Lethal Cargo Read online

  The kids were done in, Dolph was limping badly, and we were exposed out here. I was wondering if we could make it back before the Travellers spotted us, when an electric buggy bounced out to meet us. I had never been gladder to see Martin. He said severely, “I feel very left out.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was kind of impromptu. Hop in, kids.”

  Reassured by the sight of a human, the children squashed into the passenger seat of the buggy. Martin opened the back door for me and Dolph to jump in, then floored it.

  We jolted across the causeway, between the hedges, and turned the corner onto our pad. The bales and crates were gone from around the St. Clare. Martin confirmed that he had loaded the cargo. Another vehicle stood next to the ship—one of the spaceport’s rental pickups.

  Rafael Ijiuto stood beside it, arguing with Kimmie.

  “He showed up after I finished loading,” Martin said. “Wants his stuff.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  Martin parked the electric buggy next to the airlock. I clawed the door open and jumped out. I noticed that Ijiuto had a rifle in his pickup, the type known as a dino gun. Maybe he was planning to get in some hunting.

  “Hey, Ijiuto,” I said.

  He turned to me, registering shock that a wolf was talking. “You guys are Shifters?”

  “No, I just happen to be a wolf right now,” I said.

  “Ha, ha. Hey, I got nothing against Shifters. I was just surprised.”

  “I understand that you want your cargo,” I said. “Well, too fucking bad. If you had showed up in a timely fashion, I’d have delivered it with my compliments. But now it’s at the back of the hold, behind twenty tonnes of rare earths and pelts strapped down in the precise distribution that won’t mess up the center of mass of my ship. So you’re not getting it. Sorry. Feel free to contact our complaints hotline.”

  Ijiuto’s mouth opened and shut. “But,” he said lamely.

  The kids spilled out of the buggy, shouting. “Pippa! Pippa!” The older girl was climbing down from the port airlock, in such a hurry she nearly fell off the ladder. The three children hugged. Their joy brought a tear even to my hardened eye.

  Kimmie marched up. “Excuse me,” she said to Ijiuto, and bent down to speak to me. “Mike, I’ve been talking to her. I think we should take them with us. You wouldn’t believe what their lives are like here. They’ve got no future. No hope—”

  An engine thrummed. Dust spurted up from the wheels of Rafael Ijiuto’s pickup. He had jumped back into the driver’s seat and reversed away from the ship. The pickup bounced away across the pad as fast as it could go, and vanished around the hedge.

  “Well, that was easier than I expected,” I said.

  Dolph held up his right forepaw. “I stepped on something,” he said. Blood oozed from a nasty cut on his pad. “Think it was a sword.”

  He melted into a quaking mass of flesh, hard to look at, which resolved twenty seconds later into a naked man.

  Shifting often has a revivifying effect. I can’t quite quantify it, and no one has ever proved it scientifically, but it feels like it kind of “resets” your neural system, so you get a respite from whatever was troubling you. That’s why I was able to bite a man’s hand off in wolf form, and that’s why Dolph stopped fainting from blood loss as soon as he became a man, and staggered upright, cradling his cut hand. Back in human form, he looked pretty shocking; stark naked, his straggly black hair loose, his mouth and chin smeared with Traveller blood.

  I mentally shrugged, and Shifted back into human form, as well.

  Kimmie was pushing the two younger children towards the ladder. Naked and shivering in the icy wind, I grabbed her arm. While the little girl and the boy climbed up to the airlock, Pippa hovered anxiously, her eyes popping at my nudity.

  Kimmie had seen it before. She folded her arms. “Under the terms of the Refugee Convention, if they land on Ponce de Leon, the government’s required to help them. Anyway, we can’t leave them here.”

  I could still taste Zane’s blood in my mouth. Now that I was in human form again, it was no longer a good taste. I spat on the dust. I had no time for this argument. We had to get gone. If enough of the Travellers had survived to launch their ship, we would be in trouble. “All right, all right,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

  Kimmie broke into a smile as pretty as spring flowers. “You’re the best,” she said, and then a spaceship took off from the other side of our island. The noise drowned out her voice. It drowned out everything.

