Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (18 page)

No matter. To beat the Conflux, feral was sometimes necessary.

“Go,” Pitman said, slowly sitting back down in the chair.

Pitman tipped his head, and left the bridge.

Chapter 10: the
Broadbill

Like a lot of merchantmen, Berin Ogden was young.

Also like a lot of merchantmen, Berin had the tourist bug. Still wearing his shipsuit, replete with identifier patches, he stuck out like the foreigner that he was—wandering wide-eyed through the hula-hoop of Viking Station’s kilometers-long bazaar. Flush with cash notes from his ship’s paymaster, he nosed idly through the shops and the pubs, a bulb of mildly-fizzing alcoholic drink in one hand, and a crumpled bazaar directory in the other.

The sounds of hooting men and raunchy music drew him into one of the bazaar’s dance clubs, where a lovely but not-so-young lady quickly attached herself to his arm. The woman’s eyes were as deep and inviting as her cleavage, and before long Berin was swiping his paycard for both their drinks, culminating in a stumbled rush back to the
Broadbill’s
tertiary gangway.

It was against Captain’s orders to bring a local onboard; Berin would get asschewed if anyone saw her. Luckily the tertiary hatch was deserted and he knew how to mug the tertiary’s security—he’d seen the second mate from propulsion do it more than once—so they had no trouble passing through the gate.

Once inside, Berin took her through several maintenance hatchways until they emptied into the corridor which held the door to Berin’s closet-like crew cabin. He giggled tipsily as she ran her hands over his shipsuit, teasing at the frontal zipper and murmuring impatience. With the cabin door shut tight, sex was abrupt. Berin greedily pawed at his guest’s delightfully bronzed flesh. Her scanty outfit fell away with the brush of a hand, and they kissed sloppily as they floated to his bunk, bodies rubbing.

Berin cried out with alarm as his youth betrayed him at that point.

Rather than be angry, Berin’s guest just laughed. She wiped ejaculate from her stomach and pulled him the rest of the way out of his shipsuit, making promises about being able to coax a second wind into his sail. Berin was smiling sheepishly—but with renewed enthusiasm—when she slapped him hard on the neck with her left hand.

At once, his tongue turned to rubber and the room lost focus.

“What did … you …”

Berin was dead before he got a fourth word out.

The assassin spun one of the rings on her left hand until the small hypodermic inside it, retracted. Quickly placing her victim’s body into one of his own lockers, she removed one of his clean shipsuits and slid into it, removing the wig on her head and swiping out the colored contact lenses from her eyes. A sanitary cloth from the tiny room’s single sink did away with the makeup on her face, leaving the assassin a decidedly older, sterner version of herself. Still beautiful, but
hard.
The kind of hardness bred by a hard life.

From her purse the assassin extracted the few tools she knew she would need—each of these going into a different, zippered suit pocket.

The maintenance hatches took her back—and past—the way she’d come, to the centrally-aligned series of lift cars that traveled up and down the
Broadbill’s
spine. Berin’s keys, now attached to the assassin’s belt via one of his elastic lanyards, got her a quick ride through the ship’s considerable length, until she was able to enter the cargo hold. Checking to be sure the hold wasn’t in vacuum, she again used Berin’s keys, this time to gain access to the holdmaster’s office.

“Everyone’s on station,” said the middle-aged holdmaster’s mate, eyeing his visitor from behind his desk.

The assassin matter-of-factly pulled out a tiny pistol and shot the mate through the temple, her weapon barely making a pop as her second victim went limp over his desk, blood noodling from the tiny hole in his skull. She retrieved the mate’s keys—discarding Berin’s now-superfluous set—and used them to enter the cargo hold itself. Several stories high and twice as big around, the hold was packed with plastic and metal geometric shapes, all colors and all sizes.

The woman knew from experience what to look for, and where. When she’d confirmed that the
Broadbill
was carrying the kind of cargo she and her associates desired, she went back into the holdmaster’s office and, shoving the dead mate aside, set up a point-to-point link through the
Broadbill’s
communications umbilical with Viking Station.

