Midnight Ride
Chris Kennedy
“Dexter, don’t look back.”
I couldn’t help it. A voice comes from behind you—especially that voice—you have to look. And there she was. Just like I’d last seen her. Except for the bionic replacement of her right arm.
“Kat,” I said, looking forward again into the mass of people moving through the Jonas habitat’s shopping district. “The years have been good to you.” I chuckled. “Except for the arm, I guess.”
“Funny,” she said, her voice a whisper in my ear. It sent a shiver that went down the entire length of my body. Just the way it always had. “Can we talk?”
“I thought we were.”
“Do you always have to be so difficult?”
“Do you always have to come and go without notice?”
She paused, then said, barely loud enough to hear, “Comes with the name, I guess.” She was close enough, I could feel her shrug. “Seriously. Can we talk?”
I relented, like she knew I would. She wouldn’t have come back otherwise.
“Meet me in my office in thirty minutes. It’s—”
“I know where it is,” she said. “I remember.” Then she was gone, like the way a police siren clears Bartertown.
Just like the way she left ten years ago.
* * *
I walked into my office twenty-nine minutes later, still trying to decide if I was going to meet with her. The odds were, she was toying with me, like a cat and a mouse. I’d always hated being her mouse.
I didn’t get to choose, though; I walked through my door and found her sitting in the client’s chair.
I frowned.
“Turns out I still had a key,” she said, smiling.
I’d never gotten around to changing the locks, although I’d thought about it hundreds—no, probably thousands—of times. I held my hand out. “I’ll take it.”
“It’s on your desk.” She jerked her chin toward it. The key sat in the middle of my blotter. “Still living in the past, I see.”
She wasn’t talking about the old-fashioned pad; she had obviously seen the date on it. Ten years ago.
“What have you done now, Kat?” I asked. I fell into my chair, ignoring the ominous creaking sound.
“What makes you think I’ve done anything?” she asked with a shrug. “Sometimes bad things just happen to me.”
“Usually, those bad things happen because of something you’ve done to precipitate them.”
“Ooh, look at you and your big words!” She clapped sarcastically.
“The question stands. What have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything. It was done to me.”
I arched an eyebrow at her, but didn’t say anything.
She tried to meet my gaze, but couldn’t. Finally, a little sigh escaped her, the only admission of defeat I was likely to get. “I had a cargo. A precious cargo. It was stolen from me here on Jonas. I want to hire you to find it.”
I cocked my head. “You just happened to lose it on Jonas?”
She shrugged. “What can I say? I come here a lot. I have sentimental ties to it.”
“That’s funny,” I said with a snort. “You don’t have a sentimental bone in your body.”
“That’s not true.” Her eyes fell to the floor, and her lip curled into a sad moue. “Sometimes I will sit at a café on your way to this office, just to watch you walk past. Always so sad…always so determined…”
My voice hardened. “What is it you want, Kat?”
“I told you—I had a cargo stolen. I want you to find it for me. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Find things? Someone’s pet kaldon? A husband that went missing? Things like that?”
“I’m an investigator. I solve the crimes that people don’t want to take to the authorities, or the ones the authorities won’t touch. Sometimes it results in the recovery of assets.”
“Like cargo that was stolen.” She smiled triumphantly.
I sighed, already knowing the answer to the question I was going to ask. “If someone stole your cargo, why don’t you go to JonasSec?”
“There’s no point. Security wouldn’t help me, and even if they did and—miraculously somehow found my cargo—they’d probably confiscate it. Then I’d be even worse off.”
“So it’s illegitimate.”
“Let’s just say that it didn’t clear customs here.”
“Who’s the buyer?”
“No one you know.”
I steeled my nerve, expecting her to say either “Flyboy” or “King James.” They were the top two crime bosses on the station.
“Who is the buyer?” I asked again, slowly.
Good news was, she didn’t say either of those names.
Bad news was, she said something worse, her eyes falling to the floor.
I leaned forward, my eyes narrowing as she looked at the floor and mumbled something. If I’d heard correctly, then I really didn’t like the answer.
“What did you just say?”
Her eyes, those green cat eyes, looked back up at me with something like a plea in their depths. “I said it isn’t a ‘who’ but a ‘what.’ It’s a Rigolian.”
“Here? Onboard Jonas?”
“Yeah. And someone stole the cargo I had for him. Or it. Whatever they are.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me more.”
So she did. She told me her tale like I was supposed to care about it. About her. After all these years. I didn’t want to.
But I did.
She wouldn’t tell me what the cargo was, but she’d acquired something the Rigolians wanted really badly. She’d brought it here, but someone had wiped out her crew and stolen her cargo while she was discussing the transfer terms with the Rigolians. They were now threatening to take her and eat her. It’s what they did.
