Poor Man's Fight (41 page)

Then his hand went over his belt lamp. There. That was something
Everett taught. Improvise. Right.

Turning back to
Stumpy, Tanner helped him settle Freeman down against a bulkhead. He realized then that neither of his companions knew any of the silent hand signals he had been taught, and so he improvised. He tapped Freeman’s gun and pointed down either direction of the passageway to ask the older man to cover those directions, and then looked to Stumpy and mimed picking Freeman up. “When we’re through,” Tanner whispered. “Got it?”

Stumpy nodded. So did Freeman.

Tanner painted himself up against the bulkhead at the corner again. He looked back to his shipmates and hissed, “One…two…”

The belt lamp flew up and around the corner a split second before Tanner flung himself out onto the deck. Bullets and laser fire erupted from around the corner, hosing down the passageway. Most of it went high as the guards instinctively trained their weapons on the first movement they saw. Landing on his shoulder, Tanner blasted away with his pistol.

He caught a bullet in his left thigh. Another grazed his left shoulder, and somewhere in the back of Tanner’s mind he wondered if that was somehow better or worse in light of the knife wound he already had there. Mostly he focused on shooting, blasting the gunner on the left, then the laser rifle-wielding guy on the right. He missed his shots on the latter. Stumpy made up for them.

“Right,” Tanner grunted. He scrambled
back up, rushing for the assault rifle and the dead man holding it. Pain erupted from his left leg the instant he put pressure on it, but Tanner forced it to move. It still held his weight, though he didn’t want to think about how. They were almost at their target.

“They had to have heard that,” Freeman winced as
Stumpy brought him around the corner.

“Yeah,” Tanner nodded. He reloaded the rifle with a magazine from the dead man’s corpse
and stuffed a second into his belt. “We can’t wait. You ready, Stumpy?”

His shipmate nodded.
They settled Freeman down again and readied themselves. Tanner turned to the hatch, ready to throw the wheel and face whatever lay beyond… and then stopped. Questions came in a rush, one on top of the other: What were the people on the other side supposed to do if their guards wanted to get back inside? How did they sound an all clear? There was no porthole through the hatch, nor an intercom on the outside. Did they use holocoms? Did these guys have specific procedures?

Tanner slammed the butt of his confiscated rifle twice against the hatch. “Hey, we got ‘em!” he yelled in the loudest, deepest voice he could muster. “We’re both hurt! Coming in, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Stumpy took a prone shooting position on the deck with the riot gun. Freeman, still reeling despite stims from the first aid kit, watched their rear.

Tanner threw the wheel and pulled open the hatch.
Stumpy immediately opened fire.

Two engineers fell to the deck in bloody heaps before Tanner came around the hatch. He sprayed bullets without really looking for targets, worried only about finding an emergency engineering panel in his line of sight.
Everyone in the compartment dove for cover.

Tanner found the panel up against one of the giant metal machines housing the ship’s main power plants. When he was first taught about emergency engineering procedures, he’d thought it was silly to put shutdown controls out in the open. Nobody needed a key. Nobody needed a code. Anyone could come in and turn a ship’s engines off.

Morales had called him stupid for asking about it. The point, Morales said, was to make sure
anyone
could quickly shut down the engines in an emergency. Why would anyone want emergency procedures to be complicated? Why would you want panicking crewmembers to have to think much when seconds made the difference between surviving and exploding? Keeping it simple meant that any idiot could shut down the engines. Even an idiot like Tanner.

In that moment, Tanner could hardly argue Morales’s estimation of his intelligence. He lunged forward through bullets and laser fire, diving for the big red button that any idiot could see. Even an idiot who’d caught a bullet in the ribs and a blast across his leg.

***

She was going to get away. Harper was good at math; ops specialists had to be. Even without the computer calculating everything for him, Harper could see where this would end.
Sarah’s Dream
was too close to the edge of Ophanim’s gravity well and still accelerating. She could reasonably risk a jump within another minute.
St. Jude
wouldn’t be there in time.

Understanding their imminent failure didn’t calm Harper’s nerves at all. The freighter was still in weapons range and still shooting. Reed’s cool hands at the helm coupled with t
he corvette’s evasion programs prevented further serious hits so far, but the freighter could still get lucky. Yet as the range opened up, the odds of getting hit decreased… and so did the odds that they’d ever see their shipmates again.

Then it all changed.

“XO!” Harper shouted. “She’s stopped accelerating!”

“Confirm that!” the XO demanded over the comms channel.

“Confirmed, sir! She’s cut her engines! We’ll overtake in… twenty-six seconds!”

“Make sure we don’t shoot past too fast,” Gagne instructed from
St. Jude’s
main cannon. “I don’t want to fuck this up.”

***

“Engineering!” Ming roared in a near panic. “They’re in fucking engineering! Get ‘em now, now!”

It was too late. He knew it was too late. Even if the boarders were cleared out of engineering, even if there were still snipes down there alive and able to get the engines running again, they’d never
rebuild enough acceleration to escape the corvette.

“She’s about to overtake, Ming!” warned Kiyoshi.

“Shoot her!” the exasperated captain demanded.

“We’re trying, but—“

Ming never heard the rest.
St. Jude
flew past his bridge canopy, close enough to actually see with the naked eye.

Yaomo
, he realized, had gotten screwed. Again.

Then the corvette’s main guns flashed with vengeful red light, and a moment later
Yaomo
’s entire bridge compartment was gone.

“That girl was a moron to pass up on you.”

