Last Ship Off Polaris-G: A Central Galactic Concordance Novella Page 7

  Gavril tapped his earwire. “Everyone on board, now!” He swept a hand through the holographic interface and everything went dark. “Lizet, emergency-close all the airlocks except Bravo Two. Send the flying cameras out and tell us what the flitter does. And priority-ping Chief Ferrsi and tell him what Anitra said.”

  Gavril took the stairs down two at a time. Anitra followed as fast as she could, but he soon outdistanced her as they headed toward the sloping ramp that would take them down to the ship. She liked wearing running boots, but hated actual running.

  “Youssef here. I’ll meet you at Bravo Two with some of my toys, if someone will tell me where the hell it is.”

  “Basheer will show you. He has toys, too.” Anitra didn’t know the crew’s voices well enough to know who said that.

  Above their heads, the tall glass walls of the ship dock vibrated in response to the low growl of a powerful flitter engine. Adrenaline coursed through her, narrowing her focus to Gavril’s back.

  “They’re pinging again.” Lizet sounded nervous. “What should I say?”

  The ramp began spiraling down to arc around the Diamantov’s hull. She heard Gavril’s out-of-breath voice in her earwire. “Stall them.”

  “Tell them,” panted Anitra, “only the big freight lift is working.” Glaciers moved faster than that lift.

  She nearly lost sight of Gavril around the curve of that part of the ship, and forced her aching legs to pump faster.

  “Okay.” Lizet sounded dubious.

  Anitra nearly ran into Gavril, who had slowed. “Sorry.”

  He brushed his hand against hers. “My fault. One more ramp down.” He stayed by her side until finally, they saw a big square airlock. Basheer, a strapping young man holding a beam rifle, watched behind them.

  Youssef waved with a hurry-up motion. “Inside! Two mercenaries on your tail with violence on their minds.”

  Anitra and Gavril jumped over the threshold and into the darkened corridor of the ship. Youssef slammed the emergency seal control. The leaves of the airlock began irising inward with geriatric slowness. Anitra heard the pounding of heavy boots on the metal ramp. The sound of an energy weapon sizzled.

  Basheer cursed and stumbled back. “Outer shell won’t close in time.”

  Anitra leaned against the wall and dropped her shield. She ignored everyone but the pissed-off, determined mercs outside. She activated her strongest talent and found their visual centers, then fashioned an image of an incalloy shell dropping over the airlock as fast as on a military transport. She touched their auditory centers and shared the sound of the shell sealing tight with a pressure-release hiss and a reverberating thump. Her empath talent reported the flavor of their anger.

  “Why are they stopping?” whispered Basheer.

  Anitra ignored him and concentrated on the tricky part, convincing the mercs they weren’t hearing the real airlock as it finally sealed. She let the mercs go. Even through the incalloy, she could feel their frustration.

  Youssef turned to stared at her with narrowed, speculative eyes. “That’s quite a top-level talent.” Her tone held more than a hint of suspicion. “A little far from the exalted halls of the Citizen Protection Service Minder Corps, aren’t you?”

  “As far away as I can get.” Anitra felt Gavril move closer to her, radiating protectiveness. “We didn’t part on amicable terms.” She moved closer to Gavril, almost touching him. She liked having someone on her side, for once.

  Now that Youssef was using her mid-level sifter talent, Anitra could feel its strength. Maybe a touch of telepathy as well. She deliberately kept her shields down to indicate she wasn’t hiding anything and didn’t intend to fight. Sifters could detect lies, activated talents, and impending violence in others. Law enforcement agencies liked hiring sifters for interrogation teams.

  “What did she do?” Basheer asked. He wasn’t suspicious, just puzzled.

  “Saved our asses,” growled Gavril. “Lizet, status!”

  “Everything is sealed. The monster is still closing. Three mercs wearing flexin armor and a short, big-eared guy in a shiny white suit are in the little lift. Three more mercs with a bunch of big crates got in the slow freight lift. The two that were chasing you are running down the ramp. I’m trying to crack their comms encryption. Ferrsi will send the PLE as soon as he can, but that’s at least an hour. Someone blew up the spaceport.”

