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  Sun expected he was probably right. But none of that was going to help the sisters to stay together. The ship was a means for Blue to run away, not an end in itself.

  They reached Tube Three: thirty feet of semi-rigid tube perpendicular to the station’s axis of spin, which ended in the main hatch into Pak’s ship.

  The hatch was closed.

  Standing guard were two Zuul, vaguely canine humanoids wearing smoky black light combat armor with a diagonal blood red stripe. Endless Night colors!

  They were making low growls into collar mikes. She couldn’t overhear, but they sounded seriously scared of whomever they were talking to.

  At their feet lay a large fabric sack.

  It twitched. Someone was inside!

  All this, Sun registered in the instant before the Zuul noticed the two humans. She threw one hand around Pak’s waist and smoothed the other over his broad chest. “This one’s occupied,” she giggled, barely missing a step.

  “Next one better be empty,” he growled hungrily.

  They carried on the pretense of being eager lovers all the way to the next docking tube, which was both extended and unoccupied.

  “I can’t hear pursuit,” he whispered once they’d advanced a short distance into the unused tube. “We should get help.” He didn’t sound at all convincing.

  “What is it? Are you just going to abandon your ship and your crew?”

  When the man didn’t immediately deny that was what he’d do, the gorge rose to Sun’s throat. She wasn’t just scared for her sister, but this man had the backbone of a jellyfish. Mercenary companies got paid to do a job. They didn’t put themselves in harm’s way in order to right wrongs and stand up to the strong in behalf of the weak – not unless their credit rating was good – but even so, you relied on your brothers and sisters to have your back. You didn’t abandon them at the first sign of danger.

  Not like Pak seemed about to do.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “There’s hardly anyone aboard. Just the three elSha and our Gtandan cook. We don’t need to post much of a guard because the ship knows how to take care of itself.”

  “You mean…” Sun thought better of completing that sentence. AIs were restricted technology. “But that’s good, right?” she ventured. “The automated defense systems will have neutralized the armed invaders but merely detain my sister. That is what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s find out,” Pak said, handing her the same HP-4 pistol he’d handed over in the bar. He sounded grimly determined, not like he was about to run. “I honestly don’t know what the ship will do. They may all be dead on board. It might try to kill us too. But I do know it isn’t an AI.”

  She looked on, impressed, as he snapped together the parts of a CL32 laser pistol from various pockets and pouches around his person. “But you said the ship can take care of itself. If it’s not an AI, what is it?”

  “Alive.”

  He finished snapping together his weapon and nodded to indicate his readiness for combat.

  “Wait,” she told him, and squatted down to unlace her boots. Pak copied her and the sound of two pairs of discarded boots echoed down the tube and, hopefully along the ring to the Zuul.

  “I’ll take the near one,” Sun whispered before they padded silently back to Tube Three.

  They discovered one of the Zuul pirates was rapping on the hatch door with the stock of its rifle, the other looking on nervously.

  Which made this easy.

  Pak and Sun advanced a few yards into the tube before halting and taking careful aim.

  The Zuul knocking on the door halted and sniffed the air with its doglike nose.

  Too slow, Fido, thought Sun, and opened fire.

  The range was 30 yards, but the Ctech was the most accurate pistol Sun knew. She put one round through her target’s head, and another plugged its center mass. Pak aimed his beam through his target’s eye, but the Zuul was moving to engage, and the result was to flay the alien’s flesh from its face and boil its brains.

  “Cover me,” ordered Sun and loped through the 0.5g to the bag. She sliced it open with the knife she always carried at her hip and looked inside.

  “Entropy!” she cursed.

  “Please don’t kill me,” begged the Jeha inside.

  “I’m no danger to you,” Sun told it. “Let me guess, you’re the one my sister named Jenkins.”

  “Sister?” The alien had been crawling from its sack, but froze as if diverting all its resources to processing this new information. “Your kinship explains much that was unclear to me. Yes, I am Jenkins.”

