“Wren, they’re sailing,” he said incredulously.
Then another one hit, but this one barely made the ship shudder, and where it hit the sail, it stuck like a snowflake on a windshield. As warnings flashed on all their displays, their eyes were drawn inexorably to the tiny shape. They could only stare at the thing they had caught in their sail.
“What the hell?”
“Are you getting this recorded?” Berk asked, his mind whirling with possibilities. “Are we transmitting? Good God! Committee Ship, I hope to hell you’re getting this!” Unfortunately, the feed was only one way. They had no way to know if they were being recorded, or if they were even transmitting.
“Look!” Wren tapped a key, and a spotlight flared onto the tiny thing pinned to the sail. “It’s moving!”
“Sonofa—” Berk peeled a camera off of his board and patched the feed into his monitor. Then he slapped it face down onto the hull and brought the controls for focus, pan, and zoom online. In seconds he had a full-size image on his screen; a tiny, crystalline creature struggling to lift its six gossamer wings against the wind of their flight. In that same amount of time, the rest of the small winged sailors darted away, wheeling like a school of fish. He made sure record was on and thought aloud, “What the hell do we do now?”
“I’m up for ideas,” Wren said, smiling and shrugging. “We can’t sail with the rig in shreds, but I think this is our ticket now.” She nodded at the display. “If we can figure out a way to take this up to the committee ship...”
“Fire the pickup rockets?”
“I think we’d lose it reaching escape velocity, and if not then, when we made it to apogee. It’d float away.”
“If we furled the sail, it might get caught in the spooler.” Berk tweaked the spooler, and the sail shortened by a half-meter. Fortunately, the tiny creature was stuck in one of the upper sails, not the jammed lower ones. But the upper quadrants could not be fully wound in without flipping the ship over. The spooler track was about as wide as a human hair, since the sail itself was only one very large molecule thick. If he wound it in, would the little creature get caught, or merely tumble off the spar and vanish into the endless storm?
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think I’m starting to feel sorry for the little critter,” she said, and even before he stared dumbfounded at her, he knew she was serious. “I mean, who knows. It could feel…I don’t know…pain or something.”
“And it might be doing calculus in its head.” He tapped the display. “It doesn’t even have a head, Wren! We’ve got to try to take it back!”
“I suppose.” She nodded and tried to smile. “Reef it in easy, and if it sticks, we’ll fire the pickup boosters and get scooped. If we lose it, the race is over for us anyway.”
“Right.”
He edged the sail in slowly. He tried to balance things, but with the keel so far out, it was impossible. The ship started to slew sideways, and the little creature slipped down the sail a full meter before Berk brought everything back to where it was.
“Well, that didn’t work.”
“What about changing the pitch of the spars as you furl?”
“We’d pitch-pole with all the effort on the keel. We’re close to it now. Can’t you feel it?”
“Well, she’s not handling well, I can feel that, but I didn’t think we were that close to flipping end over end. You’re sure?”
He gave her a withering look. “Trust me on this one.”
“Hey, I was trying to predict a meteorological phenomenon, not a swarm of extra-terrestrial butterflies!”
“Well, I’ll tell everyone in the solar-system you were right, if you figure out a way for us to keep that little sprite pinned to the sail for the trip back upstairs, okay?”
“Deal.”
They both fell silent and thought for a while.
They were out of the race, unable to sail efficiently, and well outside the racing lanes, but they had good video of the tiny, crystalline life-form, and that alone would make them famous. But to actually bring back a specimen would make them and their sponsors very rich, indeed. The first confirmed extra-terrestrial life-form, and who would have thought it would be sailing around the upper atmosphere of a gas giant?
“If we just hit the recovery boosters, it’ll float away when we reach apogee. We need a way to keep him stuck there,” Wren said.
“I could furl him up when the atmosphere thins out, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stick in the spooler. Especially if it doesn’t stop flopping around.” Their velocity had fallen to barely ten percent of their former pace, and it looked like the little sailor was about ready to flutter away.
