Rebel Stars 1: Outlaw (3 page)

"You disappear?"

Webber opened his hands, revealing nothing.

Jons scrunched up his face. "Like they grind you into All-Paste?"

"They take you. Knock you out. You wake up in a hole on Triton, hauling rock. And that's where you stay until you die."

"If that were true," Jons said, "do you really think you'd have heard of it?"

As drunk as drunk logic got, but Webber was in the same headspace and had no trouble accepting it. "Maybe not. But the threshold, I'm coming up on it. And I don't want to see what's on the other side."

"Well hell, man. If you're that far underwater, what are you doing spending your money in a
bar
?"

They blinked at each other, then burst into laughter.

"It's never as bad as it seems," Jons said once they'd calmed down. "If it comes down to it, here's what you do. Cut a deal with Gomes. She reports you died in an accident somewhere off the Lane. A few months later, Bob Smith shows up on Titan. Boom."

The door banged open. A steroidal bald man entered, followed by two more men and a woman. All four were dressed in blue. The bald man headed straight to the bar, relocating several people along his way.

Webber turned back to Jons. "It's not as easy as that. Everything leaves a trace. If someone's looking for me and they see a smudge on the record, and they go check with Gomes about that 'accident,' how much pressure do you think it takes before she spills?"

They talked more, but Webber had accomplished his mission of turning his memory into a reverse terminator line, behind which lay only darkness. Next thing he knew, the bald man in blue was standing over another man so short and thin it looked like he'd been raised on a diet of imagination soup. Neither of them looked happy, but the bald man bore a fatalistic, half-amused expression.

"That," Jons said, "is the embryo of a fight."

The bald man's team was watching from their table, but between the noise, the gloom, and the booze, nobody else was paying much mind. The bald man said something. The short man shook his head. Before he finished, the bald man swung his fist.

If the measure of a punch was how hard it was to avoid, this one rated about an "Angry Toddler." The short man ducked, spinning away, lashing his left hand at the other man's balls. The little man's momentum was drawing him back, neutering his strike. But considering he was attempting to do just that to the bald man, it didn't take much.

The bald man dropped. As if connected to him by Newton's Third Law, the three members of his crew shot to their feet. The little man danced back. A bystander shoved him from behind, sending him reeling toward the crew. The woman stutter-stepped up and socked him in the cheek. He bounced back, tripping on a young woman as she scrambled to escape the burgeoning violence.

The bald man was still on the ground, thighs clamped tight. The blue-suited trio advanced.

Webber wiped his mouth. "Somebody should do something."

"Yeah," Jons said. "Little dude should run."

Webber downed the table's last remaining shot and found himself on his feet. Near the bar, the little man parried an incoming kick and swept the attacker to the ground. The woman came in from his side, driving her knuckles into his gut. This time, he fell.

The three standing members of the Blue Crew swarmed him, drawing back their feet. Webber burst through the ring of people surrounding the skirmish, fumbling out the Settler of Scores.

To both the naked eye and security scanners, the Settler of Scores was your standard-issue charge stick, a finger-sized portable power source whose universal ports could provide days of electricity for whatever gizmos you were carrying around. During a particularly rough stretch on Jindo, Webber had done some research, bought a few parts (one of which was quasi-legal at best), and converted his one and only charge stick into a much more versatile item.

The short guy had managed to kick the legs out from the paunchy guy, but the woman and the third guy were now giving him the ol' boots to the ribs. Now that the bald man was out of it, the woman looked like the nastiest contender, so Webber ran up on her, dug the charge stick into her back, and pressed the button.

A pattern of electric pulses discharged through the stick's needle-sharp golden pin. The woman went as stiff as an antenna, then dropped in a twitching puddle. The third man turned, mouth agape. The little guy slammed his heel into the side of the man's knee. The man's face got very serious. He fell beside the woman clutching a bundle of busted ligaments.

By this time, the paunchy guy had gotten to his feet. Regrettably, the Settler of Scores required a recharge/reset between uses, but Webber was feeling all right: it was now two on one in their favor.

