Jason LaPier
Unexpected Rain
Originally published by HarperVoyager UK
CHAPTER 9
Klaxons bellowed and the bombball game on the holo-vision was suddenly replaced by the blazingly bright, red, flashing image of an alarm-bell icon. Runstom cursed and looked away, the ghost of the image already burned into his retinas.
Halsey yelped awake and fell off his cot. Tangled in a blanket, he tried desperately to stand but was having a difficult time with the action. As low-ranking ModPol officers, their accommodations were barely better than those of the prisoner they were escorting. Their room was a little larger than Jax’s cell, and featured two flimsy cots, a table, and a couple of chairs. Runstom slapped off the holo-vision—the one item they had that prisoners didn’t—and got up to help Halsey to his feet.
“What the fuck is going on?” Halsey had to shout to be heard over the alarms.
“I don’t know,” Runstom yelled. He opened the door to their room. The hallway walls flashed red and the klaxons were even louder.
After a minute of confusion, the alarms quieted enough for an announcement to be heard. An unnatural and unperturbed female voice calmly stated, “Alert. The ship is under attack. This is not a drill. The ship is under attack. Gunners, report to battle-stations. Guards and prisoner escorts, report to the prisoner bay. This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill.”
“Well, fuck me,” Halsey said in a normal voice, just before the alarms started blaring again. “Come on, Stan,” he shouted. “Let’s go!”
They ran down the maze of corridors that led them from the guest rooms to the prisoner bay. Various uniforms ran with them, others ran the opposite direction. Once they hit the prisoner bay, they ran into real chaos. Most of the prisoners were still in the yard and barge guards were desperately trying to corral them into their proper cells. This did not go over well with most of the prisoners, who—quite correctly—assessed that the cells were the least safe place to be during a fire-fight between the barge and other spacecraft.
Things went from bad to worse when something got past the barge’s defenses and the walls shook violently and the floor lurched out from beneath them all. Artificial gravity started to falter, causing everyone to bounce around like they were on pogo-sticks. The guards suddenly became less concerned with getting the prisoners back into their cells and more concerned with finding something to hold on to.
“Stan!” Halsey yelled. “Stanford Runstom! Over here! I found Jackson!”
Runstom got himself turned around and saw Halsey holding Jax from behind, his arms hooked under the operator’s armpits. Jax’s head lolled around, his eyes barely open. Runstom made his way over to them, trying not to run, lest he send himself flying out of control in the weak gravity.
“Jax, wake up!” Runstom yelled once he got to them and got a hold of Jax’s chin.
“I think he hit his head,” Halsey shouted. “We need to get the hell outta here!”
Runstom looked around desperately as he racked his brain trying to remember the layout of the barge. He’d been briefed on it at some point in his ModPol officer training, but that was long, long ago. “This way,” he shouted, pointing. “To the kitchen. I think if we go through there, we can get to the storage room. We might be able to find shelter in there. Inside packing crates—or something.”
Halsey nodded and moved around Jax so they could get on either side of him, each with one of his arms hooked over their shoulders. The extra weight actually made it easier for them to move in the low gravity and they got to the kitchen without injury, dodging bouncing guards and prisoners as they went. They tried to yell to people they passed to tell them to get to the storage bay, but it wasn’t apparent whether or not anyone was listening.
The kitchen was a total mess and they had to pick their way carefully through the chaos of cookware and upended food. Once they made it through, they found the short hallway that hooked up with a large corridor.
“This is the main supply corridor,” Runstom said. The alarms rang furiously in the distance, but not in this section of the ship. “I think the supply deck might detach. There will be some minimal controls in there. If the barge takes too much damage, we can try to pull off and float away.”
“Yeah, and hopefully not draw any attention.” Halsey looked back through the kitchen, the way they came. “You think anyone else got the idea?”
“I hope for their sake, someone does,” Runstom said. “Come on, let’s go.”
They moved down the long, wide corridor toward the primary supply deck. Once they reached the end, they punched the door release and the storage bay opened widely before them. Everything inside was strapped down tight and mostly unaffected by the drop in gravity.
The floor lurched violently, one way, then the other, back and forth a few times. The three of them ended up in different parts of the room. Runstom found himself near the doorway and on his back, staring at the supports high above along the ceiling. Suddenly, a high-pitched, eardrum-piercing, nails-on-a-chalkboard sound screeched from the main supply corridor.
Runstom lifted himself off the deck and hooked his arm over the rounded edge of the door frame, getting a good look into the large hallway. Bright, white light sprayed in showers of sparks on either side of the corridor. Runstom froze, unable to comprehend what was happening, unable to react. After a minute or so, the white light was just a red ghost in his eyes. A few metallic clangs, and suddenly a round section of the wall popped out and hit the floor with a clatter. Almost instantly, three more circles of wall were projected out, one on the same side as the first, the other two on the opposite side.
There was a moment of eerie silence, save the distant klaxons, which from here were beginning to sound like an alarm clock, pestering him to wake up already. The silence didn’t last. Shouts and cheers emanated from the new holes in the corridor, and were soon followed by human forms. Human forms armed to the teeth with all manner of projectile, chemical, and even bladed weaponry.
“Fuck me!” Halsey breathed, suddenly at Runstom’s side. “Fucking gangbangers!”
“Shit,” Runstom said in a hush, trying not to draw any attention. “Why are they attacking us? There’s nothing of value on this prisoner ba—”
Runstom stopped himself as the gangbangers met in the middle of the corridor. There must have been twenty or so of them. He caught sight of the symbol on the back of one of their jackets. Three arrows in a circle, arranged as if one flowed into the next, but with the arrowheads bending outward.
Halsey must have seen it too. “Space Waste!” he whispered.
No further explanation was needed. The two officers didn’t have a need to know much about space gangs in their relatively low-key planetary assignments, but Space Waste was legendary in ModPol circles. One of the largest gangs in the known galaxy, and certainly the most well-organized, Space Waste had a knack for showing up without warning, taking what they wanted and then disappearing. More often than not, they left no living witnesses; only hundreds of InstaStick decals featuring their twisted-arrows logo.
“If Space Waste is hitting a prisoner barge,” Runstom started quietly, turning away from the doorway and slouching against the wall so he could face Halsey, “they must be here to break someone out.”
“How did they get aboard?” Halsey came around the other side of him to get coverage behind the wall.
“They must have used those tubes.” Runstom gestured vaguely. “Reinforced, pressurized boarding tubes that can extend from one ship and form a seal with the hull of another ship.” He’d been asking himself the same thing for the last several minutes and finally worked it out. “They’re flexible, to account for drift. They were originally designed for rescue operations.”
“How do you know this?” said Halsey, cocking an eyebrow.
Runstom shrugged. “I saw it on holo-vision once. It was one of those rescue documentaries.”
“But if they cut through the hull, what happens when they disengage the boarding tubes?”
“Well, in a rescue operation, it’s a last resort. They only do it when they know LifSup is failing on the endangered ship, and they want to get as many survivors off as quickly as possible.”
“So lemme guess,” Halsey said grimly. “The Space Wasters won’t be so humanitarian.”
“No, I would think not,” Runstom replied calmly. He wasn’t actually calm—far from it—but the situation was beginning to feel like it wasn’t real. Like it was just a holo-vid show. “They’ll probably get whoever they’re after, and then re-board their ships and disengage the tubes without bothering to attempt to re-seal the hull breach.”
“Shit,” Halsey muttered. “This is too much explosive decompression for one week.” Runstom shot Halsey a sour look and the other man put his hands up innocently. “What? It’s not like Jackson will get framed for it this time.”
Runstom suddenly stood up halfway, his eyes darting as he scanned the storage bay. “Where is Jackson?”
“Sit down!” Halsey said, pulling on Runstom’s arm. “We’ll get him in a minute. We need to figure out what to do! We don’t have much time!”
“Okay, okay.” Runstom crouched back down and spoke in a low voice. “They’ve breached this main supply corridor. So the rest of the ship might be okay, once they detach the boarding tube. But only if someone can hit the emergency air locks, then they can cut the rest of the ship off from this hallway and be safe.”
“Safe from decompression, anyway,” Halsey said. “If the Wasters have boarded us, they must have taken out our engines. When they get what they came for, they might just sail out to a safe distance and waste us.”
“Yeah. Well, we can’t do anything about that. The only option we have is to close this hatch on the supply deck and hope they leave the storage bay alone.”
“Then we’re on the drift until someone comes along and rescues us. As long as they decide to leave us alone.” Halsey frowned, then his face brightened suddenly. He arched his head up and peered around the curve of the doorway. “There is one other option…”
“What?” Runstom tried to follow his partner’s gaze. The hallway was clear. The gangbangers had mostly moved on, to somewhere in the main part of the ship. Two of them stood there near the breaches, their backs to the supply deck.
“We get aboard one of those…” he started, then stopped. Runstom guessed he was trying to imagine what kind of ships were at the other ends of those tubes.
“Did you grab your sidearm?” Runstom asked. “I only have a stun-stick,” he said, indicating the thin rod hanging off his belt.
“Shit, I don’t have anything,” Halsey said, padding around his uniform. He turned to look back into the storage bay. “There has to be something in here. Let’s go look around.”
“Okay. I’m going to find Jax first and check on him.”
“Forget Jackson, Stan! We’re going to die out here if we don’t move right now!” Halsey was trying to yell in a whisper, and it made the veins in his skinny neck bulge.
“Listen, George,” Runstom said, pushing down with his hands and trying to take the other officer down a notch. “Let’s just pretend for a minute that Jack Jackson is innocent. We’re about to attempt to commandeer some kind of space-gang vessel. We won’t even know what it will be until we’re on board. You and I are qualified to pilot one- or two-man patrollers, but anything bigger than that and we’ll have our hands full.” Halsey frowned at this, but kept his mouth shut. “Now I’m only trying to think a few steps ahead. If we manage to get away from this situation alive, and we’re out there in the middle of nowhere in god-knows-what kind of ship, I guarantee we’ll be glad to have another hand, especially a Life Support op!”
