Dragonfly (16 page)

“Daisy-chaining the airlock system so they can’t follow.” Dragonfly tapped keys furiously. “At least not from this docking arm. Should buy us some time. There. Now burn it.”

I whirled and fired at the keypad from point-blank range. Sparks showered, setting off a chain of exploding keypads along the docking arm, and together we dived through the airlock a second before the glass door slammed shut.

The equalizer hissed, but the pressure was already at equilibrium and the door at the other end popped open. We dashed through, first Foxy, then Spider and the girl, then me and Dragonfly.

I clipped my pistol and hopped up the rippled metal ladder, Spider’s rear end in tight urban combat trousers right in front of my face. A not entirely unpleasant view. No doubt Dragonfly was getting a similar eyeful of my butt, again. Always the last to leave. How gallant. Hadn’t stopped him killing hundreds to save himself on Urumki.

I shivered as I climbed, remembering how Nikita always acted strong and incorruptible until the moment it suited him to screw you over. Maybe Dragonfly had something wrong with his brain too. Something that made him think he was brave and self-sacrificing and always did the right thing, that the bad things that always happened around him weren’t his fault. It’s called narcissistic blindness, a pathological form of denial. The kind of sickness that makes you fit right in at black ops. A lot of really smart people have it to some degree.

But no time to pop-psych Dragonfly now. I pushed him from my thoughts as I scrambled through the hatch onto the warm metal deck of Spider’s shuttlecraft.

It had a long cylindrical interior, ribbed metal walls and benches with dropship harnesses like a short-range Imperial troop transport. Already the arc rockets were charged, the stardrive humming. Spider dumped the senseless girl on a bench without breaking stride.

Foxy racked her rifle, fastened a steel-belted strap around the girl’s waist, and grabbed a swinging handhold. “Grab on,” she said. “It’ll be a bumpy ride.”

Dragonfly and I found a handle each and held on. Spider’s pimple-cheeked accomplice with the porcupine hair was already strapped into the cockpit’s starboard command chair, his pox-scarred hands alight on the controls. The ship tugged and rocked, waiting for release.

Spider took the port chair and clipped the harness tight. “Crack us off, Lux,” he ordered.

Porcupine Boy punched a control with his fist. The magclamps banged open, and with a crackle of overheated arcfuel we hurtled away from Vyachesgrad.

My feet slipped, inertia dragging me backward, and I hung on tight. The station receded in the tiny rear clearview, the docking arm strangely silent and dark. No pursuit. Whatever Dragonfly had done to the keypad, it had worked.

We careened around a pulsing beacon on a screech of rocketfire and shot off into the starfield, missing an incoming minifreighter by meters. Porcupine Boy—Lux—was either expert or suicidal. No points for guessing which.

I peered out the clearview, watching for reaction. Blue lights pulsed along the adjacent docking arm, and two pairs of shiny Sliver fighters detached, their shardlike metal fuselages designed for slipspace precision and stealth. They also had hyperfueled ion drives and the arc rocket array from hell, maneuvering in four dimensions with ease, and direct neural contact between pilot and navset. Not to mention arclight torpedoes that crawled up your butt like hungry suckerfish. Nikita flew one—don’t ask where he got it—and it ripped up the sky like a monster.

“They’re coming,” I yelled, so the cockpit could hear me over the howling arc rockets. “Four of them. Evasive maneuvers might be nice.”

But we didn’t change course. Just kept hurtling for the stars, a nice inviting straight line. The Slivers circled and spread in a tangential attack trajectory, splitting their arrival time by seconds to avoid crossfire, but all aiming for a single central point. Us. And we’d never reach slip velocity in time, not in this ship.

Dragonfly nudged me with his elbow, hanging on tight. “Don’t sweat it. Just watch.”

If he wanted to trust a bunch of lunatics, that was his funeral.

I ran up to the cockpit, the uncalibrated gravmotors pulling me left and right as we accelerated. Lux manipulated six arc rockets with his left hand to keep us on course, forcing the power past safe maximum with the right. Sweat ran from his spiky brown hair. I peered over his shoulder. The console showed empty space ahead. He didn’t even have the attack sensors on.

“What, are you crazy?”

Spider ignored me and grabbed the etherwave, monitoring the seconds ticking over on the console timer. Thirty-nine, forty, forty-one.

“
LightBringer,
time four-nine, flash it,” he ordered.

