The Neptune Contingency: Starship Fairfax Book 3 - The Kuiper Chronicles Read online

  It didn’t look good.

  Her baseline temperature was far below normal, and her heart-rate was erratic. “C’mon,” Erick muttered, shifting his weight from left to right. Given the chance, the suit should normalize temperature and airflow. It would be up to her body after that, whether or not to try to survive.

  He began pulling her to the edge of the table to pick her up, and caught a glimpse of his own vitals.

  His oxygen levels were down to thirty percent.

  He closed his eyes and fell back against the wall, laughing silently. There was hardly any use now. He’d never made it back.

  Someone gasped for air over his suit comm. He opened his eyes and saw Rylea sitting up on the table, her chest heaving as she took fast, shallow breaths.

  “Rylea? Rylea!” She turned to face him, and he came back to her side. “You’re ok, but listen to me. This ship is totaled, the hull has been breached. You need to get out, head down this passage here—” he pointed back the way he had come, “—and get outside, make sure your mag-boots are engaged, and space-walk up the hull to the airlock topside. There’s a shuttle just inside. If you get there, you can get off this wreck alive!”

  Her eyes were wide with fear. “Wally?” she asked, her voice very small.

  He looked at his feet, then met her eyes. “He’s dead, Rylea. I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, looking away. Then, after a moment, “You’re not coming with me?”

  He threw his arms up. “I’m out of air. Or will be, anyway, before we make it halfway.”

  “So why don’t you just take some of the med oxygen?”

  He followed her gaze to the bottom of one of the myriad shelves. There, a series of squat, heavy-looking oxygen tanks sat, ripe for the taking. He blinked.

  “Oh.”

  There was no way to link one of the tanks to his suit, but he was able to link one to a medical mask on the shelf. He grabbed a roll of bandages.

  “Hold this, will you?” He set the tank on the table beside her. Then he took a couple of fast breaths, one long, deep breath, and opened his suit over his chest.

  His skin seemed to freeze immediately, and the depressurizing caused the most strangely unsettling sensation. He tore a length of bandage from the roll and brought it around behind his back, inside the suit. Then, holding the oxygen tank against his stomach, he rolled the bandage around it as tight as he could. Lastly, he shoved the mask up through to his face, and felt it lock over his nose and mouth. By the time he got his suit sealed again, he was shivering convulsively, but he also had a much better supply of air.

  “Alright,” he chattered into his comm. “If this stuff makes me loopy, and it might, because I don’t think it’s diluted, just do your best to get me up there with you. If I get too far gone, go on without me, ok?”

  Rylea didn’t seem to hear him. “C’mon,” she said, heading for the door.

  Slowly and cautiously they backtracked the way he had come, down the short corridor, out through the gash in the hull, and into the void. Tiny bits of flotsam continued to pelt the Spacegull. Erick looked up and out, taking stock. Not far off, shuttles were passing around some of the dead ships, probably looking for survivors. Empire ships, he realized. The Spacegull had drifted away from the Rome formation. Every charred hull he laid eyes on was from the Empire armada.

  “We need to move,” he said over the comm.

  “We’re moving,” Rylea said.

  “Faster! If those Empire shuttles spot us before we can get to our own, we’re done for!”

  “It gets worse than this?” She gestured blithely to their surroundings.

  “It does. Prison. A work-camp. The Empire bears no love for pirates.”

  “I’m not a pirate,” she mumbled.

  “Well, you’re flying with one. Hurry up!”

  They moved as quickly as they could, but every three or four minutes Erick got too dizzy to go on, and he had to pause and adjust his oxygen mask to breath the old air from his suit mask for a few seconds. Rylea grew silent, plodding up the hull beside him.

  “There,” he said, panting. He pointed at the wreckage ahead. “The airlock is just beyond that hunk of junk; we just have to get around it.”

  Rylea nodded and picked up the pace. They came around the side, and the airlock came into view, bathed in the light reflected from Earth’s surface. A shadow passed overhead, and Erick glanced up.

