NUK NUK 117 SYSTEM.
Timing was everything. So were decisions.
There was the decision to hurry through the inspection in the previous system. The decision to give the order to jump immediately to this one, while Ia and her boarding crewmembers were still in the pods, just after they reattached to the backs of the Audie and the Murphy. The discovery of a lone pirate ship just a short flight away from their reentry point, and the command to attack and destroy its defenses with a shorthanded gunnery team.
The decision that the ship looked "sufficiently shot-up" wasn"t Ia"s, but then she knew that her junior officer for this patrol run, Lieutenant Second Grade Linsey Odingaarde, would make a bad call. Yes, the gun turrets had been successfully destroyed, but not nearly enough of the FTL panels.
Still, it was definitely Ia"s decision to agree to launch the pods back out again. Or rather, just the one, since there was a slight hang-up in the launch mechanism for the other pod. A flaw that she created carefully via electrokinesis. It delayed the other pod"s launch by a full six minutes, which was enough time for her pod to land and start carving an entrance into the other ship. The second pod therefore landed on its chosen section of hull just as Ia stepped into the still-hot opening carved beyond the pod"s airlock, and began its sealing process just a little bit too late. Timing was everything.
"Holy-!" Lieutenant Odingaarde shouted in their headsets. "The FTL panels! They"re firing up the FTL panels! Disengage! Disengage!"
Turning, Ia hooked her mechsuit hand around the edge of the pod entry and smacked the emergency release b.u.t.ton. Yanking her arm back hard and fast, she slammed her hands into the walls above her mechsuited head, bracing herself. The pod slammed its airlock door right in Private Knowles"s face, and blasted its sealant foam. A lot of air rushed past from the loss of that seal, but the bulk of her mechsuit, braced between arms and legs, kept Ia anch.o.r.ed in place.
Warning sensors beeped, letting her know the laser-carved entrance was threatening her servo-fingers and mechanized feet with excessive heat. The stars were now moving beyond the oval cut into the side of the smuggler"s ship. Only slightly, and more from a course change than from actual, fantastical speeds, but it did confirm that the ship"s thrusters were indeed warming up. It also meant that, mere minutes from now, they would be moving fast enough to exceed the speed of light.
Even at just a quarter of that speed, the sheering forces caused by leaving the field"s zone would be enough to rip anything apart. The hole she stood in was too small to need worry about the field divoting inward around her-the probabilities put it at less than a hundredth of 1 percent-but it wouldn"t be a comfortable place to stay.
Which means the only way out is to go in, and the only viable option for survival is capture. Which puts me right on schedule. Carefully turning around, Ia worked her way further into the ship until she stood at the brink of a cargo hold, partway up the wall...and found three p-suited sentients, two Humans and a Tla.s.sian, struggling to haul a heavy metal plate along one of the aisles between crates and canisters of unlabeled goods.
The Tla.s.sian was the first one to spot her. He stilled, his tail twitching inside his suit. The others tugged on the plate for a moment more, then followed his line of sight, peering up through their half-silvered helms. They froze as well.
Taking advantage of their hesitation, she jumped down from the hole, aiming for the aisle they were in, which was offset from the hole by barely a meter. Using her boot thrusters to brake her fall, she landed with a clunk that she felt up through the legs of her suit. Once she had her balance, Ia just walked up to them.
Her heads-up scanners showed the plate was mostly ferrous, high in steel content. Activating the electromagnets in her mechsuit gloves, she pressed the palms to the metal with two clanks. Lifting it out of their hands barely strained the suit"s capacity. They stared, taken aback, then followed her warily as she walked back up the aisle, then scattered out of her way when she put her back to the wall and burned her boot thrusters a second time. That strained the thrusters, but leaping was not an option, not with such a small hole for a target, nor while carrying such a heavy metal plate.
The suit"s sensors were a G.o.dsend, letting her shift subtly. The moment she could catch her heel on the rim, she pulled herself into the hole, cutting the thrusters. She didn"t pull the plate in after her, however. Leaving a gap of almost a meter, she used the eye-blink interface on her heads-up display to disengage her inner helm from the outer one, and cracked open the suit.
