Blowback (4 page)

“No recordings. I don’t want this recorded any more than you
do.” The man leaned in so close that Tom could practically smell the fear.
“Look at it this way, we want you to consider something. Just consider it. You
don’t have to do anything, but maybe if you have a few resources, you might
find a way to make the right choice.”

“You think so?”

The man took a deep breath. “I know it. Look at her. She’s a
killer.”

Tom looked down at the display. It showed a slave pen with a
woman whose dead fingers clutched the wire of her cage, and right in front of
it, a severed leg lay with a trail of blood leading off camera. Tom shrugged.
“She’s
genta
. None of them are well balanced.” Tom ignored the tight
ball of fear in his stomach.

The man poked at this display so that the images blurred
until he landed on the one where Da’shay was looking around the blood stained
room with undisguised glee. “Really? Have you ever known any of them to do
this?”

Tom rested his hand on the butt of his gun and thought about
that.
Genta
were an odd lot, but Tom hadn’t ever seen one get that
violent. Like most people if you pushed ‘em, they’d push back, kill even, but
the glee in Da’shay’s face as she’d swung that knife was a terrifying thing.

“There’s something wrong with her and too many people are
willing to treat her like a nuclear weapon—dangerous but controllable if you
have the right safety equipment. However, if she’s walking around, do you
really think she’s controlled?” The man leaned over and hit the forward button
on the display several times. Eventually Tom recognized the
Kratos
. From
the angle, the picture had been taken from a satellite and the image was a
little grainy from being enlarged, but he could recognize the ship’s lines anywhere.
She was sitting in the middle of a burnt out field with another ship next to
her lying on its side with one of the wings ripped and twisted.

Da’shay stood in the middle, her clothes burned off and her
skin blackened by the fire. For a human, that would have been fatal, but Tom
could see from her body language that she was calm.

“You’re in the ship at this point. You and your captain and
sergeant.” The man poked his finger at the damaged freighter. “Becca is pushing
every panic button on the bridge and calling for help so loud that she’d
convinced half the system that they were being invaded by some new alien life
form and Da’shay is walking around. Now someone who knows how to survive…is he
going to get back on a ship with her?”

Right now, the man had just about convinced Tom to walk away
from his pension to avoid doing exactly that, but he suspected that this man
and his employers wanted something else out of him. “What sort of resources do
you think I need?” Tom asked.

The man leaned back and sighed with relief. Rubbing his hand
across his sweaty face, he nodded. “Good. Good,” he muttered.

“Ain’t promising anything,” Tom warned. He looked around for
anyone who might be this twerp’s backup, but everyone in here looked to be up
to no good, which was normal enough for this place.

“No promises, and you aren’t agreeing to do anything,” the
man quickly answered. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small disk.
“This is a transmitter. We only want to keep track of Da’shay—where she is,
what’s she’s doing.”

Tom took the small metal disk. It was an
Agni
series
bug, one of the later ones, the WL or HL lines. “What she’s saying and what
people are saying to her,” Tom added. The L lines all used audio signals that a
microchip compacted and then broadcast in a tiny burst on a regular schedule.
That’s why they were so big. This one was almost as big as the fingernail on
Tom’s pinky finger. “I ain’t taking that on the
Kratos
.” His hand shot
out and grabbed the man by the front of his shirt, but in this bar, no one even
bothered pretending to look shocked at the threat of physical violence. An
audio signal from inside the
Kratos
was a security breech that made
blowing up your captain look like a child’s prank. After all, Captain Severn
had survived one little grenade, even if his hover hadn’t.

“No, no, I wouldn’t expect you to.” The little man’s voice
rose a couple of octaves. “When she’s on the ship, you can keep that in an
electronic safe. That’s fine. We only want to know what she’s doing when she
goes wandering off on her own. We want to know if other people are going to end
up like that crew.” The man looked down toward the display. “Command thinks
she’s not going to do that again, but I say that what a person does once, he’s
likely to do again. You were smart enough to protect yourself and your
crewmates against Captain Severn, even when it meant doing something illegal.
I’m hoping you’ll do that again.”

Tom narrowed his eyes and studied him. “So, you think I’m
smart enough to know how to keep myself alive?”

He nodded frantically.

“But then you think I’ll conspire against a
genta
?
That’s suicide. You tell me Da’shay is violent and we both know she’s
genta
-strong
and crazy as fuck, and you think someone who knows how to protect his own skin
would conspire against that? Someone in your organization has a few screws
loose.” Tom pulled the man even closer so that their faces were inches from
each other. The man’s hands grabbed at Tom’s shoulders, but there was no way he
could physically fight his way free and he knew it.