The little guy pointed over his shoulder, crying out. Webber turned, glimpsing the bald man and a fist incoming straight at his jaw.

He saw stars. Not the fixed kind you saw on a starship monitor. These ones twinkled like crazy, alerting him that his brain was temporarily nonfunctional—and that more stars, comets, and darkness were soon to follow.

There was nothing Rada hated more than someone who flaked on a date. Sitting there, the scenery was pleasant to a fault—a real wooden booth with a clear view out the floor-to-ceiling windows, which displayed the curve of Mars in all its fiery glory—but she only had eyes for the clock. Her device. And its stubbornly empty inbox.

It didn't help that it was in Harrigan's. That's what her contact had requested, however, and given the nature of that request, Rada hadn't been about to say no. She could have lost herself in her device, as Simm was doing, but she forced herself to look at the bottles behind the bar. All the colors of the alcoholic rainbow: amber; green; rich, translucent brown. With one exception, it had been three years (and counting) since the murders on Nereid and hence three years (and counting) since her last taste.

Between then and now, she'd learned two lessons. The first was optimistic: mind trumped matter. Any internal problem was capable of being solved internally. You just had to want it. Hard enough to be ruthless with yourself. Over the last three years, she had starved that part of herself until it was little more than skin and bones in the back of a cage.

The second lesson wasn't so nice. She had starved it, weakened it to the point where she could toy with it without fear, but it was still there, wasn't it? That part of herself—the part that demanded more than the plain, unadulterated world could deliver—she didn't think it
could
be starved to death. It was a zombie. Weak, presently. But if she started to feed it again?

Darkness never truly went away. She should have known as much from the beginning. You were reminded of it every time you flipped off the light.

She checked her device for the ten thousandth time. Sipped her Fizzea, which had a hideous name but tasted wonderfully of tea and active bacteria. She people-watched. Gazed out the window on the dusty orange-brown sphere beneath them.

"I want to ping her," she said.

Simm didn't look up from his device. "Bad idea. Will seem needy."

"I know it's a bad idea. I said it out loud so I wouldn't do it."

He glanced up, scanning her. Eyes as blank as windows reflecting the sun. On the Spectrum of Unusual Personalities, he rated about a five, shading toward six: fully functional, but also capable of appearing inhuman. Robotic. Able to withdraw to a place of pure observation, untroubled by feelings or doubts. This creeped a lot of people out, but not Rada. It was a major factor in why they were together: she envied him. Tried to emulate his ability for herself. Didn't matter that she too often failed, blowing her stack at the worst possible moment. What mattered was that she made the attempt.

He came back to himself, personality returning to his eyes, and smiled at her. He looked back to his device.

She finished her Fizzea, stirred the straw around the melting ice, and waited to order another. She was finishing her third when the message came in.

It was total gibberish.

"Not necessarily." Simm frowned over his device. "It could be in code."

"For what, toddlers?" Rada laughed. "It sounds like a nursery rhyme."

"The words are arbitrary. An empty vessel for the real message embedded in the transmission."

"Or that." She slid from the booth. "Can you trace its source?"

He swept his fingers across the device's screen, scanning. "Maybe. It looks like it's been rerouted."

"Get cracking. I'm going to prep the ship."

"Isn't that premature?"

"Only if everything's okay."

He watched her a moment, descending back into scan mode, then dropped his eyes to the device. She jogged out of the bar and into the mall. The air smelled dry, and though it looked clean, it carried the odor of dust, too. Better than the sweat that pervaded most stations.

Ares Orbital was about as old as old got, but it had been retrofitted with artificial gravity a few decades ago. Mars-standard levels, though, meaning her hard jog felt like something she could keep up all day. Her haste was pretty stupid—whatever was going on with Kayle was surely happening very, very far away—but Rada couldn't help it. She might not be able to understand what the woman's message meant, but that in itself carried meaning. To her, the words sounded like someone who'd just been bashed on the head.

