Chainsaw, p.4
Chainsaw, page 4
Samarina said nothing for a little bit, then shook her head. “No. I don’t think that. Our luck doesn’t seem to stretch that far.”
“Then what?”
Samarina pulled off the heavy, bulky spacesuit pants and threw them to one side. She opened the tiny locker at the back of the ship, pulling out a spare uniform. “I think they let us go.”
Chainsaw snorted. “Did you not see them shooting at us? If they wanted us to escape, why did they call us? Why didn’t they just let us jump?”
“Don’t know,” said Samarina, slowly and carefully dressing herself. “But you’re right…they shot at us. Almost as though they deliberately missed. They wanted to think it was a close call, maybe. Maybe there’s another reason; one I can’t possibly understand right now. But all I know is…this operation ended way too good. We should both be dead now, and whatever got us out of here I doubt it was pure luck.”
Chainsaw smiled drunkenly. “I dunno. My part of it was pretty lucky. I managed to get Haws, probably the least reliable senior officer on that ship, and I managed to talk him into swigging half a bottle of rocket fuel with me. Sure, I got fucked up from it, but he got fucked up too. The Anarchy’s pilot may be under the influence, comrade, but the Vigilance lost their XO. A ship that size, that’s gotta hurt.”
“Mmm,” said Samarina. “I don’t know. It’s odd that he would come down to the hanger bay like that, so quickly…something about this whole thing just doesn’t add up.”
“Such is the nature of war,” said Anne. “Things are confusing. Wheels turn within wheels. A soldier, sailor, airman…nobody knows the true picture of a given moment.”
Chainsaw shrugged. “Well, at least Anne got fixed.” She patted her console. “And we completed our mission.”
“Not quite,” said Anne, her flat, synthetic voice betraying nothing. “We might have a bit of a problem.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Samarina. “Did we take some kind of damage during the battle?”
Chainsaw glanced down at her screens. There wasn’t any indication of a short through the smart-steel armour…their ship hadn’t been hit. Nor had it suffered any kind of damage during their rushed q-jump. Whatever had happened it wasn’t obvious to her.
“I’m detecting an imbalance in the hull,” said Anne. “And a tiny change in our flight characteristics based on the profile I had saved before we landed, compared to the ship’s performance before we jumped. It’s tiny, barely perceptible really, but it’s there. We’ve gained weight.”
Chainsaw cracked a smile. The drink made everything a funny joke. “You getting fat on me, circuit brain?”
“That’s not a bad way of putting it,” said Anne. “I’m detecting a strange radioactive leak. Very mild. Not something typically found aboard the ship. It’s a decaying isotope placed inside the engine faring. A heavy material which, I’m guessing, is what’s throwing the sensors off.”
That made no sense to her. Anne’s information struggled to sink into her vodka and adrenaline addled mind. “A…hunk of radioactive material?” Chainsaw echoed, “why the hell would they put something in there like that?”
“Are they trying to poison us?” asked Samarina, her hand drifting back down to her space suit, with its heavy anti-radiation shielding.
“No,” said Anne. “The dosage is extremely mild. Just slightly above background radiation on Earth. But its got an extremely long half-life; whatever it is, the engine compartment is venting trace amounts of it as we travel.”
Samarina seemed to relax just a little. “Why the hell would they do that? To confuse our sensors?”
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” said Chainsaw. “Maybe someone put a hunk of radioactive material in there by accident, because they wanted to load something else…”
“No,” said Anne. “Preliminary analysis suggest that the radioactive material is essentially a crude, low-tech version of a tracking device. It operates without an external power source, and without batteries. They just follow the radioactive signature. Or have a drone do it.”
Chainsaw laughed at that, low and long. “You serious?” she asked. “This isn’t some kind of weird robot joke?”
“I don’t make jokes,” said Anne.
“She makes jokes,” confirmed Chainsaw, twisting around and looking over her shoulder. “But not like this. She’s more of a stupid-sarcastic type than the…” Chainsaw put her hand over her mouth.
“Do not throw up inside me,” warned Anne. “I will vent the cockpit to space and kill you both.”
Noted. Stupid evil robot…she might not do it, but even the thought was pretty distracting. Chainsaw fought down the urge to have all the vodka she’d consumed make a cameo appearance. It was going to be okay…Russian women could hold their drink. Just had to have a stomach like iron. It was fine. Totally fine.
“Do not puke,” said Anne. “I’m reading an increased thermal profile on your face.”
“I won’t,” Chainsaw promised and forced the feeling away. Breathe…
Samarina, seemingly oblivious to her companion’s distress, seemed deep in thought. “Clever bastards,” she murmured, half to herself. “They knew we were there to mess with their ship. They knew what we were doing the whole time, and they played us for chumps.”