She thought I’d just drop whatever I was doing and help her; she’d obviously forgotten how we parted. She’d walked out on me—on the best relationship I’ve ever had. It’d taken a long time to get over her. Hell. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t over her now.
And I didn’t owe her shit.
It wasn’t like I was going to go talk to the authorities and liaison with them for her. “The aliens are coming, the aliens are coming.” Like I was some damned up-time Paul Revere. Telling the authorities anything involved actually talking to them. Hard pass for that.
I sighed. But if I didn’t tell JonasSec, that meant I had to do something about it myself. Because damn it, I hadn’t gotten over her. And I was going to help her, even if it got me killed.
Which it was likely to do.
My eyes dropped to the calendar, and I sighed. I might have been tempted to let her fend for herself if it was only the system police who were after her—who was I kidding? No I wouldn’t—but I definitely wasn’t going to let her deal with a Rigolian alone. Not if I could help it.
After the peace treaty, the Rigolians didn’t come around here much—they weren’t allowed in any of our population centers. Some still lurked in them, of course, kind of like the way pedophiles lurked around elementary schools. They were the ones who’d gotten hooked on human flesh on the planets they’d conquered. When they’d told Kat they’d eat her, I had no doubt they’d meant it.
I looked back up at her. She looked vulnerable, somehow. It was something I’d never seen before. It scared me. “Who else knew about the shipment?”
“That’s just it—no one knew.”
“Someone obviously knew. Otherwise, how could they have hit your ship?”
“Trust me; none of my crew would have talked.”
“How about the Rigolians, then?”
“Why would they have done it? I brought it here for them. They were going to get it anyway; why would they risk pissing me off?”
I shrugged. “They’re Rigolians; who’s to say? Maybe they thought getting it for free was better than paying you. Maybe they thought they could grab it and get you in the bargain.” She shuddered at that thought. It was the first time in memory I’d ever seen her shudder, but I couldn’t blame her. Apparently, the Rigolians liked their food to still be alive when they ate it.
She looked up through her eyelashes at me; her eyes were wider than I’d ever seen. “Will you help me, Dex?”
Like I’d ever had a choice.
“I’ll go ask some questions. Poke around. I’ll see what I can find.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Stay here. Incommunicado. When I get back, we’ll figure it out.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Thanks, Dex. If there’d been anyone else I could have gone to…”
“You’d still have come here.”
Again, the sad smile. “Probably. You always were the best.”
And yet, still not good enough for her.
I nodded and walked out.
* * *
I started with Kat’s ship, which was berthed in Hangar Bay Foxtrot at the tail end of the station. It’s where people who couldn’t afford better docked. A quick scan of the cesspit showed a vaguely familiar blood splatter pattern on the wall, and it was obvious Foxtrot hadn’t been cleaned since the last time I’d been there weeks before. That wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that five members of JonasSec were chatting in the center of the bay; normally, the security force avoided Foxtrot like the plague it was.
An official investigation was obviously ongoing, and additional JonasSec forces were crawling over Kat’s craft. Judging by the outlines the security forces had drawn on the deck, her crew had given as well as they’d received, and the bad guys had left with a lot fewer than they’d come with.
Interesting. The outlines on the decks were humans, not Rigolians—no tails.
I strolled past as if I wasn’t interested and headed to my second destination—a food truck in Ring One. Gravity was a lot lower there, so the clientele tended to be spacers and not “elite” who resided in the outer rings.
“What’s good today, Gecko?” I asked as I stepped up to the counter, timing it so no one else was in earshot. The food was so good that everyone tended to come visit Jimmy “The Gecko” Abrams, and—like the lizard he was nicknamed for—he tended to blend into the background. He picked up on conversations without the speakers knowing it. He’d forgotten more gossip about things that had happened on the habitat and in local space than most people knew.
“Burritos are always good,” he replied. “Spicy today, too. Just got some peppers in from Earth.”
“Sounds good,” I replied. “I’ll take one.” I arched an eyebrow. “Not the only thing spicy going on today, though, is it?”
“Lots going on today, just like always,” he acknowledged as he pulled out a shell and started ladling meat—or something that looked like it, anyway—onto it.
“Looked like a ship got hit in Hangar Bay Foxtrot,” I noted, gesturing for him to put a little more jalapeno on my burrito. “Heard anything about that?”
“They say the Sky Kings bit off more than they could chew.”
“Anything else?” I asked. I pulled another five credits out of my wallet and put them with the handful of cash I was about to give him.
The Gecko looked around. I knew this would be good—it was his one “tell” when he was about to share something he considered dangerous. “They also say the Sky Kings were working for some lizards, and I don’t mean me.” He winked.
“Didn’t realize there were lizards on the station,” I said, taking my burrito and adding another five credits to the money I passed him. “Where have they been seen?”
“Nowhere and anywhere.” He shrugged. “I don’t know where they’re hiding, but most of the sightings have been near Bay Bravo.”
