* * *
In a dusty rebel settlement far beyond
Sail's
patrol, a bar had been erected from slabs of modular siding filched from derelict stations and an abandoned colonial settlement. The corners did not match, and the sand took advantage. The floors were terminally gritty. In a side room, walled off by a fringed curtain, a Freerlander raised her cowl to veil a vicious smile. Her narrowed, desert-weathered eyes caught topaz light from a candle flame as she shifted gaze to the man who sat in the shadows. 'The young officer was told outright, Captain. Guildstar, the time, the date. Everything short of your com codes, but the word is he hangs back, still.'
A dry chuckle answered from the darkness. Pale eyes flicked up and glinted, while on the wine-sticky tabletop, a pair of hands scarred by coil burns flexed and straightened and flexed with an ease that, by the nature of such injuries, never should have been possible. Over the noise of the spacers' bar beyond the doorway, a voice equally grainy and grim observed, 'Then the boy is not quite the brash fool he once was. No point in renewing the lease to that merchanter when this run's finished. I'll recall
Marity
when she makes port at Guildstar. Let out word that my next move will be those private sector interests on Chalice.'
A chair squeaked as the Freerlander sat straighter, and a sigh issued from the hawk-nosed man wearing Caldlander harness who lounged opposite. After a black glance at the Freer, the Caldlander said, 'But I understood the take on Chalice was worthy of a raid? Is it not risky to be baiting an Alliance scoutship on site at a real operation?'
'Well, Godfrey,' drawled the man with the scarred hands, if that's what it takes to get me access to a documented Fleet vessel, there's the ticket to the party. My mate Gibsen'd find the heat more welcome than bus driving guild cargoes, there's certainty.'
The Caldlander made a disparaging sound through his nose; the Freer readjusted her cowl.
Both were cultural signs of displeasure, ignored by the skip-runner captain who stretched and rose, still in shadow. He half turned, scooped up a rattling collection of weapons belts and hiked them over his shoulder. Then he exposed blunt teeth in an expression that Freer and Cald both knew better than to mistake for a smile.
'Gentleman,' said MacKenzie James in his boyishly amiable fashion. 'Lady. If one of you kills the other after I leave, take my point, I'll gut the survivor like a fish.'
No sound answered but a whore's raucous laugh beyond the doorway.
'Good,' Mac James concluded. Still slinging the weapons he had, after all, never promised to return, he spun and ducked out, a large-framed bear of a man with a tread that incongruously made no sound. The door curtain slapped shut after him and left two enemies face-to-face over a wildly guttering candle.
'Damn his arrogance,' swore the Caldlander. His fist slapped irritably against the hip that now held neither knife, nor sheath, nor pistol.
The Freer expressed her frustration through silence and a twitch of steel-nailed fingers. She found she had something to say after all. if it were only his arrogance, neither of us would have come here, nor agreed to run errands to benefit some snot-nosed boy lieutenant.'
The Caldlander stiffened fractionally. His eyes showed wide rings of white. 'You suspect the information on Chalice is a setup?'
The face under the cowl yielded nothing. 'The question is, does MacKenzie James?'
The enemies parted then, each wrapped in their own breed of silence. Days later, when Freer and captain were both beyond contact, it occurred to the Caldlander that Mac James's formidable cleverness might have fallen short. This once he might have overlooked the significance of a past action that had slagged a Freer ancestral memorial.
* * *
Sail
emerged from the queer, deep silence of FTL on a routine run to deliver dispatches to Carsey Sector base. The capsule was relayed, another received to replace it, and in the six-sided capsule that served as cockpit, Harris snoozed in his headset, bored. Behind him, in the command alcove reserved for Lieutenant Jensen,
Sail's
third crew member slouched in the process of painting her nails. Sarah Ashley del Kaplin, called Kappie by her deckmates, was short, whip-thin, and full-lipped. She had inviting, dusky skin and a deep voice, and she had taken assignment on
Sail
knowing that the lieutenant was handsome, but an iceberg, and that Harris was a bum who pinched. The pinches she fielded with equanimity, until they got too personal to ignore. Harris received a bruise he swore happened in a shower that was gravity stabilized, and the iceberg lieutenant was left to his romance with the machinations of MacKenzie James.