“You aren’t doing anything. Your hands are clean. We’ll do
everything. This is just a way to minimize the risk to others. Your hands are
clean.” The man’s words tumbled out in a raw panic and Tom pushed the man back
into his own chair. White knuckled hands clung to the arms of the chair and he
stared at Tom the way someone might look at a wild tiger. That made Tom smile.

“Hand it over, then.” Tom picked up his drink and tossed it
back. The vodka burned all the way down.

The man reached out with a trembling hand and put a small
silver disk on the table. “Press the center and little hooks will grab any
porous surface—wood, cloth, foam, unsealed—”

“I know what porous means. Idiot.” Tom slammed his drink
down on the table and grabbed the small disk.

Tom nodded to the tech who was checking the lines to the
Kratos
.
The woman nodded back and then kept running her checks. Becca could do all
this, but after watching the rest of the crew get blown up, the captain had
given her a little down time. If Tom was lucky, she might spend it with him.

There were hover races in the afternoon or the junkyard had
lots of good pickings this time of month, right after the Corps ships got
upgrades. Tom had seen Becca heading out there more than once, so maybe she’d
like a little help carrying back some of the heavier parts. He was guessing
that she was building her own atmosphere hopper or maybe even a shuttle. Took
brains to know how to do something like that, but Becca had those to spare.
Hell, she’d got through the engineering academy.

Leaning against the side of the
Kratos
, Tom hit his
communicator. “Becca, you in there?”

“Tom?”

“Who else does it sound like?” Tom flinched. That had been a
bad opening. “You feel like getting out of the ship for a while?” Tom scratched
his chest and started to feel a little nervous as the time seemed to get
awfully long considering it was a mighty short question. The tall blast wall
created shade that hid half the ship and Tom started wandering toward the
sunlight. The ship sat on a thirty-five-degree angle with her nose to the sky
and her thrusters to the blast wall, so the bunks weren’t exactly comfortable
and the passageways all turned and angled in ways that made it hard to walk.
She should jump at a chance to get out of there.

“Um, sure,” Becca finally answered. “You got any particular
place in mind?”

“I ain’t particular. You want to go to that junkyard you
like picking through?”

“The junkyard?” Becca sounded confused now and Tom could
feel his stomach tighten. He wasn’t doing this right and he wasn’t exactly sure
why.

“If you have some place else in mind, say it,” Tom snapped.
Why wouldn’t she ever tell him what she was looking for? Some days Tom envied
the doxies. People walked in and told them exactly what they wanted, no games
required. They gave sex, you gave them money and everyone was happy. Instead he
was stuck trying to read between the lines, and reading had never been his
strongest skill. Tom knew how to field strip a gun. He could take out a
half-dozen enemy before they could spot him in his sniper’s shelter, and he
knew how to run his thumbs between a woman’s legs so that she writhed in
pleasure. But no matter how often he sat in that rainbow colored engine room of
Becca’s, he couldn’t seem to figure her out.

“Cupcakes.”

Tom just about slammed his head into the
Kratos
’ wing
when he spun around to see Da’shay walking up behind him. “God damn it.” Her
long hair was gone, but short black curls had already grown out in the two
weeks since the explosion. Maybe it was his imagination that her skin looked a
little more blue and a little less green, but other than that, he couldn’t tell
she’d been standing at ground zero a few short days ago.

“Damn cupcakes would be hot,” Da’shay announced, as if that
made any sense at all. Damn it. He hadn’t wanted to see her. If he could avoid
being around her, he wouldn’t have to think about the small button in his
pocket. He could just wait until they had their orders and drop it in the
trash. The problem was that Tom could drop it in the trash now, but he hadn’t.
He kept it, fingering it when he thought about the fire that had engulfed the
Kratos
.
The captain wasn’t keeping track of Da’shay, the little man had been right
about that. Da’shay stopped her wandering and looked at Tom with a small smile
that gave him the creeps.

The hull door slid open with a heavy thunk. “Tom! You okay?”
Becca was there with a gun in hand. Tom stared up at her, trying to figure out
what she was doing.

A new voice called, “What’s wrong?” Tom looked over to see
Ramsay closing in on him.

“Don’t rightly know,” Tom answered. “Becca’s taken to
answering the door half dressed with a gun in hand.” He gestured up to where
she stood with her shirt unbuttoned. The fabric only hid her breasts because
luck and gravity made it drape right. She gave a short yelp and then vanished
back into the ship.

“What the hell?” Ramsay asked loudly. Tom could only shrug
because he really had no idea what bug had crawled up Becca’s ass.

“Captain, he was cursing and running into the ship and I
just thought—” Becca called from inside. Ramsay turned to give Tom a weary
look.