  Gavril turned to Anitra. “Can you do whatever you did again to keep them from getting in?”

  “Yes.” No sense keeping her secret any more, since Youssef already knew. “I’m an illusionist. Crowd-control specialist in riots and ground-conflict situations. Get me down there. Even if they get to the airlock before it closes, I can make them all hear and see that it’s sealed tight.”

  Gavril held out his hand. “Come on. Our lifts are faster.”

  Anitra slipped her hand into his, grateful for his acceptance. Her talent scared people, even other minders, who believed the popular fiction stories that CPS illusionists were secretly spies and assassins. She hadn’t believed them until too late.

  Gavril didn’t let go of her hand until the lift doors opened to the cavernous hold where the monster airlock was about two-thirds closed.

  “Elongo says she froze the freight elevator with the three mercs and the gear. Big Ears and his ‘cousins’ are a level below.” Lizet’s sneering teenage disdain made Anitra smile. “They’re pointing up the ramp toward the monster lock.”

  She caught Gavril’s eye. “I can’t talk and hold the illusion, so if Dalgono wants to negotiate, you’ll have to do it.” She pointed a thumb toward the airlock. “Dalgono is vain, and likes power. He’s also an ideologue who detests minders.”

  Unexpectedly, he pulled her into a warm embrace and spoke quietly. “Do you need me for an anchor?”

  She soaked in the feel of his arms around her for a long moment, then pulled back to touch the side of his face. “Not for only eight people, but thanks for asking.” She gave him a quick kiss because she couldn’t resist his handsome face or the comforting flavors of affection and concern he was sending her way. She hoped they’d someday have the chance to explore that, before he returned to his trading business, and she had to pick up the pieces of her life yet again.

  She regretfully pulled back and turned to face the airlock. Her illusion talent quickly found the minds of the two mercs she’d already influenced, plus the three minds below. She didn’t have time to figure out which was Dalgono, because one of the two with him was a shielder. She pushed the auditory illusion of a loud airlock shell sealing at the others and delicately felt around the edges of the shield. As she’d hoped, the other minder wasn’t so tightly shielded that she couldn’t insinuate her talent through the shifting cracks and push the illusion. She used her empath talent on the non-shielders to give them a flavor of futility, of missing the boat. In true crowd control situations, she’d be paired with a high-level empath to give emotional depth to the sensory illusions. Done well, the combination of talents could redirect and deflate a conflict almost before it started.

  Dimly, she heard voices, but blocked the distraction out. She was glad the monster airlock was nearly closed, but the incalloy in the hull made her job harder. She pushed the sound illusion of pressurized atmosphere being squeezed out as the airlock closed with an authoritative metallic clang that echoed through the dock. She pushed an illusion of silence, and a brief visual illusion of a thick incalloy shell, so the mercs would think they pictured it closed. Sometimes, the little details were the most convincing.

  When the monster airlock’s seal finally turned green to signal it was ready for launch, she let go of the illusions. She activated her shields as she shook her head and blinked several times to clear her mind. Her percomp told her five minutes had passed. She looked around to find only Youssef standing nearby. “How long until liftoff?”

  “Ten minutes, to give the cockroaches out there time to clear, and the crew to get the cats and dogs into their habitats.
” She waved toward the lift tubes behind them. “Captain wants us in the engine pod.” Youssef gave her a curious look as she used the wallcomp to call the lift. “I won’t ask, but someday, I hope you’ll tell me your story. I bet it’s ace.”

  “Maybe someday.” She was glad Youssef seemed to have accepted she wasn’t a CPS agent. She liked the tall, confident woman, and wouldn’t want her for an enemy.

  As they rode the lift, she wished she had a tissue for her runny nose. She’d fallen out of the habit of carrying them. She’d deliberately hidden and never used her illusion talent once she’d arrived on Pol-G, to reduce the chance of someone recognizing her combination of talents. She looked nothing like she had before, but deep biometrics might give her away, because she hadn’t had time to get a chimera implant. Very powerful, very dangerous people thought she was dead, and she didn’t want them to find out otherwise.