'Why's his nibs not out here reading off new orders?' Kaplin mused, turning her wrist to admire her nails, which this round were metallic lavender.
'Huh,' muttered Harris. One elbow on the astrogation unit, he scratched his chest through his unsealed collar, then added, 'The lieutenant will return to duty when he's finished housekeeping his map tacks.'
A shout emerged from crew quarters, followed by what sounded like a war whoop. Harris shoved out of his slouch, and Kaplin swiveled around, her almond eyes wide with astonishment. 'Did I hear that? Could this mean we've been assigned leave for the next tour?'
Harris grunted again. 'Small chance. Jensen spends leave doing volunteer scut work for the recon boys.'
Kaplin's groan was interrupted by Jensen's explosive appearance at the companionway. His rangy frame filled up the narrow opening; lit by the overhead panel, his face was flushed and his eyes overbright with excitement.
'He's done it!' the lieutenant shouted, waving a recent message com. 'He's finally taken the bait.'
The 'he' needed no definition; nothing short of obsession with MacKenzie J
a
mes could cause Jensen to overlook the crew member wh
o
usurped his command chair, the nail polish a calculated affront to his dignity.
From the pilot's station, Harris drawled, 'Let me guess. We're going to go AWOL, maybe pay an unscheduled visit to Chalice? At least I presume all those messages coming and going between us and the private sector were not over an affair.'
Kaplin watched this exchange, her nail brush forgotten in her hand, if our boy is even capable of an affair,' she muttered sotto voce.
Jensen failed to take umbrage as he crossed the cockpit in a stride. Risking an undecorous crease in his trousers, he leaned on the instrument panel cowling. This drew a frown from Harris, disregarded as the lieutenant plunged on. 'No. We go under regs, by the book.
Sail's
a scout and recon owes me a favor. Once we've placed these dispatches, I can get us an assignment to do a discretionary patrol sweep.
Since the mines on Chalice are the juiciest operation the military has going with private business, they'd naturally need to be checked.'
Harris raked his fingers through a rooster comb of red hair, then replaced his beret with its frayed Fleet insignia. 'That'd work.'
Only Kaplin insisted on particulars. 'What's at Chalice for us?'
Jensen let her sarcasm pass. 'Everything. I've been months setting it up. We're going to capture MacKenzie James and through him trace the home worlds of the Syndicate.'
Kaplin raised pencil-thin eyebrows. 'Oh? And what's in Chalice for MacKenzie?'
Smug now, Jensen smiled. 'A trap. My trap. James thinks he's going to heist core crystals, ones engineered with the technology used to interface those fancy brainship modules with their hardware. But once in, he'll find out the booty was bait.
Sail
might not have all the latest tracking gadgets, but she's strong on gunnery. We're going to stand down the
Marity.''
The nail brush by now was thoroughly dry. Tossing it aside in exasperation, Kaplin flipped back ash-brown hair. 'You're crazy. You'll get us all court-martialed.'
'Or decorated,' Harris interjected. 'That's what happened last time.'
That moment Jensen noticed the gaudy, nonregulation nail lacquer. 'Ensign Kaplin,' he rapped out. 'One more breach of protocol on this bridge, and I'll have you confined to quarters.' His voice did not change inflection as he resumed with orders for his pilot. 'Harris, charge the coils and prepare for FTL. I want our dispatches delivered as if they were hot, and
Sail
on flight course for Chalice.'
* * *
In fact the logistics took days to work out. On fire with impatience lest they miss their timing at Chalice, Jensen paced through
Sail's
tiny corridors. He ran through his plan to trap
Marity
over and over again. Since the scoutship's living quarters consisted of two bunkrooms, a galley cubby, and the bridge, his crewmates grew sick of hearing it. Harris escaped by closeting himself in astrogation to watch his library of porn tapes. Kaplin got bugged enough to argue.
