Status Quo Page 12

  'Calm down. All I want is some answers.'

  'Who the frag are you?' she screeched, still looking like a cornered wild animal.

  He put down the pistol and held up his hands,. 'All right; look, I’m unarmed. Let’s just talk. My name is Jim.'

  Her eyes narrowed, she looked carefully at him, studying the eyes as her father had taught her. 'You’re not going to hurt me?'

  'Hurt you? You’re the one who hurt me. Don’t you remember?'

  She paused,. 'Well. Yes. Sorry. I assumed you were going to…'

  '… sell you into slavery? It’s illegal, you know.'

  'Yeah? So is narcotic smuggling and everyone does that!'

  'I thought I was doing you a favour. It was supposed to be a rescue, after all.'

  Her eyes registered surprise, 'You’re not in league with that Courier?'

  'The Courier? No.'

  She looked askance at him. 'You saw it? You heard my distress call?'

  He nodded. 'I saw the Courier destroy your escort. A Pod ejected. The Courier was going to shoot it down.'

  'Did you see any others?' she asked, a hint of hope creeping into her voice.

  'No, just yours… I’m sorry. I intervened. I mean you no harm; you can trust me.'

  'Trust you? I can’t trust you! You’re a prakkin’ fugitive! The whole of Galcop is after you and this prakkin’ ship. This ship is crazy, it’s full of mad stuff that shouldn’t exist! Couriers attacking me, killing my family; Vipers shooting my ass off! Mines that blow up half the sky! You’re no innocent bystander! Who the frag are you and what are you doing?'

  'Well, that’s a tale I’m happy to share. But I’m asking the questions first. Who are you? You’re not exactly innocent, are you? I don’t know if I can trust you either.'

  'What do you mean? I’m just an honest trader!'

  'You’re a dangerous fugitive too according to the log.'

  'No prakkin’ way!'

  'Check it out if you don’t believe me.'

  He gestured to the gravity well to the bridge. She glared at him, walking past giving him a wide berth. She ascended the gravity well. He heard a cry of sheer outrage from the bridge.

  'They’ve fraggin’ marked me! They’ve crashed my accounts! Stards!'

  Jim related the first part of his tale to her after they agreed to be civil with each other. They sat on the bridge, at opposite ends, warily watching each other as they ate some nutritionals.

  He seems honest, maybe too honest…

  'So you’re a real fugitive, not just a legal one,' she said, staring at him as if trying to gauge his honesty, 'What a frakkin’ mess this is.'

  He shrugged. 'I uncovered a plot. I had to do something.'

  'And you invented this mine?'

  'Not exactly. It was an accidental discovery with a colleague of mine. Until a day ago I had no idea it had been built.'

  'And so you stole this ship. Rather than let them use it.'

  'Exactly.'

  'And they were really planning to obliterate the Achenar system?'

  'So they said. These weapons could do it.'

  She shook her head. 'Frakkin Galcop. Those stards have got it coming to them. I always thought they were a dodgy outfit. Mark my words, the whole thing will come crashing down one day soon. Sounds like the rot is already setting in. What were you planning to do?'

  'I was heading towards Lave. I’d just arrived in the Zaonce system. Your Boa was nearby.'

  'I remember. We thought your ship looked odd. You headed straight for the star.'

  'Too dangerous to approach the stations.'

  'Figures.'

  'I can only assume the Courier was an assassin, sent to kill me.'

  'And we got in the way.'

  'I’m truly sorry. I had no idea…'

  She shrugged. 'They’re dead now.'

  He frowned. 'You’re taking this very well.'

  She glared at him, eyes blazing with sudden anger. 'No I fraggin’ well am not! You think it’s easy having your ship shot out from under you? Seeing your brother killed? Your cousins murdered? Your father’s agonised expression the last thing you see? Prak you, lab boy!'

  He didn’t respond to her outburst, couldn’t; waited as she calmed herself down.

  'I’m sorry.' she managed.

  'I understand. You’ve lost everything…' it sounded hopelessly inadequate.

  'No, you don’t understand,' she said, her head dropping, allowing her hair to fall forward, covering her face. 'It’s not like that.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You wouldn't understand.'

