Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 19

  “I doubt the captain will be interested.”

  Major Sun was one of Betty’s favorite Humans, but she was becoming an irritant. First she’d told Betty she was brilliant, now there was an unmistakable sourness to Sun’s words. What was wrong with the Human? Ah…

  Betty understood. Tatterjee had explained the ways of Human females. It was the mating urge.

  “You can’t delay any longer, Major. You can’t wait for Branco’s disease to claim him. You must kill him. The need to lay your eggs is clouding your judgement.”

  “I think I’m going to pretend I never heard that. Although…maybe in your weird Tort way, you’re right.”

  “I know I am.”

  “We need this time for ourselves, Branco and I. Stay close, Betty. We’ll call you if we need assistance. We aren’t in danger.”

  “I know you can take care of yourself, Major. We still have the damsel snackling to rescue, though. I still think it’s best to alert Midnight Sun and send a team to kill everyone on Crazy Notion.”

  “Relax. We know what we’re doing.”

  “Very well. I shall relocate to the docking area. I will stay close and alert.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Sun reappeared into Branco’s sight, passing through the row of stanchions as if nothing had just happened.

  “Did you have any signal problems when you were talking with Betty?” he asked.

  She frowned. “Yes. It was patchy. Kept dropping out. Enough to have a conversation, but something was wrong. Why?”

  “Keep to this side of the stanchions and watch me.”

  She did as he asked, and he throttled forward in the replacement chair Jenkins had presented to him the day before. The two large wheels had been replaced by six smaller ones with active suspension and independent drive motors, though Branco could still crank the wheels if the hydrogen cell ran out of juice. There were rockets mounted in the arms, too, though this wasn’t the right place to try them out.

  He deliberately rode over some coiled tethering cables to test how maneuverable the contraption really was. It rode over them with ease. Jenkins was a marvel.

  His stomach suddenly lurched when, instead of his chair climbing over the obstacle in front of him, he passed right through it.

  Because it wasn’t really there.

  When Sun had sought deeper concealment to talk with Betty, she had disappeared. This was why. He was inside some kind of advanced concealment field. That last coil of cable was likely a Tri-V projection, an advanced one too. No doubt there were other ways in which this area of the hold was sealed off from outside observation. Probably there were several sections concealed by this technology, but someone had forgotten to switch this one off.

  He looked around briefly. The area was empty except for a stack of small cargo crates fixed against one bulkhead.

  Even they might be an illusion.

  He motored smoothly over to the crates, impressed by the near-silent ride, and touched one of them.

  It was cold metal. It felt real enough.

  “Neat tech,” said Sun behind him. “As soon as you moved in here, you disappeared from every sensor. I couldn’t hear you or smell you. Nothing. We never had anything like this on Unlikely Regret.” She narrowed her eyes. “Not that the skipper let on about, anyway.”

  The surveillance equipment Branco had set up when they sneaked aboard the ship indicated movement near the main airlock. He steeled himself and leaned into the storm of pain that lashed him whenever he used his pinplants. It wasn’t quite as horrendous as he expected. The new meds he’d sourced from a Bugitar trader on Vane 1 seemed to be helping. In the pinview that overlaid his natural vision, he watched a scene caught by a security camera near Crazy Notion’s main airlock.

  The image was fuzzy and stuttering. Some of that was hash from the noise of pain washing through his pinplants like an EMP attack, but more would be due to his data source. He wasn’t using a software hack. Instead, he was hooking into the radiation spilling out from an unshielded section of security feed cabling. He’d followed telltale signs of rodents until he’d found patches where the cable shielding had been gnawed away. Mice and rats—even if Peepo had wiped out life on Earth, and humanity at large, other Terran mammals were firmly establishing themselves throughout the Union.

  A lumbering Jivool with a laser rifle passed beneath the camera, followed by a Lumar carrying a curled-up Jeha in its four arms.