“Well, we’ve got to try it, don’t we?” Wren said, working on the retrieval program. She finished the calculations and punched up the sequence. “Ready?”
“Will we have enough to get to retrieval altitude with the keel out that far?”
“It’ll be close.” The rocket boosters weren’t adequate to achieve a stable orbit in the best of conditions. With half a kilometer of keel dragging at them, they’d be lucky to make it high enough to get picked up. “They’ll have to get us on the first pass, but that’s usually not a problem.”
“We better make it count, then,” Berk muttered. “Ready when you are.”
“The retrieval transponder’s on, and the hammer’s down.”
A subsonic rumble pushed them into their seats as the thrusters fired, lifting them from the Jovan atmosphere. The acceleration also pressed their precious cargo against the sail. Their payday was safe, at least for now.
The multi-hued haze whipping past them started to thin. Sunlight flooded the cabin as their trajectory reached the plane of the horizon. The hull darkened on one side and cast the other in shadow, and their tiny cargo glimmered in the sunlight like a diamond.
As the atmosphere faded away, Berk furled the sails, relying on the thrust of the retrieval rockets to keep the tiny sailor pinned to the fabric. Unfortunately, when its gossamer wing touched the spar, it curled up against the spooling seam. It wasn’t stuck.
“Damn!” he cursed, glaring at the little creature. “Why couldn’t you just lay flat?”
“Crappy luck, that’s why.” Wren tapped up a display of the descending committee ship, huge with its outriggers fully extended, the retrieval net paid out all the way. Of course they couldn’t see the net, it was made of the same stuff as their sails, though a looser weave. “Maybe it won’t drift far, and they’ll get it in the bag when they scoop us.”
“Not much we can do about it now.” He punched up some numbers. “Boosters are about done.”
The vibration of the thrusters eased and died away to nothing, and Berk watched the tiny little creature flutter away from the spar. It was moving lazily in the vacuum of space, its gossamer wings finding no purchase without atmosphere. It looked like a tiny sea creature, fluttering against an invisible current. It slowly drifted toward the bow of the Scotch Bonnet, then beyond.
“It’s drifting straight off the bow.” Wren did a quick scan with a range finder and ran some calculations. “Should be about a quarter klick out when we reach apogee.” She looked at Berk with hope in her eyes. “They should be able to get us both.”
“Well, you can bet your ass they’ve got a telescope trained on it. They’ll get it.” A thought creased his brow, but he shook his head and dismissed it. “They’ll get us both.”
“Apogee in one minute.”
“Wren,” he said, pointing to the now looming committee boat, “they’re adjusting.”
She took a range on the committee boat, and another on the corner marker of the retrieval net. Her eyes widened as she read the numbers. He saw the same numbers on his display.
“Berk…”
His heart stuck in his chest as the invisible net passed less than ten meters from their bow.
“Those bastards!” he whispered, watching his life fly past. “They scooped our find and left us!”
<
br /> “They would have lost it if they scooped us with it,” Wren said. “The net would have flexed, and it would have been ejected. The dirty sons of bitches abandoned us for it.”
“They went for the money.” Disbelief and resignation were vying for his voice. There was no way Scotch Bonnet could maintain orbit, and no way to achieve retrieval. They were going down.
The silence in the cabin was total as the gleaming crescent of Sol’s light grew brighter, adding color to the swirling storm below.
“Berk?”
“Yeah, Wren?” He was surprised at the calm in her voice.
“You tried to furl the keel, right?”
“Yeah. It’s jammed.”
“Did you try to extend it?”
“Nope.” He blinked. His eyes stung, and he wondered what she was getting at.
“Try it.”
“Sure.” It didn’t really matter. He punched his pad and raised an eyebrow at the result. “It works.”
“Run ‘em out for me then. All the way.”
“Ha!” His bark of laughter surprised him, as did the smile creasing his lips. “Make a hell of a contrail.”