  She dissolved into tears.

  Guilt; a horrible thing to have to deal with in such a situation. Survivor’s guilt? Or a genuine regret for life choices? That was her problem, not his. He had to find out what had been happening. Jim decided the best thing he could do was distract her.

  'Were you flying the Boa?'

  'Yeah.' She sniffed.

  'You fought well.'

  'I was beaten.'

  'Hardly a fair fight,' he observed. 'On equal terms I reckon you would take him down.'

  Her eyes hardened with resolve. 'One day I will.'

  'It's your funeral,' he replied with a shrug. That wasn’t what he intended to get her to think at all. 'You’ll end up dead quicker than you can get into witchspace if you pursue a vendetta.'

  'Don’t lecture me!' she snapped. 'Nobody tells me what to do! I decide!'

  He held up his hands, backing off. 'Whatever you say.'

  She wiped her eyes. 'So. The Courier is an assassin. How did it find you? It must’ve had some way of tracking this ship.'

  Jim shook his head. 'I don’t know, at least not yet. But it must have followed some kind of trail as it didn’t come after me directly.'

  'Homing device?'

  'Can't be, I've checked thoroughly.'

  Not thoroughly enough!

  'Then the 'goid ran straight into us.'

  'Galcop must have issued an order to kill any witnesses.'

  'The stards!'

  'And the Courier attacked you.'

  Rebecca shivered as she recalled the memory, it was raw in her mind. 'It was unreal. I’ve never seen such a ship. It killed our escorts in seconds and turned on us. My dad chucked me in the escape pod. I saw Eclipse explode, then nothing.'

  'I saw that too, and the Courier going for your pod. I injected my way in front of the Courier, knocked it aside and scooped your pod, then got out of there as fast as I could.'

  Her estimation of him jumped a notch. 'So you really did rescue me.'

  'And you repaid me with a cracked skull.'

  He could almost see her hackles go up at that. 'I thought you were the Courier pilot! It was self-defence!'

  He smiled, trying to ease the tension. 'Sorry, just a joke. What happened next?'

  'I locked you in, debated about ejecting you into space…'

  'Yeah, thanks for that. You’d have killed me. Your radiation shielding was gone.'

  'You should have thought about that before you scooped my pod.'

  'Haven’t you ever heard of altruism?'

  'Quit with the big words. Nobody gives a rusty gravemarker for the safety of anyone else out here in the black! That’s not the way things work! You were dumb; it was a stupid thing to do. If it had been me I would have just cleared out.'

  'I guess you would, too,' he snarled. 'So next time your ass needs saving I shouldn’t bother, is that what you’re saying?'

  She glared at him.

  'I’m grateful you saved my life,' she finally admitted. 'But don’t expect any great favours from me.'

  He shook his head in amazement at her attitude, was it typical of traders? Perhaps it was. Maybe living they way the did made them selfish and self-obsessed, unconcerned with the fate of those around them.

  'Oh, don’t worry, I won’t. Anyway, your story. What happened next?'

  'I ran for the Sun. I came across four Vipers. I tried to surrender, but they jus
t started blasting me.'

  'You fired at them?'

  'Not initially, but I was forced too. Then I discovered the fraggin’ laser doesn’t work.'

  'Doesn’t work?' He stared in surprise.

  'The cooling system was bypassed for your prakkin’ mines!'

  Jim thought about that. What a mess! These mines must have been developed fast, a rush job. They worked, but introduced ridiculous compromises. Diverting the coolant! How tacky was that. A complete kludge. He’d never have allowed it. They should have been self-contained devices, like missiles.

  'So how did you…?'

  'I fired a missile but it was shot down, so I figured one of your mines would make a diversion, enough to get me some distance to trigger the injectors. I dropped a mine. I never intended to kill them all…'

  'The Vipers? What happened?' Jim was curious, despite himself.

  'See for yourself. No explanation could do it justice.' She flipped on the vidlog, 'Candid camera.'