“We’ve been waiting to hear from you,” said a digitally-corroded male voice.

“Sorry I’m tardy, Yangis.”

“Did you have any trouble getting in?”

The woman laughed. “Do I ever?”

Now the man named Yangis laughed. “That’s our girl.”

“They’ve got at least twenty units on this ship. Probably more, once we properly inventory her.”

“Excellent. How many crew are still aboard?”

“Wait one.”

The woman used the holdmaster’s computer to do a quick count on keys which were still known to be aboard.

“Fifteen, though I can’t be sure of their location.”

“No matter. Arbai, you’ve done an excellent job, as always. You know what to do next.”

“Just make sure you and yours are ready when I extend the cargo gangway.”

“I leave the command module to your delicate skillset, my dear.”

“Copy that. I’ll see you when you get there.”

Arbai cut the secure connection.

Using the holdmaster’s mate’s keys to re-enter the lift car, she plunged back through the length of the ship, getting off at the foyer to the command center. The keys got her through the outer door, then the inner door, and nobody seemed to notice as she entered the nerve center of the
Broadbill,
looking for all the world like just another one of its crew.

Eventually a watch officer looked up.

“Can I help you, miss?”

Arbai stopped. The officer was a young woman with junior merchant command studs on her shoulder. She floated from her chair near the middle of the complex. Screens and holographic projections decorated the space between them.

Arbai smiled.

“Don’t get up, the holdmaster just sent me to tell you that he’s got trouble with the seal on bay door three.”

“Really? We didn’t detect it here.”

“He figured that, otherwise you’d have done something about it already. He wanted me to make sure you knew.”

“We’ll have to recall some of the engineers from station leave,” the officer said, her brow furrowing with concern as she walked to one of the in-wall displays and began hitting keys to bring up the ship’s roster.

Arbai drifted further into the command module, which didn’t seem to alarm any of the other five watch officers sitting at their various stations. Reaching to her left breast pocket, she pulled out a tiny device like a diver’s nose plug and inserted it into her nostrils. Then she reached into the shipsuit’s right breast pocket and removed two glass phials, gripping them in either palm.

“I’m sorry,” Arbai said to them all.

“What?”

“It’s nothing personal. Just business.”

Before anyone in the room could say or do anything else, Arbai pitched the phials in opposite directions, smashing them against the bulkheads. Several officers began to move, but not before a sickly-sour smell filled the room. All six of the watch went limp where they were, the respiratory nerve agent making them twitch as signals between brain and body became disrupted.

Arbai breathed through her nose while she counted ninety seconds—the deadly nerve agent’s active lifespan. At one hundred and twenty seconds, she allowed herself to circle the command module, checking everyone for vitals and, satisfied that all were dead, settling herself at one of the master control stations.

The menus for the cargo bay’s gangway were simple enough to find, and easier to operate. Within three minutes, a tube had been extended out to mate with Viking Station’s bulky commerce deck. The command module remained intensely quiet throughout the entire operation, only a gentle whisper coming from the air cycle vents.

When next the command center’s inner door opened, eight men and five women entered, each of them wearing filters on their noses similar to Arbai’s.

The tallest of the men grinned, surveying the dead around him, then reached up and removed his filter, taking a deep whiff.

“You know there’s always the danger of trace contamination,” Arbai said, smirking at her boss.

“Live dangerously, or don’t live at all,” Yangis said. “Let’s get these unfortunates out of here and fire up for departure.”

Yangis’s crew fanned out immediately, two people per body, and began to get the
Broadbill’s
former bridge crew evacuated.

Yangis settled himself at a control station next to Arbai’s.

“Was he a nice boy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That lad you picked up, the one we eyed out for you. Was he nice?”

“I’m not sure how to take that question,” Arbai said, frowning.

“Take it any way you like,” Yangis said.

“If you mean sexually, he was as clumsy as any young man can be.”

“Worse than me when we first met?”

“No, he wasn’t nearly that bad. Compared to you, he was a pro.”

Yangis’s laughter boomed through the command module.

“Leave it to my ex-wife to bust my balls for me!”

“You don’t pay me to be gentle, dear.”