From there, it was a matter of grabbing onto one of her own suit arms and dropping to the now mostly cooled edge of the hole while she stripped off her arm unit and tossed it into the mechsuit"s cavity. The moment it landed inside and clattered down into a leg cavity, Ia electrokinetically resealed the suit. There was no way she could allow anyone on this ship"s crew access to either mechsuit or arm unit technology. Some rules and regs, she would break, and had broken. Letting military tech fall into enemy hands was very much not necessary, so this was not one of them.
From the front right thigh pocket, she grabbed a grappling gun and a small hand-welder. From the front left compartment, a belt hung with a holster and a shrapnel grenade. Even standing several centimeters back from the opening, the suit"s arms were long enough to give her plenty of room to maneuver. The sight of the stars slowly shifting beyond the suit was an unnerving one; that meant they were now traveling at least half the speed of light. She didn"t have much time before the transition came. Ia quickly slung the belt around her grey-suited hips, holstering the welder.
Aiming up through the crack between hole and panel, she shot the grappling gun up into the struts bracing the ceiling of the cargo hold. The motor on the oversized gun had no problem lifting her minuscule weight; it was meant to lift a soldier in halfmech armor, and possibly even one in full-mech. Lifting herself up through the opening, she reached out with her mind the moment her feet cleared the hole. The suit retracted its arms, pulling the slightly larger panel up against the bulkhead of the cargo hold with a clang that vibrated through the ship and down the wire, making her sway a little oddly.
Kicking her heels, Ia played out the line, swinging until the magnetic soles in her feet clipped the panel and stuck, allowing her to pull herself in close. Drawing the welding gun, she zapped the edge of the plate in six spots, then reached out once more with her mind. None of this would have been possible without her electrokinetic gifts; if the other pod had made it to the ship, one of her crew would have been stuck on board alongside her at the very least, and that meant at least one mechsuit would have fallen into enemy hands. But with her gifts, she was able to close her eyes, concentrate, and program the mechsuit-arm unit safely tucked inside-into releasing its electromagnetics.
Guiding the suit backwards, she made it leap out of the hole. There wasn"t even a thump, since the warp panels instantly pushed the suit away from the ship, shredding it to dust. There was, however, a bright flash that seeped through the unsealed edges, letting her and the three crewmembers down below know that they had crossed the lightspeed barrier. Rappelling down, Ia kicked off one of the crates, landed in the aisle, and turned to find two more pirates had joined the first three. Pirates who were armed.
Turning the welder gun sideways, showing that it was just a welder and not a laser pistol, she slipped her hand free of the grappling gun and down to her waist. One of the armed smugglers motioned with his weapon, clearly wanting her to drop the welder and put her hands up. The welder dropped to the decking in a clatter that was felt rather than heard, given the lack of air in the hold, but when she lifted her pressure-suited arms above her head, the grenade was visibly gripped in her other hand.
They froze. Ia wriggled the gloved fingers of her empty hand, then lowered both arms. She had the advantage now, and they knew it; if they fired on her, the grooved grenade could go off, catching all of them-clad only in p-suits, which were tough, but not that tough-and shredding their meager protection against the airless state of the cargo hold, killing them slowly if the blast didn"t kill them outright.
Once she was sure they wouldn"t move, Ia stooped and picked up the welding gun again. Stepping forward, she offered it handle-first to the Tla.s.sian. He hesitated a moment, then took it from her and edged toward the patch on their hold, focusing on it as the greater priority right now. Gesturing for the others to go ahead of her, Ia slowly herded the remaining four back up the aisle toward the inner airlock separating the hold from the rest of the ship. She even made sure they cycled through first, flicking her p-suit-gloved fingers in pointed instruction.
Aware that the small reoxygenation pack on the back of her suit wouldn"t last forever, Ia cycled herself after them. Two more armed crewmembers awaited her. They didn"t wear pressure suits, but they did bring the known count of Humans and Tla.s.sian up to five and two respectively, albeit with one of the saurians left back in the cargo bay.