She hopped a shuttle to the port. Beyond the massive windows, the
Tine
rested on the tarmac, a scalpel among hammers. She still couldn't believe it was hers. Profile of a skiff with the engine of a cruiser. The perks of working for a billionaire. Check that: an
eccentric
billionaire. Then again, they all were, weren't they?

She'd already ordered a tube hooked up to its lock. At the gate, she scanned her thumb and eye and was allowed into the featureless tunnel to the ship. The lock opened and she stepped inside. When she was living on it, she never noticed the smell, but she'd been away from it for three days and easily detected the unique musk of Simm and herself.

Onboard, she put the
Tine
through its paces. Could have done most everything remotely, but she didn't trust the automation the way she trusted her own hands. She'd barely gotten started when Simm pinged her, letting her know he was on his way. He wouldn't say more.

She had everything spooled and humming by the time he arrived. Aggravatingly, they weren't cleared to launch for another forty minutes. They settled into the control deck, which was too large to be called a cockpit but too small for a bridge. Simm was fastidious about belting himself in and she knew better than to start asking questions until the last strap was clipped tight.

"So you've got something?" she said.

"Yes and no."

"Give me the yes first."

He finished installing his device into his dash and leaned back. "I think I've cracked the code."

"What's it say?"

"Well," he said, "that would be the no. What it says is, 'Hey Pip: when the rabbit sees a shadow, where can he go?'"

She drew back her head. "You're saying there's nothing embedded in it? So what is it? A lyric? A quote?"

"I don't know."

"So search it."

A trace of annoyance colored his eyes. "That was the first thing I did, Rada. No matches. Some partials, but you can partial anything if you get vague enough."

"Then where does that leave us?"

He rolled his lower lip between his teeth. "Three possibilities. First, it
is
gibberish. Unlikely, but it could have been an accidental transmission."

She narrowed her eyes. "It's a grammatical, parsable sentence. How could that be an accidental send?"

"I
said
it was unlikely. The second is that it's a generic code phrase—you know, 'the condor soars at midnight.' The third possibility is it's the only type of code that's truly unbreakable: something that only makes sense to the sender and the recipient."

"Except she sent it to us," Rada said. "And we've never even met her."

Simm looked almost but not quite at her eyes. "That's why I thought we'd go ask her in person."

"You've got a read on her."

"On where the message was sent from, anyway. It's weird. It was routed around the entire system, like you'd do to disguise the source, but it wasn't hard to track at all."

"Sounds like she wants us to come find her." She glanced at the countdown. Another thirty minutes to go. "Punch up the course."

He did so. Not that this took any more effort than transferring the coordinates from his device to the ship. The
Tine
spat out a course. Closer than Rada had feared. Within the Belt. Simm pulled up the course's details, subjecting them to his usual rigor. Unlike Rada, who ran manual checks because she didn't trust them, he did so in order to learn to calculate such things himself.

Wasn't much else to talk about until countdown. Eight minutes to departure, Simms started to get twitchy. She tried not to smile. Once the seconds hit single digits, he squeezed his eyes shut.

She laughed and reached for his hand. "This isn't even the bad part."

"It's
all
bad."

There might come a time when she got sick of his flight anxiety, but that day hadn't arrived yet. With a lurch, the ship lifted, steadying itself with brief, automated blasts from its docking thrusters. She followed along in her head. The rear screen showed the platform of parked ships shrinking behind them.

As soon as they tilted away from the station, Simm's breathing went from audible to frantic. He clamped hard on her hand.

"Everyone was wrong about everything," he said. "We should never have crawled out of the ocean."

Once they were clear, the
Tine
blasted away, thrusting her into her seat. As soon as their vector steadied, Simm's breathing calmed. Around the time Mars was a red dot in their rearview, he opened his eyes.

Rada rolled hers. "We really need to get you an anesthesiologist."

Simm muttered something and checked his device. Jain Kayle still hadn't replied. Rada's good humor fell behind her as swiftly as Ares Orbital.