Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (15 page)

Kal didn’t know if anyone else had survived the destruction of the
Broadbill
. If they had, she didn’t owe them any favors. Thief’s justice, more or less.

Except for Tim. The Reservist hadn’t deserved to die.

Kal closed her eyes briefly and tried to block him out of her mind. She didn’t need anything distracting her. She pulled the tiny emergency transponder device out of her makeshift harness and examined the reading on its tiny screen. The device could either broadcast actively, or receive passively. She’d been using it for two days to track the signal coming from a very large ship which had passed over her lifeboat’s landing site the day after she abandoned it.

That ship was her key to escaping. As well as continuing the mission.

Moving slowly and deliberately, Kal neared the lip of a ledge in the forest floor. Over her head, the sky was partially occluded by the mass of trees that towered a hundred meters into the air, darkening the ground. Her abused spacer’s coverall was damp and filthy, with holes at the elbows and knees. All she had to work with was the small emergency backpack from the lifeboat, her issue P3110 pistol in its holster, and five magazines for the pistol, worth ten shots each.

Not ideal armament, under the circumstances. Kal would have preferred tactical artillery instead.

Dead leaves clung to Kal’s skin like wet paper. She peered intently over the lip of the ledge. Half a kilometer distant, the mighty trees had been flattened in a rough halo under the belly of the enemy craft. Which was mammoth. A metal whale on stilts. The heat tiles of the ship were grossly discolored from its many, many in-atmosphere trips. Underneath the vessel—between its massive landing pylons—four personnel hatches lay open with four ramps extending down to the ground, like rusty tongues. There was also a fifth, much larger cargo hatch. Its wide ramp was populated with people moving crates up into the ship. They appeared to be bringing the crates from somewhere deep in the tree line. Where Kal couldn’t see. They must have located the remnants of the
Broadbill?
Or at least the
Broadbill’s
cargo?

Kal considered. Getting into the ship unseen would be difficult. She needed a better look before she could make a plan.

Kal crept her way over the lip and slid several meters down a sharp slope until she re-entered the undergrowth. There she stayed absolutely still for several long minutes, waiting and listening for something—anything—that would tell her if she’d been spotted.

Satisfied that her presence went undetected, Kal renewed her glacial pace towards the freighter, guessing that if she took it slow, nightfall would come soon. And with it, her best chance to get up one of those ramps.

Chapter 4: Conflux space

The Reserve pilot’s name was Tim Osterhaudt. Young. Clever with his wit. But not cocky. During the voyage out to the Conflux periphery—where the undefined border between civilization and the Occupied Zone lay—Kal got to know him. He was maybe eight years younger, and had not grown up on Earth. A colony boy. He passed through his secondary schooling with good grades, and then picked up a company scholarship from Tremonton. Which had funded him through both his civilian degree, and test pilot school. His nominal rank in the CAF Reserve was Lieutenant. Technically, he outranked Kal. Though Kal made it clear up front that she was in charge, according to their specific orders from Chief Damont.

“No problem,” Tim said, holding up his hands in a placating fashion as they talked quietly in their cabin aboard the starliner
Freefall.
They had a single porthole which looked out into space. If Kal put her forehead to the transparent fiberflex of the porthole itself, she could look down to where the giant disc of the Blackmatter Drive lay.

Like all interstellar ships, the
Freefall
was essentially a skyscraper stacked on-end in the center of the Blackmatter Drive: a circular dish nearly as wide as the ship was long. All decks were arrayed perpendicular to the path of flight, so that when under thrust each deck enjoyed something akin to gravity. Though it was the Blackmatter Drive itself which formed the relativistic bubble—allowing the ship to slip beyond the light-speed barrier and travel at trans-light velocities.

The points of starlight outside were smeared, shifting from crowded and blue above to sparse and red at the bottom.

Kal and Tim were dressed in civilian travel jumpsuits customary for migrant technicians bound for one of the sanctioned space stations that serviced the Occupied Zone. They’d come aboard the
Freefall
with assumed names and false digital travel papers provided by Kal’s boss.