  “Rylea, move!”

  Another chunk of ghost ship, this one far larger, was careening inexorably towards them. Towards the airlock. Erick tried his best to run, fighting the dots that began to swim in his vision from the pure oxygen. But it was no use. He could see it all playing out before it happened. The wreckage was going to smash into the Spacegull, obliterating the airlock, the hangar bay, and the escape shuttle all in one fell swoop.

  “Get down!” he yelled. Again, pointless. Rylea ducked as he reached her and tried to shield her with his body. Their boots held as the deck shuddered from the collision and the ship veered off onto a new vector yet again. When the quaking stopped, Erick looked up. The airlock was nowhere in sight.

  “It got worse,” Rylea said.

  Erick followed her eyes up and out. One of the Empire shuttles was heading their way.

  Chapter 10

  Dolridge paid his parking fee and hauled his dusty hopper out of Jackson as quickly and quietly as he could. He didn’t know how long it would take for the police to determine he was no longer in the building, or for them to contact Council operatives. No, he realized. The Council already knew he was there. The police came at their behest, probably when Man had given some sort of silent notice that he had Dolridge in his power. He cursed. He was in legitimate trouble.

  The problem was there was nowhere to go, nowhere safe to escape or hide from the Council of Kuiper. Their grasp enclosed the entirety of the Colonies. And even if he could get away, he had nowhere else. This was home. He couldn’t plead his case in the Empire; they would surely have a dossier on him with the words “shoot on sight” marked somewhere in red letters. He supposed there were always the pirate worlds in the middle—Ceres, the inner belt, those scum-holes casually overlooked by either party and left to the powers of organized and local crime syndicates. He huffed. Some retirement. Maybe it would be better to just get it over with and turn himself in. At least get the opportunity to get things off his chest before they put an end to his misery.

  Then he thought of Caspar. If they were after him, something had changed. Some new information had come to light, or some shift in power had to have happened for them to go through all the trouble of coming out to the family farm and putting him down. And if he wasn’t safe anymore, odds were she wasn’t, either, no matter how far her career had taken her.

  Who would they send for her, if they’d been sending old Blade agents his way? Surely there were younger, fitter men they could have tasked to take him out. Assassins for hire. In a way, it flattered him that they’d sent men he knew. It spoke well of his savvy, as if they knew he couldn’t be taken in by anyone else. He admitted he’d relied largely on luck to survive the last two encounters. Maybe the better question for him right now was, who would they send for him next? He patted the blasting pistol in its holster around his waist. Never again would he leave the hopper with it. Probably not without its friends, either.

  As he drove out of town and onto one of the open-space flyways that crisscrossed the planet, he began unpacking memories he’d done his best to ignore for the past few years. His post as XO under a distant captain. His inglorious mission of trolling the belly of the system and picking up space-scrap. The arrival of Caspar. How she had been impervious to the sloppy, drunken state of disorder onboard. And then that fateful day when they had come under attack from a mysterious enemy. The computer malfunctions, the search for a stowaway, and finally, the invasion of the ship by a pack of AI-controlled drones, top-secret next-next-next gen tech, a lethal, sentient superweapon, the likes of which he’d only seen onc
e before, on his last mission for the Kuiper Blade.

  In both encounters with the drones, Dolridge had lost nearly everyone near him. The first time, he’d been the sole survivor—again, luck. But the second time it was largely due to Caspar that he’d made it out alive. She was as brilliant and talented as she was indefatigable, and he would have looked forward to mentoring her career, had he not been a washed-up drunk grieving the death of his late daughter. And there was the other thing, the part that had driven him to retire out in the boonies and lead a quiet life.

  He was sure—he would have bet money on it, and now, his life—that the drones had been deployed by friendlies. By the Council.

