Wings of Retribution (66 page)

They’re taking my ship… 
Dallas straightened, lifting her chin.  “I’m gonna be on that ship the next time it takes off.”

Ragnar and Stuart glanced at each other.  Ragnar cleared his throat.  “Listen, Dallas, I heard about
Beetle
and everything you went through to get that ship, but that’s a tall order.  It could lift off a week from now or it could lift off tonight.  We just don’t know.”

“I’m gonna be on it,” Dallas insisted.  “It’s my ship.”

“Then what?” Stuart asked.  “You’ll just play Ring Around the Rosie with Juno’s fleet until we’re ready for you to pick us up?”

Dallas bared her teeth.  “
Retribution’s
mine.  I’m not letting it get away from me again.”

“We know that.  We’re just saying that there are more important things right now than getting back on that ship.  We can’t do it until we’re absolutely ready.”

“We’re bringing about twenty passengers with us,” Ragnar added.  “They’ve got a roomful of shifters and I’m not leaving them behind.”

“Fine.  Great.  You get the shifters and I’ll get the ship.  We’ll meet in the middle.”

“Dallas…” Stuart began.

“Just shut up, Stuart!” Dallas snapped.  “You’re not in my head anymore.  You can’t tell me what to do.  I’m not gonna let them tease me like this.  I’m getting my ship back.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what Juno wants you to do,” Stuart said softly.  “Have you thought about that?  Maybe she wants to draw out anyone she didn’t manage to brainwash.”

Leave it to Stuart to be logical.

Well, screw logic.  Dallas lifted her lips from her teeth.  “Then she’s in for a surprise, ‘cause I’m gonna blow her pretty little island to pretty little bits if she tries to stop me.”

Reenactments

Athenais was amused when the doors opened and Juno walked in with twenty Warriors carrying old-style automatic combustion rifles.  She was not amused when they began shooting.  The shifters ran, but the projectiles mowed through the decorative brush, leaving them no place to hide.

Athenais was one of the first to be hit.  She fell backwards with the force of the bullet, feeling as if she had gotten hit in the chest with a hammer.  All around her, the shifters were falling, hitting the ground, screaming in alien tongues.  One by one, their bodies changed, one final shift as their lifeforce left them.  Even Paul lost his human form, becoming a mottled orange and brown, taking on the amorphous shape of an amoeba.

In a daze, Athenais heard Juno walk up to her.

“This one’s not dead,” she said, her face perfectly calm. 

Like she’s talking about the lawn,
Athenais thought.

Boots thumped on the grassy ground as one of the Warriors stepped close and shot Athenais in the head.

Pilot of freighter B-89, please report to the loading bay for your next assignment.

Grumbling, Dallas sat up and checked the clock by the wall.  Almost three in the morning.  Outside, the rain was blasting against the inch-thick window panes, which had risen from the sills early that night, as the storm was worsening.

Pilot of freighter B-89, please report to the loading bay for—

“I’m
coming!
” Dallas shouted into the comset, probably a bit too loud.  She slipped her feet into her boots and tugged on her spacer jacket.  The place had no mirror, so she ran her hand through her hair a few times and splashed some water on her face.  Outside, lightning brightened the sky in intricate forks of blue and purple.  On the nightstand, the electric lamp was flickering as even the internal power systems bowed to the storm.

Dallas took a brief glance outside and immediately felt ill.  Seventy foot waves crashed against the base of the Wall and wind-whipped sprays of ocean water shot up another eighty feet, blowing over the top of the Wall in sloshes the size of houses.

“They want me to fly in
that?
”  Dallas suddenly didn’t feel too good.  The little cargo vessels were barely airworthy as it was, but it looked like hurricane-force winds, with ocean swells that could swallow up unsuspecting ships like mountains rising out of thin air.  The engines were delicate, too.  An overload of water could bring them to a grinding halt, and her ship didn’t carry a lifeboat. 

Biting her lip, Dallas left her room and hurried down the corridor and down the six flights of stairs to the ground level.  She tried not to look as the ocean pummeled the inch-thick glass there, straining to get inside the walls, making the stone under her feet shudder.