“Goddammit,” Halsey grumbled. He sighed. “Okay. Go find that goddamn operator. I’ll look for arms. Now let’s go, for fuck’s sake!”
They gave another look over at the two gangbangers farther up the corridor and then carefully made their way through the storage bay, ducking behind crates and shelving units as they went. The breach-guards seemed to have no inkling that someone might be hiding out on the supply deck. Or maybe they just didn’t care; which was worse news, because that would mean they knew it was going to be a quick in-and-out for their cohorts.
Runstom found Jax lying on top of a crate, about three meters up. With the low gravity, he must have been flung up there, and now he lay unconscious, one arm dangling off the side. Runstom crouched and then sprang his legs, thrusting himself up to Jax’s level, and then beyond. He had to stick his arms up to keep from banging into the high ceiling, and he angled himself so that he’d land on top of the crate on his float back down. He slung Jax over his shoulder and lightly dropped off the side of the box. They landed with a soft jar, and Jax made a quiet whimpering grunt as they did. “Still alive,” Runstom breathed.
Halsey came bounding over to them, carrying a small bundle of thin, black rods. “Fuckin’ stun-sticks was all I could find. Oh, and this med kit,” he said, unhooking a white plastic case from around his shoulder. “We could keep looking.”
“No, let’s not waste time. I have an idea.” Runstom popped open the med kit and started rummaging through it. Fortunately, it was the consumer model. Everything was clearly labeled and marked with icon-laden instructions. He grabbed a case labeled Insta-Wake. He had no idea what this stuff was, but he’d seen it used before more than once while on the job. He popped open the case and pulled out the single-shot needle-gun.
“Hold him down,” he said, and Halsey braced Jax as best he could. Runstom put the needle-gun up to the operator’s neck (as per the icon on the inside of the Insta-Wake box) and pulled the trigger. Jax coughed and his chest heaved, and Runstom quickly covered his mouth. His eyes fluttered open, slightly at first, then suddenly they were wide and intense.
“Shh. Jax. We’ve got a bit of a situation here, and we need you to be calm.” Jax’s eyes were still wide, but he nodded. They took their hands off him and he sat up and rubbed his head. “We don’t have time to explain everything, so just trust us on this…”
* * *
There were so many things that Dava loved about a low-grav fight. The sheer panic that accompanied the loss of control. The recoil of firearms working against their shooters. The majestic deadliness of someone trained to use acrobatics and blades in such a situation.
She was the first one of the Wasters to come out of the kitchen and into the yard, a massive open cube in the largest part of the barge. The tables around the room were bolted to the floor, but just about everything else wasn’t and there was debris everywhere. She scanned up the sides of the cube at the walls lined with cells, stacked up for five levels. Guards and prisoners bounded clumsily about the space, each body with its own trajectory and intention, none of them aligned. She spent a tenth of a second drinking in the pure chaos and then went to work.
The plan to target the artificial gravity pump at the bottom of the barge and then penetrate the rear corridors had worked as well as they could have hoped. Now all that remained was to find Johnny Eyeball and Captain 2-Bit.
A stun-stick came her way, with a bulky uniform in tow. She drew her short, curved scimitar and snapped the stick in half with a quick cutting motion. The guard stumbled backward, half-falling, half-floating. She braced one foot against a nearby table and launched herself at him, her sharp blade slicing clean through the midsection of his cheap armor.
She moved on without bothering to finish him off, making her way toward the starboard-side wall of cells. Another guard flew over her head, arms and legs flailing, before slamming into the back wall with a crunch. She looked toward the source of his trajectory to see Eyeball wrestling with another guard, both of them trying to gain control of a low-end ModPol pistol.
With a few long leaps she got close enough to witness Eyeball bring one of the guards’ bare hands close to his face. She caught herself between a grin and a grimace as the man howled in pain while Eyeball sank his teeth into the soft flesh just above the thumb. The gun came free and Eyeball grabbed it with one hand and with the other, shoved the guard into a sprawling tumble across the space.
“Hey Dava,” he said with a dripping-wet crimson smile. “They fly pretty good in this gravity, eh?”
“Johnny,” she said. “Seven minutes left, then you better be at the rear corridor just beyond the kitchen.”
“Right,” he said, checking his newly acquired weapon.
“Where’s 2-Bit?”
“Third level, opposite side.”
They’d come for both, but she knew Eyeball could take care of himself. The higher priority was getting 2-Bit out of there. Her boss had made a big stink about how important it was to bring 2-Bit back home, how much the others looked up to him, how critical his experience was to the gang. It was that last bit that made Dava wonder. She always thought 2-Bit was an idiot, but he did have experience, which may have been another way of saying he knew things, things that Space Waste didn’t want to turn over to ModPol. Locations of caches, plans for upcoming operations, informants sprinkled around the galaxy, those sorts of things. Secondary, everyone seemed to think that there was an advantage to having a couple of Wasters get arrested: recruitment. And 2-Bit was just the right man for the job. They knew that if they rescued him, he’d have a cartload of fresh meat to bring home as well.
She headed for the opposite wall. When another guard raised his pistol at her, she kicked to her right and balled up to avoid the shot. The kickback threw his arm up high and her scimitar swept across it, severing the hand soundlessly. The shocked victim was almost as soundless with his gasp and before he could fall to his knees, she planted one boot on his helmeted head and vaulted herself up, grabbing the railing along the edge of the second-level walkway. From there, she got to the top of the railing and leapt high enough to grab the floor of the third-level walkway, pulling herself up quickly and easily in the low gravity.
“2-Bit,” she called out. “Captain, where are you?”
A yellow-gray hand appeared through the bars a few cells down. “Down here!”
She approached and saw the old man standing tall and healthy as always. She couldn’t tell if he was exceptionally cool-headed given the situation, or if he was just oblivious to the imminent danger. Of course, 2-Bit had only gotten arrested because he was trying to rescue Eyeball from the mess he’d created back on B-4. She had to admire his ability not to lose his shit over the mistakes of his kin.
“Dava, boy is it good to see you,” he said with a genuine smile. “The force fields went off when the gravity took a hit. Safety and all that.” He tapped on the bars. “But then these came down.”
With a laser cutter and enough time, she could get through them—they weren’t more than cheap steel, probably designed for keeping things from flying out of the cells more than actually keeping prisoners in for any length of time—but the clock was ticking.
She switched her RadMess to voice mode. “Thompson, I need the cell doors on the third floor opened up.”
The reply crackled over the tiny speaker a second later. “Which one on the third floor?”
“Just open all of them.”
“Right, you got it, Dava. I’ll get someone on it.”
“Dava.” 2-Bit gestured to a form huddled at the back of the cell. “I got a man in here with me. He’s from B-3, but was runnin’ some racket on B-4 where he was selling cheap vacation getaways to naïve B-foureans. He would get them aboard his ship, rob them, and drop them in the next dome over.”
“Sounds like a real charmer,” she muttered.
“Point is, he’s a pilot,” 2-Bit said. “Claims to be a pretty good one. And you know we always need more flyboys.”
Her bosses were right, only 2-Bit could turn a jail term into a recruiting opportunity. She half-laughed at the thought. “Alright, bring him along.”
A buzzer sounded and 2-Bit flinched and took his hands off the bars as they slid upward. “Come on,” he said to the back of the cell.
A soft-pink-skinned B-threer came out of the darkness. “Thank you, thank you so much,” he said, then stopped short when he saw Dava. “What’s this?”
“What, boy?” 2-Bit said. “Come on, we need to move.”
“She’s with you?” he said, pointing at Dava. “This shitskin?”
The emergency lighting began to fail and the yard grew darker, which had an effect of shocking the stream of chaotic shouts and clamoring into a sudden silence. Dava went empty in her center. It had been more than a decade since she left the domes of Betelgeuse-3. She’d left at the age of fifteen, after spending nine years of her life in that whitewashed, shopping-mall civilization.
Children had been better than anyone at reminding her that she didn’t belong. That she came from that refuse-planet Earth, that she deserved to be incinerated and broken down into molecules like any other trash. She had to bear such barbs almost every day in those domes. She was branded with it, the mark of the unwelcome, the never-clean.
But she had not had to bear it since joining Space Waste. Ten years since she’d even had to hear slang such as that.
2-Bit was at her side, quietly nudging her back to the present. The B-threer seemed frozen, still inside the cell, the hateful eyes burning like those of the nasty dome children. She lifted the tip of her blade slightly and he stepped back.
“Close the cell doors on level three,” she said into her armband.
“What? We just opened them, Dava.”
“Close them,” she said.
* * *
Inside some supply hold, leaning against some towering crate, Jax groaned loudly. “Help. Someone. Is anyone there? I’m hurt. I need help! Can anyone hear me?” His voice cracked with fear—most of it real.
“Ello? Ooze over der?” came a rough voice after a minute. “Com’on outta der!”
Jax’s mind raced. Whatever it was Runstom gave him to wake him up was giving him the shakes. “I…I can’t move. It’s my leg. I think it’s broken. Who is that? Can you help me?”
Jax heard another voice that he couldn’t make out. Then the rough voice again, “Ee says ’is leg’s bustid. Huh? Okay, okay. I’m going.” The voice got louder as it was directed back at Jax. “Okay, you. I’m comin’ over. Don’t move. I’m uh…I’m a medic.”
Jax rolled his eyes, which caused a spike of pain to shoot through his throbbing head. He tried to keep his hands from shaking and sit still, his back to the large crate they’d found him lying on. He heard a movement, the tok-tok-tok of boots on the metal floor off to his right, and he turned his head. A scruffy, scarred, yellow face came around the side. “Ey, boy. You got a gun? You armnnNNNHHHHH—”
The body that came with the face flexed violently, hands dropping some kind of bladed, rifle-like weapon with a clatter and after a couple of seconds, the man spun around and crashed to the floor, his shocked face staring at the ceiling. Bubbling drool oozed out of the side of his mouth and down his cheek.