It was still a standoff, however. They had plenty of guns, but she had a military grenade, and they were all in close quarters. Lifting her free hand to the controls on her neck-ring, Ia unsealed her suit and flicked back the front faceplate, allowing her to breathe the air of their vessel. It also allowed her to speak.
"Thank you for not shooting recklessly," she stated dryly, if politely. "It seems, given our current standoff, a little bit of negotiation is in order."
"Alllll we have to do issss retreat and fire uponnn you from a dissstancsse," the pistol-wielding Tla.s.sian in the corridor with her hissed.
"Neh-yah-veh," she agreed, using the V"Dan equivalent of more or less. "But I"ll be blunt and admit I"m worth considerably more to you alive and unharmed."
"Shakk sh"keth," one of the Humans scoffed. His skin was too dark a shade of brown to tell if he was Terran or V"Dan. From the faint hint of an accent, Ia guessed it was the latter. "Th" military doesn"t ransom anybody!"
"I"m not talking about the Terran s.p.a.ce Force," Ia informed him. "I"m talking about the Salik. It seems they have a very large bounty on my head. Naturally, the offer"s only good if you trade me to them while I"m still very much alive, intact, and unharmed."
They stared at her. The male who had cursed blinked. "You...want to be sold to the Salik?"
She poked her free thumb over her shoulder at the airlock door behind her. "I noticed some of the crates you were hauling were stamped with codes for hyperrelay components. Since the rest of the Alliance can get their hands on such parts fairly cheaply, that means you"re smuggling them close to the Interdicted Zone for a purpose-in other words, for the Salik, or at least for those who trade with them. Since you have Salik contacts, this means you"re capable of looking up my ident through those contacts and discovering that they now have a bounty on my intact, unharmed, fully alive body, traded kilo for kilo in solid platinum. That"s enough precious metal to buy a second ship...or outfit this one with far better engines and guns than the sh"keth you"re currently running."
"Rrrunninng, until you sssshhot it up," the Tla.s.sian hissed, lifting his gun a little higher in threat.
"Yes, well, I wasn"t in charge of that decision," Ia drawled. "If I had been, your FTL capability would certainly not still be intact, and you"d be running and screaming from the advance of my full boarding party. As it is, my second-in-command is going to face a Board of Inquiry for losing both her CO and this ship."
"You"re the CO? Commanding Officers don"t lead boarding parties!" a new Human scoffed, this one a female. She wedged her way forward between two of the suited Humans, confronting Ia with her hands on her hips. Pet.i.te and Asiatic, hair cropped short and only modestly pretty for a Human, she could have been any of a hundred thousand women Ia had seen in her travels through the known galaxy. She carried herself with an air of absolute authority, however, and the rest of the crew backed off a little, deferring to her.
"I lead from the front, meioa," Ia stated. She bowed slightly, grenade still visible in her hand. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Lieutenant First Grade Ia, ident #96-03-0004-0096-0072-0002, and I am a.s.signed to the command of the TUPSF Audie-Murphy, one of the Delta-VXs flown out of Battle Platform Mad Jack. I am personally responsible for the tracking, capture, and destruction of twenty-three Salik vessels...including single-handedly shooting down one of their rare capital ships.
"They want me, First Officer Veng, like you would not believe," Ia added, watching the woman jump slightly in surprise at hearing her name. "They"re willing to pay to get their slimy little tentacles on me. Specifically alive, intact, and unharmed. And you are going to deliver me to them for a very substantial fee. Now, you can spend it however you want; I don"t care. So long as you hand me over to the Salik, alive, intact, and unharmed, I honestly do not care about you, your ship, or your crew. You can go about your business as soon as I"m done with you."
Veng eyed Ia up and down. "You"re shakking crazy. No Human wants to get eaten by th" d.a.m.ned frogtop.u.s.s.ies!"
"I didn"t say they"d get to eat me," Ia countered, shrugging slightly. "Just that I need to be handed over to them. This is an opportunity I cannot pa.s.s up, given my standing orders. You will sell me to the Salik. All I ask is that you don"t actually tell them that I want to be sold...because if you did, they"d kidnap you and your crew out of paranoia, and then you"d be on the lunch menu, too." She shrugged eloquently. "In good conscience, I could not allow that. So for the time being, while you look up the bounty on my head, you can lock me up in the unused crew quarters on Deck 5, portside, cross-corridor Charlie."
