Rebel Stars 1: Outlaw Read online

  Webber glanced at Jons. Jons winked. Webber sloshed the jug. "I'll drink to that."

  They advanced toward the bridge. The doors were locked, but Jons parted them with the same trick he'd used to spring the others. Webber entered first. Gomes was alone. Eyes locked on the screens. Muttering into her comm. Brown face turned pale by the light of the displays. For a moment, Webber's confidence receded like a tide. On screen, the lifeboat was docked to the cargo ship's airlock.

  "We need to talk," Webber said. "It's about you being a total asshole."

  She whirled. Her cheeks twitched, gaze shifting past him to the others as they filtered through the door. "Vincent. After I plucked you out of the gutter?"

  Vincent shrugged his bony shoulders. "Believe it or not, I am but a remora here. You're looking right past the shark."

  A cloud crossed over her face. "Webber?"

  "I might be dumb, but you're the one who hired me." Webber stalked forward, bottle in one hand, galley knife in the other. "Talk. Bleed. Your choice."

  "It's not how it looks." She stood, palms raised. "When we made the delivery, I was going to announce a bonus."

  "How generous," Jons said. "Is that our idiot pay kicking in?"

  "Wait until you hear the numbers."

  Harry cleared his throat. "Before we start dividing up this manna from heaven, might we discuss who we're currently robbing?"

  "Nevedia," she said. "Next-gen meds. Tailored to knock down whatever mutations Jupiter's magnetic field induces in the locals' bacteria. So sizzling they wouldn't even trust the formula to Needles."

  "Nevedia?" Harry said. "Third-largest drug manufacturer Nevedia? Top-forty fleet in the system Nevedia?"

  "That's exactly why they were arrogant enough to cut out on the Lane. Speaking of cuts, you know what we're looking at? Fifteen grand."

  Jons beetled his brows. "You knocked off a Nevedia cargo cruiser for fifteen grand?"

  "Each," Lara said. "Dumbass."

  A startled silence washed over the bridge. Webber lowered his knife. "How were you going to explain a 15K bonus?"

  "With great difficulty," Gomes laughed. "Got lucky speculating on the tritium market. Something like that. Might have had to spread it over multiple deliveries."

  "How much are you taking?"

  "Well," she said. "I'm the captain. I knew what was happening. The rest of you would have had plausible deniability."

  "How much?"

  "You have to consider expenses. Your cut. The new recruits. Mods, materiel, bribes. Savings against potential damages to the ship. Adds up. The net's a lot slimmer than the gross."

  Webber tightened his grip on the blade. "Don't make me ask a third time."

  Gomes swallowed. "Six hundred."

  "Grand?" Lara honked with laughter. "I'm guessing that's conservative, too."

  "And you get fifteen. Each. All you have to do is keep your mouths shut."

  Webber moved to rub his mouth, caught the gleam of the knife, and arrested his hand. Fifteen thousand. That was three months right there. Enough to get his head above water—for now. But after it was gone, he'd be right back where he started.

  "Question," he said. "Is this a one-time thing?"

  Gomes met his eyes. "Do you want it to be?"

  Harry laughed in disbelief. "Might I remind you this is Nevedia? Who exactly was on board?"

  "No one. Drone. Only potential casualties were Taz and MacAdams."

  "And us," Jons muttered.

  "And us." Webber stepped forward. "Taz and MacAdams, what are they getting?"

  Gomes glanced at the screen. "Depends on expenses."

  "Points on the net? Then what's what we get, too."

  "Come on. You can't ask points for staying in your bunks and squeezing your eyes shut."

  "We'll earn our points the same way they are. How much are they getting? Ten?"

  "Fifteen," she said. "Each."

  "Then we'll take ten. Each."

  Gomes drew back her chin. "That leaves me with twenty. As captain."

  He shrugged. "A lot better than twenty years in the brig after one of us decides being accessory isn't worth 15K."

  "Eight," she growled. "Each. This is the only time I'll make the offer."

  Webber glanced between the others.

  "Drones only," Harry put in. "I'm not blowing a hole in anything with a crew. No amount of money is worth murder."

  "Second," Lara said.

