The Neptune Contingency: Starship Fairfax Book 3 - The Kuiper Chronicles Page 7

  Ada looked at her, deadpan. “Do you really think that? Or did you just want to hear yourself say that out loud?”

  Joyce shrugged. “Can it be both?”

  “Uranus is no good. Don’t smile at that. I mean it’s a police-world. Every moon is operated by a different training academy. We’d be looking over our shoulders everywhere we went. What we need is someplace lawless and crooked where we can slip in under the radar. And don’t say that planet’s name again. What we need…” She swiped at the nav, pulling up a list of large-scale colonies, and selecting one. “There. We need Triton.”

  “Neptune? That’s no fun to say.”

  “Shame. Triton has a much more lively underground. Plenty of places for all of us to find work, if that’s what we want. Or hawk the ship.” Saying that out loud filled her with a pang. “Or maybe we could stick together, become our own crew? I bet there are lots of jobs available for a small, discreet crew with a nice little freighter like ours.”

  Joyce eyed her through slits. “You still want to keep the ship, don’t you?”

  “She has a name. It’s Cupid. And yes, of course I do. My offer stands; I’ll still buy you out if you’d rather move along.”

  “With what money?”

  “I’ll find money.”

  Joyce scoffed.

  “Anyway, if we’re all agreed on Triton, then there’s no need to jump ship just yet. Even if we rode all the way to Pluto, we’d be less than half a day away in this puppy.”

  Joyce considered. “I suppose Uranus can wait.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “We aren’t leaving?” Crush said.

  “Not yet, Crush.”

  He nodded, grinning a little, and slipped away. Ada watched him, squinting. “I think I’m going to see what he’s up to,” she said to Joyce. “I don’t trust this new ‘all lives are sacred’ Crush. It isn’t our Crush. How’re you supposed to crush bones when you can’t even quash your own conscience?”

  “Hmm?” Joyce looked up, opening her eyes.

  “Oh, nevermind. Just watch the ship, huh? Maybe you should get some sleep. Since I’m so well-rested.” She left the cockpit.

  Trailing Crush wasn’t all that difficult, even though he clearly thought he was being sneaky. He dodged around corners, peering out ahead of himself to be sure he wasn’t seen from anywhere other than behind. Ada smiled. He was a truly loveable sort, if a complete and utter dope. He would never think to look behind himself. Who would sneak up on a guy like him?

  Bone Crusher had been a hired thug on the pirate ship Ada had contracted on, back when she had first come to the inner belt from her family hab in the Colonies. She’d left fleeing death, and searching for her lost father. She’d found herself forcibly conscripted into serving on Carmen’s Crews, a nasty outfit where she’d been lucky to find a couple of people to watch her back. One had been her captain, killed in their first encounter with the Fairfax after she’d joined. The other had been Bone Crusher.

  He was a big man, tall, broad-shouldered, muscle-bound, and quick to use his strength and height to intimidate his enemies. He’d been a prized cage-fighter of Carmen’s. She was the owner-operator of the outfit, a charming, manipulative woman who knew exactly how to wrap a man like Crush around her little finger and convince him he was her friend, not her slave. She was dead now, thanks to Rome, Inc. The takeover had been quick and savage. As far as Ada knew, she and Crush were all that remained of the old Crews now. Rome had an unchecked monopoly in the inner belt.

  So she wasn’t surprised that Crush should be behaving oddly—after all, he was under a lot of pressure and going through changes. But the sudden sensitivity to everything and his pretended empathy for everyone—she found it hard to believe. Sure, he had always been kind to her, but she thought the reason was pretty obvious. She was young, she was fit, she was a woman. Crush’s soft spot. But she’d seen him kill more than a few men in close combat now; that was the Crush she knew. Where was this change coming from?

  When he took a lift, she cursed, biting her lip. As soon as the door closed, she raced up to the console beside it. It showed the destination three decks down, in the belly of the ship.

  Huh.

  She jogged down the stairs and peered through the door onto the third deck down.