“Thanks, Jimmy,” I said, nodding to him. He liked being called Jimmy. Probably because no one ever did.
“Anytime.”
* * *
I walked off, chewing on what he’d said as much as my burrito. The Sky Kings were the second biggest criminal gang on the habitat, and they were always looking for the score that would put them over the top. Even so, I wouldn’t have thought Flyboy and his crew would stoop to working for the lizards. But Jimmy’d said the Rigolians had been seen near Bay Bravo. Everyone knew Bravo was Sky King territory. Maybe Flyboy was more depraved—or desperate—than I’d thought.
Two tough-looking thugs stood at the entrance to the bay, leaning against the wall. They stood and moved to block the way as I approached. I hadn’t expected this to be easy, and they didn’t disappoint.
“Where ya headed?” the taller of the two asked.
“To see your boss.”
“I don’t think so.” I sized them up. I vaguely recognized the shorter one. Both were more muscle than brains. I sighed.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you. If you could just let your boss know that Dexter is here to see him, I’m sure he’ll talk to me. Then we won’t have to do…this.”
“And what is this?” the short one asked.
“‘This’ is where one of you gets hurt, the other probably gets dead”—I figured it would be the tall one—“and then I go see your boss, anyway.”
“I don’t think so,” the taller one said. “I—”
I kicked him in the shin as the shorter one went for something inside his coat. The taller one bent over by reflex, and I caught him with an uppercut to the chin. His head snapped back, his eyes staring blankly, and I grabbed him by the lapels as I spun toward his partner. I had expected to use him as a shield for the expected gunshot—which is why I’d gone for the taller one first—but the short one had drawn a knife, instead, and was lunging forward with it. Judging by the way the taller thug stiffened and cried out in pain, the knife went into his right kidney.
I tossed him to the side, and the body pulled the knife out of the shorter one’s hand as it dropped. He fell slower in the lower gravity of the ring, leaving a trail of blood droplets in his wake.
Which left the shorter one staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the unintended wreck of his partner. A knee to the groin and another to the chin as he folded over, and the smaller thug joined his partner on the deck. There was already a lot of blood on the deck; the first one had been cut worse than I’d originally thought.
Not my problem.
I walked into the bay, tuning out the whimpers of the taller man.
There were two smaller ships in the open area beyond the open blast door. One was a blockade runner of some sort; the other was a smaller intra-system runabout. I didn’t have time to give them more than a cursory scan before people started pouring from one of the hatches. Obviously, the entryway had been under surveillance, and they were responding to the threat.
Their response was overwhelming; nine men and women with drawn pistols and knives. Pistols predominated, I saw, and I put my hands in the air. No sense getting shot before I saw the boss, although it was very possible it might occur afterward.
“You’re dead, man,” the first man to reach me said, pointing a pistol at my chest. Several ran past to check on the toughs by the entryway. “No one messes with the Sky Kings and gets away with it.”
I smiled. “Aside from the Brothers of Anarchy, anyway,” I said, mentioning the biggest on-station gang.
“Oh, you’re a funny guy,” he replied. “You’re a regular comedian, you is. You ain’t one of the Brotherhood, though; I know most of ’em on sight. You know what that really makes you?”
“A better man?” I opined.
“No. That makes you dead.”
“Probably.” I nodded. “But your boss is going to be pissed if you kill me before I talk with him.”
“What makes you think he wants to talk to you?”
“Because I have info he needs.”
“Tell me,” he said, putting his pistol in a holster and drawing a wicked stiletto, “tell me or I’ll cut it out of you.”
I shook my head. “Take me to your boss. I have details about your new friends he needs.”
“Our new friends?”
“Let’s just say that Jimmy’s food truck isn’t the only place to find lizards on the station at the moment.”
“He knows, man!” one of the other toughs exclaimed. “He knows about them!”
“So what?” the leader asked.
“The boss is going to want to know what he knows,” a third tough said.
“Maybe,” the leader said. He gave me a long look. “That shit don’t mean we’re through with you, though. Not by a long way. You’ve got a lot of payback coming.”
“I expect so,” I agreed. Nothing was ever free with the Sky Kings. At least it wasn’t the Brotherhood. They probably would have killed me without even talking to me.
The leader sheathed his knife and drew his pistol again. “Take him up to the boss, Suz,” he said to one of the women. “I’ll follow and keep him covered.” He turned back to me. “If you try anything—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll kill me or shoot me or whatever else you want to do. I just want to talk to your boss, then you can have your fun.”
“Damn right we will,” he said with a wicked smile.
Not if I get you first.
Suz led me through a hatch, up a ladder, and then down a hall. She stopped just past the hatch labelled bay ops. She stared at me for a second then knocked and entered the space beyond. After a minute or so, she returned and motioned to the hatch. “The boss will see you now.”