Anxious to get away from the windows, she hurried up to the loading bay and glanced around.  The dockmaster was directing a group of men hoisting huge boulders into the back of a freighter.  All around her, soaked men in nothing but Stranger loin wraps were loading piles of rocks and debris into every ship in the dock.  Ships were coming and going at unnerving speeds, dripping rain and buffeted by the winds as they launched themselves over the wall. 

As soon as the dockmaster saw Dallas, he came toward her at a jog.

“We’ve got a breach in the wall on the eastern side,” he shouted, panting.  “Every pilot is reassigned to containment runs until the storm gives out.  Get your ship and start plugging the hole.”

“But the B-89’s barely even skyworthy.  I go out in that weather and it’s gonna go down.”

“Then make sure you land in the breach!” the dockmaster shouted at her.  “Now move!”  He turned and began haranguing a work crew, Dallas forgotten.

Dallas began jogging toward the B-89, but then hesitated.  With all the activity in the bay,
Retribution
still remained abandoned.  She glanced all around her, trying to find any sign that she wasn’t totally alone with her ship.  Eventually, her eyes settled on
Retribution
once more.  Above, the wind thrashed the sides of the wall, pummeling the dock with sheeting rain.  Somewhere nearby, one of the tarps they had thrown up to shield the workers from the rain had collected too much water and poured loose, dousing an entire work group with water.  They dropped their burden on another worker, who began to scream under the enormous rock.  The dockmaster started shouting for a stretcher and men ran to help them roll the boulder from atop the screaming dockman.

Dallas heard none of it.  She stood in the rain, her heart pounding, seeing nothing but her ship.  If she went to it instead of following the dockman’s orders, they would know.  Without Stuart, the second time they took her to that little white room, she would lose herself.  She would no longer be Dallas York, but some mindless drone working for the Empire shipping crates of pottery for the rest of her life.

Her feet started moving before she realized she had made up her mind.  She walked up to the airlock, hit the button, and stepped inside.  On the other side, she caught one last look at the chaos at the dock before the door shut, leaving her in silence.  She entered the code to lock the door, then turned and made her way to the bridge.  As she walked, the lights came on around her, a welcoming glow that sent tingles down her spine.

Home.  She was home.

Inside the bridge, she entered her codes into the security panel.  The words that followed were music to her ears.

“Welcome Captain Dallas York.  Personal preferences now in effect.”

The first thing Dallas did was delete Juno’s profile from the ship’s database.  The second thing she did was make it so that the ship would never again allow her onboard.

Satisfied, Dallas sat down in the captain’s chair and caressed the firm metal of the controls.  They weren’t the simple up-down, left-right controls of a planetary spacer.  Instead, it had two main foot pedals that controlled the slipstream pull and the main engine thrust, eight thruster controls on the stick that, when twisted, each added extra power to a different point on the ship, and an array of levers that corresponded to twenty different burners for delicate interspace maneuvering and trajectory adjustments.  And that did not even include the three hundred other buttons and switches spreading out before her, controlling everything from autopilot to sensors.

Gazing down at the complicated expanse of controls, Dallas felt a rush of happiness.  Finally.  She had her ship.

The click of boots on the metal floor behind her made Dallas stiffen and turn.

Tommy was advancing on her, a metal pipe in his hand.  He lowered it when he saw her face.  “
Dallas
?”

“
Tommy
?”

“You have orders to fly this somewhere, Dallas?”  he looked confused.

She grinned up at him.  “Nope.”

For the first time in her memory, she saw the Colonel smile.  “Then what are you waiting for?”  He set the pipe aside and sat down in the navigator’s seat.

“Might want to strap in,” Dallas suggested.  “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.”

When Athenais sat up, the sound of twenty rifles being shouldered welcomed her.

“Hello Juno,” she said, peering up at the woman tiredly.  The small, petite woman was surrounded by a couple dozen large, muscular men with rifles and combat gear that Athenais recognized from the losing side of the Second Utopian Wars.  Ground forces, shifter battalion.  Seeing that, Athenais sighed.  “Got your yearly dose of slaughter in, eh?  I was wondering how long it would take.”