Halsey came around the corner of the crate, three smoking stun-sticks bundled together in one hand. He stared at the unconscious man with a tight grin on his face.
“Goddamn,” Jax whispered. “That was a little extreme, wasn’t it?”
The officer gave him an innocent look. “Well, I had to be certain, right? He’s a big boy!” He stuck one of the stun-sticks through a loop in his belt and dropped the other two as he bent down and snatched up the loose weapon. It looked like a stubby rifle with a pair of blades extending slightly away from the barrel at two different angles, forming a vague V-shape.
Jax was about to ask Halsey if he knew how to use that thing, but then thought better of it. Whether he did or not, Jax didn’t really want to know, and there was no point in calling the officer’s ability into question now.
Halsey turned around quickly, rifle secured in both hands, as a shout and a grunt came from the other side of the room. Jax stood up and carefully peered around the other side of the box.
Runstom was about twenty meters away, his right arm wrapped around the neck of another scruffy-looking man. These men were part of a gang, apparently—at least, that’s as much as Runstom and Halsey had a chance to tell Jax before they turned him into bait. The officer was at a slight disadvantage, height-wise, and he swayed horizontally from the back of the gangbanger, who was making use of the low gravity to try to shake him loose.
Halsey slung the rifle over his shoulder and snatched up the extra stun-sticks. He ran over to the spinning officer—gangbanger combination and stopped short, trying to figure out how to get a clear shot.
“Put those goddamn things down,” Runstom said between huffs. “The current will run through him and hit me!”
“You’re gonna have to let go!” Halsey yelled, legs bent at the knees, trying to keep the other two directly in front of him.
The Space Waster spun around and faced Halsey, perhaps perceiving him to be a more immediate threat than the man trying to slowly asphyxiate him. He bent his head forward and, using the weight on his back for leverage, he lumbered at an alarming speed toward the other officer.
“Let go now!” Halsey shouted as the big, yellow man bore down on him. He thrust out his two stun-sticks, one in each hand. From his angle, Jax could see Runstom just barely manage to jump free, but he was pretty sure Halsey had his eyes closed. The sticks connected with the big man’s chest and he went down with a jaw-clenched scream through his teeth, sinking to his knees and then keeling over backwards.
Jax ran up to the officers. “Where’s his gun?” Halsey jerked his head erratically from side to side.
Runstom looked in one direction, strode a few meters, and snatched up another blade-gun type of weapon. This one appeared to be more of a single-hand weapon; a smaller but terrible and jagged blade attached to a large pistol. Most of its bulk was due to its battery pack. Runstom flipped a switch on the side of the gun and a small, red dot appeared on the crate next to him. He looked up at them. “Okay, let’s move. Jax, you wait until we say it’s clear. We’re going for the closest hole on the right.”
Their choice of breaches was, of course, entirely arbitrary. They had no idea what to expect as far as the attached ships went. Jax watched from behind the curve of the storage-bay doorway as Runstom and Halsey quickly moved down the long corridor, guns pointed forward.
Runstom looked back over his shoulder long enough to yell, “Clear! Come on, Jax, move!”
Jax tried to angle his legs so that his strides pushed him forward more than up, but he was completely unprepared for athletics in low gravity. He covered the distance of fifty meters to the first breach in what seemed like several agonizing minutes, but it could have been much less.
When he got within a few meters of the officers, he was jarred by the clapping sound of Halsey’s rifle. The officer was shooting a projectile weapon of some kind, an old-fashioned gun that actually fired bullets, and the force of the recoil in the low gravity caused him to stagger backward and lose his footing. “The door on the far right side!” he yelled, trying to get back to his feet. Runstom started firing his laser down the hall, blindly shooting down the right side.
Gunfire echoed down the hallway and Jax was sure he heard something whiz by his head. The oval corridor was a good twenty or thirty meters across, and while Jax and Runstom were taking position near the wall on their right, Halsey was closer to the opposite side. He got to his feet and dove into a nearby breach. The officer then set himself in a position where he could brace his back against the side of the tube and lean out to fire his rifle down the hall without getting pushed backwards.
Jax watched the scene with bemusement, until Runstom turned and shoved him into the boarding tube. He came in after the operator and leaned out the side of the tube, sending laser fire down the corridor. After a few blasts, he turned to Jax and shouted, “Get down the tube to the ship. Make sure we can fly the thing outta here!” Jax started to turn, but Runstom yelled “Wait!” He unhooked the stun-stick from his belt and handed it to the operator.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, fear creeping into his voice.
“There might be a pilot standing by. Just press the button on the handle and poke him with the round ball at the end.” Jax stared at the stick in bewilderment. “Go, now, goddammit!” Runstom shouted, and the look of intensity and violence in the officer’s eyes made Jax want to go down the tube and face someone less terrorizing. Like maybe a bloodthirsty gangbanger.
Runstom stuck his gun back out the breach-end of the tube and with a battle cry, continued blasting. Jax could hear Halsey join in, and for that brief moment he imagined the ModPol officers were a two-man army, fighting off a wave of invaders. He spun around and headed down the tube.
The tube itself was barely large enough in diameter for a grown person to stand. Being B-fourean, Jax was taller than many other humans and had to crouch as he picked his way through the flexing tube. There were handles dotting the length of it, and he quickly discovered their intended use. Once he was off the barge, the failing artificial gravity was no longer a factor, because there was no gravity at all. The tube was some kind of segmented metal. It was not transparent, and for this, he was thankful. It didn’t seem like a good time to be confronted with the vast emptiness of space.
After a minute or two and some distance Jax couldn’t judge, he reached the end. He could still hear Runstom shouting and blasting, and he was pretty sure he could make out the clapping of Halsey’s rifle even at this distance. The hatchway at this end was open. That seemed like a terribly dangerous thing to do, and Jax had to imagine it violated all kinds of safety regulations. So, yeah, he thought as he slowly pulled himself through the hatchway. Add that to their list of atrocities.
* * *
The ratio of ducking to returning fire for Runstom and Halsey was steadily growing in favor of ducking. There was a palpable increase in pressure coming from the center of the barge as the gangbangers reassembled their forces and returned to their only escape route. It seemed like a good plan, but now Runstom was having his doubts about getting between a legion of Space Wasters and their ships.
“George,” he said in between blasts of his laser pistol. “George!”
Halsey stopped shooting and leaned back into the tube he occupied on the opposite side of the corridor. He struggled with an extra ammo clip that was affixed to the side of the heavily modified rifle. “My last clip,” he yelled. “We need to get out of here.”
The gangbangers didn’t waste time taking advantage of the short pause. Runstom and Halsey were both forced to lean back into their tubes as the hallway crackled with machinegun fire. Runstom panted as his heart threatened to climb out of his throat. He and his fellow officers had combat training, but it didn’t come close to preparing him for something like this mess. He looked down at the cellpack in the laser pistol. It was down to about a ten-percent charge. He had no idea how many shots that translated into.
The continuous rain of bullets smoothed into a series of rhythmic bursts, and for a brief moment he thought that maybe it meant the gangbangers were running low on ammo as well and were attempting to conserve it. This thought gave him a flicker of hope until he remembered all the blades attached to the guns. Maybe he was better off getting shot before it came to that.
A new sound caught his attention, a strange metal-bouncing-on-metal sound. He and Halsey both looked into the corridor from their opposite-sided shelters. A cylindrical object bounded along and continued all the way to the supply hold they’d come from only minutes before.
“Shit.” Runstom wanted to yell to Halsey that it was a grenade, but the explosion beat him to it. The heat of it blew up the hall and into his tube, but there was nothing more than that. He ventured a peek back down toward the hold and saw the burned scarring just inside the open doors.
He realized in that second that whoever had thrown the grenade hadn’t accounted for the low gravity. The next one came with an adjusted aim, rolling to a spot directly between them where it stopped and spun idly like a bottle in a party game.
Halsey took two steps into the corridor that was still being peppered by cover fire and swung his rifle like a club, smacking the cylinder with one of the blades at the end of the barrel. The grenade flew back down the hall and Halsey cried out as a spray of red burst from his forearm. The rifle clattered to the floor and he dropped back on his ass and kicked at the floor with his feet, pushing himself back into the tube.
“George!” Runstom reflexively stepped toward his partner, but the spray of bullets drove him back.
The returned grenade blew and the cover fire was momentarily interrupted. Runstom didn’t have time to wonder if it actually took anyone out, he just used the space of a breath to dive across the hall and into the other tube. He grabbed Halsey by his good arm and hoisted him to his feet, but the other officer cried out as he stood.
He pulled away the bloody arm to reveal thicker, darker blood coming from his abdomen. “Stan,” he gasped, reflexively holding his wound once again. “You gotta go.”
“No.” Runstom tugged roughly at Halsey’s arm. “Come on, George. We’re both going.”
Halsey groaned but didn’t protest further. Runstom tried to think but he had no time. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and it was clear the rest of the barge had fared even worse. Space Waste had won. He looked down the nearby tube. No doubt there was a ship at the other end, but he’d already sent Jax down the tube opposite. More than ever, Runstom thought their only chance at escape was to stick together.
In the several seconds that had passed, the gunfire had not returned. “Come on, George,” he said with a tug. “Now or never.”
They limped across the width of the spacious hallway. A burst of gunfire sent them diving for the tube. Runstom felt the bite of one shot in his thigh and the ripping sting of another across his midsection before he hit the inside of the tube. He spun around to see Halsey twisting in the corridor, spitting curses and clutching his leg.
“George!”
Another cylinder bounced along the floor, thumping Halsey in the chest. He grabbed at it, bobbling it until he spun it around and found the safety clip. He clutched at it and looked at Runstom. “Go, Stan!”