  "And we discuss the targets in advance," Jons said. "Nevedia's not so crazy. They've barely got a presence Outside. Some of the others, you're talking suicide."

  Webber nodded. "On the flip side, I don't want to be stealing Ma and Pa's yearly harvest. I only want to take from people who can afford it."

  Gomes' gaze moved across them. "For freebooters, you make a lot of moral demands."

  Webber set down the knife. "Even pirates got to have a code, don't they?"

  Jons hefted the bottle. "I'll drink to that. Captain?"

  Anger danced in Gomes' eyes, but a smile spread across her mouth. She stepped forward, took the jug, and tipped it up.

  She returned it and wiped her mouth. "Christ. First order of business once we sell those pills? Buy something worth drinking."

  On the screen, the lifeboat disembarked from the Nemedia vessel and thrust back toward the Fourth Down. Once it cleared, the cargo ship burst from stem to stern. Webber put up his fist and cheered.

  ~

  After, as always, he felt dumb. Yet also, as always, he knew the feeling would pass. He was well beyond the normal rules. When you were drowning, you grabbed hard to any opportunity to surface. No matter how it would look to those watching from the safety of dry land.

  The lifeboat returned to the Fourth. MacAdams and Taz appeared on the bridge and halted, staring in surprise at the crew. Both bore pistols on their hips.

  Gomes smiled. "Welcome to the shareholder's meeting. We have decided to rewrite our business plan to focus on our most profitable enterprises. Speaking of, how'd the robbery go?"

  "Great." MacAdams fished a baggie of pills from his pocket and lobbed it toward Gomes. They were currently under light acceleration, and in the low gravity, the baggie sailed through the air like a spear.

  Gomes nabbed it and held it up for inspection. "Wonderful. Everyone, buckle up. Time to get out of here before the dragons show up to reclaim their treasure."

  The crew strapped in. The course was already planned and ready, but Gomes let Lara do the honor of punching the button.

  The Fourth blasted away. Behind them, the ruin of the Nemedia ship faded into the darkness.

  7

  The most widely-told story of how Toman Benez came to own the Hive—known, in those days, as the Eye of Julia—was that it had been a hostile takeover.

  By itself, this wasn't remarkable. Space being space, i.e. a gigantic yawning nothing much too vast for any single government or corporation to control more than a hair-thin slice of, people reached out and took things from each other all the time. Even things as significant as stations and habitats.

  What was remarkable about the taking of the Eye of Julia was the method. Toman hadn't come at it with a fleet of dreadnoughts and twelve tubs of marines. He hadn't swarmed it with drones and nukes. According to rumor, what he'd done was convince its security that they were playing for the wrong team. Not through bribes, blackmail, or strong-arming them. He'd simply reached out to them, one by one, and explained why they needed to switch sides.

  And when he showed up with his fleet, they opened the door and rolled out the red carpet.

  To Rada, it sounded exaggerated. Another example of the cult of personality around Toman Benez. But after working for him for the last three years, she could almost believe it was true.

  Unlike many habitats, the Hive was built to be mobile. Its present location was in a heliocentric orbit in a quiet patch of space about twenty million miles behind Mars. Originally, it had been a run-of-the-mill spinning ring, but after installing artifici
al gravity, its previous owners had drawn it to a stop and expanded its docking port. Once Toman had gotten hold of it, he'd negotiated purchase of a nearby asteroid and dragged it over. Then the bastard had sealed it inside a spherical dome. Dumped fertilizer all over it. Added ponds, greenery, animals. And connected the dome to the Hive.

  On the Tine's screen, the installation looked like a silver ring about to pass over a tiny, pocket-sized Earth.

  They docked and debarked. The air inside the port smelled moist and earthy. Rada still found the whole thing ridiculously extravagant, but she had to admit it was relaxing. A cart waited for them at the empty terminal. On autopilot, it carried them straight through the tunnel bisecting the ring and into the spherical dome housing the microplanet.

  Which had a separate gravity system from the ring. As the cart neared the sphere, gravity dissipated until the vehicle began to float. It exited the tube, flipped about on a puff of air, oriented its wheels toward the ground that awaited them two hundred feet below, and passed into the rock's puny gravity well.