  I made a move to get around her to the ladder. She sidestepped.

  And then her head exploded.

  7

  There’s shooting someone in the head. Then there’s shooting someone’s head off.

  I closed my eyes reflexively. Warm globs spattered my face, neck, and hands. Pain stabbed my cheek, and I knew I had just been jabbed by bone shrapnel from Kimmie’s skull.

  I hit the dirt. So did Dolph and Martin.

  Of all the goddamn things. Of all the damn luck. We’d been so close to gone. So close to getting away with it.

  Popping my head up, I saw Pippa staring down at Kimmie’s headless body through her fingers. Most of the spatter had hit me, ‘cause I was closer, but blood also tinted the girl’s hair like red spray paint.

  A foot to Pippa’s left, a bright crater popped out on the ship’s hull. They were still shooting.

  I pushed up on my knees. “Get down,” I howled, my voice inaudible amidst the noise. I grabbed Pippa’s ankle and jerked. She fell to her hands and knees. I slapped her on her rump to make her crawl under the ship.

  Dolph and Martin crawled after us.

  The thunder of the ship launch faded into the sky.

  “Did the other kids reach the airlock?” I said.

  Pippa nodded. Silent tears spilled from her eyes.

  “Motherfucker,” Dolph was saying, over and over. “Motherfucker.”

  “Help me with her,” Martin said. he was dragging Kimmie’s body by one ankle. Her head was gone. Correction: I was wearing it.

  I took Kimmie’s other ankle. Her neck left a bloody trail in the dust as we crawled underneath the St. Clare. A robust lattice of metal trusses at head height supported the auxiliary engine pods. The underslung missile launchers blocked my view forward, but that didn’t matter. The shots had come from the other direction. From the Travellers’ island. Thus, the aft port engine pod should now shield us from their gunner.

  I already knew their weapon did not have facial recognition targeting or smart ammo that could recalibrate in flight. Because if it did, I’d be dead.

  Zane. It had to have been him. He’d been aiming at me, but Kimmie had stepped in front of me while he was in the act of pulling the trigger, during that long instant after you commit your body to a course of action, when it’s too late to take it back.

  Why had I let him live?

  We crawled to the other side of the ship. A ladder reached down to the ground on the starboard side of the fuselage, identical to the one on the port side. “Up you go,” I said. Pippa climbed the ladder with Dolph behind her, while Martin and I struggled with Kimmie’s body, cursing. There was no way we could get her up the ladder. It was dumb to even try, and I knew that on some level, but I was in shock.

  The cargo crane bumped my shoulder. Its claws enclosed Kimmie and lifted her up.

  We climbed up to the top deck, where Dolph sat naked in the operator’s seat of the cargo crane, maneuvering Kimmie into a foot-high gap at the bottom of the hold door.

  The sniper was on the Travellers’ island, and now we had a three-storey armored superstructure in between us and them. I slapped the plate of the starboard airlock hatch, unlocking it for the others. Then I continued up to the top of the bridge.

  Irene was still at her post, lying prone behind the main radar dish. She was toying with the Travellers, firing a shot every time any of them poked their nose out of cover.

  “Kimmie’s dead,” I said.

&nbs
p; “Saw,” she said.

  “Did you see the shooter?”

  “No,” she snapped.

  “Or hear it,” I said, “because they timed it to when a ship was taking off.”

  “The shooter was not on that island,” she said, her eyes glued to the binocular sights of her Dayforce scope. “I would have seen them.”

  I understood her defensive reaction. But everyone makes mistakes. I was already beating myself up for Kimmie’s death. For bringing her to a place like this. For hiring her at all.

  “Did you find your wife?” Irene said.

  In the act of belly-crawling up beside her—not a pleasant way to move when naked—I checked. “You know?”

  “Course I know,” she said. “Dolph told me over a beer at Snakey’s, oh, a year back. You have no secrets, Cap’n.”

  After a moment, I said, “Ex-wife.”