"How did you...?" Veng asked her, blinking.
"How did I know about the unused crew cabin?" Ia asked her. "My contacts heard about your ex-crewmate Connors leaving the ship, and from there, tracked down information on where he had been staying," she lied calmly. "Your lightspeed broadband comm panel"s scrambler code has been cracked. You might want to get that changed out as soon as you can."
"But why do you need to be sold to the Salik, of all species?" the first officer repeated, shaking her head. "I"ll admit we"ll sell them a lot of things, since they pay through their nostril-flaps for it...but a living sentient?"
Ia smirked ever so slightly. "That"s need-to-know information, meioa, and you do not need to know. In fact, you don"t want to know. Trust me."
Several whispers behind her, sibilant with the hisses of the Tla.s.sian language, told her the crew was discussing her insanity. The translation of their exchange was more or less wondering if Ia was secretly a Salik agent. Ia knew there were such agents in the military, though not as many among the Terrans as the Salik could"ve wished.
Veng touched the headset hooked over her ear. She lifted her chin at the taller woman. "Fine. It"s your funeral banquet. But you strip to the skin. I want to make sure you"re not here to sabotage our ship. It"s funny, but I don"t really trust TUPSF officers."
"Only if you give me something to wear in exchange. P-suits aren"t comfortable in the long term. Ah-ah," Ia reminded both her and the others as they shifted toward her. She gave a little wave with the hand still holding the grenade. "No touching. This is nonnegotiable. You touch me, I break things. And I"ll keep this grenade up until I"m sold, to keep you honest. Oh, and I"d like something to eat when I get to my "guest quarters." A ration packet will do; it doesn"t have to be anything fancy. With luck, I won"t be here long enough to be a burden on your resources."
"You can"t hold on to that grenade forever, meioa," the V"Dan crewmember warned her.
Ia looked over her shoulder at him. "I survived all seven days of h.e.l.l Week in the Marines, Basic Training, meioa. All seven days. I can do anything I need to do. My advice? Don"t get in my way, and I won"t hurt you. Now, as I said, I suggest I be "locked away" for your own safety while your captain and first officer investigate the bounty on my intact, alive body. But don"t delay. Their offer has a narrow window of opportunity."
"Fine. You heard the meioa," Veng ordered her crewmates. "No touching, until we know if it"s true. That also means you, Sva.s.s. Give her room to pa.s.s, the lot of you. If you force her into a fight when she"s trying to be polite, I"ll point and laugh at whatever she does to you. As for you, prisoner, move that way. If it"s not true, Sva.s.s is only the first one who"ll have a shot at your pretty little backside."
The members of the crew parted, and Ia politely pa.s.sed through untouched. She skirted carefully around the Tla.s.sian as she did so, keeping well out of his reach.
Not all of the Alliance races were bipedal, and not all of the Alliance races shared the same physiological traits. Some things did translate, somewhat. Solaricans and Tla.s.sians and Humans reproduced via similar methods, and enjoyed similar pleasures while doing so. Gatsugi physiology was too different to be compatible, and K"katta, Choya, and Salik didn"t breed unless they were in heat. As for the Dlmvla, they breathed the wrong atmosphere, and the Chinsoiy lived in an environment radioactively toxic to the other races. Both situations made such speculations impossible. But among the first three races, certain activities were possible, if one were perverted enough.
It didn"t take long to get to the right deck and cross-corridor. The cabin was as small as precognitively advertised. The amount of floor s.p.a.ce was the same as the area covered by the double bunk beds, and the bathroom was little more than a closet with a toilet and sink. Ia didn"t care, though. She turned to thank the first officer, only to find Veng pointing a gun at her.
"Strip. You"re clearly carrying something around your right ankle, and I want to know what it is," Veng ordered, nodding at the bulge beneath the silvery grey material.
"Bring a set of clothes, and I"ll show you," Ia countered.
"No game. I"m not leaving you alone to pull some sort of James Bond device on me and my crew," the other woman countered.