Only Kal was armed. Which didn’t seem to bother Tim much. He thought the entire thing to be a rather daring bit of adventure. He just didn’t like the idea of hurting anyone.

“So why’d you end up in the Reserve if you don’t want to have to fight?” Kal asked.

“My CAF Reserve commission was a prerequisite of my job with Tremonton,” he said, idly tapping his hands on his knees as a gentle stream of music issued from the small speakers at the head of his bunk. He had an unusual fascinating with the classics, for someone his age. His movements kept rhythm with the sound.

“This prototype testing in the Occupied Zone,” Kal said, “it doesn’t seem like you’d be able to avoid fighting there.”

“They’ve got half a dozen pilots working the project,” Tim said. “When I was assigned to go to the Zone, I asked that they put me on the secondary team that’s charged with evaluating data being brought back from the field. All the pilots actually going out beyond the safety zone? Prior combat vets.”

Kal nodded in understanding.

“Did you, uh, fight in the war?” Tim asked hesitantly.

“Yup,” Kal said, laying on her back in her bunk across the cabin—eyes staring straight up at the ceiling.

“Ever have to … uh … well …”

“What?” Kal asked.

“You know … like … shoot somebody?”

Kal closed her eyes and sighed.

“Never ask that question of a veteran, Tim. You should have been in the Reserve long enough to know that. There are a lot of veterans who went Reserve after the war. I am surprised nobody told you the rule.”

“Rule?”

“The last thing anyone who’s seen fighting wants to do, is talk about how they were forced to kill somebody.”

Tim remained silent for many long moments.

“Sorry,” he finally said.

“No problem. I just thought you knew.”

“The Reserve Officer Training Corps teaches a man many things, but some of the tacit stuff doesn’t always translate. Hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable.”

“A little. Because the answer is yes.”

Again, a long silence.

“They told me you’re a military policewoman,” Tim said finally. “That you spend a lot of time on cases both explicitly military, as well as tangentially military-related.”

“That’s true.”

“So why aren’t you commissioned?”

“I am commissioned, after a fashion. My job warrants it, I am not appointed like you were.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I often ask myself that same question.”

Several beats later, Tim was chuckling. A pleasant sound. There wasn’t always a lot of laughter in Kal’s line of work.

“If you fought in the war,” Tim asked, “what’s your opinion of the rumor that the Ambit League might renew hostilities?”

“So far as I am concerned,” Kal said, “hostilities never ended. The survivors we left on the Occupied Zone worlds? A lot of them still think we’re at war. The blockade pretty much makes it plain that the Conflux isn’t giving them autonomy or allowing them to rejoin the interstellar economy any time soon.”

“You sympathize with them?” Tim said, raising an eyebrow and sitting up to look at her.

“Hardly,” Kal said. “I just think there’s a bad way to manage the post-war effort and a good way to manage the post-war effort. To my mind, the good way to manage it would be to re-integrate the worlds of the Occupied Zone as soon as possible. Keeping the blockade up indefinitely … just breeds contempt and hostility.”

“But some of those planets
are
dangerous,” Tim said.

“Correction, sir. Some of the
people
on those planets are dangerous. I know. I’ve been there. And the longer we treat the good folks in Oz the same way we treat the bad folks in Oz, the more the good folks swing over to the side of the bad folks. Pretty soon we’ve got nothing but bad folks. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” Tim said, his expression turning serious. “Sounds to me like it’s a no-win situation. The Assembly won’t be changing its policy any time soon. They’re intent on reassuring the electorate that the Ambit League has been permanently destroyed.”

“Right,” Kal said. “Which is why you and I have been called up to perform this mission in the first place.

“Do you think we can really find the missing armor?” Tim asked.

Kal ran her tongue along the inside of a cheek.

“No. But we might find out where it went, or at least who’s responsible for taking it. And who they might be working with on our side of the fence. My boss wants that information very badly. Recovery of the stolen hardware isn’t a requirement for the mission to be a success. It’s a bonus. If we do stumble across any of that missing armor, your job is to help figure out what the Ambit League might be doing with it.”

Chapter 5: uncharted territory

Hours passed.

