Escape (11 page)

“I know.”

“How much time do we have before others come?”

“Not long.”

The pair of men reached the end of the corridor and the shorter one waved his hand in front of the door sensor. The door slid aside.

“Let us hope Prospector Kieran Hawker hurries, then.”

* * *

I'm certifiable. What am I thinking? Getting involved with terrorists. Helping them makes me an accomplice. I'll be an outlaw. And if they don't slit my throat as soon as I finish helping them, I'll be leaving there with a stolen ship. I can't feign innocence. I'm crossing a line here. But an outlaw with a ship is better than a law-abiding citizen with nothing
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Kieran shook his head, trying in vain to clear away his doubts. He spent a moment focusing on nothing but the winding curves of the tunnel to the surface of the asteroid. Now that he knew there were no obstacles in the tunnel, he was flying back through it at top speed, the walls
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what little of them he could see, illuminated by his bow lights whenever he got too close
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were rushing by in a dark gray-brown blur. The proximity alarms were intermittently blaring, letting him know that he was adjusting for the curvature of the tunnel too slowly. He was flying back in a sweaty, adrenaline-tinged haze, his heart pounding erratically.

He needed to find a code slicer who would be willing to help him, and who might be willing to front the money for the tolls there and back again
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another thousand tokens
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in exchange for a share of the ship he was going to get. Most code slicers would go for it. The challenge of hacking UBER security would be enough incentive for most of them, and the share of a ship worth millions of tokens would certainly be enough to justify the risk. It would be harder to find one willing to shell out for the tolls, but maybe Kieran could find his slicer at a closer station
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he might even be able to pay the tolls himself in that case.

Kieran risked flying one-handed in order to query his navcomp for star charts of the nearby area. Keeping half an eye on his sensor display
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making sure he didn’t drift too close to the walls of the tunnel
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and half an eye on his star charts, he saw something interesting. The starmap his father had purchased showed a nearby station, only a few trilinears away, but located off the space lanes, meaning one could only travel to it with a TLS drive (which he didn’t have in his flitter). The interesting part was that it was more than likely an outlaw station, simply because it was located off the spacelanes and in an “officially” empty area of space. Kieran filed that detail away for future reference. After this little errand, he was going to need to find an “uncharted” place to lie low for a while.

Continuing his search for a nearer station where he might find a code slicer, Kieran checked up and down the IF-57. There was another FMG station
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Outpost 134
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just three gates further up the spacelane, and there was an independently-owned trading depot
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The Corollary
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at the same location.
Perfect.
Trading depots saw a lot of transients, people from all walks of life hawking wares and services. It was the perfect place to find a slicer, if one knew where and how to look.

Kieran keyed in a course to the station
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just as he finished, his proximity alarms began blaring. He quickly looked up from the navcomp, saw the brown and gray wall of the tunnel rushing up to greet him, and used both hands to make a hard, high-G turn to port, using his left rudder pedal to accentuate the turn. He was pinned to his lecture so hard that he could feel every contour of it pressing into his back. The wall rushed up to greet him in a hazy brown blur, so close that Kieran felt sure he was about to scrape all the paint off his ship
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And then he was away from the wall, and the pressure eased, his course now corrected.
That was close.
Away from the walls of the tunnel, he was seemingly rushing through an endless void, the only clue that he was moving at all came from the drifting micro-particles of rock in the tunnel, illuminated in great swaths by his bow lights. They came out of the gloom in a blurry hail, like driving snow, only to bounce or skip harmlessly off his flitter’s hull and cockpit canopy with computer-simulated pinging sounds.

Kieran sighed, letting out his tension in a rush of stale air. His head was spinning with possibilities, consequences, and
 
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Hope.

Outlaw or not, I'm going to be free, and if I'm careful, no one will ever discover my connection to these terrorists.
He had no moral reservations about helping them
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what's the most harm they could do with a TLS gate?
More than likely, they were just looking for a ransom. And whatever had happened to the crew of the station and the ships docked to it, their situation wasn't going to get any better or worse with the lockdown disabled.

How could it?

A few minutes later, Kieran Hawker emerged from the tunnel at a screaming 10,000 mAps, and a few minutes after that, he disappeared through the distant gray ring of a TLS gate, heading northbound on the IF-57.

* * *

“I'm worried about him,” Jilly said.

“Don't be. Kieran can take care of himself. Prospecting isn't exactly the most dangerous job in the galaxy.” Reddick reached for his glass of Aubrelian Brandy and swirled the sparkling indigo liquid a few times before taking a luxuriant sip.

Jilly frowned from her place beside Reddick on the soft, brown masser-hide couch. “I'm not worried for his safety. He's been unusually withdrawn lately. I'm his best friend, and he won't talk to me. I think he's struggling, you know? Even this lucky strike of his
 
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I get the feeling that he's grasping at straws. Like maybe, it's not quite what he thinks it is
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or hopes it is. I mean, who would leave a belt rich in tetrillium ore off the star charts? And one that is so close to the spacelanes? That seems like an unlikely omission, even for the laziest cartographer in the history of the Union.”

Reddick snorted. “I'm his brother, and he won't talk to me, so don't feel bad. Not that that's anything new. I've always been the one reaching out to him, never the other way around. Not that that stops him from coming to me for money. The little weaslin.”

