Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (49 page)

“I don’t know how
to thank you,” one brother said. The older brother embraced her
abruptly and enthusiastically.

“That’ll do,”
Ayan said after she enjoyed the embrace for a moment. “Good luck,
and welcome to the family.”

“Thank you,” said
the older brother, nodding and wiping a tear away.

Ayan led her group back
to the lift, leaving the MacMillan brothers behind. “Just like
that,” she told the pair of recruiting managers walking behind her.
“Be warm, show them the essentials, remind them of their
responsibilities, answer their questions, and direct them to
Crewcast, but make sure that everyone you’re bringing into the
Everin Building feels like they’re joining a family. They are,
that’s what this is, and it’s not just
a
family, it’s
your
family that you’re welcoming them into. If you don’t
feel confident about someone after a few days, make your supervisor
aware and try to find a solution. In most cases, it’ll be an
information problem, you’ll have to find out why someone isn’t
fitting in from them, from the people they’ve had friction with,
and your job won’t be finished until you’ve gotten them settled
in. Your supervisor will make sure you aren’t overwhelmed, and
you’ll have the help of the Section Elders, too. If any part of the
system fails, make sure you address it right away with your
supervisor. This is going to take time, and you’ll run into
problems, but this lifestyle works, it just requires patience,
thought, and respect.”

“I understand,”
said Placement Officer Stillwell, a tall, fit gentleman with a
friendly face. “I never got a chance to thank you for this job, I
would have never guessed I’d end up doing social work after
fighting on the Triton a year ago.”

“Lacey placed you,”
Ayan replied. “But you’re welcome.”

“You’re welcome,”
Lacey said. “Either of you have any questions?”

Placement Officer
Foucot, a shorter dark haired woman who had a similar history to her
comrade’s. smiled at them both. She could light a room with her
grins. “Thank you for, well, everything, Commander. I don’t know
where I’d be if it weren’t for you and all your friends, er,
crew. Maybe still on the Palamo? Who knows?” She hugged Lacey, then
Ayan. “Doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Here I am.”

“Here you are,”
Ayan repeated with a smile. The first lift arrived and Ayan said,
“I’m going down, you should take the next to the roof. There are
six groups waiting to be escorted. Your security teams are up there,
too.”

The lift doors slid
closed, leaving Ayan alone with Lacey. Ayan took a deep breath before
telling her what she’d been holding off all day. “I’m moving to
the Triton, my father is taking over operations on Tamber.”

“I know,” Lacey
said. “And you’re going to ask me to stay here to take care of
the Everin Building.”

“I’m sorry,” Ayan
said. “You’ve been an amazing second, a wonderful friend. I just
think they need you here more.”

“You’re right,”
Lacey said, looking at Ayan with a straight face. “I am an
astonishingly good friend,” she said with a dramatic flair.

Ayan couldn’t help
but laugh, and she was joined by Lacey for a chuckle. “I’m going
to miss you.”

“I won’t miss you,
because I’ll make sure my apartment has a spare bedroom, and you’ll
be visiting. If you don’t, I’ll just have to go up there.”

“Fair enough,” Ayan
replied, relieved that it had gone well. “You’re really all right
with this?”

“I’ve had my taste
of action,” Lacey replied. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t
recognize you when you were in command – you were stony, cold. I
respect that, and I understand that emotions get in the way when
you’re in that situation, but I can’t do that. Logistics, making
a home for people, that’s me. And as for watching you in command,
I’d rather take a piece of your off time, if there’s any left
after Jacob comes back.”

“Why do you say
that?” Ayan asked.

“You miss him, I see
it all the time,” Lacey said. “The Warlord is tops on your watch
list, and not just because you know they’ll probably bring supplies
that’ll trickle down here. Even though he didn’t fight for you,
probably doesn’t deserve you, you’ve been leaning back towards
him for all the time I’ve known you.”

“I didn’t give him
a chance to fight for me, my mess with Liam got in the way, sent him
running, I’m sure,” Ayan said. “Still can’t believe that all
that happened because I took the advice of an oracle machine. Should
have never listened. He stays away and I don’t blame him.”