The ion drives shuddered, picking up speed. Forty-five, forty-six.

Ahead, a Sliver right-angled and hurtled toward us, stealthplate shining in the station spotlights. Our sensors weren’t on, but I could almost hear the fighter’s weapons powering up, torpedoes charging, targeting systems aflame.

Forty-seven. I swallowed, sweating. Forty-eight. Forty-nine.

And beside us, on a parallel trajectory almost close enough to touch, a monstrous black battleship dropped out of slipspace like a falling rock.

It dwarfed us, a curving hawk-like shell with massive black side fins underslung with torpedo tubes sweeping back from a sharp hooked nose to an angular stern crusted with radshield debris. A vicious bird of prey, built by the Empire to kill.

The Sliver jerked upward to avoid a collision, and hurtled off in a directionless arc like shining silver shrapnel. The battleship shuddered and course-corrected, speed dampers kicking in.

“Lock and load.” Lux jammed his fist on the magnetics. Diodes flashed red. The shuttlecraft jerked sideways, and we slammed against the battleship’s hull and stuck there. Current zapped, electromagnets holding us fast. My teeth shuddered, metal clanging in my ears.

“Contact,” Spider snapped on the etherwave, and we yanked forward, propelled on the battleship’s mighty acceleration.

I staggered back. Our stardrive howled and sputtered, unable to match such a vicious turn of speed. Transition velocity flashed on the console. The floor shuddered and warmed, the battleship’s drives arcing hot. The air glowed scarlet as wavelengths warped and stretched, and, like a cosmic light switch, slipspace plunged the clearview into blackness.

18

Localized magnetics flipped our shuttlecraft into the nearest loading bay, where warm atomlights shone like suns, glaring off blackmetal walls hung with electric radshield scrubbers like giant welders and ammunition loaders the size of small houses. The massive airlock doors ground shut, blocking out the uncanny blackness of slipspace. The atmosphere equalized with a thump and a hiss, our ion-charged hull spitting sparks.

When the pressure alarm blinked out, I untwisted the steel-radial strap from my aching wrist and followed the others out. All six of us—Lux, Foxy Lady, Dragonfly, me, and Spider with the girl over his shoulder—crammed into one blackglass elevator, and Lux hit the flat red button for the battledeck.

The navy don’t voice-activate as a primary on battlecraft any more. It’s too unreliable. One dirty sensor or dented receptor and you lose functionality. But you can beat the shit out of those old metal buttons and they still work. Sometimes, simple is best.

Instinctively, I noted the shape of the doors as they hissed shut, memorized the configuration of levels on the schematic diagram, counted in my mind the rows of plasma fuel conduits I’d seen in the loading bay. A Raven-class battleship, third generation. The latest, deadliest Imperial hardware, worth five hundred million sols. I wondered how Spider replaced his coolants, where he found torpedoes and charges for his weapons. Half those plasma conduits had been drained, bare metal showing through the ultraplastic inspection ports. His crew didn’t look well fed, let alone fully armed.

Stopping the rebels from provisioning is a core Axis strategy. It’s not sexy, but it’s effective, and we infiltrate more insurrectionist cells with dodgy supply deals than we do with any other tactic. Which made stealing a full-armor battleship either suicidally reckless or criminally insane. I swallowed, licking sticky lips. For me, the odds were still even between those two.

No one spoke as we ascended, motors whirring. Foxy fiddled with her rifle, eyes downcast. Lux flicked sweat from his porcupine hair. Spider hummed to himself, some melancholy melody that stretched my nerves, and Dragonfly flipped his hyperchip, his gaze dark, never a sign things were going well.

I wanted to pace, rake my hair loose, crack my aching neck. I was still wearing the major’s uniform, tight and rigid around my chest. The air humidifiers were running on overdrive in here, and the thick hot-metal stink of stardrive maddened me. How in space did I get here? I was supposed to be luring Dragonfly to his doom, not kidnapping admirals’ daughters. If this Natasha got hurt, I’d have to answer to Director Renko for it. But I couldn’t let my cover slip now. If Spider found out who I was, I’d die slow and dirty. And I’d already used up my share of Dragonfly’s goodwill.

Get a plan, Aragon
. Nikita’s voice stung in my memory, from long ago when he was my mentor and every word he spoke was gold.
Act, don’t react. Take charge. Don’t let the circumstances dictate your actions. Impose your plan on the circumstances. Act like you own the world and the world will fall into line
.