“George, what are you doing? Throw it back!”
“Go!” He started belly crawling toward the tube. Sporadic bursts lit up the air. “Go before I blow us both up!”
Then it clicked. He was going to blow the tube loose so that no one could follow.
“Damn you,” Runstom said and turned away from his only ally.
He flung himself as deep into the tube as he could, then scrambled to yank himself along by the handholds when the gravity disappeared altogether.
* * *
Still coping with the weightlessness, Jax pulled himself through the small ship slowly and carefully. He was in what appeared to be a passenger-seating and load-out room. There were twelve or so “seats” on the walls which were angled in a way that, if there were any gravity, one could walk up to them and strap in securely without actually sitting. They were similar to the mount that was in his cell, only made for voluntary use. On the other side of the room was a series of racks that contained a few spare guns and what looked like suits of armor.
On the opposite wall from the hatchway was another door. This one was closed, and apparently locked, according to the lit sign on the front of it. There were a few flimsy-looking spacesuits hanging haphazardly on either side of it. Jax realized that this was probably the cockpit door. It was a small ship indeed; a personnel carrier, probably hijacked from a military outfit at one time. Just enough to get a boarding party from one big ship to another. They’d be lucky if it could even do Warp.
Jax knew the cockpit door wouldn’t open unless the outer hatchway was closed. He’d have to cut off the ModPol officers long enough to secure the ship. He put a foot against the wall, hit the door trigger on the hatchway, and sprang his body across the chamber to the opposite side, grabbing onto the latches on the wall and hiding himself behind the spacesuit closest to the cockpit.
He waited. The seconds passed. He tasted bitterness in his own saliva and he forced his breathing to slow, trying desperately not to vomit. Finally he heard the internal mechanisms of the door sliding around, eventually clinking into place. The door slowly opened.
“Hey, fellas,” a voice said. “Back already? Hello?”
Suddenly, unexpected to both Jax and the pilot, there was a series of clanging sounds coming from the outer hatchway.
“What the hell?” said the pilot to himself. He was still out of view from Jax. The banging of something solid on the metal hatch came again. “Okay, I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” he shouted, then said in a quiet aside, “How did those idiots manage get the inner door to open without coming through the outer door?”
Jax could hear the snapping sound of belts being unclipped. He tensed and poked the little ball at the end of his stun-stick between the sleeve and the midsection of the spacesuit, pushing the sleeve aside just enough for him to watch his aim. A body began to float by and he hit the button, jabbing the stick forward.
“AAAhhhhnnnnNHHHHH!” the pilot screamed, his body contorting with almost mock-athleticism in the absence of gravity. After a few seconds it went limp, and he hung there, arms dangling like a scarecrow-bot.
“Shit, guys,” Jax breathed. “I hope that’s you.” He didn’t know how to fly a ship, so he figured he was dead either way if it wasn’t Stanford Runstom or George Halsey on the other side of that hatch. He punched the close button on the cockpit door and floated over to the hatchway.
He hit the release and Runstom came through. He quickly spun around and slammed on the button to close the hatch. He looked wounded, blood oozing from different parts of his uniform. Jax tried to look into his eyes, but the officer was looking down, eyes squinted in pain.
There was a low boom and the ship seemed to drift slightly, an odd sway that moved around them while they floated weightless in the center of it.
“Stanford,” Jax started.
“Halsey,” Runstom rasped quietly, looking at the closed hatch.
“Shit.” Now Jax read the pain on Runstom’s face differently. He wasn’t good at dealing with grief, but he suddenly thought of his mother and it felt like something was tearing apart his stomach. “Stanford,” he said, putting a hand on the officer’s shoulder. “He was a good man.”
Runstom swallowed a couple of times. “That asshole was the closest thing I’ve had to a friend in years. He didn’t deserve to go like that.” He closed his eyes for a moment and Jax stayed quiet, despite being terrified of the danger they were still in. After a few seconds, Runstom opened his eyes. His lips quivered and pursed and his forehead creased as his eyebrows tensed. Jax could only guess what was going through the other man’s mind. Pushing down the pain, burying it for another time. “We don’t have much time,” the officer said finally. “We have to move.”
Runstom grabbed the floating pilot and briefly checked his pulse. He took a restraint band off his belt and pulled the pilot’s arms together and bound them. “Strap this guy into one of those,” he said to Jax, pointing at the harness-seats. “And then get up to the cabin. I’m going to warm up the engines.”
Jax did his best to strap the unconscious pilot in, and then floated into the cockpit. There were four seats, each facing a long, narrow window that looked into the blackness of space. Runstom was already strapped in, and Jax picked a seat at random and followed suit.
“I’m detaching the boarding-tube now,” Runstom said, and Jax could hear the crack in his voice. He cleared his throat and then turned with a quick jerk. “Do you have the notes I copied for you?”
“Yeah, of course. They were the only thing I grabbed when the alarms started.” Jax had a standard, prison-issue satchel strapped to his body. He pulled the collection of papers out of it and handed them to Runstom.
Runstom took the notes and quickly found the page he was looking for. He set them down on the console. “I’ll need to navigate away from the barge a few thousand meters, then we’ll be hitting Xarp speed.”
“This thing can do Xarp?” Jax asked, trepidation in his voice. Warp was light-speed, and that was terrifying enough, but Xarp was even faster; a speed appropriate for mammoth interstellar vessels, but insanely dangerous in such a small ship. His experience with space travel was about to compound as it went from a day and a half of looking at the stars through a porthole the size of his hand to a faster-than-light escape from a murderous space gang.
“She’s an interplanetary, military personnel transport. Designed to be launched in packs, usually about a hundred or so at a time, delivering squads of elite soldiers to a target without warning. Usually sent from deep, deep orbit on the outermost part of a system, where a warship can sit undetected.” Runstom looked up from the console for a moment, but not at Jax. Not at anything in particular. “She’s not much for luxury. All engine and fuel storage. Designed to bring the fight to your enemy’s doorstep.”
Jax looked around, wondering if he had missed some kind of informational plaque on the way into the cockpit. “How the hell do you know all that?”
Runstom shrugged. “ModPol training, mostly. Plus my grandfather was in the Sirius Interplanetary Navy. And…I guess I probably watch too many documentary vids.” He grabbed the throttle and the ship started to move with a jolt.
“Stanford,” Jax said tentatively. “You do know how to pilot this thing, right?”
Runstom was quiet, concentrating on the stick. “Every ModPol grunt has to fly patrol for a couple of years before they get to start doing real police work.” The ship shuddered and Runstom quickly reached for the panel in front of him, hitting a button and flipping a switch. “Of course, this thing is just a little different than a one-man patroller.”
The view panned to the left as the ship rotated, the side of the barge disappearing to the right. Jax leaned forward to angle his head back and forth and take in the view without unstrapping himself. As the emptiness of space opened up before them, he looked at the rear monitor to see the barge coming into view. There was another small craft next to it on this side, tethered by a boarding tube. Next to that he could see the boarding tube that was once attached to their newly acquired vessel, now just floating idly, a jagged hole in one side of it where it was half-hanging from the barge like a misplaced tentacle. Despite the lack of wind in space, it flapped oddly.
“I think the barge is decompressing,” Jax said, watching the monitor.
“Nothing we can do,” Runstom said quietly. “I don’t know if anyone but Space Waste is left. Our problem is that they probably expected all boarding parties to detach at the same time. So we have to get out of here quick before they figure out something is wrong.”
Jax looked away from the monitor and back to the view from the window. There was a ship in the distance, but with no frame of reference he couldn’t tell if it was a large ship far away or a small ship close by.
“That’s the command ship,” Runstom said before Jax could ask. “She’s pretty far out, but she’s got some fighters close by. That’s the contact computer.” He pointed at a crude holo-screen positioned front and center of the cockpit. It displayed a large red blob surrounded by a handful of green dots. Another green blob sat farther off from the rest. “The red one is the barge. The little green ones are combat vessels. Small fighters and personnel assault ships like this one.”
“And the big green one is the command ship,” Jax guessed.
Runstom angled their vessel in a direction that would take them away from the barge and the command ship equally and they edged forward slowly.
“Faster might be a good idea,” Jax said, realizing suddenly that he was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his fingers hurt.
“To run is to be chased,” the officer said quietly. “We’re just one of them for another minute or two, then we’re nothing but Xarp-wake.” He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. “I’m surprised nothing has come across the comm. They must be keeping radio-silent.”
Jax thought about that as they inched ponderously away from the action. He thought about these gangbangers, who seemed to him like fictional space pirates, with their ridiculous weapons and uniforms. The fact that he had not really gotten a good look at any of them only served to fuel his imagination more. The very idea that they were so organized; able to cripple the barge and board it, all while maintaining such a committed level of stealth. Radio silence meant sticking to a plan, it meant discipline and competence. These were qualities one didn’t associate with anarchist space pirates.
He hadn’t noticed the wide but short flat panel that ran part-way across the center of the top of their viewport until it lit up and blinked red a few times. It stopped blinking and a series of numbers appeared on it.
Jax looked at Stanford and opened his mouth, about to ask him what they were looking at, but the officer had a grave look on his face as he stared at the numerical sequence that lit up the cockpit. “It’s message traffic on the comm.” He frowned and looked straight forward determinedly, as if he needed both eyes on the road at that moment. “I don’t know what it means.”
“Oh,” Jax said, realizing. “It’s code.”
Runstom cast him a sideways glance and Jax read interest on his face for a fraction of a second before he re-gripped the throttle and stared back into space. “Code?” he asked idly.
“Like a cypher.” Jax tried to get at his satchel, which was wedged between his thigh and the seat restraints. “Want me to write it down? We could try to—”
“Forget it,” Runstom said. “And hold on. Xarp in thirty seconds.”
“Stanford?” Jax said quietly. “Where are we going?”
“I flipped a coin,” the ModPol officer said. “We’re going to go find that superliner.”
