Under Shadows. Jason LaPier

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on the other side.

      He flipped to the camera, wondering if he’d see a grinning welcoming committee on the other side. No, of course not. They’d opened their outer door, but not their inner. The small bay between the doors was empty.

      The outer door of the dropship was less compromising than the OrbitBurner’s universal. In fact, it was more or less invasive. When he opened it, it pushed six triangles outward, wedging itself into the other ship’s airlock. The consistent pressure would allow his new friends to open their inner door, but they couldn’t close their outer door on him.

      He waved his free hand at the camera next to the door, then lifted the blanket-shrouded weapon. “Hey there!” he said, forcing what he hoped was a friendly smile. “I got that busted drive coil I told you about. I sure appreciate you folks giving me a hand.”

      “Of course,” came a woman’s voice from the tinny speaker. “Stand by, I’m opening the door now.”

      Cazos felt his cheery grin turning darker as the door began to slide away and the painted and posh interior of the OrbitBurner appeared before him. He slid away the blanket and pulled himself through, barrel first.

      “I hope you have something to drink on this beautiful boat,” he said. “Because—”

      Then he closed his mouth as something cold, hard, and flat materialized against his throat.

      *

      “Welcome to the party, Basil.” Dava pulled lightly on Basil Roy’s shoulder, rotating him to face her. Her blade turned too, so that the point of it poked into his throat. “I was really hoping to find an ally on the other side of that door. But this is even better.”

      She could feel the others come into the foyer without seeing them. It was the change in the air, the energy. Thompson-Gun, one of her best soldiers, and Lucky Jerk, the pilot with ninety-nine lives. She could feel the tension they brought. Dava had been running on fury since the ModPol ambush that got a bunch of her Space Waste family killed, and most of the rest captured. Including Boss Moses Down, the single person in the universe she truly gave a shit about.

      So she really only had two things on her mind at any given moment: get Moses back was the first. The second was to find those responsible for the setup and murder them.

      And in her pocket, there burned a handwritten note from Psycho Jack, also known as Jack Fugere, also known as Jax. Fugere, the Fixer. Jax, the hacker.

      A note that read: Basil Roy faked the detector.

      She didn’t know what it meant, not exactly anyway. They had stolen fancy new detection equipment from a research station on a moon named Vulca, orbiting a planet called Sirius-5. That equipment was supposed to allow them to detect a ship incoming from a Xarp jump anywhere inside a single star system, from one end to the other. Only it needed the right software to make it work.

      And along came Basil Roy. Another hacker, or as he preferred, solutions architect or some shit. He had made the equipment work.

      They had a target: a supposedly lightly outfitted ModPol transport ship that would Xarp from Barnard to Epsilon Eridani. The ship itself was barely armed, but its cargo was to include a number of experimental weapons to be delivered to a ModPol base where they could be tested in a largely empty system.

      The detection equipment had seemed to work, finding the ModPol transport coming out of Xarp. Space Waste moved in, swarming the ship with fighters and boarding it with raiders. And then they found themselves waist deep in a shitstorm of an ambush. ModPol ships came out of hiding and flanked the fighters, while hordes of ModPol Defenders poured out of cargo holds and splintered the boarding parties.

      So although she still didn’t quite understand how it all went wrong, she knew that the job was a setup. And she knew that the detection equipment’s software had to be part of it.

      And she knew that the fish wriggling at the end of her spear was the one who forged the software.

      “Lemme take that for you,” Thompson-Gun said. Dava watched the other woman as she drifted around Roy and gently tugged the pulse rifle from his hands.

      “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, his hands reflexively going palms out. “I’m on your side. It’s me, Basil Roy. The uh, the hacker.”

      “I thought you preferred solutions architect,” Dava said.

      “Right, that’s what I prefer.” His eyes rotated to meet hers. “You’re Capo Dava, right?”

      “What’s the story, Roy?” she said. “Got left behind?”

      “No. I mean, yes. Rando – I mean, Underboss Jansen – he wanted me to stay behind and um.” His right hand twisted through the air. “To collect up the BatCaps. You know, the Battle Capture camera drones.”

      “We know what BatCaps are,” Lucky said.

      Dava withdrew the blade. It was a good story, and she thought she might play along. He wouldn’t be going anywhere. “So you’ve seen the recordings?”

      “What? Um, no. No, I haven’t, uh.” He seemed uncertain as to what to do with his hands with the knife no longer at his throat. If there’d been gravity, he might have let that take over and lower them for him, but instead they drifted in front of him limply. “I was supposed to play dead. Just sit in the ship with the systems powered down until it was all clear, then I could go grab the BatCaps.”

      “Play dead,” Dava said. A new level of discomfort crossed Roy’s face as his brain struggled to determine whether that’d been a question, statement, or command.

      “They left you in a dropship, by yourself?” Thompson said. “To collect up BatCaps?”

      “Well, it was the only ship on the Longhorn that has a Xarp drive. And I need to get back home after …” He trailed off, then attempted to puff out his chest a little. “After my mission.”

      Dava turned her head. If she had to look him in the face while he spouted lies any longer, she would cut his throat too soon.

      Thompson picked up the conversation. “Basil, do you have any idea what kind of clusterfuck happened here?”

      “Well, I don’t – I’m just a computer guy, here,” he said. “I mean, I know we lost the fight. But what else would I know about it?”

      “Lost the fight?” Thompson said. “We got slaughtered out there!”

      “I’m just a computer guy,” he repeated, his voice going small and weak. Then it turned curious. “Hey, how did you all get this OrbitBurner?”

      Dava turned back to him. “No. No questions from you.”

      “What? I,” he started, then swallowed as he looked at her eyes. “Dava – Capo – we’re on the same team. We’re all Space Waste here.”

      At this she closed her eyes. She buried deep the rant about what Space Waste was, and why someone like Basil Roy would never be a part of it. She pushed it down and out of the way, because there was no time to explain these things to a dead man floating. Her family was scattered, and she and two companions were stuck in the wrong fucking system. She needed to push forward.

СКАЧАТЬ