“No, no I don’t. Now get that hard ass of yours down to propulsion. I’ve got several more people coming aboard in maintenance coveralls, and I want you to make sure they don’t have any trouble when they get down to the drive assembly.”

Arbai mock-saluted and floated away from her station, feeling her ex-husband’s hand pat her rump before she went to the command module doors, and exited.

As with previous jobs on merchant ships like the
Broadbill,
everything else proved academic. Arbai wondered why more ships—more companies—hadn’t learned better. Lax protocol, lax training, weak security measures at entry points, skeleton staffing while in port. Typical, typical, typical. It was like they were begging for piracy. Though pirate was not the word Arbai would have used to describe herself. She was a trained professional, and very good at what she did. Had there been any money in it, she might have even stayed in the CAF. Lucky for her she’d met Yangis, and when they’d both gotten out of uniform, gone into business for themselves.

A very select, very exclusive kind of business.

When the
Broadbill
broke dock without warning, there was the usual wailing from traffic control. Yangis ignored it, and Arbai watched from one of the portals in the crew module as the merchant ship spun away from Viking Station and flew into the blackness of space.

Chapter 11: the
Broadbill

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the
Broadbill
had left dock without proper authorization from Viking Station control.

As soon as Kal felt the gee of acceleration assert itself, she knew what was up.

“You can’t be serious,” Tim said as he watched Kal get her pistol out of her shoulder holster, remove and check the magazine, then slap the magazine back in place.

“I’m dead serious. Whoever has been taking these Tremonton shipments? Their ambition just leveled up. Now they’re taking a whole cradle ship. The
Broadbill
is officially under new management.”

“So what do we do now?” Tim asked.

“Nothing. We stick to the plan. In fact, this actually makes things a easier. I was trying to figure out how we were going to manage to get out into the rest of the ship, if or when somebody decided to snatch the sensitive hardware in the cargo hold. Now they’re liable to take us directly to wherever the missing shipments have been piling up. Or, more probably, we’ll rendezvous with another ship in orbit somewhere obscure. The cargo will get moved to a new ship. And then the
Broadbill
will be sent off somewhere far away. To confuse the trail.”

“Sounds like we’ll have to be ready to go where the crates go,” Tim said.

“Yup. And that’s going to be very potentially tricky. We might have to go outside again and hope we can jump—ship to ship—without being noticed. Are you prepared for that?”

“Sounds like I might have to be,” Tim said, frowning and running a hand through his curly black hair.

Kal slipped her pistol back into its shoulder holster, and sat on the bunk across from where Tim was slouched in the single fold-up chair that was next to the shelf-like fold-up desk.

“Tell me,” she said, “just what is it about this new armor model that’s so exciting the Ambit League wants a piece of it?”

“Ummm, I’m not sure I can talk about that, you see—“

“Save it, kid, I have need-to-know at this point. I used several different types of armor during the war. It’s not like that’s brand new technology.”

“The Archangel series isn’t just an upgrade to the older armor suits that the CAF’s been using since the war,” Tim said. “We’re talking about an entirely new generation of bio-neural interfacing. You don’t wear the suit. It’s like the suit wears
you.
Reflexive response times far in advance of anything the CAF or the Ambit League were using in battle when the war was still hot. Plus it employs advanced ceramics, polymers, alloys, and a microcomputer system that learns its owner over time. Until the microcomputer is almost a shallow, duplicate personality. It knows your moves before you know your moves.”

Kal was intrigued. She wondered what it would be like to pilot such a suit. The conventional suits were big, bulky behemoths with loads of firepower, but slow and cumbersome. Not to mention exhausting. The delayed response times on movement meant an average troop became physically tired while fighting against the lag. If what Tim said was true, the Archangel suits truly were next-generation.

“Anyway,” Tim said, “the Ambit League would be stupid to let itself fight that kind of suit without trying to replicate the tech. Trials on some of the Occupied Zone planets have already yielded very good results. Even against entrenched, experienced opposition, the Archangel has a perfect record. No losses. With countless enemy combatants neutralized or destroyed.”