FORT LIBERTY: VOLUME ONE (10 page)

“With what?”

“Suspected natural, space rock moving at incredible speed.”

“That got past force shielding?”

“So they say.”

“Yeah.” Petra’s got that bad feeling. “And what’s being said on the low?”

Clara grimaces, like she’s been dreading saying it because Petra’s sure to react in the adverse. “Striker on the grid.”

“No strikers for fifty years, or more.”

“And yet… ”

Striker.

Petra floats in front of grid, full of doubts and suspicion, seeing lethal shadows forming between the blue glow of ships, behind virtual distance markers and the cold shimmer of flight paths. “Those reports in the system are gone? The ones where you speculate about an additional passenger?”

Clara’s brows raise. “Deleted them, and all trace of them, as ordered. But those are internal documents, wild one. I doubt—”

“And the logs?”

“Since when do we say anything of a truthful nature in the logs?”

“Just so,” Petra says. “Accelerators at full burn.”

“Kidding?”

“Start the countdown in fifteen minutes.”

“Other ships ahead of us.”

“So avoid ‘em.”

“Blaze right by on the grid? Are you insane?”

Petra nods, conceding the possibility. “And we skip Midstation. Do not alter the flight plan in advance, only correct once we’re clear.”

“That’ll look suspicious.”

“Sure… just like having registered a non-existent comm team, last minute, on our manifest, four-person no less.”

Clara holds her gaze. “You think this is about our Assaulters?”

“They’ve kept out of sight, but they look like Assaulters and no hiding it… how solid they are. Any member of the crew what might have spotted them might set to talking.”

“But… ”

“And now an attack on the very cruiser they’re supposed to be on, VIP quarters, when they’re hiding very important things, and not letting us set eyes on such. Even money, they’d be dead right now, if not for flying on our bad luck.”

Clara’s eyes slide toward the grid. “All sound reasoning, but a striker? Striker’s nothing more than a pirate vessel, flying without a pinger and shielded from grid monitoring. NRM purged most, but always knew they’d be back in fashion one day. Why not today? Thought they’d attack the richest ship on the grid, a NRM cruiser, and things didn’t go as planned. Possible, right?”

“No,” Petra says, speaking from her gut. “Not possible.”

“Okay… so what’s to be done?”

“End Protocol, that’s what.”

Clara stares for a bit, then looks down at the consoles, like she’s got no quips, no feisty comebacks on her tongue this time. And, of course, she wouldn’t, because she knows exactly what End Protocol means.

They’ve practiced it before, but with the pilot and the crew never really taking it seriously, because attacks on the shadow road never happen, not since the days of strikers and mercs and the pirates which thrived in space before NRM contractors tracked them down and killed every last one, installing checkpoints with laser cannons to keep all traffic flowing in steady, compliant lines.

Five decades of peaceful space flight breeds complacency, and if she were a different kind of smuggler, a smuggler who hadn’t learned the right lessons, then she’d have slept blissfully all these years and there’d be no End Protocol, and nothing to do but wait for that mystery striker to appear from the black.

“Get it started,” Petra nudges. “I’ll deliver the order to the crew in the hold myself, quiet and personal.”

Clara is frowning. “But… even if we’re talking about a striker… it’d have to be a fast ship to attack that cruiser then catch up to us when we’re at full accelerator burn… not even sure that’s possible.”

Petra nods. “Someone’s gone to all the trouble of building a shielded attack vessel, against all laws, probably in development for years, and you’re assuming that it’s flying on the same plasma accelerators we use for commercial transport?”

Clara’s frown deepens… no longer assuming that.

“Attacking a cruiser means they will hunt you down no matter what,” Petra continues. “So I’m thinking they’ve got no qualms about destroying every single vessel on flight path to kill what we got sitting safe and otherwise secure in crew cabin two. The captain before me would’a tried to make a profitable trade of that, instead of getting blown to bits.”

“Probably.” Clara mutters. “Not him though, are you?”

Petra looks at her, needing it to be understood. “Not just my life at risk.”

“And never was. What crew like ours sails on the guarantee of safety? And anyway, the man’s got beautiful eyes.”

No need to ask what man.

“Full burn,” Petra says. “Fifteen minute, silent countdown.”

Wyatt says nothing, processes for a moment in silence, because he’s as seasoned as they come. The other two… well, they aren’t. Gojo’s swearing under his breath, reading line after line on the small monitor he’s rewired in their cabin, now a direct feed from the ship’s comms.

Space object collision.

Explosions. VIP compartments gone.

Fucking gone.

Top Tier managers among the dead and dying. Entire ship being evacuated.

Shit!

Forty-eight hours till rescue vessels arrive.

“That was us,” Logan says, his expression strained. He floats now as if he’s been in space all his life, overtired, and thinned to the point of being gaunt. “That’s where we would have been, right?”

“Exactly where we would have been,” Gojo replies, uncharacteristically grim. “Dead center.”

Voss grimaces. The bodies that are now lost to space, or burned beyond recognition in compartments they couldn’t escape from, were people who thought they were untouchable… because they should have been.

Managers, in their shiny white suits with their fresh baby faces, maybe too young but exceptionally well educated, sent by the NRM to monitor the status of Earthbound bases and security forces, report back positive numbers to the Block 12. They had done their jobs, and they were going home to anxious mothers, wives or husbands… maybe kids.

It hits home, a knife in the gut.

