart; a heckler, always poking fun at other’s expense. She couldn’t remember his name, either. That was eight years ago, universal. It felt like a hundred. He was probably dead, the rotten, little…
“Cog-killers!” someone called.
Tawny froze, her skin going cold. She turned around in her chair and looked up.
Nope. The guy wasn’t dead at all. He was standing right there, looking at her with a quizzical grin, all one hundred and thirty pounds of him. Little snot. He strutted to her table, slid out the chair and sat. “You’re, uh…” he snapped his narrow fingers trying to jog a deep memory, and said, “Corporal Tawny, Group Zero from Raylon.”
Group Zero. The designation for an orphan. He seemed to enjoy pointing that out.
It was time to act casual, but not lie. Tawny gave him a big smile of recognition and said, “The Tremus moon, right?”
“And Jingut,” he said. “You remember. Dorlin,” and he put out his hand.
Hesitantly, she shook it saying, “Private Dorlin, seven-ninety-first. Right.”
“Now it’s Lead Corporal,” he said brandishing the insignia on his lapel like a great trophy, “Group project coordinator for the Cabal engineers, security, sector eight-eight-one-oh-four, Stathos.”
“Right,” Tawny said inferring the construction project going on all around them. “Planet killers.”
He leaned forward, said, “We’re not just killing cogs anymore.”
Yep—she was totally booffed.
Ben did not like being made separate from his wife. It made him nervous, gave him an added element of concern to poison his mind. Plus … she was good in a fight. Really good. He never knew when he might need her.
Nevertheless, the security contingent of the Menuit-B project had separated them upon their arrival. It was protocol. Tawny had stayed back in the waiting area. Ben had been told to follow one of the admin associates through a webwork of tunnels and airlocks. He strolled easily behind the guy with two security guards pacing behind. He looked back over his shoulder giving them an arrant grin. They didn’t respond, just kept their stoic eyes glaring forward. These Cabal boys didn’t mess around. Their paranoia of outsiders was pounded into them from military school. I
t made Ben feel completely alone.
Of course, they had plucked him and Tawny from REX, too, and there was no telling where their ship was, currently. Ben was none too happy about that, either. REX was escorted by tug to the privateer hangar. He was probably mag locked to some docking frame stuck between dozens of other ships. Poor REX. He was probably a nervous wreck.
They moved into an office and Ben found himself standing in front of a Cabal contract administrator of some sort. The gold blade-and-plume insignia on his lapel told him he was a man of rank. The look in his eyes endorsed Ben’s assumption.
The man looked at his admin assistant and said, “Is this him?”
“Yes, sir.”
His eyes never left Ben, just looked at him with an ambivalent expression. He didn’t look to be in any mood for conversation. Ben tried to soften him with a wry grin. It was self-preservation. It didn’t work.
He said, “I am High Major Varkin, Menuit security minister. I’m the security administrator of this facility. I run it. It’s mine.”
There was a bloated pause. Ben finally said, “That’s great.”
“You want to explain yourself?”
Ben looked at the admin assistant, then to the two guards flanking him, feigning innocence. “What do you mean?”
The man said with a pointed tone, “Why are you here?”
“You have my manifest. It’s all there,” Ben said. That earned a dry look, one that he regretted immediately.
Varkin swished the holo-window of his manifest away and said, “It means nothing.”
“It’s an authentic manifest.”
“So?”
Ben filled the ensuing silence with a nervous grin. He hated to ask, but—“What’s the problem?”
“You have a new ident load, conforms to our newest inspection protocol.”
“That’s the point.”
Varkin leaned way back in his chair. “No privateer has rolled this out yet.”
