In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (26 page)

When he saw the shocked look on my face, he said, “Like
you, Sirius, I have enemies. They left me for dead, eyes burned out, crippled.
Their mistake was not killing me when they had the chance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Cybernetics suit me.” He smiled grimly.
“I spent four years hunting them down. Killed them all. Took their ship, their
crew, everything they had.”

“And the name?”

“Regoran for vengeance,” he said simply. “It
describes my present, with no link to my past.”

Regor II was over three hundred light years from
Earth, inhabited by a minor humanoid civilization in diplomatic contact with
Earth, but not a species I’d ever dealt with. “I didn’t know you spoke
Regoran.”

“I know enough not to insult them. They take ‘
rhiix
’
very seriously,” he said, pronouncing Rix as they would, “as do I.” He motioned
to the optronic sensor. “And I named the ship after this.”

“Cyclops!” I whispered. I’d thought the ship had
been named for the massive single weapon on its bow, but now I realized it was
a sign of my brother’s dark humor and his defiance at the horror that had been
inflicted upon him.

Disfigured, lost among the Brotherhood with an
alien name, it was little wonder there’d been no trace of him for twenty years.
A lot could happen in that time, perhaps enough to make him an enemy of the
entire human race.

“There’s a Mataron on the Merak Star,” I said.

“Yes, an arrogant bastard named Inok a’Rtor.” The
Mataron’s name rolled off his tongue with a familiarity that told me he was no
stranger to their language. It was almost enough to convince me he was a
traitor willingly collaborating with the enemy.

“How’d you get involved with the Matarons?” As
soon as I said it, I knew it sounded more like an interrogation than simple
curiosity.

“You ask a lot of questions for a freighter
captain down on his luck, Sirius,” he said suspiciously.

“I want to know what kind of mess the Consortium’s
got me into.”

“The kind that pays well.”

“Not well enough to be executed.”

“Then don’t get caught,” he said coldly. “The
Mataron’s a technical advisor, a renegade. Trask told me he’s wanted by his own
people. I don’t know where Trask found him. Don’t care.”

“So it’s Mataron equipment?”

“No,” he said with certainty.

“You know what’ll happen if you’re caught stealing
alien-tech?”

“We pulled the tower off an abandoned station. It
hadn’t been used in thousands of years. It was more like salvage than theft,
and no one saw us.”

An Observer ship could have been watching and he’d
never know, yet the Tau Cetins hadn’t questioned me about it, so maybe he’d
gotten away with it.

“What about the other alien-tech, the stuff before
Hardfall?”

My brother stiffened. “How do you know about that
if you only replaced Nazari for the Hardfall transfer?”

“The Consortium told me there’d been other
alien-tech shipments. Obviously, that hadn’t required tearing the insides out
of the Merak Star.”

He nodded slowly, trying to decide if he could
trust me. “I don’t know where they get it from.”

“The Matarons? They’re your supplier?’

He nodded. “We’ve done a few pick-ups from them,
all arranged by Inok a’Rtor.”

A cold chill ran down my spine. Stealing alien
technology would drag humanity into an Access Treaty violation and whatever the
Mataron involvement was, they’d make sure we were left holding the bag when the
Forum powers came calling.

“If the Matarons are helping you, they’re playing
you.”

“Not me. Trask. He’s the customer. I’m just the
middle man.”

Suddenly, it made sense. The snakeheads were using
the Brotherhood to secretly deliver stolen alien-tech to the Consortium, ensuring
there was no way to tie them into the deal.

“What’s Trask up to?”

He smiled evasively. “He’s making the Brotherhood very
wealthy. And the richer we get, the more powerful I become.” He leaned forward,
studying my face with his bulging robotic eye. “I thought you’d look older.”

I would have, if not for the EIS genetic
engineering which had dramatically slowed my aging rate. The optronic sensor
wired to his brain would have told him I looked barely thirty, even though my
chronological age was forty eight.

Sidestepping explaining my appearance, I said, “With
what you know, Earth Navy would offer you a deal. You could start again.”