  “It’s got to be Hopper,” Branco whispered. “They’ve brought her on board.”

  “That’s the intel we need,” said Sun. “Let’s get out of here and come back loaded for Oogar.”

  She looked around at the concealed section of hold. “I’d love to know how this works. But another time, after we’ve taken this ship.”

  They made their way to an auxiliary maintenance airlock. Compared with a frontline warship, an old tub like this was leaky with portals. Even if this had been a system defense boat at one point in its life, out here in the nebula, that signified nothing more than a barge with a gun.

  Branco hit the EVA switch on the control panel glued across the arms of his chair. Within milliseconds, a pressure bubble sealed him into his seat, and the rebreather unit in its base activated. Once he was out into the vacuum, Jenkins had even provided reaction thrusters to boost him to safety—and Jenkins had called this only a stopgap. He assured them Version 2 would be much better armed and armored. Nice work.

  “Someone’s coming,” said Sun. “Stop admiring your ride and speed it up.”

  Branco listened in on the monitors he’d set in a perimeter to the hold’s inner entrances. He got a much higher fidelity signal than from the security camera, even though he’d set self-disposing units that would dissolve into fine powder in a few hours.

  “I regret there has been a change of plan,” said one of the approaching people. The voice was of a Maki, a member of an alien race with big-eyed faces that had the cuteness of a lemur. Their attitude, though, was anything but cute. “We will be making an unscheduled departure imminently. How long will it take for your people to load the cargo?”

  “Ten minutes to get it aboard,” replied a Human male. “We’re very good at moving at speed. And additional time once we’re underway to secure it in the hold.”

  “We leave in fifteen,” said the Maki. “Therefore, you must answer within five minutes.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then we will put you safely on the far side of the docking bay, and you will not be offered this chance again.”

  “And you’re still bound for Rho-Gaudi?”

  “Where I believe your ship is docked, yes.”

  Branco’s pinplants made a voice match between the Human and persons of interest. A name appeared in his pinview.

  “It’s Captain Jenkins,” he whispered to Sun.

  She made a strange noise in the back of her throat. “No! It can’t be.”

  “He’s negotiating a contract. But this ship is bugging out in fifteen. We’ve got to go, Sun.”

  “I want to hear what Jenkins is up to.”

  “Me, too. If we’re lucky, we might still get a signal from the far side of the hull.”

  She grabbed him by the shoulders. “There’s no time to summon CASPers. We can’t take the ship. But I want to eavesdrop because I think Jenkins is the key to this mystery.”

  “You could be right, but this is getting dangerous.”

  “So?” She arched an eyebrow. It was a small gesture, but her face transformed into a look of pure challenge that beamed out of an untamable spirit.

  Branco gasped. He’d only encountered one other person who looked like that. Her sister.

  “Sun,” he hissed. “What’s come over you?”

  “I’m tired of being the dependable one. I want—I need to kick off, too. I’ve spent so many years looking after my sister, I’ve forgotten how to do much else. Help me, Branco.”

  Footsteps pounded toward them a
long the hold deck.

  “But it’s not safe,” he said.

  “Face it, Branco, what have you got to go back to?”

  Her honesty stabbed him with its brutality. What did he have waiting for him on Midnight Sun? A long journey to a party back on Tau-Rietzke. The long faces of his friends as his body’s decay accelerated. Then death.

  Sun was offering him a chance of something else. A last hurrah on their own terms—his own terms.

  There was a minute softening to Sun’s face. Her look of challenge became one of playful teasing. “Well?”

  Branco laughed. There was the sister he loved. He kissed her. She was a marvel!

  Jenkins and the Maki were almost in sight. If they were to go, it was now or never.

  “Let’s get under cover,” he said. He drove his chair back into the concealment field.

  Sun whispered aloud for his benefit. “Betty, we’re following Captain Jenkins, my old skipper. Crazy Notion’s about to cast off and we’ve decided to stay here and see where the voyage takes us. Sometimes—Look, we’ve all served the company long and well, Betty. Sometimes we deserve the chance to follow our hearts. We’ll meet up further along the path. Sun out.”