«END OF EXCERPT»
Originally published by HarperVoyager UK
CHAPTER 9
Klaxons bellowed and the bombball game on the holo-vision was suddenly replaced by the blazingly bright, red, flashing image of an alarm-bell icon. Runstom cursed and looked away, the ghost of the image already burned into his retinas.
Halsey yelped awake and fell off his cot. Tangled in a blanket, he tried desperately to stand but was having a difficult time with the action. As low-ranking ModPol officers, their accommodations were barely better than those of the prisoner they were escorting. Their room was a little larger than Jax’s cell, and featured two flimsy cots, a table, and a couple of chairs. Runstom slapped off the holo-vision—the one item they had that prisoners didn’t—and got up to help Halsey to his feet.
“What the fuck is going on?” Halsey had to shout to be heard over the alarms.
“I don’t know,” Runstom yelled. He opened the door to their room. The hallway walls flashed red and the klaxons were even louder.
After a minute of confusion, the alarms quieted enough for an announcement to be heard. An unnatural and unperturbed female voice calmly stated, “Alert. The ship is under attack. This is not a drill. The ship is under attack. Gunners, report to battle-stations. Guards and prisoner escorts, report to the prisoner bay. This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill.”
“Well, fuck me,” Halsey said in a normal voice, just before the alarms started blaring again. “Come on, Stan,” he shouted. “Let’s go!”
They ran down the maze of corridors that led them from the guest rooms to the prisoner bay. Various uniforms ran with them, others ran the opposite direction. Once they hit the prisoner bay, they ran into real chaos. Most of the prisoners were still in the yard and barge guards were desperately trying to corral them into their proper cells. This did not go over well with most of the prisoners, who—quite correctly—assessed that the cells were the least safe place to be during a fire-fight between the barge and other spacecraft.
Things went from bad to worse when something got past the barge’s defenses and the walls shook violently and the floor lurched out from beneath them all. Artificial gravity started to falter, causing everyone to bounce around like they were on pogo-sticks. The guards suddenly became less concerned with getting the prisoners back into their cells and more concerned with finding something to hold on to.
“Stan!” Halsey yelled. “Stanford Runstom! Over here! I found Jackson!”
Runstom got himself turned around and saw Halsey holding Jax from behind, his arms hooked under the operator’s armpits. Jax’s head lolled around, his eyes barely open. Runstom made his way over to them, trying not to run, lest he send himself flying out of control in the weak gravity.
“Jax, wake up!” Runstom yelled once he got to them and got a hold of Jax’s chin.
“I think he hit his head,” Halsey shouted. “We need to get the hell outta here!”
Runstom looked around desperately as he racked his brain trying to remember the layout of the barge. He’d been briefed on it at some point in his ModPol officer training, but that was long, long ago. “This way,” he shouted, pointing. “To the kitchen. I think if we go through there, we can get to the storage room. We might be able to find shelter in there. Inside packing crates—or something.”
Halsey nodded and moved around Jax so they could get on either side of him, each with one of his arms hooked over their shoulders. The extra weight actually made it easier for them to move in the low gravity and they got to the kitchen without injury, dodging bouncing guards and prisoners as they went. They tried to yell to people they passed to tell them to get to the storage bay, but it wasn’t apparent whether or not anyone was listening.
The kitchen was a total mess and they had to pick their way carefully through the chaos of cookware and upended food. Once they made it through, they found the short hallway that hooked up with a large corridor.
“This is the main supply corridor,” Runstom said. The alarms rang furiously in the distance, but not in this section of the ship. “I think the supply deck might detach. There will be some minimal controls in there. If the barge takes too much damage, we can try to pull off and float away.”
“Yeah, and hopefully not draw any attention.” Halsey looked back through the kitchen, the way they came. “You think anyone else got the idea?”
“I hope for their sake, someone does,” Runstom said. “Come on, let’s go.”
They moved down the long, wide corridor toward the primary supply deck. Once they reached the end, they punched the door release and the storage bay opened widely before them. Everything inside was strapped down tight and mostly unaffected by the drop in gravity.
The floor lurched violently, one way, then the other, back and forth a few times. The three of them ended up in different parts of the room. Runstom found himself near the doorway and on his back, staring at the supports high above along the ceiling. Suddenly, a high-pitched, eardrum-piercing, nails-on-a-chalkboard sound screeched from the main supply corridor.
Runstom lifted himself off the deck and hooked his arm over the rounded edge of the door frame, getting a good look into the large hallway. Bright, white light sprayed in showers of sparks on either side of the corridor. Runstom froze, unable to comprehend what was happening, unable to react. After a minute or so, the white light was just a red ghost in his eyes. A few metallic clangs, and suddenly a round section of the wall popped out and hit the floor with a clatter. Almost instantly, three more circles of wall were projected out, one on the same side as the first, the other two on the opposite side.
There was a moment of eerie silence, save the distant klaxons, which from here were beginning to sound like an alarm clock, pestering him to wake up already. The silence didn’t last. Shouts and cheers emanated from the new holes in the corridor, and were soon followed by human forms. Human forms armed to the teeth with all manner of projectile, chemical, and even bladed weaponry.
“Fuck me!” Halsey breathed, suddenly at Runstom’s side. “Fucking gangbangers!”
“Shit,” Runstom said in a hush, trying not to draw any attention. “Why are they attacking us? There’s nothing of value on this prisoner ba—”
Runstom stopped himself as the gangbangers met in the middle of the corridor. There must have been twenty or so of them. He caught sight of the symbol on the back of one of their jackets. Three arrows in a circle, arranged as if one flowed into the next, but with the arrowheads bending outward.
Halsey must have seen it too. “Space Waste!” he whispered.
No further explanation was needed. The two officers didn’t have a need to know much about space gangs in their relatively low-key planetary assignments, but Space Waste was legendary in ModPol circles. One of the largest gangs in the known galaxy, and certainly the most well-organized, Space Waste had a knack for showing up without warning, taking what they wanted and then disappearing. More often than not, they left no living witnesses; only hundreds of InstaStick decals featuring their twisted-arrows logo.
“If Space Waste is hitting a prisoner barge,” Runstom started quietly, turning away from the doorway and slouching against the wall so he could face Halsey, “they must be here to break someone out.”
“How did they get aboard?” Halsey came around the other side of him to get coverage behind the wall.
“They must have used those tubes.” Runstom gestured vaguely. “Reinforced, pressurized boarding tubes that can extend from one ship and form a seal with the hull of another ship.” He’d been asking himself the same thing for the last several minutes and finally worked it out. “They’re flexible, to account for drift. They were originally designed for rescue operations.”
“How do you know this?” said Halsey, cocking an eyebrow.
Runstom shrugged. “I saw it on holo-vision once. It was one of those rescue documentaries.”
“But if they cut through the hull, what happens when they disengage the boarding tubes?”
“Well, in a rescue operation, it’s a last resort. They only do it when they know LifSup is failing on the endangered ship, and they want to get as many survivors off as quickly as possible.”
“So lemme guess,” Halsey said grimly. “The Space Wasters won’t be so humanitarian.”
“No, I would think not,” Runstom replied calmly. He wasn’t actually calm—far from it—but the situation was beginning to feel like it wasn’t real. Like it was just a holo-vid show. “They’ll probably get whoever they’re after, and then re-board their ships and disengage the tubes without bothering to attempt to re-seal the hull breach.”
“Shit,” Halsey muttered. “This is too much explosive decompression for one week.” Runstom shot Halsey a sour look and the other man put his hands up innocently. “What? It’s not like Jackson will get framed for it this time.”
Runstom suddenly stood up halfway, his eyes darting as he scanned the storage bay. “Where is Jackson?”
“Sit down!” Halsey said, pulling on Runstom’s arm. “We’ll get him in a minute. We need to figure out what to do! We don’t have much time!”
“Okay, okay.” Runstom crouched back down and spoke in a low voice. “They’ve breached this main supply corridor. So the rest of the ship might be okay, once they detach the boarding tube. But only if someone can hit the emergency air locks, then they can cut the rest of the ship off from this hallway and be safe.”
“Safe from decompression, anyway,” Halsey said. “If the Wasters have boarded us, they must have taken out our engines. When they get what they came for, they might just sail out to a safe distance and waste us.”
“Yeah. Well, we can’t do anything about that. The only option we have is to close this hatch on the supply deck and hope they leave the storage bay alone.”
“Then we’re on the drift until someone comes along and rescues us. As long as they decide to leave us alone.” Halsey frowned, then his face brightened suddenly. He arched his head up and peered around the curve of the doorway. “There is one other option…”
“What?” Runstom tried to follow his partner’s gaze. The hallway was clear. The gangbangers had mostly moved on, to somewhere in the main part of the ship. Two of them stood there near the breaches, their backs to the supply deck.
“We get aboard one of those…” he started, then stopped. Runstom guessed he was trying to imagine what kind of ships were at the other ends of those tubes.
“Did you grab your sidearm?” Runstom asked. “I only have a stun-stick,” he said, indicating the thin rod hanging off his belt.
“Shit, I don’t have anything,” Halsey said, padding around his uniform. He turned to look back into the storage bay. “There has to be something in here. Let’s go look around.”
“Okay. I’m going to find Jax first and check on him.”
“Forget Jackson, Stan! We’re going to die out here if we don’t move right now!” Halsey was trying to yell in a whisper, and it made the veins in his skinny neck bulge.
“Listen, George,” Runstom said, pushing down with his hands and trying to take the other officer down a notch. “Let’s just pretend for a minute that Jack Jackson is innocent. We’re about to attempt to commandeer some kind of space-gang vessel. We won’t even know what it will be until we’re on board. You and I are qualified to pilot one- or two-man patrollers, but anything bigger than that and we’ll have our hands full.” Halsey frowned at this, but kept his mouth shut. “Now I’m only trying to think a few steps ahead. If we manage to get away from this situation alive, and we’re out there in the middle of nowhere in god-knows-what kind of ship, I guarantee we’ll be glad to have another hand, especially a Life Support op!”