“As what? Captain of a space barge living on
scraps!” he snapped scornfully. “My ambitions reach far higher than that,
little brother.” There was a dark finality to his words, then he seemed to
brighten for a moment. “I could use a mediocre pilot, one that would have to
learn to stop asking so many questions.”

It was more than an offer. It was a promise to
eliminate my troubles with Gwandoya and elevate me into the higher ranks of the
Brotherhood. If that was the cost of reconciling with my brother, it was too
high a price. He saw from the look on my face it was an offer I couldn’t accept.

“Guess not,” he said, genuinely disappointed. “The
Cyclops is docked at Delta Zero Nine. Stay out of the transit tubes. Use the
backbone crawlway. My crew’s expecting you. I’ll drop you in the Duranis System
in a few weeks. You can catch a ride out from there.”

“Duranis?” It wasn’t anywhere I’d been before.

“I’m headed that way. There’s not much there. It’s
kind of a temporary transit hub.”

“I’ll pass.”

“You can’t get out on the Merak Star, not now,” he
warned. “The Brotherhood are crewing it for Trask.”

“I’ve got more than a hundred ships to choose
from,” I said with a grin. “I’ll be fine.” Either I was getting out on the
Silver
Lining
or I wasn’t getting out at all, but he didn’t need to know that.

He gave me curious look, wondering how I was going
to escape Acheron Station. “Suit yourself, little brother.” He stepped forward
and hugged me once, then released me. “Canopus
is
brighter than Sirius, once
you leave Earth.”

“Not from here it isn’t.”

“Maybe when this is over, I’ll move to Outer
Carina,” he said with a crooked grin, knowing it was where his namesake was brightest.
“I don’t know ... Canopus Rix? ... Has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

“You’ll be the terror of the space lanes,” I said,
knowing we were almost certainly enemies and one day, one of us may be forced
to kill the other.

“I already am,” he replied with a hint of the same
bravado he’d shown after beating me zero-g racing through
Freya’s
cavernous holds. “Don’t come back, Sirius, this is no place for you.” There was
a menace in his tone that revealed he also suspected we were enemies.

“I couldn’t find my way back, even if I wanted
to.” If I knew how to get back to Acheron Station, I’d return with an Earth
Navy fleet and obliterate it.

He walked to the cell door and turned to me one
last time. “Give me two minutes,” he said, then vanished into the corridor
outside.

Rapid footsteps echoed away from my cell as my
brother disappeared into the station’s maze of passageways, then I crept out
into a dimly lit corridor lined with identical cell doors. Halfway along the corridor,
I found the jailer lying in a pool of his own blood with his throat cut. He undoubtedly
deserved it, but it reminded me again of what my brother was capable of. He’d always
been good with a gun, but the knife was something new, a skill he’d acquired
after we lost contact.

I stepped over the jailer’s corpse and hurried
along the corridor to the station’s spine where a transit tube access point and
a maintenance crawlway hatch were located. I realized I didn’t know which way
to go, up or down? Suddenly, the hiss of microthrusters signaled the arrival of
a high speed transit capsule, then the tube’s airtight doors slid open
revealing two armored fighting suits standing inside, identical to those worn
by Trask’s men.

Backing away, I drew my P-50, knowing I had little
chance against two armored battle units. They marched robotically out of the
transit capsule in perfect synchronization, a head taller than me and several
tons heavier. My bionetic memory identified them as OA-5’s, obsolete Union
Regular Army orbital assault suits. They mounted a weapon on each arm, were
covered in ablative flak armor and according to the rotating schematic
projected into my mind, had a tiny weak spot at the back, above the thruster
pack. Considering I was already in their sights, I had no chance of flanking
them for a shot.

“Don’t move,” the lead fighting suit ordered in a
strangely synthesized voice, “Captain.”

Captain?

Both suits cracked open along the clamshell seams
running down the side of their torsos, then a tamph head leaned out of the
first suit.

“Izin!” I said surprised.

“The second suit is for you, Captain. It’s slaved
to this unit. I’ll release it to you, once you’re inside.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Gwandoya’s been boasting on the station-net for
several hours about how he’s going to have you repeatedly beaten in the slave
arena before burning you alive. Once we knew you were marked for the arena it
was a simple matter to locate the prison. I’m surprised you managed to escape,
Captain.”

