Osprey chronicles comple.., p.77
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 77
Sarah eyed the dusty pack, streaked with mud and dried blood. Then she snatched it, and with a furtive quickness, slipped the hairless guinea pig thing from under her shirt and into the backpack. She slung the bag over her shoulder and turned away from the corpse on the ground and the dead-eyed child.
Lawrence couldn’t smell cancer. He had no idea if the kid was dying or not. He’d told Sarah what she needed to hear, to keep moving forward.
Feeling like more weight than just that of the bag had fallen from his shoulders, he slid to his feet.
Then he turned, facing the tattered man who’d crept close to them. There was an old knife in the man’s hands.
When Lawrence stepped forward, the man swiped. Lawrence didn’t know if the man had seen the dog tags and wanted to steal a ride off this damned planet or if he was simply trying to rob them in the hope that the backpack held anything he could eat.
He didn’t care.
When the man took another step forward, dragging his knife through the air, Lawrence grabbed him by the wrist and slammed him to the ground.
He stomped a boot into the back of the man’s neck, cutting his scream brutally short.
Then he ripped the man’s arm off his body and flung it at the circling coyotes.
No one bothered them after that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rush led Petra into a space that wasn’t a room so much as a forgotten void at the back of a bay full of massive liquid storage tanks. The space was big enough for a table made of old cargo crates and four outdated computer stations that someone must have salvaged from the recyclers. Old blankets strung beneath the storage tanks created what Petra assumed were cozy little sleeping cubbies.
As they approached the shadowy space, two figures—an older man and woman—scrambled out from beneath a makeshift tent. Rush lifted his arms, his face breaking into a broad smile as he took them in an embrace. From the way they fell into easy conversation, Petra gathered they were old friends. Feeling a little forgotten as the woman ran her fingers through Rush’s slicked-back hair, Petra edged closer to one of the workstations, studying data streams on the old screens.
The swivel chair turned away from the screens, and Petra’s mouth dropped open. “Amy!”
Like Kurt, the girl in the chair had grown almost beyond recognition in the months since Petra had last seen her painting slogans on the walls outside the Youth Development Center.
Amy spread two fingers and touched them to her brow in a victory salute. Then her face broke into a wide grin. She surged to her feet and tackled Petra in a bear hug, leaving the chair spinning.
“Oof!” Petra laughed, scrubbing fingers through Amy’s buzz-cut hair. The dye job was fading, indigo tips yielding to ash-blond roots. It was a good look on Amy. “Gawd, girl, you grew so much! What are you doing down here?”
Amy pulled back and looked her in the eye. She rubbed the back of her neck sheepishly. “I might’a got made painting signs on the wall that brass didn’t like.” She flushed. Metal studs in her eyebrow and lip swirled violet and pink. “Decided it was better to go underground for a while instead of doing community service in the recycling chutes or joining you up in the brig.”
Petra laughed, but on the inside she was cold. Last she checked, brass was nicer to teenage vandals than domestic terrorists. Amy had been a good kid. Had a bit of a rebel streak, but what teenager didn’t? She was too young to throw her life away in some harebrained Resistance scheme, that was for darned sure.
“Petie. Darling.” Rush waved from the corner where he conversed quietly with the two older folks. “Come meet my friends.”
Petra gave Amy a fond pat and joined Rush.
“This is Juice,” he indicated the woman, “and Scraps.”
Petra smiled—awkwardly at first until she remembered that she didn’t have a tooth gap. The couple appeared to be in their late sixties. The man was big and broad-shouldered, wearing an old jumpsuit so sewn-over with patches she couldn’t tell what department it had originally belonged to.
The woman at his side wore a sundress printed with fading sunflowers that looked like it had seen more than a few stints in the resale shops. Blue lines popped against the papery skin of her neck, arms, and exposed calves, so bright that Petra couldn’t tell if they were an intentional aesthetic choice or if the woman just had old-lady blood something fierce.
“Ain’t you cold in that little dress?” The words slipped out of Petra’s mouth before she could stop them.