“What?” Tom demanded. He hadn’t done anything.

“Why were you out here cursing?”

“Da’shay sneaked up on me.” Tom glared at the woman. He’d
had a good plan going until she went and screwed it up. Da’shay ran her hand
over the line of rivets along the side of the
Kratos
and walked on her
tiptoes. Freak. “Are we going to get rid of her before the next mission? I
can’t trust someone like that at my back.”

For a second, Ramsay could only stare at him in shock. “I
don’t remember anyone asking your opinion.” Captain Ramsay crossed his arms and
gave Tom of those real sharp glares—one that promised that Tom would be
scraping the undersides of deckplates with a handknife if he didn’t watch his
tongue. Friendship was one thing, publicly questioning the captain was another,
and Tom knew he was over the line. However, Tom hadn’t ever been particularly
good at staying inside the lines.

“I don’t trust her at my back, Captain. Always sneaking up
on a man like that.”

Da’shay looked over. “I said ‘cupcake’.” She tilted her head
as if she was listening to something, but there wasn’t anyone talking.

“See?” Tom turned on Ramsay and pointed at her. “She’s nuts.
And she knew there was a bomb there, and she ain’t exactly reliable. We should
leave her behind next time.”

“Seems like you shouldn’t be taking shots at other people’s
reliability, Tom.” Ramsay got quiet. “Actually, seems like I shouldn’t either,
but that would be why I don’t do it.” Ramsay gave him a stern look and Tom
could feel the danger. He knew the captain was mad at him, but this time, Tom
was right. He wasn’t usually, but Da’shay was dangerous and the captain was
ignoring that.

“I’m reliable enough. You never had cause to doubt that I
had your back,” Tom pointed out. “And I figure that gives me a right to point
out that I do have cause to worry about my back.”

Ramsay was visibly taken back and he seemed to think that
over. “Another captain looking at your records might decide you were more of a
danger to a ship than Da’shay over there, but I chose you, just like I chose
Da’shay. My ship, my instincts, my rules.”

Tom frowned. “You chose her?” Tom could understand if the
captain had been ordered to take Da’shay in, but picking her didn’t make much
sense. Plenty of
genta
had jobs, skills—but Da’shay was so blessed weird
she wasn’t the sort to hold a job. She didn’t do any duties on a regular basis.
And Ramsay had picked her?

Ramsay spent a lot of time looking at Tom as if he was
trying to figure something out. “I picked her, Tom. Same as I picked you when I
saw your record. Hell, I had to talk her into joining us.”

“Crew is always crew,” Da’shay said solemnly. “Until they
fuck up.”

Tom glared at her. “Not telling us about that bomb is fucking
up.”

Ramsay sighed and ran a hand across his face. “You are
stubborn as a rutting bull, aren’t you? Well let me make this real simple, Tom.
She’s crew. You back off or I’m going to start thinking you don’t trust me
enough to follow orders, and that’s one place you don’t want me to go.”

In the face of their sudden alliance, Tom felt a helpless
rage well up. Six years he’d followed Ramsay, but the man wasn’t listening to
anything he said. Da’shay turned away from Ramsay and studied Tom.

Ramsay turned toward Da’shay. “Hey, your hair is growing
back in nice, Da’shay.” Ramsay walked over to the still-open door and shouted
in. “Becca, you coming out? I don’t really want the ship open if you’re not at
the hatch.”

Becca appeared at the opening. “Sorry about that. I grabbed
the first shirt I found when Tom bellowed and it wasn’t exactly clean. I had to
change. So, are we going somewhere?” She sat down in the hatch and dangled her
legs out the door. Tom could feel his jaw getting sore from clenching it.

That was a perfect chance to offer to lift her down instead
of waiting for the dock ramp to extend. Instead of Tom having that chance,
Ramsay was standing right there, holding his arms out for Becca. His hands slid
over her rounded waist and then he lifted her to the ground. She landed with a
little bounce and smiled at Ramsay. As much as Tom respected Ramsay, he’d never
hated him quite so much. And then there was Da’shay. If she hadn’t jumped out
and startled him, he wouldn’t have made such a mess out of things.

He glanced over and Da’shay was still staring at him oddly.
“Force the follicle through telogen phase into the anagen phase so that dermal
papilla produce keratin,” Da’shay proclaimed grandly.

“What?” Ramsay asked. At least that saved Tom from asking
the same damn question.

“Hair, Captain,” Becca said with a smile. She held her arm
out and Da’shay slid closer until the two women could lock arms. “She’s talking
about regrowing hair. Are you going to keep it curly like that? It looks really
pretty.” Tom didn’t know
genta
could control shit like that—then again,
he hadn’t ever cared.