"It"s a bracelet. Well, technically an anklet," Ia corrected, once more lying through her teeth. "I cannot remove it, because I put it on when I was a kid and couldn"t get it off again. Besides, all you have to do is call on your headset and ask someone to bring you a pair of coveralls. You don"t have to leave this cabin. Now, we can play this game all day, Meioa Veng...but I really am what I seem to be."
"And that would be?" Veng asked, one brow lifted skeptically.
"A soldier with a crazy idea, and the abilities to carry it through. All I need is for you to cooperate...and in exchange, I"ll give you five sets of navigation coordinates to go hide your ship for the next six weeks, because you"re going to need to hide for at least that long," Ia told her. Veng frowned, so she explained. "The moment you took off with me on board, you tagged this vessel across the entire s.p.a.ce Force as kidnappers. Every port will be looking for you, for the bounty on your heads.
"However, it should only take me two and a half weeks to do what needs be done, then I"ll be back, and within another two and a half, I"ll be able to clear your names with the Command Staff," Ia told her. "Give another week or so for word to spread that the bounty"s no longer valid, and you"ll be free to go back to business as usual. If you really want to. I make no guarantees against capture or destruction if you do, however."
Veng snorted. "You have contacts in the Command Staff? Yeah, right. More like you"ll leave us deadheading into the dark, meioa. Particularly since you won"t be coming back."
"Then if nothing else, do not delay in checking out my ident with the Salik," Ia said. "I weigh just over one hundred four kilos. That"s a lot of refined platinum. You could easily buy off an Independent Colonyworld to give you and the rest of the crew asylum. Maybe even turn privateer, and be semirespectable."
Veng gave her a wary look. She seemed to be considering Ia"s offer. Finally, she touched her headset, activating it. "What"s that ident number, again?"
Ia gave it to her. She waited patiently as Veng gave the orders for a spare set of ship coveralls to be brought down, too, then stripped out of the pressure suit-carefully, still holding the grenade in one hand at a time-until she bared the crysium on her ankle. Translucent peach pink, it was just clear enough to show it was just a thick ankle cuff. "Satisfied it"s not some bizarre device?"
"No, but it"ll do." Tossing the coveralls on the lower bed, Veng picked up the p-suit and started to back out of the cabin. She paused one last time. "Why do you need to be sold to the Salik? That"s what I don"t get. Since you don"t have any gear or weapons with you, I can only think you"re working for them. But if you were, why the ruse of being sold?"
Ia, stepping into the coveralls, looked up at the other woman. "I see you wear a cross," she observed. "I trust that you"re familiar with the story of David and Goliath?"
Veng snorted. "Of course I am."
Ia shrugged into the sleeves and started fastening the front. "Well, I am very good with a sling, meioa. I suggest you don"t get in the way of my cast."
"You are beyond crazy, meioa. Maybe the Salik do deserve to eat you." Stepping outside, Veng locked the door.
Touching the panel with her hand, Ia sank her mind into the locking circuitry. It wasn"t the familiar military model, so it took her a few minutes to figure out and change the code. The moment she was secure, she retreated into the closet to use the facilities. The 6 percent probability that that one perverted Tla.s.sian would want to get in there was now successfully cut off, leaving her relatively safe for the time being.
Ugh. Too many hours stuck in a pressure suit, even if I didn"t drink a lot before I went in. And I"d better dig into the emergency rations in the locker above the toilet so I can have something to eat and drink, since the probability is high that these pirates won"t be inclined to feed me. Not that the Salik won"t feed me. They"ll be taking pains to keep me alive once they get their suckers on me. But it"ll be almost two weeks of being stuck in a cell at FTL speeds with the Salik version of food before we"ll reach Sallha.
If I"m lucky, they"ll have Terran ration packets, which are tolerably edible if nothing else. If I"m not...I cannot afford to starve to death, however terrible Salik prisoner rations might be. I need to be healthy when we get to the Salik homeworld.
At least I know from the timestreams that they won"t waste good sentient flesh by offering it to their livestock. I"m not sure I could stomach adding cannibal to my list of crimes committed for the Future.