Resolution forged like steel in my spine. I’d do my best to keep the girl safe, but my mission came first. Get me and Dragonfly off this ship, back to
Ladrona
and on with the business. Dragonfly might be a mass murderer, but unlike Spider he wasn’t psychotically violent from minute to minute, so if I could get Natasha off with us, so much the better. If not …

The elevator door slipped open, and we walked onto
LightBringer
’s bridge.

It stretched in a wide black-and-silver curve around the ship’s forward bulkheads, two decks high and as deep. Icelights shed a white chill on silvery septurium instruments and glossy black panels. A virtual viewscreen illuminated the entire length of the shuttered clearview, showing sensor imagery, a glowing green web of slipspace beacons, exit trajectories, frequencies. In full battle mode, the virtual display would cover all the walls as well as floor and ceiling, giving a 3D, 360-degree battlespace view far beyond visual range.

Engine data danced in flowing red columns from floor to ceiling, and the slipfield generators hummed quiet and smooth somewhere far below. We were hurtling through slipspace, untrackable and untraceable. No way the Slivers could pursue us with any precision now.

At the back by the elevators sat instrument banks with rows of tiny readouts: on the left, life support; on the right, engineering. Two rows of curved black consoles faced the front, split in the middle by the raised command walkway to form four workstations: comms, tactics, two for nav. Just like on any Imperial battleship.

The similarity ended there. Grime crusted the glossy black consoles, like they hadn’t been cleaned for months, and the comms station was littered with food wrappers and someone’s half-eaten lunch on a cracked metal tray. The place stank of junk food and hot steel. Stuff piled in the corners: stacks of weapon parts and atomcharges and crates of engine components I didn’t recognize. Some of the readouts and a few icelights were smashed or melted, like there’d been a firefight, and a section of the flashscarred ceiling was missing. Beside the elevator, the crypto safe lay broken open, bolts sheared, the plastic capsules crushed and discarded on the floor.

LightBringer
. A parody of an Imperial name. Spider had a twisted sense of humor.

A huge black-and-white cat crouched under the primary nav seat, its piebald coat twitching, and in the chair slouched a wiry red-headed kid in shorts and a ripped blue shirt, his long bare feet propped on the navspace console like he was sunning himself on a beach.

He glanced at Spider as we stepped from the elevator, still catching our breath. “Took you long enough,” he said, and returned to his dented plastic book.

“Likewise. When I say ‘flash it’, I mean flash it, not show up next week.” Spider dumped the admiral’s daughter in the comms chair, dragging her lolling head upright.

“Bite me. Who’s she?” Beach Bum jerked his pointy nose at me without looking up.

“Fresh meat,” said Spider, grinning at me. “Sasha’s got himself a
girlfriend
. Eww.”

I cleared my throat. “It’s Lazuli.”

“You like cats?” Beach Bum said, still reading, flicking pages rapidly, his gaze jerking back and forth. Speed-reading. Obviously a quick mind. I committed his face to memory as best I could, filing it away with the others. Intel was never wasted.

“Sure.” When I was a girl, cats were food, and the mangy critters skittered away whenever they saw us. And these days, my job meant I was never home. But Mishka had liked cats, and we’d talked about getting one. We’d talked about a lot of things that didn’t end up happening.

“I’m Vish. This is Gus. You can rub his belly if you want.” The kid tickled under the monster cat’s chin, and the glaring beast meowed.

I sidled up to scratch the vast expanse of fur. Gus purred threateningly, sizing me up with one mean, scarred eye.

Vish grinned. “Gus says you’re okay.”

“What a relief.” I glanced at the console, piled with books and discarded food packaging. A battleship’s navspace was normally set up for two pilots. Single crew was difficult, unless you could do about eight things at once. It seemed Spider attracted the talented crazies. “You fly this by yourself?”

“Sure.” Vish scratched his sharp red nose, bloodshot blue eyes rolling in opposite directions. “What you want I should do with the other hand?”

Lux mimed spewing with his finger down his throat, and Foxy snorted. “Who knew you could jerk off left-handed?”

Vish’s florid face flushed even brighter, and privately I sighed. More shipboard heartbreak. Not in this universe, skinny boy. She’s dreaming about a handsome, muscled-up terrorist asshole, and only half of those words describe you.