  “Help’s on its way,” said Pak. He was working the hatch access panel, trying to open the door, but so far with no success. “What happened here, Jenkins?”

  “The pirates… they weren’t here to begin with. They entered later, after I helped the sister to get inside. We snuck around for ten minutes and then the shooting started. The human lady distracted the pirates so I could escape, but when I got out the hatch, these Zuul caught me.” He pointed his antennae at Sun. “Your sister is a hero. She tried to save my life.”

  “Good,” said Sun. “So you’ll help us get inside and help to save hers?”

  “Certainly not,” Jenkins replied. “You don’t understand. There are dead people in there. These pirates will kill us.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the reason you are here at all?” Sun snapped at the cowardly Jeha. “The one you adore, she who set you this task as a sign of your devotion.”

  “Yeah,” said Pak. “We just came from her. She’s still waiting for you… just hanging around.”

  “Not helping!” Sun roared at the man.

  Jenkins’ antennae drooped. “I don’t know. Your sister told me I deserved a better companion than Hl’ch’kh.”

  “Are you sure?” pressed Sun. “Think of her luster.”

  The Jeha perked up. “And the curve of her mandible…”

  “That’s right. Think how impressed she would be if you defeated pirates.”

  Jenkins reared up and touched his antennae gently to Sun’s face. “I am sorry about your sister. But I am too scared to confront such a fearsome foe. Perhaps the tour guide was right, and the nebula’s corrupting radiation has changed me. Or maybe your sister has widened my horizons. Either way, I see now that though Hl’ch’kh is wondrously shiny, inside her meat is rotten.”

  “Harsh,” said Pak, “but accurate. And with that kind of attitude, it seems to me that you’d fit right into our mercenary company.”

  “I’m not a fighter, Mr. Human.”

  “I can see that, Jenkins. We don’t only need close quarter combat specialists. We need engineers, data analysts, and observers. We could do with, say, a Jeha specialist crew member.”

  “Do you travel between star systems often?”

  “Frequently.”

  Sun watched fear and desire war within the alien. Pak pressed the advantage. “We never know where will be from one month to the next,” he told Jenkins. “You could have a girl in every port.”

  “But we need a test of your resolve and commitment first,” said Sun.

  The Jeha went rigid, considered its options for a few moments, and then nudged Pak away from the access panel.

  Within seconds, the main hatch was open.

  9.

  Sun

  Aboard Void company ship

  Within four minutes, they had discovered the corpses of the three elSha. Sun had been fond of the little lizard-like critters she’d met across the nebula. Excitable bundles of energy, often argumentative but goodhearted in her experience, these particular elSha had been blown apart by hollow point rounds.

  A minute later they came across the first pirates. They were a mix of humanoid species, and their chests had been carved open by ‘Z’-shaped cuts from high-energy lasers, which had burned through their armor as if it wasn’t there.

  “The ship did this?” she checked.

  “Must have been,�
� Pak replied.

  For the first time since boarding the strange vessel, Sun suddenly wondered why Pak had followed her at all. With Blue in danger, Sun was never going to wait for backup. Pak had followed her on board without seeming to question why.

  “Are there other defenders?” asked Jenkins.

  “Other than the cook, no. Nothing alive. No need. We rely on the ship itself for security. It’s insane. It enjoys killing. Most of the time, the ship is shuttered away from operating its own systems. We estimate it can only do a tenth of what it’s capable of. But in the case of a security breach, we loosen the restraints for a limited period. It’s still leashed but dangerous to any intruders. In theory. But we’ve never been boarded before.”

  “Umm. Sergeant Pak, sir. That isn’t true.”

  Pak growled at the Jeha, causing Jenkins’ antennae to lie flat along his carapace, but he didn’t curl up. “But, sir…”

  “Let him speak, said Sun.

