Escape (18 page)

Ferrel frowned at Kieran. “You'd think after I helped you lock her out of the flight controls, that there'd be a little more trust between us.”

Kieran inclined his head and shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of
what-can-I-say?
“It pays to be careful.”

“And how am I supposed to trust you?” Ferrel replied.

“If you're as smart as I suspect you are, you programmed a backdoor into the flight controls when you were locking them to my biometrics. If I mess with you, you'll lock me out, too.”

Ferrel grinned. “You're pretty smart for a jet jockey.”

Kieran smiled back and turned to the copilot's station. He bent to pick up Dimmi's plasma pistols, tucked them into his belt, and then reached an arm around Dimmi's waist, lifting her from the dash and slinging her between his arms. When Kieran turned back to face Ferrel, he saw the look of mild amusement on the boy's face.

“Doesn't look like you've left much for me to do.”

“I guess not
 
.
 
.
 
.
” Kieran didn't want Ferrel to have too much time on his hands
—
alone in the cockpit
—
so he said: “Come with me anyway. I'll need your help searching her for weapons and equipment that she might use to escape.”

“Sure, I mean, it's not like I have anything better to do, right?” Ferrel was smiling knowingly at Kieran.

“That's the spirit.” Kieran nodded his head to indicate the open door leading from the cockpit to the ship's cabin. “After you, kid.”

Ferrel obliged, leading the way down the aisle, back to the combination mess hall and briefing room, and from there down the left-hand corridor. Halfway down that corridor was a door with the word “brig” embossed into it. Kieran walked up to the door, and set Dimmi on her feet. He kept one arm around her waist to hold her up while he punched in the ship's access code. It was the same code that the captain had given to Dimmi
—
the one he had discovered secondhand from watching the security cameras.

When the door slid aside, it revealed a medium-sized room with harsh blue lighting. Half of the room was barred off, divided into two jail cells with a solid alloy wall between them. Each cell had a pair of sleeping palettes, and a rudimentary cleansing station with sink, toilet, and a shower. There was a thin fabric curtain for privacy
—
more than most prisons would afford. Kieran shuffled into the room with Dimmi slumped over his arm and Ferrel following.

Angling for the cell on the left, Kieran stopped at the wall between the cells, and entered the ship’s access code into the control panel there. The cell door automatically rattled open, and Kieran sat Dimmi down outside the cell, with her back propped up against the bars. Her head flopped limply forward, her chin resting on her chest, and a lock of hair fell away from her forehead, revealing an enormous red lump on her brow where she’d cracked her head against the cockpit canopy. Kieran grimaced.
No wonder she’s out cold.

Suddenly worried, he got down on his haunches beside her and pressed a pair of fingers to the carotid artery in her neck. Her pulse was steady.
Just a concussion, then
 
.
 
.
 
.

Kieran's hands drifted lower, patting her down. He smiled wryly. “If you were awake, you'd gut me for this,” he said, as he continued his search for any concealed weapons and equipment. His search was made easier by Dimmi's clinging black masser-hide jumpsuit. Nevertheless, she had managed to conceal a thin pair of molecular-edged daggers strapped to her calves, and a backup comm piece in one of her shoes. He laid those beside her belt and the comm piece which she had been wearing in her right ear.

Kieran frowned at the little pile of equipment. He'd actually been expecting to find another gun hidden somewhere, but as Kieran looked her over again, he conceded that she wouldn't have anywhere to put it.

“Aren't you going to check her bra?”

Kieran pivoted on his haunches to give Ferrel a patiently disapproving look. “I'm searching for concealed weaponry, not subjecting her to an involuntary striptease.”

Ferrel frowned patiently back. “I meant that her bra would be a logical place for her to hide something.”

Kieran winced, and conceded that with a slow nod. Turning reluctantly back to Dimmi, he slid his hands beneath her arms and stood up, pulling her to her feet. He turned back to Ferrel. “I'm going to need your help for that. I'll hold her while you check.”

Ferrel hesitated briefly, then started forward. “Unzip her jumpsuit in the back.”

Kieran freed one hand to do so. When that was done, he shook his head shamefully and looked away. “This is the first time I've undressed a woman without her knowledge. I feel like a pervert.”

Ferrel shrugged. “You probably do it with your imagination every day. This is just a bit more vivid.”

“And invasive.”

Ferrel was busy sliding one of Dimmi’s arms out of her jumpsuit. “Better a live pervert than a dead prude.”

“It's not exactly prudish to want a woman's consent to undress her.”

“Shhh. Don't prick my conscience any more than it needs to be,” Ferrel replied, sliding her other arm out of the jumpsuit. He whistled softly as it fell to her waist.

Kieran was holding her from behind, trying desperately not to watch. He grimaced. “Well, try not to enjoy it so much, okay?”

Ferrel waved his hand dismissively at Kieran. “Looks like we were right to check.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, her implants are real dynamite.”

Kieran noticed in his peripheral vision that Ferrel was reaching into her bra. After a few seconds, he withdrew a pair of fluid-filled cups and held them up to the light. Kieran turned his head to look. One translucent white cup was filled with a red liquid, the other with blue. “Binary explosives,” Ferrel explained. “Mix the liquid from one with the other, and she could blow a hole straight through the hull of this ship.”

Kieran frowned. “Risky for her to be wearing them next to each other, what if there was a leak?”

Ferrel shrugged. “No more Dimmi.”

“Well, nice find. Get her dressed again, would you?”

“Sure, sure, man. You don't have to watch if you don't want to,” Ferrel said, setting the explosive cups down in the pile of equipment beside the jail cell. He was careful to set them down away from each other.