Juice grinned, showing her gap where an incisor should have been. “I spent twenty years as a cold-space sensor array mechanic,” she said, lisping faintly, “back when union membership got you a decent cold-resistance mod. These days I don’t notice the chill until my toes turn blue.”
“She’s a block of ice in bed,” Scraps mumbled. He had the raspy voice of a lifelong smoker.
Juice leaned into her partner, resting her forehead on his big shoulder. “And you love any excuse to keep me warm.”
“You remember my cameraman?” Petra turned to see Rush looking unusually solemn. “Jackie?” he said. “He was their son.”
“Oh.” Petra’s eyes popped. “Oh!” She put a hand over her mouth, turning back to the old couple. “Oh, I’m so sorry…”
The man and woman nodded, suddenly somber as well. Their gazes lowered in quick acknowledgment. Juice reached over and patted Petra’s arm. Her hand was, indeed, cold as ice.
“It’s hard,” she said quietly. “It never stops being hard, losing your little boy. It helps, having a goal to focus on.”
“Rush and Jackie were friends since they were…” Scraps put a hand about a meter above the floor. “Oh, about this tall. When the Seekers murdered my boy, Rush adopted himself some new parents.”
Rush shook his head. “Don’t be modest. You’ve been cleaning vomit off this very stupid man-child for decades.” He folded his arms. “Here we are again, planning one hell of a reckless show. I keep expecting you to wake up and try to talk sense into us, Scraps.”
The big man shrugged. “They killed my kid.”
That certainly put a mood in place and not a good one.
“That they did.” Rush took Petra’s arm, directing her gently to the table. “They’ll keep doing it until someone stops them. Let’s sit and discuss strategy.”
The five of them sat around a makeshift table that could’ve seated a dozen. Scraps had collected a pitcher of water from the moisture condensing off the coolant tanks and stirred it with some dried fruit over a portable hotplate to make tea.
It was awful tea, but Petra sipped from the cracked, Tribe Six-branded mug they offered her anyway. It was colder down here in the Reds than she remembered.
“All right, then.” Rush clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “We have a crew assembled. The roster is a bit thin, I will admit, but once we get this stone rolling, more people will offer to help push. I’m sure of it.”
“What are we doing, exactly?” Petra folded her fingers over her mug, holding in whatever warmth she could. When everyone turned to stare at her, she flushed. “I mean. We’re gonna take out the fleet’s top brass, right. We ain’t had really good leadership since…”
She remembered Jackie’s final video. “Well, a long time. Ever, maybe. Leaders that will find us a good place to live without stirring up trouble with the locals.”
“Command staff that won’t order a young cameraman shot because he objected to the wholesale slaughter of innocents,” Juice said into her cup.
“And won’t throw kids into the brig for filching a few extra dinner rolls,” Amy grumbled. “Or adding a little color to the walls.”
Petra winced and nodded. “So…what do we do?”
“We get the truth out.” Rush sat up straight. “We record a mission statement and disseminate it on the nets. Hack into the comms systems and broadcast it over the e-boards if we can. Get as many eyes on us as possible.”
“Breaking into the comms system won’t be easy,” Petra said.
Juice shot her a grin, utterly unselfconscious about the gap in her teeth. “Broadcasting know-how is a family business. You’re still familiar with the comms systems. Fleet may have revoked your access, but Rush and I will find a way in. Amy will fetch any tools we might need. Trust me, Petie. Hacking into the comms system to leak videos and files is going to be the easy part of this plan.”
“Oh.” Petra hadn’t considered that, but now that she did, she thought it was darned lucky the one fleet officer this little Resistance had managed to free from Internal Affairs was indeed a lifelong comms manager. “So…what’s the hard part?”
“The hard part,” Rush slipped a thin silver flask from a coat pocket, “is never letting the audience forget we exist.” He leaned across the table and poured a thin stream of dark liquid into Scraps’ proffered mug. Juice and Amy pushed their cups forward as well.
