by Kal Spriggs
He didn’t answer for a moment. She expected another off-handed joke. Instead, when he finally spoke, his voice was gruff. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right. I probably couldn’t understand how a betrayer thinks.” She answered. “I don’t think I’d want to anyway.”
“Things aren’t always what they appear, Mel.” His voice was sad, somehow. “Keep that in mind when you work with Agent Mueller. Sometimes things aren’t what they appear to be.”
“And sometimes things are exactly what they look like,” Mel snapped back instantly. She didn’t want to think he’d had any motivation besides self-interest. Those thoughts robbed her of her anger, left her only with pain.
His seat creaked as he leaned forward to speak softly in her ear. “Don’t trust anyone on this ship.”
With that he rose and left.
***
Time: 1400 Zulu, 12 June 291 G.D.
Location: SS John Kelly, Expo System
Mel completed the undocking procedure and drew away from the prison ship. She looked out the canopy distastefully, gazing with distaste at the decrepit vessel. “LMV John Kelly, clear of your drive, Justicar.” She couldn’t find it in her to wish them a good journey.
She heard a dark chuckle from behind her. “I’d love to be able to take all the prisoners off and blast that bastard out of the sky.”
“I’m sure you would, Marcus, but you won’t be doing that.” Agent Mueller said from behind them both. Marcus muttered something about who he wished was aboard the prison ship when he did it.
Mel smiled in spite of herself.
Her smile broadened as she looked across the indicator panels and saw only two yellow lights. She took her time as she swung the bow around and inserted the coordinates for the warp engines. There was joy in a ship that responded.. There was happiness to be found at the yoke of any vessel, even if it wasn’t home. I have no home now, she thought, her joy darkened with sorrow. She had lost the last thing she had left of her parents.
“Warp coordinates uploaded. Strategic drive active in thirty seconds,” Marcus acknowledged.
Being reminded of his presence killed the smile. It didn’t hurt nearly as much this time, but it certainly didn’t feel good.
She watched the countdown timer. Most such maneuvers were routine; the good thing about warp drives was that they worked or they didn’t. The drive rings that circled the ship did their job unless they suffered actual physical damage, at which time the ship reverted immediately to normal space. Though they can function at lower levels of capability, she thought.
Watching a ship go into warp was a sign of how well a ship worked. A ship in top shape engaged smoothly, because its drive was properly aligned. Most civilian ships were slightly misaligned, not enough to cause damage, but enough to cause slight nausea to those unfamiliar to the experience. Local space warp drives, often called 'tactical' warp drives utilized only one ring so noticing any motion was difficult. The faster than light warp drive, often called strategic drive by the military, utilized both drive rings on a ship and so any issues with alignment were more easily detected.
As she’d expected, the drive was very smooth. “Minimal misalignment.”
“She goes down like a drunken—”
“If you finish that statement, you’re going to wish we had a doctor aboard.” Mel stated flatly. She’d heard the phrase before; the last person she wanted to hear it from now was him. She opened the intercom to the engine room. “Rawn, how are things down there?”
“No problems, sis.” She could almost hear his shrug. “Strak’s monitoring the power plant, and that Giran guy is keeping an eye on the control panel.”
“Thanks, Rawn.”
She heard the door slide closed, and flipped on one of the internal cameras to watch the Guard Intelligence agent walk down the corridor, toward the hangar bay.
She felt Marcus looking over her shoulder. “Getting a little suspicious of our good friend and boss?”
“I got less reason to trust you. Shut your trap.” She spoke without force, though. Why the Guard needed to rely on seven convicts to do this job she didn’t know. But she didn’t trust it one bit.
She flipped on the receiver for the hangar bay intercom. Two of the other crew members were there, Brian, the third and last member from the Varqua, and Stasia, who seemed to be a hacker of some sort. The hacker seemed to have a large number of boxes to sort through and as Mel watched, the woman opened up a box, drew out some computer components and then checked them off an inventory.
“Everything good down there?” Agent Mueller was asking.
“Da, seems good.” Stasia was a short, skinny woman with mousy brown hair. Her face had a pinched look and she seemed to squint at everything nearsightedly. Mel had spoken to her briefly; she’d seemed very distant, as if her mind was elsewhere.
As Stasia returned to sorting through her boxes, Brian gestured toward three black crates. Each was long and narrow, roughly the size and shape of a coffin, banded with metal strips. The security camera didn’t have a good angle, but Mel zoomed in and was able to read bright orange numbers written on the top of one of them.
“Three crates arrived for you just before departure.” Brian spoke. There was an unspoken consensus by the crew that no one would refer to the agent as ‘sir’. He hadn’t earned any kind of respect, and he gave them that minor victory. That they followed his orders seemed good enough for him.
“Only three?” the agent asked.
Brian held out the inventory list, but Mueller waved it away. “Have them put outside my cabin.”
“That crate is carrying MP-11s,” Marcus said from behind her. He pointed at the first crate. As the agent turned, the other two crates were clearly visible. “That one is a case for a MG-144, and that is a—” He cut himself off, looking at her.