Her fingers tapped the mess counter as she voiced her list of objections. 'First, you took a helluva risk assuming those recon boys you brown-nosed could wrangle us an assignment.'
'I
rrelevant point,' Jensen snapped. 'We've got our papers and the assignment, both on target.'
Kaplin shot a glance at the soup he would not eat because of nerves, and her next nail snicked against the counter. 'Second, the expl
o
sive you had that dock worker rig in case your plans went awry could misfire.'
Jensen gestured his exasperation. 'Not if you know, as the rest of Chalice personnel does, that the box with the self-destruct is a dummy. The crystals inside are fakes, a decoy for MacKenzie James.'
'Oh?' Kaplin's eyebrows arched. 'You told
everybody
about your plot? Even the janitors? Hell, man, if you left things that wide-open, your skip-runner's deaf not to know it. His intelligence network's better than Fleet's, if he's got connections with the Syndicate. So who's fooling who on this mission?'
'Mac's best style is recklessness,' Jensen countered. 'And he wants those interface crystals very badly.'
Kaplin threw up her hands, almost banging the dish locker in her irritation. 'You're telling me nothing but insanity! Our success depends on MacKenzie James being quantum leaps dumber than you are.'
Now Jensen grew heated in turn, if you can devise a better plan, I'd sure be interested to hear it!'
The lilac-colored nails drummed an agitated solo on the countertop. 'I can't,' Kaplin said finally. 'But God, we'll be lucky if our asses stay whole through this one.'
The queer, intangible stagger that human time sense underwent through the shift from FTL came to an end, but confusion lingered. On re-entry to analog space,
Sail
seemed to hesitate and bounce, as if she were a plane engaged in a turbulent landing. Then something moving and metallic impacted her high-density hull with an awful, ear-stinging clang.
'Jesus!' screamed Harris from the pilot's seat. 'We've dumped slap into a war zone!' He spun the spacecraft, tossing Kaplin and Jensen hard into their couch stations.
The lieutenant strained against the pull of vertigo and managed to punch up an image on the screens. Instantly his eyes were seared by the glare of an expanding plasma explosion.
Sail
had not entered a war zone; instead, the station logged as her destination had been detonated to a cloud of gases and debris. Harris responded, reflexively kicked
Sail'
s
grav drives into reverse with a scream of attitude thrusters. Small fragments rattled against the hull. The gravity drives accelerated into the red, and buzzers sounded warning.
Jensen stared at the blowing burst of destruction that Harris labored feverishly to evade. What could possibly have gone wrong? he wondered, and his shoulders tensed in anticipation of Kaplin's acerbic, 'I told you so, you arrogant, stupid fool.'
But Kaplin said nothing, only sat with her face in her hands, caution lights from the recon unit a glare of yellow against her knuckles.
'Je-sus,' Harris repeated, the Eirish accent of his childhood breaking through the more cultured tones he had acquired in air-tactics academy. A gifted sixth sense and instinct enabled him to quiet the drive engines;
Sail
described a smooth course just beyond the event horizon left by the explosion. 'What now?'
Nobody spoke. None of the three in
Sail's
cockpit cared to contemplate what might have been had their scout probe broken through FTL just half an instant sooner. Jensen looked at his hands, found them clenched whitely on the arms of his crew chair. Since he could not change the fuckup, he forced his brain to work.
And the obvious stared him in the face.
'Kappie,' he said sharply. 'Engage sensors, sweep the vicinity for the presence of other warcraft.'
'What?' Overdue, the ensign's reproach was cutting. 'Have you gone nuts? You set a live charge on Chalice station, and now you're after the culprit who blew it?'