  It fell. A parachute shot from its center, its air-capturing cells so fine the whole thing had a gauzy, indistinct appearance, more like a cloud than solid matter. The cart descended gently, touching down on an X-marked pad, retracted the chute, then drove them to the rendezvous at Lake Mars, a (relatively) large body of water whose bed was lined with genuine Martian red clay.

  Toman sat on its bank, fishing. Hearing the cart, he reeled in his line and stood, brushing off his pants. He was shorter than she always remembered him. Younger, too—early thirties, and he was the rare tycoon whose apparent age was the same as his actual one. He had a way of moving that was difficult to describe, though. Flowing. Like a dancer, or Simm's Rainese knife fighting, or someone born to near-zero gravity.

  "Rada!" He threw aside the fishing pole and rushed toward her. "Please—tell me the Tine is okay."

  "I'm afraid it…it went down, sir. We had to swim vacuum all the way here."

  He gave her a look, then turned to Simm. "Is it okay? Your message said you'd been attacked."

  Simm smiled, looking past Toman's shoulder. "You will be gratified to learn the aggressors turned tail the instant the Tine showed its teeth."

  "I am gratified." He patted Simm on the shoulder and gestured Rada to a nearby rock. "Pull up a chair. And tell me exactly why I'm putting my people—and my ship—at risk."

  She sat on the large, flat stone, warmed by the artificial sunlight. There was even a bit of a breeze swirling around. Flies jounced on the surface of the lake. It was almost more than she could stand.

  "I thought you read our message," she said.

  "And I judged that it was too flimsy a reason to keep you out there. Not if it means dogfights and lengthy, unsatisfying murder investigations." He lowered himself to a boulder across from her. "So: convince me."

  "First off, our contact on this is—was—Jain Kayle. Ex-professor, physics and astronomy, emphasis on exosolar colonization. Several years ago, she left that post for the private sector. One of your rivals, as I recall."

  "I wouldn't call Iggi Daniels a rival," Toman said. "Rivals have to be able to beat you."

  Rada let a moment pass. "Point is, Kayle was tops. She dedicated her life to getting us out of here and into the galactic neighborhood. Two years ago, there was a rumor that they'd done it."

  "She hadn't spent long enough with Iggi to get anywhere."

  "If true, they'd be the first ones to get outside the Oort. In this case, the middle of nowhere is a major somewhere. After she contacted us, we did some serious digging. Every corner of the undernet we could find, including some isolated networks in the deep Outer. Every twist of the Labyrinth. We didn't find any hard evidence of the mission, but there was talk. A lot of it."

  "That is because talk costs nothing." Toman shifted on the rock. "Unlike deep space missions designed to thwart an unknown threat that's vanished everything else sent its way."

  "You told me to tell you everything we know."

  He closed his eyes. "Go on."

  "Backing up, Kayle contacted us two weeks ago. To prove that she was talking to me, and not someone pretending to be me, she made me go on video with a paper sign, gave me a key phrase, and watched as I wrote it on the sign. After that, she asked for a meet."

  "To tell you what?"

  "Well." Rada drew her feet in to sit cross-legged. "She wouldn't say. Not until we were in person, on one of your ships."

  "The topic can be inferred by context," Simm butted in. "She was into deep space. We're bug-hunters. Presumably, she found something out there—something alien."

  "Yes, it's all very tantalizing," Toman said. "And it's just like Iggi to send the entire Solar System on a wild goose chase."

  "Before the crash, Kayle tried to clue us in," Rada said. "She Needled us one last message. Routed it all the way across the system to hide her tracks. Delayed its delivery by a whole day."

  "Why would she delay her final words?"

  "Best guess?" Simm said. "She didn't want us to arrive on the site while whoever killed her was still there. However, it was timed so that we arrived in sufficient time to get a read on engine sigs, flight paths, et cetera."

  Toman's shoulders bobbed with laughter. "So you agree she was murdered, Simm? I thought you needed more proof than that."

  "The evidence isn't conclusive. But it deserves further resources."

  "I looked into her message. The thing about the rabbit. Not a single reference to it anywhere."