I smiled past her at the thug leader. “You’ll wait for me, won’t you?”
“Damn right I will.”
“Be right back.” I went through the hatch to find the leader of the Sky Kings, Robbie “Flyboy” Delgado, sitting behind a desk waiting for me. There was no chair on my side of the desk, so I approached and stood a few feet behind it.
It takes a big man to dwarf me. I knew if I stood next to him, I’d look like a pygmy. He didn’t have a weapon visible, but he didn’t need one; he could have ripped a leg off the desk and beaten me to death with it. I’d heard that had happened in the past, and I noticed one of the legs on his desk was different than the rest. It wasn’t just an urban legend.
“Dexter Nogales,” he said as he stared me down. He shook his head. “Never thought you’d be dumb enough to walk into here. I mean, I was going to deal with you at some point; I just didn’t think you’d make it this easy.”
Yeah, we had a history. I find things—and people—who have gone missing. Sometimes criminal activity is behind the disappearance, and the gangs don’t like to give up what they’ve acquired. Sometimes, the perpetrators need to be convinced, like I’d had to persuade a Sky King member to give up a little girl he’d taken. He wouldn’t be taking anyone else.
I shrugged. “I hadn’t intended to,” I replied. I gave him a half grin. “I gotta admit, I kinda hoped you would have forgotten about Skeetz by now. Or forgiven me for it; he was a piece of shit, after all.”
Flyboy shrugged his massive shoulders. “Sure he was. Still, I can’t have people taking out the folks under my protection.”
“And I can’t have those people taking little girls. She certainly didn’t go with him on her own.”
He shrugged. “Not saying what he did was right. Just saying that I can’t have that precedent being set.” He looked at me for a moment with his head cocked. “People can say what they want, but even though you look like a knuckle dragger, I know you’re smarter than that. You wouldn’t have lasted this long in this station if you weren’t. You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t think you could walk out again.”
“There are a lot of files that will automatically get turned over to the police if I were to disappear suddenly…”
He waved a hand in dismissal. “Files get lost all the time at the station.”
I figured he had people on the payroll at the station. It was nice of him to confirm it for me. I’d have to find out who they were. Assuming I got out of here alive, of course.
“Yeah, they do,” I agreed with a nod. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to talk about your new friends.”
“Which ones are these? I have lots of friends.”
“The Rigolians.”
He growled, and his shoulders slumped, but he didn’t appear angry with me; it was out of frustration. “Damn aliens. Never should have agreed to work with them.” He shook his head. “Got a lot of my folks killed for them.”
“I’m guessing they didn’t tell you what would be involved in getting their package for them.”
“No, they—” He stopped and stared at me. “What do you know about this?”
“The person you stole the package from is a friend of mine.”
“Was a friend,” he corrected. “My guys killed everyone onboard.”
“My friend wasn’t onboard at the time.”
He nodded, nothing more than a twitch. “My guys said they thought the crew was one short.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He’s lucky, whoever your friend is.”
“She.”
He nodded. “Should have known a woman could get you to walk into here.”
“No, a friend.”
Flyboy laughed, long and hard. “No, she’s obviously more than that. You’re not dumb enough to walk into here otherwise. And especially not stupid enough to kill one of my guys as you did.”
“I didn’t stab him, another of your people did.”
“I watched the security footage. Looked like you did it to him.”
I shrugged. “They attacked me.”
“You attacked them.”
“They weren’t going to let me talk to you.”
“Only a woman—one you were attached to—would make you take them on, knowing what my response would be.”
My shoulders sagged. He was right, of course. “It doesn’t matter who she is; I’m here to try to get the package back for her.”
“No chance,” he said. “Even if I wanted to sell it back to her, I’m not double-crossing the Rigolians. They eat people who do, and I ain’t going to be their buffet.”
“Would it help to let you know they’re going to double-cross you?”
“What do you mean?”
I looked him in the eye, hoping he’d buy it. “The crew of the ship you hit knew you were coming. Someone told them. That someone was the Rigolians.”
“Why would they do that?”
“So that you’d lose a lot of guys. That way, when you bring them the package, they can simply take it from you without paying.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look at the evidence. The crew knew you were coming. You beat them…but you lost a lot more people than you should have getting the package from—”
“Why do you insist on calling it ‘the package’? Why don’t you just call it what it is?”
I looked at him, and he smiled.
“You don’t even know what it is you’re trying to recover, do you?”
I tried to come up with a convincing lie, but he had me. Again. “No, I don’t.”
“It’s an antimatter warhead that goes on an anti-ship missile. The latest and greatest.”
“And you’d give that to the Rigolians?” I asked, horrified. “Do you have a death wish? Our fleet is barely hanging on against them—”
“We’re not at war anymore. There’s a peace treaty.”
“There will be war again. You have to know they’re not going to be satisfied until they control all of human space and can use it as their own little cattle farm. That new warhead—and the fact that we have it and they don’t—is the only thing that brought them to the peace table in the first place!”