Lieutenant Jensen repeated his command, his voice back under control. 'The charge I had rigged was a contained net explosive. If anybody set it off, even accidentally, it might have burned one sector. Not the whole station. We're seeing the afterimage of a plasma bolt. Now,
make your sweep.
Our lives depend on it, because the enemy who manned the weapon is still out there.'
'Could be renegade Khalians,' offered Harris.
Nobody had time to suggest otherwise. An alarm cut across the cramped cockpit, one that signaled an inbound distress call.
Kaplin locked in on the signal. 'A survivor,' she called crisply. 'He's in freefall with no life-support beyond a service suit.' She listed distance and vector, then added figures for Harris to calculate drift factor. The human bit of flotsam moved with the debris from the station, no less a victim of the blast. 'He's got a maintenance coding,'
Kaplin finished. 'Probably a repair man who was caught outside when the charge hit.'
'Set course for intercept,' Jensen ordered. 'By regs, we're bound to pick the fellow up, and maybe he can tell us what happened.'
A pilot other than Harris might have protested; laying course through a high-speed, tumbling mass of debris was hardly the
safest of undertakings. But Harris leaned over his console, a half-crazed grin on his face. As he began the maneuver, he relished telling Kaplin that she'd better not unbelt to fetch a Dramamine. The vector changes were going to be fast, and violent, and if she was going to be sick from inertia, better that than wind up splattered against a bulkhead.
The interval that followed became a hellish parody of a carnival ride. Harris alone found the gyrations enjoyable. He leaned over
Sail's
console with his nose thrust forward like a jockey, every sense trained on the attitude displays, and his hands almost wooing the controls. The spacecraft responded to his measure, rolling, twisting, and sometimes outright wrenching a clear path through pinwheeling debris. Harris pressed
Sail
to the edge of her specs and reveled in every moment. His voice as he announced that the survivor was now close enough to grapple aboard sounded near as he came to elation.
Lieutenant Jensen issued orders through his vertigo. As Kaplin set hands to her couch belt, he told her to stay on station. 'Keep the scanners manned. If we're not the only craft out here, I want to know it fast.' Then, as if
Sail's
cockpit were too small to contain his restlessness, he strode out to manage the loading lock and grapplers on his own.
In keeping with most scout craft,
Sail's
utility levels were a warren of bare, corrugated corridors as poorly lighted as a mine shaft, and unequipped with simulated gravity.
Experienced enough to disdain magnetic soles, Jensen made his way aft through the service hatch, hand over hand on the side rails. Although he had logged more space hours, Kaplin was more agile than he. She could zip through null grav like a monkey, never the least bit disoriented. Jensen's jaw muscles tightened. A lowly female ensign should not make him feel threatened; but thanks to the almighty wishes of his politician father, others as inexperienced had earned their promotions ahead of him. Kaplin might easily do the same, despite the fact she was apt to act flighty on duty, and her record held a collection of demerits.
The frustration of being continually passed over caught up with Jensen at odd moments. Intent on the injustices of his career, he drifted over the open-grate decking to the space bay, flipped open the grappler's controls, and slipped on the headset inside. He clicked the display visor down, powered up the unit, and initiated recovery procedure as if the drifting speck on the grid represented no castaway, but an enemy target in a weapon scope. Since Jensen held a citation for marksman elite, the mote of human flotsam was recovered in commendably short order. Jensen tossed the headset into its rack. Poised before the trapezoidal entry to the lock chamber, he engaged the space bay controls, then waited, his hand on the bulkhead to pick up the jarring vibration that signaled closure of the outer lock. His ears measured the hiss of changing air pressure as atmosphere flooded the chamber. Only greenhorns and fools trusted to idiot lights on the monitor panel. Electronics were never infallible, and there were prettier ways to die than voiding an unsuited body into vacuum.