  “What Sergeant Pak said used to be accurate,” said Jenkins, “and I explained all that to your sister. She told me it was a crime to cage such a glory as this ship.”

  “Glory?” Pak looked appalled. “The ship’s a demon left over from another era. The boss says that even though it’s not an AI, it’s the distant memory of ships like this that led to fully AI-controlled weapons of war being restricted technology.”

  “Yes, well, the human lady didn’t think the same way, so I freed it for her.”

  Pak’s eyes went wild with shock. “It’s… It’s a homicidal maniac!”

  “Then why aren’t we already dead?” demanded Sun.

  “That…” Pak scratched his head. “That’s a very good question. Let’s head for the armory and suit up. I find I get better answers to thorny questions when I’m inside nine-hundred pounds of mecha suit with a MAC cannon running hot. Jenkins, with me!”

  Sun took a last look at the dead pirates and their distinctive wound patterns. When she was a little girl, Blue had been obsessed with Zorro movies.

  She shook her head. The Mark of Zorro? No, even in this crazy galaxy that wasn’t possible.

  Putting the corpses from her mind, Sun hurried after the others.

  10.

  Sun

  Aboard Void company ship

  The Combat Assault System, Personal, was a powered assault armor suit that evened the score when humans went toe to toe against alien mercenaries. The first hundred Earth-registered mercenary companies had been awarded the so-called Alpha Contracts to prove the human race could justify their position as the 37th mercenary race.

  Only four made it back alive to get paid.

  A century or so later, these Four Horsemen companies were still operating, although even here in the Spine Nebula, Sun had heard rumors that the Four Horsemen were in trouble. And the reason human mercs were still alive and winning contracts was largely down to the CASPers. At first, the constant product development of the early models had shifted the odds of surviving contact with alien mercs from near impossible to merely unlikely. And the improvements had kept coming. Aliens were learning to fear the most recent models.

  Pak had suited up in a pristine Mark 8. Sun, though, had driven Mark 6s during her tour aboard Unlikely Regret, so had picked the oldest model in the armory: the Mark 7 she was in now.

  She shifted inside her suit, stretching over to the right in order for the haptic controls to register her extending her index finger, and mimic the action by extending the corresponding digit of the CASPer’s hand around the bulkhead, so the camera mounted there could tell her what they were facing.

  The shoulder aperture dug painfully into the top of her rib cage, and her butt was already aching. As far as Sun was concerned, the ‘personal’ part of the CASPer’s designation meant any suit not calibrated for their driver was uncomfortable. And if you were a short woman like her, difficult to operate.

  But the Mark 7 was significantly lighter than she was used to, and more responsive too. Best of all, instead of craning her neck to inspect banks of monitor screens, there was a full Tri-V heads-up display that adapted to what the suit thought its driver needed to be seeing.

  It was like sitting inside a video game!

  The image from the finger camera appeared front and center of the Tri-V.

  At the end of the forty-yard passageway, a score of Endless Night scum was bunched up in front of the blast door to the ship’s CIC. They were a mix of SleSha, Pushtal, Zuul, and two humans. The way they were behaving made little sense; they were acting plenty scared, but appeared so certain that they had cleared the ship of opposition, that they hadn’t bothered to post sentries.

  A Pushtal was yammering away into a mike, trying to explain to its boss why they hadn’t secured the ship yet, and a SleSha team was trying to cut through the blast door with laser torches.

  Meanwhile, a group of four Zuul were training carbines on the two human pirates.

  “Pick up those breach packs,” a Zuul was ordering the humans, “and blast a hole through the entropy-cursed bulkhead.”

  One of the humans crossed her arms defiantly. “If I touch that pack, the ship will kill me. If you’re gonna shoot, then go ahead. At least it’ll be over quicker for me.”

  “You seeing this?” Sun asked Pak, who was a few feet behind in the side corridor.

  “I see it. It’s consistent with the ship toying with them.”

  “Then why hasn’t it killed them all? There’s something important we still haven’t figured out.”