Jilly's expression turned curious. “Why do you think that is?”

“Maledicted if I know!”

“You know, I don't think it was easy for him to go to you for a loan. I was the one who suggested it, and I had to really convince him to take my advice.”

Reddick arched one eyebrow at her, and took another sip of his brandy. “Well, it was a maledicted fine way to hear from my brother after four years of almost perfect silence. I was beginning to forget I had a brother.”

Jilly crossed her legs toward Reddick, and shifted her position on the couch, so that she was more properly facing him. “What happened between you two? Kieran won't ever tell me.”

“Happened?” Reddick frowned. “Nothing happened. If you want my opinion, he's just jealous. He always has been. He can't stand to see how successful I've become while he's still crawling around at the bottom of the corporate ladder.”

“How did you become so successful, anyway?”

Reddick sighed. “Before dad died, I was almost finished a degree in corporate administration, majoring in automated systems. Kieran had just finished his primary education. After dad died, it looked like I was going to be forced to drop out just to pay for living expenses. Kieran was accepted to a few prestigious academies, but like me, he needed to consider more basic needs. He decided to follow in dad's footsteps and become a prospector. My choices were less clear. Out of desperation I applied for as many scholarships as I could find.”

“And?”

“I won two of them
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one to finish my degree, and another for graduate studies at the most prestigious academy on the Frontier.”

“Oh.” Jilly began nodding slowly. “I think I'm beginning to understand now. You had a lot of opportunities that he didn't, so now he feels resentful.”

“Yeah, but that's life, isn't it? It's not my fault
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I got lucky.”

“And you had your father to support you for the first few years of your secondary education. Kieran never had that.”

“Again. Not my fault.” Reddick took another, longer sip of his brandy. A few reusable ice cubes clinked together in the bottom of his glass.

“I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm just saying that I can understand why he's kept his distance.”

Reddick snorted. “Yeah, I understand too. He's a cretitch.”

Jilly appeared to be hesitating, struggling with what she was about to say next. She bit her lip and her gaze slipped away from Reddick.

“What is it?”

Jilly's big, blue eyes flicked briefly back to Reddick’s face. “Have you ever thought, that maybe, now that you're so rich and he's so poor, you could right the wrongs of fate?”

Reddick's brow pinched and furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you could pay for him to go to an academy and get the education he never had a chance to get.”

“He would never accept charity from me.”

“But if you knew he would accept, would you be willing to offer?”

“I suppose.”

Jilly's lips parted into a broad grin. She leaned in close to Reddick and gave him a long kiss. When she withdrew, she stayed close, enjoying the rich, heady scent of Aubrelian Brandy on Reddick’s breath. She reached up and affectionately stroked his stubbly cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

* * *

The Corollary was a mid-sized station, with dozens and dozens of small modules assembled in a boxy rectangle. Most of them had been connected without corridors, one module adjoining another, the inner walls likely removed to form a big, open air marketplace. From the outside the station was a hodgepodge
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scratched and dented modules with all different colors of peeling paint. Independently-run stations rarely looked pretty, but they had lower docking fees, cheaper rent, and paid fewer taxes.

After docking with the station, Kieran went to the nearest public access terminal. There was one conveniently located just outside his docking tube.

He keyed in a request for a map of the station. As he'd suspected, the majority of the station's central, rectangular structure was devoted a long double row of shops, which ran the gamut from cafeterias to automaton repair. Kieran scanned the names of the stores, looking one where he might find a freelance code writer
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The Infinite Loop. Interesting.
Kieran keyed in a request for a description and received:
Coding, slicing, and other wizardry for hire.

Perfect.

Kieran shut down the data terminal and started down a badly lit corridor. A few of the lights occasionally flickered and died for no apparent reason. Kieran frowned. There definitely were some disadvantages to independently-run stations.
Deus forbid that there ever be a hull breach
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one of the bulkheads would probably jam or forget that it’s not supposed to open until there’s sufficient atmosphere on both sides.

A handful of crusty-looking passersby dressed in patched, stained, and mismatching clothes drifted by Kieran on his way to the marketplace. Some of them had swirling or angular designs on their exposed skin. Clan markings. They were drifters, the dregs of society
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not people Kieran wanted to mess with. Fortunately, he barely received a passing glance. He fit right in, dressed as he was in one of his dad's old flight suits, also thoroughly patched and stained. His angry, don't-mess-with-me expression was just the cherry on the top.

This was the perfect place to find an unscrupulous slicer.

Kieran made a right, following the sporadic signs which had been sloppily painted in red onto the bare metal walls of the corridor.

Another two turns, one left, one right, and Kieran found himself standing in a double-wide bulkhead, staring down a bustling street with storefronts lining either side. People crowded the metal street, stopping here, going there, pushing and shoving through a crowd which was definitely larger than was permitted by Union safety regulations.

Here the ceiling was twice as high as in the rest of the station, and it actually felt airy
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a luxury uncommonly afforded to spacers. To Kieran it was unsettling.
Give me small, cozy rooms and narrow corridors.
Wide-open spaces made him feel like he was adrift in space, not a pleasant experience for a pilot.