“A blaze of glory.” Her voice wasn’t so steady now.
“Right.” He thought about their association for a moment, wishing for the first time that they actually had shared a bit more than a captain-crew relationship, before he added, “Aye, aye, Captain. Full sails!”
He punched the controls that would extend the sails fully, gave the nearest camera the finger, and watched the swirling mass of the great eye storm come up to greet them.
* * * * *
Chris A. Jackson Bio
Chris A. Jackson fell in love with the sea the first time he set eyes on those majestic rolling waves. As a youth, he spent summers working on his father’s fishing boat in Oregon. Trained as a marine biologist, he became sidetracked by a career in biomedical research, but regained his heart and soul in 2009 when he and his wife Anne left the dock aboard a 45-foot sailboat to cruise the Caribbean and write full time. His acclaimed Scimitar Seas nautical fantasies won three consecutive Gold Medals in the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards. In addition to his sea tales, his repertoire includes six more award-winning fantasy novels, as well as several short stories published in anthologies. Shooting from the sea to the stars, Chris now has a triad of science fiction/humor novellas available in both ebook and audiobook formats. His most recent release is Pirate’s Honor, from Paizo Publishing.
To learn more, please visit http://jaxbooks.com.
# # # # #
Of Cats, Dogs, and Devlin by Chris Maddox
Niko Devlin awoke instantly at the sound. His senses probed the inky blackness of the apartment. Without raising his head, his hand slid under his pillow and felt the handgrip of his pistol. He slipped his lean frame out of bed quietly and crouched in the darkness. He listened intently for the sound again, his hands checking load and charge on the railgun.
A moment later, he heard it: the rattle of glass, the opening of his refrigerator door, and the slight scrape of a stool on the floor. Ballsy, he thought. Cheeky bugger’s helping himself to my groceries before robbing me. There was another reason someone would invade his home, but he adamantly refused to think about it.
He kept low, snaking around the obstacles as he stalked out of the bedroom and into the living room, until he braced himself against the blind doorway. One. Two.
Before he got to three, a purring contralto called from the kitchen, “Hello, Niko. Want a glass of milk?”
He peered around the corner. An attractive woman in a black outfit that showed way more leg than Devlin thought proper was seated at his breakfast bar as if she owned the place, glass of milk in one hand, milk container in the other. She placed both on the counter.
Devlin muttered curses in three different languages as he breathed out and came around the corner. “Dammit, Cat! You could have just gotten really shot,” he said.
“You’d never have done that,” the woman replied primly. Then she grinned impudently. “Besides, I’d never have let you.”
She picked up a huge sandwich she had apparently just made and took a bite. “I figured,” she continued while chewing, “you would eventually figure out that I was friendly when I didn’t kill you in your sleep. “
The Cat—that was all the name anyone knew—was a meter and a half tall (it sort of changed, depending on what she was doing). Her hair, cut short at the neck and tossed over at the top, was a deep burgundy red, for the moment. It really set off The Cat’s jade green eyes. Like her hair, they changed color at her whim, but were almost always green.
She had a cute little button nose and rosy pink lips that perpetually wore an impish grin. The broader the grin, the more trouble you knew you were in. Like most progen recipients, she looked young, but Devlin knew she’d seen and done more than some hardened veterans.
The Cat normally wore coveralls that did a decent job of obscuring the curvy body underneath. The outfit she was in at the moment was enough to start a riot.
She was a data slicer…a good one. Devlin had been a boot camp recruit on his final exercise before graduation when they met; she’d been shanghaied by a mercenary group to hack into a top-secret weapons facility. Devlin and his group had stumbled on the facility after being shot down by the same mercs. She, her two minions, and Devlin’s group had joined forces to keep the facility from falling into the mercenaries’ hands.