  He watched the video replay of the Viper attack, the detonation of the bomb and the resultant chaos. It was scary enough to watch it now, let alone being present when it happened. The girl had guts, she’d kept her head when the bomb had gone off and got herself out of the way. The battle with the Vipers was impressive too; she was a flyer and no mistake. He realised he would not have survived that encounter. He probably would have been shot down long before he’d been able to launch a mine, and he might not even have done that. She’d probably saved his life, though not intentionally.

  'Where did you learn to fly like that?' he asked, impressed.

  She shrugged, 'I just can.' She looked back at the vidlog, frowning. 'Dumb weapon. As dangerous to the attacker as to the target.'

  'So you injected out of range…' he prompted.

  '… and the Courier found me. I tell you, it can track this ship, has to be able to. No other way it could have found me. I was trying to jump out-system, so I had no choice.'

  Jim’s face was a question mark. 'So how did you…?'

  'I forced a mis-jump.'

  He was staggered. She was brave. Stupid maybe, but definitely brave.

  'And here we are, stuck interstellar. I was ill, really sick. I must have passed out. I guess you fixed that for me.'

  'It was radiation poisoning from when you ejected. You were almost dead. It was lucky I came round in time.'

  They looked at each other for a long moment.

  'So you did save me a second time,' she said, with the first hint of humour in her eyes.

  Jim smiled and held out his hand.

  'Jim Feynman.'

  She shook it.

  'Rebecca Tyley. Sorry about your head.'

  'Sorry about your trashed accounts.'

  'Yeah,' she mumbled, then heaved a sigh. 'So, we’re both fragged then. You’re a victim of conscience and I’m a Galcop Viper killer. What are we going to do now?'

  'We should be safe out here in interstellar for a while. I think our first job is to get this ship back on its feet. How are you as a technician?'

  'Better than you, I bet.'

  'Uh-huh.' Jim replied. She had a full measure of arrogance, that was for sure.

  'I’m not going anywhere without a working laser.'

  'Lets see what we can do together,' he offered. 'Tyley-Feynman. Has a bit of a ring to it, don’t you think?'

  'No, I don’t.' Rebecca snapped back suspiciously, giving him an acerbic look. 'Sounds like a second-hand spare parts franchise.'

  It turned out the design flaws on the bomb were pretty trivial. The coolant had been rerouted because whoever had designed the bomb thought the cascade might trigger inadvertently. Jim calculated that unless you were redlining the cabin temperature then coolant was unnecessary. They could route the coolant lines back to the laser without risk. They decided to do that first.

  And fell to arguing almost immediately.

  'You can’t just pull the coolant pipes out and reconnect them!' Jim shouted at her. 'You’ve got to bleed them down, flux-clean the interiors and then repressurise them. I designed some of these systems, I know!'

  'Prak that,' Rebecca retorted, 'that’ll take hours.'

  'So?'

  'You can do it in a couple of minutes. Just pull them out, slap them back in and run the pumps in backwash for a while.'

  'Backwash?'

  'You just reconnect the pump circuits with invert. Easy.'

  'You can’t do that you’ll blow the pump! It’s an impeller design, it won’t work! Not to mention all the valves you’ll need to reprime!'

  'Done it a hundred times. You think you’ve got time to go through the manual in the middle of a fight?' she put on a silly voice. 'Oh look, the laser’s overheated again. Oh, the manual says we have to take two hours to re-run the coolant. Better get started I suppose. Oh, we’re dead! Wonder how that happened?'

  'No need to be patronising.' His voice dripped scorn.

  'And you need to get your head out of your stupid theoretical backside,' Rebecca growled back angrily at him. 'This is the real world, not your lab.'

  'I know about the real world.'

  'Oh yeah? So you think a ‘harmless’ combat rating is good do you?'

  'I get good scores on the simulators…'

  'Don’t mean a thing.'

  'Well, I’ve not been out in space much…'

  'You’re a total greenie, aren’t you? Harmless! That explains everything. You’re lucky to still be alive.'

  'I can handle myself.'

  'Still think the flight manual is worth reading? Prak that. Listen Harmless, you need to realise that out here in the field, tech is only as good as what you can get it to do. I don’t care if you aren’t supposed to connect the pumps in backwash, it works, it keeps you alive. If you need coolant in thirty seconds you’ve got to figure a way of doing it. End of story.'