  It was a large, communal space, full of people she had never seen before—far more people than she had seen in the active Fairfax crew. They were all standing, shuffling to gather around a focal point at the far end. She risked opening the door a little more and spotted Crush sauntering up to a man in the back of the crowd. Crush laid a hand on the man’s shoulder, greeting him warmly. She couldn’t make out what they were saying over the din of everyone else.

  “Moses?” she subvocalized. “Do you know where I am?”

  “Yes, Ada. Sublevel B, section 2. You are in the communal room of some of the Fairfax’s expanded bunk housing.”

  She frowned. “Are these the Ceres survivors?”

  Beep. “More information required.”

  “Ah, it’s something Caspar said. She told me they’d picked up a pod of refugees after the nuking of Ceres, and that the people were all living down in one of the unused bunkhouses belowdecks.”

  “Unable to confirm, but that seems a likely hypothesis.”

  “Hmm.”

  The crowd hushed in the communal room. At the focal point, a man leapt up onto a dining table. “Brothers and sisters,” he shouted, “welcome!”

  “Welcome!” Everyone shouted back in chorus.

  “Creepy,” Ada muttered.

  “We have traveled through the night,” the man said, his voice ringing overhead. “We have traveled through the nightmare and lost sight of the dream forever. But in the darkness, we have been given a gift. We have found each other. We have found ourselves. And we have found our voice! We will not be silenced!” He raised his fist and his voice, and everyone in the crowd cheered.

  “Now, now,” he said, hushing them with his hands. “I know that some of you have heard the rumors. And they are true.”

  A low wave of murmurs rose from the crowd.

  “We have passed the belt,” he went on, “without stopping, as was promised to us. We have been disenfranchised, now, even by those we thought were sent to help us. They would rather turn tail and run to protect their own hides than do right by the widows and orphans that sit homeless at their feet!”

  The murmurs grew to an angry rumble.

  “We have been taken advantage of! Ask yourselves, brothers and sisters, do you sit, warm, comfortable, in your own place of dignity and privacy aboard the ship of those sent to rescue you? Or do you stand, naked, afraid, tossed belowdecks into the bowels of the ship of those sent to enslave you?”

  His voice rose to a fever pitch, and shouts echoed from the floor again.

  “We will not be naked!” he cried. “We will not be afraid! No longer will we be tossed about and trampled on and taken and given! We will not be enslaved! We will fight!”

  “Fight!” the crowd cried.

  “Rise up, brothers and sisters! The time has come! Rise up and claim your lives, claim your freedom, claim your ship!”

  The crowd erupted into a frenzy.

  Ada stood, staring, her mouth hanging open.

  Chapter 12

  “What’s your name?” The Empire officer spat when he spoke. Erick resisted the urge to wipe the spittle from his face; nothing that might make him look hostile.

  “I’m… Rodgers, Sir. Mark Rodgers.” He glanced at Rylea. “This here’s my sister, Lea.”

  The officer swiped at a device, scrolling through page after page. “I’m not finding either of you on any of the Earth ship rosters. Explain that.”

  “No, no, you wouldn’t, Sir.” He widened his eyes and exaggerated his hesitated speech, trying to harness some of his own fear for the performance. Go big or go home, right? “That’s because we weren’t on no Earthen ships, Sir. We was on one of those, whattya call ‘em? The pi
rate ships? Only we ain’t no pirates, neither, Sir, as I’m sure you can plainly see.”

  “You were on an illicit vessel, travelling illicitly in Empire space, but your plea is that you are not pirates?”

  “Uh huh, uh huh, that’s right, Sir!” Erick nodded vigorously. “We was taken, Sir! Taken by those pirates from our homeworld, a little mining hab just inside the belt, Sir! We never even knew there was a battle on. We was locked up in a brig when it all happened, Sir.”

  The officer frowned. “Hmm. And just how is it that you found yourselves out on a spacewalk? And with that… interesting oxygen configuration?” He sneered down at Erick’s chest, where the oxygen tank was still strapped to his body, visible now that his suit was open.