He shrugged. “I’m sure our navy has a way to stop the new warhead. I mean, they wouldn’t develop something without also developing a way to defend against it, would they?”
I’d been in the military. I knew the answer to that question.
He took my look—an open-mouthed stare—as my answer and shrugged again. “They’ll come up with something. Besides, like I said, I’m not double-crossing the lizards.” He shrugged. “Even if they intend to double-cross me tonight. I’ll recruit more people so they know they have to pay up for it.” He stood and came around to my side of the desk. “I do appreciate you coming to let me know about it, though.” He called out toward the door.
I watched the door open, and the thug leader from before entered.
As I turned back to Flyboy, I got a glimpse of a fist as big as my head, then blackness.
* * *
“You look like hell, Dex,” Kat said as I opened the door to my office.
“I just wish I felt like hell,” I said as I staggered to the sofa and collapsed into it. “That would be an improvement.”
“What happened?”
“I had a talk with the head of the Sky Kings.”
“Doesn’t look like the kind of ‘talk’ I’d like to have.”
“Well, we have a bit of a history. And, I sort of killed one of the Sky Kings on the way to my meeting with their leader.”
“Oh.” She winced. “You’re still alive.”
“Yeah.” I sighed and found it hurt to sigh. Just like it did everything else. Moving hurt. Breathing hurt. Hell, even laying there not breathing hurt. They’d worked me over good. They’d started while I was unconscious and had beaten me until I was unconscious again. I was alive, though. Barely. Hopefully, that meant I was square with the Sky Kings.
“Thanks,” she said after a few moments. “And I’m sorry you got beat up, but I need to get that package back. Did they have it?”
“Your ‘package’? Yeah, they have your antimatter warhead.” I coughed a gob of blood into my hand and wiped it on my pants. It blended well with the other stains.
“They do? We have to get it back from them.”
I scoffed. “Good luck. You and about fifty of your closest friends ought to be able to convince them to give it up.” I rolled onto my side, wincing, and propped myself up on an elbow to look at her with my good eye. The other one was almost swollen shut. “Let’s talk for a moment about what you were doing with an antimatter warhead in the first place.”
“It was a business deal. I can’t discuss it.” She shrugged. “We have to get it back from them.”
“And do what with it?”
“I have a deal I was supposed to make.”
“With the Rigolians? You want to sell an antimatter warhead to the Rigolians?”
“You’ll just have to believe me when I say that it’s better than a gang having access to it.”
“I’m not helping you do that.” I coughed up another gob of blood. Things started getting gray and fuzzy. “I may not be helping you at all.” Even I could tell the last bit was slurred.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a medkit.
I started to ask why she was walking around with a navy-standard medkit but found myself falling back onto the couch. I felt a prick, then I sank into oblivion.
* * *
I woke up feeling better. Not good, but better. I probably wasn’t going to die immediately, which was a definite improvement. “What time is it?” I asked.
“Eight o’clock,” Kat said. She was sitting behind my desk, using my computer. “You really should change your passwords.”
“Didn’t expect you to ever come around again,” I muttered. “What did you hit me with?” I asked, louder.
“Combat nano shot,” she said. “Looks like it fixed the internal bleeding. You should be better in a few days.”
“Don’t have a few days,” I said. “The Sky Kings are moving the warhead tonight. Hell, they could be moving it now.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me that earlier? I’ve got to get it back. If it fell into the wrong hands…”
“As far as I know, you’re the wrong hands,” I said. “Are you still planning on selling it to the Rigolians, Kat?”
“If you have to know, my customer is really our navy,” she said with exasperation in her voice. “The Rigolian deal was just a cover. Why do you have to be so difficult?”
“Because you always told me to do the right thing, and I’m trying to. I just don’t know that helping you is the same thing.”
“You have to believe me! My customer really is the navy.” She stared at me in earnest, and she sounded like she meant what she was saying, but I had established by now that she could—and would—lie to me. Something didn’t give. She hated the navy; she’d gotten out because she hated it so much. She couldn’t like the Sky Kings; they were just awful. And the Rigolians? Nobody in their right minds would help the Rigolians.
I wasn’t good at math, but even I could tell it didn’t add up. She wasn’t telling me something, and—no matter how much I asked, begged, or pleaded—she wasn’t going to tell me.
The only thing I knew for sure was that the Rigolians couldn’t be allowed to have the warhead. It was better that the Sky Kings had it; all they could do was blow up a station or a ship. If the Rigolians got it, it would be the end of humanity.
So I was her ally. Sort of. Unless she was helping the Rigolians. She said she wasn’t…but at this point, I honestly didn’t know.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked. “Please tell me you have a plan.”