“Disulfide bonds,” Da’shay offered. It sounded like
gobbledygook to Tom, but Becca smiled wider.

“It looks nice,” she said firmly. “Doesn’t it look nice?”
Becca looked from Ramsay to Tom and back.

“Looks fine,” Ramsay said a little helplessly. “I’ve got
reports to write.”

“Oh, Captain! Tom was just saying that we should do things
as crew, and Eli isn’t here and now you’re talking about leaving.” She looked
up at him with this pleading expression that Tom figured he’d cut off a finger
to get directed his way. Even worse, the look was working on Ramsay. He looked
around as if he was searching for someone to save him, but he didn’t go walking
off, which is what Tom wanted.

“Are we going to go to that junkyard you like?” Tom asked.
Maybe if the captain knew Becca wanted some hard labor done, that would scare
him off. Tom figured he could outshine Ramsay about any day of the week when it
came to lifting something big and heavy. It was about the only area where he
could outshine the captain other than shooting.

“Junkyard?” Ramsay looked at Becca, and now she was studying
the ground, her face turning color. She was fair, about as fair as a person
could get seeing as how she sat inside all day, and now Tom could see the pink
rise to her cheeks. Only, Tom wasn’t sure why she was blushing.

“A shiny new spider to scamper across the skies,” Da’shay
offered.

“Not to sound under-educated, but…what?” Ramsay asked again.

“I’m building a ship,” Becca said softly. “I mean, I’m not
going to finish for years and years, and maybe never because a quantum string
stabilizer is really expensive. I thought of maybe doing an atmosphere jumper,
but I’m not really good at flying in air. It’s like walking in soup. Really
thick soup. The whole thing is probably stupid.”

“Nothing you do is stupid,” Tom interrupted. The smile Becca
gave him in return made him forget how frustrated he was. “You’re about the
smartest person I know.”

“Thank you, Tom.” She practically preened like the roosters
on the farm where Tom had grown up. “That means a lot. And if I ever finish my
ship, you will be the first one to get a ride.”

Tom smiled. “Ain’t going to turn that down. Only maybe I
should do the landing.” Tom watched as all Becca’s joy evaporated. He opened
his mouth, desperate to take the words back, but he couldn’t. They were out
there and nothing he did would erase them. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he
hurried to add. “It’s just that I’m a bit nervous after—” Tom stopped when he
caught sight of the glare Ramsay was giving him. He changed tactics again. “It
wasn’t your fault that we all about got blown up when you were flying.” Becca
lost the last of the color in her face and Tom could feel a quiet, desperate
panic circling in his stomach. “That was Da’shay’s fault.”

“Tom!” Ramsay snapped. Instead of looking any happier, Becca
was looking at Tom as if he were a bug on the bottom of her shoe, and only
Da’shay was still smiling at him.

“That wasn’t Da’shay’s fault. Just because she was having
trouble explaining what was in the crate doesn’t mean that she wasn’t trying to
help. She was right there with the crate, so don’t you go talking about her
like she set the bomb and then ran away.” Becca was a good foot shorter than
Tom, but she moved in on him, poking her finger into his stomach with a fury
that Tom hadn’t seen her show before.

“I never said she set the bomb. Captain, tell her I never
said that,” Tom appealed to Ramsay.

“Becca,” Ramsay said with a sigh.

“Captain, he’s saying those things about Da’shay. She’s
never done anything but try to be our friend, and sometimes she doesn’t explain
things well, but she got blown up worse than any of us.”

Tom opened his mouth to tell them what else Da’shay had been
up to, but the little man had wiped the display and Tom didn’t have any proof
about what he saw. Before, maybe he would’ve taken a risk, but Ramsay wasn’t
reacting the way Tom expected. He was taking Da’shay’s side, both him and Becca
were.

Ramsay stepped forward, looking a little alarmed, but Tom
wasn’t sure whether he wanted to protect him or Becca. “Becca, maybe a crew day
out isn’t the best idea. You and Da’shay should go somewhere nice, somewhere
that you can get pampered a bit because you know our next assignment is going
to come in quick.”

Tom watched the emotions slip across Becca’s face. She was
mad at Tom and he wanted a chance to explain, but even if she gave him that
chance, what was he supposed to say? Everything he said was true. It wasn’t his
fault that the idea of Becca behind the ship’s controls made his skin crawl.
The surgeons had to use stem cells to accelerate the growth of a new ball joint
in his hip, so he figured he had a right to feel a little touchy on the
subject. That wasn’t his fault any more than it was his fault that Da’shay had
left them to get dead. But Becca clearly didn’t agree.