  “Ain’t no such thing,” Irene said in a half-joking tone, referencing our shared faith. Most all Shifters are Catholics. Yeah, I got divorced, anyway.

  “Well, I didn’t find her,” I said. “Turned out she left the life years ago.”

  “Good for her.” Irene squeezed off a shot, in response to some movement I could not see from here. In the same tone as before, she continued, “The minute I let up on the pressure, they’re gonna get up in that turret and hit us with the .50.”

  “Let ‘em,” I said.

  “For real?”

  “What’s the worst they can do? Take out a couple of the dishes.” I gestured to the radar dish and radio and laser comms receivers behind us. “So, we replace ‘em. Get below.”

  “Aye aye,” she said. Blindingly fast, she snatched her rifle off its tripod and vamoosed with the weapon in her hand. I followed her down the port ladder. I had reached the airlock before the Travellers opened up with the .50. They were slow off the mark this time.

  I slammed the airlock behind me, sealed it, and half-slid, half-fell down to the crew deck. The first people I met were Pippa and her friends. The little girl squeaked, “Mister, where’re your clothes?”

  You’ll note that Irene had said nothing about my unconventional nudity. That’s because she was a Shifter, too. She knew that it happens.

  “Looks like you’re getting a ride to the PdL,” I said. “I hope that’s acceptable to you.”

  “Thank you,” Pippa said, her eyes luminous with joy. “Thank you, thank you!”

  “Thank me later.” I squeezed past them. The corridors of my ship are considerably narrower than average, and so low that a guy my size can just barely walk upright.

  On my way to the bridge—the actual bridge, deep in the bowels of the ship—I looked into Dolph’s berth. Mechanical Failure was with him, tweezing splinters out of his cut and quacking about possible infections. Dolph said, “Make it stop.”

  I grinned and passed on. Irene met me on the bridge with some clothes.

  With Dolph temporarily off the roster, I was short a pilot. But I could fly the St. Clare myself. I dropped into the center couch in front of the long, U-shaped console, leaving Dolph’s couch on my right empty. The center seat had its own set of flight controls. I put on the AR headset that provided me with telemetry curated by the ship’s computer. My hands flew over the banks of toggles and screens, making sure every indicator—virtual and physical—read green. I punched the intercom. “Everyone strap in for launch.” But what about the kids? I didn’t have enough couches … Oh, but, I did. “Go in the lounge, kids,” I said. “You’ll see a door opening off of there.” That had been Kimmie’s berth. She had begged me to take the kids along. I would get them safe and sound to Ponce de Leon if it killed me. “Lie down on the crash couch in there. It’s meant for one person, but y’all are small enough you can squeeze up.”

  Irene strapped herself into the left seat and put on her AR headset. “Weapons systems nominal.”

  “Roger. Starting auxiliaries.” The four auxiliary engines spun up with a whine that vibrated my teeth in my head. “Launching on my mark … and mark.”

  I opened the throttle.

  The St. Clare leapt vertically off the ground on four slender pillars of incandescent plasma. 100 meters up, I throttled back the rear pair of auxiliaries—or rather the computer did. The ship’s ass dropped, and the main engine kicked in, adding a bass rumble to the rattling, roaring din that enveloped us. The St. Clare punched skywards on a curving trajectory that shoved us back into our couches. The refugee camp shrank to a brown scab on the coast of a blackly forested continent, and then the continent shrank to a black splotch on a mostly icebound globe.

  Seven minutes into our burn, we achieved orbital velocity. I announced engine cutoff, and killed the throttle.

  The roaring and rattling abated. Gravity packed up.

  I stayed in my seat for another few minutes, programming our acceleration burn to go FTL. It was just a question of entering parameters and getting the computer to validate my calculations. I typed as fast and carefully as I could. Then I popped my harness and floated out of my seat.

  No one’s ever invented artificial gravity.

  I know, it seems strange. We have skip fields that can multiply a ship’s velocity to thousands of times the speed of light. We can field-strip our own DNA and put it back together (at least we used to be able to). We can create realistic artifical intelligences. We can juggle quantum probabilities to turn a man into a wolf. We can process a payment on one planet and have it show up 50 light years away within a few days.