  With the warmth of her arms around his shoulders, they waited in silence as Jenkins and the Maki came into view.

  Through the deck came a powerful hum as the fusion reactor boosted its output, readying to feed the ship’s fusion torch, and transport Branco and Sun into the unknown if they didn’t get off this ship real soon.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  At seventy-one, Captain Jenkins was proud that at an age that would have rendered him a decayed fossil in an earlier era, he could hold his own in a brawl, enjoy company at bedtime, and still boast 20/20 vision.

  The spectacles he wore were not to correct his sight, they were to peer through the old smuggler’s tricks he often employed himself.

  Infra-red.

  Electrical emissions.

  Sources of magnetism.

  The intelligence inside the eyewear applied simultaneous observation strategies to defeat a host of concealment techniques.

  So far, the Endless Night ship had been exactly as it at first appeared.

  Until he’d come to the hold. The section they were standing next to was wrong.

  It was an unused empty space with lashing cables coiled around a row of stanchions, ready for its next cargo. But his glasses insisted that something about it was not right. Was there someone hiding inside? A person? Why?

  Jenkins made a show of inspecting the other side of the hold. “What if you’re raided, Shurough-Yub?” he asked the Maki captain. “If we throw in our lot with you, your lackadaisical security could get me killed.”

  “We have hidden compartments and exquisite concealment zone projectors. Some of them are active and yet you showed no sign of noticing. I regret that’s the only demonstration you’re getting. We’re out of time.”

  “Oh, I think I’ve seen enough, Captain.” Jenkins contemplated the Maki. “But I’m still not sure. I ran a regular shipment for the old power that went twelve years without a hitch. They were never caught. I was never caught. I never knew what I was shipping or even who I was working for. Everyone was happy.”

  “And they will be again, Captain Jenkins. The question is whether you are going to be one of the happy ones.”

  “I don’t know. Everything’s changed. Makes me nervous.”

  “Which is why I will offer a triple bonus, paid up front for the first ten shipments. I understand it appears to be extra risk for you, Captain Jenkins. It is also well known to us that in times past you had no liking for Endless Night.”

  Jenkins scowled. “Still don’t.”

  “Which is why no one will suspect you carry our shipments. It is also why I ask you to keep away from Station 5 while we…attend to business here.”

  “Are you worried I’ll run from the nebula?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Jenkins rubbed at his scruffy beard. “But I like Station 5. The rest of the nebula’s a shithole. I know. I’ve lived there for thirty years.”

  “Did I say triple bonus? I meant to say quadruple.”

  “I can’t keep my people locked up in the nebula forever. How long would I need to keep away from the station?”

  “Until we say so. In any case, no more than two Terran years.”

  Jenkins released a heavy sigh. “I’m still not sure. But what I do know is that I have a crew, ex-wives, and a lazy son to support who would all tell me the same thing—a credit’s a credit.” He spat into his hand and held it out.

  Captain Shurough-Yub shook it with his paw.

  Jenkins spoke into the collar of his greatcoat. “We’re taking this job. Start loading the cover cargo. Double sharpish, Miss Brakshi, if you please.”

  As the Maki hurried off, the alien asked over his shoulder. “Do you need assistance?”

  “No need. Leave me here. It’s a Human failing, but I want to spend a little time here to contemplate how we’ll…” He let his words drift away. The Endless Night captain was already through the hatch and heading for his bridge.

  A series of impacts thudded against the ship’s hull as mooring lines were released and sucked back into their recesses.

  “Little fella’s in quite the rush,” he said to the active concealment zone. “While I, on the other hand, have 170 hours and ten minutes to kill.” He crossed his arms, keeping his wrist slate prominent so he could read the detailed analysis sent by his spectacles. “I find a little mystery helps to pass the time.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Forty

  The bespectacled man stood, hands on hips, staring through the concealment field where Branco hid with Sun.