Kieran was turning to look away again just as Ferrel raised one of Dimmi's arms to slide it back inside the sleeve of her jumpsuit. That was when he noticed the dripping black skull that was inked onto her shoulder.

“Hold it,” Kieran said, shifting his grip to Dimmi's arm so that he could get a better look. “What's this?” he asked, his forefinger pressing firmly into the center of the tattoo.

Ferrel shrugged. “A clan marking.”

“Yeah. Exactly. You wouldn't happen to know what clan that is, would you?”

Ferrel blinked, his face an uncomprehending mask of naïveté. “The Carloni clan. So?”

“You keficking cretitch!” Kieran's green eyes were blazing. “What the Infernal have you gotten me into? When they find out that we’re holding her against her will, they’ll hunt us down and
—
”

“Whoa, hey, don't get your balls crossed, okay? So she’s a clanner
—
what’s the big deal? Half the independents on the frontier are clanners.”

Kieran shook his head. “This is different. You don’t mess with the Carloni clan.”

“Well, we're not going to mess with them, are we? We’ll ditch the ship, pay her and her buddies, and eject her in one of the escape pods. Problem solved. No hard feelings, just business.”

“Wait a minute. You mean Brathus and Garlan are from the Carloni clan, too?”

“Well, yeah
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Kieran let out a long sigh. “I can't believe you'd get us involved with them. This is going to mean big trouble for us. Come on, finish dressing her and help me get her into the cell. We’d better sell this ship and pay your buddies ASAP
—
before they think we’ve decided to stiff them.”

Chapter 8

“W
hat?” Kieran was frowning at the sensor displays. The autopilot was steering the corvette off the IF-57, angling after the twin blue thruster trails of the seraphim-class yacht which it had been set to follow. The curious part was where the yacht was headed. Dead ahead, growing ever larger in the forward viewport, was the boxy, multicolored shape of The Corollary
—
the independent trading depot where Kieran had met Ferrel.

When the autopilot had taken them northbound on the IF-57, Kieran had assumed that the yacht was headed for whatever outlaw base it had come from, but The Corollary was an independent trading depot. “What are they going there for?”

“Maybe the yacht was a rental, and now they are switching ships to confound pursuit,” Ferrel suggested from the copilot's seat.

“Maybe, but technically they haven't done anything wrong, right? They disabled a lockdown by some unconventional means, but apart from that
 
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.
 
.
”

Ferrel turned to him with eyebrows raised. “So why are they running away, then?”

“Good question. Let's find out, shall we?” Kieran disabled the autopilot and continued following the yacht on manual flight.

“Ummm, not that I want to harp on the negative, man, but you realize this is the same station where Brathus and Garlan went, right?”

Kieran shrugged. “It's a big station.”

Ferrel sighed. “Please tell me you're not planning to dock with this corvette. The docking authorities are bound to raise a few eyebrows when they realize that we're just a pair of freelancers, cruising around in a shadow-class corvette.”

“Yeah
 
.
 
.
 
.
that could attract some unwanted attention.” Kieran broke off his pursuit of the yacht, aiming for empty space. He slid the throttles forward until the thrusters were roaring at maximum. The cloaking systems would keep them concealed. Freeing his right hand from the flight yoke, Kieran used his index finger to pan around the local starmap on the navcomp's touchscreen. Finding a point that was that was sufficiently far from any sensor blips, the IF-57, and The Corollary, Kieran set a waypoint and fed it into the autopilot.

“What are you doing?” Ferrel asked.

“Getting us out of the way of random travelers. We don't want to come back to find that someone collided with our corvette because the cloak rendered it invisible.”

“What are we going to use to get to the station?”

Kieran dialed the inertial dampeners up to 100% and unbuckled from the pilot's chair. “Let's go check the hangar, shall we?”

Ferrel made no move to follow, but turned in his seat to address Kieran. “You want me to come along?”

“Well, I'm not leaving you alone on the ship.”

Ferrel sighed. “I guess not.”

When they reached the hangar door
—
inconveniently located opposite the airlock at the back of the ship
—
Kieran waved his hand across the door sensor, and it slid open immediately.

Beyond the door was a long ramp leading into the bowels of the ship. Kieran started down the ramp and heard Ferrel's footsteps clanking down the ramp after him. Kieran felt the hair on the back of his neck prickling nervously as he paid careful attention to the speed and tenor of those footsteps. He was pleasantly surprised that the boy hadn't tried to doublecross him yet, but it still made him nervous to have Ferrel at his back.

At the bottom of the ramp they emerged in a corridor with an airlock to either side, a data terminal at the end, and racks of black flight suits with the Navy Sentinels' logo
—
a white shield with a halo of gold stars around it
—
emblazoned on the shoulders of each.

Kieran started. “Huh.”

“What?” Ferrel asked.

Kieran shook his head. “It's just that I expected this ship to have been owned by UBER, since the installation where we got it, and the officers who gave it to us were all clearly affiliated with the bureau.”

“And? What makes you think otherwise now?”

Kieran held out the sleeve of one of the flight suits and pointed to the logo.

Ferrel shrugged and removed one of the flight suits from the rack, testing the length against himself. “So?”

“So, that means this ship was stolen. Even if the UBER officers we met were really from the bureau, this ship wasn't theirs to give to us.”

Ferrel snorted. “That conclusion was inescapable regardless. It's not like the officers actually owned the ship. Whether it belongs to the Sentinels or to UBER, it's still Union property. It wasn't theirs to give it to us either way.”