  Up ahead he saw one of the gateways, civilian exits from the surface flyways to orbital flight, and beyond. He revved the hopper, eager to put Pluto behind. If there was anything he could still do with his life, anything worth evading capture for, it was to find her, and warn her. Maybe help her if he could. Without warning she was as good as dead. They wouldn’t bother with an assassin. They would just lock her up and do it quietly after recalling her from duty, or on her way back from her next tour. Maybe they’d arrange for it to look like an accident, and take out a ship and crew with her. The thought made his stomach roll.

  Maybe they’d send the drones again.

  —

  The hopper hummed along, pulling out of orbit and into free space. Dolridge pulled up a navmap, considering. The ship had been outfitted as a farming utility vehicle, and wasn’t really set up for long-range flights. He would have to make a few stops before he made it out of Kuiper space. He needed extra fuel, probably some power cells, and more rations for himself. And then what? He plotted a course to Ceres, checking the distance, and frowned. The navmap must have linked to the net before he left the planet. Great.

  It was flashing red with a warning. “Ceres under quarantine. No ships to enter or exit at this time. Please direct all questions to Geta-4 Station.” Another message popped up on the screen. “Geta-4 no longer operational.” He waited for more news, but none came.

  “That’s it?” he muttered. So helpful. He heaved a sigh. He would worry about where to go other than Ceres after he was better stocked for the journey. There was always Triton. Neptune’s moon was a good bit further into Colony space, but black-market operations flourished there—or they had back when Dolridge had been young enough to know such things. It might not be a bad place to start sniffing around for information. He plotted a course.

  “There you are,” he said. He should arrive in approximately ten hours. He had a look at the console and decided his fuel should last that long, then he spread out his quilt in the back and stretched out for a nap.

  —

  An alarm sounded. Dolridge flattened himself to the floor, getting the wind knocked out of him in the process. Above him, the air grew hazy. Gas. They were trying to smoke him out. He crawled towards the end of the passageway, to the bridge doors, but they seemed to shrink, the hall lengthening even as he crawled. A young woman’s face appeared through a window at the end.

  “Sarah!” he called, his voice choked on noxious fumes. Sparks rained down from the ceiling as highly focused energy beams cut through. Robotic pincers took the ceiling away, revealing a blue sky dotted with high, thin clouds. A swarm of giant insects, hornets, each one the size of a man, blotted out the light, and descended into the hallway.

  “Sarah!!”

  Dolridge sat up in a cold sweat. He was alone in the back of his farming comet hopper, his old family quilt tossed to the side. A dream, nothing more. Except for the alarm. Something up in the cockpit was definitely beeping.

  “What in the…?” He stood staring at the console. Fuel reserves empty, already? How was that possible? He swiped through the maintenance menus until he came to the problem. Apparently one of the lines had sprung a leak. “That seems awfully convenient,” he muttered. What were the odds? He grabbed a knife and another pistol and worked his way over every inch of the ship, looking for a stowaway. He found none.

  “Hmm.” Either the line had actually torn from disrepair, or the hopper had been sabotaged while he had been enjoying coffee with Man. Under other circumstances, the former would have seemed more likely, but lately he had grown to appreciate the target on his back. And besides, though it was true the hopper was old and used plenty of old parts, he had kept her running well enough that a little light travel out here shouldn’t be such a problem. He frowned. He supposed the strain of breaking free from Pluto’s gravity could explain it. But he still didn’t like his chances. And it seemed unlikely someone would cut his fuel line without a plan to catch up to him later.

  He pulled up another screen, tasking the navcomputer to run a scan. Sure enough, he wasn’t alone. Another ship was trailing him, and closing the gap.

  It was a small freighter, not dissimilar to his in size. But he was sure it would be better equipped than his for a standoff. At their relative speeds, it looked like it should catch up to him within the hour. He stared at the screen. There was another blip ahead of them both, a little off-course, but not too far. A ship? Surely not. It looked far too large. He selected it, zooming in for details.