  “My brother came to rescue me,” Rylea said. Erick met her eyes and tried to will her into silence, but she only smiled. “They’d taken me out and put me in medical, on account of this nasty cut I got when they captured us, see?” She raised her bandaged forearm. The officer’s lips quirked. “Only when the battle happened and ships starting crashing into each other, the med bay was cut off from the rest of the ship. So Er—um, Mark got into a spacesuit and came looking for me. He’d just gotten me out when you found us, Sir. And thanks for that.” Her voice dwindled and her eyes fell to the floor. She had realized her mistakes, but too late.

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Sir,” Erick said. “She’s just a poor, sweet girl, my sister, trying to make me look better than I am. The truth is that I—”

  The officer raised his hand. “The truth is something we shall, I suspect, never hear from either of you. But I have no time to interrogate you properly; there are many more ships to inspect.” He turned to a guard. “Are either of them armed?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “Good.” He put his device away and turned to go. “Put them in cell 3. We can sort it all out after rescue operations are finished.”

  “Sir.”

  “Sorry,” Rylea mouthed to Erick as they were hefted to their feet. Erick sighed. Looked like he was back in the Empire again.

  —

  The hours passed, mostly in tedium and silence, punctuated by intense activity bursts as the officer and his guards stopped to pick up new survivors, new prisoners. Erick sneered. What had Rome Inc. been thinking, making a deal with the devil? Of course as soon as the whole thing had gone south, the Empire had swooped in to clean house. They may have lost half their armada, but they were making damn sure they gutted Rome in the process.

  Erick eventually collapsed, nodding off with his chin on his chest. He was roused by the sound of the cell door opening.

  A guard shoved a man into the cell with them. “Be nice,” he said. “The rest of the ship is full. See you all back home.” He left.

  Erick looked at the man, warily. He was tall, bald, and wore a familiar eye-patch. Erick spit on the floor. “Cyclops,” he said.

  “At your service,” Cyclops replied. “And you are…?”

  Erick put off the question with a hand. “Just one of your many conscripted minions. I suppose there have been too many new acquisitions in the past few months for you to keep track.”

  “Ah. My apologies for not recognizing you. I must not be your direct handler.” He smiled, and Erick fairly felt the slime oozing from the man’s soul.

  “No, you’re not.”

  Cyclops shrugged. “Well, what’s well is well. And how did you end up finding yourself here?”

  “Think that’s pretty obvious. Don’t you?”

  He frowned. “You lost one of our ships? Got it blown up?”

  Erick scoffed. “Even now, you’re gonna blame your peons? C’mon. You saw what we were up against.”

  Cyclops squatted in front of him, glaring at him cheerfully from his one blue eye. “I saw an army of men run in confusion from a handful of robots. Hardly worth escaping blame.”

  “Yeah, about that. What were those things?”

  Cyclops turned to look at Rylea, asleep in the corner. “She yours?”

  “She’s with me,” he said, his voice cold.

  “Hmm.” He stood and crossed to the other side of the cell, leaning against the wall.

  Erick waited. Clearly, his question wouldn’t be answered, so he tried another. “Where will they take us?”

  “I’d just sit tight if I were you. Go back to sleep, captain-boy.” He slipped down the wall and closed his one eye.

  Erick didn’t sleep another wink.

  —

  They were unloaded, in the end, onto a much larger ship, a freighter, along with hundreds of other prisoners, all “rescued” by Empire forces after the catastrophe. There was no formal explanation, no more interviews or questions. Erick and Rylea were simply assigned numbers—he was 5231, she 5232—and shuffled off to another cell, where they were provided with blue jumpsuits and locked up again. Erick knew the score. It was just as likely as not they would spend the rest of their lives in jumpsuits.

  Later in the day, Rylea was taken and sorted with the women. On the one hand, Erick was relieved. He doubted very much he could have protected her in a men’s prison. On the other hand, he despaired for her, knowing he couldn’t protect her at all if he couldn’t be with her. Rylea was just going to have to take care of herself. He hoped the Prophet had made its way out of her system.