Afterward, she’d inexplicably attached herself to his wagon, going to so far as to ‘fix it’ so her two accomplices, Joe Harold and Padraig Kilmeade, assumed the identities of two soldiers who had been slain while in Devlin’s platoon, becoming Nathaniel Jones and Jeremy Tamman. Ultimately, he had gone along with the charade and gotten two superlative soldiers.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, it’s impolite,” he said. He made sure the pistol was back on safe and laid it on the counter, seating himself.
The Cat put the sandwich down and poured him a glass of milk. He took it.
“Tamman’s being a jerk,” she said without prompting. “I came here. I put my stuff in the far bedroom.”
“And why did you automatically think that would be okay with me?” he asked.
She simply looked at him, said nothing, and took a bite of her sandwich.
* * *
When Devlin awoke the next morning, Cat was gone again. No surprise there, he thought. Just like a damn cat. They only show up when it suits them, and only so long as they’ve got a use for you. Screw you the rest of the time.
He knew this was going to cause…issues, especially with Tamman. Jeremy Tamman, nee Padraig Kilmeade, was a good guy. A clear-headed soldier (considering he started his career as a deserter who took over a dead soldier’s identity) and a steady hand. But clear-headed when it came to The Cat—not so much. He was as protective as a mother hen, and love-sick crazy—which was probably why she drove him so insane.
He walked out of the bedroom into the living room and activated the comm terminal. He punched in Tamman’s personal code.
A moment later, the battered face of Sergeant Jeremy Tamman filled the screen. His eyes were bloodshot and a little glassy. “What the hell do you want, EllTee?” the big man slurred. Tamman, it seemed, had been drinking…for a while.
“Tam,” Devlin said. “You okay?”
“Sure thing, Boss,” Tamman growled. “I’m like this all the time. Five by. Just farkking ducky.”
The big man took a pull on a bottle. Devlin thought he saw a Rurian Scotch label. That was about 2 steps below industrial solvent. Jeremy Tamman was massively, majorly drunk. He grimaced as it went down, then snarled, his voice raspy from the cheap booze, “I’m done, EllTee. I’ve farkking had it with the little minx. I hope she finds some hole to crawl into, cuz she ain’t welcome here anymore.”
He pulled on the bottle, then realized it was empty and threw it against the far wall from the screen, smashing it.
“What the hell di
d she do?” Devlin inquired.
“Don’t wanna talk about it.” Tamman grunted. He reached down and pulled out another bottle. “Just wanna get funk…funking dank…I mean farkking drunk.” He tried several times to overcome the seal on the bottle, and as Devlin watched, he slowly slid out of sight of the screen.
“Well, damn.” Devlin sighed as he cut the comm connection. He punched in another code.
After a moment, his platoon sergeant, Kevin Cooper, regarded him from the screen. His brutish face tried for jovial, but looked more like a predator sizing up a small morsel of dinner. When he saw Devlin, he frowned. “What’s up, Boss? You’re supposed to be on leave.”
“Apparently Tam and The Cat had a falling out last night. Cat’s here. She seems to be unperturbed.”
Cooper snorted. “Don’t that just sound like her. You couldn’t ruffle that girl’s fur with a nuke.”
Devlin pressed his lips together. “Look, Tamman is drunk off his ass.” He checked the comm terminal. “It looks like he’s in a hotel over in Elysium. Grab a couple of troops and go dry his ass out, before he gets some stupid idea.” He thought for a moment. “Don’t…repeat…DON’T tell that big ox WHERE Cat is. Just dry him out and try and find out what the fark happened. I’ll try the same thing here.”
Cooper nodded. “Understood, Sir. I’ll scrounge up a ground shuttle and take Jonesy, Sparklepony, and Buttsniffer. We’ll bring him back here and get him cleaned up.”
Devlin cut the connection and hung his head. So much for leave.
* * *
Devlin was loading the back of his air car with groceries as he considered the situation with Cat and Tamman. Getting involved with your troopers’ problems was, he decided, a really crappy way to spend your leave time. But then, it was a really crappy situation.
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