“Goddammit,” Halsey grumbled. He sighed. “Okay. Go find that goddamn operator. I’ll look for arms. Now let’s go, for fuck’s sake!”
They gave another look over at the two gangbangers farther up the corridor and then carefully made their way through the storage bay, ducking behind crates and shelving units as they went. The breach-guards seemed to have no inkling that someone might be hiding out on the supply deck. Or maybe they just didn’t care; which was worse news, because that would mean they knew it was going to be a quick in-and-out for their cohorts.
Runstom found Jax lying on top of a crate, about three meters up. With the low gravity, he must have been flung up there, and now he lay unconscious, one arm dangling off the side. Runstom crouched and then sprang his legs, thrusting himself up to Jax’s level, and then beyond. He had to stick his arms up to keep from banging into the high ceiling, and he angled himself so that he’d land on top of the crate on his float back down. He slung Jax over his shoulder and lightly dropped off the side of the box. They landed with a soft jar, and Jax made a quiet whimpering grunt as they did. “Still alive,” Runstom breathed.
Halsey came bounding over to them, carrying a small bundle of thin, black rods. “Fuckin’ stun-sticks was all I could find. Oh, and this med kit,” he said, unhooking a white plastic case from around his shoulder. “We could keep looking.”
“No, let’s not waste time. I have an idea.” Runstom popped open the med kit and started rummaging through it. Fortunately, it was the consumer model. Everything was clearly labeled and marked with icon-laden instructions. He grabbed a case labeled Insta-Wake. He had no idea what this stuff was, but he’d seen it used before more than once while on the job. He popped open the case and pulled out the single-shot needle-gun.
“Hold him down,” he said, and Halsey braced Jax as best he could. Runstom put the needle-gun up to the operator’s neck (as per the icon on the inside of the Insta-Wake box) and pulled the trigger. Jax coughed and his chest heaved, and Runstom quickly covered his mouth. His eyes fluttered open, slightly at first, then suddenly they were wide and intense.
“Shh. Jax. We’ve got a bit of a situation here, and we need you to be calm.” Jax’s eyes were still wide, but he nodded. They took their hands off him and he sat up and rubbed his head. “We don’t have time to explain everything, so just trust us on this…”
There were so many things that Dava loved about a low-grav fight. The sheer panic that accompanied the loss of control. The recoil of firearms working against their shooters. The majestic deadliness of someone trained to use acrobatics and blades in such a situation.
She was the first one of the Wasters to come out of the kitchen and into the yard, a massive open cube in the largest part of the barge. The tables around the room were bolted to the floor, but just about everything else wasn’t and there was debris everywhere. She scanned up the sides of the cube at the walls lined with cells, stacked up for five levels. Guards and prisoners bounded clumsily about the space, each body with its own trajectory and intention, none of them aligned. She spent a tenth of a second drinking in the pure chaos and then went to work.
The plan to target the artificial gravity pump at the bottom of the barge and then penetrate the rear corridors had worked as well as they could have hoped. Now all that remained was to find Johnny Eyeball and Captain 2-Bit.
A stun-stick came her way, with a bulky uniform in tow. She drew her short, curved scimitar and snapped the stick in half with a quick cutting motion. The guard stumbled backward, half-falling, half-floating. She braced one foot against a nearby table and launched herself at him, her sharp blade slicing clean through the midsection of his cheap armor.
She moved on without bothering to finish him off, making her way toward the starboard-side wall of cells. Another guard flew over her head, arms and legs flailing, before slamming into the back wall with a crunch. She looked toward the source of his trajectory to see Eyeball wrestling with another guard, both of them trying to gain control of a low-end ModPol pistol.
With a few long leaps she got close enough to witness Eyeball bring one of the guards’ bare hands close to his face. She caught herself between a grin and a grimace as the man howled in pain while Eyeball sank his teeth into the soft flesh just above the thumb. The gun came free and Eyeball grabbed it with one hand and with the other, shoved the guard into a sprawling tumble across the space.
“Hey Dava,” he said with a dripping-wet crimson smile. “They fly pretty good in this gravity, eh?”
“Johnny,” she said. “Seven minutes left, then you better be at the rear corridor just beyond the kitchen.”
“Right,” he said, checking his newly acquired weapon.
“Where’s 2-Bit?”
“Third level, opposite side.”
They’d come for both, but she knew Eyeball could take care of himself. The higher priority was getting 2-Bit out of there. Her boss had made a big stink about how important it was to bring 2-Bit back home, how much the others looked up to him, how critical his experience was to the gang. It was that last bit that made Dava wonder. She always thought 2-Bit was an idiot, but he did have experience, which may have been another way of saying he knew things, things that Space Waste didn’t want to turn over to ModPol. Locations of caches, plans for upcoming operations, informants sprinkled around the galaxy, those sorts of things. Secondary, everyone seemed to think that there was an advantage to having a couple of Wasters get arrested: recruitment. And 2-Bit was just the right man for the job. They knew that if they rescued him, he’d have a cartload of fresh meat to bring home as well.
She headed for the opposite wall. When another guard raised his pistol at her, she kicked to her right and balled up to avoid the shot. The kickback threw his arm up high and her scimitar swept across it, severing the hand soundlessly. The shocked victim was almost as soundless with his gasp and before he could fall to his knees, she planted one boot on his helmeted head and vaulted herself up, grabbing the railing along the edge of the second-level walkway. From there, she got to the top of the railing and leapt high enough to grab the floor of the third-level walkway, pulling herself up quickly and easily in the low gravity.
“2-Bit,” she called out. “Captain, where are you?”
A yellow-gray hand appeared through the bars a few cells down. “Down here!”
She approached and saw the old man standing tall and healthy as always. She couldn’t tell if he was exceptionally cool-headed given the situation, or if he was just oblivious to the imminent danger. Of course, 2-Bit had only gotten arrested because he was trying to rescue Eyeball from the mess he’d created back on B-4. She had to admire his ability not to lose his shit over the mistakes of his kin.
“Dava, boy is it good to see you,” he said with a genuine smile. “The force fields went off when the gravity took a hit. Safety and all that.” He tapped on the bars. “But then these came down.”
With a laser cutter and enough time, she could get through them—they weren’t more than cheap steel, probably designed for keeping things from flying out of the cells more than actually keeping prisoners in for any length of time—but the clock was ticking.
She switched her RadMess to voice mode. “Thompson, I need the cell doors on the third floor opened up.”
The reply crackled over the tiny speaker a second later. “Which one on the third floor?”
“Just open all of them.”
“Right, you got it, Dava. I’ll get someone on it.”
“Dava.” 2-Bit gestured to a form huddled at the back of the cell. “I got a man in here with me. He’s from B-3, but was runnin’ some racket on B-4 where he was selling cheap vacation getaways to naïve B-foureans. He would get them aboard his ship, rob them, and drop them in the next dome over.”
“Sounds like a real charmer,” she muttered.
“Point is, he’s a pilot,” 2-Bit said. “Claims to be a pretty good one. And you know we always need more flyboys.”
Her bosses were right, only 2-Bit could turn a jail term into a recruiting opportunity. She half-laughed at the thought. “Alright, bring him along.”
A buzzer sounded and 2-Bit flinched and took his hands off the bars as they slid upward. “Come on,” he said to the back of the cell.
A soft-pink-skinned B-threer came out of the darkness. “Thank you, thank you so much,” he said, then stopped short when he saw Dava. “What’s this?”
“What, boy?” 2-Bit said. “Come on, we need to move.”
“She’s with you?” he said, pointing at Dava. “This shitskin?”
The emergency lighting began to fail and the yard grew darker, which had an effect of shocking the stream of chaotic shouts and clamoring into a sudden silence. Dava went empty in her center. It had been more than a decade since she left the domes of Betelgeuse-3. She’d left at the age of fifteen, after spending nine years of her life in that whitewashed, shopping-mall civilization.
Children had been better than anyone at reminding her that she didn’t belong. That she came from that refuse-planet Earth, that she deserved to be incinerated and broken down into molecules like any other trash. She had to bear such barbs almost every day in those domes. She was branded with it, the mark of the unwelcome, the never-clean.
But she had not had to bear it since joining Space Waste. Ten years since she’d even had to hear slang such as that.
2-Bit was at her side, quietly nudging her back to the present. The B-threer seemed frozen, still inside the cell, the hateful eyes burning like those of the nasty dome children. She lifted the tip of her blade slightly and he stepped back.
“Close the cell doors on level three,” she said into her armband.
“What? We just opened them, Dava.”
“Close them,” she said.
Inside some supply hold, leaning against some towering crate, Jax groaned loudly. “Help. Someone. Is anyone there? I’m hurt. I need help! Can anyone hear me?” His voice cracked with fear—most of it real.
“Ello? Ooze over der?” came a rough voice after a minute. “Com’on outta der!”
Jax’s mind raced. Whatever it was Runstom gave him to wake him up was giving him the shakes. “I…I can’t move. It’s my leg. I think it’s broken. Who is that? Can you help me?”
Jax heard another voice that he couldn’t make out. Then the rough voice again, “Ee says ’is leg’s bustid. Huh? Okay, okay. I’m going.” The voice got louder as it was directed back at Jax. “Okay, you. I’m comin’ over. Don’t move. I’m uh…I’m a medic.”
Jax rolled his eyes, which caused a spike of pain to shoot through his throbbing head. He tried to keep his hands from shaking and sit still, his back to the large crate they’d found him lying on. He heard a movement, the tok-tok-tok of boots on the metal floor off to his right, and he turned his head. A scruffy, scarred, yellow face came around the side. “Ey, boy. You got a gun? You armnnNNNHHHHH—”
The body that came with the face flexed violently, hands dropping some kind of bladed, rifle-like weapon with a clatter and after a couple of seconds, the man spun around and crashed to the floor, his shocked face staring at the ceiling. Bubbling drool oozed out of the side of his mouth and down his cheek.