“Still,” Lacey
said. “I would have fought for you.”

Ayan couldn’t help
but blush at the unexpected compliment, “I know.”

“But you and he are
two halves, and all that,” Lacey said. “I wouldn’t get in the
way, because I am such a good friend, yeah?”

“You are,” Ayan
said.

“He’ll forgive
you,” Lacey said. “But you might have to be quiet and listen to
him when he tells you how that felt, watching you with Liam.”

“Yeah,” Ayan said,
feeling the weight of her need to atone. “I owe him that.”

“Then I bet you’ll
be far away. Just remember to visit,” Lacey told her. “Or else.”

“I’d sooner forget
the entire Everin Building,” Ayan replied.

“Oh, speaking of
which,” Lacey said, “You have to address Haven Shore and the new
recruits in the other centres. They’re uneasy, and there’s a
little trickle of people leaving from the new bases.”

“If I weren’t so
tired,” Ayan said with a sigh.

“You’re the one who
told me to watch for this sort of thing,” Lacey replied with a
wink. “It can wait until mid-morning tomorrow, but I have to
schedule something soon so they know they’re not being treated like
baggage.”

“That’s not the
attitude you’re seeing, is it?” Ayan asked.

“Not in the majority,
but I can see it happening. So, late tomorrow morning?”

“Mid-afternoon?”
Ayan bargained.

“I’ll schedule it
now.”

“Can’t believe I
have to write a speech,” Ayan said.

“You’ll be fine, I
can help if you like,” Lacey replied.

“I know, and thanks
much, but I’m so much better with ships. Putting an engine together
is so much easier than pulling people together.”

Wheeler Interrupted

At long last, Lucius
Wheeler had found a transport the right size, headed in the right
direction. Nine sectors away from Rega Gain and even further from the
Order of Eden, he felt he could finally sleep easy. He dropped his
old-fashioned American duster onto the narrow chair in his small
passenger cabin and checked the energy level on his disintegration
pistol. The reading said he had six hundred and twenty three shots,
but that was only because most of the circuitry thought it was still
a medium range stun pistol. He actually only had eighty-nine; the
disintegration system hidden in the pistol required a lot more power
than a stunner.

He made sure the safety
was on and slid it under his pillow. The bed was clean and fresh. The
small, high speed transit ship was in great shape as far as he could
tell. It had better be, he paid enough for the trip to Visalee. There
was a shipyard there, it was where he stole the Cold Reaver, a ship
he used as his personal armed shuttle when he couldn’t take the
Triton somewhere. He’d heard encouraging news: the place was a
graveyard. Well, it was good news for him, perhaps not the thousands
of people who were torn apart by machines infected with the Holocaust
Virus.

There was a new aid
station opening near the shipyards for the survivors, and he knew it
would be his way in to the Visalee storage complex. Finding a crew
would be a different proposition altogether, but he could cross that
bridge when he came to it. A tactical alarm went off in his mind,
drawing his attention to two armed crewmembers on the other side of
his closed door.

“D’you think it’s
really him? Travelling in the open?” he heard the short one say
through the ship’s comm system.

“Why not? He probably
doesn’t even know about the bounty,” said the tall woman beside
him. “We take him quick and bring him to the captain.”

“No, we’ll hide
him, why should the cap-“

It was all Wheeler had
to hear. He snatched his sidearm out from under his pillow, put his
armoured duster back on and came through his cabin door kicking the
tall one in the knee and shooting several rounds at the short one.
The deadly bolts cut through the short crewmember’s uniform after a
few shots, his last volley reducing the flesh around his collarbone
and neck to flaming sludge.

Before his taller
assailant could recover and take aim, Wheeler trained his sidearm on
her. “Why are you morons trying to take me down?”

“It’s a bounty! The
Brits are offering millions for you, even more if you’re delivered
alive,” her screeching reply barely cut through the gurgling and
flailing of her partner in crime.