“Hm?”

“Back home. You know.
Allison.”

Staring up at the darkness until now, Tanner turned his head to look at Alicia’s face. He couldn’t make out much. The hotel room
offered few amenities, but after all they’d been through in basic the bed felt luxurious and the ability to turn out all the lights was a bonus.

“
Why are you thinking about her? I’m not,” Tanner said, and meant it. He pulled her a little tighter, kissing the side of her neck. Two hours at a salon made an amazing difference for her. Tanner had found her cute with a buzz cut, but a few inches of hair made her quite pretty. He’d hardly been able to take his eyes off her after she came out of the salon.

The darkness prevented him from having another good look, but he’d had other ways to appreciate her in the last few hours.

“Hey, Tanner,” Alicia began. He heard a hesitant frown in her voice. “You’re not… I’m not saying I don’t really like you, but you’re not gonna get… you know I’m not looking for some forlorn long-distance thing, right?”

“Oh, I know,” he nodded, trying to sound practical.

“If we were going to the same place, it’d be different. But I don’t want you waiting around for me. I’m so happy to have this until we ship out. It’s just that when we do… I still want to be friends, y’know? I still want to stay in touch. I just don’t want it to get weird.”

He took a deep breath, releasing it slowly. “No, I don’t, either,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“So you’re not gonna freak out?”

“No.”

“Even if I start seeing somebody?”

“What, you’ve got somebody on
Los Angeles in your sights already?”

Alicia snorted and gave him a shove. “No, you dork.”

“Okay, but as long as it’s a navy guy. Marines are jerks.” She shoved him again. “Violent, too,” he laughed.

“Says a guy who punched me in the face.”

“One time! One time I got a good shot in. How many times have you kicked my ass?”

“Don’t try to change the subject. You punched a sweet, innocent girl right in the face just because she was in your way when you wanted to beat up someone else. You’re all sweet and harmless and nice, but as soon as you’ve got the right motivation, bam. Right in the face.”

Tanner sighed and tried not to dwell on it. “That was our subject?”

“No,” she said. He felt her smile against his collarbone. “We were talking about other girls who could’ve been with you but weren’t. ‘cause they were morons.”

“Yeah, well. You’re making that decision based on limited information. You don’t know what the competition was like.”

“I don’t think I’d be impressed
.” Alicia pushed him down onto his back, sliding up on top of him. “Pretty sure I got the best of the bunch right here.”

Her kisses grew hotter, as did her touch. Tanner grinned. “I’m not sure how much good I am at this point.”

“I have faith,” she countered softly. “Like I said… I know what you’re capable of when you’re properly motivated.”

She was right.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Tanner was still troubled by the memory of punches and kicks, of rage and blood. Her touch made short work of such worries.

They were almost gone before the alarm clock beeped.

His eyes opened. The ceiling was no longer so dark, nor was it that of a hotel room. The bed was not so luxurious. No lithe, warm, affectionate body lay against his.

He smelled spilt
beer. Heard the distant sound of reveille playing over speakers outside the building. Saw the flashing light accompanying the alarm on the other end of the room, and then saw it stop.

Tanner heard a groan, and then a shuffle. Thumps of footsteps on the floor. Heifer rolled out of his bed across the room from Tanner’s, scratching his ass and letting out a belch on his way into the bathroom.

He was used to waking up to such things lately. Ordinarily, he just rolled his eyes and tried to laugh off Heifer’s boorishness. He usually reminded himself that this was only temporary. Coming out of dreams and memory, though, Tanner could only shut his eyes and fight back the water trying to escape.

***

Widespread chaos made it difficult to keep up. Darren wasn’t exactly trying very hard; Jerry put out all the effort. The big pirate practically dragged Darren along through brightly lit streets as people hustled to and fro, waving down vehicles or carrying hastily bundled belongings any way they could.

Darren would’ve been fine with them all leaving. Fuckers could all bail on the planet for all he cared as long as
he could go back to bed until his head stopped pounding.

“Jerry, stop,” Darren complained. “Goddamn, man. I don’t even have my boots on.”

“I’ve got your boots, and your stupid fifty-grand combat jacket,” Jerry said, waving the bundle in his face. “Look, you’ve got your gun belt, your holocom and your money, right? Fuck the rest.”

“The rest? What the hell, man? Wha’s goin’ on?”

“I told you. Ming’s ship got pinched.”

“Wha--?” Darren asked. He tried to open his eyes to see if Jerry was kidding, but the sun made that
uncomfortable. Darren had photoreactive contacts for that, but he hadn’t had time to put them in. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know where the hell they were.

“
Yaomo
, remember?
Yaomo
got nailed.”

“
Yaomo
? But they left. Weeks ago.”

“Yeah, and they got caught weeks ago, and we only just now got the news.”

Someone jostled past Darren. He almost lost his footing, but Jerry kept him up. “Assholes,” Darren slurred. He looked at Jerry again. “So what’s that got to do with us?”

“Means the party’s over, buddy. There’s no telling what those assholes will say under interrogation or what’s in the ship’s computers. We gotta
bug out before someone decides to throw a fleet at us. We’re lucky it hasn’t happened already.”

“Aw, hey, fuck that, man,” came Darren’s plaintive, sleepy reply. “I’ve still got so much fuckin’ money to spend. Party’s not over, man.”

Jerry just grumbled under his breath. “All part of being a pirate. Come on,” he said, towing the younger man along.

“Man,” Darren fumed, “bein’ a pirate sucks.”

***