I nodded. “I have a plan. The buy is going down tonight, and from all indications, it’s going to be a bloodbath. We let the meeting go down as planned and hit whoever wins. When everyone else is dead, the warhead is ours.”
“That’s your plan?” She stared at me with her head cocked and mouth open.
I shrugged. “Never said it was a good one.”
“Do you have any friends that can help us?”
It was my turn to stare at her.
“Right,” she said. “Same passwords. Same lack of friends.” She sighed. “We’re going to die.”
“I could get the security force to show up. If they get the warhead, they’d probably give it back to the navy. At least they wouldn’t blow up the station like the Sky Kings.”
“Do you know how many people in the security force are on the take?”
Flyboy’s comment about evidence getting lost came to mind. “A few,” I allowed.
“A few.” She scoffed. “More like, ‘There are a few who aren’t.’ If the security force gets it, we might as well have handed it over to the Sky Kings or the Brotherhood. At least they might have paid for it.”
“Are you with me or not?”
“I’m with you. If you give me some time, I can probably hire some guys…”
I looked at my watch. “No time. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Do we have time to swing by my ship so I can at least get my gear?”
I arched an eyebrow. “You have gear?”
“Of course. All good smugglers do.”
“If we hurry.”
* * *
I was worried that security would still be around her ship, but they’d obviously finished. The ship was in lockdown, but that only meant it wasn’t allowed to leave until JonasSec released their conclusions. Kat ducked under the security tape, dropped the ramp, and ran inside while I kept watch outside. Happily, Bay Bravo’s operations center was on the far side of the hangar and couldn’t see the ramp.
I was starting to get antsy about five minutes later when she jogged back down the ramp covered in weapons. She secured the ship then hurried over to the alcove where I was waiting.
“Gods, Kat!” I said, shaking my head. “When you said you had gear, you weren’t kidding.”
She set down two rail guns, a couple of laser pistols, and a backpack for each of us. In addition to all of that, she was now wearing the top half of a combat exoskeleton. It was an older model, but looked to be in pretty good shape. It had been rigged to mate with her bionic arm. I had to stop myself from whistling—she looked pretty badass.
“There’s a uniform in the backpack, along with extra ammo,” she said. “It’s probably going to be a little small, but that’s what you get for letting yourself go.”
“It’s all muscle,” I said, pulling out the uniform.
“Maybe the stuff underneath the fat is,” she said as she took off the exoskeleton to slip on a navy uniform. “You need to work out more.”
I muttered something about her parentage as I pulled on the uniform. She was right; it was tight. There was no way I was going to get the top button on the pants. “Not sure I’m getting into this.”
“We need it.”
“Why?”
She jerked her chin toward the rail guns. “I doubt security is going to let us walk around with these otherwise.”
“Probably not.” I got all but one of the buttons secured and pulled the belt over the top one. “Close enough?”
“Good enough for the cameras,” she said, “but it will never pass close inspection.”
“So we need to stay away from security. Fine.” It wasn’t like I’d intended to go chat with my good friends in security. I didn’t have any. “I was planning on taking the back way, anyway.”
“Ready?” she asked as she shrugged back into the exoskeleton. I nodded. “Good. Let’s go.”
“Not that way,” I said as she walked toward the main bay door. I led her to a door marked off limits, and pulled out a key.
“How’d you get a maintenance key?” she asked.
“We all have our secrets,” I said. I opened the door and we stepped into the maintenance spaces that ran—out of sight—around the station. It wouldn’t do for tourists to see all the dirty work required to keep a station functional. Bay Bravo was four bays over from Foxtrot, and we made our way quickly toward it. The few service people we saw gave us a wide berth. It was rare to see soldiers in the maintenance spaces, but not unheard of, as soldiers used them sometimes to surround a target.
As we passed Bay Charlie, I heard the echo of rough voices from behind us. A big group was coming. I grabbed Kat and we ducked into an engineering space. We barely made it before a group of about thirty people ran past us. They were big, tough, and armed almost as well as we were.
“Who was that?” Kat asked.
I sighed. “That was the Brotherhood.”
“Where do you suppose they were going?”
“This is going to suck.”
“You think—”
“Yeah. They’re going for the warhead, too. They obviously have a spy in the Sky Kings who let them know about the deal going down.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what do we do? Hit the Brotherhood from behind?”
“I may be crazy, but I’m not suicidal.”
“What else do you have?”
I shook my head, but then it came to me. Bay Ops. The operations center was on the second deck of the two-deck-high hangar bay so it would have a good view down into the hangar. It was, of course, on the other side of the Brotherhood forces, but there was ducting we could use to go over them. It would be a tight fit for me, but I’d used it before to find a woman who’d been abducted. All we’d have to do was get into the ducting, crawl about a hundred meters, then drop down to watch the end of a three-way battle. What could be easier?
I explained the plan as we raced to the nearest access point for the ventilation ducting.