  Anitra looked around the freighter’s engine pod as she and Youssef webbed themselves into the slide-out, contoured jump seats. The pod appeared to be wrapped around a massive, spiral-shaped shiny pillar that took up most of the room. Dozens of conduits and raw cables emerged from it and vanished into the walls. A rumbling, throbbing pulse vibrated in her chest.

  She dropped her shields long enough to feel Gavril’s presence, and sense that he felt energized and engaged, and was successfully containing his talent.

  Anitra’s shipcomp earwire sparked to life.

  “Uh, Captain?” Lizet asked. “Minister Dalgono says if we don’t give him the cargo, they’ll put a hole in our hull with the flitter’s wide-array beamers.”

  Anitra reached through her webbing to tap Youssef’s arm. “What cargo? The mealpacks?” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the engines.

  Youssef rolled her eyes. “He’s warped. Says he got you on the committee, so you owe him half the profit for the rich cargo. Doesn’t believe we sent it with my father so we can rescue stranded people, even though we showed him live feeds of the empty holds.”

  “Emergency liftoff protocol in sixty seconds,” announced Gavril over the ship earwire. The rumbling pulse in the room sped up and rose in pitch. “Lizet, replay my next words on the government channel and for the PLE.” He paused. “Minister Dalgono, you and your ‘cousins’ have forty-five seconds to clear or get torched by our system drive.”

  Anitra looked at Youssef. “Can the beamers hurt us?”

  “Only if we sit still for twenty minutes.” That was Gavril’s voice in her earwire, because she’d forgotten to mute it when asking her question. “Lizet and I figured it’d be a shame to let the ship dock’s supply of incalloy go to waste, so we up-armored.”

  Anitra smiled.

  “You should see this,” said Lizet gleefully. “Two of the mercs just lifted Dalgono off the ground and stuffed him in the back of the flitter with their crates.” She giggled. “Tell her about the debris lasers and the other stuff.”

  “Later,” Gavril responded. “Thirty seconds to liftoff.”

  Anitra snugged herself back into her jump seat. On the countless shuttles and CPS military ships she’d traveled on for her career, gravity compensators kept people from being squished when the ship pulled heavy G’s through atmosphere, but who knew what the Diamantov had.

  “Captain,” said Lizet. “Flitter is clear. The merc leader took Dalgono’s government percomp away from him to tell us.”

  “I’ll give them an extra fifteen seconds for good behavior. Dock clamps released.”

  When they lifted, the engine pod’s noise assaulted her ears, and the vibration threatened to rearrange her internal organs. All they had to do now was clear the twenty-story ship dock’s hole in the ground and arc their way to the edge of the atmosphere. Over four thousand people in Lo Kuro were counting on them. She prayed to the constant stars the Diamantov and crew wouldn’t let them down.

  8

  * Interstellar Transit Point Blockade: CGC Military Frigate “Bassilon” * GDAT 3233.056 *

  Captain Ivar Okeanos stood at half attention, hands clasped behind him, in the executive-officer briefing room of the Bassilon. The realtime holo conference made it seem like he stood in a crowded room of holographic ghosts of the blockade’s twenty ship captains, all looking at phantom Commodore Britton on the phantom raised dais. Space Div loved technology and protocol. He kept his expression neutral but interested as Britton touched the agenda on the tablet in her hand.

  “Last item. Thanks to Paderau, Bassilon’s Citizen Protection Service Security Officer, we’ve just learned that this solar system has a second interstellar transit jump point. The main jump point we’re guarding is much closer to Polaris-Gamma, so the original point was abandoned because it's inconveniently situated beyond the ringed gas giant. The coordinates haven’t been published in CGC navigation updates in many years.”

  Paderau was undoubtedly feeling proud of herself. He’d left the information in his dataspace in an easy place for her to find, but he’d had to let her overhear three increasingly blatant conversations with Sobek for her to recognize its significance and sound the alarm. He hoped it wasn’t too late.

  “My strategy team”—by which Britton meant the minder forecasters she illegally kept on her staff instead of forcing them to transfer to the CPS Minder Corps—“believes it’s unlikely but possible that a few of the Polaris-Gamma quarantine breakers know about the old jump point and will try to use it.”