“I had incentive,” I said, climbing into the
second fighting suit. “Where’d you get these things?”

“Trask’s men were over confident,” he said before sliding
back into his suit and sealing up.

Once inside, I took a moment to familiarize myself
with the controls. I’d done three days of suit orientation with the URA years
ago, then hadn’t touched one since. The main lesson the instructor had stressed
was to let the suit do the work. Most of the controls were at my fingertips,
inside the hand spaces, while the large spherical head space was all screen,
except for the padding behind my head. The curved display in front of my face was
splattered with blood and a flashing indicator warned of a microleak behind my
neck, exactly where the heat exchanger regulating suit temperature was located.
Somehow, Izin had found and exploited the suit’s only weakness and clearly, the
OA-5’s auto-patcher hadn’t been able to fully seal the hole made by his weapon.

Izin’s synthesized voice sounded inside the suit’s
head space. “Releasing control to you, Captain.”

I remembered the instructor’s words: ‘thumb-lock
to seal’, but couldn’t remember which of the five thumb points did the job. I tapped
one experimentally, heard the suit’s thruster begin to power-up, then fearing I
was about to be launched into the ceiling, tapped it again to shut it down.

“Perhaps I should initiate suit command
functions,” Izin suggested. “Sealing you now.”

My fighting suit slowly clamshelled shut around me,
then pressure field sensors activated, allowing the suit to read my every
movement, turning it from a rigid sarcophagus into responsive armored skin.

“Aren’t you a little short to be operating one of
these things?”

“I can reach the controls. The pressure fields do
the rest,” he said as his suit came to life.

“Can anyone hear us talking?”

“No, Captain,” he replied as his armored robot turned
to face me. “These suits have secure tactical communications.”

“Have they found the Lining?”

“Not yet, but with two of Trask’s men missing, we
had to move her out of the Merak Star.”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t believe so. They still haven’t got the
internal sensors working and I fuse-locked access to hold four. They were cutting
through when we left. I expect they were surprised to discover the hold was
depressurized.”

A nasty surprise, no doubt. “So how do we get out
of here?”

“We take the transit tube six kilometers then walk.”

My brother had said to stay out of the tube, but
he wasn’t to know I’d be riding it in an armored fighting suit, so I followed
Izin into the capsule without protest. It accelerated briefly, then braked to
let three drunken Drakes and a station engineer squeeze aboard. We rode
together as one of the drunks leaned against my suit for support, causing his
face to loom large on my headscreen.

He belched, then rapped on my suit’s head armor. “Hey!
What’s it like in there? Can you see me?”

I ignored him, then the capsule stopped, letting
the drunks stumble off in search of more ways to blow the last of their stolen
credits while the technician studied Izin’s suit.

“They’re OA-5 mark twos aren’t they?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Izin replied, trying to terminate
the conversation.

“That’s what they are all right. The thruster
controls have a habit of freezing at high altitude.”

“I’ll remember that, next time I jump from orbit,”
Izin said.

The engineer ran a professional eye over the bulky
thruster pack, craning his neck to get a better look. “If you bring them down
to maintenance, I can insulate the controllers for you. It’ll take about an hour.
Should raise your drop ceiling to–” He stopped mid sentence, standing on his
toes to study the rear of the suit above the thruster pack. “Hey, there’s a tiny
hole back here. The auto-seals on these old models always were a bit iffy.” He
reached up and touched the microleak, then studied his fingertips, finding them
smeared red. “Is that blood?”

Izin’s arm snapped up, slamming the fighting
suit’s elbow into the engineer’s face, sending him flying into the elevator
wall. The tech’s limp body crumpled like a rag doll to the floor as Izin
resumed waiting for us to reach our destination.

“That’s one way to end a boring conversation,” I said
to myself.

When the elevator door opened, the people waiting to
enter peered curiously in at the unconscious engineer. Making no effort to
explain, Izin marched out through the crowd as if he owned the place, forcing everyone
in his path to scatter.