“This will take us over the bay,” I said, pointing in the direction we needed to travel. I started to climb up, but she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.
“Let me go first,” she said. “I have more room to maneuver, and I can see better.”
“You have some sort of eye mods?”
“Newp. But I have this.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a combat face shield. “It doesn’t give me any protection, but it’s got a heads-up display and will let me see in the infrared. I’ll know if anyone’s coming.”
She slipped it on, and I could see she’d added cat ears to the standard face shield.
“Nice touch on the ears.”
“Who says you can’t wear cat ears and still be a badass?” she asked. She adjusted it slightly and turned it on. “There. The Kat’s ready to prowl.” She slung her rail gun, climbed into the ducting, and crept off.
I nodded. It was probably better for her to go first, even though it offended my male ego to let a woman lead the way into danger. She was smaller and made a whole lot less noise than I was going to. I let her get a little farther in front of me; in addition to being quieter, it also would help for weight distribution. While I knew the ducting would hold one of us, it might not support two, and falling two stories into the middle of a firefight wasn’t something I really wanted to do.
I looked at my watch. Midnight. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen soon. I pulled myself up into the ducting.
Crawling a hundred meters through the tiny space sucked about as much as I had thought it would, and I reluctantly realized Kat was right. I needed to work out more. The ducting hadn’t felt as tight the last time I’d been in it.
I’d covered about half the distance—and the sweat was burning my eyes as it dripped into them—when the yelling and shooting started below me. Blinking the sweat away, I picked up my pace as best I could. I arrived at the exit hatchway to find that Kat had already removed the cover and dropped into the room below. Two bodies wearing Sky King colors lay among several cooling puddles of blood. She’d been busy.
“Any problems?” I asked.
She turned away from the window, where she’d been peeking over the sill. There was some scoring on the exoskeleton; she’d taken a laser bolt. She shrugged. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She nodded to the window. “Come here.”
I duck-walked over, staying low. A ricochet cracked off the window, and I ducked lower.
“It’s started,” she said.
I resisted the urge to say something sarcastic as I peeked over the edge. A cube about a meter on a side sat in the center of the bay. Two lizards lay beyond it, their spines bowed backward in their version of a death spasm. Good riddance. Four of the Sky Kings, including Flyboy, lay on the close side, the holes in their bodies still smoking from the laser char. The remaining lizards had withdrawn to the cover of several shuttles, while the Sky Kings used a variety of crates for their defensive positions. It didn’t take long to realize they were at a standoff. They traded fire back and forth, but neither side could make it across no-man’s-land to get the case.
“What do we need to do? Kat asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “We wait.”
“But security will be coming.”
“Probably. They know that, too. Sooner or later—probably sooner—someone is going to have to make a play for the warhead or risk losing it to security.”
It turned out I was wrong; I’d forgotten about the Brotherhood forces. At some unseen signal, they came pouring out of three separate hatches and took the Sky Kings from behind. A fierce mini-battle followed that left the Sky Kings dead or dying, and the Brotherhood in possession of their defensive positions.
“Now what?”
“The plan hasn’t changed,” I said. “We let them fight it out, then we kill whoever’s left.
And that would have been a great plan, except that all the people in the hangar—Rigolians and humans, both—stood up, walked to the case and shook hands.
“Shit,” I said. “It wasn’t a double cross. It was a triple cross. They hired the Brotherhood to mop everything up.”
There were a lot of the Brotherhood remaining, at least forty of them. This was going to be ugly.
“They won’t be there long,” I said. “Now’s our time.”
Kat looked skeptical. “There’s an awful lot of them. Maybe it’s better if we just let them have it.”
“We can’t let them have the warhead.”
She didn’t say anything, and I looked over, wondering what was wrong. If recovering the missile for the navy really was the main goal, she should have been down on the floor right now, firing every weapon she had at the Rigolians.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Going into combat was the wrong time to find out that your ally might not actually be fighting on your side.
“Nothing. There’s just a lot of them down there.”
“It doesn’t matter. We came to stop them.” I checked my rail gun. Time to die. I backed up a couple of paces and fired a burst through the window. It shattered, spraying out into the hangar. Before they could react, I fired another burst into the group near the box. Two humans and a Rigolian went down before I had to duck for cover.
“What the hell are you doing?” Kat screamed.
“I’m killing bad guys. You want to help, maybe? There’s an awful lot of them.”
“You almost shot the warhead! Do you want to die?”
I’ll admit; I hadn’t really thought about it. I was just trying to keep them from getting away. Shooting a warhead full of antimatter, though—especially one that was used to destroy major combatant ships—probably was contraindicated.
“Oops,” I said. “Forgot about that.”
I leaned over the top and fired at a couple of the Brotherhood who weren’t close to the crate.
“Better,” she said, picking off one closer to her side.