  Rada sighed. "That's why we went after the e-sig instead."

  Toman turned to gaze at the yellow light gleaming on the blue water of his private world. "I want you to back off that angle. I'll task some worker bees to it. They can pry into police records, pirate chatter, and anything involving the Piper from a safe distance. If their panning turns up any gold, I may redeploy you to the field then."

  "And in the meantime?"

  "You're headed to the most boring place in all the universe: Earth."

  She glanced at Simm. "I'm not following."

  Toman stood and stretched his back. "Jain Kayle, astronaut extraordinaire, is a born-and-raised Earther. Her funeral's already been scheduled. If her last words mean anything to anyone, chances are you'll find them there."

  "That's a hell of a way to condense the search." Rada got to her feet. "When's the date?"

  "Two weeks. They have to make sure everyone has time to fly in." Her boss turned and smiled at her. "In the meantime, I want you to think long and hard about what you almost did to my Tine."

  ~

  The funeral was to be held on the beach at Founder's Bay. Rada arrived early, taking a chair near the back. The air smelled like salt and kelp and water. Out to sea, the Invasion Memorial rose from the waves, silent, titanic, a black plane of startling size. She knew it had been restored many times over the centuries—not to mention stripped of anything interesting and/or useful long, long ago—yet gazing at the alien ship, she couldn't shake the feeling that it could lift off at any moment.

  And finish what it had started.

  As the guests arrived in ones and twos, she gave them a good long look. Following along remotely through the lens cam in her right eye, Simm identified each in turn. Kayle hadn't had much in the way of family (a daughter, an ex-husband, two cousins), and most of the arriving mourners were either former colleagues from her university days, or employees at Valiant, Iggi Daniels' naval company.

  No one paid Rada any mind. By the time the ceremony began, fewer than half the seats were filled.

  A priest took the short platform, his back to the sea. He said some bland pleasantries and stepped down. He was replaced by Kayle's boss, Mikela Rolf, a fortyish woman with the musculature of an Earther. Rada didn't pay attention to her words so much as the strength of the relationship they hinted at. Fairly personal. She made a mental note.

  The next to move to the stage was Kayle's daughter Dinah. She was only 28, but she looked twice that, frail
and shuffling, dark circles around her eyes, knobby knuckles. Grief rarely did anyone any favors in the looks department, but Rada thought it was more than that. On her way to the platform, Dinah faltered and had to be helped up by a young man with the no-nonsense motions of a professional caretaker.

  Dinah moved to the podium, looked down, cleared her throat. She put her hand over her eyes and gestured offstage. The caretaker bounded up and helped her off.

  In the receiver in Rada's ear, Simm said, "Kudos for trying."

  From anyone else, it would have been an insult. From Simm, she knew it was sincere.

  A middle-aged man Simm ID'd as Bill Watkins shook Dinah's hand, leaned in to say something in her ear, then ascended to the podium. He was decent-looking, in an over-sunned way, and though he looked plenty sad, it was in a less severe way than Kayle's daughter. Watkins had been Kayle's boyfriend for several years, but they'd parted ways during the same period she'd left the university for Valiant. Rada wondered which event had precipitated which split.

  "It's been a few years since I saw Jain," he said. "But I'm not too proud to admit I've thought about her far more frequently. She got under your skin—in the best possible way. Passionate, but rarely angry, and never hurtful." He grinned wryly. "Well, rarely hurtful."

  A speckle of quiet laughter.

  "She did better than most of us, though. Better than I did. I think it was because she believed so much in her work that it lent her a clarity of purpose that most of us lack. I don't think it's a stretch to say that, while we'll all miss her, so will the world."

  Watkins bowed his head. Got some applause. Things wrapped up after that. People milled around, chatting in hushed tones. Rada got to her feet and, feeling more than a little ghoulish, approached Watkins.

  "Touching speech," she said. "I think she would have liked it."

  "Thanks." He smiled at her, eyebrows raising fractionally. "Were you a friend?"

  "We shared mutual interests. That's what I'd like to ask you about, actually." She frowned at the sand. "This may sound strange, but does the name Pip mean anything to you?"