  He had been searching for her for weeks with Wally when they’d picked up a lead during a job for Rome Inc., a simple freight delivery. There’d been a bust of what had looked at first like a prostitution ring in the Empire. Young girls snatched from their homes and kept on ships. One of the ships had been raided on unrelated charges, and the media had broken the story. They’d had a little time in between jobs for Rome, and so they hunted down the settlement where the girls were being held by the authorities. It had taken some creative thinking and a little undercover work to break Rylea out. If Erick hadn’t known better, he would have thought the girls prisoners, rather than citizens, of the Empire. But once they’d found her, they’d posed as psych doctors to get to her and sneak her out of the installation. She said she hadn’t been pimped, but she was high off her mind on Prophet. Her veins were full of the stuff. They’d had her cold-turkey in the med bay for days before the incident in Earth-space.

  For his part, Erick set his jaw and resolved to survive however he could. By the second day, cliques had begun to form. He kept his head down and stayed out of it. Male prisoners were given supervised time in a communal space, a sort of rec-room. That’s where the first killing happened. Not in some dark, quiet corner, away from sight, but in the middle of a crowded room with everyone watching. As best as he could tell, it started as a fight between rival crews for dominance. A couple of dozen men had all come from one of the larger Rome ships, and a couple dozen other were from one of the ships Rome had conscripted. The conscripted men were taught a lesson. Rome Inc. men held one of them down, pinned to a table, and one of them psyched himself up and attacked the man brutally before the guards could intervene. It was a grisly mess. He hadn’t bothered with fists, but had gone straight for the prone man’s wrists with his teeth. The man bled out in less than a minute.

  The next day, Erick made an overture to the larger Rome clique, and received promise of protection in exchange for loyalty. Whatever he had to do, he reasoned.

  He was given a cellmate, prisoner number 5230. The man he had previously known as Cyclops. 5230 seemed impervious to the cliques, above concern. On the third day, after witnessing another squabble in the common room, Erick sat down on his bench in the cell across from Cyclops.

  “What’s your strategy in here?” he asked.

  “Strategy?”

  “Yeah, you know. Lock a bunch of men up, and they become animals. They treat each other like animals. I don’t see you making any moves to insure your safety.”

  Cyclops sneered. “You mean like the little deal you made with Maz’s crew?”

  Erick nodded. “You already in with them? They’re Rome bra
ss, right? Not conscripts, not like—”

  “Everyone in Rome is conscripted.” Cyclops’ voice went cold, his eyes gazing away into nothing.

  “Even you?”

  As usual, he ended the conversation by refusing an answer.

  Erick stretched out on the cold bench, considering his words. In the Empire, it had felt to him like everyone had been a slave. In here, everyone was a prisoner. Maybe everyone everywhere was a conscript and just didn’t know it yet.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed of the Spacegull.

  Chapter 13

  It was traffic that saved him.

  Dolridge’s hopper zipped into Merchant space, the pursuing ship close behind, and began dodging around freight lanes and passenger trolleys. He came in far too hot for his own liking, desperate to shake his tail, and managed to put a half-dozen other ships between them before he had to slow down. Eventually traffic just got too dense for that kind of flying.

  “Merchant Station control, come in,” he said into his comm. “This is…” he paused. He’d never named the hopper. “…the Rotten Potato requesting space to land.”

  The comm crackled to life. “Come again, freighter—was that the Hot Potato?”

  “Sure.”

  A moment passed.

  “Come about, Hot Potato. Permission to dock on sublevel I4, second gate on the right.”

  “And straight on till morning,” Dolridge muttered. “Thank you, control.”

  Whoever it was behind him, they would be forced into contingencies now. If it had been him, he would have wanted to blow the hopper out of the sky back when they were both in open space. Easy-peasy. But now they would be forced to dock, and leave a trail, and find Dolridge, kill him in person, dispose of the body or otherwise hide their tracks long enough to escape the station without getting caught by the locals. He smiled. He had significantly upped their workload.

  A bevy of service bots met him at the dock. He stepped out of the hopper and waited for a path to open. “Yes, fuel her up, please. No, she doesn’t need a tune-up, thank you. No, no need for that either. No, I won’t be visiting the Mercurial Gambling Palace.” He should have known it had gotten this way. The last time he’d been on Merchant Station, he’d been a young agent. Even then it had been highly commercialized. Now it seemed he wouldn’t be able to take two steps without declining an offer for accommodations, rations, entertainment.