More yelling came from the hangar bay. Security had arrived. They began firing at the Rigolians from the opposite side of the hangar. I killed one as he turned to engage the new threat. As I returned to the Brotherhood troops, I realized there were at least five who’d gone missing.
“Watch the door!” I warned Kat. She’d taken two steps toward it when it burst open and a Brotherhood thug ran through, spraying laser fire. Agony seared its way across my bicep. I pulled the trigger and mowed him down, but, by that time, another five had entered the room. I fired again, killing a second, but took another blast to my leg. It felt like someone had hit me in the leg with a baseball bat, and I crumpled to the ground. Then the pain hit, like all the fires of hell. I could barely keep my eyes open, but I’m glad I did.
Kat waded into the Brotherhood troops. She punched one in the ear, caving in the side of his head with the strength of her bionic arm. She grabbed two more by the throats and slammed their heads together with a popping noise that made me shudder.
The last one spun to fire on her, but his delay gave me time to stich several rail gun rounds through him.
“No!” Kat screamed. I rolled back to the door to find another Brotherhood trooper. I tried to get my rail gun around, but he was faster and hit me in the stomach. My other wounds were nothing compared to this one; it felt like all of my insides had been ripped out my back by a flamethrower. He had a rail gun, just like mine.
I tried to raise my rifle, but Kat stepped in front of me and threw her rail gun at the thug, using the enhanced strength of the exoskeleton. The rifle spun through the air and stuck, barrel first, into his chest with a squishing noise. The force of the impact drove him back through the doorway. She charged through after him, drawing her laser pistol.
I tried to call to Kat as she walked through the door, but was unable to draw a breath beyond the smallest of gasps. Time slowed as she checked both directions—her head twisting in slow motion—then she came back. “It’s clear,” she said.
I no longer had the strength to hold the rail gun, and it fell out of my fingers. My good leg pushed me up so I could look through the window. Security forces were sweeping through the hangar, chasing after a few remaining members of the Brotherhood. The Rigolians were gone. The case, I noticed, was gone, too.
I slid back down the wall, and slumped to the deck. “It’s over,” I said.
A shape came toward me, but the darkness was closing in. I no longer cared if it was Kat or a Brotherhood trooper
“We failed.”
* * *
I awoke in the medical facility. If the tubes and monitors hadn’t given it away, I would have known from the pungent sharpness of antiseptic in the air. I’d been here too many times.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Kat said. “Welcome back.” She sounded far too happy for someone who had lost an antimatter missile warhead.
“Tell me…” I said, but it was more of a gasp, “you alerted the police…and they caught the Rigolians.”
“I did give the police an anonymous call…eventually. The police gave chase but didn’t catch them.”
“You let them get away?” I tried to sit up and pulled something that was holding me together. Molten fire ripped through my stomach. I collapsed back to the bed with a gasp.
“Easy,” she said. She patted my leg. “It’s okay. They got away because we wanted them to. We just had to make it look believable.”
“You wanted—?” My jaw dropped, and I had to consciously force myself to close it. After my first attempt, I did not try and sit up again. “But that’s the next generation antimatter warhead for our missiles,” I said in a forced whisper. “Our ships barely stand a chance against the Rigolians in battle now. With those…”
“Oh, I don’t think that will be an issue.” She smiled happily.
“Why’s that?”
“That special case it was in? It’s a Penning trap.”
I hurt too badly for her games. “What the hell’s a Penning trap?” I asked with a growl.
“There are tiny accelerators built into the walls of the case. Inside, there are about five kilograms of antiprotons spiraling around as the magnetic and electric fields keep them from colliding with the walls of the trap.”
“Antiprotons…you mean like antimatter?”
“Yep. Removing the warhead from the case turns off the power to the trap and the five kilograms of antiprotons meet their opposites and annihilate each other with the force of…” She shrugged. “They told me how big a bang it would make, but I don’t remember the actual number. It was big enough to blow up the Jonas habitat, though.”
“All of Jonas?” I was having problems keeping my mouth closed. “And you intentionally brought it here? What if someone had pulled it out to look at it?”
“It would have been over quickly.” She shrugged. “We wouldn’t have even known. We just would have ceased to exist.” She smiled again. “It’s all good, though, because they didn’t. And, hopefully, the Rigolians will get all the way home before they take it out. One ship would be nice, but one of their planets—especially if it’s at their design bureau—that would really help the war effort. The best part is, they’re expecting an antimatter weapon, and it will blow up like an antimatter bomb. No one will expect deceit; they’ll just think their scientists screwed up. That’s the plan, anyway.”
“Whose plan is that? Who is this ‘we,’ Kat?”
Kat smiled. “A lot has changed since you last saw me. People now know me as ‘La Gata.’”
My eyes narrowed. “Are you working for the Federation?”
“Someone better.” She winked.
“Are you trying to recruit me?”
“No.” She smiled. “I already did.”