  Of course. Merchant Station, the massive trading station that orbited on a plane splitting the difference between Pluto and Neptune. He ran some numbers in his head quickly, trying to discern whether or not he could reach the station before his pursuer reached him. In any scenario, it was going to be very, very close. But there was something else about running for your life. It made a gambler out of even the most prudent of men. Dolridge laid in a course for Merchant and burned the fuel. Better to use it now and get as much momentum as he could than lose half to the leak.

  “Alright, then,” he said, settling back into his chair. “You’re it.”

  Chapter 11

  “Where’s the captain?” Ada stood on the bridge of the Fairfax once more. Randall sat in Odin’s chair. Caspar was at her station, gazing quietly at the viewscreen. The bridge was on a skeleton crew.

  “He’s off bridge-duty right now,” Randall said. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “No, I just hoped to—”

  “He’s down in the sub-hangar decks,” Caspar said. “Having a meeting with the Ceres survivors.”

  Ada quirked her head to the side. “Ceres survivors?”

  “Yeah. You know how Ceres got blown up by your friends, those other pirates? We managed to pick up a pod. One lousy pod. They’ve been bunking down in some of the spare rooms belowdecks.”

  “They aren’t my friends,” Ada growled.

  “Whatever.” Caspar put a hand up, as if to say the discussion was over. Fine with Ada. She turned on her heel and headed for the lift, taking it back to the hangar bay.

  “We’re out of here,” she said as she entered Cupid again.

  “Thank goodness,” Joyce said. “I’ve got her all gassed up. Amazing what you can take from people while everyone is running around feeling guilty.”

  Ada gave her a nod. “Good work. Didn’t realize you knew how to do anything useful.”

  “I’m full of surprises. Comes with the trade, you know.”

  Off to the side, Bone Crusher was looking morose. “C’mon, Crush,” Ada said. “I don’t like running out on friends, either. But these people haven’t been good to us, or for us. Let’s get out of here and find something or someone worth sticking around for. This isn’t it.”

  He nodded, glumly, and closed the hatch behind her.

  Ada fell into her seat in the cockpit, clipped her tiny earpiece on, and hailed Moses.

  “Ada, I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.

  “Sorry about that, but a girl has to rest sometime.”

  “You broke contact for a significantly longer amount of time than I was given to expect. You should know that the Fairfax has flown beyond the inner belt.”

  Ada cursed. “Joyce? Crush? How long was I out?”

  “Bout nine hours,” Joyce said, sliding in
to the copilot seat. “Guess you were getting your beauty rest, huh?”

  “Nine hours?” She pulled up a navmap on the console. “Where are we?”

  “The Fairfax makes excellent time,” Moses said. Ada flicked the speaker on so that his voice filled the cockpit, not just her ear. “The engines appear to have undergone significant modifications. We have passed beyond Jupiter and are currently ringing Uranus.”

  “That’s something I thought I’d never have to do again,” Joyce said with a snicker.

  Ada ignored her. “We didn’t stop in the belt?”

  “Negative. The ship’s AI is still reticent to communicate with me, but from what little I have learned from him, I gather that the Fairfax is on a heading with full speed to Pluto.”

  “Fleet headquarters,” Ada said. “And the Council of Kuiper.”

  “Whoa!” Crush perked up, leaning against the doorjamb. “You mean we’ve crossed almost the entire system in just a few hours?”

  “Apparently she’s a custom job,” Ada said. She sighed, looking at Joyce and Crush. “Well, what now? I didn’t have any plans to come back here anytime soon. I thought that if I—”

  “Come back?” Joyce said. “You’re from the Colonies?”

  “Ah, well… yes. Not that it matters where any of us are from now, since we’re enemies of just about everyone in existence.”

  “I’m no one’s enemy,” Crush said.

  “I’m having a really hard time squaring this new spiritual image of you with your name and MO, Crush. You been talking with a shrink on this ship or something? They have priests onboard?”

  He looked at the floor, sheepishly. “I may’ve met some people that’ve been helpin’ me.”

  Ada shook her head. “Lovely.”

  “If we’re taking votes,” Joyce said, “I say we still slip out and try for Uranus.”