  Yet no one has ever figured out how to make your feet stick to the deck of a spaceship. They say it’s legitimately impossible: the laws of physics, beaten back so far in other areas, drew their line in the sand when it comes to gravitation, and they’re not budging.

  Sure, you could just rotate your whole ship to simulate gravity, but the St. Clare isn’t that big. And frankly, who cares? A little floating isn’t a bad thing.

  So I pushed off from the ceiling and went to grab a sorely needed drink. I’d conditioned my body to only accept bourbon after lunch, or beer in an emergency. Today called for vodka.

  I was dispensing a shot into my micro-gravity mug when my headset flashed up a warning.

  A ship had just launched on a trajectory expected to intersect with our orbit.

  “Well, well,” I said. “That was fast.”

  8

  “Guess they’re pissed off,” Irene said dryly.

  The computer depicted the Traveller ship as a red blip rising towards our orbital altitude. Its trajectory was similar to the one we’d just taken, but longer and shallower. It would “cut the corner” and overtake us in a slightly lower, faster orbit.

  I finished filling my mug with vodka and settled back into my couch. “Prepare to evade auto-nukes.” I had assumed the Travellers would be too busy collecting their dead and patching up their wounded to sic their AI-guided orbital missiles on the St. Clare. I should have known better. I should have killed Zane.

  “Nothing so far,” Irene said. Through her AR headset, she was scanning our volume with computer-assisted IR and optical vision. “A few sats, but they check out.”

  “Keep your eyes peeled.”

  Dolph came weaving onto the bridge with his right hand encased in a bandage. “Let me at these scumbags,” he said.

  “I’d rather not fight them,” I said. Kimmie’s death had quenched my appetite for blood. I’d have taken Zane, but killing all the surviving Travellers, and any passengers they may have picked up, was a bit much. Also, if we blew the Traveller ship to pieces in orbit, the debris would foul the low orbital altitudes and make landing on Gvm Uye Sachttra a hazardous adventure for years to home. The little furry guys didn’t deserve that. We humans had done them enough damage already.

  I bent over the FTL computer. It was still processing my burn parameters. Instead of the notification I yearned to see, my headset delivered another warning.

  Another ship.

  This one had just curved around the planet. Travelling in a
low retrograde orbit, it was approaching us head-on. It was still thousands of kilometers away, but every second brought it closer.

  I looked up at Dolph, who didn’t have his headset on and didn’t understand why Irene was cursing. “The good news is they didn’t have auto-nukes in orbit. The bad news is they had another ship.”

  Dolph rubbed his hands. “Two’s company, three’s target practice.” He maneuvered himself into the right seat and grabbed his AR headset.

  “How many painkillers did you take?” I swigged vodka. It burned on my empty stomach. “Never mind. Take the stick.” I punched the button that reassigned the flight controls to the right seat.

  Dolph played around with the sensor suite, making agile gestures with his left hand and clumsy ones with his bandaged right hand. “What happened to the radar? It’s glitching out.”

  “Travellers,” I said. “If it was the receiver, we’d have no radar at all. It’s probably the data conduit.”

  Thanks to the radar glitching out, we could only see the ships with our optical and infrared sensors. At this distance, the ship rising from the ground was a small dot on our shared AR visualization. The one already in orbit was an even smaller one, being further away, but it was the bigger danger. I didn’t have to worry about Zane’s ship until it reached orbit. I had to worry about the other one right now.

  My headset popped up a notification. The computer had validated my flight plan. I gave thanks to God, and then saw that I was required to circle halfway around the planet before starting my acceleration burn. Correct initial orientation is everything if you don’t want to run out of power and end up drifting several light years from your destination, crossing your fingers that someone friendly comes along before you use up all your air.

  “Power up the railgun,” I snapped at Irene. “And prepare anti-HERF measures.”

  Her mouth set, Irene swept her hand over the sequence of switches that diverted shipboard electrical power to the railgun. A high-pitched hum filled the bridge. On the outside of the St. Clare’s hull, our chaff ports valved open.