  She pulled out the coolant pipes. Red flashing lights lit up all around them and sirens wailed imminent disaster. She slapped them across into matching receptacles on the other side of the small interhull space they were working in. Then she took the power pack from the pump, flipped open the access plate, adjusted the internals and pushed it back place.

  There was a burst of sparks from the pump.

  'Frag!' Jim cursed, seeing Rebecca jump back. 'Are you all right?'

  She was nursing her hand, he could see she’d burnt it. 'Yeah. Always does that.'

  There was a strange grinding and sloshing sound from the pipes. Rebecca counted for a few seconds, then pulled and reversed the power pack.

  All the lights turned green one by one.

  'There you go, job done.' she said brightly. 'Next. Coming, Harmless?'

  She crawled out of the access way, leaving a bemused Jim behind her. She was really beginning to annoy him. Worse, he knew she was right.

  Other than the laser, securing the mine and ejecting the useless escape pod into space it took them only a few hours to get the ship straight. Rebecca upgraded the astronavigation systems with weird and wonderful battle tested but unorthodox programming. She’d even rebooted the computers…

  *RUN

  © 2982 Cinklayr Research Ltd

  Ready.

  >

  She’d also tried to pick up any Galcop wideband transmissions, but they were too far out to hear anything. Worse, she’d picked up some strange clicking noises on an unused wideband channel. She could make no sense of it. What was most alarming was the signal strength indicated the source wasn’t too far away, yet there was nothing on the scanner. It was an eerie sound, unnerving and filled with menace.

  'What do you make of that?' she asked him, looking rather ill at ease.

  Jim listened to the strange sound and shrugged, 'Some weird kind of static, pulsar emanation maybe? A dark star perhaps.'

  Rebecca shook her head, 'It's too irregular. I think there's something out there.'

  Jim left her to it, he was thinking through what he planned to do next. He hadn’t got far when Rebecca in
terrupted his chain of thoughts.

  'So, Harmless, drives are on, laser is cool, shields are up, witchdrive is charging. We’re pretty much ready to go.'

  'Question for you first.'

  'Oh yeah?'

  'When you first scanned this ship, what did the ident computer say?'

  She frowned, 'It showed up as a Cobra Mk3, with a mismatch – fifteen percent I think. We assumed it was a new type of Cobra or something.'

  'Anything else?'

  She looked blank for a moment, 'Yeah. It said 'gravimetric radiation detected'.'

  Jim sat back in the pilot's chair, 'Mystery solved then.'

  'Huh?'

  'How the Imperial Courier is able to track us. It's the mines themselves. They're leaking radiation.'

  She looked worried, 'Oh wonderful… '

  'No danger to us, well, not directly.' he continued, 'Gravimetric radiation won't kill you. But it will show up like a sore thumb to a scanner properly set up to look for it.'

  'So let's dump the other mine and make good our escape.'

  'Can't.'

  'Why not?' she asked, exasperated.

  'I need it.'

  She looked at him with annoyance, 'So what's the plan then, harmless?'

  'Well, listen up, ‘Dangerous’. Set the hyperspace system to Lave.'

  He’d decided to start calling her ‘Dangerous’ in response to her ‘Harmless’ out of pure spite. It wasn’t very edifying, but it was very satisfying to irk her in return. She had to be the most irritating people he'd ever encountered.

  'Lave?' she looked incredulous, 'Are you mad?'

  'Maybe. But that’s where we need to go.'

  'Did I miss part of the plan here?' she yelled at him. 'The part where I agreed to commit suicide voluntarily? You want to go into the seat of Galcop power in a stolen ship, with an illegal bomb, two fugitives aboard and the police of half the galaxy looking for us?'

  'Yes.'

  'Just on a whim? Bit of sight-seeing perhaps? Don’t you think it might be just a little bit… fatal? As in dead?' Her voice rose to a shout. 'As in blasted to smithereens on sight?'

  'There is a good reason.'

  'Oh wow. This is going to be good, I’m sure. I can’t wait to hear it.'