Mel stared at him for a long moment, the obvious question unasked. Marcus was a smuggler, a thief, and a general scumbag. There was no reason for him to instantly recognize the coded label on a military weapon crate.
Movement on the screen caught her attention and she saw that the Guard Intelligence agent was headed toward the bridge. She cut the camera feed and brought up data on the warp drive just as the door opened.
“I trust everything is well in hand?” He asked.
Mel didn’t trust herself to face him without revealing too much. Marcus saved her by unbuckling. “Everything’s good here. We can probably go to autopilot for the rest of the trip. Damned good computers – equipment, too – for a freighter. Where’d Guard Intel come up with it?”
“There will be a briefing in five minutes in the lounge. I trust you’ll both be there.”
The agent turned and left without saying anything.
“Fishing for information?” Mel asked.
“Trying to distract him. Agent Mueller is a very perceptive man. I thought it best to give him some false lead as to what we were doing in here during his absence.”
“His name’s Mueller?” Mel asked.
There was a moment of silence. “Yeah, Adam Mueller. I caught his name when he flashed his badge.”
That sounded a little weak to Mel, “Sounds to me like you know something about this GI agent.”
He snorted, “Sure I do. I know he’ll know we’re up to something if we aren’t on time for his little briefing.”
Mel opened her mouth to retort, but too late. He had slipped through the hatch before she could come up with something suitably acidic.
“I hate that bastard,” she growled. Even she wasn't sure which bastard she meant.
***
The eight of them met in the lounge for the first time.
Agent Mueller stood next to a holo-projector. Brian and Strak had taken one couch, Mel and Rawn the other. Marcus, Stasia and Giran were seated at the lounge’s lone table.
“As most of you can easily guess after our conversations, we are going after the Fenris.” The agent smiled. “I believe we can dispense
with the pleasantries and get straight down to business.”
He had a smirk on his face, as if he expected them all to laugh at his turn of phrase. When none of them responded with so much as a smirk, his face went cold. “First: payment.” The agent ticked off his fingers as he addressed each item. “All of you will be pardoned for your crimes. Easy enough for me to arrange, I assure you.” He shrugged. “Second: each of you receives a bonus for completion. In addition to your freedom, each of you will receive ten thousand dollars.”
The seven ex-prisoners eyed each other. Mel judged from the suspicious looks she received that the others trusted her as little or less than she trusted them.
“Each of you has talents that I may find useful.” The agent spoke on, “Stasia is our computer expert. Hopefully she’s learned her lesson regarding illicit hacking and will not stray. Melanie and Marcus can serve as pilots, Brian and Strak as general crew, Giran and Rawn as engine crew. All of you have other abilities that may come in handy. And all of you were conveniently present when I needed volunteers.” He said the last in a light-hearted tone.
Mel didn't feel any surprise when no-one laughed at his joke.
The holo-projector came to life, where it displayed an external view of a ship. “This is the Fenris. You all know what it is. So do some others who didn’t make the screening process. We are going to shut the vessel down, before it strikes Vagyr. A task force is preparing to meet it in orbit, should we be unable to stop it.”
No one looked at him; they all had good ideas what the price of failure would be: a digital pardon was very easy to ‘misplace.’ For that matter, Mel thought darkly, he could easily have us all killed or marked as escaped prisoners.
“What should happen is that we catch up to it at one of its navigational stops, and we shut it down via external command. If that proves ineffective, we have to board it. That will not prove to be an easy task.” The projector changed, flashing through a deck-by-deck overview. “The entire ship is covered by a security system, which allows the AI to send in security robots, close out sections of the ship, and do all sorts of nasty things.”
“So you’re giving us all this, just for playing taxi?” Rawn asked.
There was a long, empty silence. The GI agent was silent, his face impassive.
Strak said, “He’s using us because we’re a cut-out. If this doesn’t work, the Guard won’t take the blame.” The old man stood slowly and shrugged his shoulders, “Probably lots of evidence will point to a salvage ship, us, having activated the ship in the first place.”
Everyone looked from him to the agent, Mueller smiled. “A clever idea, but one that is entirely excessive. The Preserve built the Fenris. The AI system was produced on Triad, ten decades ago. The forces we’re positioning in Vagyr show that the Guard is doing our best to avert tragedy. We don’t need any kind of cover-up.”
“So,” Mel asked, irritated by the agent’s smug attitude, “Why do you need us?”
“Because you are expendable,” he shrugged. “No reason to send highly trained professionals to deal with a semi-berserk battlecruiser, not when a handful of criminals can do the job just as well. Also, you were easy enough to recruit, whereas mercenaries or professional agents capable of the job would take longer to gather.”
“You said this wouldn’t be dangerous.” Stasia said. Muscles in her right cheek twitched nervously as she spoke.
“I also said I’d be paying you ten thousand in Guard dollars and giving you your freedom. If you’re looking to question the terms, by all means, we can discuss any changes right now.” They all rapidly got the impression that changes would include first, removing the payment and second, putting them back in their cells.
He's all by himself, Mel thought. It should feel like an empty threat, but who knows what resources he can call on?