Halsey came around the corner of the crate, three smoking stun-sticks bundled together in one hand. He stared at the unconscious man with a tight grin on his face.
“Goddamn,” Jax whispered. “That was a little extreme, wasn’t it?”
The officer gave him an innocent look. “Well, I had to be certain, right? He’s a big boy!” He stuck one of the stun-sticks through a loop in his belt and dropped the other two as he bent down and snatched up the loose weapon. It looked like a stubby rifle with a pair of blades extending slightly away from the barrel at two different angles, forming a vague V-shape.
Jax was about to ask Halsey if he knew how to use that thing, but then thought better of it. Whether he did or not, Jax didn’t really want to know, and there was no point in calling the officer’s ability into question now.
Halsey turned around quickly, rifle secured in both hands, as a shout and a grunt came from the other side of the room. Jax stood up and carefully peered around the other side of the box.
Runstom was about twenty meters away, his right arm wrapped around the neck of another scruffy-looking man. These men were part of a gang, apparently—at least, that’s as much as Runstom and Halsey had a chance to tell Jax before they turned him into bait. The officer was at a slight disadvantage, height-wise, and he swayed horizontally from the back of the gangbanger, who was making use of the low gravity to try to shake him loose.
Halsey slung the rifle over his shoulder and snatched up the extra stun-sticks. He ran over to the spinning officer—gangbanger combination and stopped short, trying to figure out how to get a clear shot.
“Put those goddamn things down,” Runstom said between huffs. “The current will run through him and hit me!”
“You’re gonna have to let go!” Halsey yelled, legs bent at the knees, trying to keep the other two directly in front of him.
The Space Waster spun around and faced Halsey, perhaps perceiving him to be a more immediate threat than the man trying to slowly asphyxiate him. He bent his head forward and, using the weight on his back for leverage, he lumbered at an alarming speed toward the other officer.
“Let go now!” Halsey shouted as the big, yellow man bore down on him. He thrust out his two stun-sticks, one in each hand. From his angle, Jax could see Runstom just barely manage to jump free, but he was pretty sure Halsey had his eyes closed. The sticks connected with the big man’s chest and he went down with a jaw-clenched scream through his teeth, sinking to his knees and then keeling over backwards.
Jax ran up to the officers. “Where’s his gun?” Halsey jerked his head erratically from side to side.
Runstom looked in one direction, strode a few meters, and snatched up another blade-gun type of weapon. This one appeared to be more of a single-hand weapon; a smaller but terrible and jagged blade attached to a large pistol. Most of its bulk was due to its battery pack. Runstom flipped a switch on the side of the gun and a small, red dot appeared on the crate next to him. He looked up at them. “Okay, let’s move. Jax, you wait until we say it’s clear. We’re going for the closest hole on the right.”
Their choice of breaches was, of course, entirely arbitrary. They had no idea what to expect as far as the attached ships went. Jax watched from behind the curve of the storage-bay doorway as Runstom and Halsey quickly moved down the long corridor, guns pointed forward.
Runstom looked back over his shoulder long enough to yell, “Clear! Come on, Jax, move!”
Jax tried to angle his legs so that his strides pushed him forward more than up, but he was completely unprepared for athletics in low gravity. He covered the distance of fifty meters to the first breach in what seemed like several agonizing minutes, but it could have been much less.
When he got within a few meters of the officers, he was jarred by the clapping sound of Halsey’s rifle. The officer was shooting a projectile weapon of some kind, an old-fashioned gun that actually fired bullets, and the force of the recoil in the low gravity caused him to stagger backward and lose his footing. “The door on the far right side!” he yelled, trying to get back to his feet. Runstom started firing his laser down the hall, blindly shooting down the right side.
Gunfire echoed down the hallway and Jax was sure he heard something whiz by his head. The oval corridor was a good twenty or thirty meters across, and while Jax and Runstom were taking position near the wall on their right, Halsey was closer to the opposite side. He got to his feet and dove into a nearby breach. The officer then set himself in a position where he could brace his back against the side of the tube and lean out to fire his rifle down the hall without getting pushed backwards.
Jax watched the scene with bemusement, until Runstom turned and shoved him into the boarding tube. He came in after the operator and leaned out the side of the tube, sending laser fire down the corridor. After a few blasts, he turned to Jax and shouted, “Get down the tube to the ship. Make sure we can fly the thing outta here!” Jax started to turn, but Runstom yelled “Wait!” He unhooked the stun-stick from his belt and handed it to the operator.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, fear creeping into his voice.
“There might be a pilot standing by. Just press the button on the handle and poke him with the round ball at the end.” Jax stared at the stick in bewilderment. “Go, now, goddammit!” Runstom shouted, and the look of intensity and violence in the officer’s eyes made Jax want to go down the tube and face someone less terrorizing. Like maybe a bloodthirsty gangbanger.
Runstom stuck his gun back out the breach-end of the tube and with a battle cry, continued blasting. Jax could hear Halsey join in, and for that brief moment he imagined the ModPol officers were a two-man army, fighting off a wave of invaders. He spun around and headed down the tube.
The tube itself was barely large enough in diameter for a grown person to stand. Being B-fourean, Jax was taller than many other humans and had to crouch as he picked his way through the flexing tube. There were handles dotting the length of it, and he quickly discovered their intended use. Once he was off the barge, the failing artificial gravity was no longer a factor, because there was no gravity at all. The tube was some kind of segmented metal. It was not transparent, and for this, he was thankful. It didn’t seem like a good time to be confronted with the vast emptiness of space.
After a minute or two and some distance Jax couldn’t judge, he reached the end. He could still hear Runstom shouting and blasting, and he was pretty sure he could make out the clapping of Halsey’s rifle even at this distance. The hatchway at this end was open. That seemed like a terribly dangerous thing to do, and Jax had to imagine it violated all kinds of safety regulations. So, yeah, he thought as he slowly pulled himself through the hatchway. Add that to their list of atrocities.
The ratio of ducking to returning fire for Runstom and Halsey was steadily growing in favor of ducking. There was a palpable increase in pressure coming from the center of the barge as the gangbangers reassembled their forces and returned to their only escape route. It seemed like a good plan, but now Runstom was having his doubts about getting between a legion of Space Wasters and their ships.
“George,” he said in between blasts of his laser pistol. “George!”
Halsey stopped shooting and leaned back into the tube he occupied on the opposite side of the corridor. He struggled with an extra ammo clip that was affixed to the side of the heavily modified rifle. “My last clip,” he yelled. “We need to get out of here.”
The gangbangers didn’t waste time taking advantage of the short pause. Runstom and Halsey were both forced to lean back into their tubes as the hallway crackled with machinegun fire. Runstom panted as his heart threatened to climb out of his throat. He and his fellow officers had combat training, but it didn’t come close to preparing him for something like this mess. He looked down at the cellpack in the laser pistol. It was down to about a ten-percent charge. He had no idea how many shots that translated into.
The continuous rain of bullets smoothed into a series of rhythmic bursts, and for a brief moment he thought that maybe it meant the gangbangers were running low on ammo as well and were attempting to conserve it. This thought gave him a flicker of hope until he remembered all the blades attached to the guns. Maybe he was better off getting shot before it came to that.
A new sound caught his attention, a strange metal-bouncing-on-metal sound. He and Halsey both looked into the corridor from their opposite-sided shelters. A cylindrical object bounded along and continued all the way to the supply hold they’d come from only minutes before.
“Shit.” Runstom wanted to yell to Halsey that it was a grenade, but the explosion beat him to it. The heat of it blew up the hall and into his tube, but there was nothing more than that. He ventured a peek back down toward the hold and saw the burned scarring just inside the open doors.
He realized in that second that whoever had thrown the grenade hadn’t accounted for the low gravity. The next one came with an adjusted aim, rolling to a spot directly between them where it stopped and spun idly like a bottle in a party game.
Halsey took two steps into the corridor that was still being peppered by cover fire and swung his rifle like a club, smacking the cylinder with one of the blades at the end of the barrel. The grenade flew back down the hall and Halsey cried out as a spray of red burst from his forearm. The rifle clattered to the floor and he dropped back on his ass and kicked at the floor with his feet, pushing himself back into the tube.
“George!” Runstom reflexively stepped toward his partner, but the spray of bullets drove him back.
The returned grenade blew and the cover fire was momentarily interrupted. Runstom didn’t have time to wonder if it actually took anyone out, he just used the space of a breath to dive across the hall and into the other tube. He grabbed Halsey by his good arm and hoisted him to his feet, but the other officer cried out as he stood.
He pulled away the bloody arm to reveal thicker, darker blood coming from his abdomen. “Stan,” he gasped, reflexively holding his wound once again. “You gotta go.”
“No.” Runstom tugged roughly at Halsey’s arm. “Come on, George. We’re both going.”
Halsey groaned but didn’t protest further. Runstom tried to think but he had no time. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and it was clear the rest of the barge had fared even worse. Space Waste had won. He looked down the nearby tube. No doubt there was a ship at the other end, but he’d already sent Jax down the tube opposite. More than ever, Runstom thought their only chance at escape was to stick together.
In the several seconds that had passed, the gunfire had not returned. “Come on, George,” he said with a tug. “Now or never.”
They limped across the width of the spacious hallway. A burst of gunfire sent them diving for the tube. Runstom felt the bite of one shot in his thigh and the ripping sting of another across his midsection before he hit the inside of the tube. He spun around to see Halsey twisting in the corridor, spitting curses and clutching his leg.
“George!”
Another cylinder bounced along the floor, thumping Halsey in the chest. He grabbed at it, bobbling it until he spun it around and found the safety clip. He clutched at it and looked at Runstom. “Go, Stan!”
“George, what are you doing? Throw it back!”