This has just turned into an undeclared war, a cruiser destroyed, civilian lives lost, suddenly much darker, more ruthless than he thought it would it get. He’d followed his instincts, anticipated there might be some act of sabotage, some attempt to wipe his team out on the cruiser—which is why they weren’t on it—but he hadn’t expected wholesale slaughter.

Anger is a force all its own, and as much as he keeps it in check, it simmers under the armor, his adrenaline up, the power of will enough to go kit up and rain hell down on anything.

Someone wants Niri dead. They want it bad enough to overrun a company base and destroy a company cruiser… kill whoever gets in the way.

That means his team, his guys, his brothers.

It also means Petra.

He drops his gaze, jaw set, knowing that the mercurial smuggler matters more to him than she should. Protecting his team, protecting Niri… he knows how to do that, at least as well as it can be done. But protecting Petra—a person he will abandon when the time comes—is impossible.

He looks up to find Logan searching his expression. The medic presses his lips together, unsure if he should intrude, but deciding to do so anyway. “They have to think we’re dead now. Right, Colonel? I mean, that was our section, and we’re on that manifest, and now we’re missing. It’s—”

“Nothing’s missing,” Gojo interrupts the kid, this rare degree of utter seriousness making him sound annoyed. “The ship’s powered down, but the life support is still going, and the AI units are working, already counting heads, already launched at least three dozen repair drones to retrieve bodies and material. Every sliver of debris is being tracked and identified. Once collected, the analysis takes minutes on these big AI systems. They’re going to figure out, relatively quickly, that there is absolutely zero confirmation that we were ever on that ship. No meals. No comms. No vid. No witnesses. No bodies. No fingers, teeth. Nothing.”

Wyatt nods his agreement.

“That doesn’t mean they’ll know what ship we’re on,” Logan says. “They can’t have saboteurs on all of them. And this one—”

The hatch comm buzzes, a yellow light blinking on its dark glass panel.

Voss cuts his gaze to Gojo, who switches views on his monitor.

“It’s the Captain,” Gojo says, his half-grin returning. “Looks pissed.”

Wyatt and Logan start reaching for the awkward net of storage bags and clothes they’ve tied to the ceiling rungs, dragging a curtain of odd stuff over Niri floating unconscious in her hammock. It hides her, but only superficially because the curtain is an oddity unto itself, and draws the eye immediately.

Voss pushes to the hatch and waits, hand hovering over the console. He imagines Petra on the other side, eyes dark and furious… having watched that cruiser listing in the holo grid with its grim report of casualties, temper burning her up like a fever, all spitfire, no patience, no diplomacy, no plan… just a straight charge to his hatch to give him a beating.

He expects it, and he deserves it. But when the hatch rolls open, she’s not that woman. She’s not so furious, not swinging for his chin. Rather, she’s steeled, small body tense, lips parted, eyes narrowed.

Petra. Focused.

“Bring your most technical,” she says. “An’ follow me.”

Petra glides ahead of him, her body sailing through tube sections, haloed in the cold fluorescent glow. She’s moving fast, grasping onto handholds, propelling herself through the
Sparrow
’s weightless labyrinth, paths so familiar to her that she can navigate them on muscle memory alone. Voss couldn’t catch her if he tried, but he can hear her, the determined hiss between her teeth in tight spaces, the careless brush of her sleeve along the railing. Her sense of urgency is apparent. Her plan is not… which he doesn’t like.

Her ship is now clearly at risk. Her life is at risk. He’s to blame for all of it, and he’s getting led down a corridor without explanation. One could be forgiven for thinking there’s an aft airlock with his name on it.

She hasn’t elaborated on her claim of murdering a smuggler crew, so he has no context for that, but the difference between killing several members of a criminal enterprise, and killing a few Assaulters who threaten your existence with their presence, is not all that great when viewed from the standpoint of survival.

And yet…

He doesn’t think it’s going to happen like that, spent too many years training men how to kill to take such an admission of murder at face value. Maybe she’s responsible for the deaths of a smuggling crew, and maybe she’s not. Maybe she only holds herself responsible. Or, maybe she killed them and had a damn good reason for doing so. He believes she has it in her. It just doesn’t feel like she’s a psychopath who kills for money, or convenience.

Too much empathy. Too much… torment.

In some sense, he trusts that. Probably more than he should.

They slip into the chilled air of the cargo hold, curving banks of lights casting a solid white glare over orange plastic netting and numbered rails. The crew—men they weren’t supposed to see, and who weren’t supposed to see them—are now hard at work. Voss counts five guys unlashing cargo and moving crates. And they’re not wasting time. They don’t look up. They don’t stare. He catches a glance, maybe two, but they’ve all been told… something.

Odds are, it’s something they didn’t want to hear.

What are you doing, Petra?

She leads them through lines of cargo then out of the hold, pulling herself down one vertical ladder way, then another.

The air grows colder by rapid degrees.

Plastic panels become diamond steel walls, soft lights and white tubes giving way to scarred metal hatches and cable trays, thick pipes coded with different shades of paint, tiny spaces lit by maintenance lamps.

Here, comforts and illusions are surrendered. The machine doesn’t exist for the humans. The humans exist for the machine, bared to its grit and dull shine, exposing the skeletal ribs of bulkheads, the metal veins of pure utility, walls humming with the rush of liquids and gases along sweating pipes, its power and fiber optic cables hidden in shielded conduits, its passages dotted by battered valves and dogging wheels as primitive as those in the early submarines that plumbed the depths of Earth’s oceans on sonar waves.