“Excellent. The Fenris needs to drop its drive field in three locations to make navigational checks on the course we believe it is taking. The ship has an older version of our warp drive, meaning our ship has twice its speed. So we have sufficient time to catch it at its second navigation check.”
“What command will we be sending?” Stasia asked.
“I’ve got the authorization codes and copies of its core programming. There wasn’t time to put together a program to do the job before we left. That will be your job, Stasia.”
Agent Mueller pointed at Rawn and Giran: “You two will be checking her code and making sure that it has no flaws. Our trip should take twenty six days, including two navigational stops, one at Expo and the other at Salvation. Our rendezvous is located in the Crossroads system, two light years west of the Bell system. We should arrive between twenty and thirty-six hours ahead of the Fenris. Data on the ship is in the computer. Disabling that ship is our objective, through any means necessary.”
Mel shivered at his words. She wondered if she’d have been safer on Thornhell.
***
A battlecruiser, even a battlecruiser designed as an automaton, was filled with access corridors, passageways and the like. Mel spent her time paging through the maps included in the technical readouts of the vessel. The raw firepower aboard the ship amazed her. It massed slightly less than a modern battlecruiser and yet it carried more weapons than a modern dreadnought.
What stunned her after looking through the ship’s layout was what wasn’t strictly in the specs. The ship's design called for a fully autonomous role without any crew at all. Nevertheless, it had a small crew bunk room, a kitchen, and numerous corridors designed for human access, along with sufficient radiation shielding to make an auxiliary crew possible.
A soft voice spoke from behind her, “Interesting vessel, eh?”
Mel nearly started out of her seat. She turned to see Brian Liu in the cockpit with her, leaning on the back of the co-pilot’s seat.
“Yeah, I guess. More interesting than setting here doing nothing, anyway.” Mel answered. As a pilot, she had little to do while the vessel was in warp.
She had little to do the rest of the time as well, for the John Kelly very nearly flew herself. She’d tried to spend some time assisting her brother in scanning through the code they were going to upload to the rogue AI ship, but she quickly bogged down in the ‘simple’ tasks he gave her. She half suspected he just wanted to one-up her.
Giran, she had found to be more than a little creepy. He and Rawn seemed to get along fine, but… He had a way of simply staring at someone with cold, emotionless, eyes that seemed far too similar to Agent Mueller. Rawn might not see that as disturbing, but Mel found the empty space outside the window of the cockpit far more welcome than the tiny room where the two scanned the upload materials.
Just as something struck her as creepy with Giran, she found something to be slightly off with Brian Liu’s public appearance.
She thought that it was just that: an appearance. Mel believed in straightforward honesty; to the point of bluntness, if necessary. She didn’t doubt that most of the others had their secrets. Even so, something about Brian’s personality was… off, to her. She just couldn’t put her finger on why. He was outwardly cheerful and brash, even flamboyant. Yet he couldn't hide the intelligence behind his eyes... or the calculation in his voice.
Brian nodded as he leaned against the co-pilot’s seat. It was a relaxed, pose, almost as if he didn't have a care in the world.
“I’ve got little to do either, but I browsed the data earlier. Did you see who the principal designers were for the vessel?” Something lurked in his tone; possibly just an edge of real interest, possibly some slight sense of anger.
Mel looked down at the screen, “Andrew Takagi and Sarah Takagi?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells?” His smile was friendly, but again, there was an edge of something else.
Mel looked at the names again, she could rattle off ship designs and specs, but she’d always had problems remembering the names of people. “Uh… not really.”
He shrugged, “The Takagi clan’s one of the best a
nd brightest scientist families. The founder, Michelle Takagi, designed the warp drive we still use today. A lot of scientists still don’t understand the math she used to do so. They’re also famous for the fact that she and most of her associates sought asylum in the Preserve for safety from the government of New Paris.” His tone was hard, almost as if he disapproved.
New Paris had a seat on the Guard Security Council... but Mel had heard dark things about the day-to-day life of common people there. It was a democracy, she knew, but one where the people voted in lock-step with power blocs, and where the bureaucracy had hands in everything.
Still, she didn't see what that mattered to their current mission. “Wasn’t that nearly two hundred years ago?”
Brian shrugged, “She lived to be a hundred and fifty. She had two daughters and three sons. Two of which were working on this while she was still alive. Do you honestly think she wasn’t involved in at least some aspects? Think about it. The best scientists in human space were designing this ship from the bottom up. They didn’t just design the higher systems, they designed every aspect, from the waste systems to the highest areas.” Brian pointed at a list of drawings. “That ship isn’t just a relic; it’s a work of art by great minds. Walking its halls would be like speaking with the Takagis.”
“Well don’t get your hopes up. Even if this works, they won’t let us near that ship.” Mel sat down in her seat again. The man’s strange fascination with the ship was odd. Certainly it was a significant work, but… “Can’t be that great a work of art if something went so wrong that it’s going to annihilate a world full of people.”
Brian shook his head. “Art can always be corrupted by men for evil ends. Tragedies like that are common throughout history.” He straightened, looking tired. “Sometimes I hate the human race.”
“You say that like you aren’t human,” Mel snorted. “We do some pretty good things sometimes. Aren’t we trying to stop this thing?”