Kal stayed low, using the gloaming of night and the blown-down trees to conceal herself. Rumbles of approaching thunder announced that the rain would start once more. Before long a steady clobbering of fat, lens-like drops beat down on the enemy landing site.

Kal relished the cloudburst. The noise and water would help conceal her from any sensors her foes had deployed around their ship.

Kal pushed forward into the drowning darkness—by feel.

Thirty more minutes passed.

Soaked to the bone and nearing exhaustion, Kal at last peeked up from behind a log, only to discover she was looking directly into the belly of the monstrous aerospace freighter—its boarding ramps lit by sodium lamps.

Kal looked nervously in all directions. It was far too quiet for her tastes. No sign of guards? That did not compute. But Kal was committed, and there was no going back, only forward.

Mustering her courage, Kal tugged down on the straps to her shoulder holster, harness, and emergency pack, then crept over the edge of the log and sprinted towards the ship. Kal stopped just as she hit the edge of illumination at the bottom of one ramp. Entering the full light for the first time, her skin crawled—she was totally exposed, and expected to hear voices and gunfire at any moment. But the shouts and bullets never came.

Senses tingling, Kal went up the ramp at a gentle trot.

The freighter’s interior was messy. Narrow corridors sprouted off in several directions, each decorated with exposed pipes, wiring, and ducts. Kal pulled out her P3110 and worked the charging handle, loading a caseless round into the pistol’s firing chamber. With safety off, she kept her finger outside the trigger guard and proceeded deeper into the guts of the ship, step by cautious step.

Kal moved through an inner hatchway and into a wider central corridor. Her eyes skipped around, looking for surveillance devices. She found one recessed into the ceiling several meters ahead of her.

Kal froze—watching the camera and its bug-like eyes. It appeared to be ignoring her. She chewed on her bottom lip, then stepped forward once, and then back again.

The camera remained still.

Deactivated? On standby? Or just plain broken?

The hair stood up on the back of Kal’s neck, but she moved onward. Most aerospace freighters didn’t need a big crew, but there should have been
someone
aboard—people she’d have seen, or at least heard already. Kal drew in a long breath, blew it out with puffed cheeks, and shook her head. This was no time to spook herself into doing something dumb. Perhaps the explosion in orbit had taken a lot of the enemy, as well as the
Broadbill
and its crew? How many people had crossed over the
Broadbill’s
ship-to-ship gangway before the double-cross had gone down?

Kal didn’t know.

Moving in her best impression of a cat, Kal crept down another passage: past some uniformly cabin-sized hatches—and then froze as another surveillance monitor suddenly loomed above her. Kal stood on her toes to peer up at the device: the cables were corroded and the gears on the device’s directional motor seemed non-functional.

What the hell?

It was then that Kal really began to take a good look around her. In addition to the exposed ductwork and wiring, the deck plates were soiled and corroded, and many of the cabin doors behind her appeared to be rusted shut. Just how
long
had this ship been gathering dust somewhere on-planet, its hatches and vents open to the air? A lot of moisture had come in, and been allowed to sit. No doubt the Ambit League was hurting, but it was still surprising to discover that they were willing to operate any scow, however scrapworthy. No wonder they were stealing armament—the League’s home-grown industrial base must have collapsed. Another byproduct of the blockade. Cut the various manufacturing centers off from each other, and it would be enormously difficult to replicate spaceworthy equipment. At least on a large commercial scale.

Somewhat heartened by these assumptions, Kal crept on until she found a doorway that looked like it had been repaired to operational condition. She stepped close to it and peered in through the small pane of transparent fiberflex that gave her a view of the next compartment. She saw four people unpacking an unmarked interstellar shipping crate—the same kind Tremonton said they used to discretely transport sensitive equipment.

Watching intently, Kal saw the people remove gauntlets and boots and other pieces of armor, all broken down for shipping. The people—Ambit League for sure—seemed to be sorting and separating the crate’s contents, while other crates were stacked nearby and waiting to be opened. Kal shifted to the side and peered past the crew, realizing that she was looking into the primary hold of the freighter. It went on for almost a hundred meters, and was half as wide, plus half as tall. Crates littered the space. Almost all of them appeared to have been opened in a hurry.