“Yup,” said Chainsaw, idly rubbing her hands over her roiling gut. “Seems like.”
“It’s worse than that. While you were drinking with Haws, trying to stall him and get him all fucked up so the didn’t think you were a threat…he was doing the exact same thing to you. Trying to get you all sloppy so that you didn’t realise he was playing you. And if that made it harder for you to get away, if it turned out you’d planted a bomb on their ship? Bonus.” Samarina smiled, tracing the tip of her finger along the back of Chainsaw’s headrest. “Clever, clever.”
Anne spoke up. “It’s unlikely they would have acted the way they did if they had a reasonable suspicion we had planted a mine on their hull.”
“Fair call,” said Samarina. “But you know, the Vigilance probably has their people out on the hull right now, prying off the beacon and throwing it into a star. Or moving it around somewhere else so we get the wrong intel. Or even opening it up to see how it works, so they can reverse engineer a way to send the signal differently if they wanted to. That’s probably what the guy I bumped into was doing out there…waiting for me to plant the device so he could pull it right off. In the meantime, while they’re working on messing with the tracker, they’re watching us instead. That’s why they let us go.”
“Sneaky Americans,” said Chainsaw, trying to act far more sober than she felt. “Damn. I thought I was being super clever by offering Haws that drink.”
Samarina tapped her foot on the floor of the co-pilot’s seat, her hand on her chin. “They were five steps ahead of us the whole time,” she said. “Every bit of bad luck we had, was actually good luck. And everything good, bad.”
“Fate is pretty cruel,” said Chainsaw, feeling dizzy. She’d had way too much to drink in too short a time…when was the last time she actually had any water? “The Vigilance seemed…well, it actually seemed like a really nice ship. Like, it had great…” she briefly forgot the right word. “Hulls. Walls for ships on the inside. Bulkheads. That’s them. Real nice…bulkheads.”
Anne beeped at her. “Excuse me, Lieutenant? Your blood alcohol content is too high to be piloting me right now.”
Chainsaw slumped back in her seat, nodding. “Fair-fair,” she said, slurring her words slightly. Yeah, it was starting to kick in now. That shit was very strong. Maybe next time, if there was a next time, she’d pick a slightly less stereotypical and slightly less intoxicating drink. She played through everything that had happened, letting the thoughts dance around in her head. “Damn. I mean…damn. So we went to all that effort to steal the space suit, set up this operation, execute it, plant the device…and so did they…their intelligence service playing off ours, each of us playing each other, and at the end of the day…neither of us came out ahead?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, they put a beacon on our ship. Which we know about. And we put a beacon on their ship. Which they know about. So we’re both back where we started?”
Samarina nodded dejectedly, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat with an angry thump. “Guess we’re all arseholes,” she said. “UE, Russia, Chinese…all of us. Just idiots running in circles, playing stupid games and hoping to come out ahead.”
“Such is the nature of war,” said Anne, diligently flying the ship with far more skill than a stupid robot-face should be able to do.
Chainsaw, her head light and her eyes fuzzy, settled a little further into her chair, finding it extraordinarily comfortable—far more so than it really should have been. Booze let her sleep anywhere. Anywhere…
Within moments, she was out, and shortly after that the ship shook with her thunderous snoring as it sailed home toward the Varyag, reeking of expensive vodka and two people’s worth of fear-sweat, a radioactive lump in its engine compartment and its many systems hastily broken and inexpertly fixed.
Such was the nature of war, indeed. At least they hadn’t gotten themselves killed.
Yet.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
One of the things I’m loving about the Legacy Fleet Kindle Worlds publications is the interconnectedness of it all.
The Vigilance is Will Swardstrom’s baby and he wrote a whole novel about it. But I had Chainsaw pay a visit, and that’s totally awesome.
This kind of crossover isn’t something I’m familiar with, and it took a lot of working together. We had to ask ourselves all kinds of hard questions. What was Haws like then? What was his ship like?
But, you know, I hope everyone enjoys the details.
Chainsaw is a character I introduced in my own Legacy Fleet novel, Hammerfall, and the ARC readers and reviewers said they really wanted to see more of her. Well, their wish is my command.
I’m at a strange point in my writing career. The sixth and final book of the Lacuna series is out now, and Symphony of War book two is well underway, but my Legacy Fleet work seems popular, and I’m going to keep going as long as Nick lets me.
I’m very excited and humbled to be a part of this whole adventure, and I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
For more of my writing…
My website is here:
http://www.lacunaverse.com/
My “new releases” newsletter is here:
http://eepurl.com/toBf9
My Facebook page is here:
http://www.facebook.com/lacunaverse
Or email me here:
dave@lacunaverse.com
David Adams, Chainsaw