  “Let’s concentrate on killing the bad guys first,” said Pak.

  “Roger that. Recommend you suppress while I advance close enough to lob an L bomb. Teach them why it’s not cool to bunch up.”

  “It’s an option,” said Pak, obviously unconvinced by the merits of using the giant high explosive grenades, “but my advice is to not piss off the ship. My guess is that it has decided that we’re on its side. Let’s not change its mind, eh?”

  Sun drew her arm back and the CASPer limb followed her movement. The suit also registered her attention on the ship’s internal map and expanded the 3-D schematic.

  “Here’s what we do instead,” she told Pak. She wriggled her arm out of the CASPer’s sleeve and painted a route that traveled back along the side passage, and reappeared in the inner shell around CIC about twenty yards from the pirates. “When you’re in position, signal me. Then I’ll draw their fire and you flank them.”

  For some reason, Pak hesitated before signaling his compliance.

  Five minutes of waiting with a terrified Jeha later, Pak signaled he was ready. The pirates, meanwhile, had wasted their time bickering, though they had made some progress etching a cut partway through the blast door into CIC.

  Time’s up, losers.

  She walked out into the passageway, cursing the leg splits ramming up against her crotch in the badly fitted suit, but her movements were practiced and assured, and the CASPer marched out into the middle of the passageway. The suits had multiple weapons mounts, principally over each shoulder and on the arms, and could carry a wide variety of weapons.

  Unfortunately, the loadout on this model had been optimized for heavy planetside assault, and if the ship was going to take offense at anyone tossing an L bomb, then it would find most of her armament far more offensive than that. She had a hunch about what was driving the ship’s strange behavior, but she wasn’t ready to bet their lives on it. All she was prepared to use – for now – was the light magnetic accelerator cannon on her left arm mount, and she was aiming at targets standing in front of the blast door that should take a few stray rounds without serious damage.

  “Hey!” she roared through her suit’s external speakers, though the pirates were already reacting to the sound of her suit’s leg motors. “How many of you scum are human?”

  Fear registered on the two who’d traveled as far from Earth as Sun, but joined up with the lowest form of life in the nebula. That humans would stoop so low was sickening, if hardly surprising. But
that the pirates were both women made it even worse somehow.

  Sun put a MAC shell through their heads, blowing them clean off their shoulders.

  Her heads-up was registering incoming fire now. Sun’s MAC was taking a heavy toll of the pirates, but the rate at which her armor integrity was falling escalated from fast to butt-clenchingly rapid.

  She turned, presenting relatively unscathed flank armor, and thudded away to the side passage, chased by hoots from the pirates and sounds of pursuit.

  “Get out of sight!” she ordered Jenkins as she turned to face the way she’d come, and extended snap-out arm blades to slice through any pirates appearing around the corner.

  Pak appeared in her HUD’s tactical map and shot the surviving pirates from the rear.

  “Clear!” he shouted down the corridor before any reached Sun’s position. She retracted her arm blades for another day.

  “It’s safe, Jenkins,” she said through her external speakers, and then warned Pak through the radio comms that she was coming out.

  She began marching through the scene of carnage, but Jenkins wouldn’t leave the safety of the side passage.

  “What if they’re faking?” he said. “They might rise from the deck and shoot me.”

  “Fair point,” she answered and snapped her blades back out. As she walked up to the blast door, she used the giant swords without mercy to convince Jenkins that these pirates would never be getting up again.

  They gathered by the CIC door which still glowed from where the lasers had tried to cut through.

  “Now what?” said Pak. “I’ve got the rest of the crew and marines out in the docking tube trying to figure out how to get in. If the pirates couldn’t get into CIC, I don’t fancy our chances. Jenkins, any ideas?”

  “No, Sergeant. Not yet. This area is clearly sealed against forced entry.”

  “Oh, will you quit fooling around!” Sun yelled at the door. “Open up already.”