“Stagnation is death, darlings,” Rush declared while pouring ample servings for all. “We need to keep the masses interested and engaged with fresh new content every day. Expose the flaws and foibles and injustices in the fleet. We drown brass in their own mistakes. We flood the nets with stories like ours. Stories of idiocy, and brutality, and incompetence.”
“Like your video of Riella 3,” Petra said. “The one with Jackie.”
“Naw.” Amy shook her head, surprising Petra. “It’s a good thought,” she added, chewing on her tongue ring as she studied her ravaged fingernails. “But only a handful of people know about Riella 3. If that video gets out, the list of people who might have leaked it is real, real short.”
Rush waved a hand sheepishly. “I’m not ready for my second debut yet.”
Petra narrowed her eyes. “Hang on. You want me to put out a video talkin’ about how bad brass is at their jobs…but you’re awfully careful to keep your name away from this Resistance business.”
“Don’t judge Rush too harshly.” Juice blew on her mug to cool it off. “Rush Starr is a red-blooded patriot. Everyone knows that. We don’t need his face in these videos.” She winked. “We need his money funding them.”
“Speaking of which.” Rush leaned back in a languid stretch and waved a finger at Scraps. “Launder another five thousand credits to Kramer, would you? It’s getting terribly morose in his joint, and I suspect he wasn’t exaggerating about the guild fees.”
“Brass already knows you’re the enemy, Petie,” Amy went on. Poor girl had chewed her nails down to nubs. “Now that you busted out of Internal Affairs, lots of people are waiting to hear what you have to say about it. They want to know more about Memo Six and what happened when Kelba took over. You can tell them the truth that everyone else is afraid to say.”
Rush nodded. “The Resistance needs a face. Your face, darling. Open the floodgates, and the truth will spill out. Others will come forward with their stories.” His eyes narrowed. “We’ll make sure of it.”
Petra swallowed and pushed her mug away, no longer thirsty. “Amy?” she said quietly, drawing the young woman’s gaze up from the flecks of old nail polish clinging to her fingers. The stud in her eyebrow shifted from blue to purple as she blinked. “Petie?”
“We ain’t painting cartoons on the lower decks here, girl. You know what they’re talking about, right?”
Amy stared at her. Gawd, despite the funky hair and the studs that changed colors like mood rings, the girl’s face had grown so serious in the last few months.
“Treason.” Beneath the table, Amy’s leg bounced. Petra recognized the twitch. Larry always did that, too, when he was feeling more than he was saying. “I know the laws, Petie. I’ve seen the Riella 3 video.”
“You ain’t too young,” Petra said. “If you get in on this, and they catch you, they’ll execute you. I seen Kelba and her men work, Amy.” She rubbed the front of her mouth.
“Jaeger stole an entire Tribe Primal warship out from under their noses,” Amy said inflexibly. “If Memo Six is for real, that’s who I want leading the fleet. Yeah, I know it’s risky. But it’s my future, Petie. It’s my life.” She caught Petra’s gaze and held it rock-steady. “You gonna try to tell me what I can and can’t do with it?”
No, Petra decided. She was not. She’d been younger—much younger—than Amy was now, the first time she risked her life to steal a food shipment from a seedy merchant. She’d been starving.
Now the entire fleet was starving. Slowly, but they were starving, all right.
It didn’t matter how young you were. You did what you had to do to secure a future.
“Larry would be proud to hear you say that,” Petra muttered. “Pissed, but proud.”
Amy dropped her head. Her skin, as well as her mood-studs, flushed a charming shade of pink. Larry had always gotten on well with the kids from the Center. Some of them had come to idolize Petra’s man.
“So.” Petra shook out her shoulders and lifted her chin, trying to look more confident than she felt. “Let’s make a movie.”
Across the Grand Concourse, billboards blaring hourly news updates and pharmaceutical ads for the new Serenity treatment flashed and went dark—only long enough for a thousand heads to swivel, a thousand tongues to fall silent with confusion. The billboards never turned off.