“Well, thank you,”
he said, shooting her in the face until there was nothing
recognizable left. Another crewmember came along with a sludge rifle
at the ready and Wheeler was already firing in the man’s direction
before he fired his first shot. The tactical map was as clear as the
world around him as it kept him informed of all motion on the ship.

The cabin door across
the hall opened, revealing a drowsy young woman who eyed the corpses,
then him. “Just a minor social turbulence,” Wheeler said. “We’ll
arrive at our destination on time.”

He left her there,
agape, as he strode towards the bridge, taking the long way around so
he could avoid three crewmembers. The hatch to the bridge was locked,
and he unlocked it with a mental command using his connection with
the computer. “Hello, Sir,” he said as he levelled his
smouldering handgun at the captain’s head. He and the five
crewmembers on the small bridge all turned toward him with surprise.
“While this is technically a hijacking, I really only want to make
sure that I make it to my destination on time. So, I’ll point this
nasty little disintegration weapon at you for the next six hours
while you make sure no one sends a message to Visalee Harbour telling
them that you have a wanted man aboard.”

The captain raised his
hands slowly. His look of confusion almost made the whole ordeal
worth it. “So you want us to continue on our course as normal, and
to keep mum about your presence aboard?”

“Exactly. It’s
going to be harder than you think, though, especially if you have a
lot of below-average intelligence crewmembers. I’m jacked into your
computer system, so I’ll notice if someone tries to send a message
about me, and I’ll block it. Then I’ll kill you, I’ll kill
them, I’ll kill everyone between me and that person, who I won’t
kill right away. I’ll probably use them to properly calibrate this
weapon here; I haven’t had a chance to do a proper job of it since
I built it. That’s the problem with custom jobs, you’re never
really done tinkering. Do you understand?”

“About custom jobs,
or keeping quiet?” asked the captain.

“About keeping quiet,
for now. We can have a conversation about custom jobs later if you
like. We need to pass the time somehow.”

“I understand. I’ll
put a communications block in place right now, if you’ll promise
not to harm my crew.”

“Sure. Aside from the
three I’ve already killed, I won’t shoot anyone if we all play
nice and get the ship where it’s going. When we get there, I leave,
and you wait two days before reporting me to the authorities. I
should be well on my way by then.”

“All right. Is there
anything else you want, Mister Collins?” asked the captain.

“No, just a quick
trip and a head start,” Wheeler replied. He had momentarily
forgotten that he’d used the name David Collins to buy his ticket.
“I am going to borrow your main hologram projector, though.”

“Sorry, we only have
screens on this ship, they’re more durable,” the captain said.

“So they are,” Wheeler replied.
“I’ll borrow your biggest, then.” He mentally searched their
data storage for the bounty on him and sent the images to the main
screen at the front of the bridge. His original face, chiselled and
roguishly handsome, rotated in the middle under the title “WANTED
BY THE BRITISH ALLIANCE FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.” Beneath were
the raw particulars in a less alarming font.

Any means of retrieval are
permitted, with the exception of any methods that may break British
Alliance or Common Galactic Laws. If the subject is presented to a
British Alliance outpost dead or in an un-revivable state, the bounty
to be paid will be no more than four million Universal Currency
Units. If presented alive and mentally intact, the transporter and
detainer of the subject will be paid ten million Universal Currency
Units. A DNA and neural scan match will be used to verify the
capture.

“And I was trying so
hard to start over, to reformat the old historical memory storage
system and get on with things, but they just won’t let me leave,”
Wheeler said to no one in particular.

“It says you’re a
war criminal and a thief,” the helmsman said. “I hope they get
you.”

Wheeler fired a shot
without looking, narrowly missing the crewman’s leg. “Sorry, it
does that whenever I hear an idiot,” he said. “Captain, if you
can speed things up and get us to our destination, I’d be grateful.
I have a ship to steal and a war to join.”

The Rush

Minh-Chu Buu hadn’t
realized how much his memories of being an infantry grunt had dulled
until he felt like one all over again following Jacob Valent and
Moira McFadden aboard the Barricade. He still made the transition
from lead pilot in the operation to backup in one of the boarding
teams well, and was relieved he wasn’t running any part of that
operation.