...Heh. "Stomach..."
At least she had her sense of humor to keep her from getting bored, warped though it was.
AUGUST 23, 2495 T.S.
SALIK VESSEL.
SIC TRANSIT.
They took away her clothes of course, and hissed and burbled in puzzlement over the smooth mineral permanently encasing her shin. But that was alright; Ia had never been body-conscious, not growing up with two brothers in her family"s small home. The clothing had been more to keep warm in the cool, dry environment of her first set of captors, and shield herself from the gaze of certain male members of the pirate crew.
Salik vessels were kept several degrees warmer and very humid for the biological comfort of their crew, which for a Human meant clothing wasn"t necessary. As far as her alien captors were concerned, clothing could be used for self-strangulation, which would ruin the purpose of taking prisoners alive. Having paid so much for Ia, she was given an "honor guard" of two Salik males to watch over her, the sole prisoner on the first of the ships bringing her via circuitous routes to within OTL-jumping distance of Sallha, but otherwise she was left alone in her cage.
On the second ship, there were five Humans, two Solaricans, and three Gatsugi, all kept in tight-gridded cages that were just large enough to stand up in or stretch out and sleep. Like sentient-sized pet cages, they came with a waste bucket and a water dispenser permanently fixed to the interior. More prisoners arrived every day or so, including two K"katta, filling up the long, cargo holdstyle brig.
Ia didn"t talk to the other prisoners. There was nothing she could say to them, nothing she could do for them. They were meant for the various regional governors to eat, celebrating elsewhere across Sallha. Ia would be taken to their greatest underground military citadel, to be served with the rest of their most important war-food.
This mission wasn"t about rescuing people. It hurt, knowing there was nothing she could do for them. No false hope she could give the others. Their fates were sealed. As the second Salik ship slipped its way carefully through the gaps between stars to the rendezvous point, all Ia could do was sleep, exercise to keep herself in shape, and meditate on the many needs of the future. Submersing herself fully onto the timeplains was the only way to block out the furtive whispers, the dull curses, and the different kinds of species-specific weeping of the others.
The captain of the ship came to see her on her second to last day aboard. So did the ship"s medical personnel, performing tests through the bars to make sure she was biologically safe to eat. After they burbled their findings to their commander and moved on to the next prisoner, he moved up to the bars of her cage. Ia didn"t pretend to ignore him. She didn"t have the refuge of retreating into her own private mental madness, like some of the other prisoners had done; the timeplains were even less pleasant than reality, but they were necessary.
"Hhhew are a strrange Hhewman," the captain hissed in Terranglo. "Hhew do not cry, hhew do not curssse. No ssstressss. No fffearrr. Yet hhew ssseem to be hhhere, rathhher than lossst."
He uncurled a pair of tentacles, writhing them slowly to indicate the reality around them.
"Where else should I be?" Ia asked, meeting his bulging-eyed gaze calmly. She didn"t move from her position, seated with her back against the bars that b.u.t.ted up against a cage holding a nervously chirping K"katta. They had taken away the alien"s translator box, leaving it unable to communicate clearly with anyone but its own kind.
"Nnnot hhhere." Crouching easily, since his backwards-bending leg joints permitted it, he ducked his head a little and gazed at her more directly. First one eye, then the other. "Wwwhat do hhew wwannnt, Hhhewman?"
"What do I want?" Ia repeated. "What do you expect me to say? Should I say that I want your head on a pike, as a warning to the rest of the galaxy to never let one kind of hunger spill over into the other? Is that what you want to hear?"
"Yessss," he hissed, baring the points of his front teeth. "There isss the annger I exsspected...annger for my kinnnd."
Shifting forward onto the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, Ia shuffled up to the front of her cage. "There"s only one problem, meioa. I don"t feel anger when I think of you. I don"t feel rage when I look upon you."
His slit-pupiled eyes flicked in their sockets, shifting around before refocusing on her. "Wwwhhhhat, thennn, do hhew feelll?"
Looking into those eyes, Ia gave him the truth. One that she had carried inside of her since that fateful morning as a teenager, when everything had changed.
"Pity."