When the boards flicked to life a few seconds later, the spectators saw another unusual sight. A now-familiar face stared at them from against a backdrop of draped blankets.
“Wh—oh, it’s on now? It’s on? Oh. Okay.” Petra’s voice was a bit distorted from the hacked feed, but the lower-deck accent was unmistakable. She cleared her throat. She looked up to the screen.
“My name is Petra Potlova, Ensign Second Class of the Tribe Six Support Fleet, serial number 74a-8661.” She opened her mouth wide—not quite to smile, because there didn’t seem to be much humor in her voice—but to show off the tooth gap that had made her mugshot so memorable.
The uneasy murmur of a thousand voices filled the chamber of the Grand Concourse.
“But you know that already, ‘cause they got my face all over the darned place,” Petra said. She added hastily: “They’re telling me I gotta be quick because the fleet might get control of their screens back any minute now.
“Six months ago, I was working the comms hub on the bridge of the Reliant when the wormhole closed. That was when Nicholetta Kelba and the Seeker Corps took control of the fleet. In all that hubbub we received a message through the wormhole. You guys are calling it Memo Six, and I’m here to tell you that it’s true.
“Tribe Six is still out there, on the other side of that wormhole. She found a good planet—the kind of planet we’ve been looking for this whole time. The people running the fleet, they called it lies. When I shared that memo, they threw me in jail for half a year without pressing charges because they don’t want you to know the truth.”
Petra hesitated, thumbing over the screen in her hands as she consulted her notes. She glanced up and nodded at someone out of view before looking back to the camera.
“I think it’s because they don’t want you to know how bad they messed up. Listen. Sarah Jaeger was my friend. When she stole Tribe Six, I was shocked as anybody. I was heartbroken. They said she was a traitor, and I believed it.
“Over the last year, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Here’s what I think. We've been on this mission for years, and we aren’t any closer to finding a place to settle than when we set out.
“So Jaeger did something bold. She did something the brass didn’t want her to do. She took the only ship she could, and she went out there—” Petra threw her arms wide, making an expansive gesture meant to encompass the whole galaxy “—where brass was afraid to go. And she found a place for us. She's waiting for us to join her on the other side of that wormhole. She didn’t betray us. She did what she had to do, to save us.
“Commander Kelba and the top brass don’t want you to know that. They want you to sit here in the same solar system for over a year, getting hungrier and hungrier so they won’t have to admit they were wrong about Jaeger.”
There was a disturbance along one section of the Grand Concourse as the front doors to the Internal Affairs department flew open, and a squad of uniformed MPs rushed out. They fanned into the concourse, rushing for the power switches to the biggest billboard screens.
“The truth is,” Petra said, as one by one, the screens showing her face went black, “the command staff has a long history of screwing up. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. Just pay attention.
“Soon, lots of stories are gonna come out about all the awful things your leaders have been doing. ‘Cause these people, the ones filling the bridges and calling the shots—their ration packs never shrink. They don’t get put on waiting lists when their toilets break.”
Petra’s face remained on a single billboard—a big one, clear across the Concourse from the IA office. She floated above them like the face of a gap-toothed god.
“They never need to filch a few dinner rolls to make sure their kids got enough to eat,” she said. “They’re not on your side.”
The screen went dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“I swear I’ve seen this in a James Bond movie.”
Jaeger rubbed crust from her eyes. She'd stolen a few hours of sleep on the shuttle ride across Locaur, and every one of them had been terrible. For once, this wasn’t Toner’s fault. He had grumbled some, sure, when she asked him to take over, but restless dreams had haunted her sleep, and now she felt like she had a hangover.
Locaur’s single sapphire ocean filled the cockpit’s main display screen. They were approaching a chain of six islands, each of them a deep brown cone with the wider base at water-level.
“We’re approaching the shecret volcano lair where they’re hiding the death raysh now, Captain,” her copilot added in a thick Scottish accent.
“Kwin has sent an explorer probe ahead to get an initial read on the location.”
Jaeger jumped. Me was resting in a groove on her control panel, eerily still for such an energetic thing.