  The intensity of his gaze wasn’t directed at the two hideaways but somewhere behind them. Branco felt like he was sitting in the front row of a theater watching an actor project to the back row.

  Suddenly, the man’s mouth curled into a smile, the softening of his expression amplified as his silver-stranded beard rustled.

  Branco touched Sun. “I think he knows we’re here.”

  “Don’t be so sure. He always was weird. Talked to himself a lot.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “I thought I did.” Sun narrowed her eyes. “Captain Lenworth Rushby Jenkins.” She shook her head. “The man I served under would never do deals with Endless Night.”

  Concentration wrapped around Captain Jenkins once more. He held an arm in front of his face and made frequent glances at his wrist slate.

  Branco’s fingers twitched over the chair’s controls. Activating them could alert Captain Jenkins, so he did what he’d been trained to do: observe, assess, and refine his plans.

  Sun’s former captain was tall and broad shouldered, with a middle-aged paunch that was only partially obscured by his heavy red greatcoat with high upturned collar and thick epaulets. Bulges over each hip suggested pistols but could be more innocent equipment.

  Deep crow’s feet lining his African face gave the surface impression of a man who knew how to laugh, to enjoy the pleasures of life. But his deep brown eyes were wells of manic sadness. Here was a man who’d experienced pain and loss. Some of it recently.

  There was a crumpled nobility to Jenkins that suited a captain of a Spine Nebula tramp freighter. Here was a man people would follow, but you wouldn’t stay captain out here for long without a sharply honed ruthless streak.

  Which meant Jenkins was also a dangerous man.

  Branco stretched his hands out, marveling at the absence of trembling. The new meds were holding up brilliantly so far. Then he reached under his seat’s control panel and removed his pistol.

  “If we all survive the next few minutes,” he whispered to Sun, “we’ll have to unpick the confusing mess your sister made with this man’s name. There’s a surfeit of Jenkinses.”

  “If he’s dealing with Endless Night then he doesn’t deserve the name.
We used to call him Skipper, anyway.”

  “Works for me.”

  The captain cleared his throat theatrically and spoke in a deep bass rumble. “Your sister walked off with my best blue greatcoat. I want it back, Sun. If she wanted a memento, she could’ve taken a lock of my hair or a photograph, like a normal person would. I mean, for Pete’s sake, the damned coat must drown her. I want it back.”

  Branco itched for action, but Sun shook her head at him and pressed a finger to her lips.

  Jenkins planted his hands on his generous belly and laughed like a space Santa. “Sun, you’re hiding a man in a damned wheelchair. I know you’re there. Give me some credit.” He sobered into a slight grin. “Funny, this is the kind of escapade I would expect of your sister. Oh, my goodness, Sun, it’s good to see you. I never expected I would.”

  “And I never expected you to be dealing with the Devil.”

  “Endless Night. Hmm.” He spat on the deck. “Still don’t like them. The situation is not as simple as it seems. Your sister, is she well?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. She was a wild one, but I was immensely fond of her.”

  “Fond? Is that what you call it? She was your mistress.”

  “Hah!” He doubled over with uncontrollable laughter choked with phlegm and tobacco, before recovering enough to wipe tears from his eyes. “That’s a good one. Blue was my mistress? No, Sun, I was her—” He shrugged. “I don’t know what you call the male equivalent, but that’s what I was. Your sister sucked me dry of entertainment and knowledge, and then she walked off my ship never to come back, taking my best coat with her. You followed her, if I remember. Meekly, as you always did.”

  Sun replied with a furious silence.

  Jenkins took a step closer. “Being your sister’s lover was like riding a tiger. I’m glad I got off before she dashed me to death, but it wasn’t just a thrill ride for me. I cared for her, and it takes a lot to unlock my tired old heart. Tell me straight, is she dead?”