“Go!” He started belly crawling toward the tube. Sporadic bursts lit up the air. “Go before I blow us both up!”
Then it clicked. He was going to blow the tube loose so that no one could follow.
“Damn you,” Runstom said and turned away from his only ally.
He flung himself as deep into the tube as he could, then scrambled to yank himself along by the handholds when the gravity disappeared altogether.
Still coping with the weightlessness, Jax pulled himself through the small ship slowly and carefully. He was in what appeared to be a passenger-seating and load-out room. There were twelve or so “seats” on the walls which were angled in a way that, if there were any gravity, one could walk up to them and strap in securely without actually sitting. They were similar to the mount that was in his cell, only made for voluntary use. On the other side of the room was a series of racks that contained a few spare guns and what looked like suits of armor.
On the opposite wall from the hatchway was another door. This one was closed, and apparently locked, according to the lit sign on the front of it. There were a few flimsy-looking spacesuits hanging haphazardly on either side of it. Jax realized that this was probably the cockpit door. It was a small ship indeed; a personnel carrier, probably hijacked from a military outfit at one time. Just enough to get a boarding party from one big ship to another. They’d be lucky if it could even do Warp.
Jax knew the cockpit door wouldn’t open unless the outer hatchway was closed. He’d have to cut off the ModPol officers long enough to secure the ship. He put a foot against the wall, hit the door trigger on the hatchway, and sprang his body across the chamber to the opposite side, grabbing onto the latches on the wall and hiding himself behind the spacesuit closest to the cockpit.
He waited. The seconds passed. He tasted bitterness in his own saliva and he forced his breathing to slow, trying desperately not to vomit. Finally he heard the internal mechanisms of the door sliding around, eventually clinking into place. The door slowly opened.
“Hey, fellas,” a voice said. “Back already? Hello?”
Suddenly, unexpected to both Jax and the pilot, there was a series of clanging sounds coming from the outer hatchway.
“What the hell?” said the pilot to himself. He was still out of view from Jax. The banging of something solid on the metal hatch came again. “Okay, I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” he shouted, then said in a quiet aside, “How did those idiots manage get the inner door to open without coming through the outer door?”
Jax could hear the snapping sound of belts being unclipped. He tensed and poked the little ball at the end of his stun-stick between the sleeve and the midsection of the spacesuit, pushing the sleeve aside just enough for him to watch his aim. A body began to float by and he hit the button, jabbing the stick forward.
“AAAhhhhnnnnNHHHHH!” the pilot screamed, his body contorting with almost mock-athleticism in the absence of gravity. After a few seconds it went limp, and he hung there, arms dangling like a scarecrow-bot.
“Shit, guys,” Jax breathed. “I hope that’s you.” He didn’t know how to fly a ship, so he figured he was dead either way if it wasn’t Stanford Runstom or George Halsey on the other side of that hatch. He punched the close button on the cockpit door and floated over to the hatchway.
He hit the release and Runstom came through. He quickly spun around and slammed on the button to close the hatch. He looked wounded, blood oozing from different parts of his uniform. Jax tried to look into his eyes, but the officer was looking down, eyes squinted in pain.
There was a low boom and the ship seemed to drift slightly, an odd sway that moved around them while they floated weightless in the center of it.
“Stanford,” Jax started.
“Halsey,” Runstom rasped quietly, looking at the closed hatch.
“Shit.” Now Jax read the pain on Runstom’s face differently. He wasn’t good at dealing with grief, but he suddenly thought of his mother and it felt like something was tearing apart his stomach. “Stanford,” he said, putting a hand on the officer’s shoulder. “He was a good man.”
Runstom swallowed a couple of times. “That asshole was the closest thing I’ve had to a friend in years. He didn’t deserve to go like that.” He closed his eyes for a moment and Jax stayed quiet, despite being terrified of the danger they were still in. After a few seconds, Runstom opened his eyes. His lips quivered and pursed and his forehead creased as his eyebrows tensed. Jax could only guess what was going through the other man’s mind. Pushing down the pain, burying it for another time. “We don’t have much time,” the officer said finally. “We have to move.”
Runstom grabbed the floating pilot and briefly checked his pulse. He took a restraint band off his belt and pulled the pilot’s arms together and bound them. “Strap this guy into one of those,” he said to Jax, pointing at the harness-seats. “And then get up to the cabin. I’m going to warm up the engines.”
Jax did his best to strap the unconscious pilot in, and then floated into the cockpit. There were four seats, each facing a long, narrow window that looked into the blackness of space. Runstom was already strapped in, and Jax picked a seat at random and followed suit.
“I’m detaching the boarding-tube now,” Runstom said, and Jax could hear the crack in his voice. He cleared his throat and then turned with a quick jerk. “Do you have the notes I copied for you?”
“Yeah, of course. They were the only thing I grabbed when the alarms started.” Jax had a standard, prison-issue satchel strapped to his body. He pulled the collection of papers out of it and handed them to Runstom.
Runstom took the notes and quickly found the page he was looking for. He set them down on the console. “I’ll need to navigate away from the barge a few thousand meters, then we’ll be hitting Xarp speed.”
“This thing can do Xarp?” Jax asked, trepidation in his voice. Warp was light-speed, and that was terrifying enough, but Xarp was even faster; a speed appropriate for mammoth interstellar vessels, but insanely dangerous in such a small ship. His experience with space travel was about to compound as it went from a day and a half of looking at the stars through a porthole the size of his hand to a faster-than-light escape from a murderous space gang.
“She’s an interplanetary, military personnel transport. Designed to be launched in packs, usually about a hundred or so at a time, delivering squads of elite soldiers to a target without warning. Usually sent from deep, deep orbit on the outermost part of a system, where a warship can sit undetected.” Runstom looked up from the console for a moment, but not at Jax. Not at anything in particular. “She’s not much for luxury. All engine and fuel storage. Designed to bring the fight to your enemy’s doorstep.”
Jax looked around, wondering if he had missed some kind of informational plaque on the way into the cockpit. “How the hell do you know all that?”
Runstom shrugged. “ModPol training, mostly. Plus my grandfather was in the Sirius Interplanetary Navy. And…I guess I probably watch too many documentary vids.” He grabbed the throttle and the ship started to move with a jolt.
“Stanford,” Jax said tentatively. “You do know how to pilot this thing, right?”
Runstom was quiet, concentrating on the stick. “Every ModPol grunt has to fly patrol for a couple of years before they get to start doing real police work.” The ship shuddered and Runstom quickly reached for the panel in front of him, hitting a button and flipping a switch. “Of course, this thing is just a little different than a one-man patroller.”
The view panned to the left as the ship rotated, the side of the barge disappearing to the right. Jax leaned forward to angle his head back and forth and take in the view without unstrapping himself. As the emptiness of space opened up before them, he looked at the rear monitor to see the barge coming into view. There was another small craft next to it on this side, tethered by a boarding tube. Next to that he could see the boarding tube that was once attached to their newly acquired vessel, now just floating idly, a jagged hole in one side of it where it was half-hanging from the barge like a misplaced tentacle. Despite the lack of wind in space, it flapped oddly.
“I think the barge is decompressing,” Jax said, watching the monitor.
“Nothing we can do,” Runstom said quietly. “I don’t know if anyone but Space Waste is left. Our problem is that they probably expected all boarding parties to detach at the same time. So we have to get out of here quick before they figure out something is wrong.”
Jax looked away from the monitor and back to the view from the window. There was a ship in the distance, but with no frame of reference he couldn’t tell if it was a large ship far away or a small ship close by.
“That’s the command ship,” Runstom said before Jax could ask. “She’s pretty far out, but she’s got some fighters close by. That’s the contact computer.” He pointed at a crude holo-screen positioned front and center of the cockpit. It displayed a large red blob surrounded by a handful of green dots. Another green blob sat farther off from the rest. “The red one is the barge. The little green ones are combat vessels. Small fighters and personnel assault ships like this one.”
“And the big green one is the command ship,” Jax guessed.
Runstom angled their vessel in a direction that would take them away from the barge and the command ship equally and they edged forward slowly.
“Faster might be a good idea,” Jax said, realizing suddenly that he was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his fingers hurt.
“To run is to be chased,” the officer said quietly. “We’re just one of them for another minute or two, then we’re nothing but Xarp-wake.” He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. “I’m surprised nothing has come across the comm. They must be keeping radio-silent.”
Jax thought about that as they inched ponderously away from the action. He thought about these gangbangers, who seemed to him like fictional space pirates, with their ridiculous weapons and uniforms. The fact that he had not really gotten a good look at any of them only served to fuel his imagination more. The very idea that they were so organized; able to cripple the barge and board it, all while maintaining such a committed level of stealth. Radio silence meant sticking to a plan, it meant discipline and competence. These were qualities one didn’t associate with anarchist space pirates.
He hadn’t noticed the wide but short flat panel that ran part-way across the center of the top of their viewport until it lit up and blinked red a few times. It stopped blinking and a series of numbers appeared on it.
Jax looked at Stanford and opened his mouth, about to ask him what they were looking at, but the officer had a grave look on his face as he stared at the numerical sequence that lit up the cockpit. “It’s message traffic on the comm.” He frowned and looked straight forward determinedly, as if he needed both eyes on the road at that moment. “I don’t know what it means.”
“Oh,” Jax said, realizing. “It’s code.”
Runstom cast him a sideways glance and Jax read interest on his face for a fraction of a second before he re-gripped the throttle and stared back into space. “Code?” he asked idly.
“Like a cypher.” Jax tried to get at his satchel, which was wedged between his thigh and the seat restraints. “Want me to write it down? We could try to—”
“Forget it,” Runstom said. “And hold on. Xarp in thirty seconds.”
“Stanford?” Jax said quietly. “Where are we going?”
“I flipped a coin,” the ModPol officer said. “We’re going to go find that superliner.”
«END OF EXCERPT»
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