  Long practice kept Ivar’s disgust off his face. Britton had to know the quarantine excuse was whale shit. A blight as virulent as the settlement company and the CPS claimed would have drawn a swarm of botanists and bioengineers, not a task force of twenty well-armed military ships.

  “Two days ago, the settlement company shared intelligence that the Polaris-Gamma government might be planning a mass evacuation of its population.” Britton scrolled on her tablet. “Twelve hours ago, we lost all feeds from system comms and satellites, and in the last six standard hours, our active scans of the planet have detected disturbances consistent with increased ship traffic.” She paused and looked up. “Therefore, I am ordering Onilaja and Takala to the far jump point.” She swept the room with a sardonic gaze. “I believe the rest of us can easily prevent a hundred private yachts and merchant ships from reaching the main transit point, regardless of how quickly they scatter.”

  The assembled captains chuckled, as she’d intended. Ivar couldn’t tell if she really believed there would only be a hundred ships instead of a thousand, or if she was giving herself cover for the inevitable internal audit inquiry into what was surely going to be a monumental clusterfuck.

  Onilaja’s captain spoke up. “What are the rules of engagement for the second jump point?”

  “Warn off, intercept, or disable.” She gave everyone a diamond-hard glance. “That goes for the entire task force. No kill shots unless they come at you with military-grade weapons. These aren’t jack crew or pirate clan, they’re misguided civilians, and we will treat them accordingly.”

  That unexpected directive gave Ivar hope that Britton was more savvy than he’d thought. Maybe the confrontation wouldn’t be a bloodbath after all. He wondered what Paderau and the other security officers thought about that, since they were all for making Polaris-Gamma a chilling cautionary tale for other hotheaded frontier planets.

  He respectfully raised his hand.

  Britton pointed her chin toward him. “Okeanos, go.”

  “Sir, Bassilon is still understaffed, and our reserve flux drive is still offline. We might be better suited for the second jump point.”

  Britton pursed her lips a moment, then nodded. “I concur. Onilaja will stay here.” She made a note on her tablet. “We’ll send the jump point’s coordinates to your nav comps so you can leave within the half hour. Use your discretion in where you deploy.”

  She concluded the daily briefing quickly, then dismissed them all. Ivar terminated the conference connection and touched the controls that would restore the room’s usual configuration.<
br />
  He’d been afraid Britton would send too many ships to the far jump point for his purposes, but now he worried that she’d sent too few. He adjusted contingencies in his plan as he strode down the corridor and into the small command pod.

  Sobek vacated the command chair. “Captain.”

  Ivar inserted one of the command wires into the skulljack behind his ear as he turned to Sobek. “Subcaptain.” Data streams began to flow into his mind. He still wasn’t as facile with them as Sobek, but he was getting better. “New orders.” He sent the command that let him speak to the entire crew via his earwire. “Commodore Britton is sending us and Takala to beyond the system’s sixth planet, to enforce the quarantine at an old, disused interstellar transit jump point.” He told them the rules of engagement and ordered his technical crew to collaborate with their counterparts on Takala, so they could leave on time.

  When he was finished, he turned to Sobek, who was still standing next to him. “Going off shift?”

  She nodded. “After I finish my reports.”

  “I don’t know Chesterton. How is she to work with?” As he spoke, he flicked his eyes to Paderau, who was pretending she wasn’t listening to and recording their every word.

  Sobek shrugged and rubbed her nose twice. “Her second says she’s regulation.”

  Ivar nodded. “Good. Approve the navigation plot, unless it needs my attention.” He sat in the command chair and let it adapt to his contours. “I’m starting shift checks.” He’d established a habit of communing with the ship’s systems to read shift reports and review the ship’s readiness status. He liked knowing as much as he could about his ship, and as an added bonus, it kept Paderau from trying to talk to him. She alternated between ingratiating and condescending, and challenged his ability to treat her with professional courtesy.

  Sobek’s nose-rubbing meant she had more to say about Takala’s captain, but it would have to wait until he could arrange a chance hallway encounter. Almost from his first day on the ship eleven months ago, Paderau seemed convinced it was worth her while to monitor him almost constantly. Maybe she disliked him because, like many others, she assumed he owed his present rank and command to his famous family’s influence. If only.