The pressure stabilized within the bay. Jensen flipped off the manual safety and unsealed sliding doors through the innerlock. Inside the steel-walled chamber, the figure he had recovered drifted limply in null grav, clad in the bulky, ribbed fabric of a deep-space mechanic's suit. The elbows showed wear, the knees were grease-stained, and the tool satchels were scuffed with use. The hands in their fluorescently striped gloves did not rise to undo the helmet, and a second later, Jensen saw why. The face shield was drenched from the inside, with an opaque film of fresh blood.
Nausea kicked the pit of his stomach. He had not expected a survivor who was injured, or maybe dead. Hindsight made his assumption seem silly. The emergency tracer signal emitted by the suit did not necessarily trigger manually. The backpacks and tool satchel compartments were typical of a repairman's, and such gear often had a proximity fail-safe: if the worker wearing the rig accidentally came adrift from a workstation, the alarm would set off automatically. Jensen swallowed back sickness. He had seen death before, had once blown a man's brains out point-blank from behind. Now, duty demanded that he ascertain whether this suit contained a corpse, or a medical emergency.
Queasiness reduced to irritation, Jensen pushed off into the lock chamber. He bumped against the drifting figure, clumsily captured it in an embrace, and managed to hook onto the handrail before he caromed off the far wall. With one elbow crooked to maintain position, he wrestled the suited body upright, then flipped the clasps on the helmet.
As he lifted the face shield, the figure moved against him. A space-gloved hand gripped his waist from behind, and a hard object jabbed his side.
Probably just a tool appendage, Jensen rationalized, his pulse quickening. But the face behind the blood-streaked shield dispelled his last vestige of delusion. The lieutenant looked down into slate-colored eyes and an expression that held only ruthlessness.
'Godfrey, you boys are predictable,' said the voice of
MacKenzie James. The cheek in shadow beneath the face shield showed a smear of new blood, but the hold that gripped Jensen, and the arm that shoved what surely was a firearm against the lieutenant's side, were not those of a wounded man. MacKenzie James was bearishly strong, with reflexes not to be trifled with. Jensen had cause to remember.
Shocked by the skip-runner's presence and enraged to have lost the upper hand to a castaway, the lieutenant fought to stay calm. 'I presume you deep-spaced the man who owned the suit you're wearing.'
The query prompted an insouciant smile. 'Cut the crap,' said James, his voice multiplied by echoes off of the lock bay walls. 'If you've got any scruples about killing, they're faked.' He shook back mussed brown hair and nudged the gun barrel in the ribs of his victim. 'Unfasten my suit clips.'
Jensen saw no option but compliance; if James decided to shed the bulky suit, a way might arise to seize advantage while his enemy was encumbered by the sleeves. Convinced that the pirate had tripped the charge in the bogus crate of brain crystals, and that an accomplice on
Marity
had seen the explosion and opened retaliatory fire on Chalice, Jensen talked in an attempt to distract his enemy's thinking.
'You'll never get away with a hijacking.
Sail's
courses are automatically logged, and she runs under check
-
in protocols. All transmissions are coded and routinely traced.'
MacKenzie James said nothing.
'Give yourself up, man.' Jensen set hands to the last shoulder clip, if our schedule is disrupted a millisecond, we're presumed to be boarded by enemies. We're tagged and targeted for armed search, with orders to be slagged on sight.'
The clip unlatched with a click. James raised insolent brows. 'Let go,' he instructed. As Jensen hesitated, James swung his body and wrenched the officer's fingers. Painfully freed, Jensen felt himself spun around, his right wrist looped neatly in a tool tether.
The lieutenant struggled, tried to jab an elbow in his enemy's face. The move was both anticipated and countered; after years spent in freefall standing ambush, Mac James had mastered null grav to a fine point. He did little but shift one hip. The result provoked a spin as he and his captive drifted in tandem from the rail. Jensen's fast movement added vector that hammered him sideways into the wall. James was protected by his suit; Jensen, caught on the inside, got the breath crushed from his lungs, and a bruise on the temple that nearly stunned him. Weakly he clawed for the